“I sat down at the table on which were the papers and the half-full glass of milk, and wrote a prescription on a sheet torn out of my note-book. The man snatched it eagerly. ‘I don’t know when and where you can get that made up,’ I said, ‘but it’s the only hope.’ At this he seemed wishful for me to depart, as wishful as he had been for me to come. ‘That’s all I want,’ he said. He took me by the arm and led me out of the house by the same back stairs. As I descended I still heard those two dreadful sounds – the thin laughter of the woman I had not seen, and the groans, becoming every moment fainter, of the young woman whom I had seen. The carriage was waiting for me and I was driven back by the same way I had come. When I reached the house and my room I saw the dawn just breaking. I rested till I heard the breakfast gong. I suppose some time had gone by since I returned to the house, but I wasn’t quite aware of it; all through the night I had rather lost the sense of time.”
When Dr Dilke had finished his narrative, which I give here badly – but, I hope, to the point – we all glanced at each other rather uncomfortably, for who was to tell a man like Dr Dilke that he had been suffering from a severe hallucination? It was, of course, quite impossible that he could have left the house and gone through the peculiar scenes he had described, and it seemed extraordinary that he could for a moment have believed that he had done so. What was even more remarkable was that so many points of his story agreed with what the medium, Mrs Mahogany, had said in her trance. We recognized the frock with the roses, the mauve velvet curtains, the glass of milk, the man who had fetched Dr Dilke sounded like the murderer, and the unfortunate woman writhing on the bed sounded like the victim; but how had the doctor got hold of these particulars? We all knew that he had not spoken to Mrs Mahogany and each suspected the other of having told him what the medium had said, and that this having wrought on his mind he had the dream, vision, or hallucination he had just described to us. I must add that this was found afterwards to be wholly false; we were all reliable people and there was not a shadow of doubt we had all kept our counsel about Mrs Mahogany. In fact, none of us had been alone with Dr Dilke the previous day for more than a moment or so save myself, who had walked with him home from the church, when we had certainly spoken of nothing except the black stone in the church and the chill which he had said emanated from it . . . Well, to put the matter as briefly as possible, and to leave out a great deal of amazement and wonder, explanation and so on, we will come to the point when Dr Dilke was finally persuaded that he had not left Verrall all the night. When his story was taken to pieces and put before him, as it were, in the raw, he himself recognized many absurdities; how could the man have come straight to his bedroom? How could he have left the house? – the doors were locked every night, there was no doubt about that. Where did the carriage come from and where was the house to which he had been taken? And who could possibly have known of his presence in the neighbourhood? Had not, too, the scene in the house to which he was taken all the resemblance of a nightmare? Who was it laughing in the other room? What was the mysterious illness that was destroying the young woman? Who was the black-browed man who had fetched him? And, in these days of telephone and motor-cars, people didn’t go out in old-fashioned one-horse carriages to fetch doctors from miles away in the case of dangerous illness.
Dr Dilke was finally silenced, uneasy, but not convinced. I could see that he disliked intensely the idea that he had been the victim of an hallucination, and that he equally intensely regretted the impulse which had made him relate his extraordinary adventure of the night. I could only conclude that he must have done so while still, to an extent, under the influence of his delusion, which had been so strong that never for a moment had he questioned the reality of it. Though he was forced at last to allow us to put the whole thing down as a most remarkable dream, I could see that he did not intend to let the matter rest there, and later in the day (out of good manners we had eventually ceased discussing the story) he asked me if I would accompany him on some investigation in the neighbourhood.
“I think I should know the house,” he said, “even though I saw it in the dark. I was impressed by the fish-pond and the low doorway through which I had to stoop in order to pass without knocking my head.”
I did not tell him that Mrs Mahogany had also mentioned a fish-pond and a low door.
We made the excuse of some old brasses we wished to discover in a nearby church to take my car and go out that afternoon on an investigation of the neighbourhood in the hope of discovering Dr Dilke’s dream house.
We covered a good deal of distance and spend a good deal of time without any success at all, and the short day was already darkening when we came upon a row of almshouses in which, for no reason at all that I could discern, Dr Dilke showed an interest and insisted on stopping before them. He pointed out an inscription cut in the centre gable, which said that these had been built by a certain Richard Carwithen in memory of Philadelphia, his wife.
“The people whose tablet you sat next to in the church,” I remarked.
“Yes,” murmured Dr. Dilke, “when I felt the chill,” and he added, “when I first felt the chill. You see the date is 1830. That would be about right.”
We stopped in the little village, which was a good many miles from Verrall, and after some tedious delays because everything was shut up for the holidays we did discover an old man who was willing to tell us something about the almshouses, though there was nothing much to be said about them. They had been founded by a certain Mr Richard Carwithen with his wife’s fortune. He had been a poor man, a kind of adventurer, our informant thought, who had married a wealthy woman; they had not been at all happy. There had been quarrels and disputes, and a separation (at least, so the gossip went, as his father had told it to him). Finally, the Carwithens had taken a house here in this village of Sunford – a large house it was, and it still stood. The Carwithens weren’t buried in this village though, but at Verrall, she had been a Verrall by birth – perhaps that’s why they came to this neighbourhood – it was the name of a great family in those days you know . . . There was another woman in the old story, as it went, and she got hold of Mr Carwithen and was for making him put his wife aside; and so, perhaps, he would have done, but the poor lady died suddenly, and there was some talk about it, having the other woman in the house at the time, and it being so convenient for both of them . . . But he didn’t marry the other woman, because he died six months after his wife . . . By his will he left all his wife’s money to found these almshouses.
Dr Dilke asked if he could see the house where the Carwithens had lived.
“It belongs to a London gentleman,” the old man said, “who never comes here. It’s going to be pulled down and the land sold in building lots; why, it’s been locked up these ten years or more. I don’t suppose it’s been inhabited since – no, not for a hundred years.”
“Well, I’m looking for a house round about here. I don’t mind spending a little money on repairs if that house is in the market.”
The old man didn’t know whether it was in the market or not, but kept repeating that the property was to be sold and broken up for building lots.
I won’t bother you with all our delays and arguments, but merely tell you that we did finally discover the lodge-keeper of the estate, who gave us the key. It was not such a very large estate, nothing to be compared to Verrall, but had been, in its time, of some pretension. Builders’ boards had already been raised along the high road frontage. There were some fine old trees, black and bare, in a little park. As we turned in through the rusty gates and motored towards the house it was nearly dark, but we had our electric torches and the powerful head-lamps of the car. Dr Dilke made no comment on what we had found, but he reconstructed the story of the Carwithens whose names were on that black stone in Verrall church.
“They were quarrelling over money, he was trying to get her to sign a will in his favour; she had some little sickness perhaps – brought on probably by rage – he had got the
other woman in the house, remember. I expect he was no good. There was some sort of poison about – perhaps for a face wash, perhaps as a drug. He put it in the milk and gave it to her.”
Here I interrupted: “How do you know it was in the milk?”
The doctor did not reply to this. I had now swung the car round to the front of the ancient mansion – a poor, pretentious place, sinister in the half-darkness.
“And then, when he had done it,” continued Dr Dilke, mounting the steps of the house, “he repented most horribly; he wanted to fly for a doctor to get some antidote for the poison with the idea in his head that if he could have got help he could have saved her himself. The other woman kept on laughing. He couldn’t forgive that – that she could laugh at a moment like that! He couldn’t get help. He couldn’t find a doctor. His wife died. No one suspected foul play – they seldom did in those days as long as the people were respectable, you must remember the state in which medical knowledge was in 1830. He couldn’t marry the other woman, and he couldn’t touch the money; he left it all to found the almshouses; then he died himself, six months afterwards, leaving instructions that his name should be added on that black stone. I dare say he died by his own hand. Probably he loved her through it all, you know – it was only the money, that cursed money, a fortune just within his grasp, but which he couldn’t take!”
“A pretty romance,” I suggested as we entered the house; “I am sure there is a three-volume novel in it of what Mrs Janey would call ‘the good old-fashioned’ sort.”
To this Dr Dilke answered: “Suppose the miserable man can’t rest? Supposing he is still searching for a doctor?”
We passed from one room to another of the dismal, dusty, dismantled house. Dr Dilke opened a damaged shutter which concealed one of the windows at the back, and pointed out in the waning light a decayed garden with stone steps and a fish-pond – dry now, of course, but certainly once a fish-pond; and a low gateway, to pass through which a man of his height would have to stoop. We could just discern this in the twilight. He made no comment. We went upstairs.
Here Cuming paused dramatically to give us the full flavour of the final part of his story. He reminded us, rather unnecessarily, for somehow he had convinced us, that this was all perfectly true:
I am not romancing; I won’t answer for what Dr Dilke said or did, or his adventure of the night before, or the story of the Carwithens as he constructed it, but this is actually what happened . . . We went upstairs by the wide main stairs. Dr Dilke searched about for and found a door which opened on to the back stairs, and then he said: “This must be the room.” It was entirely devoid of any furniture, and stained with damp, the walls stripped of panelling and cheaply covered with decayed paper, peeling, and in parts fallen.
“What’s this?” said Dr Dilke.
He picked up a scrap of paper that showed vivid on the dusty floor and handed it to me. It was a prescription. He took out his note-book and showed me the page where this fitted in.
“This page I tore out last night when I wrote that prescription in this room. The bed was just there, and there was the table on which were the papers and the glass of milk.”
“But you couldn’t have been here last night,” I protested feebly, “the locked doors – the whole thing! . . .”
Dr Dilke said nothing. After a while neither did I. “Let’s get out of the place,” I said. Then another thought struck me. “What is your prescription?” I asked.
He said: “A very uncommon kind of prescription, a very desperate sort of prescription, one that I’ve never written before, nor I hope shall again – an antidote for severe arsenical poisoning.”
“I leave you,” smiled Cuming, “to your various attitudes of incredulity or explanation.”
Christmas Honeymoon
Howard Spring
Location: Falmouth, Cornwall.
Time: Christmas Eve, 1938.
Eyewitness Description: “The remarkable thing about what happened to me and Ruth was simply that Nothing happened. If you have never come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits . . .”
Author: Howard Spring (1889–1965) was born in Cardiff, the son of a poor jobbing gardener, and had to leave school at the age of 12 when his father died. He alleviated his tough life as an office boy in the Cardiff docks by taking Evening Classes at the local university and achieved his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter. After learning his trade on several provincial newspapers, Spring landed a job on the London Evening Standard where his descriptive prose and astute literary reviews lead to him achieving an international success with one of his first novels My Son, My Son, which was filmed in 1940. That same year he wrote Fame is the Spur, about a labour leader’s rise to power, that established his reputation. During the years of the Second World War, he continued to demonstrate his understanding of contemporary human character in books such as Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley’s (1946). He and his wife settled in Falmouth where he produced three volumes of fascinating autobiography, half a dozen more novels and several short stories: a number of which evoked the supernatural in a completely new way. “Christmas Honeymoon”, which appeared in the 24 December 1940 issue of the Standard, is arguably the best of these and also believed to be based on personal experience.
We were married on 22 December, because we had met on the 21st. It was as sudden as that. I had come down from Manchester to London. Londoners like you to say that you come up to London; but we Manchester people don’t give a hoot what Londoners like. We know that we, and the likes of us, lay the eggs, and the Londoners merely scramble them. That gives us a sense of superiority.
Perhaps I have this sense unduly. Certainly I should never have imagined that I would marry a London girl. As a bachelor, I had survived thirty Manchester summers, and it seemed unlikely to me that, if I couldn’t find a girl to suit me in the north, I should find one in London.
I am an architect, and that doesn’t make me love London any the more. Every time I come down to the place I find it has eaten another chunk of its own beauty, so as to make more room for the fascias of multiple shops.
All this is just to show you that I didn’t come to London looking for a bride; and if I had been looking for a bride, the last place I would have investigated would be a cocktail party. But it was at a cocktail party in the Magnifico that I met Ruth Hutten.
I had never been to a cocktail party in my life before. We don’t go in much for that sort of thing in Manchester: scooping a lot of people together and getting rid of the whole bang shoot in one do. It seems to us ungracious. We like to have a few friends in, and give them a cut off the joint and something decent to drink, and talk in a civilised fashion while we’re at it. That’s what we understand by hospitality. But these cocktail parties are just a frantic St Vitus gesture by people who don’t want to be bothered.
I shouldn’t have been at this party at all if it hadn’t been for Claud Tunstall. It was about half-past six when I turned from the lunatic illumination of Piccadilly Circus, which is my idea of how hell is lit up, and started to walk down the Haymarket. I was wondering in an absent-minded sort of way how long the old red pillars of the Haymarket Theatre would be allowed to stand before some bright lad thought what fun it would be to tear them down, when Claud turned round from reading one of the yellow playbills, and there we were, grinning and shaking hands.
Claud had something to grin about, because the author’s name on the play-bill was his. It was his first play, and it looked as though it wouldn’t matter to Claud, so far as money went, if it were his last. The thing had been running for over a year; companies were touring it in the provinces and Colonies; and it was due to open in New York in the coming year. No wonder Claud was grinning; but I think a spot of the grin was really meant for me. He was the same old Claud who had attended the Manchester Grammar School with me and shared my knowledge of its smell of new exercise books and old suet pudding.
Claud was on his way to this party a
t the Magnifico, and he said I must come with him. That’s how these things are: there’s no sense in them; but there would have been no sense either in trying to withstand Claud Tunstall’s blue eyes and fair tumbling hair and general look of a sky over a cornfield.
That’s going some, for me, and perhaps the figure is a bit mixed, but I’m not one for figures at any time. Anyway, it explains why, five minutes later, I was gritting my teeth in the presence of great boobies looking like outsizes in 18th-century footmen, yelling names and looking down their noses.
We stood at the door of a room, and I was aware of the gold blurs of chandeliers, and a few dozen apparent football scrums, and a hot blast of talk coming out and smacking our faces, so I deduced this was the party all right. One of the boobies yelled: “Mr Claud Tunstall and Mr Edward Oldham,” and from what happened it might just as well have been “The Archangel Gabriel and one Worm”. Because, the moment we were over the threshold, all the scrums loosened up and girls descended on Claud like a cloud of bright, skitering, squawking parrakeets, flashing their red nails at him, unveiling their pearly portals in wide grins, and bearing him off towards a bar where a chap in white was working overtime among all the sweet accessories of Sin. I never saw him again.
Well, as I say, I might have been a worm, no use at all to parrakeets, but that lets in the sparrows. I was just turning slowly on my own axis, so to speak, in the space that was miraculously cleared round me, when I saw a girl looking at me with an appreciative gleam in her brown eye. She was the brownest girl I ever saw – eyes, skin, and hair – homely as a sparrow, and just as alert.
As our eyes met, there came fluting out of one of the scrums a high-pitched female voice: “No, Basil, I’m teetotal, but I can go quite a long way on pahshun fruit.”
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 55