“I can’t understand,” he pointed out slyly, “how you can be so free with this house if, as you say, you’ve been dead twentyone years or so. Don’t the present owners or occupants object? If I lived here I certainly wouldn’t turn the place over to a couple of ghosts – especially on a night like this!”
The man answered readily, “I told you that things are not as they seem. This house has not been lived in since Grace died. It’s not a very modern house, anyway – and people have natural prejudices. At this very moment you are standing in an empty room. Those windows are broken. The wallpaper has peeled away, and half the plaster has fallen off the walls. There is really no light in the house. If things appeared to you as they really are you could not see your hand in front of your face.”
Marvin felt in his pocket for his cigarettes. “Well,” he said, “you seem to know all the answers. Have a cigarette. Or don’t ghosts smoke?”
The man extended his hand. “Thanks,” he replied. “This is an unexpected pleasure. You’ll notice that although there are ashtrays about the room there are no cigarettes or tobacco. Grace never smoked, and when they took me to jail she brought all my tobacco there to me. Of course, as I pointed out before, you see this room exactly as it was at the time she killed herself. She’s wearing the same dress, for example. There’s a certain form about these things, you know.”
Marvin lit the cigarettes. “Well!” he exclaimed. “Brother, you certainly seem to think of everything! Though I can’t understand, even yet, why you want me to get out of here. I should think that after you’ve gone to all this trouble, arranging your effects and so on, you’d want somebody to haunt.”
The woman laughed dryly.
“Oh, you’re not the man we want to haunt, Mr. Phelps. You came along quite by accident; we hadn’t counted on you at all. No, Mr. Lyons is the man we’re interested in.”
“He’s out in the hall now,” the man said suddenly. He jerked his head toward the door through which Marvin had come. And all at once all this didn’t seem half so funny to Marvin as it had seemed a moment before.
“You see,” the woman went on quickly, “this house of ours is on a back road. Nobody ever travels this way. We’ve been trying for years to – to haunt Mr. Lyons, but we’ve had very little success. He lives in Felders, and we’re pitifully weak when we go to Felders. We’re strongest when we’re in this house, perhaps because we lived here so long.
“But tonight, when the bridge went out, we knew that our opportunity had arrived. We knew that Mr. Lyons was not in Felders, and we knew that he would have to take this detour in order to get home.
“We felt very strongly that Mr. Lyons would be unable to pass this house tonight.
“It turned out as we had hoped. Mr. Lyons had trouble with his car, exactly as you did, and he came straight to this house to ask if he might use the telephone. Perhaps he had forgotten us, years ago – twenty-one years is a long time. Perhaps he was confused by the rain, and didn’t know exactly where he was.
“He fainted, Mr. Phelps, the instant he recognized us. We have known for a long time that his heart is weak, and we had hoped that seeing us would frighten him to death, but he is still alive. Of course while he is unconscious we can do nothing more. Actually, we’re almost impalpable. If you weren’t so convinced that we are real you could pass your hand right through us.
“We decided to wait until Mr. Lyons regained consciousness and then to frighten him again. We even discussed beating him to death with one of those non-existent chairs you think you see. You understand, his body would be unmarked; he would really die of terror. We were still discussing what to do when you came along.
“We realized at once how embarrassing it might prove for you if Mr. Lyons’ body were found in this house tomorrow and the police learned that you were also in the house. That’s why we want you to go.”
“Well,” Marvin said bluntly, “I don’t see how I can get my car away from here. It won’t run, and if I walk to Little Rock Falls and get somebody to come back here with me the damage’ll be done.”
“Yes,” the man admitted thoughtfully. “It’s a problem.”
For several minutes they stood like a tableau, without speaking. Marvin was uneasily wondering: Did these people really have old Lyons tied up in the hallway; were they really planning to murder the man? The big car standing out beside the road belonged to somebody . . .
Marvin coughed discreetly.
“Well, it seems to me, my dear shades,” he said, “that unless you are perfectly willing to put me into what might turn out to be a very unpleasant position you’ll have to let your vengeance ride, for tonight, anyway.”
“There’ll never be another opportunity like this,” the man pointed out. “That bridge won’t go again in ten lifetimes.”
“We don’t want the young man to suffer though, John.”
“It seems to me,” Marvin suggested, “as though this revenge idea of yours is overdone, anyway. Murdering Lyons won’t really do you any good, you know.”
“It’s the customary thing when a wrong has been done,” the man protested.
“Well, maybe,” Marvin argued, and all the time he was wondering whether he were really facing a madman who might be dangerous or whether he were at home dreaming in bed; “but I’m not so sure about that. Hauntings are pretty infrequent, you must admit. I’d say that shows that a lot of ghosts really don’t care much about the vengeance angle, despite all you say. I think that if you check on it carefully you’ll find that a great many ghosts realize that revenge isn’t so much. It’s really the thinking about revenge, and the planning it, that’s all the fun. Now, for the sake of argument, what good would it do you to put old Lyons away? Why, you’d hardly have any incentive to be ghosts any more. But if you let him go, why, say, any time you wanted to, you could start to scheme up a good scare for him, and begin to calculate how it would work, and time would fly like everything. And on top of all that, if anything happened to me on account of tonight, it would be just too bad for you. You’d be haunted, really. It’s a bad rule that doesn’t work two ways.”
The woman looked at her husband. “He’s right, John,” she said tremulously. “We’d better let Lyons go.”
The man nodded. He looked worried.
He spoke very stiffly to Marvin. “I don’t agree entirely with all you’ve said,” he pointed out, “but I admit that in order to protect you we’ll have to let Lyons go. If you’ll give me a hand we’ll carry him out and put him in his car.”
“Actually, I suppose, I’ll be doing all the work.”
“Yes,” the man agreed, “you will.”
They went into the little hall, and there, to Marvin’s complete astonishment, crumpled on the floor lay old Lyons. Marvin recognized him easily from the newspaper photographs he had seen.
“Hard-looking duffer, isn’t he?” Marvin said, trying to stifle a tremor in his voice.
The man nodded without speaking.
Together, Marvin watching the man narrowly, they carried the lax body out through the rain and put it into the big sedan. When the job was done the man stood silently for a moment, looking up into the black invisible clouds.
“It’s clearing,” he said matter-of-factly. “In an hour it’ll be over.”
“My wife’ll kill me when I get home,” Marvin said.
The man made a little clucking sound. “Maybe if you wiped your ignition now your car’d start. It’s had a chance to dry a little.”
“I’ll try it,” Marvin said. He opened the hood and wiped the distributor cap and points and around the spark plugs with his handkerchief. He got in the car and stepped on the starter, and the motor caught almost immediately.
The man stepped toward the door, and Marvin doubled his right fist, ready for anything. But then the man stopped.
“Well, I suppose you’d better be going along,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Marvin said. “And thanks. I’ll stop by one of these days a
nd say hello.”
“You wouldn’t find us in,” the man said simply.
By Heaven, he is nuts, Marvin thought. “Listen, brother,” he said earnestly, “you aren’t going to do anything funny to old Lyons after I’m gone?”
The other shook his head. “No. Don’t worry.”
Marvin let in the clutch and stepped on the gas. He wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
In Little Rock Falls he went into an all-night lunch and telephoned the police that there was an unconscious man sitting in a car three or four miles back on the detour. Then he drove home.
Early the next morning, on his way to work, he drove back over the detour.
He kept watching for the little house, and when it came in sight he recognized it easily from the contour of the rooms and the spacing of the windows and the little overhang above the door.
But as he came closer he saw that it was deserted. The windows were out, the steps had fallen in. The clapboards were gray and weather-beaten, and naked rafters showed through holes in the roof.
Marvin stopped his car and sat there beside the road for a little while, his face oddly pale. Finally he got out of the car and walked over to the house and went inside.
There was not one single stick of furniture in the rooms. Jagged scars showed in the ceilings where the electric fixtures had been torn away. The house had been wrecked years before by vandals, by neglect, by the merciless wearing of the sun and the rain.
In shape alone were the hallway and living-room as Marvin remembered them. “There,” he thought, “is where the bookcases were. The table was there – the davenport there.”
Suddenly he stooped, and stared at the dusty boards and underfoot.
On the naked floor lay the butt of a cigarette. And, a half-dozen feet away, lay another cigarette that had not been smoked – that had not even been lighted!
Marvin turned around blindly, and, like an automaton, walked out of that house.
Three days later he read in the newspapers that Lieutenant-Governor Lyons was dead. The Lieutenant-Governor had collapsed, the item continued, while driving his own car home from the state capital the night the Felders bridge was washed out. The death was attributed to heart disease . . .
After all, Lyons was not a young man.
So Marvin Phelps knew that, even though his considerate ghostly hosts had voluntarily relinquished their vengeance, blind, impartial nature had meted out justice. And, in a strange way, he felt glad that that was so, glad that Grace and John Reed had left to Fate the punishment they had planned to impose with their own ghostly hands . . .
The Grey House
Basil Copper
Prospectus
Address:
The Grey House, near Burgundy, France.
Property:
Eighteenth-century stone house in beautiful countryside position. The property has a red-tiled roof, round-capped turret, plus unique classical Great Hall and terrace overlooking garden. In need of complete restoration.
Viewing Date:
Summer, 1967.
Agent:
Basil Copper (1924–) was born in London and worked as a journalist and editor while developing his skill as one of Britain’s pre-eminent writers of macabre fiction. Haunted houses have featured in his novels The Curse of the Fleers (1976) and The House of the Wolf (1983), plus several short stories, including “Dust to Dust”, “Wish You Were Here” and “The Grey House.” Many people have dreamt of converting an old ruin into a new home, and it was after coming across one in a remote region of France that Copper was inspired to write this story. As he shows, though, it is as well to know all about any old building before undertaking such a task.
1
To Angele, standing in the sunlight of a late summer afternoon, The Grey House, as they came to call it, had an air of chill desolation that was at variance with the brightness and warmth of the day. It was uninhabited and had evidently been so for many years. But Philip was delighted with the place; he clapped his hands like a child of five and then strolled around, his arms folded, lost in silent admiration. He needs and must have it and wouldn’t rest until he had rooted out the local agent and made an offer for the house.
Philip, her husband, was a writer; apart from a series of successful detective stories which brought him the larger part of his income, he was the author of a number of striking tales of mystery and the macabre. The Grey House would give him inspiration, he chuckled: Angele, stifling her doubts, didn’t like to dampen her husband’s enthusiasm and trailed round behind him and the estate agent with growing dislike.
They had spotted the place after a long day’s drive in the older parts of Burgundy. Then in early afternoon, they had stopped for a late lunch in the small mediaeval city which nestled among the blue haze of the surrounding mountains. The view was enchanting and after lunch they spent a pleasant hour on the ramparts, tracing out the path of a small river which wound its way foaming between great boulders and woods of dark pines.
It was Philip who first sighted The Grey House. It was down a narrow lane and the path to it was long choked with nettles. It was the last house, separated from its neighbours by several hundreds of yards of rough cartway and trees, over-grown shrubbery and bushes. It was unquestionably a ruin. The place looked something like a barn or stable.
It was largely constructed of great blocks of grey stone, which decided them on its name, with one round-capped turret hanging at an insane angle over the big front door, large as a church. There was a round tower at one side, immensely old and covered in lichen. The roof, of red crab tiles, sagged ominously and would obviously need a lot of repairs.
The big old wooden door was locked but Philip led the way with enthusiasm, cutting a swathe through breast-high nettles for his wife. They followed the great frowning wall down the lane until the property obviously came to an end. The rest of the lane was an impenetrable mass of brambles. But Philip had seen enough. Through the trees below the bluff he could see the rusted iron railings of a balcony and there were even some out-buildings and what looked like an old water mill.
“We could get this place for a song,” he told his wife gleefully. “It would want a lot of doing up of course, but the terrace would be ideal for my writing and what a view!”
Against such enthusiasm Angele could find no valid argument; so half an hour later found them back in the city square, at the office of M. Gasion, the principal of the main firm of agents in the area.
M. Gasion, a short broad-shouldered man of cheerful aspect and obviously addicted to the grape was shattered at the prospect of such a sale. The property had been on his books for more than forty years, over twenty years before he acquired the firm. Therefore, he was a little hazy about the antecedents of the estate. Yes, it would need a lot of doing up, he agreed; he did not think monsieur need worry about the price.
It would not be heavy and as they would see, though it needed a great deal of renovation, it had possibilities, distinct possibilities. He positively purred with enthusiasm and Angele could not help smiling to herself. A purchaser like Philip would hardly happen more than once in a lifetime; no wonder M. Gasion was pleased.
It was absurdly cheap, she had to agree. The asking price was £300, which included the main building and tower, the terrace, out-buildings and mill house, together with a short strip of orchard below the bluff on which the terrace was set. Nothing would do but that Philip must conclude the deal then and there. This called for a great deal of bustle and the notaire was sent for, while Angele, Philip and the agent went on a tour of the building. There was further delay while the key was hunted up but at last the small procession set off.
The big door gave back with a creak after M. Gasion’s repeated applications and the first ray of sunshine for something like forty years found difficulty in penetrating the interior. The unusual activity round the old building had not passed notice among the local people who lived higher up the lane and Angele had seen the curious glances t
hey cast towards her, though Philip, as usual, was too absorbed in talk with the agent to notice anything.
Angele glanced over her shoulder as they went in the main door and was not surprised to see a small knot of gawping householders standing at the last bend in the lane in front of the house. Surprisingly, the house was wired for electricity but the main switchboard inside the door, fixed by great bolts directly into the ancient stone, was bare except for fragments of rusted wire and fittings covered with verdigris. The electricity had been cut off in the twenties, when the last tenants left, explained M. Gasion.
He carried a powerful electric lantern, despite the brightness of the afternoon. The house had formerly belonged to the de Menevals, the great landed proprietors who had now died out. They had owned a chateau which formerly stood in a vast park on the mountain opposite. The building had burned down in a great fire and explosion over a hundred years earlier and now only the stones remained. The last de Meneval, Gaston, had died a violent death, said M. Gasion with relish. He was apparently a great one for the ladies and had kept The Grey House for entertaining his girl friends.
“Une maison d’assignation,” he explained to Philip with a smile, man to man. Philip returned the smile with a grin and the trio went into the house. Angele could not repress a shudder at the interior and wondered what deeds the old house had seen. She and Philip had visited the ruins of the old chateau earlier the same afternoon; it was one of the sights of the district. The park was now kept as a public pleasaunce, and the guide had told the stories of blood and violence with distinct enthusiasm.
But one did not need even that to picture dark scenes of lust centuries before, as they gazed at the ruined and distorted remains of the house, which even now bore traces of charring on ancient beams and on the undersides of blackened stones. She was disquieted to hear that The Grey House had belonged to the de Menevals too, and her own French ancestry – her mother had come from these very parts – with its heightened sensibilities, rang a little bell somewhere back in her brain.
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) Page 28