The Arthur Morrison Mystery

by Arthur Morrison

  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 café. 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!”

  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 fo
r 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.

  MYXOMYCETES

  First published in The Strand Magazine, September 1914

  At my first encounter with Mr. Montgomery Staggers, he offered me, out of pure personal regard and affection, five thousand shares in the Stumer Gold, Diamond, Silver, and Gas Mine, Limited, at fourpence a share; an offer, by his own confession, equivalent to making my fortune in a fortnight. Somehow I refrained from buying those shares, and on later occasions I neglected other similar opportunities. After this the financier’s zeal for my temporal welfare somewhat abated, and with no more than one or two further attempts to endow me beyond the dreams of avarice, he descended to an occasionally expressed desire for the loan of half a crown. It was thus that I first heard of myxomycetes.

  I was base enough, at first, to suspect Mr. Staggers of inventing this word, but you will find it in any dictionary or any encylopaedia, and you may find myxomycetes itself on an old tree-stump—any number of species of it, and men of science call it protozoa—the lowest form of animal life.

  Unless you are a hardened teetotaller you are probably aware of those wine-shops in London where a basket of free biscuits stands near a crumbled heap of eleemosynary cheese. It was at one of these institutions that Mr. Montgomery Staggers absorbed his daily sustenance and transacted such business as he could compass. The fluid share of the honour was mine, Mr. Montgomery Staggers being snugly entrenched between the biscuits and the cheese, while he proceeded to deliver himself of the following:—

  * * * *

  People have been most shockingly fed up with mines, but they’re as good a promotion as anything even now, if you can only get ’em to bite. Scientific invention’s all my eye; the scientific chaps don’t seem to know the game, and they’re bound to let you in for something, sooner or later. No more science for me, not after old Burridge and his blooming myxomycetes.

  I was in with a useful little crowd at that time that were very enterprising, and game for anything. What money was wanted we usually got from a chap called Stibbins—for office furniture and such, not much—but he certainly had ideas sometimes, and synthetic goods was one of his specials. Commercial Syntheses, Unlimited—you could do so much with it, you see; anyhow, it seemed so; synthetic bricks, synthetic timber, synthetic leather, glass, wool, gold—anything; make ’em all chemically. We made up our minds to do it properly; get a tame science merchant and put him in a proper laboratory, just to show the mugs, with all his synthetic bricks and timber round him, and a precious large lot o’ retorts and tubes and jars and glass bubble-shaped things and blow-pipes. So Stibbins got hold of Burridge. He’d been a teacher in science schools, but he was always hoofed out because he would muddle with his own experiments instead o’ teachin’. So we got him a new suit o’ clothes and all the retorts and stinks and stuff he wanted, and shoved ’em all in the back room o’ the office Stibbins took in a court off Broad Street. “And now,” says we, “go ahead and make bricks out o’ straw or anything you like in them glass things.”

  “Bricks?” says the old chap, “I want to make protoplasm. I believe I can generate life! It’s the dream of my career.”

  “Life be blowed,” says we; “we want something with money in it, like bricks. It’ll do if you only make-believe to make ’em, in a scientific way.”

  They were buildin’ a new bank up the street, and I went out and borrowed a few bricks in the dusk. We brushed ’em up neat and set ’em out on a bit o’ green baize in the office with a label: “SYNTHETIC BRICKS—THE FINISHED ARTICLE!” And next morning old Bashford Keeble—he was one of us then—brought in a bit of synthetic timber he’d sawed off a new fence, and we put that on another bit o’ green baize with a label of its own. We bought a bit of synthetic leather at a grinder’s shop for a bob, and we all put in specimens of synthetic glass—such a lot of empty whisky-bottles that Stibbins said there was nothing so suspicious as overdoin’ it, and pitched most of ’em out. You never saw anybody more surprised than old Burridge when he saw the specimens all nicely laid out with their labels, in the front office. “But I haven’t made ’em yet,” says he.

  “What rot!” says we. “Of course you made ’em—here they are! We can’t wait for your experiments—this is business.”

  I ought to have told you that besides Stibbins and me there was old Bashford Keeble and a couple of others, Pewtris and Crump. I did the gentlemanly man o’ the world, and Bashford Keeble was the respectable virtuous. He had a very high, shiny forehead—mostly baldness—beautiful wavy grey hair—and a beard like Moses. You’d have trusted him with your last bob—lots o’ people did it at different times, and sure enough it was their last. What?

  Stibbins pulled the strings generally, and Pewtris and Crump were what you might call general utility.

  First we were after a private syndicate—just a few select mugs at as much as they were good for apiece; got at through the partnership and investment advertisements.

  Well, we began on the syndicate, but somehow the syndicate wouldn’t begin on us. We got out ads solid-lookin’ enough for the Bank of England, but at first we didn’t get a bite. Nibbles, yes; miserable nibbles. Old fogies would come in and listen to it all, and take a peep at Burridge and his stinks, and say the bricks were wonderful, and the bit o’ wood was marvellous, and the leather amazing, and the bottles that life-like they almost smelt of whisky; and then they’d say they’d think over it, and they’d go fading out on to the stairs and never be heard of again.

  Stibbins was getting short and rusty about the whole thing, and kept throwing up to us the money we were all costing him for the new clothes he’d rigged us out with, and all that. And then I had a good idea. So I knocked up a little ad like this:—

  A unique opportunity of lucrative investment in the greatest scientific discovery of the age, with an important directorship, is open to a woman who is able to exercise independent judgment untrammelled by the “advice” or other patronage of the duller sex.—Address, COMMERCIAL, 5, Duffield Court, Broad Street.

  That went into a suffragette paper, and it rather fetched ’em—quite a number. The trouble was we had so many call that were all ready for the directorship but wanted to leave out the investment. And then all of a sudden we had a double event in one day. Old Burridge invented his myxomycetes and Miss Agatha Gunter answered the ad.

  We got the invention first. Stibbins and I were sittin’ in the office, when suddenly there came a frightful yell from the stink-shop. We thought old Burridge had caught fire at last or something, and rushed at the door in a bunch. But there was the old frump dancing and waving his arms like mad, and staring at a little gruelly splash on a bit o’ glass lyin’ on his bench.

  “Got it!” shouts the old boy. “Organic life! Synthetic myxomycetes! Done it! Me! Alone! Hooray!”

  And before we could make up our minds whether to knock him down or tie him up, he burst into a gabble of explanations.

  “Oh, stow the pigeon-English,” says Stibbins; “what is it in plain Whitechapel?”

  “Myxomycetes,” says Burridge; “protozoa, the lowest form of animal life—made it synthetically! It’s quite a new species, too—stronger in growth and assimilation than any of ’em, and grows with the damp of the atmosphere alone. Look here that splash on the glass is dormant, and ready to throw out spores; but look at this!”

  He scraped up a bit with a knife, and put it on a piece o’ firewood; and sure enough it settled down in a sort of blob and then began spreading out little points
very slowly all round.

  We watched the points creep out over the wood, hardly moving; and then Burridge dipped a little glass rod in water and let fall a drop or two in the wood just by the side of the jelly. The moment it reached the damp it rushed ahead like one o’clock; ran all along the bit of wood and spread round it, till it was covered.

  “It’s eating that wood up,” says Burridge and he dropped it into a jar. Sure enough presently it all sort of melted down in the bottom of the jar and there was no wood there—one o’ the rummest things I ever saw. Creepy, too, to think that messy stuff was really alive and calmly lunchin’ off our firewood in that gluttonous way.

  “It’s a most amazingly vigorous species,” says Burridge, grinning with triumph all over. “Nothing like it in the natural protozoa. Anything that’s really wet it gobbles up like lightning. Look at this.”

  He tore off a bit from a duster, and dipped it in water. Then he picked up another bit of the jelly on the knife and wiped it on the wet rag. It just rushed all over that rag, and in two seconds it was another lump of jelly, which he dropped into the jar on top of the first.

  “You see,” says Burridge, “in the glass jar it goes dormant. So it would on metal; it only grows on what it can eat, and it only eats organic matter or its derivatives. Warmth makes it grow and eat quicker, so does darkness. Dryness stops most species, and perhaps absolute dryness would stop this; but as it is, the ordinary moisture of the atmosphere keeps it going, and any greater moisture—well, you’ve seen what that does.”