Black Heather

by Virginia Coffman

  There followed another thunderclap whose prelude of lightning had somehow eluded my consciousness, and I crawled snugly under the bedclothes, trying to close out the sound by a devious boring into pillows and sheets. Gradually, in the next few minutes, the sounds of the storm and of the house itself subsided to indistinct shufflings and creakings.

  What odd premonition made me snap my eyes open later I have never known, for I was so barricaded by pillows that I could not have heard anything but the loudest thunderclap. I lay there covered in three directions by my defenses against noise, and without moving my body, I stared out of my cocoon toward the corridor wall across the room. All the dainty furnishings remained static, as innocent, yet as shadowy and full of whispers, as though each piece had a life of its own. It was an eerie sensation, and I could only explain it by the presence of something that had brushed by them; yet I had not gone near that side of the room when I got up earlier to watch the altercation over the dogs.

  Still motionless except for my eyes, I gazed over the full range of the room except those sectors just beyond my vision. The very slightest motion at the foot of the bed, almost like a faint breath, gave me a clue. There was a presence in the room with me, and my body seemed to stiffen and freeze with the horror of it, for it must be hovering at the foot of my bed.

  A great clap of thunder on the moor was followed in short order by a lightning bolt that struck one of the entrance gates of the park, sending a single blaze of light into the room. I had turned my head cautiously at the sound of thunderclap, and now in the brief instant of illumination I made out a thing huddled there at the foot of my bed. It seemed transparent, made up of shadows and dust and a vague gray masklike face, as ancient as the moors, more ancient than the oldest creature I had ever known.

  It was regarding me out of incredible black depths that were the shadowed sockets of eyes, and the fleshless fingers groped for me across the coverlet like enormous gray wood-spiders.

  I dared not move, even to shiver. I felt that my life depended upon my rigid motionlessness.

  The thunderclap that followed seconds after the revealing flash of lightning now saved me by its blessed noise. It was so loud and so near that I blinked instinctively, and somewhere in the darkness, which was deeper than ever after that single blaze of light, the Hag disappeared.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When my eyes were able to focus upon all the objects in the room, or as much as I could see of them, without the blindness that had succeeded that lightning, I began to recover feeling in all my limbs like a person who has been frostbitten. I found that where I had felt ice in my veins, there was now a madly beating pulse and a powerful attack of nerves. Moving as lightly and silently as possible I swung my feet out of bed and stood up. It was difficult to balance on the sore muscles of my foot, and I nearly fell over. I held on to the bedpost and waited until I felt less shaken, less panic-stricken. When my mind was reasonably clear, I tried to concentrate upon exactly what I must do. Then, and only then, might I know what had truly happened.

  Most important was to bring light into the room, and that without any immediate method of lighting my bedside candles. There was no firemaker handy or, of course, any hot coals in the fireplace. I pulled open the portieres, finding it strangely difficult with my fingers shaking so much. I had been right in my premonition that the Hag, whether real or phantom, was now gone from the room. I was entirely alone, but in no better case than if I had found the Hag and grappled like a tigress with the evil thing. At least, then, I should have known for a certainty what it was that haunted me.

  I ran across the room, felt for a bell cord to summon the servants, so anxious, beset by the devils of puzzlement and fear. But in the half-dark I could not find anything remotely like a bell cord.

  Out in the gallery too it was dark as a pocket. No help to me in tracing whatever signs, if any, my Hag had left behind her. I could not even make out anything distinct in the long gallery by which to summon the huge household unless I screamed, thus terrorizing all those who might not yet have encountered the Hag. And they would certainly think me mad.

  I started back to my room, where I resolved to dress and go downstairs to see if one of the Hardwickes might still be up.

  It was perfectly obvious to me, even in my confused condition, that I could not have imagined or even dreamed the whole of what had terrorized me in the thirty hours I had been in Yorkshire. One by one, I ticked off in my head the weird encounters with the Hag that Sir Nicholas and Mrs. Sedley, though divergent on every other subject, united in dismissing as a mere puff of smoke. And in the case of the moorland prowler, Sir Nicholas suggested it was a large beast belonging, perhaps, to some isolated sheep farmer. What Macrae and I had seen in the Hag’s Head, I reasoned, could be induced by the delirium of Macrae’s death throes upon my susceptibility to suggestion.

  It remained for me to prove, certainly to myself, as well as to Sir Nicholas, that something genuine and not a figment out of a nightmare had appeared to me in this room tonight.

  I scrambled to put on my freshly laundered clothing, briefly grateful to Mrs. Hardwicke and her staff for having done such a neat task. My sore foot was swollen, and I found it impossible to get my shoe on it, especially since the leather had shrunk and wrinkled from its soaking earlier in the day. Well then, I thought impatiently, my clean white stocking would have to serve that foot.

  As silently as possible, I hurried to my door, opened it by slow stages, and was out in the gallery again. I was fairly sure that if the Hag was flesh and blood, she should be well away from here by this time, fearing I would scream the house down. But I had had several minutes in which to recover from the dreadful appearance of that creature, and I was now growing more and more angry at the indignity of being so scared by a mere Guy Fawkes Day mask—or so I began to reason it away.

  But the hand, I remembered suddenly—those hideous, fleshless fingers creeping across the coverlet—were they too mere parts of a Guy Fawkes mask?

  They can’t be, I thought as I felt my way along the wall toward what must be, I hoped, the wide staircase that would lead me to parts of the house that I might better recognize. They were skeletal, and yet they moved, very like spider legs.

  In some dreadful, alive fashion, they were real fingers!

  At that moment, very real, delicately fleshed fingers caught into my shoulder. I gasped out loud. The Hag had come back. It was behind me. It was ...

  “Is that you, Kathleen?”

  “Y-yes ... And you?”

  “Elspeth.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad. So very—you can’t conceive how glad! What are you doing up here?”

  I could barely make out her face and form in the darkness.

  “I heard something and went out to the stairs. I thought it was—never mind. It seemed to be a female.”

  “Do you think it was the Hag?” I asked.

  She seemed to welcome my frankness. “Do you? She disappeared on the stairs, whatever—whoever she was.”

  “I think it must have been,” I said, considering her very brave. “I saw something enter my room.” Suddenly suspicion born of everything that had happened since I met Mrs. Sedley reared its head once more. Were Elspeth Sedley’s words the mere attempt to explain her own presence in these darkness-haunted corridors tonight?

  “Yes? Tell me. What?” She echoed with what seemed to me an extraordinary amount of eagerness, considering the lateness of the hour and the mysterious occurrences in this region, of which we both were very much aware.

  “The Hag was in my chamber,” I said flatly. I thought that if, by some weird but wholly possible chance, Elspeth Sedley was masquerading as that terrible Hag in order to persuade me once and for all to forget my purchase of the Hag’s Head, she might well appear now as herself, innocent and merely joining my search. She had not fooled me, if such was the case, however. I still did not trust her. Perhaps she was here to assure that I did not scream and stir up the household over the Hag. Or
perhaps it had been her intention to spy upon me, watching my reaction to the night’s evil business.

  “Can we find a light somewhere?” she asked. “I cannot imagine why I did not take my bed candle.”

  I could well imagine. If she had not expected to find me wandering about, or if she hoped to keep the secret of her disguise, always assuming she was the Hag, I thought she would do precisely as she had done, and when she walked into me in the corridor, she would think up exactly this sort of excuse. I only wondered how she had produced that effect of skeletal fingers and what her real purpose was, unless it might have been to help Patrick in some way.

  There was a murmur of voices at the end of the gallery where I assumed the staircase must be, and a big flaring light cast its glow before it as Mrs. Hardwicke mounted the stairs to this floor, treading distinctly upon each stair. She made surprisingly more noise than had Elspeth, who seemed, from her lack of sound, to have floated upward.

  “Who’s there? What’s amiss? Ah, it is you, ladies.”

  We replied tremulously, torn between the remnants of our fears and laughter at our own disheveled appearance under Mrs. Hardwicke’s strongly revealing lamplight, but she only looked at us with grim nods.

  “Setting us all afright you were, with your whispers and your flitting by my door like as if you was bodiless.”

  “I did not pass your door tonight, Mrs. Hardwicke,” said Elspeth. “No more did Miss Kathleen.”

  “ ’Twas you or yet it be a phantasm,” the housekeeper replied, and compressed her lips as she looked us over under the gleam of her lamp.

  Instinctively, I looked behind me. For the first time since Sir Nicholas had escorted me to my room—how long ago and in what safer time that seemed!—I was able to get a clear view of the sweep and elegance of this gallery. Certainly, no setting could be further from anyone’s vision of a weird old hag, stalking victims for reasons as yet unknown.

  “I see nothing. Nayther footpad nor haunt. Begging your pardon, Miss Elspeth.”

  “Nonetheless, she was here,” I said, recalling vividly that creature at the foot of my bed scarcely half an hour before.

  “ ‘She,’ mum?” echoed Mrs. Hardwicke derisively, trying to catch Elspeth’s eye as she sought to find reinforcement for her feeling.

  “The Hag,” I said, not being mealy-mouthed about it. But I was much more interested in examining the floor outside my room, and the two women followed me, exchanging glances at my growing signs of peculiarity. I had, however, seen smudged, muddy red marks on the carpet leading up to my door, which was ajar as I had left it. I looked down at Elspeth’s feet, daintily shod in pink satin, and the housekeeper, whose large feet were bare and undeniably chilly.

  Neither woman was likely to have been outside recently in the storm; yet there were the undeniable marks of a visitor from outside, and they led into my room.

  I beckoned to Mrs. Hardwicke. “Give me the light, please.”

  She looked surprised and a little affronted but did as I asked, and with the big, steady glow of the lamp protected by reflectors from any vagrant breeze, I pushed open my door and looked in. As I had suspected, there were several faint signs upon the carpeting leading to the foot of my bed. I lit my bed candles from the housekeeper’s light and returned it to her.

  “Please go and arouse Sir Nicholas.”

  Mrs. Hardwicke looked around as though she expected to find someone else whom I had addressed. She waved the big lamp with such enthusiasm that I thought she might spill the oil upon the floor.

  “But Miss, that’ll be none so easy. You see, when I first was woke up by the sound of you ladies, I knocked on Sir Nicholas’s door. He did not answer. I tried the door...”

  “And he was not within,” Elspeth finished coldly. “Is this, perhaps, our answer, Kate?”

  I snapped, “How ridiculous! In any case, I believe these marks are from that red soil in the bottomland of Seven Spinney. I saw just such soil there today. And I saw, too, something watching me. I believe now it was the Hag.”

  “Are you mad?” Elspeth’s exclamation startled both Mrs. Hardwicke and me. She saw us staring at her and added less violently, “Do go and fetch Nicholas. He must be somewhere in this accursed house.”

  Much resenting this aspersion upon a house in which she obviously had a proprietary interest, Mrs. Hardwicke said, with reluctance, “Well, Miss, I’ll be doing that. But I don’t know as I quite see what it’s about. A grain of dust in the carpeting mayhap. It’s not as if the help one gets these days is of the best, and Sir Nicholas has never seen fit to find fault with me on that score.”

  “Do go!” Elspeth commanded in a shrill voice that was unusual for her. And as the housekeeper left, the girl moved toward the window where the open portiers gave some view of the scene in the rainswept garden below. I could not understand the cause of her startling behavior, but when she asked me to look at the distant gates of the park, I obeyed her, still puzzled.

  What I saw, or rather, did not see, out there puzzled me even more, for I had been fully aware of the broken wall where the lightning had struck within the hour, and now, with the storm abating and allowing the barest illumination from the still clouded heavens, I could make out the iron gates, battered but, for the most part, still standing. It was surely not this which Elspeth had expected me to observe. I pushed the window open and gazed out upon the park, which now had that soft patina of calm and safety so deceiving in countrysides given to moorland fogs. I thought, as I gazed down, that among the foliage in the center of the park there was a faint flurry that was unnatural in consideration of the windless calm that had succeeded the storm. While I wondered if our intruder could possibly be still there in the park, perhaps afraid to use the gates for fear of being seen by those of us who were up and about, Elspeth had retreated from the window.

  When it seemed there would be no more stirrings among the foliage in the park, I looked back into the room, wondering that Elspeth, who had called my attention to the view from the window, should now be so very quiet behind me. Small wonder I had not heard her. She had gone out into the corridor-gallery again. I saw her shadow upon the opposite wall of the corridor, a shadow formed as a result of the light from my bed candles. She must have been moving around almost in the dark behind me, silent as death.

  At the instant I turned around, I too was moving quietly, and she was not aware that I had done so. As I watched her in the corridor, I noted how fixedly she regarded the carpeting. No doubt she was trying to guess the origin of those occasional red-mud spots. I could not understand her secretive manner, but then, there was much in Elspeth Sedley’s conduct that required explaining. She bent over, ran her forefinger daintily along a small section of carpet, and then, ever so slightly, curved that forefinger so that her long, sharp nail scraped away at what she saw.

  So that was her scheme, to destroy all signs of our fantastic and hideous night visitor! Ghosts did not leave tracks in mud, I told myself. She had merely confirmed my suspicions.

  I raised my branch of candles, held them over the floor of my room, and realized that while I had been diverted like an ignorant, unsuspicious child, to stare out the window at the quiet, night-shrouded Everett Park below, she had seen fit to scrape away every shred of evidence that there had been a visit by a very human being disguised as the Hag—or so I began to reason. It was not what I would have expected of a girl who had previously held out against visiting Everett Hall because of a supposed pursuit by just such a phantom hag. What event, what person or fear, had brought about this sudden collusion between Elspeth and our Hag?

  Having discovered her little scheme, though too late to prevent its fulfillment, I was thus better prepared for what she doubtless conceived was her shattering surprise to me. Mrs. Hardwicke was moving about on the staircase. We could see the light of the lamp she carried as it cast elongated shadows of every object it fell upon, rapidly twisting them in tortuous shapes that changed with every motion of her hand. Apparently Mrs. Sedley
too had been roused by all the wanderings about the Hall, not to mention our loudly whispered arguments with each other over the invader from the moors.

  We heard Mrs. Hardwicke reply to some words of the crippled woman just as I said to Elspeth, “What do you mean by removing all the traces of that person who entered my room tonight?”

  “I removed nothing. You are imagining things,” she said as cool as you please; yet there was high color in her cheeks. I could not but feel that lying was not in her ordinary nature and that despite her daring, she felt a certain guilt.

  “You forget,” said I, “that someone else saw those prints besides ourselves.”

  Elspeth’s glance darted one way and then the other as if she expected to see another presence with us in all these shadows beyond the candlelight.

  “What do you mean? There is no one—”

  “Mrs. Hardwicke saw the marks,” I said firmly. Elspeth took a breath and then smiled.

  “You are mistaken. I heard her say she did not know what it was we were refining so much about over a grain of dust upon the carpet.”

  It was perfectly true, and how well Elspeth had played upon that remark by Mrs. Hardwicke, who had the housekeeper’s natural anxiety not to acknowledge anything that interfered with her own province of responsibility.

  I started to say as much but stopped as we both heard the housekeeper reply stiffly to Mrs. Sedley, “That I can’t be knowing, mum. Not seeing what’s had the household in an uproar. Miss Kathleen’s been and bid me fetch up His Ludship for to make search.”