The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  ‘What is it, Frederick, that you are staring at?’

  ‘That little man at the table over there.’

  ‘What, that little clerkish chap in the dusty overcoat? He hardly looks worthy of your curiosity. Of anyone’s, come to that.’

  ‘No, he probably isn’t. A very ordinary fellow, the sort you wouldn’t recall, I suppose, in the normal way of things.’

  ‘I should think not. But you do?’

  ‘Well, as it happens, he was resident in a place where something very odd once happened to me. And not to myself alone.’

  ‘He was involved in this odd thing? He looks blameless to the point of criminality.’

  ‘I imagine that he is. No, he was simply living there at the time, had been there two or three years, if I remember correctly. I met him once, in the street, and my aunt introduced him as a Mr Polleto. We exchanged civilities, that was all. He had the faintest trace of a foreign accent, but otherwise seemed a nonentity. My aunt confessed they had all been very disappointed in him because, learning his name before his arrival, they’d hoped for some sort of flamboyant Italian theatrical gentleman, or something of the sort.’

  ‘He looks more like a grocer.’

  ‘My aunt’s words exactly. Those were the probable facts, too, I believe. He’d been a shopkeeper, but had come into some funds through a legacy. He bought a house in Steepleford, which was where I was visiting my aunt.’

  ‘This is a remarkably dull story, Frederick.’

  ‘Yes.’ I hesitated then. I added, ‘The other story isn’t, I can assure you.’

  ‘The story which you recollect only since you caught sight of your Mr Polleto? Well, are you going to blab? We have four long hours before the Wassenhaur train. Let’s refresh our glasses, and then you can tell me your tale.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Oh, come, this is too flirtatious. What have you been doing all this while but trying to engage my attention in it?’

  ‘I protest.’

  But the brandy bottle intervened. And presently, sitting on that sunny terrace of the Hotel Alpius, I recounted to my friend and travelling companion the story which I will now relate. That was the first time I ever told it to anyone. And this, now, I trust, will be the last.

  II

  The modest town of Steepleford had some slight notoriety in the eighteenth century, when it was one of the centres of a cult known as the Lilyites. These people believed so absolutely in the teachings of Christ, and acted upon them so unswervingly, that they soon turned the entire Christian church against them. There were a few hangings and some riots, as is often the way in these cases, until at last the cult lost both dedication and adherents, and ebbed away. Even so, through the succeeding years (from about 1750 to 1783), now and then some murmur might be heard of the Lilyites. Being, however, still generally feared and loathed for their extreme habits, they were soon rooted out and disposed of, one way or another. The last hint of the cult seemed to surface, nevertheless, in sleepy Steepleford. During the July of 1783, one Josebaar Hawkins was harangued in Market Square for holding a secret meeting of seventeen persons, at which they had, allegedly, sworn to slough their worldly goods and to love all men as themselves, in the celebrated Lilyite manner.

  At his impromptu trial, Hawkins either denied all this, or ably recanted. He was said to have laughed heartily at the notion of giving up his fine house, which was the product of successful dealings in the textile industry and which stood to the side of Salter’s Lane in its own grounds. He asked, it seems, if the worthies now questioning him thought that he would also abandon his new and beautiful young wife, who went by the unusual name of Amber Maria, or drag her with him in the Lilyite fashion, shoeless and penniless, about the countryside.

  Hawkins was presently acquitted of belonging to the sect. No others were even interviewed upon the matter. Thereafter no more is heard, in the annals of Steepleford, of the Lilyites, but there is one more mention of Hawkins and his wife. This record states that in 1788, Amber Maria, being then twenty years of age, (which must have made her fifteen or less at her wedding), was taken ill and died within a month. Hawkins, not wishing to part from her even dead, obtained sanction for her burial in the grounds of his house.

  All this, though possibly of local interest in Steepleford, where as a rule a horse casting its shoe in the street might cause great excitement, is of small apparent value on the slate of the world. Yet I must myself now add that even in my own short and irregular visits to the town, I had been, perhaps inattentively, aware of a strangeness that somehow attached itself to the Hawkins house, which still stood to the side of Salter’s Lane.

  The Lane ran up from Market Gate Street. It was a long and winding track, with fields at first on both sides, leading in turn to thick woodland that in places was ancient – great green oaks and mighty chestnuts and beeches, some over two hundred years of age. I can confirm from walks I have taken that there exist, or existed, areas in these woods which seemed old nearly as civilization, and when an elderly country fellow once pointed out to me a group of trees that had, he said, stood as saplings in the reign of King John, I more than half believed him. But this, of course, may be attributable merely to an imaginative man’s fancy.

  Some two miles up its length, Salter’s Lane takes a sharp turn toward the London Road. At this juncture stands the house of Josebaar Hawkins.

  It was built in the flat-faced style of those times, with tall, comfit-box-framed windows and a couple of impressive chimneys like towers, behind a high brick wall. Although lavish enough for a cloth merchant and his wife, the ‘grounds’ were not vast, more gardens, and by the time I first happened on the place these had become overgrown to a wilderness. Even so, one might make out sections of brickwork, and the chimney tops, above the trees.

  Having found it, I asked my aunt about the house, idly enough I am sure. She replied, also idly, that it was some architectural monstrosity a century out of date, standing always shut up and empty, since no one would either buy it or pull it down. Perhaps I asked her even then why no one lived there. I know I did ask at some adjacent point, for I retain her answer. She replied, ‘Oh, there’s some story, dear boy, that a man bricked up his wife alive in a room there. She belonged to some wild sect or other, with which he lost patience. But she had, I think, an interesting name . . . now what can that have been?’ My aunt then seemed to mislay the topic. However, a few hours, or it may have been days, later, she presented me, after dinner one night, with a musty thick volume from her library. ‘I have marked the place.’

  ‘The place of what, pray?’ I inquired.

  ‘The section that concerns the house of Josebaar Hawkins.’

  I was baffled enough, not then knowing the name, to sit down at once in the smoking room and read the passage indicated. So it was that I learned of the Lilyites, of whom also I had never heard anything until then, and of Hawkins and his house off Salter’s Lane. Included in the piece was the account from which I have excerpted my own note above on Hawkins’s impromptu ‘trial’. It also contained a portion quoted from Steepleford’s parish register, with records of both the marriage and the death of Amber Maria Hawkins. This was followed by the notice of her burial in the grounds of the house, which had been overseen both by the priest and by certain officers of the town. Then my aunt’s book, having set history fair and straight, proceeded, in the way of such tomes, to undermine it.

  According to this treatise, Hawkins, at first an enraptured husband, had come suddenly and utterly to think his wife an evil witch. Growing afraid of her, he tricked her to an attic room of the house and here succeeded in locking her in. Thereafter he had both the door and the window bricked up by men who, being sworn in on the scheme with him, turned blind eyes and deaf ears to her screams and cries for pity. My aunt’s book was in small doubt that the priest and the officers who later pretended to have certified Amber Maria’s death and conducted her burial were accomplices in this hideous and extraordinary act. (I have to say
that, perusing this, some memory did vaguely stir in me, but it was of so incoherent, slight and indeed uncheerful a nature, having to do, I thought, with a children’s rhyme of the locale, that I did not search after it at all diligently.)

  As I have already remarked, I seldom then visited Steepleford. On that visit I may have offered some comment on my reading, or my aunt may have done. I fail to recollect. Certainly the rest of my visit was soon over, nor, having gone away, did I return there for more than a year, and during my next dutiful brief holiday I remember nothing seen or said of the house in Salter’s Lane.

  But now I come to my next relevant visit, which occurred almost three years after those I have just described.

  I had been in Greece for ten months and had come back full of the spirit of that place, thinking to find England dull and drab. But it was May, and a nice May, too, and by the time the train stopped at the Halt, I had decided to walk the rest of the way to the town through the woods and fields. So, inevitably, I found myself, just past midday, on the winding path of Salter’s Lane. It was the most perfect of afternoons. The sky was that clear milky blue that certain poets compare (quite wrongly, to my mind) with the eyes of children. Among the oaks that clasped the track, green piled on green, wild flowers had set fire to the hedges and the grass, and sunlight festooned everything with shining jewels. Birds sang in a storm, and my heart lifted high. What is Greece to this? thought I, staring off between breaks in the trees at luminous glades, steeped in the most elder shadows. Why, this might be Greece, in her morning.

  And then, between one step and another, there fell the strangest thing, which I could and can only describe as a sudden quietness; less silence than absence. I stopped and looked about, still smiling, thinking the world of nature had fallen prone, as is its wont, to some threat or fascination too small or obscure for human eye or mind to note. I waited patiently, too, for the lovely rain of birdsong to scatter down on me once more. It did not come.

  Then, and how curious it sounded to me, as if I had never before heard such a thing, I picked up the song of a blackbird – but it seemed miles off up the Lane, the way I had come. And precisely at that moment, turning again, I saw something of a dull, dry red that thrust between the leaves. At once I knew it for a chimney of the Hawkins house.

  I was taken aback. Imaginative as I freely admit I am, I would not say that I was especially superstitious. But something now disturbed me, and that very much. Not being able to divine what it was, beyond the presence of that wry old house, discomposed me further.

  Accordingly, I stared at the house, right at it, and, crossing over the Lane, gazed up the outer wall over which the vines and ivies hung so thickly. What an ugly house it was, I thought, and no mistake. Even its windows of filthy glass, largely overgrown by creeper, were ugly. While that window there, above, was the ugliest of all, an absolute eyesore, stuck on at quite the wrong architectural moment.

  While I was thinking this and standing there, staring so feverishly and insolently, the childish rhyme came back into my head with no warning, from out of some store cupboard of the brain. And with it a host of tiny bits and pieces that, over the years of my visits here, and all unconsidered, I had apparently garnered. I heard my aunt say again how a woman had been bricked up in ‘that house’, and I heard a friend of my aunt’s, a titled lady I barely knew, saying once again, as she must have done years before: ‘Oh, the peasantry won’t go by the place after dark. No, it’s a fact. They all go out of their way by Joiner’s Crossing. And this, mark you, because of a tale more than a hundred years old.’

  And the rhyme? I had doubtless heard children singing it in play, in the streets and yards of Steepleford, and maybe they still do so, although I wonder if they do. I will set it down, for having remembered it, I have never since forgotten.

  She looks through water,

  She looks through air,

  She leaps at the moon

  And she looks in.

  Give her silver,

  Give her gold,

  And bind her eyes

  With a brick and a pin.

  ‘Aunt Alice,’ I said to her that evening, when we were pursuing some sherry before the meal, ‘I want to tell you about something I saw on my walk today, coming here to the town.’

  Pleased to see me, she turned to me a willing, expectant face, but no sooner did I mention the house in Salter’s Lane than she laughed.

  ‘Dear boy, I shall have to think you obsessed by the place. Are you intending to buy it? I should certainly be delighted to have you live in the town, but not in such a miserable property.’

  I replied, rather irritably, that nothing was further from my desires. Looking rather crushed, she sought to make amends. ‘I’m sorry, Frederick. I am sure that London is more suited to your temperament than such a dreary backwater as Steepleford.’ After which much of the evening was spent in my praising Steepleford and herself, for I felt ashamed of my bad temper. When I was a boy, this aunt had been very kind to me, and deserved far better of me than three-yearly visits laced with petty ill humour.

  By ten o’clock we were friends again and playing cards, and so I reintroduced my topic. Although I admit I stuck strictly to the facts as I saw them, omitting all the other sensations I have outlined.

  ‘The oddest thing, Aunt, is that I could swear the window that I saw had not been there previously. It was very high up, almost into the roof, rather small, yet somehow extremely noticeable. Although I have only once – to my recollection – looked at the house before, yet I thought I remembered it quite well, and I truly believe there never was a window in that position – however fantastic this may sound.’

  As women will, my aunt then said something damningly practical. ‘So many of the house windows there are closed up with ivy and creeper. Could some of this overgrowth simply have fallen away, and so revealed the casement you speak of?’

  Such a banal solution had not occurred to me. I agreed that she was probably correct. To myself I said that I must put up with the necessary boredom of my visit, and not try preposterously to dress it up with invented supernatural flights.

  The following morning, I penitently accompanied my aunt on her round of social calls. By midday, my face had set like cement in a polite smile, and thus, as we crossed Market Gate Street, I found myself beaming at a small, nondescript man in unostentatious dress who had touched his hat to us.

  ‘Ah, Mr Polleto,’ said my aunt, magnanimous to a fault. ‘What fine weather we are having.’

  Mr Polleto conceded that we were. He had a flat dusty voice, old even beyond his bent and well-aged appearance. In it my ears caught just the trace of some foreignness. Then I found myself introduced, and not standing on ceremony, as my aunt had not, I shook hands with him. What a hand he had! It was neither cold nor hot, not damp, but rather dry – it did not have much strength in it, certainly, yet nor was it a weak hand. But an uncomfortable hand it was. It did not seem to fit in mine, and I sensed it would not fit in anyone’s.

  ‘Mr Polleto has resided in the town for quite three years now, I believe,’ said my aunt, when we had parted from him. She then told me of the general disappointment that he had not lived up to his name. ‘He has the cottage by the old tiltyard.’

  But I was not interested in Mr Polleto and his indescribable handshake. His face I had already mislaid, for he was one of those men who are eternally unmemorable, or seem so – for if ever seen again, somehow they are known at once, as I have already demonstrated, and later must demonstrate further.

  However, now I wanted my lunch, and was dismayed to find my aunt was leading me to yet another doorstep. I rallied rather feebly. ‘And which lady is this, Aunt Alice?’

  ‘No lady, Frederick. This is the house of our local scholar. I have some purchases to make and will leave you here, with Mr Farbody, who has written and published pamphlets.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said I. But just then the maid let me in, and presently I was taking a glass of very drinkable Madeira in a sunlit lib
rary with Mr Farbody, who had at once addressed me thus: ‘My good sir, I understand you are interested in the history of the Hawkins house.’

  ‘Well, it is a curious tale,’ Farbody continued, requiring little prompting from me. ‘Did you know that the farmhands hereabouts, and workers and their families in the town, have kept up a tradition that the spot is cursed?’

  ‘I remember someone saying that people refuse to go along Salter’s Lane by night.’

  ‘Well, that, of course, isn’t always to be avoided, but they make a to-do about it. The thing is, it seems, not to look at the building. I’ve heard of girls, if they are due to be married, still binding their eyes with a scarf and having to be led, should they need to pass the house even in daylight.’

  ‘And all this because Amber Maria Hawkins was thought a witch?’

  ‘Ah, she was a witch, if the tales may be believed,’ and here Farbody winked at me. ‘She could see treasure in the ground, for one thing. No one knows her origins. Josebaar said he came across her one day in the woods. She was probably a gypsy girl, but all alone, bright-haired and straying with her arms full of wild flowers. He took a fancy for her, and perhaps she for him; it seems so – or else she liked the idea of his status in the town. He had already made some money and his family was an old one. And if she was a gypsy or itinerant, homeless and without kin, all that may have appealed to her, do you see. So there and then she is supposed to have said to him, “You may sport with me, and I will let you. Or you may marry me and I will make you rich.” And he said, “How might that be, seeing you are in rags?’ To which Amber Maria replied simply, “I will bring you silver and gold.” ’

  At this, the rhyme came into my head again and I interrupted. ‘I thought it was she who was to have the gold and silver?’

  Farbody smiled, and lit his pipe. ‘It does seem she could have been rich on her own account for sure, if she’d cared to be, for the next thing she did was point at the ground under a tree and say to Hawkins, “Dig there, and you will find a large store of coins.” Even money likes money, so he dug in the ground, and – hey presto! – found a box of gold pieces, deep down and undisturbed for a century. When he asked her how she knew where to dig, she shrugged and said, “I saw them.” Nor did Amber do this only once, but several times, apparently. And in the same way she could find items that had been lost. And once she is supposed to have seen a sheep that had fallen down a deep well, which animal was then got out alive. She could see, you understand, through things. Through the earth, through stone, and through certain other natural materials – though not, I think, through metal, which may account for the metals in the rhyme.’