The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (95 page)

“Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don’t understand at all,” said Sanderson, “but just that phase – I do.” He reflected. “These happen to be a series of gestures – connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry. Probably you know. Or else—
How?
” He reflected still further. “I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don’t, you don’t.”

“I know nothing,” said Clayton, “except what the poor devil let out last night.”

“Well, anyhow,” said Sanderson, and placed his church-warden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.

“So?” said Clayton, repeating.

“So,” said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.

“Ah,
now
,” said Clayton, “I can do the whole thing – right.”

He stood up before the waning fire and smiled at us all. But I think there was just a little hesitation in his smile. “If I begin—” he said.

“I wouldn’t begin,” said Wish.

“It’s all right!” said Evans. “Matter is indestructible. You don’t think any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into the world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so far as I’m concerned, until your arms drop off at the wrists.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Wish, and stood up and put his arm on Clayton’s shoulder. “You’ve made me half-believe in that story somehow, and I don’t want to see the thing done.”

“Goodness!” said I, “here’s Wish frightened!”

“I am,” said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity. “I believe that if he goes through these motions right he’ll
go
.”

“He’ll not do anything of the sort,” I cried. “There’s only one way out of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years from that. Besides . . . And such a ghost! Do you think—?”

Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs and stopped beside the table and stood there. “Clayton,” he said, “you’re a fool.”

Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back to him. “Wish,” he said, “is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall get to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through the air, Presto! – this hearthrug will be vacant, the room will be blank amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen stone will plump into the world of shades. I’m certain. So will you be. I decline to argue further. Let the thing be tried.”

“
No
,” said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and Clayton raised his hands once more to repeat the spirit’s passing.

By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension – largely because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on Clayton – I, at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling about me as though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs my body had been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that was imperturbably serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands and arms before us. As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled in one’s teeth. The last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms out wide open, with the face held up. And when at last he swung out to this closing gesture I ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner, in a queer old shadowy house. Would he, after all—?

There he stood for one stupendous moment, with his arms open and his upturned face, assured and bright, in the glare of the hanging lamp. We hung through that moment as if it were an age, and then came from all of us something that was half a sigh of infinite relief and half a reassuring “
No!
” For visibly – he wasn’t going. It was all nonsense. He had told an idle story, and carried it almost to conviction, that was all! . . . And then in that moment the face of Clayton changed.

It changed. It changed as a lit house changes when its lights are suddenly extinguished. His eyes were suddenly eyes that were fixed, his smile was frozen on his lips, and he stood there still. He stood there, very gently swaying.

That moment, too, was an age. And then, you know, chairs were scraping, things were falling, and we were all moving. His knees seemed to give, and he fell forward, and Evans rose and caught him in his arms. . . .

It stunned us all. For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing. We believed it, yet could not believe it. . . . I came out of a muddled stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt were torn open, and Sanderson’s hand lay on his heart. . . .

Well – the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost’s incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale – as the coroner’s jury would have us believe – is no matter for my judging; it is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding those passes, he changed, and staggered, and fell down before us – dead!

Sophy Mason Comes Back

E. M. Delafield

It wasn’t, as it is so often, a flippant enquiry. One was serious, on that particular subject, with Fenwick. He was keen on psychical research, although it was understood that he took a line of his own, and neither accepted, nor promulgated, arbitrary interpretations of any kind.

He answered cautiously:

“I’ve seen what the French call a
revenant
, undoubtedly.”

“Was it frightening?” asked one of the women, timidly.

Fenwick shook his head:

“I wasn’t frightened,” he admitted. “Not by the ghost or spirit – whichever you like to call it. Still less have I been so by so-called ‘haunted rooms’ with mysterious noises and unexplained openings of doors, and so on. But once, in the house where I saw the
revenant
– I was frightened.”

“Do you mean – wasn’t it the ghost that frightened you, then?”

“No,” said Fenwick, and his serious, clever face wore a look of gravity and horror.

We asked if he would tell us about it.

“I’ll try, but I may have to tell the story backwards. You see, when I came into it, everything was over – far away in the forgotten past, not just on the other side of the war, but right back in the late eighties. You know – horse-drawn carriages, and oil-lamps, and the women wearing bonnets, and long, tight skirts, all bunched up at the back . . . In a French provincial town, naturally, things were as much behind the times then, as they are now. (This happened in France by the way – did I tell you?) It isn’t necessary to give you the name of the town. It was somewhere in the midi, where the Latins are – very Latin indeed.

“Well, there was a house – call it Les Moineaux. One of those tall, narrow French houses, white, with blue shutters, and a straight avenue of trees leading to the front steps, and a formal arrangement of standard rose-bushes on either side of the blue frontdoor.

“It was quite a little house, you understand – not a chateau. It had once belonged to a very small community of contemplative monks – they’d made the garden and the avenue, I believe. When the monks became so few in number that they were absorbed into another Order, the house stayed empty for a bit. Then it was bought by a wine merchant, as a gift for his wife, who used it as a country villa for herself and her children every summer. This family lived at – well, in a town about twenty kilometres away. They could either drive out to Les Moineaux, or come by the diligence, that stopped in the village about half a mile away from the house. Most of the year, the house remained empty, and no one seems to have thought that a caretaker was necessary. Either the peasants round there were very honest, or there was nothing worth taking in the house. Probably the thrifty madame of the wine merchant brought down whatever they required for their summer visits, and took it all away again when they left. There were big cupboards in the house, too – built into the wall – and she could have locked anything away in those, and taken the key.

“The family consisted of monsieur and madame, three or four children, and an English girl, whom they all called ‘mees,’ who was supposed to look after the children, and make herself generally useful.

“Her name was Sophy Mason; she was about twenty when she came to them, and is said to have been very pretty.

“One imagines that she was kept fully occupied. Madame would certainly have seen to it that she earned her small salary, and her keep; and, as is customary in the French middle-class, each member of the household was prepared to do any job that needed doing, without reference to ‘my work’ or ‘your work.’ Sophy Mason, however, was principally engaged with the children. Quite often, in the spring and early summer, she was sent down with them to Les Moineaux for a few days’ country air, while monsieur and madame remained with the business. They must have been go-ahead people, by the way, far in advance of their time, for ‘the mees’ seems to have been allowed to keep the children out of doors, quite in accordance with the English traditions, and entirely contrary to the usual French fashion of that date and that class.

“The peasants, working in the fields, used to see the English girl, with the children, running races up and down the avenue, or going out into the woods to pick wild strawberries. Sophy Mason could speak French quite well, but she was naturally expected to talk English with the children, and, except for a word or two with the people at the farm, from which milk and butter and eggs were supplied to Les Moineaux, there was in point of fact no one for her to talk to, when monsieur and madame were not there.

“Until Alcide Lamotte came on the scene.

“All I can tell you about him is that he was the son of a farmer – a big, red-headed fellow, of an unusual type, and certainly possessing brains, and a compelling personality.

When he and Sophy Mason met first, he was in the middle of his compulsory three years’ military service, and home at the farm
en permission
.

“One can imagine it – this English girl, who’d been in France over a year without, probably, exchanging a word with anyone but her employers, their children, and perhaps an occasional old
curé
coming in for a game of cards in the evening – left to her own devices in the more or less isolated villa in the late spring, or early summer, in the vine country. What happened was, of course, inevitable. No one knows when or how their first meetings took place, but passions move quickly in that country. By the time monsieur and madame did appear, to inaugurate their usual summer
vie de campagne
, the neighbouring peasantry were perfectly aware that
le roux
, as they called him, was Sophy Mason’s lover.