Mr Hulbush drove in silence for several minutes. Then he smiled at Professor Brady. ‘That was a long time ago. And there’s a happy ending. When she left her husband last year, we became friends, you see – as you and I have – and one thing led to another and now she’s Mrs Hulbush! In fact, you’ll meet her tonight!’ He chuckled and reached into his breast pocket. ‘Cigarette?’
The white-haired man did not reply.
‘Admirable,’ said Mr Hulbush, drawing fire into his cigarette and hacking out a gray cloud. ‘However, “Better one major vice than a host of minor ones.” D’you know who said that? You, Professor Brady. The Quintessence of Morality. Chapter Seven. And besides, “It ain’t the cough that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carries you off in!” ’ He laughed heartily, then lapsed once again into silence. ‘I suppose you find that a crude joke, considering my occupation. Well, let me tell you, if I didn’t make a joke once in a while, I’d go mad. Being what I am isn’t easy.’ He dragged on the cigarette, then turned his head quickly toward his companion. ‘No, of course I didn’t choose it. One’s life is determined from the moment one is born. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. It was my father’s occupation and so – naturally – it had to be mine. We can thank my mother for it, too, and the Adirondacks. But what’s wrong with it, anyway? Somebody has to do the job, isn’t that so?’ He stuffed the cigarette into an ashtray and tapped on the car’s high beams. The road ahead snaked through a veritable forest. ‘People couldn’t understand, for a long time. Even after my pimples disappeared, they shunned me. Mother and I lived alone. Sometimes I would go to a film, but always it was by myself. I would sit in the darkness, alone, looking at the bright pictures, and wonder if I would ever have a friend.’ He shook his head. ‘Though it seems so far away now, I remember that people wouldn’t even shake my hand in those days. When I would enter a restaurant, they would shrink away from me, as though I were diseased, as though I were some sort of strange beast that didn’t belong in society. Never once was I invited to anyone’s house. Never once would anyone accept an invitation of mine. And my mother kept saying, “They’re jealous of you” but I knew that it went much deeper. They hated me because I reminded them of something they didn’t choose to think about, and because every town needs at least one person to shrink away from, to despise, to hate.’
The beams of the car suddenly illuminated a large two-story house. The limbs of dead trees scraped against its unpainted boards. No light shone from its shuttered windows. Mr Hulbush turned off the car.
‘I’m trying to explain,’ he said, ‘why I never asked you over before. If I sound self-pitying, it’s because I haven’t told you the conclusion. I gave up hope, of course, when I realized that a man in my position – or, at any rate, myself in my position – could never enjoy what is called a normal life. But at that moment, at the moment I decided to adjust to a lifetime of loneliness, everything changed.’ Mr Hulbush grinned at his companion. ‘Suddenly I began to make friends. People began accepting my invitations. The very best people in town, too! The ones who wouldn’t have spit on me before, who turned their backs, who laughed at me, who called me “that strange little man”. Now, suddenly, they were my friends. Not all, of course. You couldn’t expect that. But little by little they’ve been coming around. In fact, my at-homes are threatening to become the social event of Hilldale!’
Mr Hulbush got out of the car, extracted a wooden device from the back seat and folded it into a chair.
‘I can’t account for it,’ Mr Hulbush said, easing the chair up the steps of the house to the front door. ‘Perhaps it was the change in my attitude. Or perhaps they realized that my line of work is no less respectable than any other. Who can say?’
He inserted a key in the lock and turned it. They entered a dark hall, hung with paintings of Indian maidens in canoes and mountains. ‘My mother’s,’ Mr Hulbush said, ‘but don’t be embarrassed. I don’t like them, either.’
He rolled the chair down the hall, past many doors.
‘It’s wonderful, having you,’ he said to the white-haired man. ‘Somehow I knew we’d hit it off, but – well, I’ve told you all about that. I suppose it’s just that I can’t accept the fact that I’m popular, after all these years. I can’t accept it. Isn’t that silly?’
Mr Hulbush removed another key from his pocket and inserted it into another lock. He pulled open a heavy door.
‘I see they’ve started without us,’ he whispered, smiling.
A number of persons stood and sat about a large living room. Some were old, some young. All were dressed formally. Mr Hulbush entered the room with his companion. After closing the door securely, he turned and waved his hand.
‘Excuse me. Folks, excuse me! I’d like to introduce Professor Edward Brady. Some of you know him already, but to those who don’t, I’d like to say that Professor Brady is one of the outstanding citizens of Hilldale. In addition to coming from one of our oldest families, he is an educator of the first rank. His books on psychology are considered indispensable in universities throughout the world. He is listed in Who’s Who, the Social Register, and Celebrity Index. In high school, they voted him the most popular boy on campus. Throughout his life he has won the respect and admiration of all who have known him. He is one of my best friends.’
So saying, Mr Hulbush guided his companion slowly through the room to a couch whereupon sat an old woman in a violet dress. ‘Professor Brady, my mother, Edna Hulbush.’ In a low voice, he said to the white-haired man, ‘She has been dying to meet you for years.’
They moved on toward a woman in a black velvet gown. She appeared to be in her late forties. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ Mr Hulbush said, softly. ‘But of course you’ve guessed who she is. Marianne, the girl with the golden legs. How long I waited for her! But somehow I think I knew, even as I stood burning with shame and praying that the ground would swallow me up, even then I think I knew that we would be together some day.’ He placed the chair next to the woman, who stood looking off in the direction of a window. ‘You two get acquainted, while I find us a drink,’ he said.
Mr Hulbush greeted his guests as he walked to a bar in the corner. He mixed two martinis and returned to the white-haired man, who had not moved. He placed a glass in the man’s hand and then, holding his own drink at arm’s length, said: ‘To good companions, to acts of kindness, to pleasant conversations, and to hell with everything else!’ He drank the martini in one long swallow and hurled the empty glass at a fireplace.
‘Careful,’ he said to the white-haired man, ‘or she’ll ask who let you in!’ He laughed and wheeled the chair around. His progress through the room was slow as he halted by each guest.
‘Miss Tatum, chairman of the ladies’ league, she owns the oldest house in Hilldale. Built in 1787. The house I mean!’ ‘Mr Pedderson, of O’Brian, Ingley and Pedderson, our leading law firm. He was the boy who held my Marianne in his arms that night, though I doubt he remembers it.’ ‘Peter Grant, student body president. You remember that witty description of my face? It came from Pete. Now we’re inseparable.’ ‘Mrs Crandall, here, once lost her appetite because of me. They’d served her a fine meal and she was about to eat it when she looked over and saw that I was in the restaurant. She left the table. And look at her now, enjoying my hospitality!’
After each person in the room had been approached, Mr Hulbush turned on a radio, selected a program of music, and went to the woman in the black velvet gown.
He lifted her slightly off the floor and, holding her closely, danced until dawn.
Then he went out looking for new friends.
Hugh Fleetwood
THE POET GIVES HIS FRIEND WILDFLOWERS
Born in England in 1944, Hugh Fleetwood is a writer and artist whom a critic for the London Sunday Times has dubbed ‘the master of modern horror’. His second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and his fifth, The Order of Death, was adapted for a film starring Harvey Keitel and John Ly
don (Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols). Fleetwood’s Foreign Affairs (1974), a thriller about a famous concert pianist tormented by a deranged stalker, is available from Valancourt, and his weird and haunting short story ‘Something Happened’ was included in The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume One. This macabre little treat is original to this collection.
Pale blue and delicate, they smelled both sweet and faintly of death.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘they’re beautiful.’
Yet, perhaps just because they were –
or because of that unsettling scent –
although she smiled as she took them,
her eyes expressed a certain
fear.
As if she’d been reminded
she had always found him chilly,
and he liked to say that beauty, and art,
required sacrifice.
Still, monster or no,
she had loved him for many years,
and she was grateful and touched
by the gift.
So she tried to mask her disquiet,
and didn’t insist
when she asked where he had found them –
and he replied, ‘Oh, you know,’
and gave a vague, uncomfortable wave . . .
Shortly after, he left,
looking sad, but relieved she hadn’t pressed him;
that he hadn’t had to tell her
he had picked those flowers from her grave.
L. P. Hartley
MONKSHOOD MANOR
Like many of the authors in our Valancourt Book of Horror Stories series, L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) is well known and justly acclaimed for his mainstream literary fiction but under-appreciated for his fine contributions to the genre of horror and supernatural literature. Hartley is most famous for The Go-Between (1953), a novel of childhood in Edwardian England that opens with the oft-quoted line ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’; it was adapted for a classic 1971 film directed by Joseph Losey. His other work includes the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, the final volume of which won the James Tait Black prize for best novel of the year, as well as The Harness Room (1971), the only explicitly gay-themed novel written by Hartley, who was otherwise discreet about his sexuality. He published several volumes of fine macabre and supernatural stories, the best of which were collected in The Travelling Grave and Other Stories (1948), republished by Valancourt in 2017. ‘Monkshood Manor’, an atmospheric tale set, as with many of the best traditional ghost stories, at a large, old English country house, first appeared in The White Wand and Other Stories in 1954.
‘He’s a strange man,’ said Nesta.
‘Strange in what way?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just neurotic. He has a fire-complex or something of the kind. He lies awake at night thinking that a spark may have jumped through the fireguard and set the carpet alight. Then he has to get up and go down to look. Sometimes he does this several times a night, even after the fire has gone out.’
‘Does he keep an open fire in his own house?’ I asked.
‘Yes, he does, because it’s healthier, and other people like it, and he doesn’t want to give way to himself about it.’
‘He sounds a man of principle,’ I observed.
‘He is,’ my hostess said. ‘I think that’s half the trouble with Victor. If he would let himself go more he wouldn’t have these fancies. They are his sub-conscious mind punishing him, he says, by making him do what he doesn’t want to. But somebody has told him that if he could embrace his neurosis and really enjoy it—’
I laughed.
‘I don’t mean in that way,’ said Nesta severely. ‘What a mind you have, Hugo! And he conscientiously tries to. As if anyone could enjoy leaving a nice warm bed and creeping down cold passages to look after a fire that you pretty well know is out!’
‘Are you sure that it is a fire he looks at?’ I asked. ‘I can think of another reason for creeping down a cold passage and embracing what lies at the end of it.’
Nesta ignored this.
‘It’s not only fires,’ she said, ‘it’s gas taps, electric light switches, anything that he thinks might start a blaze.’
‘But seriously, Nesta,’ I said, ‘there might be some method in his madness. It gives him an alibi for all sorts of things besides love-making: theft, for instance, or murder.’
‘You say that because you don’t know Victor,’ Nesta said. ‘He’s almost a Buddhist – he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘Does he want people to know about his peculiarity?’ I asked. ‘I know he’s told you—’
‘He does and he doesn’t,’ Nesta answered.
‘It’s obvious why he doesn’t. It isn’t so obvious why he does,’ I observed.
‘It’s rather complicated,’ Nesta said. ‘I doubt if your terre-à-terre mind would understand it. The whole thing is mixed up in his mind with guilt—’
‘There you are!’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes, but not real guilt. And he thinks that if someone caught him prowling about at night they might—’
‘I should jolly well think they would!’
‘And besides, he doesn’t want to keep it a secret, festering. He would rather people laughed at him.’
‘Laugh!’ I repeated. ‘I can’t see that it’s a laughing matter.’
‘No, it isn’t really. It all goes back to old Œdipus, I expect. Most men suffer from that, more or less. I expect you do, Hugo.’
‘Me?’ I protested. ‘My father died before I was born. How could I have killed him?’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Nesta, pityingly. ‘But what I wanted to say was, if you should hear an unusual noise at night—’
‘Yes?’
‘Or happen to see somebody walking about—’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ll know it’s nothing to be alarmed at. It’s just Victor, taking what he calls his safety precautions.’
‘I’ll count three before I fire,’ I said.
Nesta and I had been taking a walk before the other week-end guests arrived.
The house came into sight, long and low with mullioned windows, crouching beyond the lawn. This was my first visit to Nesta’s comparatively new home. She was always changing houses. Leaving the subject of Victor we talked of the other guests, of their matrimonial intentions, prospects or entanglements. Our conversation had the pre-war air which Nesta could always command.
‘Is Walter here?’ I asked. Walter was her husband.
‘No, he’s away shooting. He doesn’t come here very much, as you know. He never cared for Monkshood, I don’t know why. Oh, by the way, Hugo,’ she went on, ‘I’ve an apology to make to you. I never put any books in your room. I know you’re a great reader, but—’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I go to bed to sleep.’
She smiled. ‘Then that’s all right. Would you like to see the room?’ I said I would.
‘It’s called the Blue Bachelor’s room, and it’s on the ground floor.’
We joked a bit about the name.
‘Bachelors are always in a slight funk,’ I said, ‘because of the designing females stalking them. But why didn’t you give the room to Victor? It might have saved him several journeys up and down stairs.’
‘It’s rather isolated,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t mind that, but he does.’
‘Was that the real reason?’ I asked, but she refused to answer.
I didn’t meet Victor Chisholm until we assembled for drinks before dinner. He was a nondescript looking man, neither dark nor fair, tall nor short, fat nor thin, young nor old. I didn’t have much conversation with him, but he seemed to slide off any subject one brought up – he didn’t drop it like a hot coal, but after a little blowing on it, for politeness’ sake, he quietly extinguished it. At least that was the impression I got. He smiled quite a lot, as though to prove he was not unsociable, and then retired into himself. He seemed to be saving himself up for somethi
ng – a struggle with his neurosis, perhaps. After dinner we played bridge, and Victor followed us into the library, half meaning to play, I think; but when he found there was a four without him he went back into the drawing-room to join the three non-bridge playing members of the party. We sat up late trying to finish the last rubber, and I didn’t see him again before we went to bed. The library had a large open fireplace in which a few logs were smouldering over a heap of wood-ash. The room had a shut-in feeling, largely because the door was lined with book-bindings to make it look like shelves, so that when it was closed you couldn’t tell where it was. Towards midnight I asked Nesta if I should put another log on and she said carelessly, ‘No. I shouldn’t bother – we’re bound to get finished sometime, if you’ll promise not to overbid, Hugo,’ which reminded me of Victor and his complex. So when at last we did retire I said meaningly, ‘Would you like me to take a look at the drawing-room fire, Nesta?’
‘Well, you might, but it’ll be out by this time,’ she said.
‘And the dining-room?’ I pursued, glancing at the others, to see if there was any reaction, which there was not. She frowned slightly and said, ‘The dining-room’s electric. We only run to two real fires,’ and then we separated.
In spite of my boasting, for some reason I couldn’t get to sleep. I tossed to and fro, every now and then turning the light on to see what time it was. My bedroom walls were painted dark blue, but by artificial light they looked almost black. They were so shiny and translucent that when I sat up in bed I could see my reflection in them, or at any rate my shadow. I grew tired of this and then it occurred to me that if I had a book I might read myself to sleep – it was one of the recognized remedies for insomnia. But I hadn’t: there were two book-ends – soap-stone elephants, I remember, facing each other across an empty space. I gave myself till half-past two, then I got up, put on my dressing-gown and opened my bedroom door. All was in darkness. The library lay at the other end of the long house and to reach it I had to cross the hall. I had no torch and didn’t know where the switches were, so my progress was slow. I tried to make as little noise as possible, then I remembered that if Nesta heard me she would think I was Victor Chisholm going his nightly rounds. After this I grew bolder and almost at once found the central switch panel at the foot of the staircase. This lit up the passage to the library. The library door was open and in I went, automatically fumbling for the switch. But no sooner had my hand touched the wall than it fell to my side, for I had a feeling that I was not alone in the room. I don’t know what it was based on, but something was already implicit in my vision before it became physically clear to me: a figure at the far end of the room, in the deep alcove of the fireplace, bending, almost crouching over the fire. The figure had its back to me and was so near to the fire as to be almost in it. Whether it made a movement or not I couldn’t tell, but a spurt of flame started up against which the figure showed darker than before. I knew it must be Victor Chisholm and I stifled an impulse to say ‘Hullo!’ – from a confused feeling that like a sleep-walker he ought not to be disturbed; it would startle and humiliate him. But I wanted a book, and my groping fingers found one. I withdrew it from the shelf, but not quite noiselessly, for with the tail of my eye I saw the figure move.
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Page 9
