Nightmare Farm

by Jack Mann

  He would say no more, evidently. Gees crossed the room and, opening the other door, saw a very large kitchen, brick-floored, with an old-time brick oven as a cavity in the chimney wall and some faggots lying beside it: apparently Stukeley and his wife used that troublesome but unsurpassable form of cooking. An enormous gallows arm with chain and hook, all red with rust, showed how pots had once been hung over fires on the open hearth, which was swept clean, now. Again, stepping on to the hearth, Gees saw the party wall and sky above: at floor level, he estimated, this chimney was not less than fourteen feet square inside.

  Emerging, he looked through an open doorway into a scullery as large as the kitchen—save for the space taken up by the staircase cutting off a piece of what Stukeley called the parlour, these four ground-floor rooms were identical in area. There was a large copper set in brickwork, by the side of this room’s portion of the chimney, which here again had been built up to enclose a large grate, and on one hob a kettle sang—the cheerfullest thing Gees had yet seen since he entered the roadway to Nightmare—while in the grate itself small logs burned silently and with but little flame. Both here and in the kitchen the cheap, new-looking furniture and utensils covered two people’s needs, but no more.

  “We might had more stuff,” Stukeley remarked, “if we’d liked. The squire said I could order what I wanted for the six months, but more stuff, more work for the missus. So this is what I got.”

  “And now, upstairs, please,” Gees suggested.

  They went back to the unfurnished “parlour,” and in the middle of the room Gees paused for a few moments, Stukeley going on and looking back as if to see why he lingered. The reason was the position of what Stukeley called the “living room.” As things were, Mrs. Stukeley would have to carry whatever she cooked in the scullery—which by the look of the kitchen hearth meant everything, except on days when the oven was heated—through the kitchen, through this parlour, and across the entrance passage, unless they took their meals on the kitchen dresser. Apart from that, there was no table in either kitchen or scullery. Use of this room would have saved her half the distance.

  “Did you make this your living room, at first?” he asked.

  “I’m showin’ you over the house,” Stukeley answered from the stairs’ foot.

  Toneless though the reproof was, it declared that he would do what he had to do under protest, say what he had to say and no word more. At the same time, it revealed that he and his wife had begun their time in the house with this as their living room, as was only reasonable: otherwise, the man would have had no cause for withholding answer to the question. Reaching that conclusion, Gees saw Mrs. Stukeley come down from the upper floor and disappear in the living room, and with that, guessing she had been to do some tidying before he made his inspection, he joined Stukeley and they clattered up the bare stairs together.

  At the top, a door on the right gave access to a narrow passage, unlighted except by such ray as came through an open doorway at its far end, which led to the room over the kitchen, and then there were two doors facing each other just at the top of the stairs, one for the apartment over the living room, the other for that over the parlour. Stukeley led on to the open door first, and Gees saw an empty room of about the area of the kitchen, with, to the right, another open door, beyond which was the room corresponding to the scullery beneath it. Bare boards, white-washed ceilings, and flowered wallpaper with pale oblongs showing where pictures had hung, gave the rooms a desolate look out of keeping with the sunrays striking through their windows. Here was nothing to call for comment, and he retraced his steps to find his guide opening the door which admitted to the bedroom over the living room, sparely furnished, and with the bedding on the cheap iron double bedstead obviously straightened in haste. Here, as in the other two rooms, a small register stove had been fitted, long ago, if the pattern of it went for anything.

  “Bathroom?” Gees inquired abruptly.

  The first suspicion of a smile half-dawned on Stukeley’s face, and faded. “A tin bath, the scullery tap, an’ a kettle,” he said. “I s’pose that’s what the people afore us did, too.”

  So that was that, and nothing in this room called for comment. Gees emerged, and tried the door facing him, but it did not give.

  “Locked,” said Stukeley.

  “Where’s the key?” Gees demanded.

  “It’s like the others, only there’s no stove. Empty, too,” Stukeley parried, quite without interest, apparently.

  “Shall I come down with you while you get the key, or wait here for you?” Gees asked, and made his words sound uninterested. A minute, nearly, of silent battle, and then Stukeley gave in.

  “I’ll fetch it,” he said, and went down the stairs.

  He returned almost immediately, turned the key in the lock that protested with a screech over being disturbed, and pushed the door open. Gees entered the empty room, which should have been of identical area with the “parlour,” at least from the outer to the inner wall, but, as Gees saw at once, being on the alert for something because of the locked door, was not. Further to that, it had no stove in it.

  Here, by the door, the distance from wall to outer wall was identical with that of the room under it, Gees decided, but the shape of the room was different. For a minute or so he stood puzzling over the difference, and then he saw it. The wall of the chimney projected farther into the room than into that of the room beneath. With Stukeley’s gaze on him, he moved slowly to the right, eyeing the projecting angle of the chimney wall, papered, as was the rest of the room, in a pattern gay with roses, rather faded, now. Down in the angle made by the chimney’s emergence lay a crumpled and faded blue bow of silk, as, perhaps, May Norris had left it. Had this been her room? But the chimney wall itself, narrowing the width of the room by fully a yard, compared with that of the parlour... Smoothly and neatly papered from ceiling to floor, and giving no sign that a stove had ever been fixed in this room, or that it had in any way been connected with the chimney, the wall projected. No casual observer, merely inspecting the place with a view to occupancy, would have noticed it: probably neither Norris nor any of his predecessors had so much as thought about it. And Stukeley?

  “What’s the idea in keeping the room locked up?” Gees asked.

  “We don’t use it,” Stukeley answered baldly.

  “I can see that, but you don’t use those other two either. Why not keep them locked as well, while you’re about it?”

  “Never thought of it,” said Stukeley.

  “Then why keep this one locked, specially?” Gees persisted.

  “We don’t use it,” Stukeley repeated.

  There was nothing in his utterly passionless sentences to indicate stubborn refusal to give his reason, but, all the same, Gees gave it up. A final glance round, and he moved to the doorway.

  “Attics?” he asked.

  Stukeley pointed up at a trapdoor in the ceiling over the top of the staircase. “There,” he answered.

  “There is a ladder, I suppose?”

  “Broke,” said Stukeley.

  “You mean, broken since you came here?” Gees persisted.

  “No, I found the pieces.”

  “Well, have you been up there yourself?”

  “I certainly have!” There was a momentary vigour in the reply, almost startling after his previous lack of any emphasis in what he said. But then, as if recollecting himself, he went on his flat, normal way. “No floor, only beams an’ lath an’ plaster—it’d break the bedroom ceilin’s in if you stepped off the beams. No windows—you’d want a candle. An’ bare rafters an’ a maze o’ cross-beams. That’s all. I forgot, though—cobwebs, an’ bats to put the candle out.”

  “If there is no ladder, how did you get up there?” Gees asked.

  “Put a box on a chair, stood on it, an’ shoved my head through. I didn’t go no farther,” Stukeley explained. “Didn’t want to.”

  Gees stood irresolute, looking up at the t
rap-door. It was fitted with a hasp and staple, and padlocked, he saw. The hasp and lock appeared very new: the brass of the lock was quite bright.

  “Neither do you,” said Stukeley, as one stating an uninteresting fact.

  On that, Gees felt a momentary determination to get up into those attics if he had to fight Stukeley to do it, but the resolve was no more than a gust that passed and left him incurious about the attic floor. He backed into the stoveless bedroom, the door of which Stukeley had not closed, and, again looking at the projecting chimney wall, saw that it came within a foot of a line drawn across the room from the edge of the window—less than a foot, in fact, for it was within one plank width of the window framing’s outer edge. He came out again.

  “No,” he said. “I want one more look into the parlour.”

  Stukeley left the door of the room open with the key in the lock, and followed down the stairs to find Gees already in the parlour. Its window, as Gees had noted before he approached the house—

  though he meant to make quite sure when he left—was directly under the bedroom window and of almost similar dimensions, yet here the line of the chimney wall was four and a half planks width back from the edge of the window framing. A full yard farther back, in fact. Was that bulge a cupboard of some sort belonging to the bedroom, but papered over and thus hidden.

  With no word to Stukeley, Gees ran up the stairs again, entered the room, and hurt his knuckles on the protruding wall. It gave back no resonance anywhere, but was solid as old brickwork should be. Returning, he faced Stukeley at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’d like one more look into your living room,” he said.

  “It’s there,” said Stukeley.

  Gees entered the room, and went to stand on the open hearth again. He saw, what he had missed before, that in the right hand corner facing him, and therefore in the angle of the party wall, a series of cross bars formed steps by which one might ascend inside the chimney. The soot that encrusted all but the lowest three of these bars went to prove that they had not been used as steps for a very long time. Standing back at the edge of the hearth as he faced inward, Gees counted ten of the bars to the top of the party wall, and, higher up, light enough came down the chimney to show him a series of u-shaped, soot-encrusted irons going up the farther main wall of the chimney. Thus, if one climbed to the top of the party wall by these bars, it would be possible to cross by its top to those u projections, and continue the ascent, but only for ten more steps, for there were only ten u-pieces in the wall.

  And no visible doorway, nor anything to show why it had been rendered possible to climb just that far up the chimney and no more. Other projections, higher up, might have been removed, of course. As far as the steps went up, the chimney wall showed in the dim light as unbroken in any way, crusted with soot that had ridged into little stilled waves, furry-looking at their edges.

  Furry-looking at their edges! The phrase had drifted into Gees’ mind, and he gave a little shiver as he stepped out from the hearth. He went out into the passage and faced Stukeley.

  “I’ve seen all I want to see of the house,” he said. “Thank you very much for showing me round.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said Stukeley, uninterestedly.

  CHAPTER 6

  PERIVALE

  AT A LITTLE DISTANCE from the end of the shadowed roadway Gees halted and looked back. He saw, now, that his impression of the smallness of the upper windows of the house compared with those of the lower storey was due to the fact that the window of the apartment which the Stukeleys used as a living room was very generously proportioned; it was evidently the best room or parlour of the house, normally, and thus had been specially favoured in the matter of lighting. The other three windows of the frontage were all of the same size, and, viewing the house cornerwise, Gees saw that there was no window at all in this end wall. The window of the bedroom which Stukeley kept locked was directly over that of the empty room beneath, so that the protrusion of the chimney into that bedroom, a good yard farther than it extended into the room beneath, was actual, and not an illusion on his part.

  And now he knew he had made a mistake in not insisting on a survey of the attics. Stukeley had first said that they were tenanted by bats that put out candles, and infested by cobwebs—and then had said that he had done no more than stand on a box placed on a chair and put his head through the trapdoor. He must have done more than that, gone up into the attics: else, how did he know about the bats, and the absence of flooring over the bedroom ceiling beams? Merely sticking a candle through the trapdoor opening was not likely to rouse enough bats to extinguish the candle, for that type of animal hid itself in remote crannies. No, Stukeley had been in the attics, and for some reason had placed a totally unnecessary (from a normal point of view) hasp and padlock on the trapdoor. As if he thought someone in the attics might try to get down, to the lower floors, and wanted to prevent it.

  Too late to go back and insist on exploring the attics, now. A second visit, perhaps, after opening up other avenues of investigation. But why had Stukeley wanted to keep him out of the attics?

  Then, the dog—Gees remembered it suddenly. It had been lying apparently asleep when he had approached Stukeley standing in the porch: to the best of his recollection Stukeley had not spoken to it, and he had not noticed whether it moved before he went inside. But, he knew, an ordinary dog would have displayed some sort of interest in a stranger, and, in nine out of ten cases, would have barked at him. This dog had simply melted away, for it was not lying there now. He could not remember whether it had been still lying there when he had entered the house with Stukeley, but knew he had not seen it move.

  A small circumstance, with nothing really abnormal about it, but he was tensed up in a way that caused him to remark and question even so unimportant a thing as that—if it were unimportant. Now, too, he was not so ready to acquit the house of deserving the local title for the place, or to confine that title to the eerie, shadowed roadway. When Norris had lived here, perhaps, it had been just an ordinary farmhouse, up to the time of May Norris’s seizure, or whatever it was, but now it was in a state that made Stukeley keep one room locked, move his “living room” furniture to his own and his wife’s inconvenience, and go to the expense and trouble of fitting a padlock to the attic trapdoor. And Stukeley, Gees would have sworn, was no sort of man to yield to superstitious fears: yet, at the cost of breaking his agreement with Squire Hunter and thus depriving himself of a reference for any other employer to take up, he was running away at the end of the month.

  Abruptly Gees spun about to face toward the roadway. Was that a distant blackbird, disturbed and chattering as it flew off, or was it a laugh, somewhere near at hand and half-suppressed?

  He listened, but the sound did not recur. Faced away from the house as he was, he saw a tract of meadow land extending toward the road, on the left of the great hedges, and on the right grew a good crop of wheat, its deep green, vigorous blades indicating rich soil beneath it. From the road to this exit from the roadway, the ground sloped gently upward, and then down again to the mere and farmhouse level, so that Gees stood now on a summit. The great chimney, he had been told, was all that remained of the ancient monastery, and he could see no lines in the earth indicating other remains, either of that or of the nunnery in connection with which the first Hunter to own these lands had done deeds which marked him as no better than Robert of evil fame.

  Midday, and there was more light along the roadway now, though still the sun rays came down at an angle that left the rutted track in shadow. A last look back at the house and the thin line of smoke wavering up from the chimney and flattening to north-eastward, and then he entered the shadowed way with that bird’s call or other being’s laughter still in his mind. And—was it fancy, or was the dimness of the way peopled by other, deeper shadows, between him and the gate at the far end? Things of unsubstantial haze that appeared, spinning like transparent tops, and disappeared to appear and di
sappear again?

  He told himself with angry vigour that fancies like this at high noon proved him no fit person to undertake an investigation of this sort. Phil Bird’s tale and Stukeley’s warning and hints were affecting his nerve, and he was letting imagination master reason. He began to whistle “Pack up your troubles,” but stopped, for it seemed that the ghostly laughter broke out again. Yet, when again there was no sound but the faint crunch of his footfalls, he could not be sure that he had heard anything, and if there were any tenuous shadows moving in the twilit way before him, they receded as he advanced. There was nothing, either in sound or sight, of which he could be sure.