A Book of Horrors

by Stephen King

  George walked around to the back of the house where the shallow stone steps led down to the lawn that sloped towards the lake. He stared at the view as if it were hostile territory. Nearly all of it had been planted and landscaped deliberately and this somehow increased the threat, though he could not tell why. There was one tree, however, which looked older, and not quite part of the Repton scheme. It was the oak, and it seemed oddly familiar. It was only as he approached the tree that George recognised it as the one against which Sir Hercules had been leaning in the Gainsborough portrait, a black hunting dog at his feet.

  The more he looked at the oak the more it seemed to him that this tree was less real than the one in the painting. It looked like a bloated imitation of Gainsborough’s oak, a dissolute elder brother. Something black flickered behind it, which might have been a dog’s tail. George looked all around the tree but could find nothing.

  A gust of wind ruffled the lake, turning it from mirror-glass to hammered pewter; a few spots of rain from a passing cloud stung him. It was a moment of decision. George could have returned to the safety and shelter of the house, but he knew he would find nothing for his delight but empty rooms and the threatening presence of his uncle.

  The nearest shelter, if it could be called that, was the little classical temple on the promontory in the lake. George viewed it with some favour only because it bore a resemblance to the classical architecture he was used to in London. Its domed roof of verdigris’d copper looked sickly in the dull light. The Ionic marble portico was reached by a short flight of steps. George ran down towards it, the wind blowing in his face.

  To get to the portico he had to walk around the temple. He tried to look in at the window in its side but the glass was misted over with dust and cobwebs. Evidently it had not been entered for some time. He felt a little tremor of excitement and fear.

  When he reached the steps to the portico, he saw that the entrance to the body of the temple was to be made through two tall coffered bronze doors, almost black, but streaked with verdigris. He wondered if the great handles could be turned, and if he would have the strength to use them.

  He pulled at one handle. The bronze door swung outwards easily, groaning loudly as it did so. George was startled by the noise, a hollow sound with screeching overtones that had an almost human quality about it.

  The interior was lit by a window in each of the side walls and a lantern at the apex of the dome. It was all white and undecorated, save for a marble panel in bas-relief on the back wall. This showed a naked man standing before a creature half-woman, half-crouching beast. The two were staring at each other intently: Oedipus and the Sphinx, perhaps.

  In the middle of the interior space of the temple was a wooden table painted in the French manner, and three oval-backed chairs similarly decorated around it. On the table was a tea service of white china engraved in black. The cups were empty, but there were still a few pale brown crystals of sugar in the bowl. The scenes depicted were from a West Indian sugar plantation: Negro slaves cutting cane, overseen by a man in a wide-brimmed hat carrying a whip; a white man and his wife at their ease on a verandah overlooking the cane fields; a slave settlement with children and chickens playing in the dirt before a wooden shack.

  The sugar bowl was decorated with the most interesting scenes. One side showed what looked like a slave revolt, with Negroes setting fire to a field and attacking the man with the whip and the broad-brimmed hat. One of the Negroes was pinning a white woman to the ground, her skirts already in disarray. The other side showed a number of British regimental soldiers clustered under a tree from whose branches hung a slave with a placard around his neck. Several other slaves, their arms bound behind their backs, were being made to watch the spectacle. Whether they were being shown the hanged man as an example or whether they too were destined to be the tree’s fruit was not clear.

  George heard a low moan behind him. He turned and saw the bronze door slowly beginning to blow shut in the breeze. George ran towards it. He had a great fear of the door banging to and of being unable to escape. He managed to reach it in time and then spent some minutes looking for an object to keep the door ajar. A fallen branch from the ancient oak served. Having secured his exit, he went back into the temple, picked up the sugar bowl and left with it.

  When he was outside again, George carefully removed the oak branch and allowed the bronze door of the temple to swing shut. It did so with a bang and he heard the faint resonance of the sound echoing inside the building. It surprised him a little that the door had not groaned on its hinges as before. The wind had picked up and the sky was clearing of cloud.

  As George passed under the oak he heard a sound which could have been its elderly branches creaking in the wind. To his ears, though, it sounded more like a heavy object on a rope swinging to and fro, though nothing like that was to be seen. He ran back to the Abbey.

  At the appointed time, before dinner, George knocked on the library door. There was a pause before there came the peremptory command: ‘Enter!’

  Sir Augustus was seated as usual behind the table. On it, beside papers, was the chessboard, this time set up for the beginning of a game. Sir Augustus appeared to be studying it, but when he saw his nephew he started.

  ‘Damn you, sir! What do you want here?’

  ‘You told me to come to you half-an-hour before dinner.’

  ‘Ah, yes! I did indeed, Master George, and I gave you a task to perform, did I not?’

  ‘You did, sir! And I have found it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have found the hanged man, as you asked me, Sir Augustus.’

  ‘Have you, by God!’

  George was puzzled by his uncle’s evident surprise. Did he think so little of his abilities? He showed him the sugar bowl.

  Sir Augustus turned it over in his hands. ‘Where did you get this?’

  George told him.

  ‘Did I say you might enter the Temple of the Sphinx?’

  George shook his head.

  ‘Very well. Did you see anything else?’

  George shook his head again.

  ‘In God’s name, sir, will you stop wagging your head and answer “yes” or “no” like a gentleman!’

  ‘What else might I have seen, Sir Augustus?’ There was a silence, and when it became clear to George that his uncle was not going to answer him he said, indicating the chessboard, ‘Would you care for a game of chess, sir?’

  ‘No I would not, damn your infernal impertinence, you young jackanapes. Get out, and go to blazes!’

  George left the library without a word. When his heart had stopped beating hard and he was breathing freely again, he began to feel a kind of consolation, though of a cold grey sort. He now knew that he was not the only person at the Abbey who felt fear.

  III

  That evening Mr Vereker, the curate who was coming to tutor George the following morning, came to dine at the Abbey with George and Sir Augustus. He was a moonfaced young man, as thin as his host, though more from malnutrition, it would seem, than from asceticism. George knew very little about carnal matters; nevertheless it amazed him that such a feeble specimen should have managed to sire four children.

  Sir Augustus sat at the head of the table with George and Mr Vereker on either side of him. The dinner served was excellent, with several dishes to each course, but Sir Augustus ate sparingly. He drank more than he ate, refilling his glass from a decanter of port which had been placed at his side and which he never passed to the others. George and the curate were given the beer which was also drunk in the servants’ hall. There was very little conversation until the main dishes were cleared away, and then it was Sir Augustus who turned to Mr Vereker.

  ‘I understand, sir, that your Christian name is Hamlet. The Reverend Hamlet Vereker?’

  ‘It is, Sir Augustus,’ replied Mr Vereker.

  ‘And how does it come about that you are named for a Prince of Denmark, sir?’

  ‘My father, Sir Augustus, was a
bookseller, and a great lover of literature. He had a particular fondness for the Swan of Avon.’

  ‘Shakespeare, man! Call him Shakespeare like a plain-speaking gentleman! We’ll have none of your namby-pamby pseudo-poetical epithets here. So your father was a bookseller, eh? A lowly trade, but an honest one in the main, I doubt not. And why did not you follow it? What made you aspire to holy orders?’

  ‘It was my own father’s dearest wish, and it was to this end that he laboured hard to pay for me to go to Oxford. Besides, I believed myself to have a calling to the ministry.’

  ‘You did, did you? Gad, what a presumptuous fellow you are, sir! So you would claim yourself to be a passable theologian?’

  ‘I flatter myself that—’

  ‘Doubtless you do, young Hamlet the Dane, but we’ll have no flattery here. So you know your theology. Very well. I will ask you this. Do you believe in Hell?’

  Mr Vereker seemed startled by the question. He shrank from Sir Augustus’s unblinking gaze. ‘Hell, Sir Augustus?’

  ‘Hell, Mr Vereker. Let us have your opinion on the matter. I presume that you have one?’

  ‘In Scripture it is said—’

  ‘No, no, sir! Do not hide behind Scripture, like a young miss behind a curtain at her first ball. Let us have your own view on the matter. Well?’

  ‘I believe that for some there is eternal damnation, Sir Augustus. It is a canonical belief of the Church of England.’

  ‘Eternal damnation, eh? And you think that to be just, do you?’

  ‘God is just, Sir Augustus.’

  ‘I was not asking you whether God was just, sir. I was asking whether it was just, as you appear to believe, that a man – or woman – should pay everlastingly for a finite series of misdeeds on this earth. Well, Mr Vereker?’

  ‘It is believed that all actions in time possess an eternal reverberation.’

  ‘Do they, by God? And why should that be so? Is it not the truth that all things pass, the good and the bad, and that in life this is both our consolation and our torment?’

  Mr Vereker was silent and, soon after the dessert was on the table, he made his excuses and left. George wondered whether this was the moment when Sir Augustus and he might begin to talk together as uncle and nephew, but it was not to be.

  Sir Augustus merely stared at George for a few moments as if expecting something from him, then said: ‘Well, then, boy, cut along! Cut along and leave me to my port.’

  George was becoming accustomed to the silence of the Abbey and of the faint twitter of bird song that announced the morning from behind his heavy damask bedroom curtains. That night he felt no immediate inclination to sleep, and so looked around his bedroom. Apart from his bedroom door, there were two other doors in the walls that stood at right angles to the window. Both were locked. The fact gave George a curious satisfaction; it meant that he knew where he was, that his course was set and his only duty was to react appropriately to an inevitable destiny.

  When he got into bed he listened appreciatively to the silence. Perhaps he slept for a while, and when he woke it was not because of a noise but a light, a thin steely blade of light which came from between the window curtains, cutting across his face. The moon was full.

  George went to the window, hoping to see for the first time a moon not above rooftops but across trees and grass and water. He opened the curtains and looked out. There were the familiar sights, but transformed into muted shades of grey by the moon. The grass, the dully-silvered mirror of the water, the temple which he now knew to be dedicated to the Sphinx, and the familiar trees, including the oak, now painted in grisaille. The shadows were deep and impenetrable, but seemed to him fuller of life than the illumined landscape which was as still and as drained of colour as a vampire’s victim.

  While he stared he wondered if the shadows moved, in particular the bulbous ones that gathered like strange fungoid growths around the oak. He thought he caught again the flicker of a dog’s tail, as if the animal had darted behind the tree. There was a little clutch of fear at George’s heart. He breathed deeply. No dog, living or dead, seen from a window could do anything to him. The thought, as he repeated it to himself, began to give him strength so that he was partly protected from the strangeness of what happened next.

  As he gazed at the shadows in the oak tree he thought he saw something within them stir that was darker even than their blackness. It was beginning to emerge from the protection of the tree, vaguely outlined as if it were a mist, but still intensely dark. Then it was standing before him, the figure of a man, or possibly a boy – the scale was so hard to determine – and, though not a single feature could be discerned from this silhouette, George knew it was looking up to him. The figure might have been naked. One arm detached itself and lifted itself up as if to demonstrate something. It was holding a length of rope or chain which had a loop in it. The outline of the man was now clearly etched so that George could see that the top of the head was covered by dense woolly hair.

  The man lifted the looped rope in the air. At that moment George was startled by a faint cry from within the house – his uncle perhaps? – then silence. The figure turned and walked back into the density of the oak’s shade.

  For half an hour George waited in silence for the man or the dog to emerge again, but nothing came. Besides, George had a feeling that there had been a performance, which was now over. He got into bed and fell asleep almost at once. When the faint twitter of birds woke him the next day a part of him confined his experience of the previous night to the status of a dream, but a part of him did not.

  Mr Vereker came that morning and unlocked another room in the Abbey which had hitherto been inaccessible to George, the schoolroom. Mr Vereker stared at the dusty shelves of books and the cobwebs that festooned the globes and the orrery in a kind of dismay. George noted his apparent helplessness with satisfaction; it could be used. As if to assert his dominance, George went to one of the tables and, having wiped away its thin patina of dust, sat down at it, smiling eagerly at his new tutor. Mr Vereker seemed relieved and began to recover his spirits.

  The rest of the morning passed smoothly. They began with a little Latin, and Mr Vereker was relieved to find that George was a quick learner. Over the following days the curate, acquiring some confidence and even pleasure in his pupil’s progress, was bold enough to instruct him in the rudiments of Greek. George consented to be taught out of boredom and the instinctive understanding that knowledge, any knowledge, even apparently useless knowledge, is power. He also wanted to see how far he could control Mr Vereker without his knowing it; Mr Vereker, who appeared so fearful of everything and everybody in life.

  With the exception of Sundays, there were lessons till one o’clock, when George would saunter down to Mrs Mace, who was always ready with his bread and meat and pickles. One morning Mr Vereker finished earlier than usual, and so George stayed behind in the schoolroom to see if there was anything there that might amuse him. All the books proved to be worn editions of Eutropius, Virgil and the like, so of no interest, but he did find, at the back of the cupboard a chess set, an inlaid wooden board and, in addition, a battered volume, its calf boards beginning to part from the cracked spine. There was no title on the binding, so George turned to the title page and read: Chess Analysed, or Instructions Whereby a Perfect Knowledge of this Noble Game May in a Short Time be Acquired, a translation from the French of Philidor’s classic work published in London in 1762. George decided to make this his study outside of school hours.

  He came down a little later for his luncheon, only to be stopped in the hall by Hargreave. George had taken a great dislike to Hargreave, even though in the week or so that they had known each other they had barely exchanged a word. It was the man’s glacial disdain that George could not stand. He seemed to look on the boy as a mere nuisance, an uncalled-for and probably temporary intrusion into life at the Abbey. All this was expressed by Hargreave not through passion, but by inscrutable blankness. The man was a walking b
lock of ice.

  ‘Sir Augustus wishes to see you in the library, Master George. At once.’ Those last two words had the inflexion of a command.

  George tried to return the servant’s frigid stare with one of his own. ‘Very well, Hargreave, that will be all. You may go.’

  It was absurd of course; George knew that. His order was super-fluous, but he felt he needed to establish an ascendancy. Hargreave did not indicate by the flicker of an eyebrow that he had been offended by George, or even that he had heard him. His pale blue eyes wandered up for a moment to the armorial window at the top of the stairs, then down to the floor again, avoiding George altogether, before he glided off.

  He found his uncle, seated behind the table as usual. The chessboard was there as before, except that a few pieces had been moved, though none had been taken by either side.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Nephew. I have been receiving very poor reports of you. They tell me that you are eating my servant Mrs Mace out of house and home with your greed, filling your plump little face with beef and bread as if we had an inexhaustible supply.’

  ‘Who told you this, sir? Hargreave, I suppose?’

  ‘Damn your impudence, sir! Never mind who told me, it is a fact. Do you not think it a most ungentlemanly thing for an overfed little pudding like yourself to be taking the bread out of the very mouths of my servants? Well, sir?’

  ‘I did not think—’

  ‘No, Nephew, you did not. Henceforth you are to be allowed bread and milk only to break your fast, and bread and cheese for luncheon. It will do you no harm, sir. You shall not starve. And when you dine at my table of an evening, you may have only what I prescribe. Do I make myself clear?’