Nightmare House

By Douglas Clegg

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The summer of 2000's free email serial novel sponsored by Cemetery Dance Publications from Douglas Clegg, author of You Come When I Call You and The Nightmare Chronicles

About Nightmare House:

"Nightmare House is part of a trilogy of novels about the history of malevolence at a particular property called Harrow. I'm creating this trilogy so that each novel stands completely alone, and the only unity is the house itself in its various manifestations.

Mischief, my novel that will be out in limited edition hardcover from CD Publications and paperback from Leisure Books in the fall of 2000, deals with an incarnation of the house in the present day.

Nightmare House deals with its existence in the 1920s. The third novel, The Infinite, will come out in the fall of 2001, but for now, I'm concentrating on Nightmare House to describe a certain aspect of haunting through its story.

Each of these novels has its own echoes of the genre of the haunted house: in Nightmare House, the echoes are of Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, as well as an aspect of supernatural fiction that I hope can bridge the gap between horror readers and mainstream sensibilities. My goal with this novel is to horrify and shock without gore, without blandness, either, but with the genuine terrors of the unknown.

Can one, at the cusp of a new century, be horrified by the unseen and the uninvited? I believe so.

I hope you'll accompany me on this journey through one unique and chilling haunted house." - Douglas Clegg

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Chapter One: Harrow

1

My dreams are there, now. You can go in any room, any secret chamber, and you will find them -- shadows of dreams, like smoke from a fire that has only just died.

They are no longer with me -- I do not dream. I live now in stark reality. In light. In a harsh sun.

Did I leave them on purpose? Of course not. They were taken from me, by Harrow.

You know the place; you read of it in the papers, in the pulps, the little legends that have grown there. They are calling it Nightmare House now, in the papers, but then, it was just Harrow.

Once, one can suppose, there was some innocence here, on this land, but my research has shown that the earth from which the stones were taken was bloody ground, that not a window -- not a piece of glass -- was added without some knowledge of the glass's history, of the wood and stone's prior existence as tree, as cave, as lair.

And the Abbey.

My grandfather liked that kind of touch. Smuggling artifacts and entire structures from the Old World to the New.

He liked owning ancient things.

Harrow was ancient.

Harrow existed, for all I knew, before the world had been created.

2

And the world was still young to me, then.

I was born to the century's end; 1897 to be precise; I was born to the Modern Age.

Soon, men could fly, could live dozens of stories above the earth, and could speak to each other through a tube or wire. By the time I was ten, I had already seen automobiles begin to replace carriages; while still a teenager, I had gone to war in Europe, and returned having seen only the slightest bit of action. I had my grandfather to thank for that, for he arranged that I should be an ambulance driver, and he had the connections for it; I had always suffered small strokes of ill health since battling pn eumonia as a child (a weakling, my father had said, from the beginning), and I was not quite fit for battle. I married by the time I was 23, worked at a book publisher's in the city called Foxworth & Sons; although I was not a Foxworth, I had grown up with the "& Sons" and they rewarded me with the sheer glamorous drudgery of publishing books on what was then the hot item: crossword puzzle books. I made a good living. In fact, I thought I was happy until Madeleine, my wife, left me.

And then, Harrow changed my life.

My grandfather died in May of 1926, but it took me until October of that year to find my way to his house among the Hudson Valley, to a town called Watch Point -- it grew as if the stones had been washed up by the river in just such an array, yet the place looked ancient. Justin Gravesend had been a wealthy antiquary, which means, as my father had always said, he collected ancient things and did not much of anything his entire life. I had not seen the house since I was very young, and now that both my father and grandfather were gone, and I the sole heir, it was my duty to make the day's drive up from the city to go through things, to decide what to sell, and what to keep, and to find just what my grandfather had been up to in the last years of his life -- those years when neither my father, mother, nor I, had heard a word from him after the falling out he and my father had gone through.

I had to stop to turn the crank only half-a-dozen times in the course of the trip -- the car I owned had been my father's and was still of the old-fashioned variety of my childhood. We called them jalopies, then; my father had paid a pretty penny for that Model T when I was a child, but now everyone on the road seemed to be driving the new Chrysler, the McLaughlin Buick, the Overland, or the newer Ford touring car, so that my tin lizzie looked like a throwback to the age of dinosaurs. Still, it did the job , with more bumps and a good deal more bother then another car, yet, as long as I could get out of the city, I was happy.

The day began full of good omens, including the money I now had in my grubby little fingers -- more wealth than some of my superiors at the publishing house even had. It felt good to be alive, and free, and on the road. The weather was magnificent and balmy for the last days in October, but by the time I found the Upper Hudson Valley (I have always been a fool with a map or directions, I admit, my wife never failed to point this out) a summer storm was brewing along the horizon.

Driving to Watch Point, with its scattered stone houses surrounding what I can best describe as a hamlet, became nerve-wracking as sheets of rain came down, my wipers barely drawing off one spray of water when another blinded my view, my jacket soaked, all a blur -- and by the time I found the narrow muddy road that led to Harrow, and then the beginning of the wooded enclave that was the invisible fence surrounding my grandfather's property, I was sure I'd be skidding off the road into some rocky ledge. A chill descended with the rain.

I should have taken a train up, and then hired a car to Harrow, I thought, as the water soaked into my shirt and trousers, through the cracks and gaping wounds in the old jalopy. You are a fool, I heard my father's admonition in my head. You will always be a fool.

A queer sort of folk occupied Watch Point -- even as a child I had noticed their difference, their eyes which seemed too far apart by a quarter inch or so, their complexions too pale -- olive and ash -- and their bodies mostly covered with an oily sort of cloth, the closest I could imagine would be sealskin, but knew, even as a child, this might not be possible. In the rain, they milled about, a dozen or so of these creatures (all right, these people, but there were times, in these small villages, isolated by thirty miles and a hundred years from the rest of civilization, that they seemed to have nothing in common with those of us from the city, as if they had once been fish flung from the river below). They went about their business as if the storm were not battering at them, as if the flashes of lightning were nothing. "Queer folk," my mother had pronounced when I was a child and we had come through to spend one of the holidays.

And then, the woods, a golden darkness within the storm, branches waving violently, entire trees listing to one side or another with the sudden winds, brilliantly-colored leaves like flags battering at the windshield --

And then, the house, in the dark of the storm, illuminated by a lightning flash.

The house I had not seen in so many years.

Even in the blinding rain, I could see it. I wept. I wept, as I hadn't even for my father, who had died two years before in a car wreck outside Boston. I wept, as I hadn't in many years; and the feeling I had was that someone had just kicked me in the gut, that something at the very core of my being had been pummeled.

I remembered some happiness, here, at this great house, this English Manor House that my grandfather had built to remind him of his native England -- although he had been raised a poor boy, circumstances had changed in his 20s, and it had been as if money could not avoid him. He had a mania for old things; he had gone on strange expeditions throughout the ancient and modern world, with men with names like Schliemann and Kempler and Orinda; he had managed to find a crumbling Abbey in Brittany, located throu gh one of his many collectors -- and he was rich enough to bring that building over, stone by stone, until he had -- not a beautiful, lovely complete structure, but again, a crumbling Abbey, within which he could wander and grow his gardens, and be alone, as he had been since my grandmother had died.

The house had always had a name, that's what my father had said, and he had grown up among its chambers and secret passages.

"It's called Harrow," he told me. "For a school in England. A place where granddad very much wanted to go. A place he dreamed of going."

"Why didn't he?" I had asked, when I was eight.

"It wasn't a school that poor boys went to," my father said.

"But granddaddy's rich," I protested. "Mommy said --"

"He hasn't always been rich. He grew up very, very poor. He grew up dreaming of having all the things he came to have in his life."

"I dream of things I want, too," I said.

My father said, so quietly I could barely hear him, "Better you should never dream at all."

And now, nearly twenty-one years later, I parked my Ford before the house that had become mine.

"Harrow," I said it aloud, against the elements. "Harrow, you belong to me."

But I was to learn that this house belonged to no man.

3

Let me mention this now: my grandfather had never lived in the Modern Age. He still used gas lamps in his rooms. Candles in wall sconces; great hearths in each room, yes, even in summer, for the house got quite cold. Heat could not enter it easily. He owned a candlestick telephone most popular twenty years before, and a large battery-operated radio that nearly took up half the parlor, and these were his only connections to the outside world as I then knew it.

The rain stopped by seven, and I was too exhausted to go through all of the papers in my grandfather's great library -- piles of them still sitting there after all this time.

Mrs. Wentworth came in with a late supper -- just as we had discussed on the telephone before I drove up. She had been grand-dad's companion in many ways, and I had no doubt she felt badly used after having taken care of the man for thirty-one years and then to have been shut out of his will. But she bore this well -- I felt no evidence of jealousy or anger about the woman, whose exuberance had not been dulled by his death or his wishes. "Lamb stew for the chill," she said, heating up a small saucepan on t he ancient Easter Range that looked like the kind I had last seen at the age of six -- in the grand kitchen that seemed made to serve banquets. "And a bit of fresh salad. I grew the lettuce out in the Holy Land and the peppers, too." The Holy Land was, of course, the ruins that stretched behind the house, just to the west. Wentworth was a round woman whose eyes never seemed to close as she spoke of missing the old man and of the days when he was his usual self. She reminded me a bit of a character from Dickens, the well-fed dowager with no dowage. "He had been in such pain for the past year, it was a blessing he got called," she said.

"Mrs. Wentworth," I said, when she brought a cup of black currant tea into the drawing room for me. "Are you doing all right yourself?"

"Fine, sir," she added. It was almost refreshing to be alive in the year 1926 and to be called "sir" by a woman who had a good three decades on me if not more. She was easily 63 years old. My father's generation had been called "sir" with regularity, but I had grown up with Jazz Age men and women who believed that was part of the dead past.

"I know my grandfather didn't provide for your retirement..." I began. With a pang of guilt at the sudden wealth handed to me, I noticed the china cup from which I drank -- expensive beyond what I could imagine.

"Oh, sir!" She laughed, sitting herself before the fire. "Good lord, he provided me well enough over the years. Didn't you know?"

"Know?"

"He paid me twice the going rate for housework and cooking. And then he taught me how to take care of it," she added, a wistful quality overtaking her voice, "but...I do miss the old badger."

"Badger?"

"That's what I called him. He was my old badger and I was his shrew."

"Did you love him?" I asked, impulsively, feeling that I had broken some barrier with her, that we'd created intimacy in this moment...and I had known my grandfather so little that I wanted to find out more about him from someone.

Mrs. Wentworth blushed, shaking her head. She rose, brushing her hands against her skirt. She grabbed a poker and pushed at the kindling beneath the logs -- sparks flew up the flue. "No, sir. I cared for him, but he was as unlovable as a badger, your grandfather was. He had claws. He dug down and hid. Whether it was those books of his or those letters he wrote to Lord knows whom, what went on between us was hardly love. But I did care for him, and I knew he needed me here."

"I thought, perhaps," again I had not thought this through. Something in Wentworth's manner had gone cold.

She set the poker back down against the hearth. "A fire like this can burn all night, but its beauty is when it dies. When it's ash, that's when you can get near it. Like your grandfather, I suppose," she chuckled, and then left me alone again. I heard her later, just before I went to bed, washing up in the kitchen. I stopped in, and said, "I'd like very much to keep you on. At least until I know what I'm going to do with this place."

"Did you leave your wife then?"

"Months ago," I said, not wishing to correct her. Madeleine had, in fact, left me. But that was in the city -- that life. That worry. That hurt. That emptiness.

She nodded as if agreeing that not being married was good. "Well, I will be happy to come work here, for as long as you need me. But my feet hurt somedays."

"I don't want you to hurt --"

"No, sir, I don't mean I don't want to keep coming here. Harrow is as much in my blood as in my dreams. I couldn't leave this place if I wanted to. Just that some days..." She hesitated, and I detected that now she was lying.

"Some days I just am not up to coming here. My feet, and sometimes my hands, get cold. They swell. Maggie comes in some days. Maggie's good at washing and dusting, but you must watch her when it comes to keys. She is sticky with keys."

"There's a Maggie as well as a Wentworth?" I asked, grinning.

"There's even an Arthur who comes twice a week for the grounds," she nodded. "He's good with a gun should you like to hunt. There's good game about these woods. Wild turkeys; excellent geese this time of year."

"I'm afraid I'm not much of a hunter."

"And then," Wentworth said, not having heard my weak comment, her eyes closing for a moment as if in prayer, "there's folks that are no longer with us."

We had a moment of silence between us. While I loved my grandfather dearly, I did not know him well enough to even pray for his soul. Weep for him, mourn a bit, and wish that I had known him better, yes. But pray? I had not believed in God since the war. Prayer was for the naive and the deluded; it was for the mass of people who refused to face reality. Madeleine had been a devout Catholic; she had thought I would go to hell for my lack of faith. But I thought then that the only hell was knowing what men d id to one another in war, and how we managed to destroy ourselves in peace. God was a dream. Faith was a foolishness. However, I respected Wentworth in her prayer. She needed it.

When the moment had passed, I said, "Of course. When you're feeling well, I would love to have the help. Particularly going through his things. His papers."

"Burn that lot," she snapped, a mood change coming over her. She turned back to her business. "I'll lock up, sir. You seem tired. The bed is all fresh and ready for you, and I'll be back by eight to fix breakfast and show you the grounds."

Sensing her mood, I nearly withdrew myself from the kitchen and went to the small wine cellar beneath the back stairs. Very quickly, and without much of a search, I grabbed an old cask of amontillado with a light amber color to it and the scent of walnut and brown sugar at its cork, and went back up to the drawing room. I lay before the fire, thinking of Madeleine, trying to erase the images in my mind of my wife in the arms of the man who had enchanted her, and managed to drink myself into a coma fairly quickly.

The fire was red ash when I awoke, having heard someone whisper something in my ear.

Then, I fell back to sleep, the liquor still swirling in my head.

4

And awoke when I felt a crawling in my ear. It terrified me all the more because I heard a gentle buzz along with the crawling, and knew some insect had crawled up my neck and along my ear lobe. I slapped at my ear, and the feeling ceased. I had fallen asleep, drunk, on the red oriental carpet with the fleur-de-lis-like designs; the room was cast into darkness. For a moment, I believed I was back in my apartment in the city; but within seconds, I remembered I was at Harrow, in my grandfather's drawing room.

I heard a clock in the hallway chime three a.m., and sat up so that I could find my way to my bedroom. The alcohol pulsed in my blood, causing me to grasp at walls and doorways. The house was completely dark -- pitch black -- and I stumbled, stubbed my toe as I went, turned this way and that, opened doors, reached for lamps and switches but could not find any, until finally, it came to me that I was dreaming and not walking through the house at all.

I came to the great glass door to the conservatory, finally, and opened it on to a cloud-shrouded moon, and there, the Abbey, a haunted skeleton of some unknown history, fittingly preserved in its decadent state.

Granddad -- the Badger -- had cut away the world, had finally collected a graveyard to keep life and death both back from the door.

Entering the ruins, in the hours before dawn, was like moving slowly through another century, another world.

And as I went, I felt a presence with me, a warm presence, a benevolent presence, a presence that made me think my grandfather was still there, a ruin among his ruins -

And I turned toward that presence, to look it in the face.

- to be continued -

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Cemetery Dance Publications is the sponsor of Nightmare House. The novel begins publishing to the list on July 30, 2000. It will go out in weekly serial installments within the body text of each email. Check www.douglasclegg.com periodically for updates and information.

Nightmare House © 2000 Douglas Clegg