Night Terrors

by E. F. Benson

  ‘No; it means that I tried to and couldn’t. She gave me an extraordinary sense of her being aware of something which we knew nothing of; of being on a plane which we couldn’t imagine. I constantly meet such people; they aren’t very rare. I don’t mean that there’s anything the least uncanny about them, or that they know things that are uncanny. They are simply aloof, as hard to understand as your dog or your cat. She would find us equally aloof if she succeeded in analysing her sensations about us, but like a sensible woman she probably feels not the smallest interest in us. She is there to bake and to boil, and we are there to eat her bakings and appreciate her boilings.’

  The subject dropped, and we sat on in the dusk that was rapidly deepening into night. The door into the hall was open at our backs, and a panel of light from the lamps within was cast out on to the terrace. Wandering moths, invisible in the darkness, suddenly became manifest as they fluttered into this illumination, and vanished again as they passed out of it. One moment they were there, living things with life and motion of their own, the next they had quite disappeared. How inexplicable that would be, I thought, if one did not know from long familiarity that light of the appropriate sort and strength is needed to make material objects visible.

  Philip must have been following precisely the same train of thought, for his voice broke in, carrying it a little further.

  ‘Look at that moth,’ he said, ‘and even while you look it has gone like a ghost, even as like a ghost it appeared. Light made it visible. And there are other sorts of light, interior psychical light which similarly makes visible the beings which people the darkness of our blindness.’

  Just as he spoke I thought for the moment that I heard the tingle of a telephone bell. It sounded very faintly, and I could not have sworn that I had actually heard it. At the most it gave one staccato little summons and was silent again.

  ‘Is there a telephone in the house?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t noticed one.’

  ‘Yes, by the door into the back garden,’ said he. ‘Do you want to telephone?’

  ‘No, but I thought I heard it ring. Didn’t you?’

  He shook his head, then smiled.

  ‘Ah, that was it,’ he said.

  Certainly now there was the clink of glass, rather bell-like, as the parlourmaid came out of the dining-room with a tray of syphon and decanter, and my reasonable mind was quite content to accept this very probable explanation. But behind that, quite unreasonably, some little obstinate denizen of my consciousness rejected it. It told me that what I had heard was like the moth that came out of darkness and went on into darkness again . . .

  My room was at the back of the house, overlooking the lawn-tennis court, and presently I went up to bed. The moon had risen, and the lawn lay in bright illumination bordered by a strip of dark shadow below the pollarded limes. Somewhere along the hillside an owl was foraging, softly hooting, and presently it swept whitely across the lawn. No sound is so intensely rural, yet none, to my mind, so suggests a signal. But it seemed to signal nothing, and, tired with the long, hot journey, and soothed by the deep tranquillity of the place, I was soon asleep. But often during the night I woke, though never to more than a dozing, dreamy consciousness of where I was, and each time I had the notion that some slight noise had roused me, and each time I found myself listening to hear whether the tingle of a telephone bell was the cause of my disturbance. There came no repetition of it, and again I slept, and again I woke with drowsy attention for the sound which I felt I expected, but never heard.

  Daylight banished these imaginations, but though I must have slept many hours all told, for these wakings had been only brief and partial, I was aware of a certain weariness, as if though my bodily senses had been rested, some part of me had been wakeful and watching all night. This was fanciful enough to disregard, and certainly during the day I forgot it altogether. Soon after breakfast we went down to the sea, and a short ramble along a shingly shore brought us to a sandy cove framed in promontories of rock that went down into deep water. The most fastidious connoisseur in bathing could have pictured no more ideal scene for his operations, for with hot sand to bask on and rocks to plunge from, and a limpid ocean and a cloudless sky, there was indeed no lacuna in perfection. All morning we loafed here, swimming and sunning ourselves, and for the afternoon there was the shade of the garden, and a stroll later on up through the orchard and to the gorse-clad hillside. We came back through the churchyard, looked into the church, and coming out, Philip pointed to a tombstone which from its newness among its dusky and moss-grown companions easily struck the eye. It recorded without pious or scriptural reflection the date of the birth and death of George Hearne; the latter event had taken place close on two years ago, and we were within a week of the exact anniversary. Other tombstones near were monuments to those of the same name, and dated back for a couple of centuries and more.

  ‘Local family,’ said I, and strolling on we came to our own gate in the long brick wall. It was opened from inside just as we arrived at it, and there came out a brisk, middle-aged man in clergyman’s dress, obviously our vicar.

  He very civilly introduced himself.

  ‘I heard that Mrs Hearne’s house had been taken, and that the tenants had come,’ he said, ‘and I ventured to leave my card.’

  We performed our part of the ceremony, and in answer to his inquiry professed our satisfaction with our quarters and our neighbourhood.

  ‘That is good news,’ said Mr Stephens; ‘I hope you will continue to enjoy your holiday. I am Cornish myself, and like all natives think there is no place like Cornwall!’

  Philip pointed with his stick towards the churchyard. ‘We noticed that the Hearnes are people of the place,’ he said. Quite suddenly I found myself understanding what he had meant by the aloofness of the race. Something between reserve and suspicion came into Mr Stephens’s face.

  ‘Yes, yes, an old family here,’ he said, ‘and large landowners. But now some remote cousin . . . The house, however, belongs to Mrs Hearne for life.’

  He stopped, and by that reticence confirmed the impression he had made. In consequence, for there is something in the breast of the most incurious which, when treated with reserve becomes inquisitive, Philip proceeded to ask a direct question.

  ‘Then I take it that the George Hearne who, as I have just seen, died two years ago, was the husband of Mrs Hearne, from whom we took the house?’

  ‘Yes; he was buried in the churchyard,’ said Mr Stephens quickly. Then, for no reason at all, he added: ‘Naturally he was buried in the churchyard here.’

  Now my impression at that moment was that Mr Stephens had said something he did not mean to say, and had corrected it by saying the same thing again.

  He went on his way, back to the vicarage, with an amiably expressed desire to do anything that was in his power for us, in the way of local information, and we went in through the gate. The post had just arrived; there was the London morning paper and a letter for Philip which cost him two perusals before he folded it up and put it into his pocket. But he made no comment, and presently, as dinner-time was near, I went up to my room. Here in this deep valley with the great westerly hill towering above us, it was already dark, and the lawn lay beneath a twilight as of deep, clear water. Quite idly as I brushed my hair in front of the glass on the table in the window, of which the blinds were not yet drawn, I looked out and saw that on the bank along which grew the pollarded limes there was lying a ladder. It was just a shade odd that it should be there, but the oddity of it was quite accounted for by the supposition that the gardener had had business among the trees in the orchard, and had left it there, for the completion of his labours tomorrow. It was just as odd as that, and no odder, just worth a twitch of the imagination to account for it, but now completely accounted for.

  I went downstairs, and passing Philip’s door heard the swish of ablutions which implied he was not
quite ready, and in the most loaferlike manner I strolled round the corner of the house. The kitchen window which looked on to the tennis-court was open, and there was a good smell, I remember, coming from it. And still without thought of the ladder I had just seen, I mounted the slope of grass on to the tennis court. Just across it was the bank where the pollarded limes grew; but there was no ladder lying there. Of course the gardener must have remembered he had left it, and had returned to remove it exactly as I came downstairs. There was nothing singular about that, and I could not imagine why the thing interested me at all. But for some inexplicable reason I found myself saying: ‘But I did see the ladder just now.’

  A bell – no telephone bell, but a welcome harbinger to a hungry man – sounded from inside the house, and I went back on to the terrace, just as Philip got downstairs. At dinner our speech rambled pleasantly over the accomplishments of today, and the prospects of tomorrow, and in due course we came to the consideration of Mr Stephens. We settled that he was an aloof fellow, and then Philip said: ‘I wonder why he hastened to tell us that George Hearne was buried in the churchyard, and then added that naturally he was!’

  ‘It’s the natural place to be buried in,’ said I.

  ‘Quite. That’s just why it was hardly worth mentioning.’

  I felt then, just momentarily, just vaguely, as if my mind was regarding stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The fancied ringing of the telephone bell last night was one of them, this burial of George Hearne in the churchyard was another, and, even more inexplicably, the ladder I had seen under the trees was a third. Consciously I made nothing whatever out of them, and did not feel the least inclination to devote any ingenuity to so fortuitous a collection of pieces. Why shouldn’t I add, for that matter, our morning’s bathe, or the gorse on the hillside? But I had the sensation that, though my conscious brain was presently occupied with piquet, and was rapidly growing sleepy with the day of sun and sea, some sort of mole inside it was digging passages and connecting-corridors below the soil.

  Five eventless days succeeded; there were no more ladders, no more phantom telephone bells, and emphatically no more Mr Stephens. Once or twice we met him in the village street and got from him the curtest salutation possible short of a direct cut. And yet somehow he seemed charged with information, so we lazily concluded, and he made for us a field of imaginative speculation. I remember that I constructed a highly fanciful romance, which postulated that George Hearne was not dead at all, but that Mr Stephens had murdered some inconvenient blackmailer, whom he had buried with the rites of the Church. Or – these romances always broke down under cross-examination from Philip – Mr Stephens himself was George Hearne, who had fled from justice, and was supposed to have died. Or Mrs Hearne was really George Hearne, and our admirable housekeeper was the real Mrs Hearne. From such indications you may judge how the intoxication of the sun and the sea had overpowered us.

  But there was one explanation of why Mr Stephens had so hastily assured us that George Hearne was buried in the churchyard which never passed our lips. It was just because both Philip and I really believed it to be the true one that we did not mention it. But just as if it was some fever or plague, we both knew that we were sickening with it. And then these fanciful romances stopped because we knew that the Real Thing was approaching. There had been faint glimpses of it before, like distant sheet-lightning; now the noise of it, authentic and audible, began to rumble.

  There came a day of hot, overclouded weather. We had bathed in the morning, and loafed in the afternoon, but Philip, after tea, had refused to come for our usual ramble, and I set out alone. That morning Mrs Criddle had rather peremptorily told me that a room in the front of the house would prove much cooler for me, for it caught the sea breeze, and though I objected that it would also catch the southerly sun, she had clearly made up her mind that I was to move from the bedroom overlooking the tennis-court and the pollarded limes, and there was no resisting so polite and yet determined a woman.

  When I set out for my ramble after tea, the change had already been effected, and my brain nosed slowly about as I strolled, sniffing for her reason, for no self-respecting brain could accept the one she gave. But in this hot, drowsy air, I entirely lacked nimbleness, and when I came back the question had become a mere silly, unanswerable riddle. I returned through the churchyard, and saw that in a couple of days we should arrive at the anniversary of George Hearne’s death.

  Philip was not on the terrace in front of the house, and I went in at the door of the hall, expecting to find him there or in the back garden. Exactly as I entered my eye told me that there he was, a black silhouette against the glass door, at the end of the hall, which was open, and led through into the back garden. He did not turn round at the sound of my entry, but took a step or two in the direction of the far door, still framed in the oblong of it. I glanced at the table, where the post lay, found letters both for me and him, and looked up again. There was no one there.

  He had hastened his steps, I supposed, but simultaneously I thought how odd it was that he had not taken his letters, if he was in the hall, and that he had not turned when I entered. However, I should find him just round the corner, and with his post and mine in my hand I went towards the far door. As I approached it I felt a sudden cold stir of air, rather unaccountable, for the day was notably sultry, and went out. He was sitting at the far end of the tennis-court.

  I went up to him with his letters.

  ‘I thought I saw you just now in the hall,’ I said. But I knew already that I had not seen him in the hall.

  He looked up quickly.

  ‘And have you only just come in?’ he said.

  ‘Yes; this moment. Why?’

  ‘Because half an hour ago I went in to see if the post had come, and thought I saw you in the hall.’

  ‘And what did I do?’ I asked.

  ‘You went out on to the terrace. But I didn’t find you there.’

  There was a short pause as he opened his letters.

  ‘Damned interesting,’ he observed. ‘Because there’s someone here who isn’t you or me.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  He laughed, pointing at the row of trees.

  ‘Yes, something too silly for words,’ he said. ‘Just now I saw a piece of rope dangling from the big branch of that pollarded lime. I saw it quite distinctly. And then there wasn’t any rope there at all, any more than there is now.’

  Philosophers have argued about the strongest emotion known to man. Some say ‘love’, others ‘hate’, others ‘fear’. I am disposed to put ‘curiosity’ on a level, at least, with these august sensations, just mere simple inquisitiveness. Certainly at the moment it rivalled fear in my mind, and there was a hint of that.

  As he spoke the parlourmaid came out into the garden with a telegram in her hand. She gave it to Philip, who without a word scribbled a line on the reply-paid form inside it, and handed it back to her.

  ‘Dreadful nuisance,’ he said, ‘but there’s no help for it. A few days ago I got a letter which made me think I might have to go up to town, and this telegram makes it certain. There’s an operation possible on a patient of mine, which I hoped might have been avoided, but my locum tenens won’t take the responsibility of deciding whether it is necessary or not.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘I can catch the night train,’ he said, ‘and I ought to be able to catch the night train back from town tomorrow. I shall be back, that is to say, the day after tomorrow in the morning. There’s no help for it. Ha, that telephone of yours will come in useful. I can get a taxi from Falmouth, and needn’t start till after dinner.’

  He went into the house, and I heard him rattling and tapping at the telephone. Soon he called for Mrs Criddle, and presently came out again.

  ‘We’re not on the telephone service,’ he said. ‘It was cut off a year ago, only they have
n’t removed the apparatus. But I can get a trap in the village, Mrs Criddle says, and she’s sent for it. If I start at once I shall easily be in time. Spicer’s packing a bag for me, and I’ll take a sandwich.’

  He looked sharply towards the pollarded trees.

  ‘Yes, just there,’ he said. ‘I saw it plainly, and equally plainly I saw it not. And then there’s that telephone of yours.’

  I told him now about the ladder I had seen below the tree where he saw the dangling rope.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said, ‘because it’s so silly and unexpected. It is really tragic that I should be called away just now, for it looks as if the – well, the matter were coming out of the darkness into a shaft of light. But I’ll be back, I hope, in thirty-six hours. Meantime do observe very carefully, and whatever you do, don’t make a theory. Darwin says somewhere that you can’t observe without a theory, but to make a theory is a great danger to an observer. It can’t help influencing your imagination; you tend to see or hear what falls in with your hypothesis. So just observe; be as mechanical as a phonograph and a photographic lens.’

  Presently the dog-cart arrived, and I went down to the gate with him. ‘Whatever it is that is coming through, is coming through in bits,’ he said. ‘You heard a telephone; I saw a rope. We both saw a figure, but not simultaneously nor in the same place. I wish I didn’t have to go.’

  I found myself sympathising strongly with this wish, when after dinner I found myself with a solitary evening in front of me, and the pledge to ‘observe’ binding me. It was not mainly a scientific ardour that prompted this sympathy, and the desire for independent combination, but, quite emphatically, fear of what might be coming out of the huge darkness which lies on all sides of human experience. I could no longer fail to connect together the fancied telephone bell, the rope, and the ladder, for what made the chain between them was the figure that both Philip and I had seen. Already my mind was seething with conjectural theory, but I would not let the ferment of it ascend to my surface consciousness; my business was not to aid, but rather stifle, my imagination.