Nightmare Farm

by Jack Mann

  “Well—questions, Miss Brandon. That’s the way to get it all clear for myself as well as for you. Plenty of time. I don’t have to go back to Denlandham till I get that wire from Norris.”

  “I don’t see that, yet,” she said. “But—what sort of girl is this Miss Norris? A hysterical type, I deduce from your dictation.”

  “Then you’re wrong,” he interposed, “and you don’t deduce it from my dictation at all, but from your determination to find a material cause for an extra-physical result. Miss Norris is a level-headed and incidentally very lovely and very charming girl, quite self-possessed, and looking on her experience with not the slightest sign of hysteria or even of fear, now it’s all over.”

  “In love with you,” she half-accused.

  “Not in the way you mean it,” he dissented. “I couldn’t have made it clear in dictating. Perfectly frank in telling me that she cares for me, as she might tell her own brother, and as free of any other sort of love for me as if I were her brother. And, from now on, a side-issue. That part of the case is finished. It was an effect, and from now on I’m concerned only with the cause. As soon as Stukeley has gone and Nightmare stands empty, I go to tackle that cause.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” she observed thoughtfully. “And you want questions. You’ll ascertain all the particulars of this marriage of Isabella Curtis-Carter and the rector before you go back, I suppose?”

  “Why should I trouble to do that?” he asked in reply. “I have the fact, and her motive I shall never have in full, no matter what inquiry I make. I deduce from the little I know that she and he met at Bournemouth, and by lies that he still believes and her own power of fascination she enslaved an elderly and rather simple-minded cleric—there is no fool like a middle-aged fool over things of that sort. She owns to thirty-two on the marriage certificate, so call her thirty-five or even forty, in reality. She found out he was rector of Denlandham, and saw him as an anchorage for her declining years—there may have been a spice of revenge on Hunter in marrying him, though I think she knew she could never marry Hunter. I think, too, that as far as a woman of that type can care for anyone but herself, Hunter was the one passion of her life, and when they met there she persuaded him to those two weeks at her mother’s place as Mr. and Mrs. d’Arcy—you haven’t transcribed and studied that part of it yet. I think, too, that Hunter has been and still is in love with her, or he wouldn’t have taken that risk—of carrying on the Isabella Curtis intrigue with Isabella Perivale, I mean. And there, you’ve got to take into account the character of Hunter. A descendant of Robert Hunter, as ripe for evil as was Robert, but until last September with no special temptation to real, downright evil like this, the possible smashing of another man’s life. Not that even now he means to smash it, if that can be avoided, but his motive in the affair, and hers with it, are evil enough to waken that curse of the Hunter family and make it active again as in the case of Miss Norris—and other possible cases of the same sort as well, if it’s not ended.”

  “Why marry under a false name?” she asked.

  “For the mother’s benefit—Madame Stephanie, as you know

  her,” he answered without hesitation. “She’s a horrid hag, I know, but I believe she is convinced that her daughter has married one Angus d’Arcy, a west-country landowner, and they come to London and stay with her occasionally. Far safer than going to any hotel, where they’d have to register and Hunter might possibly be recognised, and madame firmly believes her daughter is happily married to this d’Arcy and knows nothing at all of the Perivale that a girl named Carter married. Isabella’s clever enough to know she mustn’t outrage the sense of respectability that goes with her mother’s generation, and I don’t doubt she’s deceived that mother.”

  “But—but why this terrible deception?” Miss Brandon persisted. Gees made a little gesture of impatience.

  “My dear child, don’t you see? Once she’s inveigled Hunter into one of those trips to London, she’s got him! Denlandham is under the impression that she has her own private fortune, and so she has—but she’s getting it from Hunter! New clothes, anything she wants, and he has to pay. He knows she doesn’t care a button for Perivale, knows she’d as soon as not smash Perivale’s life by proclaiming what’s going on and then making a bolt for it, if he—Hunter—doesn’t stump up. Or it may be that he wants to see the love of his life well-dressed and prosperous-looking, wants her to be somebody to rouse pride in his manly breast when they meet over a sick housemaid at Denlandham House or some pretext of that sort—if you refer to those notes you’ll see she goes visiting, and there is some sick retainer at the House to visit. So what have you?

  Talking to you like this and answering your questions makes it clear to me, and you’re a blessing if ever there was one—the perfect secretary, and no small shakes as lady detective, either.”

  “That’s quite beside the point, Mr. Green,” she said rather severely—but she coloured with pleasure, all the same. “You wanted to discuss this Denlandham case, not me, I believe.”

  “You’re right, and I’m wrong, as you generally are, Miss Brandon,” he assured her. “The case, the whole case, and nothing but the case. What’s the next point that’s perplexing your agile brain?”

  She displayed a slight frown of annoyance.

  “Where, how, why, does Nightmare Farm come in?” she asked.

  “How can you connect this rather sordid—very sordid—intrigue between those two with what happened to this Miss Norris, or fear that it can affect anyone else? It doesn’t make sense, as I see it.”

  “The extra-physical, as I prefer to call it, rather than use the terms supernatural or sub-natural, never does make sense, Miss Brandon,” he answered “because the things or beings involved in it haven’t any sense, from a human point of view. Count up all the ghost stories you have ever heard or read, from the old clanking-chain ghost in armour to Wells’ magnificent story of the red room, and there’s no sense in any of it, from a material viewpoint. Because these extra-physical beings are not strong on sense. They have desires, and strike right across human understanding in trying to gratify them. But they use human evil, as in this case, as a means to gratification. Just as they use the unmeant evil of séances, and all the prying curiosity of morbid minds, to gratify their desires—gain strength from their human dupes and work on and through them. Just so with these things. Hunter and this woman have given and are giving that thing or those things strength, which so far is being used against other people, not against Hunter or Isabella. On that head, I’d say these things or beings have sense enough not to kill the geese laying their golden eggs—they’re not harming the actual source of their strength while the evil goes on giving them power. They’re silly, but not as silly as all that.”

  “You might be talking about apes in the Zoo,” she said acridly.

  “And a darned good comparison, except that these are not in the Zoo,” he commented with some enthusiasm. “It is a sort of ape level of intelligence, with envy of the human and intense desire to blend with human, make itself human, though horribly evil in itself. Hence that possession of Miss Norris, and quite possibly, if the evil goes on and they or it retain their or its strength, of any other approachable human being, preferably feminine and of marriageable age. The ghosts who chase women, remember—who make the women of poison-dart tribes not fit to go on living, if they succeed in capturing their souls.”

  “One thing more, Mr. Green,” she asked after a thoughtful pause.

  “If Squire Hunter wants to get rid of you with these things still active, why did he ever employ you to get rid of them as he did?”

  “That’s too easy,” he answered. “Somewhere, somehow, Hunter heard of the grey shapes in Cumberland and how I put an end to them. He must have heard of me as Gees, not as Green, and more particularly not as a Shropshire Green. And not in any way would he connect me with the particular Green who did two years in the police force and was in on the raid on t
he Peppered Pig club when Isabella got caught, or he’d have run the other way so fast that he’d set fire to himself by friction with the atmosphere. No, he came to find Gees, and found himself up against one of the Shropshire Greens, but still didn’t connect me with Police-Constable Green, and decided that if I could eliminate grey shapes I could also put paid to his gurgling whirlers. Engaged me, and I ran up against Isabella and put the wind up her to a point that made her go to Hunter—and keep on going to him, too, as witness my hearing her and smelling the scent she used when I stood outside the Hunters’

  Arms in the evening. She told him at all costs to get rid of me, and he paid what he had agreed to pay and risked what might happen with the gurglers still active about the place, for the only harm they had done so far had been undone again. He tried to bluster me out of the place at Isabella’s bidding, and had to report to her that bluster wouldn’t move me. Then she gave him the line of peaceful persuasion that he tried when I went to see him at Denlandham House, and his sigh of relief when I said I was going back to London blew Robert’s portrait clean out of it’s frame. Or maybe it ought to have done that, and didn’t, to be strictly accurate. Because Isabella’s mortal scared of me—not of what I know about her sticky past, but because of what I might find out about her sticky present if I remained in Denlandham with an open eye.”

  “But—that is, assuming that this thing or being does exist—Hunter knows it’s still active and dangerous,” she pointed out.

  “Not half so dangerous to Isabella and him as a nosey Green poking about Denlandham and picking up information, possibly putting two and two together, finding out that Hunter was absent from the village from the fourteenth to twentieth of February last, as was Isabella, and making up his mind, vulgarly speaking, to blow the gaff.”

  “Which you wouldn’t do,” she suggested.

  “I’d do nothing that might cause pain to Perivale, no matter what felony I have to compound to avoid it,” he said. “But Isabella judges me by herself, probably thinks that if I found out all this which I already know, I might follow her example, fill my pocket out of Hunter’s.”

  “She’s a most unpleasant character,” Miss Brandon said decidedly.

  “Maybe,” Gees half-assented. “I can’t be quite certain of her motive in all this, marrying one man apparently to be near another, or possibly to make an anchorage for herself in the knowledge that she’s getting on in years, or—I don’t know. But then, one never can know all that impels another human entity, and still less the impulses governing the extra-physical. I never knew fully what motive or motives drove the grey shapes to act as they did.”

  He offered his case, and she took a cigarette which he lighted for her, together with one for himself.

  “And that’s all, for the present, Miss Brandon,” he said. “Charge up an hour’s overtime, and I’m immensely obliged to you for this airing of my views. Transcribe that interview to-morrow, not to-night.”

  “One thing I can’t understand,” she said. “How do you think you will put an end to this—this extra-physical thing, as you call it?”

  He shook his head. “I dunno, quite,” he confessed. “The direct way would be to take a double-barrelled shot gun, empty one barrel into Angus d’Arcy Hunter and the other into Isabella Perivale, of course. Eliminate the two sources from which this trouble gains strength to manifest itself, as it did before when this present Hunter’s forbears followed evil rather than good. But I’m too fond of me to try that course. I know there’s something at Nightmare Farm which appears to make it and its vicinity home to them—or to it, though Miss Norris insisted it was a they, and I’m going looking for that something as soon as Nightmare is unoccupied, for a start. As to whether it is they, or they are it, until I find out some more I’m keeping an open mind, which is as useful as a fur-lined coat in a blizzard, though you may go all numb and silly with either. At present, I incline to they rather than it.”

  “If there is anything at all,” she observed.

  “This is London, Miss Brandon,” he told her. “You’ve got a nice electric train to take you home, probably an electric cooker to make your dinner when you get there, a wireless to turn on after you’ve dined, and a telephone handy if you want to talk to somebody miles away and hear their natural voices—which isn’t grammar, but recites far greater wonders than these whirling gugglers, and yet you accept them as perfectly natural and see nothing strange in their being to your hand. Out on you for a sceptical materialist, able to believe nothing that isn’t a product of a limited company and included in the quarterly account, or paid for as you pay for your season ticket!”

  “I didn’t say definitely that I don’t believe in it—or them,” she protested. “Only you must admit it is outside ordinary experience.”

  “Gugglers, Limited,” he remarked reflectively. “Whirlers produced to order—five per cent, discount on quantities of one dozen upward. Terms, cash within thirty days. If guggle-and-cluck is required, add twenty-five per cent, to quotations for plain guggle. Rate of whirl guaranteed for twelve months, and defective ones replaced free of charge, if the defect is caused by other than fair wear and tear—whirl and guggle, I mean. Special quotations for large quantities.”

  “In other words, you’re doubtful yourself,” she accused.

  “An open mind, Miss Brandon,” he said gravely, “is as valuable as a Rolls-Bentley, and either may fail to get you there. I keep both. Now one word of advice, before we say goodnight.”

  “And that—?” she asked.

  “Do not look behind the door of your room or in the wardrobe before you undress to-night, and do not look under the bed before you get into it.”

  “I won’t,” she promised calmly. “Good night, Mr. Green.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  RECALL

  THE MORNING’S MAIL LAY ON GEES’ DESK, each letter opened and with its envelope neatly clipped on its back, and Miss Brandon stood beside the desk. On top of the opened letters she had laid one marked “Personal” and still in its uncut envelope, and under them all a sheet of paper with numbers down its left-hand side, corresponding to the numbers she had accorded to the letters. Gees withdrew the sheet, merely glanced at the first opened letter, and scrawled “Rats” against the figure 1 on the sheet. Then he took the second letter, read it, and marked against 2—“Reject. Soften it down.” And so on through them until he came to the last but one—his secretary always arranged them so that he could get rid of the impossibles first—which he read carefully, and even scanned a second time.

  “Ah-humm-m!” he observed. “Did you think I’d take this on, Miss Brandon? Do I look like nosing round an office to find discrepancies in the accounts? In other words, am I a goat, or merely a nonentity?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Green,” she answered gravely. “They’re a very poor lot this morning, and I ranged them in order as usual.”

  He merely inscribed “Reject witheringly” against the number of the inquiry, took a look at the last of them, and flung it down.

  “When I go sneaking round for divorce evidence, Miss Brandon, you can go looking for a job as dresser in a nudist colony!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Green. The title, you see—”

  “I don’t care if her father was premier peer of the realm—and he’s only a dirty little Liberal creation who paid for his title thirty years ago and swelled a certain party fund’s chest—or if her mother claims descent from the Conqueror with three bends sinister between his time and Fair Rosamund’s!” He took up the letter and tore it in half. “There! Send those pieces back to her, with no comment.”

  “But—Mr. Green—” she protested, and left it at that.

  “Send them back, Miss Brandon,” he said, very quietly. “Just like that. We are confidential agents, not garbage collectors. And that’s the lot for to-day, is it—apart from this personal letter?”

  “All for this morning,” she assured him.

  “It’s because I
don’t want another case while I have this of Hunter and his gugglers on hand,” he reflected aloud. “The next attractive proposition will manifest itself when I’m ready for it. All right, Miss Brandon. Fire these back at their senders, get my interview with Madame Stephanie typed, and then you can finish that novel I was reading yesterday till you turned up—if you’ve got the patience. Of all the fat-headed drivel I ever tried to read, it’s the fattest.”