Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Muriel Spark, haunted houses, Christmas hauntings, Chill Tidings, weird Christmas, Christmas ghost stories, classic British horror
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2021-10-19T20:00:00+00:00

‘I haven’t told it before,’ said Sir Andrew, ‘partly, because it’s distasteful to recall, and partly, for the reason that the prudent sea-captain turns his blind eye on a sea serpent and keeps a buttoned lip over the glimpse he caught; no one much appreciates the grin of incredulous derision.’

‘I promise to keep a straight face,’ I assured him.

‘Yes, I rather think you will. Well, all those years ago, in that remote and golden time, I knew and climbed with a man I will call Brown. He was about my age. He had inherited considerable position and fortune and he was heir, also, to that irresistible and consuming passion for high places, their conquest and company, which, given the least opportunity, will never be denied, and only decrepitude or death can frustrate. Technically, he was a master in all departments, a finished cragsman and just as expert on snow and ice. But there was just occasionally an un-mastered streak of recklessness in him which flawed him as a leader, and everyone, including myself, preferred to have him lower down the rope.

‘It was, perhaps, due to one of these reckless seizures that, after our fourth season together, he proposed to a wench, who replied promptly in the affirmative. He was a smallish fellow, though immensely lithe, active, strong and tough. She was not far short of six feet and tipped the beam at one hundred and sixty-eight pounds, mostly muscle. With what suicidal folly, my dear Bill, do these infatuate pigmies, like certain miserable male insects, doom themselves with such Boadiceas, and how pitilessly and jocundly do those monsters bounce upon their prey! This particular specimen was terribly, viciously, “County,” immensely handsome, and intolerably authoritarian. Speaking evil of the dead is often the only revenge permitted us and I have no intention of refraining from saying that I have seldom, almost certainly never, disliked anyone more than Hecate Quorn. Besides being massive and menacing to the nth degree, she was endowed with a reverberating contralto which loaned a fearsomely oraculate air to her insistent spate of edicts. Marry for lust and repent in haste, the oldest, saddest lesson in the world, and one my poor friend had almost instantly to learn. Once she’d gripped him in her red remorseless maw, she bullied him incessantly and appeared to dominate him beyond hope of release. Such an old story I need enlarge upon it no more! How many of our old friends have we watched fall prostrate before these daughters of Masrur!

‘She demanded that he should at least attempt to teach her to climb, and females of her build are seldom much good at the game, particularly if they are late beginners. She was no exception, and her nerve turned out to be surprisingly more suspect on a steepish slope than her ghastly assurance on the level would have suggested. Poor Brown plugged away at it, because he feared, if she chucked her hand in, he would never see summer snow again. He did his very desperate best.

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