The Mist in the Mirror (23 page)

That night was the most terrible I had ever spent, or pray
to God I will ever spend. Waves of evil and malevolence crept towards me and receded again, like waves of some sinister silent sea; the smell, a foetid stench of decay, rose like a poison, puffed out into the air, hissing gassily from corners, so that I almost choked upon it, and then it was gone again, and all was cold, empty stone and earth. I heard sounds, whispers and movements behind me; a dreadful cold crept up through my body, a more intense and penetrating cold than the mere cold of the night in that unheated, ancient building.

I seemed suspended in time, the night went on for a hundred years, and yet there was no time, or at least no movement of time forward. I was in a half-daze, half-delirium; shaking, I lay down on a pew and hid my head beneath my arms and again and again I returned to hammer and rattle and bang upon the door, and wrench in rage and impotence at the handle, but it was immovable, as if it had been locked and rusted for centuries.

How I clung onto life I do not know. By dawn, a sour, pale, ghostly dawn, breaking upon the cold stones and my shattered, cowed, exhausted frame, I was indeed half-dead, half-mad.

If the old man, the Canon, had not ridden out as soon as it was breaking light, to seek me out, because he had lain awake half the night in dreadful fear for me, then I would have been very shortly beyond salvation.

He found me, on that fresh, cold, dew-filled morning, crouched on the floor of the chapel, my arms crossed over my head, like a terrified animal, after he had turned the handle of the chapel door and, finding it unlocked and easily opened at a touch, come cautiously in.

I was taken across the moor, wrapped in a rough blanket, to the cottage hospital, where I was nursed with honest care and skill until my body at least was out of danger. But it was many weeks before my mind began to heal and, in all
that time, the old Canon visited me daily and sat with me and prayed over me, patiently and with single-minded concern and, at last, I began to emerge from my nightmare and terrors, and face the world again.

But I was a broken man, scarred and damaged in the deepest recesses of my being beyond repair, and even now, as I write this some forty years later, I know the frailty of my sanity and health.

I learned a very little more about Kittiscar and my family, and the curse that had been laid upon it centuries before by an ancestor of Conrad Vane, as evil as he and upon whom he seems to have modelled himself, and only thanked God that I had escaped, with my life, by some great blessing or good fortune. Kittiscar, the Hall, the village and the land around, had been wrenched from my family; the Vanes had triumphed, by cunning, devilish means, and, reign after reign of subtle terror, they had pursued and corrupted and hounded every male Monmouth, including my own father, as, finally, Conrad Vane had sought and lured and ensnared me, even from beyond the grave.

All these things I learned or pieced together, step by slow step, over many months – for, at first, I could not speak or think of any of it, and later what little the Canon himself knew he was reluctant to tell, for fear of unhinging my mind again and destroying my health permanently.

He was a sterling friend to me, a saviour, indeed, wholly good, simple, and stalwart. What strength and peace of mind I regained and now possess I owe to him and his unselfish, prayerful devotion. I was alive. The hauntings ceased altogether and have never returned.

I only worried, from time to time, about the boy, whose distress and grief I felt I had not assuaged, for all that he was now entirely absent and silent. But, very gradually, even he began to fade from the forefront of my mind, and at last I ceased to think of him.

Sir Lionel and Lady Quincebridge travelled north to visit me several times and, towards the end of that year, took me back with them to Pyre, where I remained, convalescent and frail, for many months, wholly dependent upon their loving kindness, and deeply, humbly aware of my good fortune.

Eventually, under Sir Lionel’s guidance, I took up the study of the Law, and that has been my satisfactory profession these past years. I never married, never found the confidence and strength to found that happy family of which I had had visions at Kittiscar, and so I am the last of the Monmouths, the family dies when I die, as the Vanes also died; there will be no survivors, no victors, so that the curse and the evil and the hauntings are certain to be at an end then, and the world a better place in the absence of us all.

I never returned to Kittiscar, nor knew anything about it, from that dawn when I was dragged away from the chapel, half-dead. What became of the Hall, who took it, if anyone, I have no wish ever to know.

Sir Lionel and Lady Quincebridge went abroad to the Mediterranean, for his health, and Pyre was sold. From time to time, I visited them, until first his and then, quite recently, her death. Perhaps, if ever I might have married a woman, it would have been Viola Quincebridge, but she was quite devoted to his memory, and nothing was ever spoken between us.

I am quite alone now. I have lived the last forty years in fear and never told it. Only now, at the last, I am moved to write this, and so lift the burden from my back and lay it down.

But I was surely not meant to live so long, nor ever in such comparative safety and contentment as have been granted to me, and for which I heartily thank God.

Sir James Monmouth’s story remained vividly in my mind for the whole of the day after I had sat up reading it. I could scarcely concentrate upon my work, and several times caught myself standing still and gazing unseeingly ahead, its details and incidents unfolding before my mind’s eye.

I vowed that, when I returned it to him at the Club, I would sit with the old man and keep him company a little, recognising now how lonely he must be, and even made a vague plan to take him down to Norfolk, to be cosseted for a weekend by Ann.

I was never to do so.

Business took me to Scotland for the better part of the next week, and, when I returned, I went to the Club at the end of a tiring day, to relax over a drink.

I was greeted almost at once by the news which had been the talk of the place since the previous evening – Sir James Monmouth was dead. Sideham had found him, sitting in a chair in a corner of the library, in the hour just before dawn, an expression of what was said to have been amazement upon his face. He had been slumped down in the great wing chair and gone unnoticed when the porter had gone into the room last thing before retiring.

There was another story too, they were talking about it in the bar when I joined them, very much in need of their company. There had been some sort of disturbance, perhaps an intruder in the Club; the night porter had been alerted by it, while dozing in his chair in the lodge, and gone to investigate. Nothing had been taken, and no damage done. But he had surprised a boy, a ragged urchin, of twelve or so, and chased him, taking him to be a young thief or vandal.

But, on reaching the street outside, and even after running some way down it in both directions, he had been forced to return to the club. There had been no trace at all of any boy.

At the time of Monmouth’s death and after reading the story he had given me, I confess that I was profoundly affected by it and by the events at the Club. But my own life was not touched any more closely, and so, inevitably, as the months and then years passed, the whole matter receded from my mind altogether.

Until very recently.

My business has prospered, I have become very well established. We remained in Norfolk while the children were growing up, though we also acquired a town house in Chelsea, but lately we have been looking at larger properties, in the home counties, and it was with some interest that I received particulars, from one of the house agents, of Pyre, Hisley Beeches, Berks. Indeed, after some searching. I managed to find Sir James’s manuscript among the lumber in the attic, and in it to re-read the description of the house I knew we must certainly visit.

I felt strangely sad, driving down the avenue that Saturday afternoon, and the old man was much in my thoughts, the sight of him, in his familiar chair in the corner of the Club library, vivid before me.

The exterior of Pyre was exactly as he had described it, the park as it must have been then, and for the previous hundred years or more, and I felt my pulses racing at the thought, sentimental though it might be, that we might live here – I felt sure that it would have pleased him.

The interior, though, was quite ruined, ghastly in its vulgar, over-ornate furnishings and decorations – we went round it, seeing what amounted to the vandalism of what must once have been in such perfect restrained taste, and knowing that we could not conceivably be comfortable or easy here and that putting it all back to its original state would be a task quite beyond us. But we went on dutifully up the staircase, in and out of rooms with mounting horror as excrescences succeeded one another.

It was as we reached the end of a passage in the west wing that I saw the mirror. It was large, in a handsome gilded frame of considerably finer and more classic design than any of the other furnishings – so much so that I paused in some surprise, to admire it more closely.

And as I looked into the slightly foxed and pitted glass, the surface seemed to blur and dissolve, as if it were misting over with a fine white vapour. I stared in dawning recollection and fear, for the face that I saw staring back at me through the mist was not my own, but that of another.

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