she had gone to sleep, and in exactly the same attitude. The flames from
the logs had burned up again, and leaped on the walls, fitfully
illuminating the picture of handsome Dick above the fire-place. In her
dream she knew exactly what she had done to-day, and for what reason she
was lying here now instead of being out with the rest of the skaters.
She remembered also (still dreaming), that she was going to write a
letter or two before tea, and prepared to get up in order to go to her
room. As she half-rose she caught sight of her own arms lying out on
each side of her on the grey velvet sofa. But she could not see where
her hands ended, and where the grey velvet began: her fingers seemed to
have melted into the stuff. She could see her wrists quite clearly, and
a blue vein on the backs of her hands, and here and there a knuckle.
Then, in her dream she remembered, the last thought which had been in
her mind before she fell asleep, namely the growth of the
lichen-coloured vegetation on the face and the eyes and the throat of
Mrs Canning. At that thought the strangling terror of real nightmare
began: she knew that she was being transformed into this grey stuff, and
she was absolutely unable to move. Soon the grey would spread up her
arms, and over her feet; when they came in from skating they would find
here nothing but a huge misshapen cushion of lichen-coloured velvet, and
that would be she. The horror grew more acute, and then by a violent
effort she shook herself free of the clutches of this very evil dream,
and she awoke.
For a minute or two she lay there, conscious only of the tremendous
relief at finding herself awake. She felt again with her fingers the
pleasant touch of the velvet, and drew them backwards and forwards,
assuring herself that she was not, as her dream had suggested, melting
into greyness and softness. But she was still, in spite of the violence
of her awakening, very sleepy, and lay there till, looking down, she was
aware that she could not see her hands at all. It was very nearly dark.
At that moment a sudden flicker of flame came from the dying fire, and a
flare of burning gas from the peat flooded the room. The portrait of
handsome Dick looked evilly down on her, and her hands were visible
again. And then a panic worse than the panic of her dreams seized her.
Daylight had altogether faded, and she knew that she was alone in the
dark in the terrible gallery. This panic was of the nature of nightmare,
for she felt unable to move for terror. But it was worse than nightmare
because she knew she was awake. And then the full cause of this frozen
fear dawned on her; she knew with the certainty of absolute conviction
that she was about to see the twin-babies.
She felt a sudden moisture break out on her face, and within her mouth
her tongue and throat went suddenly dry, and she felt her tongue grate
along the inner surface of her teeth. All power of movement had slipped
from her limbs, leaving them dead and inert, and she stared with wide
eyes into the blackness. The spurt of flame from the peat had burned
itself out again, and darkness encompassed her.
Then on the wall opposite her, facing the windows, there grew a faint
light of dusky crimson. For a moment she thought it but heralded the
approach of the awful vision, then hope revived in her heart, and she
remembered that thick clouds had overcast the sky before she went to
sleep, and guessed that this light came from the sun not yet quite sunk
and set. This sudden revival of hope gave her the necessary stimulus,
and she sprang off the sofa where she lay. She looked out of the window
and saw the dull glow on the horizon. But before she could take a step
forward it was obscured again. A tiny sparkle of light came from the
hearth which did no more than illuminate the tiles of the fireplace, and
snow falling heavily tapped at the window panes. There was neither light
nor sound except these.
But the courage that had come to her, giving her the power of movement,
had not quite deserted her, and she began feeling her way down the
gallery. And then she found that she was lost. She stumbled against a
chair, and, recovering herself, stumbled against another. Then a table
barred her way, and, turning swiftly aside, she found herself up against
the back of a sofa. Once more she turned and saw the dim gleam of the
firelight on the side opposite to that on which she expected it. In her
blind gropings she must have reversed her direction. But which way was
she to go now? She seemed blocked in by furniture. And all the time
insistent and imminent was the fact that the two innocent terrible
ghosts were about to appear to her.
Then she began to pray, “Lighten our darkness, O Lord,” she said to
herself. But she could not remember how the prayer continued, and she
had sore need of it. There was something about the perils of the night.
All this time she felt about her with groping, fluttering hands. The
fire-glimmer which should have been on her left was on her right again;
therefore she must turn herself round again. “Lighten our darkness,” she
whispered, and then aloud she repeated, “Lighten our darkness.”
She stumbled up against a screen, and could not remember the existence
of any such screen. Hastily she felt beside it with blind hands, and
touched something soft and velvety. Was it the sofa on which she had
lain? If so, where was the head of it. It had a head and a back and
feet--it was like a person, all covered with grey lichen. Then she lost
her head completely. All that remained to her was to pray; she was lost,
lost in this awful place, where no one came in the dark except the
babies that cried. And she heard her voice rising from whisper to
speech, and speech to scream. She shrieked out the holy words, she
yelled them as if blaspheming as she groped among tables and chairs and
the pleasant things of ordinary life which had become so terrible.
* * * * *
Then came a sudden and an awful answer to her screamed prayer. Once more
a pocket of inflammable gas in the peat on the hearth was reached by the
smouldering embers, and the room started into light. She saw the evil
eyes of handsome Dick, she saw the little ghostly snow-flakes falling
thickly outside. And she saw where she was, just opposite the door
through which the terrible twins made their entrance. Then the flame
went out again, and left her in blackness once more. But she had gained
something, for she had her geography now. The centre of the room was
bare of furniture, and one swift dart would take her to the door of the
landing above the main staircase and into safety. In that gleam she had
been able to see the handle of the door, bright-brassed, luminous like a
star. She would go straight for it; it was but a matter of a few seconds
now.
She took a long breath, partly of relief, partly to satisfy the demands
of her galloping heart. But the breath was only half-taken when she was
stricken once more into the immobility of nightmare.
There came a little whisper, it was no more than that, from the door
opposite which she stood, and through which the twin-babies entered. It
was not quite dark outside it, for she could see that the door was
opening. And there stood in the opening two little white figures, side
by side. They came towards her slowly, shufflingly. She could not see
face or form at all distinctly, but the two little white figures were
advancing. She knew them to be the ghosts of terror, innocent of the
awful doom they were bound to bring, even as she was innocent. With the
inconceivable rapidity of thought, she made up her mind what to do. She
had not hurt them or laughed at them, and they, they were but babies
when the wicked and bloody deed had sent them to their burning death.
Surely the spirits of these children would not be inaccessible to the
cry of one who was of the same blood as they, who had committed no fault
that merited the doom they brought. If she entreated them they might
have mercy, they might forebear to bring the curse on her, they might
allow her to pass out of the place without blight, without the sentence
of death, or the shadow of things worse than death upon her.
It was but for the space of a moment that she hesitated, then she sank
down on to her knees, and stretched out her hands towards them.
“Oh, my dears,” she said, “I only fell asleep. I have done no more wrong
than that----”
She paused a moment, and her tender girl’s heart thought no more of
herself, but only of them, those little innocent spirits on whom so
awful a doom was laid, that they should bring death where other children
bring laughter, and doom for delight. But all those who had seen them
before had dreaded and feared them, or had mocked at them.
Then, as the enlightenment of pity dawned on her, her fear fell from her
like the wrinkled sheath that holds the sweet folded buds of Spring.
“Dears, I am so sorry for you,” she said. “It is not your fault that you
must bring me what you must bring, but I am not afraid any longer. I am
only sorry for you. God bless you, you poor darlings.”
She raised her head and looked at them. Though it was so dark, she could
now see their faces, though all was dim and wavering, like the light of
pale flames shaken by a draught. But the faces were not miserable or
fierce--they smiled at her with shy little baby smiles. And as she
looked they grew faint, fading slowly away like wreaths of vapour in
frosty air.
* * * * *
Madge did not at once move when they had vanished, for instead of fear
there was wrapped round her a wonderful sense of peace, so happy and
serene that she would not willingly stir, and so perhaps disturb it. But
before long she got up, and feeling her way, but without any sense of
nightmare pressing her on, or frenzy of fear to spur her, she went out
of the long gallery, to find Blanche just coming upstairs whistling and
swinging her skates.
“How’s the leg, dear,” she asked, “You’re not limping any more.”
Till that moment Madge had not thought of it.
“I think it must be all right,” she said, “I had forgotten it anyhow.
Blanche, dear, you won’t be frightened for me, will you, but--but I have
seen the twins.”
For a moment Blanche’s face whitened with terror.
“What?” she said in a whisper.
“Yes, I saw them just now. But they were kind, they smiled at me, and I
was so sorry for them. And somehow I am sure I have nothing to fear.”
* * * * *
It seems that Madge was right, for nothing untoward has come to her.
Something, her attitude to them, we must suppose, her pity, her
sympathy, touched and dissolved and annihilated the curse. Indeed, I was
at Church Peveril only last week, arriving there after dark. Just as I
passed the gallery door, Blanche came out.
“Ah, there you are,” she said, “I’ve just been seeing the twins. They
looked too sweet and stopped nearly ten minutes. Let us have tea at
once.”
CATERPILLARS
I saw a month or two ago in an Italian paper that the Villa Cascana, in
which I once stayed, had been pulled down, and that a manufactory of
some sort was in process of erection on its site. There is therefore no
longer any reason for refraining from writing of those things which I
myself saw (or imagined I saw) in a certain room and on a certain
landing of the villa in question, nor from mentioning the circumstances
which followed, which may or may not (according to the opinion of the
reader) throw some light on or be somehow connected with this
experience.
The Villa Cascana was in all ways but one a perfectly delightful house,
yet, if it were standing now, nothing in the world--I use the phrase in
its literal sense--would induce me to set foot in it again, for I
believe it to have been haunted in a very terrible and practical manner.
Most ghosts, when all is said and done, do not do much harm; they may
perhaps terrify, but the person whom they visit usually gets over their
visitation. They may on the other hand be entirely friendly and
beneficent. But the appearances in the Villa Cascana were not
beneficent, and had they made their “visit” in a very slightly
different manner, I do not suppose I should have got over it any more
than Arthur Inglis did.
* * * * *
The house stood on an ilex-clad hill not far from Sestri di Levante on
the Italian Riviera, looking out over the iridescent blues of that
enchanted sea, while behind it rose the pale green chestnut woods that
climb up the hillsides till they give place to the pines that, black in
contrast with them, crown the slopes. All round it the garden in the
luxuriance of mid-spring bloomed and was fragrant, and the scent of
magnolia and rose, borne on the salt freshness of the winds from the
sea, flowed like a stream through the cool vaulted rooms.
On the ground floor a broad pillared _loggia_ ran round three sides of
the house, the top of which formed a balcony for certain rooms of the
first floor. The main staircase, broad and of grey marble steps, led up
from the hall to the landing outside these rooms, which were three in
number, namely two big sitting-rooms and a bedroom arranged _en suite_.
The latter was unoccupied, the sitting-rooms were in use. From these the
main staircase was continued to the second floor, where were situated
certain bedrooms, one of which I occupied, while from the other side of
the first-floor landing some half-dozen steps led to another suite of
rooms, where, at the time I am speaking of, Arthur Inglis, the artist,
had his bedroom and studio. Thus the landing outside my bedroom at the
top of the house, commanded both the landing of the first floor, and
also the steps that led to Inglis’ rooms. Jim Stanley and his wife,
finally (whose guest I was), occupied rooms in another wing of the
house, where also were the servants’ quarters.
I arrived just in time for lunch on a brilliant noon of mid-May. The
garden was shouting with colour and fragrance, and not less delightful
after my broiling walk up from the _marina_, should have been the coming
from the reverberating heat and blaze of the day into the marble
coolness of the villa. Only (the reader has my bare word for this, and
nothing more), the moment I set foot in the house I felt that something
was wrong. This feeling, I may say, was quite vague, though very strong,
and I remember that when I saw letters waiting for me on the table in
the hall I felt certain that the explanation was here: I was convinced
that there was bad news of some sort for me. Yet when I opened them I
found no such explanation of my premonition: my correspondents all
reeked of prosperity. Yet this clear miscarriage of a presentiment did
not dissipate my uneasiness. In that cool fragrant house there was
something wrong.
I am at pains to mention this because to the general view it may explain
that though I am as a rule so excellent a sleeper that the extinction of
my light on getting into bed is apparently contemporaneous with being
called on the following morning, I slept very badly on my first night
in the Villa Cascana. It may also explain the fact that when I did sleep
(if it was indeed in sleep that I saw what I thought I saw) I dreamed in
a very vivid and original manner, original, that is to say, in the sense
that something that, as far as I knew, had never previously entered into
my consciousness, usurped it then. But since, in addition to this evil
premonition, certain words and events occurring during the rest of the
day, might have suggested something of what I thought happened that
night, it will be well to relate them.
After lunch, then, I went round the house with Mrs Stanley, and during
our tour she referred, it is true, to the unoccupied bedroom on the
first floor, which opened out of the room where we had lunched.
“We left that unoccupied,” she said, “because Jim and I have a charming
bedroom and dressing-room, as you saw, in the wing, and if we used it
ourselves we should have to turn the dining-room into a dressing-room
and have our meals downstairs. As it is, however, we have our little
flat there, Arthur Inglis has his little flat in the other passage; and
I remembered (aren’t I extraordinary?) that you once said that the
higher up you were in a house the better you were pleased. So I put you
at the top of the house, instead of giving you that room.”
It is true, that a doubt, vague as my uneasy premonition, crossed my
mind at this. I did not see why Mrs Stanley should have explained all
this, if there had not been more to explain. I allow, therefore, that
the thought that there was something to explain about the unoccupied
bedroom was momentarily present to my mind.
The second thing that may have borne on my dream was this.
At dinner the conversation turned for a moment on ghosts. Inglis, with
the certainty of conviction, expressed his belief that anybody who could
possibly believe in the existence of supernatural phenomena was unworthy
of the name of an ass. The subject instantly dropped. As far as I can
recollect, nothing else occurred or was said that could bear on what
follows.
We all went to bed rather early, and personally I yawned my way
upstairs, feeling hideously sleepy. My room was rather hot, and I threw
all the windows wide, and from without poured in the white light of the
moon, and the love-song of many nightingales. I undressed quickly, and
got into bed, but though I had felt so sleepy before, I now felt
extremely wide-awake. But I was quite content to be awake: I did not
toss or turn, I felt perfectly happy listening to the song and seeing
the light. Then, it is possible, I may have gone to sleep, and what
follows may have been a dream. I thought anyhow that after a time the
nightingales ceased singing and the moon sank. I thought also that if,
for some unexplained reason, I was going to lie awake all night, I might
as well read, and I remembered that I had left a book in which I was
interested in the dining-room on the first floor. So I got out of bed,
lit a candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a
side-table the book I had come to look for, and then, simultaneously,
saw that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious grey
light, not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked in.
The bed stood just opposite the door, a big four-poster, hung with
tapestry at the head. Then I saw that the greyish light of the bedroom
came from the bed, or rather from what was on the bed. For it was
covered with great caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled
over it. They were faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that
showed me the room. Instead of the sucker-feet of ordinary caterpillars
they had rows of pincers like crabs, and they moved by grasping what
they lay on with their pincers, and then sliding their bodies forward.
In colour these dreadful insects were yellowish-grey, and they were
covered with irregular lumps and swellings. There must have been
hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid
on the bed. Occasionally one fell off on to the floor, with a soft
fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete, it yielded to
the pincer-feet as if it had been putty, and, crawling back, the
caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin its fearful
companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at one end
of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration.
Then, as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became
conscious of my presence. All the mouths at any rate were turned in my
direction, and next moment they began dropping off the bed with those
soft fleshy thuds on to the floor, and wriggling towards me. For one
second a paralysis as of a dream was on me, but the next I was running
upstairs again to my room, and I remember feeling the cold of the marble
steps on my bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom, and slammed the door
behind me, and then--I was certainly wide awake now--I found myself
standing by my bed with the sweat of terror pouring from me. The noise
of the banged door still rang in my ears. But, as would have been more
usual, if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had been mine
when I saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping softly
on to the floor did not cease then. Awake now, if dreaming before, I did
not at all recover from the horror of dream: it did not seem to me that
I had dreamed. And until dawn, I sat or stood, not daring to lie down,
thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach of
the caterpillars. To them and the claws that bit into the cement the
wood of the door was child’s play: steel would not keep them out.
But with the sweet and noble return of day the horror vanished: the
whisper of wind became benignant again: the nameless fear, whatever it
was, was smoothed out and terrified me no longer. Dawn broke, hueless at
first; then it grew dove-coloured, then the flaming pageant of light
spread over the sky.
* * * * *
The admirable rule of the house was that everybody had breakfast where
and when he pleased, and in consequence it was not till lunch-time that
I met any of the other members of our party, since I had breakfast on my
balcony, and wrote letters and other things till lunch. In fact, I got
down to that meal rather late, after the other three had begun. Between
my knife and fork there was a small pill-box of cardboard, and as I sat
down Inglis spoke.
“Do look at that,” he said, “since you are interested in natural
history. I found it crawling on my counterpane last night, and I don’t
know what it is.”
I think that before I opened the pill-box I expected something of the
sort which I found in it. Inside it, anyhow, was a small caterpillar,
greyish-yellow in colour, with curious bumps and excrescences on its
rings. It was extremely active, and hurried round the box, this way and
that. Its feet were unlike the feet of any caterpillar I ever saw: they
were like the pincers of a crab. I looked, and shut the lid down again.
“No, I don’t know it,” I said, “but it looks rather unwholesome. What
are you going to do with it?”
“Oh, I shall keep it,” said Inglis. “It has begun to spin: I want to see
what sort of a moth it turns into.”
I opened the box again, and saw that these hurrying movements were
indeed the beginning of the spinning of the web of its cocoon. Then
Inglis spoke again.
“It has got funny feet, too,” he said. “They are like crabs’ pincers.
What’s the Latin for crab? Oh, yes, Cancer. So in case it is unique,
let’s christen it: ‘Cancer Inglisensis.’”
Then something happened in my brain, some momentary piecing together of
all that I had seen or dreamed. Something in his words seemed to me to
throw light on it all, and my own intense horror at the experience of
the night before linked itself on to what he had just said. In effect, I
took the box and threw it, caterpillar and all, out of the window. There
was a gravel path just outside, and beyond it, a fountain playing into a
basin. The box fell on to the middle of this.
Inglis laughed.
“So the students of the occult don’t like solid facts,” he said. “My
poor caterpillar!”
The talk went off again at once on to other subjects, and I have only
given in detail, as they happened, these trivialities in order to be
sure myself that I have recorded everything that could have borne on
occult subjects or on the subject of caterpillars. But at the moment
when I threw the pill-box into the fountain, I lost my head: my only
excuse is that, as is probably plain, the tenant of it was, in
miniature, exactly what I had seen crowded on to the bed in the
unoccupied room. And though this translation of those phantoms into
flesh and blood--or whatever it is that caterpillars are made of--ought
perhaps to have relieved the horror of the night, as a matter of fact it
did nothing of the kind. It only made the crawling pyramid that covered
the bed in the unoccupied room more hideously real.
* * * * *
After lunch we spent a lazy hour or two strolling about the garden or
sitting in the loggia, and it must have been about four o’clock when
Stanley and I started off to bathe, down the path that led by the
fountain into which I had thrown the pill-box. The water was shallow and
clear, and at the bottom of it I saw its white remains. The water had
disintegrated the cardboard, and it had become no more than a few strips
and shreds of sodden paper. The centre of the fountain was a marble
Italian Cupid which squirted the water out of a wine-skin held under its
arm. And crawling up its leg was the caterpillar. Strange and scarcely
credible as it seemed, it must have survived the falling-to-bits of its
prison, and made its way to shore, and there it was, out of arm’s reach,
weaving and waving this way and that as it evolved its cocoon.
Then, as I looked at it, it seemed to me again that, like the
caterpillar I had seen last night, it saw me, and breaking out of the
threads that surrounded it, it crawled down the marble leg of the Cupid
and began swimming like a snake across the water of the fountain towards
me. It came with extraordinary speed (the fact of a caterpillar being
able to swim was new to me), and in another moment was crawling up the
marble lip of the basin. Just then Inglis joined us.
“Why, if it isn’t old ‘Cancer Inglisensis’ again,” he said, catching
sight of the beast. “What a tearing hurry it is in.”
We were standing side by side on the path, and when the caterpillar had
advanced to within about a yard of us, it stopped, and began waving
again, as if in doubt as to the direction in which it should go. Then it
appeared to make up its mind, and crawled on to Inglis’ shoe.