Vintage Vampire Stories (10 page)

The rain had driven for centuries through the joints of the masonry, even throught he stone itself, and had streamed down inside, rotting the joists of the ebll-chamber where they rested in the wall. I don't blame the builders, they did their best. The walls are thick, but there is no stone in the country that is impervious to a south-western wind charged with rain. Granite is worst of all.You might as well build of sponge. Brentor church is built of the stone of the hill on which it stands, a sort of pumice, full of holes, and therefore by nature spongy. It holds the wet, and weeps it out at every change of weather. Now the belfty joists had given way, rotted right off, and had brought the planking down with them, and lay a wreck at the bottom of the tower. By day, I have no doubt, anyone looking up would see the three bells, and the holes in the lead roof above them. It was difficult for me to get at the ropes, so encumbered was the floor with fallen beams and boards that smelt of mildew and earth. I fancy the floor had given way since last Sunday, and that was why the litter lay there. Some of the sexton's tools had been knocked over by the falling beams. He wants strong tools, for the graves have to be hewn in the rock.

After I had removed some of the rotten timber, I made myself space, and stood in a pool of coffee-coloured water that had leaded from the roof, and drained from the sodden joists, and then I began to ring the bells. As I rang I looked round now and then. It was, of course, possible, though hardly probable, that the blacksmith or Luke Petherick might come up and take a turn at the ropes. I did not expect anyone, but I thought one might come; and I almost wished I had knocked the blacksmith up on my way, and asked him to join me a s personal favour. He couldn't have refused, for he does all my blacksmithing for me. But itmight have seemed as if I were afraid to go alone, and it would have deprived Solomon of half the ringer's fee. Looked at in another light, it would not have done, for one in my position is hardly the person to be seen ringing a church bell, and to be known to have done it out of good-nature.

I soon found that, for on unaccustomed to bell-ringing, the exertion was great; it brought into play muscles not usually exercised, and I began to feel the strain. I paused and wiped my forehead. My hands were getting galled. I did not moisten them in the customary way, which vulgar; but I dipped my palms in the coffee-coloured solution on the pavement at my feet. I had hitherto rung the ‘cokck,' as Solomon designates one old heavy bell that has a curious Latin inscription on it, which begins ‘Gallus vocor.' Now, as I rose from moistening my palms, I looked at the rope of the tenor bell, intending to pull that next. As I did so, I noticed something dark, like a ball of dirty cobwebs, hanging to the cord, rather high up. I elevated my lanthorn to see what it was, but the light afforded by the tallow dip was not sufficient to enable me to distinguish the outline of the object. I supposed it might be a great mass of filthy cobweb, or perhaps a piece of broken flooring which had remained attached to the rope, caught when the rest fell away. I considered that if I pulled the rope, I should probably bring the thing—whatever it was—down on my head.You will understand that my desisting form touching that cord was prompted by the wisest discretion, not by inane fear. SO I rang the treble bell, and ever and anon cast up my eye at the remarkable mass above.

Presently, I desisted from ringing altogether. I thought that the object was descending the rope slowly. I say I thought so, I did think so at first, but very soon I was certain of it. So certain was I, that I stepped back, and in so doing fell over a balk. When I had picked myself up the thin had reached the bottom. I should have liked to leave the church, but to do this I must step past this creature; I must do more; it was in the only clear space between me and the tower arch, so that to get out I must lift it from its place to make a passage for myself, and this I did not feel inclined to do. I never have believed in the supernatural. I do not believe in it now. Ghosts, goblins, and pixies are the creations of fevered imaginations and illiterate ignorance. It puts me out of patience to hear people, who ought to know better, speak of such things. I did not for a moment, therefore, suppose that the object before me was a denizen of another world. As far as I can recollect and analyze my sensations at the time, I should say that blank amazement prevailed, attended by a dominating desire to be outside the church and careering down the flank of the hill in the direction of Brinsabatch. I had no theory as to what the thing was; indeed the inclination to theorize was far from me. The creature I could now see had a human form. It was of the size of a three months' old baby. I have had no experience in babies myself, and am no judge of ages, so that when I say three months I do not wish to be tied down to that period exactly. In colour the object was brown, as if it had been steeped in peat water for a century, and in texture leathery. It scrambled, much as I have seen a bat scramble, out of the puddle on the pavement to the heap of broken timber, and worked its way with its little brown hands and long claws up a rafter, and seated itself thereon, holding fast by a hand on each side of what I suppose was the body, and then blinded, much in the same way as a monkey blinks, drawing a skin over the eyes different in colour from the skin of the face.

“I be Margery Palmer of Quether,” it said in strange, far-off, mumbling words. “I couldn't bide up yonder no longer; the word be that rotten, it is all giving way, and I be afeard I may fall and break my bones. That ‘ud be a gashly state o' things, my dear, to hev to bide up there year after year with a body o'bones all scatted abroad [broken to pieces], and never no chance of the bones healing.”

“Who are you?” I asked, perhaps not as loudly or with as firm a voice as that in which I usually accost a stranger. The creature did not hear me. It went on, however, in its mumbling voice, and with a querulous intonation, “I be Margery Palmer of Quether. I reckon there be someone there, but my dear, I cannot see you, and if you speak I cannot hear you. I be dear as a post, and I've the eyes white wi' caterick.”

“Are you a spirit?” I inquired. She did not hear me; so, waxing bolder, I put my hands to my mouth and shouted, as through a speaking trumpet, “are you a spirit?”

“Spirit—spirit!” she echoed. “Lauk a mussy! I wish I was! Spriti! No such luck comed to me yet. If I was I'd be thankful. Ah! Wishes don't fulfill themselves like as prayers do.”

“How came you here?” I called.

“Here!” she repeated. “Can't hear. I be got too old for that I reckon I be Margery Palmer o' Quether.”

“Impossible,” I said. Were my senses taking leave of me? “This is a sheer impossibility.” She did not hear my protest, but went mumbling on. “I lives up yonder among the bells. I've lived there these hundreds of years. I reckoned it were the safest place I could be in. I'd not ha' come down now, but that I were feared the bells would give way and all fall together, and my bones would ha' broke. It ‘ud be a gashly thing to live on for hundreds o' years wi' broked arms and legs, and mebbe also a broked neck, so that the head hung down behind, and with no power to move it, not a bit and crumb. There ain't no healing power in my old bones now; they be as ancient as they in the graves, and no more power of joining in them, than the dead and mouldering bones hev.”

I held up the lanthorn to inspect this curious creature squatted before me on a beam. It was, as I said, of the size of a baby; but otherwise it was a grown woman very aged and withered. The face was not merely wizen, it was dried up to leather, quite tanned brown, the colour of the oak beams; the hands and arms were shriveled and like those of a bat. There was actually no flesh on them, they were simply dry, tanned skin about bone. The garments seemed to have been tanned like the hide by liquor distilling from the oak. The eyes were blear.

“I can't see, and I can't hear,” she went on, “except just a little scrap o' light which I take to be a link. I gets blinder and ever blinder, till in time I shall look into the sun and see only blackness and darkness for ever. I gets deafer and deafer, but I can hear the bells still. I can also feel a little with my skin, but not much. I've one tooth remains in my head, and I hang on by that. I drive it into the oak beam, and cling round the beam wi' my arms, and strike my nails in too, and so I hold fast. But I knowed very well that the wood were rotten; I knowed it by a sort of instink, and sp I've a-comed down to-day. I reckon my hair be all falled off now; I can't tell by the feel, my hands be that numbed wi' clinging, that the feel be most gone from them. But you can see for yourself.” She put her hand to her head and thrust back a leathery hood that had covered it. The little skull was bald. I opened the door of my lanthorn and took out the candle to inspect her better. The head was as if cut out of a thornstick. Only at the back at the junction with the neck was a little frizzle of ragged white hair. I observed as she moved that her neck creased like old hide that threatened to crack at the creases. The flexibility was gone from it. “Hold the candle before my eyes,” she said; “I like the light. I can feel it shining though my dull eyes down into my stomick. What be your name, now?”

“George Rosedhu.” I yelled my name into her ear.

“Ah, George! George!” exclaimed old Margery, “you put off and off too long.You should have married when the fancy first took you. Now it be too late; we be scrumped up [dried up] like old apples.”

What could this extraordinary creature mean?

“Ah, George! George!” she went on. “That were a cruel, unkind act of yours, keeping company with me so long, and them giving me the clip after all. Do you mind how we used to meet here of Sundays, and how on the windy days you helped me up the rock, and on windy and rainy days you wrapped your clock round the both of us, and how, when the days were foggy, we used to lose out way in the mist, and never were able to find the church door till the service were over? And do you recall how one day you took me round to the west end of the church, after service, where we could stand at the edge of the rock, wi' our backs to the tower, and you said you wanted to point out Kit Hill to me-”

I sprang forward and put my hand over her mouth.

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Will you drive me mad? What do you mean? Who are you?”

She went on, when I withdrew my hand, “Ah, George, George, you know there was not much to be got with me. There were my brothers and a swarm of little ones coming on, and so you left me out in the cold, and took up with Mary Cake, of Wring-worthy, who was twenty years older than me. You said I were tooyoung; and now Mary Cake that become Mary Rosedhu be dead and mouldered these hundreds of years, and I—I be alive and old enough even for a Rosedhu.”

Then the old creature began to laugh, but stopped with a short scream. “I must not do it. I dare not laugh. I be too old, and I shall crack my sides and tear my skin. Then what is cracked bides cracked, and what is tore bides tore.”

What did the creature mean by her allusion to Mary Cake? That was my great, great—I am afraid to say how many times removed—grandmother. She died about two hundred years ago. She brought an addition to the property of fifty-three acres, which I now possess. I have the marriage settlements in the iron deeds-chest under my bed, the date 1605.

“Well, well” the little old woman went on, “we all make mistakes. Life is but a string of them. Coming into the world is the first; courting, marrying, everything in succession is a mistake. You, George, made a mistake in taking Mary Cake instead of me. Her led you a cruel, sour life, to my thinking. Her had a vixenish temper as would worry any man out of conceit with life. I, on the other hand, was all lightsomeness and fun.You knew that; but what cared you for a pretty face and sunny temper alongside of a few acres of moorland? You Rosedhus are a calkelating family, and you reckon up everything wi' a bit o' chalk on the table. I hadn't the land Mary brought, but I'd youth and energy and a cheerful disposition. But, Rosedhus, you are all afraid of long families, and are a grasping and a keeping set.You always marry late in life, and oldish women, lest a lot of children should eat the property as mice eat cheese. It be a mistake, a gashly error. But there, now, I won't aggravate you. Now tell me this: How come you alive at this time? I thought you'd be dead these two hundred and fifty years. Can't you find your rest no more nor I? Did you also pray that you might never die?”

I could not answer. I have no imagination, and I was unable to follow her, mixing up the past and the present in such an unaccountable manner. As far as I could understand, she confused me with a remote ancestor of the same name who died in 1623.That was the George Rosedhu who married Mary Cake, of Wring-worthy, in 1605.

“I made my mistake when I prayed for life,” said the old woman. “I was so joyous and fond of life and full of giddiness that I used to pray every Sunday when I came to church, and every evening when I said my Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that I might never die. I were also mortal afraid of death. The graves here be digged out of living stone, and be full of water afore they coffins be splashed into them, and the corpses don't moulder; they sop away and go off the bones hust as if they was boiled to rags. That terrified me, so I always prayed for one only thing, that I might never die, and my prayer hev been heard and answered. I cannot die, but I can grow older and more decrepit and drier. I get older and older, and shrump [wither] up more and more, and get drier and blinder and deafer. I can no longer taste, and I cannot smell, and I can hardly fell. I have no pleasure in life at all now, and the only feeling in me is fear—fear lest I should get broke or tore, for I be past mending; if I be broke or tore I must bide to the end of time. On a very hot day, when the sun shines, I seem to have a sort o' a sense of warmth, and the frost must cake me up in ice before I knows I'm cold. I reckon in another hundred years my tongue will have dried up, and then I sha'n't be able to talk no more; but that is the last organ to go in a woman, as her temper is the first; her mind may go, her teeth may go, her sight may go, her hearing may go—but her tongue dies hard. In another hundred years I shall not be able to feel the streak of midsummer sun that falls on my back, nor the winter icicle that hangs from my nose. I sit bunched up on a beam above the bells, and hold on with a tooth drove fast into the wood right home to the gum, and my nails hev grown till they go round the beam I clutch. The dry rot has got into the wood, and it be turned to powder, so that the crust has given way and I've sunk into the dust and mildew. You must put me away where I can be safe for another two or three hundred years out o' the way of dogs and rats and boys. Dogs would tear my skin, and rats gnaw holes in me, and boys pelt me wi' stones and break my bones. What is broke is broke, and what is tore is tore—I be past all healing. I were put up in the belfry above the bells as the place where I might be safest, but now that the rafters and joists be rotten and falling about me, it b'aint safe no more.”