The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two

by James D. Jenkins

  ‘Whereabouts in Epping do you live?’ I began, ordering whisky. ‘I used to know it slightly.’

  ‘Forest Avenue,’ said Poney. ‘We both do.’

  ‘Isn’t that quite near where the murder was?’

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in the murder,’ said Sig.

  ‘I’m not particularly,’ I said. ‘But it becomes more interesting if you knew the people.’

  ‘We didn’t,’ said Sig firmly.

  I did not dare to pursue it. Their faces had become closed and uninformative. Poney patted his already immaculately tidy hair and said, ‘I wonder what’s for jolly old dins.’

  ‘How are you getting on with your house-hunting?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve gone off it,’ said Poney. ‘It seems you can’t rely on the weather here. We’re going to Sardinia in a few days to look around there.’

  ‘Was anything stolen from the house where the murder was?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

  ‘Hey, what’s the . . .’ began Poney, but Sig interrupted him.

  He said very clearly, ‘Some valuable jewellery I believe.’

  ‘What’s the big interest suddenly?’ said Poney.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Sardinia. I believe it’s lovely there.’

  ‘So old Aga Khan says,’ said Poney, stroking his hair again. ‘He’s looking out a decent plot for us.’

  Then the bell went for dinner.

  I don’t know what to do.

  It is late now and I have locked myself into my bedroom. My headache has come back and I cannot sleep. I can just hear their voices next door. They talk so much alone in their room. What do they do in there?

  They have some horrible thing between them. I felt it from the beginning. They are linked by some fantasy they have built up about power and violence, I am sure of it. Perhaps the girls snubbed them at a local dance. One of the girls was called Jean. Didn’t they tell me that was the name of Poney’s little sister, when he was showing me his bruise from a bite? Jean. I’m sure they said Jean. Perhaps they simply chose the Anderson family because they were so obviously harmless. This made it more of a joke, a clever trick. They enjoy fooling people; as they enjoyed letting us all think they were two American girls the other night, to score off the rest of the world, to build up their sense of isolation and superiority. I suppose they are mad, if to live in a world of fantasy is mad; or perhaps Sig is mad and Poney merely bad, and utterly corrupted. Heaven knows what appalling rituals may be going on in the next room even now – that shout of ‘The King!’ – what shall I do if I hear it again tonight? But what can I do? Who would believe me? I have no friends in Venice. Frau Engels is useless. What about the other people in the pensione? Those unimaginative-looking Frenchwomen with the daughter, the bored businessman, the doddering old couple – what use would they be? I can’t go to the British Consul unless I can offer something more positive than just my own conviction. In a way the people I know best, though only in the most, casual way, are the couple who run the little restaurant round the corner, Mario and his wife. I don’t even particularly like them, but we have talked a certain amount. I think I will try and say something to them tomorrow. In the meantime I can do nothing but sit behind my locked door and listen to the murmurs and occasional bumps from the next room.

  October 28

  I think I did hear the shout, but it may have been a dream. I took three sleeping pills. It was too many and I have felt terrible all day.

  I lunched at the restaurant. I said to Mario, ‘Do you ever see those two young English boys who are staying at my pensione?’

  ‘Yes, they have been in once or twice,’ he answered in his good English. ‘Architectural students, they told me. They seemed nice boys. I lent them a guide book.’

  ‘They are not architectural students,’ I said.

  He looked surprised.

  ‘They lie to everyone, they live in a complete fantasy,’ I said. ‘Look, if I tell you something, will you take it seriously, will you give me your advice?’

  He said he would, and sat down at my table, looking worried.

  It was difficult to go on.

  ‘I have reason to believe,’ I said. ‘In fact I know, that they have committed a terrible crime.’

  He looked down at the table cloth in silence. I felt I was doing badly.

  ‘I know it sounds absurd,’ I said. ‘But I am quite sure about this. I wouldn’t say so otherwise. You must believe me.’

  But he didn’t. He listened politely as I told him of my suspicions, and then he told me that he thought I was mistaken.

  ‘When the fog comes I sometimes have strange ideas myself. You told me you had been having sinus trouble and bad headaches. You don’t think you could be mistaken about these boys?’

  ‘I know I am not mistaken.’

  But I could see it was no good. All I could do was to make him say that if at any stage I needed help I could come to him.

  ‘But of course,’ he said, standing up with obvious relief. ‘We are your friends.’

  During the day I managed to see the Frenchwomen and the elderly couple. I asked them whether they thought there was anything odd about the boys. They all said no, they thought them charming. I did not go on.

  I do not know what to do. They might do it again, kill someone I mean.

  October 31

  I notice them more now. I notice the black hairs on the back of Poney’s hands, and the tight line between the eyebrows on Sig’s white face. I notice how they both have the same strutting walk, how close they walk and how they never touch. I notice the metallic tone in Sig’s voice, the sleepy softness in Poney’s. I notice how light they are on their feet, how controlled; and yet I’ve seen, in Sig’s eyes only and only when he is looking at Poney, an occasional doubt. I think this must be when the veil of fantasy momentarily twitches. I don’t think Poney doubts. He has been handed his myth and he is living it out.

  I watch them. I think they are watching me. I want to go, but I must stay. They are bound to make some move, and then I can send for help and run away myself. But I can’t leave them, knowing what I do. I am not yet so disgusted with the human race. They must be caught, and stopped.

  What will they do? I lurk about the pensione, pretending to read, watching them. The other guests look at me oddly, wondering what I am doing, but I can’t talk, not yet. I feel ill and desperately anxious.

  November 1

  And now it is all over.

  The next morning I followed them to the Piazza and sat down a few tables away to drink some coffee. A girl whom I knew slightly in London came up to speak to me. She said that some friends of hers, with whom she was staying, were giving a party that night after dinner. Would I like to come?

  I had not seen anyone from London for some time. Indeed for the last few days I had had no conversation except with other people at the pensione. I said I would go to the party.

  Later when I was in my bedroom changing I heard the voices of the boys and Frau Engels in the next room. I opened the window and leaned out. I heard Frau Engels sobbing, ‘No,’ and the two voices together, one high and one low, repeating, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’

  I finished changing quickly and went downstairs. What else could I do? What could I tell to whom? Who would be concerned to know what went on in a bedroom between a middle-aged proprietress of the pensione and her two young lodgers: who would do more than shrug knowingly?

  I stayed late at the party. Not so much because it was a good party as because I did not want to go back to the pensione. It was a boring party really. My friend’s friends were stuffy Italians who lived in a comfortable little flat at the top of a fine flaking palazzo. One or two of the other people there looked quite interesting, but my Italian was not good enough to find out whether the impression was misleading, and I spent most of the evening talking to an American professor and his wife. I almost forgot about the boys, but not quite. I stayed until I was too tired to stay any longe
r. Then I walked out into the damp darkness. The vaporetto was still running. I got off at the Accademia bridge and walked towards the pensione, along the narrow way between the houses, over the little canal and up to the door. It was open. No one was at the desk. There was a light on the stairs, none in the hall.

  I moved quietly towards the stairs. There was a sound above me. I stopped. There was silence. I went on. Another soft dragging sound, very slight. I went on. The weak bulb revealed the landing much as usual, shadowy, the faded Turkish carpet, the row of doors, mine, theirs, the Frenchwomen’s, the couple’s, the businessman’s: Frau Engels slept on the top floor.

  The faint sound seemed to come from the businessman’s room. There were shoes outside some of the doors, ready for the maid to clean when she came in in the morning – the two Frenchwomen’s and the daughter’s, and the elderly couple’s – there were none outside the businessman’s door, or the boys’, or mine. There were long shadows beside the shoes. They were not shadows. They were marks. Something had been spilt. But beside all the shoes? I moved closer. All the shoes had a long dark stain coming from them. They were neatly placed outside the doors but surrounded by this dark wet stain. But the shoes were not empty. They had feet in them. There was a lot of blood.

  A handle turned quietly. The businessman’s door opened very slightly. A hand came out holding a pair of shoes. It placed them neatly outside the door.

  I ran, stumbling on the stairs.

  I battered on the door of the restaurant.

  At last they came.

  ‘It’s happened. They’ve done it again. They’ve killed everyone in the pensione.’

  ‘All right. Steady now. Come in.’

  Mario and his wife were both there, in their nightclothes, looking startled, and then annoyed. I saw the beginnings of disbelief on their faces and for the first time in my life I collapsed into hysterics.

  They slapped my face, made me swallow several pills, and put me to bed. I kept begging them to hurry, to get the police, to go round there before it was too late. They promised they would, and left me. I must have been quite heavily drugged because I fell asleep almost immediately.

  And in the morning, unbelievably, they had done nothing.

  I woke, heavy-headed, at nine o’clock, dressed as quickly as I could and went downstairs. They were in the kitchen drinking coffee.

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  The wife did not look at me. Mario said quite kindly, ‘You had a nightmare.’

  ‘But the police . . . ?’

  ‘We didn’t want to wake them in the middle of the night. Now come and have some coffee.’

  I made a great effort and remained calm.

  ‘Please will you come round there with me now.’

  Mario came.

  The pensione seemed very quiet as we approached. The front door was still open. We walked into the dim hall. A figure moved slowly towards us from the kitchen door. It was Frau Engels. Her face was very white except for where several raw red scratches ran down one side of it.

  ‘Good morning, Frau Engels,’ said Mario, in English for my sake. ‘Have you had an accident?’

  ‘It was in the fog. I walked into a tree,’ she said brusquely. ‘Have you come to collect your luggage, madame?’

  But I had already passed her without answering and was running up the stairs. The stains were still there. I burst into the boys’ room. It was empty. Their clothes and luggage had gone. I went into the next room, and the next. They were all empty. There was no sign of anyone.

  Frau Engels and Mario had followed me up the stairs. I confronted them.

  ‘Where are they?’ I said. ‘Where are the boys?’

  ‘They left this morning,’ she said, looking at me with the coldest hatred. ‘Everybody left this morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is November the 1st. I told you. I am closing down.’

  ‘These stains . . .’

  She explained them away. She said they were varnish, which had run when the wooden boards had been stained brown. I tried to insist that they should send for the police and have the stains tested to prove that they were blood. I asked where the two servants were, but Frau Engels said they had already left for a holiday with their family in Naples. I heard Mario murmur to her in Italian that he would telephone for a doctor.

  ‘I go to get the police,’ he said to me soothingly as he turned to go downstairs.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll take my luggage now and come back later with the British Consul.’

  I packed and left. I went to the hotel where my acquaintance from London was staying. I found her and told her my story. I took her with me back to the pensione. It was locked and shuttered. Frau Engels had left.

  It is of course an impossible story. I can hardly blame people for not wanting to believe it. Only I know it is true. I am not a hysterical or deluded person.

  Frau Engels also knows that I know that it is true. I do not know to what extent she was involved or whether her appalling association with the boys is still going on, but it seems likely that she may somehow or other have told them about my return to the pensione.

  This is the horror with which I have to live.

  They will find me. One day I shall take a train. I shall settle myself in my corner seat, open the paperback I have bought to read on the journey. And I shall look up. And there will be two nice boys sitting opposite me.

  THE WATCHER BY THE THRESHOLD by John Buchan

  John Buchan (1875-1940) was a barrister, diplomat, historian, editor, publisher, war correspondent, Director of Intelligence during the Lloyd George administration, Member of Parliament, and Governor General of Canada – and somehow still found time to publish some one hundred books, nearly forty of them fiction. His works include historical Scottish novels like Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895), republished by Valancourt, as well as a number of extremely successful adventure novels such as Prester John (1910), The 39 Steps (1915; adapted for a 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film) and Greenmantle (1916). Like several other authors in this volume, Buchan is not commonly thought of as a writer of horror, which is perhaps unfortunate, since he wrote around twenty supernatural tales which at their best are very good indeed and have counted H. P. Lovecraft among their admirers. Several of these stories, including ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in December 1900) were collected in Buchan’s The Watcher by the Threshold and Other Tales (1902).

  A chill evening in the early October of the year 189– found me driving in a dogcart through the belts of antique woodland which form the lowland limits of the hilly parish of More. The Highland express, which brought me from the north, took me no farther than Perth. Thence it had been a slow journey in a disjointed local train, till I emerged on the platform at Morefoot, with a bleak prospect of pot stalks, coal heaps, certain sour corn lands, and far to the west a line of moor where the sun was setting. A neat groom and a respectable trap took the edge off my discomfort, and soon I had forgotten my sacrifice and found eyes for the darkening landscape. We were driving through a land of thick woods, cut at rare intervals by old long-frequented highways. The More, which at Morefoot is an open sewer, became a sullen woodland stream, where the brown leaves of the season drifted. At times we would pass an ancient lodge, and through a gap in the trees would come a glimpse of chipped crowstep gable. The names of such houses, as told me by my companion, were all famous. This one had been the home of a drunken Jacobite laird, and a king of north country Medmenham. Unholy revels had waked the old halls, and the devil had been toasted at many a hell-fire dinner. The next was the property of a great Scots law family, and there the old Lord of Session, who built the place, in his frouzy wig and carpet slippers, had laid down the canons of Taste for his day and society. The whole country had the air of faded and bygone gentility. The mossy roadside walls had stood for two hundred years; the few wayside houses were toll bars or defunct hostelries. The names, too, were great: Scots baronial with
a smack of France, – Chatelray and Riverslaw, Black Holm and Fountainblue. The place had a cunning charm, mystery dwelt in every cranny, and yet it did not please me. The earth smelt heavy and raw; the roads were red underfoot; all was old, sorrowful, and uncanny. Compared with the fresh Highland glen I had left, where wind and sun and flying showers were never absent, all was chilly and dull and dead. Even when the sun sent a shiver of crimson over the crests of certain firs, I felt no delight in the prospect. I admitted shamefacedly to myself that I was in a very bad temper.

  I had been staying at Glenaicill with the Clanroydens, and for a week had found the proper pleasure in life. You know the house with its old rooms and gardens, and the miles of heather which defend it from the world. The shooting had been extraordinary for a wild place late in the season; for there are few partridges, and the woodcock are notoriously late. I had done respectably in my stalking, more than respectably on the river, and creditably on the moors. Moreover, there were pleasant people in the house – and there were the Clanroydens. I had had a hard year’s work, sustained to the last moment of term, and a fortnight in Norway had been disastrous. It was therefore with real comfort that I had settled myself down for another ten days in Glenaicill, when all my plans were shattered by Sibyl’s letter. Sibyl is my cousin and my very good friend, and in old days when I was briefless I had fallen in love with her many times. But she very sensibly chose otherwise, and married a man Ladlaw – Robert John Ladlaw, who had been at school with me. He was a cheery, good-humoured fellow, a great sportsman, a justice of the peace, and deputy lieutenant for his county, and something of an antiquary in a mild way. He had a box in Leicestershire to which he went in the hunting season, but from February till October he lived in his moorland home. The place was called the House of More, and I had shot at it once or twice in recent years. I remembered its loneliness and its comfort, the charming diffident Sibyl, and Ladlaw’s genial welcome. And my recollections set me puzzling again over the letter which that morning had broken into my comfort. ‘You promised us a visit this autumn,’ Sibyl had written, ‘and I wish you would come as soon as you can.’ So far common politeness. But she had gone on to reveal the fact that Ladlaw was ill; she did not know how, exactly, but something, she thought, about his heart. Then she had signed herself my affectionate cousin, and then had come a short, violent postscript, in which, as it were, the fences of convention had been laid low. ‘For Heaven’s sake, come and see us,’ she scrawled below. ‘Bob is terribly ill, and I am crazy. Come at once.’ To cap it she finished with an afterthought: ‘Don’t bother about bringing doctors. It is not their business.’