All in the dark

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

THE FURNITURE BEGINS TO TALK

He read Aunt Dinah’s letters over again, and marked the passage with his pencil, and read again,

“Do remember, dear boy, all told you, dear, about the five years. I dreamed much since. If you think of such a thing I must do it.”

This last sentence he underlined, “If you think of such a thing, I must do it. Sorry I shoul” (she means should) “fear or dislike me. I should haunt, torment Willie. But you will do right.” Do right. She meant wait for five years, of course. My poor darling aunt! I wish you had never seen one of those odious books of American bosh—Elihu Bung! I wish Elihu Bung was sunk in a barrel at the bottom of the sea.

Then William looked to his diary, for about that period of his life he kept one for two years and seven months, and he read these entries:

“⸺Dear Aunt Dinah pressed me very much to give her a distinct promise not to marry for five years—marry indeed! I—poor, penniless William Maubray! I shall never marry—yet I can’t make this vow—and she threatened me saying, ‘If I’m dead there’s nothing that spirit can do, if you so much as harbour the thought, be I good, or evil, or mocking, I’ll not do to prevent it. I’ll trouble you, I’ll torment you, I’ll pick your eyes out, but I won’t suffer you to ruin yourself.’ And she said very often that she expected to be a mocking spirit; and said again, ‘Mind I told you, though I be dead, you sha’n’t escape me.’ That night I had an odious nightmare. An apparition like my aunt came to my bedside, and caught my arm with its hand, and said quite distinctly, ‘Oh! my God! William, I am dead; don’t let me go.’ I fancied I saw the impression of fingers on my arm; and think I never was so horrified in my life. And afterwards in her own bed-room, my aunt having heard my dream, returned to the subject of her warning and said, ‘If I die before the time, I’ll watch you as an old gray cat watches a mouse, if you so much as think of it. I’ll plague you; I’ll save you in spite of yourself, and mortal was never haunted and tormented as you will be, till you give it up.’ And saying this she laughed.

“The whole of this new fancy turns out to be one of the Henbane delusions. How I wish all those cursed books of spiritualism were with Don Quixote’s library.”

William had now the facts pretty well before him. He had moreover a very distinct remembrance of that which no other person had imagined or seen—the face of the apparition of Aunt Dinah, and the dark and pallid stare she had actually turned upon him, as he recounted the particulars of his vision. It had grown very late, and he was quite alone, communing in these odd notes, and with these strange remembrances with the dead. Perhaps all the strong tea he had drunk with old Winnie that night helped to make him nervous. One of his candles had burnt out by this time, and as he raised his eyes from these curious records, the room looked dark and indistinct, and the slim, black cabinet that stood against the wall at the further end of the room startled him, it looked so like a big muffled man.

I dare say he began to wish that he had postponed his scrutiny of his papers until the morning. At all events he began to experience those sensations, which in morbid moods of this kind, dispose us to change of scene. What was it that made that confounded cabinet, and its shadow, again look so queer, as he raised his eyes and the candle; just like a great fellow in a loose coat extending his arm to strike?