The Seance

by John Harwood

  Now was his chance to flee; he knew that if the figure emerged again, it would see him. But he could move only as far as the light from the window would guide him, for fear of falling and having the creature rush upon him. He began to creep around the side of the chapel, keeping to the edge of the dim semicircle of light. Then he saw that the glass had gone from the window, leaving only four rusty bars between himself and the scene within.

  The hooded figure stood with its back to him, facing a stone coffin by the opposite wall: the lantern hung upon a bracket overhead. Even as he watched, it leaned forward and raised the lid of the sarcophagus with a grinding of stone on stone. Again his limbs failed him; he could only watch as the creature took down its lantern, slipped over the edge, and in one swirling movement lay down within the tomb, lowering the lid as it went, until only a thin line of yellow light remained. A moment later, that, too, was extinguished, and he was plunged once more into absolute darkness.

  Then his nerve gave way altogether and he fled blindly into the wood, stumbling and rebounding from one obstacle to another until he ran headfirst into a tree trunk, to be roused an indefinite time later by a gigantic crash of thunder. Even beneath the trees he was drenched to the skin, and when he finally stumbled out of Monks' Wood the next morning, he was in a worse case than I had been. He was taken to the infirmary, where he survived the first bout of fever, and was able to relate his strange tale to Dr. Dawson, but his lungs never recovered, and another infection carried him off within the month.

  Dawson, though he thought it picturesque enough to be worth relating, naturally dismissed the unfortunate man's story as a delirious dream. Of course I agreed with him, but it reminded me uncomfortably of the old superstition about the Hall, and the image of the shrouded figure with the lantern troubled my imagination for many months to come.

  Part Three

  Eleanor Unwin's Narrative

  1866

  It began with a fall, soon after my twenty-first birthday, though I recall nothing between going to bed as usual and waking as if from a long, dreamless sleep. I was found, early on a winter's morning, lying at the foot of the stairs in my nightgown, and was carried back to my room, where I lay unconscious, scarcely breathing, for the rest of that day and all of the following night, until I woke to find old Dr. Stevenson bending over me. His head was surrounded by the most extraordinary halo of light, suffused with all the colours of the rainbow, a radiance so subtle and yet so vibrant as to make me feel I had never seen colour before. I lay entranced by the beauty of it, too absorbed to follow what he was saying. And for a while longer—minutes, hours, I did not know—everyone who came to my bedside was bathed in paradisial light, as if my mother and my sister Sophie had stepped from the pages of an old manuscript book I had once seen. For each of them the light was subtly different, the colours shimmering and changing as they moved and spoke. A verse kept running through my mind: "Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." But then my head began to ache, worse and worse until I was forced to close my eyes and wait for the sleeping draught to take effect, and when I woke again, the radiance had gone.

  Everyone assumed that I had fallen whilst sleepwalking, which I had done often enough as a child for my mother to threaten to lock me in her room, though I had never injured myself before. Indeed, Mama was far from sympathetic: it was, she declared, one more sign of my selfish and obstinate nature that I should contrive to fall down the stairs a week after my sister had accepted an offer of marriage. Sophie's being the younger by a year only compounded the offence, for if I had worked at making myself agreeable, instead of hiding away with a book, I, too, might now be engaged. I thought her fiancé a vacuous booby; but I could not deny that I had always been a great trial to my mother.

  Though I was, in waking life, far bolder than Sophie, I had been prone to nightmares, as well as sleepwalking, for as long as I could recall. As I grew older, I walked less frequently in my sleep, but the nightmares became more frequent and oppressive. There was one in particular, which recurred many times, of a vast, echoing house I was sure I had never seen. It was not at all like the redbrick villa in Highgate where we had always lived, and never exactly the same from one dream to the next, and yet I knew whenever I was there. I was always alone, acutely aware of the silence, feeling that the house itself was alive, watchful, aware of my presence. The ceilings were immensely high, with dark-panelled walls, and though there were windows I could never see anything beyond the glass.

  Sometimes I would be there only for a brief space and wake thinking, "I have been in the house again," but when the dream ran its full course, I would be compelled to move from one deserted room to the next, fearful and yet powerless to stop, knowing that I must come to a flight of stairs—sometimes grand and opulent, in other dreams narrow and worn—and thence to a room at the end of a corridor: a long room furnished with carved chests and screens in a dark, oily wood, covered with elaborate designs picked out in gold. In one such dream I was drawn farther into the room until I came to a low dais, upon which stood a statue of a beast like a panther about to spring, cast in dark, gleaming metal. Cold blue light began to glow around it; a vibration like the buzzing of a gigantic insect filled my body, and I woke to my own cry of horror.

  In another sort of nightmare, quieter and yet in its way still more fearful, I would dream that I awoke—it seemed always to be twilight, just before dawn—in my own room, everything in its familiar place, except that my hearing was unnaturally acute: The blood surging in my ears sounded as loud as waves breaking upon the shore. Then I would sense the approach of some malignant being, coming up the passage or hovering at my window; my heart would begin to pound until I feared it would tear itself out of my breast, and I would wake with my heart still beating violently.

  A few months before the fall, I was woken, as I thought, in the early morning, by hearing my name called softly. I rose and went to my door in my nightgown, but there was no one in the passage. The voice had sounded like Sophie's, but when I came to her door, it was closed. All was silent; the bathroom door stood slightly open; there was my mother's room beyond; then the landing and the staircase, exactly as in waking life. I heard my name called again, only this time the voice boomed like a gong inside my head; the light failed, as if a candle had been snuffed, and something rushed at me out of the gloom. I screamed and struggled until the light came back with the sound of running feet and I realised that the demon who had seized me was, in fact, my mother.

  Mama was justifiably enraged, and I could only agree that I belonged in a madhouse, and should certainly be sent to one if I persisted with this hysterical nonsense. It was all very well to say that I could not help it: Sophie had never walked in her sleep, or woken the household with her screams, so why was I so lacking in self-control? Because I was wilful, obstinate, selfish, and contrary, and a great deal more besides. I was accustomed to Mama's tirades, but this one was so violent and, I felt, so thoroughly deserved, that I resolved to lock myself in my room and hide the key in a different place each night, in the hope that my dreaming self would not remember where I had put it. As the weeks passed without a relapse, I began to believe myself cured of the nightmares as well as the sleepwalking, and gave up locking my door, until the morning when Elspeth, our maid, found me sprawled at the foot of the stairs.

  A fortnight or so later—certainly, after the doctor had pronounced me well on the way to recovery—I was sitting up in bed reading when my grandmother came into the room and sat down in the chair beside me, looking exactly as she had when I was a little girl: the same elaborate black silk dress and tightly pinned white hair, the same familiar scent of lavender and violet water. The chair creaked as she settled herself in it, smiled at me and took up her work, just as if she had only been gone five minutes, rather than resting in Kensal Green Cemetery for the past fifteen years. I was vaguely aware that Grandmama was supposed to be dead, but somehow this did not matter; her presence at my bedside seemed entirely natu
ral and comforting. And though my own tranquil acceptance of the visit would later seem, to me, as strange as the visit itself, we sat in companionable silence for an indefinite interval until my grandmother gathered up her work, smiled once more at me and went slowly from the room.

  Mama came in so soon after that I thought they must have passed each other in the hall, so I asked, "Did you see Grandmama?" I saw from her look of consternation that I had best not pursue the subject, and agreed that I must have been dreaming. As with the strange radiance, Grandmama's appearance was followed by one of the worst headaches I had ever endured. But I felt certain I had been wide awake.

  Even after the strangeness of the experience had become fully apparent to me, I found I could not think of my visitant as a ghost. My reading in sensational literature had enhanced an already vivid imagination of how ghosts ought to conduct themselves: a hint of transparency and one or two bloodcurdling groans was surely the least that could be expected, whereas Grandmama had been—well, just Grandmama. And though nothing like this had ever happened to me before, I had not felt in the slightest afraid.

  Dr. Stevenson had declared me well enough to get up, and the memory of my grandmother's visit had faded to the point where I could almost believe it had been a dream, when one evening after dinner I saw my father crossing the hall ahead of me. He was no more than ten paces away. I heard the floor creak under his tread, smelt the smoke of his cigar. Looking neither right nor left, he entered his study and closed the door behind him, just as he would have done in life. Again I felt no fear; only an overwhelming impulse to go up to his door and knock. When there was no answer I tried the handle. The door opened readily, but there was no one there, only the familiar cracked brown leather armchairs on the worn Persian rug, the elaborate desk with its feet carved into the fierce faces of tigers that had so fascinated me as a child, the bookshelves crammed with Blue Books and army lists and regimental histories and accounts of old campaigns, the lingering faint odours of tobacco and leather and old bindings. I remained in the doorway for a long time, lost in a trance of recollection.

  My father had spent a great deal of his life, or at least the latter part of it, in this room; he had met Mama while he was home on leave after many years' service with the army in Bengal. He had thick white whiskers, streaked with grey, and a beard which jutted out when he walked, making him look very fierce. His skin was a strange shade of yellow, for he had been very ill with fever, and his bald head shone so brightly that I used to wonder if he polished it in secret. Once in a while, he would take us for a long walk by ourselves; and if we found a quiet field where there was no one watching, he would drill us like soldiers, making us march up and down in time, and stand to attention and salute. I loved this game, and used to march Sophie around the back garden until Mama put a stop to it; she did not approve of little girls playing at soldiers.

  As the youngest daughter in her family, Mama had been obliged to stay at home nursing her own father, a confirmed invalid, until he died, and by then she was almost thirty. She was very pale and slender, and grew thinner as the years passed, so that her pale blue eyes appeared to grow even larger as the bones of her face became more prominent. The house in Highgate, I came to understand, had been a compromise between Papa, who would rather have lived in the country, right away from London, and Mama, who longed to be part of Society. I had, as a child, no very clear idea of what Society might be, but it seemed that Highgate stood on the outermost fringe of it. We did not want for company: Major James Paget, an old friend and comrade of Papa's, had taken a house only a few minutes' walk from their own, and I had been fast friends with their daughter Ada since she was seven years old. But somehow the Pagets did not count as Society.

  Ada and I were often taken for sisters, for we were both quite tall and strongly featured, and much darker in colouring than Sophie, who was fair-haired, fair-skinned, and by any conventional standard the beauty of the family. Sophie had always been my mother's favourite, for she loved balls and parties and gossip, and would happily sit for half a day in front of her mirror, time which I far preferred to spend with my nose buried in a book, as Mama despairingly put it. As I grew older, I came to realise that my parents were deeply estranged, living quite separate lives and avoiding one another as far as possible. So long as the Pagets—a devoted and loving couple to the end—had remained nearby, it had not seemed to matter so much. But soon after my eighteenth birthday, James Paget had died suddenly, followed a few months later by my own father.

  And now Ada's mother was living with relations on the Isle of Wight, and Ada herself was married to a clergyman, a hundred miles away in a remote Suffolk village, while I was still at home, restless, unhappy, and constantly at loggerheads with my mother. I had worked at my sketching and music, and was competent at both, but no more; I had tried my hand at a novel and got as far as the third chapter before disbelief in my own creation pulled me up. I had pleaded to be allowed to seek a position as a governess, but my mother would not hear of it. Sophie's success in snaring Arthur Carstairs had only heightened Mama's disappointment in me, whom she was wont to characterise as unfeeling, ungrateful, insolent, obstinate, sullen, and contrary. For all the unfairness of her tirades, I could not altogether disagree, oppressed as I was by the sense of my own worthlessness, of life slipping through my fingers.

  As with Grandmama's appearance at my bedside, the apparition of my father was followed, after a peculiarly tranquil interval, by the onset of a blinding headache. I had not made any connection between the first visitation—the word that seemed the least unsatisfactory—and the fall. But now I began to wonder; I had heard people described as "cracked," and perhaps the application was more literal than I had supposed. Could the fall have opened some fissure in my consciousness, admitting perceptions which were meant to be kept out? But that implied that the appearances were in some way real, whereas if no one else could see them ... though of course they could not, if I alone had stumbled upon some special power of sight.

  I knew better than to say anything to my mother and sister, and could not bring myself to write of it even to Ada, whom I had told about the fall, and the strange radiance afterward, but nothing more; whether because I did not want to trouble her happiness, or for fear of being thought mad, I was not sure. As the days passed without further visitations, I tried to convince myself that nothing more would follow. But something in the quality of my inward life had altered, subtly but unmistakably; it was like walking into a room and feeling that the colour of the walls, or the pattern of the carpet, had changed, without being able to say precisely how. Familiar scents and tastes seemed suddenly heightened; it was springtime, admittedly, but there was more to it than that, a sense of—not exactly apprehension, but of something impending. On several occasions I had, very powerfully, the sensation of knowing what everyone in the room would say for the next few moments. And once, when Mama complained of losing the stone from a favourite pendant, I got up, walked straight to the other end of the house, turned into the drawing room, reached under a cabinet in the darkest corner, and drew out the lost stone, which was jet. I was at a loss to understand how I had done this, and glad that my mother had not witnessed quite how remarkable the feat had been.

  Several weeks had passed in this uneasy state when Mama announced that Arthur Carstairs's mother and sisters would shortly be coming to tea. On the afternoon in question, I came down to join the others and await our visitors' arrival. As I entered the drawing room, I saw a young man seated on the sofa opposite Sophie and Mama. I had never seen him before. He was just a slender, dark-haired young man, sombrely dressed in what looked like a suit of mourning, and apparently absorbed in a study of the carpet at his feet. He seemed to be averting his gaze out of modesty, as if he did not want to be noticed, but otherwise appeared quite at his ease. I stood uncertainly in the doorway, waiting to be introduced, but neither of the others seemed to be paying him the slightest attention.

  "Do sit down, Eleanor," said my mo
ther, pointing to the sofa. She seemed to be indicating the place immediately next to the young man.

  "But—will you not introduce me?" I stammered.

  "To whom?" replied my mother, staring.

  " To—" I gestured helplessly toward the young man.

  "I do not know what you mean," Mama said sharply, "and I am in no mood for frivolity. Be seated, and let us have no more nonsense."

  Throughout this exchange, the young man continued to gaze quietly at the floor, still with that self-effacing air. I stood transfixed, aware that my mother and Sophie were both speaking to me, but unable to take my eyes off the young man, who, as if suddenly conscious of my plight, rose from the sofa and began to walk toward me. I heard the rustle of his clothing, the sound of his tread upon the floor. He paused a couple of paces from me, still with his head bowed; automatically, I stepped away from the door to allow him to pass. But then—as if a painted figure had stepped from a canvas and, turning aside, revealed itself as a mere film of pigment floating upon the air—he seemed to shrink sideways into himself, until he was nothing but a jagged sliver of blackness, edged with greenish light. Then that, too, vanished and I was left dumbstruck, with the sound of the doorbell ringing in my ears.

  I must not faint, I told myself, and summoning all my resolve, managed to gasp out some excuse and stumble away down the corridor until I reached the safety of the back parlour. There I collapsed onto a couch, with my head already beginning to throb. The pain soon became so excruciating that I lost all sense of time until someone, I could not tell who, brought me a sleeping draught, and I sank at last into merciful oblivion.

  Next morning, I was at first bewildered to find myself fully dressed upon the parlour sofa. Elspeth brought me a cup of tea and Mama's instruction to remain where I was until the doctor had called, but neither Sophie nor Mama came in to see me. When Dr. Stevenson finally appeared, looking unwontedly stern, it was clear from the tenor of his questions that the others had seen nothing whatever unusual. All I could think to tell him was that I had been deceived by a trick of the light, and the sudden onset of a headache, into thinking I had seen someone sitting on the sofa, but really it was nothing, just a momentary confusion. He did not seem interested in the headache, and after he had left me, a long interval passed before I heard the front door close behind him.