The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  “Until Alcide Lamotte came on the scene.

  “All I can tell you about him is that he was the son of a farmer – a big, red-headed fellow, of an unusual type, and certainly possessing brains, and a compelling personality.

  When he and Sophy Mason met first, he was in the middle of his compulsory three years’ military service, and home at the farm en permission.

  “One can imagine it – this English girl, who’d been in France over a year without, probably, exchanging a word with anyone but her employers, their children, and perhaps an occasional old curé coming in for a game of cards in the evening – left to her own devices in the more or less isolated villa in the late spring, or early summer, in the vine country. What happened was, of course, inevitable. No one knows when or how their first meetings took place, but passions move quickly in that country. By the time monsieur and madame did appear, to inaugurate their usual summer vie de campagne, the neighbouring peasantry were perfectly aware that le roux, as they called him, was Sophy Mason’s lover.

  “Whether they betrayed her to her employers or not, one doesn’t know. Personally, I imagine they didn’t. In that country, and to that race, neither love nor passion appears as a crime, even when marital infidelity is involved, and in this case the question, for the girl merely of deceiving her mistress, and Lamotte – also a free agent – was one of themselves. Almost certainly, madame found out for herself what was going on.

  “There must have been a crisis – une scène de première classe. Perhaps madame kept watch – was peeping through the crack of a door just left ajar, when ‘the mees’ stole in – noiselessly, as she hoped – from a moonlight tryst in the woods where the wild strawberries had grown a few weeks earlier.

  “ ‘What! Depraved, deceitful creature, to whom I have entrusted my innocent children! . . .’

  “The French are nothing if not dramatic.

  “I suspect that madame enjoyed herself, making the most of the scene, whilst poor Sophy Mason, ashamed and guilty, was frightened out of her wits. Perhaps she saw herself sent back to the Bloomsbury boarding-house of the aunt who was her only living relation, disgraced, and with no hope of ever getting another situation.

  “As a matter of fact, madame forgave her. Sophy Mason was useful, the children liked her, she was very cheap – and perhaps, at the bottom of her heart, madame was not very seriously shocked at Sophy’s lapse from virtue.

  “At all events, after extracting a promise that she would never meet Alcide again, except for one farewell interview, madame told Sophy that she might stay.

  “The farewell interview, I believe, took place in madame’s presence – she’d stipulated for that. Something – one can only guess that it may have been some pathetic, scarcely disguised hint from the girl – indicated to madame’s acute perceptions that if Alcide had proposed marriage Sophy would have been ready, and more than ready, to have him. But Alcide, of course, did nothing of the kind. He accepted his dismissal with a sulky acquiescence that he would certainly not have shown if Sophy Mason – more astute and less passionate – had not so readily yielded to him every privilege that he chose to demand.

  “There was an unpleasant and humiliating moral to be drawn from his attitude, and it may safely be presumed that madame did not hesitate to draw it, probably in forcible language. Sophy Mason, poor child, was left to her tears and her disgrace.

  “But those pangs of shame and disappointment were to give place to a much more real cause for distress.

  “In the autumn, Sophy Mason discovered that she was going to have a baby.

  “It is, given her youth and probable upbringing, quite likely that the possibility of such a thing had never presented itself to her. But that madame had apparently not foreseen such a contingency is much more difficult to explain.

  “It may, of course, be that she attributed more sophistication to the girl than poor Sophy Mason actually possessed, and that she asked a leading question or two that Sophy answered without really understanding.

  “One thing is certain: that Sophy Mason did not dare to tell her employer of her condition. She had recourse, instead, to a far more hopeless alternative.

  “She appealed to her lover.

  “At first, by letter. She must have written several times, if one draws the obvious inference from the only reply of his that was seen by anyone but the recipient. It is an illiterate, ugly scrawl, evidently written in haste, telling her not to write again, and concluding with a perfunctory endearment. It was probably those few, meaningless last words that gave the unfortunate Sophy courage for her final imprudence. It seems fairly certain that she was, actually, imaginatively in love with Alcide, whereas with him, of course, the attraction had been purely sensual, and had not outlasted physical gratification. In fact, I have no doubt, personally, that the usual reaction had set in, and that the mere thought of her was probably as repellent to him as it had once been alluring. Sophy, however, could not, or would not, believe that everything was over, and that she was to be left to confront disgrace and disaster alone. Under the pretext of meeting some imaginary English friends, she obtained leave of absence from madame, and went down to Les Moineaux on a day in late October.

  “Either she had made an assignation beforehand with Alcide, or, as seems a good deal more probable, she had learnt that he was home again, on the termination of his military service, and counted on taking him by surprise. She must have made up her mind that if only she could see him again, and plead with him, he would, in the phrase of the time, ‘make an honest woman of her.’

  “The interview between them took place. What actually occurred can only be a matter of conjecture.

  “That it took place at Les Moineaux is a proved fact, and I – who have seen the house – can visualise the setting of it. They would have gone into the living-room, where only the bare minimum of furniture had been left, but from the ceiling of which dangled, magnificently, a huge candelabra of pale pink glass, swinging from gilt chains. The gaudy beauty, and tinkling light music of the candelabra have always seemed to me to add that touch of incongruity that sharpens horror to the unbearable pitch. Beneath its huddled glitter, Sophy Mason must have wept, and trembled, and pleaded, in an increasing terror and despair.

  “Lamotte was a southerner, a coarse, brutal fellow, with the strong animal passions of his years, and of his race. Whether what followed then was a premeditated crime, or a sudden impulse born of violent rage and exasperation, will never be known. With apparently no other weapon than his own powerful hands, Alcide Lamotte, probably by strangulation, murdered Sophy Mason.

  “When the girl failed to return home, her employer, apparently, neglected to make any serious enquiry into her fate. Madame, who had perhaps suspected her condition, affected to believe that the girl had run away to England, in spite of the fact that her few belongings had been left behind.

  “Possibly they were afraid of a scandalous discovery, but more probably, with the thriftiness of their class, they dreaded being put to expense that would, they well knew, never be made good by Sophy’s only relation, in distant England.

  “The aunt, in point of fact, behaved quite as callously as the French couple, and with even less excuse. Sophy Mason was the illegitimate child of her dead sister, and when, eventually, she learnt of the girl’s disappearance, she is said to have taken up the attitude of asserting: ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ and declaring that Sophy had certainly gone off with a lover, like her mother before her.

  “Conveniently for madame, if she wanted to convince herself and other people of the truth of that theory, Alcide Lamotte suddenly made off, towards the end of the same month, and was reported to have gone to America. Of course, said madame, they had gone together. Sophy had been traced as far as Les Moineaux without the slightest difficulty, and where she had spent the intervening weeks, between that visit and her alleged departure to America with her lover, no one seems to have enquired.

  “The only clue to the mystery was that last l
etter, written by Lamotte, that Sophy had left behind her, and that was found and read by her employers, and in the fact that when, in the summer following her disappearance, the wine merchant and his family went as usual to Les Moineaux, they found unmistakable evidence that the house had been entered by a backdoor, of which the lock had been picked.

  “Nothing else seemed to have been tampered with, or disturbed in any way, and the whole affair was allowed to drop in a fashion that, in this country and at this date, appeared almost incredible.”

  Fenwick paused for a while, before resuming.

  “My own connection with the story, came more than forty years later. All that I have told you, was conjectured, or found out many years after it happened. I warned you that I might have to tell the story backwards.

  “The wine merchant of Sophy Mason’s story was the connecting link. During the war, I came to know his son – a middle-aged man, once the youngest of the children in the avenue of Les Moineaux.

  “I need not trouble you with any account of how we had come to know one another well – it was no stranger than the story of many other relationships established during the war years.

  “We met from time to time, long after the Armistice had taken place, and in the summer of 1925, when I was in France, Amede, my friend, invited me to pay him a visit, in the midi. He had quite recently married a girl many years younger than himself, and in accordance with French provincial custom, was living with her in the house of his parents – or rather, of his father, for the mother had been dead for some time.

  “The wine merchant himself was over seventy – a hale and hearty old man, well looked after by an unmarried daughter, and still in perfect possession of all his faculties.

  “Whilst I was with them, an observation on my part as to the facility with which all the family spoke English, occasioned an allusion to Sophy Mason – the English ‘mees’ of forty-five years earlier.

  “The old man, I remember, referred to her mysterious disappearance, but without giving any great importance to the story, and attaching to it, as a mere matter of course, the old explanation of the flight to America with Lamotte.

  “In that light one would doubtless have accepted, and then forgotten it, but for two things. One of these was something that was told me by Amede, and the other the coincidence – if you like to call it so – that forms the whole point of the story. Amede’s revelation, that was purposely not made in the presence of his father, was as follows:

  “About fifteen years previously, shortly before the death of his mother, she had made over to him Les Moineaux, the little country villa that had belonged to her.

  “Amede was fond of the place, although he had no intention of ever living there, and long after the other brothers and sisters had scattered, when their mother was dead, and their father no longer cared to move from home, he continued to visit it periodically.

  “It was, therefore, to Amede that some peasants one day came, with an account of a gruesome discovery made in the wood near the house – that very wood where Sophy Mason used to take the children of her employers to pick wild strawberries.

  “In a deep ditch, under the leaf-mould of more than a quarter of a century, had been uncovered, by the merest chance, the skeleton of a woman. Curiously enough – or perhaps not so curiously, taking into account the mentality of the uneducated – the older generation of villagers viewed the discovery with more horror than surprise, and displayed little hesitation in identifying the protagonists of the tragedy. The story of Sophy Mason’s disappearance had survived the years, and Amede’s enquiries brought to light a singular piece of evidence.

  “A woman was found who remembered, many years before, a revelation made by a servant-girl on her deathbed. This girl – a disreputable creature – had declared that on a certain October afternoon she had been in the wood, with her lover, and that, from their place of concealment, they had seen something terrible – a gigantic youth, with red hair, half-carrying and half-dragging the body of a woman, whom he had subsequently flung into the ditch, and covered with earth and stones from the hedge.

  “Neither the girl, nor the man with her – who was, incidentally, married to another woman – had dared reveal their horrible discovery, fearing lest their own guilty connection should thereby come to light. This girl, in point of fact, died shortly afterwards, and her story, told on her deathbed, had actually been disbelieved at the time by her hearers, because the narrator was known to have the worst possible reputation and to be a notorious liar.

  “The woman to whom it was told swore that she had never actually repeated the story, but that rumours of it had long been rife and that the wood, in consequence, had been shunned for years.

  “The name of Alcide Lamotte, curiously enough, seems not to have been directly mentioned. The Lamotte family were the chief land-owners in the place, and were accounted rich and powerful, and le roux himself had never been heard of since his disappearance to America.

  “My friend Amede, hearing this strange echo of the past, doubted greatly what course to adopt. It is easy to say that an Englishman, in his place, would have doubted not at all. The Englishman has a natural respect for the law that is certainly lacking in the Latin. Remember, too, that it had all happened so long ago – that the only known witness of the crime was a woman of ill-repute, long since dead – that poor Sophy Mason – if it was indeed she who had been done to death – had no one to demand a tardy investigation into her fate – and finally, that by the law of France, a man cannot be brought to trial for a crime that is only discovered after the lapse of a certain number of years. Amede, contenting himself with giving the minimum of the information in his possession – all of which, it must be taken into account, depended upon hearsay – to the authorities, saw to the burial of the unidentified remains.

  “There the story would have ended, so far as such things can ever be said to end, but for the coincidence of which I spoke.

  “Fifteen years later, whilst I was on my visit to Amede’s old father, and just after Amede had told me of this strange and hidden postscript to the mystery of Sophy Mason, after an absence of close on forty-one years, Alcide Lamotte returned to the neighbourhood.

  “And here, at last, is where such first-hand knowledge as I possess, begins. It is here that I, so to speak, come into the story.

  “For I met Alcide Lamotte.

  “He had come back – but, of course, he was not the wild, half-civilised lout – le roux – of a lifetime ago. He was, actually, a naturalised American, and a rich and successful man.

  “There was no one left to recognise him, and, indeed, he now even called himself by a different name, and was Al Mott, from Pittsburg.

  “You understand – I am not telling you a detective story, and trying to make a mystery. It was Alcide Lamotte, but when he came to the old wine merchant’s house, Amede and his father didn’t know it. That is to say, the old man certainly didn’t – and Mr. Mott called, the first time, with a business introduction, in regard to a sale of land. Amede, when he found that, in spite of his Americanised appearance, the visitor was not only a Frenchman, but also conversant with the immediate neighbourhood, connected him with the district of Les Moineaux, but only in that vague, unemphatic fashion that just fails to put two and two together until, or unless, something happens that produces a sudden, blinding flash of illumination.

  “There was certainly nothing about Al Mott, from Pittsburg, to recall the half-legendary figure of le roux.

  “He was a big corpulent man, perfectly bald, with a hard, heavy face, and great pouches below his eyes.

  “His manners were not polished, but noisy and genial.

  “Neither Amede nor his father took a fancy to him, but they were hommes d’ affaires, there was a transaction to be concluded, and one evening he was asked to supper, and came.

  “It was an evening in late October.

  “The old man, of course, was there, and Amede and his young, newly married wife. The aunt – the o
ne that lived with them – had gone away for a few days.

  “The evening, from the beginning, did not go very well. Madame Amede, the bride, was an inexperienced hostess, and the guest was not of a type to put her at her ease.

  “Amede, who was madly in love with his wife, kept on watching her.

  “For my part, I felt an extraordinary uneasiness. You all know, I believe, what is usually meant by the word ’psychic’ applied to an individual, and you know, too, that it has often been applied to me. I can only tell you that, in the course of that evening, I knew, beyond any possibility of doubt, certain things not conveyed to me through the normal channels of the senses. I knew that the other guest, the man sitting opposite to me, had, somehow, some intimate connection with tragedy and violence, and I knew, too, that he was evil. At the same time I was aware, more and more as the evening went on, that something which I can only describe as a wave, or vibration, of misery, was in the atmosphere and steadily increasing in intensity.

  “Afterwards, Madame Amede told me that she had felt the same thing.

  “She and her husband, it is worth remembering, were in the keyed-up, highly wrought state of people still in the midst of an overwhelming emotional experience. That is equal to saying that they were far more susceptible than usual to atmospheric influence.

  “The old wine merchant, Amede’s father, was the only person, beside Mott himself, unaware of tension.

  “He made a casual allusion to the countryside, and then to Les Moineaux – but not referring to it directly by name.

  “Mott replied, and the conversation went on.

  “But in that instant, without any conscious process of reasoning or induction, the connection was made in my mind.

  “I knew him for Alcide Lamotte, and I saw that Amede did too. My eyes, and those of Amede met, for one terrible second, the knowledge flashing from one to the other.