In the Dark

by E. Nesbit

  ‘I see,’ said Doctor Jones. ‘Well, you’d better rouse the house and fetch his own doctor. It’s heart failure, of course, but I daresay he’d like to sign the certificate himself.’

  ‘Can nothing be done?’ said Parker, much affected.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dr Jones, ‘It’s the common lot. You’ll have to look out for another situation.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Parker; ‘he told me only last night what I was to do in case of anything happening to him. I wonder if he had any idea?’

  ‘Some premonition, perhaps,’ the doctor corrected.

  The funeral was a very quiet one. So the late Professor Boyd Thompson had decreed in his will. He had arranged all details. The body was to be clothed in flannel, placed in an open coffin covered only with a linen sheet, and laid in the family mausoleum, a moss-grown building in the midst of a little park which surrounded Boyd Grange, the birthplace of the Boyd Thompsons. A little property in Sussex it was. The Professor sometimes went there for weekends. He had left this property to Lucilla, with a last love-letter, in which he begged her to give his body the hospitality of the death-house, now hers with the rest of the estate. To Parker he left an annuity of two hundred pounds, on the condition that he should visit and enter the mausoleum once in every twenty-four hours for fourteen days after the funeral.

  To this end the late Professor’s solicitor decided that Parker had better reside at Boyd Grange for the said fortnight, and Parker, whose nerves seemed to be shaken, petitioned for company. This made easy the arrangement which the solicitor desired to make – of a witness to the carrying out by Parker of the provisions of the dead man’s will. The solicitor’s clerk was quite good company, and arm-in-arm with him Parker paid his first visit to the mausoleum. The little building stands in a glade of evergreen oaks. The trees are old and thick, and the narrow door is deep in shadow even on the sunniest day. Parker went to the mausoleum, peered through its square grating, but he did not go in. Instead, he listened, and his ears were full of silence.

  ‘He’s dead, right enough,’ he said, with a doubtful glance at his companion.

  ‘You ought to go in, oughtn’t you?’ said the solicitor’s clerk.

  ‘Go in yourself, if you like, Mr Pollack,’ said Parker, suddenly angry; ‘anyone who likes can go in, but it won’t be me. If he was alive, it ’ud be different. I’d have done anything for him. But I ain’t going in among all them dead and mouldering Thompsons. See? If we both say I did, it’ll be just the same as me doing it.’

  ‘So it will,’ said the solicitor’s clerk; ‘but where do I come in?’

  Parker explained to him where he came in, to their mutual consent.

  ‘Right you are,’ said the clerk; ‘on those terms I’m fly. And if we both say you did it, we needn’t come to the beastly place again,’ he added, shivering and glancing over his shoulder at the door with the grating.

  ‘No more we need,’ said Parker.

  Behind the bars of the narrow door lay deeper shadows than those of the ilexes outside. And in the blackest of the shadow lay a man whose every sense was intensified as though by a magic potion. For when the Professor swallowed the five variants of his great discovery, each acted as he had expected it to act. But the union of the five vehicles conveying the drug to the nerves, which served his five senses, had paralysed every muscle. His hearing, taste, touch, scent, and sight were intensified a thousandfold – as they had been in the individual experiments – but the man who felt all this exaggerated increase of sensation was powerless as a cat under kurali. He could not raise a finger, stir an eyelash. More, he could not breathe, nor did his body advise him of any need of breathing. And he had lain thus immobile and felt his body slowly grow cold, had heard in thunder the voices of Parker and the doctor; had felt the enormous hands of those who made his death-toilet, had smelt intolerably the camphor and lavender that they laid round him in the narrow, black bed; had tasted the mingled flavours of the drug and its five mediums; and, in an ecstasy of magnified sensation, had made the lonely train journey which coffins make, and known himself carried into the mausoleum and left there alone. And every sense was intensified, even his sense of time, so that it seemed to him that he had lain there for many years. And the effect of the drugs showed no sign of any diminution or reaction. Why had he not left directions for the injection of the antidote? It was one of those slips which wreck campaigns, cause the discovery of hidden crimes. It was a slip, and he had made it. He had thought of death, but in all the results he had anticipated, death’s semblance had found no place. Well, he had made his bed, and he must lie on it. This narrow bed, whose scent of clean oak and French polish was distinct among the musty, intolerable odours of the charnel house.

  It was perhaps twenty hours that he had lain there, powerless, immobile, listening to the sounds of unexplained movements about him, when he felt with joy, almost like delirium, a faint quivering in the eyelids.

  They had closed his eyes, and till now, they had remained closed. Now, with an effort as of one who lifts a gravestone, he raised his eyelids. They closed again quickly, for the roof of the vault, at which he gazed earnestly, was alive with monsters; spiders, earwigs, crawling beetles, and flies, far too small to have been perceived by normal eyes, spread giant forms over him. He closed his eyes and shuddered. It felt like a shudder, but no one who had stood beside him could have noted any movement.

  It was then that Parker came – and went.

  Professor Boyd Thompson heard Parker’s words, and lay listening to the thunder of Parker’s retreating feet. He tried to move – to call out. But he could not. He lay there helpless, and somehow he thought of the dark end of the laboratory, where the assistant before leaving had turned out the electric lights.

  He had nothing but his thoughts. He thought how he would lie there, and die there. The place was sequestered; no one passed that way. Parker had failed him, and the end was not hard to picture. He might recover all his faculties, might be able to get up, able to scream, to shout, to tear at the bars. The bars were strong, and Parker would not come again. Well, he would try to face with a decent bravery whatever had to be faced.

  Time, measureless, spread round. It seemed as though someone had stopped all the clocks in the world, as though he were not in time but in eternity. Only by the waxing and waning light he knew of the night and the day.

  His brain was weary with the effort to move, to speak, to cry out. He lay, informed with something like despair – or fortitude. And then Parker came again. And this time a key grated in the lock. The Professor noted with rapture that it sounded no louder than a key should sound, turned in a lock that was rusty. Nor was the voice other than he had been used to hear it, when he was man alive and Parker’s master. And—

  ‘You can go in, of course, if you wish it, Miss,’ said Parker disapprovingly; ‘but it’s not what I should advise myself. For me it’s different,’ he added on a sudden instinct of self-preservation; ‘I’ve got to go in. Every day for a fortnight,’ he added, pitying himself.

  ‘I will go in, thank you,’ said a voice. ‘Yes, give me the candle, please. And you need not wait. I will lock the door when I come out.’ Thus the voice spoke. And the voice was Lucilla’s.

  In all his life the Professor had never feared death or its trappings. Neither its physical repulsiveness, nor the supernatural terrors which cling about it, had he either understood or tolerated. But now, in one little instant, he did understand.

  He heard Lucilla come in. A light held near him shone warm and red through his closed eyelids. And he knew that he had only to unclose those eyelids to see her face bending over him. And he could unclose them. Yet he would not. He lay there, still and straight in his coffin, and life swept through him in waves of returning power. Yet he lay like death. For he said, or something in him said:

  ‘She believes me dead. If I open my eyes it will be like a dead man looking at her. If I move it will be a dead man moving under her eyes. People have gone mad for less. L
ie still, lie still,’ he told himself; ‘take any risks yourself. There must be none for her.’

  She had taken the candle away, set it down somewhere at a distance, and now she was kneeling beside him and her hand was under his head. He knew he could raise his arm and clasp her – and Parker would come back perhaps, when she did not return to the house, come back to find a man in grave-clothes, clasping a mad woman. He lay still. Then her kisses and tears fell on his face, and she murmured broken words of love and longing. But he lay still. At any cost he must lie still. Even at the cost of his own sanity, his own life. And the warmth of her hand under his head, her face against his, her kisses, her tears, set his blood flowing evenly and strongly. Her other arm lay on his breast, softly pressing over his heart. He would not move. He would be strong. If he were to be saved, it must be by some other way, not this.

  Suddenly tears and kisses ceased; her every breath seemed to have stopped with these. She had drawn away from him. She spoke. Her voice came from above him. She was standing up.

  ‘Arthur!’ she said. ‘Arthur!’ Then he opened his eyes, the narrowest chink. But he could not see her. Only he knew she was moving towards the door. There had been a new quality in her tone, a thrill of fear, or hope was it? or at least of uncertainty? Should he move; should he speak? He dared not. He knew too well the fear that the normal human being has of death and the grave, the fear transcending love, transcending reason. Her voice was further away now. She was by the door. She was leaving him. If he let her go, it was an end of hope for him. If he did not let her go, an end, perhaps, of reason, for her. No.

  ‘Arthur,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe … I believe you can hear me. I’m going to get a doctor. If you can speak, speak to me.’

  Her speaking ended, cut off short as a cord is cut by a knife. He did not speak. He lay in conscious, forced rigidity.

  ‘Speak if you can,’ she implored, ‘just one word!’

  Then he said, very faintly, very distinctly, in a voice that seemed to come from a great way off, ‘Lucilla!’

  And at the word she screamed aloud pitifully, and leapt for the entrance; and he heard the rustle of her crape in the narrow door. Then he opened his eyes wide, and raised himself on his elbow. Very weak he was, and trembling exceedingly. To his ears her scream held the note of madness. Vainly he had refrained. Selfishly he had yielded. The cold hand of a mortal faintness clutched at his heart.

  ‘I don’t want to live now,’ he told himself, and fell back in the straight bed.

  Her arms were round him.

  ‘I’m going to get help,’ she said, her lips to his ear; ‘brandy and things. Only I came back. I didn’t want you to think I was frightened. Oh, my dear! thank God, thank God!’ He felt her kisses even through the swooning mist that swirled about him. Had she really fled in terror? He never knew. He knew that she had come back to him.

  That is the real, true, and authentic narrative of the events which caused Professor Boyd Thompson to abandon a brilliant career, to promise anything that Lucilla might demand, and to devote himself entirely to a gentlemanly and unprofitable farming, and to his wife. From the point of view of the scientific world it is a sad ending to much promise, but at any rate there are two happy people hand in hand at the story’s ending.

  There is no doubt that for several years Professor Boyd Thompson had had enough of science, and, by a natural revulsion, flung himself into the full tide of commonplace sentiment. But genius, like youth, cannot be denied. And I, for one, am doubtful whether the Professor’s renunciation of research will be a lasting one. Already I have heard whispers of a laboratory which is being built on the house, beyond the billiard room.

  But I am inclined to believe the rumours which assert that, for the future, his research will take the form of extending paths already well trodden; that he will refrain from experiments with unknown drugs, and those dreadful researches which tend to merge the chemist and biologist in the alchemist and the magician. And he certainly does not intend to experiment further on the nerves of any living thing, even his own. The Professor had already done enough work to make the reputation of half-a-dozen ordinary scientists. He may be pardoned if he rests on his laurels, entwining them, to some extent, with roses.

  The bottle containing the drug from the South Seas was knocked down on the day of his death and swept up in bits by the laboratory boy. It is a curious fact that the Professor has wholly forgotten the formulae of his great discovery, the notes of which he destroyed just before his experiment which so nearly was his last. This is a great satisfaction to his wife, and possibly to the Professor. But of this I cannot be sure; the scientific spirit survives much.

  To the unscientific reader the strangest part of this story will perhaps be the fact that Parker is still with his old master, a wonderful example of the perfect butler. Professor Boyd Thompson was able to forgive Parker because he understood him. And he learned to understand Parker in those moments of agony, when his keen intellect and his awakened heart taught him, through his love for Lucilla, the depth of that gulf of fear which lies between the quick and the dead.

  THE HAUNTED HOUSE

  It was by the merest accident that Desmond ever went to the Haunted House. He had been away from England for six years, and the nine months leave taught him how easily one drops out of one’s place.

  He had taken rooms at The Greyhound before he found that there was no reason why he should stay in Elmstead rather than in any other of London’s dismal outposts. He wrote to all the friends whose addresses he could remember, and settled himself to await their answers.

  He wanted someone to talk to, and there was no one. Meantime he lounged on the horsehair sofa with the advertisements, and his pleasant grey eyes followed line after line with intolerable boredom. Then, suddenly, ‘Halloa!’ he said, and sat up. This is what he read:

  A HAUNTED HOUSE. Advertiser is anxious to have phenomena investigated. Any properly-accredited investigator will be given full facilities. Address, by letter only, Wildon Prior, 237, Museum Street, London.

  ‘That’s rum!’ he said. Wildon Prior had been the best wicket-keeper in his club. It wasn’t a common name. Anyway, it was worth trying, so he sent off a telegram.

  WILDON PRIOR, 237, MUSEUM STREET, LONDON. MAY I COME TO YOU FOR A DAY OR TWO AND SEE THE GHOST? – WILLIAM DESMOND

  On returning the next day from a stroll there was an orange envelope on the wide Pembroke table in his parlour.

  DELIGHTED – EXPECT YOU TODAY. BOOK TO CRITTENDEN FROM CHARING CROSS. WIRE TRAIN – WILDON PRIOR, ORMEHURST RECTORY, KENT.

  ‘So that’s all right,’ said Desmond, and went off to pack his bag and ask in the bar for a timetable. ‘Good old Wildon; it will be ripping, seeing him again.’

  A curious little omnibus, rather like a bathing-machine, was waiting outside Crittenden Station, and its driver, a swarthy, blunt-faced little man, with liquid eyes, said, ‘You a friend of Mr Prior, sir?’, shut him up in the bathing-machine, and banged the door on him. It was a very long drive, and less pleasant than it would have been in an open carriage.

  The last part of the journey was through a wood; then came a churchyard and a church, and the bathing-machine turned in at a gate under heavy trees and drew up in front of a white house with bare, gaunt windows.

  ‘Cheerful place, upon my soul!’ Desmond told himself, as he tumbled out of the back of the bathing-machine.

  The driver set his bag on the discoloured doorstep and drove off. Desmond pulled a rusty chain, and a big-throated bell jangled above his head.

  Nobody came to the door, and he rang again. Still nobody came, but he heard a window thrown open above the porch. He stepped back on to the gravel and looked up.

  A young man with rough hair and pale eyes was looking out. Not Wildon, nothing like Wildon. He did not speak, but he seemed to be making signs; and the signs seemed to mean, ‘Go away!’

  ‘I came to see Mr Prior,’ said Desmond. Instantly and softly the window closed.


  ‘Is it a lunatic asylum I’ve come to by chance?’ Desmond asked himself, and pulled again at the rusty chain.

  Steps sounded inside the house, the sound of boots on stone. Bolts were shot back, the door opened, and Desmond, rather hot and a little annoyed, found himself looking into a pair of very dark, friendly eyes, and a very pleasant voice said: ‘Mr Desmond, I presume? Do come in and let me apologise.’

  The speaker shook him warmly by the hand, and he found himself following down a flagged passage a man of more than mature age, well dressed, handsome, with an air of competence and alertness which we associate with what is called ‘a man of the world’. He opened a door and led the way into a shabby, bookish, leathery room.

  ‘Do sit down, Mr Desmond.’

  ‘This must be the uncle, I suppose,’ Desmond thought, as he fitted himself into the shabby, perfect curves of the armchair. ‘How’s Wildon?’ he asked, aloud. ‘All right, I hope?’

  The other man looked at him. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, doubtfully.

  ‘I was asking how Wildon is?’

  ‘I am quite well, I thank you,’ said the other man, with some formality.

  ‘I beg your pardon’ – it was now Desmond’s turn to say it – ‘I did not realise that your name might be Wildon, too. I meant Wildon Prior.’

  ‘I am Wildon Prior,’ said the other, ‘and you, I presume, are the expert from the Psychical Society?’

  ‘Good Lord, no!’ said Desmond. ‘I’m Wildon Prior’s friend, and, of course, there must be two Wildon Priors.’

  ‘You sent the telegram? You are Mr Desmond? The Psychical Society were to send an expert, and I thought—’

  ‘I see,’ said Desmond; ‘and I thought you were Wildon Prior, an old friend of mine – a young man,’ he said, and half rose.

  ‘Now, don’t,’ said Wildon Prior. ‘No doubt it is my nephew who is your friend. Did he know you were coming? But of course he didn’t. I am wandering. But I’m exceedingly glad to see you. You will stay, will you not? If you can endure to be the guest of an old man. And I will write to Will tonight and ask him to join us.’