Night Terrors

by E. F. Benson

  ‘All right, the idle scamp will come,’ said I. I knew my father didn’t want me to be in London, either.

  ‘Mark you, the idle scamp has to be pleasant,’ said Hugh. ‘Well, you’ll come, anyhow; that’s ripping. You’ll see what my father means by not wanting to do anything. That’s Garth.’

  The end of the next week saw us installed there, and never in all the first sights of the various splendours of the world that have since then been accorded to me have I felt so magical and potent a spell as that which caught the breath in my throat when on the evening of that hot August day I first saw Garth. For a mile before the road had lain through the woods that clothe the slope above it; from there my cab emerged as from a tunnel, and there in the clear twilight, with sunset flaming overhead, was the long grey façade, with the green lawns about it, and its air of antique and native tranquillity. It seemed an incarnation of the very soul and spirit of England: there on the south was the line of sea, and all round it the immemorial woods. Like its oaks, like the velvet of its lawns, the house had grown from the very soil, and the life of the soil still richly nurtured it. Venice was not more authentically born from the sea, nor Egypt from the mystery of the Nile, than Garth was born from the woods of England.

  There was time for a stroll round before dinner, and Hugh casually recounted the history of it. His forebears had owned it since the time of Queen Anne.

  ‘But we’re interlopers,’ he said, ‘and not very creditable ones. Before that, my people had been tenants of the farm you passed at the top of the hill, and the Garths were in possession. It was a Garth who built the house in the reign of Elizabeth.’

  ‘Ah, then you’ve got a ghost,’ I said. ‘That makes it quite complete. Don’t tell me that there isn’t a Garth who haunts the house?’

  ‘Anything to oblige,’ said he, ‘but that I am afraid I can’t manage for you. You’re too late: a hundred years ago it certainly was supposed to be haunted by a Garth.’

  ‘And then?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I know nothing about spooks, but it looks as if the haunt wore itself out. It must be tiresome, you know, for a spirit to be chained to a place, and have to walk about the garden in the evening, and patrol the passages and bedrooms at night, if nobody pays any attention to it. My forebears didn’t care the least, it appears, whether the ghost haunted the place or not. In consequence, it evaporated.’

  ‘And whose ghost was it supposed to be?’ I asked.

  ‘The ghost of the last Garth, who lived here in the time of Queen Anne. What happened was this. A younger son of my family, Hugh Verrall – same name as me – went up to London to seek his fortune. He made a lot of money in a very short time, and when he was a middle-aged man he retired, and took it into his head that he would like to be a country gentleman with an estate of his own. He was always fond of this country, and came to live at a house in the village up there, while he looked about, and no doubt he had ulterior purposes. For Garth Place was at that time in the hands of a wild fellow called Francis Garth, a drunkard and a great gambler, and Hugh Verrall used to come down here night after night and thoroughly fleece him. Francis had one daughter, who of course was heiress to the place; and at first Hugh made up to her with the idea of marrying her, but when that was no use, he took to the other way of getting hold of it. Eventually, in the fine traditional manner, Francis Garth, who by that time owed my ancestor something like thirty thousand pounds, staked the Garth property against his debt and lost. There was a tremendous excitement over it, with stories of loaded dice and marked cards, but nothing could be proved, and Hugh evicted Francis and took possession. Francis lived for some years yet, in a labourer’s cottage in the village, and every evening he used to walk down the path there, and, standing opposite the house, curse the inhabitants. At his death the haunt began and then, simply, it died out.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s storing force,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps it’s intending to come out strong again. You ought to have a ghost here, you know.’

  ‘Not a trace of one, I’m afraid,’ said Hugh; ‘or I wonder if you’ll think there is still a trace of it. But it’s such a silly trace that I’m almost ashamed to tell you about it.’

  ‘Go on quickly,’ said I.

  He pointed up to the gable above the front door. Underneath it, in an angle formed by the roof, there was a big square stone, evidently of later date than the wall. The surface of it was in contrast to the rest of the wall, much crumbled, but it had evidently been carved, and the shape of a heraldic shield could be seen on it, though of the arms it carried there was nothing left.

  ‘It’s too silly,’ said Hugh, ‘but it is a fact that my father remembers that stone being placed there. His father put it up, and it bore our coat of arms: you can just see the shape of the shield. But though it was of the stone of the district, exactly like the rest of the house, it had hardly been put up when the surface began to decay, and in ten years our arms were absolutely obliterated. Odd, that just that one stone should have perished so quickly, when all the rest really seems to have defied time.’

  I laughed.

  ‘That’s Francis Garth’s work beyond a doubt,’ I said. ‘There’s life in the old dog yet.’

  ‘Sometimes I think there is,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I’ve never seen or heard anything here which is in the smallest way suggestive of spooks, but constantly I feel that there is something here that waits and watches. It never manifests itself, but it’s there.’

  As he spoke, I caught some faint psychical glimpse of what he meant. There was something there, something sinister and malevolent. But the impression was of the most momentary sort; hardly had it conveyed itself to me when it vanished again, and the amazing beauty and friendliness of the house overwhelmingly reasserted itself. If ever there was an abode of ancient peace, it was here.

  We settled down at once into a delightful existence. Being very great friends, we were completely at ease with each other; we talked as we felt disposed, but if a silence fell there was no constraint about it, and it would continue, perfectly happily, till one of us was moved to speak again. In the morning for three hours or so we applied ourselves very studiously to our books, but by lunchtime they were closed for the day, and we would walk across the marsh for a swim in the sea, or stray through the woods, or play bowls on the lawn behind the house. The weather, blazing hot, predisposed to laziness, and in that cupped hollow of the hills, where the house stood, it was almost impossible to remember what it felt like to be energetic. But, as Hugh’s father had indicated, that was the proper state of body and mind to be in when you resided at Garth. You must be sleepy and hungry and well, but without desires or energies; life moved along there as on some lotus-eater’s shore, very softly and quietly without disturbance. To be lazy without scruple or compunction but with a purring content was to act in accordance with the spirit of Garth. But as the days went on I knew that below this content there was something in us both that grew ever more alert and watchful for that which was watching us.

  We had been there about a week when on an afternoon of still and sultry heat we went down to the sea for a dip before dinner. There was clearly a storm coming up, but it seemed possible to get a bathe and return before it broke. It came up, however, more quickly than we had thought, and we were still a mile from home when the rain began, heavy and windless. The clouds, which had spread right across the sky, made a darkness as of late twilight, and when we struck the little public footpath on the far side of the stream in front of the house, we were both drenched to the skin. Just as we got to the bridge I saw the figure of a man standing there, and it struck me at once as odd that he should wait out in this deluge and not seek shelter. He stood quite still, looking towards the house, and as I passed him I had one good stare at his face and instantly knew that I had seen a face very like it before, though I could not localise my memory. He was of middle-age, clean-shaven, and there was something curi
ously sinister about that lean, dark-skinned profile.

  However, it was no business of mine if a stranger chose to stand out in the rain and look at Garth Place, and I went on a dozen steps, and then spoke to Hugh in a low voice.

  ‘I wonder what that man’s doing there,’ I said.

  ‘Man? What man?’ said Hugh.

  ‘The man by the bridge whom we passed just now,’ I said.

  He turned round to look.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ he said.

  Now it seemed quite impossible that this stranger who had certainly been there so few seconds ago could have vanished into the darkness, thick as it was, and at that moment for the first time it occurred to me that this was no creature of flesh and blood into whose face I had looked. But Hugh had hardly spoken when he pointed to the path up which we had come.

  ‘Yes, there is someone there,’ he said. ‘Odd that I didn’t see him as we passed. But if he likes to stand about in the rain, I suppose he can.’

  We went on quickly up to the house, and as I changed I cudgelled my brain to think when and where I had seen that face before. I knew it was quite lately, and I knew I had looked with interest at it. And then suddenly the solution came to me. I had never seen the man before, but only a picture of him, and that picture hung in the long gallery at the front of the house, into which Hugh had taken me the first day that I was here, but I had not been there since. Portraits of Verralls and Garths hung on the walls, and the portrait in question was that of Francis Garth. Before going downstairs I verified this, and there was no doubt whatever about it. The man whom I had passed on the bridge was the living image of him who, in the time of Anne, had forfeited the house to Hugh’s ancestral namesake.

  I said nothing about this identification to Hugh, for I did not want to put any suggestion into his mind. For his part, he made no further allusion to our encounter; it had evidently made no particular impression on him and we spent the evening as usual. Next morning we sat at our books in the parlour overlooking the bowling-green. After an hour’s work, Hugh got up for a few minutes’ relaxation, and strolled, whistling, to the window. I was not following his movements with any attention, but I noticed that his whistling stopped in the middle of a phrase. Presently he spoke in rather a queer voice.

  ‘Come here a minute,’ he said.

  I joined him, and he pointed out of the window.

  ‘Is that the man you saw yesterday by the bridge?’ he said. There he was at the far end of the bowling-green, looking straight at us.

  ‘Yes, that’s he,’ I said.

  ‘I shall go and ask him what he’s doing here,’ said Hugh. ‘Come with me!’

  We went together out of the room and down the short passage to the garden door. The quiet sunlight slept on the grass, but there was no one there.

  ‘That’s queer,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s very queer. Come up to the picture gallery a minute.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said I.

  ‘So you’ve seen the likeness too,’ he said. ‘I say – it is a likeness only, or is it Francis Garth? Whatever it is, it’s that which is watching us.’

  The apparition which, from that time, we both thought and spoke of as Francis Garth, had now been seen twice. During the next week it seemed to be drawing nearer to the house that had once been its haunt, for Hugh saw it just outside the porch by the front door, and a day or two afterwards, as I sat at twilight in the room overlooking the bowling-alley waiting for him to come down to dinner, I saw it close outside the window looking narrowly into the room with malevolent scrutiny. Finally, a few days only before my visit here came to an end, as we returned one evening from a ramble in the woods, we saw it together, standing by the big open fireplace in the hall. This time its appearance was not momentary, for on our entry it remained where it was, taking no notice of us for perhaps ten seconds, and then moved away towards the far doorway. There it stopped and turned, looking directly at Hugh. At that he spoke to it, and without answer it passed out through the door. It had now definitely come inside; and from that time onwards was seen only within the house. Francis Garth had taken possession again.

  Now I do not pretend that the sight of this apparition did not affect my nerves. It affected them very unpleasantly; fright, perhaps, is too superficial a word with which to describe the effect it had on me. It was rather some still, dark horror of the spirit that closed over me, not (to be precise) at the moment when I actually saw it, but some few seconds before, so that I knew by this dire terror that invaded me that the apparition was about to manifest itself. But mingled with that was an intense interest and curiosity as to the nature of this strange visitant, who, though long dead, still wore the semblance of the living, and clothed itself in the body which had long crumbled to dust. Hugh, however, felt nothing of this; the spectre alarmed him as little now on its second inhabiting of the house as it had alarmed those who lived here when first it appeared.

  ‘And it’s so interesting,’ he said, as he saw me off on the conclusion of my visit. ‘It’s got some business here, but what can that business be? I’ll let you know if there’s any further development.’

  From that time onwards the ghost was constantly seen. It alarmed some people, it interested others, but it harmed none. Often during the next five years or so I stayed there, and I do not think that any visit passed without my seeing it once or twice. But always to me its appearance was heralded by that terror of which I have spoken, in which neither Hugh nor his father shared. And then quite suddenly Hugh’s father died. After the funeral Hugh came up to London for interviews with lawyers and for the settlement of affairs connected with the will, and told me that his father was not nearly so well-off as had been supposed, and that he hardly knew if he could afford to live at Garth Place at all. He intended, however, to shut up part of the house, and with a greatly reduced household to attempt to continue there.

  ‘I don’t want to let it,’ he said; ‘in fact, I should hate to let it. And I don’t really believe that there’s much chance of my being able to do so. The story of its being haunted is widely known now, and I don’t fancy it would be very easy to get a tenant for it. However, I hope it won’t be necessary.’

  But six months later he found that in spite of all economies it was no longer possible to live there, and one June I went down for a final visit, after which, unless he succeeded in getting a tenant, the house would be shut up.

  ‘I can’t tell you how I dislike having to go,’ he said, ‘but there’s no help for it. And what are the ethics of letting a haunted house, do you think? Ought one to tell an intending tenant? I advertised the house last week in Country Life, and there’s been an inquirer already. In fact, he’s coming down with his daughter to see the house tomorrow morning. Name of Francis Jameson.’

  ‘I hope he’ll hit it off with the other Francis,’ I said. ‘Have you seen him much lately?’

  Hugh jumped up.

  ‘Yes, fairly often,’ he said. ‘But there’s an odd thing I want to show you. Come out of doors a minute.’

  He took me out to the front of the house, and pointed to the gable below which was the shield containing his obliterated arms.

  ‘I’ll give you no hint,’ he said. ‘But look at it and make any comment.’

  ‘There’s something appearing there,’ said I. ‘I can see two bends crossing the shield, and some device between them.’

  ‘And you’re sure you didn’t see them there before?’ he asked.

  ‘I certainly thought the surface had quite perished,’ I said. ‘Of course, it can’t have. Or have you had it restored?’

  He laughed.

  ‘I certainly haven’t,’ he said. ‘In fact, what you see there isn’t part of my arms at all, but the Garth arms.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s some chance cracks and weatherings that have come on the stone, rather regular, certainly,
but accidental.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘You don’t really believe that,’ he said. ‘Nor do I, for that matter. It’s Francis: Francis is busy.’

  I had gone up to the village next morning, over some small business, and as I came back down the footpath opposite the house saw a motor drive up to the door, and concluded that this was Mr Jameson who had just arrived. I went indoors, and into the hall, and next moment was standing there with staring eyes and open mouth. For just inside were three people talking together: there was Hugh, there was a very charming-looking girl, obviously Miss Jameson, and the third, so my eyes told me, was Francis Garth. As surely as I had recognised the spectre as him whose portrait hung in the gallery, so surely was this man the living and human incarnation of the spectre itself. You could not say it was a likeness: it was an identity.

  Hugh introduced me to his two visitors, and I saw in his glance that he had been through much the same experience as I. The interview and the inquiries had evidently only just begun, for after this little ceremony Mr Jameson turned to Hugh again.

  ‘But before we see the house or garden,’ he said, ‘there is one most important question I have to ask, and if your answer to that is unsatisfactory I shall but waste your time in asking you to show me over.’

  I thought that some inquiry about the ghost was sure to follow, but was quite wrong. This paramount consideration was climate, and Mr Jameson began explaining to Hugh, with all the ardour of the invalid, his requirements. A warm, soft air, with an absence of easterly and northerly winds in winter, was what he was seeking for – a sheltered and sunny situation.

  The replies to these questions were sufficiently satisfactory to warrant an inspection of the house, and presently all four of us were starting on our tour.

  ‘Go on first, my dear Peggy, with Mr Verrall,’ said Mr Jameson to his daughter, ‘and leave me to follow a little more leisurely with this gentleman, if he will kindly give me his escort. We will receive our impressions independently, too, in that way.’