Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  “It came within a quarter of an hour—the distant beat of the hoofs of horses, many horses. It was, indeed, as though a considerable company approached The Coach and Horses along the Brighton Road. Old Titmarsh smiled to himself and crept towards the inn doorway. He laboriously opened the great oaken door and peered into the night. The sound of many hoofbeats was now clearer, plainer.

  “Then, abruptly, the hoofbeats died on the calm June air. Old Titmarsh, somewhat puzzled, listened, tremblingly. Then he smiled in his beard once more. Strategy, this! Someone with a head on his shoulders was in command of that troop! They had stopped, at some distance, lest the hoofbeats should alarm their quarry.

  “A few minutes later the old man heard the muffled sound of careful footfalls, and, within another minute, a King’s Officer in his red coat had crept up beside him.

  “‘He’s within,’ whispered Old Titmarsh, ‘and well gone by now in his damned drunkard’s slumber. Summon the troopers, sir. I’ll lead ye to where the villain sleeps. He hath the purse of His Majesty’s Messenger upon him. What need ye of better evidence?’

  “‘Nay,’ replied the train-band captain in a similar whisper, “that evidence, even, is not required. We have but now taken up the dead body of Sir William Greaves beside the highroad, an ounce ball through his honest heart. ’Tis a case, this, of drawing and quartering, Titmarsh; thanks to your good offices in sending your boy for me.’

  “The troopers gradually assembled. When eight had arrived, the captain, preceded by Old Titmarsh and followed in turn by his trusty eight, mounted the steps to where Forrester slept. It was, as you have guessed, the empty room you examined this afternoon, ‘the shut room’ of this house.

  “At the foot of the upper stairs the captain addressed his men in a whisper: ‘A desperate man, this, lads. ’Ware bullets! Yet—he must needs be taken alive, for the assizes, and much credit to them that take him. He hath been a pest on the road as well ye know these many years agone. Upon him, then, ere he rises from his drunken sleep! He hath partaken heavily. Pounce upon him ere he rises.’

  “A mutter of acquiescence came from the troopers. They tightened their belts and stepped alertly, silently, after their leader, preceded by their ancient guide carrying a pair of candles.

  “Arrived at the door of the room the captain disposed his men and crying out ‘in the King’s name!’ four of these stout fellows threw themselves against the door. It gave at once under that massed impact, and the men rushed into the room, dimly lighted by Old Titmarsh’s candles.

  “Forrester, his eyes blinking evilly in the candle-light, was halfway out of bed when they got into the room. He slept, he was accustomed to boast, ‘with one eye open, drunk or sober!’ Throwing off the cover-lid, the highwayman leaped for the chair over the back of which hung his fine laced coat, the holsters uppermost. He plunged his hands into the holsters and stood, for an instant, the very picture of baffled amazement.

  “The holsters were empty!

  “Then, as four stalwart troopers flung themselves upon him to bear him to the floor, there was heard Old Titmarsh’s harsh, senile cackle:

  “‘’Twas I that robbed ye, ye villain—took your pretty boys, your “Jem” and your “Jack” out of the holsters whiles ye were strugglin’ into your fine coat! Ye’ll not abide in a decent house beyond this night, I’m thinking; and ’twas the old man who did for ye, murdering wretch that ye are!’

  “A terrific struggle ensued. With or without his ‘Pretty Boys’ Simon Forrester was a thoroughly tough customer, versed in every sleight of hand-to-hand fighting. He bit and kicked; he elbowed and gouged. He succeeded in hurling one of the troopers bodily against the blank wall, and the man sank there and lay still, a motionless heap. After a terrific struggle with the other three who had cast themselves upon him, the remaining troopers and their captain standing aside because there was not room to get at him in the melee, he succeeded in getting the forefinger of one of the troopers, who had reached for a face-hold upon him, between his teeth and bit through it at the joint.

  “Frantic with rage and pain this trooper, disengaging himself, and before he could be stopped, seized a heavy oaken bench and, swinging it through the air, brought it down on Simon Forrester’s skull. No human bones, even Forrester’s, could sustain that murderous assault. The tough wood crunched through his skull, and thereafter he lay quiet. Simon Forrester would never be drawn and quartered, nor even hanged. Simon Forrester, ignobly, as he had lived, was dead; and it remained for the troopers only to carry out the body and for their captain to indict his report.

  “Thereafter, the room was stripped and closed by Old Titmarsh himself, who lived on for two more years, making good his frequent boast that his reign over The Coach and Horses would equal that of King George III over his realm. Th old king died in 1820, and Old Titmarsh did not long survive him. Oliver, now a changed man, because of this occurrence, succeeded to the lease of the inn, and during his landlordship the room remained closed. It has been closed, out of use, ever since.”

  Mr. Snow brought his story, and his truly excellent dinner, to a close simultaneously. It was I who broke the little silence which followed his concluding words.

  “I congratulate you, sir, upon the excellence of your narrative gift. I hope that if I come to record this affair, as I have already done with respect to certain odd happenings which have come under my view, I shall be able, as nearly as possible, to reproduce your words.” I bowed to our host over my coffee cup.

  “Excellent, excellent, indeed!” added Carruth, nodding and smiling pleasantly in Mr. Snow’s direction. “And now—for the questions, if you don’t mind. There are several which have occurred to me; doubtless also to Mr. Canevin.”

  Snow acquiesced affably. “Anything you care to ask, of course.”

  “Well, then,” it was Carruth, to whom I had indicated precedence in the questioning, “tell us, if you please, Mr. Snow—you seem to have every particular at your very fingers’ ends—the purse with the gold? That, I suppose, was confiscated by the train-band captain and eventually found its way back to Sir William Greaves’ heirs. That is the high probability, but—do you happen to know as a matter of fact?”

  “The purse went back to Lady Greaves.”

  “Ah! and Forrester’s effects—I understand he used the room from time to time. Did he have anything, any personal property in it? If so, what became of it?”

  “It was destroyed, burned. No one claimed his effects. Perhaps he had no relatives. Possibly no one dared to come forward. Everything in his possession was stolen, or, what is the same, the fruit of his thefts.”

  “And—the pistols, ‘Jem and Jack’? Those names rather intrigued me! What disposition was made of them, if you happen to know? Old Titmarsh had them, of course, concealed somewhere; probably in that ‘cubby-hole’ of his which you mentioned.”

  “Ala,” said Mr. Snow, rising, “there I can really give you some evidence. The pistols are in my office—in the Chubbs’ safe, along with the holster-apparatus, the harness which Forrester wore under his laced coat. I will bring them in.”

  “Have you the connection, Mr. Canevin?” Lord Carruth enquired of me as soon as Snow had left the dining room.

  “Yes,” said I, “the connection is clear enough; clear as a pikestaff, to use one of your time-honoured British expressions, although I confess never to have seen a pikestaff in my life! But—apart from the fact that the holsters are made of leather; the well-known background of the unfulfilled desire persisting after death; and the obvious connection between the point of disappearance of those ‘walking boots’ of Billings’, with ‘the shut room,’ I must confess myself at a loss. The veriest tyro at this sort of thing would connect those points, I imagine. There it is, laid out for us, directly before our mental eyes, so to speak. But—what I fail to understand is not so much who takes them—that by a long stretch of the imagination might very well be the persistent ‘shade,’ ‘Ka,’ ‘projected embodiment’ of Simon Forrester. No�
��what gets me is—where does the carrier of boots and satchels and jewellers’ sample-cases put them? That room is utterly, absolutely, physically empty, and boots and shoes are material affairs, Lord Carruth.”

  Carruth nodded gravely. “You have put your finger on the main difficulty, Mr. Canevin. I am not at all sure that I can explain it, or even that we shall be able to solve the mystery after all. My experience in India does not help. But—there is one very vague case, right here in England, which may be a parallel one. I suspect, not to put too fine a point upon the matter, that the abstracted things may very well be behind that rear-most wall, the wall opposite the doorway in ‘the shut room.’”

  “But,” I interjected, “that is impossible, is it not? The wall is material—brick and stone and plaster. It is not subject to the strange laws of personality. How?”

  The return of the gentleman-landlord of The Coach and Horses at this moment put an end to our conversation, but not to my wonder. I imagined that the “case” alluded to by my companion would be that of the tortured “ghost” of the jester which, with a revenge-motive, haunted a room in an ancient house and even managed to equip the room itself with some of its revengeful properties or motives. The case had been recorded by Mr. Hodgson, and later Carruth told me that this was the one he had in mind. This, it seemed to me, was a very different matter. However Mr. Snow laid the elaborate and beautifully made “harness” of leather straps out on the table beside the after-dinner coffee service. The grips of “Jem and Jack” peeped out of their holsters. The device was not unlike those used by our own American desperadoes, men like the famous Earp brothers and “Doc” Holliday whose “six-guns” were carried handily in slung holsters in front of the body. We examined these antique weapons, murderous-looking pistols of the “bulldog” type, built for business, and Carruth ascertained that neither “Jem” nor “Jack” was loaded.

  “Is there anyone on that top floor?” enquired Carruth.

  “No one save yourselves, excepting some of the servants, who are in the other end of the house,” returned Snow.

  “I am going to request you to let us take these pistols and the ‘harness’ with us upstairs when we retire,” said Carruth, and again the obliging Snow agreed. “Everything I have is at your disposal, gentlemen,” said he, “in the hope that you will be able to end this annoyance for me. It is too early in the season at present for the inn to have many guests. Do precisely as you wish, in all ways.”

  Shortly after nine o’clock, we took leave of our pleasant host, and, carrying the “harness” and pistols divided between us, we mounted to our commodious bedchamber. A second bed had been moved into it, and the fire in the grate took off the slight chill of the spring evening. We began our preparations by carrying the high-powered electric torches we had obtained from Snow along the corridor and around the corner to “the shut room.” We unlocked the door and ascertained that the two torches would be quite sufficient to work by. Then we closed but did not lock the door and returned to our room.

  Between us, we moved a solidly built oak table to a point diagonally across the corridor from our open bedroom door, and on this we placed the “harness” and pistols. Then, well provided with smoke-materials, we sat down to wait, seated in such positions that both of us could command the view of our trap. It was during the conversation which followed that Carruth informed me that the case to which he had alluded was the one recorded by the occult writer, Hodgson. It was familiar to both of us. I will not cite it. It may be read by anybody who has the curiosity to examine it in the collection entitled Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson. In that account it is the floor of the “haunted” room which became adapted to the revenge-motive of the persistent “shade” of the malignant court jester, tortured to death many years before his “manifestation” by his fiendish lord and master.

  We realised that, according to the man Billings’ testimony, we need not be on the alert before midnight. Carruth therefore read from a small book which he had brought with him, and I busied myself in making the careful notes which I have consulted in recording Mr. Snow’s narrative of Simon Forrester, while that narrative was fresh in my memory. It was a quarter before midnight when I had finished. I took a turn about the room to refresh my somewhat cramped muscles and returned to my comfortable chair.

  Midnight struck from the French clock on our mantelpiece, and Carruth and I both, at that signal, began to give our entire attention to the articles on the table in the hallway out there.

  It occurred to me that this joint watching, as intently as the circumstances seemed to warrant to both of us, might prove very wearing, and I suggested that we watch alternately, for about fifteen minutes each. We did so, I taking the first turn. Nothing occurred—not a sound, not the smallest indication that there might be anything untoward going on out there in the corridor.

  At twelve-fifteen, Carruth began to watch the table, and it was, I should imagine, about five minutes later that his hand fell lightly on my arm, pressing it and arousing me to the keenest attention. I looked intently at the things on the table. The “harness” was moving towards the left-hand edge of the table. We could both hear, now, the slight scraping sound made by the leather weighted by the twin pistols, and, even as we looked, the whole apparatus lifted itself—or so it appeared to us—from the supporting table and began, as it were, to float through the air a distance of about four feet from the ground towards the turn which led to “the shut room.”

  We rose, simultaneously, for we had planned carefully on what we were to do, and followed. We were in time to see the articles “float” around the corner, and, increasing our pace—for we had been puzzled about how anything material, like the boots, could get through the locked door—watched, in the rather dim light of that short hallway, what would happen.

  What happened was that the “harness” and pistols reached the door, and then the door opened. They went through, and the door shut behind them precisely as though someone, invisible to us, were carrying them. We heard distinctly the slight sound which a gently closed door makes as it came to, and there we were, standing outside in the hallway looking at each other. It is one thing to figure out, beforehand, the science of occult occurrences, even upon the basis of such experience as Carruth and I both possessed. It is, distinctly, another, to face the direct operation of something motivated by the Powers beyond the ordinary ken of humanity. I confess to certain “cold chills,” and Carruth’s face was very pale.

  We switched on our electric torches as we had arranged to do, and Carruth, with a firm hand which I admired if I did not, precisely, envy, reached out and turned the knob of the door. We walked into “the shut room”. . . .

  Not all our joint experience had prepared us for what we saw. I could not forbear clutching Carruth’s free arm, the one not engaged with the torch, as he stood beside me. And I testify that his arm was as still and firm as a rock. It steadied me to realise such fortitude, for the sight which was before us was enough to unnerve the most hardened investigator of the unearthly.

  Directly in front of us, but facing the blank wall at the far end of the room, stood a half-materialised man. The gleam of my torch threw a faint shadow on the wall in front of him, the rays passing through him as though he were not there, and yet with a certain dimming. The shadow visibly increased in the few brief instants of our utter silence, and then we observed that the figure was struggling with something. Mechanically we concentrated both electric rays on the figure and then we saw clearly. A bulky man, with a bull-neck and close-cropped, iron-grey hair, wearing a fine satin coat and what were called, in their day, “small cloths,” or tight-fitting knee-trousers with silk stockings and heavy, buckled shoes, was raising and fitting about his waist, over the coat, the “harness” with the pistols.

  Abruptly, the materialisation appearing to be now complete, he turned upon us, with an audible snarl and baleful, glaring little eyes like a pig’s, deep set in a hideous, scarred face, and then he spoke—he spok
e, and he had been dead for more than a century!

  “Ah-h-h-h!” he snarled, evilly, “ye would come in upon me, eh, my fine gents—into this my chamber, eh! I’ll teach ye manners . . .” and he ended this diatribe with a flood of the foulest language imaginable, stepping, with little, almost mincing, down-toed steps towards us all the time he poured out his filthy curses and revilings. I was completely at a loss what to do. I realised—these ideas went through my mind with the rapidity of thought—that the pistols were unloaded. I told myself that this was some weird hallucination—that the shade of no dead-and-gone desperado could harm us. Yet—it was a truly terrifying experience, be the man shade or true flesh and blood.

  Then Carruth spoke to him, in quiet, persuasive tones.

  “But—you have your pistols now, Simon Forrester. It was we who put them where you could find them, your pretty boys, ‘Jem and Jack.’ That was what you were trying to find, was it not? And now—you have them. There is nothing further for you to do—you have them, they are just under your hands where you can get at them whenever you wish.”

  At this the spectre, or materialisation of Simon Forrester, blinked at us, a cunning light in his evil little eyes, and dropped his hand with which he had but now been gesticulating violently on the grips of the pistols. He grinned, evilly, and spat in a strange fashion, over his shoulder.

  “Aye,” said he, more modestly now, “ay—I have ’em—Jemmy and Jack, my trusties, my pretty boys.” He fondled the butts with his huge hands, hands that could have strangled an ox, and spat over his shoulder.

  “There is no necessity for you to remain, then, is there?” said Carruth softly, persuasively.

  The simulacrum of Simon Forrester frowned, looked a bit puzzled, then nodded its head several times.

  “You can rest now—now that you have Jem and Jack,” suggested Carruth, almost in a whisper, and as he spoke, Forrester turned away and stepped over to the blank wall at the far side of the room, opposite the doorway, and I could hear Carruth draw in his breath softly and feel the iron grip of his fingers on my arm. “Watch!” he whispered in my ear; “watch now.”