The Hound of Death and Other Stories

by Agatha Christie

  "I have never been hypnotized, M. le docteur. For the other, when at prayer in the chapel, my spirit has often been caught up from my body, and I have been as one dead for many hours. It was undoubtedly a blessed state, the Reverend Mother said - a state of grace. Ah, yes!" She caught her breath. "I remember; we, too, called it a state of grace."

  "I would like to try an experiment, my sister." Rose spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. "It may dispel those painful half-recollections. I will ask you to gaze once more in the crystal. I will then say a certain word to you. You will answer with another. We will continue in this way until you become tired. Concentrate your thoughts on the crystal, not upon the words."

  As I once more unwrapped the crystal and gave it into Sister Marie Angelique's hands, I noticed the reverent way her hands touched it. Reposing on the black velvet, it lay between her slim palms. Her wonderful deep eyes gazed into it. There was a short silence, then the doctor said: "Hound."

  Immediately Sister Marie Angelique answered: "Death."

  IV

  I do not propose to give a full account of the experiment. Many unimportant and meaningless words were purposely introduced by the doctor. Other words he repeated several times, sometimes getting the same answer to them, sometimes a different one.

  That evening in the doctor's little cottage on the cliffs we discussed the result of the experiment.

  He cleared his throat and drew his notebook closer to him.

  "These results are very interesting - very curious. In answer to the words 'Sixth Sign,' we get variously Destruction, Purple, Hound, Power, then again Destruction, and finally Power. Later, as you may have noticed, I reversed the method, with the following results. In answer to Destruction, I get Hound; to Purple, Power; to Hound, Death again, and to Power, Hound. That all holds together, but on a second repetition of Destruction, I get Sea, which appears utterly irrelevant. To the words 'Fifth Sign,' I get Blue, Thoughts, Bird, Blue again, and finally the rather suggestive phrase Opening of mind to mind. From the fact that 'Fourth Sign' elicits the word Yellow, and later Light, and that 'First Sign' is answered by Blood, I deduce that each Sign had a particular col- our, and possibly a particular symbol, that of the Fifth Sign being a bird, and that of the Sixth a hound. However, I surmise that the Fifth Sign represented what is familiarly known as telepathy - the opening of mind to mind. The Sixth Sign undoubtedly stands for the Power of Destruction."

  "What is the meaning of Sea?"

  "That I confess I cannot explain. I introduced the word later and got the ordinary answer of Boat. To Seventh Sign I got first Life, the second time Love. To Eighth Sign, I got the answer None. I take it therefore that Seven was the sum and number of the signs."

  "But the Seventh was not achieved," I said on a sudden inspiration. "Since through the Sixth came Destruction!"

  "Ah! You think so? But we are taking these - mad ramblings very seriously. They are really only interesting from a medical point of view."

  "Surely they will attract the attention of psychic investigators."

  The doctor's eyes narrowed. "My dear sir, I have no intention of making them public."

  "Then your interest?"

  "Is purely personal. I shall make notes on the case, of course."

  "I see." But for the first time I felt, like the blind man, that I didn't see at all. I rose to my feet.

  "Well, I'll wish you good night, doctor. I'm off to town again tomorrow."

  "Ah!" I fancied there was satisfaction, relief perhaps, behind the exclamation.

  "I wish you good luck with your investigations," I continued lightly. "Don't loose the Hound of Death on me next time we meet!"

  His hand was in mine as I spoke, and I felt the start it gave. He recovered himself quickly. His lips drew back from his long pointed teeth in a smile.

  "For a man who loved power, what a power that would be!" he said. "To hold every human being's life in the hollow of your hand!"

  And his smile broadened.

  V

  That was the end of my direct connection with the affair. Later, the doctor's notebook and diary came into my hands. I will reproduce the few scanty entries in it here, though you will understand that it did not really come into my possession until sometime afterwards.

  Aug. 5th. Have discovered that by "the Chosen," Sister M.A. means those who reproduced the race. Apparently they were held in the highest honour, and exalted above the Priesthood. Contrast this with early Christians.

  Aug. 7th. Persuaded Sister M.A. to let me hypnotize her. Succeeded in inducing hypnotic sleep and trance, but no rapport established.

  Aug. 9th. Have there been civilizations in the past to which ours is as nothing? Strange if it should be so, and I the only man with the clue to it...

  Aug. 12th. Sister M.A. not at all amenable to suggestion when hypnotized. Yet state of trance easily induced. Cannot understand it.

  Aug. 13th. Sister M.A. mentioned today that in "state of grace" the "gate must be closed, lest another should command the body." Interesting - but baffling.

  Aug. 18th. So the First Sign is none other than... (words erased here)... then how many centuries will it take to reach the Sixth? But if there should be a shortcut to Power...

  Aug. 20th. Have arranged for M.A. to come here with Nurse. Have told her it is necessary to keep patient under morphia. Am I mad? Or shall I be the Superman, with the Power of Death in my hands?

  (Here the entries cease.)

  VI

  It was, I think, on August 29 that I received the letter. It was directed to me, care of my sister-in-law, in a sloping foreign handwriting. I opened it with some curiosity. It ran as follows:

  Cher Monsieur, - I have seen you but twice, but I have felt that I could trust you. Whether my dreams are real or not, they have grown clearer of late... And, monsieur, one thing at all events, the Hound of Death is no dream... In the days I told you of (whether they are real or not, I do not know) He Who was Guardian of the Crystal revealed the Sixth Sign to the People too soon... Evil entered into their hearts. They had the power to slay at will - and they slew without justice - in anger. They were drunk with the lust of Power. When we saw this, we who were yet pure, we knew that once again we should not complete the Circle and come to the Sign of Everlasting Life. He who would have been the next Guardian of the Crystal was bidden to act. That the old might die, and the new, after endless ages, might come again, he loosed the Hound of Death upon the sea (being careful not to close the Circle), and the sea rose up in the shape of a Hound and swallowed the land utterly...

  Once before I remembered this - on the altar steps in Belgium...

  The Dr Rose, he is of the Brotherhood. He knows the First Sign, and the form of the Second, though its meaning is hidden to all save a chosen few. He would learn of me the Sixth. I have withstood him so far - but I grow weak. Monsieur, it is not well that a man should come to power before his time. Many centuries must go by ere the world is ready to have the power of death delivered into its hand... I beseech of you, monsieur, you who love goodness and truth, to help me... before it is too late.

  Your sister in Christ,

  Marie Angelique.

  I let the paper fall. The solid earth beneath me seemed a little less solid than usual. Then I began to rally. The poor woman's belief, genuine enough, had almost affected me! One thing was clear. Dr Rose, in his zeal for a case, was grossly abusing his professional standing. I would run down and -

  Suddenly I noticed a letter from Kitty among my other correspondence. I tore it open. I read:

  Such an awful thing has happened. You remember Dr Rose's little cottage on the cliff? It was swept away by a landslide last night, and the doctor and that poor nun, Sister Marie Angelique, were killed. The debris on the beach is too awful - all piled up in a fantastic mass - from a distance it looks like a great hound...

  The letter dropped from my hand.

  The other facts may be coincidence. A Mr Rose, whom I discovered to be a wealthy relative of the doct
or's, died suddenly that same night - it was said struck by lightning. As far as was known, no thunderstorm had occurred in the neighbourhood. but one or two people declared they had heard one peal of thunder. He had an electric burn on him "of a curious shape." His will left everything to his nephew, Dr Rose.

  Now, supposing that Dr Rose succeeded in obtaining the secret of the Sixth Sign from Sister Marie Angelique. I had always felt him to be an unscrupulous man - he would not shrink at taking his uncle's life if he were sure it could not be brought home to him. But one sentence of Sister Marie Angelique's letter rings in my brain: "... being careful not to close the Circle..." Dr Rose did not exercise that care - was perhaps unaware of the steps to take, or even of the need for them. So the Force he employed returned, completing its circuit...

  But of course it is all nonsense! Everything can be accounted for quite naturally. That the doctor believed in Sister Marie Angelique's hallucinations merely proves that his mind, too, was slightly unbalanced.

  Yet sometimes I dream of a continent under the seas where men once lived and attained to a degree of civilization far ahead of ours...

  Or did Sister Marie Angelique remember backwards - as some say is possible - and is this City of the Circles in the future and not the past?

  Nonsense - of course the whole thing was mere hallucination!

  THE LAMP

  It was undoubtedly an old house. The whole square was old, with that disapproving dignified old age often met with in a cathedral town. But No. 19 gave the impression of an elder among elders; it had a veritable patriarchal solemnity; it towered greyest of the grey, haughtiest of the haughty, chillest of the chill. Austere, forbidding, and stamped with that particular desolation attaching to all houses that have been long untenanted, it reigned above the other dwellings.

  In any other town it would have been freely labelled "haunted," but Weyminster was averse from ghosts and considered them hardly respectable except as the appanage of a "county family." So No. 19 was never alluded to as a haunted house; but nevertheless it remained, year after year, "To Be Let or Sold."

  Mrs Lancaster looked at the house with approval as she drove up with the talkative house agent, who was in an unusually hilarious mood at the idea of getting No. 19 off his books. He inserted the key in the door without ceasing his appreciative comments.

  "How long has the house been empty?" inquired Mrs Lancaster, cutting short his flow of language rather brusquely.

  Mr Raddish (of Raddish and Foplow) became slightly confused.

  "Er - er - some time," he remarked blandly.

  "So I should think," said Mrs Lancaster dryly.

  The dimly lighted hall was chill with a sinister chill. A more imaginative woman might have shivered, but this woman happened to be eminently practical. She was tall, with much dark brown hair just tinged with grey and rather cold blue eyes.

  She went over the house from attic to cellar, asking a pertinent question from time to time. The inspection over, she came back into one of the front rooms looking out on the square and faced the agent with a resolute mien.

  "What is the matter with the house?"

  Mr Raddish was taken by surprise.

  "Of course, an unfurnished house is always a little gloomy," he parried feebly.

  "Nonsense," said Mrs Lancaster. "The rent is ridiculously low for such a house - purely nominal. There must be some reason for it. I suppose the house is haunted?"

  Mr Raddish gave a nervous little start but said nothing.

  Mrs Lancaster eyed him keenly. After a few moments she spoke again.

  "Of course that is all nonsense. I don't believe in ghosts or anything of that sort, and personally it is no deterrent to my taking the house; but servants, unfortunately, are very credulous and easily frightened. It would be kind of you to tell me exactly what - what thing is supposed to haunt this place."

  "I - er - really don't know," stammered the house agent.

  "I am sure you must," said the lady quietly. "I cannot take the house without knowing. What was it? A murder?"

  "Oh, no!" cried Mr Raddish, shocked by the idea of anything so alien to the respectability of the square. "It's - it's - only a child."

  "A child?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't know the story exactly," he continued reluctantly. "Of course, there are all kinds of different versions, but I believe that about thirty years ago a man going by the name of Williams took Number Nineteen. Nothing was known of him; he kept no servants; he had no friends; he seldom went out in the daytime. He had one child, a little boy. After he had been there about two months, he went up to London, and had barely set foot in the metropolis before he was recognized as being a man 'wanted' by the police on some charge - exactly what, I do not know. But it must have been a grave one, because, sooner than give himself up, he shot himself. Meanwhile, the child lived on here, alone in the house. He had food for a little time, and he waited day after day for his father's return. Unfortunately, it had been impressed upon him that he was never under any circumstances to go out of the house or to speak to anyone. He was a weak, ailing, little creature, and did not dream of disobeying this command. In the night, the neighbours, not knowing that his father had gone away, often heard him sobbing in the awful loneliness and desolation of the empty house."

  Mr Raddish paused.

  "And - er - the child starved to death," he concluded in the same tones as he might have announced that it had just begun to rain.

  "And it is the child's ghost that is supposed to haunt the place?" asked Mrs Lancaster.

  "It is nothing of consequence really," Mr Raddish hastened to assure her. "There's nothing seen, not seen, only people say, ridiculous, of course, but they do say they hear - the child - crying, you know."

  Mrs Lancaster moved towards the front door.

  "I like the house very much," she said. "I shall get nothing as good for the price. I will think it over and let you know."

  "It really looks very cheerful, doesn't it, Papa?"

  Mrs Lancaster surveyed her new domain with approval. Gay rugs, well-polished furniture, and many knickknacks, had quite transformed the gloomy aspect of No. 19.

  She spoke to a thin, bent old man with stooping shoulders and a delicate mystical face. Mr Winburn did not resemble his daughter; indeed no greater contrast could be imagined than that presented by her resolute practicalness and his dreamy abstraction.

  "Yes," he answered with a smile, "no one would dream the house was haunted."

  "Papa, don't talk nonsense! On our first day, too."

  Mr Winburn smiled.

  "Very well, my dear, we will agree that there are no such things as ghosts."

  "And please," continued Mrs Lancaster, "don't say a word before Geoff. He's so imaginative."

  Geoff was Mrs Lancaster's little boy. The family consisted of Mr Winburn, his widowed daughter, and Geoffrey.

  Rain had begun to beat against the window - pitter-patter, pitter-patter.

  "Listen," said Mr Winburn. "Is it not like little footsteps?"

  "It's more like rain," said Mrs Lancaster, with a smile.

  "But that, that is a footstep," cried her father, bending forward to listen.

  Mrs Lancaster laughed outright.

  "That's Geoff coming downstairs."

  Mr Winburn was obliged to laugh, too. They were having tea in the hall, and he had been sitting with his back to the staircase. He now turned his chair round to face it.

  Little Geoffrey was coming down, rather slowly and sedately, with a child's awe of a strange place. The stairs were of polished oak, uncarpeted. He came across and stood by his mother. Mr Winburn gave a slight start. As the child was crossing the floor, he distinctly heard another pair of footsteps on the stairs, as of someone following Geoffrey. Dragging footsteps, curiously painful they were. Then he shrugged his shoulders incredulously. "The rain, no doubt," he thought.

  "I'm looking at the sponge cakes," remarked Geoff with the admirably detached air of one who points
out an interesting fact.

  His mother hastened to comply with the hint.

  "Well, Sonny, how do you like your new home?" she asked.

  "Lots," replied Geoffrey with his mouth generously filled. "Pounds and pounds and pounds." After this last assertion, which was evidently expressive of the deepest contentment, he relapsed into silence, only anxious to remove the sponge cake from the sight of man in the least time possible.

  Having bolted the last mouthful, he burst forth into speech.

  "Oh! Mummy, there's attics here, Jane says; and can I go at once and eggzplore them? And there might be a secret door. Jane says there isn't, but I think there must be, and, anyhow, I know there'll be pipes, water pipes (with a face full of ecstasy), and can I play with them, and, oh! can I go and see the boi-i-ler?" He spun out the last word with such evident rapture that his grandfather felt ashamed to reflect that this peerless delight of childhood only conjured up to his imagination the picture of hot water that wasn't hot, and heavy and numerous plumber's bills.

  "We'll see about the attics tomorrow, darling," said Mrs Lancaster. "Suppose you fetch your bricks and build a nice house, or an engine."

  "Don't want to build an 'ouse."

  "House."

  "House, or h'engine h'either."

  "Build a boiler," suggested his grandfather.

  Geoffrey brightened.

  "With pipes?"

  "Yes, lots of pipes."

  Geoffrey ran away happily to fetch his bricks.

  The rain was still falling. Mr Winburn listened. Yes, it must have been the rain he had heard; but it did sound like footsteps.

  He had a queer dream that night.

  He dreamt that he was walking through a town, a great city it seemed to him. But it was a children's city; there were no grown-up people there, nothing but children, crowds of them. In his dream they all rushed to the stranger crying: "Have you brought him?" It seemed that he understood what they meant and shook his head sadly. When they saw this, the children turned away and began to cry, sobbing bitterly.