The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two

by James D. Jenkins

  He would not have expected it of Gingold; it was not like him to meddle in other people’s affairs. If he was so fond of the poor and needy he could well afford to advance the family some money themselves to tide them over their difficulties.

  His brain seething with these confused and angry thoughts, Mr Sharsted, panting and dishevelled, now found himself on a worn stone platform where Mr Gingold was putting the key into an ancient wooden lock.

  ‘My workshop,’ he explained, with a shy smile to Mr Sharsted, who felt his tension eased away by this drop in the emotional atmosphere. Looking through an old, nearly triangular window in front of him, Mr Sharsted could see that they were in a small, turreted superstructure which towered a good twenty feet over the main roof of the house. There was a sprawl of unfamiliar alleys at the foot of the steep overhang of the building, as far as he could make out through the grimy panes.

  ‘There is a staircase down the outside,’ explained Mr Gingold, opening the door. ‘It will lead you down the other side of the hill and cut over half a mile off your journey.’

  The moneylender felt a sudden rush of relief at this. He had come almost to fear this deceptively mild and quiet old man who, though he said little and threatened not at all, had begun to exude a faint air of menace to Mr Sharsted’s now overheated imagination.

  ‘But first,’ said Mr Gingold, taking the other man’s arm in a surprisingly powerful grip, ‘I want to show you something else – and this really has been seen by very few people indeed.’

  Mr Sharsted looked at the other quickly, but could read nothing in Mr Gingold’s enigmatic blue eyes.

  He was surprised to find a similar, though smaller, chamber to the one they had just left. There was another table, another shaft ascending to a domed cupola in the ceiling, and a further arrangement of wheels and tubes.

  ‘This camera obscura,’ said Mr Gingold, ‘is a very rare model, to be sure. In fact, I believe there are only three in existence today, and one of those is in Northern Italy.’

  Mr Sharsted cleared his throat and made a non-committal reply.

  ‘I felt sure you would like to see this before you leave,’ said Mr Gingold softly. ‘You are quite sure you won’t change your mind?’ he added, almost inaudibly, as he bent to the levers. ‘About Mrs Thwaites, I mean.’

  Sharsted felt another sudden spurt of anger, but kept his feelings under control.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ he began.

  ‘No matter,’ said Mr Gingold, regretfully. ‘I only wanted to make sure, before we had a look at this.’

  He laid his hand with infinite tenderness on Mr Sharsted’s shoulder as he drew him forward.

  He pressed the lever and Mr Sharsted almost cried out with the suddenness of the vision. He was God; the world was spread out before him in a crazy pattern, or at least the segment of it representing the part of the town surrounding the house in which he stood.

  He viewed it from a great height, as a man might from an aeroplane; though nothing was quite in perspective.

  The picture was of enormous clarity; it was like looking into an old cheval-glass which had a faint distorting quality. There was something oblique and elliptical about the sprawl of alleys and roads that spread about the foot of the hill.

  The shadows were mauve and violet, and the extremes of the picture were still tinged with the blood red of the dying sun.

  It was an appalling, cataclysmic vision, and Mr Sharsted was shattered; he felt suspended in space, and almost cried out at the dizziness of the height.

  When Mr Gingold twirled the wheel and the picture slowly began to revolve, Mr Sharsted did cry out and had to clutch at the back of a chair to prevent himself from falling.

  He was perturbed, too, as he caught a glimpse of a big, white building in the foreground of the picture.

  ‘I thought that was the old Corn Exchange,’ he said in bewilderment. ‘Surely that burned down before the last war?’

  ‘Eh,’ said Mr Gingold, as though he hadn’t heard.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mr Sharsted, who now felt quite confused and ill. It must be the combination of the sherry and the enormous height at which he was viewing the vision in the camera obscura.

  It was a demoniacal toy and he shrank away from the figure of Mr Gingold, which looked somewhat sinister in the blood-red and mauve light reflected from the image in the polished table surface.

  ‘I thought you’d like to see this one,’ said Mr Gingold, in the same maddening, insipid voice. ‘It’s really special, isn’t it? Quite the best of the two . . . you can see all sorts of things that are normally hidden.’

  As he spoke there appeared on the screen two old buildings which Mr Sharsted was sure had been destroyed during the war; in fact, he was certain that a public garden and car park had now been erected on the site. His mouth suddenly became dry; he was not sure whether he had drunk too much sherry or the heat of the day had been too much for him.

  He had been about to make a sharp remark that the sale of the camera obscura would liquidate Mr Gingold’s current debt, but he felt this would not be a wise comment to make at this juncture. He felt faint, his brow went hot and cold and Mr Gingold was at his side in an instant.

  Mr Sharsted became aware that the picture had faded from the table and that the day was rapidly turning to dusk outside the dusty windows.

  ‘I really must be going,’ he said with feeble desperation, trying to free himself from Mr Gingold’s quietly persistent grip.

  ‘Certainly, Mr Sharsted,’ said his host. ‘This way.’ He led him without ceremony over to a small oval doorway in a corner of the far wall.

  ‘Just go down the stairs. It will bring you on to the street. Please slam the bottom door – it will lock itself.’ As he spoke, he opened the door and Mr Sharsted saw a flight of clean, dry stone steps leading downwards. Light still flooded in from windows set in the circular walls.

  Mr Gingold did not offer his hand and Mr Sharsted stood rather awkwardly, holding the door ajar.

  ‘Until Monday, then,’ he said.

  Mr Gingold flatly ignored this.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Gingold,’ said the moneylender with nervous haste, anxious to be gone.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Sharsted,’ said Mr Gingold with kind finality.

  Mr Sharsted almost thrust himself through the door and nervously fled down the staircase, mentally cursing himself for all sorts of a fool. His feet beat a rapid tattoo that echoed eerily up and down the old tower. Fortunately, there was still plenty of light; this would be a nasty place in the dark. He slowed his pace after a few moments and thought bitterly of the way he had allowed old Gingold to gain the ascendancy over him; and what an impertinence of the man to interfere in the matter of the Thwaites woman.

  He would see what sort of man Mr Sharsted was when Monday came and the eviction went according to plan. Monday would also be a day of reckoning for Mr Gingold – it was a day they would both remember and Mr Sharsted felt himself quite looking forward to it.

  He quickened his pace again, and presently found himself confronted by a thick oak door.

  It gave beneath his hand as he lifted the big, well-oiled catch and the next moment he was in a high-walled alley leading to the street. The door slammed hollowly behind him and he breathed in the cool evening air with a sigh of relief. He jammed his hard hat back on his head and strode out over the cobbles, as though to affirm the solidity of the outside world.

  Once in the street, which seemed somewhat unfamiliar to him, he hesitated which way to go and then set off to the right. He remembered that Mr Gingold had told him that this way took him over the other side of the hill; he had never been in this part of the town and the walk would do him good.

  The sun had quite gone and a thin sliver of moon was showing in the early evening sky. There seemed few people about and when, ten minutes later, Mr Sharsted came out into a large square which had five or six roads leading off it, he determined to ask the correct way back down to his part of the town. Wit
h luck he could catch a tram, for he had now had enough of walking for one day.

  There was a large, smoke-grimed chapel on a corner of this square and as Mr Sharsted passed it, he caught a glimpse of a board with gold-painted letters.

  ninian’s revivalist brotherhood, it said. The date, in flaked gold paint, was 1925.

  Mr Sharsted walked on and selected the most important of the roads which faced him. It was getting quite dark and the lamps had not yet been lit on this part of the hill. As he went farther down, the buildings closed in about his head, and the lights of the town below disappeared. Mr Sharsted felt lost and a little forlorn. Due, no doubt, to the faintly incredible atmosphere of Mr Gingold’s big house.

  He determined to ask the next passer-by for the right direction, but for the moment he couldn’t see anyone about; the absence of street lights also bothered him. The municipal authorities must have overlooked this section when they switched on at dusk, unless it came under the jurisdiction of another body.

  Mr Sharsted was musing in this manner when he turned the corner of a narrow street and came out opposite a large, white building that looked familiar. For years Mr Sharsted had a picture of it on the yearly calendar sent by a local tradesman, which used to hang in his office. He gazed at its façade with mounting bewilderment as he approached. The title, corn exchange, winked back dully in the moonlight as he got near enough to make out the lettering.

  Mr Sharsted’s bewilderment changed to distinct unease as he thought frantically that he had already seen this building once before this evening, in the image captured by the lens of Mr Gingold’s second camera obscura. And he knew with numbing certainty that the old Corn Exchange had burned down in the late thirties.

  He swallowed heavily, and hurried on; there was something devilishly wrong, unless he were the victim of an optical illusion engendered by the violence of his thoughts, the unaccustomed walking he had done that day, and the two glasses of sherry.

  He had the uncomfortable feeling that Mr Gingold might be watching him at that very moment, on the table of his camera obscura, and at the thought a cold sweat burst out on his forehead.

  He sent himself forward at a smart trot and had soon left the Corn Exchange far behind. In the distance he heard the sharp clopping and the grating rattle of a horse and cart, but as he gained the entrance of an alley he was disappointed to see its shadow disappear round the corner into the next road. He still could not see any people about and again had difficulty in fixing his position in relation to the town.

  He set off once more, with a show of determination he was far from feeling, and five minutes later arrived in the middle of a square which was already familiar to him.

  There was a chapel on the corner and Mr Sharsted read for the second time that evening the legend: ninian’s revivalist brotherhood.

  He stamped his foot in anger. He had walked quite three miles and had been fool enough to describe a complete circle; here he was, not five minutes from Gingold’s house, where he had set out, nearly an hour before.

  He pulled out his watch at this and was surprised to find it was only a quarter past six, though he could have sworn this was the time he had left Gingold.

  Though it could have been a quarter past five; he hardly knew what he was doing this afternoon. He shook it to make sure it was still going and then replaced it in his pocket.

  His feet beat the pavement in his fury as he ran down the length of the square. This time he wouldn’t make the same silly mistake. He unhesitatingly chose a large, well-kept metalled road that ran fair and square in the direction he knew must take him back to the centre of the town. He found himself humming a little tune under his breath. As he turned the next corner, his confidence increased.

  Lights burned brightly on every hand; the authorities must have realized their mistake and finally switched on. But again he was mistaken; there was a little cart parked at the side of the road, with a horse in the shafts. An old man mounted a ladder set against a lamp-post and Mr Sharsted saw the thin blue flame in the gloom and then the mellow blossoming of the gas lamp.

  Now he felt irritated again; what an incredibly archaic part of the town old Gingold lived in. It would just suit him. Gas lamps! And what a system for lighting them; Sharsted thought this method had gone out with the Ark.

  Nevertheless, he was most polite.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, and the figure at the top of the lamp-post stirred uneasily. The face was in deep shadow.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ the lamplighter said in a muffled voice. He started climbing down.

  ‘Could you direct me to the town centre?’ said Mr Sharsted with simulated confidence. He took a couple of paces forward and was then arrested with a shock.

  There was a strange, sickly stench which reminded him of something he was unable to place. Really, the drains in this place were terrible; he certainly would have to write to the town hall about this backward part of the locality.

  The lamplighter had descended to the ground now and he put something down in the back of his cart; the horse shifted uneasily and again Mr Sharsted caught the charnel stench, sickly sweet on the summer air.

  ‘This is the town centre as far as I know, sir,’ said the lamplighter. As he spoke he stepped forward and the pale lamplight fell on to his face, which had been in shadow before.

  Mr Sharsted no longer waited to ask for any more directions but set off down the road at breakneck speed, not sure whether the green pallor of the man’s face was due to a terrible suspicion or to the green-tinted glasses he wore.

  What he was certain of was that something like a mass of writhing worms projected below the man’s cap, where his hair would normally have been. Mr Sharsted hadn’t waited to find out if this Medusa-like supposition were correct; beneath his hideous fear burned a savage anger at Gingold, whom somehow he suspected to be at the back of all these troubles.

  Mr Sharsted fervently hoped that he might soon wake to find himself at home in bed, ready to begin the day that had ended so ignominously at Gingold’s, but even as he formulated the thought, he knew this was reality. This cold moonlight, the hard pavement, his frantic flight, and the breath rasping and sobbing in his throat.

  As the mist cleared from in front of his eyes, he slowed to a walk and then found himself in the middle of the square; he knew where he was and he had to force his nerves into a terrible, unnatural calm, just this side of despair. He walked with controlled casualness past the legend, ninian’s revivalist brotherhood, and this time chose the most unlikely road of all, little more than a narrow alley that appeared to lead in the wrong direction.

  Mr Sharsted was willing to try anything which would lead him off this terrifying, accursed hill. There were no lights here and his feet stumbled on the rough stones and flints of the unmade roadway, but at least he was going downhill and the track gradually spiralled until he was in the right direction.

  For some little while Mr Sharsted had heard faint, elusive stirrings in the darkness about him and once he was startled to hear, some way ahead of him, a muffled cough. At least there were other people about, at last, he thought and he was comforted, too, to see, far ahead of him, the dim lights of the town.

  As he grew nearer, Mr Sharsted recovered his spirits and was relieved to see that they did not recede from him, as he had half suspected they might. The shapes about him, too, were solid enough. Their feet rang hollow on the roadway; evidently they were on their way to a meeting.

  As Mr Sharsted came under the light of the first lamp, his earlier panic fear had abated. He still couldn’t recognize exactly where he was, but the trim villas they were passing were reminiscent of the town proper.

  Mr Sharsted stepped up on to the pavement when he reached the well-lit area and in so doing, cannoned into a large, well-built man who had just emerged from a gateway to join the throng in the roadway.

  Mr Sharsted staggered under the impact and once again his nostrils caught the sickly sweet perfume of decay. The man caught him by
the front of the coat to prevent him from falling.

  ‘Evening, Mordecai,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘I thought you’d be coming, sooner or later.’

  Mr Sharsted could not resist a cry of bubbling terror. It was not just the greenish pallor of the man’s face or the rotted, leathery lips drawn back from the decayed teeth. He fell back against the fence as Abel Joyce passed on – Abel Joyce, a fellow moneylender and usurer who had died in the nineteen-twenties and whose funeral Mr Sharsted had attended.

  Blackness was about him as he rushed away, a sobbing whistle in his throat. He was beginning to understand Mr Gingold and that devilish camera obscura; the lost and the damned. He began to babble to himself under his breath.

  Now and again he cast a sidelong glimpse at his companions as he ran; there was old Mrs Sanderson who used to lay out corpses and rob her charges; there Grayson, the estate agent and undertaker; Amos, the war profiteer; Drucker, a swindler, all green of pallor and bearing with them the charnel stench.

  All people Mr Sharsted had business with at one time or another and all of whom had one thing in common. Without exception all had been dead for quite a number of years. Mr Sharsted stuffed his handkerchief over his mouth to blot out that unbearable odour and heard the mocking laughter as his racing feet carried him past.

  ‘Evening, Mordecai,’ they said. ‘We thought you’d be joining us.’ Mr Gingold equated him with these ghouls, he sobbed, as he ran on at headlong speed; if only he could make him understand. Sharsted didn’t deserve such treatment. He was a businessman, not like these bloodsuckers on society; the lost and the damned. Now he knew why the Corn Exchange still stood and why the town was unfamiliar. It existed only in the eye of the camera obscura. Now he knew that Mr Gingold had been trying to give him a last chance and why he had said goodbye, instead of goodnight.

  There was just one hope; if he could find the door back to Mr Gingold’s perhaps he could make him change his mind. Mr Sharsted’s feet flew over the cobbles as he thought this, his hat fell down and he scraped his hands against the wall. He left the walking corpses far behind, but though he was now looking for the familiar square he seemed to be finding his way back to the Corn Exchange.