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Saturday, October 16, 2010
title: The Mystery of the Semi-Detached
author: Edith Nesbit
genre: short story/horror/ghost story
published: 1893 in a short story collection titled 'Grim tales'
first line: He was waiting for her, he had been waiting an hour and a half in a dusty suburban lane, with a row of big elms on one side and some eligible building sites on the other-and far away to the south-west the twinkling yellow lights of the Crystal Palace.
In the short story, The Mystery of the Semi-Detached, the narrator is waiting for his fiancee one May night at ten-o'clock on her street. When she doesn't come out of her parents home to meet him, he goes to her front gate. He sees that her front door is wide open and begins to worry. Upon entering the dark house, it seems abandoned, yet he has the feeling that he is not alone.
When he goes upstairs and lights a candle, he sees his fiancee wearing a gown, lying on her bed, her throat slashed. The narrator runs out of the house in hysterics and is picked up by the police for public drunkenness. After spending the night in a jail cell, and after his shock wears off, he tells the police what he saw the night before. That morning they take him to his finance's house only to find her alive and well. After he tells her what he saw, and describes that he even saw her calendar was dated October 21st althought it was mid-May, she tries to tell him he was imagining things.
She explains to him that she and her family went to the Crystal Palace and left the house alone.
He insists it wasn't a hallucination and moves his fiancee and her mother in a different house, all the while never forgetting what he witnessed that night.
He was a very ordinary, common place, young man, and he didn't believe in visions, but he never rested day or night till he got his sweetheart and her mother away from that commodious semi-detached, and settled them in a quiet, distant suburb. In the course of removal, he incidentally married her, and the mother went on living with them.
His nerves must have been shaken, because he was queer for a very long time, and was always inquiring if anyone had taken the desirable semi-detached; and when an old stockbroker with a family took it, he went through the length of calling on the old gentleman and imploring him by all the he held dear, not to live in that fatal house.
The narrator tries to convince the next residents, a stockbroker and his family, not to move into the house, but they don't take his warning seriously. That following October, on the 21st, the narrator's wife finds him one morning holding the newspaper, white as a ghost. When she reads the paper, she sees the headline. The stockbroker's daughter has been found inside the house, lying on her bed, her throat slashed.
I've become a fan of Edith Nesbit's short stories. This was a good, creepy, ghost story. The only thing I didn't like was that they didn't explain what the Crystal Palace is. Upon googling it, I found the Crystal Palace was a a cast-iron and glass building erected in Hyde Park, London, holding the Great Exhibition.
You can read The Mystery of the Semi-Detached for free online here.
English poet, journalist, and short-story writer, perhaps now best-known for her children's books (the twice-filmed Five Children and It, The Railway Children and The Wouldbegoods) and the over-anthologized horror tale "Man-Size in Marble." She also published works under the joint pseudonym (with her husband) "Fabian Bland."
-quoted from The Literary Gothic
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