Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror - Chris Priestley [1]
Of course, in no time at all, I managed to pull back the creaking gate and squeeze through, and each time would turn with relief to see the wood unchanged beyond the small stone wall I had just passed through. Even so, in my childish way, I would turn again as I set out across the paddock, hoping (or rather perhaps dreading) to catch sight of someone - or something. But I never did.
That said, I did sometimes have company on my walk. The children from the village would occasionally skulk about. I had nothing to do with them, nor they with me. I was away at school. I do not wish to sound a snob, but we came from different worlds.
I would sometimes see them among the trees, as I did this particular day. They did not come near and never said a word. They stood silently among the shadows. Their intention was clearly to intimidate me, and in that they were quite successful, but I did my best not to appear ruffled. I made a show of ignoring them and continued on my way.
The paddock was overgrown with long ragged grass and the dry brown seed heads of thistles and teasels and cow parsley. As I walked across the track of trampled grass towards the garden gate, I could see and hear the scampering movement of what I took to be rabbits or pheasants, rustling in the undergrowth.
I always paused at the gate to look at the house, which stood on its own little hillock as many churches do, and indeed there was something of the graveyard in its walled garden and something of the church in its arched Gothic windows and its spikes and ornaments. The garden gate was as much in need of oil as the kissing gate and the latch so heavy that it took all my boyish strength to lift it, the metal so cold and damp it chilled my fingers to the bone.
When I turned to shut the gate again, I would always look back and marvel at how my parents' house was now entirely hidden by the wood, and at how, in the particular stillness of that place, it seemed that there was no other living soul for miles about.
The path now led across the lawn to my uncle's door, past a strange gathering of topiary bushes. No doubt these massive yews had once been artfully clipped into the usual array of cones and birds, but for some years they had been growing wild. These feral bushes now stood malevolently about the house, inviting the imagination to see in their deformed shapes the hint of teeth, the suggestion of a leathery wing, the illusion of a claw or an eye.
I knew, of course, that they were only bushes, but nevertheless I am embarrassed to say that I always found myself hurrying along the path that led between them, and was never tempted to look over my shoulder as I rapped the great hoop of the door knocker to announce my presence to my uncle - a hoop, I should say, which hung from the mouth of a most peculiar creature: the face, formed of dull unpolished brass, seemed to hover unnervingly betwixt lion and man.
After what always seemed an extraordinary length of time, and just as I was about to lift the door knocker again, the door would open and Uncle Montague would be standing there, as always, holding a candle and smiling at me, beckoning me to enter.
'Don't stand there in the cold, Edgar,.' he said. 'Come in, lad. Come in.'
I entered eagerly enough, but to tell the truth there was little difference in temperature between the garden and my uncle's hallway, and if there was a difference I would say it was in the garden's favour, for I have never been so cold inside a building as I was inside my uncle's house. I swear I once saw frost sparkling on the banisters of the stairs.
My uncle set off along the stone-flagged hall and I set off in pursuit, following the flickering candle-light as keenly as a moth. It was part of my uncle's many eccentricities that, though he clearly did not want for