Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  Mrs. Danson received us delightfully. The reason for our visit had been kept from her, and she took us to be friends of her husband and connected in some vague way with that mysterious thing called business. Danson showed us over the house and pointed out Mrs. Wratham, who was helping in the kitchen. The house being old—the oldest in Minthaven—was sufficient excuse for our being shown into every room from attic to cellar.

  We both glanced at her curiously. She was a woman in the early thirties, but her hair was already streaked with grey. She looked wan and worried, and moved about with an air of lassitude. She gave me the impression of being literally tired of life.

  Danson took us to the window of his room from which he had first seen the apparition. The road ran by on our right on the flank of Danson’s long garden, with a low hedge between. Beyond the hedge stood the Wrathams’ cottage, and Danson let us see, by lending us the telescope, how plainly he must have seen that which stood outside the door.

  While Chard was looking through the telescope, the door of the cottage actually opened, and a short, thick-set man of about forty, emerged.

  “That’s Wratham,” said Danson, and Chard involuntarily craned a little forward.

  The man did not look in the direction of the house, but turned and slouched away in the direction of the sea. Chard laid aside the glass.

  “Where’s he off to?” my friend inquired. “I’d like to have a word with him.”

  “Well, he knocked off work about an hour ago, and I suppose by this time he’s had his tea, and is off to drink a pint of beer at the Cannon.”’

  “That, I suppose, is the village pub,” said Chard. “There’s only the one road, so we can’t miss it. Mind if we go down and have a word with him?”

  “Just as you like,” Danson replied, good-humouredly; and Chard and I got our hats and sallied forth.

  The Cannon Inn was about a quarter of a mile distant and within two hundred yards of the sea. We walked into the sand-strewn tap-room, where half-a-dozen working men were gathered around the shove-ha’penny board in the window. Wratham was easily identified. He stood aloft at a corner of the counter, with a pint glass of brown ale half empty at his elbow. He looked surly and moody, his eyes were red-rimmed and there was a droop to his mouth. Chard ordered drinks for everybody in the room.

  The group around the shove-ha’penny board split up as the men came shyly up to the counter to take the hastily filled glasses. Chard selected a youngish fair-haired, good-looking fellow and tapped him on the chest.

  “Hullo!” he exclaimed. “Weren’t you with me in the Fourth—shires?”

  The other grinned and shook his head.

  “No, zur. I was in the Artillery.”

  “Well, then, you’ve got a double, or, rather, you had one. I thought for a moment I’d seen a ghost. Anybody here believe in ghosts?”

  He looked around the room and laughed, and everybody laughed too except Wratham. He glowered, finished his beer, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and stared defiantly at Chard.

  “Lot o’ rot!” he grunted, and slouched out.

  The other men were quick to apologise for his manners.

  “He don’t belong here, sir, and the quicker he be gone the better.” Chard laughed it off, and I could see that something had given him perfect satisfaction.

  On the way back he said to me, “The Wrathams know. I’m convinced of that. And the mere fact that they know and haven’t said a word is enough for me. I think one short talk with that woman will clear up everything. But we may as well see the apparition if we can—to satisfy ourselves, you know.”

  We could not use the window of Danson’s room that night without arousing the curiosity of his wife, who slept next door; but overhead was an untenanted attic, and we kept watch at the window there with Danson’s telescope.

  It was a long vigil. Not until nearly half-past two did Chard’s pose suddenly become rigid, and I heard him draw a quick, harsh breath as if he had been touched by sudden cold. He remained quite still for nearly a minute; then, without a word, he passed the glass to me, and I focussed the road just in front of the Wratham’s cottage door.

  I need not describe what I saw. That has been done already in Danson’s words, and I have nothing to add. I had seen sights like that on the battlefield, but never broken men standing upright as this apparition of a broken man was standing. I did not look at it very long.

  “You’re not going—up the road, are you?” I asked falteringly, of Chard.

  “I don’t see the need,” Chard replied, with a catch in his voice.

  Neither did I.

  On the following morning, soon after Wratham had started work in Danson’s garden, Chard and I walked up to the cottage and knocked. Mrs. Wratham opened the door to us.

  “We want to speak to you, Mrs. Wratham,” Chard said solemnly.

  The little white-faced woman stared at us in mingled curiosity and alarm. But she asked us in, and we followed her into the little kitchen where clothes were airing in front of the range.

  “Mrs. Wratham,” said Chard very quietly, “who is the soldier who comes and knocks upon your door—the poor, dead, mangled soldier?”

  For answer she uttered a faint scream and clapped her hands to her eyes. In a moment I saw the tears running down under her palms.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Chard gently, “it would be better for you to tell us.”

  She calmed herself and faced us half defiantly.

  “He is a ghost,” she said. “There are such things as ghosts, you know.”

  “I know. I know. But tell us who he was.”

  “He was my first husband,” she answered, drying her eyes and beginning to talk in a dreary monotone. “So he’s found us out and followed us here? I knew he would. He’s followed us everywhere. Isn’t there any peace for the sinful—even in this world?

  “His name was Martin, and he was in the—shires. I married him when he was home on leave. I was only a girl then. And he went back to the trenches and left me, and I was lonely. It seemed to me when he was gone that I hadn’t loved him like I thought I had. And then Wratham came along.

  “Wratham was a cattle man on a farm, so they didn’t make him go and fight. He spent his nights in my cottage, and nobody knew. I meant to marry him if anything happened to Tom. There’d been heavy fighting all round Cambrai” (she pronounced it Cambria), “where Tom was, but he seemed to have come through it safe.

  “And then one night at the end of 1917—it was the night before New Year’s Eve—Wratham woke me up and said as there was somebody knocking at the door. A quiet, muffled sound it was. And we was frightened that he’d come home on leave, so it was me that had to go down. And it was Tom Martin sure enough, but not as I’d ever seen him before, all bloody and grimed with his eyes full of sorrow and anger. And I knew ’twas his spirit and that he’d just been killed, and I gave one loud cry and fainted.

  “Since then he’s never let us alone for long, although we’ve moved here, there, and everywhere. Wratham’s clever at lots of things, and he can get work anywhere. But as soon as we’re settled in a place Tom Martin finds us out and comes knocking at our door of a night, and we have to move on somewhere else. We’ve had no peace for eight years, and the terror of it is wearing me to skin and bone. Once we got a clergyman to come and pray, but it didn’t do no good. The only way for us is to end it all, and I think it will come to that at last.”

  And, rather to my surprise, Chard had no comfort to offer her.

  “I thought from the beginning,” he said to me as we walked back, “that the Wrathams might be responsible for the phenomena. You see, nothing had been seen until they took over the cottage. And when I saw them I knew that they knew, and I wondered why they hadn’t told. The fact that nobody in the village had belonged to the—er—the dead man’s regiment made me quite certain. There’s only one thing for friend Danson to do, and that is to get rid of the Wrathams.”

  “Poor devils!” I exclaimed. “Ca
n’t anything be done for them?”

  Chard shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know what,” he said. “This isn’t a case of a haunted house—it’s a case of a haunted couple. It might be dangerous to try to interfere. We’ve got to pay for our sins—in some way or another, you know.”

  I shuddered. A few minutes since it had been a warm, sunny morning, but now the wind seemed very cold.

  A week later I had an answer to the letter which I presently addressed to my brother. Here is an extract:

  Yes, I remember Tom Martin very well, probably because he was always panicking for leave because he suspected that his wife wasn’t being faithful to him. Of course, we couldn’t even send the application up to Brigade. There was too much of that sort of thing, and besides the man seemed to have no real grounds for his suspicion.

  I shan’t forget the morning when he was killed. It was on December the thirtieth, and there’d been snow on the ground for weeks. Everything had been suspiciously quiet for a long time, and on that morning Jerry came over in the snow, camouflaged in white smocks, and pinched part of our front line on Welsh Ridge without a shot being fired. We were in support at the time and the first we knew of it was the barrage he put over to try to stop us from counter-attacking. Of course, we had to go up and dig him out, and the communication trench (called Central Avenue) was one of the warmest places through which I ever passed. That was where Martin was killed. A whizz-bang dropped on top of the traverse right in front of him, and the ground being iron-hard, he hadn’t a chance. I remember writing a letter of condolence to his wife, and wondering all the while if there was anything in the poor chap’s suspicions.

  “That,” said Chard grimly, “is a matter on which you can assuage his curiosity—at your own discretion.”

  SEBASTIAN QUIN IN

  THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHT

  SYDNEY HORLER

  Sydney Harry Horler (1888–1954) was the son of a varnish maker in Leyton, Essex. The family moved back to his father’s native Somerset where, after his education, and a brief spell as a teacher, young Horler became a journalist on local papers before moving first to Manchester and then London, where he worked for the Daily Mail. He also wrote propaganda for Air Intelligence during the First World War at which time he also turned to fiction. Initially he wrote mostly stories featuring football heroes but after the war, when sales of crime novels mushroomed, he switched to crime fiction and became extremely popular. His crime books, which began with The Mystery of No. 1 in 1925, the first of his Paul Vivanti series, were imitative of Edgar Wallace and Sapper, but were even more sensationalistic and lacked any depth. Amongst his best known novels were the series featuring Tiger Standish of British Intelligence which began with Tiger Standish in 1932 and ran for eleven books. At the time he was reckoned amongst Britain’s bestselling crime writers, but his works have long fallen out of favour, partly because of their superficiality, but also their political incorrectness and formulaic plots. Yet, despite that, from time to time he brought more definition to his work and that is the case with his stories featuring Sebastian Quin. Not all are supernatural, but in the following, sometimes reprinted as “Black Magic,” Quin displays his enthusiasm of “the Bizarre,” as his chronicler Martin Huish remarks. Quin later returned in the novels The Evil Messenger (1938) and Fear Walked Behind (1942).

  “MY FRIEND AND ASSISTANT, MR. MARTIN HUISH,” ANNOUNCED Sebastian Quin.

  I acknowledged the introduction by bowing to the girl who sat in the client’s chair in Quin’s consulting-room. She was about twenty-four, I judged, tastefully dressed and normally very pretty. I say normally, because Violet Loring’s face was now tortured by a look of restrained horror, which went straight to my heart.

  “Miss Loring has come to us in great—very great—trouble,” explained Quin. “She was about to tell me her story when you came in.”

  He looked encouragingly at the girl, whose hands were locked. Quite obviously, she had to brace herself before she could start on her narrative.

  “What I am going to tell you, Mr. Quin, may sound so fantastic, so utterly preposterous, that you will have difficulty, perhaps, in believing I am sane.” She stopped, unable for a minute to go on.

  “I may say I have listened to many strange statements in my time, Miss Loring; and my experience of life is that the fantastic is usually the likeliest thing to happen—given certain conditions.”

  The tone was grave but encouraging. Sebastian Quin, his thin, almost cadaverous, face thrust forward, was an impressive figure in that moment. His critics, whose scoffings were in every case occasioned by bitter jealousy, might say that he looked more like a jockey than a crime investigator, but the visitor evidently derived satisfaction from his manner.

  “I live at Trevelyn, in Cornwall,” she continued, gaining courage. “As you know, it is a popular seaside resort in the summer, but in the winter it is very lonely and desolate. Yet my father and I have been happy—he with his books and I with my sport and out-of-doors life-until the last few months. All this trouble has happened since”—she shuddered—“that man came!”

  “What man?” inquired Quin.

  “The man Memory—Rathin Memory, he calls himself.”

  “A singular name,” commented Quin. “And what—?”

  “He’s horrible, dreadful,” cried the visitor. “Mr. Quin, help me to save my father from that devil’s power!”

  Violet Loring’s face had become convulsed. She was struggling for breath.

  Sebastian Quin made me a sign, and I brought the brandy.

  After a while the visitor became more controlled.

  “I must tell you everything now,” she said, “and I promise I shall not be so foolish again.” Her hands locked tightly, she went on with her story.

  “It was in late September last that this man, Rathin Memory,-arrived in Trevelyn. He took the house called “The Height,” on Pentire, which is a rocky headland jutting into the sea on the north side of the town. This house had been unoccupied for so long that the place was in a dreadful state of neglect. The iron entrance-gates were rusty and almost hidden by the weeds and coarse grass which had been allowed to grow.

  “I should explain that this house, “The Height,” has an evil reputation—the local story is that a dreadful murder and suicide took place there many years ago, that the bodies of the wretched people mysteriously disappeared in the night, and that the place—which is very old—is haunted. And it was to this house that the man who, for some mysterious reason, has constituted himself my enemy, came.” The visitor’s body was shaken by a fresh shudder before she continued:

  “You can imagine, perhaps, what an interest was taken in the new resident. Everybody in Trevelyn knows everybody else, the town being so small, and the fact that Rathin Memory had taken a house which was generally believed to be haunted and which had never been let even in the summer months, had increased the natural curiosity about the man.”

  Quin nodded.

  “Will you describe him, Miss Loring?”

  Again the visitor shuddered. But the hesitation was only momentary.

  “Please do not think it is my shattered nerves which make me describe him as a man one doesn’t like to look at,” she replied. “His age is something between forty and fifty, I should say; he is very hairy—lets his hair grow and has a beard—and has remarkable eyes. Even when he has passed me in the street in broad daylight his eyes have filled me with fear. And I am not an imaginative person usually.”

  “A highly curious individual, I should imagine. But please go on, Miss Loring. Is anything known of the man—where he came from, for instance?”

  “Nothing very much. The local newspaper tried to interview him, but all he would say was that he had been a traveller all over the world, that he had lately arrived from Tibet, and that he wished to be undisturbed. He lives quite alone in that huge house, with only a foreign manservant.”

  “He has done no entertaining, then?”

  “
None. As a matter of fact, there isn’t a soul in Trevelyn who would venture into “The Height.” And the man himself—as I know to my cost—is mysterious, devilish. He has a power over people, as I shall convince you, I believe, Mr. Quin.”

  Quin almost imperceptibly stiffened in his chair.

  “I shall do everything I can to help you, Miss Loring, but I must have your complete story.”

  “You shall—whatever it costs me to tell it. Perhaps you will be able to realize my position better if I say now that this—this monster is in love with me! And I am already engaged to be married,” she went on before either Sebastian Quin or I could interject a comment.

  “It was about a month ago that I first met Memory alone,” Miss Loring explained. “I was walking on Pentire when I heard a footstep behind me. Looking around, I saw that the mystery-man—as Memory is called at Trevelyn—was close upon me. Although it was early in the afternoon and quite light, I felt myself suddenly trembling. That may seem a very weak and cowardly confession to make, but I cannot hope to convey the devilish atmosphere with which the man seems to be surrounded! I only know that it was very real to me when he looked at me with those awful staring eyes of his.

  “I merely nodded when he raised his hat and went to pass on. But he placed himself in my way.

  “‘You are Miss Loring, are you not?’ he asked, and I said ‘Yes!’

  “‘I should like you to be friends with me,”’ he went on. ‘I am a very lonely man. I do not want many friends, but I should like to know you.’

  “You can imagine, Mr. Quin, what my feelings were when I heard those words. For a moment I could not find my voice. But then, realizing my position, I replied: ‘I am afraid that is impossible. I do not know you, and I do not want to know you. Consequently, any question of friendship between us is absurd.’

  “Once again I made to move on, but he would not let me pass.

  “‘That which I desire I always obtain,’ he said in a voice that filled me with fresh fear. ‘I have asked for your friendship and I shall have it. There is no one strong enough to prevent me.’