Night Terrors

  There was no doubt whatever in my mind that he was the same person as I had seen when I was bathing, and the switching on of the light made this clear, for it shone full on his face. No doubt then Mr Barton finding he was too early was strolling about the garden till the dinner-hour. But now I did not look forward at all to this evening: I had had a good look at him and there was something horrible about him. Was he human, was he earthly at all? Then he quietly moved away, and immediately afterwards there came a knock at the front door just outside the room, and I heard Francis coming downstairs. He went to the door himself: there was a word of greeting, and he came into the room accompanied by a tall, slim fellow whom he introduced to me.

  We had a very pleasant evening: Barton talked fluently and agreeably, and more than once he spoke of his friend and pupil Dickie. About eleven he rose to go, and Francis suggested to him that he should walk back across the garden which gave him a short cut to his house. The threatening storm still held off, but it was very dark overhead, as we stood together outside the French window. Barton was soon swallowed up in the blackness. Then there came a bright flash of lightning, and in that moment of illumination I saw that there was standing in the middle of the lawn, as if waiting for him, the figure I had seen twice already. ‘Who is that?’ was on the tip of my tongue, but instantly I perceived that Francis had seen nothing of it, and so I was silent, for I knew now what I had already half-guessed – that this was no living man of flesh and blood whom I had seen. A few heavy drops of rain plopped on the flagged walk, and, as we moved indoors, Francis called out ‘Good night, Barton!’ and the cheery voice answered.

  Before long we went up to bed, and he took me into his room as we passed, a big panelled chamber with a great wardrobe by the bed. Close to it hung an oil-portrait of kit-cat size.

  ‘I’ll show you what’s in that wardrobe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Rather wonderful things . . . That’s a picture of my uncle.’

  I had seen that face before this evening.

  For the next two or three days I had no further glimpse of that dreadful visitant, but never for a moment was I at ease, for I was aware that he was about. What instinct or what sense perceived that, I have no idea: perhaps it was merely the dread I had of seeing him again that gave rise to the conviction. I thought of telling Francis that I must get back to London; what prevented me from so doing was the desire to know more, and that made me fight this cold fear. Then very soon I perceived that Francis was no more at ease than I was. Sometimes as we sat together in the evening he was oddly alert: he would pause in the middle of a sentence as if some sound had attracted his attention, or he would look up from our game of bezique and focus his eyes for a second on some corner of the room or, more often, on the dark oblong of the open French window. Had he, I wondered, been seeing something invisible to me, and, like myself, feared to speak of it?

  These impressions were momentary and infrequent, but they kept alive in me the feeling that there was something astir, and that something, coming out of the dark and the unknown, was growing in force. It had come into the house, and was present everywhere . . . And then one awoke again to a morning of heavenly brightness and sunshine, and surely one was disquieting oneself in vain.

  I had been there about a week when something occurred which precipitated what followed. I slept in the room which Dickie usually occupied, and awoke one night feeling uncomfortably hot. I tugged at a blanket to remove it, but it was tucked very tightly in between the mattresses on the side of the bed next to the wall. Eventually I got it free, and as I did so I heard something drop with a flutter on to the floor. In the morning I remembered that, and found underneath the bed a little paper notebook. I opened it idly enough, and within were a dozen pages written over in a round childish handwriting, and these words struck my eye.

  ‘Thursday, July 11th. I saw great-uncle Horace again this morning in the wood. He told me something about myself which I didn’t understand, but he said I should like it when I got older. I mustn’t tell anybody that he’s here, nor what he told me, except Mr Barton.’

  I did not care one jot whether I was reading a boy’s private diary. That was no longer a consideration worth thinking about. I turned over the page and found another entry.

  ‘Sunday, July 21st. I saw Uncle Horace again. I said I had told Mr Barton what he had told me, and Mr Barton had told me some more things, and that he was pleased, and said I was getting on and that he would take me to prayers some day soon.’

  I cannot describe the thrill of horror that these entries woke in me. They made the apparition which I had seen infinitely more real and more sinister. It was a spirit corrupt and malign and intent on corruption that haunted the place. But what was I to do? How could I, without any lead from Francis, tell him that the spirit of his uncle – of whom at present I knew nothing – had been seen not by me only, but by his nephew, and that he was at work on the boy’s mind? Then there was the mention of Barton. Certainly that could not be left as it was. He was collaborating in that damnable task. A cult of corruption (or was I being too fantastic?) began to outline itself. Then what did that sentence about taking him to prayers mean? But Dickie was away, thank goodness, for the present, and there was time to think it over. As for that pitiful little notebook, I put it into a locked despatch case.

  The day, as far as outward and visible signs were concerned, passed pleasantly. For me there was a morning’s work, and for both of us an afternoon on the golf-links. But below there was something heavy; my knowledge of that diary kept intervening with mental telephone-calls asking ‘What are you going to do?’ Francis, on his side, was troubled; there were sub-currents, and I did not know what they were. Silences fell, not the natural unobserved silences between those who are intimate, which are only a symbol of their intimacy, but the silences between those who have something on their minds of which they fear to speak. These had got more stringent all day: there was a growing tenseness: all common topics were banal, for they only cloaked a certain topic.

  We sat out on the lawn before dinner on that sultry evening, and breaking one of these silent intervals, he pointed at the front of the house.

  ‘There’s an odd thing,’ he said. ‘Look! There are three rooms, aren’t there, on the ground floor: dining-room, drawing-room, and the little study where you write. Now look above. There are three rooms there: your bedroom, my bedroom, and my sitting-room. I’ve measured them. There are twelve feet missing. Looks as if there was a sealed-up room somewhere.’

  Here, at any rate, was something to talk about.

  ‘Exciting,’ I said. ‘Mayn’t we explore?’

  ‘We will. We’ll explore as soon as we’ve dined. Then there’s another thing: quite off the point. You remember those vestments I showed you the other day? I opened the wardrobe, where they are kept, an hour ago, and a lot of big fat flies came buzzing out. A row like a dozen aeroplanes overhead. Remote but loud, if you know what I mean. And then there weren’t any.’

  Somehow I felt that what we had been silent about was coming out into the open. It might be ill to look upon . . .

  He jumped from his chair.

  ‘Let’s have done with these silences,’ he cried. ‘He’s here, my uncle, I mean. I haven’t told you yet, but he died in a swarm of flies. He asked for the Sacrament, but before the wine was consecrated the chalice was choked with them. And I know he’s here. It sounds damned rot, but he is.’

  ‘I know that, too,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I thought you would laugh at me.’

  ‘I should have a few days ago,’ said he. ‘But I don’t now. Go on.’

  ‘The first evening I was here I saw him at the bathing pool. That same night, when we were seeing Owen Barton off, a flash of lightning came, and he was there again standing on the lawn.’

  ‘But how did you know it was he?
’ asked Francis.

  ‘I knew it when you showed me the portrait of him in your bedroom that same night. Have you seen him?’

  ‘No; but he’s here. Anything more?’

  This was the opportunity not only natural but inevitable.

  ‘Yes, much more,’ I said. ‘Dickie has seen him too.’

  ‘That child? Impossible.’

  The door out of the drawing-room opened, and Francis’s parlour-maid came out with the sherry on a tray. She put the decanter and glasses down on the wicker table between us, and I asked her to bring out the despatch case from my room. I took the paper notebook out of it.

  ‘This slipped out from between my mattresses last night. It’s Dickie’s diary. Listen:’ and I read him the first extract.

  Francis gave one of those swift disconcerting glances over his shoulder.

  ‘But we’re dreaming,’ he said. ‘It’s a nightmare. God, there’s something awful here! And what about Dickie not telling anybody except Barton what he told him? Anything more?’

  ‘Yes. “Sunday, July 21st. I saw Uncle Horace again. I said I had told Mr Barton what he told me, and Mr Barton told me some more things, and that he was pleased and said I was getting on, and that he would take me to prayers some day soon.” I don’t know what that means.’

  Francis sprang out of his chair.

  ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Take him to prayers? Wait a minute. Let me remember about my first visit here. I was a boy of nineteen, and frightfully, absurdly innocent for my age. A woman staying here gave me a book to read called Là-Bas. I didn’t get far in it then, but I know what it’s about now.’

  ‘Black Mass,’ said I. ‘Satan worshippers.’

  ‘Yes. Then one day my uncle dressed me up in a scarlet cassock, and Barton came in and put on a cope and said something about my being a server. He used to be a priest, did you know that? And one night I awoke and heard the sound of chanting and a bell rang. By the way, Barton’s coming to dine tomorrow . . . ’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘About him? I can’t tell yet. But we’ve got something to do tonight. Horrors have happened here in this house. There must be some room where they held their Mass, a chapel. Why, there’s that missing space I spoke of just now.’

  After dinner we set to work. Somewhere on the first floor on the garden front of the house there was this space unaccounted for by the dimensions of the rooms there. We turned on the electric light in all of them, and then going out into the garden we saw that the windows in Francis’s bedroom and in his sitting-room next door were far more widely spaced than they should have been. Somewhere, then, between them lay the area to which there was no apparent access and we went upstairs. The wall of his sitting-room seemed solid, it was of brick and timber, and large beams ran through it at narrow intervals. But the wall of his bedroom was panelled, and when we tapped on it, no sound came through into the other room beyond.

  We began to examine it.

  The servants had gone to bed, and the house was silent, but as we moved about from garden to house and from one room to another there was some presence watching and following us. We had shut the door into his bedroom from the passage, but now as we peered and felt about the panelling, the door swung open and closed again, and something entered, brushing my shoulder as it passed.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said. ‘Someone came in.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘Look what I’ve found.’

  In the border of one of the panels was a black stud like an ebony bell-push. He pressed it and pulled, and a section of the panelling slid sideways, disclosing a red curtain cloaking a doorway. He drew it aside with a clash of metal rings. It was dark within, and out of the darkness came a smell of stale incense. I felt with my hand along the frame of the doorway and found a switch, and the blackness was flooded with a dazzling light.

  Within was a chapel. There was no window, and at the West end of it (not the East) there stood an altar. Above it was a picture, evidently of some early Italian school. It was on the lines of the Fra Angelico picture of the Annunciation. The Virgin sat in an open loggia, and on the flowery space outside the angel made his salutation. His spreading wings were the wings of a bat, and his black head and neck were those of a raven. He had his left hand, not his right, raised in blessing. The virgin’s robe of thinnest red muslin was trimmed with revolting symbols, and her face was that of a panting dog with tongue protruding.

  There were two niches at the East end, in which were marble statues of naked men, with the inscriptions ‘St Judas’ and ‘St Gilles de Raies’. One was picking up pieces of silver that lay at his feet, the other looked down leering and laughing at the prone figure of a mutilated boy. The place was lit by a chandelier from the ceiling: this was of the shape of a crown of thorns, and electric bulbs nestled among the woven silver twigs. A bell hung from the roof, close beside the altar.

  For the moment, as I looked on these obscene blasphemies, I felt that they were merely grotesque and no more to be regarded seriously than the dirty inscriptions written upon empty wall-spaces in the street. That indifference swiftly passed, and a horrified consciousness of the devotion of those who had fashioned and assembled these decorations took its place. Skilled painters and artificers had wrought them and they were here for the service of all that is evil; that spirit of adoration lived in them dynamic and active. And the place was throbbing with the exultant joy of those who had worshipped here.

  ‘And look here!’ called Francis. He pointed to a little table standing against the wall just outside the altar-rails.

  There were photographs on it, one of a boy standing on the header-board at the bathing pool about to plunge.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘Barton took it. And what’s written underneath it? “Ora pro Francisco Elton.” And that’s Mrs Ray, and that’s my uncle, and that’s Barton in a cope. Pray for him, too, please. But it’s childish!’

  He suddenly burst into a shout of laughter. The roof of the chapel was vaulted and the echo that came from it was loud and surprising, the place rang with it. His laughter ceased, but not so the echo. There was someone else laughing. But where? Who? Except for us the chapel was empty of all visible presences.

  On and on the laughter went, and we stared at each other with panic stirring. The brilliant light from the chandelier began to fade, dusk gathered, and in the dusk there was brewing some hellish and deadly force. And through the dimness I saw, hanging in the air, and oscillating slightly as if in a draught the laughing face of Horace Elton. Francis saw it too.

  ‘Fight it! Withstand it!’ he cried as he pointed to it. ‘Desecrate all that it holds sanctified! God, do you smell the incense and the corruption?’

  We tore the photographs, we smashed the table on which they stood. We plucked the frontal from the altar and spat on the accursed table: we tugged at it till it toppled over and the marble slab split in half. We hauled from the niches the two statues that stood there, and crash they went on to the paved floor. Then appalled at the riot of our iconoclasm we paused. The laughter had ceased and no oscillating face dangled in the dimness. Then we left the chapel and pulled across the doorway the panel that closed it.

  Francis came to sleep in my room, and we talked long, laying our plans for next day. We had forgotten the picture over the altar in our destruction, but now it worked in with what we proposed to do. Then we slept, and the night passed without disturbance. At the least we had broken up the apparatus that was hallowed to unhallowed uses, and that was something. But there was grim work ahead yet, and the issue was unconjecturable.

  Barton came to dine that next evening, and there hung on the wall opposite his place the picture from the chapel upstairs. He did not notice it at first, for the room was rather dark, but not dark enough yet to need artificial light. He was gay and lively as usual, spoke amusingly and wittily, and as
ked when his friend Dickie was to return. Towards the end of dinner the lights were switched on, and then he saw the picture. I was watching him, and the sweat started out on his face that had grown clay-coloured in a moment. Then he pulled himself together.

  ‘That’s a strange picture,’ he said. ‘Was it here before? Surely not.’

  ‘No: it was in a room upstairs,’ said Francis. ‘About Dickie? I don’t know for certain when he’ll come back. We have found his diary, and presently we must speak about that.’

  ‘Dickie’s diary? Indeed!’ said Barton, and he moistened his lips with his tongue.

  I think he guessed then that there was something desperate ahead, and I pictured a man condemned to be hanged waiting in his cell with his warders for the imminent hour, as Barton waited then. He sat with an elbow on the table and his hand propping his forehead. Immediately almost the servant brought in our coffee and left us.

  ‘Dickie’s diary,’ said Francis quietly. ‘Your name figures in it. Also my uncle’s. Dickie saw him more than once. But, of course, you know that.’

  Barton drank off his glass of brandy.

  ‘Are you telling me a ghost story?’ he said. ‘Pray go on.’

  ‘Yes, it’s partly a ghost story, but not entirely. My uncle – his ghost if you like – told him certain stories and said he must keep them secret except from you. And you told him more. And you said he should come to prayers with you some day soon. Where was that to be? In the room just above us?’