by Otto Penzler
As a student deeply involved with and knowledgeable about occultism, most of her stories reflect her belief in the existence and power of goodness. Her villainous characters, therefore, tend to be less fully fleshed out than her heroic figures, and it soon becomes fairly obvious that they are doomed because of their innate evil. There is a great sense of authenticity to her fiction, though there is little sense of wonder at even the most extraordinary supernatural occurrences.
“Thing of Darkness” was originally published in the August 1937 issue of Weird Tales; it has been collected in Thing of Darkness (Seattle, Midnight House, 2005), edited by Mike Ashley.
Thing of Darkness
G. G. PENDARVES
I
A long curving sweep of tall gray houses. At their feet the old parade, its worn seawall banked up against wind driven tides. Troon House, grayer, gaunter than the rest, stood empty. A signboard creaked on rusted hinges, advertising it For Sale or To Let.
Lonely. Lovely. Deserted.
Seagate was proud of Troon House. Seagate was afraid of it. People came by the score to see it, always in broad daylight. They were careful to keep in groups, silent, timid, turning a sharp corner, entering each unexplored room with that sudden jolt that a clumsily manipulated elevator gives to one’s heart.
They stared at beautiful restorations, at blackened beams, at vast wall-cupboards, and at brick fireplaces whose ancient clay showed every tint of umber, rose, and purple-brown. They bunched together closely going up the last steep narrow stairs to the west attic. They looked at its deep recess, recently and fatally uncovered—looked and shuddered.
They went in close order downstairs again, escaped through low-roofed, retiled kitchens to a long untended garden behind the house and thence to a broad lane and main road at last. Shaken, nervously loquacious, they didn’t speak of Troon until the old place was out of sight. Over tea and famous Seagate shrimps they exchanged impressions.
Going home after sunset, if they stayed so long, they glanced in passing along the road, at Troon’s blank front windows, shivered, looked quickly away.
Troon—gray old house, left to hideous memories of the Thing of Darkness. Day by day, night by night, through the years, through the centuries Troon had stood. Old, forsaken, betrayed. Old Troon—shell of death—old Troon.
Low sullen clouds. A cold northwest wind. Fierce squalling gusts of rain. A high angry tide, gray-green flecked with bitter white, roaring up the estuary, Seagate was a mile of wet gray road and blank-faced houses. Wind and sea … wind and sea.
At the village-church of Keston, a fifteen minutes walk away on the hill behind, the broken body of Joe Dawlish with its staring tortured eyes and twisted face of fear was being buried. And in another grave, a sad small grave, the bones of Lizzy Werne were being laid to rest after three hundred years delay.
People thronged the small churchyard to its broad low moss-stained walls. From Seagate, from Keston, from all over the Wirral peninsula, and even from Liverpool and Chester they had come to witness this double funeral. Reporters, psychic investigators, university professors rubbed wet shoulders with fishermen, farmers, shop-keepers, and local gentry.
At the end, the very end when the last words of the service were said and it only remained for the gaping graves to be filled in, the vicar stood with uplifted hands. His somber gaze looked out over the crowd to tossing trees and lowering sky. His lined face, wet with rain, was worn and anxious.
Suddenly his voice rang out again, a cry from the heart of this shepherd of a stricken flock … “Deliver us, O Lord, from all assaults of the devil! In thine infinite mercy, protect and succor us! Stretch forth thy hand against this Thing of Darkness and set us free from fear! In the name of Him who died for us—Amen.”
There was a murmurous response like water breaking on a distant shore. Then, slowly, silently, pelted by spiteful icy rain, the crowd dispersed.
At the lich-gate Doctor Dick Thornton was pushed up against two people he wanted to avoid: Edith and Alec Kinloch. Alec’s heavy sallow face showed distinct traces of emotion. He looked quite appealingly at Doctor Dick.
“ ’Fraid I didn’t take all this quite seriously before,” he confessed. “I don’t understand what it’s all about, but—”
Edith put a restraining hand on his arm. He was having one of his emotional moments, she could see. Heaven knew what he might say! Probably he would double his already absurdly generous offer of five pounds to the widow. What a blessing she could count on herself never to lose her head! Queer sort of service it had been. These villagers adored emotional orgies. Well, poor things, they must have some pleasure in their dull stupid lives. Clever of the vicar to stage such a good show for them. He knew how to cater for a rural diocese.
To deflect her husband from possible weakness she turned to the young girl behind her.
“Lynneth, this is Doctor Thornton. He’s a sort of uncle to all the fishermen of Seagate. Miss Lynneth Brey, Doctor Thornton. A connection of my husband’s. She’s going to spend a month or so with us—at Troon.”
There, Edith thought, that’ll let him know right off that they’ve not succeeded in scaring us. Her tactics were wasted. The doctor didn’t even hear her. He was looking down into Lynneth’s uplifted rosy face. Black eyes, soft, sooty, heart-catching. Eyes made for tears and laughter and—oh, yes! he knew at once—made for love. He looked deep, deeper into them; young, radiant, kindled with recent deep emotion. Eyes to light a man’s path, to draw him on and up, above life’s dusty sordid clamor. Eyes that promised and withheld.
Doctor Dick’s feet were treading air, his heart thumped with the beat-beat-beat of hooves on a hollow road, his head felt full of fizzy champagne. But no one guessed it. He heard his voice, it didn’t seem to surprise anyone, replying to the introduction. He waited with parted lips, eyes a clear tender blue, listening—listening for her voice.
“Oh!” She considered him. A smile drew her lips in an adorable sideways quirk. “You make me feel homesick, although I’ve only been here a day. You speak like a Highlander.”
“I am one. From Gairloch.”
She put out a small hand to be enveloped in his close grip, and laughed in quick delight.
“That’s my place. My own darling funny village. My mother’s birthplace. We’ve got a cottage there. D’you remember it—the one like a brown loaf at the head of Glen Ruach?”
They drifted from the churchgate, away down the twisting road. The crowd of people might have been blown wet leaves. The two Kinlochs, left behind, exchanged long glances.
“Let ’em go.” Alec took his wife’s arm. “Birds of a feather—eh? She and Pills can keep each other amused. Looks like a case to me. You won’t be bothered with her long.”
“Really, Alec! There’s the garage—what on earth are you dragging me on for? I’m certainly not going to hang about for that silly girl. Going off with a man she’s just met, like that! She behaves like a child. No idea of appearances.”
“What odds? Nobody’s going to notice a kid like that.”
“Nonsense! She’s connected with us. D’you want him for a permanent relation?”
“Why not? Get the girl off your hands while the going’s good. She and Pills would run a dispensary or a nursing-home and be too busy to interfere with us. This yearly visit’s beginning to pall.”
She glanced shrewdly at him.
“Something in that. And even if he’s queer, quite important people have taken him up. Come on, then. I’m perishing with cold. This sensed fuss! Seagate doesn’t seem to have altered since Troon House was first built.”
They clambered into their car and splashed down the lane to their bungalow by the marshes.
“Quite! Quite! However, there are always two sides to everything.”
Mr. Alec Kinloch presented a large bulwark of flesh from behind which his schoolboy’s mind issued bulletins to the outside world. He kept a store of such ready-made bulletins within, stereotyped responses calculated to give intim
ation of a subtle discerning intellect at work. He would employ such tactics indefinitely if conducting a conversation unaided. If his wife was with him she manned the big guns while he posed as an impregnable fortress.
Doctor Dick regarded the large dull pretentious creature with patience born of his profession rather than his temperament. Doctor Dick was a Highlander. Alec Kinloch a Lowland Scot. This, in itself, was a deep fixed gulf between them, apart from gulfs of breeding and intellect, and today the doctor found his host peculiarly trying. He’d made a point of calling when he knew Lynneth would not be at Sandilands. He wanted to spare her the grim tale he had to tell. It had been an effort, however, to miss a chance of seeing her, and his mood grew steadily darker.
“What,” he demanded, “would you consider the other side of this horror at Troon?”
Baffled at such direct attack, Alec poked at his pipe with an air of grave reserve. He and Edith always were careful to be noncommittal in their attitude until they discovered the trend of popular feeling with reference to a new idea. This Troon ghost notion now! If Seagate took it seriously, and yesterday’s funeral service seemed to indicate so, then they would follow suit. Alec had been swayed by the vicar yesterday. Now, however, he knew Edith’s view was the really intelligent and logical one. The vicar had been simply playing up, doing what the villagers expected of him. Jolly good thing no one but his wife knew that he’d actually got the wind up yesterday. The “Thing of Darkness!” Uh! Nasty phrase that! He’d felt like chucking up everything—selling Troon to any fool who wanted the old place. Well, he could laugh at himself and his fears now.
But this young Pills! He seemed officious. Trying to interfere. Pulling all this stuff about haunts and devils at Troon. Warning him that the workmen restoring the old house were in danger and that he and Edith ought to give up all idea of living there. Damned young whippersnapper, sitting there at his ease and telling a man of the world what was what! He’d tell him where he got off all right!
The door opened to admit his wife. Alec crossed his legs, resumed his pipe, took up the fortress-pose as Doctor Dick rose to his feet. Edith Kinloch progressed with ceremony to a chair.
“How nice of you to call again—so soon, Doctor Thornton.”
“Doctor Dick” corrected the visitor. “My father is still in practice here. We have to make a distinction.”
“Oh! How awkward for you!”
Edith was slim and tall and neat. She was invariably bright and kind too. It was part of her chosen role to stoop kindly to her inferiors. The Lady Bountiful was her favorite part, to be gracious, to condescend. She’d been these things infuriatingly and increasingly ever since she cut free from her decent but quite uneducated family at the age of fourteen. Alec never knew to this day that her mother had a fish-and-chips shop in Edgware road, that her father was crippled and on the dole, that her younger sisters were working in a glue factory.
“My wife,” Alec would tell you, believing it to be a fact, “lost both her parents—died in India when she was a child. Friends made themselves responsible for her education” (the Local Educational Council as represented by Edith’s adaptable mind) “a branch of the Dorsetshire Frome-Stoddarts, you know. Good old family but improverished—impoverished.”
Edith smiled brightly on the two men sitting before the study fire.
“I’m sure you must be cold and hungry, Doctor—Dick, if you insist on the familiarity. I just went to tell cook she must drop everything and make some of her famous hot cakes for tea. Cook is so difficult, but really I find the best thing is to alter her routine every now and then. I do it on principle.”
She proceeded to stage-manage a background for an afternoon-tea act. Doctor Dick was used as scene-shifter. Edith directed him with firm smiling competence. He pulled up tables and pushed away chairs. She conveyed atmospherically that he was young and insignificant enough to do these things rather than Alec.
“And now do let’s go on with all that too adorable tale you were telling us about Troon just now. So like a story of Edgar Allan Poe’s. Now don’t say you finished that tale while I was out of the room! No? That’s right!”
She beamed approval.
“Now. We’re all settled. Tea—and put on another log, Alec, the basket’s beside you there—a real Christmas fire to warm you up, Doctor Dick. And eat up the scones; you must be needing something. No use calling at teatime and not taking advantage of the fact.”
Glittering gracious hostess. Her varnished toffee-brown eyes shone in the firelight. She addressed the doctor as if he were a schoolboy out for a treat. She was convinced he’d arranged purposely to call at their tea hour. So lean and hungry-looking! She plumed herself on the observation which thus misread Doctor Dick’s rigidly disciplined muscular body.
“This is the only time I can call,” the doctor was young enough to feel not amused at her patronage. “I pass this bungalow on my way up to Keston. Due at the hospital at five, you know.”
Edith smiled her best worldly understanding smile. Let the young man get away with his excuses, poor dear. She didn’t grudge him his tea. Pity Lynneth was out. It would have been easy then to sidetrack him from the mission he felt he had concerning Troon and its restoration. She must make things plain, perfectly plain, once and for all. She leaned forward. Her glistening eyes, her perfectly smooth face, her small ungenerous mouth registered smiling cordiality.
“Now do tell me all about it.”
Doctor Dick’s blue eyes grew black and gray as the November afternoon. He told her. Told her details of Joe Dawlish’s death. Told her of daily increasing peril at Troon. Implored her to give up the whole thing, to leave the gray haunted old house to its evil.
“The men are in hourly danger—horrible danger. You are letting loose forces that have been pent up in the place for centuries. The men should come off the job at once.”
At his increasingly urgent manner, Alec and Edith Kinloch stiffened simultaneously. After all, dash it all, the house is mine, ran Alec’s thoughts, and there’s a limit to the interference one can stand! Edith’s eyes answered his unspoken protest, agreeing with it.
Alec voiced his ideas. His tone was a subtle reproach.
“Was this Joe Dawlish working on the house when he died?”
“He was.” The doctor’s clipped reply roused all Alec’s fathomless obstinacy.
“I suppose he was insured.”
Alec’s own instant perception of the vital core of this queer fuss about Dawlish gratified him enormously. He was moved, without waiting for his wife’s lead, to make a gesture.
“Well, I might give the wife a little extra. Ten pounds would pay for the funeral—handsomely. These people love a ghoulish sort of feast, don’t they? ‘Buried him with ham’—what!”
“Ham? Er, yes … quite. Ham.”
Doctor Dick looked his host up and down as if he saw some connection between him and the word he reiterated. He got to his feet.
He was out of the room, out of the little entrance-hall, out of the house—stalking like a longlegged bird down the garden and on to the road almost before Edith and Alec could reply to his swift farewell. He’d been so quick, so cumbered with hat, stick, and a knobby untidy parcel, that he didn’t even shake hands.
Alec threw himself down in his armchair by the fire, took up a brass toasting fork and began to warm up the remaining scones. Edith watched him absent-mindedly.
“Shut Pills up, didn’t I?” he spoke with his mouth full of scone. “Nothing like getting down to brass tacks with these fellows. Driveling about spooks and Troon! Neat dodge for collecting for Dawlish’s widow. Better do the thing handsomely, as we’re strangers here. Living at the big house, we’ll be obliged to play up a bit.”
Edith continued her pursuit of abstract thought.
“Well?”
“Yes, dear.”
She came out of her trance, sat forward inelegantly, a thin hand on either knee. Strong emotion did occasionally uncover the past.
“Ale
c, there’s more in this than meets the eye. Mark my words, there’s someone else after Troon. They want to turn us out, force us to sell. I dare say they’ve found how old and much more valuable the property is than they believed. Let ’em try!”
He wolfed the last scone, pulled out a large white linen handkerchief, polished his lips, arranged his mustache, hitched up his trousers at the knee, and lighted a fresh pipe.
“Let ’em!” he echoed in profound sepulchral tones.
Six o’clock on a late November evening. Rain and a squalling wind from the east. A high tide slapping and hissing against the mile-long ancient seawall.
Jim Sanderson drove at his job in the cold drafty house with nervous hurry. A highly intelligent able workman was Jim, the best workman of the gang at Troon House.
Well over three hundred years old the house was. Of late it had fallen into bad disrepair. Its landlord lived in Ireland and had rented his fine old derelict to one careless tenant after another until roof and walls let in as much weather as they kept out.
The Liverpool agent happened to love the house. He had done his best, wrested small sums from its owner for patching here and patching there for forty odd years. But he and Troon could bluff no longer.
Would-be tenants kept on coming, for a genuine old Seagate house for sale was rare. Their verdict was unanimous. Damp! Rain drove in through deep cracks and faulty windows. Salt water used in the cement made ugly discolorations everywhere. Timbers were rotting. One roof had curvature of the spine. Toads and spiders had taken over ruined outbuildings and kitchens. Weeds, coarse grass, overgrown hedges, and dumps of rubbish made a desert of the long garden at Troon’s back.
