The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  “Suppose what?” inquired Meagle.

  “Nothing,” stammered Lester. “Let’s wake him. Try him again. White! WHITE!”

  “It’s no good,” said Meagle seriously; “there’s something wrong about that sleep.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said Lester; “and if he goes to sleep like that, why shouldn’t—”

  Meagle sprang to his feet. “Nonsense,” he said roughly. “He’s tired out; that’s all. Still, let’s take him up and clear out. You take his legs and Barnes will lead the way with the candle. Yes? Who’s that?”

  He looked up quickly towards the door.

  “Thought I heard somebody tap,” he said, with a shamefaced laugh. “Now, Lester, up with him. One, two – Lester! Lester!”

  He sprang forward too late; Lester, with his face buried in his arms, had rolled over on the floor fast asleep, and his utmost efforts failed to awake him.

  “He – is – asleep,” he stammered. “Asleep!”

  Barnes, who had taken the candle from the mantelpiece, stood peering at the sleepers in silence and dropping tallow over the floor.

  “We must get out of this,” said Meagle. “Quick!”

  Barnes hesitated. “We can’t leave them here—” he began.

  “We must,” said Meagle, in strident tones. “If you go to sleep I shall go – Quick! Come!”

  He seized the other by the arm and strove to drag him to the door. Barnes shook him off, and, putting the candle back on the mantelpiece, tried again to arouse the sleepers.

  “It’s no good,” he said at last, and, turning from them, watched Meagle. “Don’t you go to sleep,” he said anxiously.

  Meagle shook his head, and they stood for some time in uneasy silence. “May as well shut the door,” said Barnes at last.

  He crossed over and closed it gently. Then at a scuffling noise behind him he turned and saw Meagle in a heap on the hearthstone.

  With a sharp catch in his breath he stood motionless. Inside the room the candle, fluttering in the draught, showed dimly the grotesque attitudes of the sleepers. Beyond the door there seemed to his overwrought imagination a strange and stealthy unrest. He tried to whistle, but his lips were parched, and in a mechanical fashion he stooped, and began to pick up the cards which littered the floor.

  He stopped once or twice and stood with bent head listening. The unrest outside seemed to increase; a loud creaking sounded from the stairs.

  “Who is there?” he cried loudly.

  The creaking ceased. He crossed to the door, and, flinging it open, strode out into the corridor. As he walked his fears left him suddenly.

  “Come on!” he cried, with a low laugh. “All of you! All of you! Show your faces – your infernal ugly faces! Don’t skulk!”

  He laughed again and walked on; and the heap in the fireplace put out its head tortoise fashion and listened in horror to the retreating footsteps. Not until they had become inaudible in the distance did the listener’s features relax.

  “Good Lord, Lester, we’ve driven him mad,” he said, in a frightened whisper. “We must go after him.”

  There was no reply. Meagle sprang to his feet.

  “Do you hear?” he cried. “Stop your fooling now; this is serious. White! Lester! Do you hear?”

  He bent and surveyed them in angry bewilderment. “All right,” he said, in a trembling voice. “You won’t frighten me, you know.”

  He turned away and walked with exaggerated carelessness in the direction of the door. He even went outside and peeped through the crack, but the sleepers did not stir. He glanced into the blackness behind, and then came hastily into the room again.

  He stood for a few seconds regarding them. The stillness in the house was horrible; he could not even hear them breathe. With a sudden resolution he snatched the candle from the mantelpiece and held the flame to White’s finger. Then as he reeled back stupefied, the footsteps again became audible.

  He stood with the candle in his shaking hand, listening. He heard them ascending the farther staircase, but they stopped suddenly as he went to the door. He walked a little way along the passage, and they went scurrying down the stairs and then at a jog-trot along the corridor below. He went back to the main staircase, and they ceased again.

  For a time he hung over the balusters, listening and trying to pierce the blackness below; then slowly, step by step, he made his way downstairs, and, holding the candle above his head, peered about him.

  “Barnes!” he called. “Where are you?”

  Shaking with fright, he made his way along the passage, and summoning up all his courage, pushed open doors and gazed fearfully into empty rooms. Then, quite suddenly, he heard the footsteps in front of him.

  He followed slowly for fear of extinguishing the candle, until they led him at last into a vast bare kitchen, with damp walls and a broken floor. In front of him a door leading into an inside room had just closed. He ran towards it and flung it open, and a cold air blew out the candle. He stood aghast.

  “Barnes!” he cried again. “Don’t be afraid! It is I – Meagle!”

  There was no answer. He stood gazing into the darkness, and all the time the idea of something close at hand watching was upon him. Then suddenly the steps broke out overhead again.

  He drew back hastily, and passing through the kitchen groped his way along the narrow passages. He could now see better in the darkness, and finding himself at last at the foot of the staircase, began to ascend it noiselessly. He reached the landing just in time to see a figure disappear round the angle of a wall. Still careful to make no noise, he followed the sound of the steps until they led him to the top floor, and he cornered the chase at the end of a short passage.

  “Barnes!” he whispered. “Barnes!”

  Something stirred in the darkness. A small circular window at the end of the passage just softened the blackness and revealed the dim outlines of a motionless figure. Meagle, in place of advancing, stood almost as still as a sudden horrible doubt took possession of him. With his eyes fixed on the shape in front he fell back slowly, and, as it advanced upon him, burst into a terrible cry.

  “Barnes! For God’s sake! Is it you?”

  The echoes of his voice left the air quivering, but the figure before him paid no heed. For a moment he tried to brace his courage up to endure its approach, then with a smothered cry he turned and fled.

  The passages wound like a maze, and he threaded them blindly in a vain search for the stairs. If he could get down and open the hall door –

  He caught his breath in a sob; the steps had begun again. At a lumbering trot they clattered up and down the bare passages, in and out, up and down, as though in search of him. He stood appalled, and then as they drew near entered a small room and stood behind the door as they rushed by. He came out and ran swiftly and noiselessly in the other direction, and in a moment the steps were after him. He found the long corridor and raced along it at top speed. The stairs he knew were at the end, and with the steps close behind he descended them in blind haste. The steps gained on him, and he shrank to the side to let them pass, still continuing his headlong flight. Then suddenly he seemed to slip off the earth into space.

  Lester awoke in the morning to find the sunshine streaming into the room, and White sitting up and regarding with some perplexity a badly-blistered finger.

  “Where are the others?” inquired Lester.

  “Gone, I suppose,” said White. “We must have been asleep.”

  Lester arose, and stretching his stiffened limbs, dusted his clothes with his hands and went out into the corridor. White followed. At the noise of their approach a figure which had been lying asleep at the other end sat up and revealed the face of Barnes. “Why, I’ve been asleep,” he said, in surprise. “I don’t remember coming here. How did I get here?”

  ‘Nice place to come for a nap,” said Lester severely, as he pointed to the gap in the balusters. “Look there! Another yard and where would you have been?”

  He walked
carelessly to the edge and looked over. In response to his startled cry the others drew near, and all three stood staring at the dead man below.

  Feet Foremost

  L. P. Hartley

  Prospectus

  Address:

  Low Threshold Hall, north Suffolk, England.

  Property:

  Queen Anne style building, elegant low frontage with square, castellated tower at north end. Surrounded by lush lawns and borders running down to a stream. Recently renovated to a very high standard.

  Viewing Date:

  August, 1938.

  Agent:

  Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972) was born in Whittlesea, Cambridge, and became famous as a novelist of country life and morals as exemplified in The Go-Between (1953) which has been filmed and adapted for television. He has also been credited with writing some of the most sophisticated ghost stories in the English language, and was quoted as saying that this type of story was “if not the highest, certainly the most exacting form of literary art”. The best of Hartley’s work is to be found in Night Fears (1924), The Killing Bottle (1932) and The Travelling Grave (1948). “Feet Foremost” is one of several of his supernatural stories set in elegant country houses and features the continuing malevolence of a spirit dead for 400 years.

  The house-warming at Low Threshold Hall was not an event that affected many people. The local newspaper, however, had half a column about it, and one or two daily papers supplemented the usual August dearth of topics with pictures of the house. They were all taken from the same angle, and showed a long, low building in the Queen Anne style flowing away from a square tower on the left which was castellated and obviously of much earlier date, the whole structure giving somewhat the impression to a casual glance of a domesticated church, or even of a small railway train that had stopped dead on finding itself in a park. Beneath the photograph was written something like “Suffolk Manor House re-occupied after a hundred and fifty years,” and, in one instance, “Inset, (L.) Mr. Charles Ampleforth, owner of Low Threshold Hall; (R.) Sir George Willings, the architect responsible for the restoration of this interesting mediaeval relic.” Mr. Ampleforth’s handsome, slightly Disraelian head, nearly spiked on his own flagpole, smiled congratulations at the grey hair and rounded features of Sir George Willings who, suspended like a bubble above the Queen Anne wing, discreetly smiled back.

  To judge from the photograph, time had dealt gently with Low Threshold Hall. Only a trained observer could have told how much of the original fabric had been renewed. The tower looked particularly convincing. While as for the gardens sloping down to the stream which bounded the foreground of the picture – they had that old-world air which gardens so quickly acquire. To see those lush lawns and borders as a meadow, that mellow brickwork under scaffolding, needed a strong effort of the imagination.

  But the guests assembled in Mr Ampleforth’s drawing-room after dinner and listening to their host as, not for the first time, he enlarged upon the obstacles faced and overcome in the work of restoration, found it just as hard to believe that the house was old. Most of them had been taken to see it, at one time or another, in process of reconstruction; yet even within a few days of its completion, how unfinished a house looks! Its habitability seems determined in the last few hours. Magdalen Winthrop, whose beautiful, expressive face still (to her hostess’ sentimental eye) bore traces of the slight disappointment she had suffered earlier in the evening, felt as if she were in an Aladdin’s palace. Her glance wandered appreciatively from the Samarcand rugs to the pale green walls, and dwelt with pleasure on the high shallow arch, flanked by slender columns, the delicate lines of which were emphasised by the darkness of the hall behind them. It all seemed so perfect and so new; not only every sign of decay but the very sense of age had been banished. How absurd not to be able to find a single grey hair, so to speak, in a house that had stood empty for a hundred and fifty years! Her eyes, still puzzled, came to rest on the company, ranged in an irregular circle round the open fireplace.

  “What’s the matter, Maggie?” said a man at her side, obviously glad to turn the conversation away from bricks and mortar. “Looking for something?”

  Mrs. Ampleforth, whose still lovely skin under the abundant white hair made her face look like a rose in snow, bent forward over the cream-coloured satin bedspread she was embroidering and smiled. “I was only thinking,” said Maggie, turning to her host whose recital had paused but not died upon his lips, “how surprised the owls and bats would be if they could come in and see the change in their old home.”

  “Oh, I do hope they won’t,” cried a high female voice from the depths of a chair whose generous proportions obscured the speaker.

  “Don’t be such a baby, Eileen,” said Maggie’s neighbour in tones that only a husband could have used. “Wait till you see the family ghost.”

  “Ronald, please! Have pity on my poor nerves!” The upper half of a tiny, childish, imploring face peered like a crescent moon over the rim of the chair.

  “If there is a ghost,” said Maggie, afraid that her original remark might be construed as a criticism, “I envy him his beautiful surroundings. I would willingly take his place.”

  “Hear, hear,” agreed Ronald. “A very happy haunting-ground. Is there a ghost, Charles?”

  There was a pause. They all looked at their host.

  “Well,” said Mr Ampleforth, who rarely spoke except after a pause and never without a slight impressiveness of manner, “there is and there isn’t.”

  The silence grew even more respectful.

  “The ghost of Low Threshold Hall,” Mr. Ampleforth continued, “is no ordinary ghost.”

  “It wouldn’t be,” muttered Ronald in an aside Maggie feared might be audible.

  “It is, for one thing,” Mr. Ampleforth pursued, “exceedingly considerate.”

  “Oh, how?” exclaimed two or three voices.

  “It only comes by invitation.”

  “Can anyone invite it?”

  “Yes, anyone.”

  There was nothing Mr. Ampleforth liked better than answering questions; he was evidently enjoying himself now.

  “How is the invitation delivered?” Ronald asked. “Does one telephone, or does one send a card: ‘Mrs. Ampleforth requests the pleasure of Mr. Ghost’s company on – well – what is to-morrow? – the eighteenth August, Moaning and Groaning and Chain Rattling. R.S.V.P.’?”

  “That would be a sad solecism,” said Mr. Ampleforth. “The ghost of Low Threshold Hall is a lady.”

  “Oh,” cried Eileen’s affected little voice. “I’m so thankful. I should be much less frightened of a female phantom.”

  “She hasn’t attained years of discretion,” Mr. Ampleforth said. “She was only sixteen when—”

  “Then she’s not ‘out’?”

  “Not in the sense you mean. I hope she’s not ‘out’ in any sense,” said Mr. Ampleforth, with grim facetiousness.

  There was a general shudder.

  “Well, I’m glad we can’t ask her to an evening party,” observed Ronald. “A ghost at tea-time is much less alarming. Is she what is called a ‘popular girl’?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then why do people invite her?”

  “They don’t realise what they’re doing.”

  “A kind of pig in a poke business, what? But you haven’t told us yet how we’re to get hold of the little lady.”

  “That’s quite simple,” said Mr. Ampleforth readily. “She comes to the door.”

  The drawing-room clock began to strike eleven, and no one spoke till it had finished.

  “She comes to the door,” said Ronald with an air of deliberation, “and then – don’t interrupt, Eileen, I’m in charge of the cross-examination – she – she hangs about—”

  “She waits to be asked inside.”

  “I suppose there is a time-honoured formula of invitation: ‘Sweet Ermyntrude, in the name of the master of the house I bid thee welcome to Low Threshold Hall.
There’s no step, so you can walk straight in.’ Charles, much as I admire your house, I do think it’s incomplete without a doorstep. A ghost could just sail in.”

  “There you make a mistake,” said Mr. Ampleforth impressively. “Our ghost cannot enter the house unless she is lifted across the threshold.”

  “Like a bride,” exclaimed Magdalen.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ampleforth. “Because she came as a bride.” He looked round at his guests with an enigmatic smile.

  They did not disappoint him. “Now, Charlie, don’t be so mysterious! Do tell us! Tell us the whole story.”

  Mr. Ampleforth settled himself into his chair. “There’s very little to tell,” he said, with the reassuring manner of someone who intends to tell a great deal, “but this is the tale. In the time of the Wars of the Roses the owner of Low Threshold Hall (I need not tell you his name was not Ampleforth) married en troisièmes noces the daughter of a neighbouring baron much less powerful than he. Lady Elinor Stortford was sixteen when she came and she did not live to see her seventeenth birthday. Her husband was a bad hat (I’m sorry to have to say so of a predecessor of mine), a very bad hat. He ill-treated her, drove her mad with terror, and finally killed her.”

  The narrator paused dramatically but the guests felt slightly disappointed. They had heard so many stories of that kind.

  “Poor thing,” said Magdalen, feeling that some comment was necessary, however flat. “So now she haunts the place. I suppose it’s the nature of ghosts to linger where they’ve suffered, but it seems illogical to me. I should want to go somewhere else.”

  “The Lady Elinor would agree with you. The first thing she does when she gets into the house is make plans for getting out. Her visits, as far as I can gather, have generally been brief.”

  “Then why does she come?” asked Eileen.

  “She comes for vengeance,” Mr. Ampleforth’s voice dropped at the word. “And apparently she gets it. Within a short time of her appearance, someone in the house always dies.”