I know not to this day how I got myself away from the stain, the mirror – or how I found my way through those passages and corridors back to the inhabited part of the castle . . . perhaps the letter, which I had never once let go, gave me courage, perhaps I knew that I must not, dared not stumble or fall, with that behind me . . . but when at last I reached my room, and sank down before an almost burnt out fire, I cried like a child, cried for that murdered girl who had once been young, and perhaps loved even as I – and I wondered if that enchanting melody had been used to draw her to her death, even as it had drawn me to behold her spirit, revisiting the scene of the crime.
At breakfast next morning a servant entered, carrying a salver, upon which was a shoe buckle of brilliants that I knew, and he asked to which lady present it belonged, as it had been found that morning in a passage of the disused portion of the castle.
I claimed it for mine, and as I took it, met Lady William’s eyes full – then she looked at her husband, who was looking at her, then both went on talking as if the incident were quite natural, though some of the women smiled, others regarded me curiously, then turned inquiring glances on the men, as if asking with which of them I had held a tryst. But the men’s faces expressed nothing save surprise, and though afterwards I got chaffed about my nocturnal wanderings, no one present seemed to know what Lord and Lady William and I knew – if the look I had seen them exchange meant anything at all.
Only when I told my hostess later, she laughed my story away – ‘You had been dreaming,’ she said; ‘was not the fire out when you woke up?’
I asked her, then, ‘What of the buckle?’
‘You lost it in some other part of the house – and a servant picked it up, and meaning either to restore it, or not, dropped or deliberately placed it in the disused wing, which, nevertheless, is often used by the servants when up to nefarious practices,’ she said.
‘And my dress?’ I answered. ‘Come and see it’ – and she came.
The ivory satin train was half a yard deep in dust and dirt – the front was disfigured by the candle grease that had fallen on it as my hand trembled. I could never wear the gown again.
‘Clearly you walk in your sleep,’ Lady William said with perfect sang-froid; ‘Kenneth must cure you of such tricks – if what I hear is true?’
I said that it might be true – and my hand stole to my bosom, where, for greater safety, the letter whose loss had brought about such a striking experience lay, and to which I had not yet written an answer – though long ago, had not my heart and eyes given it?
‘I have asked him for Christmas,’ she said, ‘and he comes on Saturday.’ She smiled, and came and kissed me, but was resolute not to discuss what had happened to me overnight.
‘And you must let me give you a new frock,’ she said, ‘as a punishment for living in an old castle with miles of dirty passages!’
And she sent for her maid, and would not go away until the woman had got my measurements, and she promised me that my frock should arrive before Kenneth, and so it did.
But before that, and this is a true and strange thing, each night, close on twelve, I would be seized with an intense longing to hear that melody again, and my feet would begin to move of their own accord towards the door, and there would be so fierce a struggle between my will and their intention, that I would have to sit down, and hold fast to the arms of the chair, and wish that Kenneth were here to hold me in his, and keep my feet from itching to follow the music, that I knew was ravishing the silence, and which I was at too great a distance to hear. And I longed to see once more that face in the mirror – to question it – to ask if the murderer had escaped, or if he had walked free among his fellow-men with the blood stain on his hand hidden – and for that awful injustice done to her, she must come back for ever and ever to her death chamber, luring with the spell of ensnaring music, strangers to the spot where, helpless, she met her death, unavenged to this day!
Night by night, the longing grew – taking such fierce hold upon me, that the sweat would pour off my brow, and by main force I would hold myself still till half-past twelve, when the fierce struggle relaxed, and, exhausted, I would fall into deep slumber.
And even in the day time the ebullient gaiety that used to distinguish me was gone, and I could not lose myself in thoughts of Kenneth and his coming; I could not even feel that I loved him very much; I was as one in a thrall, and even when I read his love-letters, I wondered if that murdered girl had been loved as Kenneth loved me – if it were because love had made her life so sweet, and she so loath to leave it, that the horror of her fate had made such imprint on her face as life departed . . . and the desire burned and burned in me to find out the real truth of the apparition and the ghostly melody, and which my hostess knew, but would not tell me.
I found the gown that she had ordered for me laid out on my bed when I came home from driving, on the day before I expected Kenneth, and I gazed upon it with no pleasure – I would so much rather have had the secret of the melody, and the face in the mirror, that she would not give me.
I had brought no maid, and as the woman lent to me by Lady William laced my frock for dinner, I looked idly at her face – reflected behind mine in the glass, and then I looked again, struck by something faintly familiar in it – not the features, which were very pretty, but the expression – where had I seen one like it, and when?
Her trained fingers did their work deftly, but there was no spring in them, and no life in her aspect; looking closely at her, I could see that she was completely absorbed in one idea – and that one of fear – and the fear in her face was the faint shadow of the vivid, overmastering one that I had seen in the face of the murdered girl in the mirror.
I know little of magnetism, of the power of the physical touch, or I might argue that her fingers carried a nerve message to my brain, but somehow I realised that the girl was in trouble, that a man was at the bottom of it, that if ever one woman stood in need of another woman’s help, this one did now.
She arranged the flowers on the bodice of my dress, gave me my gloves, fan, and handkerchief, all without the least relaxing of that strained, waiting look on her face, and it was on my lips to ask what her trouble was, though I knew how frankly the lower orders resent such sympathy from their betters, and seldom forgive those who offer it.
But the dinner bell was ringing, and I went downstairs, and at dinner I contrived to study each one of the men-servants present, and before dessert had arrived at a conclusion – the man who had brought me my buckle was at the bottom of the trouble. Also, by the perfectly infallible rule that makes the prettiest and brightest women choose the very worst possible men, this one was as sorry a knave, for all his powder and smart livery, as ever I saw.
He, too, seemed in a dream, and made several small mistakes in waiting at table – and it was an ugly dream too, judging by his expression, an expression that became a direct menace to some person unknown, when, watching him closely, I saw him, alone for a moment at the sideboard, slip into his coat-tail pocket a sharp knife, that the butler had used for carving game. I could see the dent it made in his coat as he moved to and fro, and I knew that he had hidden it there for no good purpose, yet how was I to hinder him from carrying that purpose out?
A deaf old man, greedily intent on his plate, had taken me in, and a man desperately enamoured of the girl next to him, was on my left, so I had plenty of time in which to think the matter out, and in which to put two and two together, the maid’s looks upstairs, the man’s below, and yet I was too dense to do so – then.
At dessert a telegram was handed to Lady William, and she left the table at once, after sending round the message to her husband, and within an hour had left the castle to go to her mother who was dangerously ill.
I could not worry her with the matter of a footman’s vagaries at such a time, and having begged us all to stay on, and insisted that I should not put off Kenneth, she departed, and after a dull evening in the drawing-room among w
omen, half of whom meditated flight on the morrow, I went upstairs to bed.
The maid, Esther, was usually in waiting to unlace me, but tonight she was not there, and, expecting her every minute, and unable to unfasten my frock for myself, I took up a book, and read on for quite half an hour. I can never quite account to myself for not ringing, but I did not; and only when I looked at the clock, and saw that it wanted five minutes to twelve, did I realise that I had felt no overpowering desire to explore the haunted room, as at this hour I usually did.
But I could not sleep in an evening gown, and I was about to ring the bell, possibly to get no response, when suddenly there came over me an entirely different sensation to any I had felt before; this was one of overwhelming horror, something that froze my marrow, palsied the tongue with which I tried to cry out, engulfed me as in a billow of icy water that knocked breath and sight out of me as it passed . . . through that sense of disaster, of peril, flashed the thought, ‘Why is not Esther here – and why did that man hide the knife? He knows of the haunted chamber, or he could not have found my buckle there . . .’
I snatched one of the lighted candles from the toilette table, and the matches that lay beside it, and sped down the staircase, across the hall, along those corridors and passages through which a haunting melody had beckoned me; but there was no strain of music now – not even the far-off cry of a woman lured to her fate by the lover who had betrayed her; but was not that a light athwart the dark passage, and did it not come from the haunted room? I was yet some fifty yards from it, when a stifled moan, stifled in the uttering, spurred me on, and I dashed in at the door to find Esther gagged and on her knees, while the man, who had secreted the knife at dinner, stood over her, about to strike.
He breathed hard, and glared at me as I struck the weapon out of his hand, then set my foot upon it, and I have since thought it strange that he did not regain possession of it, for we were but two weak women against six feet of ruffian manhood, and he could easily have killed the pair of us if he had had the pluck, and the presence of mind.
But my unforeseen entry, the hour, the situation, unmanned him; and also he had been drinking, and looked a mere loutish brute as he backed away from me, and so through the door, and out of sight.
Then I kneeled down, and took the gag out of the poor girl’s mouth, and the look of the murdered that had been on her face when I burst in (involuntarily my eyes sought the mirror, but it was vacant) gradually faded. She kissed my hand, and burst into tears over it, and, as we kneeled together on the dusty floor, she told me her story. How this man had courted only to deceive her, and now was paying his addresses to one of the ladies’ maids staying in the house, to whom she had threatened to tell the truth, if he persisted in his attentions to her.
They had been wont to meet here, in the haunted chamber, and Esther had kept the tryst William had made with her, when he had suddenly set upon, and gagged her, and but for my appearance would have killed and hidden her away in one of the old cellars, where her bones might have remained undiscovered to all time.
‘He found your buckle, miss,’ said Esther, ‘and only brought it back for fear you should come by daylight to look for it – and bring others with you who might find their way here again. But ’twas God Himself sent you here tonight’ – then suddenly she screamed out ‘Look!’ and pointed to the mirror, across which a face flitted that seemed to be looking directly at us, a face that smiled at me, and looked a blessing at me, if ever a spirit face did.
And I knew then, that she had called me, first by that haunting melody, to show me the way, then by spiritual means to save another loving woman from the tragedy that had been her own, and now having prevented it, she would ‘walk’ no more, since she had accomplished what was better than revenge.
Esther has been in our service many years; her child is at school, and she is fairly happy. The man Rufus was never heard of again, and it is thought that he lost his life in the floods that were out that night. And sometimes I sit down to the piano and try to put into notes the melody that still sounds so plain in my ears, and the children laugh, and say, ‘mother is picking out a tune,’ but Kenneth knows better.
Charles Beaumont
THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
One of the premier American speculative fiction writers of the mid-20th century, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) was until recently remembered chiefly for his film and TV work, including scripts for several of the most memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone and a number of Roger Corman films. When Beaumont died at age 38 of a still-unexplained illness, he left behind three published collections of short fiction; a novel, The Intruder (1959), basis for a film starring William Shatner; and a wealth of unpublished material, all of which in recent years has enjoyed a remarkable revival. Starting with Valancourt’s reissue of The Hunger and Other Stories (1957) in 2012, Beaumont’s work has received substantial new attention, including collector’s editions from Centipede Press and a best-of collection from Penguin Classics. ‘The Life of the Party’ is a rare Beaumont tale that had gone unpublished until its inclusion in a now out-of-print limited edition volume in 2013. In addition to its inherent interest as a macabre tale with a trademark Beaumont twist ending, the story is also significant for its autobiographical elements: according to Roger Anker, the events at the high school dance ‘happened to Beaumont in 1944 . . . exactly as he depicted them in the story’. Beaumont’s The Hunger and Other Stories, A Touch of the Creature, and The Intruder are all available from Valancourt.
‘I can’t tell you how pleased i am,’ said Mr Hulbush, smiling shyly at his companion. ‘Of course, I’d always meant to invite you, but somehow I could never find the courage. I suppose I was afraid of being turned down.’ He laughed. ‘I agree! It is silly. But that’s what comes of being an only child. You’ll meet my mother and then you’ll understand completely. Not that I blame her. She behaved like any normal mother, I suppose. Under the circumstances. I mean, with the first three dying and all, and my father running away. It was natural that she should want to protect me, coddle me, keep me out of harm’s way. Don’t you agree?’
The white-haired man beside him said nothing.
‘Still, it wasn’t the best start in the world. And my appearance didn’t help much, either. From the age of twelve I was plagued with acne, you see. What with that, my crooked ears, and my bulbous nose, I did not present a very attractive appearance. But of course mother always told me I was a lovely child, and I believed her. Until I started school. And you can imagine what happened then. The children mocked me. They told me my face looked like a relief map of the Adirondacks. I remember that one. I didn’t know exactly what Aiderondacks were, but I got the point, nonetheless. And it crushed me. Mother said the children were simply jealous of me because I lived in a big house and got high marks, but I wasn’t sure. I thought perhaps it was simply that I was ugly. So I went to the doctor for shots and sent away for ointments and salves and gave up sweets altogether, but nothing did any good. Every night I would stand before the mirror, touching the great tender sores and weeping. Do I bore you?’
The white-haired man did not reply.
‘Well,’ continued Mr Hulbush, ‘I heard of a dance coming up about that time. I had seen a girl in class and, though she and I had never exchanged a word, I found that I was dreaming about her. I would go to sleep and dream about her smooth tan skin, the little tiny hairs on her legs shining gold in the sunlight, the heavy ring dangling from a chain between her breasts. And I determined that I would go to the dance and see her. For hours I worked at preparing myself. First I squeezed all the pimples and boils. Then I applied a special salve. Then I covered it all up with a white powder, which I patted just so. Then came the combing of the hair, again just so, and the donning of my best, and only, suit. Mother warned me that I was making a terrible mistake, but I wouldn’t listen to her. I was determined.’ Mr Hulbush laughed sadly. ‘Did I go through with it? Yes. I went alone, long after the festivities had begun. It was at Ba
rker Hall, which at that time stood in the midst of a dark field. I walked across the field and presently I could hear the sounds of music and laughter. Barker Hall was blazing in the night like a beacon, I thought, or a lighthouse. With every step my fear grew. My palms were hot and wet. My heart was hammering.
But the fear forced me on. Much as I wanted to turn and run, I could not. So I stood for a moment at the door, wiping my hands on my trousers, and then I went in. It was bedlam. Thousands of young people – or anyway it seemed like thousands – were dancing and laughing and drinking. The air was full of smoke and the smell of alcohol. There were all the children I saw at school, only now, in their dark suits and tight gowns, they didn’t look like children, but young Apollos and Dianas. No one noticed me, of course. I continued to stand by the door, trying to swallow. Then I saw her. If she was lovely seated at her desk with the sun on her legs, she was incredible now. The gown she wore was black velvet. It hugged her. God! She was so beautiful, and I wanted her so much, then, so very much . . .’
Mr Hulbush turned off the main highway onto a rutted, unpaved road walled on either side by thick dark trees. Then he glanced at his passenger, Professor Brady. ‘Remember, though we were classmates, we’d never spoken to one another. Less than a foot away from her every day for two years, I’d worshipped her from afar. Now she was pressing her body close to a young man and laughing. I admit that I thought terrible, unwholesome things then. I will tell you because we are friends now. I thought of her flesh beneath the dress, and of the young man’s flesh, and of how close each was to the other now. Their naked flesh separated by less than a fraction of an inch! And what I would have given then to exchange places with that fellow, I cannot tell you. Consummation enough, only that, and far more than I ever dreamed possible for me. The music stopped after a moment. The young people uncoupled, and the boy walked away from the girl with the golden legs, leaving her standing there, alone. I rushed forward, pushed from behind by the desperate fear of fifteen agonized years. She turned her head. She saw me. Recognition flickered. I said, ‘Hello.’ And she answered me. Do you know what she said, that Diana with the golden legs, that object of my dreams and hopes? She said: “Who let you in?” ’
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Page 8