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Christmas Eve: and though outside there was only the muggy, murky, grey-brown-blackness of a London December evening, inside the flat on Mount Street there was quite as much of Christmas cheer as the heart could desire. A blazing fire in the hearth, straggling festoons of paper chains, a Christmas tree strung with coloured lights, Algy and Ginger bickering amiably over possession of the toasting fork, and Bertie Lissie doing something complicated with half a pound of lump sugar and a sack of lemons that spread a sweet, sharp scent through the air.
“I suppose there’s this about having the fireplace done away with,” said Algy, watching Ginger narrow-eyed as the younger man held a crumpet to the blaze. “It’ll be a jolly sight harder for certain people to burn tea to a crisp in an electric toaster.”
“Some people,” Ginger said, loftily, “simply like their crumpets toasted, not just looking as though they’ve been held up to a nice warm electric bulb for a minute or two.”
“You wait until you spend a Christmas at Merioneth,” said Biggles, buried somewhere behind a novel in the depths of his armchair. “Then you’ll understand that the taste for under-cooked crumpets is purely defensive. His mother never allows enough coal to do the job properly.”
Algy picked up a lemon, and thoughtfully hefted it; but Bertie deftly abstracted it from his hand before he could loose the missile.
“Seems a shame, though,” said Ginger. “A gas fire just won’t be the same. No toasted crumpets, no dancing flames - ”
“No smoking chimney when the wind’s in the east, no choking on coal dust from November till March - “
“It’s long overdue,” said Biggles, imperturbably, ignoring the half-hearted kick which Ginger had aimed at his cousin. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to miss the twice-weekly visits of the coal man leaving black footprints all over the carpets. And since Mrs Symes retired it’s been no end of a pain not having any kitchen to speak of. A couple of weeks in lodgings while the builders are bringing the place up to date won’t kill us.”
“I’ll remind you of that when you’re pacing the hallways, growling like a bear with a sore head because you can’t find that very particular clipping you desperately need and all your files are in storage,” muttered Algy.
“Well I’m with you, old man,” put in Bertie, throwing the last handful of sugar into the pan and shaking the stiffness out of his fingers. “Houses can get dashed peculiar if you just leave ‘em to their own devices. Much better to keep ‘em up to the mark if you can, stops ‘em developing crotchets when you’re not lookin’.”
“I suppose Chedcombe doesn’t have any crotchets to speak of then?” teased Ginger. “All mod cons and bang up to date?”
“Lord no, the old place is riddled with the things,” said Bertie cheerfully. “But m’grandfather had the place fitted for gas, and m’father had the generator put in, and I’m sure I’ll get round to having it plumbed into the mains ‘leccy one of these days, or whatever it is one does to electricity - it doesn’t do to let a place fall too far behind, you know. An open fire is a lovesome thing, God wot, but central heating is a jolly sight lovesomer, if you see what I mean. I’m sure that half of what people put down to ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties is really just houses left to their own devices too much.”
“What - all down to drafty window sashes and floor boards creaking in the damp, you think?” asked Algy.
“Well - not quite that,” said Bertie, a little cautiously, picking up the paring knife and beginning carefully to cut the yellow zest from the lemon.
“I’m not so sure,” said Ginger, pensively eying the dying flames as he pulled the crumpet from the fork and dropped it on Algy’s plate. “It’s not as though every ghost sighting takes place in a crumbling gothic mansion, is it? They’re just as likely to be in a country lane as in a crotchety old house - or for that matter in a snug modern flat.”
Algy snorted. “How many ghosts have you seen in snug modern flats?”
“How many have you seen anywhere else?” Ginger shot back.
“Exactly,” said Algy, triumphantly. “And I grew up in as crumbling and gothic a mansion as the heart could desire. If I didn’t see a single ghost there - and I didn’t, by the way - then I don’t believe one would see one anywhere.”
“Maybe the ghosts were as keen to get out of Merioneth Towers as you were,” said Biggles.
“Or maybe some people wouldn’t see a ghost even if it came up and stole the crumpet off their plate,” added Ginger. “Perhaps some people are temperamentally unsuited.”
“That’s a bit of a pat answer though, isn’t it?” said Biggles, placing the novel face-down on the arm of the chair. “I wouldn’t say I’m a superstitious man, but I hope I wouldn’t close my eyes to a spook if it was standing in front of me. If I haven’t seen one, it’s because there hasn’t been one to see. It’s hardly a point in favour of the existence of ghosts that the only people who seem to see them are people who were already determined that they would.”
“Not to mention that you never seem to meet someone who actually says they’ve seen one themselves,” Ginger pointed out. “It’s always some boy they were at school with, or some acquaintance of their godfather, or their second cousin twice removed. If it was as common as all that, you’d expect to meet people who’d actually seen one themselves.”
“Well - it’s not impossible that you have, old thing,” said Bertie, dropping a neat spiral of zest into the saucepan along with the sugar. “They just didn’t fancy chatting about it.”
“But why on earth not? If I’d seen a spook, you can bet I’d be shouting it from the house-tops!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Bertie, rather vaguely. “I can imagine that a lot of fellows might not fancy chatting about that sort of experience. I mean to say, the last thing one wants, if one happens to have just stumbled across what one is convinced is a genuine spook, is for all one’s friends and relations to start passing remarks about what a blithering idiot one is.”
Biggles looked across at Bertie curiously. “You sound like you’ve given it a surprising amount of thought.”
“You’ll be telling us next that you’ve seen a ghost,” said Algy.
“Of course I have, old thing,” said Bertie with a small shrug. “Only surprised that you haven’t.”
There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the sound of Bertie opening a bottle of brandy and pouring it into the pan, with every appearance of perfect equanimity.
“Well - go on then!” burst out Ginger. “You can’t just leave it there!”
“Oh - there isn’t a great deal to tell, old fruit,” said Bertie. “And certainly nothing that’d be really convincing to anyone who hadn’t seen ‘em themselves. Most of ‘em were when I was just a nipper - just the sort of age when a lot of people’s imagination rather gets the better of them. I don’t suppose you’ll be too astonished to hear that I was rather prone to seeing things that weren’t there - it’s just that a few of them I rather think were, if you catch my drift. There were the children at Chedcombe - and a few things at Duke’s Denver that I don’t think make it into the official histories - that sort of thing. But whether they were there or whether they weren’t, I didn’t seem ‘em nearly as often after I went off to school - just as you’d expect of figments of an overactive imagination, really.”
“But if most of them disappeared when you got older, then some of them must not have,” Ginger insisted.
“Well - yes - but really just the sort of unsatisfactory stories you were talking about,” said Bertie, a little apologetically. “Just crotchetty old houses and dark nights and worked-up nerves - exactly the sort of thing that’d make anyone think they’d seen a ghost, you know. Nothing like the neat little explanations you get in the magazine stories - caches of old bones discovered behind the plaster partition, bundles of documents that reveal the dark deeds of some disreputable ancestor, that sort of thing.”
“Tell one all the same,” Ginger begged. “Whichever one you fancy. I’ve always liked a Christmas Eve ghost story.”
“And I promise not to call you a blithering idiot,” Algy added, with a grin. “Not more than usual, anyway.”
“I suppose I don’t mind tellin’ one,” said Bertie, slowly, kneeling down on the heathrug and pouring a little of the spirits into a long-handled metal ladle, before holding it to warm over the hot embers. “I warn you though, there’s not a scrap of proof in any of it. In fact the only other person who was there would probably tell you something quite different about it - but then I think that’s rather the nature of the thing. And I’m afraid It does rather make me sound like a blithering idiot - but then, knowing what I know now, I suppose I was rather a blithering idiot, though I didn’t really have much reason to guess it at the time. It was when I was still at school, too, and I suppose most of us are blithering idiots at that age. Can’t remember if I was seventeen or eighteen, but it was somewhere thereabouts. Very much the blithering idiot age.”
“Was it at school that you saw it?” asked Ginger, leaning forward avidly.
“No - though the dear old alma mater was certainly old enough to support a spook or two. And it wasn’t at Chedcombe either - not on that occasion, at any rate. No, for reasons I won’t go into now it wasn’t quite convenient for me to be at Chedcombe that Christmas. Normally that’d mean staying at school over the vac, which I didn’t mind so awfully much - there was usually a decentish handful of other boys staying up, and sometimes you’d get enough snow for a really first rate snowball fight. But that year I’d been asked down to a friend’s house - in point of fact, down to Gimlet King’s place in Devon. You knew we were at school together, I suppose? I’d been down to Lorrington - that’s his place, you know, the clue’s in the name - I’d been down there once or twice for visits, since it wasn’t too ghastly far from Chedcombe, and that Christmas he asked if I might not fancy spending the vac with him. Well, naturally I leapt at the chance - always more jolly to spend Christmas with a friend - and when school broke up we went down there together on the train.
“Since you’ve none of you taken Gimlet up on that offer of a weekend’s shooting yet, I’ll tell you a little about the place - though not much, because not much of it actually matters to what happened. It’s called Lorrington Hall, and now Gimlet’s got his hands on it he’s turning it into a jolly pleasant spot - electric light, central heating and all. You wouldn’t think it, but he’s rather a one for the old creature comforts. Back then, of course, his father was still lord of the jolly old manor - and jolly old it was in places. The Kings have lived there for donkeys years - the official histories tell that they came over with the Conqueror, but it’s hardly a Norman name, and I imagine that whoever the Sir Lorrington of the time was, he just quietly married the widow of some poor old Saxon he’d biffed over the boko at Hastings, and kept the old Saxon’s manor going much as it had been before. And I suppose it’s as likely as not that the jolly old Saxon’s ancestor did much the same to the jolly old Celt who lived there before him. It’s that sort of place, really.
“Most of the Hall as you see it now is pure Elizabethan - very handsome of its kind, I suppose, but mostly of interest if you’re of the architectural persuasion. No, the really interesting thing there - at any rate if you’re a seventeen year old boy - is the castle.”
Which was, of course, the moment when he tipped the spoon just enough to ignite the rum in it from the last lick of fire in the hearth. Blue flame suddenly sprang up within the ladle, crawling and curling over the surface of the liquid; and when he carefully tipped the burning spirits into the pan, the flame flashed up, lighting his face from below with unearthly blue light.
“You did that on purpose,” Algy muttered.
“I’ve heard of Lorrington Castle,” said Biggles, stirring a little in his seat. “Wasn’t it besieged for an unfeasibly long time during the Civil War?”
“That’s the one,” said Bertie, stirring the pan very gently so as not to put the flame out. “Hardly surprising really - can you imagine trying to besiege somewhere held by a whole hatful of Gimlet Kings? The blood runs cold at the thought! I believe they starved them out in the end, and then old Cromwell or one of his cronies had the battlements knocked off to discourage them from trying it again in the future.”
“I remember now,” said Biggles. “I had no idea that was Gimlet’s place - or that there was anything much left of it.”
“There’s a quite extraordinary amount left of it, in point of fact,” said Bertie. “It’s as predictable a sample of a Norman keep as you could wish to find, and made of the most beastly hard stone, pure Devon granite. The blocks still fit together so closely you can hardly get a knife blade between them - and believe me we tried. The Roundheads - right but repulsive, you know the chaps - managed to heave the top couple of courses off when they slighted the place, but other than that it’s more or less as it was left when the family got tired of the heating bills and built the nice modern Hall next door, back in the reign of Good Queen Bess. It’s on the top of its own little mound - a motte, I think it’s called - with trees growing almost up to the walls, although I imagine there weren’t any there in its glory days. There’s a narrow flight of steps up to a door at first floor level, and even the door’s much as it was - a great thick slab of oak, all over iron studs, and nearly as grey as the walls. Inside there are still spiral steps running up the corner towers, still floors on the floor joists - except on the floor where you enter, where the Parliamentary troops had the boards out to feed their campfires, and there’s a great gaping hole down into the storerooms below.
“I call them storerooms, because I suppose that’s what they must have been really - but naturally Gimlet and I called them the dungeons, even though we were quite senior boys by that point - or I was, at any rate - and really knew better. But I mean to say, if a castle doesn’t have dungeons, then what on earth is the point of it? But whatever they were, you could see right down into ‘em, as soon as you stepped in through the door - and that first floor wasn’t overly endowed with windows, either, and the light from the door was more or less all you got, so you had to be jolly careful to remember to mind your footing, or you’d walk slap bang off the edge and drop fifteen feet or so to the floor below. Worse than that, there was a great hole in the middle of the basement floor too - a well, to provide the castle with clean water in time of siege. So if you were really unlucky, you could blunder straight in through the front door, tumble into the basement, and roll straight into the well, all in one neat movement, and that’d be the end of you, and serve you right for being such an ass. Any other family would have thought to put a grating over the thing - the well, I mean - but not the Kings of Lorrington. Gimlet and I spent many a happy hour dropping things down it, putting down plumb bobs on strings, that sort of thing, trying to work out how deep it went - but either our arithmetic was off, or the water level went up and down like a bally yoyo, because we never came up with quite the same answer twice. We did talk at one time about trying to lower one or other of us down there on a rope to settle the thing once and for all, but nothing ever came of it. And looking back, I’m not sure that wasn’t for the best.
“At any rate, that’s Lorrington Castle, and a better place for two bright boys to break their bally necks you couldn’t hope to find. We’d been talking since the first time I visited about spending the night there; but what possessed us to actually try it in December I really don’t know - and on Christmas Eve, of all nights! Perhaps it was that Gimlet was rather on the outs with his father that night - I don’t imagine he’d much mind me saying that he often was rather on the outs with his father, probably because they were a little too much alike for anyone’s comfort, least of all their own. I can’t remember precisely what the spat was about, if I ever knew it; but you could always tell when Gimlet and the Colonel were at odds, because the temperature of the Hall would drop by about ten degrees, and on that particular evening it was so chilly you could practically see the ice forming on the insides of the windows. We came back from midnight service in the village - noblesse oblige and all that - and normally it’d be straight off to bed and no chatting on the way; but on this particular evening King beckoned me into his room and shut the door behind him.
“‘Well? What about it?’ he asked, or words to that effect - I can’t remember the exact way of it, of course, but it must have been something of that kind, because I remember blinking at him like a particularly bleary owl and bleating ‘what about what?’ or some such rot. And he fixed me with one of those looks of his, and asked: ‘What about spending the night in the castle?’
“Well, naturally my first impulse was to pour cold water on the whole thing - and my second, third and fourth impulses too. Even then I had quite enough common sense to know a ridiculous idea when I heard one - all right, old boy, you needn’t snort so, you’ve made your point. But I don’t know if you’ve ever tried talking Gimlet King out of a thing when once he’s set his mind on it, but I have, and I’ve met brick walls which are a jolly sight easier to sway. So the long and the short of it was that half an hour or so later, when the rest of the Hall had bedded down snugly for the night, I was muffled up in all the clothes I could conveniently muster, with a great bundle of blankets in my arms, creeping after him through the long gallery and out to the east wing, and my heart, as the saying goes, very much in my mouth.
“There was a very fine moon that night, I remember, and the Hall - which inclined to the half-timbered, at least on the inside - was all over black and white, black and white, wherever the moonlight shone in through the little diamond windows. Seeing King creeping ahead of me in and out of the shadows - knowing that if the Colonel found us out of bed at that hour he’d make things jolly uncomfortable for both of us - was already quite enough to put the wind up me; and the prospect of spending the night in a half-ruined castle somehow didn’t seem nearly as jolly as we squeezed out of the window and scrambled down the old elm tree as it had done in July when I’d first suggested it. Still, it was too late now, I thought, and nothing to be done but to make the best of it.
“I suppose that’s where the first accusation of blithering idiocy ought to come in. It was a perishing cold night, especially for Devon, and there was already a thick frost on the grass, so our chances of getting a wink of sleep were decidedly slim. We filched a couple of buckets of firewood from the stack, but a little fire like that was always going to look rather lost in the middle of one of those great castle fireplaces - they were big enough to roast an ox in, if you’d happened to have such a thing as an ox to hand - and even after we got it well going it hardly made a dent on the chill.
“Then there was the darkness, of course. I can’t tell you just how dark it was in there that night, even with the moon - no light at all in the entrance room except what came in at the door and the little bobbing pinprick of Gimlet’s torch, and that was hardly strong enough to reach the storerooms below even when he shone it down over the edge of the drop. The well was so black you could believe it was full to the brim with ink - except there wasn’t any glint of light on top to show where the surface was. It quite gave me the shivers just to look at it, though King didn’t seem to notice.
“We shuffled around the edge of the drop as far as the staircase; but that was even worse, because it was so narrow we had to go up single file, and the curve of the spiral was so tight that whenever Gimlet shone the torch down at his own feet, the shadows meant I couldn’t see mine, and if he shone it back to show me, then he couldn’t see the ground in front of himself. In the end he shone the beam up the wall a bit, and we both had to stumble along as best we could in the reflected light. And even that didn’t do very much to see off the shadows that kept creeping past me from behind, following me up the stairs. Oh, I know it was just the way the torch light fell, but it really did feel as though anything might crawl out of that shadow and reach out for me, and I wouldn’t know it until it got me.”
Algy cleared his throat a little. “That’s always the way in old, shadowy places though, isn’t it? They always give you the horrors, no matter how familiar with them you might be.”
“Oh, I know that, old thing,” Bertie went on. “Knew it at the time, too. That’s rather what I meant about the blithering idiocy - quite apart from the cold, and the very real danger of breaking our damn fool necks, we were well on track to work ourselves into as thoroughgoing a fit of the screaming hab-dabs as you could hope for. Or I was, at least. I’m not sure if Gimlet has so much as a single nerve for things to prey on; if he does, then I’ve never seen any evidence of it.”
“It sounds to me like it’d have been more remarkable if you hadn’t thought you’d seen a ghost,” said Algy.
“Couldn’t agree more, old thing,” said Bertie. “I was quite prepared for anything from a bloody friar to dear old Anne Boleyn with her head tucked underneath her arm, especially knowing how the servants felt about the place.”
“Were there already stories about it?” asked Ginger, quickly. “Rawhead and bloody bones, that sort of thing?”
“Nothing quite so classical,” murmured Bertie. “Nor quite so concrete. It was just that none of ‘em would spend the night in the place - though of course why would they? Dashed uncomfortable, I’d never have fancied it myself if I hadn’t still been a scrubby schoolboy and used to hard beds and draughts. I don’t know whether the local lads dared one another to stay there or not - I shouldn’t be in the least surprised. But the older villagers and the servants at the Hall wouldn’t have dreamed of it - not for all the tea in China, as Gimlet had told me the first time we visited the place. They just never said why.”
Ginger shifted in his chair. “How’s that punch coming along?”
“You can’t rush these things, my lad,” said Bertie, placidly, nudging the saucepan further onto the little trivet that kept it clear of the hot embers, and stirring it gently the while. “It’ll be ready when it’s ready. Now, if I’m reading a ghost story, there always comes a point when I start calling the hero all the sorts of bally idiot I can think of, because really, what on earth did he think was going to happen if he opted to - exempli gratia - spend Christmas Eve night in a half-ruined castle about which obscure but alarming stories circulated? If he chooses not to heed the charmingly rural warnings of the obligatory half-mad and hoary old fellow who’s lived in the district all his life, then really he deserves all he gets, or so I usually think when I’m reading it. Well, I suppose I’ve rather reached that point in my story now. Why on earth did I go along with it? The simple answer is that I didn’t really believe a word of it, of course; and quite rightly too. Who would? Certainly not any sensible-minded seventeen year old in the reign of George V - especially one who didn’t want to show himself up as a bally coward in front of his friend. And Lorry - as I mostly called Gimlet then, and sometimes still do now when I forget not to - well, Lorry had assured me that he’d spent the night in the old place more than once and not seen anything more alarming than an owl, so I didn’t imagine that there was anything really to worry about.
“Or at any rate in the day time I didn’t. We’d explored it top to bottom in the day-time without seeing hide nor hair of anything super-natural - if such things have hides or hairs, which I’m not sure they always do. By night though - with not much but a twist of moonlight to show the way, and dodging the aforementioned barn owls and the occasional bat - I wasn’t nearly so sanguine. (Being forewarned about the owls, of course, I was only startled out of six months’ growth when one of ‘em came swooping out at me from the darkness, not the full twelve.) We set up camp on the second floor - the old great hall of the place, I suppose, where the old barons had their audience chamber and held their grander banquets and so forth. We got our little fire going in the hearth, and folded ourselves a couple of neat little blanket beds, and sat and had a few mouthfuls of chocolate and chatted over this and that until we were ready to sleep.”
“When you say ‘this and that’,” said Algy, dryly, “you weren’t perhaps running over the old family legends, were you? In the spirit of the season?”
“I should jolly well think not,” Bertie replied, with emphasis. “I had quite as bad a case of the shivers as I could have wanted already, and King never was one for a ghost story. No, I think we talked about the horses we were going to take out for the Boxing Day hunt, as far as I remember.”
“Might have known it,” Algy grumbled. “You never have had much sense of occasion.”
“Well, it was late, and we were both tired, and chilly or not we were quite capable of going to sleep, and so we did. I don’t know how long I slept for - not more than a couple of hours, I suspect, and not an especially sound sleep either, because it never is when you’re sleeping on a hard floor in a temperature not far above freezing. I suppose I dodged in and out of this dream and that - Christmas and owls and horses and goodness knows what else - but when the dream eventually settled down into something more coherent, it was something like this.
“I found I was sitting up in my blankets, looking down at the floor, but that in the dream I could somehow see straight down through the floorboards, right the way down to the bottom of the castle; and down in the basement I could see that a simply enormous tree had grown up from the well while we were asleep. Its trunk stretched away down into the darkness as far as the eye could see, and its branches stretched quite from one wall to the other - something like an oak, I thought, but far more massive and straight and stately than any oak I’d ever seen. Its branches reached up and up - up through the floor of the room we were in, up into the room above us, even up into the open air over the top of the tower, though I couldn’t quite see that. It didn’t seem to matter to the tree in the least that someone had built a castle around it - it was quite happy to go on about its business regardless. I remember thinking to myself, ‘my goodness, whatever can it have got its roots down into, to help it grow to that size?’ It would have been the most marvellous tree for climbing, if one could only have got up the trunk, I remember that too. It was in full leaf, even though it was December, the most glorious midsummer green; and there were things tied to the lower branches - shreds of fabric, odds and ends of beads and feathers, that sort of thing. I couldn’t make them out very clearly; but the wonder was that I could make them out at all. That was the most curious thing about it, you see: I could see it - positively see it, though everything had been as black as pitch when we had gone through that lower room earlier.
“Then I noticed that I couldn’t quite see all of it. The leaves and upper branches were quite as clear as ever; but there was something - something creeping up it: something like ink creeping up a piece of paper, if you dip a corner of your blotting paper in the ink well. No: not creeping: more deliberate than that: something climbing. It was stretching up hand over hand, climbing up the trunk - I could just see it, where it had reached up over the edge of the well. And whatever it was, it was dark - dark as that room downstairs had been, with the cold air pouring out of the well.
“And suddenly, with rather a shock, I had that ghastly realisation - I don’t know if you’ve ever had it in a dream, but I have, a couple of times, and I’ve never cared for it - that my eyes were closed - really closed, I mean, my real eyes - and even in the dream I could feel it was so. And because now I knew my eyelids were in the way, I found I couldn’t see anything any more of that tree, or that dark, climbing thing; but I knew they were still there, and that the thing, whatever it was, was climbing higher and higher. Only now I couldn’t see it any more, because if I opened my eyes - really opened my eyes - all I could see was the real world - the floorboards, and the last embers of the fire in the hearth, and a little chill fragment of moonlight that fell from the window, and King lying next to me, all huddled up in his outdoor clothes so I could hardly see him. I couldn’t see that tree at all, nor the thing climbing it. But if I closed my eyes again - well, there I was in the dream, but with my eyes closed still. The only way round it, I found, was to try to sort of half open my eyelids, but to keep my eyes looking as high up as I could, so I was looking at my eyelids but with my eyes still open a chink: and that way I could see little glimpses of the tree, just around the edges of my lids.
“Not that I wanted to see it - by Jove, no! I’d have cheerfully never seen it again, let alone the whatever-it-was that was climbing it. It was up out of the well now, I could make out that much in the corner of my eyes. It had sort of - flopped onto the flagstoned floor of the storeroom level, as if it wasn’t meant by nature to walk upright. There was something sort of jellyish about it - something boneless, like a deep-sea creature when you bring it up onto land; but already it was reaching out again, just like an octopus reaches with its tentacles before pulling its body along behind them. I could barely see it through my scraps of eye; but I knew it was reaching out, reaching for the lower branches of the tree. And wherever it had been, it seemed to shed darkness behind it - or perhaps it was simply that it was growing bigger, stretching itself out as it went; and in all that blackness behind that leading, climbing edge there was nothing at all, except perhaps a sort of odd, wet, rustling.
“Perhaps you’re wondering why I didn’t just open my eyes entirely - wake myself up properly, end the horrid dream there and then. Quite simply because I was sure - I was certain, right down to my boots - that it was no dream; and that if I opened my eyes it would still all be going on, whatever it was, but I wouldn’t be able to see it any more, and that would be far, far worse. My heart was drumming nineteen to the dozen, and I’m not sure I’d ever understood what a cold sweat was until that night, but by golly I understood it then. I was shivering all over, praying that it wouldn’t be able to find its way up to us; but it was a marvellous tree for climbing, you see. The thing - the arms, tentacles, tendrils, whatever you want to call them - was reaching up through the branches, finding places to pull itself up; and everywhere it touched it blackened.
“I don’t know how long I sat watching it, or trying to watch it, huddled in my blankets, trembling from head to foot. Somehow it seemed colder even than it had done when I had woken up; I could positively see my breath in the air, and my fingers and toes were numb. Perhaps you’re wondering why I didn’t wake Lorry and make a break for it? The fact is that I hardly thought of it: it was as if my brain was getting as cold and numb as the rest of me. I also couldn’t help thinking that perhaps if I woke him he’d only be able to see the real world, as I could with my eyes open, and how awful it would be if I tried to warn him and he didn’t believe me - he always was stubborn as the devil. And as for making a break for it - well, there was only one way into or out of the place, and the darkness was between us and it, and the thought of trying to go through that dark place to get to the door was frankly unbearable.
“It had reached the branches which came up through the floor now. I could still see a few fragments of that tree on the floor below - just the tips of the branches, you know, a few knots of leaves - but they were the last outliers, and everything else was black, black, black - like the well when we had gone upstairs, black as a sea of ink but without any glint to show the surface. It was like a great tide rising up until it swamped us; but instead of rising steadily, inch by inch, it was being pulled up by that climbing, crawling thing. I can’t really tell you the horror of the way it moved - there was something so very liquid about it, yet so terribly purposeful, for all it was so slow; something skulking, like some creature that lives under black rocks in the very deepest parts of the ocean; and it was moving towards us.
“If I dared to open my eyes properly now - if I dared to look away from the tree, and that monstrous thing climbing it - then I could see the wood of the floorboards, and the little slot of moonlight from the window in its deep stone embrasure, and the last faint glow of the embers in the hearth; but I could also see something else now. There was a darkness on the floor. It spilled from the spiral staircase; it fell across the boards like pitch; and slowly - very slowly - it was narrowing that slender scrap of moonlight that lay on the floor. To anyone who hadn’t seen the other side of things it would just have looked like the moon westering in the sky, falling less fully on the window as it went, or perhaps the shadow of a cloud passing slowly across its face: but I had seen the other side, and I knew better. The horror of the moment when the last ember fell into ash and was extinguished isn’t something I’ll ever forget: because I had looked at it the other way, and seen one of those tendrils creep right up to it, and fall across it, and crush the light out of it.
“The moonlight was almost gone now, and I was huddled up next to King, hardly able to breathe with fear, as the shadows lapped around us. Then I struck against something metal that rolled, and I realised it was the electric torch. I picked it up, my hands shaking so badly I could hardly switch it on, but I did it eventually; and you can imagine my relief when the shadows fell back from that little pool of light. But the relief didn’t last long: because when I half closed my eyes to look into that other side of things, there was no torch light there: or rather I could see the beam, but when it fell on that shadow, it was as though it had fallen into a pit so deep that the beam couldn’t find the bottom of it, and the darkness was just as bad as before. I opened my eyes in horror, and there were the floor-boards again; but I knew that didn’t much matter, if that thing on the other side was still drawing closer. But perhaps - I thought - perhaps the torch could protect us enough on this side that we could get through to the door - and I began to shake King, as hard as I could, and shouted for him to wake up.
“But he didn’t: he went on sleeping, no matter how I shouted and shook. The shadows were over his feet now. I shone the torch over him as much as I could, trying to keep it off him if only on this side of things, though what bally good that could have done I had no idea. And of course when the torch was on him, it wasn’t on me. I drew myself in as much as I could, but I knew when the shadows were touching me because that cold got worse and worse - like the worst snow-storm you’ve ever been out in, but utterly still. I shouted and shouted and pummelled his shoulder, but he didn’t stir, and his breath was so shallow and slow I could hardly feel it unless I put my hand in front of his mouth and nose.
“Then I looked the other way, just for a moment: and I saw that the darkness had risen like flood water. It was up to my knees, as I knelt there; and it was over King’s head.
“I tried to heave him up - to get his head up, at least, because I had a frantic sort of hope that if I could only get his head up out of it then perhaps I’d be able to wake him; but he was heavy as lead, and my hands were numb, and I couldn’t raise him without the torch beam going all which ways, and the torch was the only thing keeping that shadow away from us in the real world too. I managed to get him up on my lap in the end, with his head on my shoulder, though he was lolling like a ragdoll. But while I was doing that, I dropped the torch; and it went out.
“I think I should almost have gone mad at that moment, if it hadn’t been that suddenly I felt Lorry stirring, as if he was waking up. Lord knows what I said - I don’t remember - but I babbled something about the darkness and the tree and the thing I’d seen with my eyes closed. King didn’t say a word: only he heaved himself up, first to his knees and then to his feet. But there was something in the way he moved that wasn’t like him at all. You’ve all met him, of course - even with the bad leg he moves like he’s built entirely out of springs and sinews. But I could just see him, in that last thin scraping of moonlight; and he moved like he was being pulled up by his collar. There was an awful dragging quality about it, with his arms hanging limp from his shoulders, and his head slumped down on his neck. And then I saw that his eyes were open.
“Then the last of the moonlight vanished; and the darkness closed over my head.
“I’m not quite sure what happened then. I think I screamed. I know I grabbed hold of his legs, because he was the only thing in the darkness there with me, and if I couldn’t feel him then there was nothing at all except darkness and cold and that awful, terrible rustling. I don’t know how long it was - seconds, probably, but it felt like years. If I live to be a hundred I think I shall never be so frightened again.
“But then there was a voice - Lorry’s voice, only not quite - and it called out something that was something like English but rather more like German. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, especially in the state I was in; but as soon as it finished, it was as though my head broke the surface of the water. And the shadows ebbed away, like the tide going out; and the moonlight came back; and the shadows were only shadows again, quite tame and shallow. In fact, it all looked quite as normal.
“Then King sort of sagged - like the proverbial puppet when the strings are cut, you know - and he’d have fallen if I hadn’t been huddled right by his feet and been able to catch him before he went over. Well, catch him I did, and that’s when I saw that his eyes were closed again, and his breathing was quite normal, and I gave him a shake and he mumbled something like ‘get off you idiot, it’s the middle of the night’, and I was within an eighth of bursting into tears from sheer relief. So I shook him a bit more, and he was none too happy to be woken, I can tell you; but wake he did, in the end.
“‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ he asked, or words to that effect. ‘I was in the middle of the most wonderful dream.’ ‘Well I’m glad one of us was,’ I said; and there must have been something in my voice that gave the game away, because he stopped calling me all the names under the sun and asked me if something was the matter. So I told him all about it, or at least all I could bring myself to say; and at the end of it he found the torch where it had fallen, and switched it on, and being the sort of boy he was he insisted on taking a quick look down the stairs. I don’t mind admitting that I jibbed a bit at that to begin with, and stuck to his heels pretty closely on the way down; but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d thought it would be. Whatever that awful feeling was, it had gone along with the darkness; at any rate it wasn’t any more frightening than any dark old room is at night.
“I still wasn’t best pleased when Gimlet suggested we finish the night there as we’d planned; but I didn’t feel badly enough about it any more to argue the toss. ‘This is my home, and you’re my guest, and I’m dashed if I’m going to let any hobgoblin push either of us out before we’re ready to go,’ was how he put it; and he had that sort of expression on which made me think that if I were a hobgoblin, I’d have thought twice about poking my nose above the parapet for a bit. But I insisted that we build the fire up again, and told him that I would sit up for the rest of the night to keep it burning; and then he said he’d sit up with me, and that was how we saw in Christmas Day.
“‘What was your dream about?’ I asked, mostly for the sake of something to say, when the flames were roaring up the chimney again. ‘Oh - nothing much,’ he said, holding his hands to the blaze. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with that - I wanted as much trivial chit-chat as I could muster for the rest of the night. So I pressed him, and eventually he told me about it. ‘I suppose I was here - or somewhere very like it,’ he said. ‘To start with it was here, just as it is now; and then some people took me up to the chamber above, and told me it was time for the feast, and I must get dressed. Then they put the most peculiar clothes on me - something like a dressing gown in heavy blue velvet, only with great hanging sleeves lined in white fur - and then I heard the music down here, all pipes and - what are those long things with reeds? Well, I could hear them, and smell the most wonderful foods, all fruit and spice and roasting meat; and when they brought me down there was a whole company of knights here, all in the brightest colours imaginable, and they all rose when I entered the hall, and sat me down in the high seat. And there were great billowing curtains on the walls, and great boughs of holly and yew over the doors and windows, and sweet herbs on the floor that you crushed when you stepped on them, and trestle tables running from wall to wall, and all of them heaving with food.
“‘It was the most wonderful feast, and the fellow who sat beside me was telling me of the marvellous hunt they would have the next day for Christmas, and of the horses I would ride if I wished and so forth - when all of a sudden I realised there was something there that shouldn’t have been there. How it had got in I don’t know, but it was a hart - a white hart, just like in King Arthur - or at least something like a hart, for I couldn’t look at it straight on - you know how it sometimes happens like that in dreams. But the hounds - there were the most beautiful coal-black hounds there, by the way, dozens of them, all sleek and grinning and scuffling over the bones - they were going fairly mad for it, snapping at it, trying to pull it down, though it was trying to kick them away, or gore them with its horns; and my knights were all vying with each other over who would win the honour of bringing me its head. And the man next to me - I fancy he was some sort of chamberlain or steward, he was all in black with a silver chain - he put a hunting spear into my hand, and told me that I should bring it down, because it was disturbing our solemn feast, and also it would show all the others that I was the master.
“So I raised the spear - and I was certain I knew how to use it, you know how one is in dreams, and that I could bring down the beast at first thrust - and I took aim: but then the creature cried out. I know you’ve heard a horse scream - I have too - but I’d never heard a deer scream before. It sounded almost human. And it cast itself down almost at my feet - almost as if it was baring its throat for the spearpoint - and I saw what a fine animal it was, and how its white coat was all marked with blood, and the blood and the foam that was around the muzzles of those big hunting dogs - and I pitied it.’”
“I remember he stopped then for a moment; I remember it because - well, that doesn’t matter now. At any rate he seemed to think that something needed talking through about that, so he went on: “You know how it is sometimes when you’re out stalking, and you’ve got the shot clear, and then the beast turns and shows its side to you, as if on purpose to make the shot easier - and you find that you don’t want to take it? It was like that, only a hundred times stronger. I felt that it would be a crime to kill it. More than that, I felt quite furiously angry with my knights and my hounds that they had harried it about so, for its flanks were heaving, and its eyes - and they were almost human, too - its eyes rolling almost back in their sockets with fear.
“‘And so I lowered the spear, and stepped forward towards it, and I shouted something like: “It is not this beast that has disturbed our feast, but you, who bring this uproar to my hall! This is the night when dumb beasts may talk, and when we take thought even for the wild birds that roost on our beams, yet you would lay this creature in its blood for your sport and the contentment of your own lusts. But this is my hall, and I am master here, and I say to you that this creature is under my protection: and that any who would harm him must first answer to me.” And at that the whole place seemed to collapse, all at once; and I found you were shaking me awake.’ ‘Him,’ I said. ‘‘Any who would harm him,’ you said.’ ‘Yes,’ King said. ‘I did. Well, I suppose it was a hart, after all.’
“And that’s when I remembered the other part of what the servants said about the place - or at any rate what Gimlet had told me of it, right back when I’d first visited. They wouldn’t stay in the place overnight, not for all the tea in China; but whatever they thought was in the place, they said it wouldn’t trouble Lorrington King. ‘The place knows its master’, they said.”
Bertie lifted the saucepan from the hearth, and began to pour the punch into the tea-cups which were ranged on the low table, and the scent of lemon and brown sugar and hot rum filled the air. “Well - that’s really the end of it, I’m afraid - an unsatisfying sort of ending, but the only one I’ve got. As I said at the start, I don’t have a neat explanation for any of it - and whether it was really what we call a ghost, whatever that means, or whether it was something else entirely, I’ve really no idea. But I rather think I was in as much danger that night as I ever was in a Spitfire - I certainly felt like I was. And I wouldn’t stay there again - not for all the tea in China, as they say. Of course it could have been pure imagination - just a lot of shadows in an old building - but somehow I don’t think that it was. Perhaps it was just as I said at the start: if you leave a house to its own devices for too long, then it tends to come over a little odd.”
Algy sat up a little, and cleared his throat, and reached for a cup of punch. “I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house that’s come over quite that odd.”
“Perhaps not - but then Lorrington Castle is older than most,” said Bertie. “It’s had more time to get set in its ways. At any rate there are no tall tales I’ve ever managed to discover from the days when the Kings lived there regularly, so it must be something that’s come over the place since they moved to the Hall. I can quite well believe that Gimlet’s ancestors were quite as mad as he is, but I don’t believe even he’d be mad enough to lodge with that - whatever it was - for the best part of five hundred years. I wonder if it just got bad-tempered without the company.”
“What about the well?” asked Ginger. “Did Gimlet ever take a look down there?”
“Oh, he’s had it dredged a couple of times since, I believe - nothing to report but old pennies and the occasional bit of tree root,” Bertie replied, handing round the rest of the cups. “So there - that’s my story, and that’s an end of it, and if nothing else then at least it’s wiled away the time until the punch was ready, what? I suppose we should have a toast - what do you fellows think?”
Biggles smiled. “To the spirit of the season?”
“And to home improvements,” said Ginger, fervently. “Suddenly a modern flat in the twentieth century doesn’t seem like such a bad place to live.”
“Of course, there’s another funny thing about the Kings of Lorrington,” said Bertie, a minute or so later, when they had put another shovel full of coal on the fire and drunk a little of the punch. “They lead the most wretchedly rackety lives - they all have, since the year dot - and the number of them who die untimely deaths is really quite astronomical; but there’s always been another in the male line to take over. There aren’t many titled families that can claim an unbroken line from Domesday or even earlier, but the Kings can. And I’ve sometimes wondered just what a man might have bargained away to secure that sort of prize for his descendants - or just what he might have sacrificed, and to whom.”