"You must be bold when the cold wind blows and eyes flicker in the thickets that shiver in the wind. You must fear the face that is keeping pace through the brakes as you make your trembling way home. When the owls flash white in the closing night and a shape walks close behind, when footsteps follow in gloomy hollows and a shadow falls beside yours on the road ... all this and more will snuffle at your door as you huddle close 'round the fire. Stack logs to build it higher, and quaking wait for the dawn."
Such was the poesy gloom he was reading, huddled close over his reading-table with the drapes drawn and a contented fire murmuring in the grate, when in the corner of his eye he caught an owl-white flash. It was just a suggestion of a something, but enough to make him drop his book, forgotten, and startle out of his chair.
The curtains were tightly drawn, thick heavy things in beige twill with an even thicker lining to keep out the chill. Outside the wind rattled the bare branches and mourned under the eaves. There was the distant shushing of the woods and nothing more.
He thought to himself, This is silly, and strode over to the curtained window. A prickle of fear ran up his spine as he passed the two windows on his left, though their curtains were equally tightly closed - presumably the work of the overzealous Spanish housemaid who feared drafts as if they were vipers - and there was that sense he couldn't dismiss. He had seen something, a flicker of white.
A face had peered in at the window.
On the third floor? Up three storeys of bare stone wall? Good stone, neatly repointed only the year before so that the sandstone face was as smooth as if it had been planed? Never!
Yet here he was, standing before the window, cold sweat beading at his temples, eyes fixed on that little black triangle where the curtains didn't meet quite as tightly as they might because one was coming away from its runners - again the work of the overzealous Spanish housemaid who treated curtains as if they were oxen. Here he was, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his smoking jacket, fumbling with his pipe and his tobacco to distract himself from the terrible idea that he might pull the curtains back.
Surely it was nothing. A fancy. A trick of the light. A spark from the fireplace. A figment of the brain. The gamekeeper's torch. At the uttermost worst, a passing owl.
He listened. The fire crick-cracked sleepily. Beyond the lawns and the flowerbeds the wood rushed in the wind, the wind sighed around the gutters and a pheasant coughed a mile away. On the first floor a door closed.
He couldn't have seen a face at the window. Not a white face, not an eyeless face, not a face peering in between the curtains at the top of a window eight feet high, not at the top of a window three storeys up.
Perhaps he should go to bed ... but the dark hallways were suddenly forbidding. The passage beyond the door was bleak with the potential for far worse than a rucked carpet underfoot or an unseen cat on the stairs.
This is silly, he told himself again, and grasped the curtain firmly, set upon yanking it back to reveal the dark and empty night outside. Then he would look down on the frosty lawn and the gravel path shining under the moon - aha, the moon, white and peering in through windows - and then he would laugh at himself and smoke a pipe before retiring to bed with De Witts's Life in Oxford or some such.
"This is silly," he said aloud, and pulled back the curtain.
It was terribly white.