The Phantom Coach

by Michael Sims

  “Do you like me a little better?” I asked, abruptly, after a minute. “Could you listen to me again?”

  I had no sooner spoken than she laid her hand quickly, with a certain force, on my arm. “Hush!—isn’t there some one there?” She was looking into the gloom of the far end of the balcony. This balcony ran the whole width of the house, a width very great in the best of the old houses at Brighton. We were lighted a little by the open window behind us, but the other windows, curtained within, left the darkness undiminished, so that I made out but dimly the figure of a gentleman standing there and looking at us. He was in evening dress, like a guest—I saw the vague shine of his white shirt and the pale oval of his face—and he might perfectly have been a guest who had stepped out in advance of us to take the air. Miss Marden took him for one at first—then evidently, even in a few seconds, she saw that the intensity of his gaze was unconventional. What else she saw I couldn’t determine; I was too taken up with my own impression to do more than feel the quick contact of her uneasiness. My own impression was in fact the strongest of sensations, a sensation of horror; for what could the thing mean but that the girl at last saw? I heard her give a sudden, gasping “Ah!” and move quickly into the house. It was only afterwards that I knew that I myself had had a totally new emotion—my horror passing into anger, and my anger into a stride along the balcony with a gesture of reprobation. The case was simplified to the vision of a frightened girl whom I loved. I advanced to vindicate her security, but I found nothing there to meet me. It was either all a mistake or Sir Edmund Orme had vanished.

  I followed Miss Marden immediately, but there were symptoms of confusion in the drawing-room when I passed in. A lady had fainted, the music had stopped; there was a shuffling of chairs and a pressing forward. The lady was not Charlotte, as I feared, but Mrs. Marden, who had suddenly been taken ill. I remember the relief with which I learned this, for to see Charlotte stricken would have been anguish, and her mother’s condition gave a channel to her agitation. It was of course all a matter for the people of the house and for the ladies, and I could have no share in attending to my friends or in conducting them to their carriage. Mrs. Marden revived and insisted on going home, after which I uneasily withdrew.

  I called the next morning to ask about her and was informed that she was better, but when I asked if Miss Marden would see me the message sent down was that it was impossible. There was nothing for me to do all day but to roam about with a beating heart. But toward evening I received a line in pencil, brought by hand—“Please come; mother wishes you.” Five minutes afterward I was at the door again and ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs. Marden lay upon the sofa, and as soon as I looked at her I saw the shadow of death in her face. But the first thing she said was that she was better, ever so much better; her poor old heart had been behaving queerly again, but now it was quiet. She gave me her hand and I bent over her with my eyes in hers, and in this way I was able to read what she didn’t speak—“I’m really very ill, but appear to take what I say exactly as I say it.” Charlotte stood there beside her, looking not frightened now, but intensely grave, and not meeting my eyes. “She has told me—she has told me!” her mother went on.

  “She has told you?” I stared from one of them to the other, wondering if Mrs. Marden meant that the girl had spoken to her of the circumstances on the balcony.

  “That you spoke to her again—that you’re admirably faithful.”

  I felt a thrill of joy at this; it showed me that that memory had been uppermost, and also that Charlotte had wished to say the thing that would soothe her mother most, not the thing that would alarm her. Yet I now knew, myself, as well as if Mrs. Marden had told me, that she knew and had known at the moment what her daughter had seen. “I spoke—I spoke, but she gave me no answer,” I said.

  “She will now, won’t you, Chartie? I want it so, I want it!” the poor lady murmured, with ineffable wistfulness.

  “You’re very good to me,” Charlotte said to me, seriously and sweetly, looking fixedly on the carpet. There was something different in her, different from all the past. She had recognised something, she felt a coercion. I could see that she was trembling.

  “Ah, if you would let me show you how good I can be!” I exclaimed, holding out my hands to her. As I uttered the words I was touched with the knowledge that something had happened. A form had constituted itself on the other side of the bed, and the form leaned over Mrs. Marden. My whole being went forth into a mute prayer that Charlotte shouldn’t see it and that I should be able to betray nothing. The impulse to glance toward Mrs. Marden was even stronger than the involuntary movement of taking in Sir Edmund Orme; but I could resist even that, and Mrs. Marden was perfectly still. Charlotte got up to give me her hand, and with the definite act she saw. She gave, with a shriek, one stare of dismay, and another sound, like a wail of one of the lost, fell at the same instant on my ear. But I had already sprung toward the girl to cover her, to veil her face. She had already thrown herself into my arms. I held her there a moment—bending over her, given up to her, feeling each of her throbs with my own and not knowing which was which; then, all of a sudden, coldly, I gathered that we were alone. She released herself. The figure beside the sofa had vanished; but Mrs. Marden lay in her place with closed eyes, with something in her stillness that gave us both another terror. Charlotte expressed it in the cry of “Mother, mother!” with which she flung herself down. I fell on my knees beside her. Mrs. Marden had passed away.

  Was the sound I heard when Chartie shrieked—the other and still more tragic sound I mean—the despairing cry of the poor lady’s death-shock or the articulate sob (it was like a waft from a great tempest), of the exorcised and pacified spirit? Possibly the latter, for that was, mercifully, the last of Sir Edmund Orme.

  Robert W. Chambers

  1865–1933

  Robert Chambers achieved his greatest fame for popular bestsellers in the first two decades of the twentieth century—books with such titles as The Restless Sex, Some Ladies in Haste, and The Younger Set. He became one of the most successful authors of his time. He was dubbed “the Shopgirl Scheherazade,” and H. L. Mencken dismissed him as “the Boudoir Balzac.” He also wrote romantic historical novels against backdrops such as the Franco-Prussian War and the American Revolution.

  But before these books, back in 1895, came a collection of stories entitled The King in Yellow. The first four stories comprise an interwoven sui generis tapestry. Later Chambers wrote a few more volumes of fantasy and supernatural horror, such as In Search of the Unknown, before turning to more profitable tales. He is remembered now, however, for The King in Yellow, in part for its clear influence on H. P. Lovecraft, who references it often in his Cthulhu Mythos cycle, and recently for its appearance as a motif in the HBO series True Detective.

  A running theme in the four stories is the existence of a play with the title The King in Yellow, which seems to resemble Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” and an ancient malevolent spirit also called the King in Yellow. Now and then Chambers quotes from act 1, maintaining that the opening of the play is deceptively ordinary and harmless, but that even perusing the text of Act 2 can drive a reader mad. Out of this series of outré stories, none is more horrific than “The Yellow Sign,” with its nightmare imagery of death, decay, and living corpses.

  Chambers began as a painter, and his familiarity with the medium suffuses this story. He studied at the Art Students League in New York City and was friends with Charles Dana Gibson, soon to become famous for his creation of the “Gibson girl” in advertisements and illustrations. Later Gibson illustrated many of Chambers’s society novels. Chambers spent much of his twenties in Paris, studying at the École des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian. These student experiences inspired his first novel, the anonymously published In the Quarter, which appeared in 1894. The next year came The King in Yellow.

  The Yellow Sign

  Let the red dawn surmise

  What we sha
ll do,

  When this blue starlight dies

  And all is through.

  I

  There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To think that this also is a little ward of God!”

  When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut.

  I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.

  I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

  “Is it something I’ve done?” she said.

  “No—I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,” I replied.

  “Don’t I pose well?” she insisted.

  “Of course, perfectly.”

  “Then it’s not my fault?”

  “No. It’s my own.”

  “I am very sorry,” she said.

  I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look over the illustrations in the Courrier Français.

  I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water. Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all the time what a séance I should hold with Duval who had sold me the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was defective nor yet the colours of Edward. “It must be the turpentine,” I thought angrily, “or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.” I called Tessie, the model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the air.

  “What have you been doing to it?” she exclaimed

  “Nothing,” I growled, “it must be this turpentine!”

  “What a horrible colour it is now,” she continued. “Do you think my flesh resembles green cheese?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said angrily; “did you ever know me to paint like that before?”

  “No, indeed!”

  “Well, then!”

  “It must be the turpentine, or something,” she admitted.

  She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of which reached Tessie’s ears.

  Nevertheless she promptly began: “That’s it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!”

  I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until, thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the shoulder.

  “Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,” she announced.

  “Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,” I said, yawning. I looked at my watch.

  “It’s after six, I know,” said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the mirror.

  “Yes,” I replied, “I didn’t mean to keep you so long.” I leaned out of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval and leaned from the window.

  “Is that the man you don’t like?” she whispered.

  I nodded.

  “I can’t see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,” she continued, turning to look at me, “he reminds me of a dream—an awful dream I once had. Or,” she mused, looking down at her shapely shoes, “was it a dream after all?”

  “How should I know?” I smiled.

  Tessie smiled in reply.

  “You were in it,” she said, “so perhaps you might know something about it.”

  “Tessie! Tessie!” I protested, “don’t you dare flatter by saying that you dream about me!”

  “But I did,” she insisted; “shall I tell you about it?”

  “Go ahead,” I replied, lighting a cigarette.

  Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

  “One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be afraid; everything outside seemed so—so black and uncomfortable. Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was soaked.”

  “But where did I come into the dream?” I asked.

  “You—you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.”

  “In the coffin?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know? Could you see me?”
>
  “No; I only knew you were there.”

  “Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?” I began, laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

  “Hello! What’s up?” I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the window.

  “The—the man below in the churchyard;—he drove the hearse.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, but Tessie’s eyes were wide with terror. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone. “Come, Tessie,” I urged, “don’t be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.”

  “Do you think I could forget that face?” she murmured. “Three times I saw the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and—and soft? It looked dead—it looked as if it had been dead a long time.”

  I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

  “Look here, Tessie,” I said, “you go to the country for a week or two, and you’ll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when night comes your nerves are upset. You can’t keep this up. Then again, instead of going to bed when your day’s work is done, you run off to picnics at Sulzer’s Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.”