Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  Then they brought an architect in to see if he could discover any secret chamber leading from the Tower Room, but his examinations only proved that the walls were quite solid.

  A fortnight passed, and Shiela had become very nervy and restless. The nightly torment she went through was beginning to undermine her constitution. Each night left her weaker than the previous one; she began to suffer from palpitations of the heart, and experienced great pain when she breathed.

  “I won’t give in,” she said to herself, between tightly clenched teeth. I will master this stupid terror.”

  Although the fear was still intangible, it had become more real. She suffered actual physical pain at times. It varied in intensity, but, always sensitive to the slightest scratch, her sufferings at times were almost unbearable. Then came the night when her whole body felt as if it was on the rack. Her joints cracked—her muscles swelled, and when she woke in the morning, her arms were inflamed and sore.

  She felt the time had come to speak of the terror she was going through. Lord Menzies looked grave.

  “If there is anything supernatural at work, don’t you think it would be wiser if I had the door blocked up again? The room needn’t be used, and I think it would be wiser for you to give up this search.”

  “No,” said Shiela, defiantly; “I am determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. I wonder if you would have the room entirely re-decorated?”

  “Why, certainly, if you think it will make any difference.”

  “And the chimney swept?”

  “Certainly.”

  The orders were given, and for a week Shiela slept in peace, and to some extent recovered her nerve.

  When the room was finished, Shiela again insisted on sleeping there, but the horror was worse, if anything, than it was before. She felt the cold sweat running down her body; her hands were clammy and cold, and as the clock outside struck three, she realised she could no longer stand the strain. She dragged herself across the floor to the bell-pull—unconsciously her lips moved. “Stavordale! Stavordale! help me,” she cried. A harsh bell clanged through the oaken corridors with startling suddenness. Lady Menzies stirred uneasily, and then woke to life.

  “Archie—It’s Miss Crerar; she’s in danger,” she cried.

  “Quickly—quickly.”

  But the servants were before her, and when she reached the Tower Room, Shiela was being carried out. She was quite stiff; her eyes were closed, and her breath came in short convulsive gasps. Tenderly she was placed on a settee, and brandy was forced between her tightly clenched teeth. She moaned slightly, and opened her eyes, and then fell into a rather restless sleep.

  Lady Menzies watched by her side through the rest of the night, and in the morning, although she was much better, a doctor was sent for.

  “Heart trouble,” he said, quickly, when he first glanced at her, but after examination—“Very strange. She shows every sign of having a badly strained heart. Yet it is working quite normally now. I should say she has had some great shock. Plenty of rest and quiet, a light diet, and she will be quite all right in a couple of days.”

  About ten, Stavordale Hartland came over in a great state of excitement.

  “Shiela—Miss Crerar?” he asked. “Is she ill?”

  “Why, how did you know?” asked Lady Menzies in some surprise. “She is certainly not very well. She fainted last night, but there is not the slightest cause for alarm.”

  Stavordale’s face whitened.

  “It’s damnable,” he cried. “I beg your pardon, Lady Menzies, but it really is. It’s perfectly mad of a child like Shiela to meddle with the unknown. When may I see her?” he added eagerly.

  “Tomorrow. She will be quite herself, I hope.”

  Next morning Stavordale arrived with an armful of flowers for Shiela. She smiled shyly as she took them.

  “How did you know I was ill?” she asked.

  “You told me yourself,” he said, grimly.

  “I did?” she replied in some astonishment.

  “Yes. I awoke and heard you calling me. ‘Stavordale, Stavordale, help me,’ you seemed to say. Oh, so distinctly that I thought for the moment you were still with us in the house. The horror in your voice nearly maddened me—I knew something was wrong. Little girl,” he went on hoarsely, “if you called for me in distress, surely it proves you think of me sometimes? Won’t you give all this up and be my wife?”

  “Oh, I can’t,” she cried tremulously. “I—I can’t. I have a mission to fulfil I can’t explain. If you will only be patient—”

  “Will you send for me if you ever want any help?” he pleaded. “I promise you I will be patient. I won’t worry you any more—”

  “If I ever need any help I will send for you,” she said sweetly, and he had to be content with that.

  “I am going to stay in the cellars under the Tower Room,” announced Shiela a few days later. In vain they threatened—forbade—commanded.

  “Won’t you let someone watch with you?” pleaded Lady Menzies, but she refused all help.

  At eleven she went down and turned the lights on full. It was rather chilly, and she buttoned up her coat and drew a rug round her shoulders. The hours passed slowly. One—two—three—four. At seven she went to her own room, and slept peacefully until late in the morning. The next night found her in the cellars again, but nothing disturbed her tranquillity. The cellars were obviously immune from the phenomena that haunted the upper chamber.

  In desperation she fulfilled her promise to Stavordale and sent for him.

  “I can’t fathom this at all,” she said. “I wonder if you and Lord Menzies would sit up with me tonight in the Tower Room? I want to see if the same fear will affect you both.”

  That night there were three watchers. It was very still, and there was a pleasant smell of cigar smoke in the room. They talked on all subjects but one—psychology was taboo. Lord Menzies was in the midst of a funny story when the clock chimed the quarter to one. He stopped in the middle of a word, his face whitened, and he stared at Shiela out of glassy eyes. Stavordale moved restlessly. Shiela had lost consciousness, fear the omnipotent held her within its thrall.

  Lord Menzies staggered to his feet, and gasped in unnatural tones, “I’m stifling. Let’s get out of this accursed place.”

  It took the united efforts of the three to force themselves out of the room. They staggered, supported each other, staggered again, and eventually reached the door. The sweat was running down the two men’s faces, and it was with a sigh of relief that they closed the door behind them. But as they reached the passage the terror left them.

  “This is the end,” said Lord Menzies dryly. “You don’t sleep there again, young lady. Tomorrow I have the door bricked up. Why, it’s worse than uncanny—it’s unholy.”

  Next day Shiela went to the Tower Room. She was very disappointed. All the suffering she had gone through had been for nought. She had not discovered the sinister secret of the room. Already the furniture was gone, and the carpet had been taken away. The sunlight streamed in and its beams strayed into the passage beyond. Almost without thinking, she noticed the difference in the flooring. Out in the passage it was black and shining, slightly rough and uneven in places. In the Tower Room itself the floor was more even—newer, smoother.

  “I wonder,” she said to herself, and went in search of the earl.

  “Before the door is bricked up,” she said abruptly, “I wonder if you would try and prise up some of the flooring in the Tower Room?”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I was looking at it just now, and the floor looks altogether newer than that outside. Surely if the Tower is the oldest part of the castle, and the original flooring is in the passage, the Tower Room ought to have still older boards?”

  “Start at the door,” she directed. “One of the boards looks quite loose there.”

  With great difficulty he succeeded in raising one of the narrow boards. Eagerly they peered underneath. A wooden step, blac
k with age, worm-eaten, and uneven, met their astonished gaze. He prised open a second and a third board, and three more steps were laid bare before them.

  “This room was on a lower level at one time,” said Shiela in excitement. “Oh, have the floor all taken up, Lord Menzies.”

  With the help of some of the outdoor servants, the whole of the flooring was removed, and the original floor was open to view, some three and a half feet below; three stairs led down to it from the other portion of the house.

  Shiela gazed at it uncomprehendingly. It was a very rough, uneven floor, great knots were in the wood, and in parts it was very frail. Here and there iron rings and rusty bolts were fixed to the ground. In one corner an iron slab was raised perhaps a foot from the ground. On the slab itself were fastened metal sockets in the shape of a boot. Shiela gazed at them curiously, and slipped her little feet into them.

  “Whatever are they for?” she asked, and suddenly gave a cry of pain. “Oh, help me, Lord Menzies. I can’t get out. Something is hurting me.”

  The earl bent over her. A rusty catch on one side still worked, and he opened the boot-shaped metal. Inside were sharp iron spikes that fell into position when the foot was slipped into the “boot”; but they were so cunningly fixed that they would not allow the feet to come out again, and the slightest movement gave the most excruciating pain.

  Shiela was scared. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Torture,” he breathed.

  He picked up an old and rusty pair of thumbscrews. “A torture chamber,” he repeated, “and I should say one of the most horrible of its kind, yet I have never heard of it. Who used it—whether it was civil or religious—I don’t know. It must have been complete in its terrors.”

  Blood stains on the floor had turned brown and rusty, but they were ominous reminders of the horrors of bygone days. In one corner lay a spiked iron club, rusted with blood. There was a rack fixed to the floor itself. Chains, clubs, iron masks with bloody spikes inside—the room was completely equipped for its dreadful purpose.

  “It’s horrible,” said Shiela, shuddering. “I wonder I didn’t think of the solution myself. This was a torture chamber, and probably always used at the dead of night.

  “From about a quarter to one until four o’clock,” put in Lord Menzies.

  “Yes. It would be the most unlikely time for discovery. It was no doubt entirely secret. That is the reason you have no records of its existence. You see,” she went on excitedly, “the hideous fear of the unhappy victims communicated itself to the very room. The walls, the wood, the bricks, were impregnated with wave upon wave of terror from the suffering ones. They retained it throughout the ages, and each night the terror that was once inflicted here, is let loose again at the hour it used to take place.”

  “But is such a thing possible?” asked the earl.

  Shiela smiled. “It seems like it, doesn’t it? What other explanation can you give? At any rate, may I suggest that you have the old floor taken away altogether?”

  “Well?”

  “Have the cavity between the old and new floors filled in, and destroy”—pointing with a shudder—“these.”

  “And you think that the room will be all right then?”

  “I don’t know. It seems possible.”

  “You will stay till it is all complete,” urged Lady Menzies.

  “With pleasure.”

  The work was set in motion at once, and in the course of excavations the workmen discovered a charred skeleton. The fingers were gone, and the way the bones were twisted proved only too plainly the pain that the unhappy creature must have suffered.

  “May it rest in peace,” said Lord Menzies, and he gave orders for its burial.

  The hideous belts and torture instruments the earl caused to be thrown into the loch. He never found any records of the terrible place. He searched his own family histories, but never a sign or clue was given to point to its existence.

  Shiela, Lord Menzies, and Stavordale Hartland stayed in the room the first night that the floor had been relaid. At a quarter to one they all became nervous, but the night passed with no ill effects. Clearly the Room of Fear no longer justified its name. The intangible horrors of the past had gone.

  The sounds of agony, the horror and terror, the awe inspiring spectacles that had been absorbed into the very room itself, and that were nightly exuded from it, had gone never to return. The Torture Chamber was no more.

  It was early September when Shiela once more boarded a train en route for Edinburgh.

  Stavordale Hartland saw her off from Benderloch. She had stayed a couple of nights at Duroch Lodge after leaving Menzies Castle. As the guard waved his flag, Stavordale drew towards her, and instinctively their lips met. The whistle blew, and Shiela, blushing rosy red, slipped back into her corner seat, trembling with happiness.

  Stavordale Hartland watched the train fade away in the distance. What mattered it that no smiling face leant out of the window and waved him a farewell? He pictured the rosy face in the corner, the tremulous lips, the downcast eyes. He was well content.

  PETER CARWELL IN

  THE SEVEN FIRES

  PHILIPPA FOREST

  Philippa Forest was the writing alias of journalist and suffragette Marion Holmes (1867–1943). She was even imprisoned for her beliefs in 1907 for taking part in a protest march at the House of Commons. But she was also convinced she was psychic, because in her childhood she had had a vision when playing in an old shed of something swinging above her. A week later a man hanged himself there. She wrote just four stories about Peter Carwell and his “Watson,” an artist called Wilton. Carwell is a successful businessman who trades in Oriental fare but has developed a detailed knowledge of esoteric matters. The stories were published in Pearson’s Magazine from March to June 1920, of which this is the first.

  I MET HIM FIRST IN THE WAY OF BUSINESS. QUILTER, AN OLD SCHOOL friend, introduced him. Quilter, who was one of the biggest duffers at school I remember, now brokers, tea, or palm oil, or something of the kind, in the City with extraordinary success. He drops into my studio occasionally “to have a talk over old times,” he says, but the talk generally resolves itself into a series of explosive diatribes against the latest Budget, though what he has to complain of I never can understand, for he is making money hand over fist.

  I was putting the last touch to a picture one afternoon some years ago when he entered. He came and looked over my shoulder, and the next minute I heard a gasp of horror.

  “Good Lord, man!” he said, “where did you get the idea for that—that nightmare? Why, it’s a murderer—not a wolf. What a brute!”

  I drew back and looked at it. A big grey wolf was slinking away from a huddled heap in the snowy foreground—a heap suggestive of riven clothes and limbs. There was a pine wood in the background and a pale, frosty moon riding low down in the sky. The wolf was looking back over its shoulder at the mangled heap it had just left.

  Well, that was all right; it was the scene I had meant to paint. But now, for the first time I saw that the brute’s furtive eyes were uncannily human. There were hate and fear and malicious triumph—all the emotions of a degraded human soul lurking there.

  “Well, I’ve never noticed it before, I give you my word,” I gasped. “You’re right, it’s a murderer—not a wolf. How on earth did that look get there, I wonder?”

  “Isn’t it beastly? It gives me cold shivers all down my back. But d’ye mean to tell me you didn’t do it on purpose? Don’t be an ass!”

  It was perfectly true, though. Of course, every painter experiences this kind of thing occasionally. Both beautiful and sinister details will spring to life under his brush quite unintentionally. Indeed, he often doesn’t notice them until the picture is finished, and then, alter as he will, he can’t get rid of them.

  I didn’t try to explain this to Quilter, however. He’s not the kind—or at least he wasn’t then—to appreciate a psychological riddle.

  We both stood staring at i
t for a few minutes in silence, then I moved to take it down from the easel.

  “No, don’t,” he begged, “let’s have another look. I know what it is, but the name escapes me for the minute. . . . Ah! I’ve got it now!” triumphantly, “it’s a werwolf! Carwell was talking about them only the other night—but lor’! I thought it was just one of his hair raising yarns. Wilton, you must let him see this. He positively levels in uncanniness; makes a hobby of it in fact.”

  “Can he afford to buy it?” I asked with unashamed sordidness, as I wiped my brushes.

  “Ra-ther! He’s the head of one of the best-known firms in the City—Chinese silks, carvings, porcelain, and such-like. A tip-top business man too—keeps his crankiness for private consumption only. You’d never guess there was anything at all out of the way about him, except that he has a trick of suddenly turning his eyes on you when he’s interested or roused, and then you see there’s—oh, well! sort of something behind ’em you know,” finished Quilter feebly. Description was never his strong point.

  Mr. Peter Carwell called two days afterwards. He looked like a prosperous solicitor or an unusually well-groomed scientist, I thought, he was so tall and slender and dressed with such meticulous care. His lean, clean-shaven face appeared to be dominated by a long, high-bridged nose, but this was a false impression I discovered afterwards. It was the eyes, small and deep-set though they were, that really stamped the face with its look of strength and power. When his interest was roused the grey irises turned a peculiar golden red, almost as if a flame were lit behind them.

  I went forward to meet him with the gracious smile that—like other impecunious members of my profession—I keep on tap for prospective patrons. Half an hour afterwards I had sold him “The Werwolf” for twenty guineas, and, to be quite candid, would have counted myself well rid of it for half the sum.

  Our friendship was a matter of gradual growth. When I first met him I neither knew nor cared about so-called “occult” subjects, but I defy anyone to come into close contact with Peter Carwell without developing an interest in them sooner or later.