The Dark Boatman

by John Glasby

  I assured him I was not in the least perturbed by the stories, even if, in those far-off days, they may have held an element of truth. These things belonged to the realm of spectral lore, and at that time, I was a pronounced sceptic in such matters. Those who search after vague and unspecified horrors spoke of in old legends will often haunt strange, out-of-the-way places; go down into black, slime-covered vaults where catacombs are hewn out of the solid rock wall, linger by moon-infested night in haunted rooms and turrets where sky-rearing towers thrust spectral fingers to a cloud-wracked sky. They see dark, lycanthropic-like figures that flicked through forests of hideous trees among the Hartz Mountains, or midnight things silhouetted against the face of the moon and hidden by day in rotting coffins tucked away from prying eyes in vaults deep beneath the vampire-ridden Rhine castles.

  During the six days I spent in Bude, I learned all that Carrington had discovered concerning Faxted Manor, and by the end of my stay, had pieced together a reasonably full story of the house’s black medieval history from the date when the first records were available, to the time when the last occupiers had left, suddenly, and for some unknown reason.

  Then, on October 3, 1932, I moved into the manor. Three servants had been found who were agreeable to remain there with me, all of them from Truro, far enough afield for them not to have been affected by any of the wild rumours that were still rife concerning the place. William Pengarden had been a seaman for most of his fifty-three years, was a solid and very intense man, strong and obedient and dependable. Mary Ventnor, who combined the duties of cook and maid, was a tall girl of twenty-six, not given to listening to these tales of wild fancy, as also was Carfax, a man in his late thirties, sullen by nature, but robust and unimaginative. None of the three appeared concerned by the isolated nature of the manor, and if any of them had heard the curious stories which circulated in the district, they either ignored them, or kept them to themselves.

  For almost two weeks, the general routine at Faxted Manor proceeded evenly and with a quite placidity, my own time being spent mainly in pouring through the old, moth-eaten documents which filled the shelves of the library in the West Wing. It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by these records when I discovered that many of them had been preserved from the earliest days of the house, were possibly priceless volumes, giving a graphic account of the happenings of those distant days. The picture provided by these writings, adding much to that which I had learnt from Carrington, was not one designed to set my mind at rest concerning the evil reputation the place possessed.

  Before, the vague tales had been extremely picturesque and fanciful, most of them based on hearsay carried down and embellished through the long centuries. But the records here were of a different kind altogether, giving a consistent and onerously continual record of the house from the Eighth Century when a stone building had been erected on the site by an order of monks who had flourished there until their diabolical rites had forced the king, Edgar, to put an end to their heathen practices in 966. The monastery had been razed to the ground and after a short trial, the members of the order, without exception, had been hurled off the top of the cliff into the sea. There were dark hints in the documents of the relics which had been found buried in narrow passages beneath the site, of human and inhuman remains discovered in the lower chambers hewn out of the solid rock; and there was a general feeling of relief in the neighbourhood, and a belief that a terrible evil which had overshadowed them had been destroyed forever.

  The area was apparently shunned, or at least disregarded, until the lands were given to William de Warr Hoppe in 1124 by Henry I, who built the forerunner of the present manor on the cliff top. For close on a hundred and fifty years there was no record of any trace of evil associated with the place, nor anything sinister about the family, who occupied. Then, in 1271, John Warr Hoppe extended the building by erecting the West Wing, covering the site of the ancient monastery, and the first inkling of the impending calamity that was to follow the family for more than six hundred years showed itself. Having married in the previous year, his first child, a girl, died five months after birth of a sickly malady which defied all analysis. Of the four other children of this union, two were stillborn, both girls, while the sons apparently thrived.

  But the family seemed cursed after that. There were attestations of strange ailments which afflicted the Warr Hoppes, of mutant children born into the family, shut away in the curious stone cells which had been hollowed out under the foundations some hundreds of years earlier, of frightening inhuman cries heard in the night, of nocturnal excursions made to the shore during the moonless eldritch hours, blue-green lights which flickered behind untapestried windows, horrific black shapes outlined therein, and a return of the old and half-forgotten pestilences to the district, with evil shrouding the area and abounding a hundredfold.

  In 1797, Cecil Warhope, in his fiftieth year, went inexplicably mad and wandered into the village of Morganswode, as it was known then, giving voice to strange dreams and visions of the most terrible sort, which sent a band of men back to the manor bearing flaming torches and carrying any weapons they could lay their hands on. They had found little amiss in the house itself, but down on the narrow stretch of beach at the foot of the cliffs were odd tracks in the sand which had not been washed away by the encroaching sea, although for the sanity of one or two members of the band of men it would have been better by far if the tide had obliterated them entirely before they had been found.

  In the flickering yellow candlelight, seated in the high-backed chair, before the blazing fire, I read through the tattered and fading parchments backed by peeling leather that was cracked and worn, reading of the finding of William Warhope, Cecil’s brother, on the beach, his body and features curiously deformed, oddly grotesque, mindless horror mirrored in the wide-open eyes that stared up at the moon-flooded heavens. Rather than allow such an obviously unhallowed soul rest in peace in the quiet ground of the small churchyard, his body had been hastily buried in the sand of the beach, and on that same morning, the worst storm in the history of that stretch of coastline broke over the cliffs, seemingly centred on Faxted Manor. Certainly it was unlike anything known in living memory. Most vivid of all, apparently, in the eyes of the unknown chronicler, was a belief, rife at the time among the superstitious peasants on the beach, that after the storm had died down late the following afternoon, another set of prints as bizarre and unbelievable as the first had appeared in the sand, running almost parallel with the others which had, by that time, been almost washed away; but in this case the prints led up out of the sea and up the sheer wall of the cliff towards Faxted Manor.

  The horror had returned with a vengeance.

  * * * *

  Such was the history which assailed me and which I absorbed during the first few days at the manor. It must not, however, be imagined that I spent all my waking hours in the library, reading among these ancient, musty tomes of a bygone age. The weather at that time proved to be exceedingly clement even for early October, and I spent much time out of doors, taking as much of the fresh air as possible. Several times I wandered to the edge of the rocks and stared down their almost vertical depths to where the sea crashed onto the boulders in a spuming of white, wind-tossed spray. There was, I noticed, a small promontory where a ridge of cliff thrust itself out into the sea for perhaps fifty yards, forming a natural breakwater there, enclosing a tiny bay where the water seemed calmer than further out, or even a little way along the coast.

  Towards late evening during the second week of my stay there, I often stood on top of the cliffs looking out to the west where some of the most unusual and colourful sunsets I had ever known occurred with an almost clockwork regularity. One particular evening proved no exception. The entire sky to the west was a mass of pinks and scarlet, blending imperceptibly into apple green, blue, and finally purple directly overhead. Lowering my glance from the flaming wonders of the sunset, I chanced to look down at the water immediately
below me, and felt an odd edge of surprise to notice that on this occasion, the surface within that the tiny bay was not smooth and unruffled as it normally was. There was something thrusting itself up above the water. From where I stood, in the fading light, it looked rather like a black stone monolith, its lower half hidden by the waves. I wished I had brought my binoculars with me so that I might have examined it more closely, for there seemed to be strange carvings on it, but with the night falling, I had to reluctantly give up any attempt to discover the exact nature of the object.

  That night I retired early. I had not yet fully recovered from my long illness and the long walk along the cliffs, coupled with the hours spent during the past week pouring over the old manuscripts into the early hours of the morning, had tired me more than I had realised.

  My room was in the west wing of the house, high in one turreted tower, the solitary window looking out directly over the small bay alongside the narrow headland. It was reached by a winding stairway of stone, between walls that still ran with dripping moisture in spite of the fires that had been lit.

  I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but was soon haunted by dreams of the most hideous kind. I was standing alone on the windswept cliffs looking down into the twilight sea. The water heaved with a sullen, oily swell, black and fathomless; yet there was something in those dark depths and vasty deeps, something which was straining to the surface, unutterably evil, a thing which was not of Earth, had no part in anything that was sane and normal. There was the vaguest suspicion of moonlight in the sky, and as I turned in my dream to where the house should have stood, I discovered myself staring at a circle of crudely-hewn stones of the most terrifying aspect, lit by the grotesque paleness of the moonlight. There were presences in among the stones, queer, half-visible things that hovered and flitted on the edge of my vision, never coming close enough, nor staying still long enough, to be seen clearly, and all the more frightening because of this abnormal, spectral elusiveness.

  One thing in particular I noticed in my dream. A creature that stood hooded and gowned, on the cliff edge, arms raised as if in supplication. Then it turned, and it was as if I screamed aloud in my dream. It would be wrong to say that this monstrosity, visible as the hood which covered its face fell back at that instant, could not be described in terms understandable by anyone who had knowledge of these black abominations from pits unimaginable and unnameable. There was something human about, it but if anything it was this merest hint of humanness that brought the sense of terror crowding into my sleeping mind. The protruding forehead was ridged and furrowed, and the two bony protuberances gave an unmistakable sense of witnessing some fiendish creature from the lowest pit of Hell. Some instinct warned me, even in the dream, that I was witnessing here had no connection with the present day.

  The being began to mumble and mutter and there was nothing English in the mouthings; indeed, the disjointed phrases seemed to have no earthly connotation, and as they trailed off into nothingness, something stirred deep within the black water below the cliff. There was a swirling as if a whirlpool was forming; a surging, leprous gleaming of spectral whiteness, indistinct at first, then growing clearer as it came up to the surface. I felt my gaze drawn hypnotically to the sea where the waves, whipped to a sudden frenzy, hammered on the belt of sand that fronted the rocks. Then it emerged, dripping, from the sea and whatever horror, whatever frenzy of nightmarish terror I had experienced before, faded into insignificance before the soul-searing fear which took a hold of my sleeping mind.

  Shivering intolerably, with the clammy sweat lying cold on my body, I woke with a start, my heart palpitating wildly in my chest. Hands clutching at my body, I opened my eyes, peered about me.

  The most terrible, the most unbelievable of all mental shocks is that of the totally unexpected. The nightmare was still strong in my mind, the shaking still lay on my limbs from the sheer terror of it, but nothing in that dream could compare with the fear I now felt as I saw what lay about me; not the simple furnishings of my room high in the turreted tower, nor even the long, winding stairway which led up to it—but the rocky, moss-turfed cliffs with the dark silhouette of the manor more than a hundred yards away; and the dull booming in my ears, blending with the tortuous beating of my heart, was the sound of the sea breaking on the rocks.

  I cannot even begin to hint at the thoughts that went through my mind as I stumbled back to the manor. The main door opened creakingly at my touch, and this was evidently the means by which I had earlier left the house. How long had passed since I had left my room and gone wandering forth into the night, I could not tell, but I knew that if I did not get warm at once. I would, in my weakened state, run a distinct risk of catching pneumonia. Throwing a handful of logs on to the fire, which had burned down to mere glowing embers, I sat in front of it until the wood caught and blazed up slowly, very slowly, as the heat permeated into my chilled body. Gradually, the fear in my shocked, numbed mind subsided.

  It had been nothing more than a dream, of course, a highly vivid dream possibly the result of the excitement which had been building up inside me over the past few days, and the general malaise had brought about our recurrence of the sleep-walking which had once afflicted me as a child.

  Further sleep that night was utterly out of the question, so lighting the long candle, I sat in the high-backed chair by the fire, threw a heavy wrap over my legs, and waited for the dawn. As I sat there, I became aware of the noises in the house. It was the first time I had really noticed them. Before, they had been mere background sounds. Now there was an oddly menacing tone to them; a moaning, droning whisper, which built up from some inconceivable depth beneath the structure of the manor, an ululation that sent shivers along my taut-strung nerves. The sound persisted until the first greys and blues of the dawn showed through the windows, then it subsided to a soft, hideous murmur that never quite faded into nothingness.

  That morning, I summoned the two men and asked them to bring lanterns, so that I might examine the vaults and cellars of the house. At the bottom of a score of stone steps which led down into an abysmal darkness was a small cellar, the floor slime-covered to a depth of almost two inches, walls glistening in the lantern light, the cracks in the stone filled with horrible fungoid growths, pale and sickly, which had never seen the light of day. The stench that rose around us was full of rottenness and decay, and here and there, ranged on narrow shelves around the walls, were oddly shaped wooden boxes whose contents I dared not imagine. Was this a part of the old house, built innumerable ages before the manor itself? What I saw there forced me to the inescapable conclusion that it was—and yet, towards the far end of the cellar, we came upon a heavy stone slab set in the wall, around the edges of which a faint stirring of air flickered the lantern flames and gave a hint of something more which lay beyond.

  Setting our fingers around the edges of the stone we pulled with all of our strength, but for long moments the heavy stone refused to budge. Then, with a leaden swinging motion, it moved around a central pivot. The rush of fetid air brought a rising nausea into my stomach. But it was a sensation I instantly forced down in the faint excitement of what lay before me, dimly lit by the pale yellow glow of the lantern I thrust forward.

  As I stood there hesitating, I felt I was on the brink of frightful and terrible revelations. The sense of malignancy in that blast of air from those unknown regions had touched me more deeply than I had imagined. The servants, seeing my hesitation, were all for going back, declaring that whatever lay down there, deep in the bowels of the solid rock beneath the manor, it was not good to know. There were many things, they maintained, it was better to remain in utter ignorance of, rather than bring them to light. But as always, in my belief that there had to be a logical and scientific explanation for any of the seemingly abnormal and paranormal phenomena, I insisted that we should go on; ordering them to follow, I stepped forward, the man at the rear carrying the other lantern.

  Slowly I began the descent into that p
assage composed of small steps carved from hard rock, steps of such a weirdly impossible shape and design that the mind baulked at any idea of what sort of feet they had been made for in the past. The pale yellow glow revealed, too, that the stone walls were not perfectly smooth but were covered with time-effaced designs, a few of them discernible. Here were the remaining traces of the pictorial art of this long-forgotten age. I paused to look at only a few of them before hurrying on, gagging at the rush of fear in my mind, the muscles of my throat constricted, warning my men not to look at them, knowing that once they did no power on Earth would keep them with me.

  Diabolical-like images drawn from some drug-delirium, they were so oddly reminiscent of my dream of the previous night that I could not put them out of my mind. Deeper and deeper went that passage, as if we were slipping down some hellish well, through haunted tunnels that rang with the muffling echoes of our feet and oozed a thick, viscid moisture from their walls. I saw, too, that after a while there were other passages leading off from the main one along which we were working our way forward, and the lantern light failed to penetrate these black corridors for more than a few feet. Once, I fancied I heard a slithering, rustling sound far off down one of these narrow passages, but as I stopped, my heart thumping madly in my chest, the sound was gone, and there was nothing but the gale of our breathing in the stillness.

  The tunnel led us down deep within the foundations of the manor, and we were soon undoubtedly far inside the rock of the cliff itself. The air here was not wholesome, but possessed a horribly fishy odour, and it came to me that we must soon be approaching the level of the sea if the tunnel continued to descend in this manner.