The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack: 36 Classic Tales of the Supernatural

by Algernon Blackwood

  And it was here, just when he most desired to keep his mind and thoughts controlled, that the vivid pictures received day after day upon the mental plates exposed in the courtroom of the Old Bailey came strongly to light and developed themselves in the darkroom of his inner vision. Unpleasant, haunting memories have a way of coming to life again just when the mind least desires them—in the silent watches of the night, on sleepless pillows, during the lonely hours spent by sick and dying beds. And so now, in the same way, Johnson saw nothing but the dreadful face of John Turk, the murderer, lowering at him from every corner of his mental field of vision: the white skin, the evil eyes, and the fringe of black hair low over the forehead. All of the pictures of those ten days in court crowded back into his mind unbidden and very vivid.

  “This is all rubbish and nerves,” he exclaimed at length, springing with sudden energy from his chair. “I shall finish my packing and go to bed. I’m overwrought, overtired. No doubt, at this rate I shall hear steps and things all night!”

  But his face was deadly white all the same. He snatched up his field glasses and walked across to the bedroom, humming a music-hall song as he went—

  a trifle too loud to be natural; and the instant he crossed the threshold and stood within the room something turned cold around his heart, and he felt that every hair on his head stood up.

  The kit bag lay close in front of him, several feet closer to the door than he had left it, and just over its crumpled top he saw a head and face slowly sinking down out of sight as though someone was crouching behind it to hide, and at the same moment a sound like a long-drawn sigh was distinctly audible in the still air around him between the gusts of the storm outside.

  Johnson had more courage and willpower than the girlish indecision of his face indicated; but at first such a wave of terror came over him that for some seconds he could do nothing but stand and stare. A violent trembling ran down his back and legs, and he was conscious of a foolish, almost an hysterical, impulse to scream aloud. That sigh seemed in his very ear, and the air still quivered with it. It was unmistakably a human sigh.

  “Who’s there?” he said at length, finding his voice; but though he meant to speak with loud decision, the tones came out instead in a faint whisper, for he had partly lost the control of his tongue and lips.

  He stepped forward so that he could see all around and over the kit bag. of course there was nothing there, nothing but the faded carpet and the bulging canvas sides. He put out his hands and threw open the mouth of the sack where it had fallen over, being only three parts full, and then he saw for the first time that around the inside, some six inches from the top, there ran a broad smear of dull crimson. It was an old and faded bloodstain. He uttered a scream and drew back his hands as if they had been burned. At the same moment the kit bag gave a faint, but unmistakable, lurch forward toward the door.

  Johnson collapsed backward, searching with his hands for the support of something solid, and the door, being farther behind him than he realized, received his weight just in time to prevent his falling and shut with a resounding bang. At the same moment the swinging of his left arm accidentally touched the electric switch, and the light in the room went out.

  It was an awkward and disagreeable predicament, and if Johnson had not been possessed of real pluck, he might have done all manner of foolish things. As it was, however, he pulled himself together and groped furiously for the little brass knob to turn the light on again. But the rapid closing of the door had set the coats hanging on it swinging, and his fingers became entangled in a confusion of sleeves and pockets so that it was some moments before he found the switch. And in those few moments of bewilderment and terror two things happened that sent him beyond recall over the boundary into the region of genuine horror: he distinctly heard the kit bag shuffling heavily across the floor in jerks, and close in front of his face sounded once again the sigh of a human being.

  In his anguished efforts to find the brass button on the wall, he almost scraped the nails from his fingers, but even then, in those frenzied moments of alarm—so swift and alert are the impressions of a mind keyed up by a vivid emotion—he had time to realize that he dreaded the return of the light and that it might be better for him to stay hidden in the merciful screen of darkness. It was but the impulse of a moment, however, and before he had time to act upon it, he had yielded automatically to the original desire, and the room was flooded again with light.

  But the second instinct had been right. It would have been better for him to have stayed in the shelter of the kind darkness. For there, close before him, bending over the half-packed kit bag, as clear as life in the merciless glare of the electric light, stood the figure of John Turk, the murderer. Not three feet from him the man stood, the fringe of black hair marked plainly against the pallor of the forehead, the whole horrible presentment of the scoundrel, as vivid as he had seen him day after day in the Old Bailey, when he stood there in the dock, cynical and callous, under the very shadow of the gallows.

  In a flash Johnson realized what it all meant: the dirty and much-used bag; the smear of crimson within the top; the dreadful stretched condition of the bulging sides. He remembered how the victim’s body had been stuffed inside a canvas bag for burial, the ghastly, dismembered fragments forced with lime into this very bag, and the bag itself produced as evidence—it all came back to him as clear as day…

  Very softly and stealthily his hand groped behind him for the handle of the door, but before he could actually turn it, the very thing that he most of all dreaded came about, and John Turk lifted his devil’s face and looked at him. At the same moment that heavy sigh passed through the air of the room, formulated somehow into words: “It’s my bag. And I want it.”

  Johnson just remembered clawing open the door and then falling in a heap upon the floor of the landing as he tried frantically to make his way into the front room.

  He remained unconscious for a long time, and it was still dark when he opened his eyes and realized that he was lying, stiff and bruised, on the cold boards. Then the memory of what he had seen rushed back into his mind, and he promptly fainted again. When he woke the second time, the wintry dawn was just beginning to peep in at the windows, painting the stairs a cheerless, dismal gray, and he managed to crawl into the front room and cover himself with an overcoat in the armchair, where at length he fell asleep.

  A great clamor woke him. He recognized Mrs. Monks’s voice, loud and voluble.

  “What! You ain’t been to bed, sir! Are you ill, or has anything ‘appened? And there’s an urgent gentleman to see you, though it ain’t seven o’clock yet, and—”

  “Who is it?” he stammered. “I’m all right, thanks. Fell asleep in my chair, I suppose.”

  “Someone from Mr. Wilb’ram’s, and he says he ought to see you quick before you go abroad, and I told him—”

  “Show him up, please, at once,” said Johnson, whose head was whirling, and his mind was still full of dreadful visions.

  Mr. Wilbraham’s man came in with many apologies and explained briefly and quickly that an absurd mistake had been made and that the wrong kit bag had been sent over the night before.

  “Henry somehow got hold of the one that came over from the courtroom, and Mr. Wilbraham only discovered it when he saw his own lying in his room and asked why it had not gone to you,” the man said.

  “Oh!” said Johnson stupidly.

  “And he must have brought you the one from the murder case instead, sir, I’m afraid,” the man continued, without the ghost of an expression on his face. “The one John Turk packed the dead body in. Mr. Wilbraham’s awful upset about it, sir, and told me to come over first thing this morning with the right one, as you were leaving by the boat.”

  He pointed to a clean-looking kit bag on the floor, which he had just brought. “And I was to bring the other one back, sir,” he added casually.

  For some minutes Johnson could not find his voice. At last he pointed in the direction of his bedroo
m. “Perhaps you would kindly unpack it for me. Just empty the things out on the floor.”

  The man disappeared into the other room and was gone for five minutes. Johnson heard the shifting to and fro of the bag and the rattle of the skates and boots being unpacked.

  “Thank you, sir,” the man said, returning with the bag folded over his arm. “And can I do anything more to help you, sir?”

  “What is it?” asked Johnson, seeing that he still had something that he wished to say.

  The man shuffled and looked mysterious. “Beg pardon, sir, but knowing your interest in the Turk case, I thought you’d maybe like to know what’s happened—”

  “Yes.”

  “John Turk killed himself last night with poison immediately on getting his release, and he left a note for Mr. Wilbraham saying as he’d be much obliged if they’d have him put away, same as the woman he murdered, in the old kit bag.”

  “What time—did he do it?” asked Johnson.

  “Ten o’clock last night, sir, the warden says.”

  1 King’s Counsel.

  THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM

  He arrived late at night by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped after the toilsome ascent of three slow hours. the village, a single mass of shadow, was already asleep. Only in front of the little hotel was there noise and light and bustle for a moment. the horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the road and disappeared into the stable of their own accord, their harness trailing in the dust; and the lumbering diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it the body of a great yellow-sided beetle with broken legs.

  In spite of his physical weariness the schoolmaster, revelling in the first hours of his ten-guinea holiday, felt exhilarated. For the high Alpine valley was marvellously still; stars twinkled over the torn ridges of the Dent du Midi where spectral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink; and the keen air smelt of pine forests, dew-soaked pastures, and freshly sawn wood. He took it all in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few minutes, while the other three passengers gave directions about their luggage and went to their rooms. Then he turned and walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the hall, only just able to resist stopping to examine the big mountain map that hung upon the wall by the door.

  And, with a sudden disagreeable shock, he came down from the ideal to the actual. For at the inn—the only inn—there was no vacant room. Even the available sofas were occupied.…

  How stupid he had been not to write! Yet it had been impossible, he remembered, for he had come to the decision suddenly that morning in Geneva, enticed by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain.

  They talked endlessly, this gold-braided porter and the hard-faced old woman—her face was hard, he noticed—gesticulating all the time, and pointing all about the village with suggestions that he ill understood, for his French was limited and their patois was fearful.

  “There!” he might find a room, “or there! But we are, hélas full—more full than we care about. Tomorrow, perhaps if So-and-So give up their rooms —!” And then, with much shrugging of shoulders, the hard-faced old woman stared at the gold-braided porter, and the porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster.

  At length, however, by some process of hope he did not himself understand, and following directions given by the old woman that were utterly unintelligible, he went out into the street and walked towards a dark group of houses she had pointed out to him. He only knew that he meant to thunder at a door and ask for a room. He was too weary to think out details. the porter half made to go with him, but turned back at the last moment to speak with the old woman. the houses sketched themselves dimly in the general blackness. the air was cold. the whole valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water. He was thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be very far away, and that he might even spend the night wandering in the woods, when there was a sharp noise behind him and he turned to see a figure hurrying after him. It was the porter running.

  And in the little hall of the inn there began again a confused three-cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and whispered asides in patois between the woman and the porter—the net result of which was that, “If Monsieur did not object there was a room, after all, on the first floor—only it was in a sense ‘engaged.’ That is to say—”

  But the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely into the puzzle that had somehow provided it so suddenly. the ethics of hotelkeeping had nothing to do with him. If the woman offered him quarters, it was not for him to argue with her whether the said quarters were legitimately hers to offer.

  But the porter, evidently a little thrilled, accompanied the guest up to the room and supplied in a mixture of French and English details omitted by the landlady and Minturn, the schoolmaster, soon shared the thrill with him, and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible tragedy.

  All who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high mountain valleys where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of the attractions, will understand a certain faint element of high alarm that goes with the picture. One looks up at the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks involuntarily of the men who find their pleasure for days and nights together scaling perilous summits among the clouds, and conquering inch by inch the icy peaks that for ever shake their dark terror in the sky. the atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable from any imaginative contemplation of the scene; and the idea Minturn gleaned from the half-frightened porter lost nothing by his ignorance of the language. This Englishwoman, the real occupant of the room, had insisted on going without a guide. She had left just before daybreak two days before the porter had seen her start and…she had not returned! the route was difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for a skilled climber, even a solitary one. And the Englishwoman was an experienced mountaineer. Also, she was self-willed, careless of advice, bored by warnings, self-confident to a degree. Queer, moreover; for she kept entirely to herself, and sometimes remained in her room with locked doors, admitting no one, for days together: a “crank,” evidently, of the first water.

  This much Minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter’s talk while his luggage was brought in and the room set to rights; further, too, that the search had gone out and might, of course, return at any moment. In which case—. Thus the room was empty, yet still hers. “If Monsieur did not object if the risk he ran of having to turn out suddenly in the night—” It was the loquacious porter who furnished the details that made the transaction questionable; and Minturn dismissed the loquacious porter as soon as possible, and prepared to get into the hastily arranged bed and snatch all the hours of sleep he could before he was turned out.

  At first, it must be admitted, he felt uncomfortable— distinctly uncomfortable. He was in some one else’s room. He had really no right to be there. It was in the nature of an unwarrantable intrusion; and while he unpacked he kept looking over his shoulder —as though some one were watching him from the corners. Any moment, it seemed, he would hear a step in the passage, a knock would come at the door, the door would open, and there he would see this vigorous Englishwoman looking him up and down with anger. Worse still he would hear her voice asking him what he was doing in her room her bedroom. of course, he had an adequate explanation, but still!

  Then, reflecting that he was already half undressed, the humor of it flashed for a second across his mind, and he laughed—quietly. And at once, after that laughter, under his breath, came the sudden sense of tragedy he had felt before. Perhaps, even while he smiled, her body lay broken and cold upon those awful heights, the wind of snow playing over her hair, her glazed eyes staring sightless up to the stars.… It made him shudder. the sense of this woman whom he had never seen, whose name even he did not know, became extraordinarily real. Almost he could imagine that she was somewhere in the room with him, hidden, observing all he did.

  He opened the door softly to put his boots outsid
e, and when he closed it again he turned the key. Then he finished unpacking and distributed his few things about the room. It was soon done; for, in the first place, he had only a small Gladstone and a knapsack, and secondly, the only place where he could spread his clothes was the sofa. There was no chest of drawers, and the cupboard, an unusually large and solid one, was locked. the Englishwoman’s things had evidently been hastily put away in it. the only sign of her recent presence was a bunch of faded Alpenrosen standing in a glass jar upon the washhand stand. This, and a certain faint perfume, were all that remained. In spite, however, of these very slight evidences, the whole room was pervaded with a curious sense of occupancy that he found exceedingly distasteful. One moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a “just left” feeling—the next it was a queer awareness of “still here” that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him.

  Altogether, the room inspired him with a singular aversion, and the strength of this aversion seemed the only excuse for his tossing the faded flowers out of the window, and then hanging his mackintosh upon the cupboard door in such a way as to screen it as much as possible from view. For the sight of that big, ugly cupboard, filled with the clothing of a woman who might then be beyond any further need of covering—thus his imagination insisted on picturing it—touched in him a startled sense of the Incongruous that did not stop there, but crept through his mind gradually till it merged somehow into a sense of a rather grotesque horror. At any rate, the sight of that cupboard was offensive, and he covered it almost instinctively. Then, turning out the electric light, he got into bed.

  But the instant the room was dark he realised that it was more than he could stand; for, with the blackness, there came a sudden rush of cold that he found it hard to explain. And the odd thing was that, when he lit the candle beside his bed, he noticed that his hand trembled.