by Otto Penzler
The next morning the house was all astir. The boarders congregated on the landing outside my room, and Hammond and myself were lions. We had to answer a thousand questions as to the state of our extraordinary prisoner, for as yet not one person in the house except ourselves could be induced to set foot in the apartment.
The creature was awake. This was evidenced by the convulsive manner in which the bedclothes were moved in its efforts to escape. There was something truly terrible in beholding, as it were, those second-hand indications of the terrible writhings and agonized struggles for liberty which themselves were invisible.
Hammond and myself had racked our brains during the long night to discover some means by which we might realize the shape and general appearance of the Enigma. As well as we could make out by passing our hands over the creature’s form, its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks; and its hands and feet felt like those of a boy. At first we thought of placing the being on a smooth surface and tracing its outline with chalk, as shoemakers trace the outline of the foot. This plan was given up as being of no value. Such an outline would give not the slightest idea of its conformation.
A happy thought struck me. We would take a cast of it in plaster of Paris. This would give us the solid figure, and satisfy all our wishes. But how to do it? The movements of the creature would disturb the setting of the plastic covering, and distort the mold. Another thought. Why not give it chloroform? It had respiratory organs—that was evident by its breathing. Once reduced to a state of insensibility, we could do with it what we would. Doctor X—— was sent for; and after the worthy physician had recovered from the first shock of amazement, he proceeded to administer the chloroform. In three minutes afterward we were enabled to remove the fetters from the creature’s body, and a well-known modeler of this city was busily engaged in covering the invisible form with the moist clay. In five minutes more we had a mold, and before evening a rough fac simile of the mystery. It was shaped like a man—distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen. Gustave Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to “Un Voyage où il vous plaira,” which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should have fancied a ghoul to be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.
Having satisfied our curiosity, and bound every one in the house to secrecy, it became a question what was to be done with our Enigma. It was impossible that we should keep such a horror in our house; it was equally impossible that such an awful being should be let loose upon the world. I confess that I would have gladly voted for the creature’s destruction. But who would shoulder the responsibility? Who would undertake the execution of this horrible semblance of a human being? Day after day this question was deliberated gravely. The boarders all left the house. Mrs. Moffat was in despair, and threatened Hammond and myself with all sorts of legal penalties if we did not remove the Horror. Our answer was, “We will go if you like, but we decline taking this creature with us. Remove it yourself if you please. It appeared in your house. On you the responsibility rests.” To this there was, of course, no answer. Mrs. Moffat could not obtain for love or money a person who would even approach the Mystery.
The most singular part of the transaction was that we were entirely ignorant of what the creature habitually fed on. Everything in the way of nutriment that we could think of was placed before it, but was never touched. It was awful to stand by, day after day, and see the clothes toss, and hear the hard breathing, and know that it was starving.
Ten, twelve days, a fortnight passed, and it still lived. The pulsations of the heart, however, were daily growing fainter, and had now nearly ceased altogether. It was evident that the creature was dying for want of sustenance. While this terrible life struggle was going on, I felt miserable. I could not sleep of nights. Horrible as the creature was, it was pitiful to think of the pangs it was suffering.
At last it died. Hammond and I found it cold and stiff one morning in the bed. The heart had ceased to beat, the lungs to inspire. We hastened to bury it in the garden. It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that viewless corpse into the damp hole. The cast of its form I gave to Dr. X——, who keeps it in his museum in Tenth Street.
As I am on the eve of a long journey from which I may not return, I have drawn up this narrative of an event the most singular that has ever come to my knowledge.
NOTE—It was rumored that the proprietors of a well-known museum in this city had made arrangements with Dr. X—— to exhibit to the public the singular cast which Mr. Escott deposited with him. So extraordinary a history cannot fail to attract universal attention.
FULL FATHOM FIVE
Alexander Woollcott
THOUGH NOT MUCH READ today, Alexander “Aleck” Woollcott (1887–1943) was a hugely influential critic in his day, both of the theater and literature, single-handedly making James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon bestsellers. Born in Phalanx, New Jersey, he became a prolific drama critic for The New York Times and then wrote a column titled “Shouts and Murmurs” for The New Yorker. His editor at the magazine was quoted as saying, “I guess he was one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed,” although the great bookman Vincent Starrett selected his While Rome Burns as one of the fifty-two “Best Loved Books of the Twentieth Century.”
He was one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table (just as he later was one of the charter members of the Baker Street Irregulars, famously arriving at the first dinner in a hansom cab). He loved the theater and wrote two plays with fellow member George S. Kaufman, both failures. Kaufman, with Moss Hart, later wrote The Man Who Came to Dinner and based the titular character, Sheridan Whiteside, on Woollcott, exaggerating his best and worst characteristics. Less well known is that he also served as the inspiration for Waldo Lydecker in the noir novel and film Laura. Clifton Webb, who played the columnist, also toured as Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner; Woollcott starred in a traveling company of the comedy. Although he didn’t like Los Angeles, calling it “seven suburbs in search of a city,” he liked being in films and had numerous small parts and cameos.
“Full Fathom Five” was presented to readers as a true story; it was originally published in the June 22, 1929, issue of The New Yorker.
Full Fathom Five
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
THIS IS THE STORY just as I heard it the other evening—a ghost story told me as true. It seems that one chilly October night in the first decade of the present century, two sisters were motoring along a Cape Cod road, when their car broke down just before midnight and would go no further. This was in an era when such mishaps were both commoner and more hopeless than they are today. For these two, there was no chance of help until another car might chance to come by in the morning and give them a tow. Of a lodging for the night there was no hope, except a gaunt, unlighted, frame house which, with a clump of pine trees beside it, stood black in the moonlight, across a neglected stretch of frost-hardened lawn.
They yanked at its ancient bell-pull, but only a faint tinkle within made answer. They banged despairingly on the door panel, only to awaken what at first they thought was an echo, and then identified as a shutter responding antiphonally with the help of a nipping wind. This shutter was around the corner, and the ground-floor window behind it was broken and unfastened. There was enough moonlight to show that the room within was a deserted library, with a few books left on the sagging shelves and a few pieces of dilapidated furniture still standing where some departing family had left them, long before. At least the sweep of the electric flash which one of the women had brought with her showed them that on the u
ncarpeted floor the dust lay thick and trackless, as if no one had trod there in many a day.
They decided to bring their blankets in from the car and stretch out there on the floor until daylight, none too comfortable, perhaps, but at least sheltered from that salt and cutting wind. It was while they were lying there, trying to get to sleep, while, indeed, they had drifted halfway across the borderland, that they saw—each confirming the other’s fear by a convulsive grip of the hand—saw standing at the empty fireplace, as if trying to dry himself by a fire that was not there, the wraithlike figure of a sailor, come dripping from the sea.
After an endless moment, in which neither woman breathed, one of them somehow found the strength to call out, “Who’s there?” The challenge shattered the intolerable silence, and at the sound, muttering a little—they said afterwards that it was something between a groan and a whimper—the misty figure seemed to dissolve. They strained their eyes, but could see nothing between themselves and the battered mantelpiece.
Then, telling themselves (and, as one does, half believing it) that they had been dreaming, they tried again to sleep, and, indeed, did sleep until a patch of shuttered sunlight striped the morning floor. As they sat up and blinked at the gritty realism of the forsaken room, they would, I think, have laughed at their shared illusion of the night before, had it not been for something at which one of the sisters pointed with a kind of gasp. There, in the still undisturbed dust, on the spot in front of the fireplace where the apparition had seemed to stand, was a patch of water, a little, circular pool that had issued from no crack in the floor nor, as far as they could see, fallen from any point in the innocent ceiling. Near it in the surrounding dust was no footprint—their own or any other’s—and in it was a piece of green that looked like seaweed. One of the women bent down and put her finger to the water, then lifted it to her tongue. The water was salty.
After that the sisters scuttled out and sat in their car, until a passerby gave them a tow to the nearest village. In its tavern at breakfast they gossiped with the proprietress about the empty house among the pine trees down the road. Oh, yes, it had been just that way for a score of years or more. Folks did say the place was spooky, haunted by a son of the family who, driven out by his father, had shipped before the mast and been drowned at sea. Some said the family had moved away because they could not stand the things they heard and saw at night.
A year later, one of the sisters told the story at a dinner party in New York. In the pause that followed a man across the table leaned forward.
“My dear lady,” he said, with a smile, “I happen to be the curator of a museum where they are doing a good deal of work on submarine vegetation. In your place, I never would have left that house without taking the bit of seaweed with me.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she answered tartly, “and neither did I.”
It seems she had lifted it out of the water and dried it a little by pressing it against a window pane. Then she had carried it off in her pocketbook, as a souvenir. As far as she knew, it was still in an envelope in a little drawer of her desk at home. If she could find it, would he like to see it? He would. Next morning she sent it around by messenger, and a few days later it came back with a note.
“You were right,” the note said, “this is seaweed. Furthermore, it may interest you to learn that it is of a rare variety which, as far as we know, grows only on dead bodies.”
And that, my dears, is the story as I heard it the other evening, heard it from Alice Duer Miller who, in turn, had heard it five-and-twenty years before from Mrs. George Haven Putnam, sometime dean of Barnard College, and author of that admirable work, The Lady. To her I must go if—as I certainly did—I wanted more precise details. So to Mrs. Putnam I went, hat in hand and, as an inveterate reporter, showered her with questions. I wanted the names of the seaweed, of the curator, of the museum, of the two sisters, of the dead sailor, and of the nearby village on Cape Cod. I wanted a road-map marked with a cross to show the house in the grove of pines. I wanted—but the examination came to a dead stop at the sight of her obvious embarrassment. She was most graciously apologetic, but, really, what with this and what with that, she had forgotten the whole story. She could not even remember—and thus it is ever with my life in science—who it was that had told it to her.
FOOTNOTE: More recently, the Curator of the Botanical Museum in St. Louis has assured me that this tale, whispered from neighbor to neighbor across the country, has become distorted in a manner offensive to students of submarine vegetation. According to him, the visitor from the sea was seen in a house in Woods Hole, Mass. He was a son of the house who had been drowned during his honeymoon off the coast of Australia. The seaweed picked up off the dusty floor of that New England mansion was of a variety which grows only off the Australian coast. The Curator even presented me with the actual seaweed. I regard it with mingled affection and skepticism, and keep it pressed between the pages of Bullfinch’s Mythology.
HE COMETH AND HE PASSETH BY
H. R. Wakefield
THE LAST MAJOR AUTHOR of ghost stories in the classic, old-fashioned style of M. R. James was H(erbert) R(ussell) Wakefield (1888 or 1890–1964), whose early (and best) stories were set among old ruins and involved family curses and forbidden tomes. Born in Kent, the son of the future Bishop of Birmingham, he was educated at Oxford University with a degree in history. He was a publisher from 1920 to 1930, having turned to writing as late as 1928 when his first ghost story, the much-anthologized “The Red Lodge,” was inspired by a real incident in his life. He had stayed in a lovely, apparently charming old house, where he felt an inexplicable “fear without a name,” as he described it, and later learned that five previous tenants had committed suicide there.
Although he wrote in other fields, such as true crime, with The Green Bicycle Case (1930) and Landru: The French Bluebeard (1936), and three undistinguished mystery novels: Hearken to the Evidence (1933), Belt of Suspicion (1936), and Hostess of Death (1938), it is his ghost stories for which he is remembered—although the excellence of his work exceeds his recognition. Among his outstanding collections of supernatural and occult fiction are They Return at Evening (1928), Others Who Returned (1929, published in the U.K. as Old Man’s Beard), and Imagine a Man in a Box (1931); later collections are mainly reprints or comprise lesser works. In 1968, Claire Bloom starred in a BBC adaptation of Wakefield’s haunted house story, “The Triumph of Death,” which was first published in Strayers from Sheol (1961).
“He Cometh and He Passeth By” was originally published in They Return at Evening (London, Phillip Allen, 1928).
He Cometh and He Passeth By
H. R. WAKEFIELD
EDWARD BELLAMY SAT DOWN at his desk, untied the ribbon round a formidable bundle of papers, yawned and looked out of the window.
On that glistening evening the prospect from Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, was restful and soothing. Just below the motor mowing-machine placidly “chug-chugged” as it clipped the finest turf in London. The muted murmurs from Kingsway and Holborn roamed in placidly. One sleepy pigeon was scratching its poll and ruffling its feathers in a tree opposite, two others—one coyly fleeing, the other doggedly in pursuit—strutted the greensward. “A curious rite of courtship,” thought Bellamy, “but they seem to enjoy it; more than I enjoy the job of reading this brief!”
Had these infatuated fowls gazed back at Mr. Bellamy they would have seen a pair of resolute and trustworthy eyes dominating a resolute, nondescript face—one that gave an indisputable impression of kindliness, candour, and mental alacrity. No woman had etched lines upon it, nor were those deepening furrows ploughed by the highest exercise of the imagination marked thereon.
By his thirty-ninth birthday he had raised himself to the unchallenged position of the most brilliant junior at the Criminal Bar, though that is, perhaps, too flashy an epithet to describe that combination of inflexible integrity, impeccable common sense, perfect health, and tireless industry which was Edw
ard Bellamy. A modest person, he attributed his success entirely to that “perfect health,” a view not lightly to be challenged by those who spend many of their days in those Black Holes of controversy, the Law Courts of London. And he had spent eight out of the last fourteen days therein. But the result had been a signal triumph, for the Court of Criminal Appeal had taken his view of Mr. James Stock’s motives, and had substituted ten years’ penal servitude for a six-foot drop. And he was very weary—and yet here was this monstrous bundle of papers! He had just succeeded in screwing his determination to the sticking point when his telephone bell rang.
He picked up the receiver languidly, and then his face lightened.
“I know that voice. How are you, my dear Philip? Why, what’s the matter? Yes, I’m doing nothing. Delighted! Brooks’s at eight o’clock. Right you are!”
So Philip had not forgotten his existence. He had begun to wonder. His mind wandered back over his curious friendship with Franton. It had begun on the first morning of their first term at University, when they had both been strolling nervously about the quad. That it ever had begun was the most surprising thing about it, for superficially they had nothing in common. Philip, the best bat at Eton, almost too decorative, with a personal charm most people found irresistible, the heir to great possessions. He, the crude product of an obscure Grammar School, destined to live precariously on his scholarships, gauche, shy, taciturn. In the ordinary way they would have graduated to different worlds, for the economic factor alone would have kept their paths all through their lives at Oxford inexorably apart. They would have had little more in common with each other than they had with their scouts. And yet they had spent a good part of almost every day together during term time, and during every vacation he had spent some time at Franton Hall, where he had had first revealed to him those many and delicate refinements of life which only great wealth, allied with traditional taste, can secure. Why had it been so? He had eventually asked Philip.
