There was nothing particular to look at and I commenced to return up the stairs. Then I realized the cause of my mistake: below ground there was an extraordinarily clear echo, so that every step I took I seemed to hear an invisible person following me. No doubt that explained why the rustics had thought the place haunted. But it was curious that when I made some remark to the Vicar my voice did not seem to echo in the same way. I could not resist going once again down the steps and up again.
And then I noticed a very peculiar thing. It was not an echo in the ordinary sense of the word. Having an ear for rhythm, I am acutely conscious of the different sounds made by my own footfalls and by those of a person who does not limp and this is particularly obvious upon a staircase, as I unconsciously descend upon my stronger foot. Yet as I went haltingly, slowly, and cautiously down the stairs, the footsteps echoing behind me were firm and even. It was uncanny. I was quite glad to get back to the surface and the company of the Vicar. I am not superstitious, but I am not at all sure that I should have cared to walk back alone to the village through the gathering dusk, quite apart from the difficulty of finding the way over the muddy fields.
‘I hope you will come and have a little tea with me,’ said the Vicar. ‘Probably you have lost your bearings, but it is actually only a few minutes’ walk to the vicarage from here.’
‘I really ought to be starting back to London——’ I began.
‘But you must have tea somewhere,’ he said, as though the argument was unanswerable. ‘Besides, it is coming on to rain and you will not want to start till the shower is over. It rains very heavily in this part of the world when it does rain.’
He gave me permission to put my car in the little vicarage stable, while he went in to make tea. It was as well that I did so, for by the time I had got it safely under cover it was pelting with rain. To avoid being soaked, I had to run across the little yard and along the tiled pathway to the house. And once again I noticed a very peculiar thing. Behind me, as I ran, I could hear footsteps, not the echo of my own steps but the slow measured steps of someone who does not hurry because he knows he must arrive in time. And yet there was nobody: when I got indoors, I found the Vicar placidly boiling a kettle upon a little spirit stove. Everything else seemed to be laid out ready for tea.
I could not help asking him if he was married. He shook his head.
‘Do you live all by yourself?’
‘Practically so.’
‘Don’t you find it rather lonely?’
‘I have my church to look after and my parishioners.’
This man whom at first I had regarded as a harmless bore seemed now to have taken on a sinister interest, which was increased by the surroundings—the Vicar’s study was furnished principally with bookcases and religious pictures, and lighted only by candles, while outside the rain beat upon the lattice windows and the wind howled in the tree-tops. I felt as the great detective in a detective story must feel when he suddenly realizes that the harmless lunatic or the old professor, or for that matter why not say ‘the Vicar’, is leader of the international drug-traffickers and, of course, armed to the teeth.
As far as I remember, he went on telling me about the parish church. I certainly did not feel like asking him any more about St Wilfred of Wilbraham, and in any case I was far more interested in the man himself than in anything that he said. The more I looked at him the more uncanny and ghost-like he seemed. When I finally went away and the Vicar walked with me to the stable I was quite surprised to find that the only footsteps audible were his and my own. And yet I do not know why I should particularly associate these curious footsteps with the Vicar, for I was never actually in his company when I heard them. But I had evidently worked myself into a queer state of mind, for I must admit, idiot as it sounds, that when I had got miles away from the vicarage on the main road to Oxford, I could not resist stopping the car for a few minutes to make sure there were not footsteps following me along the road.
The foregoing account I composed the morning after my return. Indeed, after writing to my aunt, it was the first thing I did—for it happened to be a Sunday morning and I had nothing particular to do. I was determined to put down all the relevant incidents while they were fresh in my mind and as they had struck me at the time, and to tell the story with such artistry as I could command, since I anticipated that it would be the only occasion in my conventional existence when I should be able to tell—what all the world who know no better, desire to tell—a first-hand ghost story. For, of course, I imagined that the story had come to its end. The present record is made in very different circumstances. All attempt at style or narrative skill has vanished. I am merely trying to describe as shortly as I can what I had far rather not have to describe, but what should not in the interest of others remain a secret. At least it is accurate, for I particularly made a note at the time they occurred of the manifestations or symptoms, as I suppose one would call them if, like Lecky, or whoever it was, one regards it as mere insanity.
It was on the Sunday, the very next day after my return, the day I wrote the former narrative, that I realized that the footsteps had not left me. I had been for a short walk, posted the letter to my aunt, and just as it was getting dark I was returning home to tea, when, walking up the stone stairs, I plainly heard behind me the same footsteps, which I had heard before, following me once again with the same insistent slowness and lack of hurry up the four flights of stairs, through the door-way and along the passage to my room. And since then I have never got rid of them. I do not mean they are always there. If they were, it would be better, for I could regard them more easily as a mere nervous affliction like a continual buzzing of the ears. In the broad daylight I do not hear them, nor when I am walking with a companion, but at uncertain times, particularly as I walk about the flat at night, or when I come up the stairs about sunset, they are following me. In the summer it was better, but I was never entirely rid of them: nor is it any use going away from London. They are attached to me, not to any particular place. Once when I was at the seaside and went for a walk along the shore in the evening as it got dark, I could hear them following behind me, crunching down the shingle, never tripping over it as I did, coming on slowly but inevitably.
I do not know that it makes it any better to say it is all an illusion. I admit that I am in some ways a nervous man. At one time, for example, I became excessively apprehensive of burglars, and even bought myself an automatic pistol; until I came to realize there was nothing of sufficient value in my flat to tempt a serious burglar. Perhaps, therefore, my fear of burglars was no more reasonable than a fear of ghosts. Yet there is something, as I realize, absurd in the idea of a supposedly rational businessman living in what is surely the most heavily substantial and Victorian block of buildings in the whole of London, unable to walk up the staircase without the sound of these ghostly footsteps following, so slowly yet so firmly, behind me, as though their owner was merely mocking at me, knowing that in the end there could be no escape.
Once I was seized with an idea, and I wrote to the Vicar. I was not sure whether he was my friend or my worst enemy. I did not even know his name but I guessed that, in the eight months that had elapsed, the living would not have changed hands, and I addressed the envelope to ‘The Rev. the Vicar of Wilbraham’. I had only one question to ask him: were the footsteps which followed St Wilfred heard by anyone except himself? And I enclosed a stamped postcard for him to answer.