The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story

by Susan Hill

  But aware that, if I gave into panic, I should most certainly be lost, I thought furiously and then, very cautiously, lay down full length on the marsh mud, keeping my lower body pressed as hard as I could onto a small island of solid ground and, reaching and stretching my trunk and my arms forward, inch by inch, gasping for breath until, just as the last of her body sank, I lunged out and grabbed the dog about the neck and hauled and strained and tugged with all the force I could, a strength I would never have dreamed I could have summoned up, born of terror and desperation; and after an agonizing time, when we both fought for our lives against the treacherous quicksand that tried to pull us both down into itself and I felt my grip on the slippery wet fur and wet flesh of the dog almost give, at last I knew that I would hold and win. I strained as hard as ever I could to drag my body backward onto firmer ground. As I did so, the dog’s body suddenly gave and the tug of war was over as I fell back, holding her tight, the two of us soaked with water and mud, my chest burning and my lungs almost bursting, my arms feeling as if they had been dragged from their sockets, as indeed they almost had.

  We rested, panting, exhausted, and I wondered if I would ever be able to get up, I felt suddenly so faint and weak and lost in the middle of the marsh. The poor dog was making choking noises now and rubbing her head against me over and over, no doubt both terrified and also in great pain, for I had nearly asphyxiated her as I had clutched so hard around her neck. But she was alive and so was I and, gradually, a little warmth from each of our bodies and the pause revived us and, cradling Spider like a child in my arms, I began to stumble back across the marshes toward the house. As I did so and within a few yards of it, I glanced up. At one of the upper windows, the only window with bars across it, the window of the nursery, I caught a glimpse of someone standing. A woman. That woman. She was looking directly toward me.

  Spider was whimpering in my arms and making occasional little retching coughs. We were both trembling violently. How I reached the grass in front of the house I shall never know but, as I did so, I heard a sound. It was coming from the far end of the causeway path which was just beginning to be visible as the tide began to recede. It was the sound of a pony trap.

  A Packet of Letters

  There was a bright light and I was staring into it—or, rather, I felt that it was boring into me, boring through my eyes right into my brain and I struggled to turn my head away and my head seemed to be very light, scarcely set on my shoulders at all, but spinning, floating like blown thistledown!

  Then abruptly the light was removed and when I opened my eyes the normal world and ordinary things in it came into focus again. I found myself lying, propped up on the couch in the morning room, with the large, red, concerned face of Mr. Samuel Daily looming over me. In his hand he held a pocket torch, with which, I realized, he must have been peering into my eyes, in a crude attempt to arouse me.

  I sat up, but at once the walls began to shift and buckle forward and I was obliged to lie back again weakly. And then, in a rush, everything came back to me with great force, the chase after the dog across the wet marshes and the struggle to free her, the sight of the woman in black at the nursery window and then those sounds which had caused my fears to mount to such a height that I had lost control of myself and my senses and fallen unconscious.

  “But the trap—the pony and trap …”

  “At the front door.”

  I stared.

  “Oh, I still like to make use of it now and again. It’s a pleasant way to travel when there’s nothing to hurry over and it’s a sight safer than a motor car across that causeway.”

  “Ah.” I felt a surge of relief as I realized the plain facts of the matter, that the noise I had heard had been that of a real pony and cart.

  “What did you think?” He was looking at me keenly.

  “A pony and cart—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d—heard others. Another.”

  “Keckwick, perhaps,” he said evenly.

  “No, no.” I sat up, more cautiously and the room stayed firm.

  “You take care now.”

  “I’m better—I’m all right. It was …” I wiped my brow. “I should like a drink.”

  “At your elbow.”

  I turned and saw a jug of water and a glass and I drank thirstily, beginning to feel more and more refreshed and my nerves to be steadier as I did so.

  Realizing it, Mr. Daily moved away from my side to a chair opposite and sat himself down.

  “I had you on my mind,” he said at last. “I wasn’t happy. It began to unsettle me.”

  “Isn’t it quite early in the morning—I’ve become confused …”

  “Early enough. I kept waking. As I said, I had you on my mind.”

  “How strange.”

  “Was it? Not as it seems to me. Not strange at all.”

  “No.”

  “A good job I came when I did.”

  “Yes, indeed, I’m very grateful. You must have—what? Carried me in here, I remember nothing about it.”

  “I’ve dragged heavier than you with one arm around my neck—there’s not much flesh on your bones.”

  “I’m extremely glad to see you, Mr. Daily.”

  “You’ve good reason.”

  “I have.”

  “People have drowned on that marsh before now.”

  “Yes. Yes, I know that now. I felt that I was being pulled under and the dog with me.” I started up. “Spider …”

  “She’s here. She’ll do.”

  I looked to where he nodded, to the dog down on the rug between us. At the sound of her name, she bumped her tail, but otherwise she lay, the mud drying on her coat in clots and streaks, and pasted thickly to her leg, looking as limp and exhausted as I myself felt.

  “Now, when you’ve come to a bit more, you’d better get whatever you need and we’ll be off.”

  “Off?”

  “Aye. I came to see how you were faring in this godforsaken place. I have seen. You had better come back home with me and recover yourself.”

  I did not answer for a few moments but lay back and went over in my mind the sequence of events of the previous night and of this morning—and, indeed, further back than that, from my first visit here. I knew that there had been hauntings by the woman in black and perhaps by some other occupant of this house. I knew that the sounds I had heard out on the marsh were ghostly sounds. But although these had been terrifying, and inexplicable, I thought that if I had to I could go over them again, if only because I had been growing more and more determined to find out what restless soul it was who wanted to cause these disturbances and why, why. If I could uncover the truth, perhaps I might in some way put an end to it all forever.

  But what I couldn’t endure more was the atmosphere surrounding the events: the sense of oppressive hatred and malevolence, of someone’s evil and also of terrible grief and distress. These, which seemed to invade my own soul and take charge of me, these were what I could no longer bear. I told Mr. Daily that I would be glad and grateful to go back with him and to rest at his house if only for a short while. But I was worried, not wanting to leave the mystery unexplained and knowing, too, that at the same time someone would have to finish, at some point, the necessary work of sorting out and packing up Mrs. Drablow’s papers.

  This I mentioned now.

  “And what have you found here, Mr. Kipps? A map to buried treasure?”

  “No. A great quantity of rubbish, old waste paper, and precious little of interest, let alone of value. Frankly, I doubt whether there will be anything. But the job will have to be done at some time or other. We are obliged to it.”

  I got up and began to walk about the room, trying my limbs and finding them more or less steady.

  “For now, I don’t mind confessing that I shall be pretty glad to let up and leave the lot of it behind. There were just one or two papers I should like to go over again for my own curiosity. There is a packet of old letters with a few documents att
ached. I was reading them late last night. I shall bring those with me.”

  Then, while Mr. Daily began to go round the downstairs rooms, drawing the blinds, checking that all the fires were extinguished, I went first to the room in which I had been working to gather together the bundle of letters and then upstairs for my few belongings. I was no longer at all afraid because I was leaving Eel Marsh House at least for the time being and because of the large and reassuring presence of Mr. Samuel Daily. Whether I would ever return here I did not know but certainly if I did so it would not be alone. I felt altogether calm, therefore, as I reached the top of the staircase and turned toward the small bedroom I had been using, the events of the previous night seeming far in the past and with no more power to harm me than a particularly bad nightmare.

  I packed up my bag quickly, closed the window and drew down the blind. On the floor lay the remnants of the shattered torch and I swept them together into a corner with the edge of my foot. All was quiet now, the wind had been dropping since dawn, though, if I closed my eyes, I could hear again its moaning and crying and all the banging and rattling it had given rise to in the old house. But, although that had contributed to my nervousness, I could perfectly well sort out those incidental events—the storm, the bumps and creaks, the darkness, from the ghostly happenings and the atmosphere surrounding them. The weather might change, the wind drop, the sun shine, Eel Marsh House might stand quiet and still. It would be no less dreadful. Whoever haunted it and whatever terrible emotions still possessed them would continue to disturb and distress anyone who came near here, that I knew.

  I finished picking up my belongings and left the room. As I reached the landing I could not prevent myself from glancing quickly and half-fearfully along the passage that led to the nursery.

  The door was ajar. I stood, feeling the anxiety that lay only just below the surface begin to rise up within me, making my heart beat fast. Below, I heard Mr. Daily’s footsteps and the pitter-patter of the dog as it followed him about. And, reassured by their presence, I summoned up my courage and made my way cautiously toward that half-open door. When I reached it I hesitated. She had been there. I had seen her. Whoever she was, this was the focus of her search or her attention or her grief—I could not tell which. This was the very heart of the haunting.

  There was no sound now. The rocking chair was still. Very slowly I pushed open the door wider and wider, inch by inch, and took a few steps forward until I could see all the way into the room.

  It was in a state of disarray as might have been caused by a gang of robbers, bent on mad, senseless destruction. Whereas the bed had been made up neatly, now the clothes were pulled off anyhow and bundled up or trailing onto the floor. The wardrobe door and the drawers of the small chest were pulled open and all the clothes they contained half dragged out, and left hanging like entrails from a wounded body. The lead soldiers had been knocked down like a set of ninepins and the wooden animals from the ark strewn about the shelf, books lay open, their jackets torn, puzzles and games were all jumbled up in a heap together in the center of the floor. Soft toys were split and unclothed, the tin Sambo was smashed as by a hammer blow. The bedside table and the small cupboard were overturned. And the rocking chair had been pushed into the center, to preside, tall-backed and erect, like a great brooding bird, over the wreck.

  I crossed the room to the window, for perhaps the vandals had gained an entry here. It was tight-bolted and rusted over and the wooden bars were fast and firm. No one had entered here.

  As I climbed unsteadily up into Mr. Daily’s pony trap which waited in the drive, I stumbled and he was obliged to grip my arm and support me until I could regain my strength and I saw that he peered intensely into my face and recognized by its pallor that I had suffered a new shock. But he said nothing about it, only wrapped a heavy rug about my legs, set Spider on my knees for the greater warmth and comfort of us both and then clicked at the pony to turn about.

  We left the gravel and went across the rough grass, reached the Nine Lives Causeway and began to traverse it. The tide was dropping back steadily, the sky was a uniform, pearly gray, the air moist and cold but still, after the storm. The marshes lay dull, misty and drear all about us, and, ahead, the flat countryside was dripping and gloomy, without color, without leaf, without undulation. The pony went steadily and quietly and Mr. Daily hummed in a low, tuneless sort of way. I sat as one in a trance, numb, unaware of very much except the movement of the pony trap and the dankness of the air.

  But, as we reached the lanes and left the marsh and the estuary behind, I did glance back once over my shoulder. Eel Marsh House stood iron-gray and grim, looming up like a crag, its windows blank and shuttered. There was no sign of any shape or shadow, no living or dead soul. I thought that no one watched us go. Then, the pony’s hooves began to clip-clop briskly on the tarmac of the narrow lane between the ditches and straggling blackthorn hedges. I turned my eyes away from that dreadful place for what I fervently prayed was the last time.

  From the moment I had climbed into the pony trap, Mr. Samuel Daily had treated me as gently and with as much care and concern as an invalid and his efforts to make me feel rested and at ease were redoubled upon arrival at his house. A room had been prepared, a large quiet room with a small balcony overlooking the garden and the open fields beyond. A servant was dispatched at once to the Gifford Arms for the rest of my belongings and, after being given a light breakfast, I was left alone to sleep through the morning. Spider was bathed and groomed and then brought to me, “since you’ve got used to her.” And she lay contentedly beside my chair, apparently none the worse for her unpleasant experience early that morning.

  I rested but I could not sleep, my brain was still in a confusion and a fever, my nerves all on edge. I was deeply grateful for the peace and tranquility, but above all for the knowledge that, although I was quite alone and undisturbed here, nevertheless in the house below and the outbuildings beyond there were people, plenty of people, going about their everyday affairs, the reassurance I so badly needed that the normal world still moved through its appointed course.

  I tried very hard not to let my mind dwell upon what had happened to me. But I wrote a somewhat guarded letter to Mr. Bentley and a fuller one to Stella—though to neither of them did I tell everything nor confess the extent of my distress.

  After this, I went outside and took a few turns of the large lawn but the air was cold and raw and I soon returned to my room. There was no sign of Samuel Daily. For an hour or so before noon I dozed fitfully in my chair and, strangely enough, though my body jerked upright once or twice in sudden alarm, after a short time I was able to relax, and so refresh myself more than I would have expected.

  At one o’clock there was a knock upon my door and a maid inquired as to whether I would like my luncheon to be served here or if I felt like going down to the dining room.

  “Tell Mrs. Daily I will join them directly, thank you.”

  I washed and tidied myself, called to the dog and walked downstairs.

  The Dailys were attentiveness and kindness itself and insistent that I remain with them a day or two longer, before I returned to London. For I had fully decided to go back: nothing on earth would have induced me to pass another hour in Eel Marsh House; I had been as bold and determined as a man could be but I had been defeated and I was not afraid to admit as much, nor did I feel any sense of shame. A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.

  But I was angry nonetheless, not with myself but with whatever haunted Eel Marsh House, angry at the wild and pointless behavior of that disturbed creature and angry that it had prevented me, as it would no doubt prevent any other human being, from doing my job. Perhaps I was also angry with those people—Mr. Jerome, Keckwick, the landlord, Samuel Dail
y—who had been proven right about the place. I was young and arrogant enough to feel dashed. I had learned a hard lesson.

  That afternoon, left to my own devices again after an excellent luncheon—Mr. Daily was soon gone to visit one of his outlying farms—I took out the packet of Mrs. Drablow’s papers which I had brought with me, for I was still curious about the story I had begun to piece together from my initial reading of the letters and I thought I would divert myself further by trying to complete it. The difficulty was, of course, that I did not know who the young woman—J for Jennet, who had written the letters—was, whether she might have been a relative of Mrs. Drablow, or her husband, or merely a friend. But it seemed most likely that only a blood relation would have given or, rather, been forced to give her illegitimate child for adoption to another woman, in the way the letters and legal documents revealed.

  I felt sorry for J, as I read her short, emotional letters over again. Her passionate love for her child and her isolation with it, her anger and the way she at first fought bitterly against and, finally, gave despairingly in to the course proposed to her, filled me with sadness and sympathy. A girl from the servant class, living in a closely bound community, might perhaps have fared better, sixty or so years before, than this daughter of genteel parentage, who had been so coldly rejected and whose feelings were so totally left out of the count. Yet servant girls in Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children. At least Jennet had known that her son was alive and had been given a good home.

  And then I opened the other documents that were bound together with the letters. They were three death certificates. The first was of the boy, Nathaniel Drablow, at the age of six years. The cause of death was given as drowning. After that, and bearing exactly the same date, was a similar certificate, stating that Rose Judd had also died by drowning.

  I felt a terrible, cold, sickening sensation that began in the pit of my stomach and seemed to rise up through my chest into my throat, so that I was sure I would either vomit or choke. But I did not, I only got up and paced in agitation and distress about the room, clutching the two sheets of creased paper in my hand.