The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos Read online

  “Now—you saw someone there, at the house tonight, who had no right to be there, didn’t you? Was it one of those three?”

  “No. It wasn’t.” He twisted a little uneasily in his chair, then said with a grave quietness: “It was Mister Peters.”

  “The old solicitor you used to work for, forty years ago?”

  “Yes. I’m quite sure of it. I know that it doesn’t make sense. That all of these people we’re talking about died many years ago. Yet we’ve both seen them up there at the Manor.”

  * * * * * * *

  “The rural tales are clear about what happens up at that old house,” said Doctor Woodbridge quietly. It was the following day, a morning of clear skies and flooding sunlight which made the horrors of the night before seem unreal and remote, so distant that to Calder’s mind, it was almost as if they had never occurred. Woodbridge smoked for a moment reflectively, then continued: “They might be queerer still if some of the things I’ve heard from a couple of my patients were brought out into the open.”

  “What sort of things?” queried Calder uncertainly.

  “I haven’t mentioned this before to anyone, partly because it’s so distasteful to recall, and also to protect the wishes of my patients. But I think, from what you told me last night and from my own experience a little while ago, that what I heard is relevant to this matter. Previously, I put all of this down to imagination, to the ramblings of two men who were not quite—rational, shall we say. In one case, I might even have gone further and said he was bordering on madness.”

  “I promise to keep a straight face,” said Calder.

  “Yes. I rather think that you will after you’ve heard what I have to say. Three years ago I was called out to one of the houses on the outskirts of the village a little after midnight. It sounded urgent so I’m afraid I broke any speed limits there might have been at that time of night and arrived at the house less than fifteen minutes after getting the call. By that time, the patient who was a youth of perhaps nineteen, was in a state of profound shock, bordering on hysteria. I did all I could for him, managed to calm him down and put him under mild sedation and then left, telling his parents to keep him in bed and I would call in to see him early the following morning. Unfortunately, there was an acute appendicitis case next morning and it was almost two in the afternoon before I got out to see him. He seemed to have recovered quite well from his experience and had a good grip on himself. I knew that something must have happened the previous night to shock him and I tried to get it out of him, knowing that if he would only talk about it, I might be able to help him a good deal. At first, he didn’t want to say anything but from what little he did say, I got the impression that he had been up to the old Belstead place, probably poaching, and had either seen or heard something sufficiently frightening to have sent him running for home, shocked out of his wits.”

  “What was your opinion about it?” asked Calder. Leaning forward, he filled the other’s glass, then his own. The sunlight, flooding into the windows behind him made everything seem sane and normal, but the other’s words had sent that strange and indefinable chill through him.

  “At the time, I didn’t have one.” The other seemed as if he did not quite trust himself to speak. “I knew I had to get to the bottom of it, get the information from him as soon as possible, or there was a definite chance of him going insane. Eventually, I got most of the story from him. Some of it seemed to have gone so far into his subconscious that nothing short of hypnosis could bring it to the surface. That—I left alone. He didn’t expect anyone to believe a word of what he said, least of all a practical man like myself. And when he did tell me, I think I know why.”

  Woodbridge closed his eyes for a moment and frowned in taut concentration as if trying to remember something, only to find it hard work, something he was not quite up to. “According to his story, he had gone to the house about ten o’clock. It was an evening in late October and it was quite dark at that time with little moonlight, just enough to see by, but not bright enough for him to be seen easily. He apparently didn’t believe the stories about the place and it wasn’t until he was inside the grounds and moving towards a house that he noticed there was a certain feel about the place that he had not noticed before. It was nothing that he could describe to me. All he could say was that he felt something was going to happen that night and that when it did, it would be something hideous and frightening.” The doctor paused and sat down in his chair, his forehead furrowed. “What happened then, according to him, was so unbelievable that at the time, I’m afraid I dismissed it completely as the ravings of a man on the borderline of hysteria. He approached the house from the hill at the back where the Belstead family are buried. It wasn’t until he was going past the vaults that he saw where the iron gate had been pushed down—from the inside.”

  “From the inside! But that’s impossible.”

  “I know. Now you can realise why I thought little about it at the time. Now looking back on it, I think it might have been possible to have averted a lot of what has happened since.”

  “Go on,” prompted Calder.

  “He found bits of torn cloth and dirt on the old pathway outside the vaults and being either a fool or a very brave man—I don’t know which—he followed the trail that led almost directly to the library of the house. He said there were lights in the French windows, and at first, he thought it was candle-light but as he drew closer, he saw that it was something else—a weird, bluish glow that seemed to fill the whole room and spill out into the garden outside. It was a steady light, unlike the flickering of candle-light. Going closer, he looked inside.” A pause, then Woodbridge said in a clear voice: “He discovered for himself, that the old Belstead house was not quite as empty as he had thought.”

  “And you believe his story now?”

  “Yes, I do. Since then, I’ve had a very similar story told me by a young servant girl who had to come past that place one night shortly before midnight. She saw lights in the house, bluish lights she described them, and figures outlined against the windows. Add to this what I saw with my own eyes that day I went up to see Charles Belstead, and what you claim to have seen yesterday and you’ll see why I’m forced believe it.”

  “But it goes against all reason.” Calder’s logical solicitor’s mind was trying to put a rational explanation on to all of this, and failing miserably. “Is there any possible explanation for it?”

  “I’m not sure. It must all tie in with old Henry Belstead. There seems to have been no talk of strange happenings there until he arrived in the house. Prior to that, everything was quite respectable.”

  “I think I know what you’re going to say,” went on the other quickly, “and it’s something I cannot accept. Such things just don’t happen in this modern age,”

  The other got to his feet, hands clasped behind his back. He spoke around the stem of his pipe thrust into his mouth. “As a doctor, I have to examine everything in connection with any patients I have, no matter how strange it may seem at the time. As soon as I discovered what had happened to that boy I had to attend to, I started asking a lot of questions around the village, about things which happened before I arrived here forty or fifty years ago. At first, the folk here didn’t want to talk about such things. They still look upon me as an outsider, even though I had been here for close on twenty-seven years. But gradually, they opened out and what they did tell me, made a very queer and bizarre sort of sense. Scientifically speaking, it makes no sense at all; because this deals with something which, at the moment, is quite outside of science as we know it; although there are a few men of vision in the States and elsewhere, experimenting with these metaphysical occurrences.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me that Henry Belstead is still alive, I can’t believe you; and the same goes for the others. I was there at the reading of old Henry Belstead’s will, and I can say quite confidently that he was dead then. He couldn’t possibly be—”

  The doctor shook his head slowl
y. “How can I make you see?” he murmured. “It never is very easy to explain these things. Sometimes, I think that because of our civilisation, we have regressed a long way from the senses which we had originally. The ancient peoples must have been a lot closer to the truth than we are. Now, we can’t see these things because of the scientific facts that have built up a wall around them. And breaking through that wall is the most difficult thing in the world today.”

  “So, all right, Henry Belstead started something and whatever it was, it still seems to be happening. What I want to know, is what’s at the bottom of it all?”

  “Black magic,” murmured the other. He emphasised the words queerly. “You might say that this is something that went out of fashion by the middle of the Eighteenth Century.” He lowered his voice almost in apology. “I suppose you could be forgiven for thinking that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen to be true. As soon as I realised that there was something strange going on at the Belstead place, I took the trouble to read back over everything that was known about Henry Belstead.”

  “And did you find anything? I should imagine you would find very little.”

  “I found enough,” went on the other grimly. “There was a little written about him in the local paper at that time, mostly from hearsay. But once I broke through the barrier of indifference, I managed to get quite a lot out of the people in the village. It seems they have long memories when it comes to something like this.”

  “These people talk about anything if they think they have found somebody willing to listen to them,” said Calder crisply. “I’ve been a lawyer here for more than thirty-eight years and I think I can say that I know these people extremely well.”

  Woodbridge shook his head slowly. “But it’s obvious that you didn’t know Henry Belstead. If you had, you’d have realised that he was a very strange man.” He paused to let the full import of his words sink in. “I can see that you don’t believe that what you saw at the Belstead place the other night was anything out of the ordinary. You’re confused and trying to make yourself believe that it was only someone who looked like old Peters and the bad light.”

  “Well, I—” He swallowed thickly, then went on hurriedly. “I’m not sure now what I saw. I’m certain there was someone there. Who it was, I’m not prepared to say.”

  “I can understand your attitude. This isn’t an easy thing to accept. You’re a lawyer, and your legal mind always tries to seek a logical solution to everything. It was the same with me in the beginning. But there were too many little isolated incidents happened here, and when I collected them all together, and linked them up, I found that they made a strange kind of sense, a frightening kind of sense, but one which couldn’t be ignored. I’m a doctor, Jeremiah. I believe in the things of the mind as well as of the body. Perhaps if I explained a little to you of what I discovered about Henry Belstead, you might begin to understand.” He lowered himself into the chair and leaned back, knocking out his pipe into the tray beside him, the ashes gleaming redly for a moment. “Madness was in all of the Belsteads. I’ve recognised that from the beginning and I can prove that it was there from the middle of the Fourteenth Century. It must have been something to do with the family, because you’ll find that there aren’t many of them. Their family tree didn’t put forth many branches, and the few that there are soon died out, leaving only the single line. Certainly, the madness came out in Henry Belstead when he was a younger man. He went off on long trips into the jungles of New Guinea, taking only natives with him. No white man would venture into the regions that he visited, but it was not until he came back and took up residence here that the talk really began. It was perhaps his own talk, especially when he was drunk, that led to the rumours so rife in the village later. I’m not surprised that the villagers thought him to be mad, when he talked of strange rites that were practised in the hidden jungles, of a power even stronger than voodoo and the ways these people had of raising the dead and other such hideous things.”

  Calder uttered a sharp snort. “And you’re asking me to believe all of this? Good Lord, you’re a doctor, you must know that these were just idle traveller’s tales. There couldn’t have been a word of truth in any of them.”

  “You think so? If it is true that evil was practised in that house out there, a really potent brand of evil, might it not be that some of it still exists, some terrible force that had somehow been crystallised in the place, still able to exert some tremendous influence over anyone living there?”

  Calder licked dry lips with a tongue that seemed suddenly to have gone stiff. Something that was lurking terror uncoiled itself in his mind. “If you are right,” he said uncertainly, “what can be done about it? Is there any way that it can be stopped before it gets out of hand?”

  “I’m not sure. It all depends on how potent that force is.” The doctor spoke almost professionally, as if he were discussing a case with a patient. “There are always ways of protecting yourself from these things. I’d already made up my mind to go there and see for myself—tonight.”

  “But why at night?” He looked perplexed, bewildered almost.

  “I’m afraid that you still don’t fully understand, Jeremiah,” said the other gently. “We aren’t fighting things of flesh and blood and the powers that these things can command are not things that we can examine scientifically and catalogue for easy reference. These are the dark things of the night, the black knowledge of evil which has been sought throughout the long ages, discovered by only a few, and kept hidden. But all of the knowledge that has been gained is there for everyone to read if they only know where to look for it.”

  “I see.” Calder nodded, no longer sure of himself. “And what do you think will happen when you go? I only ask because I think someone should go with you and I’d like to know what to expect.”

  “That’s very difficult to say at the moment. If I knew, I’d feel a little easier in my mind.” Woodbridge grimaced slightly, then forced a smile.

  * * * * * * *

  Immediately, the silence settled down about the place. The moment they had stepped through the wrought-iron gate, the metal twisted into strange, cabalistic designs, closing it carefully behind them, it was as if they had, by that simple action, cut off all sound around them. Calder felt his taut muscles beginning to jerk spasmodically. He thought queerly that it was dreadful that any place could be so silent. Even the odour of the place had changed subtly but horribly, since he had last been there. Then there had been the smell of rain on wet leaves underfoot, of growing things—now there was an overpowering stench of cold, damp earth and stone.

  It was impossible for Calder to describe the feeling that went through him at that moment as he stood there beside the doctor, staring into the cold, clammy darkness. The intense quiet had something to do with it, he felt sure—and that strange, sickly, cloying smell which persisted in his nostrils. Tensely, he found himself wishing that some sound would break in on that awful silence; the crush of their feet on the damp leaves beneath their feet on the gravel of the drive, thickly overgrown with weeds. But for what seemed an eternity, they stood absolutely still, feeling around with their eyes and ears, alert for the slightest movement or the faintest sound.

  Woodbridge turned his head. “You’re sure that you still want to go on with me?” His voice sounded eerie and unnaturally low in the clinging stillness. “God only knows what will happen when we get there and I don’t want you to—”

  “I’ll stay with you,” said Calder tightly. He could feel the coldness on his face and the muscles of his body seemed numb. “I’m not sure what it is you expect to find up there.”

  “Neither do I. But whatever it is, the sooner we know about it, the better.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to call the house first and see Charles Belstead? After all, I feel a little like a criminal walking through someone else’s grounds like this, completely uninvited.”

  “No.” Woodbridge’s voice was harsh and decisive. “That will do no good. I wa
nt to go through with the first part of this without him knowing anything about it. Besides, I’m sure that the evil emanates, not from the house itself, but from that place on top of the hill.”

  They went forward into the dimness. There was a moon lying low on the horizon, a great fiery red ball, touching the tops of the trees with a lurid glow like fire. He shivered. Ordinarily, he regarded the moon as a warm and friendly thing. Now there was fear in it, and terror. It was something strangely unreal and grotesque, abnormal, like a huge red eye that watched them from the heavens as they moved deeper into the trees, where they crowded in thickly on all sides, the shadows long and huge and dark. Calder glanced about him out of the corner of his eye, not quite knowing what to expect. The trees themselves did not seem quite right. The trunks looked too thick and grotesquely big for normal growth, with strange nodules sticking from their roots and the branches were twisted into ugly, fear-haunted shapes that clawed at the scudding clouds, almost, he thought inwardly, trembling a little, as if they were sucking something dark and poisonous from the ground.

  He shrugged as he followed the tall shape of the doctor, pulling himself together. This was all part of his overwrought imagination, he tried to tell himself fiercely. He was nervous and on edge. Jumpy. All of this running around the countryside on a night such as this, with a storm brewing somewhat on the western horizon, was not good for a man of his age. He shuddered convulsively for a moment and noticed that his hands were trembling more than usual.