The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“And then, when he had done it,” continued Dr Dilke, mounting the steps of the house, “he repented most horribly; he wanted to fly for a doctor to get some antidote for the poison with the idea in his head that if he could have got help he could have saved her himself. The other woman kept on laughing. He couldn’t forgive that – that she could laugh at a moment like that! He couldn’t get help. He couldn’t find a doctor. His wife died. No one suspected foul play – they seldom did in those days as long as the people were respectable, you must remember the state in which medical knowledge was in 1830. He couldn’t marry the other woman, and he couldn’t touch the money; he left it all to found the almshouses; then he died himself, six months afterwards, leaving instructions that his name should be added on that black stone. I dare say he died by his own hand. Probably he loved her through it all, you know – it was only the money, that cursed money, a fortune just within his grasp, but which he couldn’t take!”

“A pretty romance,” I suggested as we entered the house; “I am sure there is a three-volume novel in it of what Mrs Janey would call ‘the good old-fashioned’ sort.”

To this Dr Dilke answered: “Suppose the miserable man can’t rest? Supposing he is still searching for a doctor?”

We passed from one room to another of the dismal, dusty, dismantled house. Dr Dilke opened a damaged shutter which concealed one of the windows at the back, and pointed out in the waning light a decayed garden with stone steps and a fish-pond – dry now, of course, but certainly once a fish-pond; and a low gateway, to pass through which a man of his height would have to stoop. We could just discern this in the twilight. He made no comment. We went upstairs.

Here Cuming paused dramatically to give us the full flavour of the final part of his story. He reminded us, rather unnecessarily, for somehow he had convinced us, that this was all perfectly true:

I am not romancing; I won’t answer for what Dr Dilke said or did, or his adventure of the night before, or the story of the Carwithens as he constructed it, but this is actually what happened . . . We went upstairs by the wide main stairs. Dr Dilke searched about for and found a door which opened on to the back stairs, and then he said: “This must be the room.” It was entirely devoid of any furniture, and stained with damp, the walls stripped of panelling and cheaply covered with decayed paper, peeling, and in parts fallen.

“What’s this?” said Dr Dilke.

He picked up a scrap of paper that showed vivid on the dusty floor and handed it to me. It was a prescription. He took out his note-book and showed me the page where this fitted in.

“This page I tore out last night when I wrote that prescription in this room. The bed was just there, and there was the table on which were the papers and the glass of milk.”

“But you couldn’t have been here last night,” I protested feebly, “the locked doors – the whole thing! . . .”

Dr Dilke said nothing. After a while neither did I. “Let’s get out of the place,” I said. Then another thought struck me. “What is your prescription?” I asked.

He said: “A very uncommon kind of prescription, a very desperate sort of prescription, one that I’ve never written before, nor I hope shall again – an antidote for severe arsenical poisoning.”

“I leave you,” smiled Cuming, “to your various attitudes of incredulity or explanation.”

Christmas Honeymoon

Howard Spring

Location:  Falmouth, Cornwall.

Time:  Christmas Eve, 1938.

Eyewitness Description:  “The remarkable thing about what happened to me and Ruth was simply that Nothing happened. If you have never come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits . . .”

Author:  Howard Spring (1889–1965) was born in Cardiff, the son of a poor jobbing gardener, and had to leave school at the age of 12 when his father died. He alleviated his tough life as an office boy in the Cardiff docks by taking Evening Classes at the local university and achieved his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter. After learning his trade on several provincial newspapers, Spring landed a job on the London Evening Standard where his descriptive prose and astute literary reviews lead to him achieving an international success with one of his first novels My Son, My Son, which was filmed in 1940. That same year he wrote Fame is the Spur, about a labour leader’s rise to power, that established his reputation. During the years of the Second World War, he continued to demonstrate his understanding of contemporary human character in books such as Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley’s (1946). He and his wife settled in Falmouth where he produced three volumes of fascinating autobiography, half a dozen more novels and several short stories: a number of which evoked the supernatural in a completely new way. “Christmas Honeymoon”, which appeared in the 24 December 1940 issue of the Standard, is arguably the best of these and also believed to be based on personal experience.

We were married on 22 December, because we had met on the 21st. It was as sudden as that. I had come down from Manchester to London. Londoners like you to say that you come up to London; but we Manchester people don’t give a hoot what Londoners like. We know that we, and the likes of us, lay the eggs, and the Londoners merely scramble them. That gives us a sense of superiority.

Perhaps I have this sense unduly. Certainly I should never have imagined that I would marry a London girl. As a bachelor, I had survived thirty Manchester summers, and it seemed unlikely to me that, if I couldn’t find a girl to suit me in the north, I should find one in London.

I am an architect, and that doesn’t make me love London any the more. Every time I come down to the place I find it has eaten another chunk of its own beauty, so as to make more room for the fascias of multiple shops.

All this is just to show you that I didn’t come to London looking for a bride; and if I had been looking for a bride, the last place I would have investigated would be a cocktail party. But it was at a cocktail party in the Magnifico that I met Ruth Hutten.

I had never been to a cocktail party in my life before. We don’t go in much for that sort of thing in Manchester: scooping a lot of people together and getting rid of the whole bang shoot in one do. It seems to us ungracious. We like to have a few friends in, and give them a cut off the joint and something decent to drink, and talk in a civilised fashion while we’re at it. That’s what we understand by hospitality. But these cocktail parties are just a frantic St Vitus gesture by people who don’t want to be bothered.

I shouldn’t have been at this party at all if it hadn’t been for Claud Tunstall. It was about half-past six when I turned from the lunatic illumination of Piccadilly Circus, which is my idea of how hell is lit up, and started to walk down the Haymarket. I was wondering in an absent-minded sort of way how long the old red pillars of the Haymarket Theatre would be allowed to stand before some bright lad thought what fun it would be to tear them down, when Claud turned round from reading one of the yellow playbills, and there we were, grinning and shaking hands.

Claud had something to grin about, because the author’s name on the play-bill was his. It was his first play, and it looked as though it wouldn’t matter to Claud, so far as money went, if it were his last. The thing had been running for over a year; companies were touring it in the provinces and Colonies; and it was due to open in New York in the coming year. No wonder Claud was grinning; but I think a spot of the grin was really meant for me. He was the same old Claud who had attended the Manchester Grammar School with me and shared my knowledge of its smell of new exercise books and old suet pudding.

Claud was on his way to this party at the Magnifico, and he said I must come with him. That’s how these things are: there’s no sense in them; but there would have been no sense either in trying to withstand Claud Tunstall’s blue eyes and fair tumbling hair and general look of a sky over a cornfield.

That’s going some, for me, and perhaps the figure is a bit mixed, but I’m not one for figures at any time. Anyway, it explains why, five minutes later, I was gritting my teeth in the presence of great boobies looking like