‘Oh! I don’t know what it is - there, behind the gravel, can you see it?’
‘What sort of something? Big or little?’
She opened her arms. ‘Big.’
‘I don’t see anything.’
And as he spoke, it was gone.
But the sense of a sinister, lurking presence remained, and intensified as the days began to grow shorter. She was aware of it, like an assassin waiting to jump out at her, every time she came home, from the moment she stepped out of her car until, nerves taut and vibrating with fear, she managed to scurry into the house and shut the door. Only then did she dare to relax, a little.
That her husband was unable to see the dead man, that he was seemingly immune to any sense of its presence, reassured her. She thought his blindness kept her safe when he was home. The one thing she was dreading was the first time she’d have to spend the night alone.
It would happen very soon. Once a fortnight his scheduled delivery rounds included an overnight stay - mandatory, whenever further driving would push him over the safety limits for hours behind the wheel. Drivers broke those limits all the time, of course, including J.D., but after a recent high-profile fatal accident his company was cracking down.
She was trying to be cool about it, but knew that he’d picked up on her nervousness. The day before he was to leave, she was coming back from shopping and as she glanced across the emptiness to their house, she saw his van, at least an hour before she’d expected him, and called to let him know she was on her way.
‘I’ve been shopping, too,’ he said; ‘I bought a surprise - well, it’s for the house, but I think it will make you happy.’
She felt happy as she pulled in to park beside his van, until she saw something that gripped her heart with a nameless dread: the front door to the house was wide open.
Leaving her purse, phone, bags, everything in the car, she galloped inside, calling his name in blind panic.
‘What’s wrong?’ He was in the kitchen, a carton, packaging, tools on the counter.
‘You left the door open!’
‘Jesus, Linz, so what? We can’t let a little air in? I heard you slam it hard enough!’
She stood with jaw clenched, hands in fists, and tried to regain control.
He came over and held her. ‘What’s wrong? You didn’t bash into my van?’
‘No, no, it’s fine. I’m fine. I just— I just saw the door and thought— thought someone might— might be inside.’
‘So? You knew I was here; I talked to you a minute ago.’
She could think of no plausible explanation and was determined not to speak her fear aloud, her terror that the dead man she had seen in the ditch and then closer on the ground outside was now inside the house with them. But she knew it was true. She could feel that the tenuous safety of their home had been breached by that old ghost.
‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ His voice was gentle; he didn’t sound angry at all.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice tiny as she clung to him. ‘But when I saw the door hanging open, I got scared.’
‘Wow. I definitely made the right choice of what to buy you today.’
She was still trying to summon sufficient interest to ask what it was when he said, ‘But I’ll show you after we’ve searched the house and you can see we’re alone here.’
It was obvious as they walked through the large, light and still sparsely furnished rooms that there were few places a man might hide, but Linzi knew the intruder she feared could hide in plain sight. She didn’t know why she’d been cursed with the ability to see him and found herself wishing J.D. would see the dead man, just once. Then he’d know what she’d been going through, and they could talk about how they were going to deal with the fact that the ghost of an ancient sacrifice now inhabited their home.
But neither of them saw anything that did not belong, and Linzi had to pretend to be comforted by J.D.’s present to her of a CCTV system. With the cameras mounted outside, she could monitor the property, all approaches to the house, from the TV set in the bedroom. Thus, if she heard spooky noises from outside while he was away, she could check them out without even having to show herself at the window, and find out if it was a fox, or a gust of wind, or even a couple of kids from the village looking for somewhere to take drugs and have sex. She thanked him as ardently as she could, because he had meant well; he couldn’t know modern technology was utterly useless against the thing she feared.
But he must have picked up the fact that she was not as reassured as she pretended, because he suggested she invite her mother to stay over while he was away. Considering his prickly relationship with her, the suggestion was staggeringly generous. But she turned it down.
‘And then go through this whole rigmarole again in two weeks? No, I have to get used to a night on my own some time. Might as well be tonight,’ she told him before she hugged and kissed him goodbye.
*
The day passed peacefully enough, soundtrack supplied by Radio One as she painted the upstairs room they’d designated as the nursery. The light, buttery yellow would be a good choice for a child of either sex, although she still thought about wallpaper for one wall, pattern to be chosen when she knew she was expecting.
She talked to J.D. around eight, assured him she was coping. He said he’d try to phone her back later, but if he hadn’t, she should phone him at bedtime. She agreed, although she wasn’t sure what counted as bedtime when they were apart. She was quite tired by ten, but the thought of going to bed alone made her linger downstairs, drinking the rest of a bottle of wine and watching some rubbish film until she nearly fell asleep on the couch. Then she staggered upstairs and fell into bed and into a light, woozy sleep.
A sound, something her sleeping mind recognised without alarm, brought her awake, not frightened, but utterly bewildered. What time was it, and what night? She could feel the still, solid presence of the man sleeping beside her. But if J.D. was home, whose was the key in the door downstairs?
Laying one hand on a sheeted shoulder she whispered, ‘J.D.! Honey, wake up!’
From downstairs came the familiar sequence of beeps that meant the alarm system was being disarmed. But who else knew their code? Maybe somebody from the security company, but—
‘Honey?’ Still more confused than frightened, she fumbled for the light-switch on the hanging cord, and heard someone mounting the stairs.
‘J.D.!’ She said his name, loud and urgent, as the light came on, and she sat up, shutting her eyes briefly against the flare of light as she tugged at the sheet which he’d pulled up over his head. ‘Honey, wake up.’
Then she saw what was lying next to her, curled on his side in an almost foetal position, naked brown skin like ancient leather, face beneath the close-fitting cap serenely smiling in death, and the terrified scream that rose in her throat strangled her, cutting off not only sound but breath. In the instant before she blacked out, she saw her husband standing in the doorway, staring at the bed - but not at her.
Mere seconds later, when she came to, she screamed again, out loud this time. Recoiling in horror, she jerked convulsively up and out of the bed before she noticed that it was empty.
She stopped in the doorway, clutching at the doorframe for support, and looked again. Not only was the bed empty, the bedclothes were disturbed only on the side where she had been. There was no depression to indicate that any other head had rested on J.D.’s pillows since she’d plumped them up after making the bed that morning. But J.D. had seen him - she had seen the direction of his gaze and, more importantly, the look on his face; a look she knew she would never forget.
‘J.D.?’ She tried to call, but her voice was little more than a whisper.
Where was he? Her husband had disappeared as utterly as the ghastly corpse. She had to ask herself if the whole experience had been a nightmare from which she had only now awakened.
Stepping into the dark hall, she felt an unexpected draught. Putting o
n the light, she looked down the stairs and saw the front door was wide open. Descending, she heard the sound of a motor starting, the easily recognisable, throaty note of J.D.’s van, shifting hard into reverse, flinging up gravel, then driving off at speed.
Uselessly she called her husband’s name, ran down the stairs and then back up again for her phone, seeing in her mind’s eye the dark, angry flush on his face, the vein throbbing in his temple, tears in his fixed, furious eyes as he pressed harder on the accelerator, as if by going faster he could outpace his own jealous rage.
He thought he’d seen another man in bed with her. Why hadn’t he stayed to be sure, stayed to curse her, stayed to fight? She had to reach him, had to tell him the truth, had to make him understand …
But his phone went straight to voicemail. She was listening impatiently to the mechanical instructions for leaving a message when she heard the scream of tortured brakes, the slam of metal against metal, the final, shattering sound of a car crash up on the main road. Heart in her throat, she grabbed her keys and ran for her own car, barefoot and in her nightgown, unable to think of anything but the necessity of reaching him, imagining there must be something she could do to help him, to save him; clinging to that belief right up to the moment when she reached the site of the accident and saw her husband lying where he’d been thrown through the windscreen when his van went off the road, half curled on his side, neck broken, already dead in the ditch.
LISA TUTTLE made her first professional sale forty years ago with the short story ‘Stranger in the House’ - now the opening entry in Stranger in the House, Volume One of her Collected Supernatural Fiction, published by Ash-Tree Press.
Perhaps best known for her short fiction, which includes the International Horror Guild Award-winning tale ‘Closet Dreams’ she is also the author of several novels, including The Pillow Friend, The Mysteries and The Silver Bough, as well as books for children and non-fiction works.
Although born and raised in America, she has been a British resident for the past three decades, and currently lives with her family in Scotland.
As the author explains, “‘The Man in the Ditch” was inspired by The Bog People by P.V. Glob - or at least by the photograph on the cover. (I don’t think I ever actually read that book.)
‘I’m not sure when I began to write the first draft, but it must have been when I was still living in Texas, in the days before personal computers, because it was typed on my old IBM Selectric. Fast-forward three decades, travelling through the bleak midwinter to a funeral in Norfolk, gazing out the car window across the fens, I realised this was the proper setting for that long-unfinished story … As soon as I got back home to Scotland, I wrote it.
‘If short fiction was paid by the hour, instead of the word, I should be rich by now. Fortunately, most of my short stories aren’t quite so long in the making.’
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*
A Child’s Problem
-REGGIE OLIVER-
O
n 28th August 1843 a rising young artist called Richard Dadd (1817-1886) attacked his father with a razor and killed him in Cobham Park near Gravesend, Kent. At his trial Dadd was found guilty but insane, and spent the rest of his life in secure institutions, firstly Bedlam (Bethlem Hospital, now the Imperial War Museum), then Broadmoor, where he died. While there, Dadd painted the works for which he is now famous. One of the most disturbing and enigmatic of these is ‘The Child’s Problem’ (1857), which hangs in the Tate Gallery collection. It shows a child fearfully reaching up to move a chess piece on a table, while, close by, a sinister figure, head half-covered by a cloth, appears to be sleeping. No one has been able to discover the origin or meaning of this haunting image, but it is known that during the 1850s Dadd was frequently visited in Broadmoor by Sir George St Maur MP Bart. (1802-1883), a social reformer who took a great interest in the treatment of the insane, and of Dadd in particular. It may have been at the instigation of Sir George that Dadd conceived ‘The Child’s Problem’.
*
I
ONE AFTERNOON IN JULY of the year 1811 a carriage drew up on the drive in front of Tankerton Abbey in the county of Suffolk. It was a clear bright day with a slight breeze, and high white clouds. Deep black shadows lurked among the elms in the park and around the ancient masonry of the house. For a moment nothing happened, then the Abbey’s great Gothic portals opened and out ran a liveried footman to let down the steps and open the door of the waiting vehicle.
From it emerged a woman and a man, both in their thirties, followed by a boy of nine. The boy, whose name was George, wore a plum-coloured velvet suit and white shirt with wide ruffled collar such as one sees in fashionable portraits of children by Lawrence and Hoppner. George might have been thought a pretty child, if a little inclined to plumpness, were it not for his sullen expression. The man and woman, his parents, were a well-nourished, undistinguished looking pair, and both of them, particularly the woman, appeared anxious. Their names were Julius and Amelia St Maur, and the house they were visiting belonged to Julius’ elder brother, Sir Augustus St Maur, Baronet.
Tankerton Abbey no longer exists, but in those days it was a curious structure. It had been acquired by the St Maur family shortly after its dissolution by Henry VIII, and parts of it had been successively destroyed and built up as the fortunes of the family varied. In the late 18th century it was restored by the late Sir Hercules St Maur, father to Augustus and Julius, employing the fashionable Gothic style in imitation of his friend Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill. Being half-ruin, half-imitation Gothic, it had about it a curious air of incompleteness, as if its owner had never quite made up his mind whether to live in it or contemplate it in thoughtful melancholy as a memento mori. It was finely situated, though, in the heart of a wide shallow valley and the park had been laid out in Humphry Repton’s best manner.
Sir Augustus did not meet his relatives at the door; instead they were greeted by Hargreave, the baronet’s butler, accompanied by a posse of footmen who took some boxes and other baggage from the carriage. Hargreave was a tall, thin man with prematurely white hair. In a manner that was notably formal and unwelcoming he told the family that Sir Augustus would see them shortly in the library.
Though the two brothers had corresponded regularly, they had barely seen one another since their father’s death over a decade ago, for they lived very different lives. In accordance with family tradition, Augustus, being the elder son, had inherited not only the title but the entire Suffolk estate and the sugar plantations in Antigua, from which the bulk of his considerable wealth was derived. Julius, the younger son, had been left a small annuity which was not enough to keep himself and his family in the manner to which he felt entitled. He had entered the medical profession and, by dint of some industry and good family connections, had risen to become a Lecturer in Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
As both he and his wife were somewhat extravagant in their habits, his salary had never been enough and when, again through family influence, he was offered a post as the Principal of a new medical school in Calcutta at a considerably higher salary than the one he enjoyed in London, Julius, with his wife’s wholehearted agreement, accepted.
There was, however, one problem: their son George. He was a child of what they called in those days ‘a delicate constitution’, and his mother believed the Indian climate might do him irreparable damage. Besides, George was approaching the age when he must be sent to school in England, and the long journeys by sea to and from India would be deleterious to both health and purse. A correspondence ensued between the two brothers, which resulted in the agreement that young George should stay with his uncle at Tankerton and be schooled there by tutors until it was time to send him to Eton; in those days boys as young as eight were being entered as Oppidans at that school.
It had not escaped Julius’s attention that his brother was a childless widower who had shown no inclination to marry after the early death, some seven years previous
ly, of his wife. Both Julius and Amelia thought that it might be as well for young George to become acquainted with the estate he might one day be master of, and the man from whom, in all probability, he would inherit.
Standing on the drive, George contemplated the Abbey with some dismay. It was quite as large as he had expected it to be, but not nearly as well ordered. He had become used to the neat and disciplined modern houses of the London squares, with their sash windows and their doorways set in the middle of each classically symmetrical facade. What he saw here was a confusion of old and new tumbled together, in parts crumbling, in parts overgrown with ivy and other predatory plants.
Stone gargoyles retched from the guttering; crocketed pinnacles and finials thrust upwards from the battlements like threatening fists (the word ‘romantic’ was not yet part of the boy’s vocabulary). Moreover, for someone used to the bustle of London - the rattle of carriages, the clip of horses, the cry of street hawkers -it was all far too quiet. The faint twitter of bird song barely impinged on his unaccustomed ears.
George was a stubborn, spoilt child. He had decided that he was going to be unhappy at Tankerton and that he would make his parents feel as uncomfortable as possible about deserting him.
The family was now in the entrance hall, a vast, uncomfortable vaulted space that must once have been a refectory or some other public chamber in its days as a monastery. The flagstones were grey and worn. There was a slight draught from somewhere which, even in the depths of June, made them shiver. Hargreave passed them without a glance in their direction and made his way towards an elaborate doorway surmounted by an ogival arch. He knocked and, upon hearing a faint reply from within, entered.
Some time elapsed. Amelia tugged at her husband’s sleeve and suggested he go himself to see what was happening, but Julius was reluctant. George passed the time by stamping on the stone floor as loudly as possible to test the echo of the hall until his mother told him to stop.
A Book of Horrors - [Anthology] Page 27