I picked this book up a week or so ago without giving a thought to the RIP Challenge and that it would form part of my list of five, until I started reading it yesterday and then realised that this was another creepy ghost story to put alongside The Woman in Black on my bookshelves. I started reading it in bed late on Saturday night and then remembered that I had made this mistake with WIB and had scared myself witless, so I shut it up, turned the light off and read it in the sunny morning next day. I then realised that really this was another mistake. This kind of book must be read at night when you are on your own and nobody around - it all adds to the reading experience. Better still to read it on 'a dark and stormy night' with the curtains drawn, sheets of rain hitting the window panes and a fire flickering in the hearth.
This is the story of James Monmouth who has returned to England after years of living abroad. His childhood was spent with his guardian in Kenya, whence he was taken after the death of his parents, and when he found himself alone at the age of 18 he decided he would travel. He reads the works of a famous traveller, Conrad Vane, and on his eventual return to England he decided to discover more about him. Everywhere he goes, he is warned off his quest and it soon transpires that Conrad Vane was not a nice person, and did some pretty awful things during his life, though nobody will actually say what.
James, ignoring all the warnings he has been given, travels down to Vane's old school to research the 
archives there. He arrives on a dark, winter's evening with snow falling and all is quiet and still. In London he has been haunted by the sight of a boy with a face of despair and fear on his face but who vanishes when James tries to follow him to find out what is troubling him. He sees him here also - he has followed him. In the middle of a sleepless night, James decides to take a midnight walk into the library and sets off down a dark, corridor and opens the doors. At this stage, the reader will be screaming DON'T DO IT, but to no avail. He knows somebody or something is watching him. He can hear breathing:
"The soft breathing came again, from a different place, in the darkness just ahead of me, and I began to edge forward and then to stop, move and stop, but it was always just out of reach. I looked down in the great barrel of the room below. Every shadow seemed like a crouched, huddled figure, every corner concealed some dreadful shape"
He also hears the sound of despairing sobbing behind a door and discovers later that a boy, badly beaten, had been found hanging from a beam in a locked room. The next morning, he cannot find the door. It has vanished.
James manages to trace his original birthplace, Kittiscar Hall in Scotland, but when he visits he finds it, and the surrounding village, deserted. Nobody will go near the house. His surviving relative has died and left him the property and he decides to make his home there to the horror of the local vicar (Mem: While I understand that in order for the narrative to progress it is necessary for secrecy to abound, there are times when you just wish that somebody, anybody, would tell the hero why he should not set foot in the place instead of pussyfooting around with 'I would not recommend it' and 'strange things happen here' and remarks of that sort, but then of course we would not have a story)
I digress. James is in the house and, once again at night, when most of us know full well that this is the worse possible time to visit a ruined chapel, decides to do so. He discovers that it is full of the tombstones of all the Monmouth males and on the wall a memorial to none other than Conrad Vane of Kittiscar. As he realises what it is that has been pursuing him and causing him to live his life in fear he hears a sound and 'turning, saw the door of the chapel which I had left open, begin slowly to close'. He is locked in and sees a dark shadowy figure watching him:
"He was standing in the open entrance to the crypt......I knew him, knew him from the seductive, smiling expression of decadence and silken cunning, knew him for my tormentor and betrayer....'"
So, no more - please read this book for yourself and, once again, be prepared to be scared witless. It makes a wonderful companion read to The Woman in Black. It has the same darkness, rain, fog, lights shining in pools of light on pavements, gas lamps, squalor, and over it all a brooding sadness.
Don't forget what I said about reading it in daylight. Of course, if you choose to read this late at night, then there is nothing I can do to stop you....
