He Arrived at Dusk

by Ashby, R. C.

  Mark Valentine

  April 25, 2013

  HE ARRIVED AT DUSK

  CONTENTS

  I MERTOUN’S STORY

  II HAMLETH’S DIARY

  III AHRMAN’S REPORT

  PART I

  MERTOUN’S STORY

  ENTR’ACTE

  AMONG those who took part as eye-witnesses or more intimately as actors in the strange affair which came to light in Northumberland in the spring of 1931, that dramatic—I was going to say melodramatic—business was tersely spoken of afterwards as The Gladius Case.

  The label has a cut-and-dried sound, scarcely appropriate to the title-page of this manuscript in which is written down for the first time an edited account of what actually occurred. “The Gladius Case” admits of no deviation from concrete fact; He Arrived at Dusk, I venture to suggest, will allow some amplification of detail and include the more human aspects of what was actually a grimly practical business. Hence the inclusion of Mr. Mertoun’s romance which properly had very little to do with the main theme, and also his irritating insistence upon the accompanying state of the weather, the purpose of which is to prove that at least a few rays of sunlight did fall upon that winter-blackened northern heath.

  The story as here presented is in three parts; three stories in one, three points of view; in fact, murder through the eyes of three men of widely differing mentality and outlook.

  With regard to the construction: in accordance with the excellent ruling of Father Ronald Knox for a story of this genre, the action has taken place before the narration begins, and the opening chapter which introduces you to a London Club on a February evening in 1931 is entitled Entr’acte for the foregoing reason.

  In the smoke-room of the National Progress Club, though the noise of voices boomed like the surge of an inland sea, a superhuman voice dominated all, a voice unhurried, supreme, slightly distorted; the voice of the radio.

  It was not apparent that anyone was attending to that strident message. There was a certain pathos, thought one man whose name was Ahrman, in the unregarded voice so patiently telling its interminable tale. What was it all about, anyway? And who cared one whit, in any case? The B.B.C. had decided that here was something good for the nation to know, and about ninety-nine per cent of the nation thought otherwise.

  “Turn it off!” muttered Ahrman’s companion, suddenly savage; “Stop the thing, man. It’s too much.”

  Ahrman looked round. Within a few feet of the radio three elderly members were sitting with rapt faces, drinking it in. Interference would be unwarranted.

  “Sorry, Mertoun. Those old fellows. . . .”

  Ahrman listened with pained curiosity.

  “. . . On May 14th we began our excavations at the broch of Durnigh. A single doorway four feet high admitted us to a circular court thirty feet in diameter. The dry-built walls, rising to a height of forty feet, shut out the morning sun. In the spot of which I have previously spoken, at a depth of only four feet, we discovered a hoard of relics; ornaments, bracelets, and pins, of brass, silver, jet, and lignite. It was a week later before the underground chamber was discovered, revealing the weapons, the querns, the bowls and lamps of serpentine and marble. Our greatest surprise was yet to follow . . .”

  And so was the greatest surprise of the evening for the occupants of the smoke-room; for though the Club, being a political one, had a large and democratic membership, it was not usual to see a gentleman seize a tall glass of lager from someone else’s table and fling it at the loud-speaker with such force and precision that splintered fragments cascaded in all directions, and streams of liquid dripped from the fretwork face of the instrument.

  That was what Mertoun did. Then he turned on his heel and bolted through the swing-doors to the terrace.

  Ahrman followed unobtrusively. His friend was standing, back to the River Thames, with one tight fist at his forehead, staring up at the lighted windows and rococo balconies of the Club.

  “Nerves!” thought Ahrman. “These business men. Is he ruined?”

  He crossed over to the parapet, eyed the dark river through a screen of trees wintry-bare, and approved the chain of lights spangling the rim of the Embankment.

  Mertoun spun round and released his pent-up breath.

  The sky above was black, and peppered with silver stars.

  “The noise . . .” muttered Ahrman, vaguely sympathetic. “It’s better here.”

  “Yes.” Mertoun leaned on the parapet and dislodged a small piece of mortar which his fingers seized eagerly. “You see,” he went on, “I’ve been looking at one of those things . . . from my bedroom window for weeks. Three weeks. There it was; that round, dark Thing, humped on the mound. Half the time there was rain, snow, sleet. I got to hate it. As that fellow said, it seemed to kill the morning sun.”

  “Quite!” said Ahrman. It seemed to him a case for a doctor. Absolute quiet, and firm yet kindly hands.

  “I want you to tell me what to do,” said Mertoun suddenly; “I’m—I’m haunted.”

  This to the other man seemed more normal. Many men were haunted. Remorse, maybe; or regret; or just a sharp, unhappy memory. He had to say something since Mertoun was so silent, and he said by way of encouraging and at the same time lightening the burden of the conversation: “I conclude you don’t mean me to take that literally?”

  “Why, yes!” Mertoun stared, without smiling. “Yes. I mean that.” He turned sideways to the parapet and added: “Three weeks ago I wouldn’t have believed it either. And yet——” He stopped and fumbled for cigarette and match-box, waiting with uplifted flame as though listening for sounds from the river. His hand was not unsteady. “What was that? A motor-launch, I think . . . I suppose you’ll admit, Ahrman—as I was once prepared to admit with reservations—that bricks and mortar, wood and stone, can hold a certain psychic quality, derived from association with human personality. Conversely, that human personality, greatly enhanced by temporary emotion, can pass on a living and indestructible quality to surrounding objects, the influence of which may be apparent in various ways. It’s a theory which doesn’t affect the average man, because so far from his probable experience. I never gave it serious thought, and I can’t say that I was ever sensitive to atmosphere . . . at least, not to that degree, until——” He blew out the creeping flame of the match.

  “There’s something in it,” admitted Ahrman; “though I fancy it’s apt to be greatly exaggerated.”

  He was sorry he had spoken, Mertoun took him up so eagerly.

  “You grant so much? That makes it easier. Now can you go further and admit the survival of personality, apart from its impress on surrounding objects?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at!” said Ahrman bluntly.

  “Do you believe,” persisted his friend, “that human personality is blotted out by death; or that it is capable of survival, on earth, among the surroundings of its lifetime? This is important to me.”

  “Possibly.” Truth to tell, Ahrman was uninterested.

  “Then do you believe,” Mertoun pursued, “that a human personality of unusual power and vitality, belonging to a body cut off in its prime by death, could survive for years, or for centuries, and even manifest itself in unmistakable form to practical men who were incapable of being deluded?”

  “No,” said Ahrman.

  “Any grounds?”

  “Yes. Ghosts. Poppycock.”

  “In other words, ‘We’re in twentieth-century London, my dear young friend, and we don’t believe in anything that hasn’t got the price marked on it in plain figures.’”

  “I’m sorry,” his friend conceded; “but I’m a practical man. My profession demands it.”

  “So am I,” said Mertoun, somewhat nettled. “Do you think I’m a spook-hunter?”

/>   “Then why——”

  Mertoun laughed curtly. He poised his little pebble of mortar and aimed at the shining coil of the river. The pebble fell short, and its fall was noiseless. A tram went clanging below, lighted and empty, and surprisingly dived into a subway like a salamander going to earth.

  “I know what I’ve seen,” said Mertoun.

  “What have you seen?”

  “Murder.”

  “Oh!”

  “I thought that would jolt you.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “About five days.”

  “And where?”

  “A few—comparatively few—miles from where we stand.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was an inquest, and a perfectly sane, hard-headed coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of—well, presumably suicide, though the poor fellow was stabbed in the back and everybody for miles around knew who’d done it. I saw the murderer.”

  “But that’s a travesty of justice! I——”

  “You can’t ask a magistrate for a warrant against a man who died sixteen hundred years ago.”

  “Who died sixteen hundred years ago?”

  “The murderer.”

  “Oh, come off it, laddie! You’ve had one too many.”

  “That’s the easiest explanation,” Mertoun said, frankly serious, and twisting the butt of his bitten cigarette; “I wish it were true. You say you’ll believe that walls have ears, and voices too. That walls can speak and make you shiver to their message; that a house can hold an atmosphere of gloomy warning which nothing can remove or explain away. But it’s too much to accept that unseen figure, the man himself without the flesh and trappings of his body—until one day you see him, as I did, in a whorl of light, and you know you’ll never blot out that sight from your memory until your dying day. It was the same night that they found his victim . . . not the first.”

  “You don’t mean to say that the creature had committed murder before?”

  “And may again.”

  “Mertoun! Mertoun!”

  “Thanks!” said Mertoun dryly; “I recognize the tone. My nurse used to check my flights of imagination in the same way.” He turned his back on the river and made a gesture which included all the roofs of London. “In the face of all that it seems fantastic. I can hardly believe that I’m not suffering from the effects of a bad dream, but suffering I am. I couldn’t be mistaken in my own mental reactions. And yet, London! My own office, crowded and undusted, as I left it three weeks before. And to-night the Club, a roomful of materially-minded dodderers betting on the prospects of a General Election before the autumn. It makes it all . . . so unreal.”

  “I grant you,” said Ahrman, “that a psychic experience—presuming that you have had a psychic experience, which I very much doubt—would be apt to wilt in the smoke-room of a London club. These things usually require a lonely house and several leagues of moorland.”

  “Ah!” Mertoun frowned. “If you want me to tell you, you’re making it impossibly difficult.”

  “Not intentionally,” said Ahrman promptly. “I hope you are going to tell me the tale, and I shan’t interrupt, however improbable it seems. Why did you try to smash the wireless?”

  Mertoun shrugged his shoulders. “Coincidence. A fellow was describing the excavation of a circular castle, built by the Celtic tribes of Britain as a defence against the Romans. There are scores of them in Scotland, and one at least in northern England. I’ve stared at it every morning for three weeks, and every night the great black beast was still there. It . . . was a symbol.”

  “Was it really?” said Ahrman, not without irony. “And how long will this story take?”

  “All the evening, I’m afraid. It may even be a little incoherent. I haven’t tried before to put it into words.”

  Ahrman nodded. “We’ll go inside. There’s a little writing-room with a good fire. With luck, no one will be using it now.”

  I

  “A LONELY house, you said, and a few leagues of moorland,” began Mertoun. “That stung me. Because they’re a condition that I shall have to induce you to accept. But the people involved were no ignorant rustics, but intelligent modern humans like myself, Charlie Barr, Miss Goff, Doctor Ingram. I needn’t apologize for them. However, to begin from three weeks ago last Tuesday, which was the very day. In the morning I had a letter at my office asking me if I’d go up and value the contents of a house somewhere in Northumberland; furniture, pictures, books, that kind of thing. The writer, a Colonel Barr, had had my name recommended by an acquaintance who had done business with me; in fact, it was a client—an artist—for whom I’d furnished a period room. Business was bad just then and Barr’s offer was attractive. Of course I accepted by return of post, packed a bag, and departed next morning from King’s Cross. I had better say here and now that there were two unusual points about the letter, though at the time I didn’t give them a minute’s thought. One doesn’t look for mysteries in normal business life. The letter was dated December 11 and written in a man’s hand. I didn’t receive it until January 17, and the envelope was directed in an entirely different, and apparently feminine hand.

  Very well then. I arrived after dark at an appalling little station called Heaviburgh—empty milkcans and peeling advertisements of cocoa—and asked if there was a car from The Broch to meet me. There wasn’t a car, but one of the two porters said he was going off duty in half an hour and would drive me over. The distance was seven miles, and it would be five shillings. The car was a fairly new Ford with an all-weather hood. It was raining and there was a swirling wind, so the shower-bath effect was constant. Also it was extremely dark and the roads were bad, so we never exceeded twelve miles an hour. Once there was a positive cloud-burst and the rain came at us like a wall of water. We had to stop for at least ten minutes. After that it grew a little lighter, and I could see scudding clouds and a greenish-white crescent moon lying on its back. The road was like a river. It ran between dry-stone walls, and beyond the walls were ragged fields, and beyond the fields rough hills, very black and bristling against the sky. It wasn’t an attractive landscape, but I was interested because it was new country to me. I hadn’t been in that part of England before.

  My driver was a dour chappie, a Scot from Glasgow, with very little to say—until we suddenly punctured, when he became voluble. Of course I got out and helped him to change the wheel and by the time we were both soaked to the skin we had become quite brotherly. He told me he had been at Heaviburgh six years and his only pleasure in life was reading about Clydeside politics in the Glasgow paper which his sister sent him.

  Off we went again, and soon we topped a rise and came out on a stretch of moorland; just miles of dead heather, black and rolling like a frozen sea. The desolation of it got me by the throat in the most curious way; it had the stark, bleak fascination of a Doré infernal landscape, and I can’t imagine any worse punishment for sin than to be compelled to wander alone at night over such a wilderness.

  However, nothing was wandering there, not even a sheep, and I was glad when we left it and found ourselves in broken country, hilly and cold, with very few and stunted trees. That is a practically treeless region. I was some time before I discovered what I missed in the landscape. Trees.

  ‘You’re from London?’ my friend the porter asked me.

  I can’t attempt to reproduce his dialect, particularly as the local one was superimposed upon his Glasgow Scots, but it was not unmusical and every sentence ended on a high note.

  I told him I was from London, and he then asked me if I were a doctor and if Colonel Barr were worse.

  ‘I didn’t know that Colonel Barr was ill,’ I confessed; and he said yes, the Colonel had been ill for some time, in fact ever since his brother’s accident; and there was a nurse in at
tendance, though some people said she was only the housekeeper.

  This was just gossip and not very exciting, but I asked idly whether the brother’s accident were serious, and he stared and said, ‘Why, of course. He was killed. He fell over the cliffs.’

  I mention that because it was the first I had heard of any cliffs. I hadn’t realized that the house I was going to was practically on the coast, half a mile from the sea. Driving there in the dark I knew nothing of it; and it wasn’t until the middle of my first night that the long moaning surge woke me and I jumped out of bed thinking I was dreaming, and saw across the sky that creeping shaft of weird luminosity, the beam from the lighthouse. It was a coast of rocks and turbulent seas. There was barely harbour for a fishing smack, much less a trawler.

  But where was I? . . . Oh, yes, we came to the house in the dark and the pouring rain; and there it was, quite a large house with an east wing like a pointing finger, rather Gothic and stony-looking, and in keeping with its surroundings.

  A manservant let me in and took my bags. Yes, they were expecting me; would I come upstairs. There was a stone hall with a lot of pewter and benches of rough-hewn oak that looked about seven hundred years old.