“And you and Lloyd didn’t want to sell the house?”
“We did, but look at it! We’d need to find another Moretta to fall in love with it. And also you must know that the village of Dunwich has been slipping into the sea since the 1400s. There are streets of houses, churches, shops, all under water now. Some say you can hear the church bells sounding on stormy nights. Who would want to buy a house on a cliff in a place like that? You can see by the picture that it’s close to the edge. It won’t been too long before erosion claims another victim.”
“So you rent it out as a themed holiday home, presumably to lovers of Gothic literature and movies. How do you look after it?”
“An agency. They send in a cleaner and manage the clients.”
“But not at the moment.”
“Not since Mr and Mrs Clements died.”
“In the same way as Moretta.”
“Yes. They had been crushed to death. The couple were from the States. California, I think. Anyway, the police were called in, but nothing untoward was found.”
“Beyond all the grisly contents.”
We both stared at each other.
Elaine said, “You don’t have to do this, Steve. We could just leave the place to fall down or drop into the sea. Lloyd and I don’t actually need the money. It would be a waste, but preventing more loss of life must be the priority.”
“I know,” I replied, smiling, “but what else have I got to do? I’m a retired old major. I don’t like fishing or golf. As an ex-army cryptographer, naturally what I like is puzzles. This will make a change from the daily crossword.”
“Well, be careful.”
“Just what your aunt Sybil used to say before I went to foreign climes with a gun over my shoulder. I’m still here.”
“This is different and you know it.”
“It’s intriguing, I know that.”
BY EVENING THE next day, James and I were on the train heading towards Ipswich, where we intended hiring a car to drive to Dunwich. I like East Anglia, with its rugged, evocative coastline. It has an oldy-worldly feel about it, especially places like Orford and Shingle Street, which are out on the very tip of the end of nowhere. And Dunwich, of course. Suffolk and Norfolk are a shotgun blast of villages, with only the odd town or two of concentrated life. They are said to be the least inhabited of the English counties. On top of this, once we were in the car we found out that there are very few street lights in Suffolk, even now in the twenty-first century, in this amazing Technological Age.
“Why is that, do you think?” I asked James, as I concentrated on hurtling the vehicle into the pitch blackness.
James was an ex-telecoms man; not BT, but a firm called Cable and Wireless, a company who operated mostly in countries abroad. We had met at the London-based ‘Hong Kong Society,’ having both spent some years in that wonderful Oriental city, with its mystical undercurrents and effervescent street life. Suffolk was a million miles away from one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
“The villagers don’t like street lights,” he said, emphatically.
“The reason being?’
“Once you get street lights, the council starts putting in double yellow lines. They can’t do that without the street lights being there in the first place. You can’t see yellow lines in the dark.”
“Interesting. Canny people, these Suffolk yokels. Ah, here we are in dear old Dunwich.”
I drove down a slope and found myself in an unmade car park near the pebbled beach. All roads lead to the sea from Dunwich. We left the car there and, with backpacks on and torches bravely beaming, set off along a track which led up to the top of the cliffs.
After about a quarter of a mile of walking along the path between the forest and the sea, we came to the house. Moretta’s place. I had looked up my niece’s new name on the internet. A moretta was an oval mask of black velvet with a fringe-veil at the bottom, worn all year round by women in Venice visiting convents, as well as at Carnival. Perfect for a drama queen like Lucy, who seemed to have taken up the macabre in her fifties the way some women take up voluntary work.
It was indeed a ramshackle-looking place. Godforsaken, one would have called it, even in the nineteenth century, when presumably it was built. The windows were small, twisted and mean, no doubt to keep out the fierce North Sea gales, and the misshapen doors had obviously been swollen by the constant dampness, fed by sprigs of spray coming up from the sea below. The chimneys were right out of Gormenghast, sprouting at odd angles from a slick-tiled roof full of dips and rises. There were all sorts of porches and gables, and dormers, and a weather vane shaped like a terrified man in flight. My torchlight ranged over lumps and bumps on the exterior, which at one time had been intended for decoration, but now looked like canker growths and galls on oak branches. A wind from the ocean was causing a wild stirring amongst the glass panes, loose in their frames. They rattled and shook as if trying to escape their prisons. In silhouette, with the starlit sea shining behind it, I have to say the dwelling looked quite uninviting.
“Let’s go and stay at a pub tonight,” I suggested, “and come back in the morning.”
“Scaredy-cat,” replied James, but he turned as he did so and we headed back along the track towards the village.
I was, indeed, a little unnerved. There are those who expect ex-army majors to be pragmatists with little sensitivity in their bones. Actually army majors are as mixed in temperament and character as the rest of the population. There are those who have no imagination – no depths to their soul, so to speak – but I was not one of them. I had a very fertile mind and had owned a quixotic streak since childhood. The army needs both kinds of men: those who walk in straight lines and those who like to look around the corner first. Since Hong Kong, where I had met Chinese businessmen who I greatly admired, men who firmly believed in the supernatural, I was not always ready to discount an aberrant solution to a problem that did not appear to have a logical one.
So, yes, my little friend was right, I was scared. I had a healthy respect for the state of fear. You do not ignore it just because you want to look a bold, nerveless commander frightened of nothing. Too many of those types have led their men into terrible firefights and lost not only their own lives, but also the life of many a good ordinary soldier.
James and I found a goodly tavern, had a nice meal, then went to bed.
The following morning we returned to the house. In the light of day it didn’t look so forbidding. In fact it looked a little ludicrous, and I mentally chastised myself for the previous evening’s show of funk. This time we used the giant door key to enter a world of dried bats dangling from cotton threads, stuffed ravens, strangely-dressed mannequins, books on the occult including fiction by Bram Stoker and other predictable authors, hats and masks, puppets, weirdly-shaped objects that might have been anything or nothing, purple walls and doors, cobwebs real and unreal, spiders real and unreal, stuffed rats, instruments of torture and degradation, and a whole host of paraphernalia connected with the dark arts and gruesome magic. The musty smell almost knocked us over each time we entered a new room. Clearly Moretta had spent a lifetime collecting the black, dusty carrion of human endeavour, which must have been such a comfort to her in her loneliness and solitude.
James, in offering me his feelings on the place, also decided to go for irony.
“Nice and cosy,” he murmured. “There’s a very pleasant under-odour of alley cats. Lunch?”
We undid our packs and took out sandwiches, and standing by one of the filthy windows we munched away.
“So, who’s going to use the murder room tonight?” he asked.
“We’ll both sleep in there.”
“There’s only one bed. I don’t want to share it with a great hulk like you. You jerk around in your sleep.”
We had shared a two-man tent on Ben Nevis once, and, indeed, my dreams were usually fueled by old combats.
“I’ll use the armchair.”
“Fair e
nough.”
On reflection, it should have been me in the bed. James was half my size, a little frailer in his constitution, and anyway it was my job to find out what was happening in this house. The beds had been made up by the agency’s cleaner woman, but James was not eager to turn in, that much was true. When he did, he had managed to make himself so fatigued he fell asleep right away. I moved an armchair on the far side of the room and flopped in it, prepared for a wakeful, vigilant night on watch. Of course I fell asleep, probably not long after James himself did, being of tired mind and slightly whiskied.
I was woken by the noise of a furious storm, which had no doubt come in from the Atlantic. It raved and crashed over the cliffs. Thunder ripped across the night sky and forked lightning flashed dramatically, illuminating the windows. The old house seemed very vulnerable under such an attack. Surely it would crack apart?
However, it withstood the battering for at least half an hour, then it lowered in volume enough for me to hear the screams which must have been coming from James for some time.
Panicking, I grabbed for the torch in my pocket, but as I pulled it out it slipped from my grasp. I stood up in the blackness and felt for the wall behind me, trying to find the light switch. It took me a good minute or two. James’s screams had turned now to choked gasps. After turning on the light there was a distinct impression of having disturbed something. A shadow flitted past my light-blinded vision. However, my attention was all for James, who was clearly in deep trouble.
My friend was lying on his back, his arms outside the covers, struggling for each shallow breath.
On his bloodless face was a look of absolute terror.
“James! James!”
I rushed over to him, but he was obviously in agony, and was clearly in no condition to answer any questions. I didn’t dare touch him, in case I injured him further.
“Don’t worry, old chap,” I told him, soothingly, “I’ll get help immediately.”
I called emergency services on my mobile.
It was some while before I heard the sound of the ambulance outside and during that time James had done nothing but fight for each breath. And no wonder. The paramedics suggested that he might have one or two broken ribs. Possibly one had punctured his lung. They took him away on a stretcher. James was able to say a few words before they drove him off along that rugged cliffside track.
“I saw it,” he croaked, his eyes bulging. “When the lightning flashed – I saw it.”
The back of my neck bristled.
“Saw what? Who?”
But James was unable to elaborate.
Later, with a cup of coffee in my shaking hands, staring into that murderous bedroom, I pondered on his words. Nothing further had come from his poor tortured throat. I had to be content with knowing that I was not alone in the house. Since we had been the only people in the place, who was the company? Who had James seen, that was not present now? I stood and pondered on this question for quite a while and I could find no rational explanation. James had been attacked and severely injured by a seemingly invisible assailant.
Clearly he had still been under attack when I had turned on the light. Then the aggressor had fled, but so rapidly I had only caught a glimpse of something so flimsy and insubstantial it was less than a wisp. Unless there were people hiding behind the wainscot, the intruder had to be other than a human. What could possibly crush a man in his own bed? I did a very thorough square search of the house to ascertain that we had indeed been alone and found no evidence of another person in the dwelling.
It’s obviously not easy to accept the presence of malevolent supernatural beings. Although, as I said, I’m not a thoroughly pragmatic person, I’m not exactly psychic either, and like most people I’m sceptical when it comes to the paranormal. Ordinarily, I do not believe in ghosts, ghouls, spectres or any of those creatures of the night. But either there was devious human trickery going on – and my search had revealed no evidence of this – or this was something beyond normal, rational understanding. I couldn’t simply straighten my back and discount the idea that there was something in this house, something in Moretta’s bed, which had its origins in a place other than this world. My friend was lying in hospital. I had been with him in the room.
‘It’ had tried to kill James.
Looking round me at the dried bats and other stuffed wildlife, thinking about the dark nature and foul, unspeakable atmosphere of her weird residence, it seemed that Moretta might as well have invited ghouls to inhabit its confines. It beckoned to those beyond the grave to come and make their lair in some nook or cranny of this hideous dwelling. Now, having accepted that there was an unwelcome presence from beyond inhabiting the place, it seemed it was up to me to exorcise it. Since I was a complete amateur when it came to the spirit world, I had no idea how to carry this out, but for James’s sake I had to try.
Switching on all the lights, the first thing I did was inspect the walls for any hidden panels, just in case I had missed something on my earlier search. This exercise took me all day and half the evening. Besides filth, I found very little, until I came to a small cupboard up on the landing. It was hidden behind a chest which, going by the dead spiders and dirt beneath, had not been moved in a long time. The little door was locked, so I forced it with the spike on my jack-knife that is supposed to be used by boy scouts for removing stones from horses’ hooves. Inside the cupboard was a stack of papers. I took the lot down to the living-room, and dumped them on the table next to a vase full of artificial black tulips, intending to go through them. Then there was a power cut. I was too exhausted to peer at papers by torchlight.
I took myself off to bed. Despite my trepidation, I intended to sleep in Moretta’s bed. What I had asked my friend to do, I had to do, otherwise I would have had to call myself a coward. I felt I had a moral duty to use myself as bait for this fiend, or whatever it was, that took human life so easily and without compunction. I was fully alert to the dangers I was subjecting myself to and had decided that the moment I felt anything unusual going on, I would vacate the bed with alacrity.
Was I scared? I was bloody petrified.
It doesn’t matter what you say you don’t believe in when you’re standing in the bright sunshine, amongst the company of friends. It doesn’t matter how much you extol the rational and logical, and scorn the mystical when you’re out and about in a sane and ordinary world. In a dark, creaking old house, amongst the clutter of a dabbler in the occult, your disbeliefs vanish at the going down of the sun.
I climbed the stairs with leaden feet and stood in the doorway of Moretta’s room, my torchlight on the bed. It looked innocent enough. What was it about this antique piece of furniture that attracted such violence from the otherworld? Apart from the fact that it was an ancient four-poster, it looked very ordinary. Where was the cabalistic magnet? In the ornate and handcarved woodwork? In the ropes that (‘’Night, ’night, sleep tight!’) served as springs? Who knew?
Conquering my terror, I undressed down to my underwear and crawled between the sheets. There I lay under the bedclothes, unwilling to switch off the torch. My heart was in a race against itself. My blood was pumping round my body in a torrent. There was a sharp, sickening pain over my right eye: the sort of headache I used to get before going into battle. I wanted to get up and run away, but I had to stay where I was and wait for whatever might be sent to haunt me. This was not an easy thing to do. It was like awaiting an enemy attack.
Gradually the torch battery ran down. The light became dimmer and dimmer until it was a faint glow reminiscent of one of my lit cigarette ends in the days when I used to smoke. Then it went out altogether. Midnight, and I was in complete darkness. The sweat ran cold and clammy down the channel of my spine.
I stared up into the blackness in the direction of the velvet ceiling, unable to sleep. I must have lain there for at least another two hours, then my eyes closed and finally I dropped off.
I woke suddenly, with a loud grunt of pain.
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br /> I couldn’t move my arms. They were pinned tightly to my sides. Under its loose coverlette it seemed the quilt had moulded itself around my body. I was mummified and the quilt was shrinking, squeezing the breath and life from my lungs. My knees, my ankles, my feet, all were jammed hard against each other, grinding the bones together. It was as if I were in a rope cocoon that was gradually tightening, tightening. You would think I could just break loose, but the strength of simple ordinary fabric is actually incredible and the force behind this action to crush me was unstoppable. It was as if I were in the grip of an anaconda snake which was trying to pulp me before devouring me.
“Help!” I gasped. “Somebody help me!”
Then to my horror I was suddenly aware of the weight of some stinking creature squatting on my chest, staring down into my face. Even though I couldn’t see it, I was sure it was grinning. Fuseli’s nightmare! The demon on the maiden’s breast. Though this monster had not just one, but several heads. I could feel only one form, but many disgusting exhalations on my face. I could feel boney haunches, digging into my ribs, and then my terror increased as coarse, hairy knuckles brushed my brow, as if I were being stroked into the realms of death.
It was not the demon who was crushing me, however, but an innocuous quilt. I felt sure the fiend was just there to watch, a curious witness to my helpless struggles against an ugly death.
The pain increased until I let out a scream that filled the room. The monster on my chest laughed, a deep gutteral sound that filled my head. My scream had taken all the breath out of my lungs and in that moment I knew I couldn’t fill them again. I was swiftly dying. My bonds were impossible to dislodge. I prayed in those few moments; I tried to invoke the power of good over evil. I called on God to help me. I pleaded for my fading life. My attempts failed. There were bright flashing lights in my brain which I knew to be portents of death. It was being starved of oxygen. My heart felt ready to explode. I was going, and the fear that had been gripping me suddenly evaporated. Only the agony remained, and soon that would leave me too. I was leaving this world, going on to the next. Only a step, no further. I managed to whisper a faint “Goodbye” to no one in particular.
The Future of Horror Page 13