The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (51 page)

She went abroad, and I was glad to know her gone. If life became unutterably dreary, at least my nightmare fears were in abeyance. Naturally I wrote begging for an explanation of her note, but none came. I had many letters from her; but, except for the one line, “I am so glad I came away,” they told me nothing. They were merely brilliant descriptions of her travels – little more than inspired
Baedekers
, with scarcely a word to show we had ever been great friends and shared an unacknowledged dread. I wrote to Rebecca to enquire after her mistress’s health. Her reply said her young lady seemed well enough, but appeared restless and as though not really enjoying the full life she led.

As the leaves fluttered down, till winter lay like iron over the land, the magical days of that long summer began to assume the golden haze of something dreamed. Often I would go and gaze at her empty home. I began to wonder whether I was ever to see her again. There was even a rumour that the Manor House was to be let on a long lease.

One morning, when an unusually reluctant spring had at last turned the fields to glory, I was surprised to see on an envelope bearing a London postmark the writing that always made my heart leap. I read:

I find it quite impossible to keep away any longer. I feel myself irresistibly drawn home, but I shall not sleep in my old room. I shall come back Monday, but shall arrive late. Please come to luncheon Tuesday.

Margaret Clewer

Coming home Monday? This was Monday. I should see her in little more than twenty-four hours. The day crept by with unbelievable slowness. To hasten tomorrow I went to bed unusually early.

In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly and with the certainty that I had been aroused by some sound. Yes, there it was again, outside the house. Small pebbles were being thrown up against my window. Expecting an emergency call, I struggled out of sleepiness and looked out of my low window. The moon was full; a tall figure stood below; a white, upturned face gleamed in the silvery-green light. It was Margaret! Her loveliness glimmered in the strange, cold light, but she looked wild, and there was desperate urgency in her voice.

“Quick, quick!” she cried. “I must have your help. I’m so frightened. Quick! Let me in! Let me in! This time I’ll tell you everything!”

Snatching my overcoat, I hurried downstairs as quietly as I could for fear of waking my servant, and opened the door.

It was no dream. The white figure stood outside, arms outstretched towards me. A glorious hope leaped in my heart; but, as I advanced, something indescribable looked out of her eyes. With desperate haste her hands moved, and in a second her face was entirely concealed by the chiffon scarf in which they had swathed it.

“Too late! Too late!” she wailed in a changing voice. “Go back, go back, and for God’s sake, don’t dare to follow me!” The white figure sped away.

Aghast, I started in pursuit, but after a few strides, the swathed, faceless figure turned. At the torrent of words that were shrieked at me in an unknown voice, I stood transfixed, frozen with horror.

Wild, nauseated fear took possession of me. God forgive me, I renounced her. To save my soul I could not have followed another step. I stole back and, drenched in cold sweat, lay shaking on my bed. Sleep never approached me, but I felt too shattered and ill to get up at my usual hour. At ten the telephone rang. Wondering what ghastly intimation was to come, I lifted the receiver.

Margaret’s lovely voice slid into my astonished ears. “It’s
me
. Please come and see me. They tell me I’m not well.” Her own lovely voice that I had not hoped to hear again. Had some monstrous dream imposed itself upon me? Almost I began to think it.

When I reached the Manor House, I asked where Miss Clewer’s new room was.

“Just the same as before, sir,” replied the parlour maid. “Miss Clewer did give orders for one to be prepared on the other side of the house, but as soon as she came she said she’d go back to her own room.”

Rebecca lay in wait in the familiar passage.

“Thank God you’ve come, Doctor,” she whispered. “She seems to be wandering in her mind this morning.”

I stole into the room. Margaret, strangely beautiful, but wan and fragile, lay back on a great pillow. She stretched out both hands in welcome. At once I knew that her memory held no trace of last night. She greeted me as though we met for the first time since her departure all those long months ago.

“Rebecca thinks I’m ill,” she said. “But I must be a creature incapable of my own distress, because I assure you I feel quite well. And, oh! So, so glad to see my physician!”

Did I say that, after the incident of the dog, I was only once again to see Margaret in her incomparable radiance? Strange that it should have been now, when I was prepared to find her in delirium. But thus it was. Once more she seemed her original, untroubled, sparkling self.

She questioned me about all the Mosstone news and gave irresistibly funny descriptions of people she had met on her travels. All was as I first remembered her, dancing voice, lovely laughter, buoyant, bubbling talk, lightning response, showers of quotations. What had Rebecca meant by describing her as delirious?

But suddenly a change came into her eyes. She clutched at my hands and held them tight. Then she began to, what Rebecca described as, wander. Her voice was solemn.

“As the tree falls, so shall it lie! That is true, isn’t it, John?”

John? I had almost forgotten my unused Christian name.

“It is true in every sort of way,” she went on, “isn’t it, darling? And as that tree lies, so shall it be all through the days of eternity – that’s true too, isn’t it, John – absolutely true?”

“Yes – yes, of course,” I soothed her.

“Oh, John,” she went on. “I’ve just found such a lovely, lovely poem. I didn’t know it before. I can’t think how I could have missed it. It’s by Barnefield. Just listen to the mournful magic of these two lines:

“‘King Pandion he is dead,
All thy friends are lapped in lead’.

“‘Lapped in lead’! Doesn’t that make death sound delicious and luxurious? As though to be alive were something very makeshift.” She gave a little quick laugh. “‘Lapped in lead – lapped in lead’,” she repeated, very slowly. “Oh, how lovely and peaceful and untormented! You know that would be the best thing that could happen to me, don’t you? The best thing that could happen to your Me. Then
your
Me would be safe.”

An urgent summons came, and I had to go to a distant case. Telling Rebecca on no account to leave her for a moment, and that I would get a nurse to come as soon as possible, I hurried away.

It was for a birth that I had been summoned. The baby was as reluctant to enter the world as its mother seemed disposed to leave it, and midnight had already struck when I reached home.

Through all the strain of that endless day I had been haunted by Margaret, and I intended to snatch some supper and hurry back to the Manor House. But before I had sat down the telephone rang. It was Rebecca’s voice:

“Come quick, come at once! Miss Margaret seems so weak, as though she couldn’t scarcely breathe. I’m speaking from her room. Do—” The voice broke off; it was no longer at the mouthpiece, but I heard it cry out, in deathly terror: “Oh, God, who—” And then the telephone must have been dropped.

No further sound came through. I replaced the receiver, and after a moment’s pause rang up the Exchange, in my impatience violently rattling the instrument.

“Number, please? Number, please?” expostulated the Exchange. I gave the number several times, but there was nothing to be heard beyond the intermittent ringing of an unanswered call . . . I pictured the overturned telephone lying on the floor of Margaret’s room. What had happened?

Leaping into my car, I drove to the Manor House. The front door stood wide open, but no one was about. I did not meet anyone on my way to Margaret’s room. The whole house was deserted.

What I saw when I approached the bed no one could attempt to describe and keep their reason. It writhed and moaned and seemed to breathe with terrible difficulty. I averted my eyes from the face, and with the automatic professional instinct to preserve life, administered an injection.

The thing on the bed gave a convulsive shudder and I heard the fast, thick breathing of some desperate struggle. Determined not to see the usurper again, I kept my eyes shut. I dared not look! Then there was silence, followed by a gentle sigh.

Something in that gentle sigh impelled me to open my eyes. Ineffable relief flowed over me. Like pure silver rising through primeval slime, the being I loved had struggled through and triumphed over the awful spiritual hideousness of that invasion. It was Margaret’s face that smiled at me. Her voice came sweet but hopelessly weak.

“It’s all right, darling,” she breathed, and in her voice was a tenderness I had never imagined. “It’s all right. I’ve won. It’s me,
your
Me. Don’t let me give way again. Keep me safe—”

Sure of her haven she gazed at me. Her hand clung to mine, and her lips smiled, but the strain of that final struggle had been too much for the already weakened heart. The eyelids fluttered up once or twice, as her clasp of my hand loosened. Almost inaudibly, but with an ecstasy of glimpsed peace, she breathed out the words: “‘Lapped in lead – lapped in lead—’” And something else I could not quite hear. I felt a last little clinging clutch at my hand, and with one or two long sighs the spirit I loved slipped from its beautiful lodging.

Some hours later I left the deserted house, and returned to the emptied world. Gratitude mingled with my grief; my broken heart was at peace, for I knew her to be unassailable. The long dread was at an end.

It is a desolate path I tread, but sometimes, when it seems most steep and bare, there comes, like a gentle wave washing against my tired brain, the soft assuagement of her voice murmuring: “‘Lapped in lead – lapped in lead’.” And again I hear the promise in the infinite tenderness of her whispered “darling”.

What were the words I failed to hear?

I often linger round her empty home. No smoke rises from the twisted chimneys, but pigeons still flutter and croon, and the grey house I once thought so aloof seems to receive me into an atmosphere of benign peace.

Amelia B. Edwards

The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them. They happened to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had taken place only yesterday. Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night. During those twenty years I have told the story to but one other person. I tell it now with a reluctance that I find it difficult to overcome. All I entreat, meanwhile, is that you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I want nothing explained away. I desire no arguments. My mind on this subject is quite made up, and having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it.

Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one’s way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and stared anxiously into the gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I could, by the way. So I shouldered my gun again and pushed wearily forward, for I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak and had eaten nothing since breakfast.

Meanwhile, the snow began to come down with ominous steadiness, and the wind fell. After this, the cold became more intense, and the night came rapidly up. As for me, my prospects darkened with the darkening sky, and my heart grew heavy as I thought how my young wife was already watching for me through the window of our little inn parlour, and thought of all the suffering in store for her throughout this weary night. We had been married four months, and, having spent our autumn in the Highlands, were now lodging in a remote little village situated just on the verge of the great English moorlands. We were very much in love, and, of course, very happy. This morning, when we parted, she had implored me to return before dusk, and I had promised her that I would. What would I not have given to have kept my word!

Even now, weary as I was, I felt that with supper, an hour’s rest, and a guide, I might still get back to her before midnight, if only guide and shelter could be found.

And all this time the snow fell and the night thickened. I stopped and shouted every now and then, but my shouts seemed only to make the silence deeper. Then a vague sense of uneasiness came upon me, and I began to remember stories of travellers who had walked on and on in the falling snow until, wearied out, they were fain to lie down and sleep their lives away. Would it be possible, I asked myself, to keep on thus through all the long dark night? Would there not come a time when my limbs must fail, and my resolution give way? When I, too, must sleep the sleep of death. Death! I shuddered. How hard to die just now, when life lay all so bright before me! How hard for my darling, whose whole loving heart – but that thought was not to be borne! To banish it, I shouted again, and again the echo followed. Then a wavering speck of light came suddenly out of the dark, shifting, disappearing, growing momentarily nearer and brighter. Running towards it at full speed, I found myself, to my great joy, face to face with an old man and a lantern.