Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  The face dropped out of sight. Only hate, like a tangible thing, pervaded the room. From twenty feet below came back to the trembling men a grating, “Och-och-och, ha-ha-ha-heh-heh-heck, och—och.” It retreated down the shrubbery.

  Dr. Muncing stood a long minute in choked silence. Then bitterly he swore. Slowly, with incisive grimness he said, “Man’s ingenuity can guard against everything except the sheer dumb stupidity of man.”

  It was morning. Dr. Muncing was taking his leave. He was leaving behind him a few last words of advice. They were not gentle.

  “I shall say no more about the criminal stupidity of opening your windows after my warning to you; perhaps the thing was able to influence all of you. Your brother, madam, has paid the price. Through your fault and his, there is now loose, somewhere in our world, an elemental entity, malignant and having sufficient human energy to continue. Where or how, I cannot say. It may turn up in the next town, it may do so in China; or something may happen to dissipate it.

  “As far as you are concerned it is through. It has tapped this source of energy and has gone on. It will not come back, unless you, madam, go out of your way deliberately to attract it by fooling with these silly séances before you have learned a lot more about them than you know now.”

  Mrs. Jarrett was penitent and very wholesomely frightened, besides. She would never play with fire again, she vowed; she would have nothing at all to do with it ever again; she would be glad if the doctor would take away her ouija board and her planchette and all her notebooks; everything. She was afraid of them; she felt that some horrible influence still attached to them.

  “Notebooks?” The doctor was interested. “You mean you took notes of the babble that came through? Let me see. Hm-m, the usual stuff; projected reversal of your own conceptions of the hereafter and how happy all your relatives are there. Ha, what’s this? Numbers, numbers—twelve, twenty-four, eight—all the bad combinations of numbers. What perversity made you think only of bad numbers? Hello, hello, what—From where did you get this recurring ten, five, eight, one, fourteen? A whole page of it. And here again. And here; eighteen, one, ten? Pages and pages—and a lot of worse ones here? How did this come?”

  Mrs. Jarrett was tearful and appeared somewhat hesitant.

  “They just came through like that, Doctor. They kept on coming. We just wrote them down.”

  The doctor was very serious. A thin whistle formed in his pursed lips. His eyes were dark pools of wonder.

  “There are more things in heaven and earth—” He muttered. Then shaking off the awe that had come over him, he turned to Mrs. Jarrett.

  “My dear lady,” he said. “I apologize about those open windows. This thing was able to project its influence from even the other side of the veil. It made you invite it. Don’t ask me to explain these mysteries. But listen to what you have been playing with.” The doctor paused to let his words soak in.

  “These numbers, translated into their respective letters, are the beginning of an ancient Hindu Yogi spell to invoke a devil. Merciful heaven, how many things we don’t understand. So that’s how it came through. And there is no Yogi spell to send it back. We shall probably meet again, that thing and I.”

  MILES PENNOYER IN

  THE CASE OF THE HAUNTED CATHEDRAL

  MARGERY LAWRENCE

  Margery Lawrence (1889–1969) had long been fascinated by the supernatural and later in life became a spiritualist, writing about all forms of psychic experiences in Ferry Over Jordan (1944). Her father, a solicitor, had funded her first publication in 1913, a book of poems, Songs of Childhood, and after the war she turned to writing fiction, initially short stories, several of which appeared in The Tatler and were collected in Nights of the Round Table (1926). She had early success with her romance novel Red Heels (1925) and thereafter she felt obliged to produce similar works to sustain an income, although this was alleviated in 1927 when she married Arthur Towle, manager of the St. Pancras Railway Hotel, and controller of all the hotels on the London, Midland, Scottish Railway. This allowed her more freedom, along with the success of her novel Madonna of the Seven Moons (1935), about a woman with a dual personality, which was later filmed. She produced two further books of weird tales, The Terraces of Night (1932) and The Floating Café (1936). After completing a long novel of reincarnation, The Bridge of Wonder (1939) and her book on spiritualism, Margery returned to short fiction. She had always liked the John Silence stories by Algernon Blackwood and created her own specialist in the supernatural, Miles Pennoyer, whose cases are recorded by Jerome Latimer. The first book of seven stories, Number Seven, Queer Street was published in 1945, but it was years before she completed the second volume of longer stories, Master of Shadows in 1959. August Derleth published one final story, “The Case of the Double Husband” in 1971, making twelve stories in total.

  “YES,” SAID PENNOYER, “IT’S A GLORIOUS PIECE OF WORK, AS YOU say. Small, perhaps, as cathedrals go—probably one of the smallest cathedrals in the world, but a beautiful piece of modern architecture. A sad thing that it was its architect’s swan-song.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you know that the man who designed it—Gregg Hart—died six months after it was finished?” said Pennoyer.

  He glanced oddly at me and I pricked up my ears, for that sidelong glance generally meant that a story lay somewhere hidden behind the apparent casual speech.

  He paused a moment and then added softly, “He committed suicide—was found dead on the altar steps. Didn’t you know?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. It probably happened while I was abroad somewhere—you know how much I miss, wandering about as I do. And besides,” sheer honesty forced me to add, “frankly, I’m not much of a religionist, you know, and I don’t suppose the death of anybody in a cathedral—even the architect of it—would make any particular impression on me.”

  “Probably not,” said Pennoyer as he turned the leaves of the handsome folder of photographs of Nant Valley Cathedral that I had brought back with me after my recent visit. “But you are interested in the odd and the uncanny, and there were stories . . . look!” He stabbed a place on one of the photographs with the point of a pencil. “That’s where the body was found. Lying sprawling halfway up the steps, as though he’d tried to reach the altar and failed.” He paused and then went on reflectively, “No wonder—and yet he found forgiveness in the end, poor chap, after all.”

  “After all what?” I said determinedly, pulling my chair to the fire and taking out my tobacco-pouch and pipe. “You settle down and tell me the story that’s behind all this, Pen! I know the signs by now.”

  Pennoyer laughed.

  “It’s a long one,” he said. “But interesting . . . yes, very interesting. I’ll get you a whisky and soda, then, and let you hear it. Odd that by sheer chance, out of interest in modern architecture, you should have gone to see this place—the setting for one of the strangest and most pathetic haunting cases in all my experience. Here you are—help yourself. I never know the right proportion of that poison of yours. Well . . .

  “It was about a year after the death of Gregg Hart that I was called in to consultation by the Church Authorities—the Dean and Chapter of Nant Cathedral. I found them in a considerable state of agitation, I may say, and I was soon aware that there had been much arguing and counter-arguing as to whether I should be called in or not. But the matter was getting out of their hands.

  “It had all begun, I gathered, even before Hart’s death—stories, rumours, whispers of odd happenings, nothing very tangible, but still they were there. And since his death they had grown and spread so rapidly that they were beginning to have a very bad effect not only on the various church officials, from Canons, major and minor, down to choristers, vergers, lay-clerks, bell-ringers, and so on, but even with many of the congregation. Indeed, matters had become so serious that attendances were falling off, and the Dean and Chapter was getting deeply concerned! So at last a spe
cial meeting was summoned at which the situation could be discussed and, it was hoped, cleared up to everybody’s satisfaction.

  “But unfortunately the meeting did no such thing, as it was found that the opinions of the five worthy clergymen—who, with the Dean as head, formed the meeting—themselves were far from uniform. Canon Hotchkiss frankly scoffed and declared that there was ‘nothing in it,’ and that the only attitude was to pooh-pooh everything and carry on as though nothing had happened, hoping that the various rumours would, if persistently ignored, die out in time. Canon Maple was frankly puzzled and apprehensive and admitted that he did not know what to think. Canon Whippet supported him, declaring that the stories were being deliberately spread by the Church’s enemies, and advised police action, while Canon Fraser doggedly maintained, in the teeth of his brother Canon, Hotchkiss, that ‘there were more things in heaven and earth, etc.’ Moreover, he daringly decided that he had himself heard and seen certain matters in the Cathedral that he could by no means dismiss as pure imagination—at which Canons Hotchkiss and Whippet plunged into action and the meeting became something resembling a general wrangle! So the Dean dismissed it, realizing that united action of any kind was, in the face of such varied feeling, for the moment, impossible.

  “So the matter had been allowed to drift on and on, and the rumours grew and flourished, until at last things came to a head when a visiting Bishop, conducting the Communion Service, cried out and fainted as he was holding the Chalice to the lips of a communicant and had to be hastily carried out to the vestry while another priest took his place. The Bishop took some time to recover, and when he did, the first thing he did was to declare that there was an Evil Force abroad in the Cathedral, and that it had tried to prevent the communicant—an elderly woman, a decent, pious body well known to the Dean—from touching the Cup. Questioned further by the perturbed clergy, the Bishop declared that he was holding the Cup out to the communicant when (to use his own words) ‘another face—a man’s face—seemed to slide over hers, to come down like a mask as it were, as though to try and prevent her lips reaching the rim of the Cup—or to get its own there first! And at the same moment I felt a cold hand on my wrist and a voice seemed to whisper, ‘No, no!’

  “The alarm and consternation amongst the clergy at the incident was great, as you may imagine, and the matter was hastily hushed up, and a story concocted to the effect that the Bishop had had a heart-attack. But it was quite impossible to prevent the rumour spreading that something had been heard—or seen—by the Bishop, which naturally lent evidence to the stories of other things that had been heard or seen by less important people; and attendances at the services fell off to such a degree that in sheer desperation the Dean called another meeting, and it was decided to try exorcism. But this failed, the hauntings persisted, and at last the Dean—much against the advice of several of his brother-priests, who saw in me a sort of necromancer having dealings with devils, various and assorted—wrote me a note inviting me to come and see him.”

  “How did he come to know about you?” I demanded.

  Pennoyer crinkled up his eyes at me and laughed.

  “That, as Kipling says, is another story,” he said. “As a matter of fact I dealt with a rather nasty obsession case in which his niece was mixed up. I’ll tell you about that another time if you like. But apparently the Dean was sufficiently impressed with that business to risk sending for me—and of course I went down to Nant at once, and found a charming, rather fussy, anxious little man, with a face like an elderly Donatello cherub and white hair growing in a sort of tonsure round a pink bald pate, waiting to greet me in the drawing-room of a pretty house in the Close. Where’s that brochure of yours? I think there’s a picture of the Close that shows his house.”

  He flipped over a page or two of the booklet and showed me a charming photograph of a row of pleasantly designed houses, each set back in a neat garden, that clustered round the Cathedral—which stood magnificently alone upon a great stretch of green sward—like a group of guards standing in a square round the throne of a King. He pointed to one of the houses and continued.

  “The Dean was a bit shy at first and rang for tea while he talked trivialities. And then a dear little silver-haired sister came in, as round and pink and cherubic as he was. They reminded me irresistibly of a pair of elderly whats-their-names . . . that outmoded celluloid doll that used to be popular with children? Thing with an inane baby face and a blue bow on its tummy.”

  “I know! Kewpies!” I said with a chuckle. “Go on, I can just see them.”

  “Well,” said Pennoyer, “they gave me a sumptuous tea—home-made scones and jam sandwiches, and chocolate cake in such quantities that I no longer wondered where the dear little man had got the pot-belly that bulged out his cassock like a small football! They were charming; the little old lady twittered at me and pressed cake on me, and at the end of tea we had grown more at ease with one another, so that when the tea and Miss Conover took themselves off together, I sat back in the comfortable leather-covered chair and said to the Dean, ‘Now, sir, what’s the trouble?’ And he told me the whole story quite simply.”

  “You mean the beginning of the story,” I quibbled. “Obviously if he had told you the whole story he would not have needed to ask your advice.”

  “I hate obvious and rather ham-handed jokes,” said Pennoyer severely. “And anyway if ordinary people could solve psychic problems, where would a psychic doctor like your venerable friend get a living? Anyway, he started by giving me a surprise—because he told me that the Cathedral was haunted by two ghosts. One had been seen—or heard—before the death of poor Gregg. And Gregg Hart was—or so it was presumed—the second.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Two ghosts?” I said. “I thought the haunting must be Hart, of course, when you told me he’d committed suicide in the Cathedral itself. But two? What could have happened to produce two ghosts in a completely new building? If it had been a hoary old pile . . .”

  “I know,” said Pennoyer, “but you do sometimes get haunting in a new house, you know—generally a ghost that belongs to an old house that has been pulled down to make way for the new! I remember once in a brand-new ultra-modern steel-and-glass bungalow built by a rich young man on the Sussex Downs—Still, that’s not the yarn I’m telling. But apart from that, a double haunting sounded interesting, so I asked the Dean to go into details.

  “He told me that rumours that the Cathedral was haunted were pretty widely spread several months before Hart’s death. Precisely when they started he did not know, but certainly he became aware of them about three or four months before the building was finally completed. The story was that it was a child-ghost—sometimes seen, or more often, footsteps pattering, the flutter of a frock, a childish voice singing or whispering, that sort of thing—even some of the workmen engaged on the building swore they had seen something. And in connection with this, the Dean said, an odd incident occurred.

  “Gregg Hart was fulminating to him, as he so often did, about the slackness of some of the men, about their readiness to knock off early, even before the dusk drew in, and jokingly the Dean said perhaps they were anxious to leave before dark for fear they might see the ghost of the child that there was so much talk about . . . and this remark had the most alarming effect. Hart went absolutely green, and almost collapsed! Frightened the Dean to death—though Hart recovered in a minute or two and passed it off—but it was obvious, said the Dean, that Hart himself had seen or heard something, or why should he look so scared and sick? Later on, of course, I had another theory, but for the moment I accepted the Dean’s, and he went on. Apparently it was about a month after that conversation that the Cathedral was finished and consecrated, and three days after the consecration Hart was found dead in the nave of the Cathedral—and then the double haunting started!

  “I began to be distinctly interested and asked for more details. How many people had seen the two ghosts together—when and how, for how long a time—an
d the Dean answered me with a tense frown on his chubby face, obviously trying to be as exact as possible. Reports varied, it seems—probably with the varying psychic perception of the seers. Some people apparently saw only the child . . . a faint, shadowy sort of shape flitting round the High Altar or running across the chancel; others said they had seen a man only, an outline, tall and dark; a very few said they saw the two together; while many people complained of a feeling in the Cathedral of intense unhappiness, of strain and distress—one described it as ‘a sort of spiritual tumult indescribably painful and bewildering.’ And of course there was the usual lot who didn’t actually see or hear anything concrete, but who merely sensed an ‘atmosphere’ about the Cathedral—especially towards evening—that made them feel uneasy. Oh, it was a nice haunting case. Very thorough and complete . . .”

  “How did Hart come to die there . . . on the steps of the altar?” I said. “Singularly dramatic! Was it an accident?”

  Pennoyer glanced at me.

  “It wasn’t,” he said briefly. “He committed suicide. Took poison . . .”

  I felt a faint thrill of horror and pity combined. To commit suicide on the steps of the altar of the great Church that was the crown of one’s life-work, the very peak and summit of one’s ambition! For a man to do this must surely mean reaching a pitch of despair the very thought of which chills one’s blood. . . .

  “Again, for the sake of the Cathedral, this was hushed up, and the doctor gave a verdict of death by heart-failure,” said Pennoyer. “Luckily one of the vergers coming in early in the morning found the body, locked up the Cathedral, and ran to fetch the Dean. The Dean’s brother—who’s a doctor—was staying with him then, and they went over together. Dr. Conover knew what a dreadful business it would be for the new Cathedral to start its ministries, as it were, by having to wipe out the stain of a suicide’s blood, so heart-failure it was, officially, and all was well. I don’t think anything queer was suspected by the world outside the Close, nor even inside, until the double haunting started. . . .”