Then suddenly the words of the stranger, which he had only half heard or understood, returned to him.
“Haunted?” he asked, looking hard at him; “haunted, did you say?” He paused in the roadway and stared into the darkness where the building of the old school had first appeared to him. But the stranger hurried him forward.
“We shall talk more safely farther on,” he said. “I followed you from the inn the moment I realised where you had gone. When I found you it was eleven o’clock—”
“Eleven o’clock,” said Harris, remembering with a shudder.
“—I saw you drop. I watched over you till you recovered consciousness of your own accord, and now—now I am here to guide you safely back to the inn. I have broken the spell—the glamour—”
“I owe you a great deal, sir,” interrupted Harris again, beginning to understand something of the stranger’s kindness, “but I don’t understand it all. I feel dazed and shaken.” His teeth still chattered, and spells of violent shivering passed over him from head to foot. He found that he was clinging to the other’s arm. In this way they passed beyond the deserted and crumbling village and gained the high-road that led homewards through the forest.
“That school building has long been in ruins,” said the man at his side presently; “it was burnt down by order of the Elders of the community at least ten years ago. The village has been uninhabited ever since. But the simulacra of certain ghastly events that took place under that roof in past days still continue. And the ‘shells’ of the chief participants still enact there the dreadful deeds that led to its final destruction, and to the desertion of the whole settlement. They were devil-worshippers!”
Harris listened with beads of perspiration on his forehead that did not come alone from their leisurely pace through the cool night. Although he had seen this man but once before in his life, and had never before exchanged so much as a word with him, he felt a degree of confidence and a subtle sense of safety and wellbeing in his presence that were the most healing influences he could possibly have wished after the experience he had been through. For all that, he still felt as if he were walking in a dream, and though he heard every word that fell from his companion’s lips, it was only the next day that the full import of all he said became fully clear to him. The presence of this quiet stranger, the man with the wonderful eyes which he felt now, rather than saw, applied a soothing anodyne to his shattered spirit that healed him through and through. And this healing influence, distilled from the dark figure at his side, satisfied his first imperative need, so that he almost forgot to realise how strange and opportune it was that the man should be there at all.
It somehow never occurred to him to ask his name, or to feel any undue wonder that one passing tourist should take so much trouble on behalf of another. He just walked by his side, listening to his quiet words, and allowing himself to enjoy the very wonderful experience after his recent ordeal, of being helped, strengthened, blessed. Only once, remembering vaguely something of his reading of years ago, he turned to the man beside him, after some more than usually remarkable words, and heard himself, almost involuntarily it seemed, putting the question: “Then are you a Rosicrucian, sir, perhaps?” But the stranger had ignored the words, or possibly not heard them, for he continued with his talk as though unconscious of any interruption, and Harris became aware that another somewhat unusual picture had taken possession of his mind, as they walked there side by side through the cool reaches of the forest, and that he had found his imagination suddenly charged with the childhood memory of Jacob wrestling with an angel—wrestling all night with a being of superior quality whose strength eventually became his own.
“It was your abrupt conversation with the priest at supper that first put me upon the track of this remarkable occurrence,” he heard the man’s quiet voice beside him in the darkness, “and it was from him I learned after you left the story of the devil-worship that became secretly established in the heart of this simple and devout little community.”
“Devil-worship! Here—!” Harris stammered, aghast.
“Yes—here—conducted secretly for years by a group of Brothers before unexplained disappearances in the neighbourhood led to its discovery. For where could they have found a safer place in the whole wide world for their ghastly traffic and perverted powers than here, in the very precincts—under cover of the very shadow of saintliness and holy living?”
“Awful, awful!” whispered the silk merchant, “and when I tell you the words they used to me—”
“I know it all,” the stranger said quietly. “I saw and heard everything. My plan first was to wait till the end and then to take steps for their destruction, but in the interest of your personal safety”—he spoke with the utmost gravity and conviction—“in the interest of the safety of your soul, I made my presence known when I did, and before the conclusion had been reached—”
“My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and—” Words failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom.
“It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed but evil men, seeking after death—the death of the body—to prolong their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their object, you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes.”
Harris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St. Paul’s Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business.
“For you came all prepared to be caught,” he heard the other’s voice like some one talking to him from a distance; “your deeply introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that you were en rapport at once with any forces of those days that chanced still to be lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly.”
Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger’s arm as he heard. At the moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd that this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind.
“It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects,” the other added, “and who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate. But the wicked passions of men’s hearts alone seem strong enough to leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too luke-warm.”
The stranger sighed as he spoke. But Harris, exhausted and shaken as he was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. He moved as in a dream still. It was very wonderful to him, this walk home under the stars in the early hours of the October morning, the peaceful forest all about them, mist rising here and there over the small clearings, and the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in the pauses of the talk. In after life he always looked back to it as something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. And, though at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only faint and exquisite portions.
But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o’clock in the morning, Harris shook the stranger’s hand gratefully, effusively, meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they left the confines of the forest.
“And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control th
eir very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.”
But Harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the day. And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had already taken his departure, he realized with keen regret that he had never once thought of asking his name.
“Yes, he signed in the visitors’ book,” said the girl in reply to his question.
And he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry, in a very delicate and individual handwriting—
“John Silence, London.”
No. 17
Mrs. E. BLAND
Iyawned. I could not help it. But the flat, inexorable voice went on.
“Speaking from the journalistic point of view—I may tell you, gentlemen, that I once occupied the position of advertisement editor to the Bradford Woollen Goods Journal—and speaking from that point of view, I hold the opinion that all the best ghost stories have been written over and over again; and if I were to leave the road and return to a literary career I should never be led away by ghosts. Realism’s what’s wanted nowadays, if you want to be up-to-date.”
The large commercial paused for breath.
“You never can tell with the public,” said the lean, elderly traveller; “it’s like in the fancy business. You never know how it’s going to be. Whether it’s a clockwork ostrich or Sometite silk or a particular shape of shaded glass novelty or a tobacco-box got up to look like a raw chop, you never know your luck.”
“That depends on who you are,” said the dapper man in the corner by the fire. “If you’ve got the right push about you, you can make a thing go, whether it’s a clockwork kitten or imitation meat, and with stories, I take it, it’s just the same—realism or ghost stories. But the best ghost story would be the realest one, I think.”
The large commercial had got his breath.
“I don’t believe in ghost stories, myself,” he was saying with earnest dullness; “but there was rather a queer thing happened to a second cousin of an aunt of mine by marriage—a very sensible woman with no nonsense about her. And the soul of truth and honour. I shouldn’t have believed it if she had been one of your flighty, fanciful sort.”
“Don’t tell us the story,” said the melancholy man who travelled in hardware; “you’ll make us afraid to go to bed.”
The well-meant effort failed. The large commercial went on, as I had known he would; his words overflowed his mouth, as his person overflowed his chair. I turned my mind to my own affairs, coming back to the commercial room in time to hear the summing up.
“The doors were all locked, and she was quite certain she saw a tall, white figure glide past her and vanish. I wouldn’t have believed it if—” And so on da capo, from “if she hadn’t been the second cousin” to the “soul of truth and honour.”
I yawned again.
“Very good story,” said the smart little man by the fire. He was a traveller, as the rest of us were; his presence in the room told us that much. He had been rather silent during dinner, and afterwards, while the red curtains were being drawn and the red and black cloth laid between the glasses and the dacanters and the mahogany, he had quietly taken the best chair in the warmest corner. We had got our letters written and the large traveller had been boring for some time before I even noticed that there was a best chair and that this silent, bright-eyed, dapper, fair man had secured it.
“Very good story,” he said; “but it’s not what I call realism. You don’t tell us half enough, sir. You don’t say when it happened or where, or the time of year, or what colour your aunt’s second cousin’s hair was. Nor yet you don’t tell us what it was she saw, nor what the room was like where she saw it, nor why she saw it, nor what happened afterwards. And I shouldn’t like to breathe a word against anybody’s aunt by marriage’s cousin, first or second, but I must say I like a story about what a man’s seen himself.”
“So do I,” the large commercial snorted, “when I hear it.”
He blew his nose like a trumpet of defiance.
“But,” said the rabbit-faced man, “we know nowadays, what with the advance of science and all that sort of thing, we know there aren’t any such things as ghosts. They’re hallucinations; that’s what they are—hallucinations.”
“Don’t seem to matter what you call them,” the dapper one urged. “If you see a thing that looks as real as you do yourself, a thing that makes your blood run cold and turns you sick and silly with fear—well, call it ghost, or call it hallucination, or call it Tommy Dodd; it isn’t the name that matters.”
The elderly commercial coughed and said, “You might call it another name. You might call it—”
“No, you mightn’t,” said the little man, briskly; “not when the man it happened to had been a teetotal Bond of Joy for five years and is to this day.”
“Why don’t you tell us the story?” I asked.
“I might be willing,” he said, “if the rest of the company were agreeable. Only I warn you it’s not that sort-of-a-kind-of-a-somebodyfancied-they-saw-a-sort-of-a-kind-of-a-something-sort of a story. No, sir. Everything I’m going to tell you is plain and straightforward and as clear as a time-table—clearer than some. But I don’t much like telling it, especially to people who don’t believe in ghosts.”
Several of us said we did believe in ghosts. The heavy man snorted and looked at his watch. And the man in the best chair began.
“Turn the gas down a bit, will you? Thanks. Did any of you know Herbert Hatteras? He was on this road a good many years. No? Well, never mind. He was a good chap, I believe, with good teeth and a black whisker. But I didn’t know him myself. He was before my time. Well, this that I’m going to tell you about happened at a certain commercial hotel. I’m not going to give it a name, because that sort of thing gets about, and, in every other respect it’s a good house and reasonable, and we all have our living to get. It was just a good ordinary old-fashioned commercial hotel, as it might be this. And I’ve often used it since, though they’ve never put me in that room again. Perhaps they shut it up after what happened.
“Well, the beginning of it was, I came across an old schoolfellow; in Boulter’s Lock one Sunday it was, I remember. Jones was his name, Ted Jones. We both had canoes. We had tea at Marlow, and we got talking about this and that and old times and old mates; and do you remember Jim, and what’s become of Tom, and so on. Oh, you know. And I happened to ask after his brother, Fred by name. And Ted turned pale and almost dropped his cup, and he said, ‘You don’t mean to say you haven’t heard?’ ‘No,’ says I, mopping up the tea he’d slopped over with my handkerchief. ‘No; what?’ I said.
“‘It was horrible,’ he said. ‘They wired for me, and I saw him afterwards. Whether he’d done it himself or not, nobody knows; but they’d found him lying on the floor with his throat cut.’ No cause could be assigned for the rash act, Ted told me. I asked him where it had happened, and he told me the name of this hotel—I’m not going to name it. And when I’d sympathized with him and drawn him out about old times and poor old Fred being such a good old sort and all that, I asked him what the room was like. I always like to know what the places look like where things happen.
“No, there wasn’t anything specially rum about the room, only that it had a French bed with red curtains in a sort of alcove; and a large mahogany wardrobe as big as a hearse, with a glass door; and, instead of a swing-glass, a carved, black-framed glass screwed up against the wall between the windows, and a picture of ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ over the mantelpiece. I beg your pardon.’’” He stopped, for the heavy commercial had opened his mouth and shut it again.
“I thought you were going to say something,” the dapper man went on. “Well, we talked about other things and parted, and I thought no more about it till business brought me to—but I’d better not name the town either—and I found my firm had marked this very hotel—where poor Fred had met his deat
h, you know—for me to put up at. And I had to put up there too, because of their addressing everything to me there. And, anyhow, I expect I should have gone there out of curiosity.
“No. I didn’t believe in ghosts in those days. I was like you, sir.” He nodded amiably to the large commercial.
“The house was very full, and we were quite a large party in the room—very pleasant company, as it might be to-night; and we got talking of ghosts—just as it might be us. And there was a chap in glasses, sitting just over there, I remember—an old man on the road, he was; and he said, just as it might be any of you, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I wouldn’t care to sleep in Number Seventeen, for all that’; and, of course, we asked him why. ‘Because,’ said he, very short, ‘that’s why.’
“But when we’d persuaded him a bit, he told us.
“‘Because that’s the room where chaps cut their throats,’ he said. ‘There was a chap called Bert Hatteras began it. They found him weltering in his gore. And since that every man that’s slept there’s been found with his throat cut.’
“I asked him how many had slept there. ‘Well, only two beside the first,’ he said; ‘they shut it up then.’ ‘Oh, did they?’ said I. ‘Well, they’ve opened it again. Number Seventeen’s my room!’
“I tell you those chaps looked at me.
“‘But you aren’t going to sleep in it?’ one of them said. And I explained that I didn’t pay half a dollar for a bedroom to keep awake in.
“‘I suppose it’s press of business has made them open it up again,’ the chap in spectacles said. ‘It’s a very mysterious affair. There’s some secret horror about that room that we don’t understand,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you another queer thing. Every one of those poor chaps was a commercial gentleman. That’s what I don’t like about it. There was Bert Hatteras—he was the first, and a chap called Jones—Frederick Jones, and then Donald Overshaw—a Scotchman he was, and travelled in child’s underclothing.’
The Best Crime Stories Ever Told Page 22
