Well, I had asked a question. Now I must make what I could of the answer.
You were swept away, you were charmed, by my sudden insistence on a weekend away. It had been a while since I’d swept you off your feet. You were intrigued, too, because it was so unlike anything we’d done together before. A day of hiking in the mountains! As an excuse, I’d claimed that I needed to check on the existence of a spring-fed fountain mentioned in one of the books we were going to publish. You had so little notion of what a book-editor did, and, really, so little interest, thatyou believed what I said without question. I didn’taskwhat you’d told your wife.
At first it was like old times. The strain that had been between us disappeared, and we laughed a lot and touched each other as you drove us out of the city in the freshness of early morning. But the farther I got from the city and the world I knew, the more uneasy I felt. What was I doing? I’m a good walker, but only in the city, when there is some point to it, things to look at, places worth going to. I don’t like the country. It bores me and it makes me nervous; okay, there have to be farms, and places for wild animals and plants, but I don’t see the point of it for me. As for this magic fountain – did it follow that because I believed in romantic love I’d also believe in magic? I wasn’t Janet-what sort of desperation had made me believe in her magical fountain?
Naturally, I took it out on you. Your enthusiasm began to irritate me. What were you getting so excited about? A walk in the country? I didn’t like hiking, why didn’t you know that? You wanted me to be something I wasn’t; you would have preferred someone else. Before long and I’m sure to your complete mystification we were arguing.
By the time we reached the place where Janet had indicated we should leave the car, we were barely speaking to each other. You cheered up a little once you were out of the car, lacing on your new Danish hiking boots and inhaling the clean, cool air, but I felt an undissolved lump of dread sitting heavily in my stomach. But I was determined to go through with it now. I couldn’t imagine how getting you to drink some water would result in my feeling better, but I would try.
I am a good walker in the city, but I wasn’t used to hills, or to pathways slippery with pine needles, damp leaves, loose rocks. Nor could I keep up the pace you set. I had to keep stopping to catch my breath; I had to keep calling you back. At first solicitous, you quickly became impatient.
“If we don’t get a move on we won’t even make the summit before dark, let alone get back down to the car again.”
“We don’t need to go to the summit,” I pointed out. The idea filled me with exhausted horror. “Just to the fountain, and that shouldn’t be much farther, as far as I can make out from this map . . .” Squinting at it, it occurred to me that scale was not Janet’s strong point.
You were as baffled by me as I was by you. What was the point of going only halfway up a mountain? “Come on, it’s not that hard a climb.”
“But I don’t want to go to the top.” I couldn’t keep the irritating whine out of my voice. “Will, I’m worn out already. I want to stop at the fountain and have a picnic and a rest before we go back.”
Your face began to cloud, but then it cleared. “Okay. You stay at the fountain and rest. I’ll climb to the summit alone and then come back for you.”
I didn’t like the idea much, but sometimes you have to compromise.
We reached the fountain a few minutes later. First we heard the cool, gurgling sound of water, and then we found the source, hidden beneath a curtain of ferns and ground-ivy. I pulled back some of the greenery to reveal the smooth rim of a stone bowl that caught the water flowing up from underground. There was a channel that sent the overflow spilling into a small, bright stream that raced away over a rocky bed down the hillside.
“Want a drink?” I asked.
“From that?” You frowned.
“Better than recycled city water,” I tempted. “This is exactly the sort of stuff that gets bottled and sold to people like you in restaurants.”
“I might try it when I come back. I don’t want to stop just now. You’ll be all right?”
“What about our picnic?”
You sighed. “The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. You can eat some of this stuff while you’re waiting for me, if you want. I’ll just take a candy bar and my water flask.” Then you dropped a kiss on my head, determined not to be caught and delayed by anything as time-consuming as a real embrace.
For a while, I sulked, counting the minutes, wondering how long it would take you to get there and back again. I wished I’d brought a book. With nothing else to occupy me, I poked around the fountain, uncovering more of it from the encroaching plants. I scraped away the furry moss and found a figure carved in bas-relief: a cat, it looked like. Then there were markings that might have been writing, but the letters appeared to be Greek, which I can’t read. It could have been graffiti left by fraternity boys from Syracuse or Cornell.
I was thirsty. The trill of water made the feeling worse. I fetched my little plastic bottle of Evian and drank half of it. More out of boredom than hunger I ate lunch, and finished off the Evian. Then I filled the bottle from the spring: my insurance in case I couldn’t get you to drink in situ. Then I sat down in the sun with my back against a rock and waited for you.
I fell asleep and woke disoriented, hot and dry-mouthed. I thought that someone had been watching me and laughing, but that was only the music of the fountain. I was still alone, and really thirsty. I reached for the Evian bottle and then stopped, remembering that I had refilled it from the fountain. I licked dry lips and looked at my watch, which turned out to have stopped some hours earlier. The battery had been running down all day and I hadn’t noticed except to think how slowly time was passing.
Where were you? I felt as if I had been sleeping for hours. What if you had fallen and hurt yourself, what if something awful had happened? I called your name, but the sound of my own voice echoing off the rocks in the empty air gave me the creeps. I advised myself to sit quietly and wait for you. If only I wasn’t so thirsty!
It was late September and the day was pleasantly cool, but the sun blazed down, making me hot. I wondered if I could be suffering from sunstroke. I plunged my hands and arms up to the elbow in the fountain to cool myself, and dabbed water on my face. I had never been so thirsty in my life. What if I just wet my lips? But I needed a drink.
I longed for you to come back and save me with the dull, flat, safe city water in your flask. But you didn’t come and didn’t come and finally I couldn’t bear my thirst any longer and I drank.
That was the best water I ever tasted. I drank and drank until my stomach felt distended. I felt content and at peace with the universe, without worries. I was no longer thirsty and no longer too hot. The sun felt good. The smooth rock where I had rested before was still warm with the sun, so I curled up there and went to sleep.
I was awakened by the sound of you calling my name. I opened my eyes and stretched, and you turned and looked straight at me, but the worry didn’t leave your face, and you didn’t stop calling. Were you blind? I got down and went over and pressed myself against you.
“Well, hello. Where’d you come from?” You began to stroke me. “Have you seen my girlfriend? I guess she got fed up waiting and decided to hike back to the car alone. Only, if she did that, why’d she leave her stuff?”
I wanted to explain, but no matter how I purred and cried and stropped myself against your legs, you just didn’t get it. Are women more intuitive than men, or what? I followed you to your car but you wouldn’t have me.
One of the sheriffs men took me home with him after a day spent searching the mountainside for me. You did the decent thing, regardless of the trouble it would make for you, and reported me missing.
After many adventures I made my way back to Manhattan, and to Washington Square, and Lecia’s little apartment. I don’t think she recognized me; at any rate, she shooed me off with a shocking lack of compassion. I hung around anyway
, to give her another chance. Maybe she’d put together my reported disappearance with the sudden appearance of a strange cat. I found a position on a fire-escape which gave me a view into her living-room window, and I hunkered down and waited. As soon as I saw her getting ready to go out I’d make for her door and strop her ankles and purr like an engine. She wouldn’t be able to resist me forever. So she had a cat already; why shouldn’t she have two?
I watched and waited and finally, after moonrise, I saw James the cat turn, in the magic circle of Lecia’s arms, into the man who was her lover.
Finally I understood the secret of the fountain, and knew that my only hope was to find you. If you want me, you can have me again. For you, I’ve left the city. For you, I’ll live in the suburbs. By day, I’ll be the family cat. But at night, in your arms, secretly, while your wife sleeps unknowing, I’ll be your lover. You can make me change, if only you want me.
RONALD CHETWYND-HAYES DIED in 2001. He started writing fiction in the early 1950s, and his first published book was the science fiction novel The Man from the Bomb in 1959. His second novel, The Dark Man (aka And Love Survived), appeared five years later.
While looking on a bookstall in the early 1970s, Chetwynd-Hayes noticed the profusion of horror titles and submitted a collection of his own stories, which eventually appeared in paperback as The Unbidden. Becoming a full-time writer, he began producing a prolific number of ghost stories and sedate tales of terror, many tinged with his disarming sense of humour.
Known as “Britain’s Prince of Chill”, his stories were widely anthologized and collected in such volumes as Cold Terror, Terror by Night, The Elemental, The Night Ghouls and Other Grisly Tales, The Monster Club, The Cradle Demon and Other Stories of Fantasy and Horror, The Fantastic World of Kamtellar: A Book of Vampires and Ghouls, A Quiver of Ghosts, Tales from the Dark Lands, Ghosts from the Mist of Time, Tales from the Haunted House, Dracula’s Children, The House of Dracula and Shudders and Shivers. More recently his work has been compiled in The Vampire Stories ofR. Chetwynd-Hayes (aka Looking for Something to Suck and Other Vampire Stories), Phantoms and Fiends, Frights and Fancies and Ghosts and Ghouls: The Best Short Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, while the anthology Great Ghost Stories is edited by Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones.
The movies From Beyond the Grave (1973) and The Monster Club (1980) were both adapted from his work. In the latter, based on probably his most successful book, the author himself was portrayed by veteran horror actor John Carradine.
In 1989 he was presented with Life Achievement Awards by both the Horror Writers of America and the British Fantasy Society, and he was the Special Guest of Honour at The 1997 World Fantasy Convention in London.
As the author once remarked: “I like to think I write stories for the future. There’s just a chance that someone putting an anthology together will find one of my old stories and slip it in. And so I shall live again. In that respect, I suppose being a writer is very much like being a vampire.”
WILFRED FRAZER HAD BEEN feature editor of The Daily Reporter for more years than I had lived and stated that he hated his job with a hatred that passed all understanding; but he was very good at it. He had the knack of spotting a potential human interest story from the morass of rumour, conjecture and wishful thinking that was dumped on his desk each morning. He motioned me to a chair, then pushed a pair of hornrimmed spectacles up over his thinning grey hair.
“Young Radcliffe, you’re a clever, well educated lad, tell me what you know about Caroline Fortescue.”
I shrugged and rummaged around in that mental lumber room that we all have tucked away at the back of our brains.
“A late Victorian lady novelist. Is ranked a little lower than Dickens, but is possibly on equal terms with Thackeray. She rocketed to fame with Camden’s Ridge in 1888; a three-volume novel that has been the bane of every schoolboy’s life ever since. This was followed by eleven more books of equal length, the last being Moorland Master published in 1911. Her style is a bit heavy going, but most critics regard her as a literary genius.”
Frazer nodded. “Fine. Proper little know-all, aren’t you? What about the woman herself?”
“Ah! That’s another matter entirely. She seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to keep herself out of the limelight. No one seems to know anything about her. Her real name, when she was born – when she died. Complete mystery.”
Frazer permitted himself a pale smile.
“She didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Die. According to my informant, a female who was employed around the house, Caroline Fortescue is still alive.”
I sat upright and gave a passable imitation of William the Conqueror being told that a man with an arrow in his eye was banging on the front door. I did some complicated arithmetic. “It’s now 1975 – if she was twenty in 1888 – Good God! – she’d be a hundred and seven!”
“Not impossible,” Frazer pointed out. “But my ex-employee says she’s much older than that. She puts her at around a hundred and seventeen. Again I say – not impossible. Isn’t there a chap in America who’s still belting around at a hundred and thirty-five?”
I communed with my soul before nurturing a germ of hope.
“God! Suppose it’s true!”
“Precisely. Imagine finding a live and kicking Charles Dickens and getting the dope from the great man’s mouth as to how Edwin Drood was intended to end.” He pushed a scrap of paper across the desk. “Here’s the address. Ye olde manor house down in a place called Bramfield. Get your body down there and if the old girl is still with us and if she can still talk, bring me back an interview that will set the Thames on fire. Take as long as you like. I want a series that’ll run for three weeks. Afterwards we’ll think about a book.”
“Suppose it’s all moonshine?” I asked.
“Then you’ve had a nice day in the country. Do you good. But I’ve got a hunch about this one. I think we may have something.”
“But a hundred and seventeen!” I objected. “It must take all her time merely to breathe.”
“Moses was doing all right at a hundred and twenty. If she can’t talk use your imagination. Just bring back her mark on a blank sheet of paper.”
I arrived at Bramfield Station the following afternoon and went straight to the village post office, that being if my experience was any criterion, the fount of all local gossip. I pushed open a narrow door and entered a shop equipped with an L-shaped counter; the smaller portion protected by a grill which had an oval opening in the lower centre. A smallish woman with red hair and inquisitive eyes shuffled forward and asked:
“Yes, sir, was there something?”
I gave her the full effect of a crooked, rakish smile which I had borrowed from Errol Flynn.
“Yes, can you kindly direct me to Bramfield Manor?”
She frowned and appeared to give the question more consideration than it deserved. Finally she nodded.
“Ain’t heard it called that for many a year. Never have any mail you see and the rightful name has sort of got lost. The Old House we calls it in these parts. The property of old Lady Bramfield. Although whether she’s still around, I wouldn’t like to say. Certainly she ain’t been buried to my knowledge.”
I assumed a slightly worried expression.
“Surely there can’t be any doubt that the – old lady – is still alive? I’ve been sent down to investigate the claim of a former maid who says she’s owed a week’s wages.”
The pale blue eyes were suddenly alight with an almost evil gleam of curiosity and the head jerked as though issuing an invitation for me to clamber over the counter. The voice sank to a loud whisper.
“That must have been that blonde huzzy who Jenkins drove to the station, with her packed bag on the front seat. When he came in for the provisions and suchlike, I managed to get out of him, that she’d been caught going through some private papers. That’s all he’d tell me. Very close is Jenkins.”
“This .
. . Jenkins . . . ?”
“Used to be butler donkeys’ years ago. Now he’s all there is. Except when that woman was there. Lordy, I’d give anything to know the rights of it. The old place is falling to bits. Young man, if you ever get past the front door, it would be a mercy if you’d pop back in here and tell me what’s what.”
“But first,” I prompted, “I must get there. Now if you’ll kindly tell . . .”
“Ah! Turn right and walk down the main street, then turn left, cross the stile and cut across Five Acre Field until you reach Miles Lane. Turn left and two miles further on you’ll come to Manford Bridge which you can’t miss because it’s got a broken wall on one side. A mile or so on and you’ll reach Bramfield Walk. A hundred yards to the left are the Old House iron gates. One’s fallen down. The house is at the end of the drive.”
“A taxi . . . ?”
“Young man you appear to have a stout pair of legs. It’s a nice walk so long as you keep clear of Mr Masterton’s bull. Now heed me. Even if you don’t get into the house, keep your eyes open and let me know what you see. If the old lady is still about, she might be looking out of a window or something.”
I admitted that was a remote possibility, then asked:
“When did you last see Lady Bramfield?”
One not over clean hand went up and began to scratch her head.
“Now you have me! Must have been when I was a child. Over thirty years ago. And I remember she looked old then. She can’t still be alive.”
The sun was setting when I finally reached the tree lined road that was presumably Bramfield Walk. In fact it was little more than a narrow lane that ran straight as an arrow’s flight from the distant main road to the rusty, reeling iron gates. One had not quite fallen down, having been saved from this ultimate indignity by a bottom hinge that somehow kept the top bars from touching the ground. To the right crouched the ruins of a once handsome lodge; beyond a meandering drive, its unpaved surface covered with a profusion of tall grass and wild flowers, flowed like a wind teased river, between tall slender poplars that reached up green clad arms, as though begging alms from the sun.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 26
