First of all she struggled to keep her head above the flood waters of the Lepping, while trying to swim to the bank. Then the words of the vampire sank deep enough into her mind for her to accept the truth. “You’re already dead.”
Fierce currents rolled her onto her back. She floated downstream looking up at the moon through overhanging willows. Silver-edged clouds floated high in the sky. They moved with the flow of the night winds, she moved with the flow of the night river. Just like those clouds she had no control over her direction.
I’m already dead, she thought. I don’t need to swim. Understanding seeped coldly through her. I don’t need to breathe. Because I am dead . . . At last she surrendered to the power of the river. It floated her past rocks, rolled her over, spun her in its grave eddies, then its remorseless undertow pulled her down under the black waters, down to the bottom of the river bed that was an expanse of slick mud. Being unable to breathe made no difference to her. She did not drown. Could not drown. Pale shapes swam in front of her face. For a moment she thought they were softly swollen fish, then she realized that they were her own hands floating backward and forward in this cold body of water.
There’s no point fighting this, she told herself. I may as well let the river carry me to the sea. I’m truly lost now. Even if I could climb out, I can never return home.
Once more her face broke the surface. For mile after mile she floated on her back, passing under bridges, beneath trees that arched over the water, between meadows. Above her the moon shone down. In her imagination it became a hard, round eye gazing dispassionately at the woman in the water, knowing that she was doomed and coolly observing what fate would eventually befall her. She was nothing but a piece of driftwood now. Lost to her family, to humanity, and to God.
Once the stream carried her past a house on the river bank. There was a light burning in the upstairs window – a little block of yellow radiance. Music ghosted from the house, too. A melancholy song that eerily echoed her journey through a night-time countryside that seemed haunted by the ghosts of all those tomorrows she would never now experience.
Presently the flow carried her away from the house and the music. Soon it was lost in the distance.
She closed her eyes. It only seemed for a moment, and then she realized that she was lying on solid ground. Opening her eyes, she sat up and looked around.
Moonlight revealed that she had been washed up on a beach. Oddly, it was tempting to lie there and not to even attempt to walk ever again. Only the water receded as a retreating ocean tide a dozen miles away reduced water levels upstream. As if walking in her sleep, she rose to her feet. There, on higher ground and almost engulfed by hawthorn, was a tumbledown cottage. Strangely, she felt herself drawn to it. Maybe the river brought me here because I was meant to see it, she thought. Perhaps I’m here for a purpose. The moon was bright enough to show her a path that ran through waist-high nettles and hemlock. It appeared to lead directly to the cottage that stood half-hidden from view alongside this remote stretch of river.
With her bare feet whispering through the plants, she glided almost dreamily to the gate that led into a garden grown wild – where roses ten feet high nodded huge heads of pink petals.
Seconds later, she approached one of the windows. The panes were cracked; some were partially covered by a green skin of moss. Slowly, slowly, as if she knew someone – or some thing – waited for her in the cottage, she leaned forward to look through one of the panes.
Inside was the kitchen of a long-since-abandoned house. Abandoned by human occupants, that was.
Sitting around a rotting table on decaying wooden chairs were five figures. Five beings that had once been men and women. Some wore ragged clothes; a pair were near-naked. The women possessed long manes of hair that poured in tangled coils of glossy black down their backs. Their skin was a deadly white with tints of blue. A cold, cold colour that sent a shiver down her spine. They sat at the table without moving. The males possessed powerfully muscular arms that were tracked with black veins. The faces of males and females alike were waxy mask-things that revealed no expression. It was their eyes that confirmed what they were.
Like those of the stranger who had thrown her in the river, their eyes possessed no iris, so they revealed no colour. What they had were tiny black pupils that lent them such an air of ferocity. All the time she watched the gathering in the derelict cottage, they did not move. They did not even blink or shift their gaze from the barren table top.
She realized that if she moved with enough stealth, she could leave this damned and desolate place without attracting their attention. Yet, just for a second, she saw herself sitting at that table with them . . . waiting with those festering dead-alive carcasses until the end of time. These were the abandoned scraps of their race, rejected by their fellow vampires. They had no purpose. Perhaps even the vampire lusts only burned dimly inside the stone-cold muscle they called their hearts. Pitiful, ugly, lonely creatures that had failed even to die.
Taking a step back, she glanced over her shoulder. Her only escape from here would be the river. Not that it could kill her now. But then, would it be a comfort to her either? All that waited for her in the water was a drifting existence without companionship of any sort. Once more that great dark tide of loneliness swept over her. She tottered, almost losing her balance. Could she face that again? The malignancy of solitude. How it corroded her sanity. Made every moment the most miserable, the most unbearably grim unit of time. And that moment of unyielding unhappiness would be replaced by another just as bad.
A mere thirty paces back to the river . . . then she would escape that gathering of animated death in the decaying cottage. Just thirty paces . . . she could cover that distance in twenty seconds.
This time she did not hesitate when she moved. Turning, she tapped on the window.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please . . . let me in. I don’t want to be alone.”
The night-time breeze carried her words away into darkness where they died beneath a cold, cold moon.
R. CHETWYND-HAYES
The Labyrinth
RONALD CHETWYND-HAYES was known as “Britain’s Prince of Chill”. During a publishing career that lasted more than forty years, he produced eleven novels, more than 200 short stories, and edited twenty-five anthologies.
Born in Isleworth, West London, he started writing fiction in the early 1950s, and his first published book was the science fiction novel The Man from the Bomb in 1959. His second novel, The Dark Man (a.k.a. And Love Survived), appeared five years later.
While looking on a bookstall in the early 1970s, he noticed the profusion of horror titles and submitted a collection of his own stories, which eventually appeared in paperback as The Unbidden. Becoming a full-time writer, he began producing a prolific number of ghost stories and sedate tales of terror, many tinged with his disarming sense of humour.
His stories were widely anthologized and collected in such volumes as Cold Terror, Terror by Night, The Elemental, The Night Ghouls and Other Grisly Tales, The Monster Club, Tales of Fear and Fantasy, The Cradle Demon and Other Stories of Fantasy and Horror, The Fantastic World of Kamtellar: A Book of Vampires and Ghouls, Tales of Darkness, Tales from Beyond, A Quiver of Ghosts, Tales from the Dark Lands, Ghosts from the Mist of Time, Tales from the Shadows, Tales from the Haunted House, Dracula’s Children, The House of Dracula, Shudders and Shivers, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes (a.k.a. Looking for Something to Suck and Other Vampire Stories), Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies.
The anthology movies From Beyond the Grave (1973) and The Monster Club (1980) were both adapted from his work. In the latter, based on probably his most successful book, the author himself was portrayed by veteran horror actor John Carradine. Chetwynd-Hayes’s stories were also extensively adapted for radio, and his tale ‘Housebound’ became the basis for a 1973 episode of the TV series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
In 1989 he was presented with Life Achievemen
t Awards by both the Horror Writers of America and the British Fantasy Society, and he was the Special Guest of Honour at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention in London. R. Chetwynd-Hayes died in 2001.
“Me and vampires have always got on well together,” explained the author, and to prove it here is a somewhat unusual twist on the theme . . .
THEY WERE LOST. Rosemary knew it and said so in forcible language. Brian also was well aware of their predicament but was unwilling to admit it.
“One cannot be lost in England,” he stated. “We’re bound to strike a main road if we walk in a straight line.”
“But suppose we wander in a circle?” Rosemary asked, looking fearfully round at the Dartmoor landscape, “and finish up in a bog?”
“If we use our eyes there’s no reason why bogs should bother us. Come on and stop moaning.”
“We should never have left that track,” Rosemary insisted. “Suppose we get caught out here when night falls?”
“Don’t be daft,” he snapped, “it’s only mid-day. We’ll be in Princetown long before nightfall.”
“You hope.” She refused to be convinced. “I’m hungry.”
“So am I.” They were walking up a steep incline. “But I don’t keep on about it.”
“I’m not keeping on. I’m hungry and I said so. Do you think we’ll find a main road soon?”
“Over the next rise,” he promised. “There’s always a main road over the next rise.”
But he was wrong. When they crested the next rise and looked down, there was only a narrow track which terminated at a tumbledown gate set in a low stone wall. Beyond, like an island girdled by a yellow lake, was a lawn-besieged house. It was built of grey stone and seemed to have been thrown up by the moors; a great, crouching monster that glared out across the countryside with multiple glass eyes. It had a strange look. The chimney stacks might have been jagged splinters of rock that had acquired a rough cylindrical shape after centuries of wind and rain. But the really odd aspect was that the sun appeared to ignore the house. It had baked the lawn to a pale yellow, cracked the paint on an adjacent summerhouse, but in some inexplicable way, it seemed to disavow the existence of the great, towering mass.
“Tea!” exclaimed Rosemary.
“What?”
“Tea.” She pointed. “The old lady, she’s drinking tea.”
Sure enough, seated by a small table that nestled in the shade of a vast multi-coloured umbrella was a little white-haired old lady taking tea. Brian frowned, for he could not understand why he had not seen her, or at least the umbrella, before, but there she was, a tiny figure in a white dress and a floppy hat, sipping tea and munching sandwiches. He moistened dry lips.
“Do you suppose,” he asked, “we dare intrude?”
“Watch me,” Rosemary started running down the slope towards the gate. “I’d intrude on Dracula himself if he had a decent cup of tea handy.”
Their feet moved on to a gravel path and it seemed whatever breeze stirred the sun-warm heather out on the moors did not dare intrude here. There was a strange stillness, a complete absence of sound, save for the crunch of feet on gravel, and this too ceased when they walked on to the parched lawn.
The old lady looked up and a slow smile gradually lit up a benign, wizened little face, while her tiny hands fluttered over the table, setting out two cups and saucers, then felt the teapot as though to make sure the contents were still hot.
“You poor children.” Her voice had that harsh, slightly cracked quality peculiar to some cultured ladies of an advanced age, but the utterance was clear, every word pronounced with precision. “You look so hot and tired.”
“We’re lost,” Rosemary announced cheerfully. “We’ve wandered for miles.”
“I must apologise for intruding,” Brian began, but the old lady waved a teaspoon at him as though to stress the impossibility of intrusion.
“My dear young man – please. You are most welcome. I cannot recall when I last entertained a visitor, although I have always hoped someone might pass this way again. The right kind of someone, of course.”
She appeared to shiver momentarily, or perhaps tremble, for her hands and shoulders shook slightly, then an expression of polite distress puckered her forehead.
“But how thoughtless I am. You are tired having wandered so many miles and there are no chairs.”
She turned her head and called out in a high-pitched, quivering voice. “Carlo! Carlo!”
A tall, lean man came out of the house and moved slowly towards them. He was dressed in a black satin tunic and matching trousers and, due possibly to some deformity, appeared to bound over the lawn, rather than walk. Brian thought of a wolf, or a large dog that has spotted intruders. He stopped a few feet from the old lady and stood waiting, his slate-coloured eyes watching Rosemary with a strange intensity.
“Carlo, you will fetch chairs,” the old lady ordered, “then some more hot water.”
Carlo made a guttural sound and departed in the direction of the summerhouse, leaping forward in a kind of loping run. He returned almost immediately carrying two little slatted chairs and presently Brian and Rosemary were seated under the vast umbrella, drinking tea from delicate china cups and listening to the harsh, cultivated voice.
“I must have lived alone here for such a long time. Gracious me, if I were to tell you how long, you would smile. Time is such an inexhaustible commodity, so long as one can tap the fountainhead. The secret is to break it down into small change. An hour does not seem to be long until you remember it has three thousand, six hundred seconds. And a week! My word, did you ever realise you have six hundred and four thousand, eight hundred seconds to spend every seven days? It’s an enormous treasure. Do have another strawberry jam sandwich, child.”
Rosemary accepted another triangular, pink-edged sandwich, then stared open-eyed at the house. At close quarters it looked even more grim than from a distance. There was the impression the walls had drawn their shadows above themselves like a ghostly cloak, and although the house stood stark and forbidding in broad daylight, it still seemed to be divorced from sunshine. Rosemary of course made the obvious statement.
“It must be very old.”
“It has lived,” the old lady said, “for millions upon millions of seconds. It has drunk deep from the barrel of time.”
Rosemary giggled, then hastily assumed an extravagantly serious expression as Brian glared at her. He sipped his tea and said: “This is really most kind of you. We were fagged out – and rather scared too. The moors seemed to go on and on and I thought we would have to spend the night out there.”
The old lady nodded, her gaze flickering from one young face to the other.
“It is not pleasant to be lost in a great, empty space. Doubtless, if you had not returned before nightfall, someone would have instigated a search for you.”
“Not on your nelly,” Rosemary stated with charming simplicity. “No one knows where we are. We’re sort of taking a roaming holiday.”
“How adventurous,” the old lady murmured, then called back over one shoulder. “Carlo, the hot water, man. Do hurry.”
Carlo came bounding out of the house carrying a silver jug in one hand and a plate of sandwiches in the other. When he reached the table his mouth was open and he was breathing heavily. The old lady shot him an anxious glance.
“Poor old boy,” she consoled. “Does the heat get you down, then? Eh? Does the heat make you puff and pant? Never mind, you can go and lie down somewhere in the shade.” She turned to her guests and smiled a most kindly, benign smile. “Carlo has mixed blood and he finds the heat most trying. I keep telling him to practise more self-control, but he will insist on running about.” She sighed. “I suppose it is his nature.”
Rosemary was staring intently at her lap and Brian saw an ominous shake of her shoulders, so he hurriedly exclaimed:
“You really live all alone in that vast house? It looks enormous.”
“Only a small portion, child.” She l
aughed softly, a little silvery sound. “You see the windows on the ground floor which have curtains? That is my little domain. All the rest is closed up. Miles upon miles of empty corridors.”
Brian re-examined the house with renewed interest. Six lower windows looked more wholesome than the others; the frames had, in the not-too-distant past, been painted white and crisp white curtains gave them a lived-in look, but the panes still seemed reluctant to reflect the sunlight and he frowned before raising his eyes to the upper storeys.
Three rows of dirt-grimed glass: so many eyes from behind which life had long since departed, save possibly for rats and mice. Then he started and gripped his knees with hands that were not quite steady. On the topmost storey, at the window third from the left, a face suddenly emerged and pressed its nose flat against the glass. There was no way of telling if the face were young or old, or if it belonged to a man, woman or child. It was just a white blur equipped with a pair of blank eyes and a flattened nose.
“Madam . . .” Brian began.
“My name,” the old lady said gently, “is Mrs Brown.”
“Mrs Brown. There’s a . . .”
“A nice homely name,” Mrs Brown went on. “Do you not think so? I feel it goes with a blazing fire, a singing kettle and muffins for tea.”
“Madam – Mrs Brown. The window up there . . .”
“What window, child?” Mrs Brown was examining the interior of the teapot with some concern. “There are so many windows.”
“The third from the left.” Brian was pointing at the face, which appeared to be opening and shutting its mouth. “There is someone up there and they seem to be in trouble.”
“You are mistaken, my dear,” Mrs Brown shook her head. “No one lives up there. And without life, there can be no face. That is logic.”
The face disappeared. It was not so much withdrawn as blotted out, as though the window had suddenly clouded over and now it was just another dead man’s eye staring out over the sun-drenched moors.
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