I saw a month or two ago
in an Italian paper that the Villa Cascana, in which I once stayed, had
been pulled down, and that a manufactory of some sort was in process of
erection on its site. There is therefore no longer any reason for
refraining from writing of those things which I myself saw (or imagined I
saw) in a certain room and on a certain landing of the villa in question,
nor from mentioning the circumstances which followed, which may or may not
(according to the opinion of the reader) throw some light on or be somehow
connected with this experience.
The Villa Cascana was in all ways but
one a perfectly delightful house, yet, if it were standing now, nothing in
the world — I use the phrase in its literal sense — would induce me to
set foot in it again, for I believe it to have been haunted in a very
terrible and practical manner. Most ghosts, when all is said and done, do
not do much harm; they may perhaps terrify, but the person whom they visit
usually gets over their visitation. They may on the other hand be entirely
friendly and beneficent. But the appearances in the Villa Cascana were not
beneficent, and had they made their “visit” in a very slightly
different manner, I do not suppose I should have got over it any more than
Arthur Inglis did.
The house stood on an ilex-clad hill
not far from Sestri di Levante on the Italian Riviera, looking out over
the iridescent blues of that enchanted sea, while behind it rose the pale
green chestnut woods that climb up the hillsides till they give place to
the pines that, black in contrast with them, crown the slopes. All round
it the garden in the luxuriance of mid-spring bloomed and was fragrant,
and the scent of magnolia and rose, borne on the salt freshness of the
winds from the sea, flowed like a stream through the cool vaulted rooms.
On the ground floor a broad pillared loggia ran round three sides of the house, the top of which formed a
balcony for certain rooms of the first floor. The main staircase, broad
and of grey marble steps, led up from the hall to the landing outside
these rooms, which were three in number, namely, two big sitting-rooms and
a bedroom arranged en suite. The
latter was unoccupied, the sitting-rooms were in use. From these the main
staircase was continued to the second floor, where were situated certain
bedrooms, one of which I occupied, while from the other side of the
first-floor landing some half-dozen steps led to another suite of rooms,
where, at the time I am speaking of, Arthur Inglis, the artist, had his
bedroom and studio. Thus the landing outside my bedroom at the top of the
house commanded both the landing of the first floor and also the steps
that led to Inglis’ rooms. Jim Stanley and his wife, finally (whose
guest I was), occupied rooms in another wing of the house, where also were
the servants’ quarters.
I arrived just in time for lunch on a
brilliant noon of mid-May. The garden was shouting with colour and
fragrance, and not less delightful after my broiling walk up from the marina, should have been the coming from the reverberating heat and
blaze of the day into the marble coolness of the villa. Only (the reader
has my bare word for this, and nothing more), the moment I set foot in the
house I felt that something was wrong. This feeling, I may say, was quite
vague, though very strong, and I remember that when I saw letters waiting
for me on the table in the hall I felt certain that the explanation was
here: I was convinced that there was bad news of some sort for me. Yet
when I opened them I found no such explanation of my premonition: my
correspondents all reeked of prosperity. Yet this clear miscarriage of a
presentiment did not dissipate my uneasiness. In that cool fragrant house
there was something wrong.
I am at pains to mention this because
to the general view it may explain that though I am as a rule so excellent
a sleeper that the extinction of my light on getting into bed is
apparently contemporaneous with being called on the following morning, I
slept very badly on my first night in the Villa Cascana. It may also
explain the fact that when I did sleep (if it was indeed in sleep that I
saw what I thought I saw) I dreamed in a very vivid and original manner,
original, that is to say, in the sense that something that, as far as I
knew, had never previously entered into my consciousness, usurped it then.
But since, in addition to this evil premonition, certain words and events
occurring during the rest of the day might have suggested something of
what I thought happened that night, it will be well to relate them.
After lunch, then, I went round the
house with Mrs. Stanley, and during our tour she referred, it is true, to
the unoccupied bedroom on the first floor, which opened out of the room
where we had lunched.
“We left that unoccupied,” she
said, “because Jim and I have a charming bedroom and dressing-room, as
you saw, in the wing, and if we used it ourselves we should have to turn
the dining-room into a dressing-room and have our meals downstairs. As it
is, however, we have our little flat there, Arthur Inglis has his little
flat in the other passage; and I remembered (aren’t I extraordinary?)
that you once said that the higher up you were in a house the better you
were pleased. So I put you at the top of the house, instead of giving you
that room.”
It is true, that a doubt, vague as my
uneasy premonition, crossed my mind at this. I did not see why Mrs.
Stanley should have explained all this, if there had not been more to
explain. I allow, therefore, that the thought that there was something to
explain about the unoccupied bedroom was momentarily present to my mind.
The second thing that may have borne on
my dream was this.
At dinner the conversation turned for a
moment on ghosts. Inglis, with the certainty of conviction, expressed his
belief that anybody who could possibly believe in the existence of
supernatural phenomena was unworthy of the name of an ass. The subject
instantly dropped. As far as I can recollect, nothing else occurred or was
said that could bear on what follows.
We all went to bed rather early, and
personally I yawned my way upstairs, feeling hideously sleepy. My room was
rather hot, and I threw all the windows wide, and from without poured in
the white light of the moon, and the love-song of many nightingales. I
undressed quickly, and got into bed, but though I had felt so sleepy
before, I now felt extremely wide-awake. But I was quite content to be
awake: I did not toss or turn, I felt perfectly happy listening to the
song and seeing the light. Then, it is possible, I may have gone to sleep,
and what follows may have been a dream. I thought, anyhow, that after a
time the nightingales ceased singing and the moon sank. I thought also
that if, for some unexplained reason, I was going to lie awake all night,
I might as well read, and I remembered that I had left a book in which I
was interested in the dining-room on the first floor. So I got out of bed,
lit a candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a
side-table the book I had come to look for, and then, simultaneously, saw
that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious grey light,
not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked in. The bed
stood just opposite the door, a big four-poster, hung with tapestry at the
head. Then I saw that the greyish light of the bedroom came from the bed,
or rather from what was on the bed. For it was covered with great
caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled over it. They were
faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that showed me the room.
Instead of the sucker-feet of ordinary caterpillars they had rows of
pincers like crabs, and they moved by grasping what they lay on with their
pincers, and then sliding their bodies forward. In colour these dreadful
insects were yellowish-grey, and they were covered with irregular lumps
and swellings. There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a
sort of writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed. Occasionally one fell off
on to the floor, with a soft fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard
concrete, it yielded to the pincerfeet as if it had been putty, and,
crawling back, the caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin
its fearful companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but
at one end of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration.
Then, as I looked, it seemed to me as
if they all suddenly became conscious of my presence. All the mouths, at
any rate, were turned in my direction, and next moment they began dropping
off the bed with those soft fleshy thuds on to the floor, and wriggling
towards me. For one second a paralysis as of a dream was on me, but the
next I was running upstairs again to my room, and I remember feeling the
cold of the marble steps on my bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom, and
slammed the door behind me, and then — I was certainly wide-awake now
— I found myself standing by my bed with the sweat of terror pouring
from me. The noise of the banged door still rang in my ears. But, as would
have been more usual, if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had
been mine when I saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping
softly on to the floor did not cease then. Awake, now, if dreaming before,
I did not at all recover from the horror of dream: it did not seem to me
that I had dreamed. And until dawn, I sat or stood, not daring to lie
down, thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach
of the caterpillars. To them and the claws that bit into the cement the
wood of the door was child’s play: steel would not keep them out.
But with the sweet and noble return of
day the horror vanished: the whisper of wind became benignant again: the
nameless fear, whatever it was, was smoothed out and terrified me no
longer. Dawn broke, hueless at first; then it grew dovecoloured, then the
flaming pageant of light spread over the sky.
The admirable rule of
the house was that everybody had breakfast where and when he pleased, and
in consequence it was not till lunch-time that I met any of the other
members of our party, since I had breakfast on my balcony, and wrote
letters and other things till lunch. In fact, I got down to that meal
rather late, after the other three had begun. Between my knife and fork
there was a small pill-box of cardboard, and as I sat down Inglis spoke.
“Do look at that,” he said,
“since you are interested in natural history. I found it crawling on my
counterpane last night, and I don’t know what it is.”
I think that before I opened the
pill-box I expected something of the sort which I found in it. Inside it,
anyhow, was a small caterpillar, greyish-yellow in colour, with curious
bumps and excrescences on its rings. It was extremely active, and hurried
round the box, this way and that. Its feet were unlike the feet of any
caterpillar I ever saw: they were like the pincers of a crab. I looked,
and shut the lid down again.
“No, I don’t know it,” I said,
“but it looks rather unwholesome. What are you going to do with it?”
“Oh, I shall keep it,” said Inglis.
“It has begun to spin: I want to see what sort of a moth it turns
into.”
I opened the box again, and saw that
these hurrying movements were indeed the beginning of the spinning of the
web of its cocoon. Then Inglis spoke again.
“It has got funny feet, too,” he
said. “They are like crabs’ pincers. What’s the Latin for crab? Oh,
yes, Cancer. So in case it is unique, let’s christen it: ‘Cancer
Inglisensis.’”
Then something happened in my brain,
some momentary piecing together of all that I had seen or dreamed.
Something in his words seemed to me to throw light on it all, and my own
intense horror at the experience of the night before linked itself on to
what he had just said. In effect, I took the box and threw it, caterpillar
and all, out of the window. There was a gravel path just outside, and
beyond it, a fountain playing into a basin. The box fell on to the middle
of this.
Inglis laughed.
“So the students of the occult
don’t like solid facts,” he said. “My poor caterpillar!”
The talk went off again at once on to
other subjects, and I have only given in detail, as they happened, these
trivialities in order to be sure myself that I have recorded everything
that could have borne on occult subjects or on the subject of
caterpillars. But at the moment when I threw the pill-box into the
fountain, I lost my head: my only excuse is that, as is probably plain,
the tenant of it was, in miniature, exactly what I had seen crowded on to
the bed in the unoccupied room. And though this translation of those
phantoms into flesh and blood — or whatever it is that caterpillars are
made of — ought perhaps to have relieved the horror of the night, as a
matter of fact it did nothing of the kind. It only made the crawling
pyramid that covered the bed in the unoccupied room more hideously real.
After lunch we spent a
lazy hour or two strolling about the garden or sitting in the loggza, and it must have been about four o’clock when Stanley and
I started off to bathe, down the path that led by the fountain into which
I had thrown the pill-box. The water was shallow and clear, and at the
bottom of it I saw its white remains. The water had disintegrated the
cardboard, and it had become no more than a few strips and shreds of
sodden paper. The centre of the fountain was a marble Italian Cupid which
squirted the water out of a wine-skin held under its arm. And crawling up
its leg was the caterpillar. Strange and scarcely credible as it seemed,
it must have survived the falling-to-bits of its prison, and made it’s
way to shore, and there it was, out of arm’s reach, weaving and waving
this way and that as it evolved its cocoon.
Then, as I looked at it, it seemed to
me again that, like the caterpillar I had seen last night, it saw me, and
breaking out of the threads that surrounded it, it crawled down the marble
leg of the Cupid and began swimming like a snake across the water of the
fountain towards me. It came with extraordinary speed (the fact of a
caterpillar being able to swim was new to me), and in another moment was
crawling up the marble lip of the basin. Just then Inglis joined us.
“Why, if it isn’t old ‘Cancer
Inglisensis’ again,” he said, catching sight of the beast. “What a
tearing hurry it is in!”
We were standing side by side on the
path, and when the caterpillar had advanced to within about a yard of us,
it stopped, and began waving again as if in doubt as to the direction in
which it should go. Then it appeared to make up its mind, and crawled on
to Inglis’ shoe.
“It likes me best,” he said, “but
I don’t really know that I like it. And as it won’t drown I think
perhaps—”
He shook it off his shoe on to the
gravel path and trod on it.
All afternoon the air
got heavier and heavier with the Sirocco that was without doubt coming up
from the south, and that night again I went up to bed feeling very sleepy;
but below my drowsiness, so to speak, there was the consciousness,
stronger than before, that there was something wrong in the house, that
something dangerous was close at hand. But I fell asleep at once, and —
how long after I do not know — either woke or dreamed I awoke, feeling
that I must get up at once, or I
should be too late. Then (dreaming or awake) I lay and fought this fear, telling
myself that 1 was but the prey of my own nerves disordered by Sirocco or
what not, and at the same time quite clearly knowing in another part of my
mind, so to speak, that every moment’s delay added to the danger. At
last this second feeling became irresistible, and I put on coat and
trousers and went out of my room on to the landing. And then I saw that I
had already delayed too long, and that I was now too late.
The whole of the landing of the first
floor below was invisible under the swarm of caterpillars that crawled
there. The folding doors into the sitting-room from which opened the
bedroom where I had seen them last night were shut, but they were
squeezing through the cracks of it and dropping one by one through the
keyhole, elongating themselves into mere string as they passed, and
growing fat and lumpy again on emerging. Some, as if exploring, were
nosing about the steps into the passage at the end of which were Inglis’
rooms, others were crawling on the lowest steps of the staircase that led
up to where I stood. The landing, however, was completely covered with
them: I was cut off. And of the frozen horror that seized me when I saw
that I can give no idea in words.
Then at last a general movement began
to take place, and they grew thicker on the steps that led to Inglis’
room. Gradually, like some hideous tide of flesh, they advanced along the
passage, and I saw the foremost, visible by the pale grey luminousness
that came from them, reach his door. Again and again I tried to shout and
warn him, in terror all the time that they would turn at the sound of my
voice and mount my stair instead, but for all my efforts I felt that no
sound came from my throat. They crawled along the hinge-crack of his door,
passing through as they had done before, and still I stood there, making
impotent efforts to shout to him, to bid him escape while there was time.
At last the passage was completely
empty: they had all gone, and at that moment I was conscious for the first
time of the cold of the marble landing on which I stood barefooted. The
dawn was just beginning to break in the Eastern sky.
Six months after I met
Mrs. Stanley in a country house in England. We talked on many subjects and
at last she said:
“I don’t think I have seen you
since I got that dreadful news about Arthur Inglis a month ago.”
“I haven’t heard,” said I.
“No? He has got cancer. They don’t
even advise an operation, for there is no hope of a cure: he is riddled
with it, the doctors say.”
Now during all these six months I do
not think a day had passed on which I had not had in my mind the dreams
(or whatever you like to call them) which I had seen in the Villa Cascana.
“It is awful, is it not?” she
continued, “and I feel I can’t help feeling, that he may have—”
“Caught it at the villa?” I asked.
She looked at me in blank surprise.
“Why did you say that?” she asked.
“How did you know?”
Then she told me. In the unoccupied
bedroom a year before there had been a fatal case of cancer. She had, of
course, taken the best advice and had been told that the utmost dictates
of prudence would be obeyed so long as she did not put anybody to sleep in
the room, which had also been thoroughly disinfected and newly
white-washed and painted. But—
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From Your Dark Side
