The Uncanny Read online

  HE SAW—DID HE? YES—HE SAW A FIGURE OUT THERE—A HUMAN FIGURE DRAPED IN THE MIST …

  … silhouetted by the moonlight, raven black, so black it seemed less a being than an absence of existence. It was tall. Its head was bent as if in prayer. Its profile was obscured either by a cowl or by flowing hair. And it was moving with slow and awful majesty among the churchyard stones.

  Storm gaped. He felt woozy suddenly, paralyzed. It was real, he thought. He was really seeing it. He was seeing something anyway, a spectral something gliding through the mist, gliding steadily towards the fragment of the chapel wall.

  “What is it?” said Sophia behind him. She had risen from the bed, and was standing beside it, one hand thrown out to one of the posts. Her face expressionless, her features cold, but there was a frightened, almost pleading look in her eyes.

  He didn’t answer her. An hallucination, he thought. It must be an hallucination. But still it went on. And there, beside that ruined wall—before the small crypt where Storm himself had stood—there, as he stood watching, frozen and amazed, the jet absence seemed to sink at the same stately pace, sink lower and lower into the hard earth, until only the head remained about the surface.

  And then that too—all, all of it—had vanished.…

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  You Do Something to Me, by Cole Porter. © 1929 (renewed) Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014

  This novel is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 by Amalgamated Metaphor, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  For information address:

  Crown Publishers, Inc.,

  New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79122-1

  Reprinted by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  This book is for my mother and father.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I: Prologue: Black Annie

  II: Storm, Lifting His Tragical Eyes

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  III: The Alchemist’s Castle or The Virgin’s Fate

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  IV: Sophia, The Noose Around Her Neck

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  V: Young William, A Ballad

  Chapter 1

  VI: Harper Albright and The Clockwork of History

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  VII: The Monk’s Confession

  Chapter 1

  VIII: The Night of Iago

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  IX: Spectre

  Chapter 1

  X: Black Annie II: This Time, It’s Personal

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  “Stay, Illusion!”

  —HAMLET

  I

  PROLOGUE:

  BLACK

  ANNIE

  His eyes! His eyes were full of fear. And, though I had seen him in London only six months before, he seemed since then to have aged as many decades. A man like myself in his early thirties, he peered at me through the half open door of Ravenswood Grange with all the tremulous hostility, the white-eyed apprehension, of some ancient anchorite disturbed at his grimmest meditations.

  I had already dismissed my trap. I could hear the horse’s hoofbeats fading behind me on the Grange’s long drive. The autumn darkling was closing around me, the windswept clouds of a lowering sky pressed down on me from above. The house itself, the whole great stone edifice, loomed menacingly before me as with an adsum to my conjuro te. All this—and the horrid ravens peering blackly at me from the gutters and gables of the place—served to magnify the thrill of dread I felt as I stood on the threshold and stared into the ravaged features of my old schoolmate.

  “My God, Quentin!” I managed to expostulate at last. “My God, man, where are the servants?” For he had come to the door himself and, save for the taper guttering in his trembling hand, the hall behind him, the house around him, were all in darkness.

  At the sound of my voice, Quentin glanced about, distracted, as if he only now realized he had been forsaken. Slowly, his frightened gaze returned to me—and yet, I felt, it passed right through me. I might have been a spectre, invisible, and he seeing only the empty drive where it stretched into the twilight overhung by gloomy rows of copper beech.

  “Gone,” he said then, in a high, cracked whisper, an old man’s whisper. “All gone. They would not stay. Not one of them would stay with me. No, not one.”

  The wind rose. The dead leaves swirled and chattered at my feet. From a gable peak came the hoarse cry of a raven, weirdly triumphant, horrible. I shivered. Then, bestirring myself at last from the first shock of seeing my friend in his shattered state, I stepped forward, extending my hand. Quentin merely licked his lips furtively, and faded away from me into the tenebrous front hall.

  I followed him, entered. The heavy wooden door swung shut behind me with a melancholy reverberation. I forced myself to ignore it as I ignored the ominous penumbra that quickly gathered round the edges of his solitary flame. Again, and with a soothing word, I came towards him. This time, I was allowed to approach. Taking the poor man by the elbow, I led him gently inside.

  I lit a fire in the sitting room, but it could do little to dispel the aura of dejection that had descended over the place. It was a house abandoned. Dust gathered by the wainscoting, cobwebs hung from the rafters. Papers and notebooks were strewn carelessly over the furniture and the floor. Whatever heat and cheer the hearthglow afforded was soon lost, swallowed by the lofty ceilings or transformed into a threatening phantasmagoria by the sombre tapestries hanging on the wall and the thick drapes around the narrow, arched windows.

  When I stood from the grate, I found Quentin had sunk into an armchair. Open-mouthed and silent, he sat as if transfixed by the shadows now darting and receding across the complex patterns of the oriental rug. The light from the grate, the light from the candle he still gripped loosely in his hand, dragged at his sallow cheeks like red fingers, like a premonition of hellfire. I removed the taper from his slack grasp and used it to light a lamp on the table beside his chair. Standing over him, I contemplated his macabre transformation with bafflement and with sorrow.

  Sorrowful indeed it was and more sorrowful yet for my memories of what he ‘d been not half a year before. Then, in my rooms in town, we had sat, like the schoolfellows we lately were, casually flung over chair and settee, debating long into the night with all the gay ferocity of old. A churchman with a lucrative Sussex living, Quentin was, as he had ever been, a fervent defender of the faith, an apologist for Newman, a supporter of Pusey, an ardent advocate of the high ritual and the deep mysterium. I, a physician with a small but growing practice in Harley Street, was equally determined to ride out upon the lists for science, to preach Reason and Experiment as the keys to comprehending the internal mechanisms of this clockwork life. How well I remembered the passion with which Quentin opposed me, the brightness of his eyes, the vibrancy of his voice as he proclaimed the miraculous and supernatural as our surest guides to the truth.

  Now—not a fortnight since he had returned to Ravenswood to settle the affairs appending to the sudden death of his elder brother and sister-in-law—his strong, open face was lined and su
nken, his lean, manly frame as much a ruin as the fragments of the old abbey that stood without the Grange’s walls. For all my physic, I could think to offer him nothing better than a dash of brandy. This, my hand supporting his wrist, he raised unsteadily to his lips.

  The medicine had its effect. Coughing slightly, he set the empty glass beside the lamp, blinked and looked up at me as if for the first time.

  “Neville,” he said. “Thank Heaven, you’ve come.”

  “Of course I’ve come, old fellow,” I responded, as bluffly as I could. “As soon as I got your letter. But what the devil’s the matter? You look as if you’ve been through Hell.”

  At this, some memory seemed to rekindle the terror in his eyes. He turned from me and stared into the now-blazing fire. “You were wrong, you know, Neville.”

  “Wrong? In what respect?”

  “All of it. All of it,” said he, his tone mournful.

  “There is a world beyond the world we know. There is a world beyond, and it’s … it’s …” But he did not—could not—finish. Rather, lifting his face once more, he showed to me an expression of such pitiable horror that no further utterance was necessary. “Neville,” he whispered then, galvanized suddenly, leaning towards me urgently. “Neville, I have seen it. I have seen her.”

  “Her? Who?” I said sharply. I was moved to irritation by the chill that had begun to edge up my spine.

  “What the devil are you talking about? Whom have you seen?”

  With that, the energy seemed to drain out of him. The poor fellow subsided weakly in his chair, his chin sunk on his chest, his features limp. His voice, when it came again, was as solemn as the echo from an empty tomb.

  “Black Annie!” was all he said.

  I did not know whether to laugh at this or to recoil at the further evidence of his disturbed senses. In the end, averting my face to hide my reactions from him, I said merely, “I say, do you think there’s anything to eat in this mausoleum?”

  Fortunately, there was. For it now transpired that not all the servants had entirely deserted the place. One girl, at least—in very pity for her young master, as I suspected—remained. She had agreed to attend to my friend’s needs by daylight on the stipulation that she might be well away from the house before the onset of dusk. Thus, on investigation, I found a cold repast had already been laid out in the dining room. No more than a modest portion of mutton, a half loaf of bread and a rather unfortunate claret, still it sufficed. I brought the provisions into the sitting room, where we made a rude feast of them before the hearth.

  We ate in silence. To be honest, we drank a good deal more than we ate. Quentin, at my urging, did manage to pick desultorily at his chop. For my own part, however, I mostly sat brooding over my wine, reflecting on what I had so far heard.

  Black Annie. The name—uttered in such awful tones by my companion—was not entirely unknown to me. There was, I remembered, a legend attached to the old Grange concerning such a figure. Quentin himself had related the tale to me on one of those evenings at school after lights-out when we attempted to disturb each other’s sleep by whispering scare stories across the space between our beds.

  I rose from my chair and went to stand before one of the windows on the far wall. Looking out between the dented leaden cames, I saw that night had now drawn down around the place completely. A gibbous moon, sporadically visible in the gaps between the racing clouds, cast a pall of faltering and sickly light over the sere expanse of grassland to the east. In that field, now visible, now vanishing as the moon went once again behind its shifting cover, there stood an ominous and melancholy apparition: the ruins of Ravenswood Abbey—the broken wedge of a chapel wall, the slanting monuments of its ancient churchyard.

  In the days before the old religion fell prey to the depredations of our eighth Henry, the ground where the Grange now stood had been within the abbey confines. It was with this ancient institution that the story of Black Annie was associated. It was hardly an original tale. I don’t think there is a ruin such as this in all of England that does not have some deceased monk or other gallivanting about it of a midnight. In this case, so the legend ran, the cowled spectre of a nun—Black Annie—had taken up residence among the decrepit stones. In life, she had been seduced by a canon of the Augustinians—one of the black canons, so called for the colour of their robes. There followed the necessary sequel: the poor woman was soon with child. But before her sin could become evident, she mysteriously vanished. In fact, with the conspiratorial aid of her sister nuns, she had contrived to hide herself within a secret chamber in the nunnery’s dorter. There, the sisters brought her food and drink—and kept watch during the frequent visits of her paramour. As her time approached, however, it became clear that the deception could not be continued indefinitely. What was more, the abbey was now under heavy pressure from the minions of the vicar-general, who were then touring the countryside on the king’s behalf in search of useful evidence of corruption among the clergy. Terrified of discovery, the canon persuaded his lover to give their child into his charge. He promised her he would remove the infant to some safe and secret place, where it would be well cared for by a local nurse of his acquaintance. But, having taken the babe away, the perfidious canon, hoping to set his crime permanently beyond the investigators’ ken, slit the helpless creature’s throat and hid its little body somewhere on the abbey grounds. Inevitably, word of this horrible deed found its way to the distracted mother in her hiding hole. When the royal ministers arrived to make their inspection, they were led at once to the secret chamber where—no doubt to their considerable satisfaction—they found the unfortunate woman hanging dead at the end of a stout rope she had secured to the rafters.

  This was the gruesome story Quentin had whispered to me one night in our boyhood dormitory. And he added, with appropriately spooky inflections, that the black-cowled spectre of that much-injured sister was said to walk the ruins of the abbey to this very day.

  I’m afraid I must have made a soft noise of derision at the recollection of this melodramatic yarn, for Quentin, as if reading my thoughts, said from behind me, “You remember, don’t you?”

  I gestured from the window. “I remember some nonsense you told me back in school, but …”

  “True, Neville, all true!” he exclaimed. In a fresh bout of agitation, he leapt from his chair, paced to the centre of the room. He stood there beneath the tapestry of Susanna, whose time-faded flesh the firelight made to seem roseate and alive under the leering gaze of the elders. Quentin’s pale, tormented features were also scored by flame and shadow, also given a tortuous life of their own as he lifted a shaking hand to point at the window. “I’ve seen her, I tell you. Out there. By the abbey. And what’s more …” But his arm dropped to his side and he shook his head.

  “What’s more?” I prompted.

  “Oh!” It was a sound of such hopelessness that all my impatient scepticism was swept away by a tide of compassion. “I knew you would not believe me, Neville. You with your Science and your Reason—your new religion so eager to replace the old. But I tell you, I have seen her and what’s more … what’s more, I have heard her.” He turned such a sidelong, knowing look then at the chamber’s oaken door that, for the first time, I began to suspect he was truly mad. “In the house,” he muttered. “She has been in this house.”

  Shaken—by his expression, by his tone—I tried once more to strike a hearty note of unconcern. “Well, then! It hardly matters whether I believe you or not. If she will appear to you, I hope she will not scruple to appear to me as well. Then I shall have ‘the sensible and true avouch of my own eyes,’ and I have no doubt,” I added in an undertone, “that we can begin to get to the bottom of this whole affair.”

  Quentin, nodding, only turned and walked heavily back to the blazing hearth. “Be careful what you say, Neville,” he remarked. Then he sagged once more into his chair.

  “I am not afraid,” I told him.

  But that was a lie. I was very much afraid, though not for the reasons he might have imagined. It was my friend’s sanity I feared for. Whatever vision had appeared to him, it was clear to my physician’s understanding that it was no “extravagant and erring spirit,” but rather the product of his disordered faculties. What I could not yet discern was whether those faculties were still within reach of treatment or whether Quentin was—and I have seen such cases—spiralling irretrievably into lunacy. I expected—not to say dreaded—that that very night would tell me all.