The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (41 page)

3

Through all the following day, it is plain to nurse and his governess that Willie is not himself. He is pale and nervous, jumping when a door is banged, and makes but a poor fist of his lessons.

At breakfast even his father has noticed his increased pallor and mentions it; but his wife chimes in, perhaps a little sharply, that it is due to Willie’s having taken to sleeping under the bed clothes, and that she had to uncover him by main force when she went in the previous evening.

That night, when nurse takes him to bed, she repeats her kindly search of the previous night, assuring him afterwards that he has nothing of which to be afraid, to which he replies, his courage at twanging pitch, that he is not going to be frightened any more. And so she leaves him.

Now in this night, for some reason, perhaps because the child is so thoroughly worn out by the strain of the two previous nights, he goes off to sleep, untroubled by any phantasm, and wakes near to being himself in the morning, and with a new and strange sense of confidence in his courage. Strong in this feeling, he approaches his mother after breakfast, when his father has gone out.

“Mother,” he says shyly, “I’ve stopped being a coward. I never felt afraid at all last night, and I never pulled the clothes over my head all the night.”

“I’m pleased to hear it, Willie,” she replies; but without much enthusiasm; for, to her, pluck over such a thing is so trifling a matter that she would rather almost that her little son had said nothing, than put forward so small a thing as proof of courage. For his part, the boy feels repulsed. He feels that he has achieved a gigantic victory, and cannot understand her utter inability to appreciate it. It is beyond his imagination that anyone should have never known his enemies.

That night, his new-found confidence in himself is smashed. He sees the giant hand form, as on the previous occasions, and come towards him, sinking so near that he seems like to die of suffocation. The room is filled with the same dull thunder, and, at last, the poor child swoons outright, coming to at intervals through the night. This is the second time that Terror has gone so far with him towards the Land of Shadows; though Willie does not know but that he has had a “horrid” sleep.

At breakfast the following morning, his pallor and general look of ill-health provoke remark; but the boy denies that he has been sleeping with his head beneath the clothes, when his mother taxes him with so doing, and there is something of unconscious pride in his denial that puzzles her faintly.

4

That night, when nurse takes Willie to bed, his terror is so palpable, that she is near to going down to her mistress and giving her, as she puts it, “a piece of her mind.” Yet, after a little, the boy calms down and presently assures her in a somewhat strained little voice that he isn’t really afraid. At this, having twice made search through the room, and stayed beside him so long as she dare, she has to leave him, closing the door after her; for her mistress has spoken to her about leaving it open a couple of nights previously.

Then begins for the little, nervous man, a time of torture grim and terrible. He tries to obey his mother, and keeps the clothes below his chin; but he shuts his eyes hard and determines not to open them; yet, despite his determination, within ten minutes he is staring frightenedly up at a convoluting mass of shadow near the ceiling. The great hand is forming steadily. He sees the vast fingers grow and waver about in the darkness overhead. Then he makes a huge attempt, and closes his eyes; yet, now that he knows the thing is there, it is worse to have them shut than open; for he imagines that it has come down close to him—that it is touching his face, and so, with something near to a cry, he opens his eyes and looks. The hand has grown whilst his eyes have been closed, and even as he stares, the thing comes down with its accustomed jerk. He tries to gather sufficient courage to grab at the clothes and get them over his head; for his fear has mastered his power to obey. Yet, already, he is past the ability to move and can only lie there, rigid and pressing madly and silently back against the bed.

The booming has come again in the room, throbbing solemnly, and growing louder. Above him the hand is lying motionless in the darkness; yet only for a second; then it begins to move from side to side with a peculiar waving motion, the great fingers twirling and twirling rapidly. Suddenly it stops, and the vast forefinger is reaching down toward him—down, down, down. . . . The booming noise ends suddenly, and then the finger is withdrawn. For a little the hand is very indistinct. Then it becomes plainer to his sight, and the booming noise re-echoes once more through the room; but more irregularly. For a time, the child is scarce conscious of anything save a deadly sick feeling, and behind that the overmastering fear. The sense of sickness goes, and the fear predominates nakedly. The hand is nearer, and now, for the first time, it is plain seen even to the gigantic wrist. For a while it remains motionless; then again is the long, shadowy forefinger reached down to him; but only to be withdrawn immediately, and after that, for a little, the hand remains quiet. . . . Suddenly, Willie is aware that it is sinking down upon him, slowly, imperceptibly almost . . . down . . . down . . . down. The booming noise dies out as he stares at the great shadowy mass coming down upon him. Without moving, he yet crouches backward down against the bed a little further. A cold sweat is running off his face. He sees the four vast fingers and the thumb come down right on to his face. In the same instant he screams out and then something goes snap, and he stops screaming. . . .

5

Downstairs in the big dining room Sir John and his lady are finishing dinner. Doctor Lubbock is at the table with them, and he is listening attentively to the lady. She has asked him to come to dinner, because she is wishful to have a little talk about Willie; for she has felt a little uneasy about the child’s pallor and look of ill-health in the morning. Lady John ceases to explain, and the Doctor commences to speak:

“I shouldn’t trouble about him. He’s a nervous child and will grow out of it; but I should be inclined to let him go back to the night nursery. Plenty of time, you know; plenty of time. I will slip in tomorrow and have a look at the young man. You say . . .” At this instant he is interrupted by a loud scream in the room overhead, and then the noise of something striking the floor with a distinct soft thud. Sir John starts to his feet, but his lady is before him, and is at the door, her face somewhat pale. There are running footsteps on the front stairs, and nurse bursts in upon them, her hair flying, her eyes wild and bright in the lamplight.

“In—in Mas-ter Willie’s roo-om!” she gasps, and then the mother has flung her to one side, and is racing for the stairs, her husband behind. The Doctor follows, without a word. He catches them at the door of Willie’s room. Lady John has got the corridor lamp. She turns the handle and enters. The bed is empty, the bedclothes thrown all on one side. They stand and stare around; then the mother gives out a cry of “Willie!” and runs forward to the wash-hand stand. Crouched beside it, cowering back in the corner, is a little white-robed figure, shivering and silent. The light from the lamp shines on uncomprehending eyes.

6

Three years have passed—three years in which the stern hand of sorrow has dealt with Willie’s mother. Yet now she is by no means a sorrowful looking woman as she watches a lean, sunbrowned, healthy-looking boy come bounding across the beach to her. It is Willie—Willie whom at one time she had thought gone from her forever; but, by the grace of God, the shadow has passed from the child, and now he is winning back to all of that for which she prayed so despairingly in those first two years. More, with greater health, the boy has come to courage such as would have warmed her heart in the older days; but now, though it does not fail to do so, the delight is ever tinctured by the memory of a certain night of terror, on which, for the first time, she met face to face the grim spectre—FEAR, and came to know something of the agony through which the child, her son, has passed.

Tomorrow they return to Blakenhouse Hall; they have not been near it since that night when she found her son, a little mad thing, crouched beside the wash handstand. But there is a certain room of fear into which neither he nor she will ever enter again; for the masons have walled up the doorway. And terror may hold its grim reign there undisturbed and harmless.

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The Promise

I
, Jacobeous Deacon, tell this thing, unshaken in my faith—as becometh a true believer—yet as one humanly wondering and fearful.

On the thirteenth of January—now one month gone—I kneeled by the bedside of my young brother, Josephus; he no more than sixteen years in this world, and dying of the hectic fever. I held his hands when he passed, wasted and thin were they, and my promise I gave to him in the moment he died that I, who had loved him so surely, should watch by his body until such time as he should be commit to the earth, from whence we are come.

And so died my brother whom I loved before all others; and through three nights and three days (he having passed upon the evening of the ninth day) I strayed no whither from kneeling beside him; tasting neither food nor water, which is ever my drink, in all that space. And my mother who bore me, and the father from whose loins I am descended, and the children of these twain who call me brother, came many times and besought me that I would take some food, even though a little, and sleep for a while in the room which lay next, and which was mine. But I took no heed; being, it might be, stone-like with the excess of my grief.

Then, on the fourth night, being as I have said, the thirteenth of the month, I must have broken my promise with the dead lad upon the bed; for my nature weakened, and I fell upon so profound a sleep that I heeded not that they, my people, carried me hence into the next room, and there, having laid me upon my bed, did lock me in—being determined for my reason’s sake, that I should no more come anigh the dead lad until my sanity of spirit was something restored within me.

And so for a space I slept there, all unknowing; and, presently, waked. And knowledge came to me, as I lay a moment to gather my witlessness, how that I had fallen from my sure self-respect, and slept when I should surely have watched. And in that moment I would gladly have died that this thing might have been undone.

And I got me slowly and wearifully from the bed, with sickness and desperateness in my soul that I had broken word with the dead lad; and I passed through the darkness to the door—meaning to complete my poor and scattered task in deep and humble shame. For, until that time, I, Jacobeous Deacon, had broken not my word in all my twenty years of life—counting no dishonour so great; and holding in contempt the weakness that bade the flesh fail to perform that which the spirit had laid its seal upon.

But when I was come to the door, I perceived that it was secured upon me, and my shame bade me to make no unseemly outburst. And as I stood there, unknowing for the while how to guide my actions, there came from the wall which divided my brother’s room from mine, a slight noise as though a cat scratched thrice. At this, a sudden sweat broke out upon me, and I shook a little with a sudden newly-known fear, that was yet not all clear to my consciousness; for the sound was the signal that my brother had used, in the years of his weakness, to make to me when he desired my presence in the night-time to company and cheer him. Yet was my brother dead upon the bed; and none other knew the signal. And so the strangeness that took me so coldly about my heart as with a half-knowing.

Then I had come to the wall and, pulling aside a little picture, I disclosed the hole which we had made years gone, that we might speak with one another, without need to come from our rooms. And through this hole I spied swiftly and saw my brother quiet upon the bed; and the wind, blowing gently, brought a little of the smell of the room to me; for my brother was to have burial upon the morrow.

Now, there burned three candles on each side of my brother; and he lay alone, and all the room seemed full of a dreadful stillness. And I let my gaze go about the room and come back again to the bed. But my brother was not there; and my heart dulled and sickened within me, and set thence to a mad beating; for there was no one in the room to move my brother.

Then something touched the wall upon the other side, and the hole gave to me a sudden greater smell of the room so that I was aware that I smelled. Then something came against the hole upon the other side and darkened it. And I fell backward from the hole, for some terrible thing, my spirit told to me, lay against it upon the other side, and looked at me through the darkness. And the smell of the dead spread around me; and there was a coldness upon my face.

And presently I knew that I pressed at the wall, and my cries filled the house, save when I fought to breathe. And then my people came to me, and unfastened the door, and brought lights. But I heeded them not as my friends; but cried out continually that the dead lad peered at me through the wall. And they, think me mad, and seeking to reassure me, went into the next room and returned to tell me that my brother lay all undisturbed. And they seeked to take me to him, to still my shiverings; but for a great while I was fearful, through all my being, to go. Yet, in time, they took me; their assurances having calmed my spirit. And it was as they had told to me. The boy lay quiet upon the bed, and ready for his burial.

But I, going at last to his side, saw that the rose I had placed above his hands was no longer there. And I turned me about and looked towards the wall, and so I found the rose upon the floor below the hole. But, by the grace of God, I calmed my spirit, and gat me to my knees, and they, seeing me thus, must have gone quietly from me; but I heard them not, for I prayed for the soul of my brother. And through all that remained of that night, prayed I, out of an humble heart; and my brother moved not, neither was I harmed.