Best Horror Novels

Chapter 1 An Early Fright

Chapter 1 An

Early FrightIn Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a

castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes

a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily

enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My

father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw

England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where

everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don't see how ever so

much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or

even luxuries.

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a

pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and

the small estate on which it stands, a bargain.

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a

slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes

in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat,

stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on

its surface white fleets of water lilies.

Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its

towers, and its Gothic chapel.

The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade

before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the

road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I

have said that this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say

truth. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in

which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and

twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of

your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss of

any historic associations, is that of old General Spielsdorf,

nearly twenty miles away to the right.

I have said "the nearest inhabited village," because

there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the

direction of General Spielsdorf's schloss, a ruined village, with

its quaint little church, now roofless, in the aisle of which are

the moldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct,

who once owned the equally desolate chateau which, in the thick of

the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town.

Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and

melancholy spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you

another time.

I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute

the inhabitants of our castle. I don't include servants, or those

dependents who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the

schloss. Listen, and wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on

earth, but growing old; and I, at the date of my story, only

nineteen. Eight years have passed since then.

I and my father constituted the family at the schloss. My

mother, a Styrian lady, died in my infancy, but I had a

good-natured governess, who had been with me from, I might almost

say, my infancy. I could not remember the time when her fat,

benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory.

This was Madame Perrodon, a native of Berne, whose care and good

nature now in part supplied to me the loss of my mother, whom I do

not even remember, so early I lost her. She made a third at our

little dinner party. There was a fourth, Mademoiselle De

Lafontaine, a lady such as you term, I believe, a "finishing

governess." She spoke French and German, Madame Perrodon French and

broken English, to which my father and I added English, which,

partly to prevent its becoming a lost language among us, and partly

from patriotic motives, we spoke every day. The consequence was a

Babel, at which strangers used to laugh, and which I shall make no

attempt to reproduce in this narrative. And there were two or three

young lady friends besides, pretty nearly of my own age, who were

occasional visitors, for longer or shorter terms; and these visits

I sometimes returned.

These were our regular social resources; but of course there

were chance visits from "neighbors" of only five or six leagues

distance. My life was, notwithstanding, rather a solitary one, I

can assure you.

My gouvernantes had just so much control over me as you might

conjecture such sage persons would have in the case of a rather

spoiled girl, whose only parent allowed her pretty nearly her own

way in everything.

The first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible

impression upon my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced,

was one of the very earliest incidents of my life which I can

recollect. Some people will think it so trifling that it should not

be recorded here. You will see, however, by-and-by, why I mention

it. The nursery, as it was called, though I had it all to myself,

was a large room in the upper story of the castle, with a steep oak

roof. I can't have been more than six years old, when one night I

awoke, and looking round the room from my bed, failed to see the

nursery maid. Neither was my nurse there; and I thought myself

alone. I was not frightened, for I was one of those happy children

who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy

tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the

door cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring candle makes

the shadow of a bedpost dance upon the wall, nearer to our faces. I

was vexed and insulted at finding myself, as I conceived,

neglected, and I began to whimper, preparatory to a hearty bout of

roaring; when to my surprise, I saw a solemn, but very pretty face

looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady

who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at

her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She

caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and

drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully

soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if

two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I

cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and

then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself

under the bed.

I was now for the first time frightened, and I yelled with all

my might and main. Nurse, nursery maid, housekeeper, all came

running in, and hearing my story, they made light of it, soothing

me all they could meanwhile. But, child as I was, I could perceive

that their faces were pale with an unwonted look of anxiety, and I

saw them look under the bed, and about the room, and peep under

tables and pluck open cupboards; and the housekeeper whispered to

the nurse: "Lay your hand along that hollow in the bed; someone

did lie there, so sure as you did not; the place is still

warm."

I remember the nursery maid petting me, and all three examining

my chest, where I told them I felt the puncture, and pronouncing

that there was no sign visible that any such thing had happened to

me.

The housekeeper and the two other servants who were in charge of

the nursery, remained sitting up all night; and from that time a

servant always sat up in the nursery until I was about

fourteen.

I was very nervous for a long time after this. A doctor was

called in, he was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his long

saturnine face, slightly pitted with smallpox, and his chestnut

wig. For a good while, every second day, he came and gave me

medicine, which of course I hated.

The morning after I saw this apparition I was in a state of

terror, and could not bear to be left alone, daylight though it

was, for a moment.

I remember my father coming up and standing at the bedside, and

talking cheerfully, and asking the nurse a number of questions, and

laughing very heartily at one of the answers; and patting me on the

shoulder, and kissing me, and telling me not to be frightened, that

it was nothing but a dream and could not hurt me.

But I was not comforted, for I knew the visit of the strange

woman was not a dream; and I was awfully

frightened.

I was a little consoled by the nursery maid's assuring me that

it was she who had come and looked at me, and lain down beside me

in the bed, and that I must have been half-dreaming not to have

known her face. But this, though supported by the nurse, did not

quite satisfy me.

I remembered, in the course of that day, a venerable old man, in

a black cassock, coming into the room with the nurse and

housekeeper, and talking a little to them, and very kindly to me;

his face was very sweet and gentle, and he told me they were going

to pray, and joined my hands together, and desired me to say,

softly, while they were praying, "Lord hear all good prayers for

us, for Jesus' sake." I think these were the very words, for I

often repeated them to myself, and my nurse used for years to make

me say them in my prayers.

I remembered so well the thoughtful sweet face of that

white-haired old man, in his black cassock, as he stood in that

rude, lofty, brown room, with the clumsy furniture of a fashion

three hundred years old about him, and the scanty light entering

its shadowy atmosphere through the small lattice. He kneeled, and

the three women with him, and he prayed aloud with an earnest

quavering voice for, what appeared to me, a long time. I forget all

my life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all

obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out vivid

as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by

darkness.