Black Valentines

by Barrymore Tebbs

  “Only Lionel can tell us when the sickness overtook him, but he refuses to acknowledge even to me, his doctor, that any such events ever transpired. I know better. I have heard it from the girl countless times, and children cannot fabricate something so vile without some foreknowledge. But I can tell you this; it began when she was quite young. Do not look away, Mr. Dahl. As foul as this may be, you have come demanding the truth, so hear me out.

  “There was a cottage on the estate which Lionel had designated as a sort of playhouse. When his sister was old enough that she was able to accompany him, she followed, willingly, and there became seduced by his wicked games.

  “Decorum dictates that I spare you the details of his depravity. I can see that you are sickened already. To the girl’s testament, she was justifiably horrified by the unspeakable defilement which took place there. As I have said, she was quite young, but clever enough that she attempted to defend herself. What a brave little girl she was. She kicked, and bit, and scratched. She wounded him enough that he became quite vulnerable, and she hit him on the head with a tool from the fireplace. She was only a child, so the blow was not strong enough to kill him, but he was stunned. He fell forward onto the hearth. In his dazed state, the little girl was able to push and roll her brother until the flames covered his hair and face.

  “Within moments the entire house was consumed by fire. Lionel ran screaming from the house, but when he realized the little girl was still inside, he ran back into the burning house and pulled her out alive.

  “You have seen the marks upon Lionel’s face. Every day when he looks at himself in the mirror – and Lionel prides himself on his looks so I assure you this is what he does – he is reminded of that horrible day. His sister’s act of retaliation was enough to put fear into his soul, and from my knowledge he never again disturbed the little girl. But his sister’s scar was so deep that it would never be healed, not by God and not by science nor medicine.”

  Rathcliffe eyed me for a moment, examining me for some reaction. I wanted nothing more than to slink into the shadows of that room and make myself invisible.

  “The human mind is a strange and wondrous frontier, but even with modern advancements in the study of psychiatry, there is yet much we do not understand. In the girl’s case, she protected herself from the memory of that abomination in the only way her mind knew how. She became someone else entirely.

  “At first she was Lucy, merely another little girl her own age, who lived in a world without fear, without pain, who loved her brother very deeply.

  “But over time another persona began to emerge, and then another, and another. Yes, it’s true, Mr. Dahl, there are even more than you have met, and even more than I have yet to discover.

  “I can’t prevent the Balfours from living their own lives, but it is best that they remain here, hidden from the world. Whenever they travel to London, trouble is sure to follow. It pains me deeply to see a man such as yourself so obviously obsessed with someone who does not exist.”

  Rathcliffe clapped his hands to signify that his story was at an end.

  I couldn’t speak. What could I have said? The foulness of his tale had left my mind reeling. I did not want to believe a word of it yet I knew it had to be true. I had seen with my own eyes. I had lain with her, for God’s sake, whoever she was. I had become an unwitting accomplice in this family’s depravity.

  The doctor stood and gestured for me to rise.

  “And now, Mr. Dahl, it is time for you to go home. Go back to London. Forget everything you heard tonight. Forget that you ever met Lionel Balfour. Forget all about the woman you know as Laura. There is no hope for you, otherwise. If you continue to dwell on your obsession you will be driven mad. May God help you if you do.”

  When I stood I found that my legs had gone numb, and his hand shot out to support me beneath the arm. I pulled away from him. I did not want the teller of this vile tale to touch me. I only wanted to get as far away as quickly as I could. I leaned my full weight upon the cane and stumbled behind him into the foyer.

  “Good night,” said Rathcliffe. “The fog is thick tonight. Be careful on your way.” And with that he shut the door behind me.

  A coastal wind caused the fog to billow and swirl around me and soon the lights of the mansion were swallowed up behind me. I could not get away from that place fast enough. I would return to the village inn and drink myself into a stupor. Then I would retire to my room and bring out my needle and fill my veins with every last drop of Morphine I could coax from the bottle and pray to God I not live to see another day.

  But in the next few moments, fate offered me an entirely different hand. In the cold, still silence I heard the rumbling of a motorcar. The driving lamps were twin glows which would soon fall to rest on me. I scrambled to the side of the road. With luck my red jacket would be well hidden by the shadows and he would not see me. Though it was dark and I could not see the driver, I knew who it was. The motorcar rolled past and disappeared into the night.

  No other thought crossed my mind but to turn around and return to the house. When I arrived, the car was parked in the drive. I crept up onto the terrace and, careful to remain hidden in the shadows, I peered through the gossamer curtains at the drawing room window. I watched as Rathcliffe spoke to Balfour at length. Balfour shook his head a number of times, and then threw back his head, wild with laughter, and clapped his hands. He was enjoying the joke so much that he lapsed into a fit of coughing and then strode out of the room. Not long after, Rathcliffe went about the room, turning out the lamps.

  I don’t know how long I waited, five minutes, perhaps ten, and then opened the great front door to the house. A single gas wall sconce flickered in the foyer, and ahead, in the inner hall, I could see the stairs leading up into darkness.

  The house was old, but thankfully well carpeted, and whatever gods ascended those stairs with me their fortune shone on me. Not one stair creaked.

  It is a wonder still that I went up those stairs and down a long corridor in a strange house without fear or trepidation. But you see the moment I saw Balfour’s motorcar come roaring out of the mist, I knew that I should spare my own life that night.

  You’ll think me mad, if you haven’t already shaken your head in wonder at the strangeness of my tale, and mad I may be, but from my perspective – for are we not all the heroes of our own stories? – there was only one possible way for this tale to end.

  The first door I tried was hers. A night lamp burned low, and I could tell by the feminine furnishings that it was hers. How I longed to slip inside and take one last look at the beautiful face I had loved.

  But I was in combat now, a silent warrior sent to terminate an enemy officer’s command. I was at last given the opportunity to succeed where I had failed so miserably in the war in South Africa all those years ago.

  There were two doors left at this end of the corridor. One would be Rathcliffe’s, if he slept so near his charges at all, and I should only assume he did. The other would belong to Balfour.

  If Balfour was in his usual drunken state I should expect to find him passed out on his covers still fully dressed.

  Rathcliffe struck me as a man who required little sleep and might very well be awake and reading.

  Choose wisely, Dahl.

  My hand touched the handle of the door next to the girl’s room and turned it ever so slowly. It made not a sound.

  The door opened.

  Within, I could hear the sound of labored breathing. The embers in the fire still cast a meager orange glow about the room, enough to allow me to see the bed and the figure laying on it.

  With an assassin’s assuredness I strode into the room and swung the cane with all my might. A cry escaped the man, more of a final dying gasp really, but I did not allow it to alter my resolve. I struck again and again and heard the crack when the cane at last collided with his skull and smashed it utterly.

  The room burst alive with light.

  I whirled around.


  I dropped the cane.

  Balfour stood in the doorway, a pistol in his hand.

  I have always hated the contemptible loathing with which he never failed to regard me.

  “You’ve really done it now, haven’t you Dahl? But the question is, do I shoot you now, or have the pleasure of watching you hang?”

  * * *

  No matter how many times I have told this tale, no one will believe me, and why should they? It is nothing more than a madman’s tale. I committed cold blooded murder, plain and simple. For that I will be hanged.

  With Rathcliffe dead there is no longer anyone to validate the facts. That Lionel Balfour visited unspeakable atrocities on his sister is of no consequence in my case.

  Occasionally, Laura comes to visit me in my cell. On any given day she looks and acts as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing ever were. Perhaps her memory of that awful day is truly gone forever. Lionel, of course, has nothing to say about the matter.

  And after all is said and done, she loves her brother. She always will.

  Sneak Preview

  The Haunting at Blackwood Hall (working title)

  Coming in June 2012

  The flame sputtered in the darkness, as if blown by some unseen breath, and then stood tall and strong.

  “Are you there, Glenora? Glenora Ashby, if your spirit is among us, speak. I bid you, speak.”

  I strained my eyes to see Madame Lovely in the shadows opposite me. Her hair was too tightly coiffed, her eyes turned dramatically up into her head, and she swayed to beat of some unheard rhythm.

  I detected a faint grinding in the stillness of the room and realized it was the sound of my own teeth. Save for the stifled breathing of the others around the table, there was not another sound. If a phantom trumpet should blare or a drum rattle out its mournful tattoo, we should all scream and leap from our seats. This was more than my nerves could bear. Not because I believed my mother’s voice was about to speak to us from beyond the grave, for I did not. Could the querent on each side of me feel the tension in my fingertips? And what if they did? I did not care. This charade had gone on for the past hour as Madame Lovely summoned one “spirit” after another. Was I the only person at the circle who remained unconvinced? I found the affair tolerable, to a point, but that point was about to be crossed.

  “Who is there? Who is it who calls me from the grave?” This was not my mother’s voice. It was little different than the voice before, a little boy named Ernest, taken from his mother too soon, or the voice before that, someone’s long dead sister. A West End actress would have done a more convincing job. Perhaps Madame Lovely should take lessons.

  “It is I, Glenora,” said my father, “It is Giles.” I shut my eyes, wishing I was anywhere but here. There were tears in Papa’s words. “Glenora, is it really you?”

  “Giles, my darling, my love, my sweet, darling man.” Not only was this not my mother’s voice, it was not her character. Never in their lives had the two of them uttered such romantic drivel to one another. My parents loved each other as surely as anyone’s, but that love was temperate, not melodramatic. Madame Lovely had perhaps read one too many penny novels.

  “It is so cold here, so dark, so lonely.”

  For God’s sake don’t tell him that! In his state of mind the first thing he would want to do would be to cross over and join her. The sad thing was that he was already one foot in the grave.

  Believe me, I would not have been a participant in this charade if it were not for my father. You may recall the name of Giles Ashby, for he was once a concert pianist and quite famous in his way. In his day he traveled all over Europe, to Rome, to Vienna and Paris, as far east as St. Petersburg and as far west as the Americas, to New York City, and to Chicago, and New Orleans.

  My mother, Glenora, had been one of his brightest pupils, and I followed in both their footsteps, learning to play the piano at a very young age. I had recently finished my education at L’Académie Rousseau pour les Jeunes Femmes in Paris, but my return to London was overshadowed by news of my mother’s illness. No sooner had I returned than Papa announced he would be taking her to a spa in the Mediterranean, hoping and praying that the doctors there would be able to restore her health.

  I found myself suddenly alone in the house on Crescent Walk that summer, and in an effort to appease my boredom and anxiety, I offered my services as a piano teacher to young ladies and gentlemen of society. I was glad to have an income of my own as well as something to occupy my time as I awaited letters from Greece announcing news of mother’s restoration.

  There were none.

  I had not expected that mother would recover. Still, it was a shock to greet Papa when he returned alone with nothing of my mother, no funeral urn, no coffin, nothing but the clothes on his back and the stench of whiskey on his breath. He had buried her on a hillside in Mykonos overlooking the sun dappled Mediterranean Sea.

  At night I would lie awake listening to the melancholy sound of the Nocturne in C Minor drifting through the benighted rooms of our lovely little house in Bloomsbury like the reflections of shattered moonlight on a restlessly undulating midnight sea. The soul had long since gone out of his playing, and when his hands faltered and fell upon the keys, the wretched sound of his weeping would drift upward through the house until my pillow was soaked with tears as well.

  And now it had come to this, these weekly excursions throughout the city, entering these shaded parlors and taking his position among the curious and lonely, desperate in their mourning. The spiritualist circles had been all the rage in London for several years. I have to admit that I had participated in a séance on more than one occasion at the invitation of an old family friend, Mrs. Luna Summerhill. Mrs. Summerhill was a member of the Theosophical Society and was not only a firm believer in spiritualism and the ways of the occult she allegedly possessed powers as a spiritual medium herself. But I could not take it seriously. It is simply parlor entertainment, magic tricks performed in a darkened room, and I couldn’t fathom otherwise intelligent men and women who believed that voices from beyond the grave were able speak through themselves or others. Poor Papa, so lonely in his desperation, what did he hope to gain?

  “And how is my baby, my Fiona? Is she there among you as well?”

  I sensed my father bristle in his seat just as the tension in my body prepared to uncoil.

  “You’re not my mother,” I said through clenched teeth, my voice was even, yet a shot in the stillness of the room. There were sudden intakes of breath all about me.

  “Fiona, my darling, I’ve missed you so.”

  “You’re not my mother!” The shout tore its way from my breast. I leapt to my feet, my fists beating against the table. There were shouts and cries about the room, and loudest of all Madame Lovely who screamed as though she was meeting her death at the end of some back alley madman’s blade. Chaos ensued. Someone turned up the gas on the lights and a warm yellow glow enveloped the room, and any shades that might truly have been present were dutifully banished.

  Madame Lovely had collapsed face first onto the table. Someone produced a bottle of smelling salts and another poured brandy from a decanter. Papa came and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

  “Fiona, whatever possessed you?”

  “I am sorry, Papa. Surely you must see this woman is a charlatan. That was not my mother’s voice. That was not my mother.”

  “Young lady, I think you had better leave,” the stern reprobation of our hostess. “You could have killed her.”

  The look I gave the woman was enough to let her know not to push her luck with me, and she turned away with a disgusted cluck of her tongue. Papa gathered our coats from the cloak room and we dressed in silence in the foyer. Not a word was spoken between us on the return journey home, and that night I prayed that he would come to his senses, and these weekly sojourns would come to an end.

  Barrymore Tebbs is the author of Night of the Pentagram. Visit his blog at

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