Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  “Talking about my cousin,” she heard him, a distinct effort in the voice and the tone considerably lower as though he was going to let her into a great secret, “I — er — wanted to tell you something, Marigold darling—”

  “Yes, Father, I know,” she mumbled softly, nestling deeper against his old smoky shooting-coat as though cuddling into sleep. “And if you really want another, of course take it. I’m going... to marry... a thief... myself...!”

  But the last words were so low they seemed spoken out of sleep, and it is doubtful if her father heard them even. He picked her up in his arms and carried her up himself to her bedroom, for he saw that she was half lost in dreams and slumber.

  “Tick tock! Tick tock!” sounded the old clock on the mantelpiece in the deserted room where only Judas remained playing with a crinkly prune stone on the carpet which he evidently believed to be a real and living mouse — Judas, the eighth fruit stone and the ferocious tiger-skin whose eyes and teeth and fearful tawny limbs had no reality in them....

  THE END

  The Short Story Collections

  Crayford Manor House, Dartford, South East London — Blackwood’s childhood home

  THE EMPTY HOUSE AND OTHER GHOST STORIES

  “…there is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumour with the memories of evil and violent histories.”

  This is Blackwood’s first published collection of horror stories – a genre in which he excelled and for which he is still greatly admired. It is also Blackwood’s first published book, appearing in 1906 when the author was thirty-seven years old. This was the start of a prolific career as a writer of supernatural fiction, eventually leading to fame as a radio and television star, in which mediums he broadcast readings of his own stories. Up to this point, Blackwood had tried numerous careers, but it was his literary work which steadily earned him financial security.

  Blackwood’s stories draw heavily on his own experiences, as well as his preoccupation with the mystical beliefs of Rosicrucianism and Buddhism. As well as being a firm believer in reincarnation, he often used his fiction to express his conception of nature as a sentient force — a concept that proves both beautiful and terrifying in equal measure, but which generally accounts for the sense of awe that characterises much of his fiction.

  The Empty House contains ten stories. The title story is (as the title implies) a standard haunted house story, possibly based on Blackwood’s experiences with the Society for Psychical research. Indeed, unlike the work of some other well-known contemporaries (such as M. R. James, whose stories deliberately obscure the origins or motives of their spectres), Blackwood’s stories reflect the early-twentieth-century enthusiasm for understanding supernatural phenomena in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. ‘With Intent to Steal’, the story of a haunted barn, may also be based on Blackwood’s researches with the Society.

  ‘A Haunted Island’ is Blackwood’s first known published ghost story, and was first printed in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1899. ‘A Case of Eavesdropping’, which follows it in the collection is, appropriately enough, the second known publication of a Blackwood ghost story, and first appeared in the same periodical in 1900. It is based on Blackwood’s experiences living in lodgings in New York and concerns a man (probably based on Blackwood himself) who overhears a conversation in the rooms next to his – but are the participants of this earth? ‘Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House’ is also the fruit of Blackwood’s experiences in New York, whilst also drawing on his acquaintance with the occult learning of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

  ‘Keeping His Promise’ is a story of two friends who strike up a macabre agreement to prove the existence of the supernatural, while ‘The Wood of the Dead’, set in the West Country, lives up to its doom-laden title.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  THE EMPTY HOUSE

  A HAUNTED ISLAND

  A CASE OF EAVESDROPPING

  KEEPING HIS PROMISE

  WITH INTENT TO STEAL

  THE WOOD OF THE DEAD

  SMITH: AN EPISODE IN A LODGING-HOUSE

  A SUSPICIOUS GIFT

  THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE SECRETARY IN NEW YORK

  SKELETON LAKE: AN EPISODE IN CAMP

  Title page of the first edition

  THE EMPTY HOUSE

  Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.

  And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.

  There was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood, crowded into a corner of the square, and looked exactly like the houses on either side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbours; the same balcony overlooking the gardens; the same white steps leading up to the heavy black front door; and, in the rear, there was the same narrow strip of green, with neat box borders, running up to the wall that divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses. Apparently, too, the number of chimney pots on the roof was the same; the breadth and angle of the eaves; and even the height of the dirty area railings.

  And yet this house in the square, that seemed precisely similar to its fifty ugly neighbours, was as a matter of fact entirely different — horribly different.

  Wherein lay this marked, invisible difference is impossible to say. It cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination, because persons who had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again, and that the atmosphere of the whole house produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror; while the series of innocent tenants who had tried to live in it and been forced to decamp at the shortest possible notice, was indeed little less than a scandal in the town.

  When Shorthouse arrived to pay a “week-end” visit to his Aunt Julia in her little house on the sea-front at the other end of the town, he found her charged to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating boredom; but the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple-skin wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition. The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other visitors, and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special object.

  Something was in the wind, and the “something” would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along the sea-front in the dusk.

  “I’ve got the keys,” she announced in a delighted, yet half awesome voice. “Got them till Monday!”

  “The keys of the bathing-machine, or — ?” he asked innocently, looking from the sea to the town. Nothing brought her so quickly to the point as feigning stupidity.

  “Neither,” she whispered. “I’ve got the keys of the haunted house in the square — and I
’m going there to-night.”

  Shorthouse was conscious of the slightest possible tremor down his back. He dropped his teasing tone. Something in her voice and manner thrilled him. She was in earnest.

  “But you can’t go alone—” he began.

  “That’s why I wired for you,” she said with decision.

  He turned to look at her. The ugly, lined, enigmatical face was alive with excitement. There was the glow of genuine enthusiasm round it like a halo. The eyes shone. He caught another wave of her excitement, and a second tremor, more marked than the first, accompanied it.

  “Thanks, Aunt Julia,” he said politely; “thanks awfully.”

  “I should not dare to go quite alone,” she went on, raising her voice; “but with you I should enjoy it immensely. You’re afraid of nothing, I know.”

  “Thanks so much,” he said again. “Er — is anything likely to happen?”

  “A great deal has happened,” she whispered, “though it’s been most cleverly hushed up. Three tenants have come and gone in the last few months, and the house is said to be empty for good now.”

  In spite of himself Shorthouse became interested. His aunt was so very much in earnest.

  “The house is very old indeed,” she went on, “and the story — an unpleasant one — dates a long way back. It has to do with a murder committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants’ quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below.”

  “And the stableman — ?”

  “Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder; but it all happened a century ago, and I’ve not been able to get more details of the story.”

  Shorthouse now felt his interest thoroughly aroused; but, though he was not particularly nervous for himself, he hesitated a little on his aunt’s account.

  “On one condition,” he said at length.

  “Nothing will prevent my going,” she said firmly; “but I may as well hear your condition.”

  “That you guarantee your power of self-control if anything really horrible happens. I mean — that you are sure you won’t get too frightened.”

  “Jim,” she said scornfully, “I’m not young, I know, nor are my nerves; but with you I should be afraid of nothing in the world!”

  This, of course, settled it, for Shorthouse had no pretensions to being other than a very ordinary young man, and an appeal to his vanity was irresistible. He agreed to go.

  Instinctively, by a sort of sub-conscious preparation, he kept himself and his forces well in hand the whole evening, compelling an accumulative reserve of control by that nameless inward process of gradually putting all the emotions away and turning the key upon them — a process difficult to describe, but wonderfully effective, as all men who have lived through severe trials of the inner man well understand. Later, it stood him in good stead.

  But it was not until half-past ten, when they stood in the hall, well in the glare of friendly lamps and still surrounded by comforting human influences, that he had to make the first call upon this store of collected strength. For, once the door was closed, and he saw the deserted silent street stretching away white in the moonlight before them, it came to him clearly that the real test that night would be in dealing with two fears instead of one. He would have to carry his aunt’s fear as well as his own. And, as he glanced down at her sphinx-like countenance and realised that it might assume no pleasant aspect in a rush of real terror, he felt satisfied with only one thing in the whole adventure — that he had confidence in his own will and power to stand against any shock that might come.

  Slowly they walked along the empty streets of the town; a bright autumn moon silvered the roofs, casting deep shadows; there was no breath of wind; and the trees in the formal gardens by the sea-front watched them silently as they passed along. To his aunt’s occasional remarks Shorthouse made no reply, realising that she was simply surrounding herself with mental buffers — saying ordinary things to prevent herself thinking of extra-ordinary things. Few windows showed lights, and from scarcely a single chimney came smoke or sparks. Shorthouse had already begun to notice everything, even the smallest details. Presently they stopped at the street corner and looked up at the name on the side of the house full in the moonlight, and with one accord, but without remark, turned into the square and crossed over to the side of it that lay in shadow.

  “The number of the house is thirteen,” whispered a voice at his side; and neither of them made the obvious reference, but passed across the broad sheet of moonlight and began to march up the pavement in silence.

  It was about half-way up the square that Shorthouse felt an arm slipped quietly but significantly into his own, and knew then that their adventure had begun in earnest, and that his companion was already yielding imperceptibly to the influences against them. She needed support.

  A few minutes later they stopped before a tall, narrow house that rose before them into the night, ugly in shape and painted a dingy white. Shutterless windows, without blinds, stared down upon them, shining here and there in the moonlight. There were weather streaks in the wall and cracks in the paint, and the balcony bulged out from the first floor a little unnaturally. But, beyond this generally forlorn appearance of an unoccupied house, there was nothing at first sight to single out this particular mansion for the evil character it had most certainly acquired.

  Taking a look over their shoulders to make sure they had not been followed, they went boldly up the steps and stood against the huge black door that fronted them forbiddingly. But the first wave of nervousness was now upon them, and Shorthouse fumbled a long time with the key before he could fit it into the lock at all. For a moment, if truth were told, they both hoped it would not open, for they were a prey to various unpleasant emotions as they stood there on the threshold of their ghostly adventure. Shorthouse, shuffling with the key and hampered by the steady weight on his arm, certainly felt the solemnity of the moment. It was as if the whole world — for all experience seemed at that instant concentrated in his own consciousness — were listening to the grating noise of that key. A stray puff of wind wandering down the empty street woke a momentary rustling in the trees behind them, but otherwise this rattling of the key was the only sound audible; and at last it turned in the lock and the heavy door swung open and revealed a yawning gulf of darkness beyond.

  With a last glance at the moonlit square, they passed quickly in, and the door slammed behind them with a roar that echoed prodigiously through empty halls and passages. But, instantly, with the echoes, another sound made itself heard, and Aunt Julia leaned suddenly so heavily upon him that he had to take a step backwards to save himself from falling.

  A man had coughed close beside them — so close that it seemed they must have been actually by his side in the darkness.

  With the possibility of practical jokes in his mind, Shorthouse at once swung his heavy stick in the direction of the sound; but it met nothing more solid than air. He heard his aunt give a little gasp beside him.

  “There’s someone here,” she whispered; “I heard him.”

  “Be quiet!” he said sternly. “It was nothing but the noise of the front door.”

  “Oh! get a light — quick!” she added, as her nephew, fumbling with a box of matches, opened it upside down and let them all fall with a rattle on to the stone floor.

  The sound, however, was not repeated; and there was no evidence of retreating footsteps. In another minute they had a candle burning, using an empty end of a cigar case as a holder; and when the first flare had died down he held the impromptu lamp aloft and surveyed the scene. And it was dreary enough in all conscience, for there is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumour with the memories of evil and violent h
istories.

  They were standing in a wide hall-way; on their left was the open door of a spacious dining-room, and in front the hall ran, ever narrowing, into a long, dark passage that led apparently to the top of the kitchen stairs. The broad uncarpeted staircase rose in a sweep before them, everywhere draped in shadows, except for a single spot about half-way up where the moonlight came in through the window and fell on a bright patch on the boards. This shaft of light shed a faint radiance above and below it, lending to the objects within its reach a misty outline that was infinitely more suggestive and ghostly than complete darkness. Filtered moonlight always seems to paint faces on the surrounding gloom, and as Shorthouse peered up into the well of darkness and thought of the countless empty rooms and passages in the upper part of the old house, he caught himself longing again for the safety of the moonlit square, or the cosy, bright drawing-room they had left an hour before. Then realising that these thoughts were dangerous, he thrust them away again and summoned all his energy for concentration on the present.

  “Aunt Julia,” he said aloud, severely, “we must now go through the house from top to bottom and make a thorough search.”

  The echoes of his voice died away slowly all over the building, and in the intense silence that followed he turned to look at her. In the candle-light he saw that her face was already ghastly pale; but she dropped his arm for a moment and said in a whisper, stepping close in front of him —

  “I agree. We must be sure there’s no one hiding. That’s the first thing.”

  She spoke with evident effort, and he looked at her with admiration.

  “You feel quite sure of yourself? It’s not too late—”

  “I think so,” she whispered, her eyes shifting nervously toward the shadows behind. “Quite sure, only one thing—”