Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves And Ghosts - 25 Classic Stories Of The Supernatural

by Barbara H. Solomon

  But was there in this loveliness some malignant force that was eluding us still, some untold story? Unspeakable horror . . . Even in the flood of brilliant sunlight, those words gave me a chill.

  As I came slowly up the slope I saw Richard walking lazily along the uneven shore of the lake. Now and then he glanced up at the distant battlements, his expression dreamy, almost blissfully contented.

  Rampling Gate had him. And I understood perfectly because it also had me.

  With a new sense of determination I went to him and placed my hand gently on his arm. For a moment he looked at me as if he did not even know me, and then he said softly:

  “How will I ever do it, Julie? And one way or the other, it will be on my conscience all my life.”

  “It’s time to seek advice, Richard,” I said. “Write to our lawyers in London. Write to Father’s clergyman, Dr. Matthews. Explain everything. We cannot do this alone.”

  It was three o’clock in the morning when I opened my eyes. But I had been awake for a long time. And I felt not fear, lying there alone, but something else—some vague and relentless agitation, some sense of emptiness and need that caused me finally to rise from my bed. What was this house, really? A place, or merely a state of mind? What was it doing to my soul?

  I felt overwhelmed, yet shut out of some great and dazzling secret. Driven by an unbearable restlessness, I pulled on my woollen wrapper and my slippers and went into the hall.

  The moonlight fell full on the oak stairway, and the vestibule far below. Maybe I could write of the confusion I suffered now, put on paper the inexplicable longing I felt. Certainly it was worth the effort, and I made my way soundlessly down the steps.

  The great hall gaped before me, the moonlight here and there touching upon a pair of crossed swords or a mounted shield. But far beyond, in the alcove just outside the library, I saw the uneven glow of the fire. So Richard was there. A sense of well-being pervaded me and quieted me. At the same time, the distance between us seemed endless and I became desperate to cross it, hurrying past the long supper table and finally into the alcove before the library doors.

  The fire blazed beneath the stone mantelpiece and a figure sat in the leather chair before it, bent over a loose collection of pages that he held in his slender hands. He was reading the pages eagerly, and the fire suffused his face with a warm, golden light.

  But it was not Richard. It was the same young man I had seen on the train in Victoria Station fifteen years ago. And not a single aspect of that taut young face had changed. There was the very same hair, thick and lustrous and only carelessly combed as it hung to the collar of his black coat, and those dark eyes that looked up suddenly and fixed me with a most curious expression as I almost screamed.

  We stared at each other across that shadowy room, I stranded in the doorway, he visibly and undeniably shaken that I had caught him unawares. My heart stopped.

  And in a split second he rose and moved toward me, closing the gap between us, reaching out with those slender white hands.

  “Julie!” he whispered, in a voice so low that it seemed my own thoughts were speaking to me. But this was no dream. He was holding me and the scream had broken loose from me, deafening, uncontrollable and echoing from the four walls.

  I was alone. Clutching at the doorframe, I staggered forward, and then in a moment of perfect clarity I saw the young stranger again, saw him standing in the open door to the garden, looking back over his shoulder; then he was gone.

  I could not stop screaming. I could not stop even as I heard Richard’s voice calling me, heard his feet pound down that broad, hollow staircase and through the great hall. I could not stop even as he shook me, pleaded with me, settled me in a chair.

  Finally I managed to describe what I had seen.

  “But you know who it was!” I said almost hysterically. “It was he—the young man from the train!”

  “Now, wait,” Richard said. “He had his back to the fire, Julie. And you could not see his face clearly—”

  “Richard, it was he! Don’t you understand? He touched me. He called me Julie,” I whispered. “Good God, Richard, look at the fire. I didn’t light it—he did. He was here!”

  All but pushing Richard out of the way, I went to the heap of papers that lay strewn on the carpet before the hearth. “My story . . .” I whispered, snatching up the pages. “He’s been reading my story, Richard. And—dear God—he’s read your letters, the letters to Mr. Partridge and Dr. Matthews, about tearing down the house!”

  “Surely you don’t believe it was the same man, Julie, after all these years . . . ?”

  “But he has not changed, Richard, not in the smallest detail. There is no mistake, I tell you. It was the very same man!”

  The next day was the most trying since we had come. Together we commenced a search of the house. Darkness found us only half finished, frustrated everywhere by locked doors we could not open and old staircases that were not safe.

  And it was also quite clear by suppertime that Richard did not believe I had seen anyone in the study at all. As for the fire—well, he had failed to put it out properly before going to bed; and the pages—well, one of us had put them there and forgotten them, of course . . .

  But I knew what I had seen.

  And what obsessed me more than anything else was the gentle countenance of the mysterious man I had glimpsed, the innocent eyes that had fixed on me for one moment before I screamed.

  “You would be wise to do one very important thing before you retire,” I said crossly. “Leave out a note to the effect that you do not intend to tear down the house.”

  “Julie, you have created an impossible dilemma,” Richard declared, the colour rising in his face. “You insist we reassure this apparition that the house will not be destroyed, when in fact you verify the existence of the very creature that drove our father to say what he did.”

  “Oh, I wish I had never come here!” I burst out suddenly.

  “Then we should go, and decide this matter at home.”

  “No—that’s just it. I could never go without knowing. I could never go on living with knowing now!”

  Anger must be an excellent antidote to fear, for surely something worked to alleviate my natural alarm. I did not undress that night, but rather sat in the darkened bedroom, gazing at the small square of diamond-paned window until I heard the house fall quiet. When the grandfather clock in the great hall chimed the hour of eleven, Rampling Gate was, as usual, fast asleep.

  I felt a dark exultation as I imagined myself going out of the room and down the stairs. But I knew I should wait one more hour. I should let the night reach its peak. My heart was beating too fast, and dreamily I recollected the face I had seen, the voice that had said my name.

  Why did it seem in retrospect so intimate, that we had known each other before, spoken together a thousand times? Was it because he had read my story, those words that came from my very soul?

  “Who are you?” I believe I whispered aloud. “Where are you at this moment?” I uttered the word, “Come.”

  The door opened without a sound and he was standing there. He was dressed exactly as he had been the night before and his dark eyes were riveted on me with that same obvious curiosity, his mouth just a little slack, like that of a boy.

  I sat forward, and he raised his finger as if to reassure me and gave a little nod.

  “Ah, it is you!” I whispered.

  “Yes,” he said in a soft, unobtrusive voice.

  “And you are not a spirit!” I looked at his mud-splattered boots, at the faintest smear of dust on that perfect white cheek.

  “A spirit?” he asked almost mournfully. “Would that I were that.”

  Dazed, I watched him come toward me; the room darkened and I felt his cool, silken hands on my face. I had risen. I was standing before him, and I looked up into his eyes.

  I heard my own heartbeat. I heard it as I had the night before, right at the moment I had screamed. Dear God, I was talking
to him! He was in my room and I was talking to him! And then suddenly I was in his arms.

  “Real, absolutely real!” I whispered, and a low, zinging sensation coursed through me so that I had to steady myself.

  He was peering at me as if trying to comprehend something terribly important. His lips had a ruddy look to them, a soft look for all his handsomeness, as if he had never been kissed. A slight dizziness came over me, a slight confusion in which I was not at all sure that he was even there.

  “Oh, but I am,” he said, as if I had spoken my doubt. I felt his breath against my cheek, and it was almost sweet. “I am here, and I have watched you ever since you came.”

  “Yes . . .”

  My eyes were closing. In a dim flash, as of a match being struck, I saw my father, heard his voice. No, Julie . . . But that was surely a dream.

  “Only a little kiss,” said the voice of the one who was really here. I felt his lips against my neck. “I would never harm you. No harm ever for the children of this house. Just the little kiss, Julie, and the understanding that it imparts, that you cannot destroy Rampling Gate, Julie—that you can never, never drive me away.”

  The core of my being, that secret place where all desires and all commandments are nurtured, opened to him without a struggle or a sound. I would have fallen if he had not held me. My arms closed about him, my hands slipping into the soft, silken mass of his hair.

  I was floating, and there was, as there had always been at Rampling Gate, an endless peace. It was Rampling Gate I felt enclosing me; it was that timeless and impenetrable secret that had opened itself at last.... A power within me of enormous ken . . . To see as a god sees, and take the depth of things as nimbly as the outward eyes can size and shape pervade . . . Yes, those very words from Keats, which I had quoted in the pages of my story that he had read.

  But in a violent instant he had released me. “Too innocent,” he whispered.

  I went reeling across the bedroom floor and caught hold of the frame of the window. I rested my forehead against the stone wall. There was a tingling pain in my throat where his lips had touched me that was almost pleasurable, a delicious throbbing that would not stop. I knew what he was!

  I turned and saw all the room clearly—the bed, the fireplace, the chair. And he stood still exactly as I’d left him and there was the most appalling anguish in his face.

  “Something of menace, unspeakable menace,” I whispered, backing away.

  “Something ancient, something that defies understanding,” he pleaded. “Something that can and will go on.” But he was shaken and he would not look into my eyes.

  I touched that pulsing pain with the tips of my fingers and, looking down at them, saw the blood. “Vampire!” I gasped. “And yet you suffer so, and it is as if you can love!”

  “Love? I have loved you since you came. I loved you when I read your secret thoughts and had not yet seen your face.”

  He drew me to him ever so gently, and slipping his arm around me, guided me to the door.

  I tried for one desperate moment to resist him. And as any gentleman might, he stepped back respectfully and took my hand.

  Through the long upstairs corridor we passed, and through a small wooden doorway to a screw stair that I had not seen before. I soon realized we were ascending in the north tower, a ruined portion of the structure that had been sealed off years before.

  Through one tiny window after another I saw the gently rolling landscape and the small cluster of dim lights that marked the village of Rampling and the pale streak of white that was the London road.

  Up and up we climbed, until we reached the topmost chamber, and this he opened with an iron key. He held back the door for me to enter and I found myself in a spacious room whose high, narrow windows contained no glass. A flood of moonlight revealed the most curious mixture of furnishings and objects—a writing-table, a great shelf of books, soft leather chairs, and scores of maps and framed pictures affixed to the walls. Candles all about had dripped their wax on every surface, and in the very midst of this chaos lay my poems, my old sketches—early writings that I had brought with me and never even unpacked.

  I saw a black silk top hat and a walking stick, and a bouquet of withered flowers, dry as straw, and daguerreotypes and tintypes in their little velvet cases, and London newspapers and opened books.

  There was no place for sleeping in this room.

  And when I thought of that, where he must lie when he went to rest, a shudder passed over me and I felt, quite palpably, his lips touching my throat again, and I had the sudden urge to cry.

  But he was holding me in his arms; he was kissing my cheeks and my lips ever so softly.

  “My father knew what you were!” I whispered.

  “Yes,” he answered, “and his father before him. And all of them in an unbroken chain over the years. Out of loneliness or rage, I know not which, I always told them. I always made them acknowledge, accept.”

  I backed away and he didn’t try to stop me. He lighted the candles about us one by one.

  I was stunned by the sight of him in the light, the gleam in his large black eyes and the gloss of his hair. Not even in the railway station had I seen him so clearly as I did now, amid the radiance of the candles. He broke my heart.

  And yet he looked at me as though I were a feast for his eyes, and he said my name again and I felt the blood rush to my face. But there seemed a great break suddenly in the passage of time. What had I been thinking! Yes, never tell, never disturb . . . something ancient, something greater than good and evil . . . But no! I felt dizzy again. I heard Father’s voice: Tear it down, Richard, stone by stone.

  He had drawn me to the window. And as the lights of Rampling were subtracted from the darkness below, a great wood stretched out in all directions, far older and denser than the forest of Rampling Gate. I was afraid suddenly, as if I were slipping into a maelstrom of visions from which I could never, of my own will, return.

  There was that sense of our talking together, talking and talking in low, agitated voices, and I was saying that I should not give in.

  “Bear witness—that is all I ask of you, Julie.”

  And there was in me some dim certainty that by these visions alone I would be fatally changed.

  But the very room was losing its substance, as if a soundless wind of terrific force were blowing it apart. The vision had already begun....

  We were riding horseback through a forest, he and I. And the trees were so high and so thick that scarcely any sun at all broke through to the fragrant, leaf-strewn ground.

  Yet we had no time to linger in this magical place. We had come to the fresh-tilled earth that surrounded a village I somehow knew was called Knorwood, with its gabled roofs and its tiny, crooked streets. We saw the monastery of Knorwood and the little church with the bell chiming vespers under the lowering sky. A great, bustling life resided in Knorwood, a thousand voices rising in common prayer.

  Far beyond, on the rise above the forest, stood the round tower of a truly ancient castle; and to that ruined castle—no more than a shell of itself anymore—as darkness fell in earnest we rode. Through its empty chambers we roamed, impetuous children, the horses and the road quite forgotten, and to the lord of the castle, a gaunt and white-skinned creature standing before the roaring fire of the roofless hall, we came. He turned and fixed us with his narrow and glittering eyes. A dead thing he was, I understood, but he carried within himself a priceless magic. And my companion, my innocent young man, stepped forward into the lord’s arms.

  I saw the kiss. I saw the young man grow pale and struggle and turn away, and the lord retreated with the wisest, saddest smile.

  I understood. I knew. But the castle was dissolving as surely as anything in this dream might dissolve, and we were in some damp and close place.

  The stench was unbearable to me; it was that most terrible of all stenches, the stench of death. And I heard my steps on the cobblestones and I reached out to steady myself against a wa
ll. The tiny marketplace was deserted; the doors and windows gaped open to the vagrant wind. Up one side and down the other of the crooked street I saw the marks on the houses. And I knew what the marks meant. The Black Death had come to the village of Knorwood. The Black Death had laid it waste. And in a moment of suffocating horror I realized that no one, not a single person, was left alive.

  But this was not quite true. There was a young man walking in fits and starts up the narrow alleyway. He was staggering, almost falling, as he pushed in one door after another, and at last came to a hot, reeking place where a child screamed on the floor. Mother and father lay dead in the bed. And the sleek fat cat of the household, unharmed, played with the screaming infant, whose eyes bulged in its tiny, sunken face.

  “Stop it!” I heard myself gasp. I was holding my head with both hands. “Stop it—stop it, please!” I was screaming, and my screams would surely pierce the vision and this crude little dwelling would collapse around me and I would rouse the household of Rampling Gate, but I did not. The young man turned and stared at me, and in the close, stinking room I could not see his face.

  But I knew it was he, my companion, and I could smell his fever and his sickness, and the stink of the dying infant, and see the gleaming body of the cat as it pawed at the child’s outstretched hand.

  “Stop it, you’ve lost control of it!” I screamed, surely with all my strength, but the infant screamed louder. “Make it stop.”

  “I cannot,” he whispered. “It goes on forever! It will never stop!”

  And with a great shriek I kicked at the cat and sent it flying out of the filthy room, overturning the milk pail as it went.