Shudders in the Dark & Carnival Of Terror

by Ruskin Bond

  Mr Brownrigg went round the house carefully and made sure that all the doors were locked. The shop shutters were up too, and he knew from careful observation that they permitted no light from within to escape.

  He removed his jacket and donned his working overall, switched on the lights, locked the door between the shop and the living-room, and set to work.

  He knew exactly what he had to do. Millie had been taking five Fender’s pills regularly now for eight days. Each pill contained 1/16 gr. Nativelle’s Digitalin, and the stuff was cumulative. No wonder she had been complaining of biliousness and headaches lately! Millie was a hopeless fool.

  He took out the bottle of Tincturæ Digitalin, which had come when young Perry had given him such a scare, and looked at it. He wished he had risked it and bought the Quevenne’s, or the freshly powdered leaves. He wouldn’t have had all this trouble now.

  Still, he hadn’t taken the chance, and on second thoughts he was glad. As it was, the wholesalers couldn’t possibly notice anything unusual in his order. There could be no inquiry: it meant he need never worry—afterwards.

  He worked feverishly as his thoughts raced on. He knew the dose. All that had been worked out months before when the idea had first occurred to him, and he had gone over this part of the proceedings again and again in his mind so that there could be no mistake, no slip.

  Nine drachms of the tincture had killed a patient with no digitalin already in the system. But then the tincture was notoriously liable to deteriorate. Still, this stuff was fresh; barely six days old if the wholesalers could be trusted. He had thought of that.

  He prepared his burner and the evaporator. It took a longtime. Although he was so practised, his hands were unsteady and clumsy, and the irritant fumes got into his eyes.

  Suddenly he discovered that it was nearly four o’clock. He was panic-stricken. Only two hours and Millie would come back, and there was a lot to be done.

  As the burner did its work his mind moved rapidly. Digitalin was so difficult to trace afterwards; that was the beauty of it. Even the great Tardieu had been unable to state positively if it was digitalin that had been used in the Pommeraise case, and that after the most exhaustive P.M. and tests on frogs and all that sort of thing.

  Henry Brownrigg’s face split into the semblance of a smile. Old Crupiner was no Tardieu. Crupiner would not advise a P.M. if he could possibly avoid it. He’d give the certificate all right; his mind was prepared for it. Probably he wouldn’t even come and look at the body.

  Millie’s stupid, placid body. Henry Brownrigg put the thought from him. No use getting nervy now.

  A shattering peal on the back door startled him so much that he nearly upset his paraphernalia. For a moment he stood breathing wildly, like a trapped animal, but he pulled himself together in the end, and, changing into his coat, went down to answer the summons.

  He locked the shop door behind him, smoothed his hair, and opened the back door confident that he looked normal, even ordinary.

  But the small boy with the evening paper did not wait for his Saturday’s sixpence but rushed away after a single glance at Mr Brownrigg’s face. He was a timid twelve-year-old, however, who often imagined things, and his employer, an older boy, cuffed him for the story and made a mental note to call for the money himself on the Monday night.

  The effect of the incident on Henry Brownrigg was considerable. He went back to his work like a man in a nightmare, and for the rest of the proceedings he kept his mind resolutely on the physical task.

  At last it was done.

  He turned out the burner, scoured the evaporator, measured the toxic dose carefully, adding to it considerably to be on the safe side. After all, one could hardly overdo it; that was the charm of this stuff

  Then he effectively disposed of the residue and felt much better.

  He had locked the door and changed his coat again before he noticed the awful thing. A layer of fine dust on the top of one of the bottles first attracted his attention. He removed it with fastidious care. He hated a frowsy shop.

  He had replaced his handkerchief before he saw the showcase ledge and the first glimmering of the dreadful truth percolated his startled mind.

  From the ledge his eyes travelled to the counter top, to the dummy cartoons, to the bottles and jars, to the window shutters, to the very floor.

  Great drops appeared on Henry Brownrigg’s forehead. There was not an inch of surface in the whole shop that was innocent of the thinnest, faintest coat of yellowish dust.

  Digitalin! Digitalin over the whole shop! Digitalin over the whole world! The evidence of his guilt everywhere, damning, unescapable, clear to the first intelligent observer.

  Henry Brownrigg stood very still.

  Gradually his brain, cool at the bidding of the instinct of self-preservation, began to work again. Delay. That was the all-important note. Millie must not take the capsule tonight as he had planned. Not tonight, nor tomorrow. Millie must not die until every trace of that yellow dust had been driven from the shop.

  Swiftly he rearranged his plan. Tonight he must behave as usual and tomorrow, when Millie went to church, he must clear off the worst of the stuff before young Perry noticed anything.

  Then on Monday he would make an excuse and have the vacuum cleaning people in. They came with a great machine and put pipes in through the window. He had often said he would have it done.

  They worked quickly; so on Tuesday...

  Meanwhile, normality. That was the main thing. He must do nothing to alarm Millie or excite her curiosity.

  It did not occur to him that there would be a grim irony in getting Millie to help him dust the shop that evening. But he dismissed the idea. They’d never do it thoroughly in the time.

  He washed in the kitchen and went back into the hall. A step on the stairs above him brought a scream to his throat which he only just succeeded in stifling.

  It was Millie. She had come in the back way without him hearing her, heaven knew how long before.

  ‘I’ve borrowed a portière curtain from Mother for your bedroom door, Henry,’ she said mildly. ‘You won’t be troubled by the draught up there any more. It’s such a good thick one. I’ve just been fixing it up. It looks very nice.’

  Henry Brownrigg made a noise which might have meant anything. His nerves had gone to pieces.

  Her next remark was reassuring, however; so reassuring that he almost laughed aloud.

  ‘Oh, Henry,’ she said, ‘you only gave me four of those pills today, dear. You won’t forget the other one, will you?’

  ‘Cold ham from the cooked meat shop, cold tinned peas, potato salad and Worcester sauce. What a cook! What a cook I’ve married, my dear Millie.’

  Henry Brownrigg derived a vicious pleasure from the clumsy sarcasm, and when Millie’s pale face became wooden he was gratified.

  As he sat at the small table and looked at her he was aware of a curious phenomenon. The woman stood out from the rest of the room’s contents as though she alone was in relief. He saw every line of her features, every fold of her dark cotton foulard dress, as though they were drawn with a thick black pencil.

  Millie was silent. Even her usual flow of banality had dried up, and he was glad of it.

  He found himself regarding her dispassionately, as though she had been a stranger. He did not hate her, he decided. On the contrary, he was prepared to believe that she was quite an estimable, practicable person in her own limited fashion. But she was in the way.

  This plump, fatuous creature, not even different in her very obtuseness from many of the other matrons in the town, had committed the crowning impudence of getting in the way of Henry Brownrigg. She, this ridiculous, lowly woman, actually stood between Henry Brownrigg and the inmost desires of his heart.

  It was an insight into the state of the chemist’s mind that at that moment nothing impressed him so forcibly as her remarkable audacity.

  Monday, he thought. Monday, and possibly Tuesday, and then...

 
; Millie cleared away.

  Mr Brownrigg drank his first glass of whisky and soda with a relish he did not often experience. For him the pleasure of his Saturday night libations lay in the odd sensation he experienced when really drunk.

  When Henry Brownrigg was a sack of limp, uninviting humanity to his wife and the rest of the world, to himself he was a quiet, all-powerful ghost, seated, comfortable and protected, in the shell of his body, able to see and comprehend everything, but too mighty and too important to direct any of the drivelling little matters which made up his immediate world.

  On these occasions Henry Brownrigg tasted godhead.

  The evening began like all the others, and by the time there was but an inch of amber elixir in the square bottle, Millie and the dust in the shop and Doctor Crupiner had become in his mind as ants and ant burdens, while he towered above them, a colossus in mind and power.

  When the final inch had dwindled to a yellow stain in the bottom of the white glass bottle. Mr Brownrigg sat very still. In a few minutes now he would attain the peak of that ascendancy over his fellow mortals when the body, so important to them, was for him literally nothing; not even a dull encumbrance, not even a nerveless covering but a nothingness, an unimportant, unnoticed element.

  When Millie came in at last a pin could have been thrust deep into Mr Brownrigg’s flesh and he would not have noticed it.

  It was when he was in bed, his useless body clad in clean pyjamas, that he noticed that Millie was not behaving quite as usual. She had folded his clothes neatly on the chair at the end of the bed when he saw her peering at something intently.

  He followed her eyes and saw for the first time the new portière curtain. It certainly was a fine affair, a great, thick, heavy plush thing that looked as though it would stop any draught there ever had been.

  He remembered clearly losing his temper with Millie in front of young Perry one day, and, searching in his mind for a suitable excuse, had invented this draught beneath his bedroom door. And there wasn’t one, his ghost remembered; that was the beauty of it. The door fitted tightly in the jamb. But it gave Millie something to worry about.

  Millie went out of the room without extinguishing the lights. He tried to call out to her and only then realised the disadvantage of being a disembodied spirit. He could not speak, of course.

  He was lying puzzled at this obvious flaw in his omnipotence when he heard her go downstairs instead of crossing into her room. He was suddenly furious and would have risen, had it been possible. But in the midst of his anger he remembered something amusing and lay still, inwardly convulsed with secret laughter.

  Soon Millie would be dead. Dead—dead—dead.

  Millie would be stupid no longer. Millie would appal him by her awful mindlessness no more. Millie would be dead.

  She came up again and stepped softly into the room.

  The alcohol was beginning to take its full effect now and he could not move his head. Soon oblivion would come and he would leave his body and rush off into the exciting darkness, not to return until the dawn.

  He saw only Millie’s head and shoulders when she came into his line of vision. He was annoyed. She still had those thick black lines round her, and there was an absorbed expression upon her face which he remembered seeing before when she was engrossed in some particularly difficult household task.

  She switched out the light and then went over to the far window. He was interested now, and saw her pull up the blinds.

  Then to his astonishment he heard the crackle of paper; not an ordinary crackle, but something familiar, something he had heard hundreds of times before.

  He placed it suddenly. Sticky paper. His own reel of sticky paper from the shop.

  He was so cross with her for touching it that for some moments he did not wonder what she was doing with it, and it was not until he saw her silhouetted against the second row of panes that he guessed. She was sticking up the window cracks.

  His ghost laughed again. The draught. Silly, stupid Millie trying to stop the draught.

  She pulled down the blinds and turned on the light again. Her face was mild and expressionless as ever, her blue eyes vacant and foolish.

  He saw her go to the dressing-table, still moving briskly, as she always did when working about the house.

  Once again the phenomenon he had noticed at the evening meal became startlingly apparent. He saw her hand and its contents positively glowing because of its black outline, thrown up in high relief against the white table cover.

  Millie was putting two pieces of paper there: one white with a deckle edge, one blue and familiar.

  Henry Brownrigg’s ghost yammered in its prison. His body ceased to be negligible: it became a coffin, a sealed, leaden coffin suffocating him in its senseless shell. He fought to free himself, to stir that mighty weight, to move.

  Millie knew.

  The white paper with the deckle edge was a letter from Phyllis out of the drawer in the shop, and the blue paper—he remembered it now—the blue paper he had left in the dirty developing bath.

  He re-read his own pencilled words as clearly as if his eye had become possessed of telescopic sight:

  ‘Millie dear, this does explain itself, doesn’t it?’

  And then his name, signed with a flourish. He had been so pleased with himself when he had written it.

  He fought wildly. The coffin was made of glass now, thick, heavy glass which would not respond to his greatest effort.

  Millie was hesitating. She had picked up Phyllis’s letter. Now she was reading it again.

  He saw her frown and tear the paper into shreds, thrusting the pieces into the pocket of her cardigan.

  Henry Brownrigg, understood. Millie was sorry for Phyllis. For all her obtuseness she had guessed at some of the girl’s piteous infatuation and had decided to keep her out of it.

  What then? Henry Brownrigg writhed inside his inanimate body.

  Millie was back at the table now. She was putting something else there. What was it? Oh, what was it?

  The ledger! He saw it plainly, the old mottled ledger, whose story was plain for any fool coroner to read and misunderstand.

  Millie had turned away now. He hardly noticed her pause before the fire-place. She did not stoop. Her felt-shod slipper flipped the gas tap over.

  Then she passed out of the door, extinguishing the light as she went. He heard the rustle of the thick curtain as she drew the wood close. There was an infinitesimal pause and then the key turned in the lock.

  She had behaved throughout the whole proceeding as though she had been getting dinner or tidying the spare room.

  In his prison Henry Brownrigg’s impotent ghost listened. There was a hissing from the far end of the room.

  In the attic, although he could not possibly hear it, he knew the meter ticked every two or three seconds.

  Henry Brownrigg saw in a vision the scene in the morning. Every room in the house had the same key, so Millie would have no difficulty in explaining that on awakening she had noticed the smell of gas and, on finding her husband’s door locked, had opened it with her own key.

  The ghost stirred in its shell. Once again the earth and earthly incidents looked small and negligible. The oblivion was coming, the darkness was waiting; only now it was no longer exciting darkness.

  The shell moved. He felt it writhe and choke. It was fighting—fighting—fighting.

  The darkness drew him. He was no longer conscious of the shell now. It had been beaten. It had given up the fight.

  The streak of light beneath the blind where the street lamp shone was fading. Fading. Now it was gone.

  As Henry Brownrigg’s ghost crept out into the cold a whisper came to it, ghastly in its conviction:

  ‘They never get caught, that kind. They’re too dull, too practical, too unimaginative. They never get caught.’

  They were destined to spend the rest of their lives on a remote island, condemned to a doom of unimaginable horror....

  THE VOIC
E IN THE NIGHT

  BY W.H. HODGSON

  It was a dark, starless night. We were becalmed in the Northern Pacific. Our exact position I do not know; for the sun had been hidden during the course of a weary, breathless week, by a thin haze which had seemed to float above us, about the height of our mastheads, at whiles descending and shrouding the surrounding sea.

  With there being no wind, we had steadied the tiller, and I was the only man on deck. The crew, consisting of two men and a boy, were sleeping forrard in their den; while Will—my friend, and the master of our little craft—was aft in his bunk on the port side of the little cabin.

  Suddenly, from out of the surrounding darkness, there came a hail:

  ‘Schooner, ahoy!’

  The cry was so unexpected that I gave no immediate answer, because of my surprise.

  It came again—a voice curiously throaty and inhuman, calling from somewhere upon the dark sea away on our port broadside:

  ‘Schooner, ahoy!’

  ‘Hullo!’ I sung out, having gathered my wits somewhat. ‘What are you? What do you want?’

  ‘You need not be afraid,’ answered the queer voice, having probably noticed some trace of confusion in my tone. ‘I am only an old—man.’

  The pause sounded oddly; but it was only afterwards that it came back to me with any significance.

  ‘Why don’t you come alongside, then?’ I queried somewhat snappishly; for I liked not his hinting at my having been a trifle shaken.

  ‘I—I—can’t. It wouldn’t be safe. I—’ The voice broke off, and there was silence.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, growing more and more astonished. ‘Why not safe? Where are you?’

  I listened for a moment; but there came no answer. And then, a sudden indefinite suspicion, of I knew not what, coming to me, I stepped swiftly to the binnacle, and took out the lighted lamp. At the same time, I knocked on the deck with my heel to waken Will. Then I was back at the side, throwing the yellow funnel of light out into the silent immensity beyond our rail. As I did so, I heard a slight, muffled cry, and then the sound of a splash as though some one had dipped oars abruptly. Yet I cannot say that I saw anything with certainty; save, it seemed to me, that with the first flash of the light, there had been something upon the waters, where now there was nothing.