The Top Ten Scary Stories of All Time: Number 6

A
haunted house, a dead nun, and a peculiar suggestion in a railway car. . .







THURNLEY ABBEY

by Perceval Landon











Three years ago I was on my way out
to the East, and as an extra day in London
was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail-train to Brindisi instead of the
usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long
forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across
the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or Osiris; but there
is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and
unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra
day and a half in London before I say goodbye to her for one of my longer
tramps. This time--it was early, I remember, in the shipping season, probably
about the beginning of September--there were few passengers, and I had a
compartment in the P. & O. Indian express to myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I
watched the blue waves dimpling the Adriatic,
and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the plain white towns, with their
flat roofs and their bold "duomos," and the grey-green gnarled olive
orchards of Apulia. The journey was just like
any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we decently could.
We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed
novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there
that I met Alastair Colvin.




Colvin was a man of middle height,
with a resolute, well-cut jaw; his hair was turning grey; his moustache was
sun-whitened, otherwise he was clean-shaven--obviously a gentleman, and
obviously also a pre-occupied man. He had no great wit. When spoken to, he made
the usual remarks in the right way, and I dare say he refrained from banalities
only because he spoke less than the rest of us; most of the time he buried
himself in the Wagon-lit Company's time-table, but seemed unable to concentrate
his attention on any one page of it. He found that I had been over the Siberian
railway, and for a quarter of an hour he discussed it with me. Then he lost
interest in it, and rose to go to his compartment. But he came back again very
soon, and seemed glad to pick up the conversation again.




Of course this did not seem to me
to be of any importance. Most travellers by train become a trifle infirm of
purpose after thirty-six hours' rattling. But Colvin's restless way I noticed
in somewhat marked contrast with the man's personal importance and dignity;
especially ill suited was it to his finely made large hand with strong, broad,
regular nails and its few lines. As I looked at his hand I noticed a long,
deep, and recent scar of ragged shape. However, it is absurd to pretend that I
thought anything was unusual. I went off at five o'clock on Sunday afternoon to sleep away the hour or
two that had still to be got through before we arrived at Brindisi.




Once there, we few passengers
transhipped our hand baggage, verified our berths--there were only a score of
us in all--and then, after an aimless ramble of half an hour in Brindisi, we returned to
dinner at the Httel International, not wholly surprised that the town had been
the death of Virgil. If I remember rightly, there is a gaily painted hall at
the International--I do not wish to advertise anything, but there is no other
place in Brindisi
at which to await the coming of the mails--and after dinner I was looking with
awe at a trellis overgrown with blue vines, when Colvin moved across the room
to my table. He picked up Il Secolo, but almost immediately gave
up the pretence of reading it. He turned squarely to me and said:




"Would you do me a
favour?"




One doesn't do favours to stray
acquaintances on Continental expresses without knowing something more of them
than I knew of Colvin. But I smiled in a noncommittal way, and asked him what
he wanted. I wasn't wrong in part of my estimate of him; he said bluntly:




"Will you let me sleep in your
cabin on the Osiris?" And he coloured a little as he said it.




Now, there is nothing more tiresome
than having to put up with a stable-companion at sea, and I asked him rather
pointedly:




"Surely there is room for all
of us?" I thought that perhaps he had been partnered off with some mangy
Levantine, and wanted to escape from him at all hazards.




Colvin, still somewhat confused,
said: "Yes; I am in a cabin by myself. But you would do me the greatest
favour if you would allow me to share yours."




This was all very well, but,
besides the fact that I always sleep better when alone, there had been some
recent thefts on board English liners, and I hesitated, frank and honest and
self-conscious as Colvin was. Just then the mail-train came in with a clatter
and a rush of escaping steam, and I asked him to see me again about it on the
boat when we started. He answered me curtly--I suppose he saw the mistrust in
my manner--"I am a member of White's. I smiled to myself as he said it,
but I remembered in a moment that the man--if he were really what he claimed to
be, and I make no doubt that he was--must have been sorely put to it before he
urged the fact as a guarantee of his respectability to a total stranger at a
Brindisi hotel.




That evening, as we cleared the red
and green harbour-lights of Brindisi,
Colvin explained. This is his story in his own words.




* 




"When I was travelling in India some
years ago, I made the acquaintance of a youngish man in the Woods and Forests.
We camped out together for a week, and I found him a pleasant companion. John
Broughton was a light-hearted soul when off duty, but a steady and capable man
in any of the small emergencies that continually arise in that department. He
was liked and trusted by the natives, and though a trifle over-pleased with
himself when he escaped to civilisation at Simla or Calcutta, Broughton's future was well assured
in Government service, when a fair-sized estate was unexpectedly left to him,
and he joyfully shook the dust of the Indian plains from his feet and returned
to England.
For five years he drifted about London.
I saw him now and then. We dined together about every eighteen months, and I
could trace pretty exactly the gradual sickening of Broughton with a merely
idle life. He then set out on a couple of long voyages, returned as restless as
before, and at last told me that he had decided to marry and settle down at his
place, Thurnley Abbey, which had long been empty. He spoke about looking after
the property and standing for his constituency in the usual way. Vivien Wilde,
his fiancée, had, I suppose, begun to take him in hand. She was a pretty
girl with a deal of fair hair and rather an exclusive manner; deeply religious
in a narrow school, she was still kindly and high-spirited, and I thought that
Broughton was in luck. He was quite happy and full of information about his
future.




"Among other things, I asked
him about Thurnley Abbey. He confessed that he hardly knew the place. The last
tenant, a man called Clarke, had lived in one wing for fifteen years and seen
no one. He had been a miser and a hermit. It was the rarest thing for a light
to be seen at the Abbey after dark. Only the barest necessities of life were
ordered, and the tenant himself received them at the side-door. His one
half-caste manservant, after a month's stay in the house, had abruptly left
without warning, and had returned to the Southern States. One thing Broughton
complained bitterly about: Clarke had wilfully spread the rumour among the
villagers that the Abbey was haunted, and had even condescended to play childish
tricks with spirit-lamps and salt in order to scare trespassers away at night.
He had been detected in the act of this tomfoolery, but the story spread, and
no one, said Broughton, would venture near the house except in broad daylight.
The hauntedness of Thurnley Abbey was now, he said with a grin, part of the
gospel of the countryside, but he and his young wife were going to change all
that. Would I propose myself any time I liked? I, of course, said I would, and
equally, of course, intended to do nothing of the sort without a definite
invitation.




"The house was put in thorough
repair, though not a stick of the old furniture and tapestry were removed.
Floors and ceilings were relaid: the roof was made watertight again, and the
dust of half a century was scoured out. He showed me some photographs of the
place. It was called an Abbey, though as a matter of fact it had been only the
infirmary of the long-vanished Abbey of Clouster some five miles away. The
larger part of the building remained as it had been in pre-Reformation days,
but a wing had been added in Jacobean times, and that part of the house had
been kept in something like repair by Mr. Clarke. He had in both the ground and
first floors set a heavy timber door, strongly barred with iron, in the passage
between the earlier and the Jacobean parts of the house, and had entirely
neglected the former. So there had been a good deal of work to be done.




"Broughton, whom I saw in London two or three times
about this period, made a deal of fun over the positive refusal of the workmen
to remain after sundown. Even after the electric light had been put into every
room, nothing would induce them to remain, though, as Broughton observed,
electric light was death on ghosts. The legend of the Abbey's ghosts had gone
far and wide, and the men would take no risks. They went home in batches of
five and six, and even during the daylight hours there was an inordinate amount
of talking between one and another, if either happened to be out of sight of
his companion. On the whole, though nothing of any sort or kind had been
conjured up even by their heated imaginations during their five months' work
upon the Abbey, the belief in the ghosts was rather strengthened than otherwise
in Thurnley because of the men's confessed nervousness, and local tradition
declared itself in favour of the ghost of an immured nun.




"'Good old nun!' said
Broughton.




"I asked him whether in
general he believed in the possibility of ghosts, and, rather to my surprise,
he said that he couldn't say he entirely disbelieved in them. A man in India had told
him one morning in camp that he believed that his mother was dead in England, as her
vision had come to his tent the night before. He had not been alarmed, but had
said nothing, and the figure vanished again. As a matter of fact, the next
possible dak-walla brought on a telegram announcing the mother's death. 'There
the thing was,' said Broughton. But at Thurnley he was practical enough. He
roundly cursed the idiotic selfishness of Clarke, whose silly antics had caused
all the inconvenience. At the same time, he couldn't refuse to sympathise to
some extent with the ignorant workmen. 'My own idea,' said he, 'is that if a
ghost ever does come in one's way, one ought to speak to it.'




"I agreed. Little as I knew of
the ghost world and its conventions, I had always remembered that a spook was
in honour bound to wait to be spoken to. It didn't seem much to do, and I felt
that the sound of one's own voice would at any rate reassure oneself as to
one's wakefulness. But there are few ghosts outside Europe--few,
that is, that a white man can see--and I had never been troubled with any.
However, as I have said, I told Broughton that I agreed.




"So the wedding took place,
and I went to it in a tall hat which I bought for the occasion, and the new
Mrs. Broughton smiled very nicely at me afterwards. As it had to happen, I took
the Orient Express that evening and was not in England again for nearly six
months. Just before I came back I got a letter from Broughton. He asked if I
could see him in London
or come to Thurnley, as he thought I should be better able to help him than
anyone else he knew. His wife sent a nice message to me at the end, so I was
reassured about at least one thing. I wrote from Budapest that I would come and see him at
Thurnley two days after my arrival in London,
and as I sauntered out of the Pannonia
into the Kerepesi Utcza to post my letters, I wondered of what earthly service
I could be to Broughton. I had been out with him after tiger on foot, and I
could imagine few men better able at a pinch to manage their own business.
However, I had nothing to do, so after dealing with some small accumulations of
business during my absence, I packed a kit-bag and departed to Euston.




"I was met by Broughton's
great limousine at Thurnley Road
station, and after a drive of nearly seven miles we echoed through the sleepy
streets of Thurnley village, into which the main gates of the park thrust
themselves, splendid with pillars and spread-eagles and tom-cats rampant atop
of them. I never was a herald, but I know that the Broughtons have the right to
supporters--Heaven knows why! From the gates a quadruple avenue of beech-trees
led inwards for a quarter of a mile. Beneath them a neat strip of fine turf
edged the road and ran back until the poison of the dead beech-leaves killed it
under the trees. There were many wheel-tracks on the road, and a comfortable
little pony trap jogged past me laden with a country parson and his wife and
daughter. Evidently there was some garden party going on at the Abbey. The road
dropped away to the right at the end of the avenue, and I could see the Abbey
across a wide pasturage and a broad lawn thickly dotted with guests.




"The end of the building was
plain. It must have been almost mercilessly austere when it was first built,
but time had crumbled the edges and toned the stone down to an orange-lichened
grey wherever it showed behind its curtain of magnolia, jasmine, and ivy.
Farther on was the three-storied Jacobean house, tall and handsome. There had
not been the slightest attempt to adapt the one to the other, but the kindly
ivy had glossed over the touching-point. There was a tall flhche in the middle
of the building, surmounting a small bell tower. Behind the house there rose
the mountainous verdure of Spanish chestnuts all the way up the hill.




"Broughton had seen me coming
from afar, and walked across from his other guests to welcome me before turning
me over to the butler's care. This man was sandy-haired and rather inclined to
be talkative. He could, however, answer hardly any questions about the house;
he had, he said, only been there three weeks. Mindful of what Broughton had
told me, I made no inquiries about ghosts, though the room into which I was
shown might have justified anything. It was a very large low room with oak
beams projecting from the white ceiling. Every inch of the walls, including the
doors, was covered with tapestry, and a remarkably fine Italian fourpost bedstead,
heavily draped, added to the darkness and dignity of the place. All the
furniture was old, well made, and dark. Underfoot there was a plain green pile
carpet, the only new thing about the room except the electric light fittings
and the jugs and basins. Even the looking-glass on the dressing-table was an
old pyramidal Venetian glass set in heavy repoussi frame of tarnished silver.




"After a few minutes' cleaning
up, I went downstairs and out upon the lawn, where I greeted my hostess. The
people gathered there were of the usual country type, all anxious to be pleased
and roundly curious as to the new master of the Abbey. Rather to my surprise,
and quite to my pleasure, I rediscovered Glenham, whom I had known well in old
days in Barotseland: he lived quite close, as,
he remarked with a grin, I ought to have known. 'But,' he added, 'I don't live
in a place like this.' He swept his hand to the long, low lines of the Abbey in
obvious admiration, and then, to my intense interest, muttered beneath his
breath, 'Thank God!' He saw that I had overheard him, and turning to me said
decidedly, 'Yes, "thank God"' I said, and I meant it. I wouldn't live
at the Abbey for all Broughton's money.'




"'But surely,' I demurred,
'you know that old Clarke was discovered in the very act of setting light on
his bug-a-boos?'




"Glenham shrugged his
shoulders. 'Yes, I know about that. But there is something wrong with the place
still. All I can say is that Broughton is a different man since he has lived
there. I don't believe that he will remain much longer. But--you're staying
here?--well, you'll hear all about it to-night. There's a big dinner, I
understand.' The conversation turned off to old reminiscences, and Glenham soon
after had to go.




"Before I went to dress that
evening I had twenty minutes' talk with Broughton in his library. There was no
doubt that the man was altered, gravely altered. He was nervous and fidgety,
and I found him looking at me only when my eye was off him. I naturally asked
him what he wanted of me. I told him I would do anything I could, but that I
couldn't conceive what he lacked that I could provide. He said with a
lustreless smile that there was, however, something, and that he would tell me
the following morning. It struck me that he was somehow ashamed of himself, and
perhaps ashamed of the part he was asking me to play. However, I dismissed the
subject from my mind and went up to dress in my palatial room. As I shut the
door a draught blew out the Queen of Sheba from the wall, and I noticed that
the tapestries were not fastened to the wall at the bottom. I have always held
very practical views about spooks, and it has often seemed to me that the slow
waving in firelight of loose tapestry upon a wall would account for ninety-nine
per cent. of the stories one hears. Certainly the dignified undulation of this
lady with her attendants and huntsmen--one of whom was untidily cutting the
throat of a fallow deer upon the very steps on which King Solomon, a grey-faced
Flemish nobleman with the order of the Golden Fleece, awaited his fair
visitor--gave colour to my hypothesis.




"Nothing much happened at
dinner. The people were very much like those of the garden party. A young woman
next me seemed anxious to know what was being read in London. As she was far more familiar than I
with the most recent magazines and literary supplements, I found salvation in
being myself instructed in the tendencies of modern fiction. All true art, she
said, was shot through and through with melancholy. How vulgar were the
attempts at wit that marked so many modern books! From the beginning of
literature it had always been tragedy that embodied the highest attainment of
every age. To call such works morbid merely begged the question. No thoughtful
man--she looked sternly at me through the steel rim of her glasses--could fail
to agree with me. Of course, as one would, I immediately and properly said that
I slept with Pett Ridge and Jacobs under my pillow at night, and that if Jorrocks
weren't quite so large and cornery, I would add him to the company. She hadn't
read any of them, so I was saved--for a time. But I remember grimly that she
said that the dearest wish of her life was to be in some awful and
soul-freezing situation of horror, and I remember that she dealt hardly with
the hero of Nat Paynter's vampire story, between nibbles at her brown-bread
ice. She was a cheerless soul, and I couldn't help thinking that if there were
many such in the neighbourhood, it was not surprising that old Glenham had been
stuffed with some nonsense or other about the Abbey. Yet nothing could well
have been less creepy than the glitter of silver and glass, and the subdued
lights and cackle of conversation all round the dinner-table.




"After the ladies had gone I
found myself talking to the rural dean. He was a thin, earnest man, who at once
turned the conversation to old Clarke's buffooneries. But, he said, Mr.
Broughton had introduced such a new and cheerful spirit, not only into the
Abbey, but, he might say, into the whole neighbourhood, that he had great hopes
that the ignorant superstitions of the past were from henceforth destined to
oblivion. Thereupon his other neighbour, a portly gentleman of independent
means and position, audibly remarked 'Amen,' which damped the rural dean, and
we talked to partridges past, partridges present, and pheasants to come. At the
other end of the table Broughton sat with a couple of his friends, red-faced
hunting men. Once I noticed that they were discussing me, but I paid no
attention to it at the time. I remembered it a few hours later.




"By eleven all the guests were
gone, and Broughton, his wife, and I were alone together under the fine plaster
ceiling of the Jacobean drawing-room. Mrs. Broughton talked about one or two of
the neighbours, and then, with a smile, said that she knew I would excuse her,
shook hands with me, and went off to bed. I am not very good at analysing
things, but I felt that she talked a little uncomfortably and with a suspicion
of effort, smiled rather conventionally, and was obviously glad to go. These
things seem trifling enough to repeat, but I had throughout the faint feeling
that everything was not quite square. Under the circumstances, this was enough
to set me wondering what on earth the service could be that I was to
render--wondering also whether the whole business were not some ill-advised
jest in order to make me come down from London for a mere shooting-party.




"Broughton said little after
she had gone. But he was evidently labouring to bring the conversation round to
the so-called haunting of the Abbey. As soon as I saw this, of course I asked
him directly about it. He then seemed at once to lose interest in the matter.
There was no doubt about it: Broughton was somehow a changed man, and to my
mind he had changed in no way for the better. Mrs. Broughton seemed no
sufficient cause. He was clearly very fond of her, and she of him. I reminded
him that he was going to tell me what I could do for him in the morning,
pleaded my journey, lighted a candle, and went upstairs with him. At the end of
the passage leading into the old house he grinned weakly and said, 'Mind, if
you see a ghost, do talk to it; you said you would.' He stood irresolutely a
moment and then turned away. At the door of his dressing-room he paused once
more: 'I'm here,' he called out, 'if you should want anything. Good night,' and
he shut the door.




"I went along the passage to
my room, undressed, switched on a lamp beside my bed, read a few pages of The
Jungle Book, and then, more than ready for sleep, turned the light off
and went fast asleep.

*




"Three hours later I woke up.
There was not a breath of wind outside. There was not even a flicker of light
from the fireplace. As I lay there, an ash tinkled slightly as it cooled, but
there was hardly a gleam of the dullest red in the grate. An owl cried among
the silent Spanish chestnuts on the slope outside. I idly reviewed the events
of the day, hoping that I should fall off to sleep again before I reached
dinner. But at the end I seemed as wakeful as ever. There was no help for it. I
must read my Jungle Book again till I felt ready to go off, so I
fumbled for the pear at the end of the cord that hung down inside the bed, and
I switched on the bedside lamp. The sudden glory dazzled me for a moment. I
felt under my pillow for my book with half-shut eyes. Then, growing used to the
light, I happened to look down to the foot of my bed.




"I can never tell you really
when happened then. Nothing I could ever confess in the most abject words could
even faintly picture to you what I felt. I know that my heart stopped dead, and
my throat shut automatically. In one instinctive movement I crouched back up
against the head-boards of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set my
heart going again, and the sweat dripped from every pore. I am not a
particularly religious man, but I had always believed that God would never
allow any supernatural appearance to present itself to man in such a guise and
in such circumstances that harm, either bodily or mental, could result to him.
I can only tell you that at the moment both my life and my reason rocked
unsteadily on their seats."

*




The other Osiris passengers
had gone to bed. Only he and I remained leaning over the starboard railing,
which rattled uneasily now and then under the fierce vibration of the
over-engined mail-boat. Far over, there were the lights of a few fishing-smacks
riding out the night, and a great rush of white combing and seething water fell
out and away from us overside.




At last Colvin went on:

*




"Leaning over the foot of my
bed, looking at me, was a figure swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling. This
shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes and the right side of the face
bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the
bed-end. The face was not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the
flesh of the face were totally gone. There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly
over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp of hair
crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. I looked at it, and it looked at
me, and my brains turned dry and hot in my head. I had still got the pear of
the electric lamp in my hand, and I played idly with it; only I dared not turn
the light out again. I shut my eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the
same second. The thing had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat
cooled me as it evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel
creaked in the wall.




"My reason failed me. For
twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, I was able to think of nothing else but this
awful figure, till there came, hurtling through the empty channels of my
senses, the remembrances that Broughton and his friends had discussed me
furtively at dinner. The dim possibility of its being a hoax stole gratefully
into my unhappy mind, and once there, one's pluck came creeping back along a
thousand tiny veins. My first sensation was one of blind unreasoning thankfulness
that my brain was going to stand the trial. I am not a timid man, but the best
of us needs some human handle to steady him in time of extremity, and in this
faint but growing hope that after all it might be only a brutal hoax, I found
the fulcrum that I needed. At last I moved.




"How I managed to do it I
cannot tell you, but with one spring towards the foot of the bed I got within
arm's-length and struck out one fearful blow with my fist at the thing. It
crumbled under it, and my hand was cut to the bone. With a sickening revulsion
after my terror, I dropped half-fainting across the end of the bed. So it was
merely a foul trick after all. No doubt the trick had been played many a time
before: no doubt Broughton and his friends had had some large bet among
themselves as to what I should do when I discovered the gruesome thing. From my
state of abject terror I found myself transported into an insensate anger. I
shouted curses upon Broughton. I dived rather than climbed over the bed-end of
the sofa. I tore at the robed skeleton--how well the whole thing had been
carried out, I thought--I broke the skull against the floor, and stamped upon
its dry bones. I flung the head away under the bed, and rent the brittle bones
of the trunk in pieces. I snapped the thin thigh-bones across my knee, and
flung them in different directions. The shin-bones I set up against a stool and
broke with my heel. I raged like a Berserker against the loathly thing, and
stripped the ribs from the backbone and slung the breastbone against the
cupboard. My fury increased as the work of destruction went on. I tore the
frail rotten veil into twenty pieces, and the dust went up over everything,
over the clean blotting-paper and the silver inkstand. At last my work was
done. There was but a raffle of broken bones and strips of parchment and
crumbling wool. Then, picking up a piece of the skull--it was the cheek and
temple bone of the right side, I remember--I opened the door and went down the
passage to Broughton's dressing-room. I remember still how my sweat-dripping
pyjamas clung to me as I walked. At the door I kicked and entered.




"Broughton was in bed. He had
already turned the light on and seemed shrunken and horrified. For a moment he
could hardly pull himself together. Then I spoke. I don't know what I said.
Only I know that from a heart full and over-full with hatred and contempt,
spurred on by shame of my own recent cowardice, I let my tongue run on. He
answered nothing. I was amazed at my own fluency. My hair still clung lankily
to my wet temples, my hand was bleeding profusely, and I must have looked a
strange sight. Broughton huddled himself up at the head of the bed just as I
had. Still he made no answer, no defence. He seemed preoccupied with something
besides my reproaches, and once or twice moistened his lips with his tongue.
But he could say nothing though he moved his hands now and then, just as a baby
who cannot speak moves its hands.




"At last the door into Mrs.
Broughton's rooms opened and she came in, white and terrified. 'What is it?
What is it? Oh, in God's name! what is it?' she cried again and again, and then
she went up to her husband and sat on the bed in her night-dress, and the two
faced me. I told her what the matter was. I spared her husband not a word for
her presence there. Yet he seemed hardly to understand. I told the pair that I
had spoiled their cowardly joke for them. Broughton looked up.




"'I have smashed the foul
thing into a hundred pieces,' I said. Broughton licked his lips again and his
mouth worked. 'By God!' I shouted, 'it would serve you right if I thrashed you
within an inch of your life. I will take care that not a decent man or woman of
my acquaintance ever speaks to you again. And there,' I added, throwing the
broken piece of the skull upon the floor beside his bed, 'there is a souvenir
for you, of your damned work to-night!'




"Broughton saw the bone, and
in a moment it was his turn to frighten me. He squealed like a hare caught in a
trap. He screamed and screamed till Mrs. Broughton, almost as bewildered as
myself, held on to him and coaxed him like a child to be quiet. But
Broughton--and as he moved I thought that ten minutes ago I perhaps looked as
terribly ill as he did--thrust her from him, and scrambled out of bed on to the
floor, and still screaming put out his hand to the bone. It had blood on it
from my hand. He paid no attention to me whatever. In truth I said nothing.
This was a new turn indeed to the horrors of the evening. He rose from the
floor with the bone in his hand and stood silent. He seemed to be listening.
'Time, time, perhaps,' he muttered, and almost at the same moment fell at full
length on the carpet, cutting his head against the fender. The bone flew from
his hand and came to rest near the door. I picked Broughton up, haggard and
broken, with blood over his face. He whispered hoarsely and quickly, 'Listen,
listen!' We listened.




"After ten seconds' utter
quiet, I seemed to hear something. I could not be sure, but at last there was
no doubt. There was a quiet sound as one moving along the passage. Little
regular steps came towards us over the hard oak flooring. Broughton moved to
where his wife sat, white and speechless, on the bed, and pressed her face into
his shoulder.




"Then, the last thing that I
could see as he turned the light out, he fell forward with his own head pressed
into the pillow of the bed. Something in their company, something in their
cowardice, helped me, and I faced the open doorway of the room, which was
outlined fairly clearly against the dimly lighted passage. I put out one hand
and touched Mrs. Broughton's shoulder in the darkness. But at the last moment I
too failed. I sank on my knees and put my face in the bed. Only we all heard.
The footsteps came to the door and there they stopped. The piece of bone was
lying a yard inside the door. There was a rustle of moving stuff, and the thing
was in the room. Mrs. Broughton was silent: I could hear Broughton's voice
praying, muffled in the pillow: I was cursing my own cowardice. Then the steps
moved out again on the oak boards of the passage, and I heard the sounds dying
away. In a flash of remorse I went to the door and looked out. At the end of
the corridor I thought I saw something that moved away. A moment later the
passage was empty. I stood with my forehead against the jamb of the door almost
physically sick.




"'You can turn the light on,'
I said, and there was an answering flare. There was no bone at my feet. Mrs.
Broughton had fainted. Broughton was almost useless, and it took me ten minutes
to bring her to. Broughton only said one thing worth remembering. For the most
part he went on muttering prayers. But I was glad afterwards to recollect that
he had said that thing. He said in a colourless voice, half as a question, half
as a reproach, 'You didn't speak to her.'




"We spent the remainder of the
night together. Mrs. Broughton actually fell off into a kind of sleep before
dawn, but she suffered so horribly in her dreams that I shook her into
consciousness again. Never was dawn so long in coming. Three or four times
Broughton spoke to himself. Mrs. Broughton would then just tighten her hold on
his arm, but she could say nothing. As for me, I can honestly say that I grew
worse as the hours passed and the light strengthened. The two violent reactions
had battered down my steadiness of view, and I felt that the foundations of my
life had been built upon the sand. I said nothing, and after binding up my hand
with a towel, I did not move. It was better so. They helped me and I helped
them, and we all three knew that our reason had gone very near to ruin that
night. At last, when the light came in pretty strongly, and the birds outside
were chattering and singing, we felt that we must do something. Yet we never
moved. You might have thought that we should particularly dislike being found
as we were by the servants: yet nothing of that kind mattered a straw, and an
overpowering listlessness bound us as we sat, until Chapman, Broughton's man,
actually knocked and opened the door. None of us moved. Broughton, speaking
hardly and stiffly, said, 'Chapman you can come back in five minutes.' Chapman,
was a discreet man, but it would have made no difference to us if he had
carried his news to the 'room' at once.




"We looked at each other and I
said I must go back. I meant to wait outside till Chapman returned. I simply
dared not re-enter my bedroom alone. Broughton roused himself and said that he
would come with me. Mrs. Broughton agreed to remain in her own room for five
minutes if the blinds were drawn up and all the doors left open.




"So Broughton and I, leaning
stiffly one against the other, went down to my room. By the morning light that
filtered past the blinds we could see our way, and I released the blinds. There
was nothing wrong with the room from end to end, except smears of my own blood
on the end of the bed, on the sofa, and on the carpet where I had torn the
thing to pieces."




* 




Colvin had finished his story.
There was nothing to say. Seven bells stuttered out from the fo'c'sle, and the
answering cry wailed through the darkness. I took him downstairs.




"Of course I am much better
now, but it is a kindness of you to let me sleep in your cabin."







The list so far:

7. Guy de Maupassant: The Apparition

8. MR James: Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

9. William Fryer Harvey: The Beast with Five Fingers

10. HG Wells: The Sea Raiders







A true corpse story by Gordon