by E. C. Tubb
Murphy was saying the prayer for the dead.
Strangely, the doctor could feel nothing but relief.
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
The house was much as he remembered it, a tall, rambling structure set in its own grounds, a wildly-grown privet hedge shielding it from casual view. From the gates, rusted and sagging now, a curving drive swept to the porch, widening so as to circle a flower bed, once-brilliant with glowing colour but now ragged-edged and choked with weeds. Weeds, too, spotted the discoloured gravel of the drive, showed wetly green at the base of the walls and made a carpet where once carefully tended flowers had bloomed in military array.
Frank Denman slowed the car and, as the sound of the engine died into silence, stared at the house he remembered so well. It seemed smaller than it had. To a ten-year old it had appeared huge, monstrous, a man-made labyrinth of endless rooms and limitless gardens but the passage of twenty-five years had brought an altered perspective. Time had corrected his youthful impressions but, equally so, his memories corrected time.
The house had changed. Gone now were the lace curtains, the polished brass, the clean paint and stately walls. Now the windows were blank, grimed eyes, missing panes giving mute testimony to the local children’s penchant for destruction. Lichens had mottled the walls and long streamers of dampness made inverted triangles beneath the eaves. Stucco had cracked and fallen away revealing the ugly brick beneath, and cracked and flaking paint gave the house a scabrous appearance as if it were suffering from some exotic disease. But the disease was neglect and the cure was money. Frank knew that as he knew everything else about the house.
He left the car and stood on the gravel, the small stones crunching beneath his feet as he walked slowly towards the door. It was very quiet, the high hedge cutting the house off from the outside world so that even the rare traffic merely hummed like distant bees, remote and without real meaning. The sky was overcast, sullen grey clouds hiding the afternoon sun, and the subdued light and the stillness worked together to produce an eerie feeling as of not belonging to the world at all, but to a segment of it divorced from time.
Frank sighed, memories crowding into his brain with such force that he felt something close to guilt as he lit a cigarette. Twenty-five years ago he had lived in this house, the son of the widowed housekeeper, and the discipline that had been drilled into him then had never wholly been forgotten. Twenty-five years ago, a quarter of a century, a different time and a different age. War had come during that time and social upheaval which had almost eliminated class-consciousness. Those who had been poor were now rich and those who had owned the house and the land were dead in foreign graves or eking out a pitiful existence on minute incomes. Time had brought more than the turn of fortune’s wheel, it had brought an end to an entire way of life.
A faint breeze rustled the tall grass and rank weeds, tugging and pushing at the white-painted board that signalled that the house and grounds were for sale. Frank stared at it, half-wishing that he had made some investigations before visiting the place of his youth, then dismissed the notion almost as quickly as it had come. He was not here to buy the house or inspect it with a view to purchase. He was here because of nothing but sentiment, a half-formed desire to escape from normality into the past. A journey, he smiled as he thought of it, of sentiment. He stepped towards the door.
It was locked, of course, it would be. A great padlock joined two staples sunk into the door and jamb, the thick hasp and box-like lock seeming monstrous and ugly against the panelled door. Frank pushed at it, tugged then accepted the inevitable. If he wanted to see inside the house then entry would have to be by some other way.
Grass and weeds rustled beneath his feet and against his legs as he walked towards the rear of the house. The ground floor windows were shuttered from the inside, an elementary precaution to keep out unwanted guests but at the very rear of the house someone had broken the glass and forced open the shutters. A trump perhaps, or the local children intent on exploration. Frank didn’t know and he didn’t care. The opening permitted entry into the house.
He paused by it, letting his eyes drift over the wide lawns and solid oaks at the back of the house. The kitchen gardens were beyond hem, hidden from view, as were the potting and tool sheds, the greenhouses and compost heaps. Frank smiled as he recognised a tree. Boys, when young, worry little about class, and he and Edward, the boy who was to become Sir Edward, the eighteenth baronet, had often played together. They had climbed that very tree, carrying up scraps of wood and stolen tools to construct a shaky platform high among the upper branches and there, swaying to the summer breezes as they ate cake and hoarded sweets, Edward had boasted of the monster.
“We’ve got one,” he had said. “The De Clancy’s have always had a monster.”
“You’re it,” Frank had replied with a rudeness that would have earned him smarting ears had his mother been within earshot.
“It’s true,” insisted Edward. He was older than Frank by two years and a little impatient with the younger boy. “Some families have ghosts, you know, dead ancestors. Well, we’ve got better than an old ghost, we’ve got a monster.” He chewed on an apple. “Of course,” he continued, “Only very special families have ghosts, so we must be even more special to have a real monster.”
The class-consciousness was unintentional but it was there and Frank smarted under the inference that he was inferior.
“We’ve got a ghost,” he said weakly. “It’s the ghost of my great-great-great grandfather and he comes and talks with me sometimes.”
“You’re making it up,” accused Edward. “You aren’t really a family so you can’t have a ghost. You haven’t even got a house to keep it in.”
The truth was too obvious to argue. Frank changed the subject.
“I bet you haven’t got a monster,” he said. “It’s a story.”
“No it isn’t.” Edward threw aside the core of his apple. “Nurse told me years ago and when I asked my governess she said the same. It’s in the loft.”
“The loft?” Frank stared towards the house. “Right up under the roof, you mean?”
“That’s right.” Edward grinned with the sadistic cruelty of the young. “Right above where the servants sleep. You and your mother are servants so it’s right close to you.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Frank. “You’re trying to frighten me.”
“No I’m not.” Edward was enjoying himself. “Nurse told me when I wanted to go exploring one day. She said that if I went up into the loft the monster would get me.” He shivered. “She told me all about it, how it waited in the dark to catch small boys and eat them.” He looked gloatingly at Frank. “Mind it doesn’t catch you.”
“It won’t,” said Frank. “It can’t. There’s no way it can get out.” He was almost in tears.
“You’re frightened,” said Edward. “You’re crying.”
“No I’m not,” Frank wiped his eyes. Young as he was he felt that he had to prove himself to this scion of the rich. “I’m as brave as you are, braver. Tell you what, let’s go up in the loft now and look for your old monster.” He began to climb down the tree. “Let’s do it now.”
They hadn’t done it, of course. Frank’s mother had caught them sneaking through the kitchen and had first cuffed then washed her grimy son. Edward, being discovered by his governess, had missed the cuffing but had been ordered to the bath. Somehow the subject had never been resumed and Frank had never ventured into the loft.
He chuckled as he thought about it, feeling the superiority of maturity. The lie was almost too transparent the invention of a harassed nurse to keep her charge under control. The governess, who should have known better, had taken the easy way out in reaffirming it. A man-made bogy lurking in the dark, the invisible helpers of all who had too much imagination and too little patience.
Lightning flickered on the horizon and a soft roll of distant thunder stirred the sultry air. Frank glanced at the clouds then back at the house. He w
as still in the grip of the past, the nostalgia for his youth making it easy for him to ignore the approaching storm. Not that it mattered, he had his car and all the time he needed. He stepped through the broken window and entered the house.
It was dark inside but not too dark to see the effects of time and neglect. The rooms were bare, the paper peeling from the walls, the boards, once polished, now rough and warped. Litter disfigured the parquet, papers, scraps of wood, the debris from the flaking walls. Damp, the great enemy, had done its work well.
Frank paused in the hall, staring at the lighter splotches on the walls, remembering the heavy-framed portraits which had hung there in sombre array. Weak light filtered from the windows at the head of the stairs doing little more than thinning the shadows of the lower regions. Thunder rumbled again, nearer this time, and the tiny sounds of scampering rats echoed through the great house like the footsteps of people now long dead.
Frank shivered a little and began to regret his excursion. Better for him to have retained his memories instead of trying to convert them to reality. This empty mausoleum wasn’t the house he remembered, the house in which he had spent his youth. Then the rooms had been filled with soft furnishings, with soft lights reflecting from the walls and thick carpets deadening the sounds of feet. Now rats and damp, darkness and emptiness ruled in the place he had once held dear.
The main staircase swept like a waterfall of carved and polished wood towards the upper stories but he did not use it. Nostalgia sent him to the servants’ stairs, narrow and winding and heartbreakingly familiar. He remembered the way his mother had heaved herself up these very stairs, her face almost blue, her breath rasping as death closed around her. But she had not died on the stairs. She had died in her tiny room beneath the roof, lying white and haggard, as her final hours had slipped away into eternity. Frank, climbing the stairs, remembered how the undertakers had had to use the main staircase to bring down the coffin. He paused outside the door of what had been his mother’s room.
It was small, too small, and even now that it was bare and damp it was more familiar to him than any other part of the house. He stood at the door, furnishing it from memory. There had stood the old, brass-knobbed bed, there the chest of drawers, there the single chair, the small table, the wardrobe. He stepped forward and touched a jagged hole in the plaster, done in play when he was small. A rusted nail protruded, once the support for a framed marriage certificate, symbol of respectability, the white pattern on the dirty paper still to be seen.
Other rooms yielded their store of memories. His own, smaller even than that occupied by his mother. The larger one, which had been shared by the three housemaids. The oddly shaped one in which the butler, an enormously impressive, man, had sipped stolen port before falling into a semi-drunken slumber. They came back as he looked, all the people he had known, and their almost forgotten voices seemed to come alive again in the muted roll of the thunder and the soft sough of the wind.
He had left after his mother had died, shipped off to a charity boarding school until he had reached an age to become self-supporting. He had taken little with him, mementoes of his mother none, and it was hope that sent Frank towards the loft. He stood in the passage staring thoughtfully up at the big, black, trapdoor that closed off the final upper portions of the house. Servants, in the old days, had always been accompanied with a box to hold all their possessions. With no relative to claim it the box would have been stored and, as Frank knew, the storage place would have been the loft. Impatiently he searched for a ladder and mounted towards the trapdoor.
It yielded with a shower of dust which filled his eyes and made him cough, slamming back with a harsh grating of rusted hinges. Thunder rumbled, much louder than before, as he scrambled into the cavity beneath the roof. It was very dim, only a fitful light came from between the slates and from a skylight, almost opaque, which accumulated dirt. Boards had been laid across the joists thick with dust and weak with rot. Frank wiped the dust from his face and eyes, grimacing at his soiled handkerchief, then forgot his appearance as he looked about him.
His guess had been correct. Dim and vague m the pale lighting the shapes of forgotten things were visible. Some boxes, chests, a few broken chairs, a spinning wheel, a heap of books, a jumble of discarded odds and ends, stored perhaps, for later usage, but forgotten in the passage of time. Frank stared at an old-fashioned hat stand, a monstrous thing of some close-grained, highly polished wood, the feet splayed-and the crown branching into a confusion of spines. He had seen similar such racks before, established m men’s clubs, designed to support the caped and pleated topcoats, the silk hats of a bygone age.
The spines had been replaced by the more modern, utilitarian system of curving hooks but they had served their purpose, were still serving it for, hanging like musty rags against the dark sheen of the wood, clothes hung like forgotten signals of distress.
Frank turned away and began to rummage in the boxes. They yielded nothing of value, nothing even remotely familiar as having belonged to his mother. Old dresses, old aprons once starched and brilliant, now limp and yellowed scraps of cloth. He found an old hat, plumed and feathered and once the rage, now just a pathetic joke like an old man trying to act the boy. A fan of ostrich feathers, tattered and broken which had once fluttered proudly at many a ball, a faded photograph, the man stiff and whiskered, the woman shapeless and yet still beautiful. Frank recognised neither and let the photograph fall back into the box.
He turned as lightning seared through the dimness and thunder crashed around the house. The storm, distant at first, was now very close. It had grown darker than he had thought and the loft was filled with thick shadows so that even the objects close at hand seemed vague and unreal in the dying light. In such a place at such a time it was easy to believe in the reality of ghosts and, for some reason, the memory of Edward’s monster came to him.
Frank laughed, more to reassure himself than for any other reason. It was nonsense, of course, dangerous nonsense. A child, in the loft on such a day, his mind filled with the lies of ignorant servants, might have suffered tremendous shock.
Something moved in the dimness.
Frank felt his heart leap within his chest and his hands grew suddenly clammy and cold. He swallowed, his eyes straining to pierce the shadows then, as lightning streamed through the skylight, he saw what had frightened him. It was the old-fashioned hat rack, the suspended clothes bobbing on the spines, shapeless parodies of men. The splayed feet trailed the dust and, as it came closer, Frank could see what he hadn’t noticed before.
The wood wasn’t wood, the spines were more like barbed spears than rounded ends and, as the suspended garments bobbed from the movement, little white scraps fell to the boards.
The thunder drowned out his screams.
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