Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  This angered Edwin. He felt, perhaps correctly, Iris had strung him along. They returned to London in sullen non-communication.

  Truth to tell, once parted from the girl, he was rather reluctant to go back to his flat on Tenmouth Street, behind the Temple. He passed a further hour or so at a public house, but found the pub fire far too hot. It had been a very mild day.

  *

  The heat of the fire on his face. It was burning, drying his skin so that his flesh seemed to stick to his bones. His hot eyes filled with water …

  Rising cursing from this dream, the first dream he had fully recalled for months, Edwin opened the window of his bedroom and peered into the street below. Gas-lamps blurred and flickered. But even in the fresher air he could smell the poisons of the room’s blocked chimney. He must speak to the bloody landlord again. God knew, he paid enough rent.

  *

  Quite often Edwin indulged in buying all the reputable newspapers, and reading them at home. He had accordingly done this for three consecutive days, and so found, on the evening of the third, several references to a dramatic rural house fire. In the item Violet was still, very properly, spoken of as Mrs. Henry North, and a brief comment made on the tragedy of her comparative youth and the likelihood that, the body’s having been found in the bedroom, she had wakened too late to fly. Most likely also the blaze was caused, the more proselytizing journal added, by careless use of an unguarded flame. It added a paragraph on the very severe danger of leaving lit candles in passages, or banked fires burning overnight.

  Though icy, the week had been very dry, and both the house and much of the surrounding and ancient woodland were consumed. Violet herself, as Edwin learned from a more scurrilous rag the next day, had been fairly consumed, her corpse only identifiable by a remnant of her wedding ring, which was composed of white silver rather than gold.

  Edwin Onslowe found himself cool throughout his reading of these facts. He had kept his head, and would continue to do so. Sometimes, it was true, he did feel slightly sorry for her, if only for a moment. Then he recalled how upset she had been on learning he did not love or wish to marry her. Her life thereafter would only have been a misery to her. Really, she had made a lucky escape.

  On the evening of the fifth day Edwin dined at his club in Bleecher Street. Coming back about eleven-thirty at night he found, on entering his flat, that a rank smell of smoke hung around it. He, despite the paper’s warning, had as ever left a fire in the apartment, albeit safely caged behind the fireguard. Edwin concluded something had happened in the chimney, and promptly descended the house to wake his landlord. As a rule, landlord and tenants did not have direct dealings, and the nightshirted gentleman was not best pleased to meet with Edwin at a quarter to midnight. However, it was arranged that the chimney should be investigated on the morrow.

  The next day then was occupied throughout by a visitation of sweeps and similar mechanicals. The chimney was swept and pronounced in order, and other appliances vindicated of blame.

  Worn out by this tiresomeness, yet somewhat looking forward to the following day (on which he was to escort Miss Smithys to Hastings), Edwin had that night dropped into a heavy sleep.

  After the Hastings trip, Iris’ aggravating behavior, and the odd dreams of burning heat, Edwin woke rather later than usual, about nine, and getting up, could still smell, as in the night, horribly strong and fetid smoke in every room of the apartment. Once more the landlord was summoned, and the man having this time ungraciously climbed the four flights, declared there was no smell at all.

  “Well, I’ve been forced to open all the windows. Fortunately the weather’s mild, or I’d no doubt have caught a chill.”

  “‘Tisn’t that mild,” rejoined the landlord, scanning the frosted avenue below. “Maybe it’s your nasal corridors that are at fault, Mr. Onslowe. When the wife takes cold she can smell smoke in her nose from the catarrh. Common phenomenon,” he added loftily.

  “I am not your damn—I am not your wife.”

  “Well,” said the landlord, “I’d recommend you visit your physician, Mr. O. I’m not about to call out the sweep again when the chimneys aren’t at fault.” So saying he left.

  Edwin soon also vacated the premises, needing, he felt, clean air. He would have to move, he decided, as he strode through the grasslands of Hyde Park, staring in disapproval at the feeding sheep. Some smaller apartment in some nicer venue, why not?

  After luncheon Edwin returned to his rooms, and did notice an elusively smoky odor out on the street. A fog perhaps was building itself up from the puffing chimneys of thousands of homes and places of commerce. After all, from these alone there was a constant basic underflavor of smoke that, like the horse dung, one seldom noticed. Probably he had imagined the excess inside his flat. (Edwin evidently did not realize he had little imagination.) Nevertheless, on undoing his door he was assailed at once by a choking miasma so awful he began to retch. Inclined to rush out again, he yet rushed forward, alarmed that something was indeed burning. Nothing was. The room lay warm yet grey, the hearths all dead.

  Only then did it come to him what the real cause of this “phenomenon” might be. And at the idea, his heart leapt and clutched at his breast. The clothes he had worn on the night of his departure from Violet’s house, the very wig, the shoes, the bag itself—they remained in his wardrobe, and must be imbued by smoke. He had not considered the need do anything to or with them, save store them as before. Certainly, he had detected no telltale smell of cinders or burned material on them previously, not even in the hotel at Pressingbury, let alone on the London-bound train. Yet surely here lay the cause of the rancid and bitter stink. Shut up in the dark (like his crime, had he considered it), no doubt the staleness had intensified, and his nose, more acute than those of others, grew quickly aware.

  These remnants of the “game” must go. Out, out of the flat, out of his life. He would dispose of them as soon as evening fell.

  He did not don another disguise. He had told himself, quite strictly, such immature pursuits should cease. Even so, he waited until full darkness sank on the city. It was a dark that not even the gas street lighting, not even the blazing windows of shops and taverns could properly disperse. There was also, indeed, he believed, a hint of mist. It swirled about the corners of things, and breathed out from the mouths of passersby.

  He took the bag and all its contents, which comprised both “costumes” from his visit to Violet, and walked along with casual briskness. He had not conceived a plan. Yet somehow it had been borne in on him that to follow the river a way might well be the best course. Tonight the tide was high. What could be more apt than to pause awhile, then let his burden fall. If any stray found it after, pulled down or upstream by the sea-tending Thames, it could mean little.

  He noted idly as he went along, something slightly peculiar about the gas lamps. Even, now he gave attention, the occasional brazier at a street corner. The fires in both seemed oddly extended, and in some cases to be actually fizzing. They gave off, he felt, unnecessary heat. Someone should look into it.

  Edwin came out on the fine, elongated terrace of the Embankment. It was a calm night, and down on the black serpent of the water, a fire-funneled steamer and a couple of small tugs plied their passage. Edwin glanced at the Egyptian Obelisk, erected only a few years before, a silly folly he had always thought it. But now, something in the tall narrow upwardness of it momentarily unnerved him. From its topmost point a kind of glinting ray seemed intermittently to spark—some trick of the murky evening.

  A few more persons passed him. Then came a stretch where no one was save he. All about, in the near distance, the busy metropolis galloped and hurried. But up against this artery of watery night he stood, for a space, alone. Edwin did as he had meant to. He leaned a little, the bag raised up by his chest. Below, straight down, beyond the stone steps, there expanded what looked like black liquid coal. A mile deep it seemed, but could not be. Deep enough.

  Presently the bag dropped
, noiseless, until it touched the surface with only the least audible of splashes. But then. Time felt as if it had stopped—or, not exactly stopped… time had hesitated. Edwin beheld the bag’s conglomeration of falsehood and old smoke entering the river with the solid motion of a thing far heavier. And as the river took it, then closed again above it, out on the skin of the water a hundred brilliant golden eyes came crackling and buzzing. They were little fires, little dancing yellow flames, each with a coil of bluish smoke. In utter astonishment Edwin stared at them, as they budded and bubbled there, shining so bright. Until with a popping hiss, as one they all went out, leaving only a long, thick wreath of smolder that filed slowly away between the gaps of the night.

  *

  During the next weeks, a pair of journals carried a reference to Mrs. North’s burial somewhere on the Isle of Wight. A number also bore news that her husband, a merchant-trader then resident in India, had been suspected of arranging his wife’s death, since he wished to marry elsewhere. However, without a shred of evidence he was soon cleared of all blame. By then a damp and sluggish February had lapsed into a rampaging, iron-clad March. Edwin Onslowe, it must be said, had given slight heed to either papers or weather. He had other matters on his mind.

  The night after casting his bag of disguises into the Thames, with such an odd result, he had dined in the West End. The meal was overcooked, and while coming back, a thickening of the fog gave him a cough.

  Back in his rooms he found the air no better, and once again inwardly determined to move. He slept badly, constantly waking up thinking he had heard a loud cracking noise, as if a large bough had broken from a tree. But no trees stood near his lodging. Getting up at first light, he saw the street again sugared by frost, and on touching the windowsill pulled off his hand with a cry. It would seem the surface was so cold it had felt scaldingly hot—a curious sensory error he had heard described, yet never formerly experienced. His fingers remained sore for half an hour.

  That day he called on Iris Smithys, who permitted him to take her to luncheon. She would allow nothing else, and on parting, informed Edwin she would probably be unable to continue their “friendship,” as another gentleman in her life had taken offense at it.

  As Edwin marched back through the city, he was conscious of sweating with rage. And near St. Martin’s, another unpleasant event befell him. One of those braziers with which London appeared then to be overstocked, let off a huge gout of sparks and red cinders just as he went by. Edwin, as if attacked by bees, leapt about in panic, beating out the fiery debris which had landed on his coat and in his hair, his hat on the pavement and his hands and face smeared with black. Rather than show concern, a nearby group of traders came closer to laugh at him. And when in fury he bawled profanities, he was accosted by the burliest and least wholesome of them, who manhandled Edwin, remarking, “Must be a bleedin’ lunatic, you. Clear off, or I’ll call the coppers.” Edwin prudently went on his way.

  In his flat he found many minute scorches on his face, a singed eyebrow, and tiny holes burned in his greatcoat. The scorches, even the singe, faded during the evening. The punctures in the coat also seemed to heal—some visual trick, no doubt, of the unreliable gaslight in his rooms, which had started to flicker distractedly and give out a strange resinous smell. He turned off the lights and resorted to candles. But these smoked, and were too hot to put up with.

  He passed a wretched night, coughing and sweating so he feared he had a fever. And again he was frequently woken, from any brief sleep he had, by some noise, the source of which he could never locate, but that would seem to indicate a large rat in the attic, stumbling about and knocking the brickwork loose.

  *

  The heat of the fire on his face—

  It was burning. Burning…

  Why in God’s name was he standing here, so near to this dangerously incendiary sight, however compelling? The tall house was almost by now engulfed in the vast tidal waves of the fire, the flames seeming of extraordinary size, as if made in some other world of giants, where even the elements must exist on a bigger scale. Out from the chimneys they poured in scarlet plumes, while the roofs ran like molten gold.

  And behind him, all down the hill, the dry old woods had already caught, their winter boughs breaking into hot foliage, rose-red or yellow as the eyes of tigers. The sky even was like a dense amber dome.

  He coughed ceaselessly. His lungs were tangled by the thick brown smoke. His eyes no longer ran with water, they bulged, and the moisture in them seemed to be boiling—he must at least shut his eyes, but he could not. And he could not turn and run.

  A massive explosion, like a cannon shot, resounded from the house’s core. Up through the cooking orange jam of air, the entire architecture seemed to rise. It did so with a weird, slow powerfulness. While off from every angle of it, the stones and bricks, the wood and marble and glass, went flying. One more deadly swarm. High, high the amalgam of chaos soared, then shattered and came spinning back towards the earth.

  Already slabs and shards fell all around him, each detonating as it struck the ground. Oh, he must run away—he must…

  Pleading, Edwin Onslowe woke in his London bed. He fought with his sheets, the blank dark night, his boiled eyes starting from his flame-roasted face.

  And then he flopped down again with a pitiful mewing.

  How long he lay thereafter, still coughing a little, the tears now unbottled and laving his parched skin, he never knew. It was done. It was over. So he told himself. You simpleton, a dream. What else?

  How dark it was now. Were the street lamps even alight? Puzzled, reaching for normalcy, he made to rise. But in that moment a soft amorphous glow began. Edwin lay back. He had only thought the light was gone. Look, there it was, shining through the curtains and upward along the edges of the ceiling, a pale rosy light, like that from a low-burning hearth.

  Perhaps three seconds it cheered him. Then he saw that in color it was quite wrong, not to mention in strength. For see how it grew, and as it did the room filled with heat.

  All his ceiling glowed now, a vivid restless red. And as through his curtain spiked an upsurge of light shafts like knives, he heard the loud blows and cracks above him of the blazing attics beginning to give way…

  Edwin sprang from the bed, but did not reach even the window. A smothered dizziness, a stampede in his head—as unconsciousness axed him to the carpet, he knew he would lie there at the bedside, in his nightshirt resembling a roll of washing, until the flames had eaten all of him from the bone, and baked the bone to calcined and unidentifiable black.

  *

  The landlord demanded extra rent in lieu of proper notice. Edwin refused. “Count it,” he coldly said, “your penalty for a rotten chimney and poorly maintained gas fitments.”

  Finding and securing another apartment had, of course, taken up a generous amount of March. Edwin had been meticulous, and wisely so. He did not mean to saddle himself with such a punishment twice. No wonder he had had bad dreams in that vile place. No wonder his eyes sometimes flecked over with hosts of brilliant little sparkles (like sparks?), or darkened with cloudiness (rather like smoke, perhaps). This was all due to his upset nerves. The flat in Tenmouth Street was, he believed by then, a potential death trap. Not only the temperamental gas, and the reeking chimneys, but the water had started to run boiling hot from the vaunted “modern” faucets. Besides this, most of the surfaces in the rooms intermittently burned his hands. Once a teacup left hurtful, blood-red marks on palm and fingers for seventy minutes (he had timed the horror). Strangely, there were never blisters.

  Inevitably, he continued to experience terrifying nightmares under such circumstances. He had convinced himself, however, as a rational man must, that no matter how real they seemed, they were only the result of so many petty, or alarming annoyances in the waking world. Even so, the nightmares affected his health. He felt always sweaty and feverish, and noted uneasily, with embarrassment, a faint rank charcoal odor lingering in his most newly
laundered clothes, as if his own body by now emitted it. His hands, if not scorched by something, carried dirty smears that apparently spontaneously appeared on them—nonsense, naturally. Attending to his fingernails, black grit was often removed. When in other environs, aside from the fever, and the random visual disturbances, he seemed to think he was much better. Although it was a little odd, too, the number of small fires he noted everywhere— sometimes even reflections in puddles seeming startlingly to flame. Or sunset in some window, igniting, crackling, flashing… But there. He was under such strain.

  The new apartment lay in rather a run-down street of Lambeth. There were fewer amenities, and the rooms were more cramped. But it boasted a fine view of a little public garden, and was, if anything, inclined to be draughty and cold, which he, always now so overheated, positively relished.

  He was to move in on April 2. The night before, forced to sleep at Tenmouth Street, which sometimes lately he had avoided (putting up in a small hotel—he slept only in snatches but dreamed as a rule far less), Edwin dosed himself with a chemist’s powder.

  Whatever happened, tomorrow he would cross the river—cross running water—and be free of all this insanity.

  Such a notion—the crossing of water—did not remind him that this exact gambit was used in popular fiction in order to elude a vengeful spirit.

  Had he, recently, thought of Violet? Maybe he had, but if so only deep within his not yet fully recognized unconscious.

  Steeped in the powder, he slept. But he thrashed and groaned, the drug altering his nightmares into a sort of burial by clinker and soot.

  Morning arrived. Edwin drove himself to be sprightly. And the second day of April smiled upon him. Weak sun held off the rain. The removal van and reliable horse conducted those movables that were his away to Lambeth without a hitch. By the dinner hour, Edwin was installed, fussing with positions of chairs and tables as happily as some old lady with her ornaments. He did not care. Now all should be well.