by Mike Ashley
“There was one thing that should have been most evident that puzzled me to the very last. I told you how I read the sign of the Pyramid; the assembly was to see a pyramid, and the true meaning of the symbol escaped me to the last moment. The old derivation from ‘up, fire,’ though false, should have set me on the track, but it never occurred to me.
“I think I need say very little more. You know we were quite helpless, even if we had foreseen what was to come. Ah, the particular place where these signs were displayed? Yes, that is a curious question. But this house is, so far as I can judge, in a pretty central situation amongst the hills; and possibly, who can say yes or no, that queer, old limestone pillar by your garden wall was a place of meeting before the Celt set foot in Britain. But there is one thing I must add: I don’t regret our inability to rescue the wretched girl. You saw the appearance of those things that gathered thick and writhed in the Bowl; you may be sure that what lay bound in the midst of them was no longer fit for earth.”
“So?” said Vaughan.
“So she passed in the Pyramid of Fire,” said Dyson, “and they passed again to the underworld, to the places beneath the hills.”
LORD SYFRET IN
THE HAUNTED CHILD
ARABELLA KENEALY
Lord Syfret isn’t a professional occult investigator—he’s more of a busybody who, because of his wealth and achievements, has become bored with his own life while developing an insatiable curiosity for the lives of others. As a result, he intrudes upon events, the more bizarre the better. He finds himself drawn to such cases by some inner feeling, suggesting that he might have an innate psychic ability, though he does not use it. The series ran in The Ludgate magazine from June 1896 to April 1897, but only seven of the eleven stories were collected in Belinda’s Beaux, published in 1897. For some reason the following story, which was the first in the series, appeared last in the book as “An Expiation.” Several of the stories are macabre but only one other, “A Beautiful Vampire,” verges on the fantastic.
Arabella Kenealy (1859–1938) was a writer and physician. She was the daughter of the celebrated, some say notorious, Irish barrister Edward Vaughan Kenealy who was dismissed from the bar because of his conduct in court. She exhibited some of her father’s inflexibility, such as her intractable view of the decline and degradation of the human race. She was an advocate of the now discredited theory of eugenics and her novel The Whips of Time (1908) explores the idea of whether one’s station in life is a result of nature or nurture. Kenealy may have had some psychic abilities herself, as recorded in her eccentric book The Human Gyroscope (1934) where she believed that, in certain conditions, she became telepathic and could sense others’ strong emotions. Just like Lord Syfret.
AT FORTY I HAD EXHAUSTED ALL THE RESOURCES OF CIVILISED LIFE. I had health, wealth, and position, yet I knew that unless I could devise some new expedient for passing time suicide would be my last sensation. As to whether suicide were justifiable or not I did not concern myself. I was bored and I did not purpose to continue being bored. Exploring my mental reserves I lighted upon a vein which, suitably worked, might profit me. I set about working it. So far I have done so successfully. Once more life is tolerable, occasionally exhilarating.
The vein is an insatiable and absorbing interest—curiosity—call it what you will—in other people’s lives. Fiction has no charm for me. I am always conscious that its personages are but printer’s ink. And I like my pages of story wet with the ink of life. I meet a man or a woman whose appearance or conditions stir me. By the expenditure of a little ingenuity, some trouble, and more or less hard cash, that person’s story lies in my hand. Aided by a staff of well-drilled agents, whose duty I have made it to shadow in one capacity or another the fortunes of such persons as roused my curiosity—I am enabled to read their stories like a book. And, I tell you, few romances approach in interest some of the realities I have thus been able to trace. My right to peer into my fellows’ lives may be denied. I myself have never considered the question. To do so amuses me. That is sanction enough for my morality.
It has occurred to me to record a few of the stories I have chanced upon. That thus set down they will interest others as they interested me who watched them as they were wrought in the forge of life I do not pretend. Yet they may serve for entertainment. As already stated my concern is purely psychological, or, if you prefer a simpler term, impertinent curiosity. With the right or wrong of things I do not meddle. Only in exceptional cases do I even trouble to put the law on the track of murder, though, in the course of their activities on my behalf, my agents should witness the commission of such a crime. For my part I prefer the delinquent to escape, that I may find, as I do, penalty closing in on him as an indirect consequence of his action, rather than that it shall take the clumsy form we dignify by the title of justice. Far crueller, subtler, and a hundredfold more fitting to a particular crime are the methods whereby time, character and circumstance enmesh the criminal. Expedient it may be to rid ourselves of the confessedly vicious. But the Powers which are moulding us to ends our finite minds have so far failed to grasp are neither assisted in their ultimate objects nor appeased in their far-reaching wrath—so to put it—by our crude expedients. The long arm of development which encompasses the human family and places effect in the unerring train of cause will find the murderer, many years it may be after we have done with him, but find him it will as inevitably as the impulse given to pool by pebble laps the shore.
How can it reach him after death? you ask. Death is but change of identity. Entities in the school of evolution pass through myriad lives in training for eternity, and the ill acts of one existence may not find expiation until a later one. A theory, you say. A theory, I admit. But I ask you for another that shall equally explain the inexplicabilities of human life. I have a story illustrative of my theory. Read into it any other interpretation that you will, and judge if it apply as mine does.
In a cottage on one of my estates a gamekeeper lived, some ten years since, with his young and pretty wife. He was middle-aged and morose, considering, as does many another, that the one cardinal virtue he practised—in his case that of honesty—absolved him from the obligation of practising any of the minor amenities and amiabilities of life. Nobody could imagine by what sorcery or fortuitous concomitance of accidents he had persuaded pretty Polly Penrose to mate with him. He had saved a certain sum of money, for to other unlovable qualities he added that of screw. Polly had swains better circumstanced than he, however, so that this offered no solution of the problem. The village wondered, chattered, and finally decided that “you could nivver calculate on what gells do, for they’re chock full o’ whimsies”; and so they let the matter drop. Cooper was but one of Polly’s “whimsies.”
It is probable I should never have concerned myself with Polly’s affairs had I not one day come upon her crying her eyes out in a wood. On seeing me, she blushed and stole away. Matters just then were dull with me. I had no other case on hand; and, without anticipating much result, idly determined to trace the cause of Polly’s tears. I had, among my agents, a girl of about her age and temperament; and, putting her to lodge in the village, she soon made Polly’s acquaintance. It came out then that Polly had married for pique. There was a certain stalwart sweetheart of hers—another of my keepers—of whom she was fond, but he rousing her jealousy by attention to a rival, in a fit of temper she accepted Cooper. To make a long story short—for this is but a preface—Polly and her lover made it up again too late, for Polly was then Mrs. Cooper.
Polly was a good girl, and I do not believe Cooper had any substantial reason for complaint, as she saw Dell but rarely. But she grew pallid and depressed. Occasionally she was seen with Dell. The circumstances reaching Cooper’s ears, with doubtless some embellishment, there was trouble in the cottage. Cooper even went so far as to strike her. In her fear and agitation—the poor girl was soon to be a mother—she fled to Dell.
Cooper, following, found her in a shed near
the latter’s cottage. From words the men passed to blows, and eventually Dell struck Cooper over the head with the butt-end of his gun. Whether he meant murder or not, who can say? but a long acquaintance with the poor fellow makes me confident the impulse was momentary and uncontrollable. But murder it turned out. Cooper’s skull was fractured and he died in a few hours.
Dell made no effort to escape. His one fear seems to have been for Polly. He remained with her in the cottage, soothing and re-assuring her till he was handcuffed and taken to gaol. I did all I could on his behalf. I even had the gaol-lock tampered with. I had an instinct of what would happen should his case come to trial, and hanging was the last death for the fine young fellow he was.
I was a magistrate and could easily have contrived his escape. But the blockhead would not take his liberty. He could not now marry Polly he said, and he did not care for life.
A thick-skulled jury, directed by a judge who on the Bench was as keen a stickler for the proprieties as off the Bench he was obtuse about them, put the worst—and, I believe, the false—construction on Dell’s and Polly’s fondness. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Under the circumstances, it was a monstrous sentence. There had been assuredly no premeditation, and his provocation was great. We petitioned the Home Secretary; we petitioned Parliament. We might have spared our signatures and ink. When Dell’s time came he was hanged. And now comes the gist of my story.
I filled up the places left vacant by Dell and his victim, putting in two keepers from a distance. There was a strong local feeling against the occupation of either of the cottages. Presently it was rumoured that the shed wherein the murder had occurred was haunted. But the new keepers, unaffected by the tragedy which to them was merely hearsay, pooh-poohed the rumour.
Curiously enough, the wife of one turned out to be a distant cousin of Dell’s. She was a buxom person, strong-nerved and braced with common sense. She scoffed at ghost-talk.
“Depend on it, your lordship,” she said once to me, “there’s a deal more to be afeart on in the livin’ than the dead; and as long as it’s noboddy comin’ to meddle wi’ Johnson’s belongins, why, let the poor things, if things there be, come an’ go as it pleases ’em.”
I mention this to free my story from an implication to which it may presently seem open. Mrs. Johnson was as unimpressionable a woman as could be and was as little affected by the talk of ghosts as she would have been by their apparition.
Now the ghost which was said to walk and to have been seen by more than one person, was not, as I have gathered is the way of ghosts, the shade of the murdered man, but that of his murderer. All who had caught the fleeting glimpse—which is as much as the ghost-seer generally permits himself—agreed that the apparition haunting the wood-shed was Dell’s. Round and round in a restricted circle, skirting the space whereon a ghastly form had stretched, the ghost was seen to pass. Its head was bent, its face leaned down. Its eyes stared, frozen with horror. Moans and sighs of the direst distress were heard to issue from the shed. But the man from whom I had a description, a tramp who, unwitting of its reputation, had stolen there one rainy evening for the purpose of a night’s lodging, described the thing he saw as mute and noiseless, making a dumb and ceaseless circuit of the floor. To him the circuit taken by the apparition was but a stretch of dusty boards, but the stark horror in the shadow’s eyes told of some ghastly visibility.
The man was green with fright. He had lain there staring nearly all the night, afraid to move, afraid almost to breathe, lest he should turn the horror of the eyes upon himself. He painted in the vivid speech of panic the curious effect of morning: how as the light grew, it left less and still less of the apparition visible, how from being something luminous against the darkness it passed into a thin translucent shade against the light, how the outlines slowly faded and the form was lost, yet he could see it whirling like a grey smoke round and round six feet of floor. When the sun came up it slipped away as mist slips into air. In the morning when the man was brought to me he was piebald. The hair and beard of one side had gone white in the night.
A time came when the ghost was seen no more. The sighs and moanings ceased. Still the shed lost no whit of its evil reputation.
A year after the Johnsons’ advent to the cottage, a child was born to them. They had already several children—buxom, cherry-cheeked youngsters, after the type of their mother. This child was different. The difference did not show at first. The infant was as other infants—a mere homogeneous mass of red-pink flesh, with the slate-grey eyes of its kind; eyes that deluded mothers call dark or light according to their fancy, for the rest of the world perceives that not until long after seeing the light do babies’ eyes take on the shade they eventually keep. But this infant, though like enough to others, differed from them in one particular—it had a large blood-red spot in the palm of its right hand. The doctor pronounced the spot merely accidental and ephemeral; it would disappear before the week was out. Subsequently he modified his opinion. It was a variety of naevus, but he considered that it did not call for operation. The child would outgrow it. But the doctor was wrong. As the palm grew the blood-spot grew, and its colour did not wane. Presently, when the child assumed with age the waxen whiteness that afterwards characterised it, the spot had a curious effect of focussing all the blood in its body. As the baby slowly evolved an individuality out of its pink homogeneousness, it was seen to differ singularly from the rest of the Johnson children. In the place of their fair chubbiness, it was pallid and dark. Its brows were strongly and sombrely marked, and its eyes gathered slowly a look of weird horror. It cried rarely or never. Nor did it smile. It sat staring before it with a fixed expression and a blood-red palm upturned.
A child is born with its hands knotted into fists, fists which for months are opened with difficulty. It is an instinctive action of grasping the life before it. A man or woman dies with the palms extended. The life has been wrought and is rendered up. The Johnson baby never curled its fists as normal babies do. It held its palms limply open with the blood-red spot for all to see. The villagers talked as villagers always talk of something out of the common. They drew conclusions—the short-sighted conclusions of their kind. They pronounced the child’s uncanniness a judgment on the mother for her scoffing.
“It don’t do to make light o’ they things,” they croaked. They predicted the baby’s early death. The child attracted my attention from the first. I got a curious impression about it. Its face had a familiar look. The horror in its eyes reminded me of something. It was not until later that I knew of what.
I had a vacant cottage near. In it I installed an elderly woman of observant faculty. She made friends with the mother, and having leisure took the infant frequently off her hands. By her means I am able to relate what happened. So soon as it showed signs of intelligence—signs such as those used to children interpret, while to others they are still meaningless—the Johnson baby developed interest in the haunted shed—now, it must be remembered, no longer haunted.
The moment it was taken out of doors its eyes turned in the direction of the building, that stood but a short distance from the cottage. It was restless and wayward out of sight of it, and would weary and fret with inarticulate demands until carried whence it could see it. So soon as it was able, it would drag itself along the floor and out at the door to sit there with hands on tiny knees, staring with fascinated looks.
Before it was ten months old, it was found, having crept across the patch of ground between the house and shed, tired with its efforts, lying extended on the grass, its waxen face turned solemnly upon the building, its eyes fixed. Later it managed to escape attention long enough to reach the shed, shuffling along as infants do on hands and legs. It was discovered crouching at the open door, its head dropt till its chin rested almost in its lap, its pupils wide upon some portion of the floor. An illness followed, and for some weeks the child’s life was in danger. It had taken a chill, the doctor said. Even then, though weakened with fe
ver, the poor little creature left for a moment, would struggle feebly to the foot of the bed, whence through the window a corner of the shed was visible. There it would be found staring with grave, frightened eyes.
When strong enough to be up again it made always for the window, to stand there with its face pressed close against the glass. The doctor diagnosed the child as weak-minded, but I cannot say the term at all described the terrible intelligence that looked out of its eyes. The women shook their heads.
“It knows too much, poor little dear,” they said. “There isn’t nothing that’s said it don’t know. If anybody could find out what it’s always askin’ in its eyes per’aps it ud be able to die quiet, for anybody can see it ain’t long for this world.”
Mrs. Johnson paid but little heed to all the talk.
“I don’t see anything much different in the child from other children,” she said impatiently, “only it don’t thrive. I expect it’ll be stronger on its legs when it’s got its teeth and can take a bit o’ meat wi’ the rest of us.”