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Sunday, October 10, 2010
title: The Violet Car
author: Edith Nesbit
genre: short story/supernatural/horror
published: late 1800's-early 1900's?
first line: Do you know the downs-the wide, windy spaces, the rounded shoulders of hills leaned against the sky, the hollows where farms and homesteads nestle sheltered, with trees round them pressed close and tight as a carnation in a button hole?
The Violet Car is a short story by Edith Nesbit. It is narrated by a nurse in London, who is telling her story about being sent to a home in Charleston for a mental case involving an elderly couple.
Mr. Eldridge wrote to the nurse asking her to come attend to his deranged wife. Yet when she arrives at their doorstep, the wife acts like she is fine, but Mr. Eldridge is the one who is deranged. The Eldridge's live on a large neglected farm and from the getgo something seems odd about them.
After dinner the couple always has a cup of tea and goes for a walk, where they return sad and depressed afterwards, the wife crying. However, other than this, the seemingly odd couple does not seem mentally ill.
The nurse arrives at their home in November, and by February she decides she should move on, seeing as the couple seemes fine. She no longer wants to accept payment for her services if she isn't really needed.
Spying on the couple one evening during their walk, the nurse sees that Mr. Eldridge and his wife go down to the lane and he freaks out insisting that a violet colored car is coming. He screams and pushes his wife out of the lane so she won't get hit. Yet, neither his wife nor the nurse hear or see a car.
Afterwards, when the nurse questions the couple, she finds out that their daughter had passed away after being run over by a violet colored car on the lane. Mr. Eldridge has never truly recovered from his grief and he insists he can hear the car coming and there is terror inside. So the nurse tells him she is going down the lane by herself to investigate and to prove him it's all in his imagination. That there is no car coming and perhaps he should consider moving.
I walked up and down the lane in the dusk, wishing not to wonder what might be the hidden horror in the violet car. I would not let blood into my thoughts. I was not going to be fooled by thought transference, or any of those transcendental follies. I was not going to be hypnotized into seeing things.
Reluctantly the nurse walks down to the lane one evening, only to find out that Mr. Eldridge silently followed her and is standing further up the lane.
She sees him once again freaking out over the car, and to her amazment, she actually sees the car as well.
Mr. Eldridge is hit by the car, and by the time the nurse reaches him, he is dead. However, there are no tire marks on the ground and no marks on him. Yet she saw it with her own eyes, the violet car ran him over.
When the doctor arrives, he says Mr. Eldridge died of a heart attack. There is no sign of a car.
I thought The Violet Car was a creepy short story. It scared me in a simple way.
The writing isn't overly descriptive, leaving it up to the readers imagination.
There's no blood or gore, just an everyday seemingly normal older couple and a nurse who is trying to help them. I definitely got the chills when the nurse went down the lane to prove to
Mr. Eldridge that there was no car. She was secretly terrified of going, and was not only trying to convice Mr. Eldridge that the car was in his imagination, but she was also trying to convince herself.
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
R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge
