The Pan Book of Horror Stories

THE MISTAKE Fielden Hughes

When I was the Medical Superintendent at the Applesett Private Mental Hospital, there was one patient who had been there so long that he was, in that respect as well as in one other, something of an institution. He was a silent man, and gave so little trouble that he was in a class apart. He was there, so his record showed, at his own request and at his own expense. He was without near relations, and nobody ever visited him or showed the faintest interest in him, except for many doctors, pathologists, and psychologists to whom he was of vast clinical interest. Before he entered our hospital, he had been an obscure parson in some West Country village, unknown to any but his few parishioners. After he came to us, unaware of it though he was, he achieved a wide fame in medical circles. For the simple fact about him was that he never slept. Every night for a considerable time he used to retire and read for a while. Then he would put out his light, go to sleep quite naturally, and five minutes later would wake up as if he had been asleep for hours. After a time he gave up all idea of going to bed, and treated the night as the day.

There was no point in trying to impede him in the habit of twenty-four hours of complete wakefulness, and so a room was placed at his disposal, a room—at his urgent request—without a bed. Usually he spent the night reading or writing, and the sheets of paper he covered he allowed no one to see. Occasionally he would escape from the house during the night, after showing noticeable restlessness for a period. These escapes were always at the same time of the year—in mid-October; and always he was found in the same place—the churchyard in Applesett village. This fact we attributed to some connection in his mind with his former profession. But this became clear when he died, which he did prematurely, for the phenomenon of total insomnia, interesting though it was to us as doctors, was inevitably the cause of quicker wear of his bodily tissues; and this though he was one of the biggest, most powerful men I have ever seen. In youth, he must have been a tremendously strong man. I was always thankful that so muscular a fellow was a quiet inmate. I used to wonder how the attendants would have been able to handle him if he had become violent. But he never did, and we were all truly sorry when he died in his fortieth year. Among his effects, brought to my office after the removal of his body, was a large envelope containing many sheets of paper. It was addressed to me, and marked ‘Not to be opened till after my death.’ I opened the packet, took out the scribbled sheets and read what follows here:

When I was the Vicar of St Alpha’s Church in the village of Smeritone, I was happy enough. I could have said I was completely happy except for one man in the village. That man was my warden, Admiral Sir Anthony Vilpert. It was one of those strange cases of complete natural antipathy. We hated one another for no reason that either of us could have given. I hated his very appearance. He was a very thin man with white moustache and beard, the latter thin like himself and pointed. I privately called him the ‘White Goat’, for he was pale, with light blue eyes. His voice, so unlike the voice of a sea-going man, was a bleat, and how odious its sound became to me. We bickered and differed about every parish matter, and I found that he was in the wicked habit of talking about me to my detriment behind my back, making mischief and doing all he could to poison people’s minds against me, especially newcomers, before I had time to correct by visitation the vile impressions he constantly gave them.

My hatred of the ‘White Goat’ became an obsession. I found myself thinking about him with loathing. His image would come before my mind in the silence of my study, and I had to avert my eyes from him when I was taking services in church. He filled me with fear as well as hatred, for the expression in those pale eyes told me that there I was no evil turn he would not do me if he had the opportunity. I fell into mortal sin, for I murdered him in my heart many a time, so that I could hardly read certain passages of Scripture without feeling condemned in the face of the congregation; and then I would imagine that he could read my heart, and that thin face would seem to smile bitterly at me and defy me.

One day a message came to the vicarage that he was dangerously ill. I could not repress a terrible hope. However, I set out to his house, but, by the mercy of Heaven, he was dead before I could reach his bedside. And I was overjoyed. To my horror, I was happier than I had ever been.

The day of his funeral arrived, and I met the cortege at the lych gate. As I slowly walked before the coffin to the church door, I heard a tapping sound. My blood chilled as the certainty came to my mind that the tapping came from within the coffin. I dismissed the idea and walked on. It could not be. It was my imagination. It was some weird echo of my hatred of the man. As we moved solemnly up the aisle, I heard the faint sound again. Tap tap. Then three more. Tap tap tap. There was no doubt. I waited for the bearers to act. They must have heard those dreadful sounds even as I had done. One of them would cry out. They would put down the coffin. They would open it, there in the church. But nothing happened, except that I heard the sounds once more, like a muffled, distant drum. I felt faint and had to force my legs to bear me up and on. The dreadful truth was clear. He was not dead. And only I had heard his frantic signals to return to the world.

I cannot tell, even here, of the tumult of my feelings. A terrible sense of his being in my power, there in his coffin, seized me, a glorious power. The thought rushed through my mind like a swift flame that I was a murderer who could never be detected. I who had killed him so often in my thoughts was able now to kill him with a sort of horrible innocence. He was the prisoner of my ears, alone and helpless, dependent for his delivery from the most gruesome bondage upon my silent tongue. The injuries he had done me, the calumnies he had spoken of me, the hatred he had shown to me, all hung upon my lips like locks and bars against my speaking. I seemed to see him lying there, his pale eyes wide open with fear, imploring me to mercy and the release of forgiveness. I saw him as if the coffin lid were made of glass. And with hatred in my heart, I refused his dumb appeal, condemning him to the cruellest of all deaths, a living entombment, a joining of him with the dead before his time, an inescapable, inexorable darkness. Then a kind of healing sanity returned to me. If none other there present had heard the tapping, the quiet frenzy of imprisonment, it must be my imagination.

Calmly and coldly I went on with my duties. I saw him lowered into his grave. The cold damp afternoon lay silent round us—us living upon whose brows the wisps of autumn mist were like the exhalations of death. The fragments of soil fell on the coffin thudding, as if we were knocking his outer door in response to his inner tapping. Perhaps he heard them, and hailed them with a momentary thin hope, like a miner entombed in the dark caverns of his mine. And then I heard it again, fainter this time, and lost amongst the sounds of the soil falling on the coffin.

I turned away and left the group of mourners at the graveside. As I sat in my comfortable study by the fire, the afternoon closed in and the shadows of night gathered. I drew the curtains over my windows, and as I did so, I glanced towards the darkening churchyard. My thoughts seemed suspended. I was living but numb. I had tea, and wrote a number of letters, as if I were not myself but somebody else. I felt as if a spring were tightly coiled inside me. When I retired, about ten o’clock, the vicarage was very silent. My housekeeper was away overnight, and I locked the doors and went upstairs. I read till half past ten, and then fell asleep. Suddenly I was wide awake, as if I had slept for many hours. I looked at my watch. The time was twenty minutes to eleven. I was wholly refreshed and knew I should sleep no more. The spring had uncoiled inside me. I lay awake in the darkness, as if waiting for something or someone. The church clock struck the quarter, and as if an order had been given me, I knew what I had to do. I rose and dressed. What I had to do, I must do alone. I could not seek any earthly aid. I must know the truth, and there was nobody to help me.

I went downstairs, unlocked the back door, and stepped out into the damp air. The night was still and pitch black. I went to the hut where the sexton kept his tools. I lit his lantern and took his shovel with me to the newly filled in grave under the trees. I was young and exceptionally strong then, and I had the night before me. The only sound in the black churchyard was the occasional drip of water from the branches of trees. I could hardly see the bulk of the church against the black sky. I stood the lamp on the ground and taking off my coat, I began to reopen the grave where the ‘White Goat’ lay. If I had been mistaken about the sounds from the coffin, I must know it, for the peace of the rest of my life. If I had been right, then I must do what I could to redress the wrong I had done. I must find him, and restore him, even though the two enemies should meet alone in the black night of the churchyard, the one in his premature shroud, the other in his costume of grave digger.

Chilly though the night, the sweat poured from my body, and I took off shirt and vest. The clock chimed the night along, shocking me each time it made its solemn sound, as if it were watching me at my horrid work. The earth piled up on the sides of the grave, and I sank slowly down into the pit I was digging. At length, my spade struck the coffin lid. I cleared away the soil as far as I could, and there I made myself a recess where I could brace myself to tear away the lid. The night closed around me and above as if it were itself a tomb. I had not realized the impossibility of raising the coffin alone, nor the great difficulty of pulling away the lid. Somehow, by taking out the screws and using my spade as a lever, I forced the top to one side. I reached up for my lantern and stared at what lay within. There was my enemy, the man I had hated. The faint beams of my lantern fell upon him. The most terrible feeling gripped me. I knew in that moment what death is: dark, silent, mysterious; yes, but appallingly silly. I began to shake with laughter. I could not let it out in peals in his presence. I scrambled out of the grave and began feverishly filling it in with the earth I had piled around. I had never worked so hard or so fast. A kind of deathly rhythm fell upon my strokes . . . cover it up . . . fill it in . . . hide it away . . . and all the time I laughed till I ached. What a mistake it all was.

I had seen for myself. The ‘White Goat’ was dead. But he was lying on his side.