Dancers in the dark part 2

 

As the moon cleared the garden wall he pulled himself up the gate until he was standing, legs week and shaking but standing as he looked around. Clutching the carrier bag he started on legs that trembled with each step to follow the wall.

‘There has to be a way, another gate some way over the wall.’ The thought ran around inside his head,

‘There is no escape my little one other than through me, come join my dancers,’

Twice he had walked around the garden looking for a way out. Now in the moonlight he saw it. Whether it was a trick of the light or not he didn’t know; but a pear tree that had been trained against the wall offered hope.

The carrier bag was cumbersome but he made it to the walls top. Legs dangling he let go and dropped down in to the dark shadow below.  

Thick growth on the other side cushioned his fall. Stumbling and clutching the tattered carrier bag to his chest he started following the garden wall towards the road.

‘You cannot run my little dancer there is no escape. My hand is around your heart and mind, yes you are mine. You will return.’

On the road and turning towards the village, physically hurt brought a scream of.

“I am not yours, I shall never be yours.” Laughter echoed in his mind as the words.

‘You are mine little one, you are mine. You have read my contract, you have entered my house, eaten my food, slept in my bed, and now not even death can save you, YOU ARE MINE.’

The thought drove into his mind sending him staggering as if drunk along the road.

A hammering on the pub door brought the landlord cloth in hand to the door. Only to find an exhausted man he hardly recognised falling into his hands. In the better light he had to ask a name, to prove, to know for certain.

Two years and he had changed from a man in his mid-twenties to a skeleton of the man he had known

“What in god’s name’s happened to you?” There was just a shake of his head and a horse.

“I don’t know. No I do, but please don’t ask. If you knew I think you would be in danger, don’t ask.”

“I’ll get you a drink.”

“Can you let me stay here tonight?”

“There’s a room yes.”

“With a lock on the door and window?”

“I have an attic room where the window doesn’t open, why?”

“Until day light, and I need to be locked in.”

“Well I’ve heard of people being locked out but you’re the first I’ve had ask to be locked in. And I have a feeling that I shouldn’t ask why. Let me get you that drink.”

With the electric light and a mind that was starting to function and with the will read and read again a possible germ of an idea stirred in his mind.

What time he eventually succumbed to sleep he couldn’t remember. But sleep brought memories and dreams, dreams of men and women he now knew to be the long gone owners of the house, along with the servants and men who he knew to be the missing builders. Who, to the music of the dammed, danced in agony, as they endlessly cleaned polished and repaired, and there was a place waiting for him. Or had they. Had everything about the house been a lie? He didn’t know, what he did know was he wasn’t going back there until he had an answer.

On the bus no one paid much attention to the emancipated elderly man clutching a battered carrier bag. Nor did they, as he made his way to a certain solicitors on the high street.

Mr Wilson, senior partner had to look twice at the man who entered his office. Finding it difficult to believe that this victim of Auschwitz was the young man he had dealt with just three years previously.

After a quick read of the hand written and copied notes Mr Wilson cleared his diary for the day.  He then sat and listened in horror to what was happening at the house. With the state of his client it was all too easy to believe what he was being told and had read.

The complicated contract with ridiculous, complicated and meaningless stipulations signed by his client before coming to England baffled him.

Why would an unbreakable contract binding the descendant of Sir Francis Dashwood to the house after just one night spent under that roof be needed.

And the clauses on the sale and disposal, many of them baffling, though all of them still binding.

Finally putting the file to one side he looked at his client and said.

“Once you have spent a night in the house I can see no way that for you to break this contract, or contest the will. The house is yours until you die, or are declared and found to be so. Only then it will pass to the next nearest surviving male descendent of Sir Francis Dashwood. You cannot sell the property, you cannot give the property to any person, man or woman or animal, The only one after your death who can accept the property, has to be a male and a living relative of Sir Francis Dashwood.”

 “I have seen that, but what if the property is not sold or given to a living, person?”

“I’m sorry, just what are you suggesting?”

“Last night, to try and take my mind away from the house I listened to the radio. There was a man talking about stately homes. Mr Wilson, put me right if I am wrong but the terms of the will state that once slept in, the house cannot be sold or given to any living person other than the nearest living relative of the deceased Sir Francis Dashwood, Am I correct?” There was a slow nod from Mr Wilson.

“Put me right on this if I am wrong, but here is nothing in that will or contract that says the house cannot be given to a charity. After all it will not be sold to a living person as no money changes hands. Also it has not been given to a living person, a charity is not a living person, and if no money changes hands it hasn’t been sold.” 

There was a silence for several minutes as Mr Wilson re-read the will, finally looking up he said.

“I believe you could be correct. When this will was drawn up there was nothing like what you propose. Today we have The National Trust. Given to the trust the property has no human owner. Basically it belongs to the members, but as they have no ownership rights they cannot spend one night as full owner residents. But are you willing to give the property without reservations to the trust?”

“Mr Wilson, I will willingly give the house, lock stock and smoking barrel to the trust, with not a brass, cent changing hands.”

Three nights in a hotel just a street away from the offices of Mr Wilson, his mind bruised into submission by lack of sleep had him walking out of the hotel, only to be stopped on the previous orders of himself and Mr Wilson by the door man.

 That first night the nightmare’s had returned. The voice, at first gentle and persuasive, before becoming threatening, demanding his return. Sleeping pills became a necessity. During the day the voice was just a whisper in his head that he could ignore and as the days passed his mind slowly cleared.

It was two weeks before Mr Wilson summoned him back to his office where he and a solicitor from The National Trust went over what they proposed. They both agreed that the building and gardens as a gift to the Trust would be legal and within the terms of the will, and as a final to the transaction Mr Wilson said.

“I’m sure you will be pleased to know, that the money left to you is not covered by this will. Though under the terms of the gift you will receive nothing on the property you will continue to have the income from the monies left to you. You be still a very rich man.”

“Mr Wilson, all I want is to be free of that cursed property, and the sooner the better.”

“Very well, I shall have the provisional documents prepared for you by the end of the month.”

As the Representative of the National Trust left Mr Wilson turned to hear.
“Mr Wilson, I know this may be unusual, and I know I will have to trust you and the Trust, but I think it would be wise if I signed the documents as soon as possible. That is just in case that house regains its hold on my mind.”

“Do you believe that is possible?”

“I know it is, I can feel it even here pulling me back. Mr Wilson, I am going to stop in that room across the road with a phone. If you get a phone call from me or the hotel, get someone across there to restrain me. Have a document made ready to that effect and I will sign it now.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It’s been three years, and I remember nothing or almost nothing of that time, other than the dreams, even now that house is pulling at me. Twenty five miles and it still has a hand around my mind, pulling me back.”

Mr Wilson sat studding his client, seeing the ravages of three years living in that mansion, he now decided.

“That will not be necessary.” He took a card from his desk and wrote on it before pushing it across the desk saying.

“That first number is my home number the second is my partner’s home number, ring either or both and at least one of us will be with you within twenty minutes. In the mean time I shall do my best to have the transfer of the property pushed through as quickly as possible.”

‘Ten days I have been locked in that room and now all I have to do is sign. Mr Wilson and the trust representatives have already accepted it as legal and binding but my hand shakes so much I can hardly hold the pen.

Signed I hear Mr Wilson say Signed and now you are free, quite a rich man and free what do you intend to do now. I struggle to think, I think I have things, my things, I should get them. I ask.’

“My things still in the house will I be able to get them?”

‘As if in a dream I hear the Trust’s representative saying I can, and that he is going personally accompany me there.

‘Now my eyes wander through that garden, that beautiful garden now seen through clear eyes is a jungle, and the house run down. The magnificent front door that had opened so easily for me now takes both of us to move it. Cobwebs thick dust and footprints.

Foot prints. My foot prints cross and cross again from stairs to library and the front door. I go to the library Mr Frost following, taking notes. Books on dusty and cobweb draped shelves greet us, disturbed only between Books that I have taken and the table I have used.

We go to the kitchen to find it barren and dirty. What crockery on the shelves, broken, smashed. The cold room; now just a small dirty room, it’s shelves laden with mould. Up the stairs we follow my foot cleared dust to my glorious bedroom, the first door on the corridor. There should have been a large four-poster bed with beautiful embroidered covers, magnificent carpets, and beautiful furniture only to find. A dirty a box room with soiled bedding. I say bedding rags insufficient to make a cover.  I feel sick, I hear the Trusts representative hurry from the room, I follow

Yet there is one place I have never seen, and now I am drawn to it, the cellar.

With a torch from the car we make our way down the stone steps and into the dark. I know what I must see and it frightens me. This I know. This is something I must see. Wooden shelves against a wall reluctantly move at our pulling. A thick door behind equally resists our opening giving only inches at a time, reluctantly.

A passage just a crack in the rock takes us to a cave, a cave and bodies. Scant flesh covers bones, bones of men who died where they sat or lay. The missing builders huddled together, women in fine clothes arranged alongside women in rags.

We made our way deeper into the caves, we come to a larger cave where men and women in obscene postures and positions are scattered around. This, this was the Hell fire club. While looking down from a magnificent throne, dressed in all his finery, the un-corrupted body of a man that could only be Sir Francis Dashwood. He is sitting there lording over them all, while looking just as he must have in life.

It was only after the door had been closed and the wooden shelves back hiding it that my companion who was as shaken as any man could be asked.

“How did you know about all that?”

Sitting on the low wall around the cross I told him, told him what little I remembered of the three years I had lived in luxury. Of how I used to sit here on this wall enjoying the sun. The one place my mind half worked. The one place I was alive.

It was only when we were sitting in his car ready to leave that he showed me a copy of the original drawings of the garden. Saying as he pointed out a building.

“Where that cross is now, that was the site of the original village church, Your Sir Francis had it pulled down when he evicted the village. There is a story, that when they were removing that stone cross from the church there was a violent storm and the cross was ripped from the roof to end up buried in that same stone where it is now. Your Sir Francis was so terrified that he had that low wall built around it and then just left it there. It was said that on certain nights of the year, nights when Sir Francis was holding one of his parties it would glow.

Looking back, I think I owe my sanity and my life to that cross, and that is why every year on the day that the Trust took over the running of the house, a large display of flowers is placed there.

June 1979

I didn’t stop in England, I moved back to Canada where I met my present wife. This is our anniversary, twenty five years. I had told her everything I remembered before we married and promised someday, I would take her and show her the house.

Now on our twenty-fifth anniversary we were sitting in that same village pub enjoying a meal served by the same landlord I knew all those years ago.  

The house, what a surprise, it’s magnificent being restored to all its former glory, even the garden, and to our surprise on the low wall around the cross a plaque with details of how the house came to be given to the Trust, with my name and everything.

Inside we met the Curator, after hearing who I was, he agreed to take us on a guided tour of the caves under the house. The Curator explained for my wife, that they were normally opened only on special occasions, and that the bodies had been removed, all three hundred to be buried in the local church cemetery. To be replaced later by effigies once the electric lighting had been installed to create the required atmosphere.

It was different, electric lighting not a feeble torch took all the mystery out of it, but my wife later admitted being down there frightened her. We shan’t go again, especially to that pub. My wife beat me all three games darts we played.