The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two

by James D. Jenkins

  At last it came, and in a sort of fever I tried to say the conventional farewells. I shook hands with Ladlaw, and when I dropped his hand it fell numbly on his knee. Then I took my leave, muttering hoarse nonsense about having had a ‘charming visit,’ and ‘hoping soon to see them both in town.’ As I backed to the door, I knocked over a lamp on a small table. It crashed on the floor and went out, and at the sound Ladlaw gave a curious childish cry. I turned like a coward, and ran across the hall to the front door, and scrambled into the dogcart.

  The groom would have driven me sedately through the park, but I must have speed or go mad. I took the reins from him and put the horse into a canter. We swung through the gates and out into the moor road, for I could have no peace till the ghoulish elder world was exchanged for the homely ugliness of civilization. Once only I looked back, and there against the sky line, with a solitary lit window, the House of More stood lonely in the red desert.

  * I have identified the bust, which, when seen under other circumstances, had little power to affect me. It was a copy of the head of Justinian in the Tesci Museum at Venice, and several duplicates exist, dating apparently from the seventh century, and showing traces of Byzantine decadence in the scroll work on the hair. It is engraved in M. Delacroix’s Byzantium, and, I think, in Windscheid’s Pandektenlehrbuch.

  TUDOR WINDOWS by Nevil Shute

  Nevil Shute Norway (1899-1960), who wrote under the name Nevil Shute in order to keep his career as an aeronautical engineer separate from his novel writing, was one of the most popular and beloved English novelists of the 20th century. More than fifty years after his death virtually all his work remains in print and widely read. Reflecting his own experience and interests, many of his novels featured aviation themes, including two republished by Valancourt, Landfall (1940), the story of an RAF pilot accused of accidentally sinking an English submarine, and An Old Captivity (1940), concerning an aerial expedition to Greenland with unexpected consequences. At first glance, Shute might seem the most surprising contributor to this anthology, since his down-to-earth, realistic novels, often loaded with technical detail, are the very opposite of speculative or fantastic fiction. Yet Shute was no stranger to imaginative fiction. An Old Captivity, for example, features a fascinating subplot involving reincarnation, while On the Beach (1957) recounts the extinction of the human race following a nuclear war, with the last group of survivors waiting in Australia for the arrival of the nuclear fallout that will kill them. ‘Tudor Windows’, published for the first time here, was found among Shute’s papers after his death. The address on the cover page of the typescript, held at the National Library of Australia, is one at which Shute lived from 1931-33, making it possible to date the story to this early period of his career. A young Shute’s experiment in writing a ghost story, it is an intriguing piece of work that reveals a previously unseen side to this popular writer.

  The Club waiter came and cleared the glasses from our table, and placed the ebony cigar cutter to hand.

  ‘You say that the house is on your land?’ I repeated.

  ‘I told you so,’ he said, a little testily. ‘The house is the timbered one – next to Horter’s. On the right as you come up from the Square. You must have passed it a dozen times. I’ve got all that side of the street.’

  I have heard it said that eccentricity grows more pronounced with age; at the time I thought that Jonas must be ageing rather quickly. I turned again to the reproduction of the portrait of Mrs Lyell.

  ‘Where is the original of this?’ I asked.

  ‘In America,’ said Jonas. ‘I have never seen it. But from that photograph the resemblance would be exact.’

  There is a note in Halley’s ‘Modes’ to the effect that one of the fashions of the period was to crop the hair somewhat in the modern manner. It gave an air of realism to the portrait. Curiously, I laid my hand over the reproduction to hide the eighteenth century costume; the head that I saw then was one that might have been pressed against my shoulder that morning in the bustle of the Tube. I still stand a head and shoulders above most women.

  ‘Pleasant, isn’t it?’ said Jonas. ‘They all are.’

  The face was oval, the hair dark, short, and fluffed out from the head, the features a little finely drawn, the eyes bright and sparkling even in the photograph. Certainly it was a pleasant portrait.

  ‘You say that this was painted four years before her death?’ I asked.

  ‘It was painted in June,’ he replied concisely. I remember that I was struck by the realism of his statement; it was as if he had been speaking of his cousin. ‘She was thirty nine when that was painted. That was in 1763. She died in October 1767 – forty-three years old.’

  ‘Damme,’ I said irritably. ‘It’s the most utter nonsense I have ever heard.’

  He made no answer and I closed the book and laid it beside my chair, a little ashamed of my temper. Jonas has been my solicitor since we both came down from Oxford. With the passing of the swift years his historical interests have grown into a regular obsession; I can think of nobody else who would have had the patience to dig into the county records as he had done. Still, what he said was ludicrous. If one accepted it as a fact that he had found a certain run of ages in the registers, it seemed to me that the conclusions he had built upon that flimsy evidence were quite unsound.

  ‘Dates meant very little in the eighteenth century,’ I said. ‘Much less than nowadays. You should know that. I don’t suppose one of those women could have told you how old they were.’

  ‘Eh?’ he replied. ‘What’s that you say? How old? I told you how old she was. Forty-three. They were all forty-three years old – all that are in the registers. From Ann Farrar onwards.’

  There was a minute’s silence.

  ‘You surely don’t believe in it yourself?’ I asked. ‘This . . .’ I boggled at the word, ‘. . . reincarnation stuff?’

  In a few moments I was wishing that I had put that question differently. And yet perhaps it is as well that I came to the root of the matter at once, because if I had not come to realise that he trusted in his own story with an almost childlike faith I should never have gone down to see the place. It takes a good deal to move Jonas. So many title deeds, so many settlements and windings up have made him very dry. Even at the Varsity I remember him as elderly. It came as a great shock to me to find him so upset.

  ‘I came very near to taking the house myself once,’ he said at last. ‘I had a great mind to set up in practice there. Forty years ago – just after my marriage. I did not know about this then. I should certainly have lived there . . . But I came to Town.’

  ‘That was fortunate,’ I said gravely.

  He turned to me. ‘You must not think of it like that. It has been a happy house. I do not know of any place where people live more pleasantly.’

  I suppose I looked doubtful.

  ‘You must come down to us,’ he said. ‘I should like to show it to you. Now that you know something of what goes on.’

  I daresay I went because I was curious. It may have been because I have known Jonas for so many years, because he has been so much a part of the business of my domestic life, because I was startled and concerned to find him so much affected by his own fantasy. That may have shaken me, myself. One grows old unknowingly. One accepts the passing of years as a phenomenon that has little bearing on one’s personality. And then, quite suddenly, one comes to the realisation that one’s contemporaries are growing a little old, falling off a little. One realises that one’s hair is white.

  I knew the house, of course. Jonas had pointed it out to me before, the oldest in the little town. That I could well believe. It is a timbered house, two storied, the roof tree running parallel with the street. It stands on the pavement of the main street surrounded by minor shops, but the house has never been a shop itself. I am quite sure of that. I am quite sure that it will never be one.

  ‘I’ve let it to a man called Elroy,’ said Jonas. ‘A writer, a poet in a small way, they
say. It isn’t everybody’s house.’

  ‘Martin Elroy?’ I enquired.

  ‘M.C. Elroy. I believe his name is Martin. D’you know him?’

  ‘I know his work,’ I said.

  ‘I want you to come and have a look at Mrs Elroy,’ said Jonas, fussing a little with his gloves and muffler in the hall.

  I might have answered shortly. I should have done so if I had been myself, I suppose, but something made me gentle. I thought as we walked through the town towards the house that the time for that was past, that we should be generous to our old age, that what Jonas had lost in delicacy I had lost in self control. The house could mean nothing for us now.

  ‘John Lyell, the painter, lived here once,’ said Jonas. ‘In this house. Did I tell you that?’

  ‘You showed me the portrait of his wife,’ I replied. As a musician John Lyell was never more than a gifted amateur; I think that that is generally admitted now. As a portrait painter, of course, he was unique within the limits that he laid down for himself. Till Jonas told me I had not realised that it was in this little town that he had lived and worked for the greater part of his painting career – in fact, until the death of his wife. That makes a great break in a man’s life. Beau Alleyne has a reference to it in his memoirs, though that, indeed, is little enough to guarantee the authenticity of any tale. But as he tells it,

  ‘It is come to an End,’ he said, ‘as it has used to do all through the ages,’ and though I diligently enquired of him his meaning he would say no more, but thereafter he laid aside his Painting Gear and wholly gave himself to Musick, thus transferring his Devotions from Melpomene to Euterpe.

  That morning we came through the town to the main street and saw the house before us, timbered and friendly in the sunlight, with the bustle of the town all around it. I say that it looked friendly. There are houses that I would not live in if it were to be avoided. But of this house what Jonas said was true; it was a happy house. I knew that when I saw it for the first time.

  ‘Everybody thinks well of it,’ said Jonas. ‘But it isn’t everybody’s house to live in.’

  The door was opened for us by Mrs Elroy. Jonas went in first to greet her; for myself, I hung back for a moment in amazement before I followed him into the long room that ran across the front part of the ground floor, half hall, half living room. Jonas was talking to the woman in the middle of the room, asking her for leave to show me the house. He was telling her about my books. That gave me a little time in which to steady myself, in which to study her features, in which to compare her with my memory, in which to brace myself to meet her and to hear her speak to me. She turned to me.

  ‘I’m always glad to show anybody the house,’ she said, ‘ – anybody who knows about these old houses. With a house like this, one wants to treat it properly. You really ought to know its history – what it’s been before. I don’t know very much about it, I’m afraid.’ From the Lyell portrait I could have sworn to that turn of the head, that half smile. ‘That’s why I like showing the house to people – people who really know. I pick up bits about it.’ The candour was in the portrait. It was all there.

  She led the way upstairs – broad, shallow stairs in a box-like well beside the central chimney of the house, entered by an arch from the kitchen premises.

  I pressed by Jonas. ‘The resemblance is extraordinary,’ I muttered. ‘I should certainly have taken her for the original.’

  The house was built of ships’ timbers; I put the date of it between 1540 and 1580. Probably they got the wood from Poole. There was very little evidence of restoration, and such alterations as were necessary had been well carried out. The majority of the doors were as old as the house, opening with strings and latches. It was kept in the manner that I like to see such houses, not with meticulous care for the preservation of the fabric at the expense of the comfort of the occupants. It was a house to live in.

  She took us through the rooms. A child came out from somewhere – it was dark in the passages – and followed after us: a girl perhaps ten or twelve years old, with straight bobbed hair and with a merry little face. Elroy himself was away from home, I think. At the last we come down from the attics, waiting in a passage on the first floor while Mrs Elroy latched a door above us. For a moment we waited.

  ‘We must have seen the greater part of it,’ I muttered. There are generally one or two rooms that the tenant does not offer to display.

  The little girl interposed herself between Jonas and myself. ‘You haven’t been in Mummy’s room,’ she said gravely.

  I am awkward with children. Jonas had several, and knows better than I how they should be answered. He coughed.

  ‘We’ll see your mother’s room some other time, my dear,’ he said heavily.

  There was a quick step down the stairs, and our hostess was beside us in the gloom of the passage. The child moved past me; I remember that her short hair brushed my hand.

  ‘They haven’t seen your room, Mummy,’ she said.

  Mrs Elroy laughed quietly. ‘You funny thing. All right, take them and show them my room.’ She turned to us, the laughter still bright in her eyes. ‘I didn’t think it was worth showing you . . .’

  The child moved down the passage and paused before a closed door.

  ‘This is Mummy’s room,’ she said gravely. She turned the handle and I followed her over the threshold. It was the box room. It was a fair sized room lit only by one small window high up in the wall opposite the door, and it was filled with old portmanteaus, trunks, curtain poles, sugar boxes, and dust.

  ‘We don’t use it,’ said Mrs Elroy. ‘The light’s so bad. It seems so funny to have made a room like this with only that one window.’ For some reason I did not speak. ‘The children always call this Mummy’s room.’ She dropped an arm round the child’s shoulders. ‘Don’t you?’

  I took one more long look at the west wall, noticing every discolouration of the plaster, and then turned away. It reminded me of a house that I saw in Warwickshire once, when I was a young man. It was just like that.

  We took our leave in the big front room. I had to brace afresh to face that amazing likeness, and to thank her for her trouble. ‘You have a most delightful house,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘It’s like one likes to have it,’ she said, a little incoherently. ‘Almost like a house one builds oneself, if you know what I mean.’

  We went out into the street.

  ‘That room,’ I said, and paused.

  ‘Eh?’ said Jonas. ‘What’s that? The box room?’

  I nodded. ‘It’s the best situation in the house. The builder must have meant it for the best bedroom.’

  He made no answer, and we walked on in silence. It was not till that evening after dinner that he mentioned it again.

  ‘It’s in the west wall, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  I laid down my glass. In the candle light the room was very dim; in the corners the heavy Victorian furniture loomed black and shadowy. ‘There was an alcove in the west wall,’ I said. ‘About six feet deep, I suppose. With a window. That was before the barn was built against that wall. The barn may have been put there on purpose.’

  I paused. ‘You can see the space if you know where to look,’ I said. ‘Or you can measure up. But the shape of the room is wrong for that period. That tells you straight away.’

  He dropped a walnut with a tiny clatter among the litter of the shells upon his plate.

  ‘I knew it was that room,’ he muttered. ‘I slept in the house once.’

  There was a long silence. ‘What will you do?’ I said at last.

  He roused himself. ‘Do? I don’t want to do anything.’ He fingered the table things irresolutely. ‘Do you want to open up the wall?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said frankly. ‘I want to see if there is anything there.’

  He rose heavily from the table. ‘I will not allow it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not while the house is occupied.’

  ‘The room is onl
y used for a box room,’ I said. ‘We could take out a few bricks without disturbing the remainder of the house.’

  He moved towards the fireplace. As he came forward into the strong light I saw his face, and I knew that I must yield that point.

  ‘I think that it would be the death of her,’ he said simply.

  II

  From time to time I met Jonas at the Club, perhaps once in two months. I do not think that either of us changed very much during the next three years. I saw him sometimes at the Club, as I say, but we never did much more than pass the time of day together. For my part, I was unwilling to bring up a subject on which I knew him to be queer; for his, I suppose he was reticent. I know now that there is a streak of heavy idealism in him; throughout the strain of that incredible three years Jonas remained unchanged, phlegmatic.

  He crossed the room to me. ‘The house is empty now,’ he said.

  I knew what he was speaking of. For three years now I had never thought of Jonas but I had thought immediately of that old house, and of his extraordinary fancy.

  ‘The Elroys have left it?’

  ‘Elroy took the children away,’ said Jonas. ‘Mrs Elroy died last June.’

  I was silent.

  ‘I want you to come down,’ he said. ‘That wall. I am having it opened up. You see, the house is not now tenanted.’

  He had taken considerable precautions. He had brought up an old mason from Devonshire to do the work; the man was under some obligation to him. He guarded the reputation of that house most jealously. I went down to stay with him the evening before the work was to begin, and dined in his house that night.

  He left me next morning, standing in the main street before the house, while he went to fetch the key from some caretaker that he had appointed. The house was empty, and yet it was not desolate. I moved up the pavement idly till I was opposite the shop next door. Horter, the butcher, was a tenant of Jonas’; he knew me by sight.