Seven Strange Stories

by Rebecca Lloyd

  ‘The Maggot, he means,’ Susan, in her kindness, explained to me.

  ‘She is confused, sometimes happy, sometimes angry—it is ever thus,’ I murmured half to myself. ‘She likes to wade in the stream if it is not too cold. She takes pleasure in watching the tiny fish and the moving light on the surface of the water.’

  ‘Insane then,’ Rose said needlessly. ‘The Maggot is insane.’

  ‘I can scarce recognise her without all the things that made her into a lady,’ Susan remarked. ‘I do not mean to be above myself, but do you think without their wigs and spectacles and canes, they would be just like us?’

  ‘Ah, is it only the outward trappings that makes a lord or a lady?’ Martin declared. ‘So, Susan, if we were to dress you up as a lady, do you think you would, by miracle, become one?’

  The poor child’s face went perfectly red. ‘I do not know their manners or their way of discussing things, so I suppose I would not. And I cannot play piano and I believe you must be clever at piano if you are a fine young lady.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I can sing.’

  ‘No, Susan please do not do that,’ Patrick said, ‘for the sake of all that is holy.’

  Somebody laughed and the conversation took wing, but I could not participate, being unable to shake off what Gideon had told me earlier. I could not get the pictures out of my mind, Lord Mallet’s hand, the sight of his face, the movement in the shadows of the bedclothes. I could not wait to excuse myself so that I could go to the quietness of my room, yet when I went thither, the once familiar corners and darknesses seemed to take on a leering edge that had me terrified to shut my eyes and search for sleep—but exhaustion did overcome me and I was thankful for it.

  If I could name a single day that filled me with more dread than any other at Hogsmoor House, it was the one following that night. Lady Mallet began talking once more about her earlier life as we sat by the stream in the late afternoon. I should, in truth, confess to you that not only was I a practised liar, but I was also adept at appearing to listen with great interest to Lady Mallet’s prattle, while barely hearing a word of it.

  ‘In those days, Wilson, we were magnificent and sought after by all of London, men and women alike. People lined the paths in St James’ Park when we drove through so that they could marvel at our beauty.’

  ‘As you have many times said, Lady Mallet,’ I murmured. I was thinking that if Gideon had arrived at Hog’s bedchamber a few moments later he would never have seen the monster Orgorp unclothed. He’d heard an agonised bellow, a roar of terror, and he told me it was so frightful that he did not hesitate to fling wide the door and step into the bedchamber without knocking.

  Lady Mallet’s finger poked my arm. ‘Do you have sisters, Wilson?’ she asked.

  ‘I have five,’ I replied.

  ‘And I one,’ she answered, ‘only I wish to God I did not.’

  I was trying to imagine Gideon in the darkness of Lord Mallet’s bedchamber as he told me that he had no taper with him and there was scant light from the moon although the room curtains were open. He saw first nothing much but some movement amongst the bedclothes and then he caught sight of Lord Mallet who had fallen by the side of the bed and was clutching at his heart. He was in a night shirt that had rolled itself half up his body so that his great pale flab was clearly visible. He never made a sound after that first terrible cry he uttered, except for the occasional whimpering such as a dog in distress might make. . . . I hoped Wilson was growing strong in the woodman’s cottage. I tried to think of him running amongst the forest trees with his brothers and sisters.

  ‘What makes you smile like that, Wilson? Do not let your mind wander when I am talking to you, please.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, and turned to face my mistress fully.

  ‘I was saying that of the two of us, she was more fragile in both temperament and bodily health, and insisted on having her face painted and powdered so heavily that she was whiter than the whitest snow; it was a marvel to behold.’

  My flesh did creep as Gideon told me what next he saw. It was not just the type of shivering that turns the skin to gooseflesh; it was as if some ghostly hands had laid themselves upon me and were shifting parts of my skin and the muscle below in divers directions. Some activity had caught his eye in the gloom and from that moment onwards his mind and soul abandoned the plight of Lord Mallet as he stared through the darkness at the pale thing that had arisen from the twisted sheets.

  ‘Paler than snow, Lady Mallet?’ I murmured, all in a daze. ‘I am unable to picture that.’

  ‘Yes, and many times she insisted on leaving it on at night and more would be added to it the following morning until it became like a vizard and as stiff as wood. And she was one of those whom I mentioned to you who would have her hair dressed every two weeks.’

  . . . I had reached my hand out to comfort Gideon as his story proceeded as I could see that he was trembling, but he would not have it. He did not wish to be consoled. ‘The hair on the thing was patchy and tangled and darkish,’ he told me, ‘a sight both sickening and pathetic. The limbs, all four, were that of an ordinary woman, as far as I could see.’

  ‘Well, are you glad, Wilson?’

  ‘Forgive me, Lady Mallet, am I glad for what?’

  ‘Poh! You are such an impossible child sometimes; glad that I no longer ask you to dress my hair.’

  ‘I did not mind the task greatly, and I enjoyed our walks when we hunted for pretty feathers. Yet your hair . . .’

  ‘. . . has become thin?’

  ‘Yes, Lady Mallet. I did not draw your attention to it.’

  ‘That is kind in you, Wilson, but I already knew it.’

  ‘The work of the Devil,’ Gideon had said, ‘an unholy thing. It did not have a face.’

  ‘Can that really be true?’ I whispered.

  ‘Do you suppose I did not see how much of my hair was coming free, Wilson? Of course it is true that I knew of it.’

  ‘I did not mean to speak aloud, Lady Mallet. I was contemplating the truth of something very different.’

  ‘As I see you have been doing the whole afternoon. Shall I hit you?’

  ‘No, please do not, Lady Mallet,’ I beseeched her, and rose to my feet as she was too close to me for my comfort and could strike out in a flash.

  The face of Orgorp was the most unnatural thing Gideon had ever seen; he vowed that it was right for us to have named it a monster. ‘It is a curious thing, revulsion,’ he told me. ‘While it arouses the deepest disgust in you, it holds the mind imprisoned; you would escape, yet stay, you would run, yet draw nearer and look harder.’

  ‘Still I do not know why God did forsake her, although I pray every night for the answer,’ Lady Mallet was saying as she reached down to pick up one of the yellow leaves that lay scattered now in heaps about our feet. ‘You can look into the face of a newly dead relative, and only then, for the first time, recognise your own self within them. It can be shocking, especially if you dislike them.’

  ‘Forgive me Lady Mallet, dislike who?’ I asked, seating myself next to her once more.

  ‘The relative—the sister perhaps.’

  ‘Should we return now to the house? I fear you might catch cold and it is nearly time to drink some tea.’

  ‘No, I am happy here, but go back and bring me my heavy cloak against the evening air, Wilson.’

  Perhaps it was ill-mannered of me not to have commiserated at the death of her sister which at the time I truly thought she had described to me, but my mind was so haunted by Gideon’s story that I could not have cared less about anything else at that moment. I left her company abruptly and was glad to be released for a short while as the horror I felt when first hearing of the monster Orgorp revisited me and was causing me to tremble quite visibly, I was certain.

  ‘It had a face of sorts,’ Gideon explained. ‘On one side the jaw and teeth were stripped of flesh. I mean to say that I was looking at something that should not be
seen on a living person. I had been by the door, but without realising it, I had changed position and by some cruel misfortune as clouds parted in the sky and the moon gained strength, I saw the revolting thing in detail. One eye seemed to function, the other to slope awkwardly, almost to wobble, so that the effect along with the eaten away flesh was a hellish abomination. It was a thing unfinished, misshapen, a thing melted. I do not recall a nose. It rose from the bed, and more astonishing to me than its hideousness was the fact that it seemed to have some human modesty, or rather itmimicked human modesty in wrapping the linen about itself, but not before I had looked for a tail or other sights of the Devil’s work. It had the body of a woman; that much I saw.’

  When I returned with Lady Mallet’s cloak, she was still talking as if I had never left her side. ‘. . . but my situation is far worse than that,’ she said.

  I wrapped the cloak around her shoulders and gazed into her pitiful face that in the fading daylight looked grey and heavy. ‘I beg your pardon most humbly, but I am at a loss,’ I told her. ‘What is far worse?’

  ‘You see, I believe fresh air would help her greatly as I am sure it is helping me, Wilson.’

  ‘Yes, fresh air certainly cannot harm us,’ I replied, ‘although some believe otherwise.’ I had decided as I walked back with her cloak that I would escort Gideon to the village on Wednesday where his coach would be waiting and perhaps make enquiries about my own future journey southwards—on which days the coach departed and the number of stops we would be making at inns along the way.

  ‘Then the creature seemed to cast about itself and I realised it was looking for clothing,’ Gideon had said. ‘I was in terror, and so much so that my body was as good as turned to stone. I could hear my own breathing and the rapid knocking of my heart. Before much time had passed the vile thing had garbed itself in that dark cloak of which we often speak. It is you, Caroline who notices the smell of things particularly, and had you been with me that night. . . . Then I looked again and in haste to Lord Mallet, but I saw by the way his arm was half-risen and his great hand locked into the semblance of a claw, that he was dead.’

  ‘Far worse than death,’ Lady Mallet whispered somewhere close to me, prodding my arm, ‘but still I feel fresh air would help her, if only she could be persuaded to come outside, but she stays resolutely in her rooms.’

  Now she did have my attention—‘Orgorp!’ I cried out involuntarily, suddenly in the know—she also was talking of the monster, as I indeed was thinking of it.

  ‘I said, Wilson, if you would just listen, that I believe fresh air would help her, but she will not come outside.’

  ‘Orgorp did not speak?’ I had asked Gideon.

  ‘How can it with no mouth? As it came towards me, I moved in a stumbling fashion up against the blanket chest, and it crept past me and left the room.’

  ‘Did you suppose it would harm you?’ I asked, remembering my long silent walks down the draughty corridors with the monster.

  ‘What else was there to suppose, Caroline—what nature of a question is that? It harmed Lord Mallet, did it not? It harmed him all to death!’

  ‘He died of fright, Gideon.’

  ‘Yes, I concur. But what was the monster doing in his bedchamber? Even a man as raddled and mentally bloated as he, would not willingly have set eyes upon such a thing.’

  I am sure you plainly see that I could not have told Gideon why Orgorp was there without revealing my collusion in the matter, and had I done so it is certain that he would have looked upon me with extreme disgust and told the others about my evil doings with Lady Mallet and her monster. Orgorp must have turned her face to look over her shoulder as the other monster rode her, and he must have toppled off in terror and let out the roar Gideon had heard from his bedchamber close by.

  ‘. . . I do not want her to die in Hogsmoor House, Wilson,’ Lady Mallet whispered, putting her lips close to my ear in the particular intimate manner that I so abhorred. ‘She can no longer feed herself where once she ate what she fancied, and would quite often go down to the pantry in the dead of night and eat what she could find there, and drink milk—that much I knew. And now drinking for her requires a long-necked bottle that can fit a small distance down inside her throat, like one an apothecary might use.’

  ‘I am so sorry. That is a pitiful thing indeed, Lady Mallet,’ I replied. And I was sorry, but also badly shaken, for it seemed to me that between them, Elizabeth Mallet and Gideon Ashfield had given me a startlingly clear picture of the real monster Orgorp, and freed me from the last vestiges of my disbelief. Indeed, I now fully realised that the creature I had first seen on that dark night following Lady Mallet into the house through a door that was rarely used, was a true and terrible monster and that I was the luckiest person alive to have come to no harm in its company—and the mere thought of those journeys I made with the Thing across the house, set my heart to hammering in terror.

  ‘I thank you, Wilson,’ I heard Lady Mallet say, ‘I am glad to hear you have such compassion; it will signify much, as you will soon see.’

  ‘. . . And I am sorry also about the death of your sister that you mentioned to me earlier.’

  ‘No, no, no. You have entirely misunderstood me—because of your daydreaming perhaps. I beseech you to pay more attention.’ Lady Mallet stood up and I rose with her, glad finally that she had decided to return to the house. The large bats had come out and were swooping and darting across the gardens, and I did not care much for the look of the coming night.

  ‘Wilson, before we go in, I must explain the new duties that will keep your wages handsome.’ She and I are the same in height, and I recall distinctly that she took a step towards me and looked very deeply into my eyes. Although I flinched, I returned her gaze. ‘Now that the monster of Hogsmoor House has gone to Hell where he belongs,’ she said, ‘we are all much safer, and I cannot tell you how I rejoice in the fact. We have the shrouded one as you call her, to thank for our deliverance. I doubt I will ever be able to discover if she knowingly brought about his death, or if it was done in innocence.’

  ‘Innocence?’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘Yes, Wilson . . . innocence. Do you suppose I adorned her rooms with looking glasses so she could be reminded of the cruel facts—So that with each step her face is visible to her?’

  ‘Her face?’

  ‘Yes, her face and its power to terrify. You don’t know yet, child, but I must warn you that it is not easy to look upon. In truth, it is abominable.’

  ‘I am most thankful that I have not been obliged to look upon it, then,’ I answered, and I took a step back from her, impatient to move onward to the house as the darkness in all its gloom was falling fast around us.

  ‘Well now you are,’ she replied quietly.

  ‘May we go forward to the house, Lady Mallet?’ I beseeched her. ‘We have been outside a long time today.’

  She did not move. ‘Did you hear what I just said, Caroline?’

  ‘I confess not,’ I answered.

  ‘You are now obliged to look fully upon the shrouded one, as your new duty will be to feed her.’

  It seemed to me that the ground itself rose up upwards, and that somehow the trees on either side of the path bulged and pushed closer upon us as I took in her words. ‘I am to take food to her rooms, Lady Mallet, as you yourself have done in the past?’ I whispered.

  ‘What ails you, Caroline Wilson; you have not been listening to me the whole of the afternoon. You are to feed her, as I once did you, with little dainties and morsels if you recall? Put the food deep down inside her throat with your tiny fingers; she has no lips. That is the new job I will be paying you for.’

  JACK WERRETT, THE FLOOD MAN

  When I waved at the Werrett sisters from the room at the top of the house I’d chosen as my study, their sombre faces lightened slightly, yet they did not come forward to the front door, but stood just outside the low rusty gate, glancing from time to time behind them across the frozen marsh. I thought I�
�d settled everything with them at our first meeting and wouldn’t have to speak to them again until the week of my leaving. I saw that they had bundles and packages with them and wondered if they’d brought me extra contents for the house, as apart from its coldness, it was Spartan in every respect with its tall thin-glassed windows and narrow sloping corridors.

  When I’d first met the sisters in the café in Stabman’s Reach I noticed that although they seemed keen on the rent money, they were at the same time curiously hesitant about going ahead with the deal. ‘For how long will you want him?’ one of them asked me.

  ‘Around five months,’ I said, ‘Sorry to be vague and sorry it’s such a short time.’

  ‘That ain’t so much short as long seeing as we’ve never let anyone in there before,’ Marina told me. ‘This lark is all new to us, you see.’

  I smiled at her. Her sister, Betty, didn’t speak, but stared out through the café window while she shredded a paper napkin into tiny strips and dropped the pieces into a puddle of tea in front of her.

  ‘How about if I stay until the end of March?’ I suggested. They did not answer immediately, but gazed at each other across the table, and I had time to study them. Their hair was faded brown and dry and held together at the napes of their thin necks with coloured hair slides made for little girls. The skin on their faces was wind-roughened and thick and they squinted, not just, I sensed, as a reflex to protect themselves from the wild weather of the marshlands, but also in defence against a world of strangers about which they harboured deep suspicions.

  ‘Are you going to be in him all the time?’ Marina asked finally, stretching her hand across the table to lay it on top of her sister’s moving fingers.

  ‘In the house you mean?’

  ‘Will you stop your jiffling, Betty?—yes, Miss Wood, of course in the house.’

  ‘Doctor Wood,’ I reminded her. ‘I’ll be out a fair bit taking photographs of churches,’ I offered, peering at them through the watery light. ‘But sometimes I’ll be inside all day, why?’