Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  He had had today a very long walk to reach his destination, aided only by Violet’s badly drawn map. Therefore, this big and rangy house perched on the top of a hill, surrounded by rough if private woodland, and with a strange tall rectangular façade, had left him, until that moment in the morning room, entirely untouched.

  The more curious then, maybe, the reaction that swept stilly yet intensely into and through him.

  So powerful was the impression, although utterly unnameable and nearly untranslatable, that for a second or so he failed to hear his mistress’s twitterings.

  If he had had to name it, identify it, as, rather later indeed he would struggle to do, he would say, did say, that he felt the house did not like him. Ridiculous though this was, it was the furthest he could get towards the root of the feeling. It did not like, nor did it trust him. And far, far worse than any prying servant, it seemed—through its hundreds of corners, its thousands of boards and cornices and angles, its countless ranks of windows—to be watching him with a terrible and immutable attention.

  “Forgive me, Violet. This is a fine sherry—my thought was distracted for an instant. What did you say?”

  “Oh, my dearest Edwin, I know it must all be such a startlement! Perhaps I should wait awhile. We can discuss everything after luncheon. I am so glad—so very glad you’re here at last!”

  Needless to relate, rather than discuss anything at all, they took the habitual “siesta” after lunch.

  Edwin, who had not looked forward to this, now learned that some of the very good, if cold, food left by the vacant cook had cheered him, as had the wine. And in the dim curtained bedchamber on an upper floor, he found that, instead of comparing Violet with Iris Smithys, he was enabled to conjure Iris into and over Violet’s willing, yearning flesh. He did not, then, fail to enjoy the afternoon. As for Violet, she was almost religious in her worship. Good God. She loved him. He had never fully accepted such a foible in her before. At the hour it added gloss. Then quite quickly it began to make him uneasy. And this was when, taking post-carnal tea as they had been used to do in the hotels, he felt again the “eyes” of the house upon him. Its ears were listening. The house was “weighing him in the balance,” he was afterwards to declare. And the house had fathomed him as the idiotic Violet never had, or surely could. As even he, probably, had not.

  Finally, when evening drew on, they sat in a big dark parlor inadequately lit by oil lamps (no gas, let alone electricity, had been brought to the house). And here Violet explained all that had recently occurred between her and Henry Augustus North, its impending events and ultimately seemingly unavoidable outcome.

  North himself, the old duffer, had fallen in love not only with the Indian climate, but with some native woman, some alleged princess or Rani—or some such peculiar title. For her he had given up the Christian faith, and was now proposing to marry her. To this end he would allow Violet to divorce him, so no scandal should attach to her. The Rani was also, it transpired, well-to-do. North accordingly gave over a great many funds, shares, estates, and general interests to his soon-to-be-former wife. These things included the old house in the hills.

  Violet said she had been calamitously upset by all of this; it seemed she must have reckoned him mostly faithful, even if she were not. She had felt, she announced, shamed, abandoned, scorned, and ruined. Yet, on coming to the house, she had fallen in love (oh, love again) with it immediately. It was a domicile, she told Edwin, said to have inherent healing qualities. For example, some male ancestor of the present Mr. North, during the previous century, had been miraculously cured here of a loathsome disease, while any woman brought to bed with child on the premises delivered a hale and fortunate baby, and herself suffered no harm.

  Such stories normally contemptuously tickled Edwin. Now he frowned. But Violet went on, expatiating at enormous length, with the exuberance if not the flare of a professional storyteller, on the house’s mystical pre-history. How the ground, the hill and its woods, were formerly some blessed site in “times of yore,” how all the bricks and stones, beams, even cements and joists that glued and stitched the place together, had been taken from marvelous and legendary areas, not merely in England, but over all Europe—a type of wood from some sacred antique forest, a rare marble said to have been created from ice and the blood of a saint. More than this, during the erection of the house, which, the tale had it, went on about the middle of the 1600s, not only planners and architects but every mason, carpenter and artisan of any sort was tested, and proved to be pure in heart and intellect before he took a part in the building.

  Perhaps, at another season, Edwin, here, might politely have stifled a yawn. Now he was deluged by a unique and almost horrified irritation. Like the yawn, he held it in. And eventually Violet reached her conclusion. This involved her statement that, in the end, she had come to understand her husband’s latent and luminous kindness to her in his giving of the house. She had, since being here, also recovered much of her general vitality, and hoped for a complete renewal. For these reasons she had finally sent for Edwin.

  “You bloom, dear Violet,” he drawled, and sipped the glass of champagne, whose bottle he had had to open.

  “Yes, Edwin, I’m better, and will be better still—” (For her sake he hoped so.) “But, in addition, do you see what a chance we have now— that is, once the divorce is settled?”

  Distracted by the scrutiny of shadows and silences, drained by false lovemaking, rather, he must admit, on edge, Edwin stared at her. He had no idea what Violet meant. He should not have been so slow. But never mind it, next moment, with a glowing smile, she was to enlighten him.

  “Edwin, you and I—we can at last be absolved of any guilt, and rescued from our lonely longing. We can marry, Edwin. I can be your wife! No stigma can connect to me. And I shall be wealthy now in my own right. We shall be rich, Edwin! And—my own beloved—we shall be one, as surely God has always meant us to be.”

  *

  Dinner was cold as well. He found now it did not cheer him so much, not even with the excellent Burgundy, and purplish port, not even the imported and splendid cigars she had contrived to get him.

  He saw, too, her eyes beginning to gleam once more with the renewal of lust. He had managed that earlier, but again? Edwin thought not.

  He began to make his excuses. They were sufficiently feeble. He seemed, he said, to have caught a chill during his walk to the house; he was not well. And it had been something of a shock, her news, he must admit. He had been so concerned for her…

  Oh, women. Such fools, but so sharp always when their primal needs went unmet, so clever, with the base intelligence of some lower animal—Violet had sussed him out instantly. Her eyes burst forth their tears once more. Did he not want her? But they could be married—all her considerable money should be his. Did he not love her? She had always thought he did. Why else—how else—had he persuaded her to dishonor, dragged her into wicked adultery. She loved him. He was her world.

  “Violet, you misread me now,” he blurted, frightened of her feral urgency. The most civilized of females, he had long known, could turn in a second from Belle to Beast. “I’m not myself this evening. I must go to bed, forgive me. We can talk again tomorrow.” And he rose, male authority pulled about him like a steely mantle. Violet responded with inertia. As sometimes even the most hysterical of women did. They had been so dominated, commanded, almost from the cradle. It was God’s law. Man was king. “Tomorrow,” he frigidly promised, slinking out of the door. “We will discuss all this then.” He did not risk a perhaps consoling paternal kiss on her forehead. Through her flood of tears, he saw the flames of crucifying truth burning her up, like a narrow pale house on fire within, the casements splintering at the heat, and the scarlet and gold of arson blazing from its riven skull.

  Out in the passage, where the candlelight was thin and isolated, Edwin Marsh Onslowe felt the weirdest throb, a sort of non-physical lurch, crunch through the building. It was, it went without saying, only
the differentiation of the cold night beyond the walls and the internal warmth of lamps and fires, metal and wood expanding, contracting. Such things were not supernormal.

  With luck, she would weep herself to sleep, and at first light he could, in the nondescript disguise of clerkly Mr. Harbold, quit the unsettling house, and the awful company of Violet North, forever.

  *

  It was not to be. Certain matters, it seemed, were already, as the Eastern poets said, written in some momentous book.

  Notwithstanding the prologue, he was tired, and sleep came swiftly. He had no dreams he recalled. Yet his slumber was fretted by a kind of half-conscious anxiety—the premonition of Violet’s revenge— traducing him, filthying his name, of hiring men to murder him even, or, oddly worse, somehow forcing him, despite everything, to marry her, and so decay beside her for fifty years of dreary hell.

  In actuality, Violet stole, about three in the morning, into the separate bedroom prepared for him, a room (clearly) she had not expected him to select.

  Asleep, he woke in panic as she flung herself upon him, her flailing weight, her burning hot skin, and tear-melted eyes, screaming and sobbing out all those emotions she had, until that minute, so stringently clamped for twenty-seven years in the prison of her heart.

  The fear he felt was colossal. Probably it made his excuse.

  As before, when she had sometimes giggled so loudly and insanely in those hotel bedrooms, or indeed in other stages of their passion when she grew too noisy, he clapped his right hand over her mouth. In the past, he would have kissed her next. Not now. Exerting another strength he had, which perhaps he could never have foreseen he might possess, left-handed he seized her throat. At which his right hand let go of her face and flew to join its partner. Grasping her neck in both hands (that seemed to him in those moments incredibly large, too large to belong to him) he did not merely choke the life from her, but snapped the bones of her upper spine free of her skull, as if they had only been the slender stems of glass goblets.

  *

  When Edwin had finished killing Violet, he did another—to himself, later—astonishing thing. He rolled her body straight off the bed onto the floor. There it lay then, in its coil of nightgown and robe, for the rest of the hours of darkness, while he slept in a deep and dreamless stupor on his back, at the center of the mattress.

  The commencement of dawn light on the ceiling woke him. It was rosy, one of those icing-sugar winter dawns often shown on picture cards of happy skaters, or small animals frolicking in wintry woods. Edwin lay, slightly confused, staring up at it, thinking it first the reflection of his fire, but the fire in the grate was out, naturally. He could not, for a little while, recollect where he was. Then he remembered he was in Violet’s country house. And then he remembered all of it.

  He sat up very slowly, and in a shrinking terror looked down over the side of the bed to the bundle of washing and loose hair on the carpet. Then he buried his head in his hands and wept in despair. Rather as Violet had done, but Edwin did not really think of that.

  *

  In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

  After some time Edwin, as he believed, pulled himself together and got up. Having dressed, he went down through the house to the kitchens, where he soon located some cold beef, a loaf, and butter. Since tea and coffee had not been made, of course, he did not bother with them but charged himself with a brandy and soda in the drawing room.

  In the new day—a bluish but very cold one, with frost visible on the windows, and on the edges of boughs and walls—the house, with its unlit hearths, looked quite deadly to him. Although, as has been said, Edwin lacked imaginative perception, he felt the hollowness of the place, as if it, too, were frozen both out and in. But this fancy was one he did not dwell on. He had by now mastered himself. He had done something shocking and harsh, even if driven to it by extreme provocation. He doubted any man alive, unless an uplifted priest or a fool, could have done otherwise. It seemed almost as if she—Violet— had given herself to him as a sacrifice. But again, such a notion was not to be considered now. For Edwin must make a plan.

  The excellent and rejuvenating fact was that, as he had come here in his disguise of the humble, irrelevant Harbold, Edwin had had no role in any subsequent event. Nor could he be suspected of having one. Nobody at all had ever known of Edwin’s connection with Violet North. While, and in this he did trust her fully, Violet would never have betrayed her relationship with him. She had always been far too afraid of losing her husband, or more properly, the financial parasol North had maintained over her head. As for the invented Harbold himself, even he had evidenced no link with Violet. He had gone off on his doltish country walk, vanishing from the inn, a dull little nobody soon forgotten.

  It only remained, therefore, for Edwin to go home—if perhaps now in a slightly altered disguise. This posed no difficulty. He had always taken a few spare articles of dress with him, even a secondary wig, on his jaunts with Violet; it was, for him, part of the fun. And in this manner, Harbold need not be seen again anywhere. While Edwin must have been in London all the time, at his quiet lodging, immersed in his own harmless projects.

  Edwin went to change his clothes and don the other wig, which was a rather nicer one than he had given poor Harbold. That done, Edwin went very carefully over the house, and through each room he had, however briefly, occupied. In the process of doing this, inevitably, he came upon Violet’s body again, still laid out like rolled-up washing beside the bed. Edwin was by then completely in control of himself. So much so in fact that he thought her very unseemly. Caught by a curious whim, he had half an urge to move the corpse, to stuff it possibly into its own bed, but he sternly resisted such childishness. Instead he returned alone to the master bedroom, where Violet and he had spent the previous afternoon. Here he paused, brooding.

  Of course, it could not be denied, there was every evidence here that the woman had been with a lover. Scowling, Edwin took in various signs he was too fastidious to name to himself—they had been careless here, as not in the cheap hotels. And she had troubled to tidy nothing. It was a pity, he thought then, with admirable practicality, he had not killed her before any of that took place. Could there be clues here after all that might, despite all odds, reveal his actions?

  Just then the house gave off a massive cracking creak. It must remind any who had ever heard such a noise of the snapping of bones.

  Edwin’s nerve, for a fragment of a second, also snapped. He shouted at the house. “It’s the damned cold! Just the cold makes such a sound in you! You need a bloody fire to warm you up.”

  Epiphanies are often bizarre, and come in many forms.

  That which came to Edwin caused him physically to stagger. But then he stood in utter silence, staring about him, his hands already flexing, his mind already racing. And the house, too, the house was entirely silent. Silent as the grave.

  *

  Setting the fire was very easy. Her unmodern residence was full of candles, tapers, matches, lamps, and oil. Edwin went about his task quite methodically, but also with a certain exhilaration. He could not hide from himself that he nearly relished this ultimate act of cleansing, after all the foolish mess Violet had made for him. He understood he did her also a great service. No opprobrium now could ever attach itself to her character.

  So thorough Edwin was (and so sensible, pausing even to partake of a quick luncheon in order to keep up concentration and stamina), that the sun was low when, his own luggage safely out on the lawn, Edwin struck and scattered the first of his incendiaries.

  He presently beat a hasty retreat, for the fire obligingly took hold everywhere, and with a slightly surprising efficiency. But then, he had been immaculate. He had made a proper job of it. What bewilderment the returning servants would receive, he vaguely thought, when he had got himself off along the drive an
d down onto the wooded slopes of the hill. By then he could smell the tang of smoke out in the fresh cold of a darkling dusk. Turning at length, he looked back, and saw to his immense relief and satisfaction an unearthly glow and flicker—rather like, conceivably, that of the northern lights—going on in the upper air above the trees. Then, even as he gazed transfixed, there came a huge, wide bang, like thunder, and through the twilight overhead darted an explosion of spangling elements, as if insects burst from some shell.

  A cinder dashed on Edwin’s cheek, a miniscule scorch sharp as a tiny sting. At this, it occurred to him that, with luck, even the old trees on the hillside might very well also go up in smoke. Wisely then he ran, his bag clutched tight, and the downhill path quite helpful now he was past the larger tree roots, and soon well lighted by the burning house behind.

  Not until he had reached flatter ground, due to make southwards now along deserted country tracks, did Edwin permit himself one further viewing of his masterpiece.

  By that time all he could make out was a vast black cloud rising hundreds of feet into the sky, that let out of itself quite regular bright fountains, and through which occasionally some dull crimson shape evolved, more like a noise than a sight, a sort of roar, a soundless bellowing.

  *

  It was a wearisome plod on foot and without detour to the station. But from there a late train took him to the town of Pressingbury. He could, in his smarter character, stay tonight at the Pressingbury Arms. Tomorrow there remained only the uneventful journey to London, and a little well-deserved peace.

  *

  Some seven days later, rested and recovered, Edwin Onslowe invited Iris Smithys to accompany him to the seaside, since the weather in the south-east had become clement. She consented and they visited the pier at Hastings, resplendent with its Eastern Pavilion. Iris flirted deliciously with Edwin all morning, and ate a fish luncheon with him, but declined a mutual spell in one of the more attractive hotel bedrooms.