The Book of the Living Dead

by John Richard Stephens

  He was quite unaware that he had left the door unlatched at that late hour—half-past eleven—to admit pain and woe. But even as many bells sent dolefully across the night from their steeples their disagreement as to the point of half-past eleven, pain and woe were but two streets away from him. The macintosh and dungarees and the sharp white face were coming nearer every moment.

  There was silence in the house and in the streets; a heavy silence, broken, or sometimes stressed, by the occasional night-noises—motor horns, back-firing of lorries, shunting at a distant terminus. That silence seemed to envelop the house, but he did not notice it. He did not notice the bells, and he did not even notice the lagging step that approached his shop, and passed—and returned—and passed again—and halted. He was aware of nothing save that he was smoking a last pipe, and he was sitting in that state of hazy reverie which he called thinking, deaf and blind to anything not in his immediate neighborhood.

  But when a hand was laid on the latch, and the latch was lifted, he did hear that, and he looked up. And he saw the door open, and got up and went to it. And there, just within the door, he came face to face with the thin figure of pain and woe.

  To kill a fellow-creature is a frightful thing. At the time the act is committed the murderer may have sound and convincing reasons (to him) for his act. But time and reflection may bring regret; even remorse; and this may live with him for many years. Examined in wakeful hours of the night or early morning, the reasons for the act may shed their cold logic, and may cease to be reasons and become mere excuses.

  And these naked excuses may strip the murderer and show him to himself as he is. They begin to hunt his soul, and to run into every little corner of his mind and every little nerve, in search of it.

  And if to kill a fellow-creature and to suffer the recurrent regret for an act of heated blood is a frightful thing, it is still more frightful to kill a fellow-creature and bury his body deep in an African jungle, and then, fifteen years later, at about midnight, to see the latch of your door lifted by the hand you had stilled and to see the man, looking much as he did fifteen years ago, walk into your home and claim your hospitality.

  When the man in macintosh and dungarees walked into the dining-rooms, Nameless stood still; stared; staggered against a table; supported himself by a hand, and said, “Oh!”

  The other man said, “Nameless!”

  Then they looked at each other; Nameless with head thrust forward, mouth dropped, eyes wide; the visitor with a dull, glazed expression. If Nameless had not been the man he was—thick, bovine and costive—he would have flung up his arms and screamed. At that moment he felt the need of some such outlet, but he did not know how to find it. The only dramatic expression he gave to the situation was to whisper instead of speak.

  Twenty emotions came to life in his head and spine, and wrestled there. But they showed themselves only in his staring eyes and his whisper. His first thought, or rather, spasm, was Ghosts-Indigestion-Nervous-Breakdown. His second, when he saw that the figure was substantial and real, was Impersonation. But a slight movement on the part of the visitor dismissed that.

  It was a little habitual movement which belonged only to that man; an unconscious twitching of the third finger of the left hand. He knew then that it was Gopak. Gopak, a little changed, but still, miraculously, thirty-two. Gopak, alive, breathing and real. No ghost. No phantom of the stomach. He was as certain of that as he was that fifteen years ago he had killed Gopak stone-dead and buried him.

  The blackness of the moment was lightened by Gopak. In thin, flat tones he asked, “May I sit down? I’m tired.” He sat down, and said, “So tired. So tired.”

  Nameless still held the table. He whispered, “Gopak . . . Gopak . . . But I—I killed you. I killed you in the jungle. You were dead. I know you were.”

  Gopak passed his hand across his face. He seemed about to cry. “I know you did. I know. That’s all I can remember about this earth. You killed me.” The voice became thinner and flatter. “And I was so comfortable. So comfortable. It was—such a rest. Such a rest as you don’t know. And then they came and—disturbed me. They woke me up. And brought me back.” He sat with shoulders sagged, arms drooping, hands hanging between his knees. After the first recognition he did not look at Nameless; he looked at the floor.

  “Came and disturbed you?” Nameless leaned forward and whispered the words. “Woke you up? Who?”

  “The Leopard Men.”

  “The what?”

  “The Leopard Men.” The watery voice said it as casually as if it were saying “the night watchman.”

  “The Leopard Men?” Nameless stared, and his fat face crinkled in an effort to take in the situation of a midnight visitation from a dead man, and the dead man talking nonsense. He felt his blood moving out of its course. He looked at his own hand to see if it was his own hand. He looked at the table to see if it was his table. The hand and the table were facts, and if the dead man was a fact—and he was—his story might be a fact! It seemed anyway as sensible as the dead man’s presence. He gave a heavy sigh from the stomach. “A-ah . . . The Leopard Men . . . Yes, I heard about them out there. Tales!”

  Gopak slowly wagged his head. “Not tales. They’re real. If they weren’t real—I wouldn’t be here. Would I? I’d be at rest.”

  Nameless had to admit this. He had heard many tales “out there” about the Leopard Men, and had dismissed them as jungle yarns. But now, it seemed, jungle yarns had become commonplace fact in a little London shop.

  The watery voice went on. “They do it. I saw them. I came back in the middle of a circle of them. They killed a native to put his life into me. They wanted a foreigner—for their farm. So they brought me back. You may not believe it. You wouldn’t want to believe it. You wouldn’t want to—see or know anything like them. And I wouldn’t want any man to. But it’s true. That’s how I’m here.”

  “But I left you absolutely dead. I made every test. It was three days before I buried you. And buried you deep.”

  “I know. But that wouldn’t make any difference to them. It was a long time after when they came and brought me back. And I’m still dead, you know. It’s only my body they brought back.” The voice trailed into a thread. “And I’m so tired. So tired. I want to go back—to rest.”

  Sitting in his prosperous eating-house, Nameless was in the presence of an achieved miracle, but the everyday, solid appointments of the eating-house wouldn’t let him fully comprehend it. Foolishly, as he realised when he had spoken, he asked Gopak to explain what had happened. Asked a man who couldn’t really be alive to explain how he came to be alive. It was like asking Nothing to explain Everything.

  Constantly, as he talked, he felt his grasp on his own mind slipping. The surprise of a sudden visitor at a late hour; the shock of the arrival of a long-dead man; and the realisation that this long-dead man was not a wraith, were too much for him.

  During the next half-hour he found himself talking to Gopak as to the Gopak he had known seventeen years ago when they were partners. Then he would be halted by the freezing knowledge that he was talking to a dead man, and that a dead man was faintly answering him. He felt that the thing couldn’t really have happened, but in the interchange of talk he kept forgetting the improbable side of it, and accepting it. With each recollection of the truth, his mind would clear and settle in one thought—“I’ve got to get rid of him. How am I going to get rid of him?”

  “But how did you get here?”

  “I escaped.” The words came slowly and thinly, and out of the body rather than the mouth.

  “How?”

  “I don’t—know. I don’t remember anything—except our quarrel. And being at rest.”

  “But why come all the way here? Why didn’t you stay on the coast?”

  “I don’t—know. But you’re the only man I know. The only man I can remember.”

  “But how did you find me?”

  “I don’t know. But I had to—find you. You’re the only ma
n—who can help me.”

  “But how can I help you?”

  The head turned weakly from side to side. “I don’t—know. But nobody else—can.”

  Nameless stared through the window, looking on to the lamplit street and seeing nothing of it. The everyday being which had been his half an hour ago had been annihilated; the everyday beliefs and disbeliefs shattered and mixed together. But some shred of his old sense and his old standard remained. He must handle this situation. “Well—what do you want to do? What are you going to do? I don’t see how I can help you. And you can’t stay here, obviously.” A demon of perversity sent a facetious notion into his head—introducing Gopak to his wife—“This is my dead friend.”

  But on his last spoken remark Gopak made the effort of raising his head and staring with the glazed eyes at Nameless. “But I must stay here. There’s nowhere else I can stay. I must stay here. That’s why I came. You got to help me.”

  “But you can’t stay here. I got no room. All occupied. Nowhere for you to sleep.”

  The wan voice said, “That doesn’t matter. I don’t sleep.”

  “Eh?”

  “I don’t sleep. I haven’t slept since they brought me back. I can sit here—till you can think of some way of helping me.”

  “But how can I?”

  He again forgot the background of the situation, and began to get angry at the vision of a dead man sitting about the place waiting for him to think of something. “How can I if you don’t tell me how?”

  “I don’t—know. But you got to. You killed me. And I was dead—and comfortable. As it all came from you—killing me—you’re responsible for me being—like this. So, you got to—help me. That’s why I—came to you.”

  “But what do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t—know. I can’t—think. But nobody but you can help me. I had to come to you. Something brought me—straight to you. That means that you’re the one—that can help me. Now I’m with you, something will—happen to help me. I feel it will. In time you’ll—think of something.”

  Nameless found his legs suddenly weak. He sat down and stared with a sick scowl at the hideous and the incomprehensible. Here was a dead man in his house—a man he had murdered in a moment of black temper—and he knew in his heart that he couldn’t turn the man out. For one thing, he would have been afraid to touch him; he couldn’t see himself touching him. For another, faced with the miracle of the presence of a fifteen-years-dead man, he doubted whether physical force or any material agency would be effectual in moving the man.

  His soul shivered, as all men’s souls shiver at the demonstration of forces outside their mental or spiritual horizon. He had murdered this man, and often, in fifteen years, he had repented the act. If the man’s appalling story were true, then he had some sort of right to turn to Nameless. Nameless recognised that, and knew that whatever happened he couldn’t turn him out. His hot-tempered sin had literally come home to him.

  The wan voice broke into his nightmare. “You go to rest, Nameless. I’ll sit here. You go to rest.” He put his face down to his hands and uttered a little moan. “Oh, why can’t I rest? Why can’t I go back to my beautiful rest?”

  Nameless came down early next morning with a half-hope that Gopak would not be there. But he was there, seated where Nameless had left him last night. Nameless made some tea, and showed him where he might wash. He washed listlessly, and crawled back to his seat, and listlessly drank the tea which Nameless brought to him.

  To his wife and the kitchen helpers Nameless mentioned him as an old friend who had had a bit of a shock. “Shipwrecked and knocked on the head. But quite harmless, and he won’t be staying long. He’s waiting for admission to a home. A good pal to me in the past, and it’s the least I can do to let him stay here a few days. Suffers from sleeplessness and prefers to sit up at night. Quite harmless.”

  But Gopak stayed more than a few days. He outstayed everybody. Even when the customers had gone Gopak was still there.

  On the first morning of his visit when the regular customers came in at mid-day, they looked at the odd, white figure sitting vacantly in the first pew, then stared, then moved away.

  All avoided the pew in which he sat. Nameless explained him to them, but his explanation did not seem to relieve the slight tension which settled on the dining-room. The atmosphere was not so brisk and chatty as usual. Even those who had their backs to the stranger seemed to be affected by his presence.

  At the end of the first day Nameless, noticing this, told him that he had arranged a nice corner of the front room upstairs, where he could sit by the window and took his arm to take him upstairs. But Gopak feebly shook the hand away, and sat where he was. “No. I don’t want to go. I’ll stay here. I’ll stay here. I don’t want to move.”

  And he wouldn’t move. After a few more pleadings Nameless realised with dismay that his refusal was definite; that it would be futile to press him or force him; that he was going to sit in that dining-room forever. He was as weak as a child and as firm as a rock.

  He continued to sit in that first pew, and the customers continued to avoid it, and to give odd glances at it. It seemed that they half-recognised that he was something more than a fellow who had had a shock.

  During the second week of his stay three of the regular customers were missing, and more than one of those that remained made acidly facetious suggestions to Nameless that he park his lively friend somewhere else. He made things too exciting for them; all that whoopee took them off their work, and interfered with digestion. Nameless told them he would be staying only a day or so longer, but they found that this was untrue, and at the end of the second week eight of the regulars had found another place.

  Each day, when the dinner-hour came, Nameless tried to get him to take a little walk, but always he refused.

  He would go out only at night, and then never more than two hundred yards from the shop. For the rest, he sat in his pew, sometimes dozing in the afternoon, at other times staring at the floor. He took his food abstractedly, and never knew whether he had had food or not. He spoke only when questioned, and the burden of his talk was “I’m so tired. So tired.”

  One thing only seemed to arouse any light of interest in him; one thing only drew his eyes from the floor. That was the seventeen-year-old daughter of his host, who was known as Bubbles, and who helped with the waiting. And Bubbles seemed to be the only member of the shop and its customers who did not shrink from him.

  She knew nothing of the truth about him, but she seemed to understand him, and the only response he ever gave to anything was to her childish sympathy. She sat and chatted foolish chatter to him—“bringing him out of himself” she called it—and sometimes he would be brought out to the extent of a watery smile. He came to recognise her step and would look up before she entered the room. Once or twice in the evening, when the shop was empty, and Nameless was sitting miserably with him, he would ask, without lifting his eyes, “Where’s Bubbles?” and would be told that Bubbles had gone to the pictures or was out at a dance, and would relapse into deeper vacancy.

  Nameless didn’t like this. He was already visited by a curse which, in four weeks, had destroyed most of his business. Regular customers had dropped off two by two, and no new customers came to take their place. Strangers who dropped in once for a meal did not come again; they could not keep their eyes or their minds off the forbidding, white-faced figure sitting motionless in the first pew. At mid-day, when the place had been crowded and latecomers had to wait for a seat, it was now two-thirds empty; only a few of the most thick-skinned remained faithful.

  And on top of this there was the interest of the dead man in his daughter, an interest which seemed to be having an unpleasant effect. Nameless hadn’t noticed it, but his wife had. “Bubbles don’t seem as bright and lively as she was. You noticed it lately? She’s getting quiet—and a bit slack. Sits about a lot. Paler than she used to be.”

  “Her age, perhaps.”

  “No.
She’s not one of these thin dark sort. No—it’s something else. Just the last week or two I’ve noticed it. Off her food. Sits about doing nothing. No interest. May be nothing; just out of sorts, perhaps . . . How much longer’s that horrible friend of yours going to stay?”

  The horrible friend stayed some weeks longer—ten weeks in all—while Nameless watched his business drop to nothing and his daughter get pale and peevish. He knew the cause of it. There was no home in all England like his: no home that had a dead man sitting in it for ten weeks. A dead man brought, after a long time, from the grave, to sit and disturb his customers and take the vitality from his daughter. He couldn’t tell this to anybody. Nobody would believe such nonsense.

  But he knew that he was entertaining a dead man, and, knowing that a long-dead man was walking the earth, he could believe in any result of that fact. He could believe almost anything that he would have derided ten weeks ago. His customers had abandoned his shop, not because of the presence of a silent, white-faced man, but because of the presence of a dead-living man.

  Their minds might not know it, but their blood knew it. And, as his business had been destroyed, so, he believed, would his daughter be destroyed. Her blood was not warming her; her blood told her only that this was a long ago friend of her father’s, and she was drawn to him.

  It was at this point that Nameless, having no work to do, began to drink. And it was well that he did so. For out of the drink came an idea, and with that idea he freed himself from the curse upon him and his house.