by Ellen Datlow
They heard Sarah’s voice drifting over the water. “But I mustn’t lose it!” she cried. “Mummy will kill me. It was my grandmother’s necklace. Oh, please do find it! I shall … I shall give a kiss for it … .”
More laughter. Then another splash and more voices calling out, “Arthur, you fool! It’s quite deep here!”
Seeley peered ahead at the dark shapes adrift on the river, but he could not make out any faces. One of the boats rocked as its occupants peered over the sides, and there were more splashes and shouts of, “Steady now!”
A minute or more passed, and Seeley took up the pole and began to maneuver the punt toward the other boats, where all had suddenly gone quiet. “It’s been two minutes hasn’t it?” he heard someone say.
“I say, Jack?” another of the shadowy figures called out.
“Can you see him?”
“Did he swim to shore?”
“Has anyone seen Arthur?”
“Jack!”
Seeley turned and scanned the tree-lined bank of the river, but he could see no human form in the shadows cast by the moonlight. He leaned over the side, trying to see ripples in the black water, but he could make out nothing. “Hasn’t he come up yet?” he called.
“No,” came the reply from the second boat. “And here’s why!” A hand was thrust at him and he felt the cold slime of wet foliage against his hand. “They are tangled in the weeds!”
“We should go in and see if we can free them!” someone called out.
These exchanges were punctuated by the sound of Sarah alternately screaming and breaking into floods of weeping.
“But shouldn’t someone go for help?” asked Seeley.
“I expect so,” said the calm voice. “Won’t be time to save them, of course, but … I expect so. Why don’t you take your boat ashore, then? I’m going after Jack!”
The conversation ended there.
“Right, I’ll go for help then,” said Seeley, half to himself, because nobody seemed to be paying him any mind.
The fellow from Merton stood up in the boat. “Can you manage it on your own then?” he said. “I just thought that I might be more useful here. I can swim.” He took off his jacket, folded it and laid it on the seat, and eased himself over the side, careful not to upset the punt. “Be as quick as you can, though, will you?” With that, he was gone.
The cries and the splashes faded as Seeley poled downstream a few hundred yards toward the lights of a distant house. He was thinking that the divers would be hauled to safety long before he could return, and perhaps he’d better ask for a flask of tea to take along in case they had taken a chill. He was calm and without any foreboding of tragedy when he lodged the punt in the reeds on the riverbank and waded ashore.
He had been wrong, though. When he returned some twenty minutes later with some men from the nearby cottages, they found that no rescues had been effected, and the shouts to the divers had ceased in the face of their certain death. The only sound was Sarah Darcy’s soft, persistent weeping, and no one was bothering to comfort her.
The rescuers worked with boat hooks by lantern light, but the sky was already turning gray with the first light of dawn when the first of the bodies broke the surface of the dark river. Three of the revelers had drowned—Arthur, Jack, and the divinity student from Merton, who had gone in to try and save the first two. Robbie Graham had also dived in to attempt a rescue, but the others had managed to pull him back aboard before he, too, became trapped in the weeds.
Seeley wondered later if he should have insisted on taking Sarah away with him, but he doubted that she would have gone, and although he was ashamed to admit it, the thought had not even occurred to him at the time. Perhaps he had wanted to get away from her screams as much as he had wanted to help, but he pushed that thought out of his mind.
He had stayed for the inquest, come back for the funerals, and back again for Sarah’s trial, though his testimony had hardly mattered. Both he and Gordon had testified that it was all a dreadful accident, that Sarah had meant no harm when she dropped the necklace, but the jury had listened stone-faced to their protestations. What was a young lady doing out on the river late at night, unchaperoned with a gang of varsity students, they wanted to know. No better than she should be, their stern faces said. Perhaps she did want to be rid of at least one of the young gentlemen. Who’s to say she didn’t? There was no mercy to be had from them. Sarah’s position was made all the worse by the fact that Jack Rhys-Taylor had been the heir to a baronetcy. His people were said to be distraught by his untimely death, and at the time of the trial there were whispers that their influence had been brought to bear on the case to ensure that the foolish young woman did not get off scot-free. And indeed she had not.
Now a lifetime had passed, and Seeley found himself looking again at the necklace that had caused the tragedy. It sparkled around the neck of another lovely girl, almost the image of the young Sarah herself, and the sight of that necklace made him shiver. The young woman sat there at his elbow, pouring tea and smiling, and he made replies to her conversation, with what words he scarcely knew, and all the while his mind roared with the memories of those cold, pale bodies stretched out on the riverbank, wreathed in the tendrils of water weeds.
It seemed strange to him somehow that Sarah had gone on to have a life, and that those three young men had not. He had never got over the uneasiness of having survived the incident. Everyone had said that Seeley did the correct thing by going for help, but he could not overcome the fact that he had risked nothing, while his friends were drowning. He might not have been able to save them, might even have died himself, but he had never quite escaped the guilt of not having tried. In the long army career that followed for Seeley, no act of valor had ever quite compensated for his inglorious prudence that night on the river.
And what did Sarah feel after all these years? He wondered if she ever thought of those who were drowned. She recalled the tragedy, of course. How could she not? But did she ever think of those three young men as bright and happy individuals, or were they now simply the authors of her discomfiture?
DAISY BELDON STOOD up. “Have you finished your tea, Mr. Seeley? I have. And it’s such a lovely warm evening for September. The mist is coming up, but there’s still a bit of daylight left, and it seems a pity to stay cooped up inside all day. Would you like to go out and see the garden? The roses are gone, but we have autumn flowers in the borders, and of course the herb garden.”
It was precisely the sort of reasonable suggestion that a well-bred hostess might make to a visitor to the house, and Seeley, who was quite tired of sitting anyhow, got up without a moment’s thought and followed her down the passageway and through the curtained French windows that led to the garden … that led to the river.
He saw that the twilight had deepened the sky to the color of pewter, and skeins of darker clouds now hung in the air. There couldn’t be more than half an hour’s light left, for although the afternoon weather had been perfect, it was late September and the days were short. On the river, a mist was rising.
“It’s so peaceful in the garden,” said Daisy, wending her way around a stand of rosebushes. “I love to look out over the flowers and to watch the river drift by. Grandmere never comes out here, though. I pick the flowers and take them in to her so that she can arrange them in vases. She does lovely flower arrangements. It’s the sort of thing that girls in her day had to learn.”
Seeley smiled. “I remember those days,” he said. “I remember your grandmother carrying a nosegay that she had made herself. We were at a dance. She was wearing that very necklace, as I recall.”
Daisy reached up and touched the necklace at her throat. “You remember seeing her wear this necklace? How odd. I’ve never seen her put it on. Once, when we were searching for a pair of earrings for me to wear to a dinner party, I saw the necklace tucked away in her jewelry box, and I asked her why she never wore it. The stone matches her eyes, don’t you think?”
Se
eley nodded. “I always thought so,” he said. “And now they match yours as well.”
Daisy Beldon prattled on with the assurance of a pretty young girl who thinks that all the world looks kindly on her and takes an interest in the minutiae of her existence. “It’s curious,” she said. “When I asked Grandmere about the necklace, she said she didn’t care for it. Then she said I’d better have it, because when she was nearly my age, she had got it as a gift from her own grandmother.”
“A family heirloom. Yes, I do recall that,” said Seeley politely.
“I’m fond of it. In fact, I wear it all the time,” she said with an uneasy titter of laughter. “I only wish I could stop dreaming about it.”
Seeley turned to stare at her. “I beg your pardon. Did you say that you dream about this necklace?”
“Yes. I shouldn’t have mentioned it, really. I know it’s very silly of me, but it is beginning to worry me a bit. I got the necklace only last spring, and since then I’d had the dream a time or two, but just lately it has happened nearly every night.”
Seeley stared out at the river now swirling in evening mist. After a moment, he said, “Would you think it terribly impertinent of me, Miss Beldon, if I asked you to describe your dream for me?”
“I shouldn’t mind telling you about it, Mr. Seeley, only you must promise not to tell my grandmother. I mustn’t worry her.” She waited for his nod of assent before she continued. “I see the necklace tangled in a clump of weeds … not a garden, exactly. They are strange, willowy plants that seem to float as if the wind were blowing them, but I feel no wind. I reach out my hand to grasp the necklace, and suddenly I cannot breathe. I try to run, but I cannot. I wake up choking and gasping for air.”
Seeley felt the sudden chill of the evening. The darkness had deepened now, draining the color from the garden, and when he turned to look at the river, he found it completely swathed in mist. The sky was growing darker now, giving him the sensation that a silver cover had been placed over the house and grounds, blotting out the world outside. He found himself longing for the comforting sight of the paneled library, with a fire in the grate and a decanter of whiskey on the tray before the armchair.
“A most unusual dream,” he said. “Perhaps you ought to put the necklace away for a while.”
“I know. I’ve tried.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “A few days ago, I began to take it off before I went to bed, but in the morning when I awoke, I found I was wearing it again! I suppose that I am so attached to the necklace that I cannot bear to be without it.”
“Perhaps if you asked that it be locked away in the safe, that would settle the matter,” said Seeley. “Rum thing, your dreaming like that. Puts me in mind of India … tales I heard. We should go in now. It’s getting dark.”
She turned to look at him. “It is chilly, isn’t it? The dark comes so quickly in autumn, I always think. Why don’t you go back inside, Mr. Seeley? I just want to pick a few flowers for my room in case a rain tonight spoils them, but I won’t be long. I’ll join you shortly.”
With some misgivings, Seeley turned and went back into the house. Although he was concerned about the young lady, he was not sorry to leave the garden, beautiful though it might be. He found that he no longer wanted to be within sight of the river, especially not in the presence of that infernal necklace which was the origin of that long-ago tragedy. He had almost reached the library when he heard Gordon calling out to him.
“There you are, Seeley! We couldn’t think where you’d got to. Will you join us for a drink before dinner?”
Gordon and Sarah bore down upon him, smiling with relief that the yearly ordeal was over, but despite their gaiety, the feeling of oppression did not leave him. “I was just walking in the garden with Miss Daisy,” he told them. “A most charming girl. She is outside still, gathering flowers. Perhaps we might call her.” He gestured toward the drawn curtains covering the French windows.
Sarah shivered. “Daisy is always mooning about in that garden,” she said. “Let us go in to dinner. I’ll send Cunningham to fetch her.”
“No,” said Seeley. “She’s just outside. Let me go.” Even as he said it, he felt a stab of misgiving, and he suddenly realized that he did not want to go back out into that dark garden, but he knew that he must. Perhaps this feeling of dread was only an old man’s fancy, or the oppression of a coming storm, but what was he to make of the dream? His years in India had taught him not to dismiss such things lightly.
Before Gordon and Sarah could argue further, Seeley fumbled with the curtained French windows and jerked at the catch, then plunged out into the deepening twilight. He stood there on the flagstone terrace, blinking as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light.
“Miss Beldon?” he called out. He had not spoken loudly because he thought she would be close by, but his voice echoed in the darkness, and no one answered.
Seeley did not see her at first. He had expected to find her still cutting flowers in the borders of the terrace, but when he perceived that she was not there, he scanned the expanse of lawn, and saw a dark figure walking toward the river. He called out again, but when there was no response, he began to run toward her.
He was only yards away from Daisy Beldon and the river when he saw that she was not alone. Standing at the water’s edge beside Daisy Beldon was a taller figure, his head bent as if the two of them were in conversation. Seeley hurried on. There was something familiar about the silhouette before him.
As he drew near, he heard the lazy drawl of a man’s voice saying, “We’re just going punting down the river for a bit … won’t you come?”
Seeley stepped out of the mist and clasped the girl by the arm. “Hello, Jack,” he said softly.
Jack Rhys-Taylor looked just as he had on that other night on the river so long ago. He was still dark-eyed and handsome, regally slender, and wearing a look of well-bred coolness that was the antithesis of fear. He was still twenty. At the sound of his name, he turned to look at Seeley, puzzled, perhaps, by the sight of this old man who seemed acquainted with him.
“It’s me, Jack,” said Seeley in answer to the unspoken question. “It’s Mungo.”
“Hello, Mungo,” said Jack, in the same jaunty tone he had always used. “We’re just going out on the river. I say, doesn’t Sarah look lovely in her necklace?”
Seeley turned to look at Daisy. She stood at Jack’s side, dazed and silent, like a sleepwalker. In the faint light, her resemblance to her grandmother was remarkable. Beyond her, Seeley could see the shadowy form of a punt, just beyond the reeds at the water’s edge. More dark shapes sat in the boat—waiting.
Words hovered on Seeley’s lips, but he had the absurd thought that it would be discourteous to remind Jack of the fact that he was dead. “It has been a long time,” he said at last.
“Not a bit,” said Jack softly. “We only just left the party a little while ago. Lovely evening for punting. I know Sarah is keen to go along. And we mean to take her with us.”
Seeley wondered if his fear at seeing the apparition had caused him to imagine the undercurrent of menace in Jack’s voice. The lights from the house caught in the gold of the necklace, making it shine in the darkness. Without thinking, Seeley snatched at the pendant, tearing the chain from Daisy Beldon’s throat. “This damned necklace! It has done enough,” he said, and he threw it far out into the river.
Daisy seemed to come to then, with a cry of alarm. “Grandmere’s necklace!” she cried. “Oh, I can’t lose it!”With the toe of one slipper, she began to kick at the heel of the other, struggling to get them off. “I must go after it!”
Seeley looked back at the old woman, standing in the glow of light on the terrace. He wondered if she could see them—and if it would matter to her. She made no move toward them, as she had made none on that other night on the river.
Seeley pushed his way past Daisy Beldon, who now stood alone on the bank of the river. He waded into the dark current that swirled about the reeds. “No, my d
ear, I’ll go in and get it,” said Seeley quietly. “You go back to the house now. I shan’t be long.”
AFTERWORD
My favorite fictional ghost story is called “The Green Scarf” by A. M. Burrage, in which a newly discovered relic calls up ghosts from the English Civil War. My favorite true ghost story is “Clara’s Ring,” an experience in the childhood of the real Nora Bonesteel.
CHARLES L. GRANT started out writing science fiction and won awards for his short stories in that genre. However, he’s better known these days for his horror and is the author of numerous novels, most recently Redmoor: Strange Fruit, an historical horror novel, and There’s A Red Moon Tonight, published under the pseudonym Talbot Clark. His short fiction has been collected in A Glow of Candles and Other Stories, Tales from the Nightside, Nightmare Seasons, and The Black Carousel, and reprinted in Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is also an award-winning editor of over twenty-five anthologies, including the critically acclaimed Shadows series.
BROWNIE, AND ME
CHARLES L. GRANT
I THINK IT’S going to rain.
Not that it matters, I guess. Everything is packed, I’ve made sure all the lamps and appliances are unplugged, and all the windows are locked.
It didn’t take long, though. And it didn’t take long at all for the house to begin smelling as if no one had lived there in a while. I have to admit, it kind of took the wind from my sails. I had hoped there’d be something of me left, after I left; I had hoped me and the house had had more than that. That the years, the decades, had counted for something.
The funny thing is, I hadn’t planned on leaving.
The idea was, they’d wonder where I was, down at the Brass Rail or over at the Cock’s Crow, and someone would get a little worried, someone else would either call the police or get into his car and drive over. They’d knock on the front door, knock on the back door, walk around the house a couple of times, and finally ask the neighbors if they’d seen me. Nobody would have. Not for days. So they’d break a window, probably the one in the kitchen, off the back porch. They’d climb in, they’d wander through the first floor calling my name, feeling a little foolish and maybe a little scared.