The Uncanny, page 2
So we kept vigil, he and I. The fire waned and the oil in the lamp burned away. The shadows wafted slowly down from the rafters and came to enshroud us. The figures on the tapestries blended with the darkness until only a glancing eye, an enigmatic smile, a grasping hand flared into view from time to time with the cracking of an ember.
I had opportunity, in those hours, to think more or less deeply on my friend’s situation. My own beliefs notwithstanding, I am, I hope, no enemy to honest faith. Yet I could not help but wonder if it was perhaps Quentin’s spiritual studies that had so unnerved him. The civilized religion which we practice in this modern day has still its links to antique creeds and half-forgotten superstitions. Was it these, I asked myself, that haunted the abbey ruins, moulded by my friend’s fevered brain into the likeness of Black Annie?
As I meditated thus, the lamp went out. The embers in the grate continued to settle and hiss and a deeper blackness yet enclosed us. I studied my friend surreptitiously, growing even more concerned as the enervated condition in which he had begun our watch slowly gave way to a nervous attitude of growing tension and suspense. Somewhere beyond the room, a clock chimed. It was midnight.
Suddenly, Quentin was on his feet. “This is the hour!” he exclaimed. “She is here! ”
Before I could respond, he had rushed across the room to the window, had pressed himself close to the glass. I was fairly at his heels, was peering over his shoulder an instant later.
His breath misted the pane as he cried hoarsely, “Out there!”
“I can’t see a thing!” I answered. Beyond a yard away, I could make out nothing but thick, sable night.
And then the wind rose. I heard it in the chimney. I saw it a moment later in the movement of an elm as its naked branches bent and shivered. For as the wind rose, the clouds raced—and the moon appeared behind their wisps and traces. Its eldritch silver glow drew the landscape out of the darkness. Out there, beyond the sinuous silhouette of the elm, stood the abbey ruin, sullen, black and grim. The faltering illumination, laced as it was with the running cloud shadows, gave to the entire scene a floating quality, weird and dreamlike. We seemed to stare through the glass as through a torn curtain at another world revealed.
And as we stared, I saw her. A cloaked and hooded figure—raven-black, so black she seemed less a being than an absence of existence—was moving with slow and awful majesty among the churchyard headstones.
I cannot describe the suffocating horror that swept over me at that uncanny sight. I was unmanned, paralysed, my marrow ice, my sinew water. For long seconds, as the thing glided steadily towards the fragment of the chapel wall, I could not move or speak—I could not breathe—but only gaped unblinking as if I had been petrified on the spot. Death itself would not have seemed as forbidding to me as that ebon wraith who appeared the herald of a realm beyond death, a realm beyond reason, a realm, most terrible of all, beyond the reach of mercy or forgetfulness.
The silent, mournful phantasm proceeded with its lifeless grace to the end of the churchyard, to all that remained of the chapel. There, beside that ruined wall; there—though I write it who can hardly credit his own eyes; there, as I stood watching, frozen and amazed, the jet absence of her seemed to sink at the same stately pace, sink lower and lower into the hard earth, until only the cowled head remained above the surface. And then that too—all, all of her—had vanished.
At almost the same instant, a mass of clouds, propelled before the wailing wind, surged towards us above the ruin. In seconds, it had swept over the moon. The torn curtain closed. Utter darkness pressed once more against the window.
Still, as second after second passed, I could not move, but gazed upon the viewless night as if the extraordinary scene were still before me. It was Quentin’s stifled cry that broke the trance. When I turned, I saw that he had fallen into a paroxysm of trembling. Dry, strangled sobs were forcing their way out between his clenched teeth. I feared the onset of an apoplexy. Willing myself to action, I clutched his arm roughly.
“It’s all right,” I said—shouted, more loudly than I had intended. “It’s all right, man, pull yourself together. It’s over. She’s gone.”
“Gone?” The voice that broke from him did nothing to ease my qualms. It sounded choked and high, hollowed by an undertone of barely suppressed hysterical laughter. “Not gone,” he said, eyeing me brightly. “You fool. She is not gone. There are tunnels, you see. Out there. Under the abbey. Drains, passages for supplies. Covered over now, yes. They’re all covered over. But there’s a whole network of drains and tunnels. And one of them … one of them leads …”
Before he could finish, there came a noise—a noise from within the house! Soft, but definite, insistent, it seemed to rise up from below us, to spread through the walls until it filled the darkened sitting room.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
I have heard people say that their hairs stood on end, but I had never before experienced it myself The sound was like that of a clock’s pendulum and yet more resonant; softer, thinner than a knock at the door, and yet as chillingly deliberate. There was a pause as my gaze travelled slowly over the umbral forms and faces on the hanging tapestries. And then again:
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
I returned my attention to Quentin. He smiled at me, but a smile of such wild misery that I despaired of his reclamation. He leaned forward, whispered almost gleefully:
“One of them leads to the priest’s hole.”
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
There were often, I knew, in abbeys and the neighbouring houses, secret chambers and hideaways built to protect imperilled priests during the Tudor persecutions. It would not have been surprising if these “priest’s holes” were connected to the rest of the abbey by the underground passages which King Henry always claimed were employed in the canons’ secret amours.
“A priest’s hole,” I said, as the soft ticking sound repeated yet again, as the febrile gleam in my poor friend’s eyes grew brighter. “Where is it? Can we get inside? Come on, out with it, man.”
For the second time that night, Quentin cast a queerly knowing look at the door.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. That infernal noise again. What was it?
“In the study,” Quentin said.
I did not hesitate; the slightest hesitation would have done for my resolve. I marched, with more boldness than I felt, across the room to the fireplace. I seized a candle from the mantlepiece, bent to touch the wick to an ember. When the taper ignited, I carried the flame back to where Quentin stood. His face in the wavering glow was stretched and taut with apprehension as he began to understand my intent.
“Neville,” he gasped, “we can’t, we mustn’t …”
“We will,” I said sternly. “Follow me.”
I pulled him from the window, fairly dragged him after me to the door. It was harsh therapy, but effective. As Quentin was torn from his passive terror and offered the prospect of an enterprise, a measure of his former vigour seemed to return to him. His trembling ceased, and by the time we broke from the chamber into the corridor, he was following after me of his own volition.
With every step we took, the sound grew louder, nearer. Yet always, always, it surrounded us, vibrating behind the portraits, beneath the flooring, above the beams.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
At my shoulder, Quentin began to protest again, his expression urgent in the trailing candlelight, his words tumbling over one another.
“Neville. Neville, listen … For God’s sake … You don’t know what you’re dealing with … You don’t understand … Listen to me … Listen, before it’s too late …”
I raced on, ignoring his admonitions, closing my mind to them lest they dissuade me from my purpose. The persistent, rhythmic tapping all around us grew yet louder, nearer. I felt as if it had entered my brain, was rapping at me from within.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
“Neville!” Quentin cried again.
“Is this the door?” I said, as we reached the study. Raising my candle high, I grasped the iron handle. At a nod from Quentin, I pushed it down. The door swung slowly inward.
We entered the small room, the candlelight breathing over the veiled windows, the shelves of books, a desk littered, like the sitting room, with documents heaped and strewn about. The flame’s unsteady respiration seemed to plunge the place into an element like water. The objects seemed to undulate and swim in and out of view before us.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
I stepped forward cautiously, Quentin at my back. It was here, whatever it was—here, or just nearby. The sound seemed to vibrate up out of the very heart of the chamber. I could not help but tense, the flame flickering as my grip on the candle tightened, as the sound came again.
Tick-tick.
“Where is it?” I whispered hoarsely.
“Neville …”
“Where is it?”
He inclined his head towards the books on the wall to my left. “That case there,” he said reluctantly.
In two strides, I was at the bookcase he indicated, a tall case of some dark wood, its shelves lined with musty leather volumes. Uncertainly, my hand went out to touch the bindings. Quentin continued to protest behind me.
“Neville, let us turn back, let us consider, there is more to say, much more you do not know …”
A book—-a heavy black book with no lettering on its ribbed spine—shifted inward beneath my fingers. There was the sound of a latch giving way. The entire case seemed to snap free of the wall. With a whining screak, it swung towards me on a hidden hinge.
I pulled the case open as if it were a door to reveal the narrow staircase winding into the blackness below.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
Now, at last, as if drawn from the house’s timbers, drawn from the air around us, from my own brain, the sound resolved itself upon a single centre, a single source. It ascended in its unceasing, funereal tempo from the dark at the base of the stairs.
Tick-tick.
I started down to meet it.
“No, Neville!”
As I descended, step by slow step, the damp wooden boards groaning thickly beneath my soles, Quentin’s gibbered warnings spiralled into a frantic skirl.
“You do not blow, you have not understood, you must believe me, I have thought on these things for weeks, I have tried to comprehend …”
My own shadow dodged and capered in bizarre shapes on the dripping stone walls around me. My heart was thudding in my chest and there was a thickness in my throat that nearly made me gag.
As my foot touched the bottom step, I felt a clammy draught twine round my legs. The candle flame swelled and, in the broadening glow, I saw before me a door of rotted wood hung in hammered iron bands.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
The sound was coming from behind the door. Nervously gnawing my lips, I willed my hand to reach out for the ring that secured it.
“Neville. For the love of God!” Quentin cried. “There were weeks before she died. Weeks when she left her hiding hole, when she wandered the abbey grounds by night. Nights when she used a spade, don’t you see! In her distraction, a garden spade, trying to dig through the stone! She was searching …”
The door opened heavily, grinding against the floor.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick …
And there was silence. The tapping stopped short. The candlelight faltered, recovered, bathed the priest’s hole in its bleak, liquid candescence.
But the place was empty.
Together on the threshold, Quentin and I found ourselves peering into a cramped dungeon with low beams above walls of uneven stone blocks. Nothing moved within and the quiet was so complete it seemed almost unnatural. Not even a rat scrabbled for cover as we two stood baffled, gawking.
Then Quentin blurted, “There! Look!”
I lifted the taper. The light spread over the entire chamber. My gaze, following Quentin’s gesture, fell on a small white mound of flakes and powder that had collected on the floor at the base of the wall. It was immediately apparent that the debris had fallen from one of the stones above. I could see where the stone had been chiseled, its edges frayed and chalky as if—just as if someone had been digging at it with the point of a spade.
Before I had time to think, I was moving forward, one hand holding the candle high, the other stretching towards the stone. Quentin shouted my name again, but my fingers were already digging at the jagged edge where the blade had bit into the rock. I gripped it, pulled. The stone shifted easily, wobbled, rolled from its position. It slipped from my grasp and there was a loud crash as it dropped to the floor at my feet. In the same instant, the air seemed to shake. Quentin shouted wildly. I gasped. But these noises were washed away by an indescribably hideous shriek. It flew up around us from everywhere and nowhere at once: a ragged howl full of hellish rage and a grief beyond the soothings of eternity. The entire house seemed to quake and shiver to its foundations as the anguished wail went on and on and on.
For there, in the niche revealed by the displacement of the stone, preserved in that airless cell so that its skin had grown leathery and tight, had yanked its mouth wide and given its eyeless sockets a stare of endless agony—there, its neck slashed open, lay the body of an infant, which decayed and crumbled to dust even as we gazed upon it.
II
STORM,
LIFTING
HIS
TRAGICAL
EYES
1
A glass shattered across the room and Storm, lifting his tragical eyes, saw, though too late, a woman worth dying for.
The book of ghost stories was still open in his hands. His lips were still parted on the final phrase—crumbled to dust even as we gazed upon it. But the phrase, the whole story, had been blown right out of his mind. By the woman, by her beauty. Just the sight of her had brought him from his chair to his feet.
Which was pretty ridiculous when he came to think of it. What was he going to do next? Leap into the air like a cartoon character—his tongue out—his eyes hanging from their sockets on springs—the Valentine shape of his heart boinging through his shirtfront? He was a modern guy, after all, an American guy, a Hollywood guy. A real person with nose hairs and psychiatric problems and an anus. This was life, not the movies. It wasn’t possible—was it?—that he had just fallen in love at first sight?
Maybe not, but he went on gawping at her. She was standing in the drawing-room archway, one of the guests who had drifted in when Storm had begun to read aloud. In the sitting room behind her, the great Scotch pine with its colored Christmas lights seemed to him to frame her, to set her in relief. A girl of, say, twenty and some. Not the sort of anorexic starlet he was used to, not one of his usual airheads inflated with silicon and ambition. Hers was a real figure in low-cut black velvet. A waist and hips of substance, womanly in the extreme. A bosom from the days when bosoms were bosoms. A swanlike neck, damask cheeks, skin of ivory, hair of jet. Brown eyes, the palest brown eyes imaginable, bright and snappy and quick. Woof, he thought; Jesus.
The others around her—all of Bolt’s London sophisticates—had begun to laugh now and applaud her. She was still frozen with the hand that had held the glass extended, with her startled gaze on the fragments where they lay. Fragments and glistening slivers on the tan carpet. A spreading, colorless stain. The glass had just slipped from her fingers apparently, must’ve hit the edge of the butler’s tray on the way down.
“Oh,” she said finally, “how stupid of me.”
Storm reeled inwardly, mentally clutched his chest. What an accent, too, he thought. That real English stuff. Like Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. He could still remember some of his boyhood fantasies about Mary Poppins. The things she would croon to him with that accent. Oh, Richard. Oh, young master!
I’m sorry, he was about to say aloud, sorry if I frightened you. It was just a stupid old ghost story. But he was already coming to his senses. And Bolt, anyway, was out of his armchair, was going to her, and Bolt was the host.
“Oh, Frederick, let me clean it up, I’m an idiot,” she said to him.
“No, no.” He took her arm. “I’ve already dispatched my minions.” The two women who had knelt to retrieve the shards glared up at him: a man plummeting into middle age like a bomb, shaped like a bomb, squat-bottomed, potbellied in his green suit and waistcoat. A serpentine, cynical face deeply scored by Bell’s and Rothmans. Shaggy gray hair dropping dandruff. Cigarette dropping ash. “And anyway, I rent the place,” he said. And he led her gently from the room.
Storm watched—bleakly—as the two of them turned out of sight down the front hall. He could hear their voices receding.
“I am sorry, Frederick, I shouldn’t have come, I’m just knackered. I was in Ohio yesterday, and Berlin last week …”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I live for your visits. I’ll save the pieces as a relic. I’ll build a shrine on the spot …”
Someone clapped Storm on the shoulder. Someone else said, “Well read. Spooky stuff. You put the wind up her anyway.”
“Who is she?” Storm murmured, staring at the place where she had stood.
And someone answered: “Oh, that—that’s Sophia Endering. Her father owns the Endering Gallery in New Bond Street. Not half bad, eh?”
Storm nodded. Remained on his feet a few moments more, his gaze now wandering aimlessly over the room. A cozy alcove, chairs clustered together, run-of-the-mill pseudo-Victorian prints hung above low shelves of frazzled paperbacks. A wide archway into the long sitting room where the Christmas tree sparkled and the gas fire burbled and recessed lights beamed on bottles of white wine. And where the group that had gathered to hear him read was now dispersing. And the party conversation was resuming.
