The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  “O, Kisstruck! Damn you!”

  “Yes, listen! By special licence, it seems they have a system.”

  Of course I was stunned. I glared at Kisstruck in exasperation and had a hot desire to kick him. “Went and got married, you say! To another ghost, eh!”

  He got up and paced about, deliberating, then said: “That’s what I understood from him, I hope it’s true, because later there was, you know . . . a little encumbrance.”

  Well, Well! Where do we go from here! My friend was unquestionably serious about it.

  “Kisstruck!” I yelled – I had to yell – “Are you demented; are you, Kisstruck, are you?”

  “Tut, tut,” he said mildly. “And they both came to see me before the house burnt down, they came together – only the once, though.”

  “Only once, eh! And you saw them?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “And what did they have to say, Mr. Kisstruck?”

  “She, unfortunately, nothing. She seemed to be dumb as well as invisible.”

  “Ho, ho, Mr. Kisstruck. Now I’ve got you! If you neither saw nor heard her how the devil do you know she was there?”

  “He told me she was with him then,” Kisstruck said. “Besides, I noticed a curious thing that night. It was moonlight, and on the white wall of the balcony – what do you think? I saw she was casting a faint misty shadow. And by and by, old chap, you are quite right, they do not appear to wear any clothes. There was her shadow, a most elegant outline on the wall, and it was clear she had nothing on, nothing at all.”

  Mr Edward

  Norah Lofts

  Prospectus

  Address:

  Bidstone Place, Buckinghamshire, England.

  Property:

  Fine Georgian house situated in the centre of the village of Bidstone. Built of mellow bricks

  with a mature garden, the property is within easy travelling distance of adjacent town.

  Viewing Date:

  July, 1947.

  Agent:

  Norah Lofts (1904–1983) was born in Shipdham, Norfolk and trained as a teacher before turning to writing and becoming one of Britain’s most popular romantic novelists. Her ability to mix love, drama and history was evident from her first novel, I Met A Gypsy (1935), and her fascination with old buildings can be seen in several of her books, including The Town House (1959), The House at Sunset (1962) and, especially, Haunted House (1978). Norah Lofts lived in a Georgian mansion in Suffolk not unlike the one in the curious story of Mr. Edward, featuring a lecherous old ghost who has an eye on the latest tenant of a haunted house.

  Three half-blown rosebuds, a crimson, a pink and a cream, with reddish thornless stems and glossy leaves, lay beside the battered silver hand-mirror on Mrs. Amery’s dressing-table. She picked them up in her work-worn fingers and sniffed their dewy fragrance, then, feeling the prick of imminent tears, laid them down again and snatched up her comb, running it swiftly through the wayes of her hair, which, though fading now, and thinner, still grew attractively from her broad-lined forehead and clung in close natural curls at the back of her head.

  A feeling of grateful happiness swept over her. She had so much dreaded this holiday-time, shrinking from the demands it would make, fearing that Roger would resent the plan, that she would not have time to spare for him and that the process of growing away from her, begun at St. Aubyn’s, where he was one of sixty pupils and she the mere matron-housekeeper and cook-at-odd-times, would be accelerated. But her fears had been groundless; the house was friendly, the work the reverse of onerous, and surely here, in this little flowery token, was proof that Roger, under the new casualness, the schoolboy slang, the greed and general twelve-year-old untouchability, was her own boy still.

  As she moved about the room tidying it and stripping the bed and then moving on to repeat the process in Roger’s room her mind was busy, recalling, in this new light of thankfulness, the chance events which had brought her to spend the eight weeks of the summer vacation at Bidstone Place. For three years now, the three years of widowhood, she had been in charge of the domestic side of St. Aubyn’s, a select and prosperous little school run by another widow, Mrs. Bigmore. It was an arrangement advantageous to both sides, for by taking Roger Amery as a pupil Mrs. Bigmore had gained an enviable hold over Mrs. Amery, and Mrs. Amery, by accepting her servitude, had won release, temporarily, at least, from the problem of how a woman, skilled in no art or trade, could house and feed and educate her son.

  But during the Easter holiday of her third year Mrs. Amery, in the midst of a bout of house-cleaning which she never thought of blaming, had been taken ill. The school doctor called her inability to concentrate, her loss of memory and her tendency to weep over her state “nervous prostration”, and Mrs. Bigmore, a little frightened, had bundled her into a nursing home, kept by yet another widowed friend, where, in return for much meticulous mending, the arranging of several thousand flowers, the cooking of occasional meals and the entertainment of more wealthy patients, Mrs. Amery was given her breakfast in bed, a sleeping draught at bedtime and the privilege of an infrequent visit from the regular physician.

  That, too, was a fortunate arrangement, but it left Mrs. Amery at the end of the term practically penniless, since she had for three months earned nothing but her keep, and the problem of what she was to do about the holiday was responsible for many of the symptoms which the physician of the nursing home regarded so gloomily. And yet, just a week before the end of term, that problem had been solved too. For Mrs. Stanhope, one of Mrs. Bigmore’s dearest friends, and a very wealthy woman, had scented War in the air, and bethought herself of her hitherto despised country residence in the wilds of Buckinghamshire, and considered how pleasant it would be to make this place – an unwanted legacy from old Uncle Edward – into a comfortable, safe retreat, complete with every modern convenience. Uncle Edward had lived and died as a staunch Victorian, and Bidstone Place, which Mrs. Stanhope had sometimes let and sometimes loaned and generally avoided, needed a great deal of attention before it could be fit for what she called human habitation. Only, she confided sadly to Mrs. Bigmore, it did seem that if the War was imminent one should spend one last summer on the Continent, and if one did, how would the alterations get done?

  Mrs. Bigmore had pondered the problem for about ten minutes and then said grandly, “My Mrs. Amery.” And my Mrs. Amery, offered a holiday home, her keep and the boy’s and the generous sum of twenty pounds, had battled with her diffidence and her nervousness and the lethargy which was the legacy of her illness and accepted the offer with a willingness that was more feigned than real. Desperately she wished that she could have gone, as usual, to the crowded boarding-house at Felixstowe where Roger always had such a good time; abjectly she had feared the interviews with electricians and plumbers and painters; neurotically she had pictured Bidstone Place as a vast Gothic mansion; in the depths of depression she had accepted from Mrs. Stanhope’s hand the list of the “absolute minimum”, the notes to the tradespeople of the neighbouring town, the money for necessary expenses, such as the wages of women to scrub, and finally her own cheque.

  She had explained the position to Roger, who had said, with twelve-year-old shrewdness, two cogent things. “Old Jigsaw’s usefully good at finding jobs for other people. That comes from keeping a school. School-teachers always think you’re up to mischief unless you’re sweating about something.” And when Mrs. Amery had pointed out that the arrangement was made out of Mrs. Bigmore’s kindness, he had almost snarled and said, “It’d have been a lot kinder if she’d paid you for last term, and then we could have gone to Felixstowe as usual.”

  Yet, despite this unpromising beginning, the holiday was being a happy one. Bidstone Place was neither enormous, Gothic, nor intimidating. In fact Mrs. Amery could not remember feeling such a sense of welcome from any house since the moment when she entered, as a bride, the peculiar establishment which her husband had prepared for her in far-away Kenya. And it was not isolated; it st
ood, a gracious building of mellow Georgian brick, in the very centre of a pleasant village, and there was an excellent bus service to the town. Roger had instantly struck up a friendship with two boys named Fenton who lived about a mile away and who had ponies and a boating lake and a tennis court which they seemed only too anxious to share. And Mrs. Amery had found, to her utter relief, that in the town the very mention of Mrs. Stanhope’s name was sufficient to win not only prompt and eager service, but civility as well. On this morning, as she picked the roses from her dressing-table and carried them down as she went to prepare breakfast, she was as happy as she had been at any moment since the death of Roger’s father.

  She served Roger with a cup of steaming coffee and a plateful of bacon, egg, fried bread and tomato, and then said: “Thank you for the roses, darling. It was a lovely thought.”

  Roger, a sturdy, fair-haired boy with a brown face and a peculiarly deliberate manner, looked up from his breakfast and said, “Are you being sarky?”

  “Of course not. Why? These roses” – she touched the three buds where they stood in a little vase in the centre of the table – “that you put on my dressing-table.”

  The dust of freckles on Roger’s face was lost in a wave of dusky colour. “I didn’t put them there.” There was a note of surliness in his voice. And Mrs. Amery thought, “How odd boys are – to do a thing like that and then deny it.”

  “Then I must have done it myself,” she said frivolously. “There’s no one else in the house.”

  “Well, you do forget things, don’t you?” said Roger, more comfortably. “I say, though, I am glad you’ll be back next term. That other woman couldn’t manage anything. In fact Brooks Major said that if you weren’t there next term he’d get his people to take him away, him and Minor too. I wonder what the Jigsaw’d say to that.”

  “She’d survive, I expect,” said Mrs. Amery coolly, beginning to spread her toast. Yet the subject of the rose-buds, thus lightly dismissed, nagged at her mind. Two explanations were possible, and neither of them was completely acceptable. Either Roger had picked them and was now ashamed of the gesture – and if that were so it suggested a psychological problem – or else she had, in a moment of complete aberration, gone down to the garden, cut three flowers, put them on the dressing-table in her own bedroom and then, with a sense of pleasure and surprise, discovered them there. And if that were so she was still ill.

  After breakfast she went upstairs and carefully inspected the soles of her slippers; they bore no traces of a visit to a dewy garden.

  Throughout the day she was too busy to give much thought to the matter. She had been in the house for well over a week now and the work was going forward; cheerful, casual young men knelt or reached about with lengths of electric wiring in their fingers, and from the corners of their months – they were chain-smokers to a man – talked to one another in a language which might have been Hindustani for all Mrs. Amery understood of it. Other men followed, closely and sometimes impatiently, with pots of paint and distemper and long strips of writhing, sticky paper.

  All day the house hummed with activity. And Mrs. Amery was busy, inspecting colours to see if they matched, consulting Mrs. Stanhope’s lists, telephoning for some article which was suddenly indispensable, trying to keep a clear path, as she called it, in front of and behind a number of busy men, each intent upon his own little job. Already she could see that, should War come, Mrs. Stanhope would be sure of a very pleasant, comfortable retreat.

  And yet, as the dull warm colours gave way to white and duck-egg and primrose, as the curves and scrolls were banished in favour of straight lines, when the creeper that clustered about the windows fell away and the daylight poured into the rooms, when a flick of the finger could banish the darkness from every corner of the house at any moment, Mrs. Amery was conscious of a feeling which was not exactly of regret, but something nearer nostalgia. The friendly shabbiness, the almost diffident old-fashionedness, of the house was being banished, a richness and a warmth was oozing away under every stroke of the workmen’s hammers, every sweep of their paint-filled brushes.

  The painters and the plumbers and the electricians were fetched by a truck which called for them every afternoon at half past five. Roger usually came home tired, dirty and hungry at about seven, and in the interval Mrs. Amery, after washing and changing her dress, devoted herself to the preparation of supper, expending thought and ingenuity in her effort to offer the child at the same time what he liked and what she considered good for him. But on the evening of the day when she had found the rosebuds she did not expect Roger until eight, and at six o’clock, after her daily round of tidying, she sat down in the small room which she had taken for a sitting-room, put her feet up on the sofa, took a book in her hand and prepared for an hour’s rest.

  She never opened the book. For at first, with a faint frown on her broad forehead and a rather worried expression in her childish blue eyes, she reverted to the problem of the flowers. Could it really be that she had gathered them herself and so utterly have forgotten having done so? If so she trembled for her sanity; and not for the first time she remembered her Great-aunt Vinny, who had died in a private lunatic asylum.

  It was a warm afternoon, sultry with the heat of late July, and the window behind Mrs. Amery’s head was wide open. Suddenly, as she reclined on the sofa, thinking her uncomfortable thoughts and yet trying not to worry because she had been warned that worry was the one thing she must avoid, she felt a sharp cold draught on the back of her neck, as though a wet bandage had been pressed against her curls.

  She looked at the door to see whether it had swung open and caused a through current of air. But the door was closed, and a glance at the window showed her that the shabby net curtains – doomed for the rag-bag – hung motionless. Yet the sharp draught continued and it was chilly enough to send a shudder down her spine. Springing to her feet, she slammed down the window. Then, returning to the sofa, she sat down again and inserted one finger in the book.

  But the queer feeling at the back of her neck persisted, and now, as well as the sense of cold there was a sense of movement, as though a very cold hand were gently lifting and caressing the curls of her hair. Instinctively she put up her hand, felt it warm against her own warm neck, and in the same instant felt the cold touch run over her shoulder, over the short sleeve of her dress, down on to the bare flesh of her arm and finally fasten on her hand. It was, save for its coldness, exactly the gesture and touch that a lover might use.

  But in that terrible moment Mrs. Amery was too panic-stricken to recognize the caressing quality of the touch. She sat quite still, even her breathing stopped by the force of her fear. Then, gasping, like a woman who has just been dragged back from drowning in icy water, she shook her hand violently and the cold clasp loosened – as a warm human hand might, finding itself unwelcome, relax its hold – and Mrs. Amery, on legs that shook so violently that they only just bore her weight, stumbled towards the door. As she did so she heard, beyond all question of doubt or argument, the sound of a sigh, heavy with longing, wistful, frustrated.

  A few staggering steps carried her into the kitchen, mundane and modern, with its recently connected electric stove and purring refrigerator. A few more brought her outside the back door and to the tradesmen’s entrance. Here, in the warm sunshine, amid the scent of new paint and freshly sawn wood, she paused for a moment, drawing deep steadying breaths and leaning her hand on the kitchen window-sill. She was still shuddering violently and her face and hands were wet with perspiration. But she had recovered sufficiently to begin to take stock of her position. And awkward enough she found it. A glance at her watch told her that it was only just quarter past six, and Roger would not be back until eight. She knew that she would never dare to re-enter the house alone; and the supper was not even started.

  She drew out her handkerchief and dried her face and hands, walked round to the front of the house and down to the wrought-iron railings which divided the front lawn from the vil
lage street. Almost opposite the proprietor of the little general shop was leisurely putting up his shutters; two late shoppers stood in the doorway gossiping. A dog lay on the path, lazily scratching his fleas. Away to the right two little girls turned a rope while a third skipped inexpertly. The complete normality of the scene made Mrs. Amery, who was given to self-derision, feel very foolish. Suppose anyone asked why she was standing here when she should be in the kitchen making a macaroni cheese. And suppose she replied that she had felt cold all down her arm and on her hand, and had heard a sigh. How they would laugh . . . those women, and the shopkeeper putting up his shutters, and the children; why, even the dog would laugh and point out that after hard exercise one did cool off suddenly. And the sigh? Why, her own breathing, a gasp of foolish, imaginative fear.

  She stood there until the church clock at the end of the street chimed the half hour, and the women shoppers, each with a start of surprise, darted away in opposite directions. And by that time she had almost convinced herself that her imagination or her state of health was responsible for her experience. Almost, but not quite. Had she been quite convinced she would, being a conscientious little woman, have turned and re-entered the house and put on the macaroni. Instead, she turned towards the direction of the Fentons’ house, and walked, with slow deliberation, almost counting each step, to meet Roger. At the imposing gateway, which she recognized from her son’s laconic description, she paused. She was too diffident to inflict her company uninvited, and the Fentons sounded rather lordly. So she sat on a bank near the gateway until she heard Roger’s footsteps – unmistakable to the ear of love – and then rose up and pretended that she had reached the gateway just as he did.