The Face In The Darkness // A Ghost Story
Enjoy this rendition of Charles Dickens' ghost story "To Be Read At Dusk", and happy holidays!
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TRANSCRIPT
Well, it’s that time of year again, time for the heart starts pounding yearly tradition of telling a ghost story near the holidays
If you’re new here and aren’t familiar, back in the day before electricity and any of that, it was tradition to gather around the hearth in your home and share a ghost story at christmas time. Halloween wasn’t the only holiday where people got spooked.
And though we lost that tradition over the years, we’re going to bring it back, and I have a good one for you today.
It’s a story of a woman who saw something so horrifying she almost didn’t believe it. Let’s dive in
One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them.
Five resort workers, standing around the gondola at the top of the mountain in Aspen, Colorado. They were waiting for the final stragglers to finish their drinks at the chalet and ride back down for their apres ski and dinner reservations.
I was one of those stragglers, warming my hands on a hot coffee while I watched the sun set, but I didn’t have any dinner reservations, so I sat on a bench alone and did what Rogue Detecting Society members do best…observe.
The sky was clear and gray except for a fiery orange halo where the sun was sinking behind the highest peak. The group grew quiet and then the oldest, a stout, wrinkled man with a thick salt and pepper beard, pulled a flask from his jacket and poured a little out on the hardpacked snow.
He didn’t say what for, and no one seemed to need an explanation; they simply waited for him to complete his ritual, which was timed to the sun’s disappearance behind the mountains, and resumed their conversation.
“Hell no!” said a man in his mid-thirties with a boyish look. “If you’re talking about ghosts—”
“But I’m not talking about ghosts,” said the older man taking a swig from his flask.
“Ok, then what?” said the younger man.
“If I knew I’d tell you.”
“Maybe another drink will clear your mind,” joked a girl who looked like she may still have been in high school.
“It usually does,” laughed the man raising the flask to his lips. “It’s like this—when someone is coming to see you who you’re not expecting, but they somehow send some invisible messenger ahead, putting the idea of them into your head all day—what do you call that? When you walk along a crowded street in Denver or New York or LA and think that some stranger you pass reminds you of your friend Jack, and then another stranger reminds you of him, and another until it feels like you have a premonition you’ll run into your actual friend Jack at any moment—which you do even though you thought he was on the other side of the country. That’s the thing, but what do you call it?”
“It happened to me down the mountain just the other day,” said the young girl.
“It happens all the time—that’s the point,” said the old timer. “It’s as common as a cold. And not just that—I was a ski instructor when I was a younger man, if you can believe it—”
“That you were a younger man,” asked the younger ski bum, laughing.
“Well anyway, I was doing private instruction for a family in Sun Valley all one winter. He was a banker and she was a designer or something in New York, and every morning I’d go up with her and her daughter—well one morning, we’d just gotten off the lift and we were waiting for her daughter to get her board on—this is when everyone decided to be a snowboarder because it was cooler.”
“It is cooler,” interjected the young girl.
“Maybe so, but we’re waiting and all of a sudden, this woman drops her poles, and says, ‘My sister is dead.’ And I’m looking thinking she’s gotten a message on her phone, but it was still in her pocket. “I just felt her warm hand on my cheek,” she said.
We skied straight down and her husband was waiting—he’d just gotten word. Her sister had died and it must have been more or less that very moment she said she felt her hand. Now what do you call that? Antonio! Tell them the story about that young European woman—the new bride you worked for in LA.”
A dark-haired man in his early forties who’d been leaning casually against the rail shifted his stance. He took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket and fitted one of the last between his lips as he dug around for a lighter.
The older man extended his own and Antonio dipped his cigarette into the flame and took a deep drag.
“The Romanian woman?” he said. “I don’t like to think of it more than
I have to.”
“Well now you have to because it’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about and you know it,” said the old man tucking away his lighter.
“I’m not sure what sort of thing it is,” replied Antonio. “I only know it’s true. So I will tell you,” he said looking around to each of the group. “And you can make up your own mind about what it is.”
Fifteen years ago I got a call from the agency I was driving for in Los Angeles—I was doing mostly limo—shuttling celebrities back and forth from the airport. I’d drive in the spring and summer then go back to the mountains in the fall. Anyway, they said they’d gotten a request for someone to drive for a couple all summer, so they wanted me to go meet the husband and see if it would be a good fit.
I showed up to the hotel—a nice one in Hollywood. The husband—I’ll call him Mr. London since that’s where he was from—he was a young guy—British–with a lot of money. Family money from what I gathered. Anyway, he was handsome, smart, polite—he’d just gotten married, and he and his new wife were going to spend the summer in LA before going back to London where he was supposed to start working at the family office. I don’t know what kind of office—I didn’t care and neither did he.
They weren’t familiar with the city, and they wanted someone who knew their way around. That I spoke Spanish was another plus since his wife wanted to learn, but anyway, we got along all right and he offered me the job.
I’d start in a week—once his wife and her assistant joined him. They’d rented a place in the hills—Benedict Canyon—an old mansion that had been owned by some famous actor or studio head or both—that’s what he told me but I think every big old house in LA has been. It wouldn’t be ready until the end of the month. So, for now they’d be living at the hotel.
Anyway, I left feeling glad to have a steady paycheck and I waited for his call the next week. I was supposed to pick his wife and her assistant up at the airport late on Tuesday and drive them to the hotel. I had no trouble spotting them. Miss London was young and beautiful, tall, with dark close cropped black hair and a pale but not unhealthy complexion. Her assistant, Carolina, was a very pretty and petite Swedish girl with bright blonde hair and a charming laugh.
That was the first thing I heard—that laugh. They were laughing as I helped them get their bags into the car and they laughed more or less the whole way to the hotel, stopping only to ask questions about what they saw out the window.
Carolina had gone to school with Miss London and wanted to be an actress, so they’d hired her on as a favor. And anyway, Mr. London was glad for the company for his wife since neither of them knew anyone in LA.
They were fun people and I looked forward to seeing Carolina again the next morning after I dropped them off.
There was still a week and a half until the mansion would be ready, so I spent the days shuttling them—often the three of them—the gentleman and his wife very much happy and in love—around the city. Shopping malls and museums—the Getty was a favorite—not the one by the water but the one high on the hill, and the misses made me take her there twice more that first week.
It was there, as she was staring out toward the city from the overlook while Carolina and I had a coffee at a table nearby that I noticed for the first time a sort of cloud, a dark cloud, come over the young bride. It was a sunny day, but she had a grim look as if she were watching an invisible storm roll in. I asked Carolina about it, “is she well? Is she homesick?”
“No, no, she loves it here,” she replied. “She’s very happy—they are very happy. She prefers the sunshine to the gloom of London. She’d be very happy if they didn’t go back at all I think. So would I of course,” she said smiling.
I was glad she said so, but I couldn’t match her words to the expression I saw on young Miss London’s face. And stranger still, Carolina, whose gaze always met mine, never looked up from her coffee, even as she smiled. She just stirred it around in an endless dark pool.
I thought of pressing her on it but when I looked up Miss London was coming our way, as happy as could be.
“So, Antonio, should we head back for dinner?”
And so we did and I thought no more of it. Until the day before we were to move into the mansion. Mr. London was meeting with one of his father’s business partners and I’d taken the girls to the pier in Santa Monica. And again miss london wandered off and stared across the ocean like she was looking into a storm.
And again I asked Carolina what was troubling her.
“If you have to know,” said Carolina, “And this is just between us, but she feels she’s haunted.”
“Haunted by what?” I asked
“By a dream.”
“What dream?”
“By the dream of a face. For three nights before her wedding, she saw a face in a dream—always the same face.”
“It must be a terrible face.”
‘But it isn’t. It’s the face of a remarkable-looking man, dressed all in black, with black hair and a neat grey beard. Handsome but reserved and secretive. Not kind or unkind, but unreadable.”
“Does she know the person?”
“Not at all. She says it isn’t like any face she’s ever seen. And it does nothing in the dream but stare at her from the darkness.”
“Has the dream come back?”
“Not the dream but the memory of it. It’s the memory that troubles her.”
“But why?”
“She doesn’t know. But I heard her tell Mr. London last night that if she finds a picture of that face in the house tomorrow, which she’s afraid she will, she wants to go straight back.”
I could see the worry was real, but to be worried about a face in a dream seemed silly to me. Still, I couldn’t shake the thought of it the next evening as I drove the trio through the great iron gates and up the winding little drive to the old mansion.
It sat on the hillside surrounded by Italian cypress trees and tall pines. The whole place was built in a vague Mediterranean style dreamed up by an LA architect a hundred years before. The white walls were peeled and cracked, the bricks in the drive were broken and uneven, the grand fountain at the entrance was bone dry. The house looked like it was waiting for some Russian billionaire to buy it and bulldoze it. But that would happen after the summer.
For now it was ours and as I got out and went to the trunk to grab the luggage, I could tell none of the others shared my apprehension—they were excited to step into an imagined piece of hollywood history.
This was the beginning of the June gloom, and real storm clouds were rolling in as I went up the steps and pushed open the doors to the main entrance. They swung open and I was hit with an earthy smell, like entering a tomb that had been unopened for months, or maybe years.
I set the bags at the foot of the crumbling marble staircase and looked for a light. It was dark with every heavy curtain drawn across the windows and only a dim lamp on the table against the wall casting long shadows across the floor.
In the distance two sets of footsteps came slowly toward us down the hall. Two old women finally appeared with stern expressions and spoke to me in Spanish. They came with the house, and I think were upset at having guests as they lived in a smaller residence in back and preferred the place quiet and empty which it seemed to have been for some time.
They were meant to keep the house clean or at least order around the people who would, but judging from the layers of dust on the curtains I don’t think the money had been getting through.
I wanted to open every window to air out the musty smell, but the rain had just started and that would have to wait. For now I convinced the old women to go around and open all the curtains and turn on the lights so we could see to walk around.
We followed them through each room and each time as the lights came on I could see miss london’s face darken, waiting to see the face from her dreams peering out from a painting.
And there were paintings—dozens of them. A thousand years of paintings—from madonna and child to portraits of forgotten Hollywood stars, faces beautiful and terrible, but the dark handsome face of a man dressed all in black, with black hair and a neat grey beard. Reserved and secretive. Not kind or unkind but unreadable? No.
Finally we went out to the veranda overlooking the courtyard. It was night, but the grounds were lit almost like day from the glow of the city reflecting off the storm clouds, and I could tell Miss London was scanning the marble faces of the statues for the face that had haunted her dreams.
But all was well.
“Now,” said Mr. London to his wife in a low voice, ‘you see that it is nothing? You are happy?”
I saw the relief wash over her face and she smiled and her husband smiled and they were both truly happy.
In the days and weeks ahead the old mansion transformed, if not to its glory days at least to a place of sunlight and laughter. The only shadow was the two old housekeepers who had preferred the mansion as a mausoleum.
I’d gone to them a few days after we arrived to ask about the history of the place–Miss London wanted to know everything about it–what stars had lived there, what celebrities had visited, who owned it now.
“Oscuridad y muerte.”
Darkness and death had lived here. They were the only things that had ever lived here, they assured me, rubbing their rosaries, and they refused to answer any more than that.
Of course I didn’t tell Miss London their answer, and I couldn’t find anything to prove their story. Neither could miss london or carolina even after going through every old newspaper and LA history book looking for mention of the place. Yes the listing had said it had been owned by stars and studio heads, but there was no actual record of the place being sold and soon they moved on to other adventures.
In the mornings, I would drop Mr. London at the golf club and then take Miss London and carolina on long drives down the coast through Venice all the way to Laguna Beach or up to Malibu, always stopping somewhere along the way so they could practice their Spanish lessons. In the evening they’d see shows or plays or go to screenings of old movies in the cemetery.
“Has she forgotten the dream?” I asked Carolina sometimes.
“Almost,” she said. “Almost.”
One day I picked Mr. London up from the golf club and he said, “Antonio—great news. I met someone at the club today—he’s going to come for dinner. His name’s Dellombra. Phillip Dellombra. We never have anyone over so I thought it would be fun to make a big deal of it. Champagne, a big dinner–all that stuff.”
The name seemed vaguely familiar, but i couldn’t remember from where. And he was right: they hadn’t had anyone over and it was a waste to have a house like that and not entertain.
When we got back, I went give the two old housekeepers the orders—miss london’s Spanish wasn’t good enough for that yet, or at least the two old women would pretend not to understand anything she said.
But not finding them anywhere in the house, I walked back through the garden to their little cottage. I knocked but there was no answer, so I peered in through the windows and saw a prayer altar with overflowing with burning candles. I knocked on every window but finally gave up and made preparations for the dinner myself.
When Dellombra arrived that night, I showed him in and brought him to the main dining room where Mr. London and the others were waiting. Mr. London got up to greet him like an old friend and started to introduce him to his wife, but as she rose her face twisted into a horrified expression and she started to cry out, but before the sound had passed her lips she fainted cold and fell to the floor.
I had seen the man in shadow, but now in the light I saw he was dressed all in black and he had a reserved and secret air. He was remarkable looking. Black hair, a trimmed gray beard. His face not kind or unkind but unreadable.
Mr. London ran to his wife and picked her from the floor and carried her to her room. Carolina stayed with her all night. In the morning she told me miss London hadn’t slept at all. That she’d sat by the window and stared out across the garden until sunrise.
Mr. London was anxious for his wife and also somewhat embarrassed to have his new friend and only friend in town arrive to such a scene. Dellombra for his part was extremely gracious and said the Santa Ana winds had been blowing and anyone not used to them and even those who were could be deeply affected by them. He said he’d come back another time, but Mr. London insisted he stay for dinner since they’d gone to so much trouble and they dined alone.
I overheard much of their conversation and it was clear why Mr. London enjoyed the man’s company. He was well traveled, well read, and was as generous at listening to stories as he was to sharing his own.
The next day Dellombra sent flowers and some kind of tonic the hotel recommended along with his best wishes for Miss London’s return to health.
Mr. London now had it in his mind he had to cure his wife of her strange illness—the one that had made her believe she was haunted by someone she’d never met and then convince herself this pleasant stranger was in fact the face haunting her dreams.
He reasoned with her that if she didn’t overcome it it would invite worse fears—worse sadness. That she might have other dreams of other faces and start imagining every new person she met was somehow haunting her dreams. But if she could end it now–have dinner with them and just talk with Dellombra and see for herself it was all in her imagination then all would be well.
And so it was. A few nights later, Dellombra came again, and the previous events weren’t mentioned at all. They had dinner and talked on the veranda late into the night and Miss London spent the whole time upright.
After this visit I heard mr. London say, “Now, see my love, it’s over! He’s come and gone and you’re fine.”
“Will he…will he ever come again,” she asked.
“Again? Of course. Why wouldn’t he? Are you cold?” he said, noticing her shiver.
“No, but… Are you sure he has to come again? Couldn’t we make other friends?”
“Of course, and we should make other friends, but not at the expense of such a good one as this.”
He thought he was doing the best thing for his wife. He loved her and hated to see her face darkened and hated even more to think of it being darkened for much of their lives because of a strange belief in evil dreams.
We saw Dellombra several more times that summer. I never knew what he did, only that he was very wealthy, and that he was skilled in most everything mr. London enjoyed.
But I also noticed, many times, that miss London wasn’t quite recovered. She would wander off alone on one of our excursions, her face clouded, staring out at the ocean or on the many occasions Dellombra was present, she may observe him from another room with a terrified and fascinated glance as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her.
And for his part too, I would sometimes see him looking out from the shaded veranda or the half-lit study—looking as I might say, ‘fixedly upon her out of darkness.’ I had not—I could not forget Carolina’s words describing the face in the dream.
But these were only occasional shadows on an otherwise happy time.
It was during this time I realized why Dellombra’s name had seemed at first vaguely familiar–there was a statue in the sculpture garden–a full sized sculpture of a beautiful young woman–and where the artist might have engraved their name–the name Dellombra. As the garden was the best place to have a cigarette i’d spent hours out there with the statues and must have absorbed that name with all the others.
I brought this up to Mr. London and he showed Dellombra on one of his visits and he said many of his family members back in europe were artisans–he’d be thrilled to learn that one of their pieces had somehow made it all the way to hollywood.
Late that summer, a couple of weeks before they were to return to London, I had taken Carolina and the Londons to our local Carnival down in Hollywood and they’d decided to stay at a hotel overlooking the boulevard for the night.
I’d gone back to the mansion but I couldn’t sleep so I decided to take care of some tasks I’d offered to do for mr. London over the weekend. The first was to move some cases of wine we’d brought back from a recent trip to Santa Barbara down into the wine cellar.
The wine cellar was down a narrow set of stairs in the back of the kitchen pantry. I opened the door and turned on the bare bulb and carried the first case down. It was a damp, cool room—empty but for the wooden rows of wine bottle holders. There was a sort of wooden workbench in the corner that looked like the best place to set the cases.
There were a few things wrapped in burlap on top so I went over the clear them off.
Old paintings, still in their heavy frames. I unwrapped them out of curiosity—the first was a still life—a fruit bowl or flowers or something—I’ve never been able to remember. The third I never saw. But the second. The second was in a gold gilded frame, a portrait.
I couldn’t tell you if it was a thousand years old or a hundred or from that afternoon, but it was of a man, dressed all in black and he had a reserved and secret air. He was remarkable looking. Black hair, a trimmed gray beard. His face not kind or unkind but unreadable. Staring at me from the darkness of the painting, as clear as if he’d been standing in the room, was the face of Dellombra.
I backed away and up the stairs and tried to call Mr. London, but I got no response. I ran to the car and drove as fast as I could down the winding roads toward the crowded boulevard. I couldn’t get within half a mile of the hotel—the streets were overflowing with people in their carnival masks and suits and sequins. I parked the car and ran, dialing Carolina every few seconds until finally she answered.
“Antonio! Have you heard from her? Is she with you?!” Carolina shouted—I could hear that she was in the middle of the crowd.
“She isn’t with you?!” I asked, out of breath.
“She wasn’t feeling well so she stayed in to watch from the room but when we got back she wasn’t there. Her phone is there and the hotel said they haven’t seen her or heard anything, but she isn’t here!”
I met Carolina and Mr. London in the hotel lobby and we went up and down the streets and around the hotel, every room, every floor, every stairwell, thinking maybe she’d gone to get some ice and fainted or fallen, but she was gone.
It was the next morning, the police were able to go back and look at the security tapes from the nearby buildings and crossing through the shadows of an alley, a man dressed all in black carries a limp woman in his arms. His face passes through a streetlamp for just a moment, but there was no doubt whose face it was, nor any doubt about the woman in his arms.
I have heard that she was never traced beyond that spot. All I know is that she vanished into infamous oblivion with that dreaded face beside her—that dreaded face that she had seen in her dream.
“So what do you call that?” said the old timer. ‘Ghosts. Humph,” there are no ghosts there. And what do you call this that I’m about to tell—ghosts! There are no ghosts here!”
I waited, when the old man finished, to hear what the others would say, but there was only silence. I turned to look where they’d stood and all five were gone. The gondola kept moving but it had no riders and the dusk chill had turned suddenly to a dark cold, so I left the quiet bench and returned to warm for a few minutes inside the café before taking that lonely ride down.