The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 7

  I do not think that I ever received so painful a shock in my life as that which I experienced at the sight that met my eyes. Basil was still in the chair where he had seated himself, but instead of the robust personality which he had presented to me during our early interviews, I saw in a sudden flash the Basil that I knew, only infinitely more tired and haggard than I had known him in life. He was like a man who had cast aside a mask, and had suddenly appeared in his own part. He sat before me as I had often seen him sit, leaning forward in an intensity of emotion. I stopped suddenly wheeled round in my chair, and said, “Basil, tell me what has happened.”

  He looked at me, cast an agitated glance round the room – and then all on a sudden began to speak in a voice that was familiar to me of old.

  What he said is hardly for me to recount. But he led me step by step through a story so dark in horrors that I can hardly bring myself to reproduce it here. Imagine an untainted spirit, entering cheerfully upon some simple entourage, finding himself little by little within the net of some overpowering influence of evil.

  He told me that he had settled at Treheale in his normal frame of mind. That he had intended to tell me of his whereabouts, but that there had gradually stolen into his mind a sort of unholy influence. “At first,” he said, “I resisted it,” but it was accompanied by so extraordinary an access of mental power and vigour that he had accepted the conditions under which he found himself. I had better perhaps try to recount his own experience.

  He had come to Grampound in the course of his wanderings and had enquired about lodgings. He had been referred to the farmer at Treheale. He had settled himself there, only congratulating himself upon the mixture of quiet and dignity which surrounded him. He had arranged his life for tranquil study, had chosen his rooms, and had made the best disposition he could of his affairs.

  “The second night,” he said, “that I was here, I had gone to bed thinking of nothing but my music. I had extinguished my light and was lying quietly in bed watching the expiring glimmer of the embers on my hearth. I was wondering, as one does, weaving all kinds of fancies about the house and the room in which I found myself, lying with my head on my hand, when I saw, to my intense astonishment, the little door in the corner of the bedroom half open and close again.

  “I thought to myself that it was probably Mrs Hall coming to see whether I was comfortable, and I thereupon said, ‘Who is there?’ There was no sound in answer, but presently, a moment or two after, there followed a disagreeable laughter, I thought from the lower regions of the house in the direction of the corner. ‘Come in, whoever you are,’ I said; and in a moment the door opened and closed, and I became aware that there was someone in the room.

  “Further than that,” said Basil to me in that dreadful hour, “it is impossible to go. I can only say that I became aware in a moment of the existence of a world outside of and intertwined with our own; a world of far stronger influences and powers – how far-reaching I know not – but I know this, that all the mortal difficulties and dilemmas that I had hitherto been obliged to meet melted away in the face of a force to which I had hitherto been a stranger.”

  The dreadful recital ended about midnight; and the strange part was to me that our positions seemed in some fearful manner to have been now reversed. Basil was now the shrinking, timorous creature, who only could implore me not to leave him. It was in such a mood as this that he had written the letter. I asked him what there was to fear. “Everything,” he said with a shocking look. He would not go to bed; he would not allow me to leave the room.

  Step by step I unravelled the story, which his incoherent statement had only hinted at. His first emotion had been that of intense fright; but he became aware almost at once that the spirit who thus so unmistakably came to him was not inimical to him; the very features of the being – if such a word can be used about so shadowy a thing – appeared to wear a smile. Little by little the presence of the visitant had become habitual to Basil: there was a certain pride in his own fearlessness, which helped him.

  Then there was intense and eager curiosity; “and then, too,” said the unhappy man, “the influence began to affect me in other ways. I will not tell you how, but the very necessaries of life were provided for me in a manner which I should formerly have condemned with the utmost scorn, but which now I was given confidence to disregard. The dejection, the languorous reflections which used to hang about me, gradually drew off and left me cheerful, vigorous, and, I must say it, delighting in evil imaginations; but so subtle was the evil influence, that it was not into any gross corruption or flagrant deeds that I flung myself; it was into my music that the poison flowed.

  “I do not, of course, mean that evil then appeared to me, as I can humbly say it does now, as evil, but rather as a vision of perfect beauty, glorifying every natural function and every corporeal desire. The springs of music rose clear and strong within me and with the fountain I mingled from my own stores the subtle venom of the corrupted mind. How glorious, I thought, to sway as with a magic wand the souls of men; to interpret for each all the eager and leaping desires which maybe he had dully and dutifully controlled. To make all things fair – for so potent were the whispers of the spirit that talked at my ear that I believed in my heart that all that was natural in man was also permissible and even beautiful, and that it was nothing but a fantastic asceticism that forbids it; though now I see, as I saw before, that the evil that thwarts mankind is but the slime of the pit out of which he is but gradually extricating himself.”

  “But what is the thing,” I said, “of which you speak? Is it a spirit of evil, or a human spirit, or what?”

  “Good God!” he said, “how can I tell?” and then with lifted hand he sang in a strange voice a bar or two from Stanford’s Revenge.

  “Was he devil or man? he was devil for aught they knew.”

  This dreadful interlude, the very flippancy of it, that might have moved my laughter at any other time, had upon me an indescribably sickening effect. I stared at Basil. He relapsed into a moody silence with clasped hands and knotted brow. To draw him away from the nether darkness of his thoughts, I asked him how and in what shape the spirit had made itself plain to him.

  “Oh, no shape at all,” said he; “he is there, that is enough. I seem sometimes to see a face, to catch the glance of an eye, to see a hand raised to warn or to encourage; but it is all impossibly remote; I could never explain to you how I see him.”

  “Do you see him now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Basil, “a long way off – and he is running swiftly to me, but he has far to go yet. He is angry; he threatens me; he beats the air with his hands.”

  “But where is this?” I asked, for Basil’s eyes were upon the ground.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, man, be silent,” said Basil. “It is in the region of which you and others know little; but it has been revealed to me. It lies all about us – it has its capes and shadowy peaks, and a leaden sea, full of sound; it is there that I ramble with him.”

  There fell a silence between us. Then I said, “But, dear Basil, I must ask you this – how was it that you wrote as you did to me?”

  “Oh! he made me write,” he said, “and I think he overreached himself – or my angel, that beholds the Father’s face, smote him down. I was myself again on a sudden, the miserable and abject wretch whom you see before you, and knowing that I had been as a man in a dream. Then I wrote the despairing words, and guarded the letter so that he could not come near me; and then Mr Vyvyan’s visit to me – that was not by chance. I gave him the letter and he promised to bear it faithfully – and what attempts were made to tear it from him I do not know; but that my adversary tried his best I do not doubt. But Vyvyan is a good man and could not be harmed.

  “And then I fell back into the old spell; and worked still more abundantly and diligently and produced this – this accursed thing which shall not live to scatter evil abroad.” As he said these words he rose, and tore the score that lay on the table int
o shreds and crammed the pieces in the fire. As he thrust the last pieces down, the poker he was holding fell from his hands.

  I saw him white as a sheet, and trembling. “What is the matter?” I said.

  He turned a terrible look on me, and said, “He is here – he has arrived.”

  Then all at once I was aware that there was a sort of darkness in the room; and then with a growing horror I gradually perceived that in and through the room there ran a thing like the front of a precipice, with some dark strand at its foot on which beat a surge of phantom waves. The two scenes struggled together. At one time I could plainly see the cliff-front, close beside me – and then the lamp and the firelit room was all dimmed even to vanishing; and then suddenly the room would come back and the cliff die into a steep shadow.

  But in either of the scenes Basil and I were there – he standing irresolute and despairing, glancing from side to side like a hare when the hounds close in. And once he said – this was when the cliff loomed up suddenly – “There are others with him.” Then in a moment it seemed as if the room in which we sat died away altogether and I was in that other place; there was a faint light as from under a stormy sky; and a little farther up the strand there stood a group of dark figures, which seemed to consult together.

  All at once the group broke and came suddenly towards us. I do not know what to call them; they were human in a sense – that is, they walked upright and had heads and hands. But the faces were all blurred and fretted, like half-rotted skulls – but there was no sense of comparison in me. I only knew that I had seen ugliness and corruption at the very source, and looked into the darkness of the pit itself.

  The forms eluded me and rushed upon Basil, who made a motion as though to seize hold of me, and then turned and fled, his arms outstretched, glancing behind him as he ran – and in a moment he was lost to view, though I could see along the shore of that formless sea something like a pursuit.

  I do not know what happened after that. I think I tried to pray; but I presently became aware that I was myself menaced by danger. It seemed – but I speak in parables – as though one had separated himself from the rest and had returned to seek me. But all was over, I knew; and the figure indeed carried something which he swung and shook in his hand, which I thought was a token to be shown to me. And then I found my voice and cried out with all my strength to God to save me; and in a moment there was the fire-lit room again, and the lamp – the most peaceful-looking room in England.

  But Basil had left me; the door was wide open; and in a moment the farmer and his wife came hurrying along with blanched faces to ask who it was that had cried out, and what had happened.

  I made some pitiful excuse that I had dozed in my chair and had awoke crying out some unintelligible words. For in the quest I was about to engage in I did not wish that any mortal should be with me.

  They left me, asking for Mr Netherby and still not satisfied. Indeed, Mrs Hall looked at me with so penetrating a look that I felt that she understood something of what had happened. And then at once I went up to Basil’s room. I do not know where I found the courage to do it; but the courage came.

  The room was dark, and a strong wind was blowing through it from the little door. I stepped across the room, feeling my way; went down the stairs, and finding the door open at the bottom, I went out into the snake-like path.

  I went some yards along it; the moon had risen now. There came a sudden gap in the trees to the left, through which I could see the pale fields and the corner of the wood casting its black shadow on the ground.

  The shrubs were torn, broken, and trampled, as though some heavy thing had crashed through. I made my way cautiously down, endowed with a more than human strength – it was a steep bank covered with trees – and then in a moment I saw Basil.

  He lay some distance out in the field on his face. I knew at a glance that all was over; and when I lifted him I became aware that he was in some way strangely mangled, and indeed it was found afterwards that though the skin of his body was hardly contused, yet that almost every bone of the body was broken in fragments.

  I managed to carry him to the house. I closed the doors of the staircase; and then I managed to tell Farmer Hall that Basil had had, I thought, a fall and was dead. And then my own strength failed me, and for three days and nights I lay in a kind of stupor.

  When I recovered my consciousness, I found myself in bed in my own room. Mrs Hall nursed me with a motherly care and tenderness which moved me very greatly; but I could not speak of the matter to her, until, just before my departure, she came in, as she did twenty times a day, to see if I wanted anything. I made a great effort and said, “Mrs Hall, I am very sorry for you. This has been a terrible business, and I am afraid you won’t easily forget it. You ought to leave the house, I think.”

  Mrs Hall turned her frozen gaze upon me, and said, “Yes, sir, indeed, I can’t speak about it or think of it. I feel as if I might have prevented it; and yet I have been over and over it in my mind and I can’t see where I was wrong. But my duty is to the house now, and I shall never leave it; but I will ask you, sir, to try and find a thought of pity in your heart for him” – I knew she did not mean Basil – “I don’t think he clearly knows what he has done; he must have his will, as he always did. He stopped at nothing if it was for his pleasure; and he did not know what harm he did. But he is in God’s hands; and though I cannot understand why, yet there are things in this life which He allows to be; and we must not try to be judges – we must try to be merciful. But I have not done what I could have done; and if God gives me strength, there shall be an end of this.”

  A few hours later Mr Vyvyan called to see me; he was a very different person to the Vyvyan that had showed himself to me in Holborn.

  I could not talk much with him but I could see that he had some understanding of the case. He asked me no questions, but he told me a few details. He said that they had decided at the inquest that he had fallen from the terrace. But the doctor, who was attending me, seems to have said to Mr Vyvyan that a fall it must have been, but a fall of an almost inconceivable character. “And what is more,” the old doctor had added, “the man was neither in pain nor agitation of mind when he died.” The face was absolutely peaceful and tranquil; and the doctor’s theory was that he had died from some sudden seizure before the fall.

  And so I held my tongue. One thing I did: it was to have a little slab put over the body of my friend – a simple slab with name and date – and I ventured to add one line, because I have no doubt in my own mind that Basil was suddenly delivered, though not from death. He had, I supposed, gone too far upon the dark path, and he could not, I think, have freed himself from the spell; and so the cord was loosed, but loosed in mercy – and so I made them add the words:

  “And in their hands they shall bear thee up.”

  I must add one further word. About a year after the events above recorded I received a letter from Mr Vyvyan, which I give without further comment.

  ST SIBBY, Dec, 18, 189–.

  “DEAR MR WARD,

  “I wish to tell you that our friend Mrs Hall died a few days ago. She was a very good woman, one of the few that are chosen. I was much with her in her last days, and she told me a strange thing, which I cannot bring myself to repeat to you. But she sent you a message which she repeated several times, which she said you would understand. It is simply this: ‘Tell Mr Ward I have prevailed.’ I may add that I have no doubt of the truth of her words, and you will know to what I am alluding.

  “The day after she died there was a fire at Treheale: Mr Hall was absolutely distracted with grief at the loss of his wife, and I do not know quite what happened. But it was impossible to save the house; all that is left of it is a mass of charred ruins, with a few walls standing up. Nothing was saved, not even a picture. There is a wholly inadequate insurance, and I believe it is not intended to rebuild the house.

  “I hope you will bear us in mind; though I know you so little, I shall always feel tha
t we have a common experience which will hold us together. You will try and visit us some day when the memory of what took place is less painful to you. The grass is now green on your poor friend’s grave; and I will only add that you will have a warm welcome here. I am just moving into the Rectory, as my old Rector died a fortnight ago, and I have accepted the living. God bless you, dear Mr Ward.

  “Yours very sincerely,

  “JAMES VYVYAN.”

  The Richpins

  E. G. Swain

  Location: Stoneground, East Anglia.

  Time: December, 1912.

  Eyewitness Description: “Her information was precise and her story perfectly coherent. She preserved a maidenly reticence about his trousers, if she had noticed them; but added a new fact, and a terrible one, in her description of the eyeless sockets. No wonder she had screamed . . .”

  Author: Edmund Gill Swain (1861–1938) was Chaplain at King’s College, Cambridge and like M. R. James drawn to the rich vein of antiquarian and supernatural lore in East Anglia. In his capacity as Reverend Canon and proctor at the University, he had ample opportunity to study the ghostly tradition of the eerie wastes of The Fens where several of his best stories are located. “The Richpins” is set near Yarmouth and there are strong similarities between this tale with its Napoleonic echoes and my own “Peyton House Ghost,” set in nearby Suffolk, which I wrote about in the companion volume, Haunted House Stories (2005). Swain read this gruesome little yarn at one of the Christmas gatherings just before the outbreak of the First World War and he dedicated his only collection of supernatural tales, Stoneground Ghost Stories (1912), subtitled “From the recollections of the Reverend Roland Batchel” to M. R. James, “For Twenty Pleasant Years Mr Batchel’s Friend and the Indulgent Parent of Such Tastes as these Pages Indicate.”