The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why, Ellis’s soul, Mr Deering, that passed into it with that last gasp of his, and was sealed up for anyone that likes to let it out.’

  I got to my feet, driven beyond endurance.

  ‘You ass!’ I cried. ‘Have you drivelled to an end?’

  ‘Oh, dear no!’ he whispered, with a little nervous but defiant chuckle. ‘Now, you know, don’t you, Mr Deering, that there’s something uncommon about – about that out there? Perhaps you’ll be able to explain it. It was in the hope that I asked you (who’ve made such a study of psychological phenomena) to endure my company for a night. And, to tell you the truth, there’s something more and worse. Wouldn’t you like to hear about it, Mr Deering?’

  ‘Oh, go on!’ I said, with a groan. ‘I’ve accepted my company, as you say, and—’

  ‘Won’t you come further from the door?’ he asked, truckling to and hating me, as I believed. ‘I can see you aren’t comfortable, and no wonder.’

  I ground my teeth on a curse, and slouching to the mantelpiece, put my back against it. A blue-bottle, droning heavily in labour, whirled about the room and settled with a buzzing flop on the pie. The cessation of its fulsome chaunt seemed to embolden unseen things to stir and giggle in the dark corners of the room.

  ‘Aren’t you going on?’ I said desperately.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘I’m going on. From first to last I’ll tell you everything, and then you can form your own conclusions. Mr Deering, I’d got to know, as I said, the man Ephraim Ellis. How, don’t particularly matter. I’m fond of prowling about at night. I make acquaintances, and pick up things that interest me. This man did. There was something suggestive about him – something haunted, as I’d like to put it. He kept company at one time with a slavey of mine that died of fits (I’ve seen her in ’em), and perhaps that led to my following him up to his workplace and getting into talk with him. He was a glass-blower, and on night duty. A queer customer he was, and dark and secret as sin. Sometimes I’d look at him, red and shifty in the glow, and I’d think, “Are you calculating the consequences, my friend, of braining me with a white-hot bottle?” He may have been, more than you’d fancy; for I believe the man took me for an unclean spirit sent to goad him to further desperations. “Further”, I say; but, mind you, I only go by report. It would never do, would it, Mr Deering, for you and me to be certain, or they might claim us for accessories?’

  I broke into a hoarse, angry exclamation.

  ‘No, no,’ he interrupted me hurriedly, ‘of course they couldn’t. It was only my fun. But the truth is, Ellis’s fellow-workmen were fully persuaded that Ellis had murdered Riddick, who had been found one morning, after he’d relieved Ellis at solitary night duty, with his head melted and run away against the door of a furnace. I don’t know; and I don’t know what they went upon, seeing the trunk was all right, and that there was no head to examine for trace of injuries. But they made out their suspicions – on technical grounds, I suppose; and, as to the moral – why, Riddick, by their showing, had been a taunting devil, a regular bad lot, who’d made a game of baiting Ellis till he drove the man almost to madness. Anyhow, Ellis was marked down by them, and given the cold shoulder of fear; and so he worked apart (for he was too valuable a hand to be dismissed) – he worked apart – with only me, I really believe, in the wide world to speak to him, until the police, acting upon rumours, or the shadows of ’em, came to lay hands on him.

  ‘But now, I must tell you, before that happened there was something else occurred that was more intimate to the moral, if not to the circumstantial, point. Ellis took to having fits, or seizures, in which he’d rave that Riddick hadn’t been got rid of after all, but that he’d all of a sudden be there again, and burrowing into him, and hanging on inside like a bat under ivy, while he’d whisper into his soul blasphemies not fit to be mentioned. He’d not lose his senses – what he’d got of ’em – in these states; but he’d sit down staring, with a face on him as if he’d swallowed a live eel. Sometimes I could have burst with laughter at the sight. And then, once upon a time, Mr Deering, he took me all in a moment into his confidence, as I may say. And it was like a deathbed confession, for that night the police came and finished him.

  ‘I had been standing by, watching him at work, when he broke off for a drink of water. The common tap was in a little yard at the back of the premises, and as he went out to it I fancied he beckoned me to follow him. Anyhow, I did, and faced him there under the starlight. I’m only speaking of three nights ago, so you may believe the whole thing sticks pretty vividly in my memory.

  ‘He glanced up as I stood before him.

  ‘“Why do you follow me?” he says in a low voice. “Why do you come and stand there and look at me? Are you Riddick? My God, I’ll melt your head like wax if you are!” says he.

  ‘“Why, Mr Ellis,” says I, taken aback, till I jumped to the humour of the thing, “if Riddick grips you, as he has done, while I’m looking on, I can’t be Riddick, can I?”

  ‘“No, that’s true,” he says. “What do you want with me, then?” And, “Oh, my God!” he says, in such a Hamlet’s ghost voice as would have set you sniggering, “can you stand by and see a soul raving in the grip of damnation and not offer to help it?”

  ‘“Mr Ellis,” I answered, “does Riddick really come to you like that?”

  ‘“He comes and clutches me,” he said, “as he clutched me when he was alive. He holds me and claims me to his own wickedness, and I must listen and listen, and can’t get away. I want to escape, and he clings on and whispers. And if I strike him down, and melt his bloody battered face into glass, there he is in a little while up and at my soul again, struggling with it in my throat, lest it get away from him and fly free with some last breath I put into my work.”

  ‘He looked at me in a death’s-head kind of manner, and I had a business, as you may guess, Mr Deering, not to explode in his face.

  ‘Well, after a minute he turns round, with a groan, and goes back to his work. And I followed, as you may suppose.

  ‘Now, he was at his bottles once more, and me standing by him, when all of a sudden he put down his pipe, and his face was like soapy pumice-stone.

  ‘“He’s entered into me! He’s got me again!” he whispered in a voice like choking.

  ‘“Go on with your work, as if you didn’t know,” says I, choking too, though for a different reason. “Then you’ll be able to take him off his guard and blow him out into a bottle.”

  ‘I thought that was too tall, even for his reach. But, Mr Deering – would you believe it? – the mug actually made a run and scramble to do as I told him. Only I suppose Riddick was holding on so tight that, when he blew, the two, himself and the other, came away together. Anyhow, there’s the consequences in the next room – sealed and untouched, as it was left from the corpse’s mouth; for the police took him while he was near bursting himself over that, the very last bottle he was ever to mould.’

  He brought himself to a stop with a feculent chuckle. Then: ‘What you’ll judge it to be, I can’t tell,’ he went on. ‘It’s as funny as fits, whatever it may mean. I know, for myself, I’d sooner sit and watch it – on the right side of the glass – than I would a little fish in an aquarium setting himself to catch, and lose, and catch again, and suck down by fractions a huge, wriggling worm.’

  I came away from the mantelpiece. The room seemed a swimming vortex. I have a notion that I cursed Sewell for an unnameable carrion. But, if I did, my loathing and horror hit him without effect. I can only remember that we were in the museum again, that dusk had gathered there heavy and opaque; and then suddenly Sewell had lit a candle, and was holding it behind the thing on the table, while he invited me with a gesture to advance and inspect.

  It was an ordinary claret bottle, but distorted at the neck. The light struck into and through it. And I looked, and saw that its milky-greenness was in never-ceasing motion.

  ‘There they are!’ whispered Sewell gluttonously. ‘L
ook, Mr Deering, mightn’t it be the worm and the fish, now …!’

  A little palpitating, shuddering blot of terror, human and inhuman; now distended, as if gasping in a momentary respite; now crouching and hugging itself into a shapeless ball, and always steadily, untiringly followed and sprung upon by the thing that had the appearance, through the semi-opaque glass, of a shambling, fat-lidded …

  Something gave in me, and with a sobbing snarl I caught the bottle up in my hand.

  ‘Mr Deering!’ cried Sewell, ‘Mr Deering! what are you going to do?’

  ‘Stand back!’ I shrieked, ‘stand back!’

  He ran round at me, with a little nervous gobble of laughter.

  ‘Don’t!’ he cried. ‘Let’s take it away and bury it.’

  He caught at my arm, but I flung him aside madly, and with all my force dashed the horror to the floor.

  A moment’s silence succeeded the ringing crash.

  ‘Oh,’ whispered Sewell, giggling, ‘listen! It’s going up the stairs after the other – there’s something beating on the skylight!’

  I tore on to the landing. There was a sound as if some sprawling, bloated body were climbing the bare treads in a series of scrambling flops. Higher, it might have been a great moth that fluttered frenziedly against the glass.

  The cord of the skylight hung down to my hand. I wrenched at it demoniacally, and the glass above swung open with a scream.

  A whir, receding into the faint stinging whine of a distant organ, vibrated overhead and was gone. Something on the upper stairs – something unseen and shocking – turned, and began to descend towards me. And at that I wheeled, and rushed staggering for escape and release, leaving Sewell to finish conclusions with what remained.

  THE CLOSED DOOR

  The Wanderer, the water squelching in his broken boots at every step, splashed his way across the melancholy estate. A drenched moon, seeming to pitch at its moorings as the running clouds lifted it, glazed with a lamentable light the wet roofs and palings of the surrounding houses. Those, scattered loosely over a wide area of swampy ground, illustrated the latest word, in one direction, of suburban expansion. They would close up some day and become part of the city of which they were now only the advanced outposts; at present they stood in their pretentious instability for nothing better than the smart foresight of a speculative builder. So much, in the flying moonshine, was evident to the Wanderer. He marked the little barren, stony gardens, the rows of forlorn saplings, the weedy wastes – dumping-grounds for pots and broken crockery – the unmade roads scarred with their wildernesses of soggy ruts; and his soul yearned for the flare of city slums, whose squalor was still the sweltering over-ripened fruit of exotic ages. A lonely gas-lamp here and there blinked testily, like a light-ship in a waste of waters, whenever the wind smote its solitary eye; for the rest, scarce ten o’clock as it was, drab dejection seemed on all sides to have extinguished its tapers and gone drearily to bed.

  The Wanderer, going forward with that stoic, hunch-shouldered aspect which is common to those long familiar with shrunk vitals and the filter of rain into coat-collars, raised his head suddenly and looked about him. A sound of universal running and dripping had succeeded on the passing of the last brief hammering storm.

  ‘The Laurels,’ he muttered: ‘That was the name the old woman told me – The Laurels! Curse these bally houses! When shall I reach the one I want? Uncle Greg, like all the rest of them, will have gone to bed, if I’m not quick.’

  He had not, after all, much to hope of the sinister old man; but anyhow he was Uncle Gregory’s own sole sister’s child, and any chance was worth risking in this deadly pass to which he had come. If he could only induce Uncle Greg to ship him off somewhere abroad – just to be rid of his intolerable importunities! Surely, for his own sake, he would not drive him to desperation. Uncle Greg was a wicked old Pharisee and humbug, but respectability was the breath of his nostrils. He lived by it and prevailed by it, witness this very estate exploited by him, and on which he himself was established, the crowning expression of its social orthodoxy. It would be ruinous business to have a profligate and pauperised nephew haunting its decent preserves. Yes, his case was strong enough to warrant a descent on Uncle Greg, much as in his heart he feared the malefic old man.

  He had come to an abrupt stop in the houses; beyond seemed to stretch a moon-dappled hiatus of broken ground. But, looking intently across this, he perceived distinctly enough a solitary house, standing remote and alone on the limits of the estate. Towards that house, since he had investigated all others, it was necessary for him to make his way. He distinguished a track of some sort, and followed it.

  As he approached the building, apprehension stiffened in him to fury. It was dark and lifeless like the others. Not the gleam of a light twinkled anywhere from its windows; the household, to all appearance, was a-bed.

  Cursing between his teeth, he came up to the gate, and read without difficulty its inscription. The Laurels, safe enough. He had reached his goal at last, and to what end?

  One moment he stood, deliberating the prospect before him; the next, in a rage of decision, he had opened the gate and walked in. A black shrubbery, of the nature to justify the name, appeared to accept him into its yawning arms. There was a gloom of trees about the house, in whose shadow the white shutters in the windows seemed to open and stare at him secretively. Not a sound proceeded from the building anywhere; yet its vulgarity, its raw newness, were enough to allay any sensation of eeriness which its silence, its ghostly isolation in the moonlight, might otherwise have conveyed.

  The Wanderer, standing before the hall door, held his breath to consider. His feet had crunched on the gravel path; yet it seemed to him that to breathe were more certainly to betray himself. To betray himself to what?

  Yes, to what? Why should he fear or hesitate? Desperate men need dread no ambushes. There was no lower than the bottom of things, and he lay there already, bruised and broken. To turn now were to turn for shelter to the booming wind, the rain-swept waste. There was none other possible to him, save through the door of crime. He might open that yet; Uncle Greg should decide for him. He had one negotiable asset – himself. There was a positive value in self-obliteration; it was worth money. The lesson could not be better conveyed than through self-assertion. He lifted his hand to the knocker.

  The blow sounded startlingly through the silent house; and yet he had knocked but timidly at the outset – too timidly, it appeared. He raised his hand again; louder this time; and still no one answered.

  Then anger grew in him; he refused to be ignored; if he had to wake the whole household he would stay and not desist until he was admitted. The reverberations, violently continued, gave him heart and courage, gave him confidence. Conversely with his own determination must be rising the palpitations of the silent listeners within. It was impossible that they could not hear him. He rained at last a very battery of blows upon the door. Still there followed no response. Then, in a sort of derisive perversity, he took to delivering second taps with the knocker, regular, monotonous, up to fifty or so. That must goad the most resolute inmate to rebellion.

  Suddenly, quite suddenly, he paused.

  ‘If you knock too long at a closed door, the devil may open to you.’

  Where had he heard that – read that? Superstitious drivel, of course; and yet, the spectral night, the lonely house, and this silence! Pooh! It was Uncle Greg he demanded and was resolute to arouse. Uncle Greg was devil enough for anyone. Let him appear, to vindicate the proverb if he liked; he asked nothing better.

  He had raised his hand once more, when he fancied he heard the faintest echo of a response within the house. It might have been a faint call or a footstep. ‘Ah!’ he breathed to himself, ‘the old devil at last!’

  The sound increased – came on. Unquestionably it was the stealthy tread of a footstep in the hall. A tiny ray of light shot through the keyhole. The Wanderer clutched the rags upon his chest and stood rigid. In the very act of s
teadying himself, he saw that the hall door was open and Uncle Greg standing motionless on the threshold.

  The same heavy, sly figure as of old, beaming hairless self-complacency in its every slab feature. He wore a shawl dressing-gown of a flamboyant pattern, his stumpy feet were encased in gorgeous carpet slippers; in one hand he held a lighted candle, in the other a revolver. He betrayed no astonishment, but only a sort of furtive glee.

  ‘Charlie!’ he said, in his whispering chuckle: ‘poor Charlie, is it, that has been knocking fit to wake the dead.’

  ‘I was desperate to get in – to make you hear,’ muttered the Wanderer. ‘Look at my state, Uncle Greg.’

  ‘And you made me hear,’ said the old builder. ‘What a determined fellow, to be sure. There was nothing for it at last but to get up and come. I have brought my pistol with me, you see.’

  ‘Not to use it on me, I hope, Uncle Greg?’ said the Wanderer, with a ghastly jocularity.

  ‘No,’ said Uncle Gregory; ‘no. It’s not the kind of weapon for your sort. I’ve a better way of retaliating on you.’

  The visitor, in this visible presence, was stung to wordy violence on the instant.