by Mike Ashley
Again it rose, canted at a different angle, and descended at another tilt, so that for several seconds it seemed to stand upright before them, the jaw dropping with a jerk. Then it went up and turned so that it appeared to stand head down with its back to them.
A dozen times these gyrations were repeated, and at each repetition the form was displayed at a slightly varying angle; the movements were accomplished with a horrible lazy deliberation, then with a jar the figure stopped in mid-air, level with their eyes, and was jerked double, so that it appeared to be sitting up bent forward from the hips, the head almost butting on its knees.
“It will fall on us!” screamed Chadwick. He turned for the door, but Stukeley caught him.
“Stay in the pentacle!” he shouted.
Chadwick looked over his shoulder. The figure had risen and was almost over them and almost flat against the ceiling, face up. He gave a little whimpering cry, and fainted.
Chadwick issued from his swoon all sore and cramped.
He was lying full-length within the limits of the pentacle; Stukeley’s folded coat was under his head, and his friend was sitting on a stool beside him, chin on palm and eyes full of thought. Daylight was striking in through the chinks of the blinds; the room was bare and empty of anything outside the five-pointed star.
He sat up and stared, terrified, towards the fireplace. Walls, floor, and ceiling were plain and prosaic. Meeting his eyes, Stukeley stepped out of the pentacle and stamped questingly on the very boards whence the horror had issued.
“I’d advise you to have this up, Chadwick,” he advised.
His masterful tone was a tonic. Chadwick scrambled up, shuddering.
“Let’s get out of this,” he shivered.
As he opened the front door Stukeley pointed to the unbroken seals. The rose and amber sunrise was billowing over the houses opposite; Chadwick stood by the gate basking in the clean morning air while Stukeley went over the house, putting out the lights.
“No seal disturbed,” reported the occultist.
“I can’t stand four walls at present,” Chadwick groaned.
They passed into the back garden of 75 and paced up and down between the laurels.
“That’s just what all the tenants said,” Chadwick burst out suddenly. “A decayed corpse that sprang up and down, and threatened to topple over on you—ugh!”
“It was not decayed, and it did not spring up and down,” Stukeley corrected.
“Eh?”
“I watched it until at the first streak of daylight the bubbling ceased and it vanished. It was not decayed at all.”
“Eh? The scent—”
“Scent of death, but of new death.”
“The bones—”
“The flesh had been purposely removed.”
“Mangled by beasts or birds?”
“No. Cut off neatly. Partly dissected, in a word.”
“What do you make of it, then?”
“I’m nonplussed.”
“Well, it jumped up and down,” Chadwick said ruminatively. “No. It swayed and dipped with the exact motion a ship in a heaving sea would display.”
“By George—”
“It was just as though the thing was lying on the deck of a vessel, invisible to us, that swayed and jerked it about.”
“But, Stukeley, what connection could that house have with a ship?”
“I don’t know. What I say is—have the floor up.”
They had the workmen in that very morning, but with no more result than the Psychic Society had achieved before them. At two or three places by the walls, including the spot where the bubbling rose, the planking had been repaired; mouse-holes beneath explained that, however. Below was the innocuous ventilation space, and below they found virgin earth that revealed nothing though they dug it up for some depth.
“Chadwick, one thing struck me,” said Stukeley, as they sat at lunch. “Did you notice any connection between the bubbling and the figure?”
“No. Truth is I was too frightened to notice much.”
“You are not used to these investigations, as I am,” the occultist replied charitably. “Wherever the figure moved a band of something like vapour rose, fanlike, from the bubbling, and always touched it. There should have been something under the floor.” He seemed quite annoyed at the lack. “I wonder where the second tenant, the Frenchman, lives?”
“My neighbour, who knew him well, might know.”
The neighbour, questioned, had lost touch with Monsieur Duhamel, but knew that he was an occasional contributor to The One Weekly.
That same afternoon saw Stukeley, fresh from a brief interview with the editor of The One Weekly, en route for Balham and the modest abode of M. Auguste Duhamel.
M. Duhamel was reassuring; a fat, genial old gentleman, prosy and cheery.
“Indeed, I regret the distress of the good M. Chadwick,” he asseverated. “Ourselves, we never used the front room, so saw nothing.”
“If I am not trenching on the impertinent, M. Duhamel, it seems strange that you did not use the large front room.”
“I will explain. My late respected father was a collector of curiosities, and all of them he left to me. They were of value, but ugly; African witch-masks, mummy cases—Le bon Dieu alone knows what! There was no inducement to live with them; the front room was the only one large enough to hold all, therefore we put them there. You understand, monsieur? We put them there in order that our friends might come to see them sometimes, but—tiens!—they are ugly, ugly as le diable—our friends preferred to glance at them by day, and our servant washed and dusted them by day likewise.”
“Curios?” And Stukeley pricked up his ears.
“Oui, monsieur. Curiosities. My father loved them. I do not. This year I have sold all to a museum. I was nursing them for years while prices went up. That was all the good of them in my eyes.” M. Duhamel made a gesture of large scorn. “However, I kept the room in good repair, the landlord repaired the outside, the tenant the inside; that is the rule. When the mice ate holes in the flooring I mended it; I myself mended it. I am a great amateur carpenter.”
“You mended the place by the fire? And you found nothing when you worked?” asked Stukeley eagerly.
M. Duhamel shook his head decisively, and Stukeley added, “It was from there the apparition rose.”
“En passant, M. Stukeley, I have heard much about this apparition, but never have I had a good description of it. May I ask?”
Stukeley gave a sketch of his experience of the previous night. He came out of absorption in his own recital to find the Frenchman gaping with dawning enlightenment in his eyes.
“Monsieur,” said Duhamel, “I myself am a man of rational cast of mind, but you who believe in the spirit world, you hold that the blood is the very vehicle of life and the soul, is it not? And that with blood many marvellous feats can be performed? I have read even that from the emanations of fresh blood spirit forms can be conjured.”
“Some belief of the kind is current with certain people. And what, monsieur—”
“Mr. Stukeley, is it possible that old blood may have strange properties? Power, for instance, to show to living eyes what it once was?”
Stukeley answered affirmatively. The Frenchman slapped his thigh.
“Then, m’sieur, I will tell you. In my father’s collection were many things whose bone fides it would be difficult to prove. Pieces of wood or stone from famous or infamous erections, for instance. As I care nothing for curios, and knew that it would be impossible to sell things of this species, I did not scruple to make practical use of them. It is said, monsieur, that in the famed Chicago pork-canning factories nothing of the pig is wasted but the squeak. I am more economical than that; I would make use of the squeak by calling in all the neighbours’ little ones to enjoy the sound—”
He paused to laugh. Stukeley quivered, all impatience.
“Ah, M. Stukeley, the stone that forms so good a foundation for the little rockery in the back
garden of our friend No. 77 is from the old Bastille. But who could have proved it? Who would have bought? The same with pieces of wood. When the mice ate holes in the floor I mended it, and I said to myself, ‘I will make that certain piece of wood in the cabinet of use.’ That piece cut down to a suitable size to fit the place by the fire, the chips from it went into our stove that same day. Now in the piece of wood a stain was deeply sunk, and my father held that it was blood—”
“Where from? What from?” demanded the Englishman, as the narrator paused.
“In a moment, monsieur. I mended it well. I am a good amateur carpenter. Undoubtedly it is the piece from whence your mysterious bubbling came.”
“Where was that piece of wood from?” demanded Stukeley hoarsely.
“From the raft of the Medusa, monsieur.”
That evening, directly he had returned from the metropolis to Willingborough, Stukeley took Chadwick into the dismembered room and hunted amidst the scattered planks. It was easy to identify the piece that had mended the part by the fireplace; it was small, thick, and was of a different colour to the larger planks. From the oak stain on top through half its thickness was a deeper tint than that of the lower half.
“It’s my opinion that the thing remained quiescent until it was insulted by being put to a practical use,” said Stukeley. “When I’ve destroyed it—reverently—Chadwick, I’ve every hope your house will become marketable property again.”
In the back garden he kindled a fire, feeding it to a good heat with shavings, and planted the piece of wood on it. He further scratched a pentacle round the blaze. The wood burnt slowly; Chadwick thought he detected a curious acrid odour in the smoke from it.
“‘Requiescat in pace,’” muttered Stukeley. “So a collector of ghastly relics is to be blamed for it all! By Jove, one certainly never knows what the final reflex of one’s actions may be!”
Chadwick looked puzzled.
“But Stukeley, I do not understand. What was the Medusa? And the raft? I seem to recollect the name vaguely, but nothing about it.”
“You might recollect it through Géricault’s famous picture of it—a monument of ill-taste. The Medusa, Chadwick, was a French vessel, and she happened to be wrecked, decades and decades ago. The survivors made a raft, and on it knocked about the open sea until—it’s a horrible tale, Chadwick, need I tell it all? Can’t you piece it together? They were starving—think of the wood with the indelible stain on it—and the man with a lot of flesh hacked off him that’s what a relic of the Medusa’s raft meant!”
SOLANGE FONTAINE IN
THE SANATORIUM
F. TENNYSON JESSE
Wynifried Tennyson Jesse (1889–1958), who switched her first name round to Fryniwyd, and was usually called Fryn, was the granddaughter of the sister of the poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She is another British writer who is remembered now chiefly for one novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), a tragedy based on a real life case. Jesse was an expert on legal history, contributing several essays to the series Notable British Trials in the 1920s. During her lifetime she was best known for The Lacquer Lady (1928), a fictionalized account of how an Englishwoman was involved in the fall of the Burmese royal family. Jesse’s interest in criminology inspired her to write a series featuring a young woman, Solange Fontaine, who while not a psychic detective in the usual sense, clearly had psychic abilities as she could sense evil, and this led her to explore further. The first series appeared in England in The Premier Magazine in 1919. Some ten years later Jesse returned to the series. This second series was published as The Solange Stories in 1931. The first series meanwhile languished in the lost pages of The Premier until rescued by bookdealer George Locke and published in a very limited edition as The Adventures of Solange Fontaine in 1995. These earlier stories show Fontaine’s psychic abilities at their most acute, but they also emphasise her fear of pursuing them because of inadvertent consequences.
ONE DAY SOLANGE FONTAINE AND HER GREATEST FRIEND, Raymond Ker, the American writer, sat together in the garden of a villa on the sea-coast of the Riviera. It was a languorous day in April; already the burning sea was beginning to refract the heat unpleasantly to any whose senses were not steeled to the sun by much experience of tropic days, but Solange lay basking, her pale face unflushed and her tranquil eyes fixed on the sparkling blue of the little waves in utter contentment with her surroundings. And if Raymond’s content were more with his companion than with circumstances, then at least he was only now beginning to be aware of it, while as for her—she was as yet only aware of his awareness, not of any satisfaction there might be to herself in his presence.
For, though friendship ripens strongly with the impersonal of mind, yet its almost imperceptible transition to that stage when it may turn to something warmer and less reasonable is but slowly suspected by them, and to Solange the fact that her increasing intimacy with the man who had stood by her in so much danger might be transmuted into that more hazardous state known as “being in love” had not yet occurred. For habit of mind plays a great part in lulling the danger instinct to sleep, and though Solange could tell at the meeting of the eyes, at the touch of a palm, the presence of something evil, she could not detect by precisely the same mediums the presence of a danger to herself. For danger “falling in love” meant, or would mean to her, and she had always known it. She had always recognised that her nicely balanced instincts would not only be upset, but probably destroyed by the intrusion of “falling in love.”
Just as a woman who is an artist is bound to lose her artistry—for all but the art of living—as long as the madness lasts, even if her art of creation be enriched afterwards, so Solange would lose that instinct for being aware of evil, together with the science with which it was allied, as soon as she allowed herself to be swept away by the common lot of women. It was a question, as is so much in life, of relative values.
No thought of that danger was in her mind now as she turned her head, pale under the shade of her white parasol, upon its green cushion—pale as the head of a mermaid, and as barely human, with its greenish eyes and faintly tinted mouth; as barely human, in all save its tenderness of curves—towards Raymond in answer to what he had been saying. His argument had been that criminals were men even as the rest of us, but subjected to overwhelming temptation, and Solange had roused herself for her pet topic.
“Raymond, how badly I must have trained you! Don’t you know that you are ignoring the only vital division in criminology, that which marks off the instinctive criminal from the occasional criminal? Of course, everyone had his breaking-point, but in the instinctive criminal the breaking-point is set very low. It is the low breaking-point that marks out the great malefactors of the world.”
“The people who can’t help it, eh? Doesn’t that make them blameless?”
“Blame?” She made a little movement of contempt. “What does blame amount to, anyway? It’s only a word, like forgiveness, it doesn’t really stand for anything. Nevertheless it’s only the sins that we can’t help which matter at all.”
“That sounds very unfair.”
“Unfair to the sinner, you mean. And what if it is? It is the community that matters, every time. The occasional criminal can be cured, and, better still, prevented, but for the born killer there is no remedy; he has to work out his own damnation. It’s nature’s doing, not law.”
“Then the born killers can’t help themselves?”
“Oh, I don’t say that. Irresponsibility is quite a different thing from congenital tendency. Nine times out of ten the born killers know perfectly well what they are doing, but they choose, though aware of their abnormal tendencies, deliberately to turn them to account. Think of the notorious examples of Jegado, Van der Leyden, Zwanziger, to cite three criminal women—why did they poison in the wholesale manner that they did? Not merely for gain sometimes there was none attached. Not merely for revenge, though to people of such colossal vanity as the congenital criminal any slight is cause for revenge—but s
ometimes merely to feel their own power of life and death. To be omnipotent. Also, of course, they have a supreme disregard for the value of human life, which, when not carried to such excess, is no bad thing. To be as squeamish about it as we moderns are is a weakness, because it makes us rate our own too highly! One should not, of course, carry disregard to the same extent as the Brinvilliers—who thought so little of it that she poisoned poor people in the hospitals wholesale, simply to test her art—a far more unforgivable proceeding than the subsequent removal of the whole of her family, though in those undemocratic times it wasn’t made so much of.”
“The Brinvilliers always knew why she poisoned, right enough,” objected Raymond; “there was no weak indulgence in pleasure about her. Hard cash was at the root of it.”
“Mostly; but don’t forget she tried to poison her daughter because she was growing too tall! The only really human motive that tigress ever displayed!”
“Solange, you’re very flippant today.”
“It’s the heat. I love it so it makes the cords of my mind and my morals relax. Also, I think I am half-consciously gathering myself together for what may be rather a trying time.”
Raymond questioned, but no more could he get out of her.
That afternoon a caller came to the Fontaines’ villa. It was a man of whom Raymond had occasionally heard, a doctor who had started a sanatorium for consumptives, up in the mountains behind the sea-board. He had heard nothing but good of the man, who bore shining testimonials, and yet he found himself disliking him, though for no cause he could assign, beyond the unreasonable one that he seemed to admire Solange more than he, Raymond, found fitting. Also he was too handsome; it really wasn’t decent, the lantern-jawed American found himself deciding—no man ought to have that straight profile, those handsome grey eyes that looked out so finely, even with a touch of arrogance, from their well-modelled brows, above all, no man ought to have hair that showed a tendency to curl. And yet he could not suggest, even to himself, that Dr. Fulgence Galtie was effeminate—his frame was too powerful, his jaw too heavy, his whole aspect too masculine for that charge to be brought against him. Yet there was something strange about the doctor Raymond had only to watch Solange to be aware. He knew her so well by now, knew the varying expressions that she could not hide from him, because he knew what signs to look out for, though no stranger would have guessed that the young doctor roused any feelings but those of friendliness in her. It was only because by now Raymond felt himself so one with her that he knew that she was in the grip of some strong spiritual distaste.