TALES FROM THE DEAD OF NIGHT

A beautiful antique that gives its owner a show he’d rather forget. A sinister masked ball with one too many guests. A ghost hunter whose exorcism goes horribly wrong. These are some of the classic tales of supernatural terror that will make you shiver, thrill and look under the bed tonight.

From rural England to colonial India, in murky haunted mansions and under modern electric lighting, thirteen master storytellers pull back the veil of everyday life to reveal the nightmares which lurk just out of sight. They are lessons in ingenuity and surprise, sometimes building slowly to a chilling climax, sometimes springing horror on you from the utterly ordinary.

And these stories are more than simply frightening – they are also unsettling revelations of loneliness, love, mortality and the human capacity for both evil and remorse.

We wish you pleasant dreams.

CECILY GAYFORD studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, and now works in publishing. Her interest in Gothic and supernatural literature extends from Horace Walpole to Hilary Mantel. She once saw a ghost in a hotel in Ecuador. She lives in London.

TALES FROM THE DEAD OF NIGHT

THIRTEEN CLASSIC GHOST STORIES

Selected by Cecily Gayford

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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This eBook edition published in 2013

Selection copyright © Cecily Gayford
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

‘The Crown Derby Plate’ © Estate of Majorie Bowen
‘The Cotillon’ © Estate of L. P. Hartley
‘The Black Veil’ © Chico Kidd
‘The Haunting of Shawley Rectory’ © Ruth Rendell

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eISBN 978 1 84765 982 8

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Two travellers sat alone in a train carriage.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ asked one, by way
of conversation.

‘Yes’, said the other, and vanished.

Anon.

CONTENTS

E. NESBIT

(1858–1924)

Best known now as the author of The Railway Children, Edith Nesbit was in her lifetime a formidable, and formidably eccentric, woman. She was a founder of the socialist Fabian Society, where she formed close relationships with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as a writer of short stories, novels and poems and a mother to five children (two of whom were the illegitimate offspring of her husband, Hubert Bland). She was also intensely interested in the supernatural: there are suggestions that she was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where her fellow initiates included W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and the occultist Aleister Crowley, and she complained that Well Hall, where she wrote her most famous stories for children, was haunted by a ghost who sighed over her shoulder as she worked.

THE SHADOW

THIS IS NOT an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects – no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story.

There were three of us and another, but she had fainted suddenly at the second extra of the Christmas dance, and had been put to bed in the dressing room next to the room which we three shared. It had been one of those jolly, old-fashioned dances where nearly everybody stays the night, and the big country house is stretched to its utmost containing – guests harbouring on sofas, couches, settles and even mattresses on floors. Some of the young men actually, I believe, slept on the great dining table. We had talked of our partners, as girls will, and then the stillness of the manor house, broken only by the whisper of the wind in the cedar branches, and the scraping of their harsh fingers against our windowpanes, had pricked us to such luxurious confidence in our surroundings of bright chintz and candle-flame and firelight, that we had dared to talk of ghosts – in which, we all said, we did not believe one bit. We had told the story of the phantom coach, and the horribly strange bed, and the lady in the sacque, and the house in Berkeley Square.

We none of us believed in ghosts, but my heart, at least, seemed to leap to my throat and choke me there when a tap came to our door – a tap faint, not to be mistaken.

‘Who’s there?’ said the youngest of us, craning a lean neck towards the door. It opened slowly, and I give you my word the instant of suspense that followed is still reckoned among my life’s least confident moments. Almost at once the door opened fully, and Miss Eastwich, my aunt’s housekeeper, companion and general stand-by, looked in on us.

We all said, ‘Come in,’ but she stood there. She was, at all normal hours, the most silent woman I have ever known. She stood and looked at us, and shivered a little. So did we – for in those days corridors were not warmed by hot-water pipes and the air from the door was keen.

‘I saw your light,’ she said at last, ‘and I thought it was late for you to be up – after all this gaiety. I thought perhaps –’ her glance turned towards the door of the dressing room.

‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s fast asleep.’ I should have added a goodnight, but the youngest of us forestalled my speech. She did not know Miss Eastwich as we others did; did not know how her persistent silence had built a wall round her – a wall that no one dared to break down with the commonplaces of talk, or the littlenesses of mere human relationship. Miss Eastwich’s silence had taught us to treat her as a machine; and as other than a machine we never dreamed of treating her. But the youngest of us had seen Miss Eastwich for the first time that day. She was young, crude, ill-balanced, subject to blind, calf-like impulses. She was also the heiress of a rich tallow-chandler, but that has nothing to do with this part of the story. She jumped up from the hearth rug, her unsuitably rich silk lace-trimmed dressing gown falling back from her thin collarbones, and ran to the door and put an arm round Miss Eastwich’s prim, lisse-encircled neck. I gasped. I should as soon have dared to embrace Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Come in,’ said the youngest of us – ‘come in and get warm. There’s lots of cocoa left.’ She drew Miss Eastwich in and shut the door.

The vivid light of pleasure in the housekeeper’s pale eyes went through my heart like a knife. It would have been so easy to put an arm round her neck, if one had only thought she wanted an arm there. But it was not I who had thought that – and indeed, my arm might not have brought the light evoked by the thin arm of the youngest of us.

‘Now,’ the youngest went on eagerly, ‘you shall have the very biggest, nicest chair, and the cocoa pot’s here on the hob as hot as hot – and we’ve all been telling ghost stories, only we don’t believe in them a bit; and when you get warm you ought to tell one too.’

Miss Eastwich – that model of decorum and decently done duties – tell a ghost story!

‘You’re sure I’m not in your way,’ Miss Eastwich said, stretching her hands to the blaze. I wondered whether housekeepers have fires in their rooms even at Christmas time. ‘Not a bit,’ I said it, and I hope I said it as warmly as I felt it. ‘I – Miss Eastwich – I’d have asked you to come in other times – only I didn’t think you’d care for girls’ chatter.’

The third girl, who was really of no account, and that’s why I have not said anything about her before, poured cocoa for our guest. I put my fleecy Madeira shawl round her shoulders. I could not think of anything else to do for her and I found myself wishing desperately to do something. The smiles she gave us were quite pretty. People can smile prettily at forty or fifty, or even later, though girls don’t realise this. It occurred to me, and this was another knife thrust, that I had never seen Miss Eastwich smile – a real smile – before. The pale smiles of dutiful acquiescence were not of the same blood as this dimpling, happy, transfiguring look.

‘This is very pleasant,’ she said, and it seemed to me that I had never before heard her real voice. It did not please me to think that at the cost of cocoa, a fire, and my arm round her neck, I might have heard this new voice any time these six years.

‘We’ve been telling ghost stories,’ I said. ‘The worst of it is, we don’t believe in ghosts. No one we know has ever seen one.’

‘It’s always what somebody told somebody, who told somebody you know,’ said the youngest of us, ‘and you can’t believe that, can you?’

‘What the soldier said is not evidence,’ said Miss Eastwich. Will it be believed that the little Dickens quotation pierced one more keenly than the new smile or the new voice?

‘And all the ghost stories are so beautifully rounded off – a murder committed on the spot – or a hidden treasure, or a warning … I think that makes them harder to believe. The most horrid ghost story I ever heard was one that was quite silly.’

‘Tell it.’

‘I can’t – it doesn’t sound anything to tell. Miss Eastwich ought to tell one.’

‘Oh, do,’ said the youngest of us, and her salt cellars loomed dark, as she stretched her neck eagerly and laid an entreating arm on our guest’s knee.

‘The only thing that I ever knew of was – was hearsay,’ she said slowly, ‘till just the end.’

I knew she would tell her story, and I knew she had never before told it, and I knew she was only telling it now because she was proud, and this seemed the only way to pay for the fire and the cocoa and the laying of that arm round her neck.

‘Don’t tell it,’ I said suddenly. ‘I know you’d rather not.’

‘I dare say it would bore you,’ she said meekly, and the youngest of us, who, after all, did not understand everything, glared resentfully at me.

‘We should just love it,’ she said. ‘Do tell us. Never mind if it isn’t a real, proper, fixed-up story. I’m certain anything you think ghostly would be quite too beautifully horrid for anything.’

Miss Eastwich finished her cocoa and reached up to set the cup on the mantelpiece.

‘I can’t do any harm,’ she said half to herself, ‘they don’t believe in ghosts, and it wasn’t exactly a ghost either. And they’re all over twenty – they’re not babies.’

There was a breathing time of hush and expectancy. The fire crackled and the gas suddenly glared higher because the billiard lights had been put out. We heard the steps and voices of the men going along the corridors.

‘It is really hardly worth telling,’ Miss Eastwich said doubtfully, shading her faded face from the fire with her thin hand.

We all said, ‘Go on – oh, go on – do!’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘twenty years ago – and more than that – I had two friends, and I loved them more than anything in the world. And they married each other –’

She paused, and I knew just in what way she had loved each of them. The youngest of us said, ‘How awfully nice for you. Do go on.’

She patted the youngest’s shoulder, and I was glad that I had understood, and that the youngest of all hadn’t. She went on.

‘Well, after they were married, I did not see much of them for a year or two; and then he wrote and asked me to come and stay, because his wife was ill, and I should cheer her up, and cheer him up as well; for it was a gloomy house, and he himself was growing gloomy too.’

I knew, as she spoke, that she had every line of that letter by heart.

‘Well, I went. The address was in Lee, near London; in those days there were streets and streets of new villa houses growing up round old brick mansions standing in their own grounds, with red walls round, you know, and a sort of flavour of coaching days, and post-chaises, and Blackheath highwaymen about them. He had said the house was gloomy, and it was called The Firs, and I imagined my cab going through a dark, winding shrubbery, and drawing up in front of one of these sedate, old, square houses. Instead, we drew up in front of a large, smart villa, with iron railings, gay encaustic tiles leading from the iron gate to the stained-glass-panelled door, and for shrubbery only a few stunted cypresses and aucubas in the tiny front garden. But inside it was all warm and welcoming. He met me at the door.’

She was gazing into the fire and I knew she had forgotten us. But the youngest girl of all still thought it was to us she was telling her story.

‘He met me at the door,’ she said again, ‘and thanked me for coming, and asked me to forgive the past.’

‘What past?’ said that high priestess of the inàpropos, the youngest of all.

‘Oh – I suppose he meant because they hadn’t invited me before, or something,’ said Miss Eastwich worriedly, ‘but it’s a very dull story, I find, after all, and –’

‘Do go on,’ I said – then I kicked the youngest of us, and got up to rearrange Miss Eastwich’s shawl, and said in blatant dumb show, over the shawled shoulder, ‘Shut up, you little idiot!’

After another silence, the housekeeper’s new voice went on.

‘They were very glad to see me and I was very glad to be there. You girls, now, have such troops of friends, but these two were all I had – all I had ever had. Mabel wasn’t exactly ill, only weak and excitable. I thought he seemed more ill than she did. She went to bed early and before she went, she asked me to keep him company through his last pipe, so we went into the dining room and sat in the two armchairs on each side of the fireplace. They were covered with green leather, I remember. There were bronze groups of horses and a black marble clock on the mantelpiece – all wedding presents. He poured out some whisky for himself, but he hardly touched it. He sat looking into the fire.

At last I said, “What’s wrong? Mabel looks as well as you could expect.”

‘He said, “Yes – but I don’t know from one day to another that she won’t begin to notice something wrong. That’s why I wanted you to come. You were always so sensible and strong-minded, and Mabel’s like a little bird on a flower.”

‘I said yes, of course, and waited for him to go on. I thought he must be in debt, or in trouble of some sort. So I just waited. Presently he said, “Margaret, this is a very peculiar house –” He always called me Margaret. You see, we’d been such old friends. I told him I thought the house was very pretty, and fresh, and home-like – only a little too new – but that fault would mend with time. He said, “It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Margaret, I should think it was haunted.”

‘I asked if he had seen anything. “No,” he said, “not yet.”

‘“Heard then?” said I.

‘“No – not heard either,” he said, “but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it – I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about – only when I turn round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute – but I never do – not quite – it’s always just not visible.”

‘I thought he’d been working rather hard – and tried to cheer him up by making light of all this. It was just nerves, I said. Then he said he had thought I could help him, and did I think anyone he had wronged could have laid a curse on him, and did I believe in curses. I said I didn’t – and the only person anyone could have said he had wronged forgave him freely, I knew, if there was anything to forgive. So I told him this too.’

It was I, not the youngest of us, who knew the name of that person, wronged and forgiving.

‘So then I said he ought to take Mabel away from the house and have a complete change. But he said no; Mabel had got everything in order, and he could never manage to get her away just now without explaining everything – “and, above all,” he said, “she mustn’t guess there’s anything wrong. I dare say I shan’t feel quite such a lunatic now you’re here.”

‘So we said goodnight.’

‘Is that all the story!’ said the third girl, striving to convey that even as it stood it was a good story.

‘That’s only the beginning,’ said Miss Eastwich. ‘Whenever I was alone with him he used to tell me the same thing over and over again, and at first when I began to notice things, I tried to think that it was his talk that had upset my nerves. The odd thing was that it wasn’t only at night – but in broad daylight – and particularly on the stairs and passages. On the staircase the feeling used to be so awful that I have had to bite my lips till they bled to keep myself from running upstairs at full speed. Only I knew if I did I should go mad at the top. There was always something behind me – exactly as he had said – something that one could just not see. And a sound that one could just not hear. There was a long corridor at the top of the house. I have sometimes almost seen something – you know how one sees things without looking – but if I turned round, it seemed as if the thing drooped and melted into my shadow. There was a little window at the end of the corridor.

‘Downstairs there was another corridor, something like it, with a cupboard at one end and the kitchen at the other. One night I went down into the kitchen to heat some milk for Mabel. The servants had gone to bed. As I stood by the fire, waiting for the milk to boil, I glanced through the open door and along the passage. I never could keep my eyes on what I was doing in that house. The cupboard door was partly open; they used to keep empty boxes and things in it. And, as I looked, I knew that now it was not going to be “almost” any more. Yet I said, “Mabel?” not because I thought it could be Mabel who was crouching down there, half in and half out of the cupboard. The thing was grey at first, and then it was black. And when I whispered, “Mabel”, it seemed to sink down till it lay like a pool of ink on the floor, and then its edges drew in, and it seemed to flow, like ink when you tilt up the paper you have spilt it on, and it flowed into the cupboard till it was all gathered into the shadow there. I saw it go quite plainly. The gas was full on in the kitchen. I screamed aloud, but even then, I’m thankful to say, I had enough sense to upset the boiling milk, so that when he came downstairs three steps at a time, I had the excuse for my scream of a scalded hand. The explanation satisfied Mabel, but next night he said, “Why didn’t you tell me? It was that cupboard. All the horror of the house comes out of that. Tell me – have you seen anything yet? Or is it only the nearly seeing and nearly hearing still?”

‘I said, “You must tell me first what you’ve seen.” He told me, and his eyes wandered, as he spoke, to the shadows by the curtains, and I turned up all three gas lights, and lit the candles on the mantelpiece. Then we looked at each other and said we were both mad, and thanked God that Mabel at least was sane. For what he had seen was what I had seen.

‘After that I hated to be alone with a shadow, because at any moment I might see something that would crouch, and sink, and lie like a black pool, and then slowly draw itself into the shadow that was nearest. Often that shadow was my own. The thing came first at night, but afterwards there was no hour safe from it. I saw it at dawn and at noon, in the dusk and in the firelight, and always it crouched and sank, and was a pool that flowed into some shadow and became part of it. And always I saw it with a straining of the eyes – a pricking and aching. It seemed as though I could only just see it, as if my sight, to see it, had to be strained to the uttermost. And still the sound was in the house – the sound that I could just not hear. At last, one morning early, I did hear it. It was close behind me, and it was only a sigh. It was worse than the thing that crept into the shadows.

‘I don’t know how I bore it. I couldn’t have borne it, if I hadn’t been so fond of them both. But I knew in my heart that, if he had no one to whom he could speak openly, he would go mad, or tell Mabel. His was not a very strong character; very sweet, and kind, and gentle, but not strong. He was always easily led. So I stayed on and bore up, and we were very cheerful, and made little jokes, and tried to be amusing when Mabel was with us. But when we were alone, we did not try to be amusing. And sometimes a day or two would go by without our seeing or hearing anything, and we should perhaps have fancied that we had fancied what we had seen and heard – only there was always the feeling of there being something about the house, that one could just not hear and not see. Sometimes we used to try not to talk about it, but generally we talked of nothing else at all. And the weeks went by, and Mabel’s baby was born. The nurse and the doctor said that both mother and child were doing well. He and I sat late in the dining room that night. We had neither of us seen or heard anything for three days; our anxiety about Mabel was lessened. We talked of the future – it seemed then so much brighter than the past. We arranged that, the moment she was fit to be moved, he should take her away to the sea, and I should superintend the moving of their furniture into the new house he had already chosen. He was gayer than I had seen him since his marriage – almost like his old self. When I said goodnight to him, he said a lot of things about my having been a comfort to them both. I hadn’t done anything much, of course, but still I am glad he said them.

‘Then I went upstairs, almost for the first time without that feeling of something following me. I listened at Mabel’s door. Everything was quiet. I went on towards my own room, and in an instant I felt that there was something behind me. I turned. It was crouching there; it sank, and the black fluidness of it seemed to be sucked under the door of Mabel’s room.

‘I went back. I opened the door a listening inch. All was still. And then I heard a sigh close behind me. I opened the door and went in. The nurse and the baby were asleep. Mabel was asleep too – she looked so pretty – like a tired child – the baby was cuddled up into one of her arms with its tiny head against her side. I prayed then that Mabel might never know the terrors that he and I had known. That those little ears might never hear any but pretty sounds, those clear eyes never see any but pretty sights. I did not dare to pray for a long time after that. Because my prayer was answered. She never saw, never heard anything more in this world. And now I could do nothing more for him or for her.

‘When they had put her in her coffin, I lighted wax candles round her, and laid the horrible white flowers that people will send near her, and then I saw he had followed me. I took his hand to lead him away.

‘At the door we both turned. It seemed to us that we heard a sigh. He would have sprung to her side in I don’t know what mad, glad hope. But at that instant we both saw it. Between us and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquefied – and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow. And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Mabel’s coffin. I left the next day. His mother came. She had never liked me.’

Miss Eastwich paused. I think she had quite forgotten us.

‘Didn’t you see him again?’ asked the youngest of us all.

‘Only once,’ Miss Eastwich answered, ‘and something black crouched then between him and me. But it was only his second wife, crying beside his coffin. It’s not a cheerful story, is it? And it doesn’t lead anywhere. I’ve never told anyone else. I think it was seeing his daughter that brought it all back.’

She looked towards the dressing-room door.

‘Mabel’s baby?’

‘Yes – and exactly like Mabel, only with his eyes.’

The youngest of all had Miss Eastwich’s hands and was petting them.

Suddenly the woman wrenched her hands away and stood at her gaunt height, her hands clenched, eyes straining. She was looking at something that we could not see, and I know what the man in the Bible meant when he said, ‘The hair of my flesh stood up.’

What she saw seemed not quite to reach the height of the dressing-room door handle. Her eyes followed it down, down – widening and widening. Mine followed them – all the nerves of them seemed strained to the uttermost – and I almost saw – or did I quite see? I can’t be certain. But we all heard the long-drawn, quivering sigh. And to each of us it seemed to be breathed just behind us.

It was I who caught up the candle – it dripped all over my trembling hand – and was dragged by Miss Eastwich to the girl who had fainted during the second extra. But it was the youngest of all whose lean arms were round the housekeeper when we turned away, and that have been round her many a time since, in the new home where she keeps house for the youngest of us.

The doctor who came in the morning said that Mabel’s daughter had died of heart disease – which she had inherited from her mother. It was that that had made her faint during the second extra. But I have sometimes wondered whether she may not have inherited something from her father. I had never been able to forget the look on her dead face.

W. F. HARVEY

(1885–1937)

Born into a wealthy Quaker family, William Fryer Harvey enjoyed an idyllic childhood on the edge of Ilkley Moor. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford, and taking a medical degree at Leeds University, he travelled around the world; on his return his first book of short stories, Midnight House, was published. At the outbreak of war he joined the Friends’ Ambulance Service and served in Ypres on the Western Front and then with the Royal Navy as a surgeon-lieutenant. He was awarded the Albert Medal for Lifesaving after an accident at Scapa Flow in which he amputated the arm of a stoker trapped below decks in the foundering ship. Smoke inhalation sustained during the rescue damaged his lungs permanently; his ghost stories, of which the most famous remains ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, were written at a sanatorium in Switzerland where he lived for much of his later life. Suffering from homesickness, he returned to England in 1937, and died at Letchworth.

THE CLOCK

I LIKED YOUR DESCRIPTION of the people at the pension. I can just picture that rather sinister Miss Cornelius, with her toupee and clinking bangles. I don’t wonder you felt frightened that night when you found her sleepwalking in the corridor. But after all, why shouldn’t she sleepwalk? As to the movements of the furniture in the lounge on the Sunday, you are, I suppose, in an earthquake zone, though an earthquake seems too big an explanation for the ringing of that little handbell on the mantelpiece. It’s rather as if our parlourmaid – another new one! – were to call a stray elephant to account for the teapot we found broken yesterday. You have at least escaped the eternal problem of maids in Italy.

Yes, my dear, I most certainly believe you. I have never had experiences quite like yours, but your mention of Miss Cornelius has reminded me of something rather similar that happened nearly twenty years ago, soon after I left school. I was staying with my aunt in Hampstead. You remember her, I expect; or, if not her, the poodle, Monsieur, that she used to make perform such pathetic tricks. There was another guest, whom I had never met before, a Mrs Caleb. She lived in Lewes and had been staying with my aunt for about a fortnight, recuperating after a series of domestic upheavals, which had culminated in her two servants leaving her at an hour’s notice, without any reason, according to Mrs Caleb; but I wondered. I had never seen the maids; I had seen Mrs Caleb and, frankly, I disliked her. She left the same sort of impression on me as I gather your Miss Cornelius leaves on you – something queer and secretive; underground, if you can use the expression, rather than underhand. And I could feel in my body that she did not like me.

It was summer. Joan Denton – you remember her; her husband was killed in Gallipoli – had suggested that I should go down to spend the day with her. Her people had rented a little cottage some three miles out of Lewes. We arranged a day. It was gloriously fine for a wonder, and I had planned to leave that stuffy old Hampstead house before the old ladies were astir. But Mrs Caleb waylaid me in the hall, just as I was going out.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘I wonder if you could do me a small favour. If you do have any time to spare in Lewes – only if you do – would you be so kind as to call at my house? I left a little travelling clock there in the hurry of parting. If it’s not in the drawing room, it will be in my bedroom or in one of the maids’ bedrooms. I know I lent it to the cook, who was a poor riser, but I can’t remember if she returned it. Would it be too much to ask? The house has been locked up for twelve days, but everything is in order. I have the keys here; the large one is for the garden gate, the small one for the front door.’

I could only accept, and she proceeded to tell me how I could find Ash Grove House.

‘You will feel quite like a burglar,’ she said. ‘But mind, it’s only if you have time to spare.’

As a matter of fact I found myself glad of any excuse to kill time. Poor old Joan had been taken suddenly ill in the night – they feared appendicitis – and though her people were very kind and asked me to stay to lunch, I could see that I should only be in the way, and made Mrs Caleb’s commission an excuse for an early departure.

I found Ash Grove without difficulty. It was a mediumsized red-brick house, standing by itself in a high-walled garden that bounded a narrow lane. A flagged path led from the gate to the front door, in front of which grew, not an ash, but a monkey puzzle, that must have made the rooms unnecessarily gloomy. The side door, as I expected, was locked. The dining room and drawing room lay on either side of the hall and, as the windows of both were shuttered, I left the hall door open, and in the dim light looked round hurriedly for the clock, which, from what Mrs Caleb had said, I hardly expected to find in either of the downstairs rooms. It was neither on table nor mantelpiece. The rest of the furniture was carefully covered over with white dustsheets. Then I went upstairs. But, before doing so, I closed the front door. I did in fact feel rather like a burglar, and I thought that if anyone did happen to see the front door open, I might have difficulty in explaining things. Happily the upstairs windows were not shuttered. I made a hurried search of the principal bedrooms. They had been left in apple-pie order; nothing was out of place; but there was no sign of Mrs Caleb’s clock. The impression that the house gave me – you know the sense of personality that a house conveys – was neither pleasing nor displeasing, but it was stuffy, stuffy from the absence of fresh air, with an additional stuffiness added that seemed to come out from the hangings and quilts and antimacassars. The corridor, on to which the bedrooms I had examined opened, communicated with a smaller wing, an older part of the house, I imagined, which contained a box room and the maids’ sleeping quarters. The last door that I unlocked – (I should say that the doors of all the rooms were locked, and relocked by me after I had glanced inside them) – contained the object of my search. Mrs Caleb’s travelling clock was on the mantelpiece, ticking away merrily.

That was how I thought of it at first. And then for the first time I realised that there was something wrong. The clock had no business to be ticking. The house had been shut up for twelve days. No one had come in to air it or to light fires. I remembered how Mrs Caleb had told my aunt that if she left the keys with a neighbour, she was never sure who might get hold of them. And yet the clock was going. I wondered if some vibration had set the mechanism in motion, and pulled out my watch to see the time. It was five minutes to one. The clock on the mantelpiece said four minutes to the hour. Then, without quite knowing why, I shut the door on to the landing, locked myself in, and again looked round the room. Nothing was out of place. The only thing that might have called for remark was that there appeared to be a slight indentation on the pillow and the bed; but the mattress was a feather mattress, and you know how difficult it is to make them perfectly smooth. You won’t need to be told that I gave a hurried glance under the bed – do you remember your supposed burglar in Number Six at St Ursula’s? – and then, and much more reluctantly, opened the doors of two horribly capacious cupboards, both happily empty, except for a framed text with its face to the wall. By this time I really was frightened. The clock went ticking on. I had a horrible feeling that an alarm might go off at any moment, and the thought of being in that empty house was almost too much for me. However, I made an attempt to pull myself together. It might after all be a fourteen-day clock. If it were, then it would be almost run down. I could roughly find out how long the clock had been going by winding it up. I hesitated to put the matter to the test; but the uncertainty was too much for me. I took it out of its case and began to wind. I had scarcely turned the winding screw twice when it stopped. The clock clearly was not running down; the hands had been set in motion probably only an hour or two before. I felt cold and faint and, going to the window, threw up the sash, letting in the sweet, live air of the garden. I knew now that the house was queer, horribly queer. Could someone be living in the house? Was someone else in the house now? I thought that I had been in all the rooms, but had I? I had only just opened the bathroom door, and I had certainly not opened any cupboards, except those in the room in which I was. Then, as I stood by the open window, wondering what I should do next and feeling that I just couldn’t go down that corridor into the darkened hall to fumble at the latch of the front door with I don’t know what behind me, I heard a noise. It was very faint at first, and seemed to be coming from the stairs. It was a curious noise – not the noise of anyone climbing up the stairs, but – you will laugh if this letter reaches you by a morning post – of something hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop. I heard it on the landing; it stopped. Then there was a curious scratching noise against one of the bedroom doors, the sort of noise you can make with the nail of your little finger scratching polished wood. Whatever it was was coming slowly down the corridor, scratching at the doors as it went. I could stand it no longer. Nightmare pictures of locked doors opening filled my brain. I took up the clock, wrapped it in my mackintosh, and dropped it out of the window on to a flowerbed. Then I managed to crawl out of the window and, getting a grip of the sill, ‘successfully negotiated’, as the journalists would say, ‘a twelve-foot drop’. So much for our much abused gym at St Ursula’s. Picking up the mackintosh, I ran round to the front door and locked it. Then I felt I could breathe, but not until I was on the far side of the gate in the garden wall did I feel safe.

Then I remembered that the bedroom window was open. What was I to do? Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me into that house again unaccompanied. I made up my mind to go to the police station and tell them everything. I should be laughed at, of course, and they might easily refuse to believe my story of Mrs Caleb’s commission. I had actually begun to walk down the lane in the direction of the town, when I chanced to look back at the house. The window that I had left open was shut.

No, my dear, I didn’t see any face or anything dreadful like that … and, of course, it may have shut by itself. It was an ordinary sash window, and you know they are often difficult to keep open.

And the rest? Why, there’s really nothing more to tell. I didn’t even see Mrs Caleb again. She had had some sort of fainting fit just before lunchtime, my aunt informed me on my return, and had had to go to bed. Next morning I travelled down to Cornwall to join mother and the children. I thought I had forgotten all about it, but when three years later Uncle Charles suggested giving me a travelling clock for a twenty-first birthday present, I was foolish enough to prefer the alternative that he offered, a collected edition of the works of Thomas Carlyle.

E. F. BENSON

(1867–1940)

The novelist Edward Frederic ‘Fred’ Benson is best known now for his ‘Mapp and Lucia’ series. The son of the fearsome Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson, as a young man he was a friend of Oscar Wilde, a keen archaeologist – at one point accompanying Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, on a trip to the pyramids – and a champion figure skater. During the First World War he was sent to Capri to report on the morale of the Italian civilians; the Foreign Office described his reports as ‘preposterous’. Written near the end of his life, ‘Pirates’ is set in a version of Lis Escop, the Bensons’ family home in Truro (where a young M. R. James often visited his school friend, Benson’s older brother Arthur). Benson’s fond memories of his childhood gave way to sadness in adulthood: two of his siblings died young, while another two struggled with a family tendency to severe depression. It is perhaps not surprising that ‘Pirates’ so powerfully evokes a desire for reconciliation and the simplicity and joy of youth restored in age.

PIRATES

FOR MANY YEARS this project of sometime buying back the house had simmered in Peter Graham’s mind, but whenever he actually went into the idea with practical intention, stubborn reasons had presented themselves to deter him. In the first place it was very far off from his work, down in the heart of Cornwall, and it would be impossible to think of going there just for weekends, and if he established himself there for longer periods what on earth would he do with himself in that soft remote Lotus-land? He was a busy man who, when at work, liked the diversions of his club and of the theatres in the evening, but he allowed himself few holidays away from the City, and those were spent on salmon river or golf links with some small party of solid and like-minded friends. Looked at in these lights, the project bristled with objections.

Yet through all these years, forty of them now, which had ticked away so imperceptibly, the desire to be at home again at Lescop had always persisted, and from time to time it gave him shrewd little unexpected tugs, when his conscious mind was in no way concerned with it. This desire, he was well aware, was of a sentimental quality, and often he wondered at himself that he, who was so well-armoured in the general jostle of the world against that type of emotion, should have just this one joint in his harness. Not since he was sixteen had he set eyes on the place, but the memory of it was more vivid than that of any other scene of subsequent experience. He had married since then, he had lost his wife, and though for many months after that he had felt horribly lonely, the ache of that loneliness had ceased and now, if he had ever asked himself the direct question, he would have confessed that bachelor existence was more suited to him than married life had ever been. It had not been a conspicuous success and he never felt the least temptation to repeat the experiment.