Read Online The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos by John Glasby - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Glasby
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been found who were agreeable to remain there with me, all of them from Truro, far enough afield for them not to have been affected by any of the wild rumours that were still rife concerning the place. William Pengarden had been a seaman for most of his fifty-three years, was a solid and very intense man, strong and obedient and dependable. Mary Ventnor, who combined the duties of cook and maid, was a tall girl of twenty-six, not given to listening to these tales of wild fancy, as also was Carfax, a man in his late thirties, sullen by nature, but robust and unimaginative. None of the three appeared concerned by the isolated nature of the manor, and if any of them had heard the curious stories which circulated in the district, they either ignored them, or kept them to themselves.
For almost two weeks, the general routine at Faxted Manor proceeded evenly and with a quite placidity, my own time being spent mainly in pouring through the old, moth-eaten documents which filled the shelves of the library in the West Wing. It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by these records when I discovered that many of them had been preserved from the earliest days of the house, were possibly priceless volumes, giving a graphic account of the happenings of those distant days. The picture provided by these writings, adding much to that which I had learnt from Carrington, was not one designed to set my mind at rest concerning the evil reputation the place possessed.
Before, the vague tales had been extremely picturesque and fanciful, most of them based on hearsay carried down and embellished through the long centuries. But the records here were of a different kind altogether, giving a consistent and onerously continual record of the house from the Eighth Century when a stone building had been erected on the site by an order of monks who had flourished there until their diabolical rites had forced the king, Edgar, to put an end to their heathen practices in 966. The monastery had been razed to the ground and after a short trial, the members of the order, without exception, had been hurled off the top of the cliff into the sea. There were dark hints in the documents of the relics which had been found buried in narrow passages beneath the site, of human and inhuman remains discovered in the lower chambers hewn out of the solid rock; and there was a general feeling of relief in the neighbourhood, and a belief that a terrible evil which had overshadowed them had been destroyed forever.
The area was apparently shunned, or at least disregarded, until the lands were given to William de Warr Hoppe in 1124 by Henry I, who built the forerunner of the present manor on the cliff top. For close on a hundred and fifty years there was no record of any trace of evil associated with the place, nor anything sinister about the family, who occupied. Then, in 1271, John Warr Hoppe extended the building by erecting the West Wing, covering the site of the ancient monastery, and the first inkling of the impending calamity that was to follow the family for more than six hundred years showed itself. Having married in the previous year, his first child, a girl, died five months after birth of a sickly malady which defied all analysis. Of the four other children of this union, two were stillborn, both girls, while the sons apparently thrived.
But the family seemed cursed after that. There were attestations of strange ailments which afflicted the Warr Hoppes, of mutant children born into the family, shut away in the curious stone cells which had been hollowed out under the foundations some hundreds of years earlier, of frightening inhuman cries heard in the night, of nocturnal excursions made to the shore during the moonless eldritch hours, blue-green lights which flickered behind untapestried windows, horrific black shapes outlined therein, and a return of the old and half-forgotten pestilences to the district, with evil shrouding the area and abounding a
For almost two weeks, the general routine at Faxted Manor proceeded evenly and with a quite placidity, my own time being spent mainly in pouring through the old, moth-eaten documents which filled the shelves of the library in the West Wing. It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by these records when I discovered that many of them had been preserved from the earliest days of the house, were possibly priceless volumes, giving a graphic account of the happenings of those distant days. The picture provided by these writings, adding much to that which I had learnt from Carrington, was not one designed to set my mind at rest concerning the evil reputation the place possessed.
Before, the vague tales had been extremely picturesque and fanciful, most of them based on hearsay carried down and embellished through the long centuries. But the records here were of a different kind altogether, giving a consistent and onerously continual record of the house from the Eighth Century when a stone building had been erected on the site by an order of monks who had flourished there until their diabolical rites had forced the king, Edgar, to put an end to their heathen practices in 966. The monastery had been razed to the ground and after a short trial, the members of the order, without exception, had been hurled off the top of the cliff into the sea. There were dark hints in the documents of the relics which had been found buried in narrow passages beneath the site, of human and inhuman remains discovered in the lower chambers hewn out of the solid rock; and there was a general feeling of relief in the neighbourhood, and a belief that a terrible evil which had overshadowed them had been destroyed forever.
The area was apparently shunned, or at least disregarded, until the lands were given to William de Warr Hoppe in 1124 by Henry I, who built the forerunner of the present manor on the cliff top. For close on a hundred and fifty years there was no record of any trace of evil associated with the place, nor anything sinister about the family, who occupied. Then, in 1271, John Warr Hoppe extended the building by erecting the West Wing, covering the site of the ancient monastery, and the first inkling of the impending calamity that was to follow the family for more than six hundred years showed itself. Having married in the previous year, his first child, a girl, died five months after birth of a sickly malady which defied all analysis. Of the four other children of this union, two were stillborn, both girls, while the sons apparently thrived.
But the family seemed cursed after that. There were attestations of strange ailments which afflicted the Warr Hoppes, of mutant children born into the family, shut away in the curious stone cells which had been hollowed out under the foundations some hundreds of years earlier, of frightening inhuman cries heard in the night, of nocturnal excursions made to the shore during the moonless eldritch hours, blue-green lights which flickered behind untapestried windows, horrific black shapes outlined therein, and a return of the old and half-forgotten pestilences to the district, with evil shrouding the area and abounding a
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