It was with something of amused bravado that he reported to his few friends in Paris his acquisition of a haunted room; for, once out of the place, he readily convinced himself that his disgust and dislike while in the room were the result of imagination and nothing more. Certainly, there was no rational reason to account for the unpleasantness; consequently, what could it be but a matter of fancy? He resolved to face the matter from the beginning, and clear his mind from any foolish prejudices that the hints of the old engraver might have inspired, by forcing himself through whatever adventures he might encounter. In fact, as he walked the streets about his business, and arranged for the purchase and delivery of the few simple articles of furniture that would be necessary, his enterprise assumed the guise of a pleasing adventure. He remembered that he had made an attempt, only a year or two ago, to spend a night in a house reputed haunted in England, but had failed to find the landlord. Here was the adventure to hand, with promise of a tale to tell in future times; and a welcome idea struck him that he might look out the ancient history of the room, and work the whole thing into a magazine article, which would bring a little money.
So simple were his needs that by the afternoon of the day following his first examination of the room it was ready for use.
He took his bag from the cheap hotel in a little street of Montparnasse, where he had been lodging, and carried it to his new home. The key was now in his pocket, and for the first time he entered the place alone. The window remained wide open; but it was still there—that depressing, choking something that entered the consciousness he knew not by what gate. Again he accused his fancy. He stamped and whistled, and set about unpacking a few canvases and a case of old oriental weapons that were part of his professional properties. But he could give no proper attention to the work, and detected himself more than once yielding to a childish impulse to look over his shoulder. He laughed at himself—with some effort—and sat determinedly to smoke a pipe, and grow used to his surroundings. But presently he found himself pushing his chair farther and farther back, till it touched the wall. He would take the whole room into view, he said to himself in excuse, and stare it out of countenance. So he sat and smoked, and as he sat his eye fell on a Malay dagger that lay on the table between him and the window. It was a murderous, twisted thing, and its pommel was fashioned into the semblance of a bird’s head, with curved beak and an eye of some dull red stone. He found himself gazing on this red eye with an odd, mindless fascination. The dagger in its wicked curves seemed now a creature of some outlandish fantasy—a snake with a beaked head, a thing of nightmare, in some new way dominant, overruling the centre of his perceptions. The rest of the room grew dim, but the red stone glowed with a fuller light; nothing more was present to his consciousness. Then, with a sudden clang, the heavy bell of St. Sulpice aroused him, and he started up in some surprise.
There lay the dagger on the table, strange and murderous enough, but merely as he had always known it. He observed with more surprise, however, that his chair, which had been back against the wall, was now some six feet forward, close by the table; clearly, he must have drawn it forward in his abstraction, towards the dagger on which his eyes had been fixed… The great bell of St. Sulpice went clanging on, repeating its monotonous call to the Angelus.
He was cold, almost shivering. He flung the dagger into a drawer, and turned to go out. He saw by his watch that it was later than he had supposed; his fit of abstraction must have lasted some time. Perhaps he had even been dozing.
He went slowly downstairs and out into the streets. As he went he grew more and more ashamed of himself, for he had to confess that in some inexplicable way he feared that room. He had seen nothing, heard nothing of the kind that one might have expected, or had heard of in any room reputed haunted; he could not help thinking that it would have been some sort of relief if he had. But there was an all-pervading, overpowering sense of another Presence—something abhorrent, not human, something almost physically nauseous. Withal it was something more than presence; it was power, domination—so he seemed to remember it. And yet the remembrance grew weaker as he walked in the gathering dusk; he thought of a story he had once read of a haunted house wherein it was shown that the house actually was haunted—by the spirit of fear, and nothing else. That, he persuaded himself, was the case with his room; he felt angry at the growing conviction that he had allowed himself to be overborne by fancy—by the spirit of fear.
He returned that night with the resolve to allow himself no foolish indulgence. He had heard nothing and had seen nothing; when something palpable to the senses occurred, it would be time enough to deal with it. He took off his clothes and got into bed deliberately, leaving candle and matches at hand in case of need. He had expected to find some difficulty in sleeping, or at least some delay, but he was scarce well in bed ere he fell into a heavy sleep.
Dazzling sunlight through the window woke him in the morning, and he sat up, staring sleepily about him. He must have slept like a log. But he had been dreaming; the dreams were horrible. His head ached beyond anything he had experienced before, and he was far more tired than when he went to bed. He sank back on the pillow, but the mere contact made his head ring with pain. He got out of bed, and found himself staggering; it was all as though he had been drunk—unspeakably drunk with bad liquor. His dreams—they had been horrid dreams; he could remember that they had been bad, but what they actually were was now gone from him entirely. He rubbed his eyes and stared amazedly down at the table: where the crooked dagger lay, with its bird’s head and red stone eye. It lay just as it had lain when he sat gazing at it yesterday, and yet he would have sworn that he had flung that same dagger into a drawer. Perhaps he had dreamed it; at any rate, he put the thing carefully into the drawer now, and, still with his ringing headache, dressed himself and went out.
As he reached the next landing the old engraver greeted him from his door with an inquiring good-day. “Monsieur has not slept well, I fear?”
In some doubt, Attwater protested that he had slept quite soundly. “And as yet I have neither seen nor heard anything of the ghost,” he added.
“Nothing?” replied the old man, with a lift of the eyebrows, “nothing at all? It is fortunate. It seemed to me, here below, that monsieur was moving about very restlessly in the night; but no doubt I was mistaken. No doubt, also, I may felicitate monsieur on breaking the evil tradition. We shall hear no more of it; monsieur has the good fortune of a brave heart.”
He smiled and bowed pleasantly, but it was with something of a puzzled look that his eyes followed Attwater descending the staircase.
Attwater took his coffee and roll after an hour’s walk, and fell asleep in his seat. Not for long, however, and presently he rose and left the cafÇ. He felt better, though still unaccountably fatigued. He caught sight of his face in a mirror beside a shop window, and saw an improvement since he had looked in his own glass. That indeed had brought him a shock. Worn and drawn beyond what might have been expected of so bad a night, there was even something more. What was it? How should it remind him of that old legend—was it Japanese?—which he had tried to recollect when he had wondered confusedly at the haggard apparition that confronted him? Some tale of a demon-possessed person who in any mirror, saw never his own face, but the face of the demon.
Work he felt to be impossible, and he spent the day on garden seats, at café tables, and for a while in the Luxembourg. And in the evening he met an English friend, who took him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes, shook him, and declared that he had been overworking, and needed, above all things, a good dinner, which he should have instantly. “You’ll dine with me,” he said, “at La Perouse, and we’ll get a cab to take us there. I’m hungry.”
As they stood and looked for a passing cab a man ran shouting with newspapers. “We’ll have a cab,” Attwater’s friend repeated, “and we’ll take the new murder with us for conversation’s sake. Hi! Journal!”
&
nbsp; He bought a paper, and followed Attwater into the cab. “I’ve a strong idea I knew the poor old boy by sight,” he said. “I believe he’d seen better days.”
“Who?”
“The old man who was murdered in the Rue Broca last night. The description fits exactly. He used to hang about the cafés and run messages. It isn’t easy to read in this cab; but there’s probably nothing fresh in this edition. They haven’t caught the murderer, anyhow.”
Attwater took the paper, and struggled to read it in the changing light. A poor old man had been found dead on the footpath of the Rue Broca, torn with a score of stabs. He had been identified—an old man not known to have a friend in the world; also, because he was so old and so poor, probably not an enemy. There was no robbery; the few sous the old man possessed remained in his pocket. He must have been attacked on his way home in the early hours of the morning, possibly by a homicidal maniac, and stabbed again and again with inconceivable fury. No arrest had been made.
Attwater pushed the paper way: “Pah!” he said; “I don’t like it. I’m a bit off colour, and I was dreaming horribly all last night; though why this should remind me of it I can’t guess. But it’s no cure for the blues, this!”
“No,” replied his friend heartily; “we’ll get that upstairs, for here we are, on the quay. A bottle of the best Burgundy on the list and the best dinner they can do—that’s your physic. Come!”
It was a good prescription, indeed. Attwater’s friend was cheerful and assiduous, and nothing could have bettered the dinner. Attwater found himself reflecting that indulgence in the blues was a poor pastime, with no better excuse than a bad night’s rest. And last night’s dinner in comparison with this! Well, it was enough to have spoiled his sleep, that one-franc-fifty dinner.
Attwater left La Perouse as gay as his friend. They had sat late, and now there was nothing to do but cross the water and walk a little in the boulevards. This they did, and finished the evening at a café table with half a dozen acquaintances.
Attwater walked home with a light step, feeling less drowsy than at any time during the day. He was well enough. He felt he should soon get used to the room. He had been a little too much alone lately, and that had got on his nerves. It was simply stupid.
Again he slept quickly and heavily and dreamed. But he had an awakening of another sort. No bright sun blazed in at the open window to lift his heavy lids, and no morning bell from St. Sulpice opened his ears to the cheerful noise of the city. He awoke gasping and staring in the dark, rolling face-downward on the floor, catching his breath in agonized sobs; while through the window from the streets came a clamour of hoarse cries: cries of pursuit and the noise of running men: a shouting and clatter wherein here and there a voice was clear among the rest—“A l’assassin! Arrêtez!”
He dragged himself to his feet in the dark, gasping still. What was this—all this? Again a dream? His legs trembled under him, and he sweated with fear. He made for the window, panting and feeble; and then, as he supported himself by the sill, he realized wonderingly that he was fully dressed—that he wore even his hat. The running crowd straggled through the outer street and away, the shouts growing fainter. What had wakened him? Why had he dressed? He remembered his matches, and turned to grope for them; but something was already in his hand—something wet, sticky. He dropped it on the table, and even as he struck the light, before he saw it, he knew. The match sputtered and flared, and there on the table lay the crooked dagger, smeared and dripping and horrible.
Blood was on his hands—the match stuck in his fingers. Caught at the heart by the first grip of an awful surmise, he looked up and saw in the mirror before him, in the last flare of the match, the face of the Thing in the Room.
MR. MACFADYEN, MORTAL
First published in The Strand Magazine, Vol. XLII. Jul-Dec 1911.
I
Obviously young Phipps should never have been admitted a member of the Mausoleum Club. He was the only member one could readily call to mind who had any hair whatever on the crown of his head, and the only human being who had ever committed the outrage of whistling (yes, whistling) on the staircase of that solemn institution. As a matter of fact, he passed the committee simply as the son of his father, the great Sir Mumplebury Phipps, the palaeographer. It would be a great blow to his father if young Phipps were expelled from the Mausoleum; but something of the sort is sure to happen sooner or later. He will be fortunate if he is only asked to resign. It might have been expected that the somnolent dignity of the place and the members would have had its effect on young Phipps; and so it did, but it was quite the wrong effect. It stung him into excesses of misbehaviour, such as he would probably never have contemplated in any less portentous environment. He was constantly exposed to the temptation to do something atrocious and see what would happen. Mind—I am not offering excuses for young Phipps; I am merely explaining.
His worst outrage was never distinctly traced to him by the committee, but—! It was something so very shocking that I would rather not mention it; but that happens to be the only way of explaining what followed. I will just say, then, hurriedly and without painful detail, that early one evening he secreted gin in a flat bottle under his coat and entered the smoking-room at a moment when it was empty. Two freshly-filled water-carafes stood there, and these he took and partly emptied into a ventilating pipe; he then divided the contents of the gin-bottle between the two carafes and replaced them carefully where he had found them. That was all.
Now, as it happened, this was the first evening for many years that Mr. Priscian Macfadyen had spent at the club; and the reason was that this was the first night for many years that Mrs. Macfadyen had been away from home without her husband. She had been sent for, in fact, by a sister who had been taken ill; and as she had not positively extracted a pledge from Mr. Macfadyen that he would stay at home, that dutiful husband thought there could be no positive objection to the exceedingly mild diversion of an evening at the Mausoleum, and no absolute need to report the fact to Mrs. Macfadyen on her return. It was a sad thing—a tragedy, as you will see—that on the occasion of Mr. Macfadyen’s first evening at the club for years there should be gin in the water-bottle.
In the smoking-room Mr. Macfadyen met his old friend Bowker, whom he had not seen for a very long time; because Bowker was a bachelor and spent every evening at the club. Bowker had very good cigars of his own, which he preferred to those kept on the premises. Mr. Bradley Jeeves, another old acquaintance, also liked Bowker’s cigars. So these three elderly contemporaries sat together with three of Bowker’s cigars between them; and, partly because they were of a generation before the coming into fashion of whisky, and partly because of certain restrictions of Mr. Bowker’s doctor, they resolved on three glasses of weak brandy and water; especially as Jeeves had been told of an excellent new brandy just arrived in the club cellars.
Three tumblers were brought, with a little brandy at the bottom of each, and one of the treacherous water-bottles was placed at hand. Mr. Jeeves, after a sniff and a slight sip of the undiluted brandy, added a generous helping from the water-bottle, and pronounced the result quite extraordinary.
“This is really a brandy of very remarkable quality,” he said, “with a character quite its own. Somehow the water seems to bring out the flavour.”
Bowker agreed, and resolved to speak to the secretary about getting some of that same brandy for his private store. And Mr. Priscian Macfadyen, with glowing interior and blinking eyes, approved of the cigar and the brandy, and Bowker, and Jeeves, and the circumstances generally—but particularly the brandy.
“There’s a certain curious silkiness—yes, I think silkiness is the only word—about this brandy,” said Mr. Bowker, critically, “that is positively extraordinary.” He took a good mouthful, and swallowed it with lingering approval. “Excellent!” he went on, “quite excellent! It’s very far from being my usual habit, but it’s very tempting, and I r
eally think I must have another.”
So they had another, all three, and from a far corner the diabolical Phipps, entrenched behind a newspaper, watched the fell result of his revolting machinations.
Let us, with a truly and genuinely respectable shudder, draw a veil over the rest of that evening’s transactions; a veil thick enough to conceal the fact whether or not those three unoffending and most proper elderly gentlemen, under the stimulus of the first two, had another glass apiece, or even more. A veil that will permit no glimpse of the confused oscillations of three exceedingly pink scalps as viewed from the top of the Mausoleum staircase at their departure very late in the evening indeed. A veil that will reveal nothing of the panic amazement of the decorous hall-porter, nothing of the rumours of musical efforts in the fresh air of the street, nothing of suggested explanations before the committee.
II.
Mr. Bowker awoke very late next morning with a double-elephant headache and a very doubtful remembrance as to how he had acquired it. His man was gathering up his clothes, striding after them about the room in a subtly irritating manner which Mr. Bowker strongly resented. The fellow was under notice, and since he had received it his manner had grown less respectful each day.
Mr. Bowker noticed that there was a good deal of mud on the clothes, and he began to wonder as to the manner of his home-coming.
“Wade!” he said.
“Sir.”
“I—I was rather late home last night.”
“This mornin’, sir,” corrected Wade.
“But you didn’t wait up after twelve, I suppose?”
The Arthur Morrison Mystery Page 104