The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 3

  Whatley’s daughter showed no emotion when they told her he was dead. She just said that things were as they had to be. She had some workmen to the house in the following weeks, and it seemed she might be about to redecorate and start living more of a normal life, but she carried on as secluded an existence as before. On her occasional shopping trips, though, people noticed that she was pregnant. Of course, nobody knew who the father was, but plenty were willing to make suggestions.

  The vicar went to visit her and offer help and consolation, but Flora Whatley was not having any of it. She was quite content, she told him over tea in a dingy front room. She was less dreamy than previously, more determined. Her voice was quiet but firm. She had money and did not need anybody’s help. Her family’s blood had been renewed—renewed, that was the word she used. As she went on she became more fervent, perhaps finding an outlet for feelings pent up too long. Her family would be a great dynasty and the father was none of his business. She talked herself up into a high state, and in the end declared that she was the Whore of Babylon and her son would be greater than kings, and how did he like that?

  “You look to your church, Vicar,” she said. “My son will shake it to its foundations.”

  The vicar was taken aback. He half thought about having a doctor examine her and rule on her mental state, but she seemed so self-possessed, and he doubted that her mild delusions would count for much. The house was untidy—a pigsty—but she had food and clothing and heating and was looking after herself well enough.

  “You know how some of them get when they’re pregnant,” said Dunning. “Or maybe you don’t, being young. But he didn’t dare try to help her after that.”

  Some months later the neighbours were alarmed by screams from the Whatley house in the middle of the night, and they realised that her time had come. They tried to get in to help, but the doors were locked and the windows barred and shuttered. The screams continued for hours.

  Eventually firemen were summoned to break down the front door with axes. By then the house was ominously silent. The would-be rescuers found that the internal doors were locked too. There was a note pinned to the bedroom door saying that nobody should disturb her. Dunning said the note trailed off into what he called strange language.

  “What language?” I asked.

  “Gibberish,” said Dunning. “She was touched in the head, that one.”

  When they broke that door down, they found a large bedroom with a bare floor covered with green chalk markings. In the middle was an enormous bed covered with dark hangings. Candles were still burning around the room.

  On the bed lay Flora Whatley and her baby, a girl. Both were quite dead.

  “The newspapers made a meal of it,” said Dunning.

  “I read about it,” I said, “just a paragraph or two, but it mentioned chalk pentacles and the last survivor of a celebrated family of witches dying in a birth ritual because she refused a doctor.”

  “Well, some of it was true. She was wearing all that jewellery, and a sort of robe. Vicar was there and he told me. Ritual, family tradition, who knows, but the Whatleys were a queer lot, had their own ways. Too much gipsy blood and inbreeding, not like true English folk at all.”

  Flora had died after giving birth to the grotesquely deformed baby, which according to Dunning could not have lived long. Had she killed it deliberately in an act of sacrifice? He shrugged; to him it didn’t make much difference.

  Everything in the arrangements suggested that it was all deliberate. She had made no effort to get assistance, even right at the end. Old Whatley’s book was open on the pillow beside her.

  It took lawyers weeks trace any sort of heir. There was the house itself, and a strongbox containing several thousand pounds in gold. It eventually went to some distant cousin who showed no inclination to visit, but put the place up for sale. There had not been any takers in the six months it had been on the market.

  “That’s the place there,” said Dunning, pointing out the house through the trees. “The cellar’s half full of water and it’s all rotten. Better to pull it down and start again, and I dare say someone will when they drop the price some more. And forget those Whatleys were ever here.”

  That was the end of the tour. Dunning was tired, and the vicar would be back soon. He said he needed a drink, and I didn’t think he meant a cup of tea. I tipped him another shilling, and the extra penny he asked for the use of the electric torch. I went back to my lodgings, already assembling my notes and conclusions in my head.

  The next week found us gathered around in the snug, and I held the floor with my account of my anthropological excursion. Afterwards it turned into open debate about who had won the bet and whether there were really any pagan remains at Dulwich. I was surprised when Jessica produced a ground plan which showed the layout of the church and the position of the old barrows. It kept surprising me how readily she took my side and how much trouble she took to help.

  “What this map proves,” says George, “is that there were pagan remains before, and they’re all gone now.”

  “This chamber,” said Tom. “I’d like to see that, get some photographs, I really would.”

  “It’s perfectly vile,” said Sophie. “And a man died in there too.”

  “The way you describe it sounds like there’s some rather clever trompe l’oeil,” said Tom. He turned over one of my pages of notes and sketched on the back. “A normal brick wall has bricks all the same size, but perspective means they look smaller as they recede into the distance. If you use stones of different sizes, with smaller ones at one end, you can get an illusion of receding in a short space the way you describe.”

  “That’s a useless picture,” said Jessica, laughing. “I can’t make anything of it.”

  “The futility of trying to convert three dimensions into two,” said Daniel, reviving a long-standing wrangle he enjoyed with Tom the photographer. “You’d do better folding the paper into a model.”

  “But who built it?” asked George. “It’s not ancient, obviously. But the thieves’ den story is balderdash. Two hundred years ago, perhaps—Dick Turpin was from around here, and plenty of others must have had somewhere to stash their ill-gotten loot. But not in modern times.”

  Daniel took two pencils and, pinching them together, made a rude compass and started making marks on the plan.

  “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” said George, watching him closely.

  Daniel ended up by putting an X on the map.

  “That’s exactly where the chamber is,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “It’s at the centroid of the barrows, obviously,” he said. “You just watched me calculate it.”

  “The hat is in the balance,” declared George. “Clearly a site visit is needed so Tom can get some snaps, and our architecture expert can rule on the antiquity of the stonework.”

  “What about that business with the Whatleys?” asked Jessica.

  “Inbreeding and incest, with a touch of witchcraft,” said Sophie.

  “Awfully Gothic, isn’t it?” said Jessica. “And that bedroom, atavistic primeval cave-birthing-room?”

  “The house is still empty, you say?” George asked.

  “The house is all locked up,” I said. “And the vicar won’t let anyone visit the chamber; I only managed because his back was turned and Dunning will do anything for a half-crown.”

  “Leave everything to me, old man,” said George. “We will get to the bottom of this. Fortes fortuna juvat, y’know—‘fortune favours the brave’ as you peasants say in the vernacular.”

  Now it seemed George felt as though he had been challenged. I sensed some ulterior motive, but I had no clue as to what it might be. The question of pagan influence was not proven. Every village has its eccentric, and that stone cell now seemed less weird than when I was in it. Now it was a riddle that needed to be solved, and I devoted a certain amount of thought to it over the next few days.

  III

 
I was not invited back to church; I think the vicar found my curiosity offensive and conveyed his feelings to Mrs Hall. Mr. Hall and I would wash up after supper each evening, he washing and I drying. Mrs Hall always objected to this, but her husband was punctilious about doing his bit.

  One evening as he passed me a scrubbed plate he asked, “How was your visit to the church on Sunday?”

  “Oh, very good,” I said.

  “I don’t go regular myself, though the missus has always been one for it. Seems to me it’s been shaken up at that church lately. Since that Whatley business. Some of them are…touched, sort of. What did you make of it?”

  “What do you mean by strange?”

  He passed me another plate, and as he did so he gave me such a look that I couldn’t meet his gaze.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “I don’t know what it was like before. But there did seem to be some…well…nervous conditions among the congregation.”

  “About what I thought,” he said darkly, and the conversation turned to other things.

  Two days later, on a fine August evening, George led the group—Tom, Daniel, Sophie, Jessica, and I—up to the house. Like a conjuror performing a trick, he produced a heavy iron key and opened the door with a flourish. He had persuaded the estate agents that he was representing a possible buyer, a foreign prince no less who wanted somewhere close by for visiting his son at Dulwich School.

  I had pictured a vast Gothic pile. But it was a poorer, meaner sort of place. The house crouched low to the ground. The windows were small and narrow, and everything was uneven. It had no recognisable architectural style, but looked as if it had been constructed piecemeal, room by room, by the most unskilled labourers. Overgrown hedges screened it from the neighbouring houses.

  Feeling like an intruder, I stepped over the threshold. The house, I sensed, did not want us there.

  The interior was in a bad way, the rooms empty with just odd pieces of furniture remaining. In the hallway was an old grandfather clock, run down long ago. George pointed out the odd celestial markings alongside the dial that showed phases of the moon.

  The upstairs was completely derelict, and some rooms had not been used for years. The only place that showed any signs of life was the large kitchen, which looked as though gypsies had camped in it. The stone flags were well worn, and stains showed where pots and pans and cups had been left. The ceiling had been painted brown by decades of smoke and soot. A few empty bottles and crumpled papers remained in odd corners. The pantry held tins and jars with faded labels, and a few bottles of unidentifiable brown liquid.

  “Not even a rat,” said George.

  The bedroom was smaller and darker than my imagination had made it, with a low, beamed ceiling. The chalk markings on the floor had been largely erased by the scuffling of feet, but there were still traces of diagrams, pictures, and crude writings. I could not decipher any of it, but Tom took pictures and made notes.

  Two things were notable in the bedroom. One was what at first looked like a black rug in the bay window. This was actually a hole in the floorboards, some three feet square. Down below water glinted in the blackness. The hole went all the way through, opening an entrance into the flooded cellar. At first we thought the floorboards had rotted and given way, dropping some unfortunate person into the pool below, but I saw that the ends of the boards were all sawn smooth and the hole was too regular to be accidental. And from it rose the same animal smell as from the church.

  The bed was quite a piece of work. It was large and, according to George, probably late seventeenth century. The woodwork was intricately carved on every surface, but the design was unusual. Instead of the usual fruits and flowers, it was covered with the impression of seaweed, of serpents or eels, or dragons, and tentacled things like octopi or cuttlefish. It was a bed more likely to encourage nightmares than sweet dreaming.

  George ran his fingers over it thoughtfully.

  “An unusual piece, I should say,” he said. “English, local wood but with foreign elements in the design. Oriental influence?”

  Tom pointed to the headboard where a medallion showed what could have been a castle turret. The perspective was all wrong, as though seen through a distorting lens. It reminded me of something I could not quite remember.

  “The chamber,” I said at last. “The stonework had that sort of warped effect.”

  “I have to see that chamber,” said Tom, setting up his tripod for a photograph of the bedstead.

  Satisfied that they had seen everything, the others trooped out to go poking through the kitchen, where there might be clues to be found amid the rubbish. I remained after the others left. Something troubled me. It was as though the most obvious clue were right there and we were missing it.

  Now I come to a difficult part of my narrative. Up to this point it might all have been some lark, as inconsequential as children looking for pirate treasure. But what I saw in that bedroom changed everything for me. For me and for us, forever.

  Not the markings on the floor, or the meagre furnishings. Not even that peculiar opening in the floor. It was the bed. We had all looked at it, taken in those disquieting carvings.

  There was something underneath the bed. I was convinced of it. I got down on all fours to have a look.

  Nothing but a dark, empty space. Of course they must have looked here when Flora Whatley died. Dunning told me there had been a chest full of gold, and under the bed was the first place they must have looked.

  But my conviction of something concealed grew stronger. There was not enough light to tell; it was all the same blankness. I could not hear anything. The smell was no stronger. But somehow I felt there was something there.

  My eyes adjusted to the dim light, but however I turned my head this way and that I could not see anything. The candles had been cleared away and, not being a smoker, I did not have any matches. I could have called one of the others…but I did not want to look foolish.

  Nor did I want to feel around in that dark, dusty space with my bare hands. Frustrated, I continued to peer into the shadowy recess, seeing nothing. I stood up, casting about the room. I saw through the open doorway into the hall, where there was an umbrella stand. A couple of umbrellas, and—the very thing!—a Malacca cane.

  I was still a little embarrassed and glanced round to check none of the others were near.

  “George, that is quite disgusting…” Sophie was saying from the kitchen.

  Kneeling on all fours again, I saw that the space under the bed was still impenetrable. It was probably packed with trunks and hatboxes, suitcases and chests of linen. The usual sorts of lumber.

  I swung the cane experimentally. It was a good, stout stick. I expected it to meet the wood or leather of a solid trunk. Instead it met with something else.

  Sometimes shocks can have a physical effect, like an electric jolt. Then that plummeting sensation in your stomach. It was like seeing a stranger looking in through the window, or waking and finding a shadow looming over you in the bedroom. It was like finding an unfamiliar lump under your skin, a disturbing presence that should not be there.

  That was what I felt when the stick connected with the unmistakable bulk of a living thing. My first instinct was that it must be a person, that someone was hiding under the bed.

  “Who’s there?” I blurted.

  It opened its eyes.

  They were not human eyes, or the eyes of anything else I had ever seen. Perhaps octopi or squid have eyes like that, but they did not seem like the eyes of any earthly thing. They were big and acid yellow, with a radiating pattern but no pupil. I still do not know how I could see them so clearly, as even animal eyes do not glow without light shone on them.

  Those eyes saw me, and I had the sensation that they saw through me like a needle piercing a butterfly. Sometimes when you meet someone’s gaze unexpectedly you feel a shock of recognition, so sharp that you take a breath. This was like that, but vile. It was like being seen naked by a hostile gaze. Worse, it
was more like touch than sight, like having a grubby pickpocket feel over your clothing, plucking at it, soiled fingers scrabbling at your skin, picking through your organs, poking your brains.

  I recoiled, rolling on the floor and scrambling to my feet, reacting in blind panic without thinking. I flew out of the room, through the hall, passing George and Tom, and was out of the house.

  I was lying in a ditch when they found me.

  The others were very understanding about it. George and Tom both said that they had glimpsed something too, but it had been too quick for them.

  “What was it?” asked Sophie. “A cat or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, panting. “But it scared the living daylights out of me.”

  Normally there would have been a lot of joking about my active imagination and high-strung temperament. I must have looked badly shaken for the others to say nothing.

  Tom, George, and Jessica went to inspect the underground chamber, carrying Tom’s photographic impedimenta with them. Sophie and Daniel escorted me to the Crown for a restorative drink. Mercifully they did not ask me about what I had seen, or even discuss the Whatley house. Instead Sophie resumed an argument about jazz, having seen a performance the previous evening. She insisted it was the freest flowering of the artistic spirit, but to Daniel it would always be a form of creative mathematics and its beauty lay in the strict patterns that underlay the apparent chaos. It was like watching a tennis match.

  The others arrived some time later. The place was not quite as I described it, according to George, but had been rather interesting. Apparently George had bribed Dunning with a bottle of whisky, and they had not had any trouble. “And it helped that my uncle was colonel of his regiment during the war,” said George, winking.

  “I didn’t know—”

  “Don’t be an ass, William,” said George.

  “I want to see how my photographs come out,” said Tom. “I want to see if they can capture that effect.”

  “Never mind that—is it ancient or modern?” Sophie asked Jessica.