Here we have another story-told-to-me-by-someone else story. Typical of its day, it has a frame that is almost inconsequential to the story itself. Unlike others of its day, however, it interrupts the story itself with a strange return to the present in a very dramatic moment.
What starts out as a tale of a man on a long journey quickly turns into a fellow traveler’s ghost story. Alastair Colvin is the basic Englishman abroad, very polite, very well-groomed, but also kind of dull. Things don’t interest him enough for good conversation. However, he is on good terms with the original narrator, good enough to tell him the story of his friendship with John Broughton.
Broughton is a sturdy he-man of a fellow who gets married and moves into Thurnley Abbey, which is kinda-sorta known to be haunted. The previous inhabitant, a hermit by the name of Clarke, started the rumors of this haunting by playing tricks on the nearby villagers. The problem is, even though he got caught, people still decided the place was haunted.
Later, Broughton begs Colvin to visit him, but he never comes out and says why. What he wants is for his friend to have a ghostly experience with the spirit of the Abbey, supposedly a nun, and to talk to her, which is the custom of the day.
This is a very basic, run-of-the-mill ghost story for 1908 with one exception: it doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet at the same time it offers up genuine shocks. Colvin is absolutely certain that this is all hogwash, and he’s cocky enough to say that he’ll just talk to the ghost when he sees it, thereby banishing it once and for all. Yet when he finally is confronted by the nun, in the most visceral scene in the story, he is horrified beyond all reason.
All too often, stories like this depicted their main characters in a very gruff, fearless manner. Here, Landon gives a very palpable, very personal depiction of a man in the throes of terror.
But in keeping with not doing the expected, he has Colvin do a 180 after the shock of seeing a skeleton shrouded in a veiled tatter at the foot of his bed. He leaps to his feet and savagely attacks the thing, now convinced that it was some kind of joke. He beats and batters that skeleton so badly it crumbles and falls to pieces at his feet. The beating is so violent his knuckles are covered with his own blood by the time he’s finished.
SPOILER ALERT: By now, all he’s left with is a piece of the skull, and he marches down to Broughton’s room to call him all sorts of names and demand satisfaction for such an awful prank. Broughton and his wife pale and clutch at each other, trying to comfort one another. Then, they hear a shuffling sound in the hallway. Colvin knows in his heart that it’s the ghost, reassembled, and it wants to piece of skull he’s holding. He throws it on the floor and hides his face as he listens to it enter the room and take back its missing piece. END OF SPOILERS.
So while this story seems at first to be very ordinary for its time, there are some pleasant surprises farther in that make it all worthwhile. Sure, the most important part happens off-stage, but the suggestion is enough to make this a superior horror story.
[This story first appeared in RAW EDGES and can be read here.]
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