There was no chance of a sleeper. I huddled in the corner of a carriage packed with returning holidaymakers, my face turned first to the twilight, and then to the darkness rushing past the window. In the dead cold hours, when the other passengers sprawled and snored, the terror for Allan nearly throttled me. Once I dozed off, and woke, biting back a scream because I thought I saw the telephone wire running alongside the train, stretched and singing, ‘You’ll never know. You’ll never know …’
Euston in the morning loomed gaunt and monstrous. The London streets were dripping with autumn rain. I told the taximan to drive as fast as possible up to Hampstead. When he pulled up in Allan’s road before a gate set in a high wall, I was already half out of the taxi. I pushed the fare at him, slapped open the gate, and ran up the short drive. I just had time to notice that the white Regency house was more or less what I had pictured, before I was up the flight of steps and tugging at the iron bell-pull. I was tired – deadly tired, deadly afraid. What courage I had ever had seemed to have fled. ‘I promise. I promise. Oh, if you’ve ever really been here, please have gone,’ I gabbled, while the London rain poured over me, and the bell reverberated through the house.
At last I heard a movement inside the house, and then footsteps slowly drawing towards the door. For a second Allan and I stood gazing at each other. Then – suddenly – I was over the threshold, and in his arms. While the door swung gently to behind us, I drew him over to the staircase, drew him down, knelt beside him as he sat there on the second stair. He turned his face against my shoulder, and heaved a sigh.
After a little while, I raised my head and looked about me. We were in a large white-panelled hall, with a window through which I could see a plane-tree, its quiet branches stroking the glass. The only thing in common with our hall up in Scotland was the telephone, standing on a mahogany table against the wall. For some moments I gazed at it. My terror was wholly gone – like a dream at morning. But I became aware of a new emotion – disquieting, faintly discreditable. I looked suspiciously down at Allan, I wanted to know. Cautiously I began to frame my question. He was so still that I wondered if he had fallen asleep. But just then he stirred, and I took his head between my hands and, as he smiled at me, turned his face searchingly towards the light. It was calm as though washed by tidal waters. I knew that I could never ask my question.
At that moment the front door-bell began to peal. We both jumped, and got to our feet.
‘You go,’ said Allan, disappearing into the back of the house.
The sharp-nosed young man in the dripping mackintosh was aggrieved. ‘Been sent to cut you off,’ he said. ‘Bill unpaid – nothing done –’
I turned back into the hall. About me, above me, the house lay quiet. Only against the window the boughs of the plane-tree clamoured in a sudden flurry of wind and rain. The question I could never ask – the answer never to be given – surely both were irrelevant? For all the tranquillity of the house, I felt my panic begin again to stir. There was only one thing that mattered to me – to us.
‘Allan –’ I called – and I tried not to let my voice quaver – ‘It’s about the telephone. Do you – do you want it cut off?’
I held my breath. The reply came immediately.
‘Why – darling – we’re going back to Scotland tonight, out of this damnable climate. We don’t want to pay for what we aren’t going to need any more. Tell them they can disconnect it at once.’
The Ghost of a Hand
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of particularity.
I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular, as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady’s letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.
That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr Alderman Harper, of High Street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir’s mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House – for I find it spelt both ways – stood.
This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr and Mrs Prosser came there some time in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard, and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law’s family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.
Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of the Exchequer to compel Mr Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking out the lease. But the Alderman drew an answer, supported by no less than seven long affidavits, copies of all of which were furnished to his lordship, and with the desired effect; for rather than compel him to place them upon the file of the court, his lordship struck, and consented to release him.
I am sorry the case did not proceed at least far enough to place upon the files of the court the very authentic and unaccountable story which Miss Rebecca relates.
The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs Prosser, quite alone, was sitting in the twilight at the back parlour window, which was open, looking out into the orchard, and plainly saw a hand stealthily placed upon the stone window-sill outside, as if by someone beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up. There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short, but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the window-sill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged somewhere about forty, as she conjectured. It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants who was now about to scale the windows of the Tiled House. She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.
Search was made in the orchard, but there were no indications of any person’s having been under the window, beneath which, ranged along the wall, stood a great column of flower-pots, which it seemed must have prevented anyone’s coming within reach of it.
The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen. The women grew frightened, and the servant-man, taking fire-arms with him, opened the back-door, but discovered nothing. As he shut it, however, he said, ‘a thump came on it’, and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened him; and though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window panes, he made no further explorations.
About six o’clock on the Saturday evening following, the cook, ‘an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years’, being alone in the kitchen, saw, on looking up, it is supposed the same fat but aristocratic-looking hand, laid with its palm against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface. She cried out, and said something like a prayer on seeing it. But it was not withdrawn for several seconds after.
After this, for a great many nights, there came at first a low, and afterwards an angry rapping, as it seemed with a set of clenched knuckles at the back-door. And the servant-man would not open it, but called to know who was there; and there came no answer, only a sound as if the palm of the hand was placed against it, and drawn slowly from side to side with a sort of soft, groping motion.
All this time, sitting in the back parlour, which, for the time, they used as a drawing-room, Mr and Mrs Prosser were disturbed by rappings at the window, sometimes very low and furtive, like a clandestine signal, and at others sudden, and so loud as to threaten the breaking of the pane.
This was all at the back of the house, which looked upon the orchard, as you know. But on a Tuesday night, at about half past nine, there came precisel
y the same rappings at the hall-door, and went on, to the great annoyance of the master and terror of his wife, at intervals, for nearly two hours.
After this, for several days and nights, they had no annoyance whatsoever, and began to think that the nuisance had expended itself. But on the night of the 13th September, Jane Easterbrook, an English maid, having gone into the pantry for the small silver bowl in which her mistress’s posset was served, happening to look up at the little window of only four panes, observed, through an auger-hole which was drilled through the window frame, for the admission of a bolt to secure the shutter, a white pudgy finger – first the tip, and then the two first joints introduced, and turned about this way and that, crooked against the inside, as if in search of a fastening which its owner designed to push aside. When the maid got back into the kitchen, we are told ‘she fell into “a swounde”, and was all the next day very weak.’
Mr Prosser, being, I’ve heard, a hard-headed and conceited sort of fellow, scouted the ghost, and sneered at the fears of his family. He was privately of opinion that the whole affair was a practical joke or a fraud, and waited an opportunity of catching the rogue flagrante delicto. He did not long keep this theory to himself, but let it out by degrees with no stint of oaths, and threats, believing that some domestic traitor held the thread of the conspiracy.
Indeed it was time something were done; for not only his servants, but good Mrs Prosser herself, had grown to look unhappy and anxious. They kept at home from the hour of sunset, and would not venture about the house after nightfall, except in couples.