The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“No negro blood, I suppose?” the host asked, with almost discourteous insistence.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Desmond answered. He meant to say it laughing, but he didn’t. “My hair, you know – it’s a very stiff curl it’s got, and my mother’s people were in the West Indies a few generations ago. You’re interested in distinctions of race, I take it?”

“Not at all, not at all,” Mr Prior surprisingly assured him; “but, of course, any details of your family are necessarily interesting to me. I feel,” he added, with another of his winning smiles, “that you and I are already friends.”

Desmond could not have reasoningly defended the faint quality of dislike that had begun to tinge his first pleasant sense of being welcomed and wished for as a guest.

“You’re very kind,” he said; “it’s jolly of you to take in a stranger like this.”

Mr Prior smiled, handed him the cigar-box, mixed whisky and soda, and began to talk about the history of the house.

“The foundations are almost certainly thirteenth century. It was a priory, you know. There’s a curious tale, by the way, about the man Henry gave it to when he smashed up the monasteries. There was a curse; there seems always to have been a curse—”

The gentle, pleasant, high-bred voice went on. Desmond thought he was listening, but presently he roused himself and dragged his attention back to the words that were being spoken.

“– that made the fifth death . . . There is one every hundred years, and always in the same mysterious way.”

Then he found himself on his feet, incredibly sleepy, and heard himself say: “These old stories are tremendously interesting. Thank you very much. I hope you won’t think me very uncivil, but I think I’d rather like to turn in; I feel a bit tired, somehow.”

“But of course, my dear chap.”

Mr Prior saw Desmond to his room.

“Got everything you want? Right. Lock the door if you should feel nervous. Of course, a lock can’t keep ghosts out, but I always feel as if it could,” and with another of those pleasant, friendly laughs he was gone.

William Desmond went to bed a strong young man, sleepy indeed beyond his experience of sleepiness, but well and comfortable. He awoke faint and trembling, lying deep in the billows of the feather bed; and lukewarm waves of exhaustion swept through him. Where was he? What had happened? His brain, dizzy and weak at first, refused him any answer. When he remembered, the abrupt spasm of repulsion which he had felt so suddenly and unreasonably the night before came back to him in a hot, breathless flush. He had been drugged, he had been poisoned!

“I must get out of this,” he told himself, and blundered out of bed towards the silken bell-pull that he had noticed the night before hanging near the door.

As he pulled it, the bed and the wardrobe and the room rose up round him and fell on him, and he fainted.

When he next knew anything someone was putting brandy to his lips. He saw Prior, the kindest concern in his face. The assistant, pale and watery-eyed. The swarthy manservant, stolid, silent, and expressionless. He heard Verney say to Prior: “You see it was too much – I told you—”

“Hush,” said Prior, “he’s coming to.”

Four days later Desmond, lying on a wicker chair on the lawn, was a little disinclined for exertion, but no longer ill. Nourishing foods and drinks, beef-tea, stimulants, and constant care – these had brought him back to something like his normal state. He wondered at the vague suspicions, vaguely remembered, of that first night; they had all been proved absurd by the unwavering care and kindness of everyone in the Haunted House.

“But what caused it?” he asked his host, for the fiftieth time. “What made me make such a fool of myself?” And this time Mr Prior did not put him off, as he had always done before by begging him to wait till he was stronger.

“I am afraid, you know,” he said, “that the ghost really did come to you. I am inclined to revise my opinion of the ghost.”

“But why didn’t it come again?”

“I have been with you every night, you know,” his host reminded him. And, indeed, the sufferer had never been left alone since the ringing of his bell on that terrible first morning.

“And now,” Mr Prior went on, “if you will not think me inhospitable, I think you will be better away from here. You ought to go to the seaside.”

“There haven’t been any letters for me, I suppose?” Desmond said, a little wistfully.

“Not one. I suppose you gave the right address? Ormehurst Rectory, Crittenden, Kent?”

“I don’t think I put Crittenden,” said Desmond. “I copied the address from your telegram.” He pulled the pink paper from his pocket.

“Ah, that would account,” said the other.

“You’ve been most awfully kind all through,” said Desmond, abruptly.

“Nonsense, my boy,” said the elder man, benevolently. “I only wish Willie had been able to come. He’s never written, the rascal! Nothing but the telegram to say he could not come and was writing.”

“I suppose he’s having a jolly time somewhere,” said Desmond, enviously; “but look here – do tell me about the ghost, if there’s anything to tell. I’m almost quite well now, and I should like to know what it was that made a fool of me like that.”

“Well” – Mr Prior looked round him at the gold and red of dahlias and sunflowers, gay in the September sunshine – “here, and now, I don’t know that it could do any harm. You remember that story of the man who got this place from Henry VIII and the curse? That man’s wife is buried in a vault under the church. Well, there were legends, and I confess I was curious to see her tomb. There are iron gates to the vault. Locked, they were. I opened them with an old key – and I couldn’t get them to shut again.”

“Yes?” Desmond said.

“You think I might have sent for a locksmith; but the fact is, there is a small crypt to the church, and I have used that crypt as a supplementary laboratory. If I had called anyone in to see to the lock they would have gossiped. I should have been turned out of my laboratory – perhaps out of my house.”

“I see.”

“Now the curious thing is,” Mr Prior went on, lowering his voice, “that it is only since that grating was opened that this house has been what they call ‘haunted’. It is since then that all the things have happened.”

“What things?”

“People staying here, suddenly ill – just as you were. And the attacks always seem to indicate loss of blood. And—” He hesitated a moment. “That wound in your throat. I told you you had hurt yourself falling when you rang the bell. But that was not true. What is true is that you had on your throat just the same little white wound that all the others have had. I wish” – he frowned – “that I could get that vault gate shut again. The key won’t turn.”

“I wonder if I could do anything?” Desmond asked, secretly convinced that he had hurt his throat in falling, and that his host’s story was, as he put it, “all moonshine”. Still, to put a lock right was but a slight return for all the care and kindness. “I’m an engineer, you know,” he added, awkwardly, and rose. “Probably a little oil. Let’s have a look at this same lock.”

He followed Mr Prior through the house to the church. A bright, smooth old key turned readily, and they passed into the building, musty and damp, where ivy crawled through the broken windows, and the blue sky seemed to be laid close against the holes in the roof. Another key clicked in the lock of a low door beside what had once been the Lady Chapel, a thick oak door grated back, and Mr Prior stopped a moment to light a candle that waited in its rough iron candlestick on a ledge of the stonework. Then down narrow stairs, chipped a little at the edges and soft with dust. The crypt was Norman, very simply beautiful. At the end of it was a recess, masked with a grating of rusty ironwork.

“They used to think,” said Mr Prior, “that iron kept off witchcraft. This is the lock,” he went on, holding the candle against the gate, which was ajar.

They went through the gate, because the lock was on the other side. Desmond worked a minute or two with the oil and feather that he had brought. Then with a little wrench the key turned and returned.

“I think that’s all right,” he said, looking up, kneeling on one knee, with the key still in the lock and his hand