The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  He laughs, but he is moved. He thinks it might be true. If it were not for Vanessa he would not just be rich and successful, he would be rich, successful, and renowned as well.

  “Vanessa says this room is haunted,” he says, seeing the shadows himself, almost defined at last, a body hanging from a noose: a woman destroyed, or self-destroyed. What’s the difference? Love does it. Love and ghosts.

  “What’s the matter?” Audrey asks. He’s pale.

  “We could leave here,” he says. “Leave this house. You and me.”

  A shrewd light gleams in her intelligent, passionate eyes. How he loves her!

  “A pity to waste all this,” says Audrey. “It is your home, after all, Vanessa’s never liked it. If anyone leaves, it should be her.”

  The flowers on the landing are still fresh and sweet a week later. Maurice will keep the table they stand upon – a gift from Vanessa to him, after all. If you give someone something, it’s theirs for ever. That is the law, says Audrey.

  Vanessa moves her belongings from the bathroom shelf. She wants nothing of his, nothing. Just a few personal things – toothbrush, paste, cleansing cream. She will take her child and go. She cannot remain under the same roof, and he won’t leave.

  “You must see it’s for the best, Vanessa,” says Maurice, awkwardly. “We haven’t really been together for years, you and I.”

  “All that bed-sharing?” she enquires. “That wasn’t together? The meals, the holidays, the friends, the house? The child? Not together?”

  “No,” he says. “Not together the way I feel with Audrey.” She can hardly believe it. So far she is shocked, rather than distressed. presently, distress will set in: but not yet.

  “I’ll provide for you, of course,” he says, “You and the child. I always looked after Anne, didn’t I? Anne and Wendy.” Vanessa turns to stare at him, and over his shoulder sees a dead woman hanging from a rope, but who is to say where dreams begin and reality ends? At the moment she is certainly in a nightmare. She looks back to Maurice, and sees the horror of her own life, and the swinging body fades, if indeed it was ever there. The door opens, by itself.

  “You never did fix the catch,” she says.

  “No,” he replies. “I never got round to it.”

  The train beneath the overpass was nearly through. The past had caught up with the present and the present was dissolving into the future, and the future was all but out of sight.

  It was 1980. The two women, Anne and Vanessa, sat together in the room in Upton Park. The damp patch was back again, but hidden by one of the numerous posters which lined the walls calling on women to live, to be free, to protest, to re-claim the right, demand wages for housework, to do anything in the world but love. The personal, they proclaimed, was the political. Other women came and went in the room.

  “However good the present is,” said Anne, “the past cannot be undone. I wasted so much of my life. I look back and see scenes I would rather not remember. Little things; silly things, even. Wendy being late for school, a lover looking in a mirror. Damp on a wall. I used to think this room was haunted.”

  “I used to think the same of Aldermans Drive,” said Vanessa, “but now I realize what it was. What I sensed was myself now, looking back; me now watching me then, myself remembering me with sorrow for what I was and need never have been.”

  They talked about Audrey.

  “They say she’s unfaithful to him,” said Anne. “Well, he’s nearly sixty and she’s thirty-five. What did he expect?”

  “Love,” said Vanessa, “like the rest of us.”

  4

  PHANTOM LOVERS

  Sex and the Supernatural

  A Spirit Elopement

  Richard Dehan

  Prospectus

  Address:

  Mon Desir, Guernsey, Channel Islands.

  Property:

  Eighteenth-century mansion house standing in its own spacious grounds, screened by lofty red-brick walls, with a wrought iron gate entranceway. Tastefully decorated in yellow-white.

  Viewing Date:

  April, 1915.

  Agent:

  “Richard Dehan” was the pseudonym of Clotilde Mary Graves (1863–1932), who was born in County Cork, Ireland and became popular with readers on both sides of the Atlantic for her humorous novels and stories of witchcraft and pagan religions, including Under The Hermes (1917) and The Eve of Pascua (1920). She also travelled a great deal and wrote short stories on a variety of themes from the Boer War to Eskimo folklore. Graves resided in the Channel Islands for several years, which were the inspiration for this story.

  When I exchanged my maiden name for better or worse, and dearest Vavasour and I, at the conclusion of the speeches – I was married in a travelling-dress of Bluefern’s – descended the steps of mamma’s house in Ebury Street – the Belgravian, not the Pimlican end – and, amid a hurricane of farewells and a hailstorm of pink and yellow and white confetti, stepped into the brougham that was to convey us to Waterloo Station, en route for Southampton – our honeymoon was to be spent in Guernsey – we were perfectly well satisfied with ourselves and each other. This state of mind is not uncommon at the outset of wedded life. You may have heard the horrid story of the newly-wedded cannibal chief, who remarked that he had never yet known a young bride to disagree with her husband in the early stages of the honeymoon. I believe if dearest Vavasour had seriously proposed to chop me into cotêlettes and eat me, with or without sauce, I should have taken it for granted that the powers that he had destined me to the high end of supplying one of the noblest of created beings with an entrée dish.

  We were idiotically blissful for two or three days. It was flowery April, and Guernsey was looking her loveliest. No horrid hotel or boarding-house sheltered our lawful endearments. Some old friends of papa’s had lent us an ancient mansion standing in a wild garden, now one pink riot of almond-blossom, screened behind lofty walls of lichened red brick and weather-worn, wrought-iron gates, painted yellow-white like all the other iron and wood work about the house.

  “Mon Desir” the place was called, and the fragrance of potpourri yet hung about the old panelled salons. Vavasour wrote a sonnet – I have omitted to speak before of my husband’s poetic gifts – all about the breath of new Passion stirring the fragrant dust of dead old Love, and the kisses of lips long mouldered that mingled with ours. It was a lovely sonnet, but crawly, as the poetical compositions of the Modern School are apt to be. And Vavasour was an enthusiastic convert to, and follower of, the Modern School. He had often told me that, had not his father heartlessly thrown him into his brewery business at the outset of his career – Sim’s Mild and Bitter Ales being the foundation upon which the family fortunes were originally reared – he, Vavasour, would have been, ere the time of speaking, known to Fame, not only as a Minor Poet, but a Minor Decadent Poet – which trisyllabic addition, I believe, makes as advantageous a difference as the word “native” when attached to an oyster, or the guarantee “new laid” when employed with reference to an egg.

  Dear Vavasour’s temperament and tastes having a decided bias towards the gloomy and mystic, he had, before his great discovery of his latent poetical gifts, and in the intervals of freedom from the brain-carking and soul-stultifying cares of business, made several excursions into the regions of the Unknown. He had had some sort of intercourse with the Swedenborgians, and had mingled with the Muggletonians; he had coquetted with the Christian Scientists, and had been, until Theosophic Buddhism opened a wider field to his researches, an enthusiastic Spiritualist. But our engagement somewhat cooled his passion for psychic research, and when questioned by me with regard to table-rappings, manifestations, and materialisations, I could not but be conscious of a reticence in his manner of responding to my innocent desire for information. The reflection that he probably, like Canning’s knife-grinder, had no story to tell, soon induced me to abandon the subject. I myself am somewhat reserved at this day in my method of dealing with the subject of spooks. But
my silence does not proceed from ignorance.

  Knowledge came to me after this fashion. Though the April sun shone bright and warm upon Guernsey, the island nights were chill. Waking by dear Vavasour’s side – the novelty of this experience has since been blunted by the usage of years – somewhere between one and two o’clock towards break of the fourth day following our marriage, it occurred to me that a faint cold draught, with a suggestion of dampness about it, was blowing against my right cheek. One of the windows upon that side – our room possessed a rather unbecoming cross-light – had probably been left open. Dear Vavasour, who occupied the right side of our couch, would wake with toothache in the morning, or, perhaps, with mumps! Shuddering, as much at the latter idea as with cold, I opened my eyes, and sat up in bed with a definite intention of getting out of it and shutting the offending casement. Then I saw Katie for the first time.

  She was sitting on the right side of the bed, close to dear Vavasour’s pillow; in fact, almost hanging over it. From the first moment I knew that which I looked upon to be no creature of flesh and blood, but the mere apparition of a woman. It was not only that her face, which struck me as both pert and plain; her hands; her hair, which she wore dressed in an old-fashioned ringletty mode – in fact, her whole personality was faintly luminous, and surrounded by a halo of bluish phosphorescent light. It was not only that she was transparent, so that I saw the pattern of the old-fashioned, striped, dimity bed-curtain, in the shelter of which she sat, quite plainly through her. The consciousness was further conveyed to me by a voice – or the toneless, flat, faded impression of a voice – speaking faintly and clearly, not at my outer, but at my inner ear.

  “Lie down again, and don’t fuss. It’s only Katie!” she said.

  “Only Katie!” I liked that!

  “I dare say you don’t,” she said tartly, replying as she had spoken, and I wondered that a ghost should exhibit such want of breeding. “But you have got to put up with me!”

  “How dare you intrude here – and at such an hour!” I exclaimed mentally, for there was no need to wake dear Vavasour by talking aloud when my thoughts were read at sight by the ghostly creature who sat so familiarly beside him.

  “I knew your husband before you did,” responded Katie, with a faint phosphorescent sneer. “We became acquainted at a séance in North-West London soon after his conversion to Spiritualism, and have seen a great deal of each other from time to time.” She tossed her shadowy curls with a possessive air that annoyed me horribly. “He was constantly materialising me in order to ask questions about Shakespeare. It is a standing joke in our Spirit world that, from the best educated spook in our society down to the most illiterate astral that ever knocked out ‘rapport’ with one ‘p,’ we are all expected to know whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays, or whether they were done by another person of the same name.”

  “And which way was it?” I asked, yielding to a momentary twinge of curiosity.

  Katie laughed mockingly. “There you go!” she said, with silent contempt.

  “I wish you would!” I snapped back mentally. “It seems to me that you manifest a great lack of refinement in coming here!”

  “I cannot go until Vavasour has finished,” said Katie pertly. “Don’t you see that he has materialised me by dreaming about me? And as there exists at present” – she placed an annoying stress upon the last two words – “a strong sympathy between you, so it comes about that I, as your husband’s spiritual affinity, am visible to your waking perceptions. All the rest of the time I am hovering about you, though unseen.”

  “I call it detestable!” I retorted indignantly. Then I gripped my sleeping husband by the shoulder. “Wake up! wake up!” I cried aloud, wrath lending power to my grasp and a penetrative quality to my voice. “Wake up and leave off dreaming! I cannot and will not endure the presence of this creature another moment!”

  “Whaa—” muttered my husband, with the almost inebriate incoherency of slumber, “whasamaramydarling?”

  “Stop dreaming about that creature,” I cried, “or I shall go home to Mamma!”

  “Creature?” my husband echoed, and as he sat up I had the satisfaction of seeing Katie’s misty, luminous form fade slowly into nothingness.

  “You know who I mean!” I sobbed. “Katie – your spiritual affinity, as she calls herself!”

  “You don’t mean,” shouted Vavasour, now thoroughly roused, “that you have seen her?”

  “I do mean it,” I mourned. “Oh, if I had only known of your having an entanglement with any creature of the kind, I would never have married you – never!”

  “Hang her!” burst out Vavasour. Then he controlled himself, and said soothingly: “After all, dearest, there is nothing to be jealous of—”

  “I jealous! And of that—” I was beginning, but Vavasour went on:

  “After all, she is only a disembodied astral entity with whom I became acquainted – through my fifth principle, which is usually well developed – in the days when I moved in Spiritualistic society. She was, when living – for she died long before I was born – a young lady of very good family. I believe her father was a clergyman . . . and I will not deny that I encouraged her visits.”

  “Discourage them from this day!” I said firmly. “Neither think of her nor dream of her again, or I will have a separation.”

  “I will keep her, as much as possible, out of my waking thoughts,” said poor Vavasour, trying to soothe me; “but a man cannot control his dreams, and she pervades mine in a manner which, even before our engagement, my pet, I began to find annoying. However, if she really is, as she has told me, a lady by birth and breeding, she will understand” – he raised his voice as though she were there and he intended her to hear – “that I am now a married man, and from this moment desire to have no further communication with her. Any suitable provision it is in my power to make—”

  He ceased, probably feeling the difficulty he would have in explaining the matter to his lawyers; and it seemed to me that a faint mocking sniggle, or rather the auricular impression of it, echoed his words. Then, after some more desultory conversation, we fell soundly asleep. An hour may have passed when the same chilly sensation as of a damp draught blowing across the bed roused me. I rubbed my cheek and opened my eyes. They met the pale, impertinent smile of the hateful Katie, who was installed in her old post beside Vavasour’s end of the bolster.

  “You see,” she said, in the same soundless way, and with a knowing little nod of triumph, “it is no use. He is dreaming of me again!”

  “Wake up!” I screamed, snatching the pillow from under my husband’s head and madly hurling it at the shameless intruder. This time Vavasour was almost snappish at being disturbed. Daylight surprised us in the middle of our first connubial quarrel. The following night brought a repetition of the whole thing, and so on, da capo, until it became plain to us, to our mutual disgust, that the more Vavasour strove to banish Katie from his dreams, the more persistently she cropped up in them. She was the most ill-bred and obstinate of astrals – Vavasour and I the most miserable of newly-married people. A dozen times in a night I would be roused by that cold draught upon my cheek, would open my eyes and see that pale, phosphorescent, outline perched by Vavasour’s pillow – nine times out of the dozen would be driven to frenzy by the possessive air and cynical smile of the spook. And although Vavasour’s former regard for her was now converted into hatred, he found the thought of her continually invading his waking mind at the most unwelcome seasons. She had begun to appear to both of us by day as well as by night when our poisoned honeymoon came to an end, and we returned to town to occupy the house which Vavasour had taken and furnished in Sloane Street. I need only mention that Katie accompanied us.

  Insufficient sleep and mental worry had by this time thoroughly soured my temper no less than Vavasour’s. When I charged him with secretly encouraging the presence I had learned to hate, he rudely told me to think as I liked! He implored my pardon for this brutality afterwa
rds upon his knees, and with the passage of time I learned to endure the presence of his attendant shade with patience. When she nocturnally hovered by the side of my sleeping spouse, or in constituence no less filmy than a whiff of cigarette-smoke, appeared at his elbow in the face of day, I saw her plainly, and at these moments she would favour me with a significant contraction of the eyelid, which was, to say the least of it, unbecoming in a spirit who had been a clergyman’s daughter. After one of these experiences it was that the idea which I afterwards carried into execution occurred to me.

  I began by taking in a few numbers of a psychological publication entitled The Spirit-Lamp. Then I formed the acquaintance of Madame Blavant, the renowned Professoress of Spiritualism and Theosophy. Everybody has heard of Madame, many people have read her works, some have heard her lecture. I had heard her lecture. She was a lady with a strong determined voice and strong determined features. She wore her plentiful grey hair piled in sibylline coils on the top of her head, and – when she lectured – appeared in a white Oriental silk robe that fell around her tall gaunt figure in imposing folds. This robe was replaced by one of black satin when she held her séances. At other times, in the seclusion of her study, she was draped in an ample gown of Indian chintz innocent of cut, but yet imposing. She smiled upon my new-born desire for psychic instruction, and when I had subscribed for a course of ten private séances at so many guineas apiece she smiled more.

  Madame lived in a furtive, retiring house, situated behind high walls in Endor’s Grove, N.W. A long glass tunnel led from the garden gate to the street door, for the convenience of Mahatmas and other persons who preferred privacy. I was one of those persons, for not for spirit worlds would I have had Vavasour know of my repeated visits to Endor’s Grove. Before these were over I had grown quite indifferent to supernatural manifestations, banjos and accordions that were thrummed by invisible performers, blood-red writing on mediums’ wrists, mysterious characters in slate-pencil, Planchette, and the Table Alphabet. And I had made and improved upon acquaintance with Simon.