He was visualizing the front page story that his paper would carry if his theory were correct, and if – a matter of conjecture – his editor had the necessary nerve to make a bold stroke, when a cry of ‘Time, gentlemen, please! All out!’ reminded him of the hour. He got up and went out into a world of mist, broken by the ragged discs of roadside puddles and the streaming lightning of motor buses. He was certain that he had the story, but, even if it were proved, he was doubtful whether the policy of his paper would permit him to print it. It had one great fault. It was truth, but it was impossible truth. It rocked the foundations of everything that newspaper readers believed and that newspaper editors helped them to believe. They might believe that Turkish carpet-sellers had the gift of making themselves invisible. They would not believe this.
As it happened, they were not asked to, for the story was never written. As his paper had by now gone away, and as he was nourished by his refreshment and stimulated by his theory, he thought he might put in an extra half-hour by testing that theory. So he began to look about for the man he had in mind – a man with white hair, and large white hands; otherwise an everyday figure whom nobody would look twice at. He wanted to spring his idea on this man without warning, and he was going to place himself within reach of a man armoured in legends of dreadfulness and grue. This might appear to be an act of supreme courage – that one man, with no hope of immediate outside support, should place himself at the mercy of one who was holding a whole parish in terror. But it wasn’t. He didn’t think about the risk. He didn’t think about his duty to his employers or loyalty to his paper. He was moved simply by an instinct to follow a story to its end.
He walked slowly from the tavern and crossed into Fingal Street, making for Deever Market, where he had hope of finding his man. But his journey was shortened. At the corner of Lotus Street he saw him – or a man who looked like him. This street was poorly lit, and he could see little of the man: but he could see white hands. For some twenty paces he stalked him; then drew level with him; and at a point where the arch of a railway crossed the street, he saw that this was his man. He approached him with the current conversational phrase of the district: ‘Well, seen anything of the murderer?’ The man stopped to look sharply at him; then, satisfied that the journalist was not the murderer, said:
‘Eh? No, nor’s anybody else, curse it. Doubt if they ever will.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about them and I’ve got an idea.’
‘So?’
‘Yes. Came to me all of a sudden. Quarter of an hour ago. And I’d felt that we’d all been blind. It’s been staring us in the face.’
The man turned again to look at him, and the look and the movement held suspicion of this man who seemed to know so much. ‘Oh? Has it? Well, if you’re so sure, why not give us the benefit of it?’
‘I’m going to.’ They walked level, and were nearly at the end of the little street where it meets Deever Market, when the journalist turned casually to the man. He put a finger on his arm. ‘Yes, it seems to me quite simple now. But there’s still one point I don’t understand. One little thing I’d like to clear up. I mean the motive. Now, as man to man, tell me, Sergeant Ottermole, just why did you kill those inoffensive people?’
The sergeant stopped, and the journalist stopped. There was just enough light from the sky, which held the reflected light of the continent of London, to give him a sight of the sergeant’s face, and the sergeant’s face was turned to him with a wide smile of such urbanity and charm that the journalist’s eyes were frozen as they met. The smile stayed for some seconds. Then said the sergeant: ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mister Newspaper Man, I don’t know. I really don’t know. In fact, I’ve been worried about it myself. But I’ve got an idea – just like you. Everybody knows that we can’t control the workings of our minds. Don’t they? Ideas come into our minds without asking. But everybody’s supposed to be able to control his body. Why? Eh? We get our minds from lord-knows-where – from people who were dead hundreds of years before we were born. Mayn’t we get our bodies in the same way? Our faces – our legs – our heads – they aren’t completely ours. We don’t make ‘em. They come to us. And couldn’t ideas come into our bodies like ideas come into our minds? Eh? Can’t ideas live in nerve and muscle as well as in brain? Couldn’t it be that parts of our bodies aren’t really us, and couldn’t ideas come into those parts all of a sudden, like ideas come into – into’ – he shot his arms out, showing the great white-gloved hands and hairy wrists; shot them out so swiftly to the journalist’s throat that his eyes never saw them – ‘into my hands!’
The Open Window
Saki
‘My aunt will be down presently, Mr Nuttel,’ said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; ‘in the meantime you must try and put up with me.’
Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.
‘I know how it will be,’ his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; ‘you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.’
Framton wondered whether Mrs Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.
‘Do you know many of the people round here?’ asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.
‘Hardly a soul,’ said Framton. ‘My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here.’
He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.
‘Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?’ pursued the self-possessed young lady.
‘Only her name and address,’ admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An indefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.
‘Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,’ said the child; ‘that would be since your sister’s time.’
‘Her tragedy?’ asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.
‘You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,’ said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn.
‘It is quite warm for the time of the year,’ said Framton; ‘but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?’
‘Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.’ Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. ‘Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing “Bertie, why do you bound?” as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window –’
She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled
into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.
‘I hope Vera has been amusing you?’ she said.
‘She has been very interesting,’ said Framton.
‘I hope you don’t mind the open window,’ said Mrs Sappleton briskly; ‘my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they’ll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folks, isn’t it?’
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.
‘The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,’ announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. ‘On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement,’ he continued.
‘No?’ said Mrs Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention – but not to what Framton was saying.
‘Here they are at last!’ she cried. ‘Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!’
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: ‘I said, Bertie, why do you bound?’
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.
‘Here we are, my dear,’ said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window; ‘fairly muddy, but most of it’s dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?’
‘A most extraordinary man, a Mr Nuttel,’ said Mrs Sappleton; ‘could only talk about his illness, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost.’
‘I expect it was the spaniel,’ said the niece calmly; ‘he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.’
Romance at short notice was her specialty.
In The Vault
H. P. Lovecraft
There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows though, that the prosy tale which George Birch’s death permits me to tell has in it aspects beside which some of our darkest tragedies are light.
Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician, Doctor Davis, who died years ago. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving-tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in some one else after Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.
Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley, and was a very calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such matters as the ownership of costly ‘laying-out’ apparel invisible beneath the casket’s lid, and the degrees of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and function – thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.
Just where to begin Birch’s story I can hardly decide, since I am no practised teller of tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch’s inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving-tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, nor disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.
At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother of removal and interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his horse, after having laid but one body to its permanent rest. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far. from the tomb. Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work until Good Friday, the fifteenth. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever afterward he refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week. Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch.
On the afternoon of Friday, April fifteenth, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. That he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things. He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive horse, which as he drew it viciously up at the tomb neighed and pawed and tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had seemingly vexed it. The day was clear, but a high wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter, as he unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault. Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days was insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the right grave. He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby’s relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city whither they had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.
The light was dim, but Birc
h’s sight was good, and he did not get Asaph Sawyer’s coffin by mistake, although it was very similar. He had, indeed, made that coffin for Matthew Fenner; but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and flimsy, in a fit of curious sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy five years before. He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man, and many stories were told of his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious memory for wrongs real or fancied. To him Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffin which he now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner casket.
It was just as he had recognized old Matt’s coffin that the door slammed to in the wind, leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. The narrow transom admitted only the feeblest rays, and the overhead ventilation funnel virtually none at all; so that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch. In this funereal twilight he rattled the rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. In this twilight, too, he began to realize the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse outside could do more than neigh an unsympathetic reply. For the long-neglected latch was obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight.
Cries of Terror Page 3
