Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  She watched and listened. She watched Monica; she watched the doll. All seemed as normal as in a thousand other homes. Her mind reviewed the position, and where mind and superstition clashed, the former held its own easily. During her evening off she enjoyed the local cinema, leaving the heated building with the conviction that coloured fantasy benumbed the faculties, and that ordinary life was in itself prosaic. Yet before she had covered the half-mile to the house, her deep, accountable uneasiness returned with over-mastering power.

  Mrs. O’Reilly had seen Monica to bed for her, and it was Mrs. O’Reilly who let her in. Her face was like the dead.

  “It’s been talking,” whispered the cook, even before she closed the door. She was white about the gills.

  “Talking! Who’s been talking? What do you mean?”

  Mrs. O’Reilly closed the door softly. “Both,” she stated with dramatic emphasis, then sat down and wiped her face. She looked distraught with fear.

  Madame took command, if only a command based on dreadful insecurity.

  “Both?” she repeated, in a voice deliberately loud so as to counteract the other’s whisper. “What are you talking about?”

  “They’ve both been talking — together,” stated the cook.

  The governess kept silent for a moment, fighting to deny a shrinking heart.

  “You’ve heard them talking together, you mean?” she asked presently in a shaking voice that tried to be ordinary.

  Mrs. O’Reilly nodded, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Her nerves were, obviously, in rags. “I thought you’d never come back,” she whimpered. “I could hardly stay in the house.

  Madame looked intently into her frightened eyes.

  “You heard . . . ?” she asked quietly.

  “I listened at the door. There were two voices. Different voices.” Madame Jodzka did not insist or cross-examine, as though acute fear helped her to a greater wisdom.

  “You mean, Mrs. O’Reilly,” she said in flat, quiet tones, “that you heard Miss Monica talking to her doll as she always does, and herself inventing the doll’s answers in a changed voice? Isn’t that what you mean you heard?”

  But Mrs. O’Reilly was not to be shaken. By way of answer she crossed herself and shook her head.

  She spoke in a low whisper. “Come up now and listen with me, Madame, and judge for yourself.”

  Thus, soon after midnight, and Monica long since asleep, these two, the cook and governess in a suburban villa, took up their places in the dark corridor outside a child’s bedroom door. It was a quiet windless night; Colonel Masters, whom they both feared, doubtless long since gone to his room in another corner of the ungainly villa. It must have been a long dreary wait before sounds in the child’s bedroom first became audible — the low quiet sound of voices talking audibly — two voices. A hushed, secretive, unpleasant sound in the room where Monica slept peacefully with her beloved doll beside her. Yet two voices assuredly, it was.

  Both women sat erect, both crossed themselves involuntarily, exchanging glances. Both were bewildered, terrified. Both sat aghast.

  What lay in Mrs. O’Reilly’s superstitious mind, only the gods of “ould Oireland” can tell, but what the Polish woman’s contained was clear as a bell: it was not two voices talking, it was only one. Her ear was pressed against the crack in the door. She listened intently; shaking to the bone, she listened. Voices in sleep-talking, she remembered, changed oddly.

  “The child’s talking to herself in sleep,” she whispered firmly, “and that’s all it is, Mrs. O’Reilly. She’s just talking in her sleep,” she repeated with emphasis to the woman crowding against her shoulder as though in need of support. “Can’t you hear it,” she added loudly, half angrily, “isn’t it the same voice always? Listen carefully and you’ll see I’m right.”

  She listened herself more closely than before.

  “Listen! Hark . . . !” she repeated in a breathless whisper, concentrating her mind upon the curious sound, “isn’t that the same voice — answering itself?”

  Yet, as she listened, another sound disturbed her concentration, and this time it seemed a sound behind her — a faint, rustling, shuffling sound rather like footsteps hurrying away on tiptoe. She turned her head sharply and found that she had been whispering to no one. There was no one beside her. She was alone in the darkened corridor. Mrs. O’Reilly was gone. From the well of the house below a voice came up in a smothered cry beneath the darkened stairs: “Mother o’ God and all the Saints . . .” and more besides.

  A gasp of surprise and alarm escaped her doubtless at finding herself deserted and alone but in the same instant, exactly as in the story books, came another sound that caught her breath still more aghast — the rattle of a key in the front door below. Colonel Masters, after all, had not yet come in and gone to bed as expected: he was coming in now. Would Mrs. O’Reilly have time to slip across the hall before he caught her? More — and worse — would he come up and peep into Monica’s bedroom on his way up to bed, as he rarely did? Madame Jodzka listened, her nerves in rags. She heard him fling down his coat. He was a man quick in such actions. The stick or umbrella was banged down noisily, hastily. The same instant his step sounded on the stairs. He was coming up. Another minute and he would start into the passage where she crouched against Monica’s door.

  He was mounting rapidly, two stairs at a time.

  She, too, was quick in action and decision. She thought in a flash. To be caught crouching outside the door was ludicrous but to be caught inside the door would be natural and explicable. She acted at once.

  With a palpitating heart, she opened the bedroom door and stepped inside. A second later she heard Colonel Masters’ tread as he stumped along the corridor up to bed. He passed the door. He went on. She heard this with intense relief.

  Now, inside the room, the door closed behind her, she saw the picture clearly.

  Monica, sound asleep, was playing with her beloved doll, but in her sleep. She was indubitably in deep slumber. Her fingers, however, were roughing the doll this way and that, as though some dream perplexed her. The child was mumbling in her sleep, though no words were distinguishable. Muffled sighs and groans issued from her lips. Yet another sound there certainly was, though it could not have issued from the child’s mouth. Whence, then, did it come?

  Madame Jodzka paused, holding her breath, her heart panting. She watched and listened intently. She heard squeaks and grunts, but a moment’s examination convinced her whence these noises came. They did not come from Monica’s lips. They issued indubitably from the doll she clutched and twisted in her dream. The joints, as Monica twisted them, emitted these odd sounds, as though the sawdust in knees and elbows wheezed and squeaked against the unnatural rubbing. Monica obviously was wholly unconscious of these noises. As the doll’s neck screwed round, the material — wax, thread, sawdust — produced this curious grating sound that was almost like syllables of a word or words.

  Madame Jodzka stared and listened. She felt icy cold. Seeking for a natural explanation she found none. Prayer and terror raced in her helter-skelter. Her skin began to sweat.

  Then suddenly Monica, her expression peaceful and composed, turned over in her sleep, and the dreadful doll, released from the dream-clutch, fell to one side on the bed and lay apparently lifeless and inert. In which moment, to Madame Jodzka’s unbelieving yet horrified ears, it continued to squeak and utter. It went on mouthing by itself. Worse than that, the next instant it stood abruptly upright, rising on its twisted legs. It started moving. It began to move, walking crookedly, across the counterpane. Its glassy, sightless eyes seemed to look straight at her. It presented an inhuman and appalling picture, a picture of the utterly incredible. With a queer, hoppity motion of its broken legs and joints, it came fumbling and tumbling across the rough unevenness of the slippery counterpane towards her. Its appearance was deliberate and aggressive. The sounds, as of syllables, came with it — strange, meaningless syllables that yet managed to convey anger.
It stumbled towards her like a living thing.

  Once again, this effect of a mere child’s toy, aping the life of some awful monstrosity with purpose and passion in its hideous tiny outline, brought collapse to the plucky Polish governess. The rush of blood without control drained her heart, and a moment of unconsciousness supervened so that everything, as it were, turned black.

  This time, however, the moment of dark unconsciousness passed instantly: it came and went, almost like a moment of forgetfulness in passion. Passionate it certainly was, for the reaction came upon her like a storm. With recovered consciousness a sudden rage rushed into her woman heart — perhaps a coward’s rage, an exaggerated fury against her own weakness? It rushed, in any case, to help her. She staggered, caught her breath, clutched violently at the cupboard next her, and — recovered her self-control. A fury of resentment blazed through her, fury against this utterly incredible exhibition of a wax doll walking and squawking as though it were something intelligently alive that could utter syllables. Syllables, she felt convinced, in a language she did not know.

  If the monstrous can paralyse, it also can affront. The sight and sound of this cheap factory toy behaving with a will and heart of its own stung her into an act of violence that became imperative. For it was more than she could stand. Irresistibly, she rushed forward. She hurled herself against it, her only available weapon the high-heeled shoe her foot kicked loose on the instant, determined to smash down the frightful apparition into fragments and annihilate it. Hysterical, no doubt, she was at the moment, and yet logical: the godless horror must be blotted out of visible existence. This one thing obsessed her — to destroy beyond all possibility of survival. It must be smashed into fragments, into dust.

  They stood close, face to face, the glassy eyes staring into her own, her hand held high for the destruction she craved — but the hand did not fall. A stinging pain, sharp as a serpent’s bite, darted suddenly through her fingers, wrist and arm, her grip was broken, the shoe spun sideways across the room, and in the flickering light of the candle, it seemed to her, the whole room quivered. Paralysed and helpless, she stood utterly aghast. What gods or saints could come to aid her? None. Her own will alone could help her. Some effort, at any rate, she made, trembling, on the edge of collapse: “My God!” she heard her half-whispering, strangled voice cry out. “It is not true! You are a lie! My God denies you! I call upon my God . . . !”

  Whereupon, to her added horror, the dreadful little doll, waving a broken arm, squawked back at her, as though in definite answer, the strange disjointed syllables she could not understand, syllables as though in another tongue. The same instant it collapsed abruptly on the counterpane like a toy balloon that had been pricked. It shrank down in a mutilated mess before her eyes, while Monica — added touch of horror — stirred uneasily in her sleep, turning over and stretching out her hands as though feeling blindly for something that she missed. And this sight of the innocently sleeping child fumbling instinctively towards an incomprehensibly evil and dangerous something that attracted her proved again too strong for the Polish woman to control.

  The blackness intervened a second time.

  It was undoubtedly a blur in memory that followed, emotion and superstition proving too much for common-sense to deal with. She just remembers violent, unreasoned action on her part before she came back to clearer consciousness in her own room, praying volubly on her knees against her own bed. The interval of transit down the corridor and upstairs remained blank. Yet her shoe was with her, clutched tightly in her hand. And she remembered also having clutched an inert, waxen doll with frantic fingers, clutched and crushed and crumpled its awful little frame till the sawdust came spurting from its broken joints and its tiny body was mutilated beyond recognition, if not annihilated . . . then stuffing it down ruthlessly on a table far out of Monica’s reach, Monica lying peacefully in deepest sleep. She remembered that. She also saw the clear picture of the small monster lying upside down, grossly untidy, an obscene attitude in the disorder of its flimsy dress and exposed limbs, lying motionless, its eyes crookedly aglint, motionless, yet alive still, alive moreover with intense and malignant purpose. No duration or intensity of prayer could obliterate the picture.

  She knew now that a plain, face to face talk with her employer was essential; her conscience, her peace of mind, her sanity, her sense of duty all demanded this. Deliberately, and she was sure, rightly, she had never once risked a word with the child herself. Danger lay that way, the danger of emphasizing something in the child’s mind that was best left ignored. But with Colonel Masters, who paid her for her services, believed in her integrity, trusted her, with him there must be an immediate explanation.

  An interview was absurdly difficult; in the first place because he loathed and avoided such occasions; secondly because he was so exceedingly impervious to approach, being so rarely even visible at all. At night he came home late, in the mornings no one dared go near him. He expected the little household, once its routine established, to run itself. The only inmate who dared beard him was Mrs. O’Reilly, who periodically, once every six months, walked straight into his study, gave notice, received an addition to her wages, and then left him alone for another six months.

  Madame Jodzka, knowing his habits, waylaid him in the hall next morning while Monica was lying down before lunch, as usual. He was on his way out and she had been watching from the upper landing. She had hardly set eyes on him since her return from Warsaw. His lean, upright figure, his dark, emotionless face, she thought magnificent. He was the perfect expression of the soldier. Her heart fluttered as she raced downstairs. Her carefully prepared sentences, however, evaporated when he stopped and looked at her, a jumble of wild words pouring from her in confused English instead. He cut her rigmarole short, though he listened politely enough at first.

  “I’m so glad you were able to come back to us, as I told you. Monica missed you very much—”

  “She has something now she plays with—”

  “The very thing,” he interrupted. “No doubt the kind of toy she needs. . . . Your excellent judgment. . . . Please tell me if there’s anything else you think. . . .” and he half turned as though to move away.

  “But I didn’t get it. It’s a horrible — horrible—”

  Colonel Masters uttered one of his rare laughs. “Of course, all children’s toys are horrible, but if she’s pleased with it. . . . I haven’t seen it, I’m no judge. . . . If you can buy something better—” and he shrugged his shoulders.

  “I didn’t buy it,” she cried desperately. “It was brought. It makes sounds by itself — syllables. I’ve seen it move — move itself. It’s a doll.”

  He turned from the front door which he had just reached as though he had been shot; the skin held a sudden pallor beneath the flush and something contradicted the blazing eyes, something seemed to shrink.

  “A doll,” he repeated in a very quiet voice. “You said — a doll?”

  But his eyes and face disconcerted her, so that she merely gave a fumbling account of a parcel that had been brought. His question about a parcel he had ordered strictly to be destroyed added to her confusion.

  “Wasn’t it?” he asked in a rasping whisper, as though a disobeyed order seemed incredible.

  “It was thrown away, I believe,” she prevaricated, unable to meet his eyes, anxious to protect the cook as well. “I think Monica — perhaps found it.” She despised her lack of courage, but his intensity scattered her wits; she was conscious, moreover, of a strange desire not to give him pain, as though his safety and happiness, not Monica’s, were at stake. “It — talks! — as well as moves,” she cried desperately, forcing herself at last to look at him.

  Colonel Masters seemed to stiffen; his breath caught oddly.

  “You say Monica has it? Plays with it? You’ve seen movement and heard sounds like syllables?” He asked the questions in a low voice, almost as though talking to himself. You’ve — listened?” he whispered.

  Unabl
e to find convincing words, she bowed her head, while some terror in him came across to her like a blast of icy wind. The man was afraid in his heart. Instead, however, of some explosive reply by way of blame or criticism, he spoke quietly, even calmly: “You did right to come and tell me this — quite right,” adding then in so low a tone that she barely caught the ominous words, “for I have been expecting something of the sort . . . sooner or later . . . it was bound to come. . . .” the voice dying away into the handkerchief he put to his face.

  And abruptly then, as though aware of an appeal for sympathy, an emotional reaction swept her fear away. Stepping closer, she looked her employer straight in the eyes.

  “See the child for yourself,” she said with sudden firmness. “Come and listen with me. Come into the bedroom.”

  She saw him stagger. For a moment he said nothing.

  “Who,” he then asked, the low voice unsteady, “who brought that parcel?”

  “A man, I believe.”

  There was a pause that seemed like minutes before his next question.

  “White,” he asked, “or — black?”

  “Dark,” she told him, “very dark.”

  He was shaking like a leaf, the skin of his face blanched; he leaned against the door, wilted, limp; unless she somehow took command there threatened a collapse she did not wish to witness. “You shall come with me tonight,” she said firmly, “and we shall listen together. Wait till I return now. I go for brandy,” and a minute later as she came back breathless and watched him gulp down half a tumbler full, she knew that she had done right in telling him. His obedience proved it, though it seemed strange that cowardice should borrow from its like to produce courage.