Shivers for Christmas (13 page)

They tempted her up the stair with encouraging fingers. Maisie followed them like a child, in implicit confidence. The steps wound round and round, spirally, and the staircase was dim; but a supernatural light seemed to fill the tower, diffused from the bodies or souls of its occupants. At the head of all, the High Priest still chanted as he went about his unearthly litany; magic sounds of chimes seemed to swim in unison with his tune as they mounted. Were those floating notes material or spiritual? They passed the belfry; no tongue of metal wagged; but the rims of the great bells resounded and reverberated to the ghostly symphony with sympathetic music. Still they passed on and on, upward and upward. They reached the ladder that alone gave access to the final storey. Dust and cobwebs already clung to it. Once more Maisie drew back. It was dark overhead, and the luminous haze began to fail them. Her friends held her hands with the same kindly persuasive touch as ever. ‘I cannot!’ she cried, shrinking away from the tall, steep ladder. ‘Oh, Yolande, I cannot!’

‘Yes, dear,’ Yolande whispered in a soothing voice. ‘You can. It is but ten steps, and I will hold your hand tight. Be brave and mount them!’

The sweet voice encouraged her. It was like heavenly music. She knew not why she should submit, or, rather, consent; but none the less she consented. Some spell seemed cast over her. With tremulous feet, scarcely realising what she did, she mounted the ladder and went up four steps of it.

Then she turned and looked down again. Old Bessie’s wrinkled face met her frightened eyes. It was smiling horribly. She shrank back once more, terrified. ‘I can’t do it,’ she cried, ‘if that woman comes up! I’m not afraid of
you
, dear’—she pressed Yolande’s hand—‘but she, she is too terrible!’

Hedda looked back and raised a warning finger. ‘Let the woman stop below,’ she said; ‘she savours too much of the evil world. We must do nothing to frighten the willing victim.’

The High Priest by this time, with his ghostly fingers, had opened the trap-door that gave access to the summit. A ray of moonlight slanted through the aperture. The breeze blew down with it. Once more Maisie felt the stimulating and reviving effect of the open air. Vivified by its freshness, she struggled up to the top, passed out through the trap, and found herself standing on the open platform at the summit of the tower.

The moon had not yet quite set. The light on the snow shone pale green and mysterious. For miles and miles around she could just make out, by its aid, the dim contour of the downs, with their thin white mantle, in the solemn silence. Range behind range rose faintly shimmering. The chant had now ceased; the High Priest and his acolytes were mingling strange herbs in a mazar-bowl or chalice. Stray perfumes of myrrh and of cardamoms were wafted towards her. The men in leopards’ skins burnt smouldering sticks of spikenard. Then Yolande led the postulant forward again, and placed her close up to the new white parapet. Stone heads of virgins smiled on her from the angles. ‘She must front the east,’ Hedda said in a tone of authority: and Yolande turned her face towards the rising sun accordingly. Then she opened her lips and spoke in a very solemn voice. ‘From this new-built tower you fling yourself,’ she said, or rather intoned, ‘that you may serve mankind, and all the powers that be, as its guardian spirit against thunder and lightning. Judged a virgin, pure and unsullied in deed and word and thought, of royal race and ancient lineage—a Cymry of the Cymry—you are found worthy to be entrusted with this charge and this honour. Take care that never shall dart or thunderbolt assault this tower, as She that is below you takes care to preserve it from earthquake and ruin, and She that is midway takes care to preserve it from battle and tempest. This is your charge. See well that you keep it.’

She took her by both hands. ‘Mary Llewelyn,’ she said, ‘you willing victim, step on to the battlement.’

Maisie knew not why, but with very little shrinking she stepped as she was told, by the aid of a wooden footstool, on to the eastward-looking parapet. There, in her loose white robe, with her arms spread abroad, and her hair flying free, she poised herself for a second, as if about to shake out some unseen wings and throw herself on the air like a swift or a swallow.

‘Mary Llewelyn,’ Yolande said once more, in a still deeper tone, with ineffable earnestness, ‘cast yourself down, a willing sacrifice, for the service of man, and the security of this tower against thunderbolt and lightning.’

Maisie stretched her arms wider, and leaned forward in act to leap, from the edge of the parapet, on to the snow-clad churchyard.

One second more and the sacrifice would have been complete. But before she could launch herself from the tower, she felt suddenly a hand laid upon her shoulder from behind to restrain her. Even in her existing state of nervous exaltation she was aware at once that it was the hand of a living and solid mortal, not that of a soul or guardian spirit. It lay heavier upon her than Hedda’s or Yolande’s. It seemed to clog and burden her. With a violent effort she strove to shake herself free, and carry out her now fixed intention of self-immolation, for the safety of the tower. But the hand was too strong for her. She could not shake it off. It gripped and held her.

She yielded, and, reeling, fell back with a gasp on to the platform of the tower. At the selfsame moment a strange terror and commotion seemed to seize all at once on the assembled spirits. A weird cry rang voiceless through the shadowy company. Maisie heard it as in a dream, very dim and distant. It was thin as a bat’s note; almost inaudible to the ear, yet perceived by the brain or at least by the spirit. It was a cry of alarm, of fright, of warning. With one accord, all the host of phantoms rushed hurriedly forward to the battlements and pinnacles. The ghostly High Priest went first, with his wand held downward; the men in leopards’ skins and other assistants followed in confusion. Theirs was a reckless rout. They flung themselves from the top, like fugitives from a cliff, and floated fast through the air on invisible pinions. Hedda and Yolande, ambassadresses and intermediaries with the upper air, were the last to fly from the living presence. They clasped her hand silently, and looked deep into her eyes. There was something in that calm yet regretful look that seemed to say, ‘Farewell! We have tried in vain to save you, sister, from the terrors of living.’

The horde of spirits floated away on the air, as in a witches’ Sabbath, to the vault whence it issued. The doors swung on their rusty hinges, and closed behind them. Maisie stood alone with the hand that grasped her on the tower.

The shock of the grasp, and the sudden departure of the ghostly band in such wild dismay, threw Maisie for a while into a state of semi-unconsciousness. Her head reeled round; her brain swam faintly. She clutched for support at the parapet of the tower. But the hand that held her sustained her still. She felt herself gently drawn down with quiet mastery, and laid on the stone floor close by the trap-door that led to the ladder.

The next thing of which she could feel sure was the voice of the Oxford undergraduate. He was distinctly frightened and not a little tremulous. ‘I think,’ he said very softly, laying her head on his lap, ‘you had better rest a while, Miss Llewelyn, before you try to get down again. I hope I didn’t catch you and disturb you too hastily. But one step more, and you would have been over the edge. I really couldn’t help it.’

‘Let me go,’ Maisie moaned, trying to raise herself again, but feeling too faint and ill to make the necessary effort to recover the power of motion. ‘I
want
to go with them! I
want
to join them!’

‘Some of the others will be up before long,’ the undergraduate said, supporting her head in his hands; ‘and they’ll help me get you down again. Mr. Yates is in the belfry. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d lie quite still, and take a drop or two of this brandy.’

He held it to her lips. Maisie drank a mouthful, hardly knowing what she did. Then she lay quiet where he placed her for some minutes. How they lifted her down and conveyed her to her bed she scarcely knew. She was dazed and terrified. She could only remember afterward that three or four gentlemen in roughly huddled clothes had carried or handed her down the ladder between them. The spiral stair and all the rest were a blank to her.

When she next awoke she was lying in her bed in the same room at the hall, with Mrs. West by her side, leaning over her tenderly.

Maisie looked up through her closed eyes and just saw the motherly face and grey hair bending above her. Then voices came to her from the mist, vaguely: ‘Yesterday was so hot for the time of year, you see!’ ‘Very unusual weather, of course, for Christmas.’ ‘But a thunderstorm! So strange! I put it down to that. The electrical disturbance must have affected the poor child’s head.’ Then it dawned upon her that the conversation she heard was passing between Mrs. West and a doctor.

She raised herself suddenly and wildly on her arms. The bed faced the windows. She looked out and beheld—the tower of Wolverden church, rent from top to bottom with a mighty rent, while half its height lay tossed in fragments on the ground in the churchyard.

‘What is it?’ she cried wildly, with a flush as of shame.

‘Hush, hush!’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t trouble! Don’t look at it!’

‘Was it—after I came down?’ Maisie moaned in vague terror.

The doctor nodded. ‘An hour after you were brought down,’ he said, ‘a thunderstorm broke over it. The lightning struck and shattered the tower. They had not yet put up the lightning-conductor. It was to have been done on Boxing Day.’

A weird remorse possessed Maisie’s soul. ‘My fault!’ she cried, starting up. ‘My fault, my fault! I have neglected my duty!’

‘Don’t talk,’ the doctor answered, looking hard at her. ‘It is always dangerous to be too suddenly aroused from these curious overwrought sleeps and trances.’

‘And old Bessie?’ Maisie exclaimed, trembling with an eerie presentiment.

The doctor glanced at Mrs. West. ‘How did she know?’ he whispered. Then he turned to Maisie. ‘You may as well be told the truth as suspect it,’ he said slowly. ‘Old Bessie must have been watching there. She was crushed and half buried beneath the falling tower.’

‘One more question, Mrs. West,’ Maisie murmured, growing faint with an access of supernatural fear. ‘Those two nice girls who sat on the chairs at each side of me through the tableaux—are they hurt? Were they in it?’

Mrs. West soothed her hand. ‘My dear child,’ she said gravely, with quiet emphasis, ‘there were
no
other girls. This is mere hallucination. You sat alone by yourself through the whole of the evening.’

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Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) achieved her greatest fame and popularity with
The Railway Children, The Would-Be-Goods, The Treasure Seekers
and other children’s classics. Most of her adult fiction is largely forgotten, although two or three of her ghost stories—notably ‘Man-Size in Marble’—have often been anthologized. Less familiar is ‘The Shadow’, which appeared in her collection aptly entitled
Fear
(1910).

T
his is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects—no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story.

There were three of us and another, but she had fainted suddenly at the second extra of the Christmas dance, and had been put to bed in the dressing-room next to the room which we three shared. It had been one of those jolly, old-fashioned dances where nearly everybody stays the night, and the big country house is stretched to its utmost containing—guests harbouring on sofas, couches, settles, and even mattresses on floors. Some of the young men actually, I believe, slept on the great dining-table. We had talked of our partners, as girls will, and then the stillness of the manor house, broken only by the whisper of the wind in the cedar branches, and the scraping of their harsh fingers against our window panes, had pricked us to such a luxurious confidence in our surroundings of bright chintz and candle-flame and fire-light, that we had dared to talk of ghosts—in which, we all said, we did not believe one bit. We had told the story of the phantom coach, and the horribly strange bed, and the lady in the sacque, and the house in Berkeley Square.

We none of us believed in ghosts, but my heart, at least, seemed to leap to my throat and choke me there, when a tap came to our door—a tap faint, not to be mistaken.

‘Who’s there?’ said the youngest of us, craning a lean neck towards the door. It opened slowly, and I give you my word the instant of suspense that followed is still reckoned among my life’s least confident moments. Almost at once the door opened fully, and Miss Eastwich, my aunt’s housekeeper, companion and general stand-by looked in on us.

We all said ‘Come in,’ but she stood there. She was, at all normal hours, the most silent woman I have ever known. She stood and looked at us, and shivered a little. So did we—for in those days corridors were not warmed by hot-water pipes, and the air from the door was keen.

‘I saw your light,’ she said at last, ‘and I thought it was late for you to be up—after all this gaiety. I thought perhaps—’ her glance turned towards the door of the dressing-room.

‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s fast asleep.’ I should have added a goodnight, but the youngest of us forestalled my speech. She did not know Miss Eastwich as we others did; did not know how her persistent silence had built a wall round her—a wall that no one dared to break down with the commonplaces of talk, or the littlenesses of mere human relationship. Miss Eastwich’s silence had taught us to treat her as a machine; and as other than a machine we never dreamed of treating her. But the youngest of us had seen Miss Eastwich for the first time that day. She was young, crude, ill-balanced, subject to blind, calf-like impulses. She was also the heiress of a rich tallow-chandler, but that has nothing to do with this part of the story. She jumped up from the hearth-rug, her unsuitably rich silk lace-trimmed dressing-gown falling back from her thin collar-bones, and ran to the door and put an arm round Miss Eastwich’s prim, lisse-encircled neck. I gasped. I should as soon have dared to embrace Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Come in,’ said the youngest of us—‘come in and get warm. There’s lots of cocoa left.’ She drew Miss Eastwich in and shut the door.