“My round, chaps!”
The speaker was tall, handsome, rugged; from his built-up shoes to his shoulder bag he was every inch an English gentleman.
“Smythe, my dear fellow!” the Major cried. “We’d given you up for dead!”
“And well you might,” said Smythe. “It happened to me once, did death—you may remember my telling you about that hideous affair of the haunted percolator? For a short while, then, I was clinically dead. It was nothing. There are things worse than death, worse by far . . .”
“Murrage’s keg beer, for example?” suggested Carruthers.
The subtlety of this hint was not lost on Smythe, who took the empty glasses to the bar and in a mere twenty minutes returned with three beers and a stiff gin-and-tonic for himself.
“Cheers,” said the Major. “Now where have you been these last three months? Living abroad with some woman, I suppose, as you did for half a year after laying the ghost in that ‘Astral Buffalo’ case? Ah, you randy devil—”
“Not so,” Smythe said with a laugh. “For one reason and another I’ve merely been visiting a different class of pub, a different sort of bar, as shortly you will understand . . .”
“Well, dammit man, what was this case?” the Major boomed. “What was so much more terrible than death? You’ve changed, you know. The experience has set its mark upon you . . . by God! Your hair! I’ve only just noticed it’s gone white!”
“Just a little bleach, my dear Major—I fancied myself as a blond. But let me tell you of the case which must rank as one of the most baffling and sinister of my career—an appalling case of what I can only call occult possession.”
“We had that last year,” said Carruthers, scratching his head. “That business of the giant bat of Sumatra: or was it the giant cat? One frightful influence from beyond the world we know is very like another, I find.”
Smythe settled himself more comfortably on his favorite stool, smiled, and opened a packet of potato chips in the characteristic manner which told his friends that another fascinating narration was on its way, and that they were to buy drinks for the raconteur all the rest of that evening.
“As you know, I’ve gained some small reputation in matters of detection, the occult and the odd tricks of the mind—” Here Smythe distributed the customary business cards and mentioned the 10 percent discount he offered to friends—“And so it was that Mrs. Pring brought her terrible problem to me, on the recommendation of a bosom friend who’d heard of my ad in the Sunday Times color supplement. Mrs. Pring—”
“Ah, an incurable old womanizer,” wheezed Hyphen-Jones. “Did Mr. Pring find you out?”
Smythe gave him an austere glance, and coldly ate another chip. “Mrs. Pring is a widow of forty-six, whose home is in the moderately appalling seaside resort of Dash. She lets out one room of her house under the usual bed-and-breakfast terms. Personally I think the enterprise would be more successful if she did not apparently stuff the mattress with breakfast cereal and serve its former contents in a bowl each morning, but this is to anticipate. The story Mrs. Pring told to me three months ago was, like so many of the tales told in my office, strange, terrible and unique. Over the years, you see, my client had noticed a curious statistical trend as regards the people who stayed with her. She keeps a very detailed set of books, two in fact, and there was no possibility that her memory could be deceiving her. In brief: many gentlemen (to use her term) had undergone bed and breakfast at Mrs. Pring’s and for some reason which I find inexplicable had returned in subsequent years. Some women did the same: the odd point which caught Mrs. Pring’s attention was that young or even relatively young women tended not to return. In fact they tended to leave abruptly, with various noises of embarrassment and outrage, after no more than one night in the room. That Mrs. Pring took several years to notice the phenomenon is perhaps best explained by her delicate state of health, which is only sustained by almost daily trips to buy medicinal liquids not sold by chemists. That Mrs. Pring was properly alarmed by her discovery is shown by the fact that for a whole year she actually provided butter rather than margarine with the breakfast toast: it made no difference. What d’you make of that?”
“I suppose,” said Carruthers slowly, “that some terrible tragedy had been enacted in that fatal room?”
Smythe looked startled, and dropped a chip. “Well—yes, actually. However did you guess?”
“My dear fellow, I’ve been listening to your curious and unique tales for upwards of eight years.”
“Well, never mind that. Mrs. Pring evolved a theory that that all too unyielding mattress was infested, not with elementals as in that fearsome Wriggling Eiderdown case but with what in her rustic way she chose to call incests. As she put it, ‘What I thought was, those bleeding things might be partial to young ladies what has nice soft skin . . . anyway, I reckoned I’d better have a kip-down there meself and see if anything comes crawling-like, bedbuggers or flippin’ fleas or whatever—’ With uncommon fortitude, Mrs. Pring did indeed pass a night in this spare room of hers. Her account of it is very confused indeed, but she remarked several times that something had indeed come a-crawling . . . but as to its nature and actions, she continually lapsed into a state of incoherence and embarrassment. The same embarrassment, you may note, with which her lady lodgers would so hurriedly leave.”
The Major said: “And the next morning, I suppose, she came straight to you and asked for something to be done about it?”
Smythe studied each of his friends in turn, until Hyphen-Jones misinterpreted the dramatic pause and scurried to buy more drinks. “In point of fact,” Smythe said quietly, “she first attempted to investigate the phenomenon more closely by sleeping in that room every night for the following six months. It seems that no other manifestation took place during all that time, as she informed me with some suppressed emotion; after a while she dismissed the experience as hallucination and thought little more of it until the first week of the new holiday season—when no less than three young women stayed a night and left without eating the margarine they’d paid for. One of them murmured something incoherent to Mrs. Pring about a ghost that needed to be laid. It was then that Mrs. Pring decided something must be done: and after checking that my fee was tax-deductible, she placed the matter in my hands.”
“Why d’you suppose the Pring female only saw whatever-it-was the one time?” inquired Carruthers.
“My theory has to take into account the fact that this was a chauvinist haunting, as you might put it, with a preference for young ladies, quite contrary to the Sex Discrimination Act. The inference would seem to be that Mrs. Pring, who is a lady of what is called a certain age, very rapidly lost her attraction for—let’s call it the manifestation. Picture her as a glass of that repellent keg beer: one sip was quite enough for any person of taste.”
“I’m beginning to get a vague but quite monstrous notion of what you’re leading up to . . .” the Major observed slowly.
“It’s worse than you think,” Smythe assured him. “I know I shall never be the same again after the night I spent in that room.”
“But—” said Hyphen-Jones querulously, before Smythe silenced him with a single charismatic gesture which tipped half a pint of beer into his lap.
“An exorcism seemed to be in order,” said Smythe, “but first I had to know what I was up against. You recall that ghastly business of the Squeaking Room in Frewin Hall—the exorcism had no effect whatever upon those mice. When closely questioned, Mrs. Pring retreated into blushes and giggles: I saw I’d have to keep a vigil there myself, and see what astral impressions my finely trained nervous system might not glean from the surroundings. Thus I traveled first-class to Dash, and Mrs. Pring accompanied me back in (I’m glad to relate) a second-class carriage. The resort was as depressing as I’d foreseen, rather like an extensive penal colony by the sea; Mrs. Pring’s house corresponded roughly to the maximum security block. Anyway, I steeled myself against the appalling Presence which pervaded the pl
ace—chiefly a smell of boiled cabbage—and readied myself to pass a night within the haunted room. I assured Mrs. Pring that I never failed . . . have you ever known me tell the story of a case in which I failed?”
Hyphen-Jones looked up again. “What about that time when—ouch!” Some paranormal impulse had helped the rest of his beer to find its way into his lap.
“So I assured her, as I said, that I never failed—ah, little did I know—and that whatever dwelt in that room was as good as exorcized. I fancied, you know, that she looked regretful—as though admitting to herself that a favorite aunt who’d committed several chainsaw massacres should probably be locked up, but admitting it regretfully. So, one by one, I ascended the creaking stairs to that room of dread. The dying sun peered through its single window in a flood of grimy yet eldritch radiance. But there was nothing sinister about the place save the peeling wallpaper, whose green-and-purple pattern set me brooding for some reason on detached retinas. I waited there, as darkness fell, all lights extinguished to minimize the etheric interference . . .”
“And what happened, old boy?” cried Carruthers. “What happened to you?”
“Precisely what I’d expected: nothing at all. Whatever haunted that room was staying a male chauvinist pig to the very last. The only moment when a thrill went through me was when I heard a clock strike midnight far out across the town—the witching hour—the moment when my consultation rates switched from time-and-a-half to double time. Presently dawn came, and this being the seaside resort of Dash it wasn’t even a proper rosy dawn: more like suet pudding rising in the east. An appalling place.
“Over breakfast, when not pitting my teeth against Mrs. Pring’s famous vintage toast, I questioned her closely about the room’s history. As you know, we occult sleuths can deduce a great deal from the answers to innocuous-seeming questions; after some routine inquiries about whether, for example, she regularly celebrated the Black Mass in the room in question, I subtly asked her, ‘Mrs. Pring, has some terrible tragedy been enacted in that fatal room?’ She denied this loudly and angrily, saying, ‘What kind of a house do you think I bleeding well keep here? I’ve had no complaints and no-one’s ever snuffed it on my premises, not even Mr. Brosnan what had the food-poisoning, which he must have got from chips or summat brought in against me house rules . . . you’ll not get no food-poisoning from my bacon-an-eggs, sir.”
“I was tolerably well convinced that I wouldn’t, since after noting how many times Mrs. Pring dropped the bacon on the floor I had taken the precaution of secreting mine under the table-cloth (where I was interested to find several other rashers left by previous visitors). After a short silence during which she tested the temperature of the teapot with one finger and apparently found it satisfactory, Mrs. Pring added: ‘Of course there was always poor Mr. Nicolls all those years ago.’
“We occult sleuths are trained to seize instantly on apparent trivia. Casually I threw out the remark, ‘What about poor Mr. Nicolls?’
“ ‘Oh, ’e had a terrible accident, he did. Oh, it was awful, sir. What a lucky thing he wasn’t married. What happened, you see, he caught himself in the door somehow, which I could understand, him being clumsy by nature and having such a— Well, lucky he wasn’t married is what I always said, and of course ’e wouldn’t get married after that. I heard tell he went into the civil service instead. —Oooh sir, you don’t think—?’
“ ‘I do indeed think precisely that, Mrs. Pring,” I told her solemnly. We occult sleuths are, as you can imagine, sufficiently accustomed to such phenomena as disembodied hands or heads haunting some ill-favored spot, and I’ve even encountered one disembodied foot—you remember it, the ‘Howling Bunion’ case, which drove three Archbishops to the asylum. I conjectured now that the unfortunate Mr. Nicolls, though it seemed that most of him still lived, was a man of parts and haunted Mrs. Pring’s room still. Upon hearing my theory, the landlady seemed less shocked and horrified than I would have expected. ‘Fancy that,’ she remarked with a look of peculiar vacancy, and added, ‘I ought to ’ave recognized him, at that.’ I did not press my questioning any further.”
“What a frightful story,” shivered Carruthers. “To think of that poor Mr. Nicolls, never able to know the pleasure of women again.”
“In that,” said Smythe in a strange voice, “I share his fate.”
There was a tremulous pause. Smythe licked his lips, squared his shoulders. “I must have a trickle,” he remarked, and departed the room amid whispered comments and speculations as to whether or not there was something odd in the way he walked.
“My strategy,” Smythe continued presently, “was to lure the manifestation into the open so it might be exorcized by the Ritual of the Astral League. You need damnably supple limbs for that ritual, but it has great power over elementals, manifestations and parking meters. But how to lure this abhuman entity into sight? Mrs. Pring no longer had charms for it, which was understandable, and I could hardly ask some innocent young woman to expose herself to what I now suspected to lurk in that room.
“In the end I saw there was only one thing to be done. During the day I made certain far from usual purchases in the wholly God-forsaken town of Dash, and also paid a visit to a local hairdresser’s. You remarked, did you not, my dear Major, that I’d gone ash-blond with fright? I cleared the furniture from that bedroom and made my preparations—having first instructed Mrs. Pring to remain downstairs and presented her with a bottle of her favorite medicine to ensure she did so. Now the water in that town, I suspected, was not pure: instead I consecrated a quantity of light ale and with it marked out my usual protective pentacle. This was a mark-IX Carnacki pentacle, guaranteed impervious to any materialized ectoplasmic phenomenon as specified in British Standard 3704.
“In the early evening I carried out the last stages of my plan, undressing and changing into the clothes I’d bought amid some small embarrassment. There was a rather exquisite form-fitting black dress with its skirt slashed almost to the hip; beneath this dress, by certain stratagems well known to us occult consultants, I contrived a magnificent bosom for myself. I need scarcely trouble you with the minor details of the sensual perfume guaranteed to send any male bar the unfortunate Mr. Nicolls into instant tachycardia, or the pastel lipstick which so beautifully complemented my eyes, or the sheer black stockings which I drew over my carefully shaven legs, or . . .”
“All right, all right,” said the Major, gulping hastily at his beer. “I think we get the general idea.”
“Be like that if you must. I waited there in the huge pentacle, in a room lit only by the flickering candles I’d acquired from the occult-supplies counter at the local Woolworth’s. As I stood there I could see myself in the mirror screwed to one wall (presumably because Mrs. Pring felt her guests might well smuggle out any six-by-four-foot mirror that wasn’t screwed down): I was magnificent, I tell you, a vision of—oh, very well, if you insist.
“I waited there with the tension mounting, waiting for whatever might (so to speak) come, and the candles gradually burnt down. The room filled with bodings of approaching abomination, as of a dentist’s waiting room. Suddenly I realized there was a strange luminescence about me, a very pale fog of light that filled the air, as though Mrs. Pring were boiling vast quantities of luminous paint in the kitchen below. With fearful slowness the light coagulated, condensed, contracted toward a point in the air some eighteen inches from the floor; abruptly it took definite shape and I saw the throbbing, ectoplasmic form of the thing that had haunted this room for so long. It was larger than I’d expected, perhaps nine inches from end to end; it wavered this way and that in the air as though seeking something in a curious one-eyed manner; the thought occurred to me that it had formed atop the bed and centrally positioned itself, or at least would have done so had I not previously removed the bed. Even as this notion flared in my mind like a flashbulb, the Thing appeared to realize there was nothing to support it now: it flopped quite solidly and audibly to the floor.”
&
nbsp; “Audibly?” Hyphen-Jones quavered. “With a thud, or a clatter, or—?”
Smythe darted an impatient glance at him. “With the sound of a large frankfurter falling from a height of eighteen inches onto wooden floorboards, if you wish to be precise. The horror of it! These solid manifestations are the most terrible and inarguable of spiritual perils—it’s infinitely easier to deal with an astral entity which can’t respond with a sudden blow to your solar plexus. And worst of all, something which might have sent my hair white if I hadn’t already dyed it this rather fetching color, the Thing had now fallen inside the pentacle, with me! Again, imagine the horror of it, the feeling of spiritual violation: already my outer defenses had been penetrated. The ab-human embodiment reared up, questing this way and that like a cobra readying its strike—and then it began to move my way. I utterly refuse to describe the manner in which it moved, but I believe there are caterpillars which do the same thing. If so, they have no shame. I knew that a frightful peril was coming for me—it’s always horribly dangerous when something materializes inside your very defences, though this wasn’t perhaps as bad as in that Phantom Trumpeter case: you remember it, where the spectral elephant took solid form within my all too small pentacle? But in this particular situation I felt I was safe from the worst, at least.”
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