Horror Stories Read online

  E. Nesbit

  * * *

  HORROR STORIES

  With an introduction by

  Naomi Alderman

  Contents

  Introduction

  Hurst of Hurstcote

  The Ebony Frame

  Man-Size in Marble

  The Violet Car

  John Charrington’s Wedding

  The Shadow

  The Five Senses

  The Head

  In the Dark

  From the Dead

  The Three Drugs

  The Pavilion

  The Judgment: A Broadmoor Biography

  To the Adventurous

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HORROR STORIES

  E. Nesbit was born in Surrey in 1858. A world-famous children’s author, her works include The Railway Children and Five Children and It. She also wrote several short stories for adults. With her husband, Hubert Bland, she was one of the founding members of the socialist Fabian Society; their household became a centre of the socialist and literary circles of the times. She died in 1924.

  Naomi Alderman is the author of three novels: Disobedience, The Lessons and The Liars’ Gospel. She has won the Orange Award for New Writers and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and each of her literary novels has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. She was selected for Granta’s once-a-decade list of Best of Young British Novelists, Waterstone’s Writers for the Future, and was mentored by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She presents Science Stories on BBC Radio 4, is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and she is the co-creator and lead writer of the bestselling smartphone audio adventure app Zombies, Run!. She lives in London.

  Introduction

  by Naomi Alderman

  Those of us who grew up with E. Nesbit’s wonderful novels for children – The Railway Children, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet – may be surprised to learn that she wrote ghost stories for adults. And it might be even more surprising to encounter some of the grim underpinnings of these delicious fireside tales. Lurking in the background of some of these stories are dead children, thwarted love, jealousy, vengeance and the sense that even the best kind of love – the famous love that never falters, the love that pays the price – has something dark lurking within it.

  ‘This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story,’ says the narrator of ‘The Shadow’, ‘and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened.’ Which of course begs the reader to ask themselves what the explanation for the story is, and why any of it should have happened. There is a young couple, very much in love, expecting their first baby. And there is Miss Eastwich, a woman so silent that the children she looks after later in life never think of treating her as ‘other than a machine’. She tells her story of the ‘shadow’ that crept into the house of her two friends whom she had ‘loved more than anything in the world’ and who had married each other. The narrator understands, as does the reader, that Miss Eastwich had trusted her best friend Mabel – one half of that connubial bliss – not to take the man she loved, but Mabel had taken him anyway. And then what happens? Well, there’s a ‘shadow’. Is Miss Eastwich the shadow? Is she the one responsible for all that happens in the house? Take a look at the story and see what you think.

  The darkness teems at the corners of these stories, like that gathering shadow – ordinary callousness turning into something more disturbing. ‘There’ll be more wedding tomorrow than ever you’ll take the first part in,’ snarls the narrator of ‘John Charrington’s Wedding’ to his spinster sister – another man so consumed with jealousy that he sneaks around eavesdropping on the happy couple. What happens to them reads as a dark enactment of his deepest wishes. The nurse narrator of ‘The Violet Car’ – presented with a couple who each claim the other is the mad one in need of her care – mentions with cool appraisal ‘that importance, that conscious competence, that one feels in the presence of other people’s troubles’. The whole story is concerned with the complicated business of apportioning blame, guilt and justice. A lot of inconvenient people are got rid of in these stories, one way or another; and they’re more disquieting than they seem at first read.

  But of course, it was always so. Nesbit’s stories for children are always prefigured by adult sadness – it’s just that she never made the children look in that direction. Think of the father of the railway children, sent to prison after being falsely accused of spying. Think of the smug and awful young man that the Lamb turns into in Five Children and It. Nesbit had always known that adults could be rapacious, contemptuous, malicious and sadistic – her own biography includes an adulterous husband who got one of her dearest friends pregnant. She knew about anger, hatred and sexual jealousy. And in these very chilling grown-up stories she lets the knowledge out that she held back so carefully in her work for children.

  Hurst of Hurstcote

  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.
r />   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 answer 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 draw-bridge. 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.

  With life or death in the balance: Right!

  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 someone 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 mesmerise 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 almost 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.’