Free The Seance by John Harwood Page A

sagging timbers; jagged cracks in the mortar; a wild profusion of nettles and saplings growing right up against the wall in places. All of the windows were shuttered, except for a row along the first floor, which appeared to be at least thirty feet above the ground. It struck me that these might be the windows of the gallery from which the boy Felix Wraxford had fallen seventy years before. The shutters along the second floor were much smaller; and protruding above these were the attics, each in its own gable and all on different levels. Silhouetted against the brightness of the sky were a dozen or so crumbling chimneys, and jutting above each of these I saw what appeared to be a blackened spear, aimed at the heavens. These were lightning rods; my first glimpse of the Wraxford family’s strange obsession.
    It is difficult now to separate my first impressions from the knowledge of what was to follow. I felt at once fearful and exhilarated; my accustomed melancholy vanished like smoke upon the wind. The house seemed preternaturally vivid in the afternoon light, as if I had stepped from the waking world into a dream in which I was
meant
to be here and nowhereelse. I settled my back against the trunk of the great oak, got out my tablet and my colour box and set about making the best use of the remaining daylight.
    An hour passed, with no sign of life; I began to wonder if the dogs were only a figment of my friend’s imagination. Perhaps Cornelius himself had died – but no, we had had his letter only the previous week – yet what did we really know of his movements? He could have closed up the house and gone away immediately after writing to us. Or perhaps there was another, more modest dwelling in a different part of the wood ... Slowly the twilight deepened until I could no longer tell one colour from another. I set my materials aside and ate the food I had brought while the outlines of rooftops and chimneys, the spectral branches of the lightning rods, faded with the last glow of evening until the Hall was no more than a dark mass humped against the blackness of the forest.
    A pale glow through the foliage behind me heralded the rising of the moon, and I saw that for its light to fall upon my page I would have to work in the open. Convinced by now that the estate was deserted, I gathered my things and moved cautiously forward into the starlight. About thirty yards from the house I stumbled over the remnant of a low stone wall, where I settled myself with my tablet and pencils. The air was still and cold; somewhere in the distance a fox barked, but no answering cry arose from the blackness opposite.
    Minute by minute, the clearing brightened; the Hall seemed to be inching its way upward out of darkness. As the moon rose higher, the proportions of the house appeared to alter until it loomed above me like a precipice. I reached down for my tablet and, as I straightened, saw a light spring up in the window immediately above the main entrance: A flickering, yellow glow that began to move to my left, passing from one window to the next until it came to the farthest, then slowly back about half the distance it had come, before it halted and steadied.
    All of my childhood terrors swarmed up at the sight, yet in that sinisterprogress I saw the completion of my picture; saw that if I could master my fear for long enough to fix the scene in memory I might at last realise a vision that was truly my own. I began working feverishly, even as my skin crawled in anticipation of a malign face rising up against the glass; or the shout – or shot – that would signal my discovery. The light glowed steadily, wavering every so often as if someone had passed close by, for there was not a breath of wind. It is old Cornelius, I told myself, moving about his domain; so long as his lamp is lit, he will not see me. I seemed to have become two people: the one appalled at my folly and pleading for release, the other indifferent to everything except