Fear

by Roald Dahl

  Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had been struck by a note of flatness in Alida’s answering hilarity.

  ‘Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.’

  ‘Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?’

  His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back, tantalizing: ‘Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.’

  ‘Never know it?’ Boyne pulled her up. ‘But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?’

  ‘I can’t say. But that’s the story.’

  ‘That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?’

  ‘Well – not till afterward, at any rate.’

  ‘Till afterward?’

  ‘Not till long, long afterward.’

  ‘But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t its signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?’

  Alida could only shake her head. ‘Don’t ask me. But it has.’

  ‘And then suddenly’ – Mary spoke up as if from cavernous depths of divination – ‘suddenly, long afterward, one says to oneself, “That was it!”’

  She was startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida’s pupils. ‘I suppose so. One just has to wait.’

  ‘Oh, hang waiting!’ Ned broke in. ‘Life’s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can’t we do better than that, Mary?’

  But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months of their conversation with Mrs Stair they were settled at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for, to the point of planning it in advance in all its daily details, had actually begun for them.

  It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded fire-place, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkened to a deeper solitude; it was for the ultimate indulgence from such sensations that Mary Boyne, abruptly exiled from New York by her husband’s business, had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and gardening (against a background of grey walls), he dreamed of the production of his long-planned book on the Economic Basis of Culture; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered: they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past.

  Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by an air of remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island – a nest of counties, as they put it – that for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.

  ‘It’s that,’ Ned had once enthusiastically explained, ‘that gives such depth to their efforts, such relief to their contrasts. They’ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every delicious mouthful.’

  The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old house hidden under a shoulder of the downs had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more completely in its special charm – the charm of having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the mysterious stir of intenser memories.

  The feeling had never been stronger than on this particular afternoon when, waiting in the library for the lamps to come, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred to go alone; and, in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning’s work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had thought it would, and there were lines of perplexity between his eyes such as had never been there in his engineering days. He had often, then, looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of ‘worry’ had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her – the introduction, and a summary of the opening chapter – showed a firm hold on his subject, and an increasing confidence in his powers.

  The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with ‘business’ and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible source of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then? But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier and fresher-eyed. It was only within the last week that she had felt in him the undefinable change which made her restless in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a secret to keep from him!

  The thought that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the long room.

  ‘Can it be the house?’ she mused.

  The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the row of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hearth.

  ‘Why, of course – the house is haunted!’ she reflected.

  The ghost – Alida’s imperceptible ghost – after figuring largely in the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually left aside as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her rural neighbours, but, beyond a vague ‘They du say so, ma’am,’ the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive spectre had apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

  ‘And I suppose, poor ineffectual demon, that’s why it beats its beautiful wings in vain in the void,’ Mary had laughingly concluded.

  ‘Or, rather,’ Ned answered in the same strain, ‘why, amid so much that’s ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as the ghost.’ And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous enough to make them soon unaware of the loss.

  Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning – a sense gradually acquired through daily contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own past; if one could only get into close enough communion with the house one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on one’s own account. Perhaps, in his long hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired it already, and was silently carrying about the weight of whatever it had revealed to him. M
ary was too well versed in the code of the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of taste as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her. ‘What, after all, except for the fun of the shudder,’ she reflected, ‘would he really care for any of their old ghosts?’ And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one’s greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one did see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it.

  ‘Not till long afterward,’ Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned had seen one when they first came, and had known only within the last week what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of the hour, she threw back her thoughts to the early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a lively confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the house as, treasure after treasure, it revealed itself to them. It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel that opened on a flight of corkscrew stairs leading to a flat ledge of the roof – the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.

  The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her discovery. She remembered still how, standing at her side, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.

  ‘And now the other way,’ he had said, turning her about within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long satisfying draught, the picture of the grey-walled court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the high-road under the downs.

  It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt his arms relax, and heard a sharp ‘Hullo!’ that made her turn to glance at him.

  Distinctly, yes, she now recalled that she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man – a man in loose greyish clothes, as it appeared to her – who was sauntering down the lime-avenue to the court with the doubtful gait of a stranger who seeks his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness and greyishness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its dress; but her husband had apparently seen more – seen enough to make him push past her with a hasty ‘Wait!’ and dash down the stairs without pausing to give her a hand.

  A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow him first more cautiously; and when she reached the landing she paused again, for a less definite reason, leaning over the banister to strain her eyes through the silence of the brown sun-flecked depths. She lingered there until, somewhere in those depths she heard the closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow flight of steps till she reached the lower hall.

  The front door stood open on the sunlight of the court, and hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she crossed the threshold and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.

  He looked up, as if surprised at her entrance, but the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

  ‘What was it? Who was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’ he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

  ‘The man we saw coming towards the house.’

  He seemed to reflect. ‘The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable drains, but he had disappeared before I could get down.’

  ‘Disappeared? But he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.’

  Boyne shrugged his shoulders. ‘So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?’

  That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine rising above the roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incident’s having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the fold of memory from which it now emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash down from the roof in pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for them, and rushing out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the distance the grey figure had looked like Peters.

  Yet now, as she reviewed the scene, she felt her husband’s explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with him on the subject of the stable drains, had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one of these questions had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now marshalled themselves at her summons, she had a sense that they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.

  Weary with her thoughts, she moved to the window. The library was now quite dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world still held.

  As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself far down the perspective of bare limes: it looked a mere blot of deeper grey in the greyness, and for an instant, as it moved towards her, her heart thumped to the thought, ‘It’s the ghost!’

  She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two months earlier, she had had a distant vision from the roof, was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband’s; and she turned to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly.

  ‘It’s really too absurd,’ she laughed out, ‘but I never can remember!’

  ‘Remember what?’ Boyne questioned as they drew together.

  ‘That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.’

  Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his gesture or in the lines of his preoccupied face.

  ‘Did you think you’d seen it?’ he asked, after an appreciable interval.

  ‘Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!’

  ‘Me – just now?’ His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo of her laugh. ‘Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if that’s the best you can do.’

  ‘Oh yes, I give it up. Have you?’ she asked, turning round on him abruptly.

  The parlour-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne’s face as he bent above the tray she presented.

  ‘Have you?’ Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination.

  ‘Have I what?’ he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

  ‘Given up trying to see the ghost.’ Her heart beat a little at the experiment s
he was making.

  Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the hearth.

  ‘I never tried,’ he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.

  ‘Well, of course,’ Mary persisted, ‘the exasperating thing is that there’s no use trying, since one can’t be sure until so long afterward.’

  He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands, he looked up to ask, ‘Have you any idea how long?’

  Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fire-place. From her seat she glanced over, startled, at her husband’s profile, which was projected against the circle of lamplight.

  ‘No; none. Have you?’ she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added stress of intention.

  Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then, inconsequently, turned back with it towards the lamp.

  ‘Lord, no! I only meant,’ he explained, with a faint tinge of impatience, ‘is there any legend, any tradition as to that?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ she answered; but the impulse to add, ‘What makes you ask?’ was checked by the reappearance of the parlour-maid, with tea and a second lamp.

  With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her husband’s face. He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The longer she looked the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The lines of tension had vanished, and such traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort. He glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.