Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories

by Hugh Ealpole

  He telephoned Grace. ‘Just to know whether you’re happy, darling.’

  ‘Of course I’m happy.’

  ‘Thinking about me?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Is Penelope there sitting in front of the fire?

  ‘Yes. As a matter of fact, she’s on my lap.’

  He had an absurd instinct to scream through the telephone: ‘Put her down! Put her down! Don’t touch her!’ But he wished Grace a loving goodnight, turned from the telephone and saw the cat walking from his sitting-room into his bedroom. He went into his bedroom. There was no cat there. That night he had a dream. Somebody warned him, he couldn’t in the morning remember who, that he’d better not marry Grace Ferguson. Suspended on a little cloud between heaven and earth, he enquired why. ‘It’s not safe,’ said the angel or the devil or whoever it might be. On about the third day from this, driving Grace up to one of the Bowl concerts, he said to her, ‘Darling, I haven’t been drinking. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked him, laying her little hand on his.

  ‘I’m always seeing your cat. At least, I don’t know whether I see it or don’t. It seems to be there; and then it isn’t.’

  She pressed his hand. ‘Penelope has been rather strange the last few days,’ she said. ‘I felt a little frightened of her myself, as though I were doing something wrong. You do love me, Thornton, don’t you?’

  ‘Love you,’ he breathed.

  ‘Because if you didn’t, if you were marrying me for some other reason, I can imagine Penelope doing something terrible. She isn’t an ordinary cat. You say you fancy you’ve seen her. Well, so did I once. I was at Palm Springs for a week or two and I left her at home with the servants. You’ll think me ridiculous, I know, but she came every evening just as the sun was fading behind the mountains. She would be there, she would rub herself against my leg.’

  For the first time since his friendship with her, Thornton was irritable.

  ‘Oh, don’t, Grace! This is ridiculous. We’re both ridiculous.’

  They got out, gave the car to a parking attendant and walked slowly up the hill without speaking.

  Two nights later, he awoke suddenly and thought that he was choking to death. He sat up gasping, beating the air with his hands. As he sat there, his heart hammering, his whole body trembling, staring into the darkness, something again whispered to him: ‘Give this marriage up. You’re in danger.’

  Next day he felt so unwell that he consulted a doctor. There was, it seemed, nothing actually the matter with him, but his friends all noticed the change. He was pale and he looked as though he hadn’t slept. His manner was nervous and irritable. For three days he did not see Grace, and during that time quite seriously considered whether he would not run away. Something was driving him. He would write to her when he got to New York. He would borrow some money from someone there and go to Europe. He would fly to New York. He nearly did.

  And then his pride and his real affection for Grace, his thought, too, of the economic comforts waiting for him, these were all too much for him. He stayed. He spent the long afternoon in Grace’s drawing-room, tempting her to comfort him. When she knew that he suffered, she was distraught and distressed; her affection for him grew into love, because the real basis of her nature was maternal. She loved him that afternoon. Penelope sat without moving in a square of sunlight and never looked at either of them.

  On that same evening, he went to bed early. He had no appetite. His whole body was weary, as though he were beginning some kind of attack. Was it influenza? He took several aspirins and a strong highball.

  He awoke quite suddenly with a start of apprehension. He switched on the electric light and saw from his clock that it was a quarter to three in the morning. Then he looked around the room and saw the white cat lying up against the wall opposite the bed. He knew then such fear as he had never before experienced. The cat this time did not vanish as he looked at it. It seemed to grow larger, and there was something quite horrible about its watching, emotionless impassivity. While he sat there and stared, he told himself of his own foolishness. All that he had to do was to get out of bed and walk out of the door.

  He moved and felt that he was caught, as one sometimes is, by the bedclothes. He pushed against them and got one bare foot to the floor. At the same moment the cat moved, not its head, but rather its back, which seemed to arch and shiver very slightly as though it were shaking itself.

  He got the other foot to the floor, and then, his hands gripping the bedclothes, he watched the animal. It slowly rose, stretched first one leg, then the other, then very softly came towards him. When it was halfway across the floor it crouched, watching him with its large grey eyes; the great white body seemed to be instinct with power. It looked as though it might spring with a tiger’s action.

  He screamed hysterically, ‘Get out! Get out!’ and then, drawing himself back into bed again, let himself drop on the other side away from the door.

  The cat moved towards the bed, and now it was so close to him that he could feel the hot foetid jungle air of its breath, and in its deep grey eyes he saw an intensity of malevolence. But the stupor of a few moments ago had left him. He felt now all activity. Could he but reach the door and escape, all would be well. But as he turned his head, the cat gave a soundless leap and to his horror was crouching there on the top of the bed quite close to him.

  He made a movement and the cat, drawing itself on its belly, came to the very edge of the bed, its eyes with a steady burning intensity fixed on him.

  He fell on his knees. The air, now close against his eyes, nostrils and mouth, was of so sickening a stench that he could not breathe.

  He looked up. His mouth opened for a scream of terror, but no sound came.

  The cat leapt. He felt its claws on his cheek. He was stifled with the press of warm fur. . . .

  When next morning Grace Ferguson read that Mr Thornton Busk was found in his apartment, clad in his pyjamas, on the floor of his bedroom, dead, she burst into a storm of tears. It seemed that he had died of heart failure. Feeling unwell, he had crawled out of bed to get assistance and had died there on the floor. On each cheek there was a tiny scratch for which there was no accounting.

  She cried her heart out. She had been so very fond of Thornton. She felt at the same time a strange relief. She had been free for so long, and now she was free again. Poor Thornton! The excitement of these last few days had been too much for him. The Chinese boy brought in the saucer of milk that Penelope enjoyed always at a settled time. Grace Ferguson blew her nose, dried her eyes, and, her voice a little broken with her crying, said:

  ‘Come, Penelope. Here’s your milk, darling.’ The cat got up, walked across to the saucer, began happily to lap. It purred its hearty contentment.

  The Perfect Close

  OLD PAUL THOMLINSON was eighty-nine years of age, and everyone in his circle watched him eagerly to see whether he would capture ninety. Once, and not so long ago, it had been hoped that he would reach one hundred, and his sister, Ada Mailey, had very confidently promised it. She was supposed to have been so completely in control that she could surely manage his age as well as everything else. But maybe, in this particular respect, she was not altogether whole-hearted, for, although the old man was not at all a trouble, it would quite certainly be easier for her when her brother was gone. He would leave her the house, a tidy bit of money, and all the odds and ends. Her son, Morgan, would also benefit.

  Paul Thomlinson was a very nice, clean old gentleman; a faint, pale shell, but a shell with fire burning inside it. Behind the delicate, almost intangible, age-washed mask you could see the glow and feel the heat. He was no trouble at all. He slept and passed the day in his library, a big, wide-windowed room on the second floor, with books, seventeenth and eighteenth century for the most part, reaching to the ceiling, a fine portrait of his grandfather in a red tortoiseshell frame, an atlas in old dark oak bound round with brass, a bright green inksta
nd, and his dear old dog, Caesar. In his dark red leather armchair he sat, a rug over his knees, and looked out to the garden, with the Cathedral towers, ancient, beneficent, and the colour of bird’s-nest grey, looking over the old brick wall. He saw the swifts cutting the sky like messengers and, when the weather was warm and the windows open, he could smell the roses and the pinks.

  He was very little trouble, but he did hold himself aloof. That was what his sister and her son Morgan felt. For, as Mrs Mailey herself, a thin but friendly lady of seventy, said:

  ‘It’s as though he thought himself superior.’

  But, then, his mother had thought herself superior. Paul and Ada’s father had been twice married, Paul the child of one mother, Ada of another. Paul’s mother had been remote, reserved, austere. Ada’s had been everybody’s friend. Ada herself was everybody’s friend, and when, after Mailey’s sudden death from heart failure in a London restaurant, she had come with her baby boy to live in Polchester, she had known, in a lick of the thumb, everyone in Polchester worth knowing. Paul had been kind and generous. Ada had run the house and also, as it seemed to the world, her brother. But this last, as Ada had well known, was not the truth. She had never possessed, or even controlled, her brother. It had simply been that he had not wished to take the trouble to resist her about the unimportant things. So long as he had his books, his few friends, the Cathedral music and his summer trip abroad he had made no fuss. And, oh yes, his dog! There had always been a dog. Of his interest in women, Ada knew nothing—perfect discretion, at any rate in Polchester, whatever his annual trip abroad may have included.

  He had been a handsome man, brown-haired, straight-backed, with rather gentle and easily amused eyes and a most distinguished mouth. He wore elegant clothes, liking them coloured, a bright blue tie, a buff-coloured waistcoat. He had the shining cleanliness of Venetian glass. Well, here he was, a very old man indeed, and quite suddenly, on a late autumn afternoon in his library, he knew that he was going to die.

  The knowledge came to him as though a bird from heaven had flown in through the closed and heavily curtained windows and whispered in his ear. In the light given by the sharp-flamed fire and the sheltered electric glow, he almost fancied that he saw the bird.

  ‘Within an hour or two you’re going to die. Within an hour or two you’re going to die.’

  He smiled to himself and laid on the little table at his side the volume of Dryden’s prose that he had been reading. So it had come at last! He had no pain—simply a quick access of weakness. It was as though he could see, through the glass-like shell of his body, the life force ebbing away. He knew that many old people had these alarms, and that, very often, they were false and meaningless scarings. But, this time, he had no doubt. He was in no way frightened. All his life, like every other human being, he had speculated on death. A child is immortal, for, during childhood, death is an incredibility. Maturity makes it the only certainty. Paul had loved life so intensely that death had seemed to him, for many years, an almost unbearable shame. Very simple things had always pleased him—light and dark, colours and scents, food and drink, friendship. His deeper experiences, hospital work in France during the war, love, once, twice, thrice—these had made death more understandable. They had gone to the roots of experience. But why should he not be permitted to watch the sunlight, keep company with his books, walk with his dog, enjoy the blessed indulgence of sleep, for ever and ever? Of these he would never tire and indulging in them did no one any harm.

  For a long time he had resented death. Then, as experience had gathered with the years, he had turned more to wonder as to how he would meet it when it came. He did not fear it. The only thing of which he was really afraid was long-continued physical pain. Once he had suffered acute arthritis in his left arm for a continuous six months and had realised, through that experience, how pain that never relaxes can do something to the spiritual side of man, something disgraceful and humiliating. If he knew that he was to die, would he be a coward? He often pictured to himself that familiar scene in the consulting-room, he seated, listening attentively to the surgeon’s sentence of death. That sudden realisation of death! What a fearful thing! To know that, within a definite sum of months, you would be removed, extinct, forgotten!

  Could he then summon a brave and philosophic serenity? He did hope so.

  Then, as the years had passed and he had grown older and older, he had felt, without too much boastfulness, a sort of triumph. He was getting the better of that old devil, Death! Suppose he reached his century—what a snap of the fingers for that old humbug! He was proud of his birthdays and liked them solemnised. On his seventieth he had a great dinner-party, with all his friends around him. On his ninetieth, he would have another! Now, this afternoon, he knew very certainly that he would never reach that ninetieth.

  Of course, as age had advanced, his vitality had ebbed. This room had become his world, and a very agreeable world too. He slept a great deal, he had still a good appetite, his brain was as active as ever, and he was still able to feel his old energetic likes and dislikes of his fellow human beings. He liked his sister, for old times’ sake, although he held the opinion that most men have about most women—that she had little sense of the important things in life. He detested his young nephew, Morgan. He had detested him from the first moment of seeing him, a baby, howling for something, screaming at sight of him. Young Morgan had all the qualities that his uncle most abhorred—he was conceited without reason, cocksure without knowledge, noisy and extravagant. Morgan patronised his old uncle, without intending it of course, but that only made the patronage worse. He delivered his opinions on politics, the arts, love, religion, as though they were the only possible opinions. He had brains, and would make a good lawyer, but he was a horrible young man. Morgan and his uncle played chess together. Paul was an erratic player and Morgan usually defeated him. Paul hated the boy’s supercilious pleasure at his victories, but Paul adored the game and, on every separate occasion, was certain that this time he would trounce the young devil.

  And Morgan had a dog, a succession of dogs. Always the same kind of dog—barking, restless, selfish dogs, fox-terriers for the most part. He thought of Morgan’s fox-terrier, Satan, the present one, and he motioned with his thin, blue-veined hand to his old Sealyham, Caesar, who, stretched near the fire, apparently sleeping, had nevertheless his eye closely fixed on his master. Caesar came slowly over to him and rested his head against his master’s leg, sighing portentous satisfaction as he did so. Caesar, old as he was, could still put fear into the heart of young Satan. A grand fighter Caesar had always been!

  So here then was Death, and it was neither terrifying nor humiliating. There was a strange agitation about his heart, as though all the forces there were engaged in a last battle together. His brain was extraordinarily lucid and clear. He seemed to possess a double vision, so that the dark plum-coloured curtains were almost transparent, and the black and white marble slabs of the fireplace nearly revealed to him the active world moving behind them. Soon he would know—ah, very soon!—the shapes, sounds, and vigours of that second world.

  The door opened. It was young Morgan.

  ‘Like a game of chess, Uncle, before tea?’

  ‘Now,’ the old man thought, ‘I’m within an hour or less of death. I should be at charity with all the world. But I dislike that young man as much as ever. Why does he speak as though he owns the world? And,’ he thought, ‘if ever in all my life I wanted to beat him at chess, I want to beat him now.’

  He was not a bad young man, Morgan. He thought himself irresistibly charming. He was thinking:

  ‘Poor old boy—and aren’t I a hero to play a game with him?’

  He fetched, from a corner of the room, the chessmen. They were a beautiful set of dark red agate and clear shining crystal. Very handsome they looked, set up there, with the firelight behind them.

  ‘Red,’ said Morgan.

  ‘Red it is,’ the old man answered.

  Although he
wished so eagerly to win, he found it difficult at first to concentrate—and chess demands absolute concentration. Why was it, he thought, that he disliked, almost bitterly, his nephew’s appearance? For he was a handsome young man, hair the colour of ripe corn, blue eyes, a taut, trained, athletic body? The mouth was supercilious, the hands too grasping. . . . Yes, yes. That was the thing to do. Knight to Bishop Three and then, perhaps, if Morgan had not foreseen . . .

  His thoughts were captured with the consciousness of the littleness of time that remained to him. Only an hour or two. . . . What did he wish to do? To win this game of chess. And Minna’s dress . . . Before he moved his bishop, he said:

  ‘There isn’t a parcel for me downstairs, is there?’

  ‘Didn’t see anything. Your move, Uncle!’

  Dear, dear Minna! Everyone thought her so plain, just a dry, ill-dressed, elderly virgin. But she had been always so very kind to him. There had been between them for so many years a most beautiful relationship. She and the dog Caesar were now everything to him. Yes, now that so many dear others were dead. His mind speculated yet further. Did death mean nothing? Would he, in another brief space of time, be aware of Nothing? Nothing! How appalling a word! But it seemed to him that God was more likely and, if God, why, then surely continuing experience.

  ‘Your move, Uncle.’

  With a mighty effort that seemed almost the most strenuous exercise he had ever commanded, he looked at the board. He saw with horror that he was in the greatest danger. Morgan’s queen and bishop commanded a line threatening disastrously his king. Every piece of Morgan’s—he had the red, sinister, dark, shadowed agate—seemed to be stirring with menace. His own crystal pieces were, he felt, appealing to him for succour. Oh, he must win this game, he must win this, the last game of his life! He glanced at young Morgan’s cocky, supercilious smile, at the superior, confident fashion of his seat, his back taut, his thighs spread.