The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two

by James D. Jenkins

  That was the worst. The figure was undraped.

  Close at his side and reaching almost to the window-ledge were stacked the ponderous tomes in braille which must next morning follow Flora to the Vicarage. They had been covered with a tablecloth to save them from the dust.

  He seized the cloth and, standing upon tiptoe, secured it about the shoulders of the effigy.

  Once more he had retreated to the window. His pulses raced, but for a moment he no longer felt afraid. His draping of the figure had increased his boldness. He would do more! Why shouldn’t he? Lock up the room, not let his daughters see. Cover the thing entirely. Even – By God, he would! – even——

  But there he stopped. His courage ebbed away. The wording of the will was too precise. Charlotte had made so sure. Three pounds a year were even set apart for ‘maintenance’!

  For some time he stood motionless. The afternoon sun had fallen on the effigy’s left hand. The other, pressed against a breast, was hidden by the cloth.

  Protopart gave a sudden start. He almost had forgotten . . . One thing there yet remained which he must do, one last and grim command was still to be obeyed. A tremor of repugnance made him shiver as he approached the image. From his pocket he took out a small morocco case. Some seconds passed before he pressed its spring. Within there lay a circle of plain gold. Shuddering, he made to place it on the wedding-finger of the effigy.

  He was so intent upon his task that he did not hear the soft ascent of footsteps up the turret stair. The ring was difficult to fit. He had to strain and press. Not till at last he forced it home beyond the stony knuckle did he swing terrified around.

  Before him, with one groping hand upon the window-ledge, stood Flora, his blind ward.

  iii. Maiden

  ‘Jasper!’

  For some seconds he was too taken by surprise to realise the disaster. She had even crossed the room without his hearing her.

  ‘Jasper!’ she repeated.

  He had started violently already, and the tones of her voice, sweet, clear and searching, always like their own bell-echo, made him start yet again.

  ‘Flora – how – how did you manage to come up, all by yourself?’

  ‘Oh . . . Mr Cowan brought me to the gate, and the side-door was open. It was easy, but . . . where’s everybody gone? What are you doing here alone? And——’

  Protopart regarded her with dismay. He must tell her. It would be more dignified to tell her before she could find out. In a sort of nightmare infatuation he watched her as she moved slowly toward a corner of the room where there was, ordinarily, a chair.

  ‘It’s gone. It isn’t there!’ It was he who uttered the words, warningly. Flora stopped abruptly, turning her face to his. Yes, he must tell her. All at once he recollected, as if this were a suddenly-remembered fact which crushed out hope, that she was not entirely blind. She could at least distinguish light from shade.

  ‘Jasper – there’s something different, Jasper. Whitewash – I smell it. And – I – I can see something – on that wall!’

  He was too late. By intuition if not actually by sight she had forestalled the revelation he had been too cowardly to make. She was already moving toward the effigy. Before he could prevent her she had reached it. Fascinated, he stared at her as her hands explored its contours underneath the cloth.

  ‘Jasper – why – it’s a statue! Of . . . why, I believe . . . of – Charlotte!’

  Protopart licked dry lips. A reflection, charged with an inexplicable despair and menace, came to him. How small Flora looked! He and his ward were both short people – in comparison with Charlotte.

  ‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s – her statue. She – she wanted it. It was her wish; not mine.’

  Flora’s face, flushed delicately to a coral pink, amazed him by its smile.

  ‘But why – why didn’t you tell me? It’s – why, it’s lovely, beautiful, I think . . . I think it’s beautiful . . .’

  iv. The Bride of Christ

  Flora’s thoughts, an hour later, went weaving, weaving over what had come to pass. The hot afternoon, she knew, drooped all about her, round the Cowans’ house, but its stale languor did not penetrate. Through the most torrid of South London dog-days she could carry her own coolness. It was a faculty of which she was herself half-conscious. Down its own private dream her mind tripped nimbly, with a stag-footed lightness, veering in shy assault, in mimic delicate affray, in instant and fastidious withdrawal. Charlotte’s statue had been beautiful, but Jasper when he had walked back with her to the Vicarage had been so tired and so miserable . . .

  Mr Cowan, to whom she had spoken of the effigy, had expressed no direct surprise. The notion, he had told her, was not so unusual, not so very. The Cowans had been very good to her since Charlotte’s death, but she could never be so fond of Mr Cowan as of Jasper.

  Now, after tea, she set out for St Agatha’s, which stood, secluded in a small, tree-sprinkled park, no more than a long stone’s-throw from the Vicarage. At her side, occasionally grunting a perfunctory admonition, walked a dun-coloured boy, known as William, who carried soap, two nail-brushes, a tin of Vim, and a large pail of water. Flora was periodically of opinion that she could see quite well enough to clean the reredos, and from this innocent and pious exercise no one had the unkindness to dissuade her.

  In the grateful coolness of the church they worked together for an hour. Flora, wrinkling her small nose in wry affectation of disdain, was deciding that the building smelled a little ‘mousy,’ but, simultaneously, she was in the turret room once more with Jasper Protopart, hearing his pained, grief-laden voice go on ‘explaining,’ wondering why he sounded so exhausted and so hurt. Over these things her mind played like a darting, intermittent flame, seizing ideas and dropping them dismayed, daintily reaching forth for them again, and shrinking back.

  To have his dead wife’s statue fixed up there was evidently ‘funny.’ Mr Cowan, in denying it, had now implied as much. It was all in the will . . . And there was yet another letter to be opened soon. She, Flora, would have still remained in ignorance if she had not encountered Lizzie Turnbull just before. Lizzie had told her of sepulchral happenings in Jasper’s house, of something on a shutter, ‘going in’ . . .

  Jasper’s image rose, fragrantly, in Flora’s brain, the image of something warm and reassuring, like an old shabby frock, a sort of hot, protecting duskiness . . . He said so very little. All his confidences had got to be wooed from him. Naturally, he had been prostrated by the simple shock of Charlotte’s death. And yet – it must have been in some sense a relief – release . . .

  Suddenly one of those ideas which she had fingered gingerly and then let fall so many times flashed up once more. She had never really liked Charlotte very much – even before the paralysis – and Charlotte, she was sure, had not liked her. A cold, obstinate word precipitated itself finally, stayed with her tinglingly. Could that be possible . . . ?

  The dun-coloured boy, breathing stertorously over St James the Less, did not notice that his companion dropped her brush and, after gropingly retrieving it, knelt motionless and idle for a full minute with her lips parted and a slow colour mounting to her cheeks.

  She could feel her own heart fluttering. As if to regain some departed warmth she was hugging herself in a curious, secret chill which, she recalled, had come upon her once or twice before. Was that when she was just a little girl, one night in Charlotte’s room, and sickening, as afterwards appeared, for chickenpox? No, it was much more recent. Yet it was like a fever too, the strange, half-pleasurable onset of some slow, mysterious and destructive change – the dim, almost delicious herald and forerunner of disease. And ‘Plaster of Paris,’ she was thinking. ‘That was how it was done . . . All those years and years . . . she must . . . have thought – she must have been – jealous . . .’

  High, far above her, streaming on an eastern pane (though she could not observe it save as a vague patch of light) the remote, languid figure of the Christ fled upward in a
lambent glow of colour.

  In what she thought was its direction she bestowed an apologetic glance, and on the next apostle a conciliatory rub.

  v. Communion

  Up in his turret room one morning in the following week, Protopart shrinkingly stared out, in forced serenity, on the tranced London panorama that he knew. Through the half-open windows a low, echoing murmur stole, a hoarse and languid composite of sound came rising in. Far away, beyond Streatham, toy trains went brightly pointing in a grey-golden haze, leaving doll trails of smoke. He gazed at them unseeingly, his mind lapped in painful recollection. This day, with its queer, muted quality of omen – of some disquiet message going on and on for him, continually uncaught, in teeming distant streets – oppressed him with the flavour of a dream. Faint on the sky-line he could make out blurred yet beckoning shapes. Faint to his ears there crept an intimated cadence, always promised, constantly withheld. Over there, where the sun’s rays shot fanwise on remote, leaden-glittering points, something was dumbly striving, being said to him in vain. His brain was numb, lost in a waking swoon. Yes, this was like that other day, he thought, just after Charlotte died. Then, too, there was some whisper that eluded him; then, too, some patient undertone of meaning had informed the storied cliffs of brick and tossing masonry, swum in the weltering human gulf of Penge and Southern Anerley, ungrasped.

  He had stood on that day, as now, in his high white-and-lemon watch-tower, listening to this slow surge that beat up to the windows from reverberating depths beneath. Even in the midst of his distress he had wondered about it. That sound, to which a million irretrievable, unreckoned sounds contributed, bore on him with a sense of anguished impotence. Refined to a vast, level melancholy, it was the distillation of all vainer cries, charged with a curious, filtered sorrow he could recognise but not interpret. Sensible of some pathos not mundane, he was unable to accept its burden or extract its essence. He had looked down into swarming, heat-vague streets and steeled his heart. Once and again amidst that arid, far-flung waste of drab and burnished grey he had picked out in fearful intuition some barely moving, distant dot of black, marked it wend slowly nearer and resolve as slowly into brougham or landau, turn up restrainedly along his gravel drive, disgorge its callers and its sympathy in a decorous hush. He had seen none of them. Their cards alone were left.

  All that was over now, but he was harassed yet. His mind was cluttered with the undigested shapes of grief he could not feel. Deplorable words and phrases seethed, with a nauseous, iterated inappropriateness, in his brain. ‘Manfully,’ ‘bearing up,’ ‘irreparable loss,’ ‘Time, the great healer,’ ‘Resurrection morn’. . .

  Behind him, Charlotte beetled on the wall. It was on Sunday that he had been forced at last to let his daughters see. Even in imagination he shrank sickly from that picture. He could still feel the trembling of his knees as he had headed the inevitable, shamed procession up the stairs to the locked room. Then, when the key was turned, had come the necessary raising of the blinds, the spellbound stares, the shocked and stifled wonder of the girls . . .

  Now, wheeling from the window, Protopart faced the effigy, at first indignantly, shambled before it in a growing nervousness for half a minute, and then dropped his glance. He sat down at a table and began to write. His pen scratched only a few lines beneath the letter-head, and ceased. He struck a match and lit a pipe.

  Presently he altered his position somewhat so that his gaze once more swept the dim, sweltering London sea. His pipe went out, and in the action of relighting it he turned slightly inwards to the room. The white face of the statue moved into the circle of his vision and he stopped, abruptly, to regard it.

  The eyes crept.

  A curious rage came upon him, with it a sudden apprehension. Panic-stricken, he leaped to his feet and hurriedly drew down the blinds.

  Then, in a mute despair, he tiptoed to the door, opened it softly, left the turret room, and turned the key behind him. He could stay there no longer. It was quite impossible. The place was haunted, had the charnel fragrance of a mausoleum.

  For an hour or more he wandered in suburban streets that like himself were pale and somnolent. The heat-drooped air had become tense and stale, unnaturally still. Probably a storm was brewing. In an effort to distract his thoughts he tried to fix attention on the multiplying signs of its approach. It was of no avail. Eternally, his mind harked back to Charlotte. Could she be seen, he wondered, from the road – from any road? Perhaps, if someone quite a long way off had got a telescope, and if the blinds were up . . . He must not think. Now, until rain fell, he would cease to brood, tire himself by rapid walking around Gipsy Hill, forget, if possible, the turret room and what it held.

  It brought him back.

  As he passed inwards, toward the dining-room, his youngest daughter, Mabel, met him in the hall. ‘Oh, so you’re home . . . It’s just begun to rain. Flora’s here, too. She came to get a book.’

  Flora herself appeared, smiling. ‘It’s the “Imitation.” I’ve got all my brailles except that one. You must have left it up there by mistake.’ On Mabel’s face as well, for no too-obvious reason, was a smile.

  Protopart demurred. ‘I’m sure it isn’t there. All of your books went over days ago.’

  Flora insisted. ‘Do you mind just looking? I’m coming with you too . . .’

  Together they ascended, silently. The key turned in the lock; the blinds flew up. For some seconds they remained, motionless and hardly breathing, too awe-struck by the instant impact of some formidable and conscious presence to make sound or stir.

  Above their heads, Charlotte stared past and over them toward the gathering storm with a remote and enigmatic frown.

  vi. Thunderclap

  Within another quarter of an hour the tempest broke. The rain, at first descending in sparse, sullen drops, burst suddenly in a cold, lashing fury. A livid throat of deepest indigo, stretching its vault from Upper Norwood over Thornton Heath, was seamed and wrinkled into reeling cliffs, stitched intermittently with lightning. The bumping hubbub of the thunder was augmented periodically by fresh entries from the outer suburbs. Catford announced itself in one terrific roar, and Anerley came in next moment with a stupendous series of crescendo crashes like the disruption of Plutonic arsenals. Under the heady chaos of the sky, now gushing with pale fire, the earth appeared up-ended, tossed this way and that. Protopart, staring through the streaming windows of the turret room, saw his lawn littered instantaneously with sodden leaves, branches, and even boughs, torn from the writhing trees. He had to shout to render his voice audible.

  ‘What a storm! It’ll clear the air, though . . .’

  Flora’s face, lit by a flash, had a queer expression. The fruitless search for the missing book had been perfunctory, and she was now standing close behind him, near the statue. Her lips moved, but to hear her he had to bend an ear beside her mouth.

  ‘Jasper – why did she do it? Tell me . . .’

  He drew back, startled. After a moment’s pause he answered her, defensively:

  ‘It isn’t so peculiar as you think. Poor Charlie! She didn’t want us to forget.’

  Flora, he fancied, had not caught his answer. The racket of the storm, though lessening somewhat, was an effectual obstacle to conversation, particularly upon such a subject. For several minutes they abandoned the attempt to speak.

  Presently, however, at the commencement of what proved to be a longer lull, Flora resumed: ‘It wasn’t usual, was it?’

  Protopart looked at her in consternation. What had come over her to make her talk like this? A conviction that she must be ill, or frightened by the storm, restrained him from rebuking her. Instead, he forced himself to reply steadily:

  ‘Poor Charlotte. One mustn’t judge by ordinary standards. In her condition . . .’

  Flora interrupted him. ‘You mean that, at the end, when she – came to, and spoke, she wasn’t quite – quite normal. Jasper, you’re wrong. Just listen. When Charlotte died she was – all there! Oh yes, she
was all there!’

  ‘ “All there” . . . !’

  ‘Oh yes, I know . . . You know as well as I. That thing up there – you feel it like I do. Don’t you feel Charlotte herself looking at you and . . . remembering things?’

  Protopart was about to answer, but a louder clap than usual silenced him. While he was waiting for another lull he scanned Flora’s face anxiously, yet with a sense of unreality that made this whole preposterous argument a dream. Why had she started it – got him up here on the pretence of looking for a book?

  ‘Flora,’ he said, when the weird, pealing uproar had died down, ‘Flora, you – you exaggerate. You’ll see things differently . . . Wait a bit . . .’

  ‘No, I shan’t wait. You’ve never told me all that Charlie said – but I can guess without. The watching wasn’t only on her side those last six months. The watching – and – and the listening!’

  ‘ “Listening”!’

  ‘Yes, listening! I’ve heard her talking – when you thought she couldn’t talk. Talking to herself about us. Talking——’

  He made a desperate waving motion, but she went on remorselessly:

  ‘Of course . . . of course! I expect she made her mind up about that – the statue – months before. Even left money for it in her will . . .’

  ‘Flora . . . don’t!’ How could he silence her, forget what she had said? With some notion of dragging her by main force from the room he had laid a hand upon her shoulder when a voice rose abruptly up the stairs. ‘Dad-dy! Flor-a . . . !’ It was Mabel calling to them to come down.

  ‘Yes, very well . . . I’m coming . . .’ Flora’s tones were choked. ‘Yes, let’s go down . . .’ Suddenly, as they were moving toward the door, she threw one arm around his neck and kissed his cheek. ‘Forgive me, oh, forgive me! Jasper, please . . . !’