Chapter 1

THE MORNING POST says: “Messrs Mills & Boon seem to have acquired a
monopoly in clever first novels.” THE PALL MALL GAZETTE says: “We have
come to expect good work from the publishers of ‘In Different Keys’
(Mills & Boon).” THE GLOBE says: “One has almost come to regard Messrs
Mills & Boon as the publishers of the unexpected. Alike in fiction and
in more serious works, they introduce us to writers of exceptional
ability, and to subjects of uncommon interest.” THE NEW YORK HERALD
says: “They have long ago acquired the reputation for the production of
original books.”

Mills & Boon’s New Novels

_Crown 8vo, 6s. each_

THE LURE. E. S. STEVENS.
THE DAUGHTER OF BRAHMA. I. A. R. WYLIE.
THE ROOM IN THE TOWER. E. F. BENSON.
A BACHELOR’S COMEDY. J. E. BUCKROSE.
THE PALACE OF LOGS. ROBERT BARR.
WHEN GOD LAUGHS. JACK LONDON.
ASHES OF INCENSE. By the AUTHOR OF “MASTERING FLAME.”
HIS FIRST OFFENCE. J. STORER CLOUSTON.
THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE. HUGH WALPOLE.
THE BATTLE. CLAUDE FARRERE.
STORIES WITHOUT TEARS. BARRY PAIN.
THE FRONTIER. MAURICE LEBLANC.
THE MARK. Mrs PHILIP CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY.
THE GIRL WITH THE BLUE EYES. Lady TROUBRIDGE.
SONS OF STATE. WINIFRED GRAHAM.
ENTER BRIDGET. THOMAS COBB.
THE THORNBUSH NEAR THE DOOR. SOPHIE COLE.
MEN AND DREAMS. MARY E. MANN.
THE WRITTEN LAW. FRANCES G. KNOWLES-FOSTER.
RUTH OF THE ROWLDRICH. Mrs STANLEY WRENCH.
THE PRINCE. T. METCALFE.
THE SILVER MEDALLION. PERCY J. BREBNER.
THE PRINCE AND BETTY. P. G. WODEHOUSE.
ALIENS NEAR OF KIN. N. VERNON.

THE

ROOM IN THE TOWER

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

E. F. BENSON

AUTHOR OF
“THE ANGEL OF PAIN,” “SHEAVES”

SECOND EDITION

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON W.

_Published 1912_

_Copyright in the United States of America, 1912, by E. F. Benson_

PREFACE

These stories have been written in the hopes of giving some pleasant
qualms to their reader, so that, if by chance, anyone may be occupying
in their perusal a leisure half-hour before he goes to bed when the
night and the house are still, he may perhaps cast an occasional glance
into the corners and dark places of the room where he sits, to make sure
that nothing unusual lurks in the shadow. For this is the avowed object
of ghost-stories and such tales as deal with the dim unseen forces which
occasionally and perturbingly make themselves manifest. The author
therefore fervently wishes his readers a few uncomfortable moments.

Some of those tales have appeared before in various magazines; the
remainder are new. One, the story of “The Man who went too Far,” is the
germ of what subsequently developed into a book called “The Angel of
Pain.”

E. F. BENSON.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE ROOM IN THE TOWER 1

THE DUST-CLOUD 22

GAVON’S EVE 44

THE CONFESSION OF CHARLES LINKWORTH 62

AT ABDUL ALI’S GRAVE 87

THE SHOOTINGS OF ACHNALEISH 107

HOW FEAR DEPARTED FROM THE LONG GALLERY 131

CATERPILLARS 155

THE CAT 169

THE BUS-CONDUCTOR 192

THE MAN WHO WENT TOO FAR 206

BETWEEN THE LIGHTS 241

OUTSIDE THE DOOR 260

THE TERROR BY NIGHT 273

THE OTHER BED 285

THE THING IN THE HALL 302

THE HOUSE WITH THE BRICK-KILN 321

THE ROOM IN THE TOWER

It is probable that everybody who is at all a constant dreamer has had
at least one experience of an event or a sequence of circumstances which
have come to his mind in sleep being subsequently realised in the
material world. But, in my opinion, so far from this being a strange
thing, it would be far odder if this fulfilment did not occasionally
happen, since our dreams are, as a rule, concerned with people whom we
know and places with which we are familiar, such as might very naturally
occur in the awake and day-lit world. True, these dreams are often
broken into by some absurd and fantastic incident, which puts them out
of court in regard to their subsequent fulfilment, but on the mere
calculation of chances, it does not appear in the least unlikely that a
dream imagined by anyone who dreams constantly should occasionally come
true. Not long ago, for instance, I experienced such a fulfilment of a
dream which seems to me in no way remarkable and to have no kind of
psychical significance. The manner of it was as follows.

A certain friend of mine, living abroad, is amiable enough to write to
me about once in a fortnight. Thus, when fourteen days or thereabouts
have elapsed since I last heard from him, my mind, probably, either
consciously or subconsciously, is expectant of a letter from him. One
night last week I dreamed that as I was going upstairs to dress for
dinner I heard, as I often heard, the sound of the postman’s knock on my
front door, and diverted my direction downstairs instead. There, among
other correspondence, was a letter from him. Thereafter the fantastic
entered, for on opening it I found inside the ace of diamonds, and
scribbled across it in his well-known handwriting, “I am sending you
this for safe custody, as you know it is running an unreasonable risk to
keep aces in Italy.” The next evening I was just preparing to go
upstairs to dress when I heard the postman’s knock, and did precisely as
I had done in my dream. There, among other letters, was one from my
friend. Only it did not contain the ace of diamonds. Had it done so, I
should have attached more weight to the matter, which, as it stands,
seems to me a perfectly ordinary coincidence. No doubt I consciously or
subconsciously expected a letter from him, and this suggested to me my
dream. Similarly, the fact that my friend had not written to me for a
fortnight suggested to him that he should do so. But occasionally it is
not so easy to find such an explanation, and for the following story I
can find no explanation at all. It came out of the dark, and into the
dark it has gone again.

All my life I have been a habitual dreamer: the nights are few, that is
to say, when I do not find on awaking in the morning that some mental
experience has been mine, and sometimes, all night long, apparently, a
series of the most dazzling adventures befall me. Almost without
exception these adventures are pleasant, though often merely trivial. It
is of an exception that I am going to speak.

It was when I was about sixteen that a certain dream first came to me,
and this is how it befell. It opened with my being set down at the door
of a big red-brick house, where, I understood, I was going to stay. The
servant who opened the door told me that tea was going on in the garden,
and led me through a low dark-panelled hall, with a large open
fireplace, on to a cheerful green lawn set round with flower beds. There
were grouped about the tea-table a small party of people, but they were
all strangers to me except one, who was a school-fellow called Jack
Stone, clearly the son of the house, and he introduced me to his mother
and father and a couple of sisters. I was, I remember, somewhat
astonished to find myself here, for the boy in question was scarcely
known to me, and I rather disliked what I knew of him: moreover, he had
left school nearly a year before. The afternoon was very hot, and an
intolerable oppression reigned. On the far side of the lawn ran a
red-brick wall, with an iron gate in its centre, outside which stood a
walnut tree. We sat in the shadow of the house opposite a row of long
windows, inside which I could see a table with cloth laid, glimmering
with glass and silver. This garden front of the house was very long, and
at one end of it stood a tower of three stories, which looked to me much
older than the rest of the building.

Before long, Mrs Stone, who, like the rest of the party, had sat in
absolute silence, said to me, “Jack will show you your room: I have
given you the room in the tower.”

Quite inexplicably my heart sank at her words. I felt as if I had known
that I should have the room in the tower, and that it contained
something dreadful and significant. Jack instantly got up, and I
understood that I had to follow him. In silence we passed through the
hall, and mounted a great oak staircase with many corners, and arrived
at a small landing with two doors set in it. He pushed one of these open
for me to enter, and without coming in himself, closed it behind me.
Then I knew that my conjecture had been right: there was something awful
in the room, and with the terror of nightmare growing swiftly and
enveloping me, I awoke in a spasm of terror.

Now that dream or variations on it occurred to me intermittently for
fifteen years. Most often it came in exactly this form, the arrival, the
tea laid out on the lawn, the deadly silence succeeded by that one
deadly sentence, the mounting with Jack Stone up to the room in the
tower where horror dwelt, and it always came to a close in the nightmare
of terror at that which was in the room, though I never saw what it was.
At other times I experienced variations on this same theme.
Occasionally, for instance, we would be sitting at dinner in the
dining-room, into the windows of which I had looked on the first night
when the dream of this house visited me, but wherever we were, there was
the same silence, the same sense of dreadful oppression and foreboding.
And the silence I knew would always be broken by Mrs Stone saying to me,
“Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.”
Upon which (this was invariable) I had to follow him up the oak
staircase with many corners, and enter the place that I dreaded more and
more each time that I visited it in sleep. Or, again, I would find
myself playing cards still in silence in a drawing-room lit with immense
chandeliers, that gave a blinding illumination. What the game was I have
no idea; what I remember, with a sense of miserable anticipation, was
that soon Mrs Stone would get up and say to me, “Jack will show you your
room: I have given you the room in the tower.” This drawing-room where
we played cards was next to the dining-room, and, as I have said, was
always brilliantly illuminated, whereas the rest of the house was full
of dusk and shadows. And yet, how often, in spite of those bouquets of
lights, have I not pored over the cards that were dealed me, scarcely
able for some reason to see them. Their designs, too, were strange:
there were no red suits, but all were black, and among them there were
certain cards which were black all over. I hated and dreaded those.

As this dream continued to recur, I got to know the greater part of the
house. There was a smoking-room beyond the drawing-room, at the end of a
passage with a green baize door. It was always very dark there, and as
often as I went there I passed somebody whom I could not see in the
doorway coming out. Curious developments, too, took place in the
characters that peopled the dream as might happen to living persons. Mrs
Stone, for instance, who, when I first saw her, had been black haired,
became grey, and instead of rising briskly, as she had done at first
when she said, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room
in the tower,” got up very feebly, as if the strength was leaving her
limbs. Jack also grew up, and became a rather ill-looking young man,
with a brown moustache, while one of the sisters ceased to appear, and I
understood she was married.

Then it so happened that I was not visited by this dream for six months
or more, and I began to hope, in such inexplicable dread did I hold it,
that it had passed away for good. But one night after this interval I
again found myself being shown out on to the lawn for tea, and Mrs Stone
was not there, while the others were all dressed in black. At once I
guessed the reason, and my heart leaped at the thought that perhaps this
time I should not have to sleep in the room in the tower, and though we
usually all sat in silence, on this occasion the sense of relief made me
talk and laugh as I had never yet done. But even then matters were not
altogether comfortable, for no one else spoke, but they all looked
secretly at each other. And soon the foolish stream of my talk ran dry,
and gradually an apprehension worse than anything I had previously known
gained on me as the light slowly faded.

Suddenly a voice which I knew well broke the stillness, the voice of Mrs
Stone, saying, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room
in the tower.” It seemed to come from near the gate in the red-brick
wall that bounded the lawn, and looking up, I saw that the grass outside
was sown thick with gravestones. A curious greyish light shone from
them, and I could read the lettering on the grave nearest me, and it
was, “In evil memory of Julia Stone.” And as usual Jack got up, and
again I followed him through the hall and up the staircase with many
corners. On this occasion it was darker than usual, and when I passed
into the room in the tower I could only just see the furniture, the
position of which was already familiar to me. Also there was a dreadful
odour of decay in the room, and I woke screaming.

The dream, with such variations and developments as I have mentioned,
went on at intervals for fifteen years. Sometimes I would dream it two
or three nights in succession; once, as I have said, there was an
intermission of six months, but taking a reasonable average, I should
say that I dreamed it quite as often as once in a month. It had, as is
plain, something of nightmare about it, since it always ended in the
same appalling terror, which so far from getting less, seemed to me to
gather fresh fear every time that I experienced it. There was, too, a
strange and dreadful consistency about it. The characters in it, as I
have mentioned, got regularly older, death and marriage visited this
silent family, and I never in the dream, after Mrs Stone had died, set
eyes on her again. But it was always her voice that told me that the
room in the tower was prepared for me, and whether we had tea out on the
lawn, or the scene was laid in one of the rooms overlooking it, I could
always see her gravestone standing just outside the iron gate. It was
the same, too, with the married daughter; usually she was not present,
but once or twice she returned again, in company with a man, whom I took
to be her husband. He, too, like the rest of them, was always silent.
But, owing to the constant repetition of the dream, I had ceased to
attach, in my waking hours, any significance to it. I never met Jack
Stone again during all those years, nor did I ever see a house that
resembled this dark house of my dream. And then something happened.

I had been in London in this year, up till the end of July, and during
the first week in August went down to stay with a friend in a house he
had taken for the summer months, in the Ashdown Forest district of
Sussex. I left London early, for John Clinton was to meet me at Forest
Row Station, and we were going to spend the day golfing, and go to his
house in the evening. He had his motor with him, and we set off, about
five of the afternoon, after a thoroughly delightful day, for the drive,
the distance being some ten miles. As it was still so early we did not
have tea at the club house, but waited till we should get home. As we
drove, the weather, which up till then had been, though hot, deliciously
fresh, seemed to me to alter in quality, and become very stagnant and
oppressive, and I felt that indefinable sense of ominous apprehension
that I am accustomed to before thunder. John, however, did not share my
views, attributing my loss of lightness to the fact that I had lost both
my matches. Events proved, however, that I was right, though I do not
think that the thunderstorm that broke that night was the sole cause of
my depression.

Our way lay through deep high-banked lanes, and before we had gone very
far I fell asleep, and was only awakened by the stopping of the motor.
And with a sudden thrill, partly of fear but chiefly of curiosity, I
found myself standing in the doorway of my house of dream. We went, I
half wondering whether or not I was dreaming still, through a low
oak-panelled hall, and out on to the lawn, where tea was laid in the
shadow of the house. It was set in flower beds, a red-brick wall, with a
gate in it, bounded one side, and out beyond that was a space of rough
grass with a walnut tree. The façade of the house was very long, and at
one end stood a three-storied tower, markedly older than the rest.

Here for the moment all resemblance to the repeated dream ceased. There
was no silent and somehow terrible family, but a large assembly of
exceedingly cheerful persons, all of whom were known to me. And in spite
of the horror with which the dream itself had always filled me, I felt
nothing of it now that the scene of it was thus reproduced before me.
But I felt the intensest curiosity as to what was going to happen.

Tea pursued its cheerful course, and before long Mrs Clinton got up. And
at that moment I think I knew what she was going to say. She spoke to
me, and what she said was:

“Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.”

At that, for half a second, the horror of the dream took hold of me
again. But it quickly passed, and again I felt nothing more than the
most intense curiosity. It was not very long before it was amply
satisfied.

John turned to me.

“Right up at the top of the house,” he said, “but I think you’ll be
comfortable. We’re absolutely full up. Would you like to go and see it
now? By Jove, I believe that you are right, and that we are going to
have a thunderstorm. How dark it has become.”

I got up and followed him. We passed through the hall, and up the
perfectly familiar staircase. Then he opened the door, and I went in.
And at that moment sheer unreasoning terror again possessed me. I did
not know for certain what I feared: I simply feared. Then like a sudden
recollection, when one remembers a name which has long escaped the
memory, I knew what I feared. I feared Mrs Stone, whose grave with the
sinister inscription, “In evil memory,” I had so often seen in my dream,
just beyond the lawn which lay below my window. And then once more the
fear passed so completely that I wondered what there was to fear, and I
found myself, sober and quiet and sane, in the room in the tower, the
name of which I had so often heard in my dream, and the scene of which
was so familiar.

I looked round it with a certain sense of proprietorship, and found that
nothing had been changed from the dreaming nights in which I knew it so
well. Just to the left of the door was the bed, lengthways along the
wall, with the head of it in the angle. In a line with it was the
fireplace and a small bookcase; opposite the door the outer wall was
pierced by two lattice-paned windows, between which stood the
dressing-table, while ranged along the fourth wall was the washing-stand
and a big cupboard. My luggage had already been unpacked, for the
furniture of dressing and undressing lay orderly on the wash-stand and
toilet-table, while my dinner clothes were spread out on the coverlet of
the bed. And then, with a sudden start of unexplained dismay, I saw that
there were two rather conspicuous objects which I had not seen before in
my dreams: one a life-sized oil-painting of Mrs Stone, the other a
black-and-white sketch of Jack Stone, representing him as he had
appeared to me only a week before in the last of the series of these
repeated dreams, a rather secret and evil-looking man of about thirty.
His picture hung between the windows, looking straight across the room
to the other portrait, which hung at the side of the bed. At that I
looked next, and as I looked I felt once more the horror of nightmare
seize me.

It represented Mrs Stone as I had seen her last in my dreams: old and
withered and white haired. But in spite of the evident feebleness of
body, a dreadful exuberance and vitality shone through the envelope of
flesh, an exuberance wholly malign, a vitality that foamed and frothed
with unimaginable evil. Evil beamed from the narrow, leering eyes; it
laughed in the demon-like mouth. The whole face was instinct with some
secret and appalling mirth; the hands, clasped together on the knee,
seemed shaking with suppressed and nameless glee. Then I saw also that
it was signed in the left-hand bottom corner, and wondering who the
artist could be, I looked more closely, and read the inscription, “Julia
Stone by Julia Stone.”

There came a tap at the door, and John Clinton entered.

“Got everything you want?” he asked.

“Rather more than I want,” said I, pointing to the picture.

He laughed.

“Hard-featured old lady,” he said. “By herself, too, I remember. Anyhow
she can’t have flattered herself much.”

“But don’t you see?” said I. “It’s scarcely a human face at all. It’s
the face of some witch, of some devil.”

He looked at it more closely.

“Yes; it isn’t very pleasant,” he said. “Scarcely a bedside manner, eh?
Yes; I can imagine getting the nightmare if I went to sleep with that
close by my bed. I’ll have it taken down if you like.”

“I really wish you would,” I said.

He rang the bell, and with the help of a servant we detached the
picture and carried it out on to the landing, and put it with its face
to the wall.

“By Jove, the old lady is a weight,” said John, mopping his forehead. “I
wonder if she had something on her mind.”

The extraordinary weight of the picture had struck me too. I was about
to reply, when I caught sight of my own hand. There was blood on it, in
considerable quantities, covering the whole palm.

“I’ve cut myself somehow,” said I.

John gave a little startled exclamation.

“Why, I have too,” he said.

Simultaneously the footman took out his handkerchief and wiped his hand
with it. I saw that there was blood also on his handkerchief.

John and I went back into the tower room and washed the blood off; but
neither on his hand nor on mine was there the slightest trace of a
scratch or cut. It seemed to me that, having ascertained this, we both,
by a sort of tacit consent, did not allude to it again. Something in my
case had dimly occurred to me that I did not wish to think about. It was
but a conjecture, but I fancied that I knew the same thing had occurred
to him.

The heat and oppression of the air, for the storm we had expected was
still undischarged, increased very much after dinner, and for some time
most of the party, among whom were John Clinton and myself, sat outside
on the path bounding the lawn, where we had had tea. The night was
absolutely dark, and no twinkle of star or moon ray could penetrate the
pall of cloud that overset the sky. By degrees our assembly thinned, the
women went up to bed, men dispersed to the smoking or billiard room, and
by eleven o’clock my host and I were the only two left. All the evening
I thought that he had something on his mind, and as soon as we were
alone he spoke.

“The man who helped us with the picture had blood on his hand, too, did
you notice?” he said. “I asked him just now if he had cut himself, and
he said he supposed he had, but that he could find no mark of it. Now
where did that blood come from?”

By dint of telling myself that I was not going to think about it, I had
succeeded in not doing so, and I did not want, especially just at
bedtime, to be reminded of it.

“I don’t know,” said I, “and I don’t really care so long as the picture
of Mrs Julia Stone is not by my bed.”

He got up.

“But it’s odd,” he said. “Ha! Now you’ll see another odd thing.”

A dog of his, an Irish terrier by breed, had come out of the house as we
talked. The door behind us into the hall was open, and a bright oblong
of light shone across the lawn to the iron gate which led on to the
rough grass outside, where the walnut tree stood. I saw that the dog
had all his hackles up, bristling with rage and fright; his lips were
curled back from his teeth, as if he was ready to spring at something,
and he was growling to himself. He took not the slightest notice of his
master or me, but stiffly and tensely walked across the grass to the
iron gate. There he stood for a moment, looking through the bars and
still growling. Then of a sudden his courage seemed to desert him: he
gave one long howl, and scuttled back to the house with a curious
crouching sort of movement.

“He does that half-a-dozen times a day,” said John. “He sees something
which he both hates and fears.”

I walked to the gate and looked over it. Something was moving on the
grass outside, and soon a sound which I could not instantly identify
came to my ears. Then I remembered what it was: it was the purring of a
cat. I lit a match, and saw the purrer, a big blue Persian, walking
round and round in a little circle just outside the gate, stepping high
and ecstatically, with tail carried aloft like a banner. Its eyes were
bright and shining, and every now and then it put its head down and
sniffed at the grass.

I laughed.

“The end of that mystery, I am afraid,” I said. “Here’s a large cat
having Walpurgis night all alone.”

“Yes, that’s Darius,” said John. “He spends half the day and all night
there. But that’s not the end of the dog mystery, for Toby and he are
the best of friends, but the beginning of the cat mystery. What’s the
cat doing there? And why is Darius pleased, while Toby is
terror-stricken?”

At that moment I remembered the rather horrible detail of my dreams when
I saw through the gate, just where the cat was now, the white tombstone
with the sinister inscription. But before I could answer the rain began,
as suddenly and heavily as if a tap had been turned on, and
simultaneously the big cat squeezed through the bars of the gate, and
came leaping across the lawn to the house for shelter. Then it sat in
the doorway, looking out eagerly into the dark. It spat and struck at
John with its paw, as he pushed it in, in order to close the door.

Somehow, with the portrait of Julia Stone in the passage outside, the
room in the tower had absolutely no alarm for me, and as I went to bed,
feeling very sleepy and heavy, I had nothing more than interest for the
curious incident about our bleeding hands, and the conduct of the cat
and dog. The last thing I looked at before I put out my light was the
square empty space by my bed where the portrait had been. Here the paper
was of its original full tint of dark red: over the rest of the walls it
had faded. Then I blew out my candle and instantly fell asleep.

My awaking was equally instantaneous, and I sat bolt upright in bed
under the impression that some bright light had been flashed in my face,
though it was now absolutely pitch dark. I knew exactly where I was, in
the room which I had dreaded in dreams, but no horror that I ever felt
when asleep approached the fear that now invaded and froze my brain.
Immediately after a peal of thunder crackled just above the house, but
the probability that it was only a flash of lightning which awoke me
gave no reassurance to my galloping heart.