Shudders in the Dark & Carnival Of Terror

by Ruskin Bond

  He shut it quickly behind him, and felt as though some cold thing had settled on his back and was writhing upon him. The passage was quite dark, but he found his hat and was out in the alley in a moment, breathing more freely, and surprised to find how much light there still was in the open air. He could see the pavement clearly under his feet, and far off in the street to which the alley led he could hear the laughter and calls of children, playing some game out of doors. He wondered how he could have been so nervous, and for an instant he thought of going back into the house to wait quietly for Else. But instantly he felt that nervous fright of something stealing over him again. In any case it was better to walk up to Cranston House and ask the servants about the child. One of the women had perhaps taken a fancy to her, and was even now giving her tea and cake.

  He walked quickly to Belgrave Square, and then up the broad streets, listening as he went, whenever there was no other sound, for the tiny footsteps. But he heard nothing, and was laughing at himself when he rang the servants’ bell at the big house. Of course, the child must be there.

  The person who opened the door was quite an inferior person—for it was a back door—but affected the manners of the front, and stared at Mr Puckler superciliously.

  No little girl had been seen, and he knew ‘nothing about no dolls’.

  ‘She is my little girl,’ said Mr Puckler tremulously, for all his anxiety was returning tenfold, ‘and I am afraid something has happened.’

  The inferior person said rudely that ‘nothing could have happened to her in that house, because she had not been there, which was a jolly good reason why’; and Mr Puckler was obliged to admit that the man ought to know, as it was his business to keep the door and let people in. He wished to be allowed to speak to the under nurse, who knew him; but the man was ruder than ever, and finally shut the door in his face.

  When the doll doctor was alone in the street, he steadied himself by the railing, for he felt as though he were breaking in two, just as some dolls break, in the middle of the backbone.

  Presently he knew that he must be doing something to find Else, and that gave him strength. He began to walk as quickly as he could through the streets, following every highway and byway which his little girl might have taken on her errand. He also asked several policemen in vain if they had seen her, and most of them answered him kindly, for they saw that he was a sober man and in his right senses, and some of them had little girls of their own.

  It was one o’clock in the morning when he went up to his own door again, worn out and hopeless and broken-hearted. As he turned the key in the lock, his heart stood still, for he knew that he was awake and not dreaming, and that he really heard those tiny footsteps pattering to meet him inside the house along the passage.

  But he was too unhappy to be much frightened any more, and his heart went on again with a dull regular pain, that found its way all through him with every pulse. So he went in, and hung up his hat in the dark, and found the matches in the cupboard and the candlestick in its place in the corner. Mr Puckler was so much overcome and so completely worn out that he sat down in his chair before the work-table and almost fainted, as his face dropped forward upon his folded hands. Beside him the solitary candle burned steadily with a low flame in the still warm air.

  ‘Else! Else!’ he moaned against his yellow knuckles. And that was all he could say, and it was no relief to him. On the contrary, the very sound of the name was a new and sharp pain that pierced his ears and his head and his very soul. For every time he repeated the name it meant that little Else was dead, somewhere out in the streets of London in the dark.

  He was so terribly hurt that he did not even feel something pulling gently at the skirt of his old coat, so gently that it was like the nibbling of a tiny mouse. He might have thought that it was really a mouse if he had noticed it.

  ‘Else! Else!’ he groaned, right against his hands.

  Then a cool breath stirred his thin hair, and the low flame of the one candle dropped down almost to a mere spark, not flickering, as though a draught were going to blow it out, but just dropping down as if it were tired out. Mr Puckler felt his hands stiffening with fright under his face; and there was a faint rustling sound, like some small silk thing blown in a gentle breeze. He sat up straight, stark and scared, and a small wooden voice spoke in the stillness.

  ‘Pa-pa,’ it said, with a break between the syllables.

  Mr Puckler stood up in a single jump, and his chair fell over backwards with a smashing noise upon the wooden floor. The candle had almost gone out.

  It was Nina’s doll-voice that had spoken, and he should have known it among the voices of a hundred other dolls. And yet there was something more in it, a little human ring, with a pitiful cry and a call for help, and the wail of a hurt child. Mr Puckler stood up, stark and stiff, and tried to look round, but at first he could not, for he seemed to be frozen from head to foot.

  Then he made a great effort, and he raised one hand to each of his temples, and pressed his own head round as he would have turned a doll’s. The candle was burning so low that it might as well have been out altogether, for any light it gave, and the room seemed quite dark at first. Then he saw something. He would not have believed that he could be more frightened than he had been just before that. But he was, and his knees shook, for he saw the doll standing in the middle of the floor, shining with a faint and ghostly radiance, her beautiful glassy brown eyes fixed on his. And across her face the very thin line of the break he had mended shone as though it were drawn in light with a line point of white flame

  Yet there was something more in the eyes, too; there was something human, like Else’s own, but as if only the doll saw him through them, and not Else. And there was enough of Else to bring back all his pain and to make him forget his fear.

  ‘Else! My little Else!’ he cried aloud.

  The small ghost moved, and its doll-arm slowly rose and fell with a stiff, mechanical motion.

  ‘Pa-pa,’ it said.

  It seemed this time that there was even more of Else’s tone echoing somewhere between the wooden notes that reached his ears so distinctly and yet so far away. Else was calling him, he was sure.

  His face was perfectly white in the gloom, but his knees did not shake any more, and he felt that he was less frightened.

  ‘Yes, child! But where? Where?’ he asked. ‘Where are you, Else?’

  ‘Pa-pa!’

  The syllables died away in the quiet room.

  There was a low rustling of silk, the glassy brown eyes turned slowly away, and Mr Puckler heard the pitter-patter of the small feet in the bronze kid slippers as the figure ran straight to the door. Then the candle burned high again, the room was full of light, and he was alone.

  Mr Puckler passed his hand over his eyes and looked about him. He could see everything quite clearly, and he felt that he must have been dreaming, though he was standing instead of sitting down, as he should have been if he had just waked up. The candle burned brightly now. There were the dolls to be mended, lying in a row with their toes up. The third one had lost her right shoe, and Else was making one. He knew that, and he was certainly not dreaming now. He had not been dreaming when he had come in from his fruitless search and had heard the doll’s footsteps running to the door. He had not fallen asleep in his chair. How could he possibly have fallen asleep when his heart was breaking? He had been awake all the time.

  He steadied himself, set the fallen chair upon its legs, and said to himself again very emphatically that he was a foolish old man. He ought to be out in the streets looking for his child, asking questions, and enquiring at the police stations where all accidents were reported as soon as they were known, or at the hospitals.

  ‘Pa-pa!’

  The longing, wailing, pitiful little wooden cry rang from the passage, outside the door, and Mr Puckler stood for an instant with white face, transfixed and rooted to the spot. A moment later his hand was on the latch. Then he was in the passage, with the li
ght streaming from the open door behind him.

  Quite at the other end he saw the little phantom shining clearly in the shadow, and the right hand seemed to beckon to him as the arm rose and fell once more. He knew all at once that it had not come to frighten him but to lead him, and when it disappeared, and he walked boldly towards the door, he knew that it was in the street outside, waiting for him. He forgot that he was tired and had eaten no supper, and had walked many miles, for a sudden hope ran through and through him, like a golden stream of life.

  And sure enough, at the corner of the alley, and at the corner of the street, and out in Belgrave Square, he saw the small ghost flitting before him. Sometimes it was only a shadow, where there was other light, but then the glare of the lamps made a pale green sheen on its little Mother Hubbard frock of silk; and sometimes, where the streets were dark and silent, the whole figure shone out brightly with its yellow curls and rosy neck. It seemed to trot along like a tiny child, and Mr Puckler could hear the pattering of the bronze kid slippers on the pavement as it ran. But it went very fast, and he could only just keep up with it, tearing along with his hat on the back of his head and his thin hair blown by the night breeze, and his horn-rimmed spectacles firmly set upon his broad nose.

  On and on he went, and he had no idea where he was. He did not even care, for he knew certainly that he was going the right way.

  Then at last, in a wide, quiet street, he was standing before a big, sober-looking door that had two lamps on each side of it, and a polished brass bell-handle, which he pulled.

  And just inside, when the door was opened, in the bright light, there was the little shadow, and the pale green sheen of the little silk dress, and once more the small cry came to his ears, less pitiful, more longing.

  ‘Pa-pa!’

  The shadow turned suddenly bright, and out of the brightness the beautiful brown glass eyes were turned up happily to his, while the rosy mouth smiled so divinely that the phantom doll looked almost like a little angel just then.

  ‘A little girl was brought in soon after ten o’clock,’ said the quiet voice of the hospital doorkeeper. ‘I think they thought she was only stunned. She was holding a big brown-paper box against her, and they could not get it out of her arms. She had a long plait of brown hair that hung down as they carried her.’

  ‘She is my little girl,’ said Mr Puckler, but he hardly heard his own voice.

  He leaned over Else’s face in the gentle light of the children’s ward, and when he had stood there a minute the beautiful brown eyes opened and looked up to his.

  ‘Pa-pa!’ cried Else softly, ‘I knew you would come!’

  Then Mr Puckler did not know what he did or said for a moment, and what he felt was worth all the fear and terror and despair that had almost killed him that night. But by and by Else was telling her story, and the nurse let her speak, for there were only two other children in the room, who were getting well and were sound asleep.

  ‘They were big boys with bad faces,’ said Else, ‘and they tried to get Nina away from me, but I held on and fought as well as I could till one of them hit me with something, and I don’t remember any more, for I tumbled down and I suppose the boys ran away, and somebody found me there. But I’m afraid Nina is all smashed.’

  ‘Here is the box,’ said the nurse. ‘We could not take it out of her arms till she came to herself Would you like to see if the doll is broken?’

  And she undid the string cleverly, but Nina was all smashed to pieces. Only the gentle light of the children’s ward made a pale green sheen in the folds of the little Mother Hubbard frock.

  He needed a helping hand, a comforting presence. He knew just the right person to cheer him up. A study of loneliness and despair

  ENCOUNTER AT NIGHT

  BY MARY FRANCES MCHUGH

  Dublin was growing deserted; only an odd car slid by in the dark, rainy night, for the second of its passing throwing a dazzle on the shiny pavements and lighting up the shuttered shops. Figures would pass, hurrying by with hunched shoulders—but less and less frequently.

  Tom Donovan and his three friends scarcely felt the rain. They were hot and happy and bemused. All that each of them wanted was somehow to continue talking and drinking and smoking in genial company. . . But Jim, the red-haired barman at Flynn’s, had gradually edged them out into the night, and bolted the doors against them. There was nothing for it but to go home.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Joe!’

  ‘Well, good-night, boys!’

  ‘Take care—see you tomorrow!’

  The milk of human kindness flowed in them, and they patted one another’s backs affectionately again and again before each went his separate way. Donovan, the shiftless poet, was left standing on the pavement, last and lonely. Slowly there faded from his face its smile of convivial bliss, and into his sobering mind crept back those thoughts which now, with the fleeting years, possessed him more and more in his solitary moments.

  Wretched, killing thoughts. No, not thoughts—not thoughts, but feelings—or one feeling only, corroding unhappiness. A sense that life was vain and empty, with comfort nowhere—not even in drinking, in friendship, or in love. If even he knew friendship or love! A certainty that never, during all his existence, even when he had been young and gay and roystering, had he known ease: always a shadow had been lurking at his elbow. And it whispered to him that he was a fool to go on with the sham from day to day, that there was only one solution to everything: a knife or a rope for his throat.

  Cruel memories came thronging. He saw a miserable, beaten peasant child: himself. All that child had really known was suffering, though the man had sweet lilting songs of a boy, barefooted, in the ‘West, birds’-nesting or tickling for trout in a mountain stream. The boy had been there, the sun, the stream, the idyllic sky, the irrational light heartedness of childhood. These were the stuff of his verse—but not the harsh home, the pain and puzzled grief, the cold and hunger which had been more true and near. These things had made him!—they were with him even now.

  Later, there was the man. A poet he was now, praised and wondered at for the clear innocency of his songs, toys fashioned for the cultured mind by a queer bohemian fellow. That he was so different from his poetry merely gave it zest. He knew this, and cultivated his oddity, and it was partly to curry favour with his admirers that he drank and sang his way through Europe without a word of any language but his own. Here, standing on a Dublin pavement in the night, he recalled the troubadour adventure and shivered—not because the steely rain was stinging his face and sending cold arrows through his clothing. No; but because from those wanderings from which he had so triumphantly returned he could now remember only a haunting horror. He evoked without willing it a night in Russia, when he lay in a country tavern with his familiar spirit beside him. There, in a big common room, several poor travellers slept about the stove. The air was humid with their breath and the odorous damp of their clothing, and the windows were sealed to blindness by the snow outside. In the yard there suddenly arose the commotion of a sledge being unharnessed; a bulky figure stepped into the room, and looked stealthily around at the sleepers and fixedly at him, Donovan, before flinging itself likewise down in a corner. Donovan through half-closed eyes saw the stranger’s Mongolian face, and as though he were a child it smote him with its mystery of a locked mind, of a race other than and alien to his own. There was no reason for his sudden panic of fear, or for the anguish of loneliness which overcame him then. It was simply part of the encompassing oppression of the world to his soul, driving him whither he knew not.

  He tossed his head, heedless of the rain, appealing to the sky above him to protect and save. There must be rest somewhere, a cooling of this fever: why should he, more than other men, be so tormented? Why could he not be like little Terry Shaughnessy, caring nothing for anyone, whether drunk or sober, in funds or out of them?—Now, there was an idea! Why go back, in this mood and in this weather, to his cold room and unwelcoming bed, when Terry wou
ld be glad enough for him to drop in for a smoke and a talk? He’d be there, sure enough, in his attic in Eustace Street. He wouldn’t be in bed. Who ever heard of little Terry being in bed? He’d have a warm fire, and may be a taste of something—‘one for the worms’, as he called it... Donovan turned towards Eustace Street.

  He trotted along mechanically, now thinking cheerfully of himself and Terry. They were the only bachelors among the boys—and taking it all in all, he’d swear they were as well off like that. He thought of Ned Buckley’s wife, and grinned to himself. A nice exhibition she made of the poor man, running to his newspaper office or writing to the editor when she wanted money. Ned was a good sort—but what kind of man was he to put up with that? Now, if any woman tried to manage him—Or Terry! he’d swear Terry would know how to deal with her, too. Keep a firm hand. That was it.

  Yet, may be—Terry as well as himself—in their hearts they’d like to have a home, and a woman waiting for them, and children. May be they’d die in the workhouse, no one caring enough for them to follow them to the grave... At these sad thoughts Donovan’s mouth turned down again behind his coat collar, and he felt nearly dismal enough to cry. But resolutely he clung to the advantages of his state. He was his own master, anyway. He could drop in on Terry like this, tonight, and Terry was welcome to drop in on him, any hour he liked.

  The rain beat on his face, stood in tears on his eyelashes till the street lamps carried a halo, each of them. Then he blinked and shook his head, and the long, deserted street shone straight before him again. A clock struck twelve. Ah, here was Terry’s door. God, it was good to get in out of the rain!

  The door stood ajar. That saved ringing the bell. Probably someone had left it like that on purpose—goodness knew how many lived in the old rookery. Not a glimmer of light. But Donovan felt his way to the banisters, gripped them, and mounted, cautiously counting the stairs.

  Terry’s door was opposite the fourth turn. Two ... three ... The next one ... Mother of God, what was that?