The Most Frightening Story Ever Told

by Philip Kerr

  “Not only that, but the kids themselves will be missing out. Because you know something? It’s fun getting scared. Frightening yourself can be a blast. My fellow American booksellers, a healthy amount of fear is the key to everything. We have nothing to fear except the lack of fear itself. The fact is, I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I hadn’t been terrified of the dark. If I hadn’t believed that there was some foul fiend lurking underneath my bed. If I hadn’t believed there was a ghost in my attic or a wolf-man in the forest. In other words, if I hadn’t believed all that childish nonsense, I wouldn’t ever have developed an imagination. And where would any of us be without one of those?

  “Remember. We use it or we lose it. Thank you.”

  Mr. Rapscallion sat down. Most people clapped politely. But one woman was standing up and clapping with great enthusiasm.

  Billy thought she was beautiful but also kind of weird. Her dark hair looked like she’d stuck her finger in a light socket and there were shadows under her big gray eyes. Her thin face was as pale as milk. He’d seen healthier-looking vampires.

  “Bravo!” she shouted. “Bravo!”

  Mr. Rapscallion leaned toward Billy. “Come on,” he growled. “Let’s get the heck out of here before I say something really tactless.”

  A taxi took Billy and Mr. Rapscallion back to the Savoy Hotel.

  They found Miss McBatty in the bathroom with all her camera and recording equipment set up to monitor if the ghost of Betsy Ward put in an appearance. But she reported that so far there had been no sign of any ghostly activity.

  “Not a squeak, not even a faucet turning,” she said. “Of course, it’s not midnight yet, so there’s still plenty of time for her to make an appearance.”

  “According to the Shudders guide,” said Mr. Rapscallion, “her appearances are usually accompanied by a strong smell of soap and then a woman’s voice asking where the light is.”

  “It’s common for a ghost to want to know where the light is,” explained Miss McBatty. “Most ghosts are just lost spirits, looking for the light. They’re confused. Lost. They don’t know where to go. Or if they do, they’re afraid to go there. Most ghosts are probably more fearful than we are.”

  Mr. Rapscallion closed the lid on the toilet and sat down. “I think you’re right, Miss McBatty. We’ll have to be patient if we’re going to see anything.”

  “Talking of lights,” said Miss McBatty. “It might help if you were to put all the lights out. In here, and in the bedroom next door. Ghost hunting is usually conducted in the dark.”

  “Yes, yes of course,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Billy. Do you think you could turn the lights off for Miss McBatty?”

  “Sure.”

  Billy got up and shut off the lights. Then he groped his way back along the wall to the corner of the bathroom and sat down beside Mercedes McBatty and Mr. Rapscallion on the tiled floor to help them keep watch.

  “Mercedes is an interesting name,” he whispered.

  “My dad was into cars,” she said, and then shushed him loudly. “I’m sorry, Billy, but we need silence as well as darkness. Just about anything tends to spook a…a ghost.”

  “She was going to say ‘spook a spook,’ ” said Mr. Rapscallion, “but she thought it sounded less than scientific.”

  Outside the window the street grew quieter as Kansas City people went home to their beds. Mr. Rapscallion coughed a couple of times, and once, Billy sneezed. The only light was a low infrared glow from the screen of one of Miss McBatty’s spook monitors. After a while the girl whispered, “By the way, how did your speech go?”

  Mr. Rapscallion whispered, “Very well, I think.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  After that they were all silent for a long time, and it seemed to Billy he must have fallen asleep for a while because he had the strangest dream. In fact, it was worse than a strange dream; it was a frightening one. So frightening and real and vivid, in fact, that inside that haunted bathroom he wondered if it was a dream at all.

  Billy saw a woman standing at the end of a long, dim corridor waving to Billy as if she wanted the boy to go with her somewhere.

  “Billy,” said the woman. “Come with me. Come with me now. You don’t belong here. This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be doing this.”

  Billy was certain that the woman was dead, which made Billy quite sure he didn’t want to go anywhere with her. He was also certain that what he saw had something to do with the haunted bathroom they were in. He blinked against the darkness and rubbed his eyes until the woman had disappeared. Then he said, “This room is haunted. I’m certain of it.”

  “How?” asked Miss McBatty.

  “Just now, there was a woman here who wanted me to go with her somewhere,” said the boy.

  “I didn’t see or hear anything,” said Miss McBatty.

  “Me neither,” said Mr. Rapscallion.

  “You were dreaming,” said Miss McBatty.

  “I don’t think so,” said Billy.

  “If it wasn’t a dream,” said Mr. Rapscallion, “then maybe she’ll come again. The woman you saw.”

  Suddenly all of the monitors turned off.

  “What happened?” asked Billy.

  “Some sort of power outage,” said Miss McBatty, flicking some switches but with no result.

  “Odd,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps you overloaded the circuit,” said Billy.

  “Shh,” said Miss McBatty. “I heard something. In the bedroom.”

  Billy froze. It was true. There was something moving around in the bedroom next door.

  “Where am I? Where’s the light?” The voice—a woman’s voice—was muffled.

  And then they heard a sort of dreadful groan. “Can someone help me, please?” said the voice.

  “Did you hear that?” asked Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Of course I heard it,” said Miss McBatty. “Quiet. You’ll scare it away.”

  “Is there someone there who can help me?” said the woman’s voice. “I don’t know where I am. Please help me, if you can. It’s very dark and I’m lost.”

  Mr. Rapscallion gasped. And so did Billy.

  The door of the darkened bathroom opened slowly with a loud and sinister creak. And there appeared the shadow of a figure. A woman’s figure. She had a large head of mad-looking hair and was accompanied by a strong smell of soap. “I can’t see a thing in this darkness,” whispered the woman.

  “Betsy,” said Miss McBatty. “Is that you?”

  The woman gasped in the dark. “Who’s there? And how do you know that name?”

  “We’ve been expecting you, Betsy,” said Mr. Rapscallion firmly.

  “Mr. Rapscallion? Is that you?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Rapscallion bravely.

  And then the woman said: “Thank goodness for that. Just as I came along the hallway and was about to knock on your bedroom door, there was a power outage and all the lights went off. I hope I’m not disturbing you but I really didn’t have any choice but to come in here and look for you. I’ve been fumbling around in the dark for several minutes.”

  Billy thought that the woman sounded English. And not really very much like a ghost at all.

  “You’re not a ghost, are you?” he asked.

  “I sincerely hope not,” said the woman. “Although after the dinner I ate tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up dying. I was at the B.A.B. dinner. I looked everywhere for you afterwards but you’d gone, so I decided to come and speak to you here.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Miss McBatty. “I’ve got a flashlight in one of my bags, somewhere.”

  A second or two later, they had some light in the bathroom. And it revealed a person Billy recognized as the vampire-like woman who had applauded Mr. Rapscallion’s speech so enthusiastically at the Kansas City Public Library.

  “But why did you say your name was Betsy?” asked Miss McBatty.

  “Because it is,” said the woman. “Elizabeth Woll
stonecraft-Godwin. Some of the girls used to call me Betsy when I was at school. I must say you gave me quite a turn when I heard it just now. What are you all doing huddled in here, anyway?”

  “Ghost hunting,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “There’s a ghost of a woman called Betsy who haunts this bathroom. We were kind of hoping to see her.”

  “And then you turned up and ruined everything,” complained Miss McBatty.

  “She can hardly ruin anything when there’s no power to work your machines,” objected Billy.

  “Thank you—Billy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Bertolucci told me your name. And that you were both staying here at the Savoy.”

  A second or two later, Miss McBatty’s monitors flickered back into life and Billy got up off the floor and switched on the electric light.

  “That’s better,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Thank you, Billy.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “So, Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin,” said Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Please, call me Elizabeth. Or Betsy, if you must.”

  “Very well, Elizabeth,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “This is Miss McBatty. She’s a ghost hunter.”

  “Jolly good,” said Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. “Any luck?”

  “Not so far.” Miss McBatty spoke coolly. Then she switched off her monitors.

  “Perhaps we’d be more comfortable in the bedroom,” said Mr. Rapscallion.

  They all went out of the bathroom and sat around the edge of the bed.

  “So, what can I do for you, Elizabeth?” asked Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Well, I was very impressed by your speech, Mr. Rapscallion. Marvelous stuff.”

  Mr. Rapscallion smiled modestly. “You’re just saying that.”

  “Oh no, it was marvelous. Jolly interesting. Top-hole stuff. And very much related to my own field of inquiry. You see…” Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin paused and looked around the room. “I say, is someone running a bath?”

  Straightaway Billy, Mr. Rapscallion and Miss McBatty leaped up from the bed and dashed into the bathroom to find that both the faucets in the bath were now running.

  Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin followed, nervously. “Did I say something rude?”

  Mr. Rapscallion sighed. “No, not at all. It’s just that…” He shrugged.

  “She was here,” said Miss McBatty. “The ghost of Betsy Ward. She was here. She came in here and turned on the faucets and we missed her. Can you believe it? We missed her.”

  The disappointment they felt at not seeing the ghost of Betsy Ward turning on the faucets in the bathroom soon gave way—at least as far as Mr. Rapscallion was concerned—to a fascination with Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin.

  “That’s an interesting name you have there,” he said after he had turned off the faucets.

  “Elizabeth?” Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin pulled a face. “Actually, I don’t much like it. My mother named me after Her Majesty the Queen. It suits her better than it does me, I think.”

  “No, I meant your surname,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Wollstonecraft-Godwin.”

  “With a hyphen,” said Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin.

  “What’s a hyphen?” asked Billy.

  “It’s the little dash that connects two parts of someone’s surname,” said Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. “Silly, really. And rather old-fashioned, but there it is.”

  “I never met anyone with a hyphen before,” said Billy.

  “Actually, we used to have two,” admitted Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. “Two hyphens, that is. My father shortened our name for the sake of convenience. It saves time when you have to write it out.”

  “If that’s the shortened name,” said Miss McBatty, “I can’t imagine what the longer one must be like.”

  “It was Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley.”

  “Yikes,” said Billy. “What a mouthful.”

  Mr. Rapscallion looked flabbergasted. “But that means you must be descended from the person who wrote the very first creepy story. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.”

  “I am,” said Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. “Quite a name, isn’t it?”

  “Quite a name?” said Mr. Rapscallion. “I call it living history. I call it the Holy Grail. I call it the mother lode. The Klondike. I call it living history. I call it aristocracy. Forget Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. For me, meeting you, Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin—that’s like meeting the queen. The queen of the creepy story, that is.”

  And so saying, he went down on one knee and kissed Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin’s little gloved hand, as if she really had been the queen. Either way, it was love at first sight for Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Oh, I say,” said Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. “How utterly romantic. And I insist, do please call me Elizabeth. You can’t go on calling me Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. We’ll be here all night.”

  “Amen,” said Miss McBatty. “You mentioned your own field of inquiry, Elizabeth. What exactly is that? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I’m a child psychologist,” said Elizabeth.

  “A shrink,” said Miss McBatty. “I might have guessed.”

  “I’ve been making a special study of fear in children, so that I can write a book about it.”

  “We like books, don’t we, Billy?” said Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Sure do,” said Billy.

  “I’ve often thought of writing a book myself,” said Miss McBatty. “But so far I just haven’t had the time. I expect I will one day. When I’m not so busy with much more important stuff.”

  Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice Miss McBatty’s apparent jealousy. “I found what you said at the B.A.B. dinner quite inspiring,” she told Mr. Rapscallion.

  “You flatter me, Elizabeth,” said Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Nevertheless, that is what happened,” said Elizabeth. “I was inspired. Listening to your fabulous speech, I suddenly had the most fantastic idea for an experiment. An experiment involving children.”

  “Yes,” said Miss McBatty, “perhaps you could get hold of a lot of dead kids and chop them up, to make a living one. Like Frankenstein.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, it does involve a lot of dead children,” said Elizabeth.

  “You intrigue me,” said Mr. Rapscallion.

  “Me too,” admitted Billy.

  “You probably know the story of how Mary Shelley, my ancestor, came to write the story of Frankenstein,” said Elizabeth.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Rapscallion, “but maybe Billy doesn’t.”

  Billy shook his head.

  “She and her husband, Percy,” explained Elizabeth, “went on holiday to Italy with Lord Byron, the poet, in 1816. Byron took along his doctor, John Polidori, my other ancestor.”

  “How very convenient,” said Miss McBatty. “To take your own doctor. Me, I have a problem just remembering to get some travel insurance.”

  “Anyway, the weather was terrible and they were all cooped up in this villa Lord Byron had rented on the shores of Lake Geneva, called the Villa Diodati. And this being 1816, of course, there was absolutely nothing to do. No television. No Internet. No Scrabble. They couldn’t even use the swimming pool. So, anyway, they all dared each other to write and read out the scariest story they could think of.”

  “It must have been some holiday,” murmured Miss McBatty.

  “Shh,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “This is fascinating.”

  “Doctor Polidori read out the first ever story about a vampire. But it was Mary who won, of course, because that particular night, everyone thought that her story, Frankenstein, was quite simply the scariest story of all. But what most people don’t know is that the weather really didn’t get any better for the rest of the week and that Mary Shelley and John Polidori wrote another story together. A story they judged to be the scariest story ever written and much too frightening ever to be read to anyone. Including Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.”

  “Cool,” said Billy.

  “Isn’t it? W
ell. After this holiday, Polidori’s interest as a doctor in the subject of fear grew more intense. At the same time he probably went a little bit mad. People did go a little bit mad in those days. Which perhaps explains the peculiar events that subsequently took place at the workhouse in the London parish of All Hallows Barking by the Tower, in 1820. This workhouse had some one hundred inmates, of whom more than a dozen were boys aged between five and sixteen—just like those poor boys in Charles Dickens’s great book Oliver Twist.

  “The churchwarden of the parish workhouse was, like Polidori himself, of Italian origin. His name was Victor Creap. Creap had made a very bad job of running the All Hallows workhouse, which is probably why the poor lads had revolted against his authority. And, hoping to terrify these rebellious boys into behaving themselves again, Victor Creap persuaded his friend Polidori to come to the workhouse and—under the guise of giving them the very unusual treat of a bedtime story—to read to the boys the very story that Mary Shelley had deemed too terrifying ever to be read aloud.

  “According to a London newspaper report of the time, the effect on the boys of Polidori reading the story to them was simply earth-shattering. Most merely fainted with fear. Several ran screaming from the workhouse, their hair turning white, even as they were running out the door. Three went to the madhouse and were confined there for the rest of their lives. One boy actually died of fright. It caused a sensational scandal. Victor Creap was dismissed from his position by officials of the parish while John Polidori found himself shunned by polite society. So much so that, weighed down by depression, not to mention some substantial gambling debts, poor old Polidori poisoned himself.

  “Following his death, it was thought that the manuscript of the story read by Polidori to the naughty boys of All Hallows Barking by the Tower had been destroyed by John’s sister Charlotte. In fact, a copy of this, the scariest story ever written, survives to this day and is in my possession.”

  “Yikes!” said Billy.

  “Yikes indeed, Billy,” seconded Mr. Rapscallion.

  “As I listened to your wonderful speech,” said Elizabeth, “about how nothing much seems to scare the kids of today, I wondered what they would make of the story read all those years ago by John Polidori to the boys of the All Hallows Barking by the Tower workhouse. And when you said that you wished someone would write a book that is really scary so that it might scare kids again like we were scared, I thought to myself—gosh, someone already did, back in 1816: Mary Shelley and John Polidori.