Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  “That’s all right,” said Low. “It was an experience worth having.”

  “But, no! Not for me! I do not envy you your researches into mysteries of this abominable description. I now comprehend perfectly that Sir George has lost his nerve if he has had to do with this horror. Besides, it is entirely impossible to explain these things.”

  At this moment they heard Sir George’s arrival and went out to meet him.

  “I could not sleep all night for thinking of you!” exclaimed Blackburton on seeing them; “and I came along as soon as it was light. Something has happened.”

  “But certainly something has happened,” cried M. Thierry shaking his head solemnly; “something of the most bizarre, of the most horrible! Monsieur Flaxman, you shall tell Sir George this story. You have been in that accursed room all night and remain alive to tell the tale!”

  As Low came to the conclusion of the story Sir George suddenly exclaimed:

  “You have met with some injury to your face, Mr. Low.”

  Low turned to the mirror. In the now strong light three parallel weals from eye to mouth could be seen.

  “I remember a stinging pain like a lash on my cheek. What would you say these marks were caused by, Thierry?” asked Low.

  Thierry looked at them and shook his head.

  “No one in their senses would venture to offer any explanation of the occurrences of last night,” he replied.

  “Something of this sort, do you think?” asked Low again, putting down the object he held in his hand on the table.

  Thierry took it up and described it aloud.

  “A long and thin object of a brown and yellow colour and twisted like a sabre-bladed corkscrew,” then he started slightly and glanced at Low.

  “It’s a human nail, I imagine,” suggested Low.

  “But no human being has talons of this kind—except, perhaps, a Chinaman of high rank.”

  “There are no Chinamen about here, nor ever have been, to my knowledge,” said Blackburton shortly. “I’m very much afraid that, in spite of all you have so bravely faced, we are no nearer to any rational explanation.”

  “On the contrary, I fancy I begin to see my way. I believe, after all, that I may be able to convert you, Thierry,” said Flaxman Low.

  “Convert me?”

  “To a belief in the definite aim of my work. But you shall judge for yourself. What do you make of it so far? I claim that you know as much of the matter as I do.”

  “My dear good friend, I make nothing of it,” returned Thierry, shrugging his shoulders and spreading out his hands. “Here we have a tissue of unprecedented incidents that can be explained on no theory whatever.”

  “But this is definite,” and Flaxman Low held up the blackened nail.

  “And how do you propose to connect that nail with the black hairs—with the eyes that looked through the bars of a cage—the fate of Batty, with its symptoms of death by pressure and suffocation—our experience of swelling flesh, that something which filled and filled the room to the exclusion of all else? How are you going to account for these things by any kind of connected hypothesis?” asked Thierry, with a shade of irony.

  “I mean to try,” replied Low.

  At lunch time Thierry inquired how the theory was getting on.

  “It progresses,” answered Low. “By the way, Sir George, who lived in this house for some time prior to, say, 1840? He was a man—it may have been a woman, but, from the nature of his studies, I am inclined to think it was a man—who was deeply read in ancient necromancy, Eastern magic, mesmerism, and subjects of a kindred nature. And was he not buried in the vault you pointed out?”

  “Do you know anything more about him?” asked Sir George in surprise.

  “He was I imagine,” went on Flaxman Low reflectively, “hirsute and swarthy, probably a recluse, and suffered from a morbid and extravagant fear of death.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I only asked about it. Am I right?”

  “You have described my cousin, Sir Gilbert Blackburton, in every particular. I can show you his portrait in another room.”

  As they stood looking at the painting of Sir Gilbert Blackburton, with his long, melancholy, olive face and thick, black beard, Sir George went on. “My grandfather succeeded him at Yand. I have often heard my father speak of Sir Gilbert, and his strange studies and extraordinary fear of death. Oddly enough, in the end he died rather suddenly, while he was still hale and strong. He predicted his own approaching death and had a doctor in attendance for a week or two before he died. He was placed in a coffin he had had made on some plan of his own and buried in the vault. His death occurred in 1842 or 1843. If you care to see them I can show you some of his papers, which may interest you.”

  Mr. Flaxman Low spent the afternoon over the papers. When evening came, he rose from his work with a sigh of content, stretched himself, and joined Thierry and Sir George in the garden.

  They dined at Lady Blackburton’s, and it was late before Sir George found himself alone with Mr. Flaxman Low and his friend.

  “Have you formed any opinion about the thing which haunts the Manor House?” he asked anxiously.

  Thierry elaborated a cigarette, crossed his legs, and added: “If you have in truth come to any definite conclusion, pray let us hear it, my dear Monsieur Flaxman.”

  “I have reached a very definite and satisfactory conclusion,” replied Low. “The Manor House is haunted by Sir Gilbert Blackburton, who died, or, rather, who seemed to die, on the 15th of August, 1842.”

  “Nonsense! The nail fifteen inches long at the least—how do you connect it with Sir Gilbert?” asked Blackburton testily.

  “I am convinced that it belonged to Sir Gilbert,” Low answered.

  “But the long black hair like a woman’s?”

  “Dissolution in the case of Sir Gilbert was not complete—not consummated, so to speak—as I hope to show you later. Even in the case of dead persons the hair and nails have been known to grow. By a rough calculation as to the growth of nails in such cases, I was enabled to indicate approximately the date of Sir Gilbert’s death. The hair too grew on his head.”

  “But the barred eyes? I saw them myself!” exclaimed the young man.

  “The eyelashes grow also. You follow me?”

  “You have, I presume, some theory in connection with this?” observed Thierry. “It must be a very curious one.”

  “Sir Gilbert in his fear of death appears to have mastered and elaborated a strange and ancient formula by which the grosser factors of the body being eliminated, the more ethereal portions continue to retain the spirit, and the body is thus preserved from absolute disintegration. In this manner true death may be indefinitely deferred. Secure from the ordinary chances and changes of existence, this spiritualised body could retain a modified life practically for ever.”

  “This is a most extraordinary idea, my dear fellow,” remarked Thierry.

  “But why should Sir Gilbert haunt the Manor House, and one special room?”

  “The tendency of spirits to return to the old haunts of bodily life is almost universal. We cannot yet explain the reason of this attraction of environment.”

  “But the expansion—the crowding substance which we ourselves felt? You cannot meet that difficulty,” said Thierry persistently.

  “Not as fully as I could wish, perhaps. But the power of expanding and contracting to a degree far beyond our comprehension is a well-known attribute of spiritualised matter.”

  “Wait one little moment, my dear Monsieur Flaxman,” broke in Thierry’s voice after an interval; “this is very clever and ingenious indeed. As a theory I give it my sincere admiration. But proof—proof is what we now demand.”

  Flaxman Low looked steadily at the two incredulous faces.

  “This,” he said slowly, “is the hair of Sir Gilbert Blackburton, and this nail is from the little finger of his left hand. You can prove my assertion by opening the coffin.”

  S
ir George, who was pacing up and down the room impatiently, drew up.

  “I don’t like it at all, Mr. Low, I tell you frankly. I don’t like it at all. I see no object in violating the coffin. I am not concerned to verify this unpleasant theory of yours. I have only one desire; I want to get rid of this haunting presence, whatever it is.”

  “If I am right,” replied Low, “the opening of the coffin and exposure of the remains to strong sunshine for a short time will free you for ever from this presence.”

  In the early morning, when the summer sun struck warmly on the lawns of Yand, the three men carried the coffin from the vault to a quiet spot among the shrubs where, secure from observation, they raised the lid.

  Within the coffin lay the semblance of Gilbert Blackburton, maned to the ears with long and coarse black hair. Matted eyelashes swept the fallen cheeks, and beside the body stretched the bony hands, each with its dependent sheaf of switch-like nails. Low bent over and raised the left hand gingerly.

  The little finger was without a nail!

  Two hours later they came back and looked again. The sun had in the meantime done its work; nothing remained but a fleshless skeleton and a few half-rotten shreds of clothing.

  The ghost of Yand Manor House has never since been heard of.

  When Thierry bade Flaxman Low good-bye, he said:

  “In time, my dear Monsieur Flaxman, you will add another to our sciences. You establish your facts too well for my peace of mind.”

  HARGREAVES & SARGENT IN

  THE TAPPING ON THE WAINSCOT

  ALLEN UPWARD

  Following the success of the Flaxman Low series, the publisher C. Arthur Pearson sought to repeat the experiment, running Allen Upward’s “The Ghost Hunters” series in The Royal Magazine in 1905 and Jessie Adelaide Middleton’s rather more factual “True Ghost Stories” in Pearson’s Magazine in 1907. Upward’s series is significant for including a woman investigator, Miss Sargent, who is the secretary to the firm of estate agents Mortimer & Hargreaves, but also has talents as a medium. Although Jack Hargreaves, who buys and sells haunted houses, initially has some concerns, he soon realizes how useful Alwyne Sargent’s talents are and thereafter they form a team. The first story in the series, “The Story of the Green House, Wallington,” is a fairly mundane episode but Upward found the right mood with this next story.

  A barrister by training but with a yearning to be a politician, George Allen Upward (1863–1926) led a rather diverse, one might almost say impulsive, career. Besides his literary works as poet, novelist, and essayist, he fought as a volunteer in the invasion of Turkey by the Greeks in 1897, he was in charge of a mission to Macedonia in 1907, and at the start of the First World War he travelled to Belgium dressed in his scoutmaster’s uniform. He enjoyed exploring secret histories and was perhaps best known for the series “Secrets of the Courts of Europe” that ran in Pearson’s Magazine during 1896. He also wrote two series of “Historic Mysteries” during 1900 and 1901; and “Behind the Scenes of Europe” in 1917. His death was itself something of a mystery. He was found dead of a gunshot wound at his cottage but his adopted son, Richard, who was in bed upstairs, heard no shot, and both he and Upward’s sister did not believe that Upward was depressed. A verdict of suicide while of unsound mind was recorded, but was it an accident or something more sinister?

  Amongst his books was The Discovery of the Dead (1910) where a scientist discovers a way of communicating with the dead, or “necromorphs,” which is the next stage of spiritual existence after death.

  THE MYSTERIOUS INCIDENT WHICH I AM GOING TO NARRATE IS ONE which seems to have a particular interest for those who study occult phenomena.

  According to some who have discussed it with me, it throws an important light on the conditions which prevail in the world of spirits, and the limitations to their action.

  However, I do not care to say anything on the subject myself. My object is simply to set down facts, and leave others to draw their own conclusions.

  It was about a year after the affair of the Green House, Wallington, already related, when our firm received instructions from the solicitors of Sir Henry Weetman to dispose by auction of his family mansion, Hailesbury Manor, Sussex.

  I was told that Sir Henry was a distant relation, who had recently come into the title and estate on the death of the last baronet, and preferred to live abroad. The furniture and effects had been sold already by a firm of auctioneers, well known for their sales of that kind, and the house and estate were to follow.

  I went down with a clerk to view the place and found it to be a very handsome old Jacobean mansion, with valuable oak wainscot in all the principal rooms.

  The caretaker who showed us over it was a dear old lady who had been housekeeper to the last baronet, and was evidently heartbroken at the prospect of the old family seat passing into the possession of strangers.

  “Sir Christopher—that’s my late master—would turn in his grave if he knew what was being done with the old place,” she lamented. “And I shouldn’t wonder if he did know.”

  I was busy directing the clerk in taking measurements of the more important rooms and did not pay much heed to this obscure intimation.

  In due course we reached the first floor, and the housekeeper conducted us into a great, square room with a huge fireplace and two windows commanding a view over the park.

  I was surprised to find that this room had not been stripped so completely as the ones downstairs. It still contained a magnificently carved oak bedstead, a four-poster, equal in size to the bedroom of a modern flat.

  “This is the room Sir Christopher died in,” the old lady said impressively. “He died in that bed King Charles I once slept in it.”

  “And why hasn’t it been removed like the rest of the furniture?” I naturally asked.

  “It is fixed to the floor, for one thing,” was the answer. “And Sir Henry thought; it would fetch more by leaving it where it is. But I believe he would have it taken away now if he knew what I know.”

  Mrs. Musgrave, as the old housekeeper was named, nodded her head and pursed up her lips, after the manner of old ladies when they have a secret which they are longing to tell, but which they think it due to their dignity only to part with under pressure.

  “Why, what is it you know?” I asked, with an interest by no means feigned.

  “Perhaps I ought not to speak of it,” the housekeeper returned, with a glance at my clerk.

  I sent the young man into the other room and repeated my question.

  “Well, sir, it may be that I ought not to be the first to mention it, but it’s being talked of in the village, and if you didn’t hear of it from me you’d hear of it from somebody else, most likely.” Mrs. Musgrave lowered her voice: “This house is haunted, sir.”

  Remembering my late grisly experience, I did not reply as lightly as I might have done once to such a statement.

  “Haunted? How? In what way?”

  “You may believe me, or you may not, sir,” Mrs. Musgrave said with deliberation, evidently in no hurry to come to the point. “There are some who can hear it, and some who can’t. Some say it’s only fancy, and others that it’s the spirit of Sir Christopher. But all I can say is, I wouldn’t pass a night in this room again, not if you were to offer me fifty pounds.”

  This was not very pleasant hearing. If a report of this kind were current in the village, it would be pretty sure to reach the ears of any intending purchaser, and perhaps choke him off.

  An old family ghost, or the tradition of one, is sometimes considered an attraction to a venerable country seat. But any really unpleasant phenomena, particularly if of quite recent date, would be a very decided drawback in most people’s eyes.

  “Can you tell me exactly what you did hear?” I asked.

  “It is a tapping, sir, a tapping on the wainscot just over there,” she pointed to the wall opposite the foot of the bed. “I was lying asleep in the bed, sir,—for when the house was stripped, and Sir Henry
went away, I thought there would be no harm in my sleeping here, and I wanted to say I had slept in the same bed as King Charles. But it’s my belief that Sir Henry must have heard the tapping himself, and seen something as well, that frightened him; and that’s why he was so anxious to clear everything out of the house and leave it.”

  I listened, hardly knowing what question to put next. At last I inquired:

  “Do you suggest—is there any reason to suppose—that there was anything wrong about Sir Christopher Weetman’s death?”

  The question took Mrs. Musgrave by surprise.

  “Wrong, sir? What should there be wrong? I’m sure the poor gentleman couldn’t have died more peacefully. Miss Alice and I were with him the whole time.”

  “Who was Miss Alice?”

  “His daughter—at least, his adopted daughter. She had lived with him since she was a baby, and he made no difference between her and his own flesh and blood.” Mrs. Musgrave’s voice changed again, as she added: “And in my belief it’s on her account that Sir Christopher walks.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when Sir Henry came down he turned her out of the house with nothing but the clothes she stood in. Sir Christopher hadn’t made a will, and he came into everything as the heir. Miss Alice had to go to London and take a situation as a waitress.”

  I mused in silence, Could there be anything in that strange suggestion? Was it not more likely that the old housekeeper’s indignation at her new master’s conduct had made her fancy that the ordinary noises of an old mansion by night were a protest on the part of the dead?

  “And have you heard the tapping since?” I asked.

  “I hear it every night!” was the startling answer. “I have shifted my bed to half the rooms in the house, but it makes no difference. Wherever I am, the taps come; and then they move along the wall and by the staircases and the corridors till they reach this room and stop there!”