by Roald Dahl
Euston in the morning loomed gaunt and monstrous. The London streets were dripping with autumn rain. I told the taximan to drive as fast as possible up to Hampstead. When he pulled up in Allan’s road before a gate set in a high wall, I was already half out of the taxi. I pushed the fare at him, slapped open the gate, and ran up the short drive. I just had time to notice that the white Regency house was more or less what I had pictured, before I was up the flight of steps and tugging at the iron bell-pull. I was tired – deadly tired, deadly afraid. What courage I had ever had seemed to have fled. ‘I promise. I promise. Oh, if you’ve ever really been here, please have gone,’ I gabbled, while the London rain poured over me, and the bell reverberated through the house.
At last I heard a movement inside the house, and then footsteps slowly drawing towards the door. For a second Allan and I stood gazing at each other. Then – suddenly – I was over the threshold, and in his arms. While the door swung gently to behind us, I drew him over to the staircase, drew him down, knelt beside him as he sat there on the second stair. He turned his face against my shoulder, and heaved a sigh.
After a little while, I raised my head and looked about me. We were in a large white-panelled hall, with a window through which I could see a plane-tree, its quiet branches stroking the glass. The only thing in common with our hall up in Scotland was the telephone, standing on a mahogany table against the wall. For some moments I gazed at it. My terror was wholly gone – like a dream at morning. But I became aware of a new emotion – disquieting, faintly discreditable. I looked suspiciously down at Allan, I wanted to know. Cautiously I began to frame my question. He was so still that I wondered if he had fallen asleep. But just then he stirred, and I took his head between my hands and, as he smiled at me, turned his face searchingly towards the light. It was calm as though washed by tidal waters. I knew that I could never ask my question.
At that moment the front door-bell began to peal. We both jumped, and got to our feet.
‘You go,’ said Allan, disappearing into the back of the house.
The sharp-nosed young man in the dripping mackintosh was aggrieved. ‘Been sent to cut you off,’ he said. ‘Bill unpaid – nothing done –’
I turned back into the hall. About me, above me, the house lay quiet. Only against the window the boughs of the plane-tree clamoured in a sudden flurry of wind and rain. The question I could never ask – the answer never to be given – surely both were irrelevant? For all the tranquillity of the house, I felt my panic begin again to stir. There was only one thing that mattered to me – to us.
‘Allan –’ I called – and I tried not to let my voice quaver – ‘It’s about the telephone. Do you – do you want it cut off?’
I held my breath. The reply came immediately.
‘Why – darling – we’re going back to Scotland tonight, out of this damnable climate. We don’t want to pay for what we aren’t going to need any more. Tell them they can disconnect it at once.’
The Ghost of a Hand
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of particularity.
I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular, as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady’s letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.
That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr Alderman Harper, of High Street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir’s mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House – for I find it spelt both ways – stood.
This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr and Mrs Prosser came there some time in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard, and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law’s family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.
Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of the Exchequer to compel Mr Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking out the lease. But the Alderman drew an answer, supported by no less than seven long affidavits, copies of all of which were furnished to his lordship, and with the desired effect; for rather than compel him to place them upon the file of the court, his lordship struck, and consented to release him.
I am sorry the case did not proceed at least far enough to place upon the files of the court the very authentic and unaccountable story which Miss Rebecca relates.
The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs Prosser, quite alone, was sitting in the twilight at the back parlour window, which was open, looking out into the orchard, and plainly saw a hand stealthily placed upon the stone window-sill outside, as if by someone beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up. There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short, but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the window-sill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged somewhere about forty, as she conjectured. It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants who was now about to scale the windows of the Tiled House. She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.
Search was made in the orchard, but there were no indications of any person’s having been under the window, beneath which, ranged along the wall, stood a great column of flower-pots, which it seemed must have prevented anyone’s coming within reach of it.
The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen. The women grew frightened, and the servant-man, taking fire-arms with him, opened the back-door, but discovered nothing. As he shut it, however, he said, ‘a thump came on it’, and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened him; and though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window panes, he made no further explorations.
About six o’clock on the Saturday evening following, the cook, ‘an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years’, being alone in the kitchen, saw, on looking up, it is supposed the same fat but aristocratic-looking hand, laid with its palm against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface. She cried out, and said something like a prayer on seeing it. But it was not withdrawn for several seconds after.
After this, for a great many nights, there came at first a low, and afterwards an angry rapping, as it seemed with a set of clenched knuckles at the back-door. And the servant-man would not open it, but called to know who was there; and there came no answer, only a sound as if the palm of the hand was placed against it, and drawn slowly from side to side with a sort of soft, groping motion.
All this time, sitting in the back parlour, which, for the time, they used as a drawing-room, Mr and Mrs Prosser were disturbed by rappings at the window, sometimes very low and furtive, like a clandestine signal, and at others sudden, and so loud as to threaten the breaking of the pane.
This was all at the back of the house, which looked upon the orchard, as you know. But on a Tuesday night, at about half past nine, there came precisel
y the same rappings at the hall-door, and went on, to the great annoyance of the master and terror of his wife, at intervals, for nearly two hours.
After this, for several days and nights, they had no annoyance whatsoever, and began to think that the nuisance had expended itself. But on the night of the 13th September, Jane Easterbrook, an English maid, having gone into the pantry for the small silver bowl in which her mistress’s posset was served, happening to look up at the little window of only four panes, observed, through an auger-hole which was drilled through the window frame, for the admission of a bolt to secure the shutter, a white pudgy finger – first the tip, and then the two first joints introduced, and turned about this way and that, crooked against the inside, as if in search of a fastening which its owner designed to push aside. When the maid got back into the kitchen, we are told ‘she fell into “a swounde”, and was all the next day very weak.’
Mr Prosser, being, I’ve heard, a hard-headed and conceited sort of fellow, scouted the ghost, and sneered at the fears of his family. He was privately of opinion that the whole affair was a practical joke or a fraud, and waited an opportunity of catching the rogue flagrante delicto. He did not long keep this theory to himself, but let it out by degrees with no stint of oaths, and threats, believing that some domestic traitor held the thread of the conspiracy.
Indeed it was time something were done; for not only his servants, but good Mrs Prosser herself, had grown to look unhappy and anxious. They kept at home from the hour of sunset, and would not venture about the house after nightfall, except in couples.
The knocking had ceased for about a week; when one night, Mrs Prosser being in the nursery, her husband, who was in the parlour, heard it begin very softly at the hall-door. The air was quite still, which favoured his hearing distinctly. This was the first time there had been any disturbance at that side of the house, and the character of the summons was changed.
Mr Prosser, leaving the parlour-door open, it seems, went quietly into the hall. The sound was that of beating on the outside of the stout door, softly and regularly, ‘with the flat of the hand’. He was going to open it suddenly, but changed his mind; and went back very quietly, and on to the head of the kitchen stair, where was a ‘strong closet’ over the pantry, in which he kept his fire-arms, swords, and canes.
Here he called his manservant, whom he believed to be honest, and, with a pair of loaded pistols in his own coat-pockets, and giving another pair to him, he went as lightly as he could, followed by the man, and with a stout walking-cane in his hand, forward to the door.
Everything went as Mr Prosser wished. The besieger of his house, so far from taking fright at their approach, grew more impatient; and the sort of patting which had aroused his attention at first assumed the rhythm and emphasis of a series of double-knocks.
Mr Prosser, angry, opened the door with his right arm across, cane in hand. Looking, he saw nothing; but his arm was jerked up oddly, as it might be with the hollow of a hand, and something passed under it, with a kind of gentle squeeze. The servant neither saw nor felt anything, and did not know why his master looked back so hastily, cutting with his cane, and shutting the door with so sudden a slam.
From that time Mr Prosser discontinued his angry talk and swearing about it, and seemed nearly as averse from the subject as the rest of his family. He grew, in fact, very uncomfortable, feeling an inward persuasion that when, in answer to the summons, he had opened the hall-door, he had actually given admission to the besieger.
He said nothing to Mrs Prosser, but went up earlier to his bedroom, ‘where he read a while in his Bible, and said his prayers’. I hope the particular relation of this circumstance does not indicate its singularity. He lay awake for a good while, it appears; and, as he supposed, about a quarter past twelve he heard the soft palm of a hand patting on the outside of the bedroom-door, and then brushed slowly along it.
Up bounced Mr Prosser, very much frightened, and locked the door, crying, ‘Who’s there?’ but receiving no answer, but the same brushing sound of a soft hand drawn over the panels which he knew only too well.
In the morning the housemaid was terrified by the impression of a hand in the dust of the ‘little parlour’ table, where they had been unpacking delft and other things the day before. The print of the naked foot in the sea-sand did not frighten Robinson Crusoe half so much. They were by this time all nervous, and some of them half-crazed, about the hand.
Mr Prosser went to examine the mark, and made light of it, but, as he swore afterwards, rather to quiet his servants than from any comfortable feeling about it in his own mind; however, he had them all, one by one, into the room, and made each place his or her hand, palm downward, on the same table, thus taking a similar impression from every person in the house, including himself and his wife; and his ‘affidavit’ deposed that the formation of the hand so impressed differed altogether from those of the living inhabitants of the house, and corresponded with that of the hand seen by Mrs Prosser and by the cook.
Whoever or whatever the owner of that hand might be, they all felt this subtle demonstration to mean that it was declared he was no longer out of doors, but had established himself in the house.
And now Mrs Prosser began to be troubled with strange and horrible dreams, some of which as set out in detail, in Aunt Rebecca’s long letter, are really very appalling nightmares. But one night, as Mr Prosser closed his bedchamber-door, he was struck somewhat by the utter silence of the room, there being no sound of breathing, which seemed unaccountable to him, as he knew his wife was in bed, and his ears were particularly sharp.
There was a candle burning on a small table at the foot of the bed, besides the one he held in one hand, a heavy ledger, connected with his father-in-law’s business, being under his arm. He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was as he first thought, a toad – but really the same fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple.
Mr Prosser, with a horrified jerk, pitched the ledger right at the curtains, behind which the owner of the hand might be supposed to stand. The hand was instantaneously and smoothly snatched away, the curtains made a great wave, and Mr Prosser got round the bed in time to see the closet-door, which was at the other side, pulled to by the same white, puffy hand, as he believed.
He drew the door open with a fling, and stared in: but the closet was empty, except for the clothes hanging from the pegs on the wall, and the dressing table and looking-glass facing the windows. He shut it sharply, and locked it, and felt for a minute, he says, ‘as if he were like to lose his wits’; then, ringing at the bell, he brought the servants, and with much ado they recovered Mrs Prosser from a sort of ‘trance’, in which, he says, from her looks, she seemed to have suffered ‘the pains of death’; and Aunt Rebecca adds, ‘from what she told me of her visions, with her own lips, he might have added, “and of hell also”.’
But the occurrence which seems to have determined the crisis was the strange sickness of their eldest child, a little boy aged between two and three years. He lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the doctors, who were called in, set down the symptoms to incipient water on the brain. Mrs Prosser used to sit up with the nurse, by the nursery fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.
His bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the door of a press or cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close. There was a little valance, about a foot deep, round the top of the child’s bed, and this descended within some ten or twelve inches of the pillow on which it lay.
They observed that the little creature was quieter whenever they took it up and held it on their laps. They had just replaced him, as he seemed to have grown quite sleepy and tranquil, but he was not five minutes in his bed when he began to screa
m in one of his frenzies of terror; at the same moment the nurse, for the first time, detected, and Mrs Prosser equally plainly saw, following the direction of her eyes, the real cause of the child’s sufferings.
Protruding through the aperture of the press, and shrouded in the shade of the valance, they plainly saw the white fat hand, palm downwards, presented towards the head of the child. The mother uttered a scream, and snatched the child from its little bed, and she and the nurse ran down to the lady’s sleeping-room, where Mr Prosser was in bed, shutting the door as they entered; and they had hardly done so, when a gentle tap came to it from the outside.
There is a great deal more, but this will suffice. The singularity of the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a hand, and no more. The person to whom that hand belonged never once appeared; nor was it a hand separated from a body, but only a hand so manifested and introduced that its owner was always, by some crafty accident, hidden from view.
In the year 1819, at a college breakfast, I met a Mr Prosser – a thin, grave, but rather chatty old gentleman, with very white hair drawn back into a pigtail – and he told us all, with a concise particularity, a story of his cousin, James Prosser, who, when an infant, had slept for some time in what his mother said was a haunted nursery in an old house near Chapelizod, and who, whenever he was ill, over-fatigued, or in any wise feverish, suffered all through his life as he had done from a time he could scarcely remember, from a vision of a certain gentleman, fat and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced clothes, and every feature and line of whose sensual, benignant, and unwholesome face, was as minutely engraven upon his memory as the dress and lineaments of his own grandfather’s portrait, which hung before him every day at breakfast, dinner, and supper.