The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story, Page 2

  There was a further pause, and Esmé shook her head, smiling over her embroidery.

  “Come …”

  Then Oliver got to his feet and began to go about the room rapidly switching off every lamp, save the lights upon the Christmas tree at the far end, so that, when he returned to his seat, we had only the immediate firelight by which to see one another, and Esmé was obliged to lay down her sewing—not without a murmur of protest.

  “May as well do the job properly,” Oliver said with some satisfaction.

  “Oh, you boys …”

  “Now come on, Will, your turn, isn’t it?”

  “No, Edmund’s.”

  “Ah-ha,” said the youngest of the Ainley brothers, in an odd, deep voice. “I could an’ if I would!”

  “Must we have the lights out?” Isobel spoke as if to much smaller boys.

  “Yes, Sis, we must, that’s if you want to get the authentic atmosphere.”

  “But I’m not sure that I do.”

  Oliver gave a low moan. “Get on with it then, someone.”

  Esmé leaned over toward me. “They are telling ghost stories.”

  “Yes,” said Will, his voice unsteady with both excitement and laughter. “Just the thing for Christmas Eve. It’s an ancient tradition!”

  “The lonely country house, the guests huddled around the fireside in a darkened room, the wind howling at the casement …” Oliver moaned again.

  And then came Aubrey’s stolid, good-humored tones. “Better get on with it then.” And so they did, Oliver, Edmund and Will vying with one another to tell the horridest, most spine-chilling tale, with much dramatic effect and mock-terrified shrieking. They outdid one another in the far extremes of inventiveness, piling agony upon agony. They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horsemen, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. The stories grew more and more lurid, wilder and sillier, and soon the gasps and cries merged into fits of choking laughter, as each one, even gentle Isobel, contributed more ghastly detail.

  At first, I was amused, indulgent, but as I sat on, listening, in the firelight, I began to feel set apart from them all, an outsider to their circle. I was trying to suppress my mounting unease, to hold back the rising flood of memory.

  This was a sport, a high-spirited and harmless game among young people, for the festive season, and an ancient tradition, too, as Will had rightly said, there was nothing to torment and trouble me, nothing of which I could possibly disapprove. I did not want to seem a killjoy, old and stodgy and unimaginative, I longed to enter into what was nothing more nor less than good fun. I fought a bitter battle within myself, my head turned away from the firelight so that none of them should chance to see my expression which I knew began to show signs of my discomfiture.

  And then, to accompany a final, banshee howl from Edmund, the log that had been blazing on the hearth collapsed suddenly and, after sending up a light spatter of sparks and ash, died down so that there was near-darkness. And then silence in the room. I shuddered. I wanted to get up and go round putting on every light again, see the sparkle and glitter and color of the Christmas decorations, have the fire blazing again cheerfully, I wanted to banish the chill that had settled upon me and the sensation of fear in my breast. Yet I could not move, it had, for the moment, paralyzed me, just as it had always done, it was a long-forgotten, once too-familiar sensation.

  Then, Edmund said, “Now come, stepfather, your turn,” and at once the others took up the cry, the silence was broken by their urgings, with which even Esmé joined.

  “No, no.” I tried to speak jocularly. “Nothing from me.”

  “Oh, Arthur …”

  “You must know at least one ghost story, stepfather, everyone knows one …”

  Ah, yes, yes, indeed. All the time I had been listening to their ghoulish, lurid inventions, and their howling and groans, the one thought that had been in my mind, and the only thing I could have said was, “No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude—not so … so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible.”

  “Come on, stepfather.”

  “Don’t be an old spoilsport.”

  “Arthur?”

  “Do your stuff, stepfather, surely you’re not going to let us down?”

  I stood up, unable to bear it any longer.

  “I am sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But I have no story to tell!” And went quickly from the room, and from the house.

  Some fifteen minutes later, I came to my senses and found myself on the scrubland beyond the orchard, my heart pounding, my breathing short. I had walked about in a frenzy of agitation, and now, realizing that I must make an effort to calm myself, I sat down on a piece of old, moss-covered stone, and began to take deliberate, steady breaths in on a count of ten and out again, until I felt the tension within myself begin to slacken and my pulse become a little steadier, my head clearer. After a short while longer, I was able to realize my surroundings once again, to note the clearness of the sky and the brightness of the stars, the air’s coldness and the crispiness of the frost-stiffened grass beneath my feet.

  Behind me, in the house, I knew that I must have left the family in a state of consternation and bewilderment, for they knew me normally as an even-tempered man of predictable emotions. Why they had aroused my apparent disapproval with the telling of a few silly tales and prompted such curt behavior, the whole family would be quite at a loss to understand, and very soon I must return to them, make amends and endeavor to brush off the incident, renew some of the air of jollity. What I would not be able to do was explain. No. I would be cheerful and I would be steady again, if only for my dear wife’s sake, but no more.

  They had chided me with being a spoilsport, tried to encourage me to tell them the one ghost story I must surely, like any other man, have it in me to tell. And they were right. Yes, I had a story, a true story, a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy. But it was not a story to be told for casual entertainment, around the fireside upon Christmas Eve.

  I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibers, an inextricable part of my past, but I had hoped never to have to recollect it, consciously, and in full, ever again. Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully, as the years went on and my happiness, sanity and equilibrium were assured. Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple on a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory.

  Now, tonight, it again filled my mind to the exclusion of all else. I knew that I should have no rest from it, that I should lie awake in a chill of sweat, going over that time, those events, those places. So it had been night after night for years.

  I got up and began to walk about again. Tomorrow was Christmas Day. Could I not be free of it at least for that blessed time, was there no way of keeping the memory, and the effects it had upon me, at bay, as an analgesic or a balm will stave off the pain of a wound, at least temporarily? And then, standing among the trunks of the fruit trees, silver-gray in the moonlight, I recalled that the way to banish an old ghost that continues its hauntings is to exorcise it. Well then, mine should be exorcised. I should tell my tale, not aloud, by the fireside, not as a diversion for idle listeners—it was too solemn, and too real, for that. But I should set it down on paper, with every care and in every detail. I would write my own ghost story. Then pe
rhaps I should finally be free of it for whatever life remained for me to enjoy.

  I decided at once that it should be, at least during my lifetime, a story for my eyes only. I was the one who had been haunted and who had suffered—not the only one, no, but surely, I thought, the only one left alive, I was the one who, to judge by my agitation of this evening, was still affected by it deeply, it was from me alone that the ghost must be driven.

  I glanced up at the moon, and at the bright, bright Pole star. Christmas Eve. And then I prayed, a heartfelt, simple prayer for peace of mind, and for strength and steadfastness to endure while I completed what would be the most agonizing task, and I prayed for a blessing upon my family, and for quiet rest to us all that night. For, although I was in control of my emotions now, I dreaded the hours of darkness that lay ahead.

  For answer to my prayer, I received immediately the memory of some lines of poetry, lines I had once known but long forgotten. Later, I spoke them aloud to Esmé, and she identified the source for me at once.

  “Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes

  Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,

  This bird of dawning singeth all night long.

  And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,

  The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

  No Fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

  So hallowed and so gracious is that time.”

  As I recited them aloud, a great peace came upon me, I was wholly myself again yet stiffened by my resolution. After this holiday when the family had all departed, and Esmé and I were alone, I would begin to write my story.

  When I returned to the house, Isobel and Aubrey had gone upstairs to share the delight of creeping about with bulging stockings for their young sons, Edmund was reading, Oliver and Will were in the old playroom at the far end of the house, where there was a battered billiard table, and Esmé was tidying the drawing room, preparatory to going to bed. About that evening’s incident, nothing whatsoever was said, though she wore an anxious expression, and I had to invent a bad bout of acute indigestion to account for my abrupt behavior. I saw to the fire, damping down the flames, and knocked out my pipe on the side of the hearth, feeling quiet and serene again, and no longer agitated about what lonely terrors I might have to endure, whether asleep or awake, during the small hours of the coming night.

  Tomorrow was Christmas Day, and I looked forward to it eagerly and with gladness, it would be a time of family joy and merrymaking, love and friendship, fun and laughter.

  When it was over, I would have work to do.

  A London Particular

  It was a Monday afternoon in November and already growing dark, not because of the lateness of the hour—it was barely three o’clock—but because of the fog, the thickest of London peasoupers, which had hemmed us in on all sides since dawn—if, indeed, there had been a dawn, for the fog had scarcely allowed any daylight to penetrate the foul gloom of the atmosphere.

  Fog was outdoors, hanging over the river, creeping in and out of alleyways and passages, swirling thickly between the bare trees of all the parks and gardens of the city, and indoors, too, seething through cracks and crannies like sour breath, gaining a sly entrance at every opening of a door. It was a yellow fog, a filthy, evil-smelling fog, a fog that choked and blinded, smeared and stained. Groping their way blindly across roads, men and women took their lives in their hands, stumbling along the pavements, they clutched at railings and at one another, for guidance.

  Sounds were deadened, shapes blurred. It was a fog that had come three days before, and did not seem inclined to go away and it had, I suppose, the quality of all such fogs—it was menacing and sinister, disguising the familiar world and confusing the people in it, as they were confused by having their eyes covered and being turned about, in a game of Blind Man’s Buff.

  It was, in all, miserable weather and lowering to the spirits in the dreariest month of the year.

  It would be easy to look back and to believe that all that day I had had a sense of foreboding about my journey to come, that some sixth sense, some telepathic intuition that may lie dormant and submerged in most men, had stirred and become alert within me. But I was, in those days of my youth, a sturdy, commonsensical fellow, and I felt no uneasiness or apprehension whatsoever. Any depression of my usual blithe spirits was solely on account of the fog, and of November, and that same dreariness was shared by every citizen of London.

  So far as I can faithfully recall, however, I felt nothing other than curiosity, a professional interest in what scant account of the business Mr. Bentley had put before me, coupled with a mild sense of adventure, for I had never before visited that remote part of England to which I was now traveling—and a certain relief at the prospect of getting away from the unhealthy atmosphere of fog and dankness. Moreover, I was barely twenty-three years old, and retained a schoolboy’s passion for everything to do with railway stations and journeys on steam locomotives.

  But what is perhaps remarkable is how well I can remember the minutest detail of that day; for all that nothing untoward had yet happened, and my nerves were steady. If I close my eyes, I am sitting in the cab, crawling through the fog on my way to King’s Cross Station, I can smell the cold, damp leather of the upholstery and the indescribable stench of the fog seeping in around the window, I can feel the sensation in my ears, as though they had been stuffed with cotton.

  Pools of sulphurous yellow light, as from random corners of some circle of the Inferno, flared from shops and the upper windows of houses, and from the basements they rose like flares from the pit below, and there were red-hot pools of light from the chestnut-sellers on street corners; here, a great, boiling cauldron of tar for the road-menders spurted and smoked an evil red smoke, there, a lantern held high by the lamplighter bobbed and flickered.

  In the streets, there was a din, of brakes grinding and horns blowing, and the shouts of a hundred drivers, slowed down and blinded by the fog, and, as I peered from out of the cab window into the gloom, what figures I could make out, fumbling their way through the murk, were like ghost figures, their mouths and lower faces muffled in scarves and veils and handkerchiefs, but on gaining the temporary safety of some pool of light they became red-eyed and demonic.

  It took almost fifty minutes to travel the mile or so from Chambers to the station, and as there was nothing whatsoever I could do, and I had made allowance for such a slow start to the journey, I sat back, comforting myself that this would certainly be the worst part of it, and turned over in my mind the conversation I had had with Mr. Bentley that morning.

  I had been working steadily at some dull details of the conveyance of property leases, forgetful, for the moment, of the fog that pressed against the window, like a furred beast at my back, when the clerk, Tomes, came in, to summon me to Mr. Bentley’s room. Tomes was a small man, thin as a stick and with the complexion of a tallow candle, and a permanent cold, which caused him to sniff every twenty seconds, for which reason he was confined to a cubby-hole in an outer lobby, where he kept ledgers and received visitors, with an air of suffering and melancholy that put them in mind of Last Wills and Testaments—whatever the business they had actually come to the lawyer about.

  And it was a Last Will and Testament that Mr. Bentley had before him when I walked into his large, comfortable room with its wide bay window that, on better days, commanded a fine view of the Inn of Court and gardens, and the comings and goings of half the lawyers of London. “Sit ye down, Arthur, sit ye down.” Mr. Bentley then took off his spectacles, polished them vigorously, and replaced them on his nose, before settling back in his chair, like a man content. Mr. Bentley had a story to tell and Mr. Bentley enjoyed being listened to.

  “I don’t think I ever told you about the extraordinary Mrs. Drablow?”

  I shook my head. It would, at any rate, be more interesting than the conveyance of leases.

  “Mrs. Drablow,” he repeated, and picked up the Will, to wa
ve it at me, across his partner’s desk.

  “Mrs. Alice Drablow, of Eel Marsh House. Dead, don’t you know.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. I inherited Alice Drablow, from my father. The family has had their business with this firm for … oh …” he waved a hand, back into the mists of the previous century and the foundation of Bentley, Haigh, Sweetman and Bentley.

  “Oh yes?”

  “A good age,” he flapped the paper again. “Eighty-seven.”

  “And it’s her will you have there, I take it?”

  “Mrs. Drablow,” he raised his voice a little, ignoring my question which had broken into the pattern of his storytelling. “Mrs. Drablow was, as they say, a rum ’un.”

  I nodded. As I had learned in my five years with the firm, a good many of Mr. Bentley’s older clients were “rum ’uns.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Nine Lives Causeway?”

  “No, never.”

  “Nor ever of Eel Marsh, in —shire?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nor, I suppose, ever visited that county at all?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Living there,” said Mr. Bentley thoughtfully, “anyone might become rum.”

  “I’ve only a hazy idea of where it is.”

  “Then, my boy, go home and pack your bags, and take the afternoon train from King’s Cross, changing at Crewe and again at Homerby. From Homerby, you take the branch line to the little market town of Crythin Gifford. After that, it’s a wait for the tide!”

  “The tide?”

  “You can only cross the Causeway at low tide. That takes you onto Eel Marsh and the house.”

  “Mrs. Drablow’s?”

  “When the tide comes in, you’re cut off until it’s low again. Remarkable place.” He got up and went to the window.

  “Years since I went there, of course. My father took me. She didn’t greatly care for visitors.”

  “Was she a widow?”