Ellery Queen's Blighted Dwellings, page 1
ELLERY
QUEEN’S
BLIGHTED
DWELLINGS
In The Garrison of Cape Ann, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: “Soon or late to all our dwellings come the spectres of the mind.” This is proven out in each of the 23 stories in this anthology, from Honoré de Balzac’s great classic “The Mysterious Mansion,” written in the early 1800s, to Lilly Carlson’s “Locked Doors,” which won the Robert L. Fish Award for best first mystery short story written in 1983.
ELLERY
QUEEN’S
BLIGHTED
DWELLINGS
Stories collected from issues
of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
edited by Ellery Queen
Edited by Eleanor Sullivan
LONGMEADOW PRESS
Published exclusively for Longmeadow Press by
Davis Publications, Inc.
380 Lexington Avenue
New York, New York 10017
SECOND PRINTING
Copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-13341
Printed in the U.S.A.
COPYRIGHT NOTICES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made for permission to reprint the following:
The Haunting of Shawley Rectory by Ruth Rendell; Copyright © 1979 by Ruth Rendell; reprinted by permission of George Borchardt, Inc.
The Living End by Dana Lyon; Copyright © 1975 by Dana Lyon; reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
I Wish He Hadn’t Said That by George Baxt; Copyright © 1982 by George Baxt; reprinted by permission of the author.
The Inner Voices by Jean Potts; Copyright © 1966 by Davis Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Mcintosh & Otis, Inc.
Over There—Darkness by William O’Farrell; Copyright © 1958 by William O’Farrell; reprinted by permission of Blanche C. Gregory.
In the House Next Door by William Bankier; Copyright © 1977 by William Bankier; reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
The Third-Floor Closet by Jack Ritchie; Copyright © 1980 by Jack Ritchie; reprinted by permission of Larry Sternig Literary Agency.
The Crime in Nobody’s Room by John Dickson Carr; Copyright © 1944 by William Morrow & Company, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.
Locked Doors by Lilly Carlson; Copyright © 1983 by Lilly Carlson; reprinted by permission of the author.
Le Château de L’Arsenic by Georges Simenon; Copyright © 1948 by American Mercury, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.
My Neighbor, Ay by Joyce Harrington; Copyright © 1974 by Joyce Harrington; reprinted by permission of the author.
The Dwelling Place of the Proud by Charles B. Child; Copyright © 1966 by Davis Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.
The Thief by Helen Hudson; Copyright © 1967 by Helen Hudson; reprinted by permission of the author.
The Name on the Window by Edmund Crispin; Copyright © 1953 by Mercury Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Mrs. Ann Montgomery, Victor Gollancz Ltd. and A. P. Watt, reprinted by permission of Marie Rodell.
The Ghost of Greenwich Village by Donald McNutt Douglass; Copyright © 1954 by Mercury Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.
The Dark Place by Richard A. Selzer; Copyright © 1971 by Richard A. Selzer; reprinted by permission of the author.
The Problem of the Whispering House by Edward D. Hoch; Copyright © 1979 by Edward D. Hoch; reprinted by permission of the author.
A Hearse Is Not a Home by Jean L. Backus; Copyright © 1981 by Jean L. Backus; reprinted by permission of the author.
No Place to Live by Ellery Queen; Copyright © 1956 by United Newspapers Magazine Corp.; reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
A Nice Place to Stay by Nedra Tyre; Copyright © 1970 by Nedra Tyre; reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
“Q”
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Haunting of Shawley Rectory—Ruth Rendell
The Living End—Dana Lyon
I Wish He Hadn’t Said That—George Baxt
The Yellow Wallpaper—Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Inner Voices—Jean Potts
Over There—Darkness—William O’Farrell
In the House Next Door—William Bankier
The Third-Floor Closet—Jack Ritchie
The Crime in Nobody’s Room—John Dickson Carr
Locked Doors—Lilly Carlson
Le Château de L’Arsenic—Georges Simenon
My Neighbor, Ay—Joyce Harrington
The Dwelling Place of the Proud—Charles B. Child
The Thief—Helen Hudson
The Name on the Window—Edmund Crispin
The Hump in the Basement—Suzanne Blanc
The Ghost of Greenwich Village—Donald McNutt Douglass
The Dark Place—Richard A. Selzer
The Problem of the Whispering House—Edward D. Hoch
A Hearse Is Not a Home—Jean L. Backus
No Place To Live—Ellery Queen
A Nice Place To Stay—Nedra Tyre
The Mysterious Mansion—Honoré de Balzac
“Q”
CONTENTS
Cover
Description
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
INTRODUCTION
RUTH RENDELL
The Haunting of Shawley Rectory
DANA LYON
The Living End
GEORGE BAXT
I Wish He Hadn’t Said That
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
The Yellow Wallpaper
JEAN POTTS
The Inner Voices
WILLIAM O’FARRELL
Over There—Darkness
WILLIAM BANKIER
In the House Next Door
JACK RITCHIE
The Third-Floor Closet
JOHN DICKSON CARR
The Crime in Nobody’s Room
LILLY CARLSON
Locked Doors
GEORGES SIMENON
Le Château de L’Arsenic
JOYCE HARRINGTON
My Neighbor, Ay
CHARLES B. CHILD
The Dwelling Place of the Proud
HELEN HUDSON
The Thief
EDMUND CRISPIN
The Name on the Window
SUZANNE BLANC
The Hump in the Basement
DONALD MCNUTT DOUGLASS
The Ghost of Greenwich Village
RICHARD A. SELZER
The Dark Place
EDWARD D. HOCH
The Problem of the Whispering House
JEAN L. BACKUS
A Hearse Is Not a Home
ELLERY QUEEN
No Place To Live
NEDRA TYRE
A Nice Place To Stay
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Mysterious Mansion
About the Editor
Back Cover
INTRODUCTION
One of the first signs of our maturity is the awareness that wherever we live, wherever we go, we have to take ourselves with us—that we ourselves are dwelling places. Which is not to say we aren’t affected by the dwellings in which we live or those with whom we choose—or are forced—to live.
While putting together this new collection of stories from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, our television set was tuned to a favorite program, Elsa Klensch’s Style on CNN, and one of that week’s showings was the elegant 1985 fall collection by Karl Lagerfeld with its splendidly rendered and harmonious theme, “Home Sweet Home.” Our collection is also splendidly rendered by the contributing authors, but the word “harmonious” is not quite so apt.
In The Garrison of Cape Ann, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: “Soon or late to all our dwellings come the spectres of the mind.” This is proven out in each of the 23 stories in this anthology, from Honoré de Balzac’s great classic “The Mysterious Mansion,” written in the early 1800s, to Lilly Carlson’s “Locked Doors,” which won the Robert L. Fish Award for best first mystery short story written in 1983.
“Where dwellest thou?” asks the servant in Coriolanus. Wherever it is, if it is the source of serious discontent, we hope you’re planning to do something to sweeten your situation. Non-criminal, please. Crime is for fiction.
—Eleanor Sullivan
Ruth Rendell
The Haunting of Shawley Rectory
I don’t believe in the supernatural, but just the same I wouldn’t live in Shawley Rectory.
That was what I had been thinking and what Gordon Scott said to me when we heard we were to have a new Rector at St. Mary’s. Our wives gave us quizzical looks.
“Not very logical,” said Eleanor, my wife.
“What I mean is,” said Gordon, “that however certain you might be that ghosts don’t exist, if you lived in a place that was reputedly haunted you wouldn’t be able to help wondering every time you heard a stair creak. All the normal sounds of an old house would take on a different significance.”
I agreed with him. It wouldn’t be very pleasant feeling uneasy every time one was alone in one’s own home at night.
“Personally,” said Patsy Scott, “I’ve always believed there are no ghosts in the Rectory that a good central-he
We laughed at that, but Eleanor said, “You can’t just dismiss it like that. The Cobworths heard and felt things even if they didn’t actually see anything. And so did the Bucklands before them. And you won’t find anyone more level-headed than Kate Cobworth.”
Patsy shrugged. “The Loys didn’t even hear or feel anything. They’d heard the stories, they expected to hear the footsteps and the carriage wheels. Diana Loy told me. And Diana was quite a nervy, highly strung sort of person. But absolutely nothing happened while they were there.”
“Well, maybe the Church of England or whoever’s responsible will install central heating for the new parson,” I said, “and we’ll see if your theory’s right, Patsy.”
Eleanor and I went home after that. We went on foot because our house is only about a quarter of a mile up Shawley Lane. On the way we stopped in front of the Rectory, which is about a hundred yards along. We stood and looked over the gate.
I may as well describe the Rectory to you before I get on with this story. The date of it is around 1760 and it’s built of pale dun-colored brick with plain classical windows and a front door in the middle with a pediment over it. It’s a big house with three reception rooms, six bedrooms, two kitchens, and two staircases—and one poky little bathroom made by having converted a linen closet. The house is a bit stark to look at, a bit forbidding; it seems to stare straight back at you, but the trees round it are pretty enough and so are the stables on the left-hand side with a clock in their gable and a weathervane on top. Tom Cobworth, the last Rector, kept his old Morris in there. The garden is huge, a wilderness that no one could keep tidy these days—eight acres of it, including the glebe.
It was years since I had been inside the Rectory. I remember wondering if the interior was as shabby and in need of paint as the outside. The windows had that black, blank, hazy look of windows at which no curtains hang and which no one has cleaned for months or even years.
“Who exactly does it belong to?” said Eleanor.
“Lazarus College, Oxford,” I said. “Tom was a Fellow of Lazarus.”
“And what about this new man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think all that system of livings has changed but I’m pretty vague about it.”
I’m not a churchgoer, not religious at all really. Perhaps that was why I hadn’t got to know the Cobworths all that well. I used to feel a bit uneasy in Tom’s company, I used to have the feeling he might suddenly round on me and demand to know why he never saw me in church. Eleanor had no such inhibitions with Kate. They were friends, close friends, and Eleanor had missed her after Tom died suddenly of a heart attack and she had had to leave the Rectory. She had gone back to her people up north, taking her fifteen-year-old daughter Louise with her.
Kate is a practical down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman. She had been a nurse—a ward sister, I believe—before her marriage. When Tom got the living of Shawley she several times met Mrs. Buckland, the wife of the retiring incumbent, and from her learned to expect what Mrs. Buckland called “manifestations.”
“I couldn’t believe she was actually saying it,” Kate had said to Eleanor. “I thought I was dreaming and then I thought she was mad. I mean really psychotic, mentally ill. Ghosts! I ask you—people believing things like that in this day and age. And then we moved in and I heard them, too.”
The crunch of carriage wheels on the gravel drive when there was no carriage or any kind of vehicle to be seen. Doors closing softly when no doors had been left open. Footsteps crossing the landing and going downstairs, crossing the hall, then the front door opening softly and closing softly.
“But how could you bear it?” Eleanor said. “Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you terrified?”
“We got used to it. We had to, you see. It wasn’t as if we could sell the house and buy another. Besides, I love Shawley—I loved it from the first moment I set foot in the village. After the harshness of the north, Dorset is so gentle and mild and pretty. The doors closing and the footsteps and the wheels on the drive—they didn’t do us any harm. And we had each other, we weren’t alone. You can get used to anything—to ghosts as much as to damp and woodworm and dry rot. There’s all that in the Rectory, too, and I found it much more trying!”
The Bucklands, apparently, had got used to it, too. Thirty years he had been Rector of the parish, thirty years they had lived there with the wheels and the footsteps, and had brought up their son and daughter there. No harm had come to them; they slept soundly, and their grownup children used to joke about their haunted house.
“Nobody ever seems to see anything,” I said to Eleanor as we walked home. “And no one ever comes up with a story, a sort of background to all this walking about and banging and crunching. Is there supposed to have been a murder there or some other sort of violent death?”
She said she didn’t know, Kate had never said. The sound of the wheels, the closing of the doors, always took place at about nine in the evening, followed by the footsteps and the opening and closing of the front door. After that there was silence, and it hadn’t happened every evening by any means. The only other thing was that Kate had never cared to use the big drawing room in the evenings. She and Tom and Louise had always stayed in the dining room or the morning room.
They did use the drawing room in the daytime—it was just that in the evenings the room felt strange to her, chilly even in summer, and indefinably hostile. Once she had had to go in there at ten-thirty. She needed her reading glasses, which she had left in the drawing room during the afternoon. She ran into the room and ran out again. She hadn’t looked about her, just rushed in, keeping her eyes fixed on the eyeglass case on the mantelpiece. The icy hostility in that room had really frightened her, and that had been the only time she had felt dislike and fear of Shawley Rectory.
Of course one doesn’t have to find explanations for an icy hostility. It’s much more easily understood as being the product of tension and fear than aural phenomena are. I didn’t have much faith in Kate’s feelings about the drawing room. I thought, with a kind of admiration of Jack and Diana Loy, that elderly couple who had rented the Rectory for a year after Kate’s departure, had been primed with stories of hauntings by Kate, yet had neither heard nor felt a thing. As far as I know, they had used that drawing room constantly. Often, when I had passed the gate in their time, I had seen lights in the drawing-room windows, at nine, at ten-thirty, and even at midnight.
The Loys had been gone three months. When Lazarus had first offered the Rectory for rent, the idea had been that Shawley should do without a clergyman of its own. I think this must have been the Church economizing—nothing to do certainly with ghosts. The services at St. Mary’s were to be undertaken by the Vicar of the next parish, Mr. Hartley. Whether he found this too much for him in conjunction with the duties of his own parish or whether the powers-that-be in affairs Anglican had second thoughts, I can’t say, but on the departure of the Loys it was decided there should be an incumbent to replace Tom.
The first hint of this we had from local gossip; next the facts appeared in our monthly news sheet, the Shawley Post. Couched in its customary parish magazine journalese it said: “Shawley residents all extend a hearty welcome to their new Rector, the Reverend Stephen Galton, whose coming to the parish with his charming wife will fill a long-felt need.”
“He’s very young,” said Eleanor a few days after our discussion of haunting with the Scotts. “Under thirty.”
“That won’t bother me,” I said. “I don’t intend to be preached at by him. Anyway, why not? Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” I said, “hast Thou ordained strength.”
“Hark at the devil quoting scripture,” said Eleanor. “They say his wife’s only twenty-three.”
I thought she must have met them, she knew so much. But no.
“It’s just what’s being said. Patsy got it from Judy Lawrence. Judy said they’re moving in next month and her mother’s coming with them.”
“Who, Judy’s?” I said.
“Don’t be silly,” said my wife. “Mrs. Galton’s mother, the Rector’s mother-in-law. She’s coming to live with them.”
