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  GASLIGHT

  BELLA WAS TRAPPED IN THE EVIL MANSION ON ANGEL STREET—A HELPLESS VICTIM WHOSE SAFETY AND SANITY WAS AS UNCERTAIN AS THE FLICKERING GASLIGHT THAT FILLED HER WITH HORROR!

  Lying in drugged terror in her bedroom, beautiful Bella suspects that her own husband, sinister Mr. Manningham, is driving her mad. But can she be sure? As she fights the whirlpool of insanity, again and again Mr. Manningham threatens to put her into an asylum.

  Suddenly Bella sees one last chance to save herself. If she fails, she knows she will never leave the house on Angel Street alive.

  Millions thrilled to the play “Angel Street” in New York and London. Millions of movie fans thrilled to Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in the film version called GASLIGHT. Now an even more chilling experience awaits you in this taut masterpiece of Gothic terror and suspense.

  FIRST TIME IN NOVEL FORM!

  THE GREATEST GOTHIC THRILLER OF ALL TIME!

  GASLIGHT

  A novelization by William Drummond of Patrick Hamilton’s world-famous suspense classic ANGEL STREET.

  Theatergoers in New York and London raved about the suspense-filled play Angel Street. Movie fans all over the world thrilled to the film version called GASLIGHT. Now for the first time, you can experience even more thrills and chills when you read this nerve-shattering novelization of that modern masterpiece of Gothic terror and suspense—GASLIGHT.

  “. . . GASLIGHT is a genuine candidate for honors in the Gothic field.” (Publishers’ Weekly)

  PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

  First Printing: September, 1966

  Copyright © 1966 by William Drummond

  Paperback Library books are published by Paperback Library, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Paperback Library” and associated distinctive design, is registered in the United States Patent Office. Paperback Library, Inc., 260 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  DEDICATION

  To The Late Patrick Hamilton

  Writing this novel, I have often thought of our conversations of thirty-three years ago concerning the difficulty of making a novel of a play.

  Here is the result of our discussion; an attempt to write the novel of your stage thriller Angel Street which later became the great motion picture Gaslight. Over the years it has remained with me as a tantalizing technical exercise. The play from the novel is as simple as orange juice from an orange. The reverse of the process is making an orange from its juice. Gone are the unities of time and place; gone even the dramatic highlights so effective on the stage, but so hard to make convincing in print.

  Bella has become more intelligent; Jack more psychopathic. There are subordinate characters which you would have to cut out, complexities of motive you would rightly simplify; even what happened that dreadful evening when the whole affair came to a head is rather different. But I hope that you would approve; and that my readers will derive from the novel at least some of the same sort of pleasure which so many audiences have had from your Gaslight as a play and film.

  William Drummond

  1966

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Peace!

  Bella had always longed for peace. Give us peace in our time, O Lord. Peace on earth and good will towards all men. The peace of God that passeth all understanding. Above her bed when she was a child hung a text: PEACE PERFECT PEACE.

  But there was never peace, as she understood it: life going on like a clock that never had to be wound up, never oiled and cleaned. Life was a terrible, frightening thing.

  There was the witch in the cupboard under the stairs. When Bella plucked up courage in the daytime to open the door, the witch hid somewhere behind the mops and brooms; or maybe, since witches could surely shrivel, within the dirty bunch of cobwebs beneath the stairs. It was only when the sun went down and the trees extended their evil shadows that witches crept out, lurking in corners made all the darker by the gaslight or leaping to avoid the flames of candles.

  She was eight when she heard the phrase “Ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night” from her father one Christmas Eve. It was a family party, with Great-aunt Annie, her face as wrinkled as the chimpanzee in the Regent’s Park Zoo; and Cousin Alfred, like a Dutch cheese, so round and red; and her mother, hidden in the Paisley shawl, looking as if she was going any moment to disappear within its folds. And her father was trying to entertain them all. Bella recognized later that this was what he was doing. But at that moment she felt that he was revealing to her a truth that hitherto she had been too young to be told.

  Yet she had known about ghosties and ghoulies for a long time. She had wakened at night suddenly to see a face which was like her mother’s face but redrawn by some mad artist, hear a voice which could not be hers because it was so thick, slow and as if coming from afar through gauze. And this specter of her mother had fallen upon her weeping, suddenly clutching her face roughly and breathing foully into her mouth. Then the specter of her father appeared, breathing smoke and fire like a dragon, and he hauled the specter of her mother away. And Bella went whimpering back to sleep, only to be wakened later by her father stroking the hair back from her temple and saying, “Darling, Bella darling, don’t worry, sweetest!” Then came a shriek from below, like the witch’s shriek, pretending to be her mother, and Bella clutched her father’s hand, frightened. But he stroked her forehead with his other hand and disengaged himself. “I must go. Don’t worry!”

  He went away. And now, awake, she worried, hearing sounds from downstairs and the crack of what she came later to know was merely the shrinking of wooden joints; but she thought that Christmas Eve was “Ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.”

  This sort of thing happened not once but many times.

  “Your mother is very ill,” her father said, at various times.

  “What is wrong with her?” Bella asked.

  “She is very ill,” he repeated. “But do not worry, Bella darling.” He winked like a boy. “Everything will be all right.”

  One day her father stayed home and two men with white coats took her mother quietly down the stairs and drove away. “It is best this way,” her father said, “though very sad.”

  “What way?” Bella asked.

  That evening Bella was allowed to stay up to supper and she sat on her fathers left, where she sat at luncheon. But the next night, she sat in her mother’s chair. There was peace in the house. On Sunday afternoons her father went to the hospital, and sometimes he was sad when he came back. “You’ve got to be my little wife,” he said.

  Bella made him laugh, which made her laugh too. So they were happy. Bella thought the witch had gone away with mother. Father came in and kissed her good-night and she never heard anything go bump in the night. But sometimes she walked in her sleep and woke up the next morning in her father’s bed. “You love your daddy,” he said.

  “Isn’t that right?” she asked.

  He hugged her. “Of course,” he said.

  When her father had friends to dinner, Bella was allowed to stay up and play the hostess until quite late. He would talk to her about his friends and about his business which she never understood but it made her feel grown-up.

  There was no one like her father, with the beautifully brushed top hat, and the gold fob and the gold-repeater-watch which he would let her press and hear the tiny tinkling sounding of the hour, and the smell of cigars. When they went to church on Sunday mornings, he sat in a pew three from the front on the right and there was father and the clergyman and God and Bella allowed to sit up. Church was like one of his important dinner parties.

  Yet all the time there was her mother in the Lunar Tick Asylum. Daddy said it wasn’t frightening because an asylum was somewhere no one could
reach you to harm you—like a church; if you’d done something wrong, you fled to the porch and caught hold of the knocker and the police couldn’t arrest you. “But what had Mummy done wrong?” Bella asked.

  Mummy hadn’t done anything wrong and the police weren’t trying to arrest her. It was just that life had been too much for her. “Why?”

  “Well, that is rather difficult to say, Bella darling. If the doctors knew that, then perhaps Mummy could come back to us tomorrow.”

  Bella was glad that the doctors didn’t know, because she did. Mummy had a lunar tick and had sought the asylum because Bella wanted her to go there. She wanted her daddy to herself.

  It was wonderful to act the little hostess and to listen to her darling daddy as if she were as grown-up as the dresses she was allowed to wear: “So very precocious that girl of yours, my dear fellow! Such a consolation!” There might be no witches in the cupboard under the stairs, but even on the sunniest day there was a threat of thunder.

  She was a clever girl and her father was proud of her intellect. “Like a man’s,” he said. He taught her Latin and Greek in the evenings. At first she learned in order to please him. There was a wonderful intimacy sitting beside him at the great desk enclosed in the warm light thrown from the oil-lamp with all his attention drawn to teaching her the mastery of the ablative absolute in Latin or the Greek dual. But as she came to construe Caesar, Cicero and Virgil, Herodotus, Homer and the Greek dramatists, her father’s approbation became secondary. He was not a scholar, but the sort of gentleman more common in the eighteenth century than the nineteenth, who read the Greek and Roman classics for their wit, wisdom and beauty. He kept the Odes of Horace beside the Holy Bible at his bedside and he chuckled over the smart epigrams of Tacitus.

  Bella was fired by his enthusiasm, secretly delighting that she showed a perception of the vitality of what her mother had called “those dead, dull books.” But it wasn’t until she read Aeschylus and Sophocles, that she really found voices which spoke to her directly. The idea in Genesis of everything going wrong because of Eve and Adam eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and everything being made right because of Jesus being crucified and taking on himself the sins of the world, did not explain her own feelings. But the curse on the House of Atreus, the murder of Agamemnon by his adulterous Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus and the agony of Orestes at being forced to avenge the murder of his father by killing his mother, and then hunted by the Furies—this made a secret sense to her. Blind forces like Nemesis, Ananke, the Eumenides, Fate, Necessity and the Furies, which had even in talking of them to be appeased as The Kindly Ones, appealed to her sense of life as it really was.

  Bella and her parents lived in the same sort of world as Agamemnon and Orestes and Electra, as Oedipus and Jocasta; human beings caught like flies in the web of destiny. So that when one weekday her father returned early from the office in great agitation, Bella knew, even before he had tried gently to break the news to her, that her mother was dead.

  She did not say, “Did Mother kill herself?” Bella knew that she had. A shutter had opened on a terrifying world.

  Her father turned to her, wide-eyed. “Where,” he asked, “how did I fail her?” His eyes focused on a receding vista of failures before he closed his lids and sat slumped in grief.

  She touched his hand. Hairs were lined up like soldiers parading on the backs of his fingers. “It’s Nemesis,” she said, and as she did so, the shutter closed again, leaving her in the world of myth.

  He opened his eyes, seeming to look at her from a distance. “Out of the mouths of babes . . .” he muttered. Then he nodded his head and smiled and touched her cheek in gratitude.

  She did not flinch. It was with a tragic quickening in her heart that she realized that Daddy acknowledged she was right. There was a curse on their house, too. The witch was dead beneath the stairs; but in her place there were the Furies, the implacable “Kindly Ones.” Somehow they were easier to bear than the guilt, which made her mouth twitch with a smile at knowing her mother no longer lived.

  The joy which she felt in her father’s company was sharpened by the menace of destiny, like sunlight made more brilliant by threatening thunderheads. It was too good to last. Her keenest fear was that her father might marry again, for her sake or his own. So with the wiles of a girl beyond her years, she set herself out to be the woman in his life, daughterly in deference, wifely in solicitude and, in her freedom from demands almost, even though she would not have understood its significance, a mistress.

  But of course the enemy never strikes from the suspected direction. Other women appeared on the horizon, but they made off, when they saw how occupied her father was with Bella. “You keep me young, my dear,” he said. “Without you, Bella, I should become an old fogey.” One day he went sailing with her and was drowned.

  For weeks afterwards she lay in Portsmouth Hospital, her heart ticking faintly, her soul as twilit as the darkened room. She ate, she drank, she barely existed. There was nothing, said the doctors, wrong with her organically. But she had lived in and for her father and losing him had lost the impulse to live.

  What revived her was not Christian hope but the Greek sense of tragedy, the Nemesis which gave to Philoctetes the bow whose arrows always found their mark and the wound whose festering was so foul that his comrades abandoned him rather than bear his pestilential company in the siege of Troy.

  It needed an effort of imagination for Bella to translate her Victorian plight into classical terms. Her nearest relative was Great-aunt Annie, a soured sixty-year-old, widowed, barren and willful, who was assisted in the administration of Bella’s affairs by Cousin Alfred, twenty years Bella’s senior. He was a lawyer who, devoid of brilliance or shrewdness, disguised under the mask of reliability the fact that he was a stick-in-the-mud. But Bella had that life-saving tragic sense.

  Bella, after her release from the hospital, went to Great-aunt Annie’s house in Hampstead where she found two Furies. One was clad in black, with black jet beads which she fondled in the arthritic fingers of hands blotched with the stains of old age. She was the Queen Harpy, with her rustling crinolines, the croaking raven voice and the mixed scents of moth balls and Eau-de-Cologne. Alfred, her attendant Fury, wore high starched collars, black cravats ornamented with a diamond pin, across his plum duff paunch a gold watch chain from which dangled a heavy signet and on his left arm a crêpe band of black to mourn whatever was the latest relative, dear friend or public figure to pass on. Though “in the Law,” Alfred looked like a funeral undertakers mute, with the handkerchief stuffed in his starched shirt-cuff, which he removed three or four times an hour to absorb the drops which appeared at the end of his long red nose as if from a tap with an imperfect washer.

  Great-aunt Annie lived in an echoing mansion on the heights of Hampstead, a nineteenth century version of the Halls of Atreus, bright with beeswax, burnished copper and shining silver. Alone, except for three servants who divided their time between ministering to her meager wants and preserving her copious possessions from the corruption of moth, rust, verdigris and tarnish, she suggested that Bella should be the companion of her old age. “If, that is, you can bear with an old fogey,” she added, being, like other fogeys, convinced that she wasn’t one.

  Bella accepted gratefully. It was the punishment which Nemesis prescribed. Great-aunt Annie was a sort of Victorian Gorgon who ate charcoal biscuits and talked with unusual animation when her stomach rumbled noisily.

  Yet Bella was not totally absorbed in her Greek fantasy. She knew that Great-aunt Annie and cousin Alfred regarded themselves as well-meaning relatives who had a duty to find a suitable husband for a young “small heiress” with nearly £30,000 and who were justified in employing part of her income for her upkeep and “launching her.”

  Her great-aunt, though miserly with her own money, liked to entertain with that of her great-niece. Other old fogeys, whom she hadn’t seen for years, were invited to bring their middle-aged bachelor fogey s
ons to afternoon tea, a hand of whist or even a venomous game of croquet. Sometimes even grandsons would be produced, young fogeys, with clicking cuffs and drooping whiskers.

  It was a penitential bore to Bella, which she accepted as her desserts. It was necessary to suffer: and even if they were fools, she suffered them gladly because legend told her that the maiden in distress, whether in the toils of a dragon or a great-aunt, was always rescued sooner or later.

  With Bella, it was later: so much later that Great-aunt Annie had long run out of “eligibles” and was resigned to the idea that Bella was an “old maid,” who would be happy to look after her dear old great-aunt for the rest of her life in return for becoming her heiress. “After all,” she remarked to Cousin Alfred, “with the addition of my £50,000, somebody would be prepared to take her on.”

  Cousin Alfred agreed. With such an inducement, he might take Bella on, himself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bella’s birthdays passed over the crest of the twenties, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. At thirty, one was on the shelf. But Bella did not brood. Persephone spent six months in the nether regions. Who could say how many years each mythical month might be? Someone would certainly come sometime to release her from the deserved bondage in Hampstead. She was the maiden in the castle with her eye to the window-slit. She was Rapunzel with the golden locks that made a rope for her freedom.

  She went about her shopping demurely, but conscious both of her own style and that of those she saw. What made her seem old-maidish to her great-aunt was that she kept deliberately not abreast or ahead of the fashion, but a little behind the time. It suited her style, she thought, or her image of herself, which was to be not in, but outside, fashion. She was no ordinary woman and interested in no ordinary man. And so in the village of Hampstead she made something of a figure, “a caricature of yourself, my dear child,” remarked her great-aunt.