But he must do something, he must stop this. The water was now level with the seats of the chairs, but still was soundless. Could he but reach the door!
He put down his naked foot, then cried again. The water was icy cold. Suddenly, leaning, staring at its dark, unbroken sheen, something seemed to push him forward. He fell. His head, his face was under the icy liquid; it seemed adhesive and, in the heart of its ice, hot like melting wax. He struggled to his feet. The water was breast-high. He screamed again and again. He could see the looking glass, the row of books, the picture of Dürer’s Horse, aloof, impervious. He beat at the water, and flakes of it seemed to cling to him like scales of fish, clammy to his touch. He struggled, ploughing his way towards the door.
The water now was at his neck. Then something had caught him by the ankle. Something held him. He struggled, crying, ‘Let me go! Let me go! I tell you to let me go! I hate you! I hate you! I will not come down to you! I will not –’
The water covered his mouth. He felt that someone pushed in his eyeballs with bare knuckles. A cold hand reached up and caught his naked thigh.
VIII
In the morning the little maid knocked and, receiving no answer, came in, as was her wont, with his shaving water. What she saw made her scream. She ran for the gardener.
They took the body with its staring, protruding eyes, its tongue sticking out between the clenched teeth, and laid it on the bed.
The only sign of disorder was an overturned water jug. A small pool of water stained the carpet.
It was a lovely morning. A twig of ivy idly, in the little breeze, tapped the pane.
RUTH RENDELL
(1930– )
Ruth Rendell was born in London, of Swedish and English descent. Her elegant crime fiction and thrillers, which focus on the psychological complexities behind seemingly ordinary lives, have been praised by authors from Toni Morrison to Ian Rankin. She has also edited the ghost stories of M. R. James, whom she described as ‘the best of all’ ghost story writers. During an early job at the Chigwell Times, she reported on a house supposedly haunted by the ghost of an old woman; the owners threatened the newspaper with litigation for devaluing their home. She was made a life peer, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, in 1997 and sits in the House of Lords for Labour. ‘The Haunting of Shawley Rectory’ was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1972.
THE HAUNTING OF SHAWLEY RECTORY
I DON’T BELIEVE in the supernatural, but just the same I wouldn’t live in Shawley Rectory.
That was what I had been thinking and what Gordon Scott said to me when we heard we were to have a new rector at St Mary’s. Our wives gave us quizzical looks.
‘Not very logical,’ said Eleanor, my wife.
‘What I mean is,’ said Gordon, ‘that however certain you might be that ghosts don’t exist, if you lived in a place that was reputedly haunted you wouldn’t be able to help wondering every time you heard a stair creak. All the normal sounds of an old house would take on a different significance.’
I agreed with him. It wouldn’t be very pleasant feeling uneasy every time one was alone in one’s own home at night.
‘Personally,’ said Patsy Scott, ‘I’ve always believed there are no ghosts in the Rectory that a good central-heating system wouldn’t get rid of.’
We laughed at that, but Eleanor said, ‘You can’t just dismiss it like that. The Cobworths heard and felt things even if they didn’t actually see anything. And so did the Bucklands before them. And you won’t find anyone more level-headed than Kate Cobworth.’
Patsy shrugged. ‘The Loys didn’t even hear or feel anything. They’d heard the stories, they expected to hear the footsteps and the carriage wheels. Diana Loy told me. And Diana was quite a nervy, highly strung sort of person. But absolutely nothing happened while they were there.’
‘Well, maybe the Church of England or whoever’s responsible will install central heating for this new person,’ I said, ‘and we’ll see if your theory’s right, Patsy.’
Eleanor and I went home after that. We went on foot because our house is only about a quarter of a mile up Shawley Lane. On the way we stopped in front of the Rectory, which is about a hundred yards along. We stood and looked over the gate.
I may as well describe the Rectory to you before I get on with this story. The date of it is around 1760 and it’s built of pale dun-coloured brick with plain classical windows and a front door in the middle with a pediment over it. It’s a big house with three reception rooms, six bedrooms, two kitchens and two staircases – and one poky little bathroom made by having converted a linen closet. The house is a bit stark to look at, a bit forbidding; it seems to stare straight back at you, but the trees round it are pretty enough and so are the stables on the left-hand side with a clock in their gable and a weathervane on top. Tom Cobworth, the last rector, kept his old Morris in there. The garden is huge, a wilderness that no one could keep tidy these days – eight acres of it including the glebe.
It was years since I had been inside the Rectory. I remember wondering if the interior was as shabby and in need of paint as the outside. The windows had that black, blank, hazy look of windows at which no curtains hang and which no one has cleaned for months or even years.
‘Who exactly does it belong to?’ said Eleanor.
‘Lazarus College, Oxford,’ I said. ‘Tom was a Fellow of Lazarus.’
‘And what about this new man?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think all that system of livings has changed but I’m pretty vague about it.’
I’m not a churchgoer, not religious at all really. Perhaps that was why I hadn’t got to know the Cobworths all that well. I used to feel a bit uneasy in Tom’s company, I used to have the feeling he might suddenly round on me and demand to know why he never saw me in church. Eleanor had no such inhibitions with Kate. They were friends, close friends, and Eleanor missed her after Tom died suddenly of a heart attack and she had had to leave the Rectory. She had gone back to her people up north, taking her fifteen-year-old daughter Louise with her.
Kate is a practical down-to-earth Yorkshire woman. She had been a nurse – a ward sister, I believe – before her marriage. When Tom got the living of Shawley she several times met Mrs Buckland, the wife of the retiring incumbent, and from her learned to expect what Mrs Buckland called ‘manifestations’.
‘I couldn’t believe she was actually saying it,’ Kate had said to Eleanor. ‘I thought I was dreaming and then I thought she was mad. I mean really psychotic, mentally ill. Ghosts! I ask you – people believing things like that in this day and age. And then we moved in and I heard them too.’
The crunch of carriage wheels on the gravel drive when there was no carriage or any kind of vehicle to be seen. Doors closing softly when no doors had been left open. Footsteps crossing the landing and going downstairs, crossing the hall, then the front door opening softly and closing softly.
‘But how could you bear it?’ Eleanor said. ‘Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you terrified?’
‘We got used to it. We had to, you see. It wasn’t as if we could sell the house and buy another. Besides, I love Shawley – I loved it from the first moment I set foot in the village. After the harshness of the north, Dorset is so gentle and mild and pretty. The doors closing and the footsteps and the wheels on the drive – they didn’t do us any harm. And we had each other, we weren’t alone. You can get used to anything – to ghosts as much as to damp and woodworm and dry rot. There’s all that in the Rectory too and I found it much more trying!’
The Bucklands, apparently, had got used to it too. Thirty years he had been rector of the parish, thirty years they had lived there with the wheels and the footsteps, and had brought up their son and daughter there. No harm had come to them; they slept soundly, and their grown-up children used to joke about their haunted house.
‘Nobody ever seems to see anything,’ I said to Eleanor as we walked home. ‘And no one ever comes up with a story, a sort
of background to all this walking about and banging and crunching. Is there supposed to be a murder there or some sort of violent death?’
She said she didn’t know, Kate had never said. The sound of the wheels, the closing of the doors, always took place at about nine in the evening, followed by the footsteps and the opening and closing of the front door. After that there was silence, and it hadn’t happened every evening by any means. The only other thing was that Kate had never cared to use the big drawing room in the evenings. She and Tom and Louise had always stayed in the dining room or the morning room.
They did use the drawing room in the daytime – it was just that in the evenings the room felt strange to her, chilly even in summer and indefinably hostile. Once she had had to go in there at ten-thirty. She needed her reading glasses which she had left in the drawing room during the afternoon. She ran into the room and ran out again. She hadn’t looked about her, just rushed in, keeping her eyes fixed on the eyeglass case on the mantelpiece. The icy hostility in that room had really frightened her, and that had been the only time she had felt dislike and fear of Shawley Rectory.
Of course one doesn’t have to find explanations for an icy hostility. It’s much more easily understood as being the product of tension and fear than aural phenomena are. I didn’t have much faith in Kate’s feelings about the drawing room. I thought with a kind of admiration of Jack and Diana Loy, that elderly couple who had rented the Rectory for a year after Kate’s departure, had been primed with stories of hauntings by Kate, yet had neither heard nor felt a thing. As far as I know, they had used that drawing room constantly. Often, when I had passed the gate in their time, I had seen lights in the drawing-room windows, at nine, at ten-thirty and even at midnight.
The Loys had been gone three months. When Lazarus had first offered the Rectory for rent, the idea had been that Shawley should do without a clergyman of its own. I think this must have been the Church economising – nothing to do certainly with ghosts. The services at St Mary’s were to be undertaken by the vicar of the next parish, Mr Hartley. Whether he found this too much for him in conjunction with the duties of his own parish or whether the powers-that-be in affairs Anglican had second thoughts, I can’t say; but on the departure of the Loys it was decided there should be an incumbent to replace Tom.
The first hint of this we had from local gossip; next the facts appeared in our monthly news sheet, the Shawley Post. Couched in its customary parish magazine journalese it said, ‘Shawley residents all extend a hearty welcome to their new rector, the Reverend Stephen Galton, whose coming to the parish with his charming wife will fill a long-felt need.’
‘He’s very young,’ said Eleanor a few days after our discussion of haunting with the Scotts. ‘Under thirty.’
‘That won’t bother me,’ I said. ‘I don’t intend to be preached at by him. Anyway, why not? Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ I said, ‘hast Thou ordained strength.’
‘Hark at the devil quoting scripture,’ said Eleanor. ‘They say his wife’s only twenty-three.’
I thought she must have met them, she knew so much. But no.
‘It’s just what’s being said. Patsy got it from Judy Lawrence. Judy said they’re moving in next month and her mother’s coming with them.’
‘Who, Judy’s?’ I said.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said my wife. ‘Mrs Galton’s mother, the rector’s mother-in-law. She’s coming to live with them.’
Move in they did. And out again two days later.
The first we knew that something had gone very wrong for the Galtons was when I was out for my usual evening walk with our Irish setter Liam. We were coming back past the cottage that belongs to Charlie Lawrence (who is by way of being Shawley’s squire) and which he keeps for the occupation of his gardener when he is lucky enough to have a gardener. At that time, last June, he hadn’t had a gardener for at least six months, and the cottage should have been empty. As I approached, however, I saw a woman’s face, young, fair, very pretty, at one of the upstairs windows.
I rounded the hedge and Liam began an insane barking, for just inside the cottage gate, on the drive, peering in under the hood of an aged Wolseley, was a tall young man wearing a tweed sports jacket over one of those black-top things the clergy wear, and a clerical collar.
‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘Shut up, Liam, will you?’
‘Good evening,’ he said in a quiet, abstracted sort of way.
I told Eleanor. She couldn’t account for the Galtons occupying Charlie Lawrence’s gardener’s cottage instead of Shawley Rectory, their proper abode. But Patsy Scott could. She came round on the following morning with a punnet of strawberries for us. The Scotts grow the best strawberries for miles around.
‘They’ve been driven out by the ghosts,’ she said. ‘Can you credit it? A clergyman of the Church of England! An educated man! They were in that place not forty-eight hours before they were screaming to Charlie Lawrence to find them somewhere else to go.’
I asked her if she was sure it wasn’t just the damp and the dry rot.
‘Look, you know me. I don’t believe the Rectory’s haunted or anywhere can be haunted, come to that. I’m telling you what Mrs Galton told me. She came to us on Thursday morning and said did I think there was anyone in Shawley had a house or a cottage to rent because they couldn’t stick the Rectory another night. I asked her what was wrong. And she said she knew it sounded crazy – it did too, she was right there – she knew it sounded mad, but they’d been terrified out of their lives by what they’d heard and seen since they moved in.’
‘Seen?’ I said. ‘She actually claims to have seen something?’
‘She said her mother did. She said her mother saw something in the drawing room the first evening they were there. They’d already heard the carriage wheels and the doors closing and the footsteps and all that. The second evening no one dared go in the drawing room. They heard all the sounds again and Mrs Grainger – that’s the mother – heard voices in the drawing room, and it was then that they decided they couldn’t stand it, that they’d have to get out.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ I said. ‘I don’t believe any of it. The woman’s a psychopath, she’s playing some sort of ghastly joke.’
‘Just as Kate was and the Bucklands,’ said Eleanor quietly.
Patsy ignored her and turned to me. ‘I feel just like you. It’s awful, but what can you do? These stories grow and they sort of infect people and the more suggestible the people are, the worse the infection. Charlie and Judy are furious, they don’t want it getting in the paper that Shawley Rectory is haunted. Think of all the people we shall get coming in cars on Sundays and gawping over the gates. But they had to let them have the cottage in common humanity. Mrs Grainger was hysterical and poor little Mrs Galton wasn’t much better. Who told them to expect all those horrors? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘What does Gordon say?’ I said.
‘He’s keeping an open mind, but he says he’d like to spend an evening there.’
In spite of the Lawrences’ fury, the haunting of Shawley Rectory did get quite a lot of publicity. There was a sensational story about it in one of the popular Sundays and then Stephen Galton’s mother-in-law went on television. Western TV interviewed her on a local news programme. I hadn’t ever seen Mrs Grainger in the flesh and her youthful appearance rather surprised me. She looked no more than thirty-five, though she must be into her forties.
The interviewer asked her if she had ever heard any stories of ghosts at Shawley Rectory before she went there and she said she hadn’t. Did she believe in ghosts? Now she did. What had happened, asked the interviewer, after they had moved in?
It had started at nine o’clock, she said, at nine on their first evening. She and her daughter were sitting in the bigger of the two kitchens, having a cup of coffee. They had been moving in all day, unpacking, putting things away. They heard two doors close upstairs, then footsteps coming down the main staircase. She had t
hought it was her son-in-law, except that it couldn’t have been because as the footsteps died away he came in through the door from the back kitchen. They couldn’t understand what it had been, but they weren’t frightened. Not then.
‘We were planning on going to bed early,’ said Mrs Grainger. She was very articulate, very much at ease in front of the cameras. ‘Just about half-past ten I had to go into the big room they call the drawing room. The removal men had put some of our boxes in there and my radio was in one of them. I wanted to listen to my radio in bed. I opened the drawing-room door and put my hand to the light switch. I didn’t put the light on. The moon was quite bright that night and it was shining into the room.’
‘There were people, two figures, I don’t know what to call them, between the windows. One of them, the girl, was lying huddled on the floor. The other figure, an older woman, was bending over her. She stood up when I opened the door and looked at me. I knew I wasn’t seeing real people, I don’t know how but I knew that. I remember I couldn’t move my hand to switch the light on. I was frozen, just staring at that pale tragic face while it stared back at me. I did manage at last to back out and close the door, and I got back to my daughter and my son-in-law in the kitchen and I – well, I collapsed. It was the most terrifying experience of my life.’
Yet you stayed a night and a day and another night in the Rectory? said the interviewer. Yes, well, her daughter and her son-in-law had persuaded her it had been some sort of hallucination, the consequence of being overtired. Not that she had ever really believed that. The night had been quiet and so had the next day until nine in the evening, when they were all this time in the morning room and they heard a car drive up to the front door. They had all heard it, wheels crunching on the gravel, the sound of the engine, the brakes going on. Then had followed the closing of the doors upstairs and the footsteps, the opening and closing of the front door.
Tales from the Dead of Night Page 8