The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by Michael McDowell

  ‘Well – have you moved in yet?’ Bingham asked, staring at me through floating clouds of tobacco smoke, in the midst of which his plump pale face, with its thick-­lensed spectacles perched on an absurdly babyish nose, appeared like a full moon. Or the dial of a kitchen clock; it had more the expression of that – something plain, honest, homely, but certainly neither brilliant nor romantic. Yet Bingham, in a sense, was romantic: I also found him subtle and ironic; and the artlessness of his freckled countenance added a piquancy, an element of unexpectedness, to the more daring flights of his convers­ation. Spiritually he was alert, restless, adventurous: and corporeally he was sluggish, a consumer of patent medicines, a creature of habit. That is why I had known exactly where I should find him, and exactly how he would be occupied, on this damp muggy evening, which, but for its temperature, might have been an evening in November. It was not November; it was July; but times and seasons meant little to Bingham, their passing did not affect him – except that towards the end of May he ceased to wear socks, and resumed these again in October. A hygienic measure, I imagine, extremely uncomfortable and of doubtful efficacy, like so many of his other prophylactic experiments. There had been a period when he had lived entirely upon half-­raw chops; there had been a period when he had taken iron till his hair had turned a weird rusty colour; there had been a period when he had swallowed sulphur in such frequent doses that it had begun to ooze out through the pores of his skin, and had actually tarnished the keys in his pocket. Before I had time to sit down he had pushed an electric bell behind him, and before the barman had time to answer it he had pushed it again.

  That also was habit, an eccentricity, Bingham invariably was in a hurry for his drinks; though once the stuff was there he would sit for long enough with the tumbler untasted before him, lost in what appeared to be an aesthetic appreciation of its rich and cream-­topped darkness. I had seen him so often in this particular attitude that in his absence I found it difficult to picture him in any other, or in any other surroundings than those of a public-­house. Elsewhere, he presented a timid, vaguely lost appearance; but in a ‘pub’ he was at home, like a snail in his shell – from which he could peep out at a variegated, complex world, and weave his impressions into boldly speculative designs. He had a theory on the subject; he once told me he could think better in a public-­house than anywhere else; and he certainly talked better, though not just any kind of ‘pub’ would do. There were ‘pubs’ and ‘bars’, and for those latter gilded and brightly illuminated establishments, where the sexes are mixed, Bingham had no use at all. His public-­house was not of the kind to which opulent customers brought vivacious lady friends; it was of a strictly democratic order, a blend of the homely and the decently, comfortably gross. He liked the murky atmosphere, the smoke-­darkened ceiling and woodwork, the rough uneducated voices, the complete absence of everything genteel. He called such places ‘taverns’, and maintained that they gave him much the same pleasure as a picture by Rembrandt – the later Rembrandt – the interesting Rembrandt – for of course the only beauty that was really interesting was the beauty created out of ugliness. That was another theory – they were numerous as mites in cheese – theories of art, of religion, of philosophy, of life; and the only place where one could do them justice, expound them at one’s ease, was a ‘pub’. . . .

  When the barman had served us, and swabbed the small square table with a damp cloth; when he had been paid and had retired, leaving us in our comparatively secluded corner, Bingham repeated his question.

  This time I answered it. ‘I haven’t moved,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know that I ever shall. At least, not to the place you mean.’

  ‘But why? Last week you were full of it. You even described it as ideal. Ideal and cheap. I happen to remember the combination because it struck me at the time as ominous.’

  ‘It is cheap,’ I answered, ignoring his ironical tone. ‘On the other hand, it has several disadvantages.’

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ Bingham persisted. ‘I mean, what is your real reason – apart from the several disadvantages?’

  ‘I see. . . . Well, if you want to know, I went there last night – late – just to take a few measurements for bookshelves, and – I didn’t like it.’

  Bingham looked at me searchingly, but he only said, ‘Nothing more than that? Nothing definite?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘The place struck me as depressing – that is all.’

  He sighed faintly – perhaps at my inability, or reluctance, to pursue a subject which lent it itself so invitingly to the kind of imaginative speculation he loved.

  ‘You don’t think there’s much in such impressions?’ I suggested. ‘You think they’re entirely fanciful?’

  Bingham, I was sure, thought nothing of the sort; but he did not reply at once, and during the ensuing pause we both sat listening to the melancholy notes of a flute, which drifted in from the street. I guessed that he was on the brink of a theory, or perhaps a story bearing on the matter, and I was quite content to wait in silence. Nor was I surprised when presently, leaning across the table, he made this oracular statement: ‘Houses are like sponges. They absorb.’

  ‘Absorb what?’ I asked, and saw him cast a quick glance over his shoulder at a group of revellers perched on three-­legged stools close by the counter. At the same time, and I suppose suggested by his words, there floated into my mind the memory of a room in a house I had known in childhood – a room which had been kept locked up for years simply because somebody had died of cancer in it – a room I myself one afternoon had peeped into, half expecting I know not what secret and ghastly spectacle.

  Bingham’s judiciously lowered voice brought me back to the present. ‘That depends,’ he was saying, ‘depends on who lives in them. But they absorb: they’re absorbing all the time; night and day. And when they’re saturated they begin to give out.’

  ‘Still,’ I objected – for now that he appeared to have condoned it, I began to regard my behaviour as weak – ‘to sacrifice what was in many ways a suitable flat – and you know how hard it is to find one – ’

  He did not give me time to finish. ‘It can’t have been suitable if it affected you in that way. And if you had moved in it would have got worse. That sort of thing spreads and deepens – like a damp spot on a wall. I mean, when it once gets at you it doesn’t stop there. The barrier, or whatever it is, breaks down: your mind comes into tune: in the end you begin both to see and to hear.’ He paused, and gazing down at the table, began to draw circles and triangles of stout on its damp surface with his forefinger. Then, abruptly, and in a voice surprisingly morose, he said: ‘Did you ever hear of the Wace affair?’

  I shook my head: the name was unfamiliar.

  ‘It got into the papers,’ Bingham muttered, ‘for all that. . . . And it would have been a good deal more in them if it had happened nowadays. Fortunately there were then no Sunday papers specializing in such things.’

  ‘You mean it was unpleasant,’ I said, and he replied, ‘Yes, very unpleasant. . . . damned unpleasant to be mixed up with.’

  I gazed at him: there was no mistaking this particular note: Bingham had been mixed up with it. What was more, unless I was greatly mistaken he was going to tell me how and why – a most unusual proceeding on his part, for he rarely indulged in autobiography. And it suddenly occurred to me that beyond his ideas and fads I really knew remarkably little about him, except that he wrote musical criticisms for a newspaper I seldom read, and that his journalism appeared to provide him with sufficient means to satisfy his wants, which were few, since he was a bachelor, middle-­aged, and prudent.

  ‘I never told you, did I,’ he went on, ‘of how I first came to London – many years ago – when I was a boy – and a boy, I may add, who had lived all his life in a small country town.’

  ‘You’ve never told me anything,’ I replied. ‘Anything about yourself, I mean. You’re the least communicative person I know.’

  He looked surprised,
but did not dispute the statement. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me I didn’t talk.’

  I laughed. ‘Oh, you talk,’ I assured him. ‘You talk more than most people; only not in that way.’

  Again he pondered my words. ‘It isn’t because I wish to be secretive,’ he explained. ‘It’s because I didn’t think you’d be interested. My childhood and boyhood weren’t interesting, you know. For one thing, I never properly woke up till I was seventeen. I had no definite tastes, except a love of music. When I was asked what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t want to do anything – or so it must have seemed. I was torpid. At the same time I was extremely docile, and there wasn’t really very much choice. Anyhow, when my father decided to put me into a bank I accepted his decision.’

  Bingham paused, and seemed to be staring at what might have been the wooden partition behind my head, but what was, I felt sure, something much less palpable. Then, as if dismissing an irrelevant vision or reflection, he resumed his story.

  ‘The bank was in London. My father himself was a country parson; and I had several brothers and sisters, all of whom had to be educated and given some sort of start in life. My start happened to be a bad one. . . . Perhaps I ought not to blame my father, for if he was unimaginative and fatally slack, I, on my side, was stupidly submissive. Chance, of course, entered into it too; because originally both my parents had intended to come up to London with me to look for lodgings, and had they done so all would have been well. Unluckily, when train-­time came my mother was prostrate with an attack of neuralgia, so my father and I set out alone.

  ‘We had selected Westminster for our hunting ground – I suppose that I might be near the office where I was going to work – and it was in a quiet, dingy street, within a few minutes walk of the Abbey, that eventually we found what we wanted. Or rather what he wanted; or rather what he thought would do. Number 10 Anselm Terrace – that was the address; and the locality, I dare say, had once been highly respectable. Indeed, it was its obviously reduced respectability which in the first place discouraged me. The house was half way down a side street leading to the entrance of a mews. A narrow, commonplace, brick house, with a tall flight of steps mounting up to the hall-­door, and rusty iron railings facing an underground basement. The basement suggested cockroaches; the steps were dirty; the paint and plaster blistered and begrimed; the very card in the window, which had attracted my father’s attention, looked to me as if it had been there for years. Certainly, it was a quiet neighbourhood (the only living thing I saw was a cat crossing the entrance to the mews), but the quiet did not appeal to me; I should have preferred cheerfulness.

  ‘We knocked twice (the bell was broken), and I had begun to hope the house was empty, when we heard footsteps in the hall. The door was opened by a small and unexpectedly pretty servant in a neat cap and apron. She was quite young, almost childish, and she looked timidly at my father when he asked to see the rooms, keeping her hand on the door, as if ready to shut it at any moment in our faces. It was perfectly clear to me that we were not wanted, and equally clear that she did not know how to tell us this. ‘I don’t think there are any rooms, sir,’ she said at last.

  ‘ “But you’ve a card in the window!” my father exclaimed. “Why is it there if the rooms are taken?”

  ‘ “A card?”

  ‘ “Yes, yes; a card.” My father, though incorrigibly dilatory himself, was never very patient with others. “A card with ‘Apartments’ printed on it – ‘Furnished Apartments’.”

  ‘ “I expect she forgot,” faltered the small maid – and the door began to close.

  ‘ “You mean the rooms have been taken,” my father persisted.

  ‘But to this there was no reply, and as she faced us, in the now narrowed slit of doorway, she reminded me of a kitten I had once seen holding the road against two bullying dogs. My father’s persistence annoyed me, and I made a sign to him to come away, while she still gazed at him – never once at me – and only his clerical dress, I fancy, kept her from straying into the path of fibs. Her lips, indeed, moved soundlessly as if rehearsing a few, and then: “No, sir; there’s nobody taken rooms,” she whispered – “not since I was here. . . . But I don’t think the card should be there. . . . He must have – ”

  ‘ “Come away,” I muttered, and my father might have done so had we not heard from invisible back regions the sound of an opening door, followed by the call of an abnormally high-­pitched masculine voice.

  ‘ “What is it, Maggie? Who is there?” At the same moment a shuffle of loosely-­slippered feet approached, and the hall-­door was suddenly pulled wide, revealing a man.

  ‘He was distinctly not a gentleman; neither did he seem to me to belong to the working class – something half way between. Moreover, he looked ill; he had the unhealthy complexion of a chronic invalid; though the illness, I now imagine, was more mental than physical. He was dressed in a loose, badly-­fitting, rather flashy suit; he had a thin, greyish beard, and dark bright eyes. Altogether, there was something gimcrack about him, meretricious, shoddy, cheap.

  ‘ “I called to see about lodgings for my son,” my father began, “but I’m told you have none to let.”

  ‘ “Who told you that? What are you thinking of, Maggie? Of course there are rooms. Come in – come in. Why, nobody lives in the house but my wife and myself and Maggie here, and it’s a big house, though it doesn’t look so from the street. . . . I don’t know how many rooms your son may require,” he went on, with a quick glance at me, “but I dare say we can give him half a dozen.” This last remark I supposed was a joke, since it was followed by a shrill soprano cackle. “My name is Wace,” he continued jauntily. “Mrs Wace has gone out, but I can show you the rooms.” He waved towards the staircase, and that thin yellowish hand strengthened the feeling of aversion he had already inspired in me. At the same time I was puzzled by the manner of the small servant. She evidently wished to tell her master something, and equally evidently he was determined not to listen. At last she faltered, “Please, sir, there was a gentleman called the other day and the mistress told him she didn’t take lodgers.”

  ‘Mr Wace tapped her good-­naturedly on the cheek with one finger. “Nonsense, Maggie, nonsense. You must have misunderstood her. I expect she didn’t like the look of that particular gentleman,” he added significantly to us. “Naturally, she doesn’t want people who may turn out to be undesirable.”

  ‘ “Naturally – naturally,” my father agreed, and I could see that Mrs Wace’s exclusiveness was greatly in her favour. She was just the landlady for me; obviously particular; one who would look after me, take care that I formed no dangerous acquaintances.

  ‘The small servant, having done her duty, said no more; she retired, while the rest of us, the three of us, in single file, mounted the stairs to inspect the rooms.

  ‘At the head of the first flight was a landing roofed by a semi-­opaque glass dome, and from this landing there stretched back a long passage, off which several rooms opened, one behind the other, their doors, which had triangular fan-­lights above them, facing a blank wall. “Queer, the way they built these old houses,” Mr Wace rattled on. “You’d have no idea, from the street, that they ran back so far. I don’t call them well-­planned myself; because, as you can see, the only light in this passage comes from the dome in the landing. . . . Not at all our modern idea of comfort. Too much work for servants – basements and all that. . . . That’s why most of them are empty and have been allowed to get out of repair. We don’t use the basement; we keep it locked up; and speaking personally I’d sell the house for what it would fetch and move into a smaller one, or into rooms, only Mrs Wace is so attached to it. It’s hers; it belongs to Mrs Wace; she’s lived in it all her life, and her father lived in it all his life.” He had reached the door of the end room as he produced this information, but he still kept us standing outside it in the dim grey light while he proceeded volubly: “Mrs Wace’s father was a we
ll-­known scientist. Might have made pots of money, but instead devoted himself to unremunerative research – experiments – experiments with animals – down in the basement. Edwards was his name – Dr Edwards – you may possibly have heard of him. If you have, you can take it from me that all those ridiculous stories circulated at the time were the inventions of cranks and busybodies. They were lies, my dear sir, lies – malicious distortions of the truth – when they had any truth in them at all, which was seldom. Dr Edwards was a charming man. A trifle unconventional, I don’t dispute, but incapable of hurting a fly. That is, of course, except in the interests of science. I’m not denying that he went in for vivisection; but I’d like to ask some of those people who talked so freely – and wrote – actually in the end they wrote – to the papers: – I’d like to ask them just where they think surgical science would be to-­day if it weren’t for such experiments!”

  ‘ “Quite quite,” my father murmured, to show that the church at least recognized the legitimacy of Dr Edwards’ efforts in the cause of an afflicted humanity.

  ‘Mr Wace, by a bow, accepted the acknowledgement. At the same time he flung the door open with a flourish. “How will this do?” he asked, stepping politely to one side that we might enter first.

  ‘My father turned to me, smiling. “You’ll certainly not be cramped for space, Henry.”

  ‘And it was, I don’t mind admitting, a finely proportioned room – far larger and far loftier than any bedroom in the rectory at home: yet, though I tried to smile in response, I didn’t like it. From the first moment of entering that house I had felt a spiritual distress. Not all the geniality of Mr Wace (whom I suspected to be cracked), supported by that of my father, could blind me. I knew there was something wrong. Cheap – cheap and ideal – like that flat of yours – a combination to be avoided like the devil.’