Fear

by Roald Dahl

  Now it is hard ever to recall mere physical sensations, when they have passed. If you have been cold and are warmed, it is difficult to remember what cold was like: if you have been hot and have got cool, it is difficult to realize what the oppression of heat really meant. Just so, with the passing of that presence, I found myself unable to recapture the sense of the terror with which, a few moments ago only, it had invaded and inspired me.

  ‘A soul in hell?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He moved about the room for a minute or so, and then came and sat on the arm of my chair.

  ‘I don’t know what you saw,’ he said, ‘or what you felt, but there has never in all my life happened to me anything more real than what these last few minutes have brought. I have talked to a soul in the hell of remorse, which is the only possible hell. He knew, from what happened last night, that he could perhaps establish communication through me with the world he had quitted, and he sought me and found me. I am charged with a mission to a woman I have never seen, a message from the contrite … You can guess who it is …’

  He got up with a sudden briskness.

  ‘Let’s verify it anyhow,’ he said. ‘He gave me the street and the number. Ah, there’s the telephone book! Would it be a coincidence merely if I found that at No. 20 in Chasemore Street, South Kensington, there lived a Lady Payle?’

  He turned over the leaves of the bulky volume.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said.

  Christmas Meeting

  by Rosemary Timperley

  I have never spent Christmas alone before.

  It gives me an uncanny feeling, sitting alone in my ‘furnished room’, with my head full of ghosts, and the room full of voices of the past. It’s a drowning feeling – all the Christmases of the past coming back in a mad jumble: the childish Christmas, with a house full of relations, a tree in the window, sixpences in the pudding, and the delicious, crinkly stocking in the dark morning; the adolescent Christmas, with mother and father, the war and the bitter cold, and the letters from abroad; the first really grown-up Christmas, with a lover – the snow and the enchantment, red wine and kisses, and the walk in the dark before midnight, with the ground so white, and the stars diamond bright in a black sky – so many Christmases through the years.

  And, now, the first Christmas alone.

  But not quite loneliness. A feeling of companionship with all the other people who are spending Christmas alone – millions of them – past and present. A feeling that, if I close my eyes, there will be no past or future, only an endless present which is time, because it is all we ever have.

  Yes, however cynical you are, however irreligious, it makes you feel queer to be alone at Christmas time.

  So I’m absurdly relieved when the young man walks in. There’s nothing romantic about it – I’m a woman of nearly fifty, a spinster schoolma’am with grim, dark hair, and myopic eyes that once were beautiful, and he’s a kid of twenty, rather unconventionally dressed with a flowing, wine-coloured tie and black velvet jacket, and brown curls which could do with a taste of the barber’s scissors. The effeminacy of his dress is belied by his features – narrow, piercing, blue eyes, and arrogant, jutting nose and chin. Not that he looks strong. The skin is fine-drawn over the prominent features, and he is very white.

  He bursts in without knocking, then pauses, says: ‘I’m so sorry. I thought this was my room.’ He begins to go out, then hesitates and says: ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s – queer, being alone at Christmas, isn’t it? May I stay and talk?’

  ‘I’d be glad if you would.’

  He comes right in, and sits down by the fire.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I came in here on purpose. I really did think it was my room,’ he explains.

  ‘I’m glad you made the mistake. But you’re a very young person to be alone at Christmas time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go back to the country to my family. It would hold up my work. I’m a writer.’

  ‘I see.’ I can’t help smiling a little. That explains his rather unusual dress. And he takes himself so seriously, this young man! ‘Of course, you mustn’t waste a precious moment of writing,’ I say with a twinkle.

  ‘No, not a moment! That’s what my family won’t see. They don’t appreciate urgency.’

  ‘Families are never appreciative of the artistic nature.’

  ‘No, they aren’t,’ he agrees seriously.

  ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘Poetry and a diary combined. It’s called My Poems and I, by Francis Randel. That’s my name. My family say there’s no point in my writing, that I’m too young. But I don’t feel young. Sometimes I feel like an old man, with too much to do before he dies.’

  ‘Revolving faster and faster on the wheel of creativeness.’

  ‘Yes! Yes, exactly! You understand! You must read my work some time. Please read my work! Read my work!’ A note of desperation in his voice, a look of fear in his eyes, makes me say:

  ‘We’re both getting much too solemn for Christmas Day. I’m going to make you some coffee. And I have a plum cake.’

  I move about, clattering cups, spooning coffee into my percolator. But I must have offended him, for, when I look round, I find he has left me. I am absurdly disappointed.

  I finish making coffee, however, then turn to the bookshelf in the room. It is piled high with volumes, for which the landlady has apologized profusely: ‘Hope you don’t mind the books, Miss, but my husband won’t part with them, and there’s nowhere else to put them. We charge a bit less for the room for that reason.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘Books are good friends.’

  But these aren’t very friendly-looking books. I take one at random. Or does some strange fate guide my hand?

  Sipping my coffee, inhaling my cigarette smoke, I begin to read the battered little book, published, I see, in Spring, 1852. It’s mainly poetry – immature stuff, but vivid. Then there’s a kind of diary. More realistic, less affected. Out of curiosity, to see if there are any amusing comparisons, I turn to the entry for Christmas Day, 1851. I read:

  ‘My first Christmas Day alone. I had rather an odd experience. When I went back to my lodgings after a walk, there was a middle-aged woman in my room. I thought, at first, I’d walked into the wrong room, but this was not so, and later, after a pleasant talk, she – disappeared. I suppose she was a ghost. But I wasn’t frightened. I liked her. But I do not feel well tonight. Not at all well. I have never felt ill at Christmas before.’

  A publisher’s note followed the last entry: FRANCIS RANDEL DIED FROM A SUDDEN HEART ATTACK ON THE NIGHT OF CHRISTMAS DAY, 1851. THE WOMAN MENTIONED IN THIS FINAL ENTRY IN HIS DIARY WAS THE LAST PERSON TO SEE HIM ALIVE. IN SPITE OF REQUESTS FOR HER TO COME FORWARD, SHE NEVER DID SO. HER IDENTITY REMAINS A MYSTERY.

  Elias and the Draug

  by Jonas Lie

  On Kvalholmen down in Helgeland there once lived a poor fisherman, by name Elias, and his wife, Karen, who before her marriage had worked in the parsonage at Alstadhaug.fn1 They lived in a little hut, which they had built, and Elias hired out by the day in the Lofoten fisheries.

  Kvalholmen was a lonely island, and there were signs at times that it was haunted. Sometimes when her husband was away from home, the good wife heard all sorts of unearthly noises and cries, which surely boded no good.

  Each year there came a child; when they had been married seven years there were six children in the home. But they were both steady and hard working people, and by the time the last arrived, Elias had managed to put aside something and felt that he could afford a sixern, and thereafter do his Lofoten fishing as master in his own boat.

  One day, as he was walking with a halibut harpoon in one hand, thinking about this, he suddenly came upon a huge seal, sunning itself in the lee of a rock near the shore, and apparently quite as much taken by surprise as he was.

  Elias meanwhile was not slow. From the rocky ledge, on
which he was standing, he plunged the long, heavy harpoon into its back just behind the neck. But then – oh, what a struggle! Instantly the seal reared itself up, stood erect on its tail, tall as the mast of a boat, and glowered at him with a pair of bloodshot eyes, at the same time showing its teeth in a grin so fiendish and venomous that Elias almost lost his wits from fright. Then suddenly it plunged into the sea and vanished in a spray of mingled blood and water.

  That was the last Elias saw of it; but that very afternoon the harpoon, broken just below the iron barb, came drifting ashore near the boat landing not far from his house.

  Elias had soon forgotten all about it. He bought his sixern that same autumn, and housed it in a little boat shed he had built during the summer.

  One night, as he lay thinking about his new sixern, it occurred to him that perhaps, in order to safeguard it properly, he ought to put another shore on either side underneath it. He was so absurdly fond of the boat that he thought it only fun to get up and light his lantern and go down to look it over.

  As he held up his lantern to see better, he suddenly glimpsed, on a tangle of nets in one corner, a face that resembled exactly the features of the seal. It grimaced for a moment angrily towards him and the light. Its mouth seemed to open wider and wider, and before he was aware of anything further, he saw a bulky man-form vanish out the door of the boat house, not so fast however but that he managed to make out, with the aid of his lantern, a long iron prong projecting from its back.

  Elias now began to put two and two together. But even so he was more concerned for the safety of his boat than he was for his own life.

  On the morning, early in January, when he set out for the fishing banks, with two men in the boat beside himself, he heard a voice call to him in the darkness from a skerry directly opposite the mouth of the cove. He thought that it laughed derisively.

  ‘Better beware, Elias, when you get your femböring!’fn2

  It was a long time, however, before Elias saw his way clear to get a femböring – not until his eldest son was seventeen years old.

  It was in the fall of the year that Elias embarked with his whole family and went to Ranen to trade in his sixern for a femböring. At home they left only a little Lapp girl, but newly confirmed, whom they had taken into their home some years before. There was one femböring in particular which he had his eye on, a little four man boat, which the best shipwright thereabout had finished and tarred that very fall. For this boat he traded in his own sixern, paying the difference in coin.

  Elias thereupon began to think of sailing home. He first stopped at the village store and laid in a supply for Christmas for himself and his family, among other things a little keg of brandy. It may be that, pleased as they were with the day’s bargaining, both he and his wife had one drop too many before they left, and Bernt, their son, was given a taste too.

  Whereupon they set sail for home in the new femböring. Other ballast than himself, his wife and children, and his Christmas supplies he had none. His son Bernt sat at the stem; his wife, with the assistance of the second son, managed the halyard; Elias himself sat at the tiller, while the two younger sons, twelve and fourteen respectively, were to alternate at the bailing.

  They had fifty odd miles of sea before them, and they had no sooner reached the open than it was apparent that the femböring would be put to the test the very first time it was in use. A storm blew up before long, and soon white-crested waves began dashing themselves into spray. Then Elias saw what kind of a boat he had. It rode the waves like a sea gull, without so much as taking in one single drop, and he was ready to swear that he would not even have to single-reef, as any ordinary femböring would have been compelled to do in such weather.

  As the day drew on, he noticed not far away another femböring, completely manned, speeding along, just as he was then, with four reefs in the sail. It seemed to follow the same course, and he thought it strange that he had not noticed it before. It seemed to want to race with him, and when Elias realized this, he could not resist letting out a reef again.

  So they raced along at a terrific speed past headlands and islands and skerries. To Elias it seemed that he had never before sailed so gloriously, and the femböring proved to be every whit that had been claimed – the best boat in Ranen.

  Meanwhile the sea had risen, and already several huge waves had rolled over them, breaking against the stem up forward, where Bernt sat, and sweeping out to leeward near the stern.

  Ever since dusk had settled over the sea, the other boat had kept very close to them, and they were now so near each other that they could have thrown a bailing-dipper, one to the other, had they wished. And so they sailed on, side by side, all the evening, in an ever-increasing sea.

  That last reef, Elias began to think, ought really to be taken in again, but he was loath to give up the race, and made up his mind to wait as long as possible, until the other boat saw fit to reef in, for it was quite as hard pressed as he. And since they now had to fight both the cold and the wet, the brandy bottle was now and then brought forth and passed around.

  The phosphorescent light, which played on the dark sea near his own boat, flashed eerily in the white crests around the stranger, which appeared to be ploughing a furrow of light and throwing a fiery foam to either side. In the reflection of this light he could even distinguish the rope ends in the other boat. He could also make out the crew on board in their oilskin caps, but inasmuch as they were on the leeward side of him, they kept their backs turned and were almost hid behind the lofty gunwale, as it rose with the seas.

  Of a sudden a gigantic breaker, whose white crest Elias had for some time seen in the darkness, crashed against the prow of the boat, where Bernt sat. For a moment the whole femböring seemed to come to a stop, the timbers creaked and jarred under the strain, and then the boat, which for half a second had balanced uncertainly, righted itself and sped forward, while the wave rolled out again to leeward.

  All the while this was happening Elias thought he heard fiendish cries issuing from the other boat.

  But when it was over his wife, who sat at the halyard, cried out in a voice that cut him to the very soul, ‘My God, Elias, that sea took Marthe and Nils!’

  These were their two youngest children, the former nine, the latter seven years old, who had been sitting forward close to Bernt.

  ‘Hold fast to the halyard, Karen, or you may lose more!’ was all that Elias answered.

  It was necessary now to take in the fourth reef, and Elias had no sooner done so than he thought it advisable to reef in the fifth, for the sea was steadily rising. On the other hand, if he hoped to sail his boat clear of the ever mounting waves, he dared not lessen his sail more than was absolutely necessary.

  It turned out, however, to be difficult going even with the sail thus diminished. The sea raged furiously, and deluged them with spray after spray. Finally Bernt and Anton, the next oldest, who had helped his mother at the halyard, had to take hold of the yardarm, something one resorts to only when a boat is hard pressed even with the last reef in – in this case the fifth.

  The rival boat, which in the meantime had disappeared from sight, bobbed up alongside them again with exactly the same amount of sail that he was carrying.

  Elias now began rather to dislike the crew over there. The two men who stood holding the yardarm, and whose faces he could glimpse underneath their oilskin caps, appeared to him in the weird reflections from the spray more like spectres than human beings. They spoke ne’er a word.

  A little to leeward he spied the foaming ridge of another breaker rising before him in the dark, and he prepared himself to meet it. He turned the prow slantwise towards it, and let out as much sail as he dared, to give the boat speed enough to cleave its way through.

  The sea struck them with the roar of a torrent. For a moment the boat again careened uncertainly. When it was all over, and the vessel had righted itself once more, his wife no longer sat at the halyard, nor was Anton at the yardarm – they had b
oth been washed asea.

  This time, too, he thought he made out the same fiendish voices above the storm, but mingled with them he also heard his wife’s agonizing cries as she called him by name. When he realized that she had been swept overboard, he muttered to himself, ‘In Jesus’s name!’ and said no more.

  He felt vaguely that he would have preferred to follow her, but he realized at the same time that it was up to him to save the other three he had on board, Bernt and the two younger sons, the one twelve, the other fourteen, who for a while had been doing the bailing, but whom he had later placed in the stern behind him.

  Bernt was now left to manage the yardarm alone, and the two, father and son, had to help each other as best they could. The tiller Elias did not dare let go; he held on to it with a hand of iron, long since numb from the strain.

  After a while the companion boat bobbed up again; as before it had been momentarily lost to view. He now saw more clearly than before the bulky form that sat aft, much as he was sitting, and controlled the tiller. Projecting from his neck whenever he turned his back, just below the oilskin cap, Elias could clearly discern some four inches or so of an iron prong, which he had seen before.

  At that he was convinced in his innermost soul of two things: one was that it was none other than the Draugfn3 himself who sat steering his half-boat alongside his and who had lured him on to destruction, and the other was that he was fated no doubt this night to sail the sea for the last time. For he who sees the Draug at sea is a marked man. He said nothing to the others, in order not to discourage them, but he commended his soul in silence to the Lord.

  He had found it necessary, during the last hours, to bear away from his course because of the storm, and when furthermore it took to snowing heavily, he realized that he would no doubt have to postpone any attempt to land until dawn.

  Meanwhile they sailed on as before.

  Now and again the boys aft complained of freezing, but there was nothing to do about that, wet as they were, and furthermore Elias sat preoccupied with his own thoughts. He had been seized with an insatiable desire to avenge himself. What he would have liked to do, had he not had the lives of his three remaining children to safeguard, was suddenly to veer about in an attempt to ram and sink the cursed boat, which still as if to mock him ran ever alongside him, and whose fiendish purpose he now fully comprehended. If the halibut harpoon had once taken effect, why might not now a knife or a gaff do likewise? He felt he would willingly give his life to deal one good blow to this monster, who had so unmercifully robbed him of all that was dearest to him on earth, and who still seemed insatiate and demanded more.