Horror Express Volume Two

by Bentley Little

  He stifled the urge the laugh as Sabrina followed him back out to the car, tailing him like a frightened child. Night was closing fast. Clive grabbed the torch from the boot and walked back to the vestibule. He switched the torch on and closed the door. At once a gloomy darkness settled around them. Suddenly it seemed like the lost soul screeching through the keyhole had been joined by some fellow denizens. Purposely Clive unlocked and pushed the main door which leads to the main hall. Sabrina moaned in fear. Even Clive felt a tinge of despair when he saw what lay before them. They were confronted with quickening dark. It seemed that the house hadn’t been looked after for some considerable amount of time. Neglected was the correct term.

  Bailey and Scott the solicitors based in Richmond had written to Clive and explained that it was the opinion of the local GP that Aunt Judith was clinically insane. Probably due to advanced syphilis. Hence the lack of electricity. She was described as suffering from an organic psychosis. But good god! Thought Clive, the place was thick with dust! Covered in cobwebs. It was like the lair of a giant arachnid. Some filthy beast that would make your skin crawl. In the gloom Clive made out loads of candles, some in candelabras, others thrust into bottles. It’s a miracle that the silly old hag hadn’t burned the place down like a pyre. He could have seen her committing suttee in a last act of madness. There was a smell, a miasma emanating from somewhere. It was like animals, a musty scent. But tinged with the aroma of putrefaction. Clive thought that if he concentrated on it too much he would begin to retch. What had she been doing?

  ‘There’s something evil about this place!’

  Sabrina’s voice was fragile, glass like almost. He almost agreed with her. But some of this was at least partly his fault. He had regaled Sabrina with a potted history of

  Craglin House. She yawned all the way through his lecture. He was only trying to pass the time. He then decided to talk about the resident ghosts. Legends really. Sabrina like all women was interested in all things psychic. He told her about Mad Lizzie or Dizzie Lizzie to some. Lizzie was an apparition of a Tudor servant girl who had empty black orbs instead of eyes. The story relates that an illustrious ancestor of Clive’s had, taken with bacchanalian intoxication, and then raped the servant girl. He had taken it upon himself to blind her by cutting out her eyes. There was never a reason given for that act of barbarity, unless it was symbolic. But the Borders always were a cruel region. He should have cut her tongue out. Lizzie died or committed suicide and took to wandering the upper corridors of the house during the dark early mornings. Grandpapa Ernest used to terrify the younglings by recounting his encounter with Lizzie at three in the morning one dark yuletide night.

  Retiring after a late night read in the library he had bumped into Lizzie on the main stairs. She offered him a loathly grin, eyeless face gazing at him. Grandpapa almost dropped the lamp he was clutching. He was found laughing his head off in nervous excitement back in the library after downing a couple whiskies. Also there was the drowned man. A former gamekeeper who was drowned and came back into the house, dripping with duckweed, looking to frighten the virgin females of the house. These tales were droll, if Clive were to be honest.

  Yet Clive can recall shivering under the covers with Nigel, waiting in the dark for mad Lizzie to materialise in front of them and begin wailing at in a ghastly voice. It didn’t help that their nanny Mary was from the Highlands of Scotland and used to tell them about the disembodied head that used to haunt the cross roads near her village. It would fly up to you and give chase. And if it touched you; next year you would die a horrific death. Clive produced his lighter and lit the candles to introduce some light. Yet this light offered no real illumination. It merely created a host of spindly sinister shadows. A darkness seemed to have enveloped the room, and the house. Clive noticed some sigils that had been scrawled on the wall. Daubed in some kind of a brown paste. He squirmed at the thought of it. It was crystal clear now; Judith really had suffered a geriatric mental breakdown. It had been on the cards for years.

  ‘She, she was a witch!’

  Sabrina stormed off into the mauve twilight. Clive stood numbed for a while and then followed her. She stood by the car in the rain, like a lost pet. They sat in the car in the dark. Clive had turned the radio on, nothing but malevolent static. Sabrina had insisted that they drive back to Scotch Corner and book into one of those ghastly hotels. Clive refused without hesitation. The hotel was about thirty to forty miles away. He probably didn’t have enough petrol to get them there. And for what? To dine with a bunch of travelling salesman? Three stars was not an option, not for the lord of the manor. He would rather sleep in the squalor of his paternal family’s ancestral pile. The Grimwade-Pow’s had been there since the middle ages as reivers and cattle rustlers. Then as merchants. Through to industrialists. A majority shareholder was their current modus operandi. And that was as it should be and ever shall be. Sabrina was sobbing in the car.

  ‘Sabrina! Let’s just attend the funeral. Then I can speak to the solicitors. And I promise I will whisk you off to that hotel you like in Edinburgh. The one on the royal mile. We can have a long weekend. It’s only up the road, over the border. You can go crazy with the credit card in Jenners?’

  Clive couldn’t really make out her facial expressions, but he knew that he would have to bribe her to make this work. He had to make this work. There was too much riding on this estate. Perhaps then he could just tell the silly bitch the truth. That she would have to downgrade to living in the flat in Chelsea. Lose the townhouse on Wimbledon Common. Cut up all her credit cards. Shop at the local supermarket. Live like the great unwashed.

  Things were not going well in the city. Let’s see how her fear of the supernatural holds when she is told about the repercussions of this deal not working. The land was useless, the house needed renovating. If the health club failed, it would be the end. It was all the fault of Sabrina’s sister. The one who lived in Paris. The bloody spiritualist hag feeding her mind with mumbo bloody jumbo.

  It was fortunate that Judith seemed to have taken to living in a feral manner in the front hall. The other rooms seemed have been unmolested. Well the library and late Aunt Amelia’s room. This was where they retired. Originally there were three Grimwade-Pow sisters. Each markedly different from the other. Amelia was the eldest, Robina in the middle and Judith as the baby. Amelia was by far the nicest; she had been a missionary and remained a spinster. Yet behind all the muscular Christianity there lurked a deeply warm person. She was a rabid vegetarian and seemed to be happiest when baking cakes for the National Trust of which she was a trustee. Thankfully Judith didn’t bequeath the estate to those vampires. Amelia filled everywhere with light. She was a tad eccentric and filled the house with cacti and succulents. None of which seemed to have remained. Robina was the only sister to have married. Her husband was a general in British India. When he died she returned to her ancestral birthplace. Her three daughters were spread out on all four continents, and rarely visited. Robina was very girlish, and musical. She loved opera and would sing at any given opportunity. Robina taught some of the local children to play the harpsichord.

  Amelia’s room though very dusty seemed to have been untouched by the insane filth of Judith. There was even the faintest smell of hellebore in the air; this was Amelia’s favourite scent. Luckily after inspection by candlelight and torch light, there seemed to be no strange sigils on the walls. He lit some more candles. The dust sheets looked eerie in the flickering gloom. Like classic shroud ghosts waiting to pounce. The room had been fitted in typical North Country manor house style. There was a picture of the triumvirate on the wall. Shot in sepia. Amelia had a stern but warm look. Robina looked coquettish. While a petulant Judith gazed grimly.

  Clive blew dust out of the glass that he had taken from the kitchen. The kitchen was somewhere that Judith had seemed to sometimes inhabit. He found the bottle of scotch in a cupboard. It was old, but had not been opened. God that tasted good. Clive swigged it down neat. He reckoned
the Pow’s used to make illicit whisky when they lived over the border. He had a taste for it. He had set up a whisky club in his final year at public school much to the chagrin of various other boys, who preferred wine. It became more popular if a bit rowdy. Clive refilled and passed the glass to Sabrina. He laughed, the ultimate snob grabbed the greasy glass and slugged down the Scotch, like a seasoned alcoholic. Clive poured another when she thrust the glass back to him. They both had another deep slug each.

  ‘We leave tomorrow after the solicitors and the funeral.’

  Clive nodded. He didn’t want to stick around. Admittedly in the gloom there was an unsettling feeling about the house. As though something had happened. It had never felt like that before. This was all to do with his nervous system of course. Stress from modern day existence. The wind was screeching through the spaces in the window sills in a most unnerving way. It sounded like a feeble old hag moaning in an evil mood. Sabrina jumped under the covers fully clothed. As though wanting to stay dressed in case she had to flee. She hadn’t offered Clive any of her sleeping tablets, which she washed down with another whisky. Clive unperturbed slipped into his pyjamas, and then rinsed his mouth out with an imperial measure of whisky. He swallowed it. Too bloody good to waste. He would have to find out about shaving and bathing in the morning.

  Sabrina was soon in an uneasy sleep. Clive lay on the bed listening to the wind. Wondering why he was here. Aunt Judith’s body had been found in the local church yard. She had apparently been trying to claw her way into a grave. Very macabre. This all happened in an inclement Cumbrian early morning. She had been found by the sextant, dressed in only a flimsy nightgown covered in mud and dirt. Judith’s corpse was discovered in a quiet unkempt part of the grave yard. On the eastern side. The sextant went straight to the local pub and ordered double dark rum. He then told them to call for an ambulance. He told them who it was. The village had expected it. There had been rumours abound for months about the spectral looking Judith roaming the byways in the dead of night. She feverously explained to people that she was enjoying the moon.

  But there had always been something odd about Judith. She never married. There had been family whispers about an illegitimate baby born to her who had swiftly been adopted. The father was reputed to have been a ne’er do well from the Bloomsbury set. She had even been a lover of a mad decadent who had a manor by the shores of Loch Ness. Apparently he was on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She had become a drug fiend by that stage. From there she went into mental decline. She stayed with Robina in India to try and recuperate, but decided to join some strange millennial orgiastic Buddhist cult. Judith only to be riddled with Syphilis. Robina sent her home lest her solid reputation be tarred completely. It seemed that the dark things in Judith’s past had kept pace with her, phantasms of her past misdeeds. And she had tried to seek relief in various ways. None worked and madness was the only conclusion. Insanity and slow suicide.

  Yet Clive had remembered his aunt as being an attractive woman. Chestnut haired and angular. There was something sultry about her. She had taken the mantle of being the black sheep of the family gladly. Seeking refuge with wizards and Bloomsbury decadents and then talking openly, unashamedly about her fin de sicle outrages at family picnics. Her last outrage about twenty years ago, the last time that Clive had seen her, was her fling with an Italian heroin addict. He died of an overdose. By this time Amelia called her the Witch of Endor. Or just the witch. Judith was sister no more to her.

  Morning came and the rain had not ceased its torrent for the arrival of dawn. In fact it seemed to get heavier as if to mock Clive’s sensibilities. The landlady of the local inn, Ms Wilton, had been very kind and allowed them both to use the bath in a spare room of the guest house. There, they bathed and attended to personal care and then changed into funereal clothing. Sadly the room was going to be taken later. A group of hill walkers doing the Pennine way. Clive could feel the pent up anger inside Sabrina. He hated her sometimes. She was so unreasonable. And it gave him intense satisfaction to say that they would be fine staying another night at the estate.

  A hearty carnivorous English breakfast cheered Clive up no end. Sabrina nibbled on some toast in passive aggressive stupor. Clive masticated on a locally produced Cumberland sausage and thought about the end of him and Sabrina when this whole incident had finished and the health farm was up and running. He knew about her affair with her yoga instructor. Such a cliché. Still he couldn’t pretend to be a saint. Not with his two year affair with Regina his secretary. A leggy 25 year old White Russian. Clive mused that he would be taking his solicitor out to lunch very soon. It would be a good time to write up a little petition.

  The funeral was sombre. Clive declined a private viewing before they screwed the coffin shut. He was feeling a little bit queasy after the breakfast mixed with the cocktail of out of sell by date whisky and purloined tranquillisers. It played havoc with his peptic ulcer. The sight of an emaciated dishevelled cadaver would tip him over the edge. They had kept her for six weeks in the mortuary at Carlisle because she had died during a cold snap, and there had been some confusion as to the actual time of death give or take a few days. It was routine in those circumstances. There were also concerns about why she had been neglected by social services. Clive and Nigel had of course tried to sort something out. But being busy men didn’t give them enough time to phone the health board. They had precious little time to go running about Cumbria and visit her. Clive would speak to my lawyer in due time.

  Duly the coffin was sealed and the remains contained. Farmer Haslett was the only other person in attendance during the service. Bar the vicar. They all stood in the rain and suffered the bite of the wind during the ceremony. The vicar didn’t really know what to say about Judith. What could he have said? God rest this crazed harlot. She was local gentry but of an unknown quantity. Aunt Amelia’s funeral had attracted most of the village. As had Robina’s.

  In the Red Cap Inn Clive had been greeted with some bad news. The solicitor from Bailey and Scott, a chap called Jervis couldn’t get into Craglin due to the bad weather. Flooding. He left a message with Ms Wilton saying that he would post the deeds to Clive and that they would arrive at Craglin House the next day. Special delivery by parcel. Clive was now legally laird of Craglin. But Clive hand wanted to speak to the solicitor face to face. He wanted to find out about what Nigel’s chances were of contesting the decision. Which he would. He was a Grimwade-Pow. Clive needed verbal reassurance that the deeds were watertight. Reading legal literature is so tedious.

  Haslett joined them for drinks in a snug in the Red Cap drinking to Judith’s memory. Clive pondered that Haslett was an okay sort. Obviously had bags of money. He had attended the funeral dressed as though he was going to a bullock auction. Tweed jacket and Wellingtons. He also smelled a bit pungent. Sabrina looked at him with an animated horror as though she was an ancient regime aristocrat confronted by a bloodthirsty peasant. Haslett though he’s a good egg. Acting as unpaid factor to the estate, was a jolly nice thing to do. Clive suddenly became suspicious. Perhaps Haslett wanted to do something with the land, and had some claim from an ancient parchment that had been forgotten since Norman times. He spoke to Clive.

  ‘I was a bit put out by the police. They come out to interview me. I was in the cow shed at the time. They asked me when I had last seen yer aunt. Well I hadn’t seen her for over a week. Aye not since I had tried to get her to fill up the generator again. The cold were setting in. But she looked queer. Wouldn’t let me in the house. They spoke like I were a murderer or summit.’

  He mumbled over his brown ale.

  Ah the generator! Thought Clive.

  Before long they were standing in the outhouse. Clive was trying to pretend to be a mechanically expert type of a guy. Not scared of getting his hands oily. Just like his brother the structural engineer. Haslett filled the generator with a few gallons of diesel and primed it. The whirring sound was very pleasing indeed.
/>   ‘Won't last long mind’

  Perhaps that’s why Judith had opted to go for candles from the local shop. She had also taken to eating cold tinned food. Clive wondered if she had any money hidden around the house. He would have to look. They waited in the outhouse for a while until the rain eased. Sabrina stayed in the car refusing to enter the house even in daylight.

  ‘Had trouble with the car last night?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Haslett smiled, ‘Well I was out in the tractor last night. About four in the morning. There was a little bit of moonlight and I was looking for a lost ewe. When I came past the manor I saw a figure from the road. Stood next to the car. They were glowing and sparkling. I thought it could have been your good self doing a spot of work on the car with a blow torch’

  Clive thought back. He was so out of it with exhaustion and stolen sleeping tablets that black void sleep and enveloped him. Sabrina had woken him at day break. Slapping him on the face. Neither had looked like they had been out prowling the grounds last night. Mud on their clothes and pneumonia would surely have been evidence of that.

  ‘No we were fast asleep.’

  Haslett smiled again ‘Mibbes it were the ghost of Dizzie Lizzie. The figure it was glowing.’

  With that he shook Clive’s hand and walked out into the tempest. He jumped into his tractor and drove off. Spewing fumes into the maelstrom. He was their nearest neighbour, four miles as the crow flies. Silly oik, thought Clive. He has probably on the supermarket brandy when he saw the figure. A reflection in the moonlight. A trick of the light. He probably takes those veterinary anaesthetics. Or it could be he really wanted to stake a claim to the land. Make out it was hexed so that he could stock it with his mangy sheep. Clive thought about getting a new factor for the estate when the work begun.

  At dusk Clive let Sabrina put the lights in the hall on. Only some of them. He didn’t know how long the power would last for. So they had to be frugal. Not go blazing every light in the house. Sabrina cursed him. He tried to placate her by lighting a fire. But the firewood was damp. Blankets had to suffice. Luckily it was wet but relatively mild. Clive checked out the kitchen again. He wasn’t brave enough to look into some of the kitchen offices and pantries. They looked too dark. He looked into the massive fridge. Not cleaned since Judith had dismissed the house keeper Mrs Kellie. The fridge stunk, as though something unspeakable had been kept in it. There probably had been. There was no food. Not even tinned food. Clive’s stomach rumbled. Sabrina was okay, she had bought some cigarettes in the machine in the inn. They would keep her hunger at bay. Not that she was a great eater. In solace Clive found two bottles of claret. He armed himself with a cork screw, slumped in a big chair and drank the claret sans glass. The rain continued its aquatic assault. Though at least the eerie wind had ceased. Sabrina had sequestered the other bottle of claret and sat in the corner, chain smoking and reading a woman’s magazine.