Seashore Macabre by Hugh Walpole

“Seashore Macabre” was first published in 1933, in All Souls’ Night, a collection of 16 short stories written by Hugh Walpole. An unusual tale of terror, the story begins on a happy note with a young boy enjoying a family day out to the seaside. Then, after a chance encounter with a sinister old man, the boy’s curiosity—or a supernatural influence—causes him to be drawn into a nightmare situation that continues to haunt his memories in later life.

About Hugh Walpole

The son of an Anglican clergyman, Sir Hugh Walpole was an English Novelist who initially intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a carreer in the church. However, like his father, who published more than 20 books on theology, Hugh was a gifted wordsmith, and eventually decided to throw his creativity into creating works of fiction, while also working as a teacher.

Walpose published his first novel, The Wooden Horse, in 1909, and many books followed, usually at the rate of one book per year. A good deal of Walpoles short stories are ghost stories or tales of weird fiction and the macabre. Known influences include the authors, Herny James and A. C. Benson, both of whom were his personal friends.

However, although Walpole wrote many dark tales and works of speculative fiction, including the Gothic horror novels Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (1925) and The Killer and the Slain (1942), he also wrote children’s stories and historic fiction. Hugely popular, Walpole was a best-selling author during the 1920s and 1930s. A lesser-known author among modern-day readers, Walpole produced a large and varied body of work including five books of short stories and thirty-six novels.

Seashore Macabre

By Hugh Walpole

(Online Text )

We had gone to our usual summer residence, a farm perched on the steep hill above Gosforth—Gosforth in Cumberland, where the Druid Cross is in the graveyard, so that foreigners come from the far ends of the earth to see it. For the rest the farm was hay and chickens’ eggs, and wallflowers in hot dusty clusters under the narrow garden-wall, and the ducks walking into the kitchen, and Mrs. A—, the friendly, soft-hearted and deeply pessimistic farmer’s wife, making cakes, hot and spicy, in the cavernous black oven.

But this incident, so clearly and sharply remembered, so symbolic, Mr. Freud perhaps would tell me, of all my older life, has nothing to do with the farm, except that it starts from there. It starts from there because on fine days we bicycled three miles into Seascale.

Seascale was the nearest seaside resort. It looked then as though one day it might become a true resort. It had long, lazy sands, a new golf course, a fine hotel, and there were little roads and lanes in and about that looked as though, with the slightest encouragement, they might become quite busy shop-haunted streets. Nevertheless, little roads and lanes now after thirty years they still are. Seascale has never taken that step upward into commercial prosperity that once perhaps was hoped for it. I myself am glad that it has not. It is the one place of my childhood that is not altered. The flat, passive sands are damp and wind-blown as they always were, the little station—sticky in the warm weather with a sort of sandy grit, damp in the wet weather like a soaked matchbox—stands just as it always did, as though with a rather stupid finger to its lip it were wondering whether it should go or stay.

No, not on the face of it a romantic place, Seascale—and yet to myself one of the romantic places of the world!

We bicycled—my father, my sister and I—while my mother and small brother were driven the three miles in a pony-trap. Then, if the weather permitted us, we spent the day on Seascale sands. We bathed in water that had always a chill on it quite special to itself, we ate ham sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and gingerbreads under the shelter of the one small rock that the beach possessed (if that rock were not already occupied), and we read—my mother and father The Egoist; I—if priggish—Le Rouge et le Noir, if unpriggish, Saracinesca.

Now it happened that one day in the week was specially glorious to me; this was the day of my weekly pocket-money, threepence the amount, if not already owed for reasons of discipline, sin or back-answering. Now it also occurred that on the same day that I received my pocket-money was published the new number of a paper, yet I believe (and hope) in a flourishing condition—The Weekly Telegraph.

The Weekly Telegraph was my love and my dear. It cost, I think, only a penny. Its dry and rather yellow-tinted sheets (smelling of straw, liquorice and gunpowder, I fancy in reminiscence) held an extraordinary amount of matter, and especially they held the romantic short stories of Robert Murray Gilchrist, the serial narratives of young Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, and even, best of all as I remember it, The Worldlings, by Mr. Leonard Merrick. There were also ‘Country Notes,’ tinged deeply with Cumberland sights and sounds, jests, quips and oddities, ways of cleaning knives and forks, making pillow-slips and curing a child of the croup.

What I suppose I am trying to emphasise is the contrast of these happy simplicities with—well, reader (as Charlotte Brontë always said), be patient and you shall hear!

You can see me, small, spindle-shanked and wind-blown, while my family sat huddled beneath the one Seascale rock, struggling through the spidery sand to the little station, my threepenny piece damply clutched. It was, as I remember it, a day of bright, glittering sun and a high wind. I am at least certain of a general glitter in the heavens and fragments of burning sand about my eyes.

I fought my way up the slope, sand in my shoes, sand in my eyes, sand in my throat. I stood on the higher ground, rubbed the sand from my eyes and looked back to the distant plum-coloured hills where the Screes run down sheer to Wastwater and Gable rolls his shoulder. Then into the little station that burnt in the sun so that its paint sizzled. I asked for The Weekly Telegraph. I cannot remember what he was like who gave it to me, but I do know that I did not take two steps before I had opened the paper to see whether there were a Gilchrist ‘Peakland’ story, all about My Lady Swarthmore and tinkling spinets and a room darkly hung with tapestries, and some fair child working a picture in delicate silks. Yes, there it was! The horn was blowing through Elf-land, the long slow sands below me were lit with mother-of-pearl, and there were mermaids near the shore. Mr. Oppenheim was also there—A Prince of Swindlers, Chap. XVII. ‘As he walked down the steps of the Hôtel Splendide, wondering whether he should try his luck at the Tables or no, Prince Serge . . .’ I drew a deep breath of satisfaction, took a step out of the station and almost collided with the wickedest human being it has ever been my luck to behold. Now, wicked human beings are rare! I have, I think, never beheld another. The majority of us are fools with or without a little knavery. This old man was, although, as you will see, I never exchanged a word with him, really wicked—capable, I am sure, of real, fine, motiveless villainy like Iago.

He was a little man, bent in the back, wearing a rather floppy black hat and carrying an umbrella. He had, I remember, a sallow complexion, a hooked nose, and a wart on his chin. I say I remember, but indeed he is as vivid to me as though he were standing by my side at this moment—which in fact he may be for all I know to the contrary.

And now, how strange what followed! As I have said, I almost stumbled on him. He stood aside and looked at me, and I looked at him! His look as I recall it was cold, sneering and mean-faced. Then he turned on his heel and, waving his bulging umbrella in the air, walked down the road.

Why, of all things in the world, did I follow him? I cannot imagine. I was on the whole a timid child, a good deal of a coward. Moreover, I had in my hand my adored Weekly Telegraph and was longing to read in it. Nevertheless I followed him. Looking back across all those years it seems to me that a cloud passed over the sun as we walked along, that the walls of the houses shone with a less brilliant reflection, that a chill creeping little wind began to wander. That is doubtless imagination. What is true is that the little man walked without making any sound upon the road. He was wearing, I suppose, shoes soled in felt or something of the kind. What is also true is that I was drawn after him as though I were led by a string.

Now I have said that I knew him to be wicked. How did I know? Was it only the idlest fancy? At that time I had but a child’s knowledge of the world, and wickedness was far from my experience. The nearest to wickedness that I had then reached perhaps was the sight of a schoolfellow who had pulled the wings from a fly, or the lustful anger in the eyes of a schoolmaster beating one of my companions. Well, this little old man with the umbrella had something of that about him. Cruelty and meanness? Are there any other sorts of wickedness? I am sure that this little man could be both cruel and mean.

Did he know that I was following him? He must have heard my step. He gave no sign. With his head forward, his back bent, waving his umbrella, so under the windy sun he pursued his way.

Beyond the little town we reached paths soft in sand and with stiff sea-grasses sprouting there. We approached the sea and I fancy that the wind increased in volume, began to blow a hurricane. My heart was beating with terror, a sort of sickly pleasure, an odd mixture of daring and foreboding.

The little man came to a cottage knee-deep in sand, on the very edge in fact of a dune that ran down to a sea where waves were flinging in a succession of fiery silver wheels. Although the sun shone so brilliantly, the cottage looked dark and chill. There was, as I remember it, no warmth here, and the wind tugged at my trouser-legs. The little man vanished into the cottage. Clutching my Weekly Telegraph, I followed. And then—how did I have the courage? What spell was laid upon me so that I did something utterly against my nature? Or was it that my true nature was for once permitted the light?

In any case I paused, my heart hammering the little cottage as still as a picture. Then—I turned the handle of the door and looked in.

What I saw was a decent-sized kitchen with a yawning black oven, dressers—but on them no plates; windows—but uncurtained. In a rocking-chair beside the fire sat an old man, the very spit of the old gentleman I had followed. The room was dark, for the windows were small; it was lit by candles and the candles were placed, two at one end of a trestle, two at another. And on the trestle lay a corpse.

I had never until that moment seen a dead person. This figure lay wrapped in white clothes; a white bandage was round his chin; his cheeks were waxen and yellow. So he lay. There was a silence, as there should be, of the grave itself. The corpse, as, with horror clutching my throat, I more persistently gazed, was that of an old man, the image again of the old boy with the umbrella, of the old boy in the chair. Nothing stirred. I could hear the solemn tick of a clock.

But, in my agitation, unknowing, I held the door open. A sudden gust of wind rushed past me, and instantly—most horrible of all my life’s recollections!—everything sprang to life. The little man whom I had followed appeared at the head of the kitchen-stairs and, in the most dreadful way, he pointed his umbrella as though condemning me to instant death. The little man in the chair sprang out of his sleep, and I shudder now when I remember his loose eye with its pendulous lid and an awful toneless grin as he stepped towards me. But worst of all was the way in which the thin silver hair of the corpse began to blow and his grave-clothes to flutter.

The room was filled with the wind. Sand came blowing in. Everything was on the move; it seemed to me that the yellow-faced corpse raised his hand . . .

Screaming, I ran for my life. Stumbling, falling, bruising my knees, tearing my hands against the spiky grass, I frantically escaped.

A moment’s experience—yes, but Mr. Freud might say—a lifetime’s consequence.

Hugh Walpole (1920 – 1925)