"The China Bowl" (1916) by E. F. Benson is a shocker: no one is better than Benson at showing a man succeeding in finding and moving into a suitable house, and then being dropped into nightmare. It's the wholesome and prosaic bourgeois circumstances that prepare the reader for the "pleasing terror" hurrying on its way.
No. 29 Barrett's Square, Benson's protagonist soon learns, has recently seen a death: the wife of the present lessee, Sir Arthur Bassenthwaite.
"'There is so much here…. that is very intimately bound up with me....'" Bassenthwaite tells the narrator as they tour the rooms.
Then, in the watches of the night:
....I had been so engrossed in my work that I had let the fire go out, and myself get hungry, and went into the dining-room, which opened into the little back-garden, to see if the fire still smouldered there, and a biscuit could be found in the cupboard. In both respects I was in luck, and whilst eating and warming myself, I suddenly thought I heard a step on the tiled walk in the garden outside.
I quickly went to the window and drew aside the thick curtain, letting all the light in the room pour out into the garden, and there, beyond doubt, was a man bending over one of the beds.
Startled by this illumination, he rose, and without looking 'round, ran to the end of the little yard and, with surprising agility, vaulted on to the top of the wall and disappeared.
But at the last second, as he sat silhouetted there, I saw his face in the shaded light of a gas-lamp outside, and, to my indescribable astonishment, I recognized Sir Arthur Bassenthwaite. The glimpse was instantaneous, but I was sure I was not mistaken, any more than I had been mistaken about the light which came from the bedroom that looked out on to the square.
But whatever tender associations Sir Arthur had with the garden that had once been his, it was not seemly that he should adopt such means of indulging them. Moreover, where Sir Arthur might so easily come, there, too, might others whose intentions were less concerned with sentiment than with burglary.
In any case, I did not choose that my garden should have such easy access from outside, and next morning I ordered a pretty stiff barrier of iron spikes to be erected along the outer wall. If Sir Arthur wished to muse in the garden, I should be delighted to give him permission, as, indeed, he must have known from the cordiality which I was sure I showed him when he called, but this method of his seemed to me irregular. And I observed next evening, without any regret at all, that my order had been promptly executed. At the same time I felt an invincible curiosity to know for certain if it was merely for the sake of a solitary midnight vigil that he had come.
A few days later, the narrator is joined by an overnight guest: Hugh Grainger, expert on ghosts and murder.
They decide to spend the night in the late Mrs. Bassenthwaite's room.
'I say, I'm feeling fairly beastly,' [Hugh] said, 'and yet there's nothing to see or hear.'
'Same with me,' said I.
'Do you mind if I turn up the light a minute, and have a look 'round?' he asked.
'Not a bit.'
He fumbled at the switch, the room leapt into light, and he sat up in bed frowning. Everything was quite as usual, the bookcase, the chairs, on one of which he had thrown his clothes; there was nothing that differentiated this room from hundreds of others where the occupants lay quietly sleeping.
'It's queer,' he said, and switched off the light again.
There is nothing harder than to measure time in the dark, but I do not think it was long that I lay there with the sense of nightmare growing momentarily on me before he spoke again in an odd, cracked voice.
'It's coming,' he said....
Like the image of Sir Arthur Bassenthwaite bounding at night over the garden wall, that simple phrase 'It's coming' raised more gooseflesh in this reader than anything I have read or viewed in the last two months.
Jay
7 June 2022
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