Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth

by Chris Priestley

  But it was going to be difficult with Mrs Rowland evidently being the kind of parent who let her children run wild and then expected governesses and schoolmasters to tidy up after them.

  As she brushed her hair, she heard a noise in the corridor outside her room. She walked to the door and pulled it open, glancing quickly to right and left.

  But the glow of her candle did not create a great deal of illumination. A battalion of the Scots Guards could have been standing twenty yards away and she would not have detected so much as a brass button in that gloom.

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  Still, Amelia was sure that Daniel was there, watching, and she smiled a wry smile at his childish efforts to unnerve her, but the smile was more forced than she would have liked. She would deal with Daniel in the morning.

  She stepped back and closed the door again and then gasped, almost dropping her candle, as she saw Daniel standing in the centre of her room.

  ‘Get out this instant!’ said Amelia, her free hand fumbling at the door handle until the door finally creaked open.

  Daniel merely smiled and walked towards her. He paused and looked up into her face with cruel disregard, as though she were a fly he was about to swat. Then he nonchalantly walked past her and out of the room.

  Amelia stood for a moment, her heart racing, and then she hurriedly shut the door, turning the key in the lock. She walked shakily over to her bed and sat down, taking long breaths to calm herself.

  ‘I shall deal with you tomorrow, little boy,’ she said to herself. ‘Have no fear.’

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  Amelia slept rather fitfully that night, and she had to compose herself for nearly ten minutes before she felt able to join the family for breakfast.

  She had persuaded herself that the best course of action was to have a meeting with Mrs Rowland, tell her of her concerns regarding the children and calmly, but firmly, explain that she must, as the children’s governess, be allowed to take the lead in setting boundaries of behaviour.

  But this resolution dissolved as Daniel once again ate nothing and stared at her throughout the meal with his usual look of contempt. Molly the cat rubbed herself up against Amelia’s leg and she kicked out, making the cat squeal and leap from under the table, ears back, tail fluffed up.

  ‘No, no!’ said Amelia, throwing down her napkin with rather more force than intended and sending a teaspoon clattering across the table. ‘This is insufferable!’

  ‘My dear!’ said Mrs Rowland. ‘Is there something the matter?’

  ‘I wonder at how you can ask such a thing,’ said Amelia, her voice fluttering with frustration.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Mrs Rowland, looking concernedly at the children. ‘If Molly upsets you this much –’

  ‘This is not about Molly!’ shouted Amelia.

  Mrs Rowland frowned and waved away the parlour maid, who was standing staring open-mouthed at Amelia’s outburst.

  ‘Whatever is the matter, dear? Would you like to discuss it in private?’ asked Mrs Rowland quietly.

  ‘He is the matter, ma’am,’ said Amelia, pointing to Daniel.

  ‘Who?’ said Mrs Rowland, looking baffled.

  ‘Daniel, of course!’ said Amelia in exasperation.

  ‘Daniel?’ repeated Mrs Rowland.

  Cecelia giggled and Andrew kicked her.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Children go to your rooms,’ said their mother.

  ‘But Mother –’ said Andrew.

  ‘This instant,’ said Mrs Rowland. ‘I need to speak to Miss Spenser alone.’

  ‘I should prefer it if Daniel stayed,’ said Amelia in the severest tone she could muster. ‘He roams about the house at night and even had the audacity to enter my room and behave in the most insolent manner.’

  The children stopped in their tracks and stared back at the adults expectantly. Mrs Rowland put her hand to her mouth, looking at Amelia as if she were afraid of her suddenly.

  ‘Sissy, Andrew – go to your rooms!’ she said. ‘Please do not make me ask you again.’

  The children were not used to hearing such a harsh tone in their mother’s voice and left the room without further complaint. Amelia looked at Daniel across the table, and he stared defiantly back. Mrs Rowland rested on her hands as if in prayer and so it fell to Amelia to say something.

  ‘I am sorry, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I should not have expressed myself so forcefully. But I feel that Daniel needs a firm hand or –’

  ‘Miss Spenser,’ interrupted Mrs Rowland. ‘I think this nonsense has gone far enough.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’ said Amelia.

  ‘At first I was delighted that you were sporting enough to indulge the children in their play, as I have done – possibly a little too readily since their father went away – but now I think you’re upsetting them.’

  ‘Upsetting them?’ said Amelia, casting a vicious glance at Daniel, who smiled back. ‘Is Daniel to be given free licence to treat me in any way he sees fit, then?’

  Again Mrs Rowland raised her hand to her mouth, and Amelia was shocked to see tears filling her eyes.

  ‘But my dear girl,’ said Mrs Rowland. ‘Daniel is the poor gypsy boy we took into our home two years ago. What his real name is, we never did know, for he was a mute and could not write.’

  ‘Gypsy boy?’ said Amelia, confused. She had noticed that Daniel was rather sallow-skinned, despite his paleness, and shared little resemblance to the other two children, but had thought little of it. ‘But I don’t follow you, ma’am.’

  ‘The poor boy had been caught in a poacher’s trap and his people had left him behind. He must have been in terrible pain and yet he made barely a sound. We took him in and did all we could for him. Oh, but he was such a wild little thing.’

  ‘Was?’ said Amelia. ‘I’m afraid he still is. I commend you for your Christian charity in adopting this boy, ma’am, but the absence of any kind of manners or reasonable standards of behaviour seems to betray a lack of gratitude that –’

  ‘But Daniel died, my dear,’ said Mrs Rowland quietly. ‘A year ago.’

  Amelia stared at her employer, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

  ‘What can you mean, ma’am?’ said Amelia, pointing across the table. ‘Then who is that?’

  ‘Stop it! Stop it at once!’ cried Mrs Rowland, getting to her feet. ‘There is no one there!’

  Amelia looked across the table. Daniel grinned.

  ‘But what do you mean? I can see him . . . I can see him sitting there!’ shouted Amelia.

  Mrs Rowland backed away, refusing to look in the direction of Amelia’s shaking, pointing finger. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  ‘The children began to say that Daniel was with them sometimes when they played, and I, perhaps foolishly, indulged them. I could not see what harm it could do. I thought that it was their way of dealing with the loss. Many children have imaginary friends.’

  ‘An imaginary friend?’ said Amelia, staring at Mrs Rowland as the edge of her vision became greasy and blurred and began to slip away from her. ‘But you told me about Daniel in your letter.’

  ‘I told you about Nathaniel,’ she said. ‘Nathaniel. My eldest boy who is away at school.’

  ‘Nathaniel?’ said Amelia quietly. It was true. She remembered now. It had been Nathaniel in the letter. She felt dizzy. Her thoughts seemed to be spinning about like leaves in a whirlwind.

  ‘Oh my dear,’ said Mrs Rowland. ‘I think I ought to contact your parents.’

  ‘No . . . please . . .’

  ‘I think I must insist,’ said Mrs Rowland sternly. ‘It is for the best. You are not yourself.’

  Amelia looked back towards Daniel and saw, no matter how hard she stared, that his chair was empty. When she turned to Mrs Rowland again, her employer was already leaving the room.

  Amelia had a curious shrinking sensation, as if, like Alice on her way to Wonderland, she was entering some new world where nothing would make s
ense. She searched her memory, hunting blindly back through the hours she had spent in the house looking for something that would make Daniel as real as he had seemed, but all she found were smirking gardeners and giggling children.

  She felt Molly the cat playing with her shoelaces, but her legs were too weak to kick out this time. As if in a trance, she eased her chair back and lifted the tablecloth to shoo the creature away, falling backwards as she saw Daniel crawling out from the shadows under the table, a horrible grin on his face.

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  Mrs Rowland told friends later that the scream sounded like nothing she had ever heard before or would ever want to hear again, and that she had returned to the dining room to find the poor deluded girl wildly kicking out at empty air, as if the devil himself was coming for her.

  She had sat down beside Amelia and held her in her arms, calling for a maid to fetch the doctor, who arrived within minutes and lost no time in sending word to the sanatorium at Bennington Priory. It was only two miles away.

  Amelia’s movements did gradually become less violent as they waited, but Mrs Rowland saw that the poor girl’s face was a mask of terror still. She looked with such intensity that Mrs Rowland was compelled to follow her gaze, but she could see nothing but her own dear children, who had wandered into the room. Cecelia was holding Andrew’s hand. Her other hand was by her side, her fingers curled, as if grasped by someone standing unseen beside her. Then, as silently as they had appeared, the children turned and walked away.

  *

  My storyteller sat back contentedly after her tale, with a tight, pursed little smile and sparkling eyes, as if she had delivered the most morally uplifting and instructive of sermons.

  But I fear my expression must have been somewhat different. The image of that spectral boy was for some reason especially disturbing to me. I felt the need to discuss the story in order to exorcise it.

  ‘So was the governess mentally disturbed, then?’ I said after a pause.

  ‘Well if she was, she is cured now,’ said the Woman in White with an alarmingly inappropriate chuckle. I frowned.

  ‘I meant – was she perhaps hallucinating?’ I persisted.

  ‘You seek reassurance,’ said the Woman in White with an expression a nanny might have used had I been four years old and scraped my knee. ‘You seek comfort. You want there to be a rational explanation.’

  All that she said was true, of course, and yet there was something in her tone of voice that made me prickle. But again, I found it hard to collect my thoughts as the feeling of fatigue returned unabated.

  ‘Forgive me. You still seem to talk as though these were real events and not the happenings of a story,’ I said. ‘I was merely trying to make sense of the character and what she might have been thinking.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, but added nothing more.

  A fly droned lazily past my face and collided drunkenly with the carriage window. It made several attempts to butt its way through this barrier and, having failed, flew off once more in confused circuits of the compartment. There was something mesmerising about following its meandering flight path.

  It landed on the head of the Surgeon and began to wander across the sleeping man’s forehead. I watched with a grin, fully expecting him to suddenly awake with comic flapping and spluttering at the irritation of the crawling fly.

  But to my increasing astonishment, the fly continued its journey across the Surgeon’s face with only the slightest twitch from the gentleman’s eyebrow.

  This slight twitch was enough, though, to persuade the fly to take flight, and it set off again on its ragged circuit of the compartment. Without looking, the Woman in White reached out and plucked the insect from the air.

  She did this with such stealth that had the fly not disappeared, I might not even have registered the action. Again, without looking, she opened her hand and the fly dropped dead to the floor.

  ‘I detest flies,’ she said. ‘You would think that I’d have become used to them by now, but I never have.’

  It was such an extraordinary thing for anyone to do – let alone the prim young woman sitting before me – that I almost immediately began to doubt what I had seen, particularly as my eyelids were becoming heavy once more and everything seemed to be losing clarity. Had I imagined it, just as I had earlier imagined my stepmother? And yet the fly was on the floor, dead. There was no doubting that.

  But remembering my stepmother made me once again feel that it was somehow vital that I stayed awake and alert. I had to keep talking. I had to keep my mind active.

  ‘You don’t appear to have much sympathy for the people in these tales,’ I said, taking my eyes from the fly. ‘If you will forgive my frankness, it seems a little unfeminine.’

  ‘Does it?’ she said with raised eyebrows. ‘Dear me, but you have a lot to learn.’

  ‘I simply meant that the feminine sex is more naturally caring.’

  ‘And yet you find that irritating,’ she said, ‘when your stepmother is doing the caring.’

  I frowned.

  ‘I rather think I have said too much about my stepmother,’ I said. ‘Surely you must agree though: ladies are more predisposed to nurturing.’

  ‘Perhaps. But girls can be quite vicious, you know,’ she said.

  I had to concede that this was true. A good friend of mine at school invited me to stay at his house one Easter holiday and his sister was vile. I have been wary of girls ever since.

  ‘Girls can be particularly cruel to other girls,’ she said. ‘You are a boy and can never fully appreciate this. These matters are only exaggerated when girls are thrown together unwillingly – at school, for instance, or when a parent remarries and they inherit a stepsister. I have a story about this kind of mismatch – would you like to hear it?’

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  The Little People

  Penelope had begun to hate her stepsister. It had come upon her like a winter’s night: suddenly the temperature just dropped. Now everything she felt about Laura was dark and cold.

  It was true to say that Penelope had never really liked Laura, from the moment they met. When Penelope thought back to that day – when Laura and her mother first arrived at the house and her father had smiled like a fool and told her that she was to have a new mummy and a new sister – she felt physically sick.

  Penelope hadn’t wanted a new mother and she certainly hadn’t wanted a new sister. This wasn’t because she felt an overriding love for or loyalty towards her deceased mother. She had never really loved her mother as she saw other children love theirs.

  No. She resented these incomers because they spoiled everything. When her mother died, Penelope had had her father all to herself. And he was happier as a widower, she knew that. He seemed to have a lightness about him, and Penelope believed she had helped him to have it.

  But now she realised that he was happier because he had met this woman: this awful, vain and pretentious creature who said she was an actress but was really some sort of artist’s model – or ‘muse’, as she preferred to put it.

  ‘Do you know that Rossetti said I had the most beautiful mouth he had ever seen?’ said Penelope’s stepmother with a pout.

  Penelope did know this. In fact it must have been the fourth time she’d heard this particular piece of information. She also knew that Sir John Everett Millais had described her as ‘a goddess’ and had begged to be allowed to paint her portrait.

  But as irritating as her stepmother was, she could not compete in Penelope’s disaffection with her daughter, Laura.

  Laura was very different from her mother. She had none of her mother’s relentless hunger for the limelight, none of her mother’s outlandishness of behaviour, but still she managed to attract more attention than Penelope.

  In any event, Penelope found Laura’s self-contained quietude even more odious than the shrill attention-seeking of her mother.

  Penelope’s father had already taken to calling Laura his ‘little flower’. It jabbed Penelope like a needle
every time she heard it. Her father had never called her anything but Penelope. He had not even shortened it to Penny as her mother had – not even once.

  Laura’s mother, and her contact – real or imagined – with these silly painters calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, seemed to have infected Laura and filled her head with all kinds of nonsense. She was forever singing silly songs about elfin knights and fairy queens, and Penelope would constantly find her reading poetry. She even gave a recital of John Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ one evening after dinner.

  ‘O what can ail thee, knight at arms,’ she had intoned, dressed in a long white gown, ‘Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing . . .’

  Penelope had yawned and sighed as much as she could before her stepmother hissed at her, but Laura could not be distracted. In fact Penelope believed that she had never intended to follow this poem with ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and only did so out of spite.

  Penelope was not a lover of books or art or anything to speak of, and so was frequently bored. She was so bored that she would even have deigned to play with Laura, except that Laura never wanted to play anything at all.

  Penelope would find Laura palely loitering around the house or the garden, her head in a book or else in the clouds. She was often talking to herself. Laura seemed to need no one else. She was utterly self-contained and self-reliant and Penelope hated her for it.

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  One day, as Penelope wandered aimlessly about the garden, she saw Laura standing under one of the old plum trees. She always had the suspicion that Laura posed herself in these picturesque locations on purpose.

  The plum tree was heavy with white blossom, the flowers full of busy bees. Laura was leaning against the green-grey lichen-covered trunk, threading daisies into a chain and talking to herself as usual. A small bird flitted away as Penelope approached.

  ‘You do realise it’s a sign of madness,’ said Penelope, ‘talking to yourself. You ought to watch out or else they’ll cart you off to an asylum.’

  Penelope allowed herself a moment to fully picture that delicious thought. Laura did not even bother to turn round. It was as if she had known Penelope was there.