He Who Whispers

by John Dickson Carr

  To breathe this dew-scented dimness was like a weight off the lungs. He climbed up the little grass slope of the terrace to the open space between here and the line of the forest. A few feet below him now lay the long narrow side of the house; he could see into the library, into the dark dining-room, into the sitting-room with its low-glimmering lamp, then the dark reception hall. Most of the other rooms at Greywood were bedrooms, chiefly unused and in a bad state of repair.

  He glanced upwards and to his left. Marion’s bedroom was at the rear of the house, over the library. The bedroom windows on the side facing him – eastwards – were covered with curtains. But its rear windows, looking south towards another loom of the encircling woods, threw out dim yellow light the edge of whose reflexion he could see as it touched the trees. Though Miles was out of sight of these rear windows, that yellow light lay plain enough at the corner of his eye. And, as he watched, a woman’s shadow slowly passed across it.

  Marion herself? Or Fay Seton talking to her before she retired?

  It was all right!

  Muttering to himself, Miles swung round and walked northwards towards the front of the house. It was a bit chilly; he might at least have brought a raincoat. But the singing silence, the hint of moonrise beginning to make a white dawn behind the trees, at once soothed and exalted him.

  He walked down to the open space in front of Greywood. Just before him lay the stream spanned by the rustic bridge. Miles went out on the bridge, leaned against its railing, and stood listening to the little whispering noises of the water at night. He might have stood there for twenty minutes, lost in thoughts where a certain face kept obtruding, when the jarring bump of a motor-car roused him.

  The car, approaching unseen through the trees in the direction of the main road, jolted to a stop on gravel. Two men got out of it, one of them carrying an electric torch. As they toiled up on foot towards the rustic bridge, Miles could see in outline that one of them was short and stoutish, bouncing along with quick little inward-turning steps. The other was immensely tall and immensely fat, his long dark cape making him appear even more vast; he strode along with a rolling motion like an emperor, and the sound of his throat-clearing preceded him like a war-cry.

  The smaller man, Miles saw, was Professor Georges Antoine Rigaud. And the immense man was Miles’s friend, Dr Gideon Fell.

  He called out their names in astonishment, and both of them stopped.

  Dr Fell, absent-mindedly turning the light of the torch on his own fare as he whirled it round to seek the source of the voice, stood briefly revealed as being even more ruddy of face and vacant of eye than Miles remembered him. His several chins were drawn in as though for argument. His, eye-glasses on the broad black ribbon were stuck wildly askew on his nose. His big mop of grey-streaked hair seemed to quiver with argument like the bandit’s moustache. So he stood peering round, huge and hatless, in every direction except the right one.

  ‘I’m here, Dr Fell! On the bridge! Walk forward.’

  ‘Oh, ah!’ breathed Dr Fell.

  He came rolling forward majestically, swinging a cane, and towered over Miles as his footsteps thundered and shook on the planks of the bridge.

  ‘Sir,’ intoned Dr Fell, adjusting his eyeglasses as he peered down like a very large djinn taking form, ‘good evening. You may safely trust two men of – harrumph – mature years and academic pursuits to do something utterly harebrained. I refer, of course …’

  Again the planks of the bridge quivered.

  Rigaud, like a barking little terrier, achieved the feat of worming past Dr Fell’s bulk. He stood gripping the railing of the bridge, staring at Miles with that same inextinguishable curiosity in his face.

  ‘Professor Rigaud,’ said Miles, ‘I owe you an apology. I meant to ring you up this morning; I honestly meant it. But I didn’t know where you were staying in London, and …’

  The other breathed quickly.

  ‘Young man,’ he replied, ‘you owe me no apology. No, no, no! It is I who owe you one.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Justement!’ said Professor Rigaud, nodding very rapidly. ‘Last night I had my merry joke. I teased and tantalized the minds of you and Mees Morell until the very last. Is it not so?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. But –’

  ‘Even when you mentioned casually that you sought after a librarian, young man, it struck me as no more than an amusing coincidence. I never guessed, not I, that this woman was within five hundred miles of here! I never knew – never! – that the lady was in England!’

  ‘You mean Fay Seton?’

  ‘I do.’

  Miles moistened his lips.

  ‘But this morning,’ pursued Professor Rigaud, ‘comes Mees Morell, who does ring up on the telephone with confused and incoherent explanations about last night. Mees Morell further tells me that she too knows Fay Seton is in England, knows her address, and believes the lady may be sent to you for employment. A call to the Berkeley Hotel, tactfully made, confirms this.’ He nodded over his shoulder. ‘You see that motor-car?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I have borrowed it from a friend of mine, a Whitehall official, who has the petrol. I have broken the law to come and tell you. You must find some polite excuse to get this lady away from your house at once.’

  White glimmered Professor Rigaud’s face under the rising moon, his patch of moustache no longer comical and a desperate seriousness in his manner. Under his left arm he gripped the thick yellow sword-stick with which Howard Brooke had been stabbed. Long afterwards Miles Hammond remembered the tinkling stream, the loom of Dr Fell’s huge outline, the stout little Frenchman with his right hand holding tightly to the railing of the bridge. Now Miles took a step backwards.

  ‘Not you too!’

  Professor Rigaud’s eyebrows went up.

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘Candidly, Professor Rigaud, every single person has been warning me against Fay Seton. And I’m getting damned sick and tired of it!’

  ‘It is true, of course? You did engage the lady?’

  ‘Yes! Why not?’

  Professor Rigaud’s quick eyes moved over Miles’s shoulder towards the house in the background.

  ‘Who else is here to-night besides yourself?’

  ‘Only my sister Marion.’

  ‘No servants? No other person?’

  ‘Not for to-night, no. But what difference does that make? What is all this? Why shouldn’t I ask Miss Seton to come here and stay as long as she likes?’

  ‘Because you will die,’ answered the other simply. ‘You and your sister will both die.’

  CHAPTER 9

  EVEN more white, very white, glimmered Rigaud’s face under the rising moon, whose light now touched the water beneath them.

  ‘Will you come with me, please?’ Miles said curtly.

  And he turned round and led the way back towards the house.

  Towards the western side of Greywood lay the broad flat stretch of lawn, as close-clipped as a bowling green, where you could dimly make out the wicker chairs, the little table, and the bright-canopied garden swing. Miles glanced towards that side of the house as he walked. No lights showed there, though Fay Seton had been given a bedroom on the ground floor. Fay must have turned in.

  Miles led the way round to the east side, through the reception-hall which housed his uncle’s little collection of medieval arms, and into the long sitting-room. This sitting-room was a pleasant place of tapestry chairs, low, white-painted bookshelves, and a small Leonardo in oils above the mantelpiece. Only one lamp burned there as a night-light, with a very tiny flame which made immense shadows; but Miles had no wish to make it brighter.

  In the hush of the New Forest at past midnight, he swung round.

  ‘I think I ought to tell you,’ he said in a louder voice than was necessary, ‘that I’ve already had a long talk with Miss Seton …’

  Professor Rigaud stopped short. ‘She told you!’

 
(Steady, now! No reason at all to have a lump in your throat or a furiously hammering heart!)

  ‘She told me about the facts of Mr Brooke’s death, yes. The police eventually decided it was suicide, because only Mr Brooke’s fingerprints were on the handle of the swords-tick. Is that true?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And, at the time of – at the time it happened, Fay Seton had gone for a swim in the river some distance away from the tower. Is that true?’

  ‘As far as it goes,’ Professor Rigaud nodded, ‘yes. But did she tell you about the young man Pierre Fresnac? The son of Jules Fresnac?’

  ‘Need we,’ Miles almost shouted, ‘need we be so infernally censorious nowadays? After all! If there did happen to be anything between this young man Fresnac and Fay Seton …’

  ‘The English!’ breathed Professor Rigaud in a tone of awe. And then, after a pause: ‘My God, the English!’

  He stood staring back in a light so dim as to take away expression, with Dr Fell’s big shape behind him. He propped the yellow sword-cane against the arm of a tapestry chair, and removed his hat. There was something in the tone of his voice, not a loud voice, which twitched along Miles’s nerves.

  ‘You are like Howard Brooke,’ breathed Professor Rigaud. ‘I say one thing, and you think I mean only …’

  Again he paused.

  ‘Do you think it likely, young man,’ he went on with a sort of pounce, ‘that a peasant farmer of Eure-et-Loir would care two sous, would care that,’ he snapped his fingers, ‘about a little affair of the passions between his son and a lady of the district? It would only amuse him, if in fact he noticed it at all. It would not, I assure you, start the thunder-storm which swept with terror every peasant in that district. It would not make Jules Fresnac throw a stone at the woman in a public road.’

  ‘What was it, then?’

  ‘Can you cast your mind back to the days just before Howard Brooke’s death?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘This young man, Pierre Fresnac, lived with his parents in a stone farm-house off the road between Chartres and Le Mans.

  It is necessary to emphasize that his bedroom was in an attic up three flights of stairs.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘For some days Pierre Fresnac had been ill, had been weak, had been dazed. Partly because he dared not speak, partly because he did not understand and thought it was all a night-mare, he said nothing to anyone. Like all young people, he was frightened of being thrashed for something that was not his fault. So he bound a scarf round his neck and said not a word.

  ‘He thought it was a dream when he saw, night after night, the white face floating outside the upstairs window. He thought it was a dream when he saw the body taking form in the air metres above ground, and felt the anaesthesia that dims the mind and muscles as that lamp is dimmed when you turn down the wick. It was his father, presently, who tore away the bandage from the throat. And they found the sharp teeth-marks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away.’

  In the pause that followed, with a sort of wild patience, Miles Hammond waited for someone to laugh.

  He waited for this emptiness to be broken. He waited for Rigaud to throw back his head and utter that chuckle which showed a gold tooth. He waited for the Gargantuan chuckle of Dr Fell. And nothing happened. No one as much as smiled, or asked him how he liked the joke. What struck his wits numb, what held him in a kind of paralysis, was the uttering of those solid flat police-court-like words, ‘the sharp teeth-marks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away.’

  As though from a distance Miles heard his own voice.

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean –?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Professor Rigaud. ‘I mean the vampire. I mean the un-dead. I mean the drainer of bodies and killer of souls.’

  The white face floating in the air outside the upstairs window.

  The white face floating in the air outside the upstairs window …

  In spite of himself Miles couldn’t laugh. He tried to do so, but the sound stuck in his throat.

  ‘The good simple-minded Mr Howard Brooke,’ said Professor Rigaud, ‘understood nothing of this. He saw in it only a vulgar intrigue between a peasant lad and a woman older than the boy. He was shocked to the very depths of his British soul. He had the simple conviction that any immoral woman can be bought off with money. And so …’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘He died. That is all.’

  Professor Rigaud shook his bald head, in a very fever and passion of earnestness. He picked up the sword-cane, clutching it under his arm.

  ‘I tried last night … alas for my idiotic sense of humour! … to tease you with a puzzle. I stated facts quite fairly, if obliquely. I told you that this woman was not, in the accepted sense, a criminal of any kind. I told you truly that in the workaday world she is gentle and even prudish.

  ‘But this does not apply to the soul inside, which she can no more help than I can help greed or inquisitiveness. It does not apply to the soul which can leave the body in trance or sleep, and take form visible to the eye. That soul, like the white face at the upstairs window, feeds on and draws life from the blood of the living.

  ‘If Howard Brooke had told me any of this beforehand, I could have helped him. But no, no, no! This woman is immoral; this must be kept quiet. Perhaps I should have guessed for myself, from the outward signs and from the story I gave you. The physical characteristics, the red hair and the slender figure and the blue eyes, are always in folklore associated with the vampire because in folklore they are signs of eroticism. But as usual I do not recognize what is under my nose. I am left to learn it after Howard Brooke’s death, from a mob of peasants who wish to lynch her.’

  Miles passed a hand across his forehead and pressed hard.

  ‘But you can’t seriously mean this! You can’t mean it was this … this …’

  ‘This thing,’ supplied Professor Rigaud.

  ‘This person, let’s say. You tell me that Fay Seton killed Howard Brooke?’

  ‘The vampire did. Because the vampire hated him.’

  ‘It was plain murder with a sharp sword-blade! No supernatural agency is involved!’

  ‘How then,’ asked Professor Rigaud coolly, ‘did the murderer approach and leave his victim?’

  Again there was a long silence.

  ‘Listen, my good friend!’ cried Miles. ‘I tell you again, you can’t seriously mean this! You, a practical man, can’t put forward as an explanation this superstitious …’

  ‘No, no, no!’ said Professor Rigaud with three separate words like hammer-blows, and suddenly snapped his fingers in the air.

  ‘How do you mean, no?’

  ‘I mean,’ returned Professor Rigaud, ‘it is an argument I often have with my academic colleagues about the word “superstitious”. Can you dispute the facts I present?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Justement! And supposing – I say supposing! – any such creature as a vampire to exist, do you agree that it may explain Fay Seton’s every action while she lived with the Brooke family?’

  ‘But look here – !’

  ‘I say to you,’ Professor Rigaud’s little eye gleamed in a sort of logical frenzy, ‘I say to you: “Here are certain facts; please to explain them.” Facts, facts, facts! You reply to me that you cannot explain them, but that I must not – must not, must not! – talk such superstitious nonsense, because the thing I suggest upsets your universe and makes you afraid. You may be right in saying so. You may be wrong in saying so. But it is I who am practical and you who are superstitious.’

  He peered round at Dr Fell.

  ‘You agree, dear doctor?’

  Dr Fell had been standing over against the low line of the white-painted bookshelves, his arms folded under his long box-pleated cape, and his eyes fixed with absent-minded absorption on the dim flame of the lamp. Miles was assured of his presence by a gentle wheezing of breath, w
ith occasional snorts and stoppages as though the doctor had suddenly waked out of a half-dream, and by the flutter of the broad black eyeglass-ribbon when his chest rose and fell.

  His face, as ruddy as a furnace, radiated that sort of geniality which as a ride made him tower in heartening comfort like Old King Cole. Gideon Fell, Miles knew, was an utterly kind-hearted, utterly honest, completely absent-minded and scatterbrained man whose best hits occurred half through absent-mindedness. His face at the moment, with the under-lip drawn up and the bandit’s moustache drawn down, appeared something of a study in ferocity.

  ‘You agree, dear doctor?’ persisted Rigaud.

  ‘Sir – ’ began Dr Fell, rearing up with a powerful oratorical flourish like Dr Johnson. Then he seemed to change his mind; he subsided and scratched his nose.

  ‘Monsieur?’ prompted Rigaud with the same formality.

  ‘I do not deny,’ said Dr Fell, sweeping out one arm in a gesture which gravely endangered a bronze statuette on the bookshelves, ‘I do not deny that supernatural forces may exist in this world. In fact, I firmly believe they do exist.’

  ‘Vampires!’ said Miles Hammond.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dr Fell, with a seriousness which made Miles’s heart sink. ‘Perhaps even vampires.’

  Dr Fell’s own crutch-handled stick was propped against the book-shelves. But he was now looking, with even more witless vacancy, at the thick yellow sword-cane still clutched under Professor Rigaud’s arm.

  Wheezing as he lumbered forward, Dr Fell took the cane from Rigaud. He turned it over in his fingers. Holding it in the same absent-minded fashion, he wandered over and sat down – very untidily – in a big tapestry chair by the empty fireplace. The whole room shook as he sat down, though this was a solidly constructed house.

  ‘But I believe,’ he pursued, ‘like any honest psychical researcher, in first of all examining the facts.’

  ‘Monsieur,’ cried Professor Rigaud, ‘I give you facts!’

  ‘Sir,’ replied Dr Fell, ‘no doubt.’

  Scowling, he blinked at the sword-cane. He slowly unscrewed the blade-handle, removed it from the scabbard, and studied it. He held the threads of the handle close to his lopsided eyeglasses, and tried to peer into the scabbard. When the learned doctor spoke again, rousing himself, it was in a voice like a schoolboy.