The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two

by James D. Jenkins

  I went to the library earlier than usual one evening. The clock had not long struck nine when I left the drawing room. I had seen a change for the worse in Lota at dinner, though she had kept up her pretence of gaiety, and had refused to be treated as an invalid, insisting upon dining as we dined, scarcely touching some things, eating ravenously of other dishes, the least wholesome, laughing to scorn all her doctor’s advice about dietary. I endured the interval between eight and nine, stifling my anxieties, and indulging the mild old lady with a game of bezique, which my wretched play allowed her to win easily. Like most old people her sorrow was of a mild and modified quality, and she had, I believe, resigned herself to the inevitable. The careful doctor, the admirable nurses, had set her mind at ease about dear Lota, she told me. She felt that all was being done that love and care could do, and for the rest, well, she had her church services, her prayers, her morning and evening readings in the well-worn New Testament. I believe she was almost happy.

  ‘We must all die, my dear Helen,’ she said, plaintively.

  Die, yes. Die when one had reached that humdrum stage on the road of life where this poor old thing was plodding, past barren fields and flowerless hedges – the stage of grey hairs, and toothless gums, and failing sight, and dull hearing – and an old-fashioned, one-idead intellect. But to die like Lota, in the pride of youth, with beauty and wealth and love all one’s own! To lay all this down in the grave! That seemed hard, too hard for my understanding or my patience.

  * * * * *

  I found her asleep on the sofa by the hearth, the nurse sitting quietly on guard in her armchair, knitting the stocking which was never out of her hands unless they were occupied in the patient’s service. Tonight’s sleep was sounder than usual, for the sleeper did not stir at my approach, and I seated myself in the low chair by the foot of the sofa without waking her.

  A book had slipped from her hand, and lay on the silken cover­let open. The pages caught my eye, for they were in manu­script, and I remembered what the nurse had said about Lota’s fancy for this volume. I stole my hand across the coverlet, and possessed myself of the book, so softly that the sleeper’s sensitive frame had no consciousness of my touch.

  A manuscript volume of about two hundred pages in a neat firm hand, very small, yet easy to read, so perfectly were the letters formed and so evenly were the lines spaced.

  I turned the leaves eagerly. A diary, a business man’s diary, recording in commonplace phraseology the transactions of each day, Stock Exchange, Stock Exchange – railways – mines – loans – banks – money, money, money, made or lost. That was all the neat penmanship told me, as I turned leaf after leaf, and ran my eye over page after page.

  The social life of the writer was indicated in a few brief sentences. ‘Dined with the Parkers: dinner execrable; company stupid; talked to Lendon, who has made half a million in Mexican copper; a dull man.’

  ‘Came to Brighton for Easter; clear turtle at the Ship good; they have given me my old rooms; asked Smith (Suez Smith, not Turkish Smith) to dinner.’

  What interest could Lota possibly find in such a journal – a prosy commonplace record of losses and gains, bristling with figures?

  This was what I asked myself as I turned leaf after leaf, and saw only the everlasting repetition of financial notes, strange names of loans and mines and railways, with contractions that reduced them to a cypher. Slowly, my hand softly turning the pages of the thick volume, I had gone through about three-fourths of the book when I came to the heading, ‘Orange Grove’, and the brief entries of the financier gave place to the detailed ideas and experiences of the man of leisure, an exile from familiar scenes and old faces, driven back upon self-­commune for the amusement of his lonely hours.

  This doubtless was where Lota’s interest in the book began, and here I too began to read every word of the diary with closest attention. I did not stop to think whether I was justified in reading the pages which the dead man had penned in his retirement, whether a licence which his grand-daughter allowed herself might be taken by me. My one thought was to discover the reason of Lota’s interest in the book, and whether its influence upon her mind and spirits was as harmful as I feared.

  I slipped from the chair to the rug beside the sofa, and, sitting there on the ground, with the full light of the shaded reading-lamp upon the book, I forgot everything but the pages before me.

  The first few pages after the old man’s installation in his villa were full of cheerfulness. He wrote of this land of the South, new to his narrow experience, as an earthly paradise. He was almost as sentimental in his enthusiasms as a girl, as if it had not been for the old-fashioned style in which his raptures expressed themselves these pages might have been written by a youthful pen.

  He was particularly interested in the old monkish rooms at the back of the villa, but he fully recognised the danger of occupying them.

  ‘I have put my books in the long room which was used as a refectory,’ he wrote, ‘but as I now rarely look at them there is no fear of my being tempted to spend more than an occasional hour in the room.’

  Then after an interval of nearly a month:

  ‘I have arranged my books, as I find the library the most interesting room in the house. My doctor objects to the gloomy aspect, but I find a pleasing melancholy in the shadow of the steep olive-clad hill. I begin to think that this life of retirement, with no companions but my books, suits me better than the pursuit of money making, which has occupied so large a portion of my later years.’

  Then followed pages of criticism upon the books he read – history, travels, poetry – books which he had been collecting for many years, but which he was now only beginning to enjoy.

  ‘I see before me a studious old age,’ he wrote, ‘and I hope I may live as long as the head of my old college, Martin Routh. I have made more than enough money to satisfy myself, and to provide ample wealth for the dear girl who will inherit the greater part of my fortune. I can afford to fold my hands, and enjoy the long quiet years of old age in the companionship of the master spirits who have gone before. How near, how living they seem as I steep myself in their thoughts, dream their dreams, see life as they saw it! Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakes­peare, Milton, and all those later lights that have shone upon the dullest lives and made them beautiful – how they live with us, and fill our thoughts, and make up the brightest part of our daily existence.’

  I read many pages of comment and reverie in the neat, clear penmanship of a man who wrote for his own pleasure, in the restful solitude of his own fire-side.

  Suddenly there came a change – the shadow of the cloud that hung over that house:

  ‘I am living too much alone. I did not think I was of the stuff which is subject to delusions and morbid fancies – but I was wrong. I suppose no man’s mind can retain its strength of fibre without the friction of intercourse with other minds of its own calibre. I have been living alone with the minds of the dead, and waited upon by foreign servants, with whom I hardly exchange half a dozen sentences in a day. And the result is what no doubt any brain-doctor would have foretold.

  ‘I have begun to see ghosts.

  ‘The thing I have seen is so evidently an emanation of my own mind – so palpably a materialisation of my own self-consciousness, brooding upon myself and my chances of long life – that it is a weakness even to record the appearance that has haunted me during the last few evenings. No shadow of dying monk has stolen between me and the lamplight; no presence from the vanished years, revisiting places. The thing which I have seen is myself – not myself as I am – but myself as I am to be in the coming years, many or few.

  ‘The vision – purely self-induced as I know it to be – has not the less given a shock to the placid contentment of my mind, and the long hopes which, in spite of the Venusian’s warning, I had of late been cherishing.

  ‘Looking up from my book in yesterday’s twilight my casual glance rested on the old Venetian mirror in front of my desk; and gradually
, out of the blurred darkness, I saw a face looking at me.

  ‘My own face as it might be after the wasting of disease, or the slow decay of advancing years – a face at least ten years older than the face I had seen in my glass a few hours before – hollow cheeks, haggard eyes, the loose under-lip drooping weakly – a bent figure in an invalid chair, an aspect of utter helplessness. And it was myself. Of that fact I had no shadow of doubt.

  ‘Hypochondria, of course – a common form of the malady, – perhaps this shaping of the imagination into visions. Yet, the thing was strange – for I had been troubled by no apprehensions of illness or premature old age. I had never even thought of myself as an old man. In the pride bred of long immunity from illness I had considered myself exempt from the ailments that are wont to attend declining years. I had pictured myself living to the extremity of human life, and dropping peacefully into the centenarian’s grave.

  ‘I was angry with myself for being affected by the vision, and I locked the door of the library when I went to dress for dinner, determined not to re-enter the room till I had done something – by outdoor exercise and change of scene – to restore the balance of my brain. Yet when I had dined there came upon me so feverish a desire to know whether the glass would again show me the same figure and face that I gave the key to my major-domo, and told him to light the lamps and make up the fire in the library.

  ‘Yes, the thing lived in the blotched and blurred old glass. The dusky surface, which was too dull to reflect the realities of life, gave back that vision of age and decay with unalterable fidelity. The face and figure came and went, and the glass was often black – but whenever the thing appeared it was the same – the same in every dismal particular, in all the signs of senility and fading life.

  ‘ “This is what I am to be twenty years hence,” I told myself, “A man of eighty might look like that.”

  ‘Yet I had hoped to escape that bitter lot of gradual decay which I had seen and pitied in other men. I had promised myself that the reward of a temperate life – a life free from all consuming fires of dissipation, all tempestuous passions – would be a vigorous and prolonged old age. So surely as I had toiled to amass fortune so surely also had I striven to lay up for myself long years of health and activity, a life prolonged to the utmost span.’

  * * * * *

  There was a break of ten days in the journal, and when the record was resumed the change in the writing shocked me. The neat firm penmanship gave place to weak and straggling characters, which, but for marked peculiarities in the formation of certain letters, I should have taken for the writing of a stranger.

  ‘The thing is always there in the black depths of that damnable­ glass – and I spend the greater part of my life watching for it. I have struggled in vain against the bitter curiosity to know the worst which the vision of the future can show me. Three days ago I flung the key of this detestable room into the deepest well on the premises; but an hour afterwards I sent to Taggia for a blacksmith, and had the lock picked, and ordered a new key, and a duplicate, lest in some future fit of spleen I should throw away a second key, and suffer agonies before the door could be opened.

  ‘ “Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas – ”

  ‘Vainly the poet’s warning buzzes and booms in my vexed ear – repeating itself perpetually, like the beating of a pulse in my brain, or like the ticking of a clock that will not let a man sleep.

  ‘ “Scire nefas – scire nefas.”

  ‘The desire to know more is no stranger than reason.

  ‘Well, I am at least prepared for what is to come. I live no longer in a fool’s paradise. The thing which I see daily and hourly is no hallucination, no materialisation of my self-­consciousness, as I thought in the beginning. It is a warning and a prophesy. So shalt thou be. Soon, soon, shalt thou resemble this form which it shocks thee now to look upon.

  ‘Since first the shadow of myself looked at me from the darker shadows of the glass I have felt every indication of approaching doom. The doctor tries to laugh away my fears, but he owns that I am below par – meaningless phrase – talks of nervine decay, and suggests my going to St Moritz. He doubts if this place suits me, and confesses that I have changed for the worse since I came here.’

  Again an interval, and then in writing that was only just legible­.

  ‘It is a month since I wrote in this book – a month which has realised all that the Venetian glass showed me when first I began to read its secret.

  ‘I am a helpless old man, carried about in an invalid chair. Gone my pleasant prospect of long tranquil years; gone my selfish scheme of enjoyment, the fruition of a life of money-getting. The old Eastern fable has been realised once again. My gold has turned to withered leaves, so far as any pleasure that it can buy for me. I hope that my grand-daughter may get some good out of the wealth I have toiled to win.’

  Again a break, longer this time, and again the hand­writing showed signs of increasing weakness. I had to pore over it closely in order to decipher the broken, crooked lines pencilled casually over the pages.

  ‘The weather is insufferably hot; but too ill to be moved. In library – coolest room – doctor no objection. I have seen the last picture in the glass – Death – corruption – the cavern of Lazarus, and no Redeemer’s hand to raise the dead. Horrible! Horrible! Myself as I must be – soon, soon! How soon?’

  And then, scrawled in a corner of the page, I found the date – June 24, 1889.

  I knew that Mr Hammond died early in the July of that year.

  * * * * *

  Seated on the floor, with my head bent over the pages, and reading more by the light of the blazing logs than by the lamp on the table above me, I was unaware that Lota had awoke, and had raised herself from her reclining position on the sofa. I was still absorbed in my study of those last horrible lines when a pale hand came suddenly down upon the open book, and a laugh which was almost a shriek ran through the silent spaces around us. The nurse started up and ran to her patient, who was struggling to her feet and staring wildly into the long narrow glass in the recess opposite her sofa.

  ‘Look, look!’ she shrieked. ‘It has come – the vision of Death! The dreadful face – the shroud – the coffin. Look, Helen, look!’

  My gaze followed the direction of those wild eyes, and I know not whether my excited brain conjured up the image that appalled me. This alone I know, that in the depths of that dark glass, indistinct as a form seen through turbid water, a ghastly face, a shrouded figure, looked out at me——

  ‘As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.’

  A sudden cry from the nurse called me from the horror of that vision to stern reality, to see the life-blood ebbing from the lips I had kissed so often with all a sister’s love. My poor friend never spoke again. A severe attack of haemorrhage hastened the inevitable end; and before her heart-broken lover could come to clasp the hand and gaze into her fading eyes, Violetta Hammond passed away.

  THE CREATURES IN THE HOUSE by Robert Westall

  Robert Westall (1929-1993) was the multi-award-winning author of over forty books for young readers. He is the only author to have won the Carnegie Medal twice, for The Machine Gunners (1975) and The Scarecrows (1981), while Blitzcat (1989) won the Smarties Prize and was named by the American Library Association as one of the best books for young adults in the past 25 years. Westall also wrote extensively in the field of the supernatural and has been called the best writer of traditional British ghost stories since M. R. James. Valancourt has previously published his collection Antique Dust (1989), his only book written specifically for adults, featuring tales centred on an antique dealer’s encounters with the supernatural, as well as his novella The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral (1991), and an original collection, Spectral Shadows, which comprises three short novels of the supernatural. ‘The Creatures in the House’, originally published in 1980, was Westall’s first published horror story and features two of the author’s favourite subjects – the supernatural, and cats.
r />   Dawn broke over Southwold seafront.

  The wind was blowing against the waves; white horses showed all the way to the horizon, smaller and smaller as if painted by some obsessional Dutch marine artist. On the horizon itself sat a steamship, square as a pan on a shelf, scarcely seeming to move.

  Seafront deserted; beach-huts huddled empty in the rain. The only movement was a flaking flap of emulsion-paint on the pier pavilion, tearing itself off in the wind.

  Miss Forbes opened her eyes on her last day. Eyes grey and empty as the sea. She eased her body in the velvet reclining rocker in the bay window; luxurious once, now greased black in patches from the day and night shifting of her body. It was some years since she had been to bed. Beds meant sheets and sheets meant washing . . . She seldom left the bay window. She took her food off the front doorstep and straight on to the occasional table by her side. Once a week she took the remains to the dustbin. Otherwise there was just the trips to the toilet, and the weekly journey to the dripping tap in the kitchen for a pink-rosed ewerful of water.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the sea and wondered what month it was. Her mind was clearer this morning than for a long time. The creature in the house had not fed on her mind for a week. There wasn’t much of Miss Forbes’ mind left to feed on. A few shreds of memory from the forties; a vague guilt at things not done. The creature itself was weakening. The creature knew a time would come soon when it had nothing to feed on at all. Then it would have to hibernate, like a dormouse or hedgehog. But first the creature must provide for its future, while there was still time. There was something Miss Forbes had to do . . .