“The Undying Thing” was written by Barry Pain and first appeared in Stories in the Dark (1901). Like “The Moon-Slave,” “The Undying Thing” is about an inevitable doom.

“The Undying Thing” begins with Sir Edric Vanquerest suddenly resorting to prayer. He admits to God that he has been an awful person and has done unforgivable things and that he never knew true love until he met his second wife, Eve. Edric goes on to say that from this point forward he will live a good life, and that he hopes God will make Eve happy. Edric’s family doctor, Dennisoun, then appears and tells Edric that Eve died in childbirth. Edric takes this in stride–Eve is with God and so Edric sees no reason to mourn–but Dennisoun has more news. The child lived, but there is something about him that Edric had to see. The child is frightening, and Dennisoun suggests that it be killed. Edric initially refuses, accepting that the child is God’s punishment for Edric’s sins and that he must live with it, but when Dennisoun points out that the shame of the child would attach to Eve, Edric agrees to kill the child: “this night for the sake of Eve I will break my word, and lose my own soul eternally.”¹ Edric and Dennisoun bring the baby to the caves in Hal’s Planting, a nearby plantation, and leave it there. Sir Edric lives the rest of his life in great sanctity, raising his son by his first marriage. Strange stories begin to be told about Hal’s Planting. When Sir Edric dies a strange sound is heard outside the house.

Four generations pass. An old man, John Marsh, tells everyone in the village of Mansteth the stories of the Vanquerests: how Sir Edric had kept wolves, intending to train them as pets, but that they had frightened Lady Vanquerest and Sir Edric had shot them a few months before Lady Vanquerest died in childbirth; and how Sir Edric’s son, as a vice-ridden old man, had the doom of the Vanquerests foretold to him by an old woman, and how the old woman had died mysteriously in Hal’s Planting. The fifth Baronet Vanquerest was a good man, and the sixth and current Baronet, Sir Edric, is a fine fellow that Marsh can find nothing bad to speak of–and Marsh hates the Vanquerests, having been whipped across the face as a child by the fourth Baronet and having been frightened by a horrifying cry in Hal’s Planting. Recently two trees in Hal’s Planting have fallen and revealed the caves at the center of the plantation. Now Sir Edric and his friend Andrew Guerdon have returned to Mansteth Hall, the Edric family’s mansion, to look over the old home before Edric marries Andrew’s sister Ray. Edric is wary of Hal’s Planting, having stayed there one night to dispel rumors that it was haunted, only to hear the same frightening sound. Edric plans to destroy Hal’s Planting to end the curse. Then John Marsh’s body is found in Hal’s Planting. Edric is away when Marsh’s death is reported, and in Edric’s absence Guerdon is going through his friend’s papers. Guerdon finds an old piece of parchment. It is the confession of the third Baronet, who describes what he and Dennisoun did with the baby. The confession bears a postscript from Dennisoun: “It is not dead. I do not think that it will ever die."²

When Edric returns Guerdon tries to get him to leave, but Edric refuses. Edric knows about what lives in Hal’s Planting, the “Undying Thing,” and plans to discover what it is when he dynamites the Planting. That night a storm hits Mansteth, and the Undying Thing breaks into Mansteth Hall and kidnaps Edric. Guerdon runs after them, but before he reaches Hal’s Planting the entire plantation collapses into the caves beneath it.

“The Undying Thing” does not reach the heights of “The Moon-Slave.” The first half of “The Undying Thing” is more involving than the second. Stories of the supernatural which portray wicked men becoming moral and humble through a genuine change of heart rather than a didactically-told religious experience are rare, and Pain succeeds in making the conversion convincing. By comparison, the plot machinery of the curse is predictable. Interestingly, though, Pain does not make the story obvious. The reader is given information early in the story but only has it explained later, so that the reader knows that the curse will kill Edric but is unsure for a time what the nature of the Undying Thing is.

Print: Hugh Lamb, ed., Three Men in the Dark: Tales of Terror by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain & Robert Barr. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.

¹ Barry Pain, “The Undying Thing,” in Stories in the Dark (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 121.

² Pain, “The Undying Thing,” 154.