Vale of the White Horse and Other Strange British Tales by Thomas Scott

Author:Thomas, Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weird House Press
Published: 2021-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Queen of Weeds

England, 1888

Davis Chambers, Esquire, purchased an ancient Tudor mansion in the Yorkshire dales. The structure was a brooding, majestic thing of stone, a cross between a quaint cottage and an im-posing castle. It had only just been vacated by a gentleman who boasted a link of minor capil-laries to the royal bloodline. Chambers, along with his wife Adeline, gathered their friends to the grounds come Christmas-time.

A light snow was falling on the moors as the hardiest of the revelers gathered about a blaz-ing hearth with cigars and brandy. The hour was late, and most of the guests had gone off to their chambers. Shadows jerked on the dark paneling of the library.

When midnight chimed, one of the men said goodnight and wobbled off to bed. Three re-mained, these being Chambers, Worster and Stubbings. Chambers sat beneath the grey weight of his beard, his bulk joggling as he chuckled and gestured with his cigar. George Worster, bald-ing and non-descript, was the quietest of the group, and prone to grinning. Raymond Stubbings was animated and thin, his reddish lambchop sideburns so busy that they made him appear top-heavy.

“Adeline tells me I'm to stay in the haunted room,” Stubbings said, wriggling his brows.

Chambers laughed. “Yes! I thought you might fancy that, mindful of your fondness for a good ghost story.”

“I'm intrigued,” Stubbings said, bravely enough. “And what might the story be?”

Worster sat forward, grinning.

“Well, I had heard something of the ghost before ever stepping foot in the place, truth be told, but it was one of the servants that stayed on who proved most informative, following a bit of prompting,” Chambers said.

Stubbings poured himself another brandy.

The host, pensively fingering his ponderous beard, went on. “The room, which occupies the first floor, by the way, is nothing extraordinary, not particularly charming, nor menacing to the eye. The view is pleasant enough—it looks upon the garden. I believe it was a nursery, back in the late sixteen hundreds, and I take it several young children perished there. But children were so frequently lost to fever and such in those days, weren't they?”

“Yes, I should think they were.”

“At any rate, the mistress of the house insisted that the room be shut up, and it sat empty for some time. Her next child was kept in other quarters and, as it turned out, did not share the mis-fortune of its siblings.

“If my servant is to be believed, a certain scandal followed.… The master of the house ap-pears to have been dallying about with one of the help. The fool got discovered, but worse than that, the girl ended up dead.”

“Dead, you say?”

Chambers nodded solemnly. “The missus came upon them while they were in the thick of it, or just after, actually. They were in the shut-up room—he had a key, you know. The girl was dead, with terrible marks about her neck. The husband's explanation was rather fantastic. He claimed that a great white spider, or something that looked like a spider—hard to tell in the dark—crawled up the side of the bed and squeezed her throat.

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