6. Dancing Shoes / How the Fox Feels

Elizabeth explores London's nightlife. Jon finds himself under suspicion at Kilphaun Hall.


Additional Sound:
Music: Speakeasy by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
Music: Jolly Good by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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Transcript

THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU Season One

A Podcast concerning love, madness, mystery, murder and dead gods in 1920's Ireland and England

THWDY  Episode 1.06

'Dancing Shoes'

Bloomsbury, London WC

22nd  November, 1925,

My dear Jon,

You must put some iodine on that cut on your hand or it will only get worse. 

This morning, you will be pleased to hear, I am taking my ease and resting the better to regain my strength after the excitement of the last few days and our blissful dinner last night! What a place London is, even in this late November dreary weather, when the cold clings to the very brickwork and the only way possible to escape its dank persistence is to travel by cab and remain in the bright indoors! 

I have with me some scribblings and sketches found among Father’s papers which I’d located one morning while Mother was shopping in Marlford. I will send you a sketch of what Father called a “Gorgon’s Head” referring to something encountered on one of his Mediterranean tours, from long ago before I was born.  It bears more than a passing resemblance to a triskelion – three hooked limbs radiating out from a centre, each one elaborately decorated.  Next to the sketch was a barely legible note– but it could say “Blackwater Valley” – together with a text fragment in a strange alphabet.  However I wanted to show Dr Rookfield the sketch first and he has taken it to make a copy. 

We did have a most sublime evening! Of course I had absolutely nothing to wear and so I borrowed a charming green watered silk dropped waist dress from Celia, who kindly agreed to accompany me, given our concerns about the propriety of such an invitation. She was wearing a most becoming eau de nil chiffon gown with a feathered trim and one of those new bandeau headpieces which did suit her. 

Dr Rookfield seemed most pleased to have the pair of us grace his table. He did not seem to me to be the sort of fellow who would mind an imbalance in the number and sex of the company. Mid-thirties, I would say, somewhat raffish in style, dark curlyish hair, and much of the bon viveur about his disposition. The Irish turn of phrase I originally noticed in his speech was more subdued at dinner though it was still there. I was unsure how to inquire but he saved me the need by referring to some grand times he had spent in his studies at the University college in Cork. His dress and manner were both relaxed and I can imagine him in a collegiate setting.

The dining room was most elegantly appointed; high ceilings with an ornate frieze around the cornicing, which depicted fascinating scenes of action  - but I could not quite decipher the detail, not quite classical. Dr Rookfield airily referred to the symbolism but did not elaborate. The venue being so close to the Freemasons’ Lodge it is not surprising to have acquired some arcane insignia by association. 

Well, to the dinner. Mindful of my recent illness I did not want anything too rich, but the invalid menu was limited, and I was pleased with my choice of lamb chops, hearty and nutritious.  Dr Rookfield, who, incidentally is a doctor of philosophy rather than medicine, did suggest that my pallor might be due to an influence by malign spirits, and that I could be in the path of conflicting cross-currents in the ether, pulling me by metaphysical magnetic forces, and he suggested a visit to a spiritualist clairvoyant of his acquaintance. 

This sounded most intriguing, but Celia voiced her view that it was all bunkum and that there was a great nightclub not far away on the fringes of Soho whose aura we’d be much better off absorbing. I expected Dr Rookfield to be offended but with alacrity he suggested we go there and called a cab. The place was very popular but we secured a small table at the front close to the band, whose performance was very lively and theatrical throughout. I was glad to have borrowed the green silk, as the other female patrons at the nightclub were very dressed up and it did make me realise how quickly fashions have changed. 

Jon, I have never been to a nightclub before and it was a most exhilarating experience, though after the gimlet cocktails and exotic cigarettes I do feel strangely polluted and long for green grass and country air. As it is, however, I have another sunray treatment next week, so I think maybe to stay in London rather than make the journey to and from Wiltshire. Cousin Celia is dismissive of the clairvoyant but says there are great shops and some more nightclubs we can go to. 

Celia and I have been discussing Lily. We are both concerned about the pace at which George’s interest is developing and I do wish Aunt Edith could keep her meddlesome nose out of such matters. Lily may be a lovely young lady but the uncle sounds rather reprehensible and I think we need to know more about his dubious actions. 

I do hope that after my second treatment next week and depending what the clairvoyant says I may be in a fit state to consider rejoining you in Ireland. I think its high time I was involved with George’s situation and of course I long to see you. What do you think, given the time of year, if I take the northerly route via Holyhead, where the crossing is generally less rough and the mail train faster and more reliable? As I am already in London it would be quite practical. Would you or George be able to meet me in Dublin?  It might be good for you to absent yourself from the Blackwater valley for a few days while all this domestic upheaval is resolved. 

I am not sure however about our next encounter with Dr Rookfield.  As the cab dropped us off in Bloomsbury I noticed he was gazing up at our upstairs windows with keen interest. Something – I know not what – made me uneasy and I made sure to fasten all the window latches and draw the heavy curtains firmly across before retiring for the night. This morning I feel more at ease but in no hurry to venture forth although I must post this letter . 

I do hope for our fond reunion soon.

Your loving fiancée,

Elizabeth

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'How The Fox Feels'
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Kilphaun Hall

23th November 1925

My dearest Elizabeth,

I suppose I should be glad that you are finally experiencing the cosmopolitan life of London. There was many a time I tried and failed to tempt you up there from cosy Wiltshire, and now this Roland has set you dining and dancing there like a mad thing, with only your cousin Celia for company. 

I certainly wish I was there with you and not here. But here I will stay to assist George. Things have gotten tricky here, and stranger. I am just back from the village, where I had hoped to interview some of the missing boy’s friends as to whether they had explored the mound in the hidden valley above us. Whereas before, notwithstanding certain politicised factions, I have been warmly greeted, now I was met with suspicious glances and closed doors. 

Another person has gone missing and the local gossips have made connections where none exist. 

To be honest after the last few nights, I am not so sure they are wrong. I keep remembering now that sailor’s warning - that the storm was the land itself trying to keep someone or something out of Ireland. Could it have been me? My hand aches all the time now, but it is not infected or swollen. I dream terrible dreams, or are they visions? 

It is two days now since that poor doomed electrician, Jim Foley, tumbled into me and sealed his fate. 

The day after, I was quite enervated and listless, much to George’s dissatisfaction. Oddly, by the evening I had perked up and enjoyed a pleasant dinner with him and aunt Edith. That night, I eventually slept, tiredness winning out over fears of mysterious visions of mounds and fire. 

In the middle of the night I awoke to a noise. The sound came again, a snickering of metal as if, somewhere close, two blades were drawn across each other. The room throbbed to some unearthly pulse and I could feel rather than hear it, a low sound deep in my bones, echoing the pulsing ache in my hand. 

The house was still. I could see the half moon out the window through a crack in the curtains. From outside I heard the mournful crying. I got up. My window looks west and the weak light of the moon shone on the lawns. At first I saw nothing besides Mr Simmon’s damned plants, but then sure enough a large fox sauntered cheekily out from under a bush. It stopped in the middle of the lawn and looked up at me. I mean, it may have been just looking at the house, but I could see the glint of its eyes. It stared at me and I stared back for the longest time. It didn’t scream again but abruptly put its head down and strolled off out of my view.

It was then that I heard breathing. Someone had crept in behind me, into my room, while I was transfixed! I spun around. The furniture and walls were a play of dark shadows and grey surfaces, lit only by the thin light of the moon. The dim room was empty. I shivered, suddenly cold. I had been convinced someone had been here with me. I considered relighting the bedroom’s fire, but it had been banked for the night and it seemed too much trouble. 

I got back into bed and pulled the heavy blankets over me. Unnerved, I did not sleep and was ashamed at myself for being so. My hand ached. I lay there, unmoving. I imagined again I heard the breathing, heavy and wheezing. I refused to look though, to give credence to these night time chills. I tried to go to sleep and failed.

Then, ever so slowly at first, someone began to pull the blankets from my bed. They slid down past my shoulders.  I was frozen, helpless. The blankets continued their inexorable movement. I felt utterly exposed. Then came that terrible snickering sound again, shockingly close and that new terror freed me from my catatonic state all at once. I leapt up in bed, turning as I did so. 

The room was again empty. The blankets slid to the floor, gravity only directing them. My door which had been shut was ajar and I saw a pale movement - someone had just moved past it!

Anger gripped me. Whoever was playing silly games  with me in the middle of the night was going to regret it. I slid my feet into my slippers and grabbed my torch from my night table. I didn’t turn it on though, but stole quietly out of my room. I wanted to catch Murphy or whoever it was in the act. 

I went down past the closed doors of the other bedrooms.  I slipped out onto the first floor landing that wraps the great hall. A full moon was shining bright through a pane of the roof pyramid and across the north wall threw a distorted monochrome image. I was just in time to see a figure cross the hall below me and enter the north wing. 

Down the stairs I went. The moonlight was untrustworthy and I had to tread carefully as the stairs always seemed too short or too long a drop. I told myself that it was an effect of the slashes of moon shadow thrown by the pyramid above me, and not because the stairs were leaning sideways and pulsing in time to the throbbing of the house, which grew stronger as I descended. When had the moon become full? 

My hand hurt so much I examined it in the moonlight expecting to see it swollen or injured but no, it looked normal. The pain came in rhythmic waves, strangely out of sync with the pulsation of Kilphaun Hall.

I reached the bottom and crossed to the door across an unsteady floor that rippled like the surface of the sea. The impossible moon threw a new face of the pyramid across the door, a grinning devil’s face I didn’t remember seeing on it. I put my hand on the doorknob anyway and twisted. A sharp spike of pain in my hand nearly took me to my knees but I gritted my teeth and pushed the door open. 

I entered the north wing.

A tangle of black angles faced me. I was sure moonlight should have streamed in the windows but instead all I could see out them was cold unblinking stars in a pitch sky. I gave up trying to understand the sky this night. I switched on my torch. This place was a labyrinth in daytime. At night it was a broken ankle or worse waiting to happen. I assumed my quarry would head for the veranda doors and exit into the night there. I turned right and started picking carefully in that direction. The torch beam threw monstrous shadows of the boards and sheets and ladders. The peeling wallpaper flopped like giant tongues that seemed to move with the changing shadows of my torch. I found myself loath to stray too close to them. Above all, I concentrated on avoiding the places where floorboards were missing; but each time I glanced back up from checking my footing, I half expected to see some figure waiting for me, ready to pounce.

I had thought the throbbing of the house muted or absent here until I put my hand onto a mantlepiece to steady myself. Its surface felt alive. I snatched my hand back and warily shone my torch on it and looked in closely. The building dust that had gathered thickly on the mantelpiece was agitated and trembling. I gingerly put my good hand on the surface and I could feel it vibrating to that hidden pulse. Suppressed as it was, it felt stronger in here, like a coiled snake waiting for its moment. I pushed on.

I got occasional glimpses of a pale figure ahead of me and other times when I thought I had lost my way, that snickering blade came again, sometimes far away, sometimes close enough to nearly make me drop my torch. I kept going through room after room after room. Was I going round in circles? The north wing was never this long. I should have reached the main reception room an age ago. I noticed now that the rooms were beginning to look in better repair, though in an old fashioned way that surprised me, George being all about the modern. I stumbled on. I had to, I had no idea how to retrace my steps.

Soon I was catching regular glimpses of the person ahead of me. It was a man in rough working clothes. What mischief had I stumbled into? Then we were in a poorly lit short corridor together. It was well kept but what got my attention was the antique nature of the furniture and the candles in their wall sconces. This was definitely not George’s work. 

“Hey, you, stop!” I shouted at the man who had paused at the door at the end of the corridor.

He turned and looked vacantly at me, face pale and eyes unblinking in the bright beam of my torch.     It was the electrician, Foley. Whoever I had expected, it was not him. The sound of metal on metal came from whatever was beyond that door. Foley turned and was through it, the door shut behind him, before I could get there. 

I twisted the door knob back and forth but it would not open.  A voice was muttering now beyond it. I rattled the door hard but it wouldn’t yield. I put my ear to it but couldn’t hear any clearer. I noticed though that the whole door was vibrating with suppressed violence. Was the house itself keeping me out? On a sudden inspiration I grabbed the doorknob with my injured left hand. An excruciating jolt of pain stabbed the length of my arm. I gritted my teeth against it, even as the door clicked open and I stepped through.

I finally found myself in that large reception room of the northern wing. The room was in perfect condition, a fire roaring in the hearth and candles on the mantlepiece. Except, I had last seen the wallpaper on those walls in tatters being stripped by workmen. A family portrait, the clothes very old fashioned, hung over the fire. I had no time to ponder this strangeness further because my eye was drawn to the two figures in front of the fire. 

Foley was kneeling, his back to the fire and facing me. He was a man slowly waking from a deep sleep, first confused and then a dawning terror on his face. I think he knew what was coming long before I did. There was that grating of metal on metal and then, dear god, the figure behind him came properly into view, as if a shroud had been lifted. It was a crooked old man, tall despite the hunch. He was bone thin with wild white hair and dressed in a ragged and dirty white robe. In his hands he held two butcher’s knifes, rusty apart from where he had been sliding one against the other. He grinned, a maw of broken teeth visible. A stench of carrion rolled over me. But his eyes! Oh Elizabeth, may I never see such a thing again. His eye sockets were crowded with pebbles that fell constantly from his face like endless tears of stone . If I close my eyes, I can still see and hear that terrible face.

I moved towards them, finally understanding what horror was about to happen here in front of me, but it was like I strode through treacle for all the headway I made. I would never get there in time.

Foley made to get up. He was sluggish too and stilled when the old man man put one of his hands, the knife flat in it, on the poor doomed electrician’s head. That was our tableau for a pregnant moment, Elizabeth, all of us frozen in our allotted places, all of us knowing the act that was coming now would break something that should not be broken in this awful house. Me, raising my hand and opening my mouth to shout ’No’. Foley, kneeling, accepting of his fate. The crooked old man, standing behind him, backlit by the roaring flames which seemed to be reaching for him, one hand on Foley’s head, the other resting on his shoulder. Everything throbbing and warping as the house reached in for us.

The old man, or whatever demon of hell it was, looked straight at me, seeing me despite the stones spilling from his eyes. He drew his butchers knife across Foley’s throat in a hard swift movement. A great gout of blood sprayed out across the floor.  He twisted and tossed the dying man down in front of the fire, his remaining blood pooling darkly on the hearthstone. The house was roaring in my ears now and this killer advanced on me now, knifes swinging in both clawed hands.   

I turned and ran from that stalking horror, knowing now how the fox feels as I crashed through the rooms of the north wing, reckless of the holes in the floor  and my torch a wild slash of tumbling light. The eldritch pulsing and throbbing of the house was a crushing physical presence I had to fight against. Behind me I heard the snickering of blades as my tormentor came closer, toying with me. 

The door to the entrance hall was in front of me as I smelled his carrion breath right behind and a blade snagged the back of my pyjamas. I tumbled out into the bright entrance hall, the cloth ripping. I swung around as I realised he would catch me easily here in the open if I ran. The door into the north wing was a black gaping void. A maw into horror. My monstrous pursuer did not emerge. I glanced up. The impossible moon soared huge and near, directly overhead and looking to crash through the skylight. It cast shadow images of all four sides of the pyramid on the walls and floor. The snickering of the blades came again, fading as though coming from increasingly far away.

I don’t know how long I stood there until I came out of a reverie with a start. I was falling asleep still standing. The hall was dark and still, no unlikely moon overhead and the door to the north wing was shut. I hesitantly went over and checked it. Locked. That had been real, surely, I thought and not some sleepwalking nightmare. 

Confused I returned carefully to my room, jumping at every shadow and creak of the house. I wedged a chair under the doorknob and lay on my bed, not intending to sleep.

I woke late in the morning, still on top of the bed. I could hear the bustle of the house around me. It was all normal, not the bedlam if a body had been discovered. I was in a daze all morning, George teasing me that I’d had more of the wine last night than he’d thought. I couldn’t bring myself to enter the north wing so I trudged along the outside of it and peered in the window of the reception room where Foley had been murdered. It was back in the half repaired state I’d first seen it, with workmen busy inside. Evidently no dead body had been discovered by them.

Elizabeth, I would say it was a particularly vivid and upsetting nightmare, the old man cadged from the images on the pyramid except, well, this is the thing, Jim Foley is missing. He went to bed last night and when his wife awoke, he was gone. I’ve hidden my pyjamas. I would destroy them if I could. They are filthy, especially at the cuffs. Worse they are spotted all over the front with dark, wine coloured marks. I know dried blood when I see it. 

What happened last night? What did I do? And where else have I seen an image of a crooked man? If I close my eyes, I get a glimpse of it - metal but quickly hidden. 

Don’t come here, Elizabeth. Stay in London. Go home to Clatbury. This house is cursed and maybe all of us within it.

I love you,

Jon