Cornhill, London, Sunday the 26th of May, 1782
“Gentlemen,” Hathaway suddenly declared. “Might I enquire whether any members of this august company have yet had the opportunity of viewing the new painting on display at the Royal Academy?”
Eyes rolled.
Lord Rotherby gave a contemptuous snort of disgust and poured himself more brandy.
Hathaway was not a member of the Coalbiter Club, he was too young a man. But he aspired to be, and his status as a mere acolyte had never deterred him from holding forth to the reluctant members. The man would, doggedly, attempt the stratagem of maneuvering the conversation onto his own diverse interests. His current passion was painting, and despite the less than warm reception Hathaway’s pronouncements habitually received, he was nevertheless persistent. Each time that he attended a meeting, just before they began their card games, Hathaway would invariably initiate an always doomed attempt to discourse on his latest obsession.
Not discouraged by the usual lack of a response, the young Hathaway continued.
“Damned strange canvas by a fellow named Fuseli. The Nightmare it’s called, and it’s aptly named I can tell you; it almost gave me nightmares after having seen it.”
He took a large pinch of snuff. Then he blew his nose voluminously before continuing.
“The manner in which the squatting thing is sat upon that poor woman’s diaphanously gowned form...” Hathaway now opined to a stonily quiet audience. “And what a creature it is that has beset her! Surely a true representation of a thing from nightmare! But to dream such dreams as that!”
This last pronouncement was followed by a prolonged and glum silence.
Bowden, who was seated at the card table, phlegmatically decided something must be done. He cleared his throat and suggested a game of Pope Joan. This was met with a renewed vigour from the gentlemen seated variously about the fireside. Sensing that Hathaway was defeated once more, Rotherby’s valet Allenby, threw more coal on the fire and the old manservant Jessop refilled their glasses. Several men reached for the tobacco jar. But even as Bowden shuffled the playing cards, a voice rose from the shadows on the far side of the hearth.
“I have had a nightmare.”
To everyone’s surprise, it was Sir Henry Mortimer who had spoken.
Of all the members of that select club, none were less loquacious nor more highly regarded than Sir Henry, the hero of the Battle of Quebec.
So it was, that when he spoke, all listened.
“Yes, Hathaway, I have indeed had a nightmare.”
Hathaway, suddenly animated, was filled with a fresh encouragement.
“Why Sir Henry, were you to see Fuseli’s painting yourself you would, I am sure, find it most moving. Indeed gentlemen,” he said, now turning to the rest of the group, “the very essence of that painting is a challenge to all rational scholars of Newtonian logic. I fear that the empirical minds of our burgeoning academies attend too lightly on Dame Metaphysics. I urge you to view the painting gentlemen! It would be an education for you all. Was it not in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy where dreams were described as...”
This was too much for the irascible Lord Rotherby. He interrupted Hathaway’s coming soliloquy with an ejaculation of gout-inspired fury.
“Damn your bones, sir! Let the member speak by Gad!” He violently adjusted his wig and pointed at the astonished Hathaway with the long stem of his clay pipe. “You sir are, after all, only a guest here.”
Suitably chastised, Hathaway’s face paled and sagged and he remained quiet, holding his claret glass in a now slightly trembling hand.
“Speak Sir Henry, tell us your nightmare,” Rotherby prompted, sensing a story, and casting a withering glare at Hathaway.
Once more the eyes of the room fell upon the figure who sat in the flickering shadows beyond the hearth’s illumination.
And Sir Henry leant forwards, his thin, saturnine face now caught the fire’s light, his wigless head revealing his short, greying hair. But it was the intensity of his green eyes that held them.
“I have no need to see Master Fuseli’s representation of nightmare to know the dread that can overcome a man in his dreams,” he began, his voice deep, and sonorously portentous. “No sir, I need no instruction on nightmares. For I have dreamt the same terrible dream for nearly thirty years,”
He looked at them intently, then shook his head grimly.
“Ever since I came into my inheritance on the passing of my late, noble father, I have suffered this ‘dream’. In his final moments, my father spoke of blood and, again and again, mentioned the stair, the ever-descending stair... At first, I discounted his words as merely arising from the delirium of approaching death. But, gentlemen, ever since that night, this dream, this nightmare, comes to me each month as regular as an unwelcome collector of rents. And always it falls on the same date, always the eve of the full moon.”
Sir Henry paused and sitting back, retreated into the gloom.
“But though the visitation is usually brief, its foreshadowing of doom has haunted my waking hours long after the dawn has brought me relief from slumber.”
The room fell into a disquieted silence.
Hathaway twitched but held his peace after a warning glance from Lord Rotherby.
“Aye, and what of it Sir Henry? Will you tell us what this nightmare was?” Rotherby at last queried, sipping at his brandy.
There was a long pause, and the silence was only broken by the crackling of the fire and the regular ticking of the lantern clock on the wall.
“It is a peculiar thing,” Sir Henry finally said from his shadowed chair. “The Book of Genesis tells us that Jacob dreamt, and then beheld a ladder set up on the earth, and that the top of it reached to Heaven itself. However, in my dream, my nightmare, I find myself descending a deep stone stair. There is no ascent to paradise, no, nor any angels upon that stair. My journey is ever downwards, mine is an inverted Jacob’s Ladder.”
He paused and called to Jessop for wine.
The company watched as Sir Henry’s hand extended his glass into the firelight and the servant refilled it.
The hand withdrew, the baronet drank and then he sighed.
“The entrance might appear anywhere within the realm of my nightly chimeric wanderings. On those evenings when the nightmare comes upon me, I might be dreaming I am riding, or walking through the grounds of my home, or even pacing the familiar corridors of the old house itself. Indeed, the dream begins just as any night-time fancy might begin. But whatever I am doing in that ethereal world, I am suddenly aware that it is time to go. And soon enough, there before me is the entrance, that dark portal that leads ever downwards. How often I have descended those stairs I cannot relate. But each time I have trodden ever deeper. For years I have stepped foot by foot lower. The stairs seem endless and the weight of the masonry and piled earth above me has grown ever more oppressive. Sometimes I perceived others on the stair. Always before me, shadows, several flights down. But they have never responded to my calls, and I have never reached them. But more often I walked alone. Steadily descending, going ever deeper down into that well, that overturned tower to the underworld.”
During the pause that followed, there were several low, wondering murmurs.
“You have called me I believe, the Hero of Quebec. But my reckless actions on that battlefield were not driven by some Achillean martial heroism. No gentlemen. I sought only death in battle and a release. To have died with my spadroon or a pistol still clutched in my hand would have been a death indeed. But death would not take me that day, and although my fury was such that I delivered many of my enemies unto the arms of the Grim Reaper, he did not come for me in turn. Thus, sometimes, are heroes named. No, it seems that I, like my father before me, must await the part destined to me, destined by my blood. But that time is fast approaching. And now I speak of it for the first, and last, time. For when last month the nightmare came once more, I finally reached the very lowest levels of that seemingly eternal stairway. I have stepped out onto the bleak shore that borders the black, sluggish waters of that Stygian River of death. And they came to me there and spoke to me. What manner of things these are I will not relate to you; else you think me disordered in the brain. But I will tell you this, they were not men... or at least they were no longer men! They told me things, revealed things to me about my lineage, and now that I have found them they will never leave me. Soon I must join them at the foot of the stair. I shall become like them, aye, and my son and his son after him for as long as our line endures. It is our fate and we Mortimers cannot escape the legacy of the blood that runs through our veins.”
“But what does this mean?” Rotherby now interjected, his interest in Sir Henry’s story dampening even his garrulous incredulity.
“It means Lord Rotherby, esteemed gentlemen of the Coalbiter Club, that tonight, the eve of the full moon, I shall dream for a final time, and you will not see me in this place anymore.”
After a brief silence, and when it was apparent that Sir Henry would say nothing further, there was a sudden babble of voices and several questions.
But Sir Henry Mortimer was already standing. After fitting his wig, he collected his cane and, with a short bow, left the room.
Sir Henry Mortimer’s obituary in The Morning Herald appeared nearly a week later. Following a lengthy account of his notable military exploits early in the American war, it concluded with the information that Sir Henry had passed ‘into God’s benevolent care’ during the early hours of Monday the twenty-seventh of May 1782.
A full contingent of the Coalbiter Club was present at the memorial service in the Morning Chapel of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Henry’s body having already been interred in the family crypt in Surrey.
The new baronet, Sir Richard Mortimer, who had recently returned from Oxford, made a great show of thanking the assembled gentlemen afterward. The Coalbiter Club had, according to the young Mortimer, been such an important part of his father’s life, especially following the death of Sir Henry’s beloved wife, Lady Margaret.
Once the required words of condolences had been mournfully expressed, the members had invited Sir Richard to dine with them at the Coalbiter Club at his own convenience and, a date was duly arranged for an evening in June.
The Coalbiter Club were considered modest only in their attire. It was a long-established fact that the gentlemen of the Club were committed to their gastronomies. When the arranged date finally arrived, a very worthy supper was enjoyed by the members and their guest. Once the desserts were consumed, the remains of the sugared fruits, sweetmeats, jams, jellies, and creams were cleared from the table, and the wine was poured. With their glasses charged, they made a final toast and were settling down to smoke and talk when the ever-impetuous Hathaway, seemingly unable to contain himself, attempted to draw Sir Richard into a conversation relating to Hathaway’s latest fancy, Mesmerism.
“Sir Richard what, pray tell, is your opinion of Mesmer the noted physician? His ideas relating to Animal Magnetism are most entertaining. Why he asserts that a journey taken hand in hand with Hypnos himself might even reveal and cure disease!”
Sir Richard looked nonplussed and Rotherby growled a warning to Hathaway.
“I’m not sure I have ever heard of this... Mesmer was it Mr. Hathaway?” Sir Richard sportingly replied. “Nor, as a scholar of theology, do I care for any part of this new fashion of rational, or indeed irrational inquiry. I am a Tory of the old school sir. The Lord made us in His image Mr. Hathaway, and I for one do not aspire to know more than the good Lord has delivered unto us.”
This last statement drew a hearty “hear, hear” from several nodding heads about the table.
Then, setting down his glass, Sir Richard frowned.
“However, I did have a most singular dream on the very night that father passed away... rather, it was a nightmare, for I cannot quite forget it... I do wonder though whether it might have some meaning, perhaps even some divine import.”
All eyes in the room turned toward him.
It was Lord Rotherby who finally broke the silence.
His voice was low and uncharacteristically subdued.
“Tell us Sir Richard, tell us about your nightmare.”
[C. P. Webster is the author of the novella The Horror Beneath]