A Book of Ghosts: 27
Author: Various authors
Date: 1860-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of thirteen stories of the uncanny and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 27 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

Another collection of thirteen stories of the uncanny and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.

Contents were originally published 1890 ~ 1928. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CONTENTS:

- The Mark of the Beast
–1890
by Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)

- An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge
–1890
by Ambrose Bierce
(1842–1914)

- The Devil of the Marsh
–1893
by Henry Brereton Marriott Watson
(1863–1921)

- A Dream of Red Hands
–1894
by Bram Stoker
(1847–1912)

- The Mysterious Card
–1896
by Cleveland Moffett
(1863–1926 )

- The Mysterious Card Unveiled
–1896
by Cleveland Moffett
(1863–1926 )

- The Ghost of Old John Hill
–1902
by E. Phillips Oppenheim
(1866–1946)

- Keeping His Promise
–1906
by Algernon Blackwood
(1869–1951)

- The House of Silence
–1906
by E. Nesbit
(1858–1924)

- According to Meredith
–1909
by Marie Belloc Lowndes
(1868–1947)

- Grim House
–1921
by Richard [Edward] Connell
(1893–1949)

- Ooze
–1926
by Anthony M. Rud
(1893–1942)

- The Hyena
–1928
by Robert E. Howard
(1906–1936)

THE MARK OF THE BEAST

Rudyard Kipling

1890

Your Gods and my Gods — do you or I know which are the stronger?

—Native Proverb

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

This theory accounts for some of the more unnecessary horrors of life in India: it may be stretched to explain my story.

My friend Strickland of the Police, who knows as much of natives of India as is good for any man, can bear witness to the facts of the case. Dumoise, our doctor, also saw what Strickland and I saw. The inference which he drew from the evidence was entirely incorrect. He is dead now; he died in a rather curious manner, which has been elsewhere described.

When Fleete came to India he owned a little money and some land in the Himalayas, near a place called Dharmsala. Both properties had been left him by an uncle, and he came out to finance them. He was a big, heavy, genial, and inoffensive man. His knowledge of natives was, of course, limited, and he complained of the difficulties of the language.

He rode in from his place in the hills to spend New Year in the station, and he stayed with Strickland. On New Year’s Eve there was a big dinner at the club, and the night was excusably wet. When men foregather from the uttermost ends of the Empire they have a right to be riotous. The Frontier had sent down a contingent o’ Catch-’em-Alive-O’s who had not seen twenty white faces for a year, and were used to ride fifteen miles to dinner at the next Fort at the risk of a Khyberee bullet where their drinks should lie. They profited by their new security, for they tried to play pool with a curled-up hedgehog found in the garden, and one of them carried the marker round the room in his teeth. Half a dozen planters had come in from the south and were talking “horse” to the Biggest Liar in Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once. Everybody was there, and there was a general closing up of ranks and taking stock of our losses in dead or disabled that had fallen during the past year. It was a very wet night, and I remember that we sang “Auld Lang Syne” with our feet in the Polo Championship Cup, and our heads among the stars, and swore that we were all dear friends. Then some of us went away and annexed Burma, and some tried to open up the Soudan and were opened up by Fuzzies in that cruel scrub outside Suakim, and some found stars and medals, and some were married, which was bad, and some did other things which were worse, and the others of us stayed in our chains and strove to make money on insufficient experiences.

Fleete began the night with sherry and bitters, drank champagne steadily up to dessert, then raw, rasping Capri with all the strength of whisky, took Benedictine with his coffee, four or five whiskies and sodas to improve his pool strokes, beer and bones at half-past two, winding up with old brandy. Consequently, when he came out, at half-past three in the morning, into fourteen degrees of frost, he was very angry with his horse for coughing, and tried to leapfrog into the saddle. The horse broke away and went to his stables; so Strickland and I formed a Guard of Dishonour to take Fleete home.

Our road lay through the bazaar, close to a little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, who is a leading divinity worthy of respect. All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people — the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.

There was a light in the temple, and as we passed we could hear voices of men chanting hymns. In a native temple the priests rise at all hours of the night to do honour to their god. Before we could stop him, Fleete dashed up the steps, patted two priests on the back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of his cigar-butt in to the forehead of the red stone image of Hanuman. Strickland tried to drag him out, but he sat down and said solemnly:

“Shee that? Mark of the B — beasht! I made it. Ishn’t it fine?”

In half a minute the temple was alive and noisy, and Strickland, who knew what came of polluting gods, said that things might occur. He, by virtue of his official position, long residence in the country, and weakness for going among the natives, was known to the priests and he felt unhappy. Fleete sat on the ground and refused to move. He said that “good old Hanuman” made a very soft pillow.

Then, without any warning, a Silver Man came out of a recess behind the image of the god. He was perfectly naked in that bitter, bitter cold, and his body shone like frosted silver, for he was what the Bible calls “a leper as white as snow.” Also he had no face, because he was a leper of some years’ standing, and his disease was heavy upon him. We two stooped to haul Fleete up, and the temple was filling and filling with folk who seemed to spring from the earth, when the Silver Man ran in under our arms, making a noise exactly like the mewing of an otter, caught Fleete round the body and dropped his head on Fleete’s breast before we could wrench him away. Then he retired to a corner and sat mewing while the crowd blocked all the doors.

The priests were very angry until the Silver Man touched Fleete. That nuzzling seemed to sober them.

At the end of a few minutes’ silence one of the priests came to Strickland and said, in perfect English, “Take your friend away. He has done with Hanuman but Hanuman has not done with him.” The crowd gave room and we carried Fleete into the road.

Strickland was very angry. He said that we might all three have been knifed, and that Fleete should thank his stars that he had escaped without injury.

Fleete thanked no one. He said that he wanted to go to bed. He was gorgeously drunk.

We moved on, Strickland silent and wrathful, until Fleete was taken with violent shivering fits and sweating. He said that the smells of the bazaar were overpowering, and he wondered why slaughter-houses were permitted so near English residences. “Can’t you smell the blood?” said Fleete.

We put him to bed at last, just as the dawn was breaking, and Strickland invited me to have another whisky and soda. While we were drinking he talked of the trouble in the temple, and admitted that it baffled him completely. Strickland hates being mystified by natives, because his business in life is to overmatch them with their own weapons. He has not yet succeeded in doing this, but in fifteen or twenty years he will have made some small progress.

“They should have mauled us,” he said, “instead of mewing at us. I wonder what they meant. I don’t like it one little bit.”

I said that the Managing Committee of the temple would in all probability bring a criminal action against us for insulting their religion. There was a section of the Indian Penal Code which exactly met Fleete’s offence. Strickland said he only hoped and prayed that they would do this. Before I left I looked into Fleete’s room, and saw him lying on his right side, scratching his left breast. Then I went to bed cold, depressed, and unhappy, at seven o’clock in the morning.

At one o’clock I rode over to Strickland’s house to inquire after Fleete’s head. I imagined that it would be a sore one. Fleete was breakfasting and seemed unwell. His temper was gone, for he was abusing the cook for not supplying him with an underdone chop. A man who can eat raw meat after a wet night is a curiosity. I told Fleete this and he laughed.

“You breed queer mosquitoes in these parts,” he said. “I’ve been bitten to pieces, but only in one place.”

“Let’s have a look at the bite,” said Strickland. “It may have gone down since this morning.”

While the chops were being cooked, Fleete opened his shirt and showed us, just over his left breast, a mark, the perfect double of the black rosettes — the five or six irregular blotches arranged in a circle — on a leopard’s hide. Strickland looked and said, “It was only pink this morning. It’s grown black now.”

Fleete ran to a glass.

“By Jove!” he said, “this is nasty. What is it?”

We could not answer. Here the chops came in, all red and juicy, and Fleete bolted three in a most offensive manner. He ate on his right grinders only, and threw his head over his right shoulder as he snapped the meat. When he had finished, it struck him that he had been behaving strangely, for he said apologetically, “I don’t think I ever felt so hungry in my life. I’ve bolted like an ostrich.”

After breakfast Strickland said to me, “Don’t go. Stay here, and stay for the night.”

Seeing that my house was not three miles from Strickland’s, this request was absurd. But Strickland insisted, and was going to say something, when Fleete interrupted by declaring in a shamefaced way that he felt hungry again. Strickland sent a man to my house to fetch over my bedding and a horse, and we three went down to Strickland’s stables to pass the hours until it was time to go out for a ride. The man who has a weakness for horses never wearies of inspecting them; and when two men are killing time in this way they gather knowledge and lies the one from the other.

There were five horses in the stables, and I shall never forget the scene as we tried to look them over. They seemed to have gone mad. They reared and screamed and nearly tore up their pickets; they sweated and shivered and lathered and were distraught with fear. Strickland’s horses used to know him as well as his dogs; which made the matter more curious. We left the stable for fear of the brutes throwing themselves in their panic. Then Strickland turned back and called me. The horses were still frightened, but they let us “gentle” and make much of them, and put their heads in our bosoms.

“They aren’t afraid of us,” said Strickland. “D’ you know, I’d give three months’ pay if Outrage here could talk.”

But Outrage was dumb, and could only cuddle up to his master and blow out his nostrils, as is the custom of horses when they wish to explain things but can’t. Fleete came up when we were in the stalls, and as soon as the horses saw him, their fright broke out afresh. It was all that we could do to escape from the place unkicked. Strickland said, “They don’t seem to love you, Fleete.”

“Nonsense,” said Fleete; “my mare will follow me like a dog.” He went to her; she was in a loose-box; but as he slipped the bars she plunged, knocked him down, and broke away into the garden. I laughed, but Strickland was not amused. He took his moustache in both fists and pulled at it till it nearly came out. Fleete, instead of going off to chase his property, yawned, saying that he felt sleepy. He went to the house to lie down, which was a foolish way of spending New Year’s Day.

Strickland sat with me in the stables and asked if I had noticed anything peculiar in Fleete’s manner. I said that he ate his food like a beast; but that this might have been the result of living alone in the hills out of the reach of society as refined and elevating as ours for instance. Strickland was not amused. I do not think that he listened to me, for his next sentence referred to the mark on Fleete’s breast, and I said that it might have been caused by blister-flies, or that it was possibly a birthmark newly born and now visible for the first time. We both agreed that it was unpleasant to look at, and Strickland found occasion to say that I was a fool.

“I can’t tell you what I think now,” said he, “because you would call me a madman; but you must stay with me for the next few days, if you can. I want you to watch Fleete, but don’t tell me what you think till I have made up my mind.”

“But I am dining out tonight,” I said.

“So am I,” said Strickland, “and so is Fleete. At least if he doesn’t change his mind.”

We walked about the garden smoking, but saying nothing — because we were friends, and talking spoils good tobacco — till our pipes were out. Then we went to wake up Fleete. He was wide awake and fidgeting about his room.

“I say, I want some more chops,” he said. “Can I get them?”

We laughed and said, “Go and change. The ponies will be round in a minute.”

“All right,” said Fleete. “I’ll go when I get the chops — underdone ones, mind.”

He seemed to be quite in earnest. It was four o’clock, and we had had breakfast at one; still, for a long time, he demanded those underdone chops. Then he changed into riding clothes and went out into the verandah. His pony — the mare had not been caught — would not let him come near. All three horses were unmanageable — mad with fear — and finally Fleete said that he would stay at home and get something to eat. Strickland and I rode out wondering. As we passed the temple of Hanuman the Silver Man came out and mewed at us.

“He is not one of the regular priests of the temple,” said Strickland. “I think I should peculiarly like to lay my hands on him.”

There was no spring in our gallop on the racecourse that evening. The horses were stale, and moved as though they had been ridden out.

“The fright after breakfast has been too much for them,” said Strickland.

That was the only remark he made through the remainder of the ride. Once or twice, I think, he swore to himself; but that did not count.

We came back in the dark at seven o’clock, and saw that there were no lights in the bungalow. “Careless ruffians my servants are!” said Strickland.

My horse reared at something on the carriage drive, and Fleete stood up under its nose.

“What are you doing, grovelling about the garden?” said Strickland.

But both horses bolted and nearly threw us. We dismounted by the stables and returned to Fleete, who was on his hands and knees under the orange-bushes.

“What the devil’s wrong with you?” said Strickland.

“Nothing, nothing in the world,” said Fleete, speaking very quickly and thickly. “I’ve been gardening — botanising, you know. The smell of the earth is delightful. I think I’m going for a walk — a long walk — all night.”

Then I saw that there was something excessively out of order somewhere, and I said to Strickland, “I am not dining out.”

“Bless you!” said Strickland. “Here, Fleete, get up. You’ll catch fever there. Come in to dinner and let’s have the lamps lit. We’ll all dine at home.”

Fleete stood up unwillingly, and said, “No lamps — no lamps. It’s much nicer here. Let’s dine outside and have some more chops — lots of ’em and underdone — bloody ones with gristle.”

Now a December evening in Northern India is bitterly cold, and Fleete’s suggestion was that of a maniac.

“Come in,” said Strickland sternly. “Come in at once.”

Fleete came, and when the lamps were brought, we saw that he was literally plastered with dirt from head to foot. He must have been rolling in the garden. He shrank from the light and went to his room. His eyes were horrible to look at. There was a green light behind them, not in them, if you understand, and the man’s lower lip hung down.

Strickland said, “There is going to be trouble — big trouble — tonight. Don’t you change your riding-things.”

We waited and waited for Fleete’s reappearance, and ordered dinner in the meantime. We could hear him moving about his own room, but there was no light there. Presently from the room came the long-drawn howl of a wolf.

People write and talk lightly of blood running cold and hair standing up, and things of that kind. Both sensations are too horrible to be trifled with.

My heart stopped as though a knife had been driven through it, and Strickland turned as white as the tablecloth.

The howl was repeated, and was answered by another howl far across the fields.

That set the gilded roof on the horror. Strickland dashed into Fleete’s room. I followed, and we saw Fleete getting out of the window. He made beast-noises in the back of his throat. He could not answer us when we shouted at him. He spat.

I don’t quite remember what followed, but I think that Strickland must have stunned him with the long boot-jack, or else I should never have been able to sit on his chest. Fleete could not speak, he could only snarl, and his snarls were those of a wolf, not of a man. The human spirit must have been giving way all day and have died out with the twilight. We were dealing with a beast that had once been Fleete.

The affair was beyond any human and rational experience. I tried to say “Hydrophobia,” but the word wouldn’t come, because I knew that I was lying.

We bound this beast with leather thongs of the punkah-rope, and tied its thumbs and big toes together, and gagged it with a shoehorn, which makes a very efficient gag if you know how to arrange it. Then we carried it into the dining-room, and sent a man to Dumoise, the doctor, telling him to come over at once. After we had dispatched the messenger and were drawing breath, Strickland said, “It’s no good. This isn’t any doctor’s work.” I, also, knew that he spoke the truth.

The beast’s head was free, and it threw it about from side to side. Anyone entering the room would have believed that we were curing a wolf’s pelt. That was the most loathsome accessory of all.

Strickland sat with his chin in the heel of his fist, watching the beast as it wriggled on the ground, but saying nothing. The shirt had been torn open in the scuffle and showed the black rosette mark on the left breast. It stood out like a blister.

In the silence of the watching we heard something without — mewing like a she-otter. We both rose to our feet, and, I answer for myself, not Strickland, felt sick — actually and physically sick. We told each other, as did the men in Pinafore, that it was the cat.

Dumoise arrived, and I never saw a little man so unprofessionally shocked. He said that it was a heart-rending case of hydrophobia, and that nothing could be done. At least any palliative measures would only prolong the agony. The beast was foaming at the mouth. Fleete, as we told Dumoise, had been bitten by dogs once or twice. Any man who keeps half a dozen terriers must expect a nip now and again. Dumoise could offer no help. He could only certify that Fleete was dying of hydrophobia. The beast was then howling, for it had managed to spit out the shoehorn. Dumoise said that he would be ready to certify to the cause of death, and that the end was certain. He was a good little man, and he offered to remain with us; but Strickland refused the kindness. He did not wish to poison Dumoise’s New Year. He would only ask him not to give the real cause of Fleete’s death to the public.

So Dumoise left, deeply agitated; and as soon as the noise of the cart-wheels had died away, Strickland told me, in a whisper, his suspicions. They were so wildly improbable that he dared not say them out aloud; and I, who entertained all Strickland’s beliefs, was so ashamed of owning to them that I pretended to disbelieve.

“Even if the Silver Man had bewitched Fleete for polluting the image of Hanuman, the punishment could not have fallen so quickly.”

As I was whispering this the cry outside the house rose again, and the beast fell into a fresh paroxysm of struggling till we were afraid that the thongs that held it would give way.

“Watch!” said Strickland. “If this happens six times I shall take the law into my own hands. I order you to help me.”

He went into his room and came out in a few minutes with the barrels of an old shotgun, a piece of fishing-line, some thick cord, and his heavy wooden bedstead. I reported that the convulsions had followed the cry by two seconds in each case, and the beast seemed perceptibly weaker.

Strickland muttered, “But he can’t take away the life! He can’t take away the life!”

I said, though I knew that I was arguing against myself, “It may be a cat. It must be a cat. If the Silver Man is responsible, why does he dare to come here?”

Strickland arranged the wood on the hearth, put the gun-barrels into the glow of the fire, spread the twine on the table, and broke a walking stick in two. There was one yard of fishing line, gut lapped with wire, such as is used for mahseer-fishing, and he tied the two ends together in a loop.

Then he said, “How can we catch him? He must be taken alive and unhurt.”

I said that we must trust in Providence, and go out softly with polo-sticks into the shrubbery at the front of the house. The man or animal that made the cry was evidently moving round the house as regularly as a night-watchman. We could wait in the bushes till he came by and knock him over.

Strickland accepted this suggestion, and we slipped out from a bathroom window into the front verandah and then across the carriage drive into the bushes.

In the moonlight we could see the leper coming round the corner of the house. He was perfectly naked, and from time to time he mewed and stopped to dance with his shadow. It was an unattractive sight, and thinking of poor Fleete, brought to such degradation by so foul a creature, I put away all my doubts and resolved to help Strickland from the heated gun-barrels to the loop of twine — from the loins to the head and back again — with all tortures that might be needful.

The leper halted in the front porch for a moment and we jumped out on him with the sticks. He was wonderfully strong, and we were afraid that he might escape or be fatally injured before we caught him. We had an idea that lepers were frail creatures, but this proved to be incorrect. Strickland knocked his legs from under him and I put my foot on his neck. He mewed hideously, and even through my riding-boots I could feel that his flesh was not the flesh of a clean man.

He struck at us with his hand and feet-stumps. We looped the lash of a dog-whip round him, under the armpits, and dragged him backwards into the hall and so into the dining-room where the beast lay. There we tied him with trunk-straps. He made no attempt to escape, but mewed.

When we confronted him with the beast the scene was beyond description. The beast doubled backwards into a bow as though he had been poisoned with strychnine, and moaned in the most pitiable fashion. Several other things happened also, but they cannot be put down here.

“I think I was right,” said Strickland. “Now we will ask him to cure this case.”

But the leper only mewed. Strickland wrapped a towel round his hand and took the gun-barrels out of the fire. I put the half of the broken walking stick through the loop of fishing-line and buckled the leper comfortably to Strickland’s bedstead. I understood then how men and women and little children can endure to see a witch burnt alive; for the beast was moaning on the floor, and though the Silver Man had no face, you could see horrible feelings passing through the slab that took its place, exactly as waves of heat play across red-hot iron — gun-barrels for instance.

Strickland shaded his eyes with his hands for a moment and we got to work. This part is not to be printed.

•   •   •   •   •   •
•   •   •   •   •   •

The dawn was beginning to break when the leper spoke. His mewings had not been satisfactory up to that point. The beast had fainted from exhaustion and the house was very still. We unstrapped the leper and told him to take away the evil spirit. He crawled to the beast and laid his hand upon the left breast. That was all. Then he fell face down and whined, drawing in his breath as he did so.

We watched the face of the beast, and saw the soul of Fleete coming back into the eyes. Then a sweat broke out on the forehead and the eyes — they were human eyes — closed. We waited for an hour, but Fleete still slept. We carried him to his room and bade the leper go, giving him the bedstead, and the sheet on the bedstead to cover his nakedness, the gloves and the towels with which we had touched him, and the whip that had been hooked round his body. He put the sheet about him and went out into the early morning without speaking or mewing.

Strickland wiped his face and sat down. A night-gong, far away in the city, made seven o’clock.

“Exactly four-and-twenty hours!” said Strickland. “And I’ve done enough to ensure my dismissal from the service, besides permanent quarters in a lunatic asylum. Do you believe that we are awake?”

The red-hot gun-barrel had fallen on the floor and was singeing the carpet. The smell was entirely real.

That morning at eleven we two together went to wake up Fleete. We looked and saw that the black leopard-rosette on his chest had disappeared. He was very drowsy and tired, but as soon as he saw us, he said, “Oh! Confound you fellows. Happy New Year to you. Never mix your liquors. I’m nearly dead.”

“Thanks for your kindness, but you’re over time,” said Strickland. “Today is the morning of the second. You’ve slept the clock round with a vengeance.”

The door opened, and little Dumoise put his head in. He had come on foot, and fancied that we were laying out Fleete.

“I’ve brought a nurse,” said Dumoise. “I suppose that she can come in for … what is necessary.”

“By all means,” said Fleete cheerily, sitting up in bed. “Bring on your nurses.”

Dumoise was dumb. Strickland led him out and explained that there must have been a mistake in the diagnosis. Dumoise remained dumb and left the house hastily. He considered that his professional reputation had been injured, and was inclined to make a personal matter of the recovery. Strickland went out too. When he came back, he said that he had been to call on the Temple of Hanuman to offer redress for the pollution of the god, and had been solemnly assured that no white man had ever touched the idol, and that he was an incarnation of all the virtues labouring under a delusion. “What do you think?” said Strickland.

I said “‘There are more things …’”

But Strickland hates that quotation. He says that I have worn it threadbare.

One other curious thing happened which frightened me as much as anything in all the night’s work. When Fleete was dressed he came into the dining-room and sniffed. He had a quaint trick of moving his nose when he sniffed. “Horrid doggy smell, here,” said he. “You should really keep those terriers of yours in better order. Try sulphur, Strick.”

But Strickland did not answer. He caught hold of the back of a chair, and, without warning, went into an amazing fit of hysterics. It is terrible to see a strong man overtaken with hysteria. Then it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s soul with the Silver Man in that room, and had disgraced ourselves as Englishmen forever, and I laughed and gasped and gurgled just as shamefully as Strickland, while Fleete thought that we had both gone mad. We never told him what we had done.

Some years later, when Strickland had married and was a church-going member of society for his wife’s sake, we reviewed the incident dispassionately, and Strickland suggested that I should put it before the public.

I cannot myself see that this step is likely to clear up the mystery; because, in the first place, no one will believe a rather unpleasant story, and, in the second, it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned.

“The Pioneer”, 12 July 1890

AN OCCURANCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE

Ambrose Bierce

1890

I

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners — two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest — a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.

Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground — a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loop-holed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway of the slope between bridge and fort were the spectators — a single company of infantry in line, at “parade rest,” the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.

The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good — a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock-coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.

The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!

He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift — all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or nearby — it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and he knew not why — apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. “If I could free my hands,” he thought, “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader’s farthest advance.”

As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.

II

Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.

One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.

“The Yanks are repairing the railroads,” said the man, “and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order.”

“How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?” Farquhar asked.

“About thirty miles.”

“Is there no force on this side the creek?”

“Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge.”

“Suppose a man a civilian and student of hanging should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel,” said Farquhar, smiling, “what could he accomplish?”

The soldier reflected. “I was there a month ago,” he replied. “I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tow.”

The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he re-passed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.

III

As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened — ages later, it seemed to him — by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness — of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud plash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river! — the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface — knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. “To be hanged and drowned,” he thought, “that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair.”

He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort! — what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water-snake. “Put it back, put it back!” He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire; his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!

He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf — saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragonflies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat — all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.

He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.

Suddenly, he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.

A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking into the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning’s work. How coldly and pitilessly — with what an even, calm intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquility in the men — with what accurately measured intervals fell those cruel words:

“Attention, company!… Shoulder arms!… Ready!… Aim!… Fire!”

Farquhar dived — dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dulled thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.

As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther downstream — nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.

The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning.

“The officer,” he reasoned, “will not make that martinet’s error a second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!”

An appalling plash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, diminuendo, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.

“They will not do that again,” he thought; “the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me — the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun.”

Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round — spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men — all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color — that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In a few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream — the southern bank — and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of aeolian harps. He had no wish to perfect his escape — was content to remain in that enchanting spot until re-taken.

A whiz and rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.

All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.

By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which — once, twice, and again — he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.

His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it, he found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue — he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!

Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene — perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon — then all is darkness and silence!

Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

“San Francisco Examiner”, 13 July 1890

THE DEVIL OF THE MARSH

Henry Brereton Marriott Watson

1893

It was nigh upon dusk when I drew close to the Great Marsh, and already the white vapours were about, riding across the sunken levels like ghosts in a churchyard. Though I had set forth in a mood of wild delight, I had sobered in the lonely ride across the moor and was now uneasily alert. As my horse jerked down the grassy slope that fell away to the jaws of the swamp I could see thin streams of mist rise slowly, hover like wraiths above the long rushes, and then, turning gradually more material, go blowing heavily away across the flat. The appearance of the place at this desolate hour, so remote from human society and so darkly significant of evil presences, struck me with a certain wonder that she should have chosen this spot for our meeting. She was a familiar of the moors, where I had invariably encountered her; but it was like her arrogant caprice to test my devotion by some such dreary assignation. The wide and horrid prospect depressed me beyond reason, but the fact of her neighbourhood drew me on, and my spirits mounted at the thought that at last she was to put me in possession of herself. Tethering my horse upon the verge of the swamp, I soon discovered the path that crossed it, and entering struck out boldly for the heart. The track could have been little used, for the reeds, which stood high above the level of my eyes upon either side, straggled everywhere across in low arches, through which I dodged, and broke my way with some inconvenience and much impatience. A full half-hour I was solitary in that wilderness, and when at last a sound other than my own footsteps broke the silence the dusk had fallen.

I was moving very slowly at the time, with a mind half disposed to turn from the melancholy expedition, which it seemed to me now must surely be a cruel jest she had played upon me. While some such reluctance held me, I was suddenly arrested by a hoarse croaking which broke out upon my left, sounding somewhere from the reeds in the black mire. A little further it came again from close at hand, and when I had passed on a few more steps in wonder and perplexity I heard it for the third time. I stopped and listened, but the marsh was as a grave, and so taking the noise for the signal of some raucous frog, I resumed my way. But in a little the croaking was repeated, and coming quickly to a stand. I pushed the reeds aside and peered into the darkness. I could see nothing, but at the immediate moment of my pause I thought I detected the sound of somebody trailing through the rushes. My distaste for the adventure grew with this suspicion, and had it not been for my delirious infatuation I had assuredly turned back and ridden home. The ghastly sound pursued me at intervals along the track, until at last, irritated beyond endurance by the sense of this persistent and invisible company, I broke into a sort of run. This, it seemed, the creature (whatever it was) could not achieve, for I heard no more of it, and continued my way in peace. My path at length ran out from among the reeds upon the smooth flat of which she had spoken, and here my heart quickened, and the gloom of the dreadful place lifted. The flat lay in the very centre of the marsh, and here and there in it a gaunt bush or withered tree rose like a spectre against the white mists. At the further end I fancied some kind of building loomed up; but the fog which had been gatherer since my entrance upon the passage sailed down upon me at that moment and the prospect went out with suddenness. As I stood waiting for the cloud to pass, a voice cried to me out of its centre, and I saw her next second with bands of mist swirling about her body, come rushing to me from the darkness. She put her long arms about me, and, drawing her close, I looked into her deep eyes. Far down in them, it seemed to me, I could discern a mystic laughter dancing in the wells of light, and I had that ecstatic sense of nearness to some spirit of fire which was wont to possess me at her contact.

“At last,” she said, “at last, my beloved!” I caressed her.

“Why,” said I, tingling at the nerves, “why have you put this dolorous journey between us? And what mad freak is your presence in this swamp?” She uttered her silver laugh, and nestled to me again.

“I am the creature of this place,” she answered. “This is my home. I had sworn you should behold me in my native sin ere you ravished me away.”

“Come, then,” said I; “I have seen; let there be an end of this. I know you, what you are. This marsh chokes up my heart. God forbid you should spend more of your days here. Come.”

“You are in haste,” she cried. “There is yet much to learn. Look, my friend,” she said, “you who know me, what I am. This is my prison, and I have inherited its properties. Have you no fear?”

For answer I pulled her to me, and her warm lips drove out the horrid humours of the night; but the swift passage of a flickering mockery over her eyes struck me back as a flash of lightning, and I grew chill again.

“I have the marsh in my blood,” she whispered; “the marsh and the fog of it. Think ere you vow to me, for I am the cloud in a starry night.”

A lithe and lovely creature, palpable of warm flesh, she lifted her magic face to mine and besought me plaintively with these words. The dews of the nightfall hung on her lashes, and seemed to plead with me for her forlorn and solitary plight.

“Behold!” I cried, “witch or devil of the marsh, you shall come with me! I have known you on the moors, a roving apparition of beauty; nothing more I know, nothing more I ask. I care not what this dismal haunt means; nor what these strange and mystic eyes. You have powers and senses above me; your sphere and habits are as mysterious and incomprehensible as your beauty. But that,” I said, “is mine, and the world that is mine shall be yours also.”

She moved her head nearer to me with an antic gesture, and her gleaming eyes glanced up at me with a sudden flash, the similitude (great heavens!) of a hooded snake. Starting, I fell away, but at that moment she turned her face and set it fast towards the fog that came rolling in thick volumes over the flat. Noiselessly the great cloud crept down upon us, and all dazed and troubled I watched her watching it in silence. It was as if she awaited some omen of horror, and I too trembled in the fear of its coming.

Then suddenly out of the night issued the hoarse and hideous croaking I had heard upon my passage. I reached out my arm to take her hand, but in an instant the mists broke over us, and I was groping in the vacancy. Something like panic took hold of me, and, beating through the blind obscurity, I rushed over the flat calling upon her. In a little the swirl went by, and I perceived her upon the margin of the swamp, her arm raised as in imperious command. I ran to her, but stopped, amazed and shaken by a fearful sight. Low by the dripping reeds crouched a small squat thing, in the likeness of a monstrous frog, coughing and choking in its throat. As I stared, the creature rose upon its legs and disclosed a horrid human resemblance. Its face was white and thin, with long black hair; its body gnarled and twisted as with the ague of a thousand years. Shaking, it whined in a breathless voice, pointing a skeleton finger at the woman by my side.

“Your eyes were my guide,” it quavered. “Do you think that after all these years I have no knowledge of your eyes? Lo, is there aught of evil in you I am not instructed in? This is the Hell you designed for me, and now you would leave me to a greater.”

The wretch paused, and panting leaned upon a bush, while she stood silent, mocking him with her eyes, and soothing my terror with her soft touch.

“Hear!” he cried, turning to me, “hear the tale of this woman that you may know her as she is. She is the Presence of the marshes. Woman or Devil I know not, but only that the accursed marsh has crept into her soul and she herself is become its Evil Spirit; she herself, that lives and grows young and beautiful by it, has its full power to blight and chill and slay. I, who was once as you are, have this knowledge. What bones lie deep in this black swamp who can say but she? She has drained of health, she has drained of mind and of soul; what is between her and her desire that she should not drain also of life? She has made me a devil in her Hell, and now she would leave me to my solitary pain, and go search for another victim. But she shall not!” he screamed through his chattering teeth; “she shall not! My Hell is also hers! She shall not!”

Her smiling untroubled eyes left his face and turned to me; she put out her arms, swaying towards me, and so fervid and so great a light glowed in her face that, as one distraught of superhuman means, I took her into my embrace. And then the madness seized me.

“Woman or devil,” I said, “I will go with you! Of what account this pitiful past? Blight me even as that wretch, so be only you are with me.”

She laughed, and, disengaging herself, leaned, half-clinging to me, towards the coughing creature by the mire.

“Come,” I cried, catching her by the waist. “Come!” She laughed again a silver-ringing laugh. She moved with me slowly across the flat to where the track started for the portals of the marsh. She laughed and clung to me.

But at the edge of the track I was startled by a shrill, hoarse screaming; and behold, from my very feet, that loathsome creature rose up and wound his long black arms about her, shrieking and crying in his pain. Stooping, I pushed him from her skirts, and with one sweep of my arm drew her across the pathway; as her face passed mine her eyes were wide and smiling. Then of a sudden the still mist enveloped us once more; but ere it descended I had a glimpse of that contorted figure trembling on the margin, the white face drawn and full of desolate pain. At the sight an icy shiver ran through me. And then through the yellow gloom the shadow of her darted past me to the further side. I heard the hoarse cough, the dim noise of a struggle, a swishing sound, a thin cry, and then the sucking of the slime over something in the rushes. I leapt forward; and once again the fog thinned, and I beheld her, woman or devil, standing upon the verge, and peering with smiling eyes into the foul and sickly bog. With a sharp cry wrung from my nerveless soul, I turned and fled down the narrow way from that accursed spot; and as I ran the thickening fog closed round me, and I heard far off and lessening still the silver sound of her mocking laughter.

Diogenes of London (1893)

A DREAM OF RED HANDS

Bram Stoker

1894

The first opinion given to me regarding Jacob Settle was a simple descriptive statement. “He’s a down-in-the-mouth chap”: but I found that it embodied the thoughts and ideas of all his fellow-workmen. There was in the phrase a certain easy tolerance, an absence of positive feeling of any kind, rather than any complete opinion, which marked pretty accurately the man’s place in public esteem. Still, there was some dissimilarity between this and his appearance which unconsciously set me thinking, and by degrees, as I saw more of the place and the workmen, I came to have a special interest in him. He was, I found, forever doing kindnesses, not involving money expenses beyond his humble means, but in the manifold ways of forethought and forbearance and self-repression which are of the truer charities of life. Women and children trusted him implicitly, though, strangely enough, he rather shunned them, except when anyone was sick, and then he made his appearance to help if he could, timidly and awkwardly. He led a very solitary life, keeping house by himself in a tiny cottage, or rather hut, of one room, far on the edge of the moorland. His existence seemed so sad and solitary that I wished to cheer it up, and for the purpose took the occasion when we had both been sitting up with a child, injured by me through accident, to offer to lend him books. He gladly accepted, and as we parted in the grey of the dawn I felt that something of mutual confidence had been established between us.

The books were always most carefully and punctually returned, and in time Jacob Settle and I became quite friends. Once or twice as I crossed the moorland on Sundays I looked in on him; but on such occasions he was shy and ill at ease so that I felt diffident about calling to see him. He would never under any circumstances come into my own lodgings.

One Sunday afternoon, I was coming back from a long walk beyond the moor, and as I passed Settle’s cottage stopped at the door to say “how do you do?” to him. As the door was shut, I thought that he was out, and merely knocked for form’s sake, or through habit, not expecting to get any answer. To my surprise, I heard a feeble voice from within, though what was said I could not hear. I entered at once, and found Jacob lying half-dressed upon his bed. He was as pale as death, and the sweat was simply rolling off his face. His hands were unconsciously gripping the bedclothes as a drowning man holds on to whatever he may grasp. As I came in, he half arose, with a wild, hunted look in his eyes, which were wide open and staring, as though something of horror had come before him; but when he recognised me he sank back on the couch with a smothered sob of relief and closed his eyes. I stood by him for a while, quiet a minute or two, while he gasped. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, but with such a despairing, woeful expression that, as I am a living man, I would have rather seen that frozen look of horror. I sat down beside him and asked after his health. For a while he would not answer me except to say that he was not ill; but then, after scrutinising me closely, he half arose on his elbow and said@

“I thank you kindly, sir, but I’m simply telling you the truth. I am not ill, as men call it, though God knows whether there be not worse sicknesses than doctors know of. I’ll tell you, as you are so kind, but I trust that you won’t even mention such a thing to a living soul, for it might work me more and greater woe. I am suffering from a bad dream.”

“A bad dream!” I said, hoping to cheer him; “but dreams pass away with the light — even with waking.” There I stopped, for before he spoke I saw the answer in his desolate look round the little place.

“No! no! that’s all well for people that live in comfort and with those they love around them. It is a thousand times worse for those who live alone and have to do so. What cheer is there for me, waking here in the silence of the night, with the wide moor around me full of voices and full of faces that make my waking a worse dream than my sleep? Ah, young sir, you have no past that can send its legions to people the darkness and the empty space, and I pray the good God that you may never have!”

As he spoke, there was such an almost irresistible gravity of conviction in his manner that I abandoned my remonstrance about his solitary life. I felt that I was in the presence of some secret influence which I could not fathom. To my relief, for I knew not what to say, he went on–

“Two nights past have I dreamed it. It was hard enough the first night, but I came through it. Last night the expectation was in itself almost worse than the dream — until the dream came, and then it swept away every remembrance of lesser pain. I stayed awake till just before the dawn, and then it came again, and ever since I have been in such an agony as I am sure the dying feel, and with it all the dread of tonight.” Before he had got to the end of the sentence my mind was made up, and I felt that I could speak to him more cheerfully.

“Try and get to sleep early tonight — in fact, before the evening has passed away. The sleep will refresh you, and I promise you there will not be any bad dreams after tonight.” He shook his head hopelessly, so I sat a little longer and then left him.

When I got home I made my arrangements for the night, for I had made up my mind to share Jacob Settle’s lonely vigil in his cottage on the moor. I judged that if he got to sleep before sunset he would wake well before midnight, and so, just as the bells of the city were striking eleven, I stood opposite his door armed with a bag, in which were my supper, and extra large flask, a couple of candles, and a book. The moonlight was bright, and flooded the whole moor, till it was almost as light as day; but ever and anon black clouds drove across the sky, and made a darkness which by comparison seemed almost tangible. I opened the door softly, and entered without waking Jacob, who lay asleep with his white face upward. He was still, and again bathed it sweat. I tried to imagine what visions were passing before those closed eyes which could bring with them the misery and woe which were stamped on the face, but fancy failed me, and I waited for the awakening. It came suddenly, and in a fashion which touched me to the quick, for the hollow groan that broke from the man’s white lips as he half arose and sank back was manifestly the realisation or completion of some train of thought which had gone before.

“If this be dreaming,” said I to myself, “then it must be based on some very terrible reality. What can have been that unhappy fact that he spoke of?”

While I thus spoke, he realised that I was with him. It struck me as strange that he had no period of that doubt as to whether dream or reality surrounded him which commonly marks an expected environment of waking men. With a positive cry of joy, he seized my hand and held it in his two wet, trembling hands, as a frightened child clings on to someone whom it loves. I tried to soothe him–

“There, there! it is all right. I have come to stay with you tonight, and together we will try to fight this evil dream.” He let go my hand suddenly, and sank back on his bed and covered his eyes with his hands.

“Fight it? — the evil dream! Ah! no sir no! No mortal power can fight that dream, for it comes from God — and is burned in here;” and he beat upon his forehead. Then he went on–

“It is the same dream, ever the same, and yet it grows in its power to torture me every time it comes.”

“What is the dream?” I asked, thinking that the speaking of it might give him some relief, but he shrank away from me, and after a long pause said@

“No, I had better not tell it. It may not come again.”

There was manifestly something to conceal from me — something that lay behind the dream, so I answered–

“All right. I hope you have seen the last of it. But if it should come again, you will tell me, will you not? I ask, not out of curiosity, but because I think it may relieve you to speak.” He answered with what I thought was almost an undue amount of solemnity@

“If it comes again, I shall tell you all.”

Then I tried to get his mind away from the subject to more mundane things, so I produced supper, and made him share it with me, including the contents of the flask. After a little he braced up, and when I lit my cigar, having given him another, we smoked a full hour, and talked of many things. Little by little the comfort of his body stole over his mind, and I could see sleep laying her gentle hands on his eyelids. He felt it, too, and told me that now he felt all right, and I might safely leave him; but I told him that, right or wrong, I was going to see in the daylight. So I lit my other candle, and began to read as he fell asleep.

By degrees I got interested in my book, so interested that presently I was startled by its dropping out of my hands. I looked and saw that Jacob was still asleep, and I was rejoiced to see that there was on his face a look of unwonted happiness, while his lips seemed to move with unspoken words. Then I turned to my work again, and again woke, but this time to feel chilled to my very marrow by hearing the voice from the bed beside me@

“Not with those red hands! Never! never!” On looking at him, I found that he was still asleep. He woke, however, in an instant, and did not seem surprised to see me; there was again that strange apathy as to his surroundings. Then I said:

“Settle, tell me your dream. You may speak freely, for I shall hold your confidence sacred. While we both live I shall never mention what you may choose to tell me,”

“I said I would; but I had better tell you first what goes before the dream, that you may understand. I was a schoolmaster when I was a very young man; it was only a parish school in a little village in the West Country. No need to mention any names. Better not. I was engaged to be married to a young girl whom I loved and almost reverenced. It was the old story. While we were waiting for the time when we could afford to set up house together, another man came along. He was nearly as young as I was, and handsome, and a gentleman, with all a gentleman’s attractive ways for a woman of our class. He would go fishing, and she would meet him while I was at my work in school. I reasoned with her and implored her to give him up. I offered to get married at once and go away and begin the world in a strange country; but she would not listen to anything I could say, and I could see that she was infatuated with him. Then I took it on myself to meet the man and ask him to deal well with the girl, for I thought he might mean honestly by her, so that there might be no talk or chance of talk on the part of others. I went where I should meet him with none by, and we met!” Here Jacob Settle had to pause, for something seemed to rise in his throat, and he almost gasped for breath. Then went on@

“Sir, as God is above us, there was no selfish thought in my heart that day, I loved my pretty Mabel too well to be content with a part of her love, and I had thought of my own unhappiness too often not to have come to realise that, whatever might come to her, my hope was gone. He was insolent to me — you, sir, who are a gentleman, cannot know, perhaps, how galling can be the insolence of one who is above you in station — but I bore with that. I implored him to deal well with the girl, for what might be only a pastime of an idle hour with him might be the breaking of her heart. For I never had a thought of her truth, or that the worst of harm could come to her — it was only the unhappiness to her heart I feared. But when I asked him when he intended to marry her his laughter galled me so that I lost my temper and told him that I would not stand by and see her life made unhappy. Then he grew angry too, and in his anger said such cruel things of her that then and there I swore he should not live to do her harm. God knows how it came about, for in such moments of passion it is hard to remember the steps from a word to a blow, but I found myself standing over his dead body, with my hands crimson with the blood that welled from his torn throat. We were alone and he was a stranger, with none of his kin to seek for him and murder does not always out — not all at once. His bones may be whitening still, for all I know, in the pool of the river where I left him. No one suspected his absence, or why it was, except my poor Mabel, and she dared not speak.

“But it was all in vain, for when I came back again after an absence of months — for I could not live in the place — I learned that her shame had come and that she had died in it. Hitherto I had been borne up by the thought that my ill deed had saved her future, but now, when I learned that I had been too late, and that my poor love was smirched with that man’s sin, I fled away with the sense of my useless guilt upon me more heavily than I could bear. Ah! Sir, you that have not done such a sin don’t know what it is to carry it with you. You may think that custom makes it easy to you, but it is not so. It grows and grows with every hour, till it becomes intolerable, and with it growing, too, the feeling that you must forever stand outside Heaven. You don’t know what that means, and I pray God that you never may. Ordinary men, to whom all things are possible, don’t often, if ever, think of Heaven. It is a name, and nothing more, and they are content to wait and let things be, but to those who are doomed to be shut out forever, you cannot think what it means, you cannot guess or measure the terrible endless longing to see the gates opened, and to be able to join the white figures within.

“And this brings me to my dream. It seemed that the portal was before me, with great gates of massive steel with bars of the thickness of a mast, rising to the very clouds, and so close that between them was just a glimpse of a crystal grotto, on whose shinning walls were figured many white-clad forms with faces radiant with joy. When I stood before the gate my heart and my soul were so full of rapture and longing that I forgot. And there stood at the gate two mighty angels with sweeping wings, and, oh! so stern of countenance. They held each in one hand a flaming sword, and in the other the latchet, which moved to and fro at their lightest touch. Nearer were figures all draped in black, with heads covered so that only the eyes were seen, and they handed to each who came white garments such as the angels wear. A low murmur came that told that all should put on their own robes, and without soil, or the angels would not pass them in, but would smite them down with the flaming swords. I was eager to don my own garment, and hurriedly threw it over me and stepped swiftly to the gate; but it moved not, and the angels, loosing the latchet, pointed to my dress, I looked down, and was aghast, for the whole robe was smeared with blood. My hands were red; they glittered with the blood that dripped from them as on that day by the river bank. And then the angels raised their flaming swords to smite me down, and the horror was complete — I awoke. Again, and again, and again, that awful dream comes to me. I never learn from the experience, I never remember, but at the beginning the hope is ever there to make the end more appalling; and I know that the dream does not come out of the common darkness where the dreams abide, but that it is sent from God as a punishment! Never, never shall I be able to pass the gate, for the soil on the angel garments must ever come from these bloody hands!”

I listened as in a spell as Jacob Settle spoke. There was something so far away in the tone of his voice — something so dreamy and mystic in the eyes that looked as if through me at some spirit beyond — something so lofty in his very diction and in such marked contrast to his workworn clothes and his poor surroundings that I wondered if the whole thing were not a dream.

We were both silent for a long time. I kept looking at the man before me in growing wonderment. Now that his confession had been made, his soul, which had been crushed to the very earth, seemed to leap back again to uprightness with some resilient force. I suppose I ought to have been horrified with his story, but, strange to say, I was not. It certainly is not pleasant to be made the recipient of the confidence of a murderer, but this poor fellow seemed to have had, not only so much provocation, but so much self-denying purpose in his deed of blood that I did not feel called upon to pass judgment upon him. My purpose was to comfort, so I spoke out with what calmness I could, for my heart was beating fast and heavily–

“You need not despair, Jacob Settle. God is very good, and his mercy is great. Live on and work on in the hope that someday you may feel that you have atoned for the past.” Here I paused, for I could see that sleep, natural sleep this time, was creeping upon him. “Go to sleep,” I said; “I shall watch with you here, and we shall have no more evil dreams tonight.”

He made an effort to pull himself together, and answered@

“I don’t know how to thank you for your goodness to me this night, but I think you had best leave me now. I’ll try and sleep this out; I feel a weight off my mind since I have told you all. If there’s anything of the man left in me, I must try and fight out life alone.”

“I’ll go tonight, as you wish it,” I said; “but take my advice, and do not live in such a solitary way. Go among men and women; live among them. Share their joys and sorrows, and it will help you to forget. This solitude will make you melancholy mad.”

“I will!” he answered, half unconsciously, for sleep was overmastering him.

I turned to go, and he looked after me. When I had touched the latch I dropped it, and, coming back to the bed, held out my hand. He grasped it with both his as he rose to a sitting posture, and I said my good-night, trying to cheer him–

“Heart, man, heart! There is work in the world for you to do, Jacob Settle. You can wear those white robes yet and pass through that gate of steel!”

Then I left him.

A week after I found his cottage deserted, and on asking at the works was told that he had “gone north,” no one exactly knew whither.

Two years afterwards, I was staying for a few days with my friend Dr. Munro in Glasgow. He was a busy man, and could not spare much time for going about with me, so I spent my days in excursions to the Trossachs and Loch Katrine and down the Clyde. On the second last evening of my stay I came back somewhat later than I had arranged, but found that my host was late too. The maid told me that he had been sent for to the hospital — a case of accident at the gas-works, and the dinner was postponed an hour; so telling her I would stroll down to find her master and walk back with him, I went out. At the hospital I found him washing his hands preparatory to starting for home. Casually, I asked him what his case was.

“Oh, the usual thing! A rotten rope and men’s lives of no account. Two men were working in a gasometer, when the rope that held their scaffolding broke. It must have occurred just before the dinner hour, for no one noticed their absence till the men had returned. There was about seven feet of water in the gasometer, so they had a hard fight for it, poor fellows. However, one of them was alive, just alive, but we have had a hard job to pull him through. It seems that he owes his life to his mate, for I have never heard of greater heroism. They swam together while their strength lasted, but at the end they were so done up that even the lights above, and the men slung with ropes, coming down to help them, could not keep them up. But one of them stood on the bottom and held up his comrade over his head, and those few breaths made all the difference between life and death. They were a shocking sight when they were taken out, for that water is like a purple dye with the gas and the tar. The man upstairs looked as if he had been washed in blood. Ugh!”

“And the other?”

“Oh, he’s worse still. But he must have been a very noble fellow. That struggle under the water must have been fearful; one can see that by the way the blood has been drawn from the extremities. It makes the idea of the Stigmata possible to look at him. Resolution like this could, you would think, do anything in the world. Ay! it might almost unbar the gates of Heaven. Look here, old man, it is not a very pleasant sight, especially just before dinner, but you are a writer, and this is an odd case. Here is something you would not like to miss, for in all human probability you will never see anything like it again.” While he was speaking he had brought me into the mortuary of the hospital.

On the bier lay a body covered with a white sheet, which was wrapped close round it.

“Looks like a chrysalis, don’t it? I say, Jack, if there be anything in the old myth that a soul is typified by a butterfly, well, then the one that this chrysalis sent forth was a very noble specimen and took all the sunlight on its wings. See here!” He uncovered the face. Horrible, indeed, it looked, as though stained with blood. But I knew him at once, Jacob Settle! My friend pulled the winding sheet further down.

The hands were crossed on the purple breast as they had been reverently placed by some tenderhearted person. As I saw them my heart throbbed with a great exultation, for the memory of his harrowing dream rushed across my mind. There was no stain now on those poor, brave hands, for they were blanched white as snow.

And somehow as I looked I felt that the evil dream was all over. That noble soul had won a way through the gate at last. The white robe had now no stain from the hands that had put it on.

“The Sketch”, 11 July 1894

THE MYSTERIOUS CARD

Cleveland Moffett

1896

Richard Burwell, of New York, will never cease to regret that the French language was not made a part of his education.

This is why:

On the second evening after Burwell arrived in Paris, feeling lonely without his wife and daughter, who were still visiting a friend in London, his mind naturally turned to the theatre. So, after consulting the daily amusement calendar, he decided to visit the Folies Bergëre, which he had heard of as one of the notable sights. During an intermission he went into the beautiful garden, where gay crowds were strolling among the flowers, and lights, and fountains. He had just seated himself at a little three-legged table, with a view to enjoying the novel scene, when his attention was attracted by a lovely woman, gowned strikingly, though in perfect taste, who passed near him, leaning on the arm of a gentleman. The only thing that he noticed about this gentleman was that he wore eyeglasses.

Now Burwell had never posed as a captivator of the fair sex, and could scarcely credit his eyes when the lady left the side of her escort and, turning back as if she had forgotten something, passed close by him, and deftly placed a card on his table. The card bore some French words written in purple ink, but, not knowing that language, he was unable to make out their meaning. The lady paid no further heed to him, but, rejoining the gentleman with the eyeglasses, swept out of the place with the grace and dignity of a princess. Burwell remained staring at the card.

Needless to say, he thought no more of the performance or of the other attractions about him. Everything seemed flat and tawdry compared with the radiant vision that had appeared and disappeared so mysteriously. His one desire now was to discover the meaning of the words written on the card.

Calling a fiacre, he drove to the Hôtel Continental, where he was staying. Proceeding directly to the office and taking the manager aside, Burwell asked if he would be kind enough to translate a few words of French into English. There were no more than twenty words in all.

“Why, certainly,” said the manager, with French politeness, and cast his eyes over the card. As he read, his face grew rigid with astonishment, and, looking at his questioner sharply, he exclaimed: “Where did you get this, monsieur?”

Burwell started to explain, but was interrupted by: “That will do, that will do. You must leave the hotel.”

“What do you mean?” asked the man from New York, in amazement.

“You must leave the hotel now — tonight — without fail,” commanded the manager excitedly.

Now it was Burwell’s turn to grow angry, and he declared heatedly that if he wasn’t wanted in this hotel there were plenty of others in Paris where he would be welcome. And, with an assumption of dignity, but piqued at heart, he settled his bill, sent for his belongings, and drove up the Rue de la Paix to the Hôtel Bellevue, where he spent the night.

The next morning he met the proprietor, who seemed to be a good fellow, and, being inclined now to view the incident of the previous evening from its ridiculous side, Burwell explained what had befallen him, and was pleased to find a sympathetic listener.

“Why, the man was a fool,” declared the proprietor. “Let me see the card; I will tell you what it means.” But as he read, his face and manner changed instantly.

“This is a serious matter,” he said sternly. “Now I understand why my confrëre refused to entertain you. I regret, monsieur, but I shall be obliged to do as he did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply that you cannot remain here.”

With that he turned on his heel, and the indignant guest could not prevail upon him to give any explanation.

“We’ll see about this,” said Burwell, thoroughly angered.

It was now nearly noon, and the New Yorker remembered an engagement to lunch with a friend from Boston, who with his family, was stopping at the Hôtel de l’Alma. With his luggage on the carriage, he ordered the cocher to drive directly there, determined to take counsel with his countryman before selecting new quarters. His friend was highly indignant when he heard the story — a fact that gave Burwell no little comfort, knowing, as he did, that the man was accustomed to foreign ways from long residence abroad.

“It is some silly mistake, my dear fellow; I wouldn’t pay any attention to it. Just have your luggage taken down and stay here. It is a nice, homelike place, and it will be very jolly, all being together. But, first, let me prepare a little ‘nerve settler’ for you.”

After the tow had lingered a moment over their Manhattan cocktails, Burwell’s friend excused himself to call the ladies. He had proceeded only tow or three steps when he turned, and said: “Let’s see that mysterious card that has raised all this row.”

He had scarcely withdrawn it from Burwell’s hand when he started back, and exclaimed:

“Great God, man! Do you mean to say — this is simply@”

Then, with a sudden movement of his hand to his head, he left the room.

He was gone perhaps five minutes, and when he returned his face was white.

“I am awfully sorry,” he said nervously; “but the ladies tell me the — that is, my wife — she has a frightful headache. You will have to excuse us from the lunch.”

Instantly realizing that this was only a flimsy pretense, and deeply hurt by his friend’s behaviour, the mystified man arose at once and left without another word. He was now determined to solve this mystery at any cost. What could be the meaning of the words on that infernal piece of pasteboard?

Profiting by his humiliating experiences, he took good care not to show the card to anyone at the hotel where he now established himself — a comfortable little place near the Grand Opera House.

All through the afternoon he thought of nothing but the card, and turned over in his mind various ways of learning its meaning without getting himself into further trouble. That evening he went again to the Folies Bergëre in hope of finding the mysterious woman, for he was now more than ever anxious to discover who she was. It even occurred to him that she might be one of those beautiful Nihilist conspirators, or, perhaps, a Russian spy, such as he had read of in novels. But he failed to find her, either then or on the three subsequent evenings which he passed in the same place. Meanwhile the card was burning in his pocket like a hot coal. He dreaded the thought of meeting anyone that he knew, while this horrible cloud hung over him. He bought a French-English dictionary and tried to pick out the meaning word by word, but failed. It was all Greek to him. For the first time in his life, Burwell regretted that he had not studied French at college.

After various vain attempts to either solve or forget the torturing riddle, he saw no other course than to lay the problem before a detective agency. He accordingly put his case in the hands of an agent de la suretè who was recommended as a competent and trustworthy man. They had a talk together in a private room, and, of course, Burwell showed the card. To his relief, his adviser at least showed no sign of taking offence. Only he did not and would not explain what the words meant.

“It is better,” he said, “that monsieur should not know the nature of this document for the present. I will do myself the honour to call upon monsieur tomorrow at his hotel, and then monsieur shall know everything.”

“Then it is really serous?” asked the unfortunate man.

“Very serious,” was the answer.

The next twenty-four hours Burwell passed in a fever of anxiety. As his mind conjured up one fearful possibility after another he deeply regretted that he had not torn up the miserable card at the start. He even seized it — prepared to strip it into fragments, and so end the whole affair. And then his Yankee stubbornness again asserted itself, and he determined to see the thing out, come what might.

“After all,” he reasoned, “it is no crime for a man to pick up a card that a lady drops on his table.”

Crime or no crime, however, it looked very much as if he had committed some grave offence when, the next day, his detective drove up in a carriage, accompanied by a uniformed official, and requested the astounded American to accompany them to the police headquarters.

“What for?” he asked.

“It is only a formality,” said the detective; and when Burwell still protested the man in uniform remarked; “You’d better come quietly, monsieur; you will have to come, anyway.”

An hour later, after severe cross-examination by another official, who demanded many facts about the New Yorker’s age, place of birth, residence, occupation, etc., the bewildered man found himself in the Conciergerie prison. Why he was there or what was about to befall him Burwell had no means of knowing; but before the day was over he succeeded in having a message sent to the American Legation, where he demanded immediate protection as a citizen of the United States. It was not until evening, however, that the Secretary of Legation, a consequential person, called at the prison. There followed a stormy interview, in which the prisoner used some strong language, the French officers gesticulated violently and talked very fast, and the Secretary calmly listened to both sides, said little, and smoked a good cigar.

“I will lay your case before the American minister,” he said as he rose to go, “and let you know the result tomorrow.”

“But this is an outrage. Do you mean to say@”

Before he could finish, however, the Secretary, with a strangely suspicious glance, turned and left the room.

That night Burwell slept in a cell.

The next morning he received another visit from the non-committal Secretary, who informed him that matters had been arranged, and that he would be set at liberty forthwith.

“I must tell you, though,” he said, “that I have had great difficulty in accomplishing this, and your liberty is granted only on condition that you leave the country within twenty-four hours, and never under any conditions return.”

Burwell stormed, raged, and pleaded; but it availed nothing. The Secretary was inexorable, and yet he positively refused to throw any light upon the causes of this monstrous injustice.

“Here is your card,” he said, handing him a large envelope closed with the seal of Legation. “I advise you to burn it and never refer to the matter again.”

That night the ill-fated man took the train for London, his heart consumed by hatred for the whole French nation, together with a burning desire for vengeance. He wired his wife to meet him at the station, and for a long time debated with himself whether he should at once tell her the sickening truth. In the end he decided that it was better to keep silent. No sooner, however, had she seen him than her woman’s instinct told her that he was labouring under some mental strain. And he saw in a moment that to withhold from her his burning secret was impossible, especially when she began to talk of the trip they had planned through France. Of course no trivial reason would satisfy her for his refusal to make this trip, since thy had been looking forward to it for years; and yet it was impossible now for him to set foot on French soil.

So he finally told her the whole story, she laughing and weeping in turn. To her, as to him, it seemed incredible that such overwhelming disasters could have grown out of so small a cause, and, being a fluent French scholar, she demanded a sight of the fatal piece of pasteboard. In vain her husband tried to divert her by proposing a trip through Italy. She would consent to nothing until she had seen the mysterious card which Burwell was now convinced he ought long ago to have destroyed. After refusing for awhile to let her see it, he finally yielded. But, although he had learned to dread the consequences of showing that cursed card, he was little prepared for what followed. She read it, turned pale, gasped for breath, and nearly fell to the floor.

“I told you not to read it,” he said; and then, growing tender at the sight of her distress, he took her hand in his and begged her to be calm. “At least tell me what the thing means,” he said. “We can bear it together; you surely can trust me.”

But she, as if stung by rage, pushed him from her and declared, in a tone such as he had never heard from her before, that never, never again would she live with him. “You are a monster!” she exclaimed. And those were the last words he heard from her lips.

Failing utterly in all efforts at reconciliation, the half-crazed man took the first steamer for New York, having suffered in scarcely a fortnight more than in all his previous life. His whole pleasure trip had been ruined, he had failed to consummate important business arrangements, and now he saw his home broken up and his happiness ruined. During the voyage he scarcely left his stateroom, but lay there prostrated with agony. In this black despondency the one thing that sustained him was the thought of meeting his partner, Jack Evelyth, the friend of his boyhood, the sharer of his success, the bravest, most loyal fellow in the world. In the face of even the most damning circumstances, he felt that Evelyth’s rugged common sense would evolve some way of escape from this hideous nightmare. Upon landing at New York he hardly waited for the gangplank to be lowered before he rushed on shore and grasped the hand of his partner, who was waiting on the wharf.

“Jack,” was his first word, “I am in dreadful trouble, and you are the only man in the world who can help me.”

An hour later Burwell sat at his friend’s dinner table, talking over the situation. Evelyth was all kindness, and several times as he listened to Burwell’s story his eyes filled with tears.

“It does not seem possible, Richard,” he said, “that such things can be; but I will stand by you; we will fight it out together. But we cannot strike in the dark. Let me see this card.”

“There is the damned thing,” Burwell said, throwing it on the table.

Evelyth opened the envelop, took out the card, and fixed his eyes on the sprawling purple characters.

“Can you read it?” Burwell asked excitedly.

“Perfectly,” his partner said. The next moment he turned pale, and his voice broke. Then he clasped the tortured man’s hand in his with a strong grip. “Richard,” he said slowly, “if my only child had been brought here dead it would not have caused me more sorrow than this does. You have brought me the worst news one man could bring another.”

His agitation and genuine suffering affected Burwell like a death sentence.

“Speak, man,” he cried; “do not spare me. I can bear anything rather than this awful uncertainty. Tell me what the card means.”

Evelyth took a swallow of brandy and sat with head bent on his clasped hands.

“No, I can’t do it; there are some things a man must not do.”

Then he was silent again, his brows knitted. Finally he said solemnly:

“No, I can’t see any other way out of it. We have been true to each other all our lives; we have worked together and looked forward to never separating. I would rather fail and die than see this happen. But we have got to separate, old friend; we have got to separate.”

They sat there talking until late into the night. But nothing that Burwell could do or say availed against his friend’s decision. There was nothing for it but that Evelyth should buy his partner’s share of the business or that Burwell buy out the other. The man was more than fair in the financial proposition he made; he was generous, as he always had been, but his determination was inflexible; the two must separate. And they did.

With the old partner’s desertion, it seemed to Burwell that the world was leagued against him. It was only three weeks from the day on which he had received the mysterious card; yet in that time he had lost all that he valued in the world — wife, friends, and business. What next to do with the fatal card was the sickening problem that now possessed him.

He dared not show it; yet he dared not destroy it. He loathed it; yet he could not let it go from his possession. Upon returning to his house he locked the accursed thing away in his safe as if it had been a package of dynamite or a bottle of deadly poison. Yet not a day passed that he did not open the drawer where the thing was kept and scan with loathing the mysterious purple scrawl.

In desperation he finally made up his mind to take up the study of the language in which the hateful thing was written. And still he dreaded the approach of the day when he should decipher its awful meaning.

One afternoon, less than a week after his arrival in New York, as he was crossing Twenty-third Street on the way to his French teacher, he saw a carriage rolling up Broadway. In the carriage was a face that caught his attention like a flash. As he looked again he recognized the woman who had been the cause of his undoing. Instantly he sprang into another cab and ordered the driver to follow after. He found the house where she was living. He called there several times; but always received the same reply, that she was too much engaged to see anyone. Next he was told that she was ill, and on the following day the servant said she was much worse. Three physicians had been summoned in consultation. He sought out one of these and told him it was a matter of life or death that he see this woman. The doctor was a kindly man and promised to assist him. Through his influence, it came about that on that very night Burwell stood by the bedside of this mysterious woman. She was beautiful still, though her face was worn with illness.

“Do you recognize me?” he asked tremblingly, as he leaned over the bed, clutching in one hand an envelope containing the mysterious card. “Do you remember seeing me at the Folies Bergëre a month ago?”

“Yes,” she murmured, after a moment’s study of his face; and he noted with relief that she spoke English.

“Then, for God’s sake, tell me, what does it all mean?” he gasped, quivering with excitement.

“I gave you the card because I wanted you to — to@”

Here a terrible spasm of coughing shook her whole body, and she fell back exhausted.

An agonizing despair tugged at Burwell’s heart. Frantically snatching the card from its envelope, he held it close to the woman’s face.

“Tell me! Tell me!”

With a supreme effort, the pale figure slowly raised itself on the pillow, its fingers clutching at the counterpane.

Then the sunken eyes fluttered — forced themselves open — and stared in stony amazement upon the fatal card, while the trembling lips moved noiselessly, as if in an attempt to speak. As Burwell, choking with eagerness, bent his head slowly to hers, a suggestion of a smile flickered across the woman’s face. Again the moth quivered, the man’s head bent nearer and nearer to hers, his eyes riveted upon the lips. Then, as if to aid her in deciphering the mystery, he turned his eyes to the card.

With a cry of horror he sprang to his feet, his eyeballs starting from their sockets. Almost at the same moment the woman fell heavily upon the pillow.

Every vestige of the writing had faded! The card was blank!

The woman lay there dead.

“The Black Cat”, February 1896

THE MYSTERIOUS CARD UNVEILED

Cleveland Moffett

1896

No physician was ever more scrupulous than I have been, during my thirty years of practice, in observing the code of professional secrecy; and it is only for grave reasons, partly in the interests of medical science, largely as a warning to intelligent people, that I place upon record the following statements.

One morning a gentleman called at my offices to consult me about some nervous trouble. From the moment I saw him, the man made a deep impression on me, not so much by the pallor and worn look of his face as by a certain intense sadness in his eyes, as if all hope had gone out of his life. I wrote a prescription for him, and advised him to try the benefits of an ocean voyage. He seemed to shiver at the idea, and said that he had been abroad too much, already.

As he handed me my fee, my eye fell upon the palm of his hand, and I saw there, plainly marked on the Mount of Saturn, a cross surrounded by two circles. I should explain that for the greater part of my life I have been a constant and enthusiastic student of palmistry. During my travels in the Orient, after taking my degree, I spent months studying this fascinating art at the best sources of information in the world. I have read everything published on palmistry in every known language, and my library on the subject is perhaps the most complete in existence. In my time I have examined at least fourteen thousand palms, and taken casts of many of the more interesting of them. But I had never seen such a palm as this; at least, never but once, and the horror of the case was so great that I shudder even now when I call it to mind.

“Pardon me,” I said, keeping the patient’s hand in mine, “would you let me look at your palm?”

I tried to speak indifferently, as if the matter were of small consequence, and for some moments I bent over the hand in silence. Then, taking a magnifying glass from my desk, I looked at it still more closely. I was not mistaken; here was indeed the sinister double circle on Saturn’s mount, with the cross inside — a marking so rare as to portend some stupendous destiny of good or evil, more probably the latter.

I saw that the man was uneasy under my scrutiny, and, presently, with some hesitation, as if mustering courage, he asked: “Is there anything remarkable about my hand?”

“Yes,” I said, “there is. Tell me, did not something very unusual, something very horrible, happen to you about ten or eleven years ago?”

I saw by the way the man started that I had struck near the mark, and, studying the stream of fine lines that crossed his lifeline from the Mount of Venus, I added: “Were you not in some foreign country at that time?”

The man’s face blanched, but he only looked at me steadily out of those mournful eyes. Now I took his other hand, and compared the two, line by line, mount by mount, noting the short square fingers, the heavy thumb, with amazing willpower in its upper joint, and gazing again and again at that ominous sign on Saturn.

“Your life has been strangely unhappy, your years have been clouded by some evil influence.”

“My God,” he said weakly, sinking into a chair, “how can you know these things?”

“It is easy to know what one sees,” I said, and tried to draw him out about his past, but the words seemed to stick in his throat.

“I will come back and talk to you again,” he said, and he went away without giving me his name or any revelation of his life.

Several times he called during subsequent weeks, and gradually seemed to take on a measure of confidence in my presence. He would talk freely of his physical condition, which seemed to cause him much anxiety. He even insisted upon my making the most careful examination of all his organs, especially of his eyes, which, he said, had troubled him at various times. Upon making the usual tests, I found that he was suffering from a most uncommon form of color blindness, that seemed to vary in its manifestations, and to be connected with certain hallucinations or abnormal mental states which recurred periodically, and about which I had great difficulty in persuading him to speak. At each visit I took occasion to study his hand anew, and each reading of the palm gave me stronger conviction that here was a life mystery that would abundantly repay any pains taken in unravelling it.

While I was in this state of mind, consumed with a desire to know more of my unhappy acquaintance and yet not daring to press him with questions, there came a tragic happening that revealed to me with startling suddenness the secret I was bent on knowing. One night, very late — in fact it was about four o’clock in the morning — I received an urgent summons to the bedside of a man who had been shot. As I bent over him I saw that it was my friend, and for the first time I realized that he was a man of wealth and position, for he lived in a beautifully furnished house filled with art treasures and looked after by a retinue of servants. From one of these I learned that he was Richard Burwell, one of New York’s most respected citizens — in fact, one of her best-known philanthropists, a man who for years had devoted his life and fortune to good works among the poor.

But what most excited my surprise was the presence in the house of two officers, who informed me that Mr. Burwell was under arrest, charged with murder. The officers assured me that it was only out of deference to his well-known standing in the community that the prisoner had been allowed the privilege of receiving medical treatment in his own home; their orders were peremptory to keep him under close surveillance.

Giving no time to further questionings, I at once proceeded to examine the injured man, and found that he was suffering from a bullet wound in the back at about the height of the fifth rib. On probing for the bullet, I found that it had lodged near the heart, and decided that it would be exceedingly dangerous to try to remove it immediately. So I contented myself with administering a sleeping potion.

As soon as I was free to leave Burwell’s bedside, I returned to the officers and obtained from them details of what had happened. A woman’s body had been found a few hours before, shockingly mutilated, on Water Street, one of the dark ways in the swarming region along the river front. It had been found at about two o’clock in the morning by some printers from the office of the Courier des Etats Unis, who, in coming from their work, had heard cries of distress and hurried to the rescue. As they drew near they saw a man spring away from something huddled on the sidewalk, and plunge into the shadows of the night, running from them at full speed.

Suspecting at once that here was the mysterious assassin so long vainly sought for many similar crimes, they dashed after the fleeing man, who darted right and left through the maze of dark streets, giving out little cries like a squirrel as he ran. Seeing that they were losing ground, one of the printers fired at the fleeing shadow, his shot being followed by a scream of pain, and hurrying up they found a man writhing on the ground. The man was Richard Burwell.

The news that my sad-faced friend had been implicated in such a revolting occurrence shocked me inexpressibly, and I was greatly relieved the next day to learn from the papers that a most unfortunate mistake had been made. The evidence given before the coroner’s jury was such as to abundantly exonerate Burwell from all shadow of guilt. The man’s own testimony, taken at his bedside, was in itself almost conclusive in his favor. When asked to explain his presence so late at night in such a part of the city, Burwell stated that he had spent the evening at the Florence Mission, where he had made an address to some unfortunates gathered there, and that later he had gone with a young missionary worker to visit a woman living on Frankfort Street, who was dying of consumption. This statement was borne out by the missionary worker himself, who testified that Burwell had been most tender in his ministrations to the poor woman and had not left her until death had relieved her sufferings.

Another point which made it plain that the printers had mistaken their man in the darkness, was the statement made by all of them that, as they came running up, they had overheard some words spoken by the murderer, and that these words were in their own language, French. Now it was shown conclusively that Burwell did not know the French language, that indeed he had not even an elementary knowledge of it.

Another point in his favor was a discovery made at the spot where the body was found. Some profane and ribald words, also in French, had been scrawled in chalk on the door and doorsill, being in the nature of a coarse defiance to the police to find the assassin, and experts in handwriting who were called testified unanimously that Burwell, who wrote a refined, scholarly hand, could never have formed those misshapen words.

Furthermore, at the time of his arrest no evidence was found on the clothes or person of Burwell, nothing in the nature of bruises or bloodstains that would tend to implicate him in the crime. The outcome of the matter was that he was honorably discharged by the coroner’s jury, who were unanimous in declaring him innocent, and who brought in a verdict that the unfortunate woman had come to her death at the hand of some person or persons unknown.

On visiting my patient late on the afternoon of the second day I saw that his case was very grave, and I at once instructed the nurses and attendants to prepare for an operation. The man’s life depended upon my being able to extract the bullet, and the chance of doing this was very small. Mr. Burwell realized that his condition was critical, and, beckoning me to him, told me that he wished to make a statement he felt might be his last. He spoke with agitation which was increased by an unforeseen happening. For just then a servant entered the room and whispered to me that there was a gentleman downstairs who insisted upon seeing me, and who urged business of great importance. This message the sick man overheard, and lifting himself with an effort, he said excitedly: “Tell me, is he a tall man with glasses?”

The servant hesitated.

“I knew it; you cannot deceive me; that man will haunt me to my grave. Send him away, doctor; I beg of you not to see him.”

Humoring my patient, I sent word to the stranger that I could not see him, but, in an undertone, instructed the servant to say that the man might call at my office the next morning. Then, turning to Burwell, I begged him to compose himself and save his strength for the ordeal awaiting him.

“No, no,” he said, “I need my strength now to tell you what you must know to find the truth. You are the only man who has understood that there has been some terrible influence at work in my life. You are the only man competent to study out what that influence is, and I have made provision in my will that you shall do so after I am gone. I know that you will heed my wishes?”

The intense sadness of his eyes made my heart sink; I could only grip his hand and remain silent.

“Thank you; I was sure I might count on your devotion. Now, tell me, doctor, you have examined me carefully, have you not?”

I nodded.

“In every way known to medical science?”

I nodded again.

“And have you found anything wrong with me — I mean, besides this bullet, anything abnormal?”

“As I have told you, your eyesight is defective; I should like to examine your eyes more thoroughly when you are better.”

“I shall never be better; besides it isn’t my eyes; I mean myself, my soul — you haven’t found anything wrong there?”

“Certainly not; the whole city knows the beauty of your character and your life.”

“Tut, tut; the city knows nothing. For ten years I have lived so much with the poor that people have almost forgotten my previous active life when I was busy with money-making and happy in my home. But there is a man out West, whose head is white and whose heart is heavy, who has not forgotten, and there is a woman in London, a silent, lonely woman, who has not forgotten. The man was my partner, poor Jack Evelyth; the woman was my wife. How can a man be so cursed, doctor, that his love and friendship bring only misery to those who share it? How can it be that one who has in his heart only good thoughts can be constantly under the shadow of evil? This charge of murder is only one of several cases in my life where, through no fault of mine, the shadow of guilt has been cast upon me.

“Years ago, when my wife and I were perfectly happy, a child was born to us, and a few months later, when it was only a tender, helpless little thing that its mother loved with all her heart, it was strangled in its cradle, and we never knew who strangled it, for the deed was done one night when there was absolutely no one in the house but my wife and myself. There was no doubt about the crime, for there on the tiny neck were the finger marks where some cruel hand had closed until life went.

“Then a few years later, when my partner and I were on the eve of fortune, our advance was set back by the robbery of our safe. Someone opened it in the night, someone who knew the combination, for it was the work of no burglar, and yet there were only two persons in the world who knew that combination, my partner and myself. I tried to be brave when these things happened, but as my life went on it seemed more and more as if some curse were on me.

“Eleven years ago I went abroad with my wife and daughter. Business took me to Paris, and I left the ladies in London, expecting to have them join me in a few days. But they never did join me, for the curse was on me still, and before I had been forty-eight hours in the French capital something happened that completed the wreck of my life. It doesn’t seem possible, does it, that a simple white card with some words scrawled on it in purple ink could effect a man’s undoing? And yet that was my fate. The card was given me by a beautiful woman with eyes like stars. She is dead long ago, and why she wished to harm me I never knew. You must find that out.

“You see I did not know the language of the country, and, wishing to have the words translated — surely that was natural enough — I showed the card to others. But no one would tell me what it meant. And, worse than that, wherever I showed it, and to whatever person, there evil came upon me quickly. I was driven from one hotel after another; an old acquaintance turned his back on me; I was arrested and thrown into prison; I was ordered to leave the country.”

The sick man paused for a moment in his weakness, but with an effort forced himself to continue:

“When I went back to London, sure of comfort in the love of my wife, she too, on seeing the card, drove me from her with cruel words. And when finally, in deepest despair, I returned to New York, dear old Jack, the friend of a lifetime, broke with me when I showed him what was written. What the words were I do not know, and suppose no one will ever know, for the ink has faded these many years. You will find the card in my safe with other papers. But I want you, when I am gone, to find out the mystery of my life; and — and — about my fortune, that must be held until you have decided. There is no one who needs my money as much as the poor in this city, and I have bequeathed it to them unless@”

In an agony of mind, Mr. Burwell struggled to go on, I soothing and encouraging him.

“Unless you find what I am afraid to think, but — but — yes, I must say it — that I have not been a good man, as the world thinks, but have — O doctor, if you find that I have unknowingly harmed any human being, I want that person, or these persons, to have my fortune. Promise that.”

Seeing the wild light in Burwell’s eyes, and the fever that was burning him, I gave the promise asked of me, and the sick man sank back calmer.

A little later, the nurse and attendants came for the operation. As they were about to administer the ether, Burwell pushed them from him, and insisted on having brought to his bedside an iron box from the safe.

“The card is here,” he said, laying his trembling hand upon the box, “you will remember your promise!”

Those were his last words, for he did not survive the operation.

Early the next morning I received this message: “The stranger of yesterday begs to see you;” and presently a gentleman of fine presence and strength of face, a tall, dark-complexioned man wearing glasses, was shown into the room.

“Mr. Burwell is dead, is he not?” were his first words.

“Who told you?”

“No one told me, but I know it, and I thank God for it.”

There was something in the stranger’s intense earnestness that convinced me of his right to speak thus, and I listened attentively.

“That you may have confidence in the statement I am about to make, I will first tell you who I am;” and he handed me a card that caused me to lift my eyes in wonder, for it bore a very great name, that of one of Europe’s most famous savants.

“You have done me much honor, sir,” I said with respectful inclination.

“On the contrary — you will oblige me by considering me in your debt, and by never revealing my connection with this wretched man. I am moved to speak partly from considerations of human justice, largely in the interest of medical science. It is right for me to tell you, doctor, that your patient was beyond question the Water Street assassin.”

“Impossible!” I cried.

“You will not say so when I have finished my story, which takes me back to Paris, to the time, eleven years ago, when this man was making his first visit to the French capital.”

“The mysterious card!” I exclaimed.

“Ah, he has told you of his experience, but not of what befell the night before, when he first met my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Yes, it was she who gave him the card, and, in trying to befriend him, made him suffer. She was in ill health at the time, so much so that we had left our native India for extended journeyings. Alas! we delayed too long, for my sister died in New York, only a few weeks later, and I honestly believe her taking off was hastened by anxiety inspired by this man.”

“Strange,” I murmured, “how the life of a simple New York merchant could become entangled with that of a great lady of the East.”

“Yet so it was. You must know that my sister’s condition was due mainly to an over fondness for certain occult investigations, from which I had vainly tried to dissuade her. She had once befriended some adepts, who, in return, had taught her things about the soul she had better have left unlearned. At various times while with her I had seen strange things happen, but I never realized what unearthly powers were in her until that night in Paris. We were returning from a drive in the Bois; it was about ten o’clock, and the city lay beautiful around us as Paris looks on a perfect summer’s night. Suddenly my sister gave a cry of pain and put her hand to her heart. Then, changing from French to the language of our country, she explained to me quickly that something frightful was taking place there, where she pointed her finger across the river, that we must go to the place at once — the driver must lash his horses — every second was precious.

“So affected was I by her intense conviction, and such confidence had I in my sister’s wisdom, that I did not oppose her, but told the man to drive as she directed. The carriage fairly flew across the bridge, down the Boulevard St. Germain, then to the left, threading its way through the narrow streets that lie along the Seine. This way and that, straight ahead here, a turn there, she directing our course, never hesitating, as if drawn by some unseen power, and always urging the driver on to greater speed. Finally, we came to a black-mouthed, evil-looking alley, so narrow and roughly paved that the carriage could scarcely advance.

“‘Come on!’ my sister cried, springing to the ground; ‘we will go on foot, we are nearly there. Thank God, we may yet be in time.’

“No one was in sight as we hurried along the dark alley, and scarcely a light was visible, but presently a smothered scream broke the silence, and, touching my arm, my sister exclaimed@

“‘There, draw your weapon, quick, and take the man at any cost!’

“So swiftly did everything happen after that that I hardly know my actions, but a few minutes later I held pinioned in my arms a man whose blows and writhings had been all in vain; for you must know that much exercise in the jungle had made me strong of limb. As soon as I had made the fellow fast I looked down and found moaning on the ground a poor woman, who explained with tears and broken words that the man had been in the very act of strangling her. Searching him I found a long-bladed knife of curious shape, and keen as a razor, which had been brought for what horrible purpose you may perhaps divine.

“Imagine my surprise, on dragging the man back to the carriage, to find, instead of the ruffianly assassin I expected, a gentleman as far as could be judged from face and manner. Fine eyes, white hands, careful speech, all the signs of refinement and the dress of a man of means.

“‘How can this be?’ I said to my sister in our own tongue as we drove away, I holding my prisoner on the opposite seat where he sat silent.

“‘It is a kulos-man,’ she said, shivering, ‘it is a fiend-soul. There are a few such in the whole world, perhaps two or three in all.’

“‘But he has a good face.’

“‘You have not seen his real face yet; I will show it to you, presently.’

“In the strangeness of these happenings and the still greater strangeness of my sister’s words, I had all but lost the power of wonder. So we sat without further word until the carriage stopped at the little château we had taken near the Parc Monteau.

“I could never properly describe what happened that night; my knowledge of these things is too limited. I simply obeyed my sister in all that she directed, and kept my eyes on this man as no hawk ever watched its prey. She began by questioning him, speaking in a kindly tone which I could ill understand. He seemed embarrassed, dazed, and professed to have no knowledge of what had occurred, or how he had come where we found him. To all my inquiries as to the woman or the crime he shook his head blankly, and thus aroused my wrath.

“‘Be not angry with him, brother; he is not lying, it is the other soul.’

“She asked him about his name and country, and he replied without hesitation that he was Richard Burwell, a merchant from New York, just arrived in Paris, travelling for pleasure in Europe with his wife and daughter. This seemed reasonable, for the man spoke English, and, strangely enough, seemed to have no knowledge of French, although we both remember hearing him speak French to the woman.

“‘There is no doubt,’ my sister said, ‘It is indeed a kulos-man; It knows that I am here, that I am Its master. Look, look!’ she cried sharply, at the same time putting her eyes so close to the man’s face that their fierce light seemed to burn into him. What power she exercised I do not know, nor whether some words she spoke, unintelligible to me, had to do with what followed, but instantly there came over this man, this pleasant-looking, respectable American citizen, such a change as is not made by death worms gnawing in a grave. Now there was a fiend grovelling at her feet, a foul, sin-stained fiend.

“‘Now you see the demon-soul,’ said my sister. ‘Watch It writhe and struggle; it has served me well, brother, sayest thou not so, the lore I gained from our wise men?’

“The horror of what followed chilled my blood; nor would I trust my memory were it not that there remained and still remains plain proof of all that I affirm. This hideous creature, dwarfed, crouching, devoid of all resemblance to the man we had but now beheld, chattering to us in curious old-time French, poured out such horrid blasphemy as would have blanched the cheek of Satan, and made recital of such evil deeds as never mortal ear gave heed to. And as she willed my sister checked It or allowed It to go on. What it all meant was more than I could tell. To me it seemed as if these tales of wickedness had no connection with our modern life, or with the world around us, and so I judged presently from what my sister said.

“‘Speak of the later time, since thou wast in this clay.’

“Then I perceived that the creature came to things of which I knew: It spoke of New York, of a wife, a child, a friend. It told of strangling the child, of robbing the friend; and was going on to tell God knows what other horrid deeds when my sister stopped It.

“‘Stand as thou didst in killing the little babe, stand, stand!’ and once more she spoke some words unknown to me. Instantly the demon sprang forward, and, bending Its clawlike hands, clutched them around some little throat that was not there — but I could see it in my mind. And the look on its face was a blackest glimpse of hell.

“‘And now stand as thou didst in robbing the friend, stand, stand;’ and again came the unknown words, and again the fiend obeyed.

“‘These we will take for future use,’ said my sister. And bidding me watch the creature carefully until she should return, she left the room, and, after none too short an absence, returned bearing a black box that was an apparatus for photography, and something more besides — some newer, stranger kind of photography that she had learned. Then, on a strangely fashioned card, a transparent white card, composed of many layers of finest Oriental paper, she took the pictures of the creature in those two creeping poses. And when it all was done, the card seemed as white as before, and empty of all meaning until one held it up and examined it intently. Then the pictures showed. And between the two there was a third picture, which somehow seemed to show, at the same time, two faces in one, two souls, my sister said, the kindly visaged man we first had seen, and then the fiend.

“Now my sister asked for pen and ink and I gave her my pocket pen which was filled with purple ink. Handing this to the kulos-man she bade him write under the first picture: ‘Thus I killed my babe.’ And under the second picture: ‘Thus I robbed my friend.’ And under the third, the one that was between the other two: ‘This is the soul of Richard Burwell.’ An odd thing about this writing was that it was in the same old French the creature had used in speech, and yet Burwell knew no French.

“My sister was about to finish with the creature when a new idea took her, and she said, looking at It as before: — ‘Of all thy crimes which one is the worst? Speak, I command thee!’

“Then the fiend told how once It had killed every soul in a house of holy women and buried the bodies in a cellar under a heavy door.

“Where was the house?’

“‘At No. 19 Rue Picpus, next to the old graveyard.’

“‘And when was this?’

“Here the fiend seemed to break into fierce rebellion, writhing on the floor with hideous contortions, and pouring forth words that meant nothing to me, but seemed to reach my sister’s understanding, for she interrupted from time to time, with quick, stern words that finally brought It to subjection.

“‘Enough,’ she said, ‘I know all,’ and then she spoke some words again, her eyes fixed as before, and the reverse change came. Before us stood once more the honest-looking, fine-appearing gentleman, Richard Burwell, of New York.

“‘Excuse me, madame,’ he said, awkwardly, but with deference; ‘I must have dozed a little. I am not myself tonight.’

“‘No,’ said my sister, ‘you have not been yourself tonight.’

“A little later I accompanied the man to the Continental Hotel, where he was stopping, and, returning to my sister, I talked with her until late into the night. I was alarmed to see that she was wrought to a nervous tension that augured ill for her health. I urged her to sleep, but she would not.

“‘No,’ she said, ‘think of the awful responsibility that rests upon me.’ And then she went on with her strange theories and explanations, of which I understood only that here was a power for evil more terrible than a pestilence, menacing all humanity.

“‘Once in many cycles it happens,’ she said, ‘that a kulos-soul pushes itself within the body of a newborn child, when the pure soul waiting to enter is delayed. Then the two live together through that life, and this hideous principle of evil has a chance upon the earth. It is my will, as I feel it my duty, to see this poor man again. The chances are that he will never know us, for the shock of this night to his normal soul is so great as to wipe out memory.’

“The next evening, about the same hour, my sister insisted that I should go with her to the Folies Bergère, a concert garden, none too well frequented, and when I remonstrated, she said: ‘I must go — It is there,’ and the words sent a shiver through me.

“We drove to this place, and passing into the garden, presently discovered Richard Burwell seated at a little table, enjoying the scene of pleasure, which was plainly new to him. My sister hesitated a moment what to do, and then, leaving my arm, she advanced to the table and dropped before Burwell’s eyes the card she had prepared. A moment later, with a look of pity on her beautiful face, she rejoined me and we went away. It was plain he did not know us.”

To so much of the savant’s strange recital I had listened with absorbed interest, though without a word, but now I burst in with questions.

“What was your sister’s idea in giving Burwell the card?” I asked.

“It was in the hope that she might make the man understand his terrible condition, that is, teach the pure soul to know its loathsome companion.”

“And did her effort succeed?”

“Alas! it did not; my sister’s purpose was defeated by the man’s inability to see the pictures that were plain to every other eye. It is impossible for the kulos-man to know his own degradation.”

“And yet this man has for years been leading a most exemplary life?”

My visitor shook his head. “I grant you there has been improvement, due largely to experiments I have conducted upon him according to my sister’s wishes. But the fiend soul was never driven out. It grieves me to tell you, doctor, that not only was this man the Water Street assassin, but he was the mysterious murderer, the long-sought-for mutilator of women, whose red crimes have baffled the police of Europe and America for the past ten years.”

“You know this,” said I, starting up, “and yet did not denounce him?”

“It would have been impossible to prove such a charge, and besides, I had made oath to my sister that I would use the man only for these soul-experiments. What are his crimes compared with the great secret of knowledge I am now able to give the world?”

“A secret of knowledge?”

“Yes,” said the savant, with intense earnestness, “I may tell you now, doctor, what the whole world will know, ere long, that it is possible to compel every living person to reveal the innermost secrets of his or her life, so long as memory remains, for memory is only the power of producing in the brain material pictures that may be projected externally by the thought rays and made to impress themselves upon the photographic plate, precisely as ordinary pictures do.”

“You mean,” I exclaimed, “that you can photograph the two principles of good and evil that exist in us?”

“Exactly that. The great truth of a dual soul existence, that was dimly apprehended by one of your Western novelists, has been demonstrated by me in the laboratory with my camera. It is my purpose, at the proper time, to entrust this precious knowledge to a chosen few who will perpetuate it and use it worthily.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” I cried, “and now tell me, if you will, about the house on the Rue Picpus. Did you ever visit the place?”

“We did, and found that no buildings had stood there for fifty years, so we did not pursue the search.”  [01]

“And the writing on the card, have you any memory of it, for Burwell told me that the words have faded?”

“I have something better than that; I have a photograph of both card and writing, which my sister was careful to take. I had a notion that the ink in my pocket pen would fade, for it was a poor affair. This photograph I will bring you tomorrow.”

“Bring it to Burwell’s house,” I said.

•   •   •

The next morning the stranger called as agreed upon.

“Here is the photograph of the card,” he said.

“And here is the original card,” I answered, breaking the seal of the envelope I had taken from Burwell’s iron box. “I have waited for your arrival to look at it. Yes, the writing has indeed vanished; the card seems quite blank.”

“Not when you hold it this way,” said the stranger, and as he tipped the card I saw such a horrid revelation as I can never forget. In an instant I realized how the shock of seeing that card had been too great for the soul of wife or friend to bear. In these pictures was the secret of a cursed life. The resemblance to Burwell was unmistakable, the proof against him was overwhelming. In looking upon that piece of pasteboard the wife had seen a crime which the mother could never forgive, the partner had seen a crime which the friend could never forgive. Think of a loved face suddenly melting before your eyes into a grinning skull, then into a mass of putrefaction, then into the ugliest fiend of hell, leering at you, distorted with all the marks of vice and shame. That is what I saw, that is what they had seen!

“Let us lay these two cards in the coffin,” said my companion impressively, “we have done what we could.”

Eager to be rid of the hateful piece of pasteboard (for who could say that the curse was not still clinging about it?), I took the strange man’s arm, and together we advanced into the adjoining room where the body lay. I had seen Burwell as he breathed his last, and knew that there had been a peaceful look on his face as he died. But now, as we laid the two white cards on the still, breast, the savant suddenly touched my arm, and pointing to the dead man’s face, now frightfully distorted, whispered: “See, even in death It followed him. Let us close the coffin quickly.”

[01]    Years later, some workmen in Paris, making excavations in the Rue Picpus, came upon a heavy door buried under a mass of debris, under an old cemetery. On lifting the door they found a vault-like chamber in which were a number of female skeletons, and graven on the walls were blasphemous words written in French, which experts declared dated from fully two hundred years before. They also declared this handwriting identical with that found on the door at the Water Street murder in New York. Thus we may deduce a theory of fiend reincarnation; for it would seem clear, almost to the point of demonstration, that this murder of the seventeenth century was the work of the same evil soul that killed the poor woman on Water Street towards the end of the nineteenth century.

“The Black Cat”, August 1896

E. Phillips Oppenheim

1902

If I commence my story, or rather my recital, with any particularities as to my personality and present condition, the chances are that I shall alienate in no small degree, perhaps altogether, the attention and interest which my narrative might otherwise gain. And yet, after very careful deliberation, I have decided to confess my secret in these few opening lines. I am a madman. Even while I write I am watched by a keen-eyed attendant (mine is a private asylum, and we don’t call them warders). To all intents and purposes I am a prisoner. Of the world outside this — shall we say retreat? — I know nothing, nor shall I ever enter it again. Empires may rise and fall, all Europe might blaze from Madrid to Moscow with fierce war and bloodshed, kingdoms might become republics, and republics might seek again the yoke of monarchy — to me it would all be one. Outside these walls I shall never step. I have wit enough to conceal my partial recovery, for I know very well that this refuge is all that stands between me and the murderer’s dock.

The winter of ’18 — I was compelled through ill-health to spend abroad. Perhaps it would be as well to remark here that my malady was one which affected in no degree my nervous system or my mental powers. It was, in fact, nothing but a slight weakness of the lungs, which had caused my medical attendant earnestly to recommend my spending the winter months in some warmer climate; and as I was my own master and had no ties to keep me in England, and as, moreover, the idea of escaping from the chilly humours and dreary fogs of our own country to bask under the warm southern sun and the blue sky of the Riviera was in itself by no means displeasing to me, I took his advice.

I was staying at a small, old-fashioned town little known to tourists, and some distance out of the beaten track of the shoals of health-seeking Europeans and sight-seeing Americans, who made this region their happy hunting-ground. The hotel was no more than an inn, but the lime-tree-bordered promenade outside was seldom pressed by the foot of a stranger. There was in the place itself, its architecture, or its surroundings, little that was picturesque or attractive. But, nevertheless, it pleased me, and I had prolonged my stay for a week or two, and was still without any settled idea of going. Strange to say, it was the very dullness of the place which attracted and kept me there. It suited the mood which I happened to be in.

One evening after my solitary dinner — table d’hôte there was none — I had strolled, as usual, with a cigar in my mouth, down the promenade. I had had but little exercise during the day, as a fit of laziness had been upon me, and the weather had been anything but tempting, and so it happened that when I reached the end of the narrow sanded walk I felt reluctant to turn back. The night was a pleasant one for walking, and seemed all the pleasanter after the hot winds and blazing sun which had kept me lounging about under cover all day. I hesitated only for a moment, leaning over the low swing-gate at the extremity of the promenade. Then, passing through it, I stepped out on to the broad high-road and walked steadily ahead.

In about a quarter of an hour I reached four crossroads. The road to the left, the road straight on, and the road behind me I knew well. The road to the right I had never taken, perhaps because it commenced with a remarkably stiff ascent and appeared to lead nowhere, for it was little more than a grass-grown cattle-track. But looking along it tonight a sensation of which I had certainly never before been conscious seized swiftly hold of me. I was filled with a sudden strong curiosity to explore the ill-kept, neglected byroad.

It was a curiosity which increased with every step I took, and became gradually coupled with a vague, incomprehensible premonition. What manner of prospect I expected to behold from the top of the hill which I was rapidly ascending I cannot tell, but I had a distinct and firm conviction that something out of the common was about to happen to me.

By degrees the road along which I was walking presented more and more the appearance of a mere sheep-track, until at last the hedges on either side terminated, the road itself degenerated into a footpath, and I found myself ascending a high, turf-covered hill. I was the more surprised because in my wanderings around the district I had never noticed anything of the nature of an eminence in this direction. However, I kept steadily on, till at last I reached the summit, and, pausing to take breath, looked around me in a startled curiosity which was not without a considerable amount of awe.

Stranger and stranger it all seemed to me. Close by my side, on the highest point of the hill, was a round tower built of rough grey stone, which I was quite certain that I had never seen before. Below me and all around, the country, clearly visible in the moonlight, was of a character totally unlike any which my many walks in the vicinity had made familiar to me. Instead of the long, vineyard-covered slopes and groves of olive trees, was a thoroughly English deer-park, studded with giant oaks and dark patches of fir trees, and stretching away beyond a purely pastoral country with deep yellow cornfields and rich meadows, in many of which were dotted about the dark shapes of reclining cattle. On my left hand yawned a cleft-like chasm, overhung at the brink with thick bracken and drooping bushes — evidently a disused slate quarry, for a broken shaft lay rotting on the ground, and all around were thick layers of broken-up slate.

I passed my hand across my eyes, half wondering whether I had not been walking in my sleep; and then, as I opened them again, I started back with a cry of horror, which rang out sharply into the clear night air, only to die away in a sort of tremor from my white, trembling lips. Face to face with me stood, or rather crouched, a man — a tall, dark man, with white, scared face and large, wildly bright eyes riveted on mine. It seemed as though he had turned round suddenly from peering down into the black depths of the chasm, and was horror-struck to see me.

Despite the cold night breeze, the perspiration streamed down from my hot, clammy forehead. I strove to speak, but I could not; like unwilling actors in a silent tableau, we stood face to face, speechless, motionless, fascinated. No sound broke the deep stillness of the summer night; no words could I force from my ashen lips after that first hoarse cry.

Suddenly there came faintly to my ears the sound of a low, moaning cry, and almost simultaneously I saw a tuft of the bracken which overhung the chasm shaken violently. A deeper chill ran through me; it seemed as though the blood in my veins was turned to ice, and I stood motionless, my feet frozen to the ground with fear. Slowly I distinguished something white moving amongst the tuft of ferns. At first it seemed shapeless, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness it gradually resolved itself into a pair of white hands clutching desperately at the roots of the ferns, as though the person to whom they belonged was striving frantically to draw himself up from beneath. Almost he seemed about to succeed, for, as I leaned over towards the spot with spellbound gaze, a white, desperate face, colourless with fear, save where smeared with blood from a wound in the temple, slowly appeared above the brink of the chasm, and I could tell from the convulsive swaying of the shoulders that the struggling man was making frantic attempts to obtain a foothold.

The horrible sight seemed to loosen my joints, which had become stiff with fear, and with a cry of encouragement I sprang forward to his aid. But the crowning horror of the whole scene was to come. The man whom I had first seen turned suddenly round, and, raising a gun which lay flat upon the ground beside him, brandished it high over his head, and brought it down with a sickening thud upon the struggling fingers. A wild shriek of despair burst from the lips of his victim as his hands relaxed their hold upon the bracken, and I reached the edge of the chasm only in time to see him stiff and rigid in mid-air, his arms stretched wildly up to the starlit sky, in the very act of falling backwards, to see him and to recognise in his ghastly countenance the face of the man who had been my close companion for years, my sworn college chum, and the only man whom I had ever cared to call a friend — Philip Hardingstone, Squire of Little Hampton.

Wild impulses, mad thoughts, rushed like lightning through my surging brain. I would have leaped after him into the black chasm. I would have struck down the murderer of my friend, and, with my fingers clutching his throat, have wrought out a speedy vengeance. I would have shrieked out my horror to the silent night. But I was powerless. Again some strange metamorphosis crept subtly and swiftly over me. Not one of these things could I do. My feet seemed suddenly sinking through the yielding ground; the scene around me closed in, growing dimmer and dimmer, until at last everything — my senses, my instincts, my very consciousness of existence — was merged in an apathetic chaos. What immediately followed is hard for me to say. There was no period of absolute blank unconsciousness, but my material surroundings seemed suddenly to change from chaotic indistinctness to a scene which I knew quite well. I found myself, without any sense of motion, or having moved, leaning against a gate, looking over a sloping vineyard only a few yards away from the crossroads. Thunderstruck and bewildered, I gazed wildly about me for a few moments. Then turning round, I hurried along the grass-grown track. In vain; I came to no hill, and the path beneath my feet grew into a broad, white high-road, winding far away into a level stretch of rolling plains. This way and that, backward and forward, I ran like a man demented. Far away in the east the sun was slowly bursting through a mass of orange-streaked clouds, scattering a purple and golden glory all over the azure sky. Morning came, noon, and afternoon; then my wearied limbs gave way, and I sank down on the roadside and prayed that the unconsciousness that was already stealing over me, numbing my frenzied brain and throbbing senses, might come soon. It came as I lay there, blotting out the hideous scene which all through the day had been dancing before my eyes, and the memory of the ghastly, diabolical face of Philip Hardingstone’s murderer. With a sigh of relief, I turned on my side and fainted.

Some peasants going home from their day’s toil in the vineyards stumbled upon me and, finding my address on an envelope in my pocket, carried me down to the hotel. Towards afternoon on the next day I recovered consciousness, and with it came flooding in upon my memory the fearful scene which I had witnessed. In spite of the doctor’s peremptory orders, I insisted upon sitting up in bed and writing out with trembling fingers a telegram to Philip Hardingstone, imploring him to let me know by return that he was well. Until the reply came I could do nothing, but lay tossing restlessly about, on the verge of a fever. Towards evening an orange-coloured envelope was brought to my bedside, and I tore it hastily open.

“From John Elwick, butler at Little Hampton Hall, to Reginald Morton, Hôtel de Paris. — Your telegram received. Please come to England at once. Mr. Hardingstone was killed this morning falling down the slate quarry on Old John Hill.”

For five weeks I lay ill of a brain fever, and even when its acute stage had passed, and I was able to move about a little, my doctor watched me anxiously, and seemed far from satisfied with my state. I myself knew that a change had come upon me. My memory seemed partially gone; I was subject to frequent fits of delirious excitement, and to corresponding periods of intense depression. When at last I flatly refused to stay where I was any longer, and left for England, Dr. F — — — insisted upon my engaging a servant of his own recommendation to travel with me. And I knew why: I felt that I was going mad.

Immediately on my arrival in London I telegraphed to John Elwick to come up from Little Hampton to my hotel. The next morning he came.

From him I heard the manner in which his master was supposed to have met his death. It seemed that he had left home with his gun and a couple of dogs, and had sent down to the keeper’s lodge for Wilson, the under-keeper, to meet him with some beaters and a favourite spaniel of his on Old John Hill. When they arrived there they found no signs of their master. They waited for an hour, and then sent down to the house. The reply came back that Mr. Hardingstone had left at the time appointed, and had not returned. They waited for another hour, and then one of the keepers, strolling about, noticed the torn bracken and tumbled earth at the side of the quarry. Ropes were sent for, and a search was instantly commenced. Late at night the body was found, fearfully mangled and crushed. The conclusion instantly arrived at by everyone was that he had made a false step and fallen over the dangerously exposed edge by accident.

I listened to the recital in silence. When Elwick had concluded, and stood with his head turned suspiciously away from me, I asked a question@

“Who succeeded to the estates, Elwick?”

“Mr. Esholt, sir, his nephew,” answered Elwick somewhat huskily.

“Mr. Esholt! Tell me everything that you know about him,” I demanded.

Elwick shook his head slowly.

“That won’t be much, sir, and nothing very good. They do say that he has been a terrible scamp. He’s only been to the Hall twice, and each time it was to borrow money. I remember last time he came I heard the master say to him, just before he went, that it would be of no use his coming again, for he would never give him another penny.”

“Where was Mr. Esholt when this happened?” I asked.

“In Chicago, sir; leastways, so he said,” Elwick answered doubtfully. “He turned up about a fortnight ago in London and said that he had come straight from there.”

“Can you describe him?” I asked, and waited for the answer with an impatience which I utterly failed to conceal.

Elwick did so. He was tall and sallow, with black eyes and hair. Then I knew this was the man who had murdered my friend.

“It’s almost a wonder, sir, as you haven’t heard nothing of him, seeing as Miss Clara@” Elwick hesitated suddenly and looked doubtful.

“Do you mean my sister, Elwick?” I exclaimed.

“Yes, sir; Miss Clara and her aunt, Lady Alice, sir — they’re often at the Hall, and they do say, sir, begging your pardon, as how we shall soon be having a mistress at the old place.”

I arose from my seat, dazed and trembling, and hurried from the room. In my other apartment was a little pile of letters which I had not as yet looked at. Hastily selecting those from my aunt and my sister, I tore them open and scanned them through.

My vague fears turned swiftly into a distinct sense of horror. From first to last they were full of praises of my old friend’s nephew, who was quite a close neighbour of theirs; and my aunt’s letters, which I looked at first, were full of hints as to the cause of his constant visits and attentions to my sister Clara. I threw them down and opened Clara’s letters. They were more explicit still. Mr. Esholt had asked her to become his wife. Would I come down and meet him? There was another letter in the pile, the handwriting of which was strange to me. I tore it open. It was signed George Esholt, and contained a formal offer for my sister’s hand.

Again there came that terrible tightening of the brain, that hideous vision before my eyes, and a monotonous buzzing in my ears. I knew that this was madness, and I fell on my knees and prayed that it might leave me, if only for a little while. My prayer was granted. I fell asleep and awoke weak and full of strange thoughts and sensations, but with my purpose still clear before me.

By the midday train I travelled down to Little Hampton, and, hiring a fly at the station, drove at once to the Hall. Mr. Esholt was in the park with some ladies, I was told. Would I await his return, or should they send in search for him? I replied that I would go and try to find him myself. And with that purpose I crossed the terraced lawns, and, dismissing the man who would have been my guide, I strode away across the smooth, velvety turf.

Far away in the distance, amongst the grey, crumbling walls of some ivy-covered ruins, I saw light dresses flitting about, and towards these I directed my footsteps. I reached them unobserved, and, crouching down behind the remnant of a pillar, peered into the enclosure where the little group were standing talking.

I saw what I had expected to see: the man whose face had haunted me without ceasing since that terrible night, my aunt, and my sister. They were speaking with raised voices, and I listened.

“Mr. Esholt, you positively shall not refuse to take me there again! I will go, sir! If you won’t take me, I shall go alone!”

I recognised Clara’s imperious voice, and I knew at once that she would have her way. But he did not yield all at once. I saw his pale face grow paler, and he seemed to be keeping back a shudder only with a great effort.

“Clara,” he said, “can’t you wonder that I hate the place? Don’t ask me to take you there, please.”

There was a brief silence, and I leaned my burning forehead against the stone wall, and through the chinks I could see that my sister was standing a little apart, With an angry frown upon her fair face. Then he approached her slowly. There was a short whispered conversation, and finally she left his side with an air of satisfied triumph.

“Auntie, we are going. Will you come?”

Aunt Alice shook her head and leaned back in her impromptu seat — the fallen, moss-covered trunk of a giant tree.

“No, I’ll wait for you. My hill-climbing days are over.”

Then I saw them leave her, hand-in-hand, and at a safe distance I followed, keeping just inside a long plantation of fir trees during the first part of the ascent, and afterwards bending low down amongst the tall bracken, ready to disappear altogether should they look round. Before me lay the high, grass-covered hill, the round, grey tower, and the quarry, just as I had seen them all on that horrible night. At every step I took, every time my eyes fell upon him bending over my sister with all a lover’s tenderness, the weight upon my brain seemed to grow heavier. Earth and sky seemed dancing around me in fantastic shapes, and the dark branches of the pine trees stooped down and whispered to me, Murder! murder! murder! A band of iron seemed to be tightening itself around my forehead, but my feet touched the grass and met with no more resistance than if I had been walking upon air. All continuity of thought and memory seemed to be breaking up within me, and I felt a strange, wild craving to shout, to run and leap, to burst out into peals of laughter. But still I kept my eyes on the ascending pair in front of me and stealthily followed them. They reached the top almost at the same moment as I also gained it by a more devious track and concealed myself behind a mass of rock. They moved to the side of the chasm, she full of awed curiosity, he pale and shrinking. Then up from my hiding-place I leaped, and stood before them, wild and dishevelled, with my burning eyes fixed upon his ghastly face, pointing, pointing with shaking hand into the abyss below.

“Murderer! murderer!” I shrieked, and the wild west wind caught up my cry and carried it down into the valley and bore it against the rock-strewn hills opposite, till the very air seemed ringing with echoes of that one word. He shrank back from me in an agony of dumb-stricken fear and leaned trembling against the tower. I followed him, caught him by the throat, and bore him struggling to the chasm. He snatched at a tuft of bracken; I tore it up by the roots and flung it down into the black water below. He dug his fingers into the mould. I stamped upon them until he relaxed his hold, and then, seizing him by the waist, I pushed him back, back, back to the very edge of the chasm and hurled him backwards. In mid-air, as his struggling feet left the ground, he shrieked out for mercy. I laughed back at him, and, leaning over the side, watched his quivering body fall until it disappeared into the black waters below — watched it, laughing all the time with the fierce, delirious joy of madness, and it seemed to me that the rocks and the trees and the very clouds were laughing with me. Everything seemed to me laughing except the white, unconscious form of my sister, who lay fainting on the grass. Mad! mad! mad! Yes, I’m mad enough at times. I was a raving lunatic when they tried me for murder, and my trial was a farce, for before it was over they brought me here to this asylum. Sometimes my reason returns to me for a brief while. I am sane now, but it will not be for long. Even now it is coming; the wild visions before my eyes, the fiery weight upon my brain. They all know it here; my keeper knows the signs and he is coming. Ah! they have taken my paper away from me, and now my pen. No matter, I have finished.

“The Windsor Magazine”, Vol 15, 1901-1902

KEEPING HIS PROMISE

Algernon Blackwood

1906

It was eleven o’clock at night, and young Marriott was locked into his room, cramming as hard as he could cram. He was a “Fourth Year Man” at Edinburgh University and he had been ploughed for this particular examination so often that his parents had positively declared they could no longer supply the funds to keep him there.

His rooms were cheap and dingy, but it was the lecture fees that took the money. So Marriott pulled himself together at last and definitely made up his mind that he would pass or die in the attempt, and for some weeks now he had been reading as hard as mortal man can read. He was trying to make up for lost time and money in a way that showed conclusively he did not understand the value of either. For no ordinary man — and Marriott was in every sense an ordinary man — can afford to drive the mind as he had lately been driving his, without sooner or later paying the cost.

Among the students he had few friends or acquaintances, and these few had promised not to disturb him at night, knowing he was at last reading in earnest. It was, therefore, with feelings a good deal stronger than mere surprise that he heard his doorbell ring on this particular night and realised that he was to have a visitor. Some men would simply have muffled the bell and gone on quietly with their work. But Marriott was not this sort. He was nervous. It would have bothered and pecked at his mind all night long not to know who the visitor was and what he wanted. The only thing to do, therefore, was to let him in — and out again — as quickly as possible.

The landlady went to bed at ten o’clock punctually, after which hour nothing would induce her to pretend she heard the bell, so Marriott jumped up from his books with an exclamation that augured ill for the reception of his caller, and prepared to let him in with his own hand.

The streets of Edinburgh town were very still at this late hour — it was late for Edinburgh — and in the quiet neighbourhood of F — Street, where Marriott lived on the third floor, scarcely a sound broke the silence. As he crossed the floor, the bell rang a second time, with unnecessary clamour, and he unlocked the door and passed into the little hallway with considerable wrath and annoyance in his heart at the insolence of the double interruption.

“The fellows all know I’m reading for this exam. Why in the world do they come to bother me at such an unearthly hour?”

The inhabitants of the building, with himself, were medical students, general students, poor Writers to the Signet, and some others whose vocations were perhaps not so obvious. The stone staircase, dimly lighted at each floor by a gas-jet that would not turn above a certain height, wound down to the level of the street with no pretence at carpet or railing. At some levels it was cleaner than at others. It depended on the landlady of the particular level.

The acoustic properties of a spiral staircase seem to be peculiar. Marriott, standing by the open door, book in hand, thought every moment the owner of the footsteps would come into view. The sound of the boots was so close and so loud that they seemed to travel disproportionately in advance of their cause. Wondering who it could be, he stood ready with all manner of sharp greetings for the man who dared thus to disturb his work. But the man did not appear. The steps sounded almost under his nose, yet no one was visible.

A sudden queer sensation of fear passed over him — a faintness and a shiver down the back. It went, however, almost as soon as it came, and he was just debating whether he would call aloud to his invisible visitor, or slam the door and return to his books, when the cause of the disturbance turned the corner very slowly and came into view.

It was a stranger. He saw a youngish man short of figure and very broad. His face was the colour of a piece of chalk and the eyes, which were very bright, had heavy lines underneath them. Though the cheeks and chin were unshaven and the general appearance unkempt, the man was evidently a gentleman, for he was well dressed and bore himself with a certain air. But, strangest of all, he wore no hat, and carried none in his hand; and although rain had been falling steadily all the evening, he appeared to have neither overcoat nor umbrella.

A hundred questions sprang up in Marriott’s mind and rushed to his lips, chief among which was something like “Who in the world are you and “What in the name of heaven do you come to me for?” But none of these questions found time to express themselves in words, for almost at once the caller turned his head a little so that the gas light in the hall fell upon his features from a new angle. Then in a flash Marriott recognised him.

“Field! Man alive! Is it you?” he gasped.

The Fourth Year Man was not lacking in intuition, and he perceived at once that here was a case for delicate treatment. He divined, without any actual process of thought, that the catastrophe often predicted had come at last, and that this man’s father had turned him out of the house. They had been at a private school together years before, and though they had hardly met once since, the news had not failed to reach him from time to time with considerable detail, for the family lived near his own and between certain of the sisters there was great intimacy. Young Field had gone wild later, he remembered hearing about it all — drink, a woman, opium, or something of the sort — he could not exactly call to mind.

“Come in,” he said at once, his anger vanishing. “There’s been something wrong, I can see. Come in, and tell me all about it and perhaps I can@” He hardly knew what to say, and stammered a lot more besides. The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings. But he had a man’s heart for all that.

He led the way across the hall, shutting the front door carefully behind him, and noticed as he did so that the other, though certainly sober, was unsteady on his legs, and evidently much exhausted. Marriott might not be able to pass his examinations, but he at least knew the symptoms of starvation — acute starvation, unless he was much mistaken — when they stared him in the face.

“Come along,” he said cheerfully, and with genuine sympathy in his voice. “I’m glad to see you. I was going to have a bite of something to eat, and you’re just in time to join me.”

The other made no audible reply, and shuffled so feebly with his feet that Marriott took his arm by way of support. He noticed for the first time that the clothes hung on him with pitiful looseness. The broad frame was literally hardly more than a frame. He was as thin as a skeleton. But, as he touched him, the sensation of faintness and dread returned. It only lasted a moment, and then passed off, and he ascribed it not unnaturally to the distress and shock of seeing a former friend in such a pitiful plight.

“Better let me guide you. It’s shamefully dark — this hall. I’m always complaining,” he said lightly, recognising by the weight upon his arm that the guidance was sorely needed, “but the old cat never does anything except promise.” He led him to the sofa, wondering all the time where he had come from and how he had found out the address. It must be at least seven years since those days at the private school when they used to be such close friends.

“Now, if you’ll forgive me for a minute,” he said, “I’ll get supper ready — such as it is. And don’t bother to talk. Just take it easy on the sofa. I see you’re dead tired. You can tell me about it afterwards, and we’ll make plans.”

The other sat down on the edge of the sofa and stared in silence, while Marriott got out the brown loaf, scones, and huge pot of marmalade that Edinburgh students always keep in their cupboards. His eyes shone with a brightness that suggested drugs, Marriott thought, stealing a glance at him from behind the cupboard door. He did not like yet to take a full square look. The fellow was in a bad way, and it would have been so like an examination to stare and wait for explanations. Besides, he was evidently almost too exhausted to speak. So, for reasons of delicacy — and for another reason as well which he could not exactly formulate to himself — he let his visitor rest apparently unnoticed, while he busied himself with the supper. He lit the spirit lamp to make cocoa, and when the water was boiling he drew up the table with the good things to the sofa, so that Field need not have even the trouble of moving to a chair.

“Now, let’s tuck in,” he said, “and afterwards we’ll have a pipe and a chat. I’m reading for an exam, you know, and I always have something about this time. It’s jolly to have a companion.”

He looked up and caught his guest’s eyes directed straight upon his own. An involuntary shudder ran through him from head to foot. The face opposite him was deadly white and wore a dreadful expression of pain and mental suffering.

“By Gad!” he said, jumping up, “I quite forgot. I’ve got some whisky somewhere. What an ass I am. I never touch it myself when I’m working like this.”

He went to the cupboard and poured out a stiff glass which the other swallowed at a single gulp and without any water. Marriott watched him while he drank it, and at the same time noticed something else as well — Field’s coat was all over dust, and on one shoulder was a bit of cobweb. It was perfectly dry; Field arrived on a soaking wet night without hat, umbrella, or overcoat, and yet perfectly dry, even dusty. Therefore he had been under cover. What did it all mean? Had he been hiding in the building…?

It was very strange. Yet he volunteered nothing; and Marriott had pretty well made up his mind by this time that he would not ask any questions until he had eaten and slept. Food and sleep were obviously what the poor devil needed most and first — he was pleased with his powers of ready diagnosis — and it would not be fair to press him till he had recovered a bit.

They ate their supper together while the host carried on a running one-sided conversation, chiefly about himself and his exams and his “old cat” of a landlady, so that the guest need not utter a single word unless he really wished to — which he evidently did not! But, while he toyed with his food, feeling no desire to eat, the other ate voraciously. To see a hungry man devour cold scones, stale oatcake, and brown bread laden with marmalade was a revelation to this inexperienced student who had never known what it was to be without at least three meals a day. He watched in spite of himself, wondering why the fellow did not choke in the process.

But Field seemed to be as sleepy as he was hungry. More than once his head dropped and he ceased to masticate the food in his mouth. Marriott had positively to shake him before he would go on with his meal. A stronger emotion will overcome a weaker, but this struggle between the sting of real hunger and the magical opiate of overpowering sleep was a curious sight to the student, who watched it with mingled astonishment and alarm. He had heard of the pleasure it was to feed hungry men, and watch them eat, but he had never actually witnessed it, and he had no idea it was like this. Field ate like an animal — gobbled, stuffed, gorged. Marriott forgot his reading, and began to feel something very much like a lump in his throat.

“Afraid there’s been awfully little to offer you, old man,” he managed to blurt out when at length the last scone had disappeared, and the rapid, one-sided meal was at an end. Field still made no reply, for he was almost asleep in his seat. He merely looked up wearily and gratefully.

“Now you must have some sleep, you know,” he continued, “or you’ll go to pieces. I shall be up all night reading for this blessed exam. You’re more than welcome to my bed. Tomorrow we’ll have a late breakfast and — and see what can be done — and make plans — I’m awfully good at making plans, you know,” he added with an attempt at lightness.

Field maintained his “dead sleepy” silence, but appeared to acquiesce, and the other led the way into the bedroom, apologising as he did so to this half-starved son of a baronet — whose own home was almost a palace — for the size of the room. The weary guest, however, made no pretence of thanks or politeness. He merely steadied himself on his friend’s arm as he staggered across the room, and then, with all his clothes on, dropped his exhausted body on the bed. In less than a minute he was to all appearances sound asleep.

For several minutes Marriott stood in the open door and watched him; praying devoutly that he might never find himself in a like predicament, and then fell to wondering what he would do with his unbidden guest on the morrow. But he did not stop long to think, for the call of his books was imperative, and happen what might, he must see to it that he passed that examination.

Having again locked the door into the hall, he sat down to his books and resumed his notes on materia medica where he had left off when the bell rang. But it was difficult for some time to concentrate his mind on the subject. His thoughts kept wandering to the picture of that white-faced, strange-eyed fellow, starved and dirty, lying in his clothes and boots on the bed. He recalled their schooldays together before they had drifted apart, and how they had vowed eternal friendship — and all the rest of it. And now! What horrible straits to be in. How could any man let the love of dissipation take such hold upon him?

But one of their vows together Marriott, it seemed, had completely forgotten. Just now, at any rate, it lay too far in the background of his memory to be recalled.

Through the half-open door — the bedroom led out of the sitting-room and had no other door — came the sound of deep, long-drawn breathing, the regular, steady breathing of a tired man, so tired that, even to listen to it made Marriott almost want to go to sleep himself.

“He needed it,” reflected the student, “and perhaps it came only just in time!”

Perhaps so; for outside the bitter wind from across the Forth howled cruelly and drove the rain in cold streams against the windowpanes, and down the deserted streets. Long before Marriott settled down again properly to his reading, he heard distantly, as it were, through the sentences of the book, the heavy, deep breathing of the sleeper in the next room.

A couple of hours later, when he yawned and changed his books, he still heard the breathing, and went cautiously up to the door to look round. At first the darkness of the room must have deceived him, or else his eyes were confused and dazzled by the recent glare of the reading lamp. For a minute or two he could make out nothing at all but dark lumps of furniture, the mass of the chest of drawers by the wall, and the white patch where his bath stood in the centre of the floor.

Then the bed came slowly into view. And on it he saw the outline of the sleeping body gradually take shape before his eyes, growing up strangely into the darkness, till it stood out in marked relief — the long black form against the white counterpane.

He could hardly help smiling. Field had not moved an inch. He watched him a moment or two and then returned to his books. The night was full of the singing voices of the wind and rain. There was no sound of traffic; no hansoms clattered over the cobbles, and it was still too early for the milk carts. He worked on steadily and conscientiously, only stopping now and again to change a book, or to sip some of the poisonous stuff that kept him awake and made his brain so active, and on these occasions Field’s breathing was always distinctly audible in the room. Outside, the storm continued to howl, but inside the house all was stillness. The shade of the reading lamp threw all the light upon the littered table, leaving the other end of the room in comparative darkness. The bedroom door was exactly opposite him where he sat. There was nothing to disturb the worker, nothing but an occasional rush of wind against the windows, and a slight pain in his arm.

This pain, however, which he was unable to account for, grew once or twice very acute. It bothered him; and he tried to remember how, and when, he could have bruised himself so severely, but without success.

At length the page before him turned from yellow to grey, and there were sounds of wheels in the street below. It was four o’clock. Marriott leaned back and yawned prodigiously. Then he drew back the curtains. The storm had subsided and the Castle Rock was shrouded in mist. With another yawn he turned away from the dreary outlook and prepared to sleep the remaining four hours till breakfast on the sofa. Field was still breathing heavily in the next room, and he first tiptoed across the floor to take another look at him.

Peering cautiously round the half-opened door his first glance fell upon the bed now plainly discernible in the grey light of morning. He stared hard. Then he rubbed his eyes. Then he rubbed his eyes again and thrust his head farther round the edge of the door. With fixed eyes he stared harder still, and harder.

But it made no difference at all. He was staring into an empty room.

The sensation of fear he had felt when Field first appeared upon the scene returned suddenly, but with much greater force. He became conscious, too, that his left arm was throbbing violently and causing him great pain. He stood wondering, and staring, and trying to collect his thoughts. He was trembling from head to foot.

By a great effort of the will he left the support of the door and walked forward boldly into the room.

There, upon the bed, was the impress of a body, where Field had lain and slept. There was the mark of the head on the pillow, and the slight indentation at the foot of the bed where the boots had rested on the counterpane. And there, plainer than ever — for he was closer to it — was the breathing!

Marriott tried to pull himself together. With a great effort he found his voice and called his friend aloud by name!

“Field! Is that you? Where are you?”

There was no reply; but the breathing continued without interruption, coming directly from the bed. His voice had such an unfamiliar sound that Marriott did not care to repeat his questions, but he went down on his knees and examined the bed above and below, pulling the mattress off finally, and taking the coverings away separately by one. But though the sounds continued there was no visible sign of Field, nor was there any space in which a human being, however small, could have concealed itself. He pulled the bed out from the wall, but the sound stayed where it was. It did not move with the bed.

Marriott, finding self-control a little difficult in his weary condition, at once set about a thorough search of the room. He went through the cupboard, the chest of drawers, the little alcove where the clothes hung — everything. But there was no sign of anyone. The small window near the ceiling was closed; and, anyhow, was not large enough to let a cat pass. The sitting-room door was locked on the inside; he could not have got out that way. Curious thoughts began to trouble Marriott’s mind, bringing in their train unwelcome sensations. He grew more and more excited; he searched the bed again till it resembled the scene of a pillow fight; he searched both rooms, knowing all the time it was useless — and then he searched again. A cold perspiration broke out all over his body; and the sound of heavy breathing, all this time, never ceased to come from the corner where Field had lain down to sleep.

Then he tried something else. He pushed bed back exactly into its original position — and himself lay down upon it just where his guest had lain. But the same instant he sprang up again in a single bound. The breathing was close beside him, almost on his cheek, and between him and the wall! Not even a child could have squeezed into the space.

He went back into his sitting-room, opened the windows, welcoming all the light and air possible, and tried to think the whole matter over quietly and clearly. Men who read too hard, and slept too little, he knew were sometimes troubled with very vivid hallucinations. Again he calmly reviewed every incident of the night; his accurate sensations; the vivid details; the emotions stirred in him; the dreadful feast — no single hallucination could ever combine all these and cover so long a period of time. But with less satisfaction he thought of the recurring faintness, and curious sense of horror that had once or twice come over him, and then of the violent pains in his arm. These were quite unaccountable.

Moreover, now that he began to analyse and examine, there was one other thing that fell upon him like a sudden revelation: During the whole time Field had not actually uttered a single word! Yet, as though in mockery upon his reflections, there came ever from that inner room the sound of the breathing, long-drawn, deep, and regular. The thing was incredible. It was absurd.

Haunted by visions of brain fever and insanity, Marriott put on his cap and macintosh and left the house. The morning air on Arthur’s Seat would blow the cobwebs from his brain; the scent of the heather, and above all, the sight of the sea. He roamed over the wet slopes above Holyrood for a couple of hours, and did not return until the exercise had shaken some of the horror out of his bones, and given him a ravening appetite into the bargain.

As he entered he saw that there was another man in the room, standing against the window with his back to the light. He recognised his fellow-student Greene, who was reading for the same examination.

“Read hard all night, Marriott,” he said, “and thought I’d drop in here to compare notes and have some breakfast. You’re out early?” he added, by way of a question. Marriott said he had a headache and a walk had helped it, and Greene nodded and said “Ah!” But when the girl had set the steaming porridge on the table and gone out again, he went on with rather a forced tone, “Didn’t know you had any friends who drank, Marriott?”

This was obviously tentative, and Marriott replied drily that he did not know it either.

“Sounds just as if some chap were ‘sleeping it off’ in there, doesn’t it, though?” persisted the other, with a nod in the direction of the bedroom, and looking curiously at his friend. The two men stared steadily at each other for several seconds, and then Marriott said earnestly@

“Then you hear it too, thank God!”

“Of course I hear it. The door’s open. Sorry if I wasn’t meant to.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” said Marriott, lowering his voice. “But I’m awfully relieved. Let me explain. Of course, if you hear it too, then it’s all right; but really it frightened me more than I can tell you. I thought I was going to have brain fever, or something, and you know what a lot depends on this exam. It always begins with sounds, or visions, or some sort of beastly hallucination, and — “

“Rot!” ejaculated the other impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

“Now, listen to me, Greene,” said Marriott, as calmly as he could, for the breathing was still plainly audible, “and I’ll tell you what I mean, only don’t interrupt.” And thereupon he related exactly what had happened during the night, telling everything, even down to the pain in his arm. When it was over he got up from the table and crossed the room.

“You hear the breathing now plainly, don’t you?” he said. Greene said he did. “Well, come with me, and we’ll search the room together.” The other, however, did not move from his chair.

“I’ve been in already,” he said sheepishly; “I heard the sounds and thought it was you. The door was ajar — so I went in.”

Marriott made no comment, but pushed the door open as wide as it would go. As it opened, the sound of breathing grew more and more distinct.

“Someone must be in there,” said Greene under his breath.

“Someone is in there, but where?” said Marriott. Again he urged his friend to go in with him. But Greene refused point-blank; said he had been in once and had searched the room and there was nothing there. He would not go in again for a good deal.

They shut the door and retired into the other room to talk it all over with many pipes. Greene questioned his friend very closely, but without illuminating result, since questions cannot alter facts.

“The only thing that ought to have a proper, a logical, explanation is the pain in my arm,” said Marriott, rubbing that member with an attempt at a smile. “It hurts so infernally and aches all the way up. I can’t remember bruising it, though.”

“Let me examine it for you,” said Greene. “I’m awfully good at bones in spite of the examiners’ opinion to the contrary.” It was a relief to play the fool a bit, and Marriott took his coat off and rolled up his sleeve.

“By George, though, I’m bleeding!” he exclaimed. “Look here! What on earth’s this?”

On the forearm, quite close to the wrist, was a thin red line. There was a tiny drop of apparently fresh blood on it. Greene came over and looked closely at it for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair, looking curiously at his friend’s face.

“You’ve scratched yourself without knowing it,” he said presently.

“There’s no sign of a bruise. It must be something else that made the arm ache.”

Marriott sat very still, staring silently at his arm as though the solution of the whole mystery lay there actually written upon the skin.

“What’s the matter? I see nothing very strange about a scratch,” said Greene, in an unconvincing sort of voice. “It was your cuff links probably. Last night in your excitement@”

But Marriott, white to the very lips, was trying to speak. The sweat stood in great beads on his forehead. At last he leaned forward close to his friend’s face.

“Look,” he said, in a low voice that shook a little. “Do you see that red mark? I mean underneath what you call the scratch?”

Greene admitted he saw something or other, and Marriott wiped the place clean with his handkerchief and told him to look again more closely.

“Yes, I see,” returned the other, lifting his head after a moment’s careful inspection. “It looks like an old scar.”

“It is an old scar,” whispered Marriott, his lips trembling. “Now it all comes back to me.”

“All what?” Greene fidgeted on his chair. He tried to laugh, but without success. His friend seemed bordering on collapse.

“Hush! Be quiet, and — I’ll tell you,” he said. “Field made that scar.”

For a whole minute the two men looked each other full in the face without speaking.

“Field made that scar!” repeated Marriott at length in a louder voice.

“Field! You mean — last night?”

“No, not last night. Years ago — at school, with his knife. And I made a scar in his arm with mine.” Marriott was talking rapidly now.

“We exchanged drops of blood in each other’s cuts. He put a drop into my arm and I put one into his@”

“In the name of heaven, what for?”

“It was a boys’ compact. We made a sacred pledge, a bargain. I remember it all perfectly now. We had been reading some dreadful book and we swore to appear to one another — I mean, whoever died first swore to show himself to the other. And we sealed the compact with each other’s blood. I remember it all so well — the hot summer afternoon in the playground, seven years ago — and one of the masters caught us and confiscated the knives — and I have never thought of it again to this day@”

“And you mean@” stammered Greene.

But Marriott made no answer. He got up and crossed the room and lay down wearily upon the sofa, hiding his face in his hands.

Greene himself was a bit nonplussed. He left his friend alone for a little while, thinking it all over again. Suddenly an idea seemed to strike him. He went over to where Marriott still lay motionless on the sofa and roused him. In any case it was better to face the matter, whether there was an explanation or not. Giving in was always the silly exit.

“I say, Marriott,” he began, as the other turned his white face up to him. “There’s no good being so upset about it. I mean — if it’s all an hallucination we know what to do. And if it isn’t — well, we know what to think, don’t we?”

“I suppose so. But it frightens me horribly for some reason,” returned his friend in a hushed voice. “And that poor devil@”

“But, after all, if the worst is true and — and that chap has kept his promise — well, he has, that’s all, isn’t it?”

Marriott nodded.

“There’s only one thing that occurs to me,” Greene went on, “and that is, are you quite sure that — that he really ate like that — I mean that he actually ate anything at all?” he finished, blurting out all his thought.

Marriott stared at him for a moment and then said he could easily make certain. He spoke quietly. After the main shock no lesser surprise could affect him.

“I put the things away myself,” he said, “after we had finished. They are on the third shelf in that cupboard. No ones touched ‘em since.”

He pointed without getting up, and Greene took the hint and went over to look.

“Exactly,” he said, after a brief examination; “just as I thought. It was partly hallucination, at any rate. The things haven’t been touched. Come and see for yourself.”

Together they examined the shelf. There was the brown loaf, the plate of stale scones, the oat-cake, all untouched. Even the glass of whisky Marriott had poured out stood there with the whisky still in it.

“You were feeding — no one,” said Greene “Field ate and drank nothing. He was not there at all!”

“But the breathing?” urged the other in a low voice, staring with a dazed expression on his face.

Greene did not answer. He walked over to the bedroom, while Marriott followed him with his eyes. He opened the door, and listened. There was no need for words. The sound of deep, regular breathing came floating through the air. There was no hallucination about that, at any rate. Marriott could hear it where he stood on the other side of the room.

Greene closed the door and came back. “There’s only one thing to do,” he declared with decision. “Write home and find out about him, and meanwhile come and finish your reading in my rooms. I’ve got an extra bed.”

“Agreed,” returned the Fourth Year Man; “there’s no hallucination about that exam; I must pass that whatever happens.”

And this was what they did.

It was about a week later when Marriott got the answer from his sister. Part of it he read out to Greene@

“It is curious,” she wrote, “that in your letter you should have enquired after Field. It seems a terrible thing, but you know only a short while ago Sir John’s patience became exhausted, and he turned him out of the house, they say without a penny. Well, what do you think? He has killed himself. At least, it looks like suicide. Instead of leaving the house, he went down into the cellar and simply starved himself to death… . They’re trying to suppress it, of course, but I heard it all from my maid, who got it from their footman… . They found the body on the 14th and the doctor said he had died about twelve hours before… . He was dreadfully thin… .”

“Then he died on the 13th,” said Greene.

Marriott nodded.

“That’s the very night he came to see you.”

Marriott nodded again.

The Empty House (1906)

THE HOUSE OF SILENCE

E. Nesbit

1906

The thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went away slowly in a curve, prolonged for miles through the green marshes.

No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There were no travellers at such an hour on such a road.

The thief looked across the valley, at the top of the mountain flushed with sunset, and at the grey-green of the olives about its base. The terraces of olives were already dusk with twilight, but his keen eyes could not have missed the smallest variance or shifting of their lights and shadows. Nothing stirred there. He was alone.

Then, turning, he looked again at the wall behind him. The face of it was grey and sombre, but all along the top of it, in the crannies of the coping stones, orange wallflowers and sulphur-coloured snapdragons shone among the haze of feathery-flowered grasses. He looked again at the place where some of the stones had fallen from the coping — had fallen within the wall, for none lay in the road without. The bough of a mighty tree covered the gap with its green mantle from the eyes of any chance wayfarer; but the thief was no chance wayfarer, and he had surprised the only infidelity of the great wall to its trust.

To the chance wayfarer, too, the wall’s denial had seemed absolute, unanswerable. Its solid stone, close knit by mortar hardly less solid, showed not only a defence, it offered a defiance — a menace. But the thief had learnt his trade; he saw that the mortar might be loosened a little here, broken a little there, and now the crumbs of it fell rustling on to the dry, dusty grass of the roadside. He drew back, took two quick steps forward, and, with a spring, sudden and agile as a cat’s, grasped the wall where the gap showed, and drew himself up. Then he rubbed his hands on his knees, because his hands were bloody from the sudden grasping of the rough stones, and sat astride on the wall.

He parted the leafy boughs and looked down; below him lay the stones that had fallen from the wall — already grass was growing upon the mound they made. As he ventured his head beyond the green leafage, the level light of the sinking sun struck him in the eyes. It was like a blow. He dropped softly from the wall and stood in the shadow of the tree — looking, listening.

Before him stretched the park — wide and still; dotted here and there with trees, and overlaid with gold poured from the west. He held his breath and listened. There was no wind to stir the leaves to those rustlings which may deceive and disconcert the keenest and the boldest; only the sleepy twitter of birds, and the little sudden soft movements of them in the dusky privacy of the thick-leaved branches. There was in all the broad park no sign of any other living thing.

The thief trod softly along under the wall where the trees were thickest, and at every step he paused to look and listen.

It was quite suddenly that he came upon the little lodge near the great gates of wrought iron with the marble gateposts bearing upon them the two gaunt griffins, the cognisance of the noble house whose lands these were. The thief drew back into the shadow and stood still, only his heart beat thickly. He stood still as the tree trunk beside him, looking, listening. He told himself that he heard nothing — saw nothing — yet he became aware of things. That the door of the lodge was not closed, that some of its windows were broken, and that into its little garden straw and litter had drifted from the open door: and that between the stone step and the threshold grass was growing inches high. When he was aware of this he stepped forward and entered the lodge. All the sordid sadness of a little deserted home met him here — broken crocks and bent pans, straw, old rags, and a brooding, dusty stillness.

“There has been no one here since the old keeper died. They told the truth,” said the thief; and he made haste to leave the lodge, for there was nothing in it now that any man need covet — only desolation and the memory of death.

So he went slowly among the trees, and by devious ways drew a little nearer to the great house that stood in its walled garden in the middle of the park. From very far off, above the green wave of trees that broke round it, he could see the towers of it rising black against the sunset; and between the trees came glimpses of its marble white where the faint grey light touched it from the east.

Moving slowly — vigilant, alert, with eyes turning always to right and to left, with ears which felt the intense silence more acutely than they could have felt any tumult — the thief reached the low wall of the garden, at the western side. The last redness of the sunset’s reflection had lighted all the many windows, and the vast place blazed at him for an instant before the light dipped behind the black bar of the trees, and left him face to face with a pale house, whose windows now were black and hollow, and seemed like eyes that watched him. Every window was closed; the lower ones were guarded by jalousies; through the glass of the ones above he could see the set painted faces of the shutters.

From far off he had heard, and known, the plash-plash of fountains, and now he saw their white changing columns rise and fall against the background of the terrace. The garden was full of rose bushes trailing and unpruned; and the heavy, happy scent of the roses, still warm from the sun, breathed through the place, exaggerating the sadness of its tangled desolation. Strange figures gleamed in the deepening dusk, but they were too white to be feared. He crept into a corner where Psyche drooped in marble, and, behind her pedestal, crouched. He took food from his pockets and ate and drank. And between the mouthfuls he listened and watched.

The moon rose, and struck a pale fire from the face of the house and from the marble limbs of the statues, and the gleaming water of the fountains drew the moonbeams into the unchanging change of its rise and fall.

Something rustled and stirred among the roses. The thief grew rigid: his heart seemed suddenly hollow; he held his breath. Through the deepening shadows something gleamed white; and not marble, for it moved, it came towards him. Then the silence of the night was shattered by a scream, as the white shape glided into the moonlight. The thief resumed his munching, and another shape glimmered after the first. “Curse the beasts!” he said, and took another draught from his bottle, as the white peacocks were blotted out by the shadows of the trees, and the stillness of the night grew more intense.

In the moonlight the thief went round and about the house, pushing through the trailing briers that clung to him — and now grown bolder he looked closely at doors and windows. But all were fast barred as the doors of a tomb. And the silence deepened as the moonlight waxed.

There was one little window, high up, that showed no shutter. He looked at it; measured its distance from the ground and from the nearest of the great chestnut trees. Then he walked along under the avenue of chestnuts with head thrown back and eyes fixed on the mystery of their interlacing branches.

At the fifth tree he stopped; leaped to the lowest bough, missed it; leaped again, caught it, and drew up his body. Then climbing, creeping, swinging, while the leaves, agitated by his progress, rustled to the bending of the boughs, he passed to that tree, to the next — swift, assured, unhesitating. And so from tree to tree, till he was at the last tree — and on the bough that stretched to touch the little window with its leaves.

He swung from this. The bough bent and cracked, and would have broken, but that at the only possible instant the thief swung forward, felt the edge of the window with his feet, loosed the bough, sprang, and stood, flattened against the mouldings, clutching the carved drip-stone with his hands. He thrust his knee through the window, waiting for the tinkle of the falling glass to settle into quietness, opened the window, and crept in. He found himself in a corridor: he could see the long line of its white windows, and the bars of moonlight falling across the inlaid wood of its floor.

He took out his thief’s lantern — high and slender like a tall cup — lighted it, and crept softly along the corridor, listening between his steps till the silence grew to be like a humming in his ears.

And slowly, stealthily, he opened door after door; the rooms were spacious and empty — his lantern’s yellow light flashing into their corners told him this. Some poor, plain furniture he discerned, a curtain or a bench here and there, but not what he sought. So large was the house, that presently it seemed to the thief that for many hours he had been wandering along its galleries, creeping down its wide stairs, opening the grudging doors of the dark, empty rooms, whose silence spoke ever more insistently in his ears.

“But it is as he told me,” he said inwardly: “no living soul in all the place. The old man — a servant of this great house — he told me; he knew, and I have found all even as he said.”

Then the thief turned away from the arched emptiness of the grand staircase, and in a far corner of the hall he found himself speaking in a whisper because now it seemed to him that nothing would serve but that this clamorous silence should be stilled by a human voice.

“The old man said it would be thus — all emptiness, and not profit to a man; and he died, and I tended him. Dear Jesus! how our good deeds come home to us! And he told me how the last of the great family had gone away none knew whither. And the tales I heard in the town — how the great man had not gone, but lived here in hiding — It is not possible. There is the silence of death in this house.”

He moistened his lips with his tongue. The stillness of the place seemed to press upon him like a solid thing. “It is like a dead man on one’s shoulders,” thought the thief, and he straightened himself up and whispered again: “The old man said, ‘The door with the carved griffin, and the roses enwreathed, and the seventh rose holds the secret in its heart.’”

With that the thief set forth again, creeping softly across the bars of moonlight down the corridor.

And after much seeking he found at last, under the angle of the great stone staircase behind a mouldering tapestry wrought with peacocks and pines, a door, and on it carved a griffin, wreathed about with roses. He pressed his finger into the deep heart of each carven rose, and when he pressed the rose that was seventh in number from the griffin, he felt the inmost part of it move beneath his finger as though it sought to escape. So he pressed more strongly, leaning against the door till it swung open, and he passed through it, looking behind him to see that nothing followed. The door he closed as he entered.

And now he was, as it seemed, in some other house. The chambers were large and lofty as those whose hushed emptiness he had explored — but these rooms seemed warm with life, yet held no threat, no terror. To the dim yellow flicker from the lantern came out of the darkness hints of a crowded magnificence, a lavish profusion of beautiful objects such as he had never in his life dreamed of, though all that life had been one dream of the lovely treasures which rich men hoard, and which, by the thief’s skill and craft, may come to be his.

He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed. He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving of chairs and presses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad sideboards flashed back to his lantern’s questionings the faint white laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve, suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich jewels. And now, at last, that carved door closed between him and the poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a consoler, a friend.

And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble family — these were companions after his own heart.

He flung open the shade of his lantern and held it high above his head. The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour — not in unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow bar of the lantern’s light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table, and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprang the gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of this concentrated splendour.

He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand — the wax dripped warm over his fingers as he went — lighting one after another, the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state bedchamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight. Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his own face in the strange depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass — wonderful, gleaming, iridescent.

The thief dropped the candle and threw his arms wide with a gesture of supreme longing.

“If I could carry it all away! All, all! Every beautiful thing! To sell some — the less beautiful, and to live with the others all my days!”

And now a madness came over the thief. So little a part of all these things could he bear away with him; yet all were his — his for the taking — even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid silver, too heavy for him to lift — even these were his: had he not found them — he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms, touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard, curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and he drank of it slowly — in little sips — from a silver goblet and from a green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a thief’s trade to know the value of things.

He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs, leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hot face in the chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.

In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore away. So presently he went about among the treasures — no more with the eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew — and he chose those precious stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith’s work and the goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver, he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for he said: “No man less fortunate than I, tonight, shall ever again drink from them.” But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things, because he loved them.

Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panel wrought with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and closed it after him.

“I must guard my treasures,” he said. But when he had passed through the door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.

When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now, and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands. He set about to find the way to the quiet night outside, for this seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that door, he had shut away warmth, and light, and companionship. He was enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a corner — for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was something, and that its breath, too, was held.

So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out; and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof cowed him back into silence.

Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.

And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern, but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed round the dead body of him.

“I had better have been born a fool,” said the thief.

Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.

Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain the fear of death beating like a hammer.

It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the insistent silence, that he saw at last a light — and it was the light of day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was morning, then, and he was a free man.

He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it — a courtyard where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on them.

As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day, and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely overhead.

As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He started back and looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman’s hair. And just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman’s hands, and her golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.

The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages — fled in the dark, and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure, and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his lantern and with all his thief’s craft to find the way out, and had sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the dewy park.

He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a twisted ribbon over the great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.

“The Windsor Magazine”, March 1906

ACCORDING TO MEREDITH

Marie Belloc Lowndes

1909

Certainly, however, one day these present conditions of marriage will he changed. Marriage will be allowed for a certain period, say ten years.

— Mr. George Meredith,
in the Daily Mail of September 24, 1904.

“Give you some heads? My dear fellow, there need be no question of heads! This is to be a model will. You need simply put down, in as few words as are legally permissible — I know nothing of such things — that I leave all of which I die possessed to my wife.”

Philip Dering threw his head back and gave the man to whom he was speaking a confident, smiling glance. Then he turned and walked quickly over to the narrow, old-fashioned, balconied window which, commanding the wide, wind-blown expanse of Abingdon Street, exactly faced the great cavity formed by the arch of the Victoria Tower.

To the right lay the riverside garden, a bright patch of delicate spring colouring and green verdure, bounded by the slow-moving grey waters of the Thames; and Bering’s eager eyes travelled on till he saw, detaching itself against an April afternoon horizon, the irregular mass of building formed by Lambeth Palace and the Lollards’ Tower.

“You wish everything to go to Louise? All right, I’ll make a note of that.” The speaker, a round-faced, slightly bald, shrewd-looking lawyer, looked indulgently at his friend as he added: “But wait a bit — I promise that yours shall be a model will; only, you seem to have forgotten, my dear fellow, that you may outlive your wife. Now, should you have the misfortune to lose Louise, to whom would you wish to devise this fifteen thousand pounds? It’s possible, too, though not very probable, I admit, that you may both die at the same time — both be killed in a railway accident, for instance.”

“Such good fortune may befall us@” Dering spoke quite simply, and accepted the other’s short laugh with great good humour. “Oh! you know what I mean — I always have thought husbands and wives — who care, I mean — ought to die on the same day. That they don’t do so is one of the many strange mysteries which complicate life. But look here, Wingfield@”

The speaker had turned away from the window. He had again taken up his stand opposite the other’s broad writing-table, and not even the cheap, ill-made clothes could hide the graceful lines of the tall, active figure, not even the turned-down collar and orange silk tie could destroy the young man’s look of rather subtle distinction.

“Failing Louise, I should like this money, at my death, to be divided equally between the young Hintons and your kids”; and as the other made a gesture of protest, Dering added quickly: “What better could I do? Louise is devoted to Jack Hinton’s children, and I’ve always regarded you — I have indeed, old man — as my one real friend. Of course it’s possible now,” — an awkward, shy break came into his voice — “it’s possible now, I say, that we may have children of our own; I don’t suppose you’ve ever realised how poor, how horribly poor, we’ve been all these years.”

He looked away, avoiding the other man’s eyes; then, picking up his hat and stick with a quick, nervous gesture, was gone.

•   •   •

After the door had shut on his friend. Wingfield remained standing for a while. His hands mechanically sorted the papers and letters lying on his table into neat little heaps; but his thoughts were travelling backward through his and Dering’s past lives.

The friends had first met at the City of London School, for they were much of an age, though the lawyer looked the elder of the two. Then Dering had gone to Cambridge, and Wingfield, more humbly, to take up life as an articled clerk to a good firm of old-established attorneys. Again, later, they had come together once more, sharing a modest lodging, while Dering earned a small, uncertain income by contributing to the literary weeklies, by ghosting writers more fortunate than himself, by tutoring whenever he got the chance — in a word, by resorting to the few expedients open to the honest educated Londoner lacking a definite profession. The two men had not parted company till Dering, enabled to do so by the help of a small legacy, had chosen to marry a Danish girl as good-looking, as high-minded, as unpractical as himself.

But had Louise Dering proved herself so unpractical during the early years of her married life? Wingfield, standing there, his mind steeped in memories, compared her, with an unconscious critical sigh, with his own stolid, unimaginative wife, Kate. As he did so he wondered whether, after all, Dering had not known how to make the best of both worlds. True, he and his Louise had gone through some bad times together. Wingfield had been the one intimate of the young couple when they began their married life in a three-roomed flat in Gray’s Inn, and he had been aware, painfully so, of the incessant watchful struggle with money difficulties, never mentioned while the struggle was in being; for only the rich can afford to complain of poverty. He had admired, with all his heart, the high courage then shown by his friend’s wife.

During those first difficult years, when he, Wingfield, could do nothing for them, Louise had gone without the help of even the least adequate servant. The women of her nation are taught housewifery as an indispensable feminine accomplishment, and so she had scrubbed and sung, cooked and read, made and mended for Philip and herself.

Wingfield was glad to remember that it was he who had at last found Dering regular employment; he who had so far thrown prudence aside as to persuade one of his first and most valuable clients to appoint his clever if eccentric friend secretary to a company formed to exploit a new invention. The work had proved congenial: Dering had done admirably well, and now, when his salary had just been raised to four hundred a year, a distant cousin of his dead mother’s had left him fifteen thousand pounds!

At last James Wingfield sat down. He began making notes of the instructions he had just received, though as he did so he knew well enough that he could not bring himself to draw up a will by which his own children might so greatly benefit. Suddenly came a sound of hurrying feet up the shallow oak staircase, and through the door, flung open quickly and unceremoniously, strode once more Philip Dering.

“I say, I’ve forgotten something!” he exclaimed, and then, as Wingfield instinctively looked round the bare, spacious room — “No, I didn’t leave anything behind me. I simply forgot to ask you one very important question@”

He took off his hat, put it down with a certain deliberation, then drew up a chair, and placed himself astride on it, an action which to the other suddenly seemed to blot out the years which had gone by since they had been housemates together. “As I went down your jolly old staircase, Wingfield, it suddenly occurred to me that making a will may not be quite so simple a matter as I once thought it.” He hesitated a moment, then went on: “So I’ve come back to ask you the meaning of the term ‘proving a will.’ What I really want to get at, old man, is whether my wife, if she became a widow, would have to give any actual legal proof of our marriage? Would she be compelled, I mean, to show her ‘marriage lines’?”

Wingfield hesitated. The question took him by surprise. “I fancy that would depend,” he said, “on the actual wording of the will; but all that sort of thing is a mere formality, and of course any solicitor employed by her would see to it. By the way, I suppose you were married in Denmark?” He frowned, annoyed with himself for having forgotten a fact with which he must once have been well acquainted. “If you had asked me to be your best man,” he added with a vexed laugh, “I shouldn’t have forgotten the circumstances.”

Dering tipped the chair which he was bestriding a little nearer to the edge of the table which stood between himself and Wingfield; a curious look, a look half humorous, half deprecating, but in no sense ashamed, came over his sensitive, mobile face.

“No,” he said, at length, “we were not married in Denmark. Neither were we married in England. In fact, there was no ceremony at all.”

The eyes of the two men, of the speaker and of his listener, met for a moment; but Wingfield, to the other’s sudden uneasy surprise, made no comment on what he had just heard.

Dering sprang up, and during the rest of their talk he walked, with short, quick strides, from the door to the window, from the window to the door. “I wanted to tell you at the time. But Louise would not have it; though I told her that in principle — not, of course, in practice — you thoroughly agreed with me — I mean with us. Nay, more, that you, with your clear, legal mind, had always realised even more than I could do, the utter absurdity of making such a contract as that of marriage — which of all contracts is the most intimately personal, and which least affects the interests of those outside the contracting parties — the only legal contract which can’t be rescinded or dissolved by mutual agreement! Then again, you must admit that there was one really good reason why we should not tell you the truth: you already liked Kate, and Louise, don’t you remember, used to play chaperon. Now, Kate’s people, you know@!” All the humour had gone out of Dering’s face, but the deprecating look had deepened.

The lawyer made a strong effort over himself. He had felt for a moment keenly hurt, and not a little angry. “I don’t think,” he said quietly, “that there is any need of explanations or apologies between us. Of course, I can’t help feeling very much surprised, and that in spite of our old theoretical talks and discussions concerning — well, this subject. But I don’t doubt that in the circumstances you did quite right. Mind you, I don’t mean about the marriage,” he quickly corrected himself, “but only as to the concealment from me.” He waited a moment, and then went on, hesitatingly: “But even now I don’t really understand what happened; I should like to know a little more@”

Dering stayed his walk across the room, and stood opposite his friend. He felt a great wish to justify himself, and to win Wingfield’s retrospective sympathy. “I will tell you everything there is to tell!” he cried eagerly. “Indeed, it can all be told in a moment. My wife and I entered into a personal contract together, which we arranged, provisionally, of course, should last ten years. Louise was quite willing, absolutely willing.…” For the first time there came a defensive note in the eager voice. “You see the idea — that of leasehold marriage? We used to talk about it, you and I, of course only as a Utopian possibility. All I can say is that I had the good fortune to meet with a woman with whom I was able to try the experiment; and all I can tell you is — well, I need not tell you, Wingfield, that there has never been a happier marriage than ours.”

Again Dering started to pace up and down the room. “Louise has been everything — everything — everything — that such a man as myself could have looked for in a wife!”

“And has no one ever guessed — has no one ever known?” asked the other, rather sternly.

“Absolutely no one! Yes, wait a moment — there has been one exception. Louise told Gerda Hinton. You know, they became very intimate after we went to Bedford Park, and Louise thought Gerda ought to know. But it made no difference — no difference at all!” he added emphatically. “In fact, poor Gerda practically left her baby to Louise’s care.”

“And that worthless creature, Jack Hinton — does he know, too?”

“No, I don’t think so; in fact, I may say most decidedly not — but of course Gerda may have told him, though, for my part, I don’t believe that husbands and wives share their friends’ secrets. Still, you are quite at liberty to tell Kate.”

“No,” said Wingfield, “I don’t intend to tell Kate; and there will be no reason to do so if you will take my advice — which is, I need hardly tell you, to go and get married at once. Now that you have come into this money, your doing so becomes a positive duty. Are you aware that if you were run over on your way home today, Louise would have no standing? that she would not have a right to a penny of this money, or even to any of the furniture which is in your house? Let me see, how long is it that you have been” — he hesitated awkwardly — “together?”

Dering looked round at him rather fiercely. “We have been married nine years and a half,” he said. “Our wedding day was the first of September. We spent our honeymoon in Denmark. You remember my little legacy?” Wingfield nodded his head. His heart suddenly went out to his friend — the prosperous lawyer had reason to remember that hundred-pound legacy, for ten pounds of it had gone to help him out of some foolish scrape. But Dering had forgotten all that; he went on speaking, but more slowly: “And then, as you know, we came back and settled down in Gray’s Inn, and though we were horribly poor, perhaps poorer than even you ever guessed, we were divinely happy.” He turned his back to the room and stared out once more at the greyness opposite. “But you’re quite right, old man, it’s time we did like our betters! We’ll be married at once, and I’ll take her off for another and a longer honeymoon, and we’ll come back and be even happier than we were before.” Then again, as abruptly as before, he was gone, shutting the door behind him, and leaving Wingfield staring thoughtfully after him.

That his friend, that the Philip Dering of ten years ago, should have done such a thing, was in no way remarkable; but that Louise, the thoughtful, well-balanced, intelligent woman, who, coming as a mere girl from Denmark, had known how to work her way up to a position of great trust and responsibility in a City house — that she should have consented to such — to such … Wingfield even in his own mind hesitated for the right word … to such an arrangement — seemed to the lawyer an astounding thing. No, no; he would certainly not tell Kate anything about it. Why should he? He knew very well how his wife would regard the matter, and how her condemnation would fall, not on Louise — Kate had become excessively fond of Louise — but on Daring. No, there was no reason why Kate should be told a word of this extraordinary, this amazing story.

•   •   •

On leaving Abingdon Street, Philip Dering swung across the broad roadway, and made his way, almost instinctively, to the garden which lay nearly opposite his friend’s office windows. He wanted to calm down, to think things over, and to recover full possession of himself before going home.

It had cost him a considerable effort to tell Wingfield this thing. Not that he was in the least ashamed of what he and Louise had done — on the contrary, he was very proud of it — but he had often felt, during all those years, that he was being treacherous to the man who was, after all, his best friend; and there was in Dering enough of the feminine element to make him feel sorry and ashamed.

However, Wingfield had taken it very well, just as he would have wished him to take it, and no doubt the lawyer had given thoroughly sound advice. This unexpected, this huge legacy made all the difference. Besides, Dering knew well enough, when he examined his own heart and conscience, that he felt very differently about all manner of things from what he had been wont to feel ten years ago. After all, he was following in the footsteps of men greater and wiser than he. It is impossible to be wholly consistent. If he had been consistent, he would have refused to pay certain taxes — in fact, to have been wholly consistent during the last ten years would probably have landed him, England being what it is, in a lunatic asylum! He shuddered, suddenly remembering that for a while his own mother had been insane. Still, as he strode along the primly kept paths of the Thames-side garden, he felt a great and, as he thought, a legitimate pride in the knowledge that in this one all-important matter, so deeply affecting his own and Louise’s life, he and she had triumphantly defied convention, and had come out victorious.

The young man’s thoughts suddenly took a softer, a more intimate turn: he told himself, with intense secret satisfaction, that Louise was dearer, aye, far dearer and more indispensable to him now than she had been during the days when she was still the “sweet stranger whom he called his wife.” From the day when they had first met and made unconventional acquaintance, he had found her full of ever recurrent and enchanting surprises. Her foreign birth and upbringing gave her both original and unsuspected points of view about everything English, and he had often thought, with good-humoured pity, of all those unfortunate friends of his, Wingfield included, whose lot it had perforce been to choose their wives among their own countrywomen.

Of course it was not always as easy as it seemed to be today. Lately Louise had been listless and tired, utterly unlike herself — even, he had once or twice thought with dismay, slightly hysterical! But all that would disappear utterly during the first few days of their coming travels; and even he, so he now reminded himself, had felt quite unlike his usual sensible self — Dering was very proud of his good sense — since had come the news of this wonderful, this fairy-gift-like legacy.

•   •   •

The young man passed out of the garden, his feet stepping from the soft shell-strewn gravel on to the wide pavement which borders the Houses of Parliament. He made his way round swiftly, each buoyant step a challenge to fate, to the Members’ Entrance, and so across the road to the gate which leads into what was once the old parish churchyard of Westminster. It was still too cold to sit out of doors, and after a momentary hesitation he turned into Westminster Abbey by the great north door.

Dering had not been in the Abbey since he was a child, and the spirit of quietude which fills the broad nave and narrow aisles on early spring days soothed his restlessness. Suddenly he saw, at right angles with himself, and moving across the choir, a group of four people, consisting of a man, a woman, and two children. The man was Jack Hinton, the idle, ill-conditioned artist neighbour of his in Bedford Park, to whom there had been more than one reference in his talk with Wingfield; the children were Agatha and Mary Hinton, the motherless girls of the Danish woman to whom Louise had been so much devoted; and the fourth figure was that of Louise herself. His wife’s back was turned to Dering, but even without the other three he would have known the tall, graceful figure, if only by the masses of fair, almost lint-white hair, arranged in low coils below her neat hat.

Dering felt no wish to join the little party. He was still too excited, too interested in his own affairs, to care for making and hearing small talk. Still, a look of satisfaction came over his face as he watched the four familiar figures finally disappear round a pillar. How pleased Louise would be when he told her of his latest scheme, that of commissioning the unfortunate Hinton to paint her portrait! If only the man could be induced to work, he might really make something of his life, after all. Dering meant to give the artist one hundred pounds, and his heart glowed at the thought of what such a sum would mean in the untidy, womanless little house in which his wife took so tender and kindly an interest.

Dering and Jack Hinton had never exactly hit it off together, though they had known each other for many years, and though they had both married Danish wives. The one felt for the other the worker’s wordless contempt for the incorrigible idler. Yet, Dering had been very sorry for Hinton at the time of poor Mrs. Hinton’s death, and he liked to think that now he would be able to do the artist a good turn. He had even thought very seriously of offering to adopt the youngest Hinton child, a baby now nearly a year old; but a certain belated feeling of prudence, of that common sense which often tempers the wind to the reckless enthusiast, had given him pause. After all, he and Louise might have children of their own, and,then the position of this little interloper might be an awkward one.

•   •   •

Dering left the Abbey by the door which gives access to the cloisters. There he spent half an hour in pleasant meditation before he started home. The contrast between the stir and unceasing sound of the broad Bath Road and the stillness of Lady Rich Road struck Dering with a sense of unwonted pleasure. As he put his latchkey in the front door, he remembered that his wife had told him that their young Danish servant was to have that day her evening out. Well, so much the better: they would have their talk, their discussion concerning their future plans, without fear of eavesdropping or interruption.

Various little signs showed that Louise was already back from town. Dering went straight upstairs, and, as he began taking off his boots, he called out to her, though the door between his room and hers was shut: “Do come in here, for I have so much to tell you!” But there came no answering word, and after a moment he heard his wife’s soft footsteps going down the house.

When he entered the dining-room, he found Louise standing by the table on which lay spread their simple supper.

She gave him a quick, questioning glance, then: “I saw you in the Abbey,” she said in a constrained, hesitating voice; “why did you not come up and speak to us? Mr. Hinton was on his way to some office, and I brought the children back alone.”

“If I had known that was going to be the case,” said Dering frankly, “I should have joined you; but I had just been spending an hour with Wingfield, and — well, I didn’t feel in the mood to make small talk for Hinton!”

He waited a moment, but she made no comment. Louise had always been a silent, listening woman, and this had made her seem to eager, ardent Philip a singularly restful companion. He went on, happily at first, rather nervously toward the close of his sentence, “Well, everything is settled — even to my will. But I found Wingfield had to know — I mean about our old arrangement.”

“Then you told him? I do not think you should have done that.” Louise spoke very slowly, and in a low voice. “I asked you if I might do so before telling Gerda Hinton.”

Dering looked at her deprecatingly. He felt both surprised and sorry. It was almost the first time in their life together that she had uttered to him anything savouring of a rebuke.

“Please forgive my having told Wingfield without first consulting with you,” he said at once; “but, you see, the absurd, the abominable state of the English law is such that in case of my sudden death you would have no right to any of this money. Besides, apart from that fact, if I trusted to my own small legal knowledge and made a will in which you were mentioned, you would probably have trouble with those odious relations of mine. So I simply had to tell him.”

Dering saw that the discussion was beginning to be very painful and disagreeable; he felt a pang of impatient regret that he had spoken to his wife now, instead of waiting until she had had a thorough change and holiday.

Louise was still standing opposite to him, looking straight before her and avoiding his anxious glances. Suddenly he became aware that her lip was trembling, and that her eyes were full of tears; quickly he walked round to where she was standing, and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I am sorry, very sorry, that I had to tell Wingfield,” he said; “but, darling, why should you mind so much? He was quite sympathetic: he thoroughly understood.”

Dering’s hand travelled from his wife’s shoulder to her waist, and he held her to him, unresisting but strangely passive, as he added: “You can guess, my dearest, what Wingfield, in his character of solicitor, advises us to do? Of course, in a sense it will be a fall from grace — but, after all, we shan’t love one another the less because we have been to a registry office, or spent a quarter of an hour in a church! I do think that we should follow his advice. He will let me know tomorrow what formalities have to be fulfilled to carry the thing through, and then, dear heart, we will go off for a second honeymoon. Sometimes I wonder if you realise what this money means to us both — I mean in the way of freedom and of added joy.”

But Louise still turned from him, and, as she disengaged herself, he could see the slow, reluctant tears rolling down her cheek.

Dering felt keenly distressed. The long strain, the gallantly endured poverty, the constant anxiety, had evidently told on his wife more than he had known. “Don’t let’s talk about it any more!” he exclaimed. “There’s no hurry about it now, after all.”

“I would rather talk about it now, Philip. I don’t — I don’t at all understand what you mean. It is surely too late for us now to talk of marriage? The time remaining to us is too short to make it worth while.”

Dering looked at her bewildered. Well as she spoke the language, she had remained very ignorant of England and of English law. “I will try and explain to you,” he said gently, “why Wingfield has made it quite clear to me that we shall have to go through some kind of legal ceremony@”

“But there are so few months,” she repeated, and he felt her trembling; “it is not as if you were likely to die before September; besides, if you were to do so, I should not care about the money.”

For the first time a glimmer of what she meant, of what she was thinking, came into Dering’s mind. He felt strongly moved and deeply touched. This, then, was why she had seemed so preoccupied, so unlike herself, of late. “My darling, surely you do not imagine — that I am thinking — of leaving you?”

“No,” and for the first time Louise, as she uttered the word, looked up straight into Dering’s face, “No, it was not of you that I was thinking — but of myself.…”

“Let us sit down.” Dering’s voice was so changed, so uneager, so cold, that Louise, for the first time during their long partnership, felt as if she were with a stranger. “I want thoroughly to understand your point of view. Do you mean to say that when we first arranged matters you intended our — our marriage to be, in any case, only a temporary union?” He waited for her answer, looking at her with a still grimness, an unfamiliar antagonism, that raised in her a feeling of resentment, and renewed her courage. “Please tell me,” he said again, “I think you owe me the truth, and I really wish to know.”

Then she spoke, and though her hands still trembled, her voice was quite steady, “Yes, Philip, I will tell you the truth, though I fear you will not like to hear it. When I first accepted the proposal you made to me, I felt convinced that, as regarded myself, the feeling which brought us together would be eternal, but I as fully believed that with you that same feeling would be only temporary. I was ready to remain with you as long as you would have me do so; but I felt sure that you would grow tired of me someday, and I told myself — secretly, of course, for I could not have insulted you or myself by saying such a thing to you then — I told myself, I say, that when that day came, the day of your weariness of me, I would go away, and make no further demand upon you.”

“You really believed that I should grow tired of you, that I should wish to leave you?” Dering looked at her as a man might look at a stranger who has suddenly revealed some sinister and grotesque peculiarity of appearance or manner.

“Certainly I did so. How could I divine that you alone would be different from all the men of whom I had ever heard? Still, I loved you so well — ah, Philip, I did love you so — that I would have come to you on any terms, as indeed I did come on terms very injurious to myself. But what matters now what I then thought? I see that I was wrong — you have been faithful to me in word, thought, and deed@”

“Yes,” said Dering fiercely, “that is so! Go on!”

“I also have been faithful to you@” she hesitated. “Yes, I think I may truly say it — in thought, word, and deed.” Dering drew a long breath, and she went slowly on. “But I have realised, and that for some time past, that the day would come when I should no longer wish to be so — when I should wish to be free. I have gradually regained possession of myself, and, though I know I must fulfil all my obligations to you for the time I promised, I long for the moment of release, for the moment when I shall at last have the right to forget, as much as such things can ever be forgotten, these ten years of my life.”

As she spoke, pronouncing each word clearly, in the foreign fashion, her voice gained a certain sombre confidence, and a flood of awful, hopeless bitterness filled the heart of the man sitting opposite to her. “And have you thought,” he asked in a constrained voice, “what you are going to do? I know you have sometimes regretted your work; do you intend — or perhaps you have already applied to Mr. Farningham?”

“No,” she answered, and, unobserved by him, for he was staring down at the tablecloth with unseeing eyes, a deep pink flush made her look suddenly girlish; “that will not be necessary. I have, as you know, regretted my work, and of late I have sometimes thought that, things being as they were, you acted with cruel thoughtlessness in compelling me to give it all up. But in my new life there will be much for me to do.”

“I do not ask you,” he said suddenly, hoarsely; “I could not insult you by asking …”

“I do not think” — she spoke slowly, answering the look, the intonation, rather than the words — “that I am going to do anything unworthy.”

But Dering, with sharp suspicion, suddenly became aware that she had changed colour. His mind glanced quickly over their comparatively small circle of friends and acquaintances — first one, then another familiar figure rose, hideously vivid, before him. He felt helpless, bewildered, fettered. “Do you contemplate leaving me for another man?” he asked quietly.

Again Louise hesitated a moment. “Yes,” she said at length, “that is what I am going to do. I did not mean to tell you now — though I admit that later, before the end, you would have had a right to know. The man to whom I am going, and who is not only willing, but anxious, to make me his wife, I mean his legal wife,” — she gave Dering a quick, strange look — “has great need of me, far more so than you ever had. My feeling for him is not in any way akin to what was once my feeling for you; that does not come twice; but my affection, my — my — regard will be, in this case, I believe, more enduring; and, as you know, I dearly love his children, and promised their mother to take care of them.”

While she spoke, Dering, looking fixedly at her, seemed to see a shadowy group of shabby, forlorn human beings form itself and take up its stand by her side — Jack Hinton, with his weak, handsome face and shifty, pleading eyes, his two plain, neglected-looking little girls, and then, cradled as he had so often seen it in Louise’s arms, the ugly and, to him, repulsive-looking baby.

What chance had he, what memories had their common barren past, to fight this intangible appealing vision?

He raised his hand and held it for a moment over his eyes, in a vain attempt to shut out both that which he had evoked and the sight of the woman whose repudiation of himself only seemed to make more plainly visible the bonds which linked them the one to the other. Then he turned away with a certain deliberation, and, having closed the door, walked quickly through the little hall, flinging himself bareheaded into the open air.

•   •   •

For the second time that day Philip Dering felt an urgent need of solitude in which to hold communion with himself. And yet, when striding along the dimly lighted solitary thoroughfares, the stillness about him seemed oppressive, and the knowledge that he was encompassed by commonplace, contented folk intolerable.

And so, scarcely knowing where his feet were leading him, he made his way at last into the broad, brilliantly lighted Bath Road, now full of glare, of sound, and of movement, for throngs of workers, passing to and fro, were seeking the amusement and excitement of the street after their long, dull working day.

Very soon Dering’s brain became abnormally active; his busy thoughts took the shape of completed, half-uttered sentences, and he argued with himself, not so loudly that those about him could hear, but still with moving lips, as to the outcome of what Louise had told him that evening.

He was annoyed to find that his thoughts refused to marshal themselves in due sequence. Thus, when trying to concentrate his mind on the question of the immediate future, memories of Gerda Hinton, of the dead woman with whom he had never felt in sympathy, perhaps because Louise had been so fond of her, persistently intervened, and refused to be thrust away. His own present intolerable anguish made him, against his will, retrospectively understand Gerda’s long-drawn-out agony. He remembered, with new, sharp-edged concern and pity, her quiet endurance of those times of ignoble poverty brought about by Hinton’s fits of idleness; he realised for the first time what must have meant, in anguish of body and mind, the woman’s perpetual child-bearing, and the death of two of her children, followed by her own within a fortnight of her last baby’s birth.

Then, with sudden irritation, he asked himself why he, Philip Dering, should waste his short time for thought in sorrowing over this poor dead woman? And, in swift answer, there came to him the knowledge why this sad drab ghost had thus thrust herself upon him tonight.

A feeling of furious anger, of revolt against the very existence of Jack Hinton, swept over him. So base, so treacherous, so selfish a creature fulfilled no useful purpose in the universe. Men hung murderers; and was Hinton, who had done his wife to death with refinement of cruelty, to go free — free to murder, in the same slow way, another woman, and one who actually belonged to Dering’s own self?

He now recognised, with bewilderment, that had Louise become his legal wife ten years ago, the thought of what she proposed to do would never have even crossed her mind.

The conviction that Hinton was not fit to live soon followed itself into a stable background to all Dering’s subsequent thoughts, to his short hesitations, and to his final determination.

After a while he looked at his watch, and found, with some surprise, that he had been walking up and down for over an hour; he also became aware, for the first time, that his bare, hatless head provoked, now and again, good-natured comment from those among whom he was walking. He turned into a side street, and taking from his pocket a small notebook, wrote the few lines which later played an important part in determining, to the satisfaction of his friends, the fact that he was, when writing them, most probably of unsound mind.

What Dering wrote down in his notebook ran as follows:

1. I buy a hat at Dunn’s, if Dunn be still open (which is probable).

2. I call on the doctor who was so kind to the Hintons last year and settle his account. It is doubtful if Hinton ever paid him — in fact, there can be no doubt that Hinton did not pay him. I there make my will and inform the doctor that he will certainly be wanted shortly at Number 8 Lady Rich Road.

3. I buy that revolver (if guaranteed in perfect working order) which I have so frequently noticed in the pawnbroker’s window, and I give him five shillings for showing me how to manage it. Mem. Remember to make him load it, so that there may be no mistake.

4. I wire to Wingfield. This is important. It may save Louise a shock.

5. I go to Hinton’s place, and if the children are already in bed I lock the door, and quietly kill him and then kill myself. If the children are still up, I must, of course, wait awhile. In any case the business will be well over before the doctor can arrive.

Dering shut the notebook with a sigh of relief. The way now seemed clear before him, for he had put down exactly what he meant to do, and in case of doubt or forgetfulness he need only glance at his notes to be set again in the right way.

As he walked slowly along the unlovely narrow streets which run parallel to the Bath Road, his emotional memory brought his wife vividly before him. He began wondering painfully if she would ever understand, if she would ever realise from what he had saved her by that which he was about to do. His knowledge of her character made him feel sure — and there was infinite comfort in the thought — that she would remain silent, that she would never yield to any foolish impulse to tell Wingfield the truth. It was good to feel so sure that his old friend would never know of his failure, of his great and desolate humiliation.

•   •   •

Dering spent the next hour exactly as he had planned; in fact, at no point of the programme did his good fortune desert him. Thus, even the doctor, a man called Johnstone, who might so easily have been out, was at home; and, though actually giving a little stag party, he good-naturedly consented to leave his guests for a few moments, in spite of the fact that the stranger waiting in the surgery had refused to state his business.

“My name is Dering. I think you must often have met my wife when you were attending the late Mrs. Hinton. In fact, I’ve come tonight to settle the Hintons’ account. I fancy it is still owing?”

Dering spoke with abrupt energy, looking straight, and almost with a frown, as he spoke, into the other’s kindly florid face.

“Oh, yes, the account is still owing.” Dr. Johnstone spoke with a certain eagerness. “Then do I understand that you are acting for Mr. Hinton in the matter? The amount is exactly ten pounds.” He paused awkwardly, and not till the two banknotes were actually lying on his surgery table before him did he believe in his good fortune. The Hintons’ account had long since passed into that class of doctor’s bill which is only kept on the books with a view to the ultimate sale of the practice, and this last quarter the young man had not even troubled to send it in again.

Johnstone remembered poor Mrs. Hinton’s friend very well; Mrs. Dering had been splendid, perfectly splendid, as nurse and comforter to the distracted household. And then, such a pretty woman, too, the very type — quiet, sensible, self-contained, and yet feminine — that Dr. Johnstone admired; he was always pleased when he met her walking about the neighbourhood.

This, then, was her husband? The doctor stared across at Dering with some curiosity. Well, he also, though, of course, in quite another way, was uncommon and attractive-looking. What was it he had heard about these people quite lately? Why, of course!

One of his old lady patients in Bedford Park had told him that her opposite neighbours, this Mr. and Mrs. Dering, had come into a large fortune — something like fifty thousand pounds!

Dr. Johnstone looked at his visitor with a sudden accession of respect. If he could have foreseen this interview, he might have made his account with Mr. Hinton bear rather more relation to the actual number of visits he had been compelled to pay to that unfortunate household. Still, he reminded himself that even ten pounds was very welcome just now, and his heart warmed to Mr. Hinton’s generous friend.

Suddenly Dering began speaking: “I forget if I told you that I am starting this very night for a long journey, and before doing so I want to ask you to do me a@”

His host became all pleased attention.

“Would you kindly witness my will? I have just come into a sum of money, and — and, though my will is actually being drawn up by a friend, who is also a lawyer, I have felt uneasy@”

“I quite understand. You have thought it wise to make a provisional will? Well, that’s a very sensible thing to do! We medical men see much trouble caused by foolish postponement in such matters. Some men seem to think that making a will is tantamount to signing their own death-warrant!”

But no answering smile brightened Dering’s fiercely set face: he did not seem to have heard what the doctor had said. “If I might ask you for a sheet of notepaper. I see a pen and blotting-pad over there@”

A sudden, instinctive misgiving crossed the other’s mind. “This is rather informal, isn’t it? Of course, I have no call to interfere, Mr. Dering; but if a large sum is involved, might it not be better to wait?”

Dering looked up. For the first time he smiled. “I don’t wish to make any mystery about it, Dr. Johnstone. I am leaving everything to my wife, and after her to sundry young people in whom we are both interested. If I die intestate, I understand that distant relatives of my own — people whom I don’t like, and who have never done anything for me — are bound to benefit.” Even as he spoke he was busy writing the words, “To Louise Larsen (commonly known as Mrs. Philip Dering), of 9 Lady Rich Road, Bedford Park, and after her death to be divided equally between the children of my esteemed friend, James Wingfield, solicitor, of 24 Abingdon Street, Westminster, and the children of the late Mrs. John Hinton, of 8 Lady Rich Road, Bedford Park.”

Short as was Dering’s will, the last portion of it was written on the inner sheet of the piece of notepaper bearing the doctor’s address, and the two witnesses, Johnstone himself, and a friend whom he fetched out of his smoking-room for the purpose, could not help seeing what generous provision the testator had made for the younger generation.

As the doctor opened the front door for his, as he hoped, new friend, Dering suddenly pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket. “I have forgotten a most important thing,” — there was real dismay in his fresh, still youthful voice — “and that is to ask you kindly to look round at No. 8 Lady Rich Road after your friends have left you tonight. I should think about twelve o’clock would do very well. In fact, Hinton won’t be ready for you before. And, Dr. Johnstone, in view of the trouble to which you may be put” — Dering thrust another banknote into the other man’s hand. “I know you ought to have charged a lot more than that ten pounds@” And then, before words of thanks could be uttered, he had turned and gone down the steps, along the little path, through the iron gate which swung under the red lamp, into the darkness beyond.

•   •   •

Down the broad and now solitary Bath Road, filled with the strange, brooding stillness of a spring dawn, clattered discordantly a hansom cab.

There was promise of a bright, warm day, such a day as yesterday had been; but Wingfield, leaning forward, unconsciously willing the horse to go faster, felt very cold. Not for the first time during this interminable journey, he took from his breast pocket the unsigned telegram which was the cause of his being here, driving, oh! how slowly, along this fantastically empty thoroughfare.

“Philip Dering is dead please come at once at once at once to eight Lady Rich Road.”

Wingfield, steadying the slip of paper as it fluttered in his hand, looked down with frowning, puzzled eyes at the pencilled words.

The message had been sent off just before midnight, and had reached his house, he supposed, an hour and a half later, for the persistent knocking at his front door had gone on for some time before he or his wife realised that the loud hammering sound concerned themselves. Even then it had been Kate who had at last roused herself and gone downstairs; Kate who had rushed up breathless, whispering, as she thrust the orange envelope into his hand: “Oh, James, what can it be? Thank God, all the children are safe at home!”

No time had been lost. While he was dressing, his wife had made him a cup of tea, kind and solicitous of his comfort, but driving him nearly distracted by her eager, excited talk and aimless conjectures. It had seemed long before he found a derelict cab willing to drive him from Regent’s Terrace to Bedford Park, but now — well, thank God, he was at last nearing the place where he would learn what had befallen the man who had been, next to his own elder boy, the creature he had loved best in, his calm, phlegmatic life.

Wingfield went on staring down at the mysterious and yet explicit message, of which the wording seemed to him so odd — in some ways recalling Dering’s familiar trick of reiteration. Then suddenly he thought of Hinton. With a sudden revulsion of feeling, the lawyer folded up the telegram and put it back into his breast pocket — this mysterious, unsigned request for his immediate presence had obviously been dispatched by Hinton. How stupid of him not to have realised this at once, the more so that No. 8 Lady Rich Road was Hinton’s address, not that of Dering. Quickly he raised his hand to the trapdoor above his head. “Pull up at Number 8, not, as I told you, at Number 9, Lady Rich Road,” he shouted.

•   •   •

The radiance of an early spring morning, so kind to everything in nature, is pitiless to that which owes its being to the ingenuity and industry of human hands. Dr. Johnstone, standing opposite a police inspector in what had been poor Mrs. Hinton’s cherished, if untidy and shabby, little sitting-room, felt his wretchedness and shame — for he felt very deeply ashamed — perceptibly increased by the dust-laden sunbeams dancing slantwise about him.

The inspector was really sorry for him, though a little contemptuous perhaps of a medical man capable of showing such emotion and horror in the face of death. “Why, doctor, you mustn’t take on so! How could you possibly have told what was in the man’s mind? You weren’t upset like this last year over that business in Angle Alley, and that was a sight worse than this, eh?”

But Johnstone had turned away, and was staring out of the bow window. “It isn’t that poor wretch Hinton that’s upset me,” he muttered. “I don’t mind death. It’s — it’s — Dering — Dering and Mrs. Dering.” Reluctant tears filled his tired, red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m sorry, too. Very sorry for the lady, that is; as for the other — well, I’m pretty sure he’ll cheat Broadmoor, and that without much delay, eh, doctor? Hullo! who’s this coming now?” The tone suddenly changed, became at once official and alert in quality, as the sound of wheels stopped opposite the little gate. When the front door bell pealed through the house he added, “You go to the door, doctor; whoever it is had better not see me at first.” And Johnstone found himself suddenly pushed out of the room and into the little hall.

There he hesitated for a moment, looking furtively round at the half-open door which led into the back room fitted up as a studio, where still lay, in dreadful juxtaposition, the dead and the dying, Hinton and his murderer, alone, save for the indifferent watchful presence of a trained nurse.

Another impatient peal of sound echoed through the house, and the doctor, walking slowly forward, opened the front door.

“Can I see Mr. Hinton? Or is he next door? I have driven down from town in response to this telegram. I was Mr. Philip Dering’s oldest friend and solicitor@”

“Then — then it was you who were making his will?”

The question struck Wingfield as unseemly. How had this young man, whom he took to be one of Hinton’s dissipated friends, learned even this one fact concerning poor Dering’s affairs? “Yes,” he said shortly, as he walked through into the hall, “that was the case. But, of course — well, perhaps you will kindly inform me where I can see Mr. Hinton?” he repeated impatiently. “I suppose he is with Mrs. Dering, at Number 9?” And the other noticed that he left the door open behind him, evidently intending to leave Hinton’s house as soon as he had obtained a reply to his question.

For a moment the two men looked at one another in exasperated silence. Then, very suddenly, Johnstone did that of which he was afterward sorry and self-reproachful. But his nerve was completely gone; for hours he had been engaged in what had proved both a terrible and a futile task, that of attempting to relieve the physical agony of a man for whose state he partly held himself to be responsible. He wished to avoid, at any rate for the present, the repetition to the stranger of what had happened the night before, and so, “Please come this way,” he muttered hoarsely. “I ought perhaps to warn you — to prepare you for something of a shock.” And, turning round, beckoning to the other to follow him, he opened the door of the studio, stepping aside to allow Wingfield to pass in before him. But once through the doorway the lawyer suddenly recoiled and stopped short, so dreadful and so unexpected was the sight which then met his eyes.

Focussed against a blurred background made up of distempered light-green walls, a curtainless open window, and various plain deal studio properties pushed back against the wall, lay, stretched out on some kind of low couch brought forward into the middle of the room, a rigid, motionless figure. The lower half of the figure, including the feet, which rested on a chair placed at the bottom of the couch, was entirely covered by a blanket; but the chest and head, slightly raised by pillows, seemed swathed and bound up in broad strips of white linen, which concealed chin and forehead, hair and ears, while the head was oddly supported by a broad band or sling fastened with safety-pins — Wingfield’s eyes took note of every detail — to the side of the couch. Under the blanket, which was stretched tightly across the man’s breast, could be seen the feeble twitching of fingers, but, even so, the only sense of life and feeling seemed to the onlooker centred in the eyes, whose glance Wingfield found himself fearing yet longing to meet.

To the right of the couch a large Japanese screen had been so placed as to hide some object spread out on the floor. To the left, watching every movement of the still, recumbent figure, stood a powerful-looking woman in nursing dress. Wingfield’s gaze, after wandering round the large, bare room, returned and again clung to the sinister, immobile form which he longed to be told was that of Hinton, and as he gazed he forced himself to feel a fierce gladness and relief in the knowledge that Dering was dead — that in his pocket lay the telegram which proved it.

At last, to gain courage and to stifle a horrible doubt, he compelled himself to meet those at once indifferent and appealing eyes, which seemed to stare fixedly beyond the group of men by the door; and suddenly the lawyer became aware that just behind him hurried whispered words were being uttered.

“This gentleman is Mr. Dering’s solicitor; perhaps he will be able to throw some light on the whole affair,” and he felt himself being plucked by the sleeve and gently pulled back into the hall.

“It is — isn’t it? — poor Hinton?” and he looked imploringly from one man to the other.

“Hinton?” said the doctor sharply. “He’s there, sure enough — but you didn’t see him, for we put him under a sheet, behind that screen. Your friend shot him dead first, and then cut his own throat, but he didn’t set about that in quite the right way, so he’s alive still, as you can see.”

“And where is Mrs. Dering?” Wingfield spoke in a quiet, mechanical voice; and Johnstone felt angered by his callousness.

“We’ve just sent her back into the next house,” he answered curtly, “and made her take the Hinton children with her. For — well, it often is so in such cases, you know — the presence of his wife seems positively to distress Mr. Dering; besides, the nurse and I can do, and have done, all that is possible.”

“And have you no clue to what has happened? Has Dering been able to give no explanation of this — this — horrible business?”

Johnstone shook his head. “Of course he can’t speak. He will never speak again. He wrote a few words to his wife, but they amounted to nothing save regret that he had bungled the last half of the affair.”

“And what do you yourself think?” Wingfield spoke calmly and authoritatively. He had suddenly become aware, during the last few moments, that he was speaking to a medical man.

“I haven’t had time to think much about it”; the tone was rough and sore. “Mr. Dering seems to have come into a large sum of money, and such things have been known to upset men’s brains before now.”

“Still, he might write something of consequence now that this gentleman has come,” interposed the inspector.

But when Wingfield, standing by that which he now knew was indeed his friend, watched the painful, laboured moving of the pencil across the slate which had been hurriedly fetched some two hours before from the young Hintons’ nursery, all he saw, traced again and again, were the words: “Look after Louise. Look after Louise.…” and then at last: “I mean to die. I mean to die. I mean to die.”

“McClure’s Magazine”, August 1909

GRIM HOUSE

Richard Connell

1921

In an out-of-the-way corner of the suburb of Pelham Manor, on the rim of Greater New York, stood a deserted house, Which had once been painted a bluish gray, but which was now dull and ashen as if it had grown pale and bloodless with the passing years. It was an old, square, wooden structure of some twenty rooms, one of those high-ceilinged mid-Victorian arks, whose jig-sawed gingerbread served to accentuate rather than relieve its forbidding, cheerless austerity.

Time was, no doubt, when it had been a fine mansion, a country house, even, and one of the floating stories connected with it was that President Grant had once dined beneath the carved gilt gas chandeliers of the dining room, a paneled, cavelike room, now dim, dank, and dirty. But its original owners had long since passed to the land where, it is almost safe to say, there is no mid-Victorian architecture, and now the old house was in a state of dilapidation approaching almost on decay, with blinds askew, windowpanes broken, and the lawns a jungle of weeds. The house was surrounded by five or six acres of grounds, studded with pine trees, which were also moth-eaten and dismal, and a privet hedge, which was unkempt.

No one had lived there in years, and it was believed by some of the dwellers in the small, modern houses near it to be haunted. Others, of a more materialistic mind, declared that the occasional sounds heard near it were nothing more ghostly than the wind in the pines. The neighbors, however, agreed that it was not the sort of place one would care to spend a night in; it was sinister, somehow. Someone once called it “The Grim House,” and that became its familiar name.

•   •   •

I had always taken an interest in The Grim House since the time, some years ago, when I bought the house nearest it — a little place, separated from the privet hedge by a small field and a road. In the daytime I never passed the old place without thinking of a broken-down aristocrat, aloof and sullen, clinging to the husk of a former grandeur. At night, when a late visit to some patient caused me to be out, I must confess I always was a little glad when I had passed that ragged privet hedge, through the gaps of which I could get glimpses of the black bulk of The Grim House, lonely and silent amid the pine trees.

By a species of self-analysis I tried to discover why I, a middle-aged physician with a good, steady set of nerves, should quicken my footsteps almost automatically while passing the deserted house. But I could discover no tangible source for the effect it had on my imagination.

One moonless October night I was returning late from the deathbed of a patient of mine, and I was musing on the grotesque game we call life, when I approached the road leading past The Grim House.

I stopped, startled. Through a gap in the hedge I could see lights moving in the old mansion. My first thought was of burglars or tramps, but I quickly perceived that it could be neither. A large motor van stood at the gate and by the light of its lamps I could see the figures of four or five men coming and going, bearing large objects that were not clearly discernible in the darkness. They were not taking things from the old house; they were carrying things into it.

I drew nearer, curious to see more of this midnight moving. A tall man, who appeared to supervising it, struck a match to light his cigarette, and in the fluttering flame I had a momentary glimpse at his face. It was a keen, pale face, with a sharp black beard, and the flickering light distorted it, making it look like a Chinese theatrical mask.

Apparently I had arrived as the last of the load was being carried into the house, for before I could start on my way again, all the men, with the exception of the bearded man, jumped into the moving van, and it rumbled away. The tall man stood at the gate a moment, watching the tail lights disappear. I thought it would be only neighborly to pass the time of day, or night, with him, and besides, I admit, I was impelled by a certain curiosity to see what manner of man would choose The Grim House to move into at midnight. So I advanced and said pleasantly:

“Good evening.”

The man started back as if I had struck at him with a knife. A thin, pale stream of light came through the open door of the house and down the path, and I could see his face. It was contorted with fear, suspicion, hate.

“Who the devil are you?” he questioned fiercely, and I saw his hand go behind him toward his hip pocket.

“I’m very sorry if I alarmed you,” I said affably. “I’m one of your neighbors. Doctor Wain is my name. I’m just returning from a late call.”

The demeanor underwent a quick and curious change. From snarling hostility it changed abruptly to a politeness so ingratiating that it seemed almost artificial.

“Oh, my dear Doctor Wain, forgive my rudeness,” he said in a voice that seemed to me to purr. “One naturally must be on one’s guard in a strange place, you know.”

“Of course,” I assented, “but you need not worry about thieves or tramps out here. The place is singularly free from them.”

“That is fortunate — for them,” he said.

“For them?” I repeated, mystified.

“You see,” explained my neighbor, “I am a somewhat nervous man, so I keep four very large and fierce Great Danes. They are trained to tear the throat out of any person who should venture on my property after dark.”

He looked at me steadily as he said this, and there was a note in his voice that disturbed me; I could not help feeling that he was giving me a warning.

“Well, good night,” he said abruptly and went crunching up the gravel walk.

I walked on to my own house slowly. He had not mentioned his name. He had given me no clew as to why he had taken The Grim House. But he had given me a very definite warning not to go there after dark.

The next morning I glanced at the old house, but there were no signs of occupancy; the new tenant was not to be seen. But late that night I heard the chug of a motor van and from my study window I saw the midnight movers at work again.

I do not approve of prying into one’s neighbors’ private affairs, but I felt that the circumstances in this case warranted my watching The Grim House. The objects the men carried were evidently quite heavy; frequently it took all four of them to carry one piece The sky was overcast and the moon gave forth only an occasional feeble beam, so that it was impossible for me to see what they were carrying into the house; of one thing I felt sure, and that was that their load was not ordinary furniture. Once, as they were carrying what I thought at first to be an enormous vase, as tall as a man, the moon, for just a second, came from behind a cloud, and its rays were reflected by the shiny surface of the strange object. Then the moon retired, and in the dimmer light I saw one of the men slip and I heard the shivering crash of breaking glass. My bearded neighbor broke into a fit of swearing.

I never remember hearing a man so completely lose control of himself; he raged and cursed like a wild thing.

“You clumsy dogs,” I heard him say angrily, “that was worth two thousand dollars.”

Several more of these large glass objects were unloaded, with great care, and carried into the house. Then I heard what I believed to be hammer blows, as if some repairing were being done.

I sat at my window, letting my fancy supply all sorts of strange solutions to the riddle I had witnessed, when I heard a sound that froze my blood.

It was a prolonged, eerie, moaning sound, now very loud, now falling way to a deep, guttural muttering. Then the moon came out, and I made out, vaguely, several black shapes roving through the tall grass of The Grim House lawn. Animals as big as small ponies! I had heard the baying of the giant dogs that my neighbor said would tear the throat out of any nocturnal visitor.

When I passed The Grim House next day, I took good care to keep clear of the hedge, for I had small wish to encounter the savage brutes. I noticed that all the blinds were in place and that new windowpanes had been put in, making the decaying house look like some ancient, dissipated roué trying to put on a bold front with new spectacles and a new necktie. Also, I observed that a large sign hung near the front gate:

NO ADMITTANCE,
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
Beware of the Dogs.

Several days passed. The man was a quiet enough neighbor; I never saw him during the day at all, and I’d have scarcely known The Grim House was occupied had I not seen lights there occasionally, or, now and then, heard the baying of the Great Danes, as they roamed about, a menace to any person who ventured to approach the old house and its secluded occupant.

About a week after The Grim House had become inhabited, I became aware that my neighbor with the black beard was not a hermit; he had a companion. I made this discovery as the result of an odd adventure.

I was strolling along past the privet hedge that girdled the old house, having found out that the dogs were kenneled up during the day, and was peering through the hedge, where it was thin enough, when I became aware that two sharp eyes were watching me through the leaves.

I paused, and made out the sketchy outlines of a face; it was not my neighbor of the beard, but a little, old man, with a wizened, lined face, like faded leather; it was the sort of face one seldom sees except on beds of pain.

As our eyes met, he looked alarmed; he glanced behind him several times, as if to see if he were watched.

“Good evening,” I said to him.

For reply the old man opened wide his mouth and pointed into it. Then he shut it and motioned with his arm toward my house; it was a motion as if he would push me away. The gesture said as plainly as words could that I had better go to my own home and avoid the vicinity of The Grim House. But although the old man seemed to have a real concern for my safety, I stood rooted to the spot, for with the trained eye of a physician I had followed the finger of the man when he had pointed to his open mouth, and I had seen a shocking thing. The man had no tongue!

Before I could answer his wordless warning, the old man turned and skurried away toward the house like a venerable frightened rabbit. As he went I could see that he was dressed in the semiformal garb of an English manservant.

A fascination that was stronger than my half-formed fears caused me to pass close to the hedge at about the same time the following evening; I was convinced that his gesture had not been a hostile one. As I passed along the hedge a wrinkled, bony hand was thrust through the hedge, and I started back, fearing, in a sudden panic, a knife thrust, but the hand of the tongueless old man contained nothing more deadly than a scrap of paper, which I took.

I unfolded the scrap of rough wrapping paper, but before I could read the message he had turned and hurried away. In a convulsive, hurried scrawl I read:

If my master asks you to dinner, for God’s sake, don’t come.

Back in my study I read the note again and again, and I looked out at the great, square shape of the old house with a renewed interest.

That night I was called to New York for a consultation, and didn’t get home till nearly one o’clock. It was a cool, crisp autumn night and before retiring I looked out at the shadowy outlines of The Grim House. A beam of light stealing through a chink in the blind told me that it was brilliantly lighted inside, but there was nothing unusual about that. My neighbor, I had long since concluded, was a very late reader, or else he was afraid of the dark. Tired, I went to bed at once, and had fallen into a doze, when the night was cut by a sound so ghastly and terrible that I bounded from my bed, trembling, It was the scream of a human being, a man, in an extremity of pain and terror, and it came from The Grim House. it was followed by words, shrieked, almost squealed:

“Mercy, mercy, for God’s sake, mercy, mer@”

And then there was a muffled crash, and dead, awful silence.

I did not go up to The Grim House, as a braver man might have done; I quieted my conscience by telling myself that the tall man with the black beard could take care of himself. As for the old servant, it could not have been he who cried out.

I did not sleep well the rest of the night, and at daybreak I was awake. I looked out of the window where I could see the sickly gray walls of The Grim House, looking like the ghost of a dwelling in the morning mist. I saw that my fears for the safety of my bearded neighbor were unfounded, for I made out his figure, surrounded his huge dogs, which fawned about him and sprang into the air to snatch bits of meat from his hand. Then a second figure, bent and small, came from the house, carrying a platter with more meat, and I recognized the tongueless servant, who held the platter while the black-bearded man made the great brutes beg for their breakfast. Who was it, then, who had cried out in the night in such anguish of body and spirit?

After that incident, I decided that it was my duty as a responsible member of the community to keep an even closer watch on The Grim House. My curiosity had a lot to do with it, too, for what I had seen and heard served to deepen the atmosphere of mystery old place had always held for me.

Two nights after I had heard the cry, the noise of a motor car at The Grim House gate brought me to my observation post, and I saw the tall, bearded tenant alight from one of the public taxicabs, followed by another man. The man, so far as I could tell in the moonlight, was young, rather fat, and roughly dressed. From the way he lurched as he went up the walk, I judged that he had been drinking. My neighbor, however, walked with a straight and steady step, sometimes helping his companion by taking him by the arm. They disappeared into the house, the lights were lit, and I heard no more that night.

The nocturnal visitors of my bearded neighbor increased in number. Sometimes for a whole week, he brought home someone with him every night, usually around midnight, and always — of this I felt certain — a different person. Most of his visitors appeared to be young. Several times there were women. This continued for nearly a month. The visitors were quiet enough; once the door of The Grim House closed behind them, I had no cause to complain, for I never heard a sound after that. The Great Danes could be seen, now and then, roaming through the uncut grass of the lawn, but they, too, it seemed, had taken on the silence of the old house, and their baying grew more and more infrequent.

A motley collection of visitors came out with my bearded neighbor, always at night, and I had about decided to put him down as a harmless eccentric, possibly a bit demented, who enjoyed playing the Caliph of Bagdad, when one of those clear and obvious things which are often so near and plain that one does not perceive them, struck me. Although I had seen my strange neighbor leave the grounds early in the evening numerous times, I had never seen a single one of his guests leave!

The only exit from the grounds of The Grim House lay directly in the path of my observation, and I felt sure that had any of that numerous company of nocturnal visitors left I’d have seen them. I smoked many a pipe over the problem that night, and strange, disquieting theories crossed my mind. When I finally retired, only one thought was clear in my brain, and that was that I must get to the bottom of this strange-looking business.

As I left my house the next morning, a man was waiting for me on the walk. I was surprised to recognize the black-bearded tenant of The Grim House.

He made me a sweeping, Continental bow, and, showing his strong, white teeth, wished me a good morning.

“I fear I have been unneighborly,” he said, “but I have been frightfully busy. But now my house is in order, and I hope you’ll do me the honor of dining with me at seven-thirty tonight.”

I thought of the warning of the tongueless old servant, and I tried to read what was in back of that smile and that elaborate courtesy. But the smile was inscrutable.

“Oh, I’ll chain up the dogs,” he said, as I hesitated.

I made a sudden resolution.

“I’ll be delighted to come,” I said.

“Fine, fine,” he said, with a curious little noise, like a chuckle. Then he walked away.

But I could not go to dinner at The Grim House that night. I was called to Philadelphia for an operation; I tried to phone my neighbor, but I remembered that he hadn’t told me his name. I was forced to resort to the expedient of sending a telegram addressed to “The Grim House,” and to hurry off to Philadelphia. I didn’t get back home till past midnight. The Grim House was dark and silent.

The next morning I decided to go to The Grim House to tell its occupant why I had been unable to come to dinner. It was about ten o’clock when I set out to visit my Mephistolphelian neighbor; I remembered the warning note of the old servant, so I slipped into my pocket the automatic I had carried in the Philippines.

I went to the front door of The Grim House, and pulled at the old-fashioned bell; rotten with rust, it came off in my hand. I rapped loudly with my walking stick without eliciting any response. I knew that it was not my neighbor’s custom to be away from home at this time of day, so I went round to the back of the house and, climbing on the sagging, decaying back porch, rapped briskly on the back door. It had not been locked, and it swung open at my touch. I saw a sight that I shall remember to my grave.

The large kitchen of the old house had been painted a brilliant white, and it had been kept spotless. It was fitted up as an unusual sort of laboratory, and was filled with strange instruments and machines that suggested at once chemistry and surgery. The apparatus was familiar, and yet unfamiliar. Then I realized what it was that made it so queer; the conventional chemical equipment was there, but it was many times the ordinary size. There were grotesque alembics, enormous burners, phials that would hold a gallon, and, finally, the glass vases which I had seen carried in turned out to be giant test tubes, as big as a man. Some were filled with curious substances, which I did not recognize, and in the room there was a pungent, mephitic odor. In one corner was a shelf, covered with glittering instruments, and near it a white-enameled table, under a powerful arc light. But the thing in the room that drew my gaze like a magnet was the only untidy object in it. It was the body of a man lying on the white table.

He had been dressed in white duck from head to foot, but his suit was now drenched in places with crimson. He had been beaten almost beyond recognition by some heavy, blunt instrument, but enough remained of that thin, sardonic face with its bristle of black beard to make me certain that it was my tall neighbor with whom I was to have dined on the night before, I bent over and made a hasty professional examination. He had not been dead long.

I called out several times, thinking to summon the old servant, but my voice echoed through the empty house. I pushed open a swinging door that in the old days had led into the dark, paneled dining room. The blinds were shut, so for a moment I could see nothing. Then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, I saw that the dining room contained four large steel cages, such as wild animals are transported in. They were empty. Had the dogs been kept there? Where were they now?

Continuing my cautious explorations, I pushed open another door and found myself in a butler’s pantry, that had been turned into a bedroom by putting an iron cot in it. Several suits of clothes of expensive material hung there. I hastily examined the pockets of a brown suit I remembered the bearded man wore when he invited me to dinner, and found three letters. They were addressed to Doctor Karl Raffin, General Delivery, New York City. They were business letters of no significance from a chemical company about some rare salts he had ordered.

Karl Raffin! The name was familiar. Then I remembered. That was the name of a physician who had published in Vienna, some years before, some curious monographs on the possibility of a man creating human life. His theories had been generally discredited in the medical world, but they had been so plausible and so daring that for a time he had created quite a stir.

I went over to my own house and phoned for the police. Then I returned to pursue my investigations, to try to find out who it was who had struck those furious blows.

As I entered the front vestibule, I stumbled over something. I stooped and picked it up. It was a heavy blackthorn stick, broken in the middle, and on the big, knobbed handle were little tufts of black hair, stuck there with a dry, reddish paste. With such a weapon it would be easy to kill a man.

Then a panic seized me and a cold sweat came to my brow, for I recognized the blackthorn stick. Years before, I had given it as a birthday present to my brother-in-law, Roger Farrier, who lived about a mile from The Grim House.

Roger Farrier a murderer? A settled, family man, a respectable lawyer. I remembered his sudden flares of violent temper, which so soon cooled for which he more than made up by long periods of perfect good nature, and I thought of his powerful physique, souvenir of his college rowing days. I held the broken stick in my hands; that there was not another like it I felt sure, for I had hunted all over Ireland for just such a stick. Roger always carried it; indeed, many persons who did not know his name described him as “the big fellow with the big, black stick.”

I was in an agony of mind, torn between duty and my affection for Roger. What was I to do? The police solved this question for me by arriving just then, and I had no choice but to hand over the stick, and, since I knew that its identification would be the work of but a few hours, to tell them whose it was. Roger Farrier was arrested within an hour.

Below is the sworn statement of Roger Farrier, member of the New York bar and resident of Pelham Manor:

On the evening of November 12th, my young son, Robert, eleven years old, was returning home from a Boy Scout meeting. Just before dark he passed the property known as The Grim House. He was tossing a ball with his brother Vernon, aged thirteen, and the ball lodged in the hedge. Robert thrust his arm in to get the ball. As he did so, his arm was seized by some man on the other side of the hedge, and the man attempted to drag my son’s body through the hedge. Robert screamed and his brother came to his aid. Vernon says that he saw the man, and that he was a tall man with a black beard and a wild, savage face. When the man saw Vernon, he released Robert, who ran home sobbing with terror and pain. His arm was black and blue from the grip of his assailant.

I was not at home at the time, and I did not hear the story until I arrived home about eight-thirty. I started at once for The Grim House to demand an explanation, for I was loath to have a man arrested until I had heard both sides of the story.

I knocked at the front door of The Grim House, and a tall man with a black beard, who was dressed all in white, like a baker or a surgeon, came to the door and asked what I wanted. I said, as calmly as I could that I had come to see the man who had assaulted my son.

He was suave, almost oily, as he replied that he feared the boys were telling me fairy stories. But I had seen the bruises on my son’s arm, and I didn’t like the man’s smile, so I answered hotly that I didn’t believe him, and that I wanted his side of the story, and without delay.

“See that sign down there,” he said, “it says no trespassers, doesn’t it? Well, it’s lucky for you I haven’t let out my dogs for the night, or they’d have ripped you to pieces.” Then he suddenly lost control of himself and cried out with an oath: “As for your brats, teach them to keep away from other men’s property.” He started to close the door in my face, but I was fighting mad now, and I blocked it with my foot. He attempted to shove me out of the door and down the steps, and gave me a blow in the chest. I lost my grip on my temper entirely, and struck him across the head with my blackthorn stick. He turned and cried into the house in a terrible voice, “Gryce, let out the dogs.” Then he struck at me again, and I struck back with such force that he staggered back into the hallway and dropped. I fled in a panic, but not a moment too soon for two or three huge dogs came tearing round the corner and came leaping after me. I reached the gate just ahead of them.

That is the whole story. I swear I struck Doctor Raffin only twice; I deny that in the heat of my anger I struck him repeatedly, although I cannot prove that I did not do so. I am deeply, deeply sorry for my loss of self-control, but I reiterate that I remember striking but twice, and then in self-defense.

(Signed)

Roger Gresham Farrier

When I read the statement of my brother-in-law, Roger Farrier, I believed every word of it. In our long friendship I had known him to be a man of unimpeachable honesty, and I knew that even in this dire circumstance he would tell the truth as he saw it. But how I, his friend, felt about his guilt, and how a skeptical jury would feel about it, were two entirely different matters, and I was gravely concerned.

After my first superficial examination of Doctor Raffin, whose shattered head told a story of the insensate fury of his assailant, I had not looked at all closely at the body, which the police had allowed to lie as I had found it until the coroner should arrive.

The coroner was long in coming, so I decided to examine the dead man more closely. I unbuttoned his tight-fitting white coat, now stained with his life blood, and as I did so I gave a whistle of surprise that made the policeman on guard over the body start out of his reverie.

“What is it, doctor?” he asked.

“Why, this man has been stabbed through the heart!” I exclaimed.

The policeman examined the deep wound.

“Whoever struck that blow had a strong right arm,” he declared.

The chief of the police force, McRae, an astute, middle-aged man, came into the room just then, visibly excited. He was carrying something in his hand.

“I always did say that the Frenchman who said, ‘Look for the woman,’ was a wise old bird,” he announced. “Look at this.” “This” was an irregular piece of purple silk, about as big as a handkerchief, and with ragged edges.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Piece of a woman’s dress,” he replied, “Found it in the grass, near the hedge, Also a few small tell-tale stains.”

“Show me where,” I said excitedly,

Chief McRae led me to a place near the hedge not far from the gate, where the long grass had been trampled for several square yards. There were a number of small, crimson patches on the ground. Quite close to the hedge was soft dirt where the grass had not grown. Eagerly I examined it. There were fresh footprints there, of two kinds: the footprints of a woman’s small, high-heeled shoe and the footprints of a very large dog.

“We must find that woman,” said Chief McRae.

“And I think I have a good idea where she may be,” I replied, as I hurried to my own house to telephone.

I called up the public hospital, which is located about a mile from The Grim House.

“This is Doctor Wain speaking,” I said. “Have you treated a woman last night or this morning for severe lacerations caused by the bite of an animal? She was wearing a purple silk dress.”

“Why, yes, doctor,” came the answer. “She’s here now.”

“Please don’t let her go before I get there,” I directed.

“Oh, no fear of that,” the hospital answered. “She’s pretty badly hurt. She’s just recovered consciousness and we haven’t been able to find out who she is or how she was hurt. She looks as if she’d been in a tiger’s cage. We found her unconscious in a field not far from your house.”

“I’ll be right over,” I said.

I jumped into my roaster and burned up the road to the hospital.

I was shown to the bedside of a dark woman of perhaps thirty, in whose deep, black eyes were signs of a great sorrow. Her limbs and body were swathed in bandages, and she was suffering from lacerations and shock, but the interne told me that her condition was not serious. When she heard I had come from The Grim House she said in a tired voice with a slight foreign accent, Italian, I judged:

“Is he dead?”

I nodded.

“I’m glad,” she said simply. Then she asked me to write down a statement, which she dictated to me with an utter lack of emotion in her tone.

My name is Marie Therese Leska, and I was born in Corsica. I confess freely, and without fear of the consequences and without remorse, that I killed Doctor Karl Raffin on the night of November 12th.

If there was ever a monster created in the shape of a man, it was he. I met Doctor Raffin about three years ago. I was singing small roles in the opera then, and had every promise of a bright career. I was fascinated by him; he was so masterful, so diabolically clever. We got married and then he deserted me.

I had lost my place in the opera company — lost my voice, and everything I held dear and sacred. I wrote him frantic letters, for I was almost penniless, and what friends I had had, I had sacrificed to him. He made no reply. I was desperate, so one night I followed him out to his house out here.

I swear I had no intention of killing him when I came out; the knife I carried was for myself if he should again spurn me

I waited outside his house till nine-thirty, crouching against the hedge. At about nine I saw a big man, swinging a big stick, go up the path. I heard the sound of angry words, and then some blows, and the big man came running down the path as if fiends were after him, as indeed they were, in the shape of huge dogs. He rushed past me as I trembled there in the darkness. A little later, someone whistled from the house and the dogs went around to the back, and I could hear them growling and snapping as they were fed. So I ran up the path and knocked at the door.

Doctor Raffin came very cautiously. He had a wound on his head, and he was holding a piece of absorbent cotton over it. I pushed by him, and was inside the house before he could stop me.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said in a sneering voice that chilled my heart.

We went into a brilliantly lighted laboratory. A scared-looking old man, whom I knew to be Gryce, Doctor Raffin’s valet, came in from feeding the dogs. Someone in the room off the laboratory moaned, and I saw Gryce shudder

“Get out, you swine,” cried Doctor Raffin and Gryce cringed out of the room, leaving me alone with the man I once loved and later hated so bitterly.

I begged him to have pity on me, but he only jeered at me.

“You may consider yourself lucky,” he said, “that the dogs didn’t tear you to ribbons when you can in. Under the circumstances, I think it would be wise of you to get down on your knees and beg me to escort you as far as the gate. That’s the most I’ll do for you.”

He blew cigarette smoke in my face.

My brain seemed to burst. With the wild fury of my Corsican ancestors, I whipped out my knife and struck him in the chest, once, twice, and he reeled away from me. Then I ran, sobbing with fear, into the night. I ran blindly toward the hedge, not keeping to the path. As I neared the hedge, one of the great dogs sprang at my throat; the knife was still in my hand, and I managed to beat him off. For a moment I struggled for my life with him; he tore my arms and legs with his fangs before I could get to the gate and fall, fainting outside.

I may have lain there an hour, I may have lain there but ten minute. I don’t know. At last I got to my feet and the will to live made me stagger on. I had a vague hope that I’d reach a railroad station and be able to get back to New York. But after I had struggled on for what seemed endless hours, my strength gave way. Just as day was breaking, I fell unconscious in a field near the roadside.

Every word of this is the truth. I repeat what I said in the beginning. I do not feel the least remorse for what I have done. An earthly jury may find me guilty of the murder of Doctor Raffin, but I have no fear of the verdict of a Heavenly one. He was not a man; he was a beast.

(Signed)

Marie Therese Leska.

It was past three in the afternoon when I returned to The Grim House with the statement of Marie Therese Leska. With me I brought, also, the knife with which she had committed the crime. It was a small affair, very old, and with a carved handle that might have been the work of Benvenuto Cellini. The blade was not very sharp. Indeed, it was more like a paper cutter than a lethal weapon, and I wondered how so frail a woman could have driven that small, dull knife into the stalwart body of Doctor Raffin.

On one point my mind was greatly relieved. Her confession supplied an incontestable alibi, it seemed to me, for Roger Farrier, for had she not sworn that she had seen Doctor Raffin alive after Roger Farrier, “the big man,” left the house? And yet how could one account for the shattered skull of the dead man?

As I drew near The Grim House, I passed that part of the hedge where the mysterious note of warning had been handed to me, and a new problem presented itself to my mind. What had become of the tongueless man? And where were the dogs?

The coroner had not reached the scene when I returned to The Grim House from the hospital; there had been a trolley accident in another part of the county which required his presence, it seemed. So the body of Doctor Raffin lay where I had first found it — on the operating table.

Once again I examined the stab wound in his chest, and then I compared it with the little Corsican knife in my hand. There could be no doubt about it; that little knife could never have made that deep gash. It might have made the two or three superficial cuts in the fleshy part of the chest, mere scratches, which I noticed for the first time, but it could never have been driven in, almost to the spine, even by a powerful man

My head began to swim with this mass of contradictory evidence. A man is dead, his skull shattered and a deep stab wound in his heart. Two persons firmly believe that they have killed him, and yet there is every reason to believe that neither of them did! And if Roger Farrier or the Corsican woman had not killed him, who had?

I decided, while waiting for the arrival of the coroner, to poke around The Grim House. I made my way along one of those seemingly superfluous passageways that honeycomb those old, wooden houses, until I came to a trapdoor in the floor.

I opened it and started down the stairs to the cellar with a lighted match in my hand. I reached the bottom of the stairs, and as I did so the trapdoor above me closed with a bang, blowing out my light and leaving me in total darkness. A heavy, sickening smell came to my nostrils. I took a step forward and partly stumbled. I put out my hand to prevent myself from falling; it touched something soft yet solid, the furry form of a large animal. I scrambled back up the stairs at the cost of a scraped shin, and then lighted another match. By its light I could see on the cellar floor four Great Danes, the largest I have ever seen; but I had no need to fear their fangs now, for their glassy eyes protruded and their muscular legs and bodies were contorted, and they were stone cold after the death spasm produced by what I could see was a powerful poison.

The atmosphere of the cellar was too nauseating for me to examine my grisly discovery further, and, indeed, I had little inclination to do so. But here was a new question that had to be answered before the whole story of the killing of Doctor Raffin could be told. Who had poisoned the dogs?

After my gruesome find in the cellar, I felt that I must ransack the entire house. The upper rooms were quite empty and had not been used. The servants’ quarters on the third floor were similarly covered with thick layers of dust. But in a little hallway I found a ladder leading to an attic, and the absence of dust on its rungs told me plainly that someone had gone up it within the past twenty-four hours. As quietly as I could, I climbed the ladder, my revolver in my hand.

I heard a slight sound above me, as if someone were moving, and then a noise that was like the whimper of an animal.

I flung open a small trapdoor and lifted myself into a squat, beamed attic. In the faint light that came through a skylight, uncleaned for ten years, I saw that the place had been fitted up as a bedroom. In the corner crouched the figure of a man.

“Come out or I’ll shoot,” I cried.

He turned, and I recognized the frightened face of the tongueless old servant. As he recognized me, he ceased to tremble so violently, and came out of the corner. Drawing the stub of a pencil from his pocket, he wrote on the gray wall:

“Is he dead?”

I nodded my head.

A curious, grim smile came to his lined, leathern face, a face with suffering that I hadn’t thought a smile possible. Then he pitched forward into my arms in a dead faint.

I carried the tongueless old man downstairs. He was on the point of a complete collapse, so I had him taken to the hospital. There, with warm food inside him, he seemed to recover rapidly, and he signified that he wanted writing material brought to him. A pen and some paper were brought, and he wrote out in the shaky scrawl of an old man the most frightful story I have ever read.

It was I, Simon Gryce, who killed Doctor Karl Raffin, the worst man ever born. I did it, yes, and I’m glad I did it. If the law wishes to punish me, I do not care, although it was not with my own hands that I struck the blows that ended the life of a devil. The blows were struck by another with even more reason for hating Doctor Raffin than I have; but he who struck the blows is beyond the reach of the law, and the crime is no blot upon his soul, because Doctor Raffin stole his soul away from him.

I, and I alone, am guilty; it was I who made it possible for the man without a soul to strike down the fiend who had stripped him of all that made life worth living. You think I talk in riddles. Let me tell you my story from the first.

I was born in London, sixty-six years ago, the son of Samuel Gryce, head butler in the household of the Earl of Dunraven. I was always a timid, undersized lad and afraid of my own shadow.

“Lad, you haven’t the pluck of a hare,” my father would say, “but I’ll make you the best gentleman’s man in England, for all that.”

That was my father’s ambition and it became mine. I became Lord Ashdowne’s man and was with him for more than thirty years; then I was with his son, Sir Ralph Berwind. One sad day, two years ago, Sir Ralph was killed while hunting, and I found myself an old man, no longer spry, and without a situation. I had supported a couple of sisters and had been able to put by very little, so one day found me sitting on the Thames Embankment, looking at the green water and thinking things no Christian had a right to think.

A tall, well-dressed stranger came and sat beside me.

“You were Sir Ralph Berwind’s man, weren’t you?” he asked.

“I was,” I said.

“Out of a situation, eh?” he says.

“Yes,” I reply.

“I need a man,” he says.

“Indeed?” I answer, not very cordially, for there was something about him I didn’t like; I don’t know what it was, but I felt he wasn’t an honest man.

“Oh,” he says with a grin, “you needn’t worry about my position. I stand quite as high in my field as Sir Ralph stood in polo.” And he handed me a card which said he was Doctor Karl Raffin.

I went with him; the wages were very good. He was overbearing, often lost his temper, and sometimes was drunk, but I put up with it. Then we came to the States.

From the very first, I stood in terror of Doctor Raffin, and my fear grew. He had a way of looking me in the eye with those burning eyes of his for a long time, until my head became dizzy and I felt weak all over. He had a way of gritting his teeth when he talked to me that always made me think he would have liked to bury them in my throat.

He took a house out in a wild spot in New Jersey, and fitted up a laboratory there. It was my work to keep the place clean. I was forbidden to come into the laboratory except when he particularly ordered it. He worked there for some weeks, and from my bedroom upstairs I heard some strange sounds, but I minded my own business as a well-trained gentleman’s man should.

One night I thought the doctor had gone out, and I heard sounds in the laboratory, so I came downstairs, thinking it might be thieves. I opened the door gently and saw a dreadful sight. There was a little boy — No, I cannot write it down.

My gasp must have betrayed me, for the doctor left his frightful experiment and shook me by the throat as a terrier shakes a rat.

“You cursed spy,” he shouted, “I’ll teach you to snoop!”

He seized the chloroform sponge, and pressed it to my nose and I lost consciousness,

When I woke up I was in my own bed, and my mouth felt dry, and sore and empty. I tried to cry out for I was too weak to move, but I could make only a gagging noise. He had cut off my tongue.

Every day while I was recovering, Doctor Raffin would come into my room and gloat over my pain and my attempts to speak.

“Listen, Gryce,” he said to me one day, “let this be a lesson to you. You are my man, body and soul, do you understand, and if you betray me, I’ll boil you alive in one of those big test tubes.”

The disappearance of the boy created such a stir in the neighborhood, that Doctor Raffin thought it advisable to move, and he came out to the old house in Pelham Manor.

My pen revolts from setting down what happened there. Night after night he lured homeless, friendless men and women out there. They never left.

One day he had been drinking, and he said to me, “Gryce, do you know what I am? I’m a vivisectionist of souls. Someday in my test tube I’ll find the elixir of life. Then I’ll live forever. But no one else shall have a drop.”

Again and again I tried to make up my mind to run away. But a fear stronger than my other fears held me there; my very soul was afraid of Doctor Raffin.

A little later he said to me: “Gryce, the quality of my material is too poor.” “Material” was what he called the poor human devils he lured into his laboratory.

“It takes life to make life,” he continued “Now, these tramps are inferior beings; I need a man of good intellectual development — a man like my neighbor, Doctor Wain, eh?” And he rubbed his hands and chuckled. So, at the risk of torture, I wrote a note warning Doctor Wain of his peril. Lucky man that he never kept his dinner engagement with Doctor Raffin!

It was Doctor Raffin’s custom to keep the men and women — “his material” — in the iron cages in the dining room. He silenced them by paralyzing their tongues.

At night he never permitted me in the laboratory; he made me go up to my little room in the attic, and then he took the ladder away. The screams and pleadings I have heard from those poor devils before Doctor Raffin silenced them were awful, awful. But I was too weak, too weak to do anything.

Yesterday I saw that the cage contained a handsome man, just turned thirty, a man with red hair and the physique of an athlete. His power of speech was gone, and he could only look at me with dumb, pleading eyes.

The doctor had been drinking again, and his tongue was loose.

“There’s material for you!” he cried. “A brilliant lawyer, he was. Tonight I’ll take out part of his brain, the part that he thinks with, and leave only the part he imitates with. Then we’ll see some sport. I’m a magician, Gryce, and with the touch of my wand I can turn a man into a gibbering parrot.” And he waved a surgical knife over his head.

Last night Doctor Wain was expected, but he didn’t come. It would have been his last visit on this earth, if he had. At nine or thereabouts, I saw the big man with the black stick visit the doctor, heard their quarrel, and saw the man strike the doctor twice.

They were only glancing blows, and inflicted slight cuts on the doctor’s head.

Then I looked into the unlighted dining room, and I saw two bright, staring eyes — the eyes of the thing that had been a man. He, too, had seen the doctor struck. I slipped out and picked up the stick the big man left when he fled, and placed it near the cage.

A little later the woman came, and, as I returned from feeding the dogs, I heard her pleading with Doctor Raffin. He ordered me from the room, but I watched at the door and saw her strike twice with the little knife. The doctor was wearing a coat of tough linen, and her blows made only slight scratches, which he dressed himself. He laughed to himself when he heard the dogs attack her. But I slipped out and called them off, and coaxed them into the cellar. There I fed them poisoned meat.

The doctor was so engrossed in his experiment that he did not notice what was happening; he did not notice that I had left the dinning- room door ajar so that the thing in the cage saw the woman stab him. Very softly I slipped into the dining room and placed a long surgical knife outside the cage door. Then I unlocked the door of the cage, and hurried to my attic, where I knelt until below I heard the most terrified scream I had ever heard in that house of torture. I knew it could not be the thing that had been a man, for his tongue was dead. I knew it was Doctor Raffin facing the creature whose soul he had destroyed.

(Signed)

Simon Gryce

I had finished reading this frightful document by the bedside of its writer when a young interne came in, walking on tiptoe.

“Say, Doctor Wain,” he whispered to me, “before you go, drop over to the psychopathic ward, will you. There’s a queer nut over there — a big, strong fellow with red hair. They picked him up in a swampy field not far from The Grim House. When they found him he was catching frogs and clubbing them to death with a stick and then stabbing them with an operating knife.”

“Detective Story Magazine”, 28 May 1921

OOZE

A Novelette of a Thousand Thrills

Anthony M. Rud

1926

In the heart of a second-growth piney-woods jungle of southern Alabama, a region sparsely settled by backwoods blacks and Cajans — that queer, half-wild people descended from Acadian exiles of the middle eighteenth century — stands a strange, enormous ruin.

Interminable trailers of Cherokee rose, white-laden during a single month of spring, have climbed the heights of its three remaining walls. Palmetto fans rise knee high above the base. A dozen scattered live oaks, now belying their nomenclature because of choking tufts of gray, Spanish moss and two-foot circlets of mistletoe parasite which have stripped bare of foliage the gnarled, knotted limbs, lean fantastic beards against the crumbling brick.

Immediately beyond, where the ground becomes soggier and lower — dropping away hopelessly into the tangle of dogwood, holly, poison sumac and pitcher plants that is Moccasin Swamp — undergrowth of ti-ti and annis has formed a protecting wall impenetrable to all save the furtive ones. Some few outcasts utilize the stinking depths of that sinister swamp, distilling “shinny” of “pure cawn” liquor for illicit trade.

Tradition states that this is the case, at least — a tradition which antedates that of the premature ruin by many decades. I believe it, for during evenings intervening between investigations of the awesome spot I often was approached as a possible customer by woodbillies who could not fathom how anyone dared venture near without plenteous fortification of liquid courage.

I know “shinny,” therefore I did not purchase it for personal consumption. A dozen times I bought a quart or two, merely to establish credit among the Cajans, pouring away the vile stuff immediately into the sodden ground. It seemed then that only through filtration and condensation of their dozens of weird tales regarding “Daid House” could I arrive at understanding of the mystery and weight of horror hanging about the place.

Certain it is that out of all the superstitious cautioning, head-wagging and whispered nonsensities I obtained only two indisputable facts. The first was that no money, and no supporting battery of ten-gauge shotguns loaded with chilled shot, could induce either Cajans or darky of the region to approach within five hundred yards of that flowering wall! The second fact I shall dwell upon later.

Perhaps it would be as well, as I am only a mouthpiece in this chronicle, to relate in brief why I came to Alabama on this mission.

I am a scribbler of general fact articles, no fiction writer as was Lee Cranmer — though doubtless the confession is superfluous. Lee was my roommate during college days. I knew his family well, admiring John Corliss Cranmer even more that I admired the son and friend — and almost as much as Peggy Breede whom Lee married. Peggy liked me, but that was all. I cherish sanctified memory of her for just that much, as no other woman before or since has granted this gangling dyspeptic even a hint of joyous and sorrowful intimacy.

Work kept me to the city. Lee, on the other hand, coming of wealthy family — and, from the first, earning from his short stories and novel royalties more than I wrested from editorial coffers — needed no anchorage. He and Peggy honeymooned a four-month trip to Alaska, visited Honolulu the next winter, fished for salmon on Cain’s River, New Brunswick, and generally enjoyed the outdoors at all seasons.

They kept an apartment in Wilmette, near Chicago, yet, during the few spring and fall seasons they were “home,” both preferred to rent a suite at one of the country clubs to which Lee belonged. I suppose they spent thrice or five times the amount Lee actually earned, yet for my part I only honored that the two should find such great happiness in life and still accomplish artistic triumph.

They were honest, zestful young Americans, the type — and pretty nearly the only type — two million dollars cannot spoil. John Corliss Cranmer, father of Lee, though as different from his boy as a microscope is different from a painting by Remington, was even further from being dollar-conscious. He lived in a world bounded only by the widening horizon of biological science — and his love for the two who would carry on that Cranmer name.

Many a time I used to wonder how it could be that as gentle, clean-souled and lovable a gentleman as John Corliss Cranmer could have ventured so far into scientific research without attaining small-caliber atheism. Few do. He believed both in God and humankind. To accuse him of murdering his boy and the girl wife who had come to be loved as the mother of baby Elsie — as well as blood and flesh of his own family — was a gruesome, terrible absurdity! Yes, even when John Corliss Cranmer was declared unmistakably insane!

Lacking a relative in the world, baby Elsie was given to me — and the middle-aged couple who had accompanied the three as servants about half of the known world. Elsie would be Peggy over again. I worshiped her, knowing that if my stewardship of her interests could make of her a woman of Peggy’s loveliness and worth I should not have lived in vain. And at four Elsie stretched out her arms to me after a vain attempt to jerk out the bobbed tail of Lord Dick, my tolerant old Airedale — and called me “papa.”

I felt a deep-down choking…yes, those strangely long black lashes someday might droop in fun or coquetry, but now baby Elsie held a wistful, trusting seriousness in depths of ultramarine eyes — that same seriousness which only Lee had brought to Peggy.

Responsibility in one instant become double. That she might come to love me as more than foster parent was my dearest wish. Still, through selfishness I could not rob her of rightful heritage; she must know in after years. And the tale that I would tell her must not be the horrible suspicion which had been bandied about in common talk!

I went to Alabama, leaving Elsie in the competent hands of Mrs. Daniels and her husband, who had helped care for her since birth.

In my possession, prior to the trip, were the scant facts known to authorities at the time of John Corliss Cranmer’s escape and disappearance. They were incredible enough.

For conducting biological research upon forms of protozoan life, John Corliss Cranmer had hit upon this region of Alabama. Near a great swamp teeming with microscopic organisms, and situated in a semitropical belt where freezing weather rarely intruded to harden the bogs, the spot seemed ideal for his purpose.

Through Mobile he could secure supplies daily by truck. The isolation suited him. With only an octoroon man to act as chef, houseman and valet for the times he entertained visitors, he brought down scientific apparatus, occupying temporary quarters in the village of Burdett’s Corners while his woods house was in process of construction.

By all accounts the Lodge, as he termed it, was a substantial affair of eight or nine rooms, built of logs and planed lumber bought at Oak Grove. Lee and Peggy were expected to spend a portion of each year with him; quail, wild turkey and deer abounded, which fact made such a vacation certain to please the pair. At other times all save four rooms were closed.

This was in 1907, the year of Lee’s marriage. Six years later when I came down, no sign of a house remained except certain mangled and rotting timbers projecting from viscid soil — or what seemed like soil. And a twelve-foot wall of brick had been built to enclose the house completely! One portion of this had fallen inward!

II

I wasted weeks of time first, interviewing officials of the police department at Mobile, the town marshals and county sheriffs of Washington and Mobile counties, and officials of the psychopathic hospital from which Cranmer made his escape.

In substance the story was one of baseless homicidal mania. Cranmer the elder had been away until late fall, attending two scientific conferences in the North, and then going abroad to compare certain of his findings with those of a Dr. Gemmler of Prague University. Unfortunately, Gemmler was assassinated by a religious fanatic shortly afterward. The fanatic voiced virulent objection to all Mendelian research as blasphemous. This was his only defense. He was hanged.

Search of Gemmler’s notes and effects revealed nothing save an immense amount of laboratory data on karyokinesis — the process of chromosome arrangement occurring in first growing cells of higher animal embryos. Apparently Cranmer had hoped to develop some similarities, or point out differences between hereditary factors occurring in lower forms of life and those half-demonstrated in the cat and monkey. The authorities had found nothing that helped me. Cranmer had gone crazy; was that not sufficient explanation?

Perhaps it was for them, but not for me — and Elsie.

But to the slim basis of fact I was able to unearth:

No one wondered when a fortnight passed without appearance of any person from the Lodge. Why should anyone worry? A provision salesman in Mobile called up twice, but tailed to complete the connection. He merely shrugged. The Cranmers had gone away somewhere on a trip. In a week, a month, a year they would be back. Meanwhile he lost commissions, but what of it? He had no responsibility for those queer nuts up there in the piney-woods. Crazy? Of course! Why should any guy with millions to spend shut himself up among the Cajans and draw microscope-enlarged notebook pictures of — what the salesman called — “germs”?

A stir was aroused at the end of the fortnight, but the commotion confined itself to building circles. Twenty carloads of building brick, fifty bricklayers, and a quarter-acre of fine-meshed wire — the sort used for screening off pens of rodents and small marsupials in a zoological garden — were ordered, damn expense, hurry! by an unshaved, tattered man who identified himself with difficulty as John Corliss Cranmer.

He looked strange, even then. A certified check for the total amount, given in advance, and another check of absurd size slung toward a labor entrepeneur, silenced objection, however. These millionaires were apt to be flighty. When they wanted something they wanted it at tap of the bell. Well, why not drag down the big profits? A poorer man would have been jacked up in a day. Cranmer’s fluid gold bathed him in immunity to criticism.

The encircling wall was built, and roofed with wire netting which drooped about the squat-pitch of the Lodge. Curious inquiries of workmen went unanswered until the final day.

Then Cranmer, a strange, intense apparition who showed himself more shabby than a quay derelict, assembled every man jack of the workmen. In one hand he grasped a wad of blue slips — fifty-six of them. In the other he held a Luger automatic.

“I offer each man a thousand dollars for silence!” he announced. “As an alternative — death! You know little. Will all of you consent to swear upon your honor that nothing which has occurred here will be mentioned elsewhere? By this I mean absolute silence! You will not come back here to investigate anything. You will not tell your wives. You will not open your mouths even upon the witness stand in case you are called! My price is one thousand apiece.

“In case one of you betrays me I give you my word that this man shall die! I am rich. I can hire men to do murder. Well, what do you say?”

The men glanced apprehensively about. The threatening Luger decided them. To a man they accepted the blue slips — and, save for one witness who lost all sense of fear and morality in drink, none of the fifty-six has broken his pledge, as far as I know. That one bricklayer died later in delirium tremens.

It might have been different had not John Corliss Cranmer escaped.

III

They found him the first time, mouthing meaningless phrases concerning an amoeba — one of the tiny forms of protoplasmic life he was known to have studied. Also he leaped into a hysteria of self-accusation. He had murdered two innocent people! The tragedy was his crime. He had drowned them in ooze! Ah, God!

Unfortunately for all concerned, Cranmer, dazed and indubitably stark insane, chose to perform a strange travesty on fishing four miles to the west of his lodge — on the further border of Moccasin Swamp. His clothing had been torn to shreds, his hat was gone, and he was coated from head to foot with gluey mire. It was far from strange that the good folk of Shanksville, who never had glimpsed the eccentric millionaire, failed to associate him with Cranmer.

They took him in, searched his pockets — finding no sign save an inordinate sum of money — and then put him under medical care. Two precious weeks elapsed before Dr. Quirk reluctantly acknowledged that he could do nothing more for this patient, and notified the proper authorities.

Then much more time was wasted. Hot April and half of still hotter May passed by before the loose ends were connected. Then it did little good to know that this raving unfortunate was Cranmer, or that the two persons of whom he shouted in disconnected delirium actually had disappeared. Alienists absolved him of responsibility. He was confined in a cell reserved for the violent.

Meanwhile, strange things occurred back at the Lodge — which now, for good and sufficient reason, was becoming known to dwellers of the woods as Dead House. Until one of the walls fell in, however, there had been no chance to see — unless one possessed the temerity to climb either one of the tall live oaks, or mount the barrier itself. No doors or opening of any sort had been placed in that hastily contructed wall!

By the time the western side of the wall fell, not a native for miles around but feared the spot far more than even the bottomless, snake-infested bogs which lay to west and north.

The single statement was all John Corliss Cranmer ever gave to the world. It proved sufficient. An immediate search was instituted. It showed that less than three weeks before the day of initial reckoning, his son and Peggy had come to visit him for the second time that winter — leaving Elsie in company of the Daniels pair. They had rented a pair of Gordons for quail hunting, and had gone out. That was the last anyone had seen of them.

The backwoods Negro who glimpsed them stalking a covey behind their two pointing dogs had known no more — even when sweated through twelve hours of third degree. Certain suspicious circumstances (having to do only with his regular pursuit of “shinny” transportation) had caused him to fall under suspicion at first. He was dropped.

Two days later the scientist himself was apprehended — a gibbering idiot who sloughed his pole — holding on to the baited hook — into a marsh where nothing save moccasins, an errant alligator, or amphibian life could have been snared.

His mind was three-quarters dead. Cranmer then was in the state of the dope fiend who rouses to a sitting position to ask seriously how many Bolshevists were killed by Julius Caesar before he was stabbed by Brutus, or why it was that Roller canaries sang only on Wednesday evenings. He knew that tragedy of the most sinister sort had stalked through his life — but little more, at first.

Later the police obtained that one statement that he had murdered two human beings, but never could means or motive be established. Official guess as to the means was no more than wild conjecture; it mentioned enticing the victims to the noisome depths of Moccasin Swamp, there to let them flounder and sink.

The two were his son and daughter-in-law, Lee and Peggy!

IV

By feigning coma — then awakening with suddenness to assault three attendants with incredible ferocity and strength — John Corliss Cranmer escaped from Elizabeth Ritter Hospital.

How he hid, how he managed to traverse sixty-odd intervening miles and still balk detection, remains a minor mystery to be explained only by the assumption that maniacal cunning sufficed to outwit saner intellects.

Traverse those miles he did, though until I was fortunate enough to uncover evidence to this effect, it was supposed generally that he had made his escape as stowaway on one of the banana boats, or had buried himself in some portion of the nearer woods where he was unknown. The truth ought to be welcome to householders of Shanksville, Burdett’s Corners and vicinage — those excusably prudent ones who to this day keep loaded shotguns handy and barricade their doors at nightfall.

The first ten days of my investigation may be touched upon in brief. I made headquarters in Burdett’s Corners, and drove out each morning, carrying lunch and returning for my grits and piney-woods pork or mutton before nightfall. My first plan had been to camp out at the edge of the swamp, for opportunity to enjoy the outdoors comes rarely in my direction. Yet after one cursory examination of the premises, I abandoned the idea. I did not want to camp alone there. And I am less superstitious than a real estate agent.

It was, perhaps, psychic warning: more probably the queer, faint, salt odor as of fish left to decay, which hung about the ruin, made too unpleasant an impression upon my olfactory sense. I experienced a distinct chill every time the lengthening shadows caught me near Dead House.

The smell impressed me. In newspaper reports of the case one ingenious explanation had been worked out. To the rear of the spot where Dead House had stood — inside the wall — was a swampy hollow circular in shape. Only a little real mud lay in the bottom of the bowl-like depression now, but one reporter on the staff of The Mobile Register guessed that during the tenancy of the lodge it had been a fishpool. Drying up of the water had killed the fish, who now permeated the remnant of mud with this foul odor.

The possibility that Cranmer had needed to keep fresh fish at hand for some of his experiments silenced the natural objection that in a country where every stream holds gar, pike, bass, catfish and many other edible varieties, no one would dream of stocking a stagnant puddle.

After tramping about the enclosure, testing the queerly brittle, desiccated top stratum of earth within and speculating concerning the possible purpose of the wall, I cut off a long limb of chinaberry and probed the mud. One fragment of fish spine would confirm the guess of that imaginative reporter.

I found nothing resembling a piscal skeleton, but established several facts. First, this mud crater had definite bottom only three or four feet below the surface of remaining ooze. Second, the fishy stench become stronger as I stirred. Third, at one time the mud, water, or whatever had comprised the balance of content, had reached the rim of the bowl. The last showed by certain marks plain enough when the crusty, two-inch stratum of upper coating was broken away. It was puzzling.

The nature of that thin, desiccated effluvium which seemed to cover everything even to the lower foot or two of brick, came in for next inspection. It was strange stuff, unlike any earth I ever had seen, though undoubtedly some form of scum drained in from the swamp at the time of river floods or cloudbursts (which in this section are common enough in spring and fall). It crumbled beneath the fingers. When I walked over it, the stuff crunched hollowly. In fainter degree it possessed the fishy odor also.

I took some samples where it lay thickest upon the ground, and also a few where there seemed to be no more than a depth of a sheet of paper. Later I would have a laboratory analysis made.

Apart from any possible bearing the stuff might have upon the disappearance of my three friends, I felt the tug of article interest — that wonder over anything strange or seemingly inexplicable which lends the hunt for fact a certain glamor and romance all its own. To myself I was going to have to explain sooner or later just why this layer covered the entire space within the walls and was not perceptible anywhere outside! The enigma could wait, however — or so I decided.

Far more interesting were the traces of violence apparent on wall and what once had been a house. The latter seemed to have been ripped from its foundations by a giant hand, crushed out of semblance to a dwelling, and then cast in fragments about the base of wall — mainly on the south side, where heaps of twisted, broken timbers lay in profusion. On the opposite side there had been such heaps once, but now only charred sticks, coated with that gray-black, omnipresent coat of desiccation, remained. These piles of charcoal had been sifted and examined most carefully by the authorities, as one theory had been advanced that Cranmer had burned the bodies of his victims. Yet no sign whatever of human remains was discovered.

The fire, however, pointed out one odd fact which controverted the reconstructions made by detectives months before. The latter, suggesting the dried scum to have drained in from the swamp, believed that the house timbers had floated out to the sides of the wall — there to arrange themselves in a series of piles! The absurdity of such a theory showed even more plainly in the fact that if the scum had filtered through in such a flood, the timbers most certainly had been dragged into piles previously! Some had burned — and the scum coated their charred surfaces!

What had been the force which had torn the lodge to bits as if in spiteful fury? Why had the parts of the wreckage been burned, the rest to escape?

Right here I felt was the keynote to the mystery, yet I could imagine no explanation. That John Corliss Cranmer himself — physically sound, yet a man who for decades had led a sedentary life — could have accomplished such a destruction, unaided, was difficult to believe.

V

I turned my attention to the wall, hoping for evidence which might suggest another theory.

That wall had been an example of the worst snide construction. Though little more than a year old, the parts left standing showed evidence that they had begun to decay the day the last brick was laid. The mortar had fallen from the interstices. Here and there a brick had cracked and dropped out. Fibrils of the climbing vines had penetrated crevices, working for early destruction.

And one side already had fallen.

It was here that the first glimmering suspicion of the terrible truth was forced upon me. The scattered bricks, even those which had rolled inward toward the gaping foundation ledge, had not been coated with scum! This was curious, yet it could be explained by surmise that the flood itself had undermined this weakest portion of the wall. I cleared away a mass of brick from the spot on which the structure had stood; to my surprise I found it exceptionally firm! Hard red clay lay beneath! The flood conception was faulty; only some great force, exerted from inside or outside, could have wreaked such destruction.

When careful measurement, analysis and deduction convinced me — mainly from the fact that the lowermost layers of brick all had fallen outward, while the upper portions toppled in — I began to link up this mysterious and horrific force with the one which had rent the Lodge asunder. It looked as though a typhoon or gigantic centrifuge had needed elbow room in ripping down the wooden structure.

But I got nowhere with the theory, though in ordinary affairs I am called a man of too great imaginative tendencies. No less than three editors have cautioned me on this point. Perhaps it was the narrowing influence of great personal sympathy — yes, and love. I make no excuses, though beyond a dim understanding that some terrific, implacable force must have made spot his playground, I ended my ninth day of note-taking and investigation almost as much in the dark as I had been while a thousand miles away in Chicago.

Then I started among the darkies and Cajans. A whole day I listened to yarns of the days which preceded Cranmer’s escape from Elizabeth Ritter Hospital — days in which furtive men sniffed poisoned air for miles around Dead House, finding the odor intolerable. Days in which it seemed none possessed nerve enough to approach close. Days when the most fanciful tales of medieval superstitions were spun. These tales I shall not give; the truth is incredible enough.

At noon upon the eleventh day I chanced upon Rori Pailleron, a Cajan — and one of the least prepossessing of all with whom I had come in contact. “Chanced” perhaps is a bad word. I had listed every dweller of the woods within a five-mile radius. Rori was sixteenth on my list. I went to him only after interviewing all four of the Crabiers and two whole families of Pichons. And Rori regarded me with the utmost suspicion until I made him a present of the two quarts of “shinny” purchased of the Pichons.

Because long practice has perfected me in the technique of seeming to drink another man’s awful liquor — no, I’m not an absolute prohibitionist; fine wine or twelve-year-in-cask Bourbon whiskey arouses my definite interest — I fooled Pailleron from the start. I shall omit preliminaries, and leap to the first admission from him that he knew more concerning Dead House and its former inmates than any of the other darkies or Cajans roundabout.

“… But I ain’t talkin’. Sacre! If I should open my gab, what might fly out? It is for keeping silent, y’r damn right!…”

I agreed. He was a wise man — educated to some extent in the queer schools and churches maintained exclusively by Cajans in the depths of the woods, yet naive withal.

We drank. And I never had to ask another leading question. The liquor made him want to interest me; and the only extraordinary thing in this whole neck of the woods was the Dead House. Three-quarters of a pint of acrid, nauseous fluid, and he hinted darkly. A pint, and he told me something I scarcely could believe. Another half-pint … But I shall give his confession in condensed form.

He had known Joe Sibley, the octoroon chef, houseman and valet who served Cranmer. Through Joe, Rori had furnished certain indispensables in way of food to the Cranmer household. At first, these salable articles had been exclusively vegetable — white and yellow turnip, sweet potatoes, corn and beans — but later, meat!

Yes, meat especially — whole lambs, slaughtered and quartered, the coarsest variety of piney-woods pork and beef, all in immense quantity!

VI

In December of the fatal winter Lee and his wife stopped down at the Lodge for ten days or thereabouts.

They were en route to Cuba at the time, intending to be away five or six weeks. Their original plan had been only to wait over a day or so in the piney-woods, but something caused an amendment to the scheme.

The two dallied. Lee seemed to have become vastly absorbed in something — so much absorbed that it was only when Peggy insisted upon continuing their trip that he could tear himself away.

It was during those ten days that he began buying meat. Meager bits of it at first — a rabbit, a pair of squirrels, or perhaps a few quail beyond the number he and Peggy shot. Rori furnished the game, thinking nothing of it except that Lee paid double prices — and insisted upon keeping the purchases secret from other members of the household.

“I’m putting it across on the Governor, Rori!” he said once with a wink. “Going to give him the shock of his life. So you mustn’t let on, even to Joe about what I want you to do. Maybe it won’t work out, but if it does…! Dad’ll have the scientific world at his feet! He doesn’t blow his own horn anywhere near enough, you know.”

Rori didn’t know. Hadn’t a suspicion what Lee was talking about. Still, if this rich, young idiot wanted to pay him a half dollar in good silver coin for a quail that anyone — himself included — could knock down with a five-cent shell, Rori was well satisfied to keep his mouth shut. Each evening he brought some of the small game. And each day Lee Cranmer seemed to have use for an additional quail or so….

When he was ready to leave for Cuba, Lee came forward with the strangest of propositions. He fairly whispered his vehemence and desire for secrecy! He would tell Rori, and would pay the Cajan five hundred dollars — half in advance, and half at the end of five weeks when Lee himself would return from Cuba — provided Rori agreed to adhere absolutely to a certain secret program! The money was more than a fortune to Rori; it was undreamt of affluence. The Cajan acceded.

“He wuz tellin’ me then how the ol’ man had raised some kind of pet,” Rori confided, “an’ wanted to get shet of it. So he give it to Lee, tellin’ him to kill it, but Lee was sot on foolin’ him. W’at I ask yer is, w’at kind of a pet is it w’at lives down in a mud sink an’ eats a couple hawgs every night?”

I couldn’t imagine, so I pressed him for further details. Here at last was something which sounded like a clue!

He really knew too little. The agreement with Lee provided that if Rori carried out the provisions exactly, he should be paid extra and at his exorbitant scale of all additional outlay, when Lee returned.

The young man gave him a daily schedule which Rori showed. Each evening he was to procure, slaughter and cut up a definite — and growing — amount of meat. Every item was checked, and I saw that they ran from five pounds up to forty!

“What in heaven’s name did you do with it?” I demanded, excited now and pouring him an additional drink for fear caution might return to him.

“Took it through the bushes in back an’ slung it in the mud sink there! An’ suthin’ come up an’ drug it down!”

“A ’gator?”

“Diable! How should I know? It was dark. I wouldn’t go close.” He shuddered, and the fingers which lifted his glass shook as with sudden chill. “Mebbe you’d of done it, huh? Not me, though! The young fellah tole me to sling it in, an’ I slung it.

“A couple times I come around in the light, but there wasn’t nuthin’ there you could see. Jes’ mud, an’ some water. Mebbe the thing didn’t come out in daytimes…”

“Perhaps not,” I agreed, straining every mental resource to imagine what Lee’s sinister pet could have been. “But you said something about two hogs a day? What did you mean by that? This paper, proof enough that you’re telling the truth so far, states that on the thirty-fifth day you were to throw forty pounds of meat — any kind — into the sink. Two hogs, even the piney-woods variety, weigh a lot more than forty pounds!”

“Them was after — after he come back!”

From this point onward, Rori’s tale became more and more enmeshed in the vagaries induced by bad liquor. His tongue thickened. I shall give his story without attempt to reproduce further verbal barbarities, or the occasional prodding I had to give in order to keep him from maundering into foolish jargon.

Lee had paid munificently. His only objection to the manner in which Rori had carried out his orders was that the orders themselves had been deficient. The pet, he said, had grown enormously. It was hungry; ravenous. Lee himself had supplemented the fare with huge pails of scraps from the kitchen.

From that day Lee purchased from Rori whole sheep and hogs! The Cajan continued to bring the carcasses at nightfall, but no longer did Lee permit him to approach the pool. The young man appeared chronically excited. He had a tremendous secret — one the extent of which even his father did not guess, and one which would astonish the world! Only a week or two more and he would spring it. First he would have to arrange certain data.

Then came the day when everyone disappeared from Dead House. Rori came around several times, but concluded that all of the occupants had folded tents and departed — doubtless taking their mysterious “pet” along. Only when he saw from a distance Joe, the octoroon servant, returning along the road on foot toward the Lodge, did his slow mental processes begin to ferment. That afternoon Rori visited the strange place for the next to last time.

He did not go to the Lodge himself — and there were reasons. While still some hundreds of yards away from the place a terrible, sustained screaming reached his ears! It was faint, yet unmistakably the voice of Joe! Throwing a pair of number two shells into the breech of his shotgun, Rori hurried on, taking his usual path through the brush at the back.

He saw — and as he told me, even “shinny” drunkenness fled his chattering tones — Joe, the octoroon. Aye, he stood in the yard, far from the pool into which Rori had thrown the carcasses — and Joe could not move!

Rori failed to explain in full, but something, a slimy, amorphous something, which glistened in the sunlight, already engulfed the man to his shoulders! Breath was cut off. Joe’s contorted face writhed with horror and beginning suffocation. One hand — all that was free of the rest of him! — beat feebly upon the rubbery, translucent thing that was engulfing his body!

Then Joe sank from sight….

VII

Five days of liquored indulgence passed before Rori, alone in his shaky cabin, convinced himself that he had seen a fantasy born of alcohol. He came back the last time — to find a high wall of brick surrounding the Lodge, and including the pool of mud into which he had thrown the meat!

While he hesitated, circling the place without discovering an opening — which he would not have dared to use, even had he found it — a crashing, tearing of timbers, and persistent sound of awesome destruction came from within. He swung himself into one of the oaks near the wall. And he was just in time to see the last supporting stanchions of the Lodge give way outward!

The whole structure came apart. The roof fell in — yet seemed to move after it had fallen! Logs of wall deserted layers of plywood in the grasp of the shearing machine!

That was all. Soddenly intoxicated now, Rori mumbled more phrases, giving me the idea that on another day when he became sober once more, he might add to his statements, but I — numbed to the soul — scarcely cared. If that which he related was true, what nightmare of madness must have been consummated here!

I could vision some things now which concerned Lee and Peggy, horrible things. Only remembrance of Elsie kept me faced forward in the search — for now it seemed almost that the handiwork of a madman must be preferred to what Rori claimed to have seen! What had been that sinister translucent thing? That glistening thing which jumped upward about a man, smothering, engulfing?

Queerly enough, though such a theory as came most easily to mind now would have outraged reason in me if suggested concerning total strangers, I asked myself only what details of Rori’s revelation had been exaggerated by fright and fumes of liquor. And as I sat on the creaking bench in his cabin, staring unseeing as he lurched down to the floor, fumbling with a lock box of green tin which lay under his cot, and muttering, the answer to all my questions lay within reach!

•   •   •

It was not until next day, however, that I made the discovery. Heavy of heart I had re-examined the spot where the Lodge had stood, then made my way to the Cajan’s cabin again, seeking sober confirmation of what he had told me during intoxication.

In imagining that such a spree for Rori would be ended by a single night, however, I was mistaken. He lay sprawled almost as I had left him. Only two factors were changed. No “shinny” was left — and lying open, with its miscellaneous contents strewed about, was the tin box. Rori somehow had managed to open it with the tiny key still clutched in his hand.

Concern for his safety alone was what made me notice the box. It was a receptacle for small fishing tackle of the sort carried here and there by any sportsman. Tangles of Dowagiac minnows, spool hooks ranging in size to silver-backed number eights; three reels still carrying line of different weights, spinners, casting plugs, wobblers, floating baits, were spilled out upon the rough plank flooring where they might snag Rori badly if he rolled. I gathered them, intending to save him an accident.

With the miscellaneous assortment in my hands, however, I stopped dead. Something had caught my eye — something lying flush with the bottom of the lock box! I stared, and then swiftly tossed the hooks and other impediments upon the table. What I had glimpsed there in the box was a loose-leaf notebook of the sort used for recording laboratory data! And Rori scarcely could read, let alone write!

Feverishly, a riot of recognition, surmise, hope and fear bubbling in my brain, I grabbed the book and threw it open. At once I knew that this was the end. The pages were scribbled in pencil, but the handwriting was that precise chirography I knew as belonging to John Corliss Cranmer, the scientist!

“… Could he not have obeyed my instructions! Oh, God! This…”

These were the words at top of the first page which met my eye.

Because knowledge of the circumstances, the relation of which I pried out of the reluctant Rori only some days later when I had him in Mobile as a police witness for the sake of my friend’s vindication, is necessary to understanding, I shall interpolate.

Rori had not told me everything. On his late visit to the vicinage of Dead House he saw more. A crouching figure, seated Turk fashion on top of the wall, appeared to be writing industriously. Rori recognized the man as Cranmer, yet did not hail him. He had no opportunity.

Just as the Cajan came near, Cranmer rose, thrust the notebook, which had rested across his knees, into the box. Then he turned, tossed outside the wall both the locked box and a ribbon to which was attached the key.

Then his arms raised toward heavens. For five seconds he seemed to invoke the mercy of Power beyond all of man’s scientific prying. And finally he leaped, inside…!

Rori did not climb to investigate. He knew that directly below this portion of wall lay the mud sink into which he had thrown the chunks of meat!

VIII

This is a true transcription of the statement I inscribed, telling the sequence of actual events at Dead House. The original of the statement now lies in the archives of the detective department.

Cranmer’s notebook, though written in a precise hand, yet betrayed the man’s insanity by incoherence and frequent repetitions. My statement has been accepted now, both by alienists and by detectives who had entertained different theories in respect to the case. It quashes the noisome hints and suspicions regarding three of the finest Americans who ever lived–and also one queer supposition dealing with supposed criminal tendencies in poor Joe, the octoroon.

John Corliss Cranmer went insane for sufficient cause!

•   •   •

As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer’s forte was the writing of what is called — among fellows in the craft — the pseudo-scientific story. In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or what-not, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility. In a large way Jules Verne was one of these men in his day; Lee Cranmer bade fair to carry on the work in worthy fashion — work taken up for a period by an Englishman named Wells, but abandoned for stories of a different — and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing — type.

Lee wrote three novels, all published, which dealt with such subjects — two of the three secured from his own father’s labors, and the other speculating upon the discovery and possible uses of inter-atomic energy. Upon John Corliss Cranmer’s return from Prague that fatal winter, the father informed Lee that a greater subject than any with which the young man had dealt now could be tapped.

Cranmer, senior, had devised a way in which the limiting factors in protozoic life and growth, could be nullified; in time, and with cooperation of biologists who specialized upon karyokinesis and embryology of higher forms, he hoped — to put the theory in pragmatic terms — to be able to grow swine the size of elephants, quail or woodcock with breasts from which a hundredweight of white meat could be cut away, and steers whose dehorned heads might butt at the third story of a skyscraper!

Such result would revolutionize the methods of food supply, of course. It also would hold out hope for all undersized specimens of humanity — provided only that if factors inhibiting growth could be deleted, some methods of stopping gianthood also could be developed.

Cranmer the elder, through use of an undescribed (in the notebook) growth medium of which one constituent was agar-agar, and the use of radium emanations, had succeeded in bringing about apparently unrestricted growth in the paramœcium protozoan, certain of the vegetable growths (among which were bacteria), and in the amorphous cell of protoplasm known as the amoeba — the last a single cell containing only neucleolus, neucleus, and a space known as the contractile vacuole which somehow aided in throwing off particles impossible to assimilate directly. This point may be remembered in respect to the piles of lumber left near the outside walls surrounding Dead House!

When Lee Cranmer and his wife came south to visit, John Corliss Cranmer showed his son an amoeba — normally an organism visible under low-power microscope — which he had absolved from natural growth inhibitions. This amoeba, a rubbery, amorphous mass of protoplasm, was of the size then of a large beef liver. It could have been held in two cupped hands, placed side by side.

“How large could it grow?” asked Lee, wide-eyed and interested.

“So far as I know,” answered his father, “there is no limit now! It might, if it got food enough, grow to be as big as the Masonic Temple!

“But take it out and kill it. Destroy the organism utterly — burning the fragments — else there is no telling what might happen. The amoeba, as I have explained, reproduces by simple division. Any fragment remaining might be dangerous.”

Lee took the rubbery, translucent giant cell — but he did not obey orders. Instead of destroying it as his father had directed, Lee thought out a plan. Suppose he should grow this organism to tremendous size? Suppose, when the tale of his father’s accomplishment were spread, an amoeba of many tons weight could be shown in evidence? Lee, of somewhat sensational cast of mind, determined instantly to keep secret the fact that he was not destroying the organism, but encouraging its further growth. Thought of possible peril never crossed his mind.

He arranged to have the thing fed — allowing for normal increase of size in an abnormal thing. It fooled him only by growing much more rapidly. When he came back from Cuba the amoeba practically filled the whole of the mud sink hollow. He had to give it much greater supplies….

The giant cell came to absorb as much as two hogs in a single day. During daylight, while hunger still was appeased, it never emerged, however. That remained for the time that it could secure no more food near at hand to satisfy its ravenous and increasing appetite.

Only instinct for the sensational kept Lee from telling Peggy, his wife, all about the matter. Lee hoped to spring a coup which would immortalize his father, and surprise his wife terrifically. Therefore, he kept his own counsel — and made bargains with the Cajan, Rori, who supplied food daily for the shapeless monster of the pool.

The tragedy itself came suddenly and unexpectedly. Peggy, feeding the two Gordon setters that Lee and she used for quail hunting, was in the Lodge yard before sunset. She romped alone, as Lee himself was dressing.

Of a sudden her screams cut the still air! Without her knowledge, ten foot pseudopods — those flowing tentacles of protoplasm sent forth by the sinister occupant of the pool — slid out and around her putteed ankles.

For a moment at first she did not understand. Then, the horrid suspicion of truth, her cries rent the air. Lee, at that time struggling to lace a pair of high shoes, straightened, paled, and grabbed a revolver as he dashed out.

In another room a scientist, absorbed in his note-taking, glanced up, frowned, and then — recognizing the voice — shed his white gown and came out. He was too late to do aught but gasp with horror.

In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first he could not analyze.

Lee, his boy, was fighting with the sticky folds, and slowly, surely, losing his own grip upon the earth!

IX

John Corliss Cranmer was by no means a coward; he stared, cried aloud, then ran indoors, seizing the first two weapons which came to hand — a shotgun and hunting knife which lay in sheath in a cartridged belt across hook of the hall-tree. The knife was ten inches in length and razor-keen. Cranmer rushed out again. He saw an indecent fluid something which as yet he had not had time to classify — lumped into a six-foot-high center before his very eyes! It looked like one of the micro-organisms he had studied! One grown to frightful dimensions. An amoeba!

There, some minutes suffocated in the rubbery folds — yet still apparent beneath the glistening ooze of this monster — were two bodies.

They were dead. He knew it. Nevertheless he attacked the flowing, senseless monster with his knife. Shot would do no good. And he found that even the deep, terrific slashes made by his knife closed together in a moment and healed. The monster was invulnerable to ordinary attack!

A pair of pseudopods sought out his ankles, attempting to bring him low. Both of these he severed — and escaped. Why did he try? He did not know. The two whom he had sought to rescue were dead, buried under folds of this horrid thing he knew to be his own discovery and fabrication.

Then it was that revulsion and insanity came upon him.

There ended the story of John Corliss Cranmer, save for one hastily scribbled paragraph — evidently written at the time Rori had seen him atop the wall.

May we not supply with assurance the intervening steps?

Cranmer was known to have purchased a whole pen of hogs a day or two following the tragedy. These animals were never seen again. During the time the wall was being constructed is it not reasonable to assume that he fed the giant organism within — to keep it quiet? His scientist brain must have visualized clearly the havoc and horror which could be wrought by the loathsome thing if it ever were driven by hunger to flow away from the Lodge and prey upon the countryside!

With the wall once in place, he evidently figured that starvation or some other means which he could supply would kill the thing. One of the means had been made by setting fire to several piles of the disgorged timbers; probably this had no effect whatever.

The amoeba was to accomplish still more destruction. In the throes of hunger it threw its gigantic, formless strength against the walls from the inside; then every edible morsel within was house assimilated, the logs, rafters and other fragments being worked out through the contractile vacuole.

During some of its last struggles, undoubtedly, the side wall of brick was weakened — not to collapse, however, until the giant amoeba no longer could take advantage of the breach. In final death lassitude, the amoeba stretched itself out in a thin layer over the ground. There it succumbed, though there is no means of estimating how long a time intervened.

The last paragraph in Cramer’s notebook, scrawled so badly that it is possible some words I have not deciphered correctly, reads as follows:

“In my work I have found the means of creating a monster. The unnatural thing, in turn, has destroyed my work and those whom I held dear. It is in vain that I assure myself of innocence of spirit. Mine is the crime of presumption. Now, as expiation — worthless though that may be — I give myself…”

It is better not to think of that last leap, and the struggle of an insane man in the grip of the dying monster.

“Weird Tales”, March 1923

THE HYENA

Robert E. Howard

1928

From the time when I first saw Senecoza, the fetish-man, I distrusted him, and from vague distrust the idea eventually grew into hatred.

I was but newly come to the East Coast, new to African ways, somewhat inclined to follow my impulses, and possessed of a large amount of curiosity.

Because I came from Virginia, race instinct and prejudice were strong in me, and doubtless the feeling of inferiority which Senecoza constantly inspired in me had a great deal to do with my antipathy for him.

He was surprisingly tall, and leanly built. Six inches above six feet he stood, and so muscular was his spare frame that he weighed a good two hundred pounds. His weight seemed incredible when one looked at his lanky build, but he was all muscle — a lean, black giant. His features were not pure Negro. They more resembled Berber than Bantu, with the high, bulging forehead, thin nose and thin, straight lips. But his hair was as kinky as a Bushman’s and his color was blacker even than the Masai. In fact, his glossy hide had a different hue from those of the native tribesmen, and I believe that he was of a different tribe.

It was seldom that we of the ranch saw him. Then without warning he would be among us, or we would see him striding through the shoulder-high grass of the veldt, sometimes alone, sometimes followed at a respectful distance by several of the wilder Masai, who bunched up at a distance from the buildings, grasping their spears nervously and eyeing everyone suspiciously. He would make his greetings with a courtly grace; his manner was deferentially courteous, but somehow it “rubbed me the wrong way,” so to speak. I always had a vague feeling that the black was mocking us. He would stand before us, a naked bronze giant; make trade for a few simple articles, such as a copper kettle, beads or a trade musket; repeat words of some chief, and take his departure.

I did not like him. And being young and impetuous, I spoke my opinion to Ludtvik Strolvaus, a very distant relative, tenth cousin or suchlike, on whose trading-post ranch I was staying.

But Ludtvik chuckled in his blond beard and said that the fetish-man was all right.

“A power he is among the natives, true. They all fear him. But a friend he is to the whites. Ja.”

Ludtvik was long a resident on the East Coast; he knew natives and he knew the fat Australian cattle he raised, but he had little imagination.

The ranch buildings were in the midst of a stockade, on a kind of slope, overlooking countless miles on miles of the finest grazing land in Africa. The stockade was large, well suited for defense. Most of the thousand cattle could be driven inside in case of an uprising of the Masai. Ludtvik was inordinately proud of his cattle.

“One thousand now,” he would tell me, his round face beaming, “one thousand now. But later, ah! Ten thousand and another ten thousand. This is a good beginning, but only a beginning. Ja.”

I must confess that I got little thrill out of the cattle. Natives herded and corralled them; all Ludtvik and I had to do was to ride about and give orders. That was the work he liked best, and I left it mostly to him.

My chief sport was in riding away across the veldt, alone or attended by a gun-bearer, with a rifle. Not that I ever bagged much game. In the first place I was an execrable marksman; I could hardly have hit an elephant at close range. In the second place, it seemed to me a shame to shoot so many things. A bush-antelope would bound up in front of me and race away, and I would sit watching him, admiring the slim, lithe figure, thrilled with the graceful beauty of the creature, my rifle lying idle across my saddle horn.

The native boy who served as my gun-bearer began to suspect that I was deliberately refraining from shooting, and he began in a covert way to throw sneering hints about my womanishness. I was young and valued even the opinion of a native; which is very foolish. His remarks stung my pride, and one day I hauled him off his horse and pounded him until he yelled for mercy. Thereafter my doings were not questioned.

But still I felt inferior when in the presence of the fetish-man. I could not get the other natives to talk about him. All I could get out of them was a scared rolling of the eyeballs, gesticulation indicative of fear, and vague information that the fetish-man dwelt among the tribes some distance in the interior. General opinion seemed to be that Senecoza was a good man to let alone.

One incident made the mystery about the fetish-man take on, it seemed, a rather sinister form.

In the mysterious way that news travels in Africa, and which white men so seldom hear of, we learned that Senecoza and a minor chief had had a falling out of some kind. It was vague and seemed to have no especial basis of fact. But shortly afterward that chief was found half-devoured by hyenas. That, in itself, was not unusual, but the fright with which the natives heard the news was. The chief was nothing to them; in fact he was something of a villain, but his killing seemed to inspire them with a fright that was little short of homicidal. When the black reaches a certain stage of fear, he is as dangerous as a cornered panther. The next time Senecoza called, they rose and fled en masse and did not return until he had taken his departure.

Between the fear of the blacks, the tearing to pieces of the chief by the hyenas, and the fetish-man, I seemed to sense vaguely a connection of some kind. But I could not grasp the intangible thought.

Not long thereafter, that thought was intensified by another incident. I had ridden far out on the veldt, accompanied by my servant. As we paused to rest our horses close to a kopje, I saw, upon the top, a hyena eyeing us. Rather surprised, for the beasts are not in the habit of thus boldly approaching man in the daytime, I raised my rifle and was taking a steady aim, for I always hated the things, when my servant caught my arm.

“No shoot, bwana! No shoot!” he exclaimed hastily, jabbering a great deal in his own language, with which I was not familiar.

“What’s up?” I asked impatiently.

He kept on jabbering and pulling my arm, until I gathered that the hyena was a fetish-beast of some kind.

“Oh, all right,” I conceded, lowering my rifle just as the hyena turned and sauntered out of sight.

Something about the lank, repulsive beast and his shambling yet gracefully lithe walk struck my sense of humor with a ludicrous comparison.

Laughing, I pointed toward the beast and said, “That fellow looks like a hyena-imitation of Senecoza, the fetish-man.” My simple statement seemed to throw the native into a more abject fear than ever.

He turned his pony and dashed off in the general direction of the ranch, looking back at me with a scared face.

I followed, annoyed. And as I rode I pondered. Hyenas, a fetish-man, a chief torn to pieces, a countryside of natives in fear; what was the connection? I puzzled and puzzled, but I was new to Africa; I was young and impatient, and presently with a shrug of annoyance I discarded the whole problem.

The next time Senecoza came to the ranch, he managed to stop directly in front of me. For a fleeting instant his glittering eyes looked into mine. And in spite of myself, I shuddered and stepped back, involuntarily, feeling much as a man feels who looks unaware into the eyes of a serpent. There was nothing tangible, nothing on which I could base a quarrel, but there was a distinct threat. Before my Nordic pugnacity could reassert itself, he was gone. I said nothing. But I knew that Senecoza hated me for some reason and that he plotted my killing. Why, I did not know.

As for me, my distrust grew into bewildered rage, which in turn became hate.

And then Ellen Farel came to the ranch. Why she should choose a trading-ranch in East Africa for a place to rest from the society life of New York, I do not know. Africa is no place for a woman. That is what Ludtvik, also a cousin of hers, told her, but he was overjoyed to see her. As for me, girls never interested me much; usually I felt like a fool in their presence and was glad to be out. But there were few whites in the vicinity and I tired of the company of Ludtvik.

Ellen was standing on the wide veranda when I first saw her, a slim, pretty young thing, with rosy cheeks and hair like gold and large gray eyes. She was surprisingly winsome in her costume of riding-breeches, puttees, jacket and light helmet.

I felt extremely awkward, dusty and stupid as I sat on my wiry African pony and stared at her.

She saw a stocky youth of medium height, with sandy hair, eyes in which a kind of gray predominated; an ordinary, unhandsome youth, clad in dusty riding-clothes and a cartridge belt on one side of which was slung an ancient Colt of big caliber, and on the other a long, wicked hunting-knife.

I dismounted, and she came forward, hand outstretched.

“I’m Ellen,” she said, “and I know you’re Steve. Cousin Ludtvik has been telling me about you.”

I shook hands, surprised at the thrill the mere touch of her hand gave me.

She was enthusiastic about the ranch. She was enthusiastic about everything. Seldom have I seen anyone who had more vigor and vim, more enjoyment of everything done. She fairly scintillated with mirth and gaiety.

Ludtvik gave her the best horse on the place, and we rode much about the ranch and over the veldt.

The blacks interested her much. They were afraid of her, not being used to white women. She would have been off her horse and playing with the pickaninnies if I had let her. She couldn’t understand why she should treat the black people as dust beneath her feet. We had long arguments about it. I could not convince her, so I told her bluntly that she didn’t know anything about it and she must do as I told her.

She pouted her pretty lips and called me a tyrant, and then was off over the veldt like an antelope, laughing at me over her shoulder, her hair blowing free in the breeze.

Tyrant! I was her slave from the first. Somehow the idea of becoming a lover never enter my mind. It was not the fact that she was several years older than I, or that she had a sweetheart (several of them, I think) back in New York. Simply, I worshipped her; her presence intoxicated me, and I could think of no more enjoyable existence than serving her as a devoted slave.

I was mending a saddle one day when she came running in.

“Oh, Steve!” she called; “there’s the most romantic-looking savage! Come quick and tell me what his name is.”

She led me out of the veranda.

“There he is,” she said, naively pointing. Arms folded, haughty head thrown back, stood Senecoza.

Ludtvik who was talking to him, paid no attention to the girl until he had completed his business with the fetish-man; and then, turning, he took her arm and they went into the house together.

Again I was face to face with the savage; but this time he was not looking at me. With a rage amounting almost to madness, I saw that he was gazing after the girl. There was an expression in his serpentlike eyes@

On the instant my gun was out and leveled. My hand shook like a leaf with the intensity of my fury. Surely I must shoot Senecoza down like the snake he was, shoot him down and riddle him, shoot him into a shredded heap!

The fleeting expression left his eyes and they were fixed on me. Detached they seemed, inhuman in their sardonic calm. And I could not pull the trigger.

For a moment we stood, and then he turned and strode away, a magnificent figure, while I glared after him and snarled with helpless fury.

I sat down on the veranda. What a man of mystery was that savage! What strange power did he possess? Was I right, I wondered, in interpreting the fleeting expression as he gazed after the girl? It seemed to me, in my youth and folly, incredible that a black man, no matter what his rank, should look at a white woman as he did. Most astonishing of all, why could I not shoot him down?

I started as a hand touched my arm.

“What are thinking about, Steve?” asked Ellen, laughing. Then before I could say anything, “Wasn’t that chief, or whatever he was, a fine specimen of a savage? He invited us to come to his kraal; is that what you call it? It’s away off in the veldt somewhere, and we’re going.”

“No!” I exclaimed violently, springing up.

“Why Steve,” she gasped recoiling, “how rude! He’s a perfect gentleman, isn’t he, Cousin Ludtvik?”

“Ja,” nodded Ludtvik, placidly, “we go to his kraal sometime soon, maybe. A strong chief, that savage. His chief has perhaps good trade.”

“No!” I repeated furiously. “I’ll go if somebody has to! Ellen’s not going near that beast!”

“Well, that’s nice!” remarked Ellen, somewhat indignantly. “I guess you’re my boss, mister man?”

With all her sweetness, she had a mind of her own. In spite of all I could do, they arranged to go to the fetish-man’s village the next day.

That night the girl came out to me, where I sat on the veranda in the moonlight, and she sat down on the arm of my chair.

“You’re not angry at me, are you, Steve?” she said, wistfully, putting her arm around my shoulders. “Not mad, are you?”

Mad? Yes, maddened by the touch of her soft body — such mad devotion as a slave feels. I wanted to grovel in the dust at her feet and kiss her dainty shoes. Will women never learn the effect they have on men?

I took her hand hesitantly and pressed it to my lips. I think she must have sensed some of my devotion.

“Dear Steve,” she murmured, and the words were like a caress, “come, let’s walk in the moonlight.”

We walked outside the stockade. I should have known better, for I had no weapon but the big Turkish dagger I carried and used for a hunting-knife, but she wished to.

“Tell me about this Senecoza,” she asked, and I welcomed the opportunity. And then I thought: what could I tell her? That hyenas had eaten a small chief of the Masai? That the natives feared the fetish-man? That he had looked at her?

And then the girl screamed as out of the tall grass leaped a vague shape, half-seen in the moonlight.

I felt a heavy, hairy form crash against my shoulders; keen fangs ripped my upflung arm. I went to the earth, fighting with frenzied horror. My jacket was slit to ribbons and the fangs were at my throat before I found and drew my knife and stabbed, blindly and savagely. I felt my blade rip into my foe, and then, like a shadow, it was gone. I staggered to my feet, somewhat shaken. The girl caught and steadied me.

“What was it?” she gasped, leading me toward the stockade.

“A hyena,” I answered. “I could tell by the scent. But I never heard of one attacking like that.”

She shuddered. Later on, after my torn arm had been bandaged, she came close to me and said in a wondrously subdued voice, “Steve, I’ve decided not to go to the village, if you don’t want me to.”

After the wounds on my arm had become scars Ellen and I resumed our rides, as might be expected. One day we had wandered rather far out on the veldt, and she challenged me to a race. Her horse easily distanced mine, and she stopped and waited for me, laughing.

She had stopped on a sort of kopje, and she pointed to a clump of trees some distance away.

“Trees!” she said gleefully. “Let’s ride down there. There are so few trees on the veldt.”

And she dashed away. I followed some instinctive caution, loosening my pistol in its holster, and, drawing my knife, I thrust it down in my boot so that it was entirely concealed.

We were perhaps halfway to the trees when from the tall grass about us leaped Senecoza and some twenty warriors.

One seized the girl’s bridle and the others rushed me. The one who caught at Ellen went down with a bullet between his eyes, and another crumpled at my second shot. Then a thrown war-club hurled me from the saddle, half-senseless, and as the blacks closed in on me I saw Ellen’s horse, driven frantic by the prick of a carelessly handled spear, scream and rear, scattering the blacks who held her, and dash away at headlong speed, the bit in her teeth.

I saw Senecoza leap on my horse and give chase, flinging a savage command over his shoulder; and both vanished over the kopje.

The warriors bound me hand and foot and carried me into the trees. A hut stood among them — a native hut of thatch and bark. Somehow the sight of it set me shuddering. It seemed to lurk, repellent and indescribably malevolent amongst the trees; to hint of horrid and obscene rites; of voodoo.

I know not why it is, but the sight of a native hut, alone and hidden, far from a village or tribe, always has to me a suggestion of nameless horror. Perhaps that is because only a black who is crazed or one who is so criminal that he has been exiled by his tribe will dwell that way.

In front of the hut they threw me down.

“When Senecoza returns with the girl,” said they, “you will enter.” And they laughed like fiends. Then, leaving one black to see that I did not escape, they left.

The black who remained kicked me viciously; he was a bestial-looking Negro, armed with a trade-musket.

“They go to kill white men, fool!” he mocked me. “They go to the ranches and trading-posts, first to that fool of an Englishman.” Meaning Smith, the owner of a neighboring ranch.

And he went on giving details. Senecoza had made the plot, he boasted. They would chase all the white men to the coast.

“Senecoza is more than a man,” he boasted. “You shall see, white man,” lowering his voice and glancing about him, from beneath his low, beetling brows; “you shall see the magic of Senecoza.” And he grinned, disclosing teeth filed to points.

“Cannibal!” I ejaculated, involuntarily. “A Masai?”

“No,” he answered. “A man of Senecoza.”

“Who will kill no white men,” I jeered.

He scowled savagely. “I will kill you, white man.”

“You dare not.”

“That is true,” he admitted, and added angrily, “Senecoza will kill you himself.”

And meantime Ellen was riding like mad, gaining on the fetish-man, but unable to ride toward the ranch, for he had gotten between and was forcing her steadily out upon the veldt.

The black unfastened my bonds. His line of reasoning was easy to see; absurdly easy. He could not kill a prisoner of the fetish-man, but he could kill him to prevent his escape. And he was maddened with the blood-lust. Stepping back, he half-raised his trade-musket, watching me as a snake watches a rabbit.

It must have been about that time, as she afterward told me, that Ellen’s horse stumbled and threw her. Before she could rise, the black had leaped from his horse and seized her in his arms. She screamed and fought, but he gripped her, held her helpless and laughed at her. Tearing her jacket to pieces, he bound her arms and legs, remounted and started back, carrying the half-fainting girl in front of him.

Back in front of the hut I rose slowly. I rubbed my arms where the ropes had been, moved a little closer to the black, stretched, stooped and rubbed my legs; then with a catlike bound I was on him, my knife flashing from my boot. The trade-musket crashed and the charge whizzed above my head as I knocked up the barrel and closed with him. Hand to hand, I would have been no match for the black giant; but I had the knife. Clinched close together we were too close for him to use the trade-musket for a club. He wasted time trying to do that, and with a desperate effort I threw him off his balance and drove the dagger to the hilt in his black chest.

I wrenched it out again; I had no other weapon, for I could find no more ammunition for the trade-musket.

I had no idea which way Ellen had fled. I assumed she had gone toward the ranch, and in that direction I took my way. Smith must be warned. The warriors were far ahead of me. Even then they might be creeping up about the unsuspecting ranch.

I had not covered a fourth of the distance, when a drumming of hoofs behind me caused me to turn my head. Ellen’s horse was thundering toward me, riderless. I caught her as she raced past me, and managed to stop her. The story was plain. The girl had either reached a place of safety and had turned the horse loose, or what was much more likely, had been captured, the horse escaping and fleeing toward the ranch, as a horse will do. I gripped the saddle, torn with indecision. Finally I leaped on the horse and sent her flying toward Smith’s ranch. It was not many miles; Smith must not be massacred by those black devils, and I must find a gun if I escaped to rescue the girl from Senecoza.

A half-mile from Smith’s I overtook the raiders and went through them like drifting smoke. The workers at Smith’s place were startled by a wild-riding horseman charging headlong into the stockade, shouting, “Masai! Masai! A raid, you fools!” snatching a gun and flying out again.

So when the savages arrived they found everybody ready for them, and they got such a warm reception that after one attempt they turned tail and fled back across the veldt.

And I was riding as I never rode before. The mare was almost exhausted, but I pushed her mercilessly. On, on!

I aimed for the only place I knew likely. The hut among the trees. I assumed that the fetish-man would return there.

And long before the hut came into sight, a horseman dashed from the grass, going at right angles to my course, and our horses, colliding, sent both tired animals to the ground.

“Steve!” It was a cry of joy mingled with fear. Ellen lay, tied hand and foot, gazing up at me wildly as I regained my feet.

Senecoza came with a rush, his long knife flashing in the sunlight. Back and forth we fought — slash, ward and parry, my ferocity and agility matching his savagery and skill.

A terrific lunge which he aimed at me, I caught on my point, laying his arm open, and then with a quick engage and wrench, disarmed him. But before I could use my advantage, he sprang away into the grass and vanished.

I caught up the girl, slashing her bonds, and she clung to me, poor child, until I lifted her and carried her toward the horses. But we were not yet through with Senecoza. He must have had a rifle cached away somewhere in the bush, for the first I knew of him was when a bullet spat within a foot above my head.

I caught at the bridles, and then I saw that the mare had done all she could, temporarily. She was exhausted. I swung Ellen up on the horse.

“Ride for our ranch,” I ordered her. “The raiders are out, but you can get through. Ride low and ride fast!”

“But you, Steve!”

“Go, go!” I ordered, swinging her horse around and starting it. She dashed away, looking at me wistfully over her shoulder. Then I snatched the rifle and a handful of cartridges I had gotten at Smith’s, and took to the bush. And through the hot African day, Senecoza and I played a game of hide-and-seek. Crawling, slipping in and out of the scanty veldt-bushes, crouching in the tall grass, we traded shots back and forth. A movement of the grass, a snapping twig, the rasp of grass-blades, and a bullet came questing, another answering it.

I had but a few cartridges and I fired carefully, but presently I pushed my one remaining cartridge into the rifle — a big, six-bore, single-barrel breech-loader, for I had not had time to pick when I snatched it up.

I crouched in my covert and watched for the black to betray himself by a careless movement. Not a sound, not a whisper among the grasses. Away off over the veldt a hyena sounded his fiendish laugh and another answered, closer at hand. The cold sweat broke out on my brow.

What was that? A drumming of many horses’ hoofs! Raiders returning? I ventured a look and could have shouted for joy. At least twenty men were sweeping toward me, white men and ranch-boys, and ahead of them all rode Ellen! They were still some distance away. I darted behind a tall bush and rose, waving my hand to attract their attention.

They shouted and pointed to something beyond me. I whirled and saw, some thirty yards away, a huge hyena slinking toward me, rapidly. I glanced carefully across the veldt. Somewhere out there, hidden by the billowing grasses, lurked Senecoza. A shot would betray to him my position — and I had but one cartridge. The rescue party was still out of range.

I looked again at the hyena. He was still rushing toward me. There was no doubt as to his intentions. His eyes glittered like a fiend’s from Hell, and a scar on his shoulder showed him to be the same beast that had once before attacked me. Then a kind of horror took hold of me, and resting the old elephant rifle over my elbow, I sent my last bullet crashing through the bestial thing. With a scream that seemed to have a horribly human note in it, the hyena turned and fled back into the bush, reeling as it ran.

And the rescue party swept up around me.

A fusillade of bullets crashed through the bush from which Senecoza had sent his last shot. There was no reply.

“Ve hunt ter snake down,” quoth Cousin Ludtvik, his Boer accent increasing with his excitement. And we scattered through the veldt in a skirmish line, combing every inch of it warily.

Not a trace of the fetish-man did we find. A rifle we found, empty, with empty shells scattered about, and (which was very strange) hyena tracks leading away from the rifle.

I felt the short hairs of my neck bristle with intangible horror. We looked at each other, and said not a word, as with a tacit agreement we took up the trail of the hyena.

We followed it as it wound in and out in the shoulder-high grass, showing how it had slipped up on me, stalking me as a tiger stalks its victim. We struck the trail the thing had made, returning to the bush after I had shot it. Splashes of blood marked the way it had taken. We followed.

“It leads toward the fetish-hut,” muttered an Englishman. “Here, sirs, is a damnable mystery.”

And Cousin Ludtvik ordered Ellen to stay back, leaving two men with her.

We followed the trail over the kopje and into the clump of trees. Straight to the door of the hut it led. We circled the hut cautiously, but no tracks led away. It was inside the hut. Rifles ready, we forced the rude door.

No tracks led away from the hut and no tracks led to it except the tracks of the hyena. Yet there was no hyena within that hut; and on the dirt floor, a bullet through his black breast, lay Senecoza, the fetish-man.

“Weird Tales”, March 1928