Night Terrors

by E. F. Benson

  A flock of sheep were feeding not far away, and they scattered before him as he ran back to the house to get the help which his heart rejoiced to know must be unavailing.

  The house remained shut up for a year and the turrets pricked their ears in vain to hear the sounds of life returning to it. Philip, by the codicil he had executed the day before his death, had revoked his previous will, and had left to Sybil only certain marriage settlements which he had no power to touch and this house ‘where’ (so ran his phrase) ‘we are now passing such loving and harmonious days’. During this year Julian’s father had died, and their marriage took place in the autumn.

  Today they came to spend here their month of honeymoon. Fenton, Philip’s butler, and his wife had been living here as caretakers, the garden had been well looked after, and all was exactly as it had been a year ago. But the shadow of the mocking malevolence had passed for ever from it, and the spring sunshine in their hearts was as tranquil as the autumn radiance that lay on the lawns. Everything, flower-beds and winding path and sun-steeped wall, was full of memories from which all bitterness was purged; it was sweet to remember what had been, in a babble of talk.

  ‘And there’s the tennis court,’ said he, ‘with the summer house where we sat – ’.

  ‘Yes, and bounced a ball to and fro between us – ’ she interrupted.

  ‘And then I missed it and it rolled away, and we thought no more about it. Then I asked you if you thought he had guessed, and we kissed.’

  ‘Just here we stood,’ she said.

  ‘And it was on that day that he began to mock us,’ he said. ‘How he enjoyed it! It made sport for him.’

  ‘I think he must have seen us,’ she said. ‘You could never tell what Philip saw. And he wove webs for us. Look, there’s a wasp caught in a spider’s web. I must let it free. I hate spiders. If ever I have a nightmare it’s always about a spider. Oh, what a pity! The sunlight is fading. There’s a sea fog coming up. How chilly it gets at once! Let’s go indoors. And we won’t talk about those things any more.’

  The mist formed rapidly, and before they got in it had spread white and low-lying over the lawn. A fire of logs burned in the hall, and as they sat over them in the fading light, a hundred memories which now they left unspoken, began to move about in their minds, like sparks crawling about the ashes of burnt paper that has flared and seems consumed. There was the cabinet gramophone to which they had danced . . . there was the chair on to which Philip had thrown his wig; above, running the length of the hall, was the gallery along which his limping footstep had passed when he left them to go early to bed, bidding them stay up and divert themselves. How the sparks crawled about the thin crinkling ash! Presently it would all be consumed, and the past collapse into the grey nothingness of forgotten things.

  Outside the mist had grown vastly denser, it beleaguered the house, and nothing was to be seen from the windows except a woolly whiteness. From the sea there came the mournful hooting of fog-horns.

  ‘I like that,’ said Sybil. ‘It makes me feel comfortable. We’re safe, we’re at home, and we don’t want anyone to know where we are, like those lost ships. But pull the curtains, it shuts us in more.’

  As Julian rattled the rings across the rod he paused, listening.

  ‘Telephone wasn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘It can’t have been,’ said she. ‘Why, it’s standing close by my chair, and I heard nothing. It was the curtain-rings.’

  ‘But there it is again,’ said he. ‘It isn’t from this instrument, it sounds as if it came from the study. I think I’ll go and see. The servants won’t have heard it there.’

  ‘If it’s for me, say I’m in my bath,’ said Sybil.

  Julian went along the passage to the room that had been Philip’s workroom close to the front door. It was dark now, and, as he fumbled for the switch by the door, the bell sounded again, rather faint, rather thin, as if the fog outside muffled it.

  He took off the receiver.

  ‘Hullo!’ he said.

  There came a little goat-like laugh, just audible, and then a voice.

  ‘Settled in comfortably, dear boy?’ it asked. ‘I’ll look in on you before long.’

  ‘Who’s speaking?’ said Julian. He heard his voice crack as he asked.

  Silence. Once more he asked and there came no reply.

  Julian felt the snowflakes of fear settle on him again. But the notion that had flashed out of the darkness into his mind was surely the wildest nonsense. The laugh, the voice, had for that moment sounded unmistakable, but his sane self knew the absurdity of such an idea. He turned out the light and went back to Sybil.

  ‘The telephone did ring, dear,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t make out who it was. Somebody is going to look before long. Not at home, I think.’

  The fog cleared during the night before a light wind from the sea, and a crystalline October morning awaited them. Sybil had some household businesses that claimed her attention, and Julian walked along the shore until she was ready to come out. Not half a mile away was the precise spot he wished to visit, namely, that belt of shingle at the base of the cliff where, a little more than a year ago, they had found the shattered body on its back with wide-open eyes. He had dreamed of the place last night; he thought that he came here, and that, as he looked, the shingle began to stir and formed itself into the figure of a man lying there, and the dreamer had watched this odd process with interest, wondering what would come next. Then skin began to grow like swiftly spreading grey lichen over the head, and eyes and mouth moulded themselves on a face that was coming to life again; the eyes turned and looked into his, the mouth moved, and Julian awoke in the grip of nightmare. Even when the night was over and the morning luminous the taste of that terror still lingered, and he had to come to the place and convince himself of the emptiness of his dream. There lay the shingle shining and wet from the recession of the tide, and the wholesome sunlight dwelt on it.

  Dusk had already fallen when they got home from a motor-drive that afternoon. As she got out Sybil stepped on the side of her foot and gave a little cry of pain. But it was nothing, she said, just a bit of a wrench, and she hobbled into the house.

  As Julian returned from taking the car to the garage he noticed that there was a light in Philip’s room by the front door. Sybil perhaps had gone in there, but, when he entered, he found the room was empty. The fire had been lit, and was beginning to burn up. No doubt the housemaid had thought he meant to use the room, and after lighting the fire had forgotten to turn off the switch.

  He went on into the hall. Sybil was not there and she must have gone upstairs to take off her cloak and fur tippet and veil. He sat down to look at the evening paper, got interested in a political article, and heard with only half an ear the opening of the door to the bedroom passage at the end of the gallery that crossed the hall. The floor of it was of polished oak boards, uncarpeted, and he heard her step coming along it, and she limped as she walked. Her ankle still hurts her, he thought, and went on with his reading. He wondered then what had happened to her, for she had crossed the gallery several minutes ago, and she had not yet appeared. He had made no doubt that that limping step was hers.

  The door at the end of the hall into the kitchen-quarters opened and she came in. She was still in her cloak and furs.

  ‘So sorry, dear,’ she said, ‘but there was a bit of a domestic upset. Fenton told the housemaid to light the fire in the study, and she came running back, rather hysterical, saying that as she was lighting it she saw a man outside in the dusk looking in at the window, and she was frightened.’

  ‘Perhaps she saw me looking in,’ said Julian, ‘When I came back from the garage I saw there was a light in the room.’

  ‘No doubt that was it. But Fenton and the gardener have gone to have a look round.’

  ‘And the foot?’ he asked.

&n
bsp; She stripped herself of her wrappings and threw them into a chair.

  ‘Perfectly all right,’ she said. ‘It only lasted a minute.’

  Motoring had made Julian sleepy, and when, after tea, Sybil gathered up her things and went upstairs he must have fallen into a doze. He did not appear to himself to have gone to sleep, for there was no change of consciousness or of scene, and he thought he was still looking into the fire, and wondering to himself, with an uneasiness that he would not admit, what that limping footstep had been. He had felt no doubt at the time that it was Sybil’s, but she had not been upstairs, nor did she halt in her walk. And he thought of that nightmare of his about the shingle on which Philip had fallen, and of the voice that he had heard on the telephone, and the familiar laugh, and the promise that the speaker would soon be here. Was he here in some bodiless form? Was he giving token of his unseen presence? Then (in his dream) he reached out for the paper he had been reading to divert his thoughts. As he did so his eye fell on the chair from which Sybil had picked up the cloak and veil and fur tippet she had thrown there, but apparently she had forgotten to take the tippet. Then he looked more closely at it and saw it was a wig.

  He woke: there was Fenton standing by him.

  ‘The dressing-bell has gone a quarter of an hour ago, sir,’ he said.

  Julian looked at the chair beside him. There was nothing there: it was all a dream, but the dream had brought the sweat to his forehead.

  ‘Has it really?’ he said. ‘I must have fallen asleep. ‘Oh, by the way, you went to see if there was anyone hanging about in the garden. Did you find anything?’

  ‘No, sir. All quite quiet,’ said Fenton.

  Sybil lingered behind in the dining-room after dinner to pour fresh water into the bowl of touzle-headed chrysanthemums that stood on the table, and Julian strolled on into the hall. The furniture was pushed aside from the centre of the room and the rugs rolled up, leaving the floor clear. Sybil had said nothing about that to him, but it would be fun to dance. Presently she followed him.

  ‘Oh, Julian, what a good idea,’ she said. ‘How quick you’ve been. Turn on the gramophone. Why, it’s a year since I have danced. Do you remember? . . . No, don’t remember: forget it . . . ’

  Julian, standing with his back to her, picked out a record. Just as the first gay bars of the tune blared out, Sybil shrieked and shrieked again.

  ‘Something’s holding me,’ she cried. ‘Something’s pressing against me. Something’s laughing. Julian, come to me! Oh, my God, it’s he!’

  She was struggling in the grip of some invisible force. With her head craned back away from it, her hands wrestled furiously with the empty air, and, still violently resisting, her feet began to make steps on the floor, now tip-toeing in a straight line, now circling. Julian rushed to her, he felt the shape of the unseen horror, he tore at the head and the shoulders of it, but his hands slipped away as if on slime, and fear sucked his strength from him. Then, as if suddenly released, Sybil dropped to the ground, and he knew that all the hellish forces of the unseen were turned on him.

  It played on him like a blast of fire or freezing, and he fled from the room, for that was its will. Down the passage he ran with it on his heels, and out into the moonlit night. He dodged this way and that, he tried to bolt back into the house again but it drove him where it would, past the tennis-court and the bed of dahlias, and out of the garden gate and on to the cliff, where the beams of the lighthouse swept across the downs. There was a flock of sheep which scattered as he rushed in among them. There were a boy and a girl, who, as he fled by them, called to him to beware of the cliff-edge that lay directly in front of him. The pencil of light swept across it now, and as he plunged over the edge he saw the line of ripple breaking on to the shingle a hundred feet below, where, one evening, he and the fisherfolk found the shattered body of Philip staring with lashless eyes into the sky.

  The Hanging of Alfred Wadham

  I had been telling Father Denys Hanbury about a very extraordinary séance which I had attended a few days before. The medium in trance had said a whole series of things which were unknown to anybody but myself and a friend of mine who had lately died, and who, so she said, was present and was speaking to me through her. Naturally, from the strictly scientific point of view in which alone we ought to approach such phenomena, such information was not really evidence that the spirit of my friend was in touch with her, for it was already known to me, and might by some process of telepathy have been communicated to the medium from my brain and not through the agency of the dead. She spoke, too, not in her own ordinary voice, but in a voice which certainly was very like his. But his voice was also known to me; it was in my memory even as were the things she had been saying. All this, therefore, as I was remarking to Father Denys, must be ruled out as positive evidence that communications had been coming from the other side of death.

  ‘A telepathic explanation was possible,’ I said, ‘and we have to accept any known explanation which covers the facts before we conclude that the dead have come back into touch with the material world.’

  The room was quite warm, but I saw that he shivered slightly and, hitching his chair a little nearer the fire, he spread out his hands to the blaze. Such hands they were: beautiful and expressive of him, and so like the praying hands of Albert Dürer: the blaze shone through them as through rose-red alabaster. He shook his head.

  ‘It’s a terribly dangerous thing to attempt to get into communication with the dead,’ he said. ‘If you seem to get into touch with them you run the risk of establishing connection not with them but with awful and perilous intelligences. Study telepathy by all means, for that is one of the marvels of the mind which we are meant to investigate like any other of the wonderful secrets of Nature. But I interrupt you: you said something else occurred. Tell me about it.’

  Now I knew Father Denys’s creed about such things and deplored it. He holds, as his church commands him, that intercourse with the spirits of the dead is impossible, and that when it appears to occur, as it undoubtedly does, the enquirer is really in touch with some species of dramatic demon, who is impersonating the spirit of the dead. Such a thing has always seemed to me as monstrous as it is without foundation, and there is nothing I can discover in the recognised sources of Christian doctrine which justifies such a view.

  ‘Yes: now comes the queer part,’ I said. ‘For, still speaking in the voice of my friend the medium told me something which instantly I believed to be untrue. It could not therefore have been drawn telepathically from me. After that the séance came to an end, and in order to convince myself that this could not have come from him, I looked up the diary of my friend which had been left me at his death, and which had just been sent me by his executors, and was still unpacked. There I found an entry which proved that what the medium had said was absolutely correct. A certain thing – I needn’t go into it – had occurred precisely as she had stated, though I should have been willing to swear to the contrary. That cannot have come into her mind from mine, and there is no source that I can see from which she could have obtained it except from my friend. What do you say to that?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I don’t alter my position at all,’ he said. ‘That information, given it did not come from your mind, which certainly seems to be impossible, came from some discarnate agency. But it didn’t come from the spirit of your friend: it came from some evil and awful intelligence.’

  ‘But isn’t that pure assumption?’ I asked. ‘It is surely much simpler to say that the dead can, under certain conditions, communicate with us. Why drag in the devil?’

  He glanced at the clock.

  ‘It’s not very late,’ he said. ‘Unless you want to go to bed, give me your attention for half-an-hour, and I will try to show you.’

  The rest of my story is what Father Denys told me, and what happened immediately afterwards.
/>
  ‘Though you are not a Catholic,’ he said, ‘I think you would agree with me about an institution which plays a very large part in our ministry, namely Confession, as regards the sacredness and the inviolability of it. A soul laden with sin comes to his Confessor knowing that he is speaking to one who has the power to pronounce or withhold forgiveness, but who will never, for any conceivable reason, repeat or hint at what has been told him. If there was the slightest chance of the penitent’s confession being made known to anyone, unless he himself, for purposes of expiation or of righting some wrong, chooses to repeat it, no one would ever come to Confession at all. The Church would lose the greatest hold it possesses over the souls of men, and the souls of men would lose that inestimable comfort of knowing (not hoping merely, but knowing) that their sins are forgiven them. Of course the priest may withhold absolution, if he is not convinced that he is dealing with a true penitent, and before he gives it, he will insist that the penitent makes such reparation as is in his power for the wrong he has done. If he has profited by his dishonesty he must make good: whatever crime he has committed he must give warrant that his penitence is sincere. But I think you would agree that in any case the priest cannot, whatever the result of his silence may be, repeat what has been told him. By doing so he might right or avert some hideous wrong, but it is impossible for him to do so. What he has heard, he has heard under the seal of confession, concerning the sacredness of which no argument is conceivable.’

  ‘It is possible to imagine awful consequences resulting from it,’ I said. ‘But I agree.’