“Hugh!” I yelled. “Hugh! He is here.”
Hugh came hurrying in, and for one second I turned my eyes to him.
“There by the door!” I cried.
When I looked back again the apparition was no longer there. But the door was open, and on the floor by it fragments of mud and soaked soil . . .
The sequel is soon told. Where we had seen the figure digging in the garden was a row of lavender bushes. These we pulled up, and three feet below came on the huddled remains of a woman’s body. The skull had been beaten in by some crashing blow; fragments of clothing and the malformation of one of the feet were sufficient to establish identification. The bones lie now in the churchyard close by the grave of her husband and murderer.
The Prescription
Marjorie Bowen
Location: Verrall Hall, Sunford, Bucks.
Time: Christmas Eve, 1928.
Eyewitness Description: “We got, however, our surprise and our shock because Mrs Mahogany began suddenly to writhe into ugly contortions and called out in a loud voice, quite different from the one that she had hitherto used: ‘Murder!’ . . .”
Author: Marjorie Bowen (1886–1952) was no relation of Elizabeth Bowen: she had been born Gabrielle Margaret Long to a poor family on Hayling Island in Hampshire where she spent the early years of her career writing prolifically to support her extravagant mother and sister. She used a variety of pen names to conceal her huge output of over 150 novels, using the Bowen pseudonym on her supernatural stories, starting with Black Magic (1909), which was a best seller. She also used the name on The Haunted Vintage (1921); but chose Robert Paye for the eerie Julia Roseing Rave (1933); and Joseph Shearing for The Spectral Bride (1942), based on a real Victorian case. Despite this productivity, the best of her books brilliantly conjure up haunted landscapes along with a unique mixture of cruelty and pathos among her characters. The best of the Bowen short stories – or “twilight tales,” as she liked to call them – were collected in several volumes between 1917 and 1932, her own favourites appearing in The Bishop of Hell (1949). However, “The Prescription”, which was originally published in the Christmas issue of the London Magazine in 1928, did not find a place in any of these – an undeserved fate for a story about a professional medium by a writer recently described by Jack Sullivan unequivocally as “one of the great supernatural writers of the 20th century.”
John Cuming collected ghost stories; he always declared that this I was the best that he knew, although it was partially second-hand and contained a mystery that had no reasonable solution, while most really good ghost stories allow of a plausible explanation, even if it is one as feeble as a dream, excusing all; or a hallucination or a crude deception. Cuming told the story rather well. The first part of it at least had come under his own observation and been carefully noted by him in the flat green book which he kept for the record of all curious cases of this sort. He was a shrewd and a trained observer; he honestly restrained his love of drama from leading him into embellishing facts. Cuming told the story to us all on the most suitable possible occasion – Christmas Eve – and prefaced it with a little homily.
“You all know the good old saw – ‘The more it changes the more it is the same thing’ – and I should like you to notice that this extremely up-to-date ultra-modern ghost story is really almost exactly the same as the one that might have puzzled Babylonian or Assyrian sages. I can give you the first start of the tale in my own words, but the second part will have to be in the words of someone else. They were, however, most carefully and scrupulously taken down. As for the conclusion, I must leave you to draw that for yourselves – each according to your own mood, fancy and temperament; it may be that you will all think of the same solution, it may be that you will each think of a different one, and it may be that everyone will be left wondering.”
Having thus enjoyed himself by whetting our curiosity, Cuming settled himself down comfortably in his deep armchair and unfolded his tale:
It was about five years ago. I don’t wish to be exact with time, and of course I shall alter names – that’s one of the first rules of the game, isn’t it? Well, whenever it was, I was the guest of a – Mrs Janey we will call her – who was, to some extent, a friend of mine; an intelligent, lively, rather bustling sort of woman who had the knack of gathering interesting people about her. She had lately taken a new house in Buckinghamshire. It stood in the grounds of one of those large estates which are now so frequently being broken up. She was very pleased with the house, which was quite new and had only been finished about a year, and seemed, according to her own rather excited imagination, in every way desirable. I don’t want to emphasize anything about the house except that it was new and did stand on the verge, as it were, of this large old estate, which had belonged to one of those notable English families now extinct and completely forgotten. I am no antiquarian or connoisseur in architecture, and the rather blatant modernity of the house did not offend me. I was able to appreciate its comfort and to enjoy what Mrs Janey rather maddeningly called “the old-world garden”, which were really a section of the larger gardens of the vanished mansion which had once commanded this domain. Mrs Janey, I should tell you, knew nothing about the neighbourhood nor anyone who lived there, except that for the first it was very convenient for town and for the second she believed that they were all “nice” people, not likely to bother one. I was slightly disappointed with the crowd she had gathered together at Christmas. They were all people whom either I knew too well or whom I didn’t wish to know at all, and at first the party showed signs of being extremely flat. Mrs Janey seemed to perceive this too, and with rather nervous haste produced, on Christmas Eve, a trump card in the way of amusement – a professional medium, called Mrs Mahogany, because that could not possibly have been her name. Some of us “believed in”, as the saying goes, mediums, and some didn’t; but we were all willing to be diverted by the experiment. Mrs Janey continually lamented that a certain Dr Dilke would not be present. He was going to be one of the party, but had been detained in town and would not reach Verrall, which was the name of the house, until later, and the medium, it seemed, could not stay; for she, being a personage in great demand, must go on to a further engagement. I, of course, like everyone else possessed of an intelligent curiosity and a certain amount of leisure, had been to mediums before. I had been slightly impressed, slightly disgusted, and very much bewildered, and on the whole had decided to let the matter alone, considering that I really preferred the more direct old-fashioned method of getting in touch with what we used to call “the Unseen”. This sitting in the great new house seemed rather banal. I could understand in some haunted old manor that a clairvoyant, or a clairaudient, or a trance-medium might have found something interesting to say, but what was she going to get out of Mrs Janey’s bright, brilliant and comfortable dwelling?
Mrs Mahogany was a nondescript sort of woman – neither young nor old, neither clever nor stupid, neither dark nor fair, placid, and not in the least self-conscious. After an extremely good luncheon (it was a gloomy, stormy afternoon) we all sat down in a circle in the cheerful drawing-room; the curtains were pulled across the dreary prospect of grey sky and grey landscape, and we had merely the light of the fire. We sat quite close together in order to increase “the power”, as Mrs Mahogany said, and the medium sat in the middle, with no special precautions against trickery; but we all knew that trickery would have been really impossible, and we were quite prepared to be tremendously impressed and startled if any manifestations took place. I think we all felt rather foolish, as we did not know each other very well, sitting round there, staring at this very ordinary, rather common, stout little woman, who kept nervously pulling a little tippet of grey wool over her shoulders, closing her eyes and muttering, while she twisted her fingers together. When we had sat silent for about ten minutes Mrs Janey announced in a rather raw whisper that the medium had gone into a trance. “Beautifully,” she added. I thought that Mrs Mahogany did not look at all beautiful. Her communication began with a lot of rambling talk which had no point at all, and a good deal of generalisation under which I think we all became a little restive. There was too much of various spirits who had all sorts of ordinary names, just regular Toms, Dicks and Harrys of the spirit world, floating round behind us, their arms full of flowers and their mouths full of good will – all rather pointless. And though, occasionally, a Tom, a Dick, or a Harry was identified by some of us, it wasn’t very convincing and, what was worse, not very interesting. We got, however, our surprise and our shock, because Mrs Mahogany began suddenly to writhe into ugly contortions and called out in a loud voice, quite different from the one that she had hitherto used: