Ladygrove

by John Burke

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN BURKE

  The Black Charade: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror (#2)

  The Devil’s Footsteps: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror (#1)

  The Golden Horns: A Mystery Novel

  Ladygrove: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror (#3)

  Murder, Mystery, and Magic: Macabre Stories

  The Nightmare Whisperers: A Novel of Horror

  The Old Man of the Stars: Two Classic Science Fiction Tales

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1978 by John Burke

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Jean, who helped conjure strange things from the forest.

  PART ONE

  THE BARRIER

  What has signs exists, and what has prophecies will come.

  —Fechner

  Buchlein Vom Leben nach dem Tode

  CHAPTER ONE

  The house stood in a fold of the valley half a mile from the village and divided from it by a meandering river. Beyond the western slope of the vale there rose in sombre cloud shapes the shoulders of the Black Mountains. In that sheltering arm, chequerwork of timber and plaster was sharply etched in black and white against soft blue-green background.

  Judith Brobury first set eyes on it one fine spring day in 1887, and could understand at once why it meant so much to the man who was soon to be her husband. Until this moment she had only once seen a trace of nervousness in him: when he proposed to her. Now he was again on edge. Bringing her to meet his parents, he was anxious that they should like her and she like them, but even more that she would like Ladygrove Manor. One day, when it fell on him to become Sir David, and she Lady Brobury, it would inevitably be their home.

  Not for a long while yet, she hoped. They had met in London; David worked hard and successfully in London; and they had already chosen the town house they would buy. Herefordshire, the village of Mockblane, and the manorial estate were too far away. Later she might be content with the remoteness and serenity of it all. For there was no denying at first glance its serenity and beauty.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said.

  David could not doubt the sincere note in her voice. He smiled, and took her hand; and the trap carried them down the hill and across the river to Ladygrove.

  On that first visit she was shy and as wishful as he was to please and be pleased. In return David’s father, Sir Mortimer, was extravagantly boisterous; while Lady Brobury, fluttery and shrill, made such an effort to put Judith at ease that she agitated everyone, starting impulsive sentences which remained unfinished, and appealing in fits and starts to her husband for confirmation of small points which clearly meant nothing whatsoever to him. They made an oddly matched couple. Sir Mortimer was domineering yet erratic, stumping off at a second’s notice and not reappearing until hours later

  ‘Somewhere on the estate,’ his wife would mutter. ‘Always up to something.’ One might have supposed that she resented his need to keep an eye on his staff and property and would have preferred him attentively at her side; yet, when he did sit with her she talked at random, often not looking at him, and rarely listening to him. Once he got up in the middle of one of her remarks and went out of the room, not in a temper but as if his mind had simply ceased to register the sound she was making and hurried off on its own concerns.

  But there was no denying their hospitality or their readiness to accept Judith. Sir Mortimer several times put his arm round Judith and squeezed her in a more than paternal manner. ‘Deuced good fortune some young chaps have these days. If I were twenty years younger.…’ He chuckled, and Judith wondered—half amused half ashamed at the thought—where he really went during some of those absences of his, and whether he really needed to lament not being twenty years younger. Lady Brobury, for her part, said, ‘Thought he was never going to settle down’, and asked Judith’s preferences for the flowerbeds, and talked at length about the rooms which would be set aside here for her and David, not so much signifying approval of their forthcoming marriage as taking it amiably for granted, and drawing her future daughter-in-law into the pattern of life at Ladygrove.

  Not yet, thought Judith.

  ‘Now, when you next come down, my dear.…’

  When she next came down, Judith was Mrs. David Brobury. Not a stranger to be welcomed and set at ease, but one of the family.

  She explored, hand in hand with David, the places he had loved best in childhood. ‘Margaret and I built a tree house in the wood here.’ Margaret was his elder sister, whom Judith had not met: living in Malaya, she was the wife of a government engineer doing something important somewhere in the Straits Settlements. David’s scattered references to her burgeoned into the picture of a brisk girl who had been sometimes dictatorial, sometimes derisive, but more often tomboyishly cooperative in his schemes and daydreams. ‘I built the house in that elm tree—my first architectural venture, I suppose you could call it—and Margaret furnished it, and we spent hours there making up stories and games. If one of us was in disgrace and went off out of sight, the other never came near the tree house. I knew Margaret would want to be left to herself. And she knew when I was there alone.’

  He took Judith’s arm and stumbled down with her into a bramble-choked hollow, pulling her close to shield her from scratches, and kissed her.

  ‘And did she stay away when you brought some pretty girl here?’

  The grip of his fingers into her arms was as painful as the brambles would have been. ‘I always knew there would have to be somebody like you to come and share all this with me. And now I’ve got you, and I was wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘There’s nobody like you.’

  They went together into the trimly clipped maze half hidden within a grove of oak and ash, between the river and a stream that had carved itself a way down from the hill behind the house. There were some cunning deceits between those yew hedges. Ten or twelve inches higher than the average man or woman, they nevertheless seemed to present no major obstacle—one could surely get one’s bearings by peeping through the twigs and interstices?—until one ventured inside. Then there were alleys that doubled back on themselves, and culs-de-sac tantalizingly finishing against the outer hedge or a thick inner clump. Once Judith chose a right turn while David went to the left: it took a great deal of retracing steps and hallooing before they came face to face again and she rushed into his arms.

  ‘Nobody,’ he said: ‘nobody like you in the whole world.’

  Once conquered, the ingenuities of the maze rarely perplexed again, Judith could soon find her way without fail to the crumbling ruin at its centre: the fragmentary wall of a small chapel, with a narrow stone outbuilding set against it, in a fair state of preservation.

  ‘All that’s left of an old priory,’ David had explained. ‘And in the Middle Ages there was a resident anchoress.’

  Judith shivered, imagining herself shut away from the world, summer and winter, in a self-imposed incarceration in this lonely valley.

  Only once, and that on first reaching it, did she duck her head and venture into the dank interior. There had presumably never been a doorway as such, but through the centuries some stones had collapsed and left an opening with a precarious lintel of two heavier blocks mortared together. The floor was covered with rubble, dried leaves, and lumps of fallen stone.

  Judith was glad to escape into the open air; glad to walk with David along the sweeter-smelling rides through the woods and out over expanses of parkland. One afternoon they saw Sir Mortimer in the distance and waved, but he affected not to notice and cantered away beyond the trees. Freed from the necessity of playing the host, he was now going about his own business with as casual an attitude towards his daughter-in-law
as towards his wife.

  Lady Brobury’s narrow face was wrenched by disdain every time he set out; and when he returned she would often stand close to him, like some suspicious teetotaller trying to smell a husband’s breath, and then turn away without a word. But they did not quarrel, any more than they showed warmth or shared a joke, an intimate memory, or affectionate smile. Nothing Lady Brobury said struck Sir Mortimer as worthy of notice. He interrupted her when he had something of his own to say; and when she chattered more swiftly as if at all costs to seize his attention, he blandly ignored her.

  Perhaps indifference was the normal, even preferable state after years of marriage?

  Judith refused to believe it. She was too much in love with her husband: more, much more in love than before they were wed.

  Yet, ready as she was to share David’s pleasure in Ladygrove, there were certain constraints beginning to trouble her in the house, in their bedroom.

  Those first nights after their wedding had been a breathtaking revelation. When he had courted her, her body had ached for his, but she had not fully understood the ache or its assuagement. At the instant of pain and ecstasy when his flesh first entered hers, she laughed first at the shock of it—laughed so that she would not have to cry—and then with exultation. When it was over she sank into a smug melancholy, sorrowing for women who were afraid, women who could not love, women who would never allow themselves to know this. And later, as the warmth came again and became raging heat again, she laughed again and did not care whether it was seemly or unseemly that she should let her husband know the intensity of her delight.

  In Ladygrove, in the still of the rural night, it was different. Her candid passion froze. Because his parents were under the same roof, perhaps awake, perhaps talking about them? It was absurd. Yet for Judith there was, under this roof, something out of true: out of tune. When David’s left arm crept round her shoulders and his right hand moved over her, she stiffened. His hand slowed, hesitated.

  ‘What is it, my love?’

  ‘Nothing.’ she said. And because she loved him, she made herself respond in a pretence that lovingly became almost real—real enough for him to be lovingly deceived.

  But she was glad they did not have to live here permanently.

  They came again; and again; rode to the village and rode over the hill to another village, on the railway line, and along the river valley and through the Brobury woods and pastures.

  They came for Christmas.

  It was bitterly cold and there had been snow a fortnight before, but now it had gone and there was a bleak stillness over the countryside. Log fires burned in the hall and dining room of Ladygrove Manor; the carter brought a fresh consignment of coal from the station; breath puffed in feathery gasps as David and Judith returned from a brisk walk to the invitation of firelight flickering through the tall windows of the terrace.

  Two nights after Christmas, warmed with wine and the desire in his gaze across the room, she lured him to bed early and drew him on her, wordless but wanton, so that he and not she was the one who cried out, and she clutched him and abandoned herself to him and what he was planting in her.

  For she was suddenly, senselessly, utterly sure that on this night she must have conceived.

  He slept. She turned over three or four times, tucking her chin under the sheet and blankets, feeling the cold on the tip of her nose, then burying her head, choking, and pulling herself out again. When at last she was comfortable, she was barely asleep, and did not really believe herself to be asleep when the dream began.

  She was walking towards the maze as she had done several times before. For some reason there was a darkness of shifting mist all about the grove, but the maze itself shone out as green and clear as ever in that inner glade. She went through the entrance as confidently as ever.

  Then she was halted. The way ahead was barred by a hedge, which she did not remember. It could not have been there before. Turning to the left, she was confronted by another barrier. To the right stretched a short avenue whose farther end must turn along another path, though she had no recollection of it. She took three steps along the avenue, and found another opening on her left: another cul-de-sac. At its end sat a carved stone statue, which she was positive had not been there on previous visits.

  She ought to turn back and find her way out of the maze, back to the house and back to bed.

  One part of Judith’s mind told her she was already in bed. She must force herself to wake up and break the dream. She pushed her arms outwards so that her fingers could brush against the smoothness of the sheet, and so that on one side she could touch David’s hunched, warm hip.

  Both hands scraped through leaves and twigs in the hedges to either side.

  The statue was as high as the hedge: a swollen woman of stone with a tiny head but vast, pendulous breasts, hips thrusting grossly out, and between the legs a voluptuously wide gash. The face was expressionless, with blind slits for eyes and a thin slit of a mouth.

  All at once she knew, without daring to look, that other faces were leering out of the yew to left and right, grimacing and urging her forward.

  And the stone statue ahead was no longer stone. The lips parted plump and slack. A stunted arm reached out for her, its solid hand opening into greedy claws. The heavy breasts swayed.

  ‘What do you want?’ Judith had to shout repudiation into the nightmare. But always in nightmare it is impossible to speak. ‘Why me—what do you want from me?’ She heard the strangled plea in her own head, but the creature neither heard nor understood. Instead, it slid from its slimy plinth and lurched to meet her. The claw would tear into her, tear life from her, squash it into that dripping maw.

  She gagged on a scream; and woke up.

  David’s arms were around her, he was holding her steady while she tried to thrash her way free. ‘What’s the matter? What is it, my dear—my dearest? Judith…where are you?’

  She was sobbing helplessly.

  ‘A dream,’ he soothed. ‘You must have had an awful dream.’

  ‘Yes. No. I mean…it was real.’

  ‘This is real.’ He stroked her hair and slid his hand between her shoulder blades, stroking rhythmically until her breathing slowed and she let herself sink back on the pillow. ‘What sort of dream—what was it about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ A fleeting horror dwindled into infinity down a long, long avenue of neatly clipped hedges. ‘I don’t remember.’

  She slept.

  In the morning she went resolutely to the maze, refusing David’s companionship. Whatever had caused the dream must be banished. Her own pride demanded that she walk to the heart of the maze, slowly, looking defiantly down every alley, and then walk back.

  She reached the opening and took one pace in.

  It was impossible to take a second.

  Judith stole a glance to her right. And one to her left. There were no new gaps, no grimacing faces. And straight ahead lay nothing but the familiar path which, she knew, would fork and then fork again. No puzzles; no terrors. There was no stony monster round that next corner waiting to come to life—waiting for her.

  Still she could not advance a step.

  The sun shone, the grove was bright and frozen under a steely December sky.

  ‘Let me in.’ She said it aloud. ‘I must see.’

  There was an invisible hand on her chest, holding her back. When she fought against it, as one would fight against a gust of wind, it thrust more forbiddingly and forced her to retreat.

  ‘I’m imagining it. It’s all part of the dream.’ Did she really say that aloud, or was it indeed part of her strangled, speechless dream?

  * * * *

  ‘But of course,’ said David jubilantly when they were back in London and, weeks later, she told him her news. ‘No wonder you were restless. All those weird ideas! I thought there might have been some food that disagreed with you. But now we know.’

  He waltzed her round the room until it seemed to her that the ga
s mantles so newly installed went into hissing, flickering protest. Next day he treated her like a fragile piece of china that might shatter if handled too roughly.

  ‘It’s so few weeks,’ Judith protested. ‘I’m in no need of coddling. And as for that nightmare in Ladygrove, I could hardly have been unsettled at such an early stage.…’

  That nightmare. That night. Could the moment of conception be so immediately devastating, throwing her so wildly off balance?

  She remembered—suddenly, vividly—that rapacious claw stabbing out to gouge her open and rob her.

  When the news of a coming grandchild was broken to David’s father and mother, there was a swift and unexpected result. Sir Mortimer came post-haste to London. Judith had assumed, a trifle gloomily, that she and David would be summoned to Ladygrove to talk about the future and a choice of names and layette and the best place for the accouchement. Instead, here was Sir Mortimer in their Marylebone home with a glass of brandy in one hand, a cigar in the other, and a troubled look in his red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘You won’t bring yourselves to Ladygrove before the child is born.’ It was a patrician order. For all his undeniable dignity, his hand shook. Judith wondered how many drinks he had poured into himself before arriving on their doorstep.

  David jibbed. ‘But father, I’d been counting on a true Ladygrove heir. Born on the premises, as they say.’

  ‘Stay where you are.’ Judith had never heard him so fierce and direct before. ‘Don’t expose him…to danger.’

  ‘Dr. Treharne up the valley is perfectly capable of—’

  ‘Damn Treharne. More important things to concern yourself with.’ Sir Mortimer turned a bleary but authoritative eye upon Judith. ‘You will lie in here—here in London. If you try to come to Ladygrove, I swear I won’t allow it.’

  Judith felt she should have protested, but was overwhelmed by a great, inexplicable relief. Recognizing her thankfulness, Sir Mortimer smirked over another brandy and then another, and a lazily lecherous gleam came into both bleary eyes and he pinched Judith’s bottom, and there was such a devilish love of life in his grin that she could only take the pinch as a compliment.