The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two

by James D. Jenkins

  ‘Sad business for Mr Elroy, sir,’ he remarked, wiping his hands on his apron.

  I nodded. ‘Was she ill long?’

  ‘Just a week. Yes, it come very sudden, that did. Not as if she was an old lady, neither. Only forty-three.’

  I pulled myself together. ‘I didn’t know them well,’ I muttered. ‘I met her once, she showed me the house – three years ago.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it’s a fine house. One of the real old ones. I lived there one time, you know.’

  ‘You lived there?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Aye – before Mr Elroy come here. That was when I took over this business. Near twenty years ago now – nineteen year last December. I thought as it ’ld be handy for the shop, you see – running in and out. But the wife took a fancy against it, and we only stayed six months. Seemed like it wasn’t the house for us, and we moved up to the top o’ the hill.’ He jerked his hand towards the little villas on the rising ground.

  ‘There’s a good number only stays a short time,’ he said. ‘There was two or three afore us that didn’t stay long. Mrs Elroy, she lived there twenty year. Then there was Dr and Mrs Weyman when I was a lad – they must have had it longer nor that. Very like Mrs Weyman was to Mrs Elroy. Very sim’lar to look at.’

  He regarded the house thoughtfully, sucking his teeth. ‘It’s a lady’s house,’ he said at last.

  He laughed, and went back into the shop.

  We went into the house. Within an hour the mason had withdrawn the first brick from the box room wall. Jonas peered in through the aperture.

  ‘What is there in there?’ I asked.

  He drew back from the wall. ‘See for yourself,’ he said.

  I knelt down in the litter beside the hole. The alcove was there as I had supposed, about six feet deep. In the far wall, facing me, was the window, bricked over on the outside, with the tattered linen still hanging from the frames in shreds. I have never seen a Tudor window so complete. In front of the window stood a table, a plain oak table measuring perhaps three feet by two feet. There were several articles upon it. That was all.

  ‘Go on,’ said Jonas to the mason. ‘Be very careful. I am particularly anxious that nothing should be disturbed.’

  He glanced at me curiously. ‘Are you all right?’

  I nodded. ‘I did not expect that we should find anything at all,’ I said at last. ‘I did not believe in it. I am not sure that I believe in it now.’

  ‘There has been proof enough,’ he said. ‘But I have known this house for the whole of my life. I hope to God that we are doing nothing wrong.’

  He bent again to the hole. ‘What are those things on the table?’ he asked. ‘What is that thing like a blotting book?’

  I stooped beside him. ‘I think it is a dressing table,’ I said. ‘A lady’s table. By those little earthenware pots. I don’t think the blotting book has anything to do with the table.’

  ‘It would be reasonable to find that here,’ he muttered. ‘But it is not what I expected.’

  That was all there was. We opened up the hole till it was sufficiently wide to enable a man to pass through. The alcove was in a very perfect state of preservation; whoever had bricked it up had done his work most carefully. There was little decay.

  ‘Why was it left like this?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Who knows?’

  We passed through the hole, Jonas and I, and stood beside the table. It was a lady’s dressing table, as I have said; the period I put at some time in the sixteenth century. There were two little earthenware pots with lids that might once have held cosmetics, enamelled blue and white. There was a flat earthen­ware bowl about eighteen inches in diameter, and in this there was a smaller wooden bowl with a black residue of soap caked in the bottom of it. There was a little wooden bottle with a glass stopper. I do not know what that was for. There was a comb made of some hard black wood, with thick teeth and a long handle. There was a convex mirror, much corroded, set in a round wooden frame without a handle, about six inches in diameter. There was a little flat wooden tray and in this lay two silver rings, both rather massive and clumsy in design, and a little piece of green jade with a silver ring through it. There was a little knife with a horn handle. In the centre of the table was the leather portfolio that we had noticed.

  Jonas lifted each of the rings in turn. One was a garnet, the other an emerald surrounded by seed pearls. Both were set in silver, black with age. Very carefully he replaced them exactly where he had found them.

  ‘We did wrong to come here,’ he muttered. ‘If I had known that it was only this I would not have broken in.’

  He laid his hand on the portfolio and lifted it carefully from the table. ‘This will tell us who she is.’

  It was fastened with three leather thongs. They were stiff with age, but we untied them without great difficulty. Very carefully Jonas opened the covers. There was a portrait there.

  I suppose we knew what we should find. I suppose we were both ready for it, so far as one could ever be prepared to meet that amazing likeness. I was not myself that day. I know that I stood staring dumbly at the portrait and it seemed to me that I had slipped back three years, that I was still standing in the doorway of the room behind me, that I was listening to her voice.

  ‘It seems so funny to have made a room like this with only that one window,’ she was saying. ‘The children always call this Mummy’s room . . .’

  I do not know how long it was before Jonas touched me on the arm to draw my attention to the portrait again. I must have been staring at the empty doorway, for I can remember that I had to turn to him.

  ‘Ann Farrar,’ he said. ‘I should have known. The house was built for her.’

  I nodded. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You mean that this – all this is hers?’

  ‘This is her house,’ he said simply.

  I turned again to the portrait and saw that the name was printed carefully at the foot. And then I suppose the collector in me awoke because on the instant I had forgotten everything else, the things that should have mattered more than drawing.

  ‘My goodness,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s a Holbein!’

  Jonas glanced at it indifferently. ‘It is very like a Holbein,’ he replied. ‘It may be the work of a pupil. That was the period.’

  I fumbled a little with my glasses and peered at the drawing. ‘I should be very much surprised if that was the work of a pupil,’ I said. ‘Bring it out into the light.’

  He turned and moved towards the hole. I saw him hesitate, and then he stopped.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We ought not to do that. It must stay in here.’

  I protested with some vigour. I remember that I watched him retie the folio with great deliberation and lay it on the table. I was half afraid to interfere, but at last,

  ‘Damme!’ I said. ‘You do not intend to leave it in there like that? It’s a Holbein!’

  He turned and looked at me, and in the heat of my irritation I was ashamed.

  ‘If it were forty times a Holbein,’ he said quietly, ‘I would leave it there.’

  He motioned me away, and I stepped out through the hole into the room beyond. Jonas remained inside; he had his back turned to the hole so that I could not see what he was doing. Then he stepped clumsily backwards into the room. For a moment he paused, looking in at that table and at that Tudor window.

  Then he turned to the mason. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Put it all back again. Be careful that no dust or brick remains inside. I want it all to be quite clean.’

  I inclined my head towards the table. ‘You are leaving it like that?’ I asked. ‘That will not help you with this – this trouble.’

  There was a rustle of footsteps in the room. I could declare on oath that at that moment there were four of us together, and I looked at Jonas, and he looked at me, and we were silent. And presently she went.

  He eyed me steadily. ‘You mean this haunting,’ he said at last. ‘You are right. I have known this place all
my life. I have known since I was twenty years old that this house was haunted – haunted with the remains of some old happiness.’ He broke off.

  ‘I am seventy years old,’ he muttered. ‘I wish to God that I had come here as a young man.’

  It took the mason the remainder of the day to replace the brickwork of the wall, and all that time Jonas never left the room. The next day the man peeled the plaster from the remainder of the wall and commenced to plaster up the whole afresh. When that was dry a coat of colour wash would do the rest.

  That is the last time that I was in the house. I am not very sure in my own mind that I should care to revisit it, now. As we passed out into the street I remember that I spoke of it to him.

  ‘You have reached an impasse,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  We walked a little way before he spoke.

  ‘I shall let it again,’ he said at last. ‘A tenant will arrive.’

  NO SIN by John Metcalfe

  John Metcalfe (1891-1965) is a name probably known only to connoisseurs and collectors of rare horror and weird fiction, since most of his work has been long out of print and unavailable to readers with more modest budgets. Most of his horror fiction is collected in the volumes The Smoking Leg and Other Stories (1925) and Judas and Other Stories (1931), neither of which has ever been reprinted, although Ash-Tree Press released a volume collecting some of Metcalfe’s fiction in 1998. Perhaps his strangest and most interesting work is the novella The Feasting Dead (1954), originally published by Arkham House in 1954 and republished by Valancourt in 2014. The story of a young English boy who falls under the corrupting influence of a vampiric being from medieval French folklore, it bears comparison with the best works of British supernatural fiction. ‘No Sin’, a strange and very Gothic tale, first appeared in Judas and Other Stories and has never been reprinted.

  i. The Widower

  The House of Protopart had raised its conscious head above the nether haze of Norwood and now seemed to sail and swim upon that lower sea of sun-fraught mist and multitudinous dwelling with the dignified precision of a swan. The square tower of white and lemon brick which Protopart had built led the way and the house streamed out behind it. Inside that tower Protopart himself rallied his forces and set the course, for it was now more than a month since Charlotte had been buried, and it was time the turret room should be got ready.

  He was a small man and broad-shouldered, with something of the bull about his head. His eyes were brown and liquid and his infrequent voice soft and low. A dull, angry patch, almost resembling a bruise, marked either cheek-bone, and the apple of his neck showed red where his collar chafed it. Some little, light-brown hairs curled, shining, in his ears, and about his whole body there hung a peculiar and odorous sweetness like the breath of cows.

  For the first time since his wife’s death he had got out of the fine black cashmere suit that irked his limbs and into the shabby old jacket and trousers that he loved. He had, too, an idea that the change of clothes might help him to forget, but he was wrong. Incessantly, with the minute agility of an ant, his mind would still be running back and forth within the limits of the single week that had included, first, the whispered preparations for Charlotte’s imminent demise, then the unexpected rallying and emergence from the trance-like coma of two years, next the astounding scene by the bedside, followed immediately by her relapse into the old stupor, and finally her quiet passing and her burial.

  After all, what had been the words with which that dark-browed woman had broken her long silence? As Protopart moved softly about the turret room, shifting chairs and table and rolling back the carpet from the inner, or windowless, wall, he repeated to himself for the thousandth time the few short sentences he knew so well.

  ‘Flora,’ she had said, ‘Flora had better go over to the Vicarage for a time. The Cowans would be glad, and you could hardly wish her to remain, as things will be. She can spend her time here when she wants to, but all her things had better be taken out of the turret room. You will understand why when you open the first of the two letters. Give her my love . . . And remember, Jasper, closely as you have watched me for the last two years, I have watched you as closely. I shall go on watching you after I have gone . . .’

  The queer phrasing of those final sentences had struck upon him strangely. When his half-blind ward, Flora, had asked him what Charlotte had said he had even thought it wise to make a slight alteration. For ‘watching’ he had substituted ‘watching over’ – ‘shall go on watching over you after I have gone.’ That was so much better. It must have been what she had meant to say.

  Yet even with this emendation his wife’s last words possessed, in retrospect, a curiously unfamiliar ring. It almost was as though, during those two years of living death, her voice had caught a different accent and her brain a different idiom.

  The two letters of which she had spoken had been written and deposited with the lawyer just before, and in hourly expectation of, the seizure which preceded her paralysis. One, Proto­part was not to open till three months after her decease, but the other he had already read, and the strangeness of its contents baffled him again with the vision of an alien, an unknown, Charlotte.

  It was in compliance with the terms of this first letter that he now removed from the turret room the last signs of his ward’s occupancy. The place would be Flora’s oratory no longer. Shrine, ornaments, kneeling-desk and lamp, all had followed her to the Cowans’ three weeks back. Only the heavy books in braille remained, and these he had stacked carefully on one side ready to take over in the morning.

  Presently the northern wall stood bare and white before him, and with a pang of misgiving he saw that the work was finished and the room waiting for that extraordinary and now imminent fulfilment of a dead wife’s whim.

  As he stood considering, he heard through the open window the heavy crunching of gravel in the drive and then a knocking. Protopart hesitated a second, then flung wide the door, moistened his dry lips, and descended in the direction of the sounds.

  ii. ‘——but not forgotten’

  The image which Charlotte had ordained hung sleek and glistering upon the wall. Life-size, life-like, it towered with a fatal authenticity. He took a backward step. Kreubler had done his work – too well. The hair, the powerful forehead and the resolute jaw, the bitter lines about the eyes and mouth, even the tiny scar below an ear . . . The thing was horrible.

  Two hours had passed since he let in the men. They had come and gone. The turret room which they had filled with muffled batterings was silent once again. Only upon that northern wall which had been bare their handiwork remained.

  Whilst they had toiled in haste Protopart had withdrawn into the room below to wait. First he had stuffed the door to dull the sounds. In vain. He could not stifle that appalling din.

  He had paced feverishly up and down, pausing at intervals to listen. What if the maids should suddenly return? It had been difficult to clear the house of them, to get them out together. All sorts of pretexts, subterfuge – for this! Suppose someone were watching from the road? No, that was safe enough; the blinds were drawn that side. His daughters – they at least would have to know, – and see . . . A nauseous phrase occurred to him, ‘the private view.’ Hilda and Joyce were present at the reading of the will, but not, he recollected, at the taking of the mask. They didn’t know the worst, the full enormity . . .

  And now once more he was alone. The workmen, clumping down the winding stair, had stopped outside his door. Would he go up to see? ‘No’ – he had shaken his head casually, had tipped them handsomely, received their heavy-breathing thanks. His gaze had shrunk before their curious stare. Not till he’d watched them go, shouldering the wooden litter with its trailing sheet, clanking a metal bucket with unnecessary violence, would he go up to look.

  Only a moment had he paused before the turret door. Then he had turned the handle softly and gone in.

  A curious, plastery odour, mingled with the smell of the distemper
which the workmen had employed to cover up the traces of their labour, had struck faint upon his nostrils. His foot had overturned an empty bottle left upon the floor.

  Walking across the room, he had pulled up the blind, then, trembling, turned to gaze.

  Now, having looked, he stifled a half-cry and, shrinking sidewise from the effigy, leaned his right arm upon the wall. For a time he thought that he was going to faint. After a while, however, the seizure passed, and then he stared again.

  Here, in this ponderous mass of gleaming stone, was Charlotte’s last authority upheld, her final mandate from the tomb obeyed, her ghastly whim indulged. There had been no escaping the provisions of the will nor the minute instructions of the letter he had opened at her death. In every detail they had been complied with. Kreubler, the sculptor, had been summoned hastily to take the mask. With that, and with the favourite photograph of the deceased, he had returned to Kensington. There, in his studio, he had been chiselling back and back, working nine hours a day, so he had said, using the death-mask only as a starting-point from which to reconstruct the Charlotte of five years ago – the vital, stormy Charlotte of the photograph, yet unapprised of the first dread oncomings of disease.

  And beyond expectation, beyond fear, he had succeeded. He had been paid extravagantly; but not for this.

  Protopart backed away a step or two. The aspect of the effigy was faintly minatory. He realised that the thing was wonderful, a masterpiece. And yet, beneath those features that he knew lay something which at first seemed alien and unfamiliar. Only at first. His memory swept back. Yes, it was true; sometimes she had that look. But Kreubler – how could he have guessed? How caught it, prisoned it? It wasn’t fair to her.

  He shivered, in a superstitious awe, and turned his head away. It was as though he feared that, if he looked too long, Charlotte herself might stir and quicken in the stone – as though, before his fascinated gaze, that hair might bristle and those eyes revolve.

  A tear ran down his cheek; but it was not for Charlotte that he wept. Resentment and a sense of cruel injury had long replaced the proper grief he would have felt but for this monstrous act. Why had she done it – why? A wife could surely leave her photograph, a lock of hair, even a bust perhaps – but this . . . This was beyond all precedent, outrageous, morbid, ghoulish affronting decency itself . . .