The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  I was dining with Hugh that night; he had been away for the last week, only returning to-day, and he had come in before these slightly agitating events happened to announce his arrival and suggest dinner. I noticed that as he stood chatting for a few minutes, he had once or twice sniffed the air, but he had made no comment, nor had I asked him if he perceived the strange faint odour that every now and then manifested itself to me. I knew it was a great relief to some secretly quaking piece of my mind that he was back, for I was convinced that there was some psychic disturbance going on, either subjectively in my mind, or a real invasion from without. In either case his presence was comforting, not because he is of that stalward breed which believes in nothing beyond the material facts of life, and pooh-poohs these mysterious forces which surround and so strangely interpenetrate existence, but because, while thoroughly believing in them, he has the firm confidence that the deadly and evil powers which occasionally break through into the seeming security of existence are not really to be feared, since they are held in check by forces stronger yet, ready to assist all who realize their protective care. Whether I meant to tell him what had occurred to-day I had not fully determined.

  It was not till after dinner that such subjects came up at all, but I had seen there was something on his mind of which he had not spoken yet.

  “And your new house,” he said at length, “does it still remain as all your fancy painted?”

  “I wonder why you ask that,” I said.

  He gave me a quick glance.

  “Mayn’t I take any interest in your well-being?” he said.

  I knew that something was coming, if I chose to let it.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever liked my house from the first,” I said. “I believe you think there’s something queer about it. I allow that the manner in which I found it empty was odd.”

  “It was rather,” he said. “But so long as it remains empty, except for what you’ve put in it, it is all right.”

  I wanted now to press him further.

  “What was it you smelt this afternoon in the big room?” I said. “I saw you nosing and sniffing. I have smelt something too. Let’s see if we smelt the same thing.”

  “An odd smell,” he said. “Something dusty and stale, but aromatic.”

  “And what else have you noticed?” I asked.

  He paused a moment.

  “I think I’ll tell you,” he said. “This evening from my window I saw you coming up the pavement, and simultaneously I saw, or thought I saw, Naboth cross the road and walk on in front of you. I wondered if you saw him too, for you paused as he stepped on to the pavement in front of you, and then you followed him.”

  I felt my hands grow suddenly cold, as if the warm current of my blood had been chilled.

  “No, I didn’t see him,” I said, “but I saw his step.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say. I saw footprints in front of me, which continued on to my threshold.”

  “And then?”

  “I went in, and a terrific crash startled me. My bronze Perseus had fallen from his niche. And there was something in the room.”

  There was a scratching noise at the window. Without answering, Hugh jumped up and drew aside the curtain. On the sill was seated a large grey cat, blinking in the light. He advanced to the window, and on his approach the cat jumped down into the garden. The light shone out into the road, and we both saw, standing on the pavement just outside, the figure of a man. He turned and looked at me, and then moved away towards my house next door.

  “It’s he,” said Hugh.

  He opened the window and leaned out to see what had become of him. There was no sign of him anywhere, but I saw that light shone from behind the blinds of my room.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see what is happening. Why is my room lit?”

  I opened the door of my house with my latchkey, and followed by Hugh went down the short passage to the room. It was perfectly dark, and when I turned the switch, we saw that it was empty. I rang the bell, but no answer came, for it was already late, and doubtless my servants had gone to bed.

  “But I saw a strong light from the windows two minutes ago,” I said, “and there has been no-one here since.”

  Hugh was standing by me in the middle of the room. Suddenly he threw out his arm as if striking at something. That thoroughly alarmed me.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “What are you hitting at?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought I saw . . . But I’m not sure. But we’re in for something if we stop here. Something is coming, though I don’t know what.”

  The light seemed to me to be burning dim; shadows began to collect in the corner of the room, and though outside the night had been clear, the air here was growing thick with a foggy vapour, which smelt dusty and stale and aromatic. Faintly, but getting louder as we waited there in silence, I heard the throb of drums and the wail of flutes. As yet I had no feeling that there were other presences in the place beyond ours, but in the growing dimness I knew that something was coming nearer. Just in front of me was the empty niche from which my bronze had fallen, and looking at it, I saw that something was astir. The shadow within it began to shape itself into a form, and out of it there gleamed two points of greenish light. A moment more and I saw that they were eyes of antique and infinite malignity.

  I heard Hugh’s voice in a sort of hoarse whisper.

  “Look there!” he said. “It’s coming! Oh, my God, it’s coming!”

  Sudden as the lightning that leaps from the heart of the night it came. But it came not with blaze and flash of light, but, as it were, with a stroke of blinding darkness, that fell not on the eye, or on any material sense, but on the spirit, so that I cowered under it in some abandonment of terror. It came from those eyes which gleamed in the niche, and which now I saw to be set in the face of the figure that stood there. The form of it, naked but for a loincloth, was that of a man, the head seemed now human, now to be that of some monstrous cat. And as I looked I knew that if I continued looking there I should be submerged and drowned in that flood of evil that poured from it. As in some catalepsy of nightmare I struggled to tear my eyes from it, but still they were riveted there, gazing on incarnate hate.

  Again I heard Hugh’s whisper.

  “Defy it,” he said. “Don’t yield an inch.”

  A swarm of disordered and hellish images were buzzing in my brain, and now I knew as surely as if actual words had been spoken to us that the presence there told me to come to it.

  “I’ve got to go to it,” I said. “It’s making me go.”

  I felt his hand tighten on my arm.

  “Not a step,” he said. “I’m stronger than it is. It will know that soon. Just pray – pray.”

  Suddenly his arm shot out in front of me, pointing at the presence.

  “By the power of God!” he shouted. “By the power of God!”

  There was dead silence. The light of those eyes faded, and then came dawn on the darkness of the room. It was quiet and orderly, the niche was empty, and there on the sofa by me was Hugh, his face white and streaming with sweat.

  “It’s over,” he said, and without pause fell fast asleep.

  Now we have often talked over together what happened that evening. Of what seemed to happen I have already given the account, which anyone may believe or not, precisely as they please. He, as I, was conscious of a presence wholly evil, and he tells me that all the time that those eyes gleamed from the niche, he was trying to realize what he believed, namely, that only one power in the world is Omnipotent, and that the moment he gained that realization the presence collapsed. What exactly that presence was it is impossible to say. It looks as if it was the essence or spirit of one of those mysterious Egyptian cults, of which the force survived, and was seen and felt in this quiet Terrace. That it was embodied in Naboth seems (among all these incredibilities) possible, and Naboth certainly has nev
er been seen again. Whether or not it was connected with the worship and cult of cats might occur to the mythological mind, and it is perhaps worthy of record that I found next morning my little lapis lazuli image, which stood on the chimney-piece, broken into fragments. It was too badly damaged to mend, and I am not sure that, in any case, I should have attempted to have it restored.

  Finally, there is no more tranquil and pleasant room in London than the one built out in front of my house in Bagnell Terrace.

  The Companion

  Joan Aiken

  Prospectus

  Address:

  3, Vascoe’s Cottages, Talland, Cornwall, England.

  Property:

  Nineteenth-century addition to two pairs of semi-detached labourers’ dwellings. Constructed of plain red brick and embellished with ornamental woodwork, the property is secluded by a privet hedge and is to be let fully furnished.

  Viewing Date:

  Autumn, 1978.

  Agent:

  Joan Aiken (1924–) was born in Rye, Sussex, the daughter of the famous American writer, Conrad Aiken, and for a time wrote for BBC Radio, before beginning the career which has established her as one of today’s most inventive writers of fantasy fiction. Haunted houses feature extensively in her work – notably The Shadow Guests (1980) and The Haunting of Lamb House (1999), in which two former real-life residents, E. F. Benson and Henry James, meet the tragic ghost of a child – and short stories like “Aunt Jezebel’s House”, “Lodging For The Night” and “The Companion”, in which an exorcist attempts to remove an unwilling ghost . . .

  The ugliness of her rented cottage was a constant source of perverse satisfaction to Mrs Clyrard. To have travelled, in the course of her seventy-odd years, over most of the civilised world, to have lived in several of its most elegant capitals, and finally to have come to roost in Number Three, Vascoe’s Cottages, had an incongruity that pleased her tart, ironic spirit. Mrs Clyrard indulged in a constant battle against life’s unreasonablenesses and inequities. Her private hobby was finding fault – with the British government, the world’s so-called leaders, with her bank, with her friends, with the young, the old, the stupid, the BBC Third Programme, the weather and the cakes from the village shop.

  It gave her intense, not wholly masochistic gratification to survey her hideous rented furniture, to go into her dark little unfunctional kitchen and discover that the gas-pilot had gone out again, that before putting a kettle on to boil she must laboriously poke a long-stemmed match into the dirty interstices of the stove, turn, at the same time, a small, gritty, and inconveniently-placed wheel, and wait for the resulting muffled explosion; this ritual, which often had to be enacted several times a day due to the fluctuations of gas pressure, filled her with a dour amusement, confirming, as it did, all her most pessimistic feelings about the world. The aged recalcitrant plastic ice-trays, which were more likely to split in half under the pressure of an angry thumb than to eject a single cube of ice, the front gate that refused to latch properly, the wayward taps turning in improbable directions, emitting a thin thread of lukewarm water, the varying levels of the cottage, which had steps up or steps down between all its rooms, even one in the middle of the bathroom – these things fulfilled her expectation that life was intended to be a series of cynical booby-traps.

  Nevertheless Mrs Clyrard could have lived in comfort if she had chosen. She was rich, had been married, had had a successful career as a painter, had had children, even, now satisfactorily grown and disposed of; she was a handsome, intelligent, and cultivated woman. Death had removed her husband, it was true, but otherwise she need have had little to complain about; yet all possible amenities had been, it seemed, wantonly jettisoned in favour of retreat into the exile of a Cornish village. Not even romantic exile, for Talland was far from picturesque: it was a small, random conglomeration of ill-assorted, mostly granite buildings, established on a treeless hillside as if they had been dropped there.

  Vascoe’s Cottages, of which Mrs Clyrard occupied Number Three, had been a nineteenth-century addition; two pairs of plain red-brick semi-detached labourers’ dwellings, which some hopeful later landlord’s hand had embellished with heavy chalet-type ornamental woodwork, thereby further darkening the already inadequately-lit interiors.

  “Oh, that will do for me very nicely,” Mrs Clyrard had remarked with her usual brief smile, on first observing Number Three, over its stout enclosing privet hedge.

  “Are you certain?” her friend and prospective landlady Mrs Helena Soames doubtfully inquired. “Are you sure it will be big enough for you – light enough? The furniture is rather a job lot, I’m afraid – I could have it taken out, if you would like to put in your own things—”

  “No, no, let them stay in store. I can’t be bothered with them. This is admirable. And the furniture will last my time.”

  Mrs Clyrard was in excellent health, but she always spoke and acted as if in expectation of imminent death.

  She moved herself into the cottage with a minimum of fuss or added impedimenta: a typewriter, some books; quickly learned the names and ways of the local tradespeople and had soon established herself on terms of remarkable cordiality with all her neighbours – the terms being that she listened to – indeed, drew out by some unique osmosis of her own – all their dissatisfactions and complaints, meanwhile herself maintaining a considerable reticence. Complaint is addictive: people came back eagerly, again and again, for more; Mrs Clyrard had all the company she could have wished for. She listened, she made her own dry comments and never disbursed advice; this was the secret of her popularity. She never offered information about herself, or divulged her own feelings. If asked what she did with herself all day – for it was plain that she was neither house-proud nor a dedicated gardener – she replied, “I am writing my memoirs. I have known any number of famous people –” and it was true, she had – “plenty of reputations will have the rug pulled from under them if I don’t die before I have finished.”

  Although she frequently and drily referred to her possible death, she manifested no anxiety about the prospect, and seemed not particularly troubled as to whether she finished her memoirs first or not. Very few things appeared to trouble Mrs Clyrard particularly, she found a sour pleasure in her occupations. Meanwhile the years rolled by, bestowing on her no signs of age or infirmity; nor did she manifest any disposition to seek more comfortable quarters than Number Three, Vascoe’s.

  “I don’t know how you can endure the poky little place,” Miss Morgan frequently remarked, when she dropped in to complain about Mrs Soames. “It’s so dark and cold. When I was living here with the old lady I thought I should go mad with the inconvenience. It must be the most awkward house in the world. Even with that lift installed—”

  The old lady had been Helena Soames’s mother, Mrs Musgrave. For ten years prior to her death from heart disease she had occupied Number Three, Vascoe’s, and Miss Morgan had been her companion. The lift had been installed for Mrs Musgrave’s benefit; it consisted of a metal chair, with a counter-balance, in the stairwell, operated by a small electric motor. Mrs Musgrave’s son, an engineer, had installed it himself. The old lady had sat herself in the chair, been buckled in with a seat-belt; then she pressed a button and was conveyed slowly up or slowly down. The lift, with its ugly metalwork, still remained; but Mrs Clyrard, who had a rooted mistrust of all machinery, saw no occasion to make use of it.

  After ten years Mrs Musgrave had died, and Miss Morgan, lacking a function, was removed to the manor to housekeep for the daughter, Mrs Soames – an arrangement which gave little satisfaction to either party.

  Almost every day, at teatime, Miss Morgan called in on Mrs Clyrard with some grievance to relate about Mrs Soames’s faultfinding, heartlessness, inconsistency, or sarcasm, to which Mrs Clyrard listened with her usual acute impassivity.

  “I do wish you would have me for your companion, dear Mrs Clyrard,” Miss Morgan, who had a slight stammer, often sighed out. “I am s-sure we should g
et on so well! I would be so h-happy to look after everything for you while you wrote your memoirs and would not dream of asking for a s-salary; all I want is a home.”

  “My dear woman, what possible use would I have for a companion in this tiny box of a house? I am almost too much company for myself.”

  Wispy, myopic little Miss Morgan would take herself off, pleading, “Think it over, dear Mrs Clyrard – do think it over!”

  In the evenings Mrs Clyrard often heard the other side of the case: her friend Helena generally dropped in for a glass of sherry and a grumble about Miss Morgan’s self-pity, inefficiency, forgetfulness, untidiness, tendency to martyrdom, and general inadequacy. Mrs Clyrard made no comment on that either. Nor did she see fit to intervene when Mrs Soames’s patience finally ran out and she dismissed the unsatisfactory housekeeper, who, being far too old by now to secure another post, went lamenting away to live with her married sister in Lanlivery, after a final and unavailing plea to Mrs Clyrard to take her in.

  More time went by. Mrs Clyrard lent a non-committal ear to the outpourings of other neighbours: of harassed parents who could not deal with their young; of rebellious teenagers who could not endure their parents; of betrayed husbands; of frustrated wives and of disillusioned friends who had fallen out. Her own private life remained as apparently tranquil as ever; her excellently coiffed iron-grey hair turned a shade paler, her hawklike profile was unchanged. She wrote a few pages a day at the desk in her upstairs study, cooked light meals for herself, waged her usual guerilla war against the inconveniences of her house and continued in her customary state of sardonic composure.