The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK ™: 17 Classic Tales Read online

  I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, till John comes.

  I want to astonish him.

  I’ve got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!

  But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!

  This bed will not move!

  I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.

  Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

  I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.

  Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.

  I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.

  I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?

  But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don’t get me out in the road there!

  I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!

  It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

  I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to.

  For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.

  But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

  Why there’s John at the door!

  It is no use, young man, you can’t open it!

  How he does call and pound!

  Now he’s crying for an axe.

  It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!

  “John dear!” said I in the gentlest voice, “the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!”

  That silenced him for a few moments.

  Then he said—very quietly indeed, “Open the door, my darling!”

  “I can’t,” said I. “The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!”

  And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.

  “What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!”

  I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

  “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

  Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

  HURST OF HURSTCOTE, by E. Nesbit

  (originally appeared in Temple Bar, June 1893)

  We were at Eton together, and afterwards at Christ Church, and I always got on very well with him; but somehow he was a man about whom none of the other men cared very” much. There was always something strange and secret about him; even at Eton he liked grubbing among books and trying chemical experiments better than cricket or the boats. That sort of thing would make any boy unpopular. At Oxford, it wasn’t merely his studious ways and his love of science that went against him; it was a certain habit he had of gazing at us through narrowing lids, as though he were looking at us more from the outside than any human being has a right to look at any other, and a bored air of belonging to another and a higher race, whenever we talked the ordinary chatter about athletics and the Schools.

  A wild paper on “Black Magic’, which he read to the Essay Society, filled to overflowing the cup of his College’s contempt for him. I suppose no man was ever so much disliked for so little cause.

  When we went down I noticed—for I knew his people at home—that the sentiment of dislike which he excited in most men was curiously in contrast to the emotions which he inspired in women. They all liked him, listened to him with rapt attention, talked of him with undisguised enthusiasm. I watched their strange infatuation with calmness for several years, but the day came when he met Kate Danvers, and then I was not calm any more. She behaved like all the rest of the women, and to her, quite suddenly, Hurst threw the handkerchief. He was not Hurst of Hurstcote then, but his family was good, and his means not despicable, so he and she were conditionally engaged. People said it was a poor match for the beauty of the county; and her people, I know, hoped she would think better of it. As for me—well, this is not the story of my life, but of his. I need only say that I thought him a lucky man.

  I went to town to complete the studies that were to make me MD; Hurst went abroad, to Paris or Leipzig or somewhere, to study hypnotism and prepare notes for his book on “Black Magic’. This came out in the autumn, and had a strange and brilliant success.

  Hurst became famous, famous as men do become nowadays. His writings were asked for by all the big periodicals. His future seemed assured. In the spring they were married; I was not present at the wedding. The practice my father had bought for me in London claimed all my time, I said.

  It was more than a year after their marriage that I had a letter from Hurst.

  Congratulate me, old man! Crowds of uncles and cousins have died, and I am Hurst of Hurstcote, which God wot I never thought to be. The place is all to pieces, but we can’t live anywhere else. If you can get away about September, come down and see us. We shall be installed. I have everything now that I ever longed for—Hurstcote—cradle of our race—and all that, the only woman in the world for my wife, and—But that’s enough for any man, surely.

  John Hurst of Hurstcote

  Of course I knew Hurstcote. Who does not? Hurstcote, which seventy years ago was one of the most perfect, as well as the finest, brick Tudor mansions in England. The Hurst who lived there seventy years ago noticed one day that his chimneys smoked, and called in a Hastings architect. “Your chimneys”, said the local man, “are beyond me, but with the timbers and lead of your castle I can build you a snug little house in the corner of your park, much more suitable for a residence than this old brick building.” So they gutted Hurstcote, and built the new house, and faced it with stucco. All of which things you will find written in the Guide to Sussex. Hurstcote, when I had seen it, had been the merest shell. How would Hurst make it habitable? Even if he had inherited much money with the castle, and intended to restore the building, that would be a work of years, not months. What would he do?

  In September I went to see.

  Hurst met me at Pevensey Station.

  “Let’s walk up,” he said; “there’s a cart to bring your traps. Eh, but it’s good to see you again, Bernard!”

  It was good to see him again. And to see him so changed. And so changed for good, too. He was much stouter, and no longer wore the untidy ill-fitting clothes of the old days. He was rather smartly got up in grey stockings and knee-breeches, and wore a velvet shooting-jacket. But the most noteworthy change was in his face; it bore no more the eager, inquiring, half-scornful, half-tolerant look that had won him such ill-will at Oxford. His face now was the face of a man completely at peace with himself and with the world.

  “How well you look!” I said, as we walked along the level winding road through the still marshes.

  “How much better, you mean!” he laughed. “I know it. Bernard you’ll hardly believe it, but I’m on the way to be a popular man!”

  He had not lost his old knack of reading one’s thoughts.

  “Don’t trouble yourself to find the polite an
swer to that,” he hastened to add. “No one knows as well as I how unpopular I was; and no one knows so well why,” he added, in a very low voice. “However,” he went on gaily, “unpopularity is a thing of the past. The folk hereabout call on us, and condole with us on our hutch. A thing of the past, as I said—but what a past it was, eh! You’re the only man who ever liked me. You don’t know what that’s been to me many a dark day and night. When the others were—you know—it was like a hand holding mine, to think of you. I’ve always thought I was sure of one soul in the world to stand by me.”

  “Yes,” I said—“yes.”

  He flung his arm over my shoulder with a frank, boyish gesture of affection, quite foreign to his nature as I had known it.

  “And I know why you didn’t come to our wedding,” he went on; “but that’s all right now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said again, for indeed it was. There are brown eyes in the world, after all, as well as blue, and one pair of brown that meant heaven to me as the blue had never done.

  “That’s well,” Hurst answered, and we walked on in satisfied silence, till we passed across the furze-crowned ridge, and went down the hill to Hurstcote. It lies in the hollow, ringed round by its moat, its dark red walls showing the sky behind them. There was no welcoming sparkle of early litten candle, only the pale amber of the September evening shining through the gaunt unglazed windows.

  Three planks and a rough handrail had replaced the old drawbridge. We passed across the moat, and Hurst pulled a knotted rope that hung beside the great iron-bound door. A bell clanged loudly inside. In the moment we spent there, waiting, Hurst pushed back a briar that was trailing across the arch, and let it fall outside the handrail.

  “Nature is too much with us here,” he said, laughing. “The clematis spends its time tripping one up, or clawing at one’s hair, and we are always expecting the ivy to force itself through the window and make an uninvited third at our dinner-table.”

  Then the great door of Hurstcote Castle swung back, and there stood Kate, a thousand times sweeter and more beautiful than ever. I looked at her with momentary terror and dazzlement. She was indeed much more beautiful than any woman with brown eyes could be. My heart almost stopped beating.

  To be beautiful is not the same thing as to be dear, thank God. I went forward and took her hand with a free heart.

  It was a pleasant fortnight I spent with them. They had had one tower completely repaired, and in its queer eight-sided rooms we lived, when we were not out among the marshes, or by the blue sea at Pevensey.

  Mrs. Hurst had made the rooms quaintly charming by a medley of Liberty stuffs and Wardour Street furniture. The grassy space within the castle walls, with its underground passages, its crumbling heaps of masonry, overgrown with lush creepers, was better than any garden. There we met the fresh morning; there we lounged through lazy noons; there the grey evenings found us.

  I have never seen any two married people so utterly, so undisguisedly in love as these were. I, the third, had no embarrassment in so being—for their love had in it a completeness, a childish abandonment, to which the presence of a third—a friend—was no burden. A happiness, reflected from theirs, shone on me. The days went by, dreamlike, and brought the eve of my return to London, and to the commonplaces of life.

  We were sitting in the courtyard; Hurst had gone to the village to post some letters. A big moon was just showing over the battlements, when Mrs. Hurst shivered.

  “It’s late,” she said, “and cold; the summer is gone. Let us go in.” So we went in to the little warm room, where a wood fire flickered on a brick hearth, and a shaded lamp was already glowing softly. Here we sat on the cushioned seat in the open window, and looked out through the lozenge panes at the gold moon, and ah! the light of her making ghosts in the white mist that rose thick and heavy from the moat.

  “I am so sorry you are going,” she said presently; “but you will come and skate on the moat with us at Christmas, won’t you? We mean to have a medieval Christmas. You don’t know what that is? Neither do I; but John does. He is very, very wise.”

  “Yes,” I answered, “he used to know many things that most men don’t even dream of as possible to know.”

  She was silent a minute, and then shivered again. I picked up the shawl she had thrown down when we came in, and put it round her.

  “Thank you! I think—don’t you?—that there are some things one is not meant to know, and some one is meant not to know. You see the distinction?”

  “I suppose so—yes.”

  “Did it never frighten you in the old days,” she went on, “to see that John would never—was always—”

  “But he has given all that up now?”

  “Oh yes, ever since our honeymoon. Do you know, he used to mesmerize me. It was horrible. And that book of his—”

  “I didn’t know you believed in Black Magic.”

  “Oh, I don’t—not the least bit. I never was at all superstitious, you know. But those things always frighten me just as much as if I believed in them. And besides—I think they are wicked; but John—Ah, there he is! Let’s go and meet him.”

  His dark figure was outlined against the sky behind the hill. She wrapped the soft shawl more closely around her, and we went out in the moonlight to meet her husband.

  The next morning when I entered the room I found that it lacked its chief ornament. The sparkling white and silver breakfast accessories were there, but for the deft white hands and kindly welcoming blue eyes of my hostess I looked in vain. At ten minutes past nine Hurst came in looking horribly worried, and more like his old self than I had ever expected to see him.

  “I say, old man,” he said hurriedly, “are you really set on going back to town today—because Kate’s awfully queer? I can’t think what’s wrong. I want you to see her after breakfast.”

  I reflected a minute. “I can stay if I send a wire,” I said.

  “I wish you would, then,” Hurst said, wringing my hand and turning away; “she’s been off her head most of the night, talking the most astounding nonsense. You must see her after breakfast. Will you pour out the coffee?”

  “I’ll see her now, if you like,” I said, and he led me up the winding stair to the room at the top of the tower.

  I found her quite sensible, but very feverish. I wrote a prescription, and rode Hurst’s mare over to Eastbourne to get it made up. When I got back she was worse. It seemed to be a sort of aggravated marsh fever. I reproached myself with having let her sit by the open window the night before. But I remembered with some satisfaction that I had told Hurst that the place was not quite healthy. I only wished I had insisted on it more strongly.

  For the first day or two I thought it was merely a touch of marsh fever, that would pass off with no more worse consequence than a little weakness; but on the third day I perceived that she would die.

  Hurst met me as I came from her bedside, stood aside on the narrow landing for me to pass, and followed me down into the little sitting-room, which, deprived for three days of her presence, already bore the air of a room long deserted. He came in after me and shut the door.

  “You’re wrong,” he said abruptly, reading my thoughts as usual; “she won’t die—she can’t die.”

  “She will,” I bluntly answered, for I am no believer in that worst refinement of torture known as ‘breaking bad news gently’. “Send for any other man you choose. I’ll consult with the whole College of Physicians if you like. But nothing short of a miracle can save her.”

  “And you don’t believe in miracles,” he answered quietly. “I do, you see.”

  “My dear old fellow, don’t buoy yourself up with false hopes. I know my trade; I wish I could believe I didn’t! Go back to her now; you have not very long to be together.”

  I wrung his hand; he returned the pressure, but said al
most cheerfully—

  “You know your trade, old man, but there are some things you don’t know. Mine, for instance—I mean my wife’s constitution. Now I know that thoroughly. And you mark my words—she won’t die. You might as well say I was not long for this world.”

  “You,” I said with a touch of annoyance; “you’re good for another thirty or forty years.”

  “Exactly so,” he rejoined quickly, “and so is she. Her life’s as good as mine, you’ll see—she won’t die.”

  At dusk on the next day she died. He was with her; he had not left her since he had told me that she would not die. He was sitting by her holding her hand. She had been unconscious for some time, when suddenly she dragged her hand from his, raised herself in bed, and cried out in a tone of acutest anguish—

  “John! John! Let me go! For Heaven’s sake let me go!”

  Then she fell back dead.

  He would not understand—would not believe; he still sat by her, holding her hand, and calling on her by every name that love could teach him. I began to fear for his brain. He would not leave her, so by-and-by I brought him a cup of coffee in which I had mixed a strong opiate. In about an hour I went back and found him fast asleep with his face on the pillow close by the face of his dead wife. The gardener and I carried him down to my bedroom, and I sent for a woman from the village. He slept for twelve hours. When he awoke his first words were—

  “She is not dead! I must go to her!”

  I hoped that the sight of her—pale, and beautiful, and still—with the white asters about her, and her cold hands crossed on her breast, would convince him; but no. He looked at her and said—

  “Bernard, you’re no fool; you know as well as I do that this is not death. Why treat it so? It is some form of catalepsy. If she should awake and find herself like this the shock might destroy her reason.” And, to the horror of the woman from the village, he flung the asters on to the floor, covered the body with blankets, and sent for hot-water bottles.