November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  “There’s your house,” said he, “ten hundred and thirteen Belbridge Street,” as, once more reading the scribbled address, he glanced over his shoulder and handed back the paper to the man. The latter again held it up in the light and again tried to say something; but Carrington was talking and had turned away, when the voice behind him seemed to rise in a sharp crescendo, dying into the words, “away—away.” When he looked again over his shoulder, the man was gone.

  “What in the world became of that little man?” exclaimed Carrington, turning to Westbrook. “Did you see him go into the house?”

  “No; I was looking across the street.”

  Carrington stepped down to the corner. Westbrook joined him. They walked along Tenth Street, and looked up and down the brightly-lit but deserted pavements.

  “The man was a Negro, wasn’t he?” Westbrook asked.

  “An East Indian, I should say. I noticed that he wore one of those embroidered skull-caps and that the little girl had a doll. But wait a minute.”

  He ran back, and across the cobble stones into an alley behind the great house, groped his way past several closed doors, along the narrow, bricked passage, reached its end, and turned back. Over the wall to his right a faint light touched the upper stories of the deserted mansion, where he noticed that one of the windows was open. Just then, to his surprise, a soft object with a muffled reverberation struck the pavement near his feet.

  “Who’s there,” he called in startled surprise, staring up at the dark window-opening. Then, hearing nothing, he stepped forward, and, leaning down, struck several matches, to discover that the fallen object was a large child’s doll. He turned it over with his foot, picked it up, and held it high enough to make out that the dress was torn and rotting, and the paint battered off the face. Bringing it to the end of the passage, he stooped down and placed it on the ground, against the brick wall.

  Westbrook was standing at the corner below when Carrington reached the street.

  “Come back here, Westbrook; I want to show you something. Look along the wall there on the left,” said he, pointing into the alley, as his friend joined him.

  Westbrook turned into the shadows, stumbled about for a while, then came out again.

  “There is nothing there,” said he. “If you are playing me a trick, I don’t see the point.”

  Carrington stepped into the alley. “By George, Westbrook, I put a doll here,—not two minutes ago. But it’s gone. What do you make of it?” he continued as, after coming out into the light, he explained the singular incident.

  “I don’t make anything of it,” returned Westbrook, “except that you are getting things mixed. It is too dark in there to see dolls or anything else. That little girl we saw with the Negro, or whatever he was, had a doll, I admit. She may have dropped it. But my idea is that the man took her into that little house over the way there when you gave him his paper.”

  Walking impatiently across the street, he knocked loudly on the door with his cane. They listened awhile to the hollow echoes. Then Carrington noticed that the light he thought he had seen over the transom had gone out, and that a board had been nailed across one of the closed shutters.

  “Why, the place is deserted,” said he. “Look here.” He opened a gate in the wall adjoining a high building next door. Then the two men, after hesitating a moment, stepped into a litter of waste-paper and rubbish. Following a narrow, slimy footway, they reached a walled enclosure, lit by the electric lights from an alley beyond. The pavement, under a little ruined porch, was scattered with broken glass and tin cans. The windows had been boarded up. Pushing aside a rotting dog-house, the intruders tried the back door, to find it either locked or nailed shut. From the dismal yard beyond, as they looked up over the kitchen wing at the diminutive windows, ancient brick chimney, and hip-roof, a disturbed, wailing cat ran along the porch-cornice and over the adjacent wall.

  “I told you so,” said Carrington; “our man never came in here.”

  “But he brought us here,” insisted Westbrook; “and you saw the number of this house on his paper. How do you account for that?”

  “I don’t pretend to account for it,—unless——”

  “Let’s get out of this,” said Westbrook; “we’ll be arrested here, if we don’t catch some disease.”

  “What I meant to say was,” continued Carrington, closing the alley door behind him as the two men reached the street again, “that we may be getting to the bottom of the business without knowing it. Suppose, for instance, that the Lascar we saw had no existence at all. This thing ought to be reported to the Psychic Research Society.”

  “You don’t mean to say that you believe that we saw the ghost!”

  “I don’t know what I believe,” Carrington replied, “except that the key to the situation is not over here but in that house across the street. I tell you, the fellow we are after is in there now. If so, we can run him down. I’ve got what I call my dead-latch candle in my pocket and a box of matches. What do you say to going in through one of the cellar windows and settling the matter?”

  “My boy, you’re crazy,” said Westbrook, looking at his watch. “Do you know what time it is? When I’m locked up and fined, it will be for something more sensible than that. For Heaven’s sake, come home.”

  “But that doll in the alley,” objected Carrington. “We ought to investigate that.”

  “Never mind the doll. I didn’t see it, and I don’t believe you did,” added Westbrook as his friend yielded; and they walked up the street.

  iii

  It was on a cool autumn afternoon nearly two months after this adventure that Carrington, homeward bound from one of his eccentric suburban rambles, happened to be walking down Eleventh Street. He was alone, as usual, with his notebook full of dramatic suggestions, gathered in dilapidated foundries, through holes in fences, and beyond broken viaducts. His thoughts were in the clouds. It was late in the day. The life of the city had waned into a drowsy, low-keyed hum. The sun’s rays were losing their heat and began to catch a false fire in the glitter of west-fronting windows. When he reached the corner of Belbridge Street, he stopped and looked eastward. Down at the angle of Tenth Street, where the pavement trees had begun to show the brown touch of the season, he recognized, to his surprise, the familiar figure of his friend Westbrook. Dressed in the height of fashion, in silk hat and frock coat, with beflowered buttonhole, the latter was standing with his back toward the great deserted house, looking at the small buildings opposite.

  “Hello, Carrington,” said he, as that explorer of the underworld turned down the thoroughfare and joined him; “you are just the man I wanted to see. I have made a discovery. I have demolished your ghost.”

  In answer to Carrington’s question, Westbrook explained that he had been examining a map of the city and had found a singular duplication of names, which he had come down to verify.

  He paused and looked knowingly at his friend.

  “Where would you say that that East Indian or Negro, or whatever he was, slipped away from us the other night?”

  “About where we are standing,” said Carrington, pointing to the little white building in front of them. “There is the house, number ten hundred and thirteen.”

  Westbrook laughed in his most triumphant style: “Not a bit of it. The man never came near that house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we are on the wrong street. This is Belbridge Street. We went up Bridge Street, the next street below. Belbridge; Bridge. Notice the similarity of names. But come this way. I’ll prove it to you.”

  He walked down to the corner and along Tenth Street, with Carrington following, turned at the first street they reached, crossed it, walked up the pavement, and stopped.

  “There’s your house,” he pointed out: “Ten hundred and thirteen Bridge Stree
t.”

  Carrington started with astonishment as he stared at the place. The little white wooden house, with its transom, hip-roof, enormous chimney, and alley gate, was apparently an exact duplicate of its Belbridge Street model. More than that, the similarity seemed to repeat itself among the neighboring houses. Westbrook pointed to a closed warehouse behind several trees opposite. “Another version of your haunted house,” said he.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” asked Carrington excitedly, “that we were in a trance,—groped past Belbridge Street, and came up this street instead?”

  “Why not? You were talking about your ‘Castle of Otranto’ and noticed nothing.”

  “But I ran up the alley back of the big house.”

  “So you did, but that was later. We were back on Belbridge Street by that time.”

  “You may be right,” returned Carrington in utter bewilderment, “but if I took the man and the little girl to this house and they went into it and stayed there, the people that live here ought to know something about it.”

  Nervously throwing away a cigar that he had just lighted, he stepped up to the door and knocked with the ferrule of his cane. Following a noise of voices and footsteps inside, it was opened presently by a thin, stooping, bright-eyed old woman. She stared at them a moment; then, after explaining by gestures that she was deaf, led them into a little darkened parlor, where an old white-bearded man was seated on a sofa.

  Carrington, in a polite extemporized account, explained that, at the request of certain ladies, he was looking up the address of a little girl, a pupil at a certain Sunday-school, and had brought the child to the house, with a colored man, some weeks before.

  The latter part of the statement had just been translated to the deaf woman by her husband, when she angrily interrupted.

  “We have heard that story before, and we don’t want to hear it again. This house is not on Belbridge Street, I’ll have you gents to know. It belongs to me. And when I have to rent it, I don’t want any of your ‘little girl’ stories hanging to it. Johnnie, show them out.”

  The old man, who had been sitting in his stockings, slipped on his shoes and led the visitors into the hall and out the door.

  “Don’t mind what my old woman says,” he muttered, as, after listening to Carrington’s apology, he followed the two men down to the corner. “I don’t know where you gentlemen picked up that story, but it don’t belong here. If you will come with me, ‘around the corner just,’ I’ll show you where it does belong.”

  He led the two friends back to Belbridge Street, turned to the right, and pointed to the house they had just left.

  “Look there,” he said. “That house looks like our house, don’t it? And it’s got the same number. That house won’t rent. Over across the street there,” he continued, shaking his fist at the forsaken mansion, “is another house that won’t rent.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” asked Westbrook.

  “You know as well as I do that they say there’s a ‘dark-complected’ man comes out of that big house and goes into this house with a little girl; and the little girl, they say, carries a doll. There’s people that will talk you to death about that doll.—Dolls!—They tell you that that house across the street is full of dolls. There’s dancing goes on in there.”

  “Dancing,” repeated Carrington. “Who dances?”

  “They say it’s the dolls,—if you believe it. I don’t, for I never saw it, and I don’t want to. Stories are bad things,” he added. “But I know gentlemen when I see them, and I don’t believe you want to take the bread out of a poor man’s mouth,—do you? Then shake hands, and I hope you will let us alone with these stories.”

  “What a superstitious old fool that man is,” muttered Westbrook as the shock of grey hair and beard disappeared around the corner.

  “Not at all,” returned Carrington. “He is afraid of what they call at law defamation of title. That is what our meddling with his house amounts to.”

  “He has told us nothing,” said Westbrook.

  “Except that there is a ghost, after all. According to his account, we must have seen it. To my notion, your discovery of house number three brings us nowhere, or rather back to where we started,—back to the big house. There it is!” he exclaimed, pointing eagerly over the way. “Look at it. What would Bulwer or Dickens or Wilkie Collins have thought of it? If I ever investigate the thing seriously, I shall drop side issues and begin there, with this doll story.”

  “All very well, if you are writing a play,” retorted Westbrook, “but if you expect to get to the bottom of the business, you had better stick to facts.”

  They had crossed the street, and Carrington was stooping down, looking at the basement windows. “They have been painted on the inside,” he said. “You can see nothing down there.” He arose, and the two men walked slowly up the pavement, then stopped, turned, and looked back at the deserted building.

  “See there!” he exclaimed, as the western beams of approaching sunset blazed on the glass of its upper windows; “what a gorgeous effect! Exactly as if the place was illuminated inside. Strange you don’t notice it on the other houses.”

  “The dolls must be dancing upstairs,” said Westbrook with a sarcastic laugh.

  iv

  Another year had passed, during which Carrington, more than ever absorbed in his work, had seen little of his friends. What an incessant traveller he was, into the far-away world of his art; how late he sat up, amidst the creations of his dramatic fancy that flitted like gay-winged moths around the flame of his midnight oil, no one knew but himself. Plays, preferred by chance or forced upon him by theatre managers, scene painters, or impressarios, came and went, until, overwhelmed with engagements, he had well-nigh forgotten Belbridge Street and its ghosts, when a chance meeting with his legal friend, Dorrance, brought the subject suddenly back to his thoughts.

  Dorrance, still at the old office, had become a great lawyer. A dweller in cities by preference, who never left town, summer or winter. A man behind the scenes in legal situations, who never addressed juries, but commanded verdicts. Always successful; hence, at length, one of the heads of the firm.

  The former colleagues rarely met. But when they did, their reminiscences of mutual friends and old times generally ended in an engagement for the theatre, or a dinner at some neighboring restaurant. On this occasion they recognized each other as the great man came out of his down-town headquarters. Carrington, who always associated Dorrance with his first knowledge of the house on Belbridge Street, introduced the subject.

  Dorrance turned back, and the two friends passed through several busy rooms, evoking memories of the past, then proceeded upstairs, into a familiar little back office, brightened through its open windows by the afternoon sun.

  “Sit down,” said the lawyer, “and have a cigar. You don’t want to buy the place, do you?”

  “No, it might make a Bohemian club or an outpost for the Psychic Research; but I’m not engineering anything of that sort.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Dorrance. “Of course, I wouldn’t like to advise against the firm’s interest, but, strictly between ourselves, that house is one of the most useless piles of brickwork in the city. A bad legacy; and a worse investment. It has been on the market without a tenant since you were here,—a dead loss to everybody but the tax collector. One of these days it will have to be pulled down.”

  A brief history of the unlucky mansion followed. Through deaths and sales, it had continually changed hands. There had been contentions in the Orphans’ Court, forfeitures of rent, prosecutions for breach of contract. Its lease as a gold cure sanitarium for inebriates had failed because of a newspaper scandal. More than once suits for defamation of title had upset negotiations.

  “Do you know,” Dorrance continued, “that, though I have had charge of the plac
e for the last ten years, I have never been inside of it? There is a dime-novel-full of stories about it, of course; but they don’t interest me a bit.”

  “Still, I suppose there is some basis of fact in some of them,” remarked Carrington.

  “If there is, I haven’t found it. A bigger jumble of contradictory nonsense raked up at groceries, apothecary shops, and pawnbroker dens I wouldn’t want to listen to. All that I know definitely is that, somewhere in the fifties or earlier, a rich widow with an only child lived in the house; that the child was stolen and never found, and that the lady went insane.”

  “Sudden grief, I suppose?” said Carrington.

  “Not exactly sudden,” replied Dorrance. “It seems that the little girl had a doll when last seen. The poor mother advertised, of course, and got anonymous letters describing dolls, discovered or traced, as clues to the child. She paid the blackmail, but got nothing,—nothing at all, year after year, but—dolls. These, it seems, she kept, and brooded over as a sort of memory,—washed and dressed, talked and sang to, until the thing drove her mad. There are other details; but these are enough. I can give you the woman’s name, if you wish.”

  “No,” said Carrington, “it’s not that. All I want is to get into the house,—not so much as a ghost hunter, but from a dramatic point of view. The fact is, I’ve heard something of the doll story, and the place strikes me as a marvelous background for a play that I have had in mind for years.”

  Dorrance walked across the room and unlocked the door of a cupboard.

  “There is no janitor at present,” said he. “Here are the keys.”