“Take me, Master,” she breathed. Something slit the thin silk of her night-gown, exposing her breasts to the chill air. An unutterable stench was in her nostrils, but she smiled happily as ancient arms lifted her from the balcony.
6
Philip returned happily from Roget’s house a little after nine, but his casual homecoming soon changed into bewilderment, then terror. The maid, Gisele, sunk into an unnaturally deep sleep on a divan in the dining room, when aroused, expressed only astonishment; the last thing she remembered, she had been dusting the room. Philip went through the house calling his wife’s name.
He found the floor of their bedroom littered with every last stitch of his wife’s clothing. But it was on the balcony that stark fear leapt out at him for the first time. It was not the overturned coffee cup, the jumble of typed paper littered across the terrace or even the green lichenous mould. But something had forced its way through the mass of brambles from the old ladder below the balcony; it was this, and the strands of his wife’s blonde hair caught on the thorns which sent him almost out of his mind.
Seizing a powerful electric searchlight from the garage, he set out down the steep, nettle-grown lane, calling his wife’s name. His voice echoed back eerily and once again he caught the loathsome stench of putrescence which seemed to emanate from the mist which swirled about these lower parts. His heart leaped in his throat as the beam of his lamp picked out something white in the gloom. It was then, he thinks, that he gave up hope of seeing Angele again; in the darkest moment of his life idiot fear babbled out at him as the probing beam caught Angele’s pathetic, torn, blood-stained scrap of nightgown fast on a patch of nettles as the unnamable thing had carried her through the night.
Philip’s knees gave under him and he trembled violently; for the path through the nettles led directly to the old grave-yard and he knew that, much as he loved his wife, he dare not go there alone at night to face such forces. It was a nightmare journey as he stumbled back up the lane; falling, hacking his shins on outcrops of rock, cutting his face with brambles. He looked an appalling sight as he staggered into a cafe on the edge of the town and made his pathetic telephone plea to Roget Frey.
The young architect not only came in his car at once, but collected Monsignor Joffroy from the university on his way over. The couple were with the demented Philip in a quarter of an hour. His appearance shocked them both but a few words only told the old Abbe all he had suspected and feared from the first.
He had come fully prepared. Round his neck he had an ornate silver crucifix; he carried a prayer book in one hand and, curiously, a crowbar. Roget Frey had also armed himself with a revolver and in the back of his car were two enormous electric lamps, like car headlights.
“Courage, mon pauvre ami,” said Monsignor Joffroy, helping Philip into a seat beside him. “What must be done, must be done. I fear it is too late to save your dear wife, but we must do all we can to destroy this evil being in order to save her soul.” Horrified, half dazed, understanding only a quarter of what he was told, Philip clutched the Monsignor’s arm as Roget’s sports car leapt like a demented thing down the narrow lane at suicidal speed.
At the bottom Frey drove straight at the wall of brambles and stinging nettles as far as he could. The headlights shone a brilliant radiance right down towards the cemetery gates. Frey left the lights on and the engine running.
“To remind us of normality,” he said with great emphasis.
“This will do,” said Monsignor Joffroy, making a great sign of the cross in the air before him. “The rest is in God’s hands.”
Roget handed a long crowbar to Philip, the prelate carried one searchlight and the other crowbar, and Roget had his revolver in one hand and the second searchlight in his left. The three men walked abreast through the wet grass, making no attempt at concealment. Philip put down his own flashlight at the cemetery entrance, which lit up a considerable part of the graveyard; he had recovered his courage now and led the way towards the de Meneval tomb.
Their feet echoed hollowly over the gravel and Philip dropped to one knee as a thing with great flaming eyes drove at them from the top of a gravestone. Frey’s revolver roared twice, with deafening impact, and a broken-backed, yowling creature that had been the great cat went whimpering to die in the bushes. Monsignor Joffroy had jumped up instantly and without swerving set off at a run towards the de Meneval tomb. The others followed, trembling from the sudden shock of the revolver shots.
Philip could never forget that charnel house scene. Like a tableau out of Goya, it ever haunted his life. The nude body of Angele, quite dead, splashed with gouts of blood, but with an expression of diabolical happiness on her face, was clutched fast in the arms of a thing which lay on its side at the entrance of the tomb, as though exhausted. It was dressed in a frayed and faded blue coat and the abomination had apparently broken one of its old and brittle legs as it dropped from the balcony. This had accounted for its slow progress to the malodorous lair beneath the old de Meneval mausoleum.
But the worst horror was to come. In one withered and grey, parchment-like paw was clutched a whip-and-spike instrument dabbled with fresh young blood. The face, half-eaten away and with the broken bones portruding from the split, rotted skin, was turned towards them. Something moved and the eyes, which were still alive, gazed balefully at the three men. Old de Meneval was malevolent to the last.
Monsignor Joffroy hesitated not an instant. Pronouncing the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in a voice like thunder, he held aloft the cross. Then, handing it to Philip, he brought down the great crowbar again and again on the brittle ancient blasphemy that had once been a man. Teeth and hair flew in all directions, old bones cracked and split and dust and putrefaction rose in the still air. At length, all was quiet.
Panting, the Monsignor led the two men away. “This is all we can do for tonight,” he said. “Much remains to be done in the morning, but this abomination will never walk again.”
He sprinkled holy water from a bottle over the remains of Angele and covered it with a blanket from the car. To Philip’s anguished protests over his wife, he remained adamant.
“We must not move her,” he insisted. “She is no longer your wife, my poor friend. She belongs to them. For her own sake and for her immortal soul we must do what has to be done.”
Little remains to be told, though the city will remember for many a long year the horrors which were found in the old de Meneval tomb. Monsignor Joffroy obtained a special dispensation from the Bishop that same night and the very next morning, at first light, a battalion of the Infanterie Coloniale were called in to work under the Abbe’s directions.
These soldiers, hardened and toughened on the forge of war as they were, saw sights which made them act like frightened children when the vault below was opened. Monsignor Joffroy, calm and strong, prevented a panic and bore himself like a true man of the church that day. Indeed, many said that the sights he saw and the things he had to do hastened the good man’s own end.
The body of Angele was taken to a hastily prepared pyre behind the canvas shelter in the old cemetery and burned while priests conducted a service. In the vault of the de Menevals a stupefying sight awaited the intruders, priest and soldier alike. Some say that there were more than thirty bodies, de Menevals and the naked corpses of fresh young girls, as undecayed as the day they were abducted from the neighbourhood upwards of two hundred years before.
The searchers also found vast passages and chambers under the earth, equipped as for the living, where the undead dead still held obscene and blasphemous rites. Be that as it may, and no one can now say for certain that all this is true, the Bishop himself with Monsignor Joffroy as his chaplain held a service of exorcism and afterwards the troops went in with flame guns and destroyed every last one of those horrors as they lay.
The underground chambers were blown up by Army engineers and the whole of the area cauterised and purified. Later, by order of the Bishop the field was concre
ted over and from that day to this the people of the city have remained unmolested, neither does mist appear in the orchard by the mill house.
The Grey House still stands, now fast falling to ruin and deserted. M. Gasion, greyer now, has retired and gone to live in a villa in Normandy; Monsignor Joffroy is dead; and Roget Frey is a successful architect, practising in Paris.
7
Philip is still a successful novelist. He lives in London, with a very young wife, who is not serious at all, and is content with what she calls the simple things of life. He seldom goes abroad, very occasionally to France, and never to Burgundy. His stories now, while very popular in the English-speaking world, are not what they were.
They are mainly comedies and light pieces, with an occasional political drama. Though he is still a year or so short of fifty, his hair is quite white and his face that of an old man. It is only when one looks closely into his eyes that one can see the fires of the pit.
Two small footnotes. Afterwards, in The Grey House, Roget Frey found a great pile of grey ash in a circular stone jar on the terrace.
In the Great Hall, the painting of the old man and the girl had disappeared; the whole wall had been gouged out from the balcony and the solid stone pitted as though with a pickaxe.
He did not make any inquiries and he had no theories, so the mysteries remain.
Watching Me, Watching You
Fay Weldon
Prospectus
Address:
66, Aldermans Drive, Bristol, Somerset, England.
Property:
Nineteenth-century terraced house in residential area of the city. Spacious rooms on two floors with a basement offering additional space. The house is prime for redevelopment in an area destined to become fashionable.
Viewing Date:
Winter, 1980.
Agent:
Fay Weldon (1931– ) was born in Worcester and educated at the University of St Andrews, where she began to write. She has subsequently become a champion of women’s rights and novels like The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967), Down Among The Women (1971) and Female Friends (1975) have played a major role in the development of female consciousness. Weldon has also written a number of excellent ghost stories, including “Angel, All Innocence”, “Breakages”, “Spirit of the House” and “Watching Me, Watching You”, in which the ghost itself is the guide to a haunted house that is typical of those in which millions of people live.
The ghost liked the stairs best, where people passed quickly and occasionally, holding their feelings in suspense between the closing of one door and the opening of another. Mostly, the ghost slept. He preferred sleep. But sometimes the sense of something important happening, some crystallization of the past or omen for the future, would wake him, and he would slither off the stair and into one room or another of the house to see what was going on. Presently, he wore an easy path of transition into a particular room on the first floor – as sheep will wear an easy path in the turf by constant trotting to and fro. Here, as the seasons passed, a plane tree pressed closer and closer against the window, keeping out light and warmth. The various cats which lived out their lives in the house seldom went into this small damp back room, and seemed to feel the need to race up and down that portion of the stairs the ghost favoured, though sitting happily enough at the bottom of the stairs, or on the top landing.
Many houses contain ghosts. (It would be strange if they didn’t.) Mostly they sleep, or wake so seldom their presence is not noticed, let alone minded. If a glass falls off a shelf in 1940, and a door opens by itself in 1963, and a sense of oppression is felt in 1971, and knocking sounds are heard on Christmas Day, 1980 – who wants to make anything of that? Four inexplicable happenings in a week call for exorcism – the same number spread over forty years call for nothing more than a shrug and a stiff drink.
66 Aldermans Drive, Bristol. The house had stood for a hundred and thirty years, and the ghost had slept and occasionally sighed and slithered sideways, and otherwise done little else but puff out a curtain on a still day for all but ten of those. He entered the house on the shoulders of a parlour-maid. She had been to a seance in the hope of raising her dead lover, but had raised something altogether more elusive, if at least sleepier, instead. The maid had stayed in the house until she died, driving her mistress to suicide and marrying the master the while, and the ghost had stayed too, long after all were dead, and the house empty, with paper peeling off the walls, and the banisters broken, and carpets rotting on the floors, and dust and silence everywhere.
The ghost slept, and woke again to the sound of movement, and different voices. The new people were numerous: they warmed gnarled winter hands before gas-fires, and the smell of boiled cabbage and sweat wafted up the stairs, and exhaustion and indifference prevailed. In the back room on the first floor, presently, a girl gave birth to a baby. The ghost sighed and puffed out the curtains. In this room, earlier, the maid’s mistress had hanged herself, making a swinging shadow against the wall in the gas-light shining from the stairs. The ghost had a sense of justice, or at any rate balance. He slept again.
The house emptied. Rain came through broken tiles into the back room. A man with a probe came and pierced into the rotten beams of roof and floor, and shook his head and laughed. The tree thrust a branch through the window, and a sparrow flew in, and couldn’t get out, and died, and after mice and insects and flies had finished with it, was nothing more than two slender white bones, placed crosswise.
It was 1965. The front door opened and a man and a woman entered, and such was their natures that the ghost was alert at once. The man’s name was Maurice: he was burly and warm-skinned; his hands were thick and crude; labourer’s hands, but clean and soft. His hair was pale and tightly curled; he was bearded; his eyes were large and heavily hooded. He looked at the house as if he were already its master: as if he cared nothing for its rotten beams and its leaking roof.
“We’ll have it,” he said. She laughed. It was a nervous laugh, which she used when she was frightened. She had a small cross face half-lost in a mass of coarse red hair. She was tiny waisted, big-bosomed and long-legged; her limbs lean and freckly. Her fingers were long and fragile. “But it’s falling down,” said Vanessa. “How can we afford it?”
“Look at the detail on the cornices!” was all he said. “I’m sure they’re original.”
“I expect we can make something of it,” she said.
She loved him. She would do what she could for him. The ghost sensed cruelty, somewhere: he bustled around, stirring the air.
“It’s very draughty,” she complained.
They looked into the small back room on the first floor and even he shivered.
“I’ll never make anything of this room,” she said.
“Vanessa,” he said. “I trust you to do something wonderful with everything.”
“Then I’ll make it beautiful,” she said, loud and clear, marking out her future. “Even this, for you.”
The plane tree rubbed against the window pane.
“It’s just a question of lopping a branch or two,” he said.
One night, after dark, when builders’ trestles were everywhere, and the sour smell of damp lime plaster was on the stairs. Maurice spread a blanket for Vanessa in the little back room.
“Not here,” she said.
“It’s the only place that isn’t dusty,” he said.
He made love to her, his broad, white body covering her narrow, freckled one altogether.
“Today the divorce came through,” he said.
Other passions split the air. The ghost felt them. Outside in the alley which ran behind the house, beneath the plane tree, stood another woman. Her face was round and sweet, her hair was short and mousy, her eyes bright, bitter and wet. In the house the girl cried out and the man groaned; and the watcher’s face became empty, drained of sweetness, left expressionless, a vacuum into which something had to flow. The ghost left with her, on her shoulders.
“I have
fibrositis now,” said Anne, “as well as everything else.” She said it to herself, into the mirror, when she was back home in the basement of the house in Upton Park, where once she and Maurice had lived and built their life. She had to say it to herself, because there was no one else to say it to, except their child Wendy, and Wendy was only four and lay asleep in a pile of blankets on the floor, her face and hands sticky and unwashed. Anne threw an ashtray at the mirror and cracked it, and Wendy woke and cried. “Seven years bad luck,” said Anne. “Well, who’s counting!”
Sweetness had run out: sourness took its place: she too had marked out her future.
The ghost found a space against the wall between the barred windows of the room, and took up residence there, and drowsed, waking sometimes to accompany Anne on her midnight vigils to 66 Aldermans Drive. Presently he wore an easy route for himself, slipping and slithering between the two places, and no longer needed her for the journey. Sometimes he was here, sometimes there.
In Aldermans Drive he found a painted stairwell and a mended banister, but stairs which were still uncarpeted, and a cat which howled and shot upstairs. The ghost moved in to the small back room and the door pushed open in his path and shadows swung and shifted against the wall.
Vanessa was wearing jeans. She and Maurice were papering the room with bright patterned paper. They were laughing: she had glue in her hair.
“When we’re rich,” she was saying, “I’ll never do this kind of thing again. We’ll always have professionals in to do it.”
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) Page 33