The Difficulty with the Light in Mr. Pembridge's Study

Being the account of Miss Agnes Culver, housemaid, as transcribed by Dr. F. W. Hartington, physician, during her period of convalescence at St. Mildred's Infirmary, Exeter, in the autumn of 1903. Miss Culver spoke clearly, and did not vary in her account across three separate interviews. I record it here because I do not know what else to do with it.

The gaslight had been a source of considerable controversy in the household even before it became a source of something worse.

Mr. Pembridge had installed it in September, against the explicit counsel of his wife, who held that gaslights were vulgar in a private room, and who had, in any case, a particular attachment to the pair of oil lamps that had illuminated her late father's study and subsequently her husband's, for a combined period of some thirty years. The gasman — a compact, cheerful fellow named Grout, whom Agnes had twice encountered on the stairs and who smelled, she noted, not unpleasantly, of sulphur — had fitted the new fixture to the wall beside the window on a Thursday afternoon. By Friday evening it had ceased to function. By the following Monday, Mr. Pembridge had summoned Grout again, and Grout had adjusted some mechanism Agnes could not see from the doorway where she stood waiting with the tea tray, and by Tuesday the light burned again, steadily, with what Agnes could only describe as a kind of insistence.

She did not tell the physician what she meant by that. He wrote it down anyway.

It was on the Wednesday evening that Agnes first noticed the shadows.

She had been sent to the study at half past eight to collect the supper tray, Mr. Pembridge having retired early with what he described as a headache of the geological variety — a phrase he used to indicate that it had layers. The study was empty. The gaslight burned. And the shadows it cast upon the wallpaper — a dark green paper, patterned with repeating arrangements of laurel leaves, installed within the last twelve months — were moving in a manner that Agnes could not account for by any movement of the flame itself.

One understands that gas flames flicker. Agnes was not an unintelligent girl. She had grown up in a house with gas and understood the principles of its operation at least as well as Mr. Pembridge did, which is to say imperfectly but with great confidence. What she observed on Wednesday evening was not a flicker. The shadows pooled and stretched in a slow, deliberate rhythm, as though something behind the wallpaper were breathing.

She picked up the tray. She left.

She said nothing.

On Thursday she noticed the cracks.

They were in the wallpaper — not tears, precisely, and not the ordinary settling-gaps one finds in older houses, but something finer, a webwork of fractures running outward from a point perhaps four feet from the floor, two feet to the left of the gaslight bracket. Agnes observed them at approximately seven o'clock in the morning, when she entered to light the fire, and she was quite certain they had not been present the previous day, because she had dusted that wall on Tuesday, and one does not dust a cracked surface without noticing.

She mentioned them to Mrs. Garvey, the housekeeper, who came to look and agreed they were peculiar, and who said she would speak to Mr. Pembridge about the damp.

Agnes did not think it was the damp.

She did not elaborate on this intuition to Mrs. Garvey, because she could not have explained it, and because Mrs. Garvey was not a woman who valued intuitions she could not verify with a damp-cloth or a housekeeping ledger.

That evening Agnes returned to the study at half past eight.

The cracks had spread.

She stood in the doorway for what she estimated was nearly a minute, holding a clean cloth she had brought for the purposes of appearing purposeful, and she counted the new fractures methodically, because she was, as has been noted, not an unintelligent girl, and counting gave her something to do with her mind while her mind decided what it thought.

The gaslight was burning with its insistent, steady flame. The shadows moved in their slow rhythm. And the cracks — which on the morning had formed a pattern perhaps the size of a dinner plate — now extended fully two feet in each direction, branching and bifurcating with what Agnes could only describe as a kind of patience.

The wallpaper in the centre of the pattern had begun to bow outward, very slightly, as though pressed from behind.

Agnes set down the cloth on Mr. Pembridge's writing desk.

She approached the wall.

She did not want to. She was entirely clear on this point with Dr. Hartington, across three separate interviews. She did not want to approach the wall. She approached it nonetheless, because she was twenty-two years old and had been in service since she was fourteen and she was not, she said, the sort of person who stood in doorways.

At a distance of approximately two feet she could see that the bowing was not uniform. It was concentrated at one point, a small protrusion at the centre of the web of cracks, pressing through the paper with a kind of deliberateness that she could not have described more precisely and did not attempt to. The gaslight shifted. The shadows shifted. And in that shifting she saw, extending from the largest crack — a horizontal fissure perhaps three inches long, running through what had once been a laurel leaf — a finger.

It was small. The size of an infant's finger, or smaller. It was grey-brown and entirely desiccated, the skin drawn tight and paperlike over the bones beneath, the nail still present, and it extended perhaps half an inch from the crack, curved very slightly, as though in an attitude of beckoning, or of pointing — though at what, Agnes could not have said, and did not say.

She stood and looked at it for what she believed was a long time.

The gaslight burned.

The shadows moved in their slow, deliberate exhalation.

She did not touch it.

She left the house that night, taking with her one carpet bag and her wages for the month, and she did not return. She sent a letter to Mrs. Garvey explaining that she had received news of a family illness, which was not true, and she was sorry for the inconvenience, which was.

She told no one what she had seen until Dr. Hartington, who was, she explained, the first person who had not interrupted her.

Physician's note, appended. I have since made two enquiries. The first: I wrote to Mr. Pembridge's residence in Exeter to determine whether the wallpaper in question had been examined or removed. His wife replied — Mr. Pembridge being indisposed — that they had, in October, engaged a decorator to repaper the study, and that upon removing the existing paper they had found the wall beneath to be quite ordinary plaster in a satisfactory state of repair. She mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Grout the gasman had been called again in November, because the light had begun, once more, to malfunction.

The second enquiry: I looked up the prior occupants of the house. The study, I am given to understand, was added to the structure in 1887.

I did not look further.

— F.W.H.