The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  She never would be able to forget it. Never forget how the woman looked: the pale, luminous flesh of her arms; her doubled-up knees against the side of the trunk, with their silken covering shining softly in the gloom; the strands of hair that covered her face. . . .

  Shudders continued to shake her. She bit her tongue and pressed her hand against her jaw to stop the chattering of her teeth. The salty taste of blood in her mouth steadied her. She tried to force herself to be rational, to plan; yet all the time the knowledge that she was imprisoned with the body of a murdered woman kept beating at her nerves like a flail.

  She drew the coat closer about her, trying to dispel the mortal cold that held her. Slowly something beyond the mere fact of murder, of death, began to penetrate her mind. Slowly she realized that beyond this fact there would be consequences. That body in the cellar was not an isolated phenomenon; some train of events had led to its being there and would follow its discovery there.

  There would be policemen.

  At first the thought of policemen was a comforting one; big, brawny men in blue, who would take the thing out of her cellar, take it away so she never need think of it again.

  Then she realized it was her cellar – hers and Ben’s; and policemen are suspicious and prying. Would they think she had killed the woman? Could they be made to believe she never had seen her before?

  Or would they think Ben had done it? Would they take the letters in the white envelopes, and Ben’s absences on business, and her own visit to her sister, about which Ben had been so helpful, and out of them build a double life for him? Would they insist that the woman had been a discarded mistress, who had hounded him with letters until out of desperation he had killed her? That was a fantastic theory, really; but the police might do that.

  They might.

  Now a sudden new panic invaded her. The dead woman must be taken out of the cellar, must be hidden. The police must never connect her with this house.

  Yet the dead woman was bigger than she herself was; she never could move her.

  Her craving for Ben became a frantic need. If only he would come home! Come home and take that body away, hide it somewhere so the police could not connect it with this house. He was strong enough to do it.

  Even with the strength to move the body by herself she would not dare to do it, because there was the prowler – real or imaginary – outside the house. Perhaps the cellar door had not been open by chance. Or perhaps it had been, and the murderer, seeing it so welcoming, had seized the opportunity to plant the evidence of his crime upon the Willsoms’ innocent shoulders.

  She crouched there, shaking. It was as if the jaws of a great trap had closed on her: on one side the storm and the silence of the telephone, on the other the presence of the prowler and of that still, cramped figure in her trunk. She was caught between them, helpless.

  As if to accent her helplessness, the wind stepped up its shriek and a tree crashed thunderously out in the road. She heard glass shatter.

  Her quivering body stiffened like a drawn bow. Was it the prowler attempting to get in? She forced herself to her feet and made a round of the windows on the first floor and the one above. All the glass was intact, staunchly resisting the pounding of the rain.

  Nothing could have made her go into the cellar to see if anything had happened there.

  The voice of the storm drowned out all other sounds, yet she could not rid herself of the fancy that she heard footsteps going round and round the house, that eyes sought an opening and spied upon her.

  She pulled the shades down over the shiny black windows. It helped a little to make her feel more secure, more sheltered; but only a very little. She told herself sternly that the crash of glass had been nothing more than a branch blown through a cellar window.

  The thought brought her no comfort – just the knowledge that it would not disturb that other woman. Nothing could comfort her now but Ben’s plump shoulder and his arms around her and his neat, capable mind planning to remove the dead woman from this house.

  A kind of numbness began to come over her, as if her capacity for fear were exhausted. She went back to the chair and curled up in it. She prayed mutely for Ben and for daylight.

  The clock said half-past twelve.

  She huddled there, not moving and not thinking, not even afraid, only numb, for another hour. Then the storm held its breath for a moment, and in the brief space of silence she heard footsteps on the walk – actual footsteps, firm and quick and loud. A key turned in the lock. The door opened and Ben came in.

  He was dripping, dirty, and white with exhaustion. But it was Ben. Once she was sure of it she flung herself on him, babbling incoherently of what she had found.

  He kissed her lightly on the cheek and took her arms down from around his neck. “Here, here, my dear. You’ll get soaked. I’m drenched to the skin.” He removed his glasses and handed them to her, and she began to dry them for him. His eyes squinted at the light. “I had to walk in from the crossroads. What a night!” He began to strip off rubbers and coat and shoes. “You’ll never know what a difference it made, finding the place lighted. Lord, but it’s good to be home.”

  She tried again to tell him of the past hours, but again he cut her short. “Now, wait a minute, my dear. I can see you’re bothered about something. Just wait until I get into some dry things; then I’ll come down and we’ll straighten it out. Suppose you rustle up some coffee and toast. I’m done up – the whole trip out was a nightmare, and I didn’t know if I’d ever make it from the crossing. I’ve been hours.”

  He did look tired, she thought with concern. Now that he was back, she could wait. The past hours had taken on the quality of a nightmare, horrifying but curiously unreal. With Ben here, so solid and commonplace and cheerful, she began to wonder if the hours were a nightmare. She even began to doubt the reality of the woman in the trunk, although she could see her as vividly as ever. Perhaps only the storm was real.

  She went to the kitchen and began to make fresh coffee. The chair, still wedged against the kitchen door, was a reminder of her terror. Now that Ben was home it seemed silly, and she put it back in its place by the table.

  He came down very soon, before the coffee was ready. How good it was to see him in that old gray bathrobe of his, his hands thrust into its pockets. How normal and wholesome he looked with his round face rubbed pink by a rough towel and his hair standing up in damp little spikes around his bald spot. She was almost shamefaced when she told him of the face at the window, the open door, and finally of the body in the trunk. None of it, she saw quite clearly now, could possibly have happened.

  Ben said so, without hesitation. But he came to put an arm around her. “You poor child. The storm scared you to death, and I don’t wonder. It’s given you the horrors.”

  She smiled dubiously. “Yes. I’m almost, beginning to think so. Now that you’re back, it seems so safe. But – but you will look in the trunk, Ben? I’ve got to know. I can see her so plainly. How could I imagine a thing like that?”

  He said indulgently: “Of course I’ll look, if it will make you feel better. I’ll do it now. Then I can have my coffee in peace.”

  He went to the cellar door and opened it and snapped on the light. Her heart began to pound once more, a deafening roar in her ears. The opening of the cellar door opened, again, the whole vista of fear: the body, the police, the suspicions that would cluster about her and Ben. The need to hide this evidence of somebody’s crime.

  She could not have imagined it; it was incredible that she could have believed, for a minute, that her mind had played such tricks on her. In another moment Ben would know it, too.

  She heard the thud as he threw back the lid of the trunk. She clutched at the back of a chair, waiting for his voice. It came in an instant.

  She could not believe it. It was as cheerful and reassuring as before. He said: “There’s nothing here but a couple of bundles. Come take a look.”

  Nothing!

  Her knees w
ere weak as she went down the stairs, down into the cellar again.

  It was still musty and damp and draped with cobwebs. The rivulet was still running down the wall, but the pool was larger now. The light was still dim.

  It was just as she remembered it except that the wind was whistling through a broken window and rain was splattering in on the bits of shattered glass on the floor. The branch lying across the sill had removed every scrap of glass from the frame and left not a single jagged edge.

  Ben was standing by the open trunk, waiting for her. His stocky body was a bulwark. “See,” he said, “there’s nothing. Just some old clothes of yours, I guess.”

  She went to stand beside him. Was she losing her mind? Would she, now, see that crushed figure in there, see the red dress and the smooth, shining knees, when Ben could not? And the ring with the diamond between the lion’s paws?

  Her eyes looked, almost reluctantly, into the trunk. “It is empty!”

  There were the neat, newspaper-wrapped packages she had put away so carefully, just as she had left them deep in the bottom of the trunk. And nothing else.

  She must have imagined the body. She was light with the relief the knowledge brought her, and yet confused and frightened, too. If her mind could play such tricks, if she could imagine anything so gruesome in the complete detail with which she had seen the dead woman in the trunk, the thought of the future was terrifying. When might she not have another such hallucination?

  The actual, physical danger did not exist, however, and never had existed. The threat of the law hanging over Ben had been based on a dream.

  “I— dreamed it all. I must have,” she admitted. “Yet it was so horribly clear and I wasn’t asleep.” Her voice broke. “I thought— oh, Ben, I thought—”

  “What did you think, my dear?” His voice was odd, not like Ben’s at all. It had a cold, cutting edge to it.

  He stood looking down at her with an immobility that chilled her more than the cold wind that swept in through the broken window. She tried to read his face, but the light from the little bulb was too weak. It left his features shadowed in broad, dark planes that made him look like a stranger, and somehow sinister.

  She said, “I—” and faltered.

  He still did not move, but his voice hardened. “What was it you thought?”

  She backed away from him.

  He moved, then. It was only to take his hands from his pockets, to stretch his arms toward her; but she stood for an instant staring at the thing that left her stricken, with a voiceless scream forming in her throat.

  She was never to know whether his arms had been outstretched to take her within their shelter or to clutch at her white neck. For she turned and fled, stumbling up the stairs in a mad panic of escape.

  He shouted: “Janet! Janet!” His steps were heavy behind her. He tripped on the bottom step and fell on one knee and cursed.

  Terror lent her strength and speed. She could not be mistaken. Although she had seen it only once, she knew that on the little finger of his left hand there had been the same, the unmistakable ring the dead woman had worn.

  The blessed wind snatched the front door from her and flung it wide, and she was out in the safe, dark shelter of the storm.

  The Waxwork

  A. M. Burrage

  Prospectus

  Address:

  Marriner’s Waxworks, Marylebone, London.

  Property:

  Converted town house in a small square with a vaulted roof and glass double doors. Contains a dozen rooms of public figures and “Murderers’ Den” in the basement.

  Viewing Date:

  April, 1931

  Agent:

  Alfred McClelland Burrage (1889–1956) began selling stories while he was still at school and made his name in 1925 with Poor Dear Esme, the extraordinary tale of a schoolboy who masquerades as a girl in a female-only public school. He was also responsible for a series of controversial supernatural tales under the pseudonym “Ex-Private X”. Vincent Price (1911–1993) obtained a master’s degree in fine art, but was drawn to the movies where he became a leading horror actor in the 1950s. Warner Brothers’ 3-D film, The House of Wax (1953), made him an international star and among his best horror pictures are House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Haunted Palace (1964). Commenting on “The Waxwork,” Price said: “It is a good example of a new twist on an old theme – spending the night in a cemetery or haunted house. What makes Burrage’s tale more frightening, though, is the introduction of a famous murderer. Is he really only a waxwork?”

  While the uniformed attendants of Marriner’s Waxworks were ushering the last stragglers through the great glass-panelled double doors, the manager sat in his office interviewing Raymond Hewson.

  The manager was a youngish man, stout, blond and of medium height. He wore his clothes well and contrived to look extremely smart without appearing over-dressed. Raymond Hewson looked neither. His clothes, which had been good when new and which were still carefully brushed and pressed, were beginning to show signs of their owner’s losing battle with the world. He was a small, spare, pale man, with lank, errant brown hair, and although he spoke plausibly and even forcibly he had the defensive and somewhat furtive air of a man who was used to rebuffs. He looked what he was, a man gifted somewhat above the ordinary who was a failure through his lack of self-assertion.

  The manager was speaking.

  “There is nothing new in your request,” he said. “In fact we refuse it to different people – mostly young bloods who have tried to make bets – about three times a week. We have nothing to gain and something to lose by letting people spend the night in our Murderers’ Den. If I allowed it, and some young idiot lost his senses, what would be my position? But your being a journalist somewhat alters the case.”

  Hewson smiled.

  “I suppose you mean that journalists have no senses to lose.”

  “No, no,” laughed the manager, “but one imagines them to be reasonable people. Besides, here we have something to gain; publicity and advertisement.”

  “Exactly,” said Hewson, “and there I thought we might come to terms.”

  The manager laughed again.

  “Oh,” he exclaimed, “I know what’s coming. You want to be paid twice, do you? It used to be said years ago that Madame Tussaud’s would give a man a hundred pounds for sleeping alone in the Chamber of Horrors. I hope you don’t think that we have made any such offer. Er – what is your paper, Mr Hewson?”

  “I am freelancing at present,” Hewson confessed, “working on space for several papers. However, I should find no difficulty in getting the story printed. The Morning Echo would use it like a shot. ‘A night with Marriner’s Murderers.’ No live paper could turn it down.”

  The manager rubbed his chin.

  “Ah! And how do you propose to treat it?”

  “I shall make it gruesome, of course; gruesome with just a saving touch of humour.”

  The other nodded and offered Hewson his cigarette-case.

  “Very well, Mr. Hewson,” he said. “Get your story printed in the Morning Echo, and there will be a five-pound note waiting for you here when you care to come and call for it. But first of all, it’s no small ordeal that you’re proposing to undertake. I’d like to be quite sure about you, and I’d like you to be quite sure about yourself. I own I shouldn’t care to take it on. I’ve seen those figures dressed and undressed, I know all about the process of their manufacture, I can walk about in company downstairs as unmoved as if I were walking among so many skittles, but I should hate having to sleep down there alone among them.”

  “Why?” asked Hewson.

  “I don’t know. There isn’t any reason. I don’t believe in ghosts. If I did I should expect them to haunt the scene of their crimes or the spot where their bodies were laid, instead of a cellar which happens to contain their waxwork effigies. It’s just that I couldn’t sit alone among them at night, with their seeming to stare at me the way they do. After all, they rep
resent the lowest and most appalling types of humanity, and – although I would not own it publicly – the people who come to see them are not generally charged with the very highest motives. The whole atmosphere of the place is unpleasant, and if you are susceptible to atmosphere I warn you that you are in for a very uncomfortable night.”

  Hewson had known that from the moment when the idea had first occurred to him. His soul sickened at the prospect, even while he smiled casually upon the manager. But he had a wife and family to keep, and for the past month he had been living on paragraphs, eked out by his rapidly dwindling store of savings. Here was a chance not to be missed – the price of a special story in the Morning Echo, with a five-pound note to add to it. It meant comparative wealth and luxury for a week, and freedom from the worst anxieties for a fortnight. Besides, if he wrote the story well, it might lead to an offer of regular employment.

  “The way of transgressors – and newspaper men – is hard,” he said. “I have already promised myself an uncomfortable night because your Murderers’ Den is obviously not fitted up as an hotel bedroom. But I don’t think your wax-works will worry me much.”

  “You’re not superstitious?”

  “Not a bit,” Hewson laughed.

  “But you’re a journalist; you must have a strong imagination.”

  “The news editors for whom I’ve worked have always complained that I haven’t any. Plain facts are not considered sufficient in our trade, and the papers don’t like offering their readers unbuttered bread.”

  The manager smiled and rose.

  “Right,” he said. “I think the last of the people have gone. Wait a moment. I’ll give orders for the figures downstairs not to be draped, and let the night people know that you’ll be here. Then I’ll take you down and show you round.”