My dog saw dead people, by Brian Sewell

Dartmoor on a grey day is a bleak and hostile place of bogs and tors and empty vastnesses, littered with the bleached bones of old ponies. In June 1961 I was walking there with a landscape painter friend much given to such barren places. ‘Let’s try for Grey Wethers,’ he said one morning — and off we set for this ring of standing stones just below Sittaford Tor, he with his painter’s clobber and me with my young dog Susie, a rangy bitch, a cross between a Hungarian pointer and a whippet, silken and smooth of coat and, from nose to toenails, a bright warm brown.

We found the stones at noon, the sky still leaden, the light flat; some stood 4ft tall, none taller, chipped and leaning, their circle ragged, but before the precise view could be found and the wobbling easel steadied, Susie lowered her haunches, raised her hackles, put back her ears, stared fixedly at nothing that I could see and keened — a high-pitched unearthly wail that pierced the wind. And then she fled. Turning tail within her own length she sped away, straight as a die. I raced after her shouting, but she would not stop, or turn, or slow, until she blundered into a bog. With difficulty, for she was consumed by panic, I got her out of it and, both relieved and angry, put her on the lead, but back toward the stones she would not go one step. I pulled; I pushed; I carried her some yards, but as soon as I put her down she dug in her toes and would not budge. That particular landscape was not painted.

Ten years later, moving into a house on Eldon Road in Kensington, Susie again saw or sensed something I could not see. It was a pretty house, built in 1840, facing south and full of light. Its records, which I went to look through at the town hall, told of families, housemaids, cooks, another landscape painter, a collector of paintings and a photographer of mild pornography — no hint of murder or other mystery, but a mystery there was.

The kitchen was in the semi-basement at the front, a sunlit room that I wished to make my dining room and a pleasant place to sit and read the morning papers, sharing the settee that served as a basket for my dogs, then six in number. It was to something on the stairs down to the kitchen that Susie first reacted. Trapped at the bottom and unable to run, she lowered her haunches and, rooted to the spot, trembled violently and howled. Again and again she did so: in the pantry that had become the kitchen, in the old kitchen itself and at the top of the stairs to it, too terrified to come down. I could not ignore such frequent expressions of distress, and distress it clearly was, for after each manifestation she became pressing in her demand for the reassurance of a hug.

Soon, however, it was I who needed the hug as I, too, began to sense something disagreeable in the kitchen quarters. It was faint at first, the sort of smell that we tend to associate with drains or a blocked sink not often used — but the usual remedies had no effect and the smell became a stench, as though something rotting and putrid was moving about. Washing dishes one evening, it stood beside me, a column of cold air and the foulest smell, human in height and volume — as I realised when I fled the room, for I had walked through it.

I walked through it again and again and, naked in the basement bathroom, I felt it brush against me, the icy cold against my skin as though in an embrace. Only in the basement did it lurk and there it could be anywhere at any time of the day, never in my bedroom, never among my books and only Susie and I were troubled by it — no other dog reacted, no friend or visitor.

One evening, again encountering it on the stairs, I sat on them and talked to it. Any witness of our one-sided conversation would have thought me mad, telling an invisible someone that I bore her no malice (for I thought of it as a she and suspected a deeply unhappy housemaid), that I had no knowledge of her misery or its cause, that I had no means of remedying what had happened in the past and that, above all, I did not in any way want to make it worse. I sensed nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing in response, but a response there was for both stench and cold disappeared. Susie died, other dogs came and went and I forgot the ghost.

Thirty years on I sold the house. On my very last hour in it, struggling to remove the pretty cut-glass light fitting I had found on the basement stairs when I first moved in, I sensed first the cold and then the stench — and left the light where it was.

Sleeping With Dogs by Brian Sewell is out now (Quartet Books, £12.50)