The Altar of the Dead And Other Morbid Tales

by Osie Turner, Algernon Blackwood, Henry James

  END

  “The Undercroft Chapel” by Osie Turner (2012)

  The Satyr

  By

  Alma Newton

  1918

  THERE are times in a woman's life when she is shipwrecked. She has thrown away brilliant opportunities—she is left without funds and, sometimes, without friends.

  Now this happens to beautiful women and it happens to distinguished women. It is more apt to happen to these, because they are more imperious and more indifferent than their less attractive sisters. Sometimes it is because they are idealistic. They will not easily sell their souls for gold. Inferior women will, for they are grasping and materialistic. Often at the crisis a satyr appears, as though sent out from the inferno to haunt beautiful and unfortunate women. Perhaps it is their only chance and the hour of emergency often darkens a woman's perspective. But not so with this woman of whom I write. She was too refined. I mean refined in the general sense, not only as applied to breeding, but to mind. Now this made her very rare, for, though she knew many women, she did not know many who were symmetrically developed, where there was a combined beauty of a clear mind, an esthetic soul, and a strong character. It was the soul that really dominated this woman. Unlovely things were impossible to her. Immorality was hideous, not because it was unlawful, but because it was vulgar.

  I speak of immorality in the larger sense as applied to marriage. Many people marry without love, but it is wrong, and many people do wrong things. A thing cannot be right just because it is a custom, for customs are often created for convenience.

  Now this woman, who was unhappy, was living in a cottage immediately by the sea. She was there with her mother. The mother was comparatively young and ill. That is one reason why they lived by the sea. At night the beautiful woman would leave the mother and walk on the beach. Her hair was black, and straight. It generally fell down as she walked, because it was pinned so listlessly. Her cape hung over her shoulders indifferently. The only definite thing about her was her walk. She fairly marched up and down the sand as though saying, "I can't do it. . . . I won't do it," as she looked in the deep water. "It is impossible. . . ."

  "But you must, there is no other way. Your work has failed, your discarded lovers are in the war, . . . and the other, . . . and the old man has so much gold," said her mind. While her Soul kept saying, "I cannot. . . . I cannot. . . ."

  "You are getting older," whispered the Mind again, "and the suspense is bringing lines in your face. Soon it will be too late. What can you do for your mother then? . . ."

  "Why do I live?" said the Soul. "Nothing can atone, can compensate for the torture of his touch! Even Heaven could not do that. It could not take away the scars: his hideous sensual old hands would tear my heart into shreds, each shred would be polluted, distorted, decayed! Nothing could live after his touch. His hands are like the old man's in the 'Tales of Hoffman'—and his eyes are worse than Svengali's in 'Trilby.' They are the things that kill young women!

  "If I walked into the ocean it would be so sweet. There would be no more agony, no more torture, but my mother is calling me now. Why does she always call just at the minute I think of the seal I wonder if she knows my thoughts. . . . I will go back. . . ."

  "It is the same when you return," said her Mind. "Decide what to do. . . ." The woman walked slowly into the house and went upstairs to her room. . . .

  The next morning the Doctor came. She did not die. It was not a pretty ending. She was quite mad. Her brain had refused to go on with that endless and futile analysis. The mother went to live with a relative which was another sort of death and the woman went to a sanitarium.

  The man whom she called the satyr paid the bills, but she never became reasonable enough to thank him. She only shrieked when he came into the room, and said something about his being half-man and half-animal, and begged the nurse to send him away. To her it was like a visit from the elemental world, to him she was a beautiful sight, as her hair was still black and her arms still young and soft. Her rebellion piqued him, for he was seventy-two.

  The Doctor noticed that she grew more violent when the old man appeared. He wanted the visits stopped but the nurse said that he paid the bills, so he continued to come.

  One day she died suddenly. The next day she was to be buried but the satyr asked that she be left there another day. This was so that he could kiss her cold lips. This he did. The nurse wondered if she imagined that the beautiful woman grew whiter as he kissed her. It was not imagination.

  END

  “Requiem” by Osie Turner (2014)

  The Wood of the Dead

  By

  Algernon Blackwood

  1906

  ONE summer, in my wanderings with a knapsack, I was at luncheon in the room of a wayside inn in the western country, when the door opened and there entered an old rustic, who crossed close to my end of the table and sat himself down very quietly in the seat by the bow window. We exchanged glances, or, properly speaking, nods, for at the moment I did not actually raise my eyes to his face, so concerned was I with the important business of satisfying an appetite gained by tramping twelve miles over a difficult country.

  The fine warm rain of seven o'clock, which had since risen in a kind of luminous mist about the tree tops, now floated far overhead in a deep blue sky, and the day was settling down into a blaze of golden light. It was one of those days peculiar to Somerset and North Devon, when the orchards shine and the meadows seem to add a radiance of their own, so brilliantly soft are the colourings of grass and foliage.

  The innkeeper's daughter, a little maiden with a simple country loveliness, presently entered with a foaming pewter mug, enquired after my welfare, and went out again. Apparently she had not noticed the old man sitting in the settle by the bow window, nor had he, for his part, so much as once turned his head in our direction.

  Under ordinary circumstances I should probably have given no thought to this other occupant of the room; but the fact that it was supposed to be reserved for my private use, and the singular thing that he sat looking aimlessly out of the window, with no attempt to engage me in conversation, drew my eyes more than once somewhat curiously upon him, and I soon caught myself wondering why he sat there so silently, and always with averted head.

  He was, I saw, a rather bent old man in rustic dress, and the skin of his face was wrinkled like that of an apple; corduroy trousers were caught up with a string below the knee, and he wore a sort of brown fustian jacket that was very much faded. His thin hand rested upon a stoutish stick. He wore no hat and carried none, and I noticed that his head, covered with silvery hair, was finely shaped and gave the impression of something noble.

  Though rather piqued by his studied disregard of my presence, I came to the conclusion that he probably had something to do with the little hostel and had a perfect right to use this room with freedom, and I finished my luncheon without breaking the silence and then took the settle opposite to smoke a pipe before going on my way.

  Through the open window came the scents of the blossoming fruit trees; the orchard was drenched in sunshine and the branches danced lazily in the breeze; the grass below fairly shone with white and yellow daisies, and the red roses climbing in profusion over the casement mingled their perfume with the sweetly penetrating odour of the sea.

  It was a place to dawdle in, to lie and dream away a whole afternoon, watching the sleepy butterflies and listening to the chorus of birds which seemed to fill every corner of the sky. Indeed, I was already debating in my mind whether to linger and enjoy it all instead of taking the strenuous pathway over the hills, when the old rustic in the settle opposite suddenly turned his face towards me for the first time and began to speak.

  His voice had a quiet dreamy note in it that was quite in harmony with the day and the scene, but it sounded far away, I thought, almost as though it came to me from outside where the shadows were weaving their eternal tissue of dreams upon the garden floor. Moreover, there was no trace in it of the rough qu
ality one might naturally have expected, and, now that I saw the full face of the speaker for the first time, I noted with something like a start that the deep, gentle eyes seemed far more in keeping with the timbre of the voice than with the rough and very countrified appearance of the clothes and manner. His voice set pleasant waves of sound in motion towards me, and the actual words, if I remember rightly, were—

  "You are a stranger in these parts?" or "Is not this part of the country strange to you?"

  There was no "sir," nor any outward and visible sign of the deference usually paid by real country folk to the town-bred visitor, but in its place a gentleness, almost a sweetness, of polite sympathy that was far more of a compliment than either.

  I answered that I was wandering on foot through a part of the country that was wholly new to me, and that I was surprised not to find a place of such idyllic loveliness marked upon my map.

  "I have lived here all my life," he said, with a sigh, "and am never tired of coming back to it again."

  "Then you no longer live in the immediate neighbourhood?"

  "I have moved," he answered briefly, adding after a pause in which his eyes seemed to wander wistfully to the wealth of blossoms beyond the window; "but I am almost sorry, for nowhere else have I found the sunshine lie so warmly, the flowers smell so sweetly, or the winds and streams make such tender music. . . ."

  His voice died away into a thin stream of sound that lost itself in the rustle of the rose-leaves climbing in at the window, for he turned his head away from me as he spoke and looked out into the garden. But it was impossible to conceal my surprise, and I raised my eyes in frank astonishment on hearing so poetic an utterance from such a figure of a man, though at the same time realising that it was not in the least inappropriate, and that, in fact, no other sort of expression could have properly been expected from him.

  "I am sure you are right," I answered at length, when it was clear he had ceased speaking; "or there is something of enchantment here—of real fairy-like enchantment—that makes me think of the visions of childhood days, before one knew anything of—of—"

  I had been oddly drawn into his vein of speech, some inner force compelling me. But here the spell passed and I could not catch the thoughts that had a moment before opened a long vista before my inner vision.

  "To tell you the truth," I concluded lamely, "the place fascinates me and I am in two minds about going further—"

  Even at this stage I remember thinking it odd that I should be talking like this with a stranger whom I met in a country inn, for it has always been one of my failings that to strangers my manner is brief to surliness. It was as though we were figures meeting in a dream, speaking without sound, obeying laws not operative in the everyday working world, and about to play with a new scale of space and time perhaps. But my astonishment passed quickly into an entirely different feeling when I became aware that the old man opposite had turned his head from the window again, and was regarding me with eyes so bright they seemed almost to shine with an inner flame. His gaze was fixed upon my face with an intense ardour, and his whole manner had suddenly become alert and concentrated. There was something about him I now felt for the first time that made little thrills of excitement run up and down my back. I met his look squarely, but with an inward tremor.

  "Stay, then, a little while longer," he said in a much lower and deeper voice than before; "Stay, and I will teach you something of the purpose of my coming."

  He stopped abruptly. I was conscious of a decided shiver.

  "You have a special purpose then—in coming back?" I asked, hardly knowing what I was saying.

  "To call away someone," he went on in the same thrilling voice, "someone who is not quite ready to come, but who is needed elsewhere for a worthier purpose." There was a sadness in his manner that mystified me more than ever.

  "You mean—?" I began, with an unaccountable access of trembling.

  "I have come for someone who must soon move, even as I have moved."

  He looked me through and through with a dreadfully piercing gaze, but I met his eyes with a full straight stare, trembling though I was, and I was aware that something stirred within me that had never stirred before, though for the life of me I could not have put a name to it, or have analysed its nature. Something lifted and rolled away. For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.

  The old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a dull, limited kingdom.

  "Come tonight," I heard the old man say, "come to me tonight into the Wood of the Dead. Come at midnight—"

  Involuntarily I clutched the arm of the settle for support, for I then felt that I was speaking with someone who knew more of the real things that are and will be, than I could ever know while in the body, working through the ordinary channels of sense—and this curious half-promise of a partial lifting of the veil had its undeniable effect upon me.

  The breeze from the sea had died away outside, and the blossoms were still. A yellow butterfly floated lazily past the window. The song of the birds hushed—I smelt the sea—I smelt the perfume of heated summer air rising from fields and flowers, the ineffable scents of June and of the long days of the year—and with it, from countless green meadows beyond, came the hum of myriad summer life, children's voices, sweet pipings, and the sound of water falling.

  I knew myself to be on the threshold of a new order of experience—of an ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that pleasure and pain are one and the same force, for the joy I had just experienced included also all the pain I ever had felt, or ever could feel. . . .

  The sunshine grew to dazzling radiance, faded, passed away. The shadows paused in their dance upon the grass, deepened a moment, and then melted into air. The flowers of the fruit trees laughed with their little silvery laughter as the wind sighed over their radiant eyes the old, old tale of its personal love. Once or twice a voice called my name. A wonderful sensation of lightness and power began to steal over me.

  Suddenly the door opened and the innkeeper's daughter came in. By all ordinary standards, her's was a charming country loveliness, born of the stars and wild-flowers, of moonlight shining through autumn mists upon the river and the fields; yet, by contrast with the higher order of beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and insipid her whole presentment.

  For a moment she stood between me and the occupant of the window seat while I counted out the small change for my meal and for her services; but when, an instant later, she moved aside, I saw that the settle was empty and that there was no longer anyone in the room but our two selves.

  This discovery was no shock to me; indeed, I had almost expected it, and the man had gone just as a figure goes out of a dream, causing no surprise and leaving me as part and parcel of the same dream without breaking of continuity. But, as soon as I had paid my bill and thus resumed in very practical fashion the thread of my normal consciousness, I turned to the girl and asked her if she knew the old man who had been sitting in the window seat, and what he had meant by the Wood of the Dead.

  The maiden started visibly, glancing quickly round the empty room, but answering simply that she had seen no one. I described him in great detail, and then, as the description grew clearer, she turned a little pale under her pretty sun-bonnet and said very gravely that it must have been
the ghost.

  "Ghost! What ghost?"

  "Oh, the village ghost," she said quietly, coming closer to my chair with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding in a lower voice, "He comes before a death, they say!"

  It was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story she told me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered with the years round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure, was an interesting and peculiar one.

  The inn, she said, was originally a farmhouse, occupied by a yeoman farmer, evidently of a superior, if rather eccentric, character, who had been very poor until he reached old age, when a son died suddenly in the Colonies and left him an unexpected amount of money, almost a fortune.

  The old man thereupon altered no whit his simple manner of living, but devoted his income entirely to the improvement of the village and to the assistance of its inhabitants; he did this quite regardless of his personal likes and dislikes, as if one and all were absolutely alike to him, objects of a genuine and impersonal benevolence. People had always been a little afraid of the man, not understanding his eccentricities, but the simple force of this love for humanity changed all that in a very short space of time; and before he died he came to be known as the Father of the Village and was held in great love and veneration by all.