by Jack Mann
Stooping, Gees took one of the electric torches from his coat pocket, snapped on the light, and directed it into the secret room, and at that Norris cried out, an inarticulate sound that was half a shriek. For, ranged in a row, stood or hung suspended or merely floated in air three shapes, if shapes they could be called that had no form nor substance, but were no more than ever-moving, coiling and twisting columns of dense fog that vignetted out to nothing at their edges. Of a little more than the size of a tall man in outline, they were faceless, armless, legless, mere columns of shifting, twisting fog, and as the ray of light revealed them they went—“Gluck-gluck-gluck”—in an incoherent chorus that was like nothing so much as liquid—some thick, oily liquid—guggling out from a full bottle. So for a second or a year—for with sight of them time had no value for Gees or Norris—they remained, and then the two on the left swayed and glucked and spun toward a hole that the torchlight revealed as the entrance to a stairway in the chimney wall. The one on the right swayed and spun out through the opening, into the room where Gees stood his ground while Norris reeled helplessly back toward the window. And, as the misty, tenuous thing came on, Gees bent forward and struck at it with the torch—but the shining nickel tube struck through it with no shock of impact, and Gees recovered his balance in time to see it go whirling, glucking, through the open door toward the stairs. When he ran to the doorway and rayed the torchlight downward, the stairway was vacant, and, shivering with sudden chill, he turned back into the room and saw Norris, his face ghastly white, leaning against the wall by the window, shivering too, and with his teeth chattering.
“Have we—have we let hell loose?” he croaked.
Gees went to him and struck him in the chest, a smart blow.
“Man, get past that dweller on the threshold!” he bade sharply.
“Dweller—what?” Norris asked, trying to recover self-control.
“Fear—you don’t know the phrase, I see,” Gees told him.
“Fear—the dweller on the threshold that divides the material world from theirs. Fear—get past it—get rid of it! If you’d been alone in this present state when that thing came out, it might have got you as one of them got your daughter, made of you what she was.”
“God forbid!” Norris exclaimed.
“That’s right—keep that Helper in your mind—call on Him if you feel the need, and you’re safe. But get out of that state of fear. We haven’t finished with our work yet, by the look of it.”
“They—where are they now—what are they?” Norris asked after a pause in which he appeared to get nearer to normal poise.
“Where, I don’t know,” Gees answered. “Whatnot ghosts, in the ordinary sense of the term. They couldn’t vanish as ghosts are supposed to do—they had to get away, and did get away, just as material beings like you or I would do. Astral, I’d say, with just enough of material substance gathered to them as will make them visible to ordinary sight—about as much as there is in a patch of fog. But traceable, visible, elementals with the devil’s own seal set on them. Untaught spirits with far less than human intelligence, but with power of their own gained from—gained from—” Suddenly he leaned against the wall beside Norris. “Gosh, but I’m utterly done!” His voice dropped to no more than a muttering. “Like—like I was after Perivale drove that one out. I know!” His voice strengthened again. “That sudden chill—they drain away your physical vitality when they come near you. Perivale was like that too, after—after it had gone.”
He pressed his hands to his cheeks and drew long breaths. Save for that sound, and the rain plashing on the window panes, with once a flash of lightning and a distant, lesser crack and rumble of thunder than the first, there was a long stillness in which both men leaned side by side against the wall. The plash of rain had decreased to a patter when Norris spoke, and stood erect again.
“Man, but you’re wonderful!” he said.
“I did two years in the police force, and they teach you wonderful things if you’ve got any wits at all,” Gees answered. “One was self-control—in face of nearly anything. To tell strict truth, Norris, I wasn’t far short of being as frightened as you were, down inside me.”
“The storm is passing—it’s getting lighter,” Norris remarked after another silence. “And—what more do you want to do?”
“See what’s in there.” Gees nodded toward the hole in the wall and, stooping, picked up the electric torch that he had dropped. “Get the other torch out of my coat pocket. We can’t have too much light.”
Drooped wearily, grimed with dust and sweat, he stood waiting while Norris found and switched on the second torch. Then they moved together toward the knee-high remnant of wall in the opening, and stopped as one man when the light fell inside. Stopped, and stared.
“Heavens above us!” Norris exclaimed whisperingly.
“All round us, too,” Gees said, “just as surely as any elemental shapes can be. But—yes, as I live! Robert Hunter! Now I know”—his voice rose to an exultant shout—“why they made their home here! Look, man! The white streak in the beard—the original of the portrait at Denlum House! Robert Hunter! Oh, this ends it!”
“Is he—is he still alive?” Norris asked fearfully.
“Smash past that dweller, man!” Gees retorted. “He’s dead and yet not dead—but there’s nothing to fear. Material, and we can deal with him materially—fetch him out, and end their homing here.”
“Fetch him out?” Norris echoed incredulously.
“What else? D’you think I’ll let him stop in there?”
They looked in at what appeared to be a low bier, an oblong covered by a pall that had once been black velvet, but now, to within an inch or less of the outline of the body, moth had eaten away all but the linen backing of the fabric, which showed as a dark and dirty grey. The body lying rigid on this pall was that of a tall man clad only in a sort of sleeveless shift, this also of a dirty grey that might once have been white, and that covered him from neck to ankles. His hands were clasped under his shaggy black hair, and the bare elbows stuck up, one on each side of his head, while from under it twisted, horny slivers projected—finger nails, grown to a foot or more in length since he had been placed or himself had lain down there. So, too, on his bare toes the nails had grown to horny slivers that curled and corkscrewed back on to his feet, horrible to see. His long hair was shaggy and unkempt, a black mass that covered the clasped, hands under his head, but his long black beard, with its startling streak of white—longer by inches than it had been when his portrait was painted—lay neatly straightened down his chest. Except that his eyes were clouded by a greyish film, it was the exact original of the painted face Gees had been studying when Mrs. Hunter wheeled herself up to him in the entrance hall of Denlandham House. Robert Hunter, and, but for the filmed eyes, decay had kept so far off from him that he might have been alive.
“Is he alive?” Norris asked again.
“Strictly speaking, no,” Gees answered. “Bear in mind, Norris, all this is capable of rational explanation. Keep your head, and I’ll try to make it all clear to you, later. For the present—I don’t know what he’s lying on, but we’ll see if we can get it out, whatever it is.”
“But—but ought we to interfere with him?” Norris objected.
“He’s made a little hell-centre here for about a century and a half, or even more, so it’s time he came out,” Gees answered coolly.
“Come on in and give a hand—let’s fetch him out and see what happens.”
The thunder cloud had passed over, now, and the light in the room was fast increasing. Gees stepped over the barrier of brickwork and, lifting the edge of the pall, tossed it upward so that it covered the feet of the body and revealed the lower part of an oblong oaken frame set on stubby legs, with the interior of the frame laced and crossed by rope as support for a mattress or whatever might be placed on it—an old-fashioned pallet bedstead, in fact. He grasped the end and lifted.
“Li
ght—quite light,” he said as he put it down again. “He’s dry, dusty-dry and not half the weight he was in life. You take this end and I’ll take the head.” He moved alongside the pallet as Norris stepped into the secret room, put his torch down beside Robert’s head, without switching it off, and took a grip on the oaken framework with both hands. “Now, lift. I’ll swing round and back out of the hole, and you come face first. Quite light, you see. Easy—back a bit.”
Stepping over the brickwork, he backed out into the bedroom, and Norris, bearing the foot end of the pallet, followed. They set it down before the window, and Gees threw back the pall from over the feet.
“And that’s that,” he said. “Why they made home here. I suppose, if the Hunter vault in the churchyard were opened again, you’d find Robert’s coffin—and brick ends inside if you opened that. Obviously he had this chamber made for himself, probably after he’d built Denlandham House and moved there with his family, and either came here when he knew he hadn’t much more ordinary life to live, or else had himself brought here and put away like that after he’d appeared to die.”
“Appeared to die?” Norris queried in a puzzled way.
“He didn’t quite die, or he wouldn’t be as complete as we see him, even dried and sere as he is. Apart from the blood stream, he is all there, as you can see.
“And as for the dryness, a Doctor Alexis Carrel has just proved or is now proving that dried organs of the body can be brought back to life—glands, brains, heaven knows what. A sort of holding life in suspension, apparently, and then reviving it. It looks to me as if these things anticipated Carrel, held Robert Hunter here in a state of suspended animation, and derived some life of their own from him. Not enough to manifest themselves—they had to have other food and warmth and strength for that—but this undead-dead Robert Hunter was home for them, a nucleus round which they could gather when they seemed quiescent. So it seems to me, and now—what to do with Robert!”
“A puzzle,” Norris said, and frowned perplexedly. “But—why did he do it, Mr. Green? Why—why harbour those—those horrors?”
“Couldn’t help himself, I’d say,” Gees answered. “Somehow he put himself in their power when he was out East—quite possibly he was possessed by one of them as your daughter was till it was driven out, and the other two we saw are familiars of that one, managed to get here with it. That’s all conjecture. Unless there’s some record at Denlandham House—and if there is we’re not likely to see it—unless there’s something of that sort, it will never be known how the body got here, even, or how he managed to get this room enclosed without knowledge of it leaking out, let alone the actual facts of why he did it. By what I’ve heard, he was as much devil as man, so quite possibly one of these things was the driving power behind his actions, and his own spirit was driven out from this body here, killed—”
He broke off, for Norris thrust out a pointing figure toward the form on the pallet, his eyes wide with utter horror.
“Look!” he almost screamed. “Look— rotting before us! The eyes!”
“Quiet, man!” Gees bade. “It’s all natural, quite rational. He’s been lying in still darkness, and now the light and air—all natural.”
Natural it might be, but even to him the sight was awful. Where the filmed eyes had been were now nothing but shrunken, empty sockets. The dry lips shrivelled back from the yellowed teeth in a mirthless, ghastly grin—all the face and figure were shrinking, changing moment by moment; With a tiny rustling sound the toenails of one foot dropped from the browning, wrinkling toes, and themselves curled and shrivelled toward nothingness, or at best a pinch of powder. Disintegrating hair fell from one side of the head, exposing the fleshless skull, and then one of the upraised arms parted at the elbow, the bones of upper and forearm falling separately and unclothed by any flesh on the moth-ravaged backing of the velvet pall. Then Norris ran out and clattered, half-fell down the stairs, and Gees followed him more slowly to where he stood outside the house, gazing toward the roadway’s end.
“You’ve got to take hold of yourself, man,” he said gravely. “I’d never have asked you to help if I’d thought you’d be like this.”
“Like—but it’s hell and the grave!” Norris exclaimed. “I’ve never seen, never in my worst dreams” He broke off, drearily.
“Think again,” Gees bade. “Norris”—earnestly—“I don’t want to be priggish or try to pretend I’m not a bit shaken too, but do bring reason to bear on—on that, for heaven’s sake! It’s been laid away in utter stillness and darkness, preserved in some way by those things as that Doctor Carrel preserves organs till he wants to reanimate them—and now all that state has been destroyed—by us, I’m glad to say. Of course he disintegrates—there’s nothing to hold him back. All of natural processes that they held back rushes at him, does in moments the work of a century and a half, and it’s a shattering thing to see, I admit. But rational—as rational as the growth of a blade of wheat, or milk fever in a cow unless someone can come along and make her feel confidence enough in them to yield her milk. I’m trying to give you similes you’ll understand, not cracking myself up over what I did with that cow. Push past the dweller on this threshold, and be yourself!”
Norris thought awhile. “I’m a rotten coward,” he said at last, bitterly. “You’re right, too—you ought to have brought a better man.”
“Gosh darn, man, I didn’t say anything like that!” Gees protested.
“I wouldn’t want a better man than you with me. It’s just that knowledge kills fear, and I’ve got more knowledge of this than you have.”
“Do we go home now?” Norris asked abruptly.
“And leave that up there for Hunter to find?” Gees asked in reply.
“Or for someone else to find? Then, an inquest—in this country they’d hold an inquest on Noah’s bones if they could find ’em under the splinters of his ark. Hunter, as owner of the place, giving evidence of our burglarious entry, your name mud and mine too—he’d see to that. Moreover, the things that made this place horrible have gone—can’t you feel that they have? We’ve nothing but the material to face.”
“Except in the attics—two of them went up there, remember,”
Norris countered. “But—what could you do with it—him?”
Gees pointed at the mere, silently.
“It’s deep, away at the back and to the right, there,” Norris said.
“Some say bottomless, but that can’t be, of course. Then—”
“Gome back up with me,” Gees urged in the pause.
Norris stood silent, gazing at the open door of the house.
“Or must I go back up there alone?” Gees asked him.
“No—no! I’m not as bad as that. I’ll come with you.”
They went back, up the shadowy staircase and into the room. And now, they saw, there remained little more than a skeleton on the pallet, its bones fallen and still falling apart, the skull utterly fleshless and grinning, the hair and beard no more than tiny, woolly wisps. Gees lifted the backing of the pall at the foot end, and the dry bones rattled against each other as they heaped toward the middle of the pallet. He lifted the head end, and the skull and bits of vertebrae slid down among the ribs. He folded both ends over, twisted the sides—the linen emitted clouds of dust, but retained strength enough in itself to stand the strain—and tied them, once and again, making a shapeless but secure bundle. Then he took one of the crowbars and thrust it under the knot.
“To make sure of its sinking,” he said.
“But—oughtn’t he to be given Christian burial?” Norris objected.
“By whom? And d’you want to face that inquest? Then again, I’d say every bone in Denlandham churchyard would stand on end in protest if these were laid there in consecrated ground. The man was little better than a devil in life, in this half-death he made his body a home for things little better than devils, if any, and—Christian burial! I’ve known dogs that deserved it more, and a
cat or two as well.”
