The Dead Smile

The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford

Sir Hugh Ockram lies dying in his study at Ockram Hall, his ravaged face fixed in a terrible smile that superstition attributes to two women he betrayed in life. His son Gabriel and his ward and niece, Evelyn Warburton, love each other and wish to marry, but Sir Hugh warns, without explanation, that they had better not, then falls asleep before revealing his meaning. The two, uncannily alike in appearance, feel the same dreadful smile pass unbidden across their own lips. Resting near the chapel afterward, Gabriel tells Evelyn the family legend of Sir Vernon Ockram, beheaded for treason, whose body is said to rise from its unlocked iron coffin in the north vault each time it is opened. Evelyn and Gabriel pledge themselves to each other despite a shared, unnamed dread, and their kiss carries a strange savour of fear and evil neither of them understands. That night, ancient Nurse Macdonald, who has served the family a hundred years, sees a banshee-like apparition with Evelyn's face at her window and knows Sir Hugh's death is at hand. She goes to his deathbed and repeatedly demands, invoking his mother, his dead wife, and the woman he betrayed, that he confess the truth: the name of Evelyn's father. Sir Hugh refuses each time, smiling, and as he dies after Evelyn herself sees her own doubled, blood-stained face at the window and collapses, he answers only, "They know it in hell." He dies smiling, his secret intact. When his body is carried to the north vault, Gabriel finds Sir Vernon's corpse again standing upright out of its coffin and restores it; all who have handled the dead find the same dead smile creeping over their own faces afterward. Gabriel succeeds as Sir Gabriel and Evelyn remains at the Hall through their mourning, the two growing closer as their wedding approaches. At a New Year's tenants' dinner, as Evelyn's health is drunk as the future Lady Ockram, an unearthly shrieking voice cries out over the company, throwing the tenants into terrified flight; Gabriel and Evelyn are again found smiling the dead smile. Afterward Gabriel grows haunted, drawn irresistibly toward the sealed vault, and confesses to Evelyn that he will go mad or die unless he looks upon Sir Hugh's corpse again; Evelyn, feeling the same terrible pull, begs him not to go, but he cannot resist. Evelyn separately visits Nurse Macdonald, who admits she suspects a "wicked thing" concerning Evelyn's parentage but will not voice it, warning that Sir Hugh's dying counsel against the marriage was a trick to ensure their ruin, and that if the guess is true, the lovers might do better to die together than live. Tormented by visions, Evelyn resists a compulsion to go to the vault herself. At midnight Gabriel, driven beyond endurance, takes a candle and makes his way through the sleeping house to the chapel, opens the iron door with the hidden key, and descends into the vault despite an unnatural wind that fights his candle-flame the whole way. Amid the shrouded corpses of his ancestors, he finds Sir Hugh's body, its stained winding-sheet, and Sir Vernon's severed head fallen loose again. Forcing himself past horror, he uncovers his father's ruined, still-smiling face and pries a sealed packet from the corpse's clenched hands. Reading it by the altar candle, he learns the truth: Sir Hugh had loved Evelyn's mother, his wife's sister, drove his own wife to death with his curse, later brought home his fallen comrade Warburton's wife and let it be believed her daughter Evelyn was Warburton's child, then wearied of and cursed the mother too — all so that Gabriel and Evelyn, unknowing, might love and marry as siblings, and the wronged women's anguish be renewed. As Gabriel finishes reading, the dead smile vanishes from his father's face at last. Evelyn, who has secretly followed him down and read the confession over his shoulder, stands revealed beside him. The tale ends as Gabriel cries her name and she answers, "My brother!"

By F. Marion Crawford · First published 1899 · Genre: Gothic Fiction, Horror, Psychological Thriller · 4 chapters · 9,998 words

First lines

Sir Hugh Ockram smiled as he sat by the open window of his study, in the late August afternoon; and just then a curiously yellow cloud obscured the low sun, and the clear summer light turned lurid, as if it had been suddenly poisoned and polluted by the foul vapours of a plague. Sir Hugh's face seemed, at best, to be made of fine parchment drawn skin-tight over a wooden mask, in which two eyes were sunk out of sight, and peered from far within through crevices under the slanting, wrinkled lids, alive and watchful like two toads in their holes, side by side and exactly alike. But as the light changed, then a little yellow glare flashed in each. Nurse Macdonald said once that when Sir Hugh smiled he saw the faces of two women in hell -- two dead women he had betrayed.

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Gothic Fiction · Horror · Mystery · Supernatural · Victorian Era · Dark Fantasy · Haunted House · Family Secrets · Tragic Events · Death · Murder · Suspense

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The Dead Smile is listed on Textopian as a novella by F. Marion Crawford, dated 1899 CE.

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More by F. Marion Crawford