Shivers for Christmas

by Richard Dalby

  I went out after dinner, to take my usual stroll along the river-bank, and to watch the evening lights die away on the columns and obelisk. On my return I saw at once that something had happened which had produced commotion among the servants of the hotel. I had reached the salon before I inquired what was the matter.

  The boy who was taking the coffee round said: ‘Mustapha is dead. He cut his throat at the door of the mosque. He could not help himself. He had broken his vow.’

  I looked at Jameson without a word. Indeed, I could not speak; I was choking. The little American lady was trembling, the English lady crying. The gentlemen stood silent in the windows, not speaking a word.

  Jameson’s colour changed. He was honestly distressed, uneasy, and tried to cover his confusion with bravado and a jest.

  4

  I could not sleep. My blood was in a boil. I felt that I could not speak to Jameson again. He would have to leave Luxor. That was tacitly understood among us. Coventry was the place to which he would be consigned.

  I tried to finish in a little sketch I had made in my notebook when I was in my room, but my hand shook, and I was constrained to lay my pencil aside. Then I took up an Egyptian grammar, but could not fix my mind on study. The hotel was very still. Everyone had gone to bed at an early hour that night, disinclined for conversation. No one was moving. There was a lamp in the passage; it was partly turned down. Jameson’s room was next to mine. I heard him stir as he undressed, and talk to himself. Then he was quiet. I wound up my watch, and emptying my pocket, put my purse under the pillow. I was not in the least heavy with sleep. If I did go to bed I should not be able to close my eyes. But then—if I sat up I could do nothing.

  I was about leisurely to undress, when I heard a sharp cry, or exclamation of mingled pain and alarm, from the adjoining room. In another moment there was a rap at my door. I opened, and Jameson came in. He was in his nightshirt, and looking agitated and frightened.

  ‘Look here, old fellow,’ said he in a shaking voice, ‘there is Musty in my room. He has been hiding there, and just as I dropped asleep he ran that knife of yours into my throat.’

  ‘My knife?’

  ‘Yes—that pruning-knife you gave him, you know. Look here—I must have the place sewn up. Do go for a doctor, there’s a good chap.’

  ‘Where is the place?’

  ‘Here on my right gill.’

  Jameson turned his head to the left, and I raised the lamp. There was no wound of any sort there.

  I told him so.

  ‘Oh, yes! I tell you I felt his knife go in.’

  ‘Nonsense, you were dreaming.’

  ‘Dreaming! Not I. I saw Musty as distinctly as I now see you.’

  ‘This is a delusion, Jameson,’ I replied. ‘The poor fellow is dead.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very fine,’ said Jameson. ‘It is not the first of April, and I don’t believe the yarns that you’ve been spinning. You tried to make believe he was dead, but I know he is not. He has got into my room, and he made a dig at my throat with your pruning-knife.’

  ‘I’ll go into your room with you.’

  ‘Do so. But he’s gone by this time. Trust him to cut and run.’

  I followed Jameson, and looked about. There was no trace of anyone beside himself having been in the room. Moreover, there was no place but the nut-wood wardrobe in the bedroom in which anyone could have secreted himself. I opened this and showed that it was empty.

  After a while I pacified Jameson, and induced him to go to bed again, and then I left his room. I did not now attempt to court sleep. I wrote letters with a hand not the steadiest, and did my accounts.

  As the hour approached midnight I was again startled by a cry from the adjoining room, and in another moment Jameson was at my door.

  ‘That blooming fellow Musty is in my room still,’ said he. ‘He has been at my throat again.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘You are labouring under hallucinations. You locked your door.’

  ‘Oh, by Jove, yes—of course I did; but, hang it, in this hole, neither doors nor windows fit, and the locks are no good, and the bolts nowhere. He got in again somehow, and if I had not started up the moment I felt the knife, he’d have done for me. He would, by George. I wish I had a revolver.’

  I went into Jameson’s room. Again he insisted on my looking at his throat.

  ‘It’s very good of you to say there is no wound,’ said he. ‘But you won’t gull me with words. I felt his knife in my windpipe, and if I had not jumped out of bed—’

  ‘You locked your door. No one could enter. Look in the glass, there is not even a scratch. This is pure imagination.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, old fellow, I won’t sleep in that room again. Change with me, there’s a charitable buffer. If you don’t believe in Musty, Musty won’t hurt you, maybe—anyhow you can try if he’s solid or a phantom. Blow me if the knife felt like a phantom.’

  ‘I do not quite see my way to changing rooms,’ I replied; ‘but this I will do for you. If you like to go to bed again in your own apartment, I will sit up with you till morning.’

  ‘All right,’ answered Jameson. ‘And if Musty comes in again, let out at him and do not spare him. Swear that.’

  I accompanied Jameson once more to his bedroom. Little as I liked the man, I could not deny him my presence and assistance at this time. It was obvious that his nerves were shaken by what had occurred, and he felt his relation to Mustapha much more than he cared to show. The thought that he had been the cause of the poor fellow’s death preyed on his mind, never strong, and now it was upset with imaginary terrors.

  I gave up letter writing, and brought my Baedeker’s Upper Egypt into Jameson’s room, one of the best of all guide-books, and one crammed with information. I seated myself near the light, and with my back to the bed, on which the young man had once more flung himself.

  ‘I say,’ said Jameson, raising his head, ‘is it too late for a brandy-and-soda?’

  ‘Everyone is in bed.’

  ‘What lazy dogs they are. One never can get anything one wants here.’

  ‘Well, try to go to sleep.’

  He tossed from side to side for some time, but after a while, either he was quiet, or I was engrossed in my Baedeker, and I heard nothing till a clock struck twelve. At the last stroke I heard a snort and then a gasp and a cry from the bed. I started up, and looked round. Jameson was slipping out with his feet on to the floor.

  ‘Confound you!’ said he angrily, ‘you are a fine watch, you are, to let Mustapha steal in on tiptoe whilst you are cartouching and all that sort of rubbish. He was at me again, and if I had not been sharp he’d have cut my throat. I won’t go to bed any more!’

  ‘Well, sit up. But I assure you no one has been here.’

  ‘That’s fine. How can you tell? You had your back to me, and these devils of fellows steal about like cats. You can’t hear them till they are at you.’

  It was of no use arguing with Jameson, so I let him have his way.

  ‘I can feel all the three places in my throat where he ran the knife in,’ said he. ‘And—don’t you notice?—I speak with difficulty.’

  So we sat up together the rest of the night. He became more reasonable as dawn came on, and inclined to admit that he had been a prey to fancies.

  The day passed very much as did others—Jameson was dull and sulky. After déjeuner he sat on at table when the ladies had risen and retired, and the gentlemen had formed in knots at the window, discussing what was to be done in the afternoon.

  Suddenly Jameson, whose head had begun to nod, started up with an oath and threw down his chair.

  ‘You fellows!’ he said, ‘you are all in league against me. You let that Mustapha come in without a word, and try to stick his knife into me.’

  ‘He has not been here.’

  ‘It’s a plant. You are combined to bully me and drive me away. You don’t like me. You have engaged Mustapha to murder me. This is the fourth time he has tried to cut
my throat, and in the salle à manger, too, with you all standing round. You ought to be ashamed to call yourselves Englishmen. I’ll go to Cairo. I’ll complain.’

  It really seemed that the feeble brain of Jameson was affected. The Oxford don undertook to sit up in the room the following night.

  The young man was fagged and sleep-weary, but no sooner did his eyes close, and clouds form about his head, than he was brought to wakefulness again by the same fancy or dream. The Oxford don had more trouble with him on the second night than I had on the first, for his lapses into sleep were more frequent, and each such lapse was succeeded by a start and a panic.

  The next day he was worse, and we felt that he could no longer be left alone. The third night the attaché sat up to watch him.

  Jameson had now sunk into a sullen mood. He would not speak, except to himself, and then only to grumble.

  During the night, without being aware of it, the young attaché, who had taken a couple of magazines with him to read, fell asleep. When he went off he did not know. He woke just before dawn, and in a spasm of terror and self-reproach saw that Jameson’s chair was empty.

  Jameson was not on his bed. He could not be found in the hotel.

  At dawn he was found—dead at the door of the mosque, with his throat cut.

  __________________________________________

  TARNHELM

  Hugh Walpole

  __________________________________________

  Sir Hugh Walpole (1884–1941), best known for his popular ‘Herries’ saga, often introduced elements of horror and the macabre in his short stories, and novels like The Old Ladies and Portrait of a Man with Red Hair. ‘Tarnhelm’, set in Walpole’s beloved Lakeland, is taken from his collection All Souls’ Night (1933).

  1

  I was, I suppose, at that time a peculiar child, peculiar a little by nature, but also because I had spent so much of my young life in the company of people very much older than myself.

  After the events that I am now going to relate, some quite indelible mark was set on me. I became then, and have always been since, one of those persons, otherwise insignificant, who have decided, without possibility of change, about certain questions.

  Some things, doubted by most of the world, are for these people true and beyond argument; this certainty of theirs gives them a kind of stamp, as though they lived so much in their imagination as to have very little assurance as to what is fact and what fiction. This ‘oddness’ of theirs puts them apart. If now, at the age of fifty, I am a man with very few friends, very much alone, it is because, if you like, my Uncle Robert died in a strange manner forty years ago and I was a witness of his death.

  I have never until now given any account of the strange proceedings that occurred at Faildyke Hall on the evening of Christmas Eve in the year 1890. The incidents of that evening are still remembered very clearly by one or two people, and a kind of legend of my Uncle Robert’s death has been carried on into the younger generation. But no one still alive was a witness of them as I was, and I feel it is time that I set them down upon paper.

  I write them down without comment. I extenuate nothing; I disguise nothing. I am not, I hope, in any way a vindictive man, but my brief meeting with my Uncle Robert and the circumstances of his death gave my life, even at that early age, a twist difficult for me very readily to forgive.

  As to the so-called supernatural element in my story, everyone must judge for himself about that. We deride or we accept according to our natures. If we are built of a certain solid practical material the probability is that no evidence, however definite, however first-hand, will convince us. If dreams are our daily portion, one dream more or less will scarcely shake our sense of reality.

  However, to my story.

  My father and mother were in India from my eighth to my thirteenth years. I did not see them, except on two occasions when they visited England. I was an only child, loved dearly by both my parents, who, however, loved one another yet more. They were an exceedingly sentimental couple of the old-fashioned kind. My father was in the Indian Civil Service, and wrote poetry. He even had his epic, Tantalus: A Poem in Four Cantos published at his own expense.

  This, added to the fact that my mother had been considered an invalid before he married her, made my parents feel that they bore a very close resemblance to the Brownings, and my father even had a pet name for my mother that sounded curiously like the famous and hideous ‘Ba’.

  I was a delicate child, was sent to Mr Ferguson’s Private Academy at the tender age of eight, and spent my holidays as the rather unwanted guest of various relations.

  ‘Unwanted’ because I was, I imagine, a difficult child to understand. I had an old grandmother who lived at Folkestone, two aunts who shared a little house in Kensington, an aunt, uncle and a brood of cousins inhabiting Cheltenham, and two uncles who lived in Cumberland. All these relations, except the two uncles, had their proper share of me and for none of them had I any great affection.

  Children were not studied in those days as they are now. I was thin, pale and bespectacled, aching for affection but not knowing at all how to obtain it; outwardly undemonstrative but inwardly emotional and sensitive, playing games, because of my poor sight, very badly, reading a great deal more than was good for me, and telling myself stories all day and part of every night.

  All of my relations tired of me, I fancy, in turn, and at last it was decided that my uncles in Cumberland must do their share. These two were my father’s brothers, the eldest of a long family of which he was the youngest. My Uncle Robert, I understood, was nearly seventy, my Uncle Constance some five years younger. I remember always thinking that Constance was a funny name for a man.

  My Uncle Robert was the owner of Faildyke Hall, a country house between the lake of Wastwater and the little town of Seascale on the sea coast. Uncle Constance had lived with Uncle Robert for many years. It was decided, after some family correspondence, that the Christmas of this year, 1890, should be spent by me at Faildyke Hall.

  I was at this time just eleven years old, thin and skinny, with a bulging forehead, large spectacles and a nervous, shy manner. I always set out, I remember, on any new adventures with mingled emotions of terror and anticipation. Maybe this time the miracle would occur: I should discover a friend or a fortune, should cover myself with glory in some unexpected way; be at last what I always longed to be, a hero.

  I was glad that I was not going to any of my other relations for Christmas, and especially not to my cousins at Cheltenham, who teased and persecuted me and were never free of ear-splitting noises. What I wanted most in life was to be allowed to read in peace. I understood that at Faildyke there was a glorious library.

  My aunt saw me into the train. I had been presented by my uncle with one of the most gory of Harrison Ainsworth’s romances, The Lancashire Witches, and I had five bars of chocolate cream, so that that journey was as blissfully happy as any experience could be to me at that time. I was permitted to read in peace, and I had just then little more to ask of life.

  Nevertheless, as the train puffed its way north, this new country began to force itself on my attention. I had never before been in the North of England, and I was not prepared for the sudden sense of space and freshness that I received.

  The naked, unsystematic hills, the freshness of the wind on which the birds seemed to be carried with especial glee, the stone walls that ran like grey ribbons about the moors, and, above all, the vast expanse of sky upon whose surface clouds swam, raced, eddied and extended as I had never anywhere witnessed…

  I sat, lost and absorbed, at my carriage window, and when at last, long after dark had fallen, I heard ‘Seascale’ called by the porter, I was still staring in a sort of romantic dream. When I stepped out on to the little narrow platform and was greeted by the salt tang of the sea wind my first real introduction to the North Country may be said to have been completed. I am writing now in another part of that same Cumberland country, and beyond my window the line
of the fell runs strong and bare against the sky, while below it the Lake lies, a fragment of silver glass at the feet of Skiddaw.

  It may be that my sense of the deep mystery of this country had its origin in this same strange story that I am now relating. But again perhaps not, for I believe that that first evening arrival at Seascale worked some change in me, so that since then none of the world’s beauties—from the crimson waters of Kashmir to the rough glories of our own Cornish coast—can rival for me the sharp, peaty winds and strong, resilient turf of the Cumberland hills.

  That was a magical drive in the pony-trap to Faildyke that evening. It was bitterly cold, but I did not seem to mind it. Everything was magical to me.

  From the first I could see the great slow hump of Black Combe jet against the frothy clouds of the winter night, and I could hear the sea breaking and the soft rustle of the bare twigs in the hedgerows.

  I made, too, the friend of my life that night, for it was Bob Armstrong who was driving the trap. He has often told me since (for although he is a slow man of few words he likes to repeat the things that seem to him worthwhile) that I struck him as ‘pitifully lost’ that evening on the Seascale platform. I looked, I don’t doubt, pinched and cold enough. In any case it was a lucky appearance for me, for I won Armstrong’s heart there and then, and he, once he gave it, could never bear to take it back again.

  He, on his side, seemed to me gigantic that night. He had, I believe, one of the broadest chests in the world: it was a curse to him, he said, because no ready-made shirts would ever suit him.