Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  ‘I saw the keeper (if it was the keeper) bring his hands sharply before his body, with the picture cord twined round his fingers. And my fingers were dry, on edge. I could hardly bear to touch the rough tweed of my coat. I heard him speak the words which sealed me.

  ‘ “I shall kill you.”

  ‘She drew in her breath, gasping, as if already she were choking. My fingers were curled and tensed, I was paralysed. He went on:

  ‘ “They will find the poacher with money on him, money I shall take from you. I have set the mantrap by the wood. He will be blamed, not me. He will take my punishment. And Coombe Morwen will be mine.”

  ‘ “I shall always be here with you, brother. Always. Always. Always here.”

  ‘ “Go up to bed. I shall bring you your posset. And after, when you settle for sleep. . . .”

  ‘He did not finish the sentence. Yes, I thought – when she settled for sleep. That was the time. . . .

  ‘Her voice came once more, and now from the foot of the stairs, yet far away, as if from the end of a long tunnel.

  ‘ “Listen, brother. I make you a prophecy. If this house is taken down and moved to another place, then, and only then will you lay your hands on me. But the house can never be moved.”

  ‘When he answered, it seemed that I answered with him.

  ‘ “The house has been moved to another place. We have come with it. I have waited only for him to come, and he is here now.”

  ‘That was all I heard. And then, in the silence, the keeper turned round and faced me.

  ‘ “Everything all right, sir?”

  ‘I said yes – yes, everything was as it should be, and now I am calm, like a last leaf on an autumn tree, knowing I must drift to earth, but not yet. As I write now the same sense of relief fills me. I listen again for further words; nothing comes. Why should it? I was shown the way, I have taken it. The way, the truth and the death? Is it that? It doesn’t matter. I can smoke and relax now. The keeper is about the place. I feel easy. Perhaps I shall go up and celebrate. I am very calm, with a greater calm than I have had in these three weeks, ever since I closed the door of our house in St Andrew’s Street, and knew that Adelaide might stay there, undisturbed, for months.

  ‘Yes. I am calm. I feel safe here. I knew I should be safe here, when I came today. For it is my place. Coombe Morwen. Mine.’

  I’ve read what I’ve copied so far, and it makes me ask a lot of questions. Too many, and uncomfortable ones. I suppose, if I were staying on in Exeter, I might be tempted to follow up two things: the actual circumstances of Foster’s life with his sister, Adelaide; and what is known about the history of Coombe Morwen. And – the background of the keeper who still leaves me to myself here.

  There’s still an hour to go before the bus, and it’s bloody cold here. I’d better copy the rest of Foster’s stuff, though I begin to wish I’d never embarked on it at all. The next bit is much more incoherent, words scribbled rapidly, harder to read. It looks as though he were scaring himself as he wrote, which isn’t any wonder –

  Here’s the last of it, then.

  ‘I have done what I never meant to do, I have, I have written about her. If anyone reads –

  ‘Burn it all in the fire – burn it – no. Go on writing, go on. The keeper has got used to you writing here – here – here. Always, she said . . . Always. She would always be here. Of course, I knew that when I came back today. Accept. Curiously calming, just to know there’s no escape. If you can’t escape, you’re safe, that stands to reason. All you have to do is repeat it, repeat it, again and again, repeat it, repeat –

  ‘The front door is opening, Someone coming in. It is very dark now, you will not be seen. Somebody coming towards me – must be the keeper, must be –

  ‘ “Do you answer to the name of Morgan Foster of 17 St Andrew’s Street, Exeter?”

  ‘I have written that down, just as he said it. Don’t answer. Don’t look up. Safe here. . . . always. . . .’

  Then follows a statement which, unlike the above, seems quite controlled. It was written, the keeper tells me, later on the same day, in the Police Station.

  ‘This is the statement of Morgan Foster, of 17 St Andrew’s Street, Exeter. I have said I will not answer questions. I will state what I have to state here, where I have been brought under duress, and charged with an act of violence against my sister, Adelaide. I have been told that she has been sent for, to come and see me here. If this is so, I will not recognise her, I refuse to admit that I have failed. But before I discuss this further I wish to explain why I lost control of myself on the edge of the wood near Coombe Morwen, when I made an attempt to run away from the policeman who had charge of me. It was the mantrap. I think it was wrong of them to place it there. When I saw the square iron platform half concealed by dead bracken with the spiked teeth gaping open ready to snap I lost command of myself. I now wish that I had planted my foot firmly on that platform, for if it had any life left in it I think I could more have endured the pain of being held by that than the pain which holds me now. I realise now, of course, that the thing had long been out of use, and had only been put there as an exhibit, in the kind of place it would have been. But I do not think it should have been left there, and I am sorry it caused me to give so much trouble. The policeman who led me away was kind enough. He cannot have understood that I could feel the teeth meeting in the flesh of my leg. And I do not expect anyone to understand that what gnaws at me now is worse. She said – as in what I have written of what I heard at Coombe Morwen – she said he would live with it forever; and this is right for me too. When I went back to the house today I felt certain it was all behind me, forever finished; but it is too close behind me, and it can never be finished. Perhaps I shall be allowed to return to Coombe Morwen when I freely confess that I killed my sister, Adelaide, three weeks ago, after the visit to the house I have described. It will be seen from this that I had to do what I did, and I will not believe I failed. I had to do it, not just because she made a hell of my life but also because I had to act within the inevitable design showed to me at Coombe Morwen. If the house had not been moved this could not have happened; but the house was moved, therefore it had to happen, and I am not responsible.

  ‘The Inspector who was watching me here as I write has gone out, and now he is returning with someone else. It is a woman. I will not look at her. She is now standing right close to me. I hear her words. “Oh Morgan, how could you? And you – all I had.” But now she has not got me, not as she had me before. It does not matter if I failed, for the desire is all important, and I made the essential action. I feel strong. I can live with my hatred. Nothing can change me. Whatever they do to me, it does not matter. It does not – Christ! I looked at her. In only three weeks she has aged greatly. Yet she looks as though she will never die. . . .’

  ‘Yet she looks as though she will never die.’ According to the keeper he never added any more, or made any verbal statement, either in the police station, or later.

  Less and less do I feel like making any comment on all this, and I wish to God I’d never copied it. But there is still time on my hands and while today is fresh in my mind I might as well write the end of the matter, as far as I’m concerned – if I am concerned. And in some way I am.

  The keeper, as I’ve noted, went out to see to the sheep, leaving me to read Foster’s mad ramblings. After my first reading of it – that is, before I’d made this copy – he hadn’t returned. I heard a scuttling sound in the other room, something tiny rustling across the flagstones. I went in, but couldn’t discover any reason for the sound at first; then I saw it moving – nothing but a dead, dried leaf on the floor, blown in with a sudden gust of wind. I picked it up, and looked at the mantrap. There it stood like an outsize gin, reminding me that men had once been treated like rats.

  I stood there for a few seconds, uncertain
whether to leave the place now, and wait for the bus by the village church. But it would be a long wait and it was still raining. Then it was that I heard another sound, upstairs, a board creaking and a kind of muffled thump. Going to the foot of the bare polished stairway, I called. No answer. So I went up.

  Nobody there, which didn’t surprise me. But I looked into the two main bedrooms, lofty rooms with a weight of thatch bunched above the ancient double beds, one of them a four-poster. I thought of beds and what they meant to us – begetting, birth, death. The door to the little room, often closed to visitors because of some loose boards, was open. I went to it. There was a shelving step down and I almost fell and had to clutch the door lintel.

  I heard four words spoken. They were, in fact, ‘Be careful now, sir.’ But as I write this I think of four other words. ‘He has come then.’

  It was, of course, the keeper. He came towards me, putting his hand out to my arm. But I signified I had no need for his help. For some reason I didn’t want him to touch me.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come up,’ I said. ‘I was lost in what you gave me to read.’

  He said he had come the back way, and asked me, ‘How did you take it then, sir?’

  I asked him whether Foster had been right as to the history of the house. ‘As near as could be,’ he said, ‘though he never got it from me.’ In 1790, it appears, the last of a family called Price lived here, a brother and sister, Hubert and Dorcas. Hubert ran away to sea, and his father disowning him, left house and land to the daughter and died before Hubert returned. He found that in his absence his sister had virtually starved the mother to death, to get possession of the place. Hubert tried to strangle Dorcas, but failed, and was caught in the mantrap he had set for the poacher.

  ‘It was said in Morwenbeare that he was held there for two whole days, sir, his leg mangled horrible. Dorcas Price heard his screams, they say – but would she go to him? Not that lady! Found by the squire’s men he was, and all the money taken from the house where she’d hoarded it – in that little cabinet downstairs, sir – crushed into the ground where he’d been stamping and struggling with his one free foot. Better, I say, to have left him, instead of dragging him out to hang him, which they did.’

  I asked him whether there had been an incestuous relationship.

  ‘Well, sir, all we know for certain – because he’s in the Parish register – is that she had a child, but nobody knew who the father was. She hid the poor little thing from the villagers, and when he died – it was in this room, sir – she didn’t last long. And that was the end of the Price family.’

  I looked at the crumbling old bed, covered by a tattered patchwork quilt.

  ‘After that,’ he went on, ‘various folk took on Coombe Morwen, but never any luck nobody had, till, in 1933, it stood empty and rotting away for three years. Then the trustees of St Breward’s got it, and here it is, sir, for all to visit. I expect Mr Foster dug the story out somehow and that’s why he took to coming here, his being a similar tale, like.’

  ‘But how similar?’ I asked him sharply. I doubted every word the man said by now. ‘For example, was there any such relationship between him and his sister?’

  ‘Well, sir . . . There was something – not quite as it should be, you felt. And she went on visiting him, every day, at the East Devon Infirmary, and that can’t have been exactly a comfort. Detained at His Majesty’s pleasure, sir, see? The doctors tried to do what they could for him. But he never opened his mouth, except once or twice when she failed to turn up. Then he’d go raving mad, attacked the nurses sometimes. Oh, very difficult, he could be then, very difficult! I could calm him down a bit; and I reckon he appreciated that, in his dumb way. Anyway, he said several times that he wanted me to have his notebook, it ought to be at Coombe Morwen, he said. The police had let him have it back, you see, sir; one of the doctors had suggested it might help him to have it. It was quoted at the Assize by his counsel, every bit of it read out. But Foster, never one more word did he say, except he pleaded guilty. Four years in that place, then he went and died, quiet like. I went to the funeral, sir – and the only one, me and Miss Foster. I often think, must have been terrible for him to know he’d failed, like the other one before him, or alongside of him, as you might say. You see, sir, when he comes up here that November day he writes about, he really did think he’d gone for her; a strangling job, see? But he hadn’t got very strong hands, very delicate they were. Then he locks up the house, leaving her unconscious, and spends three weeks in the Albany Hotel in Exeter, living on money he’d taken from Miss Foster. Of course he had the wits to use another name.

  ‘Then one day, December the 21st, he comes back here again. And that was his undoing, because a policeman sees him get on the bus for St Breward’s, and follows. He hadn’t once left the Albany in that three weeks. Then his cash runs out, and he comes back here, to take stock of himself, like he says in his book. Miss Foster, she screamed the house down when she came round, till the neighbours called the police and they find her, locked in her bedroom. She still had the marks of it round her neck, even when I met her. Act of violence! I should say it was! But she forgave him, and never gave up hope she’d get him back home with her. Better, I sometimes think, if he’d gone the way of Hubert Price; more merciful than to spin out the rest of his days as he did – seeing her every day, too.’

  (And, I thought, at times the keeper.)

  I made a move towards the stairhead; but he was barring the door with his lumbersome body. I asked why the mantrap had been left outside on the edge of the wood.

  He looked at me. He had pinkish bland eyes.

  ‘That, sir? It never was left outside. He imagined that, like his voices. What happened was – the copper comes, finds him writing downstairs where you were sitting, can’t get a word out of him, takes him in charge and leads him out. Then, sudden, he makes a run for it, and when he gets to the edge of the wood he begins to scream – terrible sound it was, cut right across to the old barn, quarter mile away, where I was talking to Joe – him who got me out to the sheep just now. Terrible sound.’

  ‘The barn?’ I looked steadily at him. ‘But you were here, in the house. He keeps referring to you.’

  ‘Oh no, sir. I told you there were things he got wrong about me, and that was one of them, as I said in court when I had to give evidence. I was never in the house at all that afternoon. Burning leaves, near the barn, I was. Here the first time he writes about I might have been. But never that day. Oh no! Never even saw him come. Only heard him screaming later. Never forgot that. Nobody could.’

  It was then, foolishly, I asked whether I could borrow Foster’s narrative to make a copy; I felt it was too strange a story to lose.

  But he wouldn’t have this. ‘I couldn’t let it out of my care, sir. It’s a kind of sacred trust, like everything else what’s come to roost here. But you’re welcome to copy it now, on the premises. I can make the fire up for you and come back in half-an-hour or so. I’ve got to see all the other houses are locked up for the night.’

  I remarked that it would take me some time to copy it. But he made light of this. ‘Your time’s your own, sir. And I’ve got paper here; I’m making some notes myself about the place, little bit of amateur research, like.’

  At last he limped down the stairs, and I followed. My mind was racing. I did not want to stay. Yet now I had missed the bus and. . . .

  He found paper, bellowsed up the fire, lit a candle and went to the door. ‘Make yourself comfortable, sir. Take your time. No hurry. Time’s what we make of it, that’s what I always say.’

  Then he went.

  And still no sign of him. Not that I want to see him. But there’s a lot I’d like to get out of him. There’s something monstrous, something forced, about all this; something too inhuman to be real – the whole story seems distorted. But if it is, by whom? Foster? He sounds
pathetic. I feel that his story had been blown up out of all proportion – though certainly you could say, taking his writing at its face value, that if he hadn’t come here he might never have tried to kill his sister – if he even did so. Is the whole thing an obsessive fiction of the keeper’s? But no – he could not have written what I have copied. Yet, if Foster had never met him. . . .

  Is this where it is rooted then, in the keeper? – a disease which he holds here, to infect suitable victims? Murder unresolved – the thought never consummated in the act: a darker hell than murder itself. . . .

  I’d better go. No good waiting longer for him. Yet there’s still twenty minutes before the bus, and I feel I ought to check on some details of that vile mantrap. But I don’t; I stay, looking down at the table, and all I have written. I wait for the sound of his uneven footsteps outside in the half dusk. But all I hear is the steady fall of rain, rain gushing down now.

  I think of Foster, four years inside, and his sister visiting him every day. I suppose, in his mind, he was always here – is always here. And Hubert Price, and Dorcas, Adelaide – always here at Coombe Morwen, with their keeper. . . .

  Always here. . . .

  That bloody leaf is scuttling across the flagstones in the kitchen again. I must get out of this place. . . .

  X

  Tyme Tryeth Troth

  The field was very wide and the path twisted across it towards a tall stone hedge. Above the hedge the man could see the chimneys and the two top windows of a cottage, and as from one of the chimneys there was smoke, he assumed that the place was occupied. The path seemed to lead to some flat stone jutting out like steps from the hedge, and it would only bring him, he reflected, into the garden of the cottage. But peasant people would not mind him passing through; and he could ask them the nearest way back to the village.