The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  That broke the spell which held me, and had held me till then numb and speechless; and as the handle slowly turned under those cruel, sinewy fingers I shrieked aloud, shrieked again and again, till the whole house rang with my cries of fear and horror; shrieked, and springing wildly forward, saw——nothing! a blank, empty space, where a moment before had been man and animal, and let the candle fall out of my nerveless fingers down between the banister and far below, clattering into the darkness.

  What happened next, or how I got there, I shall never know; but it was early dawn when I recovered consciousness, and I was lying face downwards on the floor in my own room. Someone—Mrs. Cathers it was—was trying to lift me up; but at first I did not recognise her, and the touch of a hand only wrung a faint cry from me, and made me go off again into a second fainting-fit. I suppose she must have got some water then and dashed it in my face; for, when I next revived, both it and my hair were dripping with wet, and I opened my eyes and saw her bending over me. But I was still only half-conscious. I did not know where I was or what had happened to me, and my first effort of returning life was to cling to this woman, so repugnant to me usually, and moan out faint contradictory entreaties that she would stay with me, that she would not leave me; and then, at the same time, that she would run to that poor girl and save her. “Oh, do go to her; do, do, or he will kill her. He will have killed her by now.”

  “Killed her! Why, ma’am, whatever are you talking on? There’s no one in the ’ouse but you an’ me. There ain’t, indeed. On my conscience there ain’t.” This, or something like this, Mrs. Cathers kept repeating; but I hardly heard or understood. The frenzy of terror, only half subdued by exhaustion, was still on me; and when I found she would not move I tried to rise, and failing, burst into a fit of hysterical weeping, which lasted so long that Mrs. Cathers got quite frightened. She ran for some brandy and poured it down my throat, and this partially revived me; but by this time I was as weak as a child, and the woman had to half lift, half drag me on to the bed, and then stoop her head low to hear my whispered request, urged with tremulous eagerness, that even if she were sure that there was no one in the house, she would send at once to the friends I had been with last evening, and beg Mrs. L—— to come to me. To my surprise and sorrow, however, this Mrs. Cathers would not do. She had a hundred reasons to the contrary. There was no one to send, and I was not well enough to be left, and if I liked to write to Mrs. L—— later she would put the note in the pillar; all of which did not satisfy me; for with all my suspicions of the woman revived by her reluctance to carry out such a simple and natural wish, I could not feel sure that any letter I might write would reach its destination. Besides, a better idea had come into my head, and finding her obstinate on that score, I begged her to help me to dress, and call a cab, declaring that I would go to the L——’s myself. That would save all delay, and they would take care of me. I could not and would not sleep another night in that house.

  Mrs. Cathers lost patience.

  “Tush, ma’am! What’s the matter with the ’ouse?” she said rudely, and pressing me back on the pillows with a hand strong enough to be unpleasantly suggestive in my weakened state. “There’s not a soul stirred in it but yourself after the gentleman went last night, and nothing ain’t happened excep’ that you’ve nearly druv yourself into a fever an’ got a fit of the hystericks with the bad air in that beastly Museum, and writin’ mornin’, noon, an’ evenin’, too, as is enough to drive anyone mad. I expect you was reg’lar wore out, and most like fell asleep aside of your bed a-sayin’ your prayers, and got awful nightmares in consequence, as was only natural. Why, you was cryin’ out and struggling in one still when I came upstairs. And now just you lie down, ma’am, an’ take a sleep to quiet you. Why, bless you! you’ll be all right when you wake, and thankful to me I didn’t let you go rampagin’ about when you wasn’t sensible what you was sayin’ or doin’.”

  I looked up in the woman’s face and saw that it was useless to try either argument or command on her; for there was a darkly obstinate expression about her mouth which told me she meant to have her way. Perhaps if I pretended to give in to her, and lay still for a while, I might be able to get up later and leave the house without any further appeal to her. That any such appeal would be futile I felt sure. Indeed, her resoluteness in keeping me in the house and preventing me from speaking to other people, with her peculiarly persistent avoidance of asking me any question, either now or on the previous night, as to what had happened, preferring to put forward a made-up story of her own as though she were going through a programme learnt by rote beforehand, made me certain that she either knew more of the secrets of this gloomy house than anyone suspected, or was in the landlord’s pay to keep them from being brought to the light of day at any cost, even of life or reason, to a tenant. Put before yourself what would be the natural curiosity, wonder, and sympathy of most women of the lower orders on such an occasion, and I think you will come to a similar conclusion.

  Acting on this idea I made believe to yield to her way of thinking, and also to her making me a cup of tea, which she declared would do me all the good in the world. In truth I was both thirsty and anxious above all things to regain strength enough to carry out my purpose; and, therefore, when she brought me up a large breakfast-cup full, I raised myself and drank it off greedily, although it struck me in so doing that it was not good tea, and had a strange bitter flavour. The next moment I felt myself sinking heavily back and my eyes closing. I opened them with an effort, and looked at Mrs. Cathers. There was a smile on her face; but it seemed to be getting fainter, as though I saw it through a thickening mist; and when I tried to say, “You have given me a narcotic,” my voice sounded thick, and the words seemed to lose themselves between my teeth. Before they were fairly uttered, sound and sight, too, had faded away, and I was fast asleep.

  How long I slept I do not know, but I should judge it was about four hours. Narcotics, especially in strong doses, have rather a curious effect on me. They both operate and lose their power far more rapidly and thoroughly than with most people. It wanted a few minutes to eleven when I awoke, and, with the exception of a slight headache, I felt at once that both my perceptions and my memory were quite clear. My bodily powers, too, had come back in a great degree; for though I felt much weaker than usual I was quite able to rise, and lost no time in dressing myself for walking, and putting up my money and a few valuables in a small hand-bag as softly and swiftly as possible. My intention was to leave the house, if possible without seeing Mrs. Cathers again; and at first I seemed likely to succeed. There was no sign of her on the stairs as I passed that awful window, now blank and bare, and filled with raw, white daylight; or in the drawing-room, the door of which stood wide open; and as I hastened down a shudder ran through my limbs, and a feeling of sickness came over me, when I noticed, what I had not seen before, a large brownish stain, which had been partially obliterated by scraping and washing, on the stencilled wall just outside the room.

  There was no sign of Mrs. Cathers in the hall either, and the whole house was as still and silent as if she too had dosed herself off to sleep. It was, therefore, an unpleasant shock to me when I lifted the latch of the front door, expecting next moment to be in the street, to find that it was locked and the key gone. The dining-room too was in darkness, the shutters being still up and barred; and a feeling of nervous dread prevented me from giving more than a hasty glance into it. I preferred to boldly invade the kitchen regions, and, if I saw Mrs. Cathers, desire her to let me out by the area door. She could hardly refuse; and if she did, there were enough passers-by at this time for me to easily attract someone’s attention. I went downstairs accordingly. They were narrow stairs, and, though clean enough at present, had evidently not been kept so by previous tenants, for they were stained with blackish spots and patches nearly all the way to the bottom, as though something had been spilt down them, and soaking into the wood remained there. I noticed too that the wall on one side had been whitewa
shed for about three feet up at a much later period than the rest.

  To my surprise Mrs. Cathers was not in the kitchen below; nor in her own room, which adjoined it, and the door of which standing open showed me that her bonnet and shawl were gone from the peg where, on my previous visits to the basement, I had always seen them hanging. It flashed upon me then that she had gone out on some errand of her own, trusting to my being sound asleep, and probably meaning to return before the influence of the narcotic had worn off; and when, to my intense relief and thankfulness, I discovered that she had omitted or forgotten to fasten the area door behind her, I felt as though a heavy weight had been rolled off my heart, and a sudden resolution came to me to profit by her absence by endeavouring to discover some clue, if any existed, to those horrors nightly enacted upstairs. It did not seem likely that I should; but at least I had courage to try.

  The kitchen and lower offices generally I had examined before, and found them all alike, dreary in the dreariness of dark November days, rather bare and very clean. Mrs. Cathers’s room remained; but that came under the same category. There was not even anything lying about in it. She kept all her possessions in a small trunk, which was locked. There was no looking-glass in the room; and the key was inside the door. Did she fasten herself in at night, and remain so, unmoved by any shrieks or cries for help from upstairs? There was nothing to be learnt here.

  I had only one more place to visit, a small yard at the back of the house. Originally, perhaps, it had been a garden; for there were a couple of lilac-bushes and a holly at one end of it; but these had evidently not borne a leaf for years, and being coated with a thick garment of soot stood up against the dank, mildewed walls like black spectres. They were high walls, so high that even if there had been any sun it could hardly have forced an entrance; and the ground beneath was black, too, and sodden with moisture. At one side there was a huge tub for rain-water, and a pile of old bottles; at the bottom a worm-eaten, tumbling-to-pieces summerhouse. That was all. I do not know what took my steps to the last-named place. Standing there under the low leaden sky, and half hidden by the spectral lilac-bushes, it presented an appearance even more gloomy, sinister, and desolate than the rest; yet something within me, something which I could not resist, seemed to force me to the door and compel me to look inside. There was nothing to be seen there at first—nothing, at least, but a pile of wood heaped up on one side, and a rusty old chopper lying across some of the billets with which Mrs. Cathers had evidently been chopping them up for her fire; but as I stood gazing, something living seemed to move at one end of the wood-stack; and to my unutterable horror—a horror which must have been felt to be understood—there came out a large yellow cat, very gaunt and rough-skinned, with an unusually big head and only one eye.

  For the moment I thought I should have fainted again. This animal, hideous in itself, and the very facsimile of that whose horrible gambols I had witnessed the previous night, seemed like a part of that ghastly scene risen up again in proof of its reality; and for a minute or so the walls of the building seemed to swim round with me, and I was forced to lean on the wood-stack to save myself from falling. Then I saw that the ground where the animal had been crouching was hollowed into a hole, partly by her own claws, partly, perhaps, by chopping billets on it; and at the present moment she had returned there, and was licking and growling over a bone, which, from its whiteness and the earth on one end of it, appeared to have been disinterred in the process. It was a very small bone, not bigger than that in a rabbit’s fore-leg or a human finger; and close by I saw a gleam of something else, also white, showing through the loosened mould. Conquering my repugnance I stooped down, and with a shrinking beyond all words, and which gives me a sick feeling now to think of it, drew out this white thing, discovering it to be a second bone resembling the first. A few blackish fibres like threads were hanging from it, and to it a fragment of stuff—muslin, apparently—was adhering.

  The cat lay still, watching me all the while with her one vicious eye, and growling furtively. With an involuntary gesture of disgust I dropped the bone almost as soon as I had touched it, but the bit of muslin had got caught on my finger, and obliged me to look at it more closely. It was a scrap of cambric about nine inches long and two broad, hemmed at one side and gathered at the other, like a frill or ruffle; but it had evidently been torn roughly from the article of dress to which it belonged, and one end was stained with some dark brown liquid, which had dried and caked it into a hard, crumpled mass.

  Like a frill or ruffle! Like—like—good God! was it only a fancy?—the ruffles at her wrist; and stained with——

  How I left that horrible house I hardly know; but five minutes later I was outside it in the open street, and I have never entered it again. For several weeks I lay very ill in Russell Place; so ill that Hester was sent for from Aldershot to help the L——’s in nursing me; and as soon as I was well enough to be moved she took me back there with her, and afterwards returned with me to the North, where I have remained quietly almost ever since. On the second day of my illness Mrs. L—— and my brother-in-law went to the house in Melrose Square. Mrs. Cathers was there, and opened the door to them, professing great alarm at my absence and entire innocence as to the possibility of anything in the house being the occasion of it; but when she found that one of their first objects was to summarily send her about her business her manner altered, and she sturdily refused to go, declaring that she had been put into the house by the other lady and the landlord, and that no one had any right to send her off at a moment’s warning because a poor, weak-minded lady had got a fever. She had done all she could for her, and tried to keep her quietly in bed; though as to drugging her that was all an invention, and she would swear she had not. Let them take her to a magistrate and try; and if the poor, silly woman would get up and go out what could be expected but she would get worse? Why, she had seen at the very beginning what a nervous, hysterical state she was in; and had told the landlord she did not much like being alone with such a person; and the least she expected was a month’s board and wages in compensation. Tom had written to the landlord already, and an angry interview and correspondence ensued; the latter gentleman persisting in treating all suspicion of there being anything wrong in the house as equally childish and insulting, had the ground of the summer-house dug up, and triumphantly pointed out that there was nothing buried there (this was a week after my visit to the spot, and who could tell what had been done in the interim?) and spoke of me uniformly as a poor, nervous bibliomaniac, worked up into a brain-fever by a disordered digestion and an overwrought brain. Indeed, he even threatened to claim a quarter’s rent, declaring that the house had been taken for six months; but my brother-in-law fought this valiantly, and he had to be content with the month’s rent he had received in advance.

  As to Mrs. Cathers, she disappeared during the quarrel between her superiors, and was heard of no more. My firm belief is, and always will be, that she was aware of the evil character of the house, and was heavily paid by the landlord to act as servant to his tenants in it, and cast a slur on anything they might declare they had seen there. He, of course, spoke of her as a person of the highest character, and pointed to the fact that none of my property had been disturbed in my absence as proof thereof.

  But what was the explanation of the mystery? What was the dark secret of this house, so strangely shadowed forth to me, a plain matter-of-fact woman of the nineteenth century? After minute enquiries among the neighbours and shopkeepers in the vicinity, I can only say I do not know! The mystery is still unexplained: the secret still hidden in those dreary walls, never probably to be unveiled on earth.

  All that the lawyer and Mrs. L——, acting for me, could find out in their research was this: The house had been untenanted for a year and a half before I took it; the last people who lived there being a blind old lady with her husband and two servants. The aged couple used to go to bed very early, and the servants slept downstairs, and never spoke of having heard
or seen anything out of the common; but one night the husband, having to come downstairs for his wife’s medicine, must have missed his footing, for he was heard falling to the bottom, and was picked up speechless and dying. The blind widow went away after that, and the household broke up.

  Who had the house before them? Oh, a young couple; but they only stayed a week or so, and left suddenly. Reported in the neighbourhood that the landlord turned them out; said they were not respectable people.

  And before that? Before that it had been empty a good while, ever since the old gentleman lived there who owned it and was uncle to the present landlord. Married? No; nor likely to have been; a very ill-favoured old gent, and not pleasant in his manners either. Had a ward living with him, however—a young lady; but she was said to be a sad invalid, never went out, and no one ever saw her, except now and then at an upper window. They went away all in a hurry to France—indeed, no one knew till they were gone; for they were not sociable people, only kept one servant, latterly a charwoman who did not sleep in the house, and had no acquaintances in the neighbourhood. Folks said the young lady died abroad, and perhaps her guardian found the house lonesome without her; for though he came back after a time he did not stay. Anyhow, he was dead, too, now; for that was how the house came to the present owner, who had never lived there himself, but let it just as it stood, furnished.