11 - Sinister House by Leland Hall

What is it about that old house down the road that unnerves Pierre and his wife, Annette? The owners, Eric and Julia, appear to be a lovely couple, yet an unsettling aura of malevolence surrounds them. While Eric seems to radiate a supernatural darkness wherever he goes, Julia bears mysterious injuries that hint at a deeper horror. Are Erics sinister vibes the true source of her suffering, or is there something even more terrifying lurking within the walls of their home? (Summary by Ben Tucker)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eleven of Sinister House by Leland Hall. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker,
Chapter eleven. In the room, Annette was the first to move.
She turned off the gas which was escaping from the burner.
Then she came and took my arm. Together we looked
down at Eric, still kneeling bent over the head of

(00:22):
his wife. A figure of unutterable woe. Was Julia dead.
She did not move, she did not make a sound.
Eric too, was motionless and silent. We waited a long time,
my wife and I. At last she went softly up
to Eric and touched his shoulder, And when even then
he did not notice us, she raised his head and,

(00:44):
with calm tenderness, asked, is Julia living? Eric? He merely
looked up at her dumbly. So she lifted Julia from
his arms and let her down on the bed. She
lay as wide and as peaceful as marble. But she
was not cold. SHELI. After we had watched her for
half an hour and were assured that she slept tranquility

(01:05):
and unmolested, Annette directed my attention to Eric, who all
that time had remained sitting cross legged on the floor,
his head dropped low over his chest. I roused him
from his profound absorption, made him understand that he too
must go to bed and sleep, and gave him a
hand to help him to his feet. He was dazed
and already a little out of his head again. I

(01:27):
let him stand and look down at Julia a while,
but he said nothing, and though his gaze was fixed
upon her face, his look was vague. He followed me
meekly enough into the next room, and without a murmur,
let me undress him and get him to bed. But
instead of falling into a reposeful sleep, he became more
and more restless. His face flushed with fever, and his

(01:50):
sunken eyes began to blaze with delirious excitement. Yet I
felt strangely relieved. The instinct which had informed me that
the happiness of Eric and Julia was menaced by a
secret peril, now assured me no less certainly that that peril,
the nature of which had been revealed to me, was
exercised and banished. The time I spent at Eric's bedside

(02:12):
seemed to me, for all the darkness, the cold, and
the unelectric night wind of autumn, like the relaxed afternoon
hours which follow a heavy thunder storm in midsummer. Between
Julia and the sun, the jet black clouds of Eric's
past life had mounted. I had been beside her in
the ever deepening shadow, had shared with her the dread

(02:33):
of destructive wild forces, not knowing when they would be
entirely loosened, or where or how they would strike. But
we had withstood the worst, and now I felt as
I felt looking upon the rear of such storms, softened
by the mists of recent rain in the air, majestic
yet no longer threatening, a jumbled and indistinct splendor. Of course,

(02:57):
this was only a queer vision in my mind, which,
while relieved of the worst anxiety, was tired and vaporish.
Nothing I have since learned of Morgan Snart and his
daughter could suggest a comparison with any of the magnificent
aspects of nature, not even with the cruel beasts, or
with cold blooded and repugnant creatures of what we call
lower forms of life. They were a cold and an

(03:19):
unkind pair. They remained unwarmed even by the suffering they
inflicted upon others, which none the less apparently thrilled some
secret nerve of voluptuousness within them. But there was a
wild and for the moment a ruined splendor about Eric.
It was a strange waning of the night I passed

(03:40):
through by his bed. Not until just before dawn did
his ravings become quite incoherent, And for more than an
hour I answered his odd questions in hopes that he
would quiet down. When he sat up in bed, I
pressed him back as gently as I could. I can
see him well now as I write, tall and thin,
his old facts and nightgown. I had sought for pajamas,

(04:02):
but could find none, hanging loose and open from his shoulders.
When before I got him to lie down again, he
would sit leaning forward over his knees. I remember clearly
certain looks on his face, especially the sober thoughtfulness in
his eyes. When for the first few times he mentioned
the telegram. He spoke of this again and again, in

(04:24):
the midst of a gentle discourse on the merits of
Jonathan Edwards, or of something sentimental about the return of
a lost lamb to the fold. He would say, I
have always thought telegrams brought bad news, but it was
good news. I must always be honest. Of course, God
knew that I was glad to hear that he too
was dead. God sent the automobile against him. But I

(04:45):
no longer believe he did that to please me. I
did not think I could be so glad again. She
must have been dead a long time. She was stiff
on the floor. I would not touch her. No, but
the telegram, with the glad tidings, I laid it across
her dead hand. Oh no, that would not have killed her.

(05:07):
I closed her fingers with my foot, but my shoe
was on it. I would not have touched her, and
I am sure I did not step on her hand. Then,
when I thought he was about to lose this train
of thought, he invariably went on, You did not think
that telegram killed her, did you? I assure you I
did not kill her either. Her heart split with wickedness

(05:29):
while I was out of doors. I ran very fast
away from the house because I hated her so and
I walked very slowly back because I did not know
what to do. Her heart split with wickedness while I
was away, and she fell down dead on the floor.
That is why I put the telegram in her dead hand.

(05:49):
It was a perfect vengeance. He would have died a
second time, to know that I got his money so
little too. I have put this down more coherent then
he said it. But even from his confused ramblings that night,
I guessed what his crime had been. As I tell you,
he went through this cycle of thought many times, and

(06:10):
feverish as he was, he had a way of fastening
his eyes on mine each time he went through it,
always with the same sober thoughtfulness I have mentioned. I
am glad to say I never caught in them the
faintest glimmer of craftiness or calculation. As he grew wilder,
his repetitions of the story were less and less detailed,
but he insisted with louder and firmer voice, that she

(06:33):
died before he did, and that he had punished them,
just as if he took great pride in letting the
world know that he alone had been able to execute
a proper vengeance upon them. I shall never know precisely
what was in his mind when, by the mere act
of laying the telegram and the dead hold a hand,
he made it appear beyond question that the news of

(06:53):
her father's sudden death had killed her. That he did
so deliberately, I did not doubt with a holy acute
realization that his act would make him heir to whatever
Morgan Snart had willed to his daughter, but that he
acted from covetousness. I will never believe some hardly more
than instinctive demand for retribution, a cold passion for revenge,

(07:16):
a single lust for triumph over them, something of all those,
I think sprang into one swift, clear and irrevocable act,
the revolt from their persistent and consciously refined cruelties. Subsequently,
he could not have escaped the knowledge that he had
committed an act that made him a criminal in the
eyes of the law. But the small inheritance he had acquired,

(07:39):
the old house in Stanton and some broken down property
in Buffalo remained for him the hard and vast substance
of his victory Overholda and Morgan Snart, and he would
never relinquish it. He brought Julia to see the house
behind the hemlocks. He had never been in it before,
because he imagined that to be happy there with her
would make that victory supreme. Well, they had risen up

(08:01):
to score on him again, and the second scoring was
more terrible than the first. I assure you that I
had no curiosity in regard to the details of what
he had lived through with them, How or where he
ever met the wicked woman who wore upon his early
religious fervor, hypnotized him, and finally married him, perhaps only

(08:21):
to torture his fine sensibilities. I have never sought to
learn of what seethed up out of the mutilated heart
while I sat by his bed. I have only fragmentary recollections.
Much was too painful to bear repeating. None of us
knows how sensitive the other fellow may be. Some things,
such as the wanton uprooting of the few flowers he

(08:43):
had planted secretly, and the stripping of everything of beauty
and comfort from the house, wounded him deeply. One might
be tempted to think him as softy for that. Others
The crude disfigurement of his mother's photograph and the cutting
off by lies and malice of every soul dispose to
be friendly to him, would have made most men entirely angry,

(09:04):
but Eric until he finally turned against him, suffered in heart, first, surprised,
later afraid and horrified. When he did turn, it was
over an unmentionable piece of cruelty. To a bird. His
revulsion of feeling was so fierce that he never got
over it, more than I imagine the surface of the

(09:25):
earth rent by a volcanic eruption, ever becomes whole again
as it was before. It was about half past four
when he began humming, and from then on he was
hardly sane for a minute. He sang snatches of hymns,
not quiet old household favorites, but wild revival hymns which
make the blood curdle. And though it was the rising

(09:45):
fever that was overthrowing his reason, I think he maddened
himself a good deal with his own singing, as I
have been told fanatical persons often do. Between the crazy
strains of song, he would sometimes subside to say such
things as, when I was a boy, I loved flowers,
yet my mother was a Christian woman. Or I loved animals,

(10:08):
and they are God's creatures like the rest of us.
I liked the rest of us all but that cursed
pair that must have been weaned in a hell of
ice before they ever came upon this earth. At the
height of his frenzy, he sprang out of bed and shouted,
shaking his fist defiantly above his head. No, I was

(10:30):
not created for suffering. With the help of Annette, who
had been roused from her slumber at Julia's bed by
his cry, I got him back where he belonged. He
had exhausted his strength in a wild reenactment of his
great outburst upon Holda. Just before he relapsed into complete unconsciousness,
he had a moment's calm in which he looked up

(10:51):
at a net, mistaking her for Julia, and said, tenderly,
she will not dare haunt me, dear. I frightened her
to death, and she will be shut up fast in
hell for her wickedness. There was something so childlike and
pathetic in the way he said this that the tears
came into my eyes. It doesn't do any good at

(11:13):
all to say boo at the past when you're afraid
of it. I went over to the window and parted
the curtains. The night was just beginning to give way.
I couldn't see the river in the deep shadow of
its gorge, but to the right I could make out
against the dim gray sky, the bowing and slipping of
the hemlock tops, and the cold and steady wind. I

(11:36):
don't know why. I recalled the picture of my wife's
walking up and down with her son in her arms,
shouting boo at the horrid dream. How they had dogged
poor Eric, how terribly they had scored against him once more.
But I had faith that against him and Julia united,
they should never hereafter prevail, Annette said I had better

(11:58):
go for the doctor, so I stole out of the chamber.
But when I found myself in the dark upper hallway,
the memory of how earlier in the night we had
struggled up the stairs against the nameless and then invisible
evil swept over me like a chill. For a moment,
I lost my nerve. I slunk back into Eric's room
for another word with a net. I didn't like to

(12:19):
leave her and go down those stairs alone. I took
a good long look at Eric's flushed face. Even in
his ravings, there had been something human, something warm. What's
the matter, my wife asked me. I don't know, I
answered foolishly. I feel queer in that hallway. It's cold
and ruined. I saw her turn pale. They will not

(12:43):
come back again, she whispered, It gives me the creeps.
But I wasn't going to ask her to come downstairs
with me. I returned to the hall alone and started down.
The drafts were icy cold. I noticed, with a sick
feeling at my heart that the banister rails had been broken,
and the rose damask that had hung down from the
upper wall had been pulled from its fastenings and was

(13:06):
all awry and torn. Half way down, I felt as
if I could go no farther over the way those
fiends had made off on. There was a sort of dim,
gray luminousness in the lower hallway, the dawn stealing in
through the front door, in which the glass panels had
been smashed. The curtains that used to cover them had
been ripped from their rods and dangled in tatters to

(13:27):
the floor from the edges of the broken panes. I
think I was about to break into tears, but my
strained eyes caught sight of something that stiffened me with horror.
Prone on the floor at the foot of the stairs,
amid all the debris lay g Aisles, I whispered his name.
He did not answer. He lay still on the floor,
vague in the gloomy and imperfect light of the early dawn,

(13:50):
screwing up the last poor shred of my nerve. I
went down to him. He was breathing. I was devoutly
thankful for that, yet another human life saved out of
this night of wickedness. Gently as I could, I turned
him on his back, and then I fetched water from
the kitchen and sprinkled it on his face. I got
a piece of glass stuck in my foot, too, for
I had not put on my shoes since I had

(14:10):
gone up just before one o'clock to Julia's room. Maybe
it was partly the pain of that which made me
feel like snickering, for that is how I did feel,
even before I assured myself that Giles had been dazed
by a heavy blow on the forehead and was not dying.
When he opened his eyes and looked up at me,
kneeling like a musculman behind him in the gloom, I
wanted more than anything in the world to jibber. After

(14:33):
a minute or two, he recognized me, and then between
his groans, he said, something came down as stairs. It
hit me what the devil was it? And that was
just too much for me. I sat back on my
stockinged heels, hid my face in my hands, and laughed
like a fool. Well, here's an end to the strange story.

(14:53):
You would not be interested in the convalescence of Eric
and his wife. They were not your friends as they
were mine. You never saw the You never went into
their queer house. What's more, you never will go into it,
because it was burned down the following Christmas. Neither Annette
nor I ever entered it again. After the doctor came
and took charge of Eric, bound up Giles's head, pronounced Julia,

(15:14):
recovering from her cold, drew the glass from my foot
and told my wife she looked tired and better go
home for a little sleep. Julia was up the very
next day and had Eric taken to New York. Later.
While they were away, they hired men to move out
their furniture and close up the house. It was presently
for sale. No one knows how the fire that destroyed
it started. By that time, the old place had been

(15:37):
entirely deserted for more than six weeks. But oh, my
own house, our good looking little cement house. Nothing ever
looked better to my eyes than that did the morning
we returned to it, and it was still locked up
tight too. Felicia had obeyed Annette to the letter. She
would never have opened a door or a window until
hunger drove her out. I must confess that when we

(15:59):
scurried up the ground an aolithic walk, the little house
did look like a county jail. You remember, That's how
Giles thought most of the houses and foresby looked. But
poor Giles didn't get a glimpse of it. That morning.
His head was aching very painfully. He swore he had
been struck by lightning. I remember I had to help
him up to the front door, and I was limping
at that. We must all have looked ridiculous. Little Bobby

(16:23):
tumbled out on us like a puppy, and old Felicia
mopped her eyes with the corner of her apron, muttering
Christian thinks and glorifications. I don't suppose she knew just
the nature of the peril which had threatened us, and which,
glory be to God, we had escaped. But she had
felt it. That is the infallible barometer. Now, when I
feel the creeps, I know there's something doing, whether I

(16:45):
see it or not, which God forbid I should ever
see again. Dear old Giles, he had the strength of
a bull. It took more than the blow of a
ghost to lay him low in a blood soaked field.
Sometimes I wonder if he didn't really save us, if
it wasn't he that shocked out of Eric the words
that did the trick. When he left us, he asked

(17:06):
me to drive to the station by way of the
old house. We went right up to the front door.
In the ford. Boards were nailed over the smashed glass
panes in the door. Every window was shuttered in perfect silence.
We cast an eye over it all, each absorbed in
his own thoughts. When we were back on the flat
highway again, he said, turning away from me, She is

(17:26):
a fine woman, Pierre. I hope they will be happy.
Now there's lightning and lightning, and still another lightning after all.
As for Annette, she will not voluntarily recall those dreadful
nights to her mind. In the three years that have passed,
we have talked of them only once. I know she
fears the effect of them upon me. That's all. She acknowledged, however,

(17:48):
that there was something unusual in the house the night
Julia was so sick and Eric went out of his head. Now,
if I try to talk of it again, she looks
at me as if I were out of my mind
that worries her, for I'm the bread winner. So I
go on commuting and keep my mouth shut about the
upper or nether spheres. To tell the truth, I shall
be glad when the memory has faded. Take it all

(18:10):
and all. There was nothing in it but terrible suffering
for Julia and Eric. You should see foresby in the
winter time. There's a foot of snow on the ground
now in the middle of January, and the nights are
very cold, but it's healthy for the children, and hard
as it is sometimes to get to and from the
station and the ford. We wouldn't move into the city
for anything. Think of giving up the spotless fields and

(18:34):
roads of snow for the city's soot, or the silence
of the nights for the racket and town, or the
whole expanse of clear black sky with its brilliant independent
stars for the street lights and a rift between the
roof tops. We have a blazing fire on the hearth
every night, and we sit before it until it's time
to go to bed, my wife and I, sometimes reading,

(18:55):
sometimes talking, sometimes dreaming, but never haunted. A day or
two ago we had a letter from Julia who with Eric,
has gone to France. They are going to devote themselves
in what is theirs, to the alleviation of the great
suffering that has come upon the world. I mustn't forget
to tell you that Julia's small fortune has recently been increased.

(19:15):
As for what Eric inherited from Morgan Snart, I will never,
please Heaven write that name again. They have made that
over to some relief organization. They too have gone in
the Red Cross. Last night I sat here before the
fire with my pencil and my manuscript. Annette was reading
one of the two new magazines to which we have subscribed,

(19:36):
either The House Decorated or The Home Beautiful. Isn't that
a funny trace of it all? I couldn't write anything,
as you know, there's nothing more to write. My unguided
pencil just went on scrawling over the paper. The Singing House.
A piece of burning wood snapped and sent a big
spark out on the rug. I got up to kick
it back to the hearthstone, and then I went over

(19:56):
to the door and went out on the porch. It
was cold and still. There was no moon, and the
stars were like diamonds, just as the mighty things will
always go on being to humans when the air is clear.
I looked to the north, and in my mind I
saw the black spread of charred embers on the snow
where the old house had stood. I could not hear

(20:17):
a sound, and with my eyes could see nothing but
the expanse of white snow, and a long way down
the road to the right, a light in the window
of our nearest neighbor's house. So I came back again
to the fire, but not to try to write, just
to think, Giles gone. Well, it will come to me too,
and before long. But what a life to look back on,

(20:40):
What a memory always this house and this life of mine,
and this wife and my children. That's the point I've
had it. Whereas Eric, they have gone, and we shall
not see them again, at least not for a long time.
Only a mass of charred embers marks the place where
their house of horror stood. Here is my wife training

(21:02):
her mind to see in houses a beauty she thought
she missed in theirs. Here am I regarding still as
a nightmare. What entered into my flesh as a most
terrible reality? And has I know colored my outlook upon
life for the rest of my mortal days. What does
it all amount to if it isn't just a story
to tell first and last, like all stories, not to

(21:24):
be explained, like all stories first and last. True, there,
said Annette to me, handing me over a Cromo from
the home. Beautiful is a hanging on that wall, like
the one Julia had in her house. I wonder how
a curtain or something would look on the wall upstairs,
but I guess not. It would only catch the dust
in things, Yes, I repeated, quite like a melancholy tragedy,

(21:47):
and of the hollow old school, dust and things, things
and dust. What's the matter with you, Pierre? You're talking nonsense.
You've been getting up and sitting down and going to
the door as if you expected somebody to come. I
looked at her and grinned. Nobody would come so late
as this, My love, you've been working too long on

(22:09):
that book. You're tired out, and you'd better go to bed, Annette,
I said, laying my hand over hers. There isn't any
dustin things in this house. That's why we're so happy.
Let's be sure there never is any. She gave me
a funny look with her shrewd blue eyes. You mind
your business, Pierre, and I'll mind mine. Now, run along

(22:30):
to bed. It's late, so I locked the doors and
windows just as I always locked them, went upstairs after
my wife, put out the lights downstairs from the switch
on the upper floor, and made ready for bed. But
before I turned in, I had to look out the
window a little while. There wasn't a thing to see
except stars and snow. Annette warned me that I should

(22:52):
catch my death of cold. Well. After I'd put out
the little light on the table by my bed, I
strained my ears to hear something, and I heard the
whistle of the last train from New York. There was
not a sound in our dark house. Surely, I whispered
to my wife, finding her hand and giving her a
good night squeeze. No one will come so late as this,

(23:15):
of course, not. What are you thinking of? Nothing? Go
to sleep. Then I did so, and met nothing on
the way. End of chapter eleven, end of Sinister House
by Leland Hall