The Dark Boatman

by John Glasby

  I felt oddly drained and lethargic the next day. What little sleep I’d had during the night had been sporadic and unrefreshing. Nevertheless, I knew I had to do something, otherwise I would find myself dwelling upon things I didn’t want to think about.

  I decided to paint the gutters around the front of the house while my aunt went over the rubbings she had made the previous day. Finding a long ladder against the side of the shed, I located a couple of tins of paint and a large brush, and made myself busy for the whole of the morning.

  It was while I was cleaning my hands with turpentine that I noticed the door in the corner that I dimly recalled led down into the cellar. I looked around for the key, which I remembered having been hung on a high nail beside the door. The nail was still there, rusty now, but there was no sign of the key. Trying the door, I found it to be securely locked. The key might have been lost, and I was relying on memories of twenty years earlier, but something about its absence disturbed me.

  Going into the front room, I asked Aunt Amelia about it, but she merely replied that it must have gone missing a long time before. Certainly she could not recall seeing it for several years.

  “There’s nothing down there anyway,” she added. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing really,” I replied. “I just thought I’d tidy it up for you and get rid of anything you no longer need.”

  “No need to bother your head about that. You’ll be better occupied getting the exterior of the house done before winter comes.”

  That evening, it began to rain, a steady downpour that continued for the next three days. My aunt fretted continually at not being able to go along to the church and continue with her hobby, flitting restlessly about the house, peering out of the windows to check on the weather.

  Then, on the fourth day, two things happened which were to bring the horror to a head. The weather cleared suddenly. The sun blazed from a cloudless blue sky, and Aunt Amelia announced her intention of making further rubbings of the brass plates set in the stone pavings inside the church.

  It was also the morning when, hunting among some old tins at the back of the garden shed, I discovered the large, rusty key for which I had been searching. Slipping it into my pocket, I went into the house.

  Aunt Amelia was already dressed for going out and, recalling our earlier discussion, I said I would accompany her, just to see for myself what happened when she made her rubbings of the plates over the tombs.

  I half expected her to make some protest but she merely said, “Come if you like, James. Then you can see for yourself.”

  Together, we walked through the churchyard to the church. It was cool and dim inside, the rows of pews standing empty on either side.

  “Now where are those plates?” I asked as we paused in the doorway.

  “Over here.” She led the way towards the altar, then stopped and pointed at her feet.

  There were, indeed, two plaques set in the stone floor. The lettering on both was barely legible. The passage of innumerable feet had worn them almost smooth. Going down on my hands and knees, I ran my fingers over the plates. Despite the way they had been effaced by time, I reckoned the lettering should have shown up more clearly on the rubbings that my aunt had made several days before.

  I felt a little strange, kneeling there, knowing that directly beneath me were the bones of Sir Roger and Lady Elwyn de Courtney, buried there in the middle of the sixteenth century. Scrambling to my feet, I sat down on one of the pews.

  “Are you all right, James?” Aunt Amelia asked concernedly. “You do look a little queer.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “It’s just the chill in here after the heat outside.”

  “Then you just sit there while I get on with my work.” She had brought a small cushion with her and placing it carefully on the stone, she sank down onto her knees, spreading the sheet of paper over the brass.

  A sudden, muttered exclamation from my aunt brought my attention to her. I saw the look of exasperated consternation on her face as she straightened abruptly from her work. The rubbing was half-finished.

  “What is it?” I asked, keeping my voice down.

  “It’s just the same as before,” she complained. “Just when I think I have it, everything starts moving.”

  If my aunt had been any other type of person; I would have thought she was imagining things. As it was, she threw down her carbon stick with an angry motion and gestured me down beside her.

  “There—feel it,” She commanded

  To please her, I placed my right hand on top of the paper where it covered the brass plate. I could feel nothing out of the ordinary and opened my mouth to say so. But then, picking up the carbon stick she began moving it lightly across the paper. Almost at once, I felt the plate beneath my hand begin to shake. With a faint cry, I snatched my hand away.

  “There, what did I tell you?” she said triumphantly. “You felt it too, didn’t you?”

  “I felt something,” I admitted.

  “Like a shaking beneath the paving.”

  “Something like that.” I felt a little tremor of fear pass through me. What the hell was going on? I did not believe in spirits or any other ghostly phenomenon. Yet I had distinctly that movement beneath my hand.

  Straightening up, I said harshly, “I don’t think you should go on with this, Aunt Amelia. Forget this little hobby for the time being.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anything stop me. If they don’t like what I’m doing, that’s just too bad.”

  I did not try to stop her. I just stood there, shivering for a few moments, knowing there was something unnatural going on but not knowing what it was. All I knew was that I had no wish to remain in that old church. She was still on her hands and knees, rubbing away viciously, as I turned and left.

  I knew she would remain there for some hours once she went into one of her moods of perverse obstinacy. Accordingly, I decided to check on the cellar in her absence.

  Lighting a candle, I unlocked the cellar door and pulled it open. It was clear no one had been down there for a long time and I descended the steps slowly; holding the candle in front of me.

  Finally, I reached the bottom, shielding the candle flame with one hand as I bent to peer into the darkness. As I looked for a place to put the candle, I noticed something dark and misshapen lying on the dusty floor. Lowering the candle, the light fell full upon the object and the scream that came unbidden to my lips echoed eerily around the confining walls.

  There was no mistaking the features, even though the skin was parchment dry and brittle.

  It was Aunt Amelia!

  There was no doubt the body had been there for a considerable time. In that horrifying moment it was as if all I had subconsciously conjectured, what I had forced deep into the back of my thoughts, what I had not wanted to face, had all come together in that single instant of clarity.

  I could not doubt the evidence of my own eyes. How she had died, there was no way of knowing. Whether it had been a tragic accident, or deliberate murder on the part of Jenkins, a sudden push as she had stood at the top. All I did know was that, ever since arriving at the house, I had been in the presence of a ghost, that my aunt would haunt this place forever, and the longer I remained there with this horror, the more difficult it would be to escape.

  All of the signs had been there had I opened my eyes to see them. Her vigils in the churchyard, speaking with the spirits of those friends who had gone before. That queer shaking above the tombs of the dead in her presence.

  Before she returned, I had thrown all of my things into the two cases and left by the back way, circling around through the woods. Two hours later, I caught the train to London.

  Now all I have left are the dreams, which still haunt my sleep—nightmares from which I wake screaming and shaking uncontrollably.

  But more than that, there is the thought that, someday, a letter will come, informing me that my aunt’s body has been discove
red, and that, as her only heir, I must go to claim my inheritance—to find her waiting at the door to greet me with that terrible knowing smile on her lips as she did once before!

  THAT DEEP BLACK YONDER

  On September 26, 1932, I took the express train from Paddington, and began the four-hour long journey that was to take me to the Devon coast and into a nightmare of horror from which the doctors say I shall never fully recover. That I did not witness any actual visual horror until the very end made the mental shock only more terrifying, the final episode in a series of such events which sent me running through the wind-scoured, storm-ridden night along the cliff tops with the stinging rain lashing my face and the pounding waves of the Atlantic lit by vivid flashes of lightning that tore the berserk heavens apart.

  For three months, I had lain seriously ill in a hospital in north London, recovering from a major operation, and this was followed by a similar length of time convalescing at my home in Chelsea. That summer, in London, had been exceptionally hot and oppressive, and Doctor Forsyth, my physician, had seen that my recovery was hampered rather than accelerated by the heat; and when the beginning of September had brought no alleviation, had suggested that a change of air and scenery would prove beneficial. Sea air, he maintained, was all I needed to regain my health and strength, and a holiday in Devon had been his suggestion, one I had readily fallen in with since I had grown to hate and detest the dusty streets of London during the long, drought-filled summer with the parks full of trees burned and ugly brown, the usual green grass patchy for want of moisture.

  My letter of enquiry to an estate agent in Bude had been answered almost by return with information that an old manor house was available at a modest rent on the shore between Bude and Morwenstow. It occupied a somewhat isolated position on the cliffs, but I did not let this fact deter me. From the news given in the letter it seemed the ideal place for me. I had always been of a solitary disposition, preferring to keep my own company, shunning crowds; and even at the end of September there was the possibility of holiday-makers flooding into the Devon and Cornish coastal towns.

  It was early afternoon when I was admitted to the offices of Swatheley & Corrie, Estate Agents. Arnold Swatheley proved to be a short, balding affable man in his early fifties who readily agreed to drive me out to Faxted Manor once I had affirmed my desire to rent it for an indefinite period.

  As we made our way along the narrow, winding road which skirted the top of the cliffs most of the way, only occasionally moving inland so far that it was out of sight of the sea, he explained that the manor had been occupied only intermittently during the past century. It was now almost forty years since the last owner had packed up and left for South Africa. There had been talk of a personal tragedy, which had struck the Harcroft family, something unspeakable, that had been all but forgotten now down the intervening years. All attempts to reach the survivors of the family had met with no success, as had attempts to find a buyer for the property once the courts had presumed them dead.

  So Faxted Manor remained untenanted throughout the whole of the forty years. A platoon of soldiers had been billeted there for three weeks during the World War, sometime in the winter of 1917, but after three men had unaccountably disappeared, gone over the cliffs one wild night according to the information Swatheley had, the platoon had left and the manor brooded alone among the white cliffs, with only the wild seabirds to keep it company and the rollers beating their heads on the rocks below. Not that its existence had gone unnoticed during all of those years. Students of the mediaeval history of this part of the country had come to examine its structure. The architecture was quaint, a combination of several styles, Gothic towers had been built onto a far earlier base, though now little remained of this older structure. Extensive renovations had been carried out in the time of the Harcroft tenancy, obliterating much of the earlier work.

  My first sight of Faxted Manor evoked little emotion in me. We rounded a sharp bend in the narrow road, and there it lay before us, sunken a little beneath the towering, grey-white cliffs that rose on all sides of it as if somehow trying to hide it from view. It stood within fifty yards of the cliff edge, where the rocky walls plunged almost vertically for two hundred feet into the frothing water that spumed and foamed on to the needle-shaped rocks, and I saw that the road led directly to the front of the house and no further.

  As we drew closer to the manor, however, I felt a sudden stir of anticipation, after the way of a man who had somehow discovered something he had never dreamed of, and there was a faint ruffling of the small hairs on the back of my neck as if a chill wind had blown from the direction of the house. As we got out of the car, I had the unshakeable feeling that Swatheley was affected in the same manner, possibly even more so than myself. He appeared oddly hesitant to enter the place, opening the door with a key that grated in the lock, standing back so that I might go in first.

  The current of air that came from inside the building at the opening of that door was a sudden noxious rush of decay as at the opening of a tomb. We did not pause long in the doorway but went inside, into a long hall, panelled and hung with pictures half-hidden in dust and filmy cobwebs. Very little daylight filtered in through the grimed windows. The dust on the floor the hall was a thick grey carpet. The rest of the house was composed of vast and dismal chambers; some of them with torn, mildewed hangings which all but covered the walls, dark passages, and high ceilings, arched and carved, most of the carvings hideous in the extreme, possessing a curiously unearthly quality that sent a little shiver along my nerves. There was an air of dampness about the place, too, but I knew that a few roaring fires in the wide hearths would soon rid the room of this and I felt suddenly calm and content there.

  I could see that Swatheley was surprised by my attitude, that he had expected me to turn and flee the instant I saw the manor. Whether he considered I was mad or not it was difficult to say, but his gaze was curious when I finally told him that I would take the place for the coming winter and asked whether it would be possible to obtain servants to live in, since the autumn and winter coming, the storms which arranged along the strip of coast of a terrible violence would prevent anyone from getting there and back each day.

  Swatheley agreed to do his best for me, but made it clear that he would have to go further afield than Bude, or anywhere in the near vicinity, since the people around of those parts would have nothing whatever to do with the place, having an almost unbelievable aversion and hatred of the manor and all associated with it. As if to emphasise the difficulty of getting anyone, and pointing out that it would be almost impossible for me to remain there long, he suggested I should put up at the hotel in Bude until he had made the necessary arrangements which he assured me would be only a matter of a few days.

  What made me fall in so readily with this plan was my desire to learn more of the history of the manor, and since I understood that one of the scholars who had been studying the place for almost three years was living in Bude, it would afford me an excellent opportunity for discussing it with him.

  During the week I stayed in Bude, I met George Carrington on several occasions. He was a reticent, raw-boned individual, a product of Oxford, who seemed a trifle out of place outside the cloisters of the University. He was only too willing to express his own opinions and tell me some of the tales which circulated in the district concerning Faxted Manor, initially, perhaps hoping to dissuade me from staying there, an act which he considered to be the height of folly. When he saw that I was determined to go through with my plans, he ceased his attempts to make me change my mind. I gained the impression he was only too pleased to find someone willing to listen to him; that his original intention had been to publish his findings in one of the journals devoted to such outworldly tales, but that he had eventually been forced to the conclusion that these stories were so ghastly and terrifying he had decided against such a course.

  Typical as the tales were, speaking of evil rites that had been performed in the manor since ea
rly in the Fourteenth Century, possibly far earlier than that—although the more remote history was shrouded in the mists of antiquity and only scattered fragments remained in existence—they did not repel me as Carrington clearly expected. Rather I found them to be oddly stimulating, exciting my imagination. One theme ran persistently through the accounts that had been handed down verbally through the ages. Something unutterably evil had either existed in the house in remote times, or had been born into the Warhope family—or Warr Hoppe—as it had been known during the Fourteenth Century. There were accounts of strange pestilences which had affected the surrounding countryside, of terrible and abnormal growths that had sprouted up from the once fertile soil on top of the cliffs and a little to landward, and of things that had been cast ashore on wintry nights onto the narrow strip of sandy beach at the foot of the cliffs whenever the storms raged along the coast. Carrington had carried out extensive investigations into the possible identity of these odd remains, but with only a limited success. A search among the church records going back for almost four hundred years had revealed isolated, but cunningly concealed, accounts of creatures buried in unhallowed ground or taken out in boats at dead of night and thrown into the sea; but these records were, he felt sure, merely hints of other things, dark and evil things, spawned out of pits deep and remote and unimaginable.

  In one ancient chronicle, there was reference to the marriage of one Henry Warhope to Nylene Poiseder in 1521, a union that appeared to have lasted less than a year, ending with Henry Warhope being tried for the abominable murder of his wife. What had been brought to light during the trial by his peers was not given in the chronicle, but the verdict had been a complete acquittal for the condemned man.

  “There was something given in the evidence then which they did not repeat to the outside world,” Carrington said. “Something the church prohibited. This fact, that so many things have been deliberately hidden and suppressed, is the most annoying thing about the whole business. It can be explained on the assumption that there is nothing more to this than the ramblings of superstitious peasants, or, as I believe, the events were of such a nauseous nature, were so far outside even the knowledge of the church and the learned men of that period, that they had no other course open to them.”