The Uncanny Stories MEGAPACK ™: 16 Classic Chillers

by Roy Vickers

  Chapter V

  Looking back I cannot think how we endured the suspense. Counted by days the measure of it was not long, but it seemed as if ages went by. We tried to comfort each other; Lady Heron was an angel to me through all her own pain; but for her I would have died.

  I cannot write about it; you must take it for granted, and I hurry on to the end. We were sitting together, we two alone, as we were when the sign came. Lady Heron was knitting, feverishly knitting at those socks for Jack which she would not lay aside, little as either of us believed they would be worn. We were together, as I said, when Peters rushed into the room with another telegram on his silver tray. (I wonder he remembered the tray.) Lady Heron tore it open; it was addressed to her. “Home slightly wounded. With you and Cecily tomorrow.—Jack.”

  My mind takes a leap from that moment to another when he stood at the door. Lady Heron would not let me go to the station because I had fainted again, and as I might not, she would not either; she said it would be unfair to take the advantage. Jack at the door, a figure in soiled khaki, very pale, with his head bandaged and his arm in a sling; Jack himself, alive and still to live. My Jack; and I do not mind now, as once I did, that he is his mother’s Jack as well.

  He has been through dreadful things. Heron fell—poor Heron—and was left in No Man’s Land, and Jack went after him. At the utmost risk to himself he dragged out his brother from under a pile of dead, and into the shelter of a shell-crater. There they existed for three days under incessant fire, all hope of them being abandoned; existed by a miracle, for it was death to move. Heron was fearfully wounded, but Jack, wounded himself, managed so to bandage him that the bleeding stopped; and then he found some emergency rations on which they sustained life. If there ever were a coldness between the brothers, as I thought, it must have melted away in those dreadful hours.

  On the fourth day our troops attacked again on the farther side of the wood, which diverted attention, and then Jack began the task—the difficult and painful task—of half-carrying, half-dragging Heron to where he could be helped, as his only chance of life. All this time Jack was wounded himself, in the head and on the shoulder and side, but the burst of shrapnel which shattered his arm did not happen till they were close to our own lines. By this Heron was wounded again, but in any case Jack thinks he could not have survived; the doctor at the dressing-station said so. Heron died there, but not till some hours later, and Jack was with him to the last.

  So the pipers were right and not wrong when they bewailed the head of the house who had fallen. What it meant to Jack I did not consider then, and it came on me with a shock of surprise when Peters, sometime later, addressed him as “my lord.”

  But I think more—much more—of the fact that he has been recommended for the Cross.

  VISITING ROUNDS, by Michael Kent

  Before he joined up Raymond Holt had been the bright star of the Modern Theatre. He did not join up very quickly, however, for the value of his productions, which included Cubist scenery, neurotic plot, and a certain morbidity of tone seemed to him of greater national importance than the gift of his nerve and sinew in the services of his country. Moreover, the amount of nerve and sinew which he had to offer was not considerable.

  Eventually, however, he went to the Crystal Palace and embraced a life of action. The change, mainly a consequence of the vulgar preference for revue over modern art, stirred Raymond to the depths of his soul. He got his hair cut—a bitter sacrifice. He learnt much about the position of his hands and feet which was totally at variance with stage tradition, and he earned a valuation of his general intelligence and real worth as painful to himself as it would have been to the patrons of the Modern Theatre. On the other hand, his arms, legs, and chest increased in a manner that was neither morbid nor neurotic, and, in spite of a certain dismay at this, he felt a real satisfaction at the first small expressions of approval from his C.P.O. The Chief Petty Officer drew his notions of art from the Mile End Borough Theatre, and had an idea that Futurism was some sort of religion.

  Yet Raymond, for all these signs of grace, was not happy. He did not love his heritage of heavy boots and scratchy underclothing. He hated his hard, dirt-stippled palms. So when, after many tribulations, an avenue of escape opened, he promptly took it and became a lieutenant. This would not have been possible in the ordinary course, but many things happened out of the ordinary course in those days.

  Raymond’s new life was certainly easier. He was second in command of His Majesty’s Ship Recorder, the same being a half-acre of cinder-heaps enclosed within a quarter of a mile of corrugated-iron fencing, some impressive barbed-wire entanglements, one searchlight, one gasoline engine for same, and a high-angle gun. The good ship Recorder rode securely at anchor between a glue factory and a dump for old iron in a dingy suburb of London, whose name must never be revealed.

  Raymond had studied many strange things to attain this desired haven—angles and arcs, and fields of fire, and Morse signaling. As may be supposed, he had a good memory, and that gave him a start over the untrained. Yet even here there was a thorn in the flesh—his commander, a heavy-jowled, blue-nosed old sea-dog who had spent the best years of his active career in pushing an iron-skinned auxiliary gunboat round the Northern Pacific. The fact that Commander Ballantyne had only one eye, had led the Lords of the Admiralty to deny him a place on blue water despite historical precedent, and he had to be content with the cinder-heap. He was not. Add to this the fact that he was a martinet, suffering landsmen grimly and despising every form of art, and it may be imagined that Raymond’s thorn was poignant enough in all conscience.

  The Commander quickly decided that for Raymond the only hope of salvation lay in ragging. He ragged him accordingly with an elephantine irony.

  “What a jolly, hail-fellow-well-met young dog you are, to be sure,” he said to him coming off parade one morning.

  “Why?” asked Raymond cautiously.

  “Well,” returned Ballantyne, “didn’t I hear you address the port watch on parade as ‘dear laddies’? You’ll be darning their socks for ’em next.”

  Of course the “Second” was not entirely expert in his work. One night in spring as Ballantyne was going off, he heard him, as officer of the watch, speak to the look-out.

  “What’s the light, Simmons, bearing right over the church tower?”

  Ballantyne took out his watch. It was a quarter to eight. He put his head in at the office door. “Take down, logsman,” he said, “15.45 O.C.” (so runs the time in the service) “Officer of the watch reports strange light bearing W.S.W.”

  The report was duly logged, and the Commander lingered on the station another five minutes filling his pipe.

  “What’s come to your light, Holt?” he asked anxiously, as he prepared to go.

  “Still there, sir,” replied Raymond, “southing a little.”

  “Keep an eye on it,” said Ballantyne drily, and went. On his return to quarters he went straight to the log and read:

  “16.12 O.C. Light reported at 15.45 O.C. by Lieut. Holt and confirmed by Cr. Ballantyne proves to be the Dog Star”

  “‘Confirmed by Commander Ballantyne,’” quoted the Skipper wrathfully. “As if I don’t know Sirius when I see it! The young cub must know that I only had it logged to teach him a lesson.”

  Later on the papers started a “slackers” campaign, and the Commander conceived it his duty to point out to Holt that an anti-air-craft station in the R.N.A.S. involved little physical strain and no risk to a man well under forty.

  “There’s many a slacker in khaki and Navy blue,” he remarked once sententiously.

  “You’re right there, sir,” returned Holt with hearty innocence. In a moment the Commander tried again.

  “I say, Holt,” he said, “I’ve often wondered you don’t transfer into something a bit more active.”

  “
I’ve thought about it myself,” said Holt lazily.

  “How about the M.P.?” asked the Senior. “I could get you a job on the Motor Patrol any day you like.”

  Ballantyne, as a fact, would have gone on his knees to anyone who would have taken Holt off the ship’s books of the Recorder.

  “Oh, I could never stand the M.P.,” drawled Holt. “If I changed into anything at all it would be the Flying Corps.”

  Ballantyne laughed short and sharp.

  “Want to see your picture in the Daily Snapshot bringing down a Zepp?” he asked sardonically.

  “You’ve hit it, sir,” said Holt. “This craze for notoriety which bites the great lights of the drama! Gets into the blood, what?” He knew that would rile his senior; any reference to the stage always did.

  “Huh!” said Ballantyne. “It’s a different sort of limelight you have to perform under up yonder.” He jerked his thumb skywards. “You haven’t the nerve for it, my lad.”

  “Perhaps I haven’t,” returned Holt, with irritating philosophy.

  “You bet you haven’t,” said the Commander, and Raymond Holt’s lazy eyes opened wide.

  “Oh,” he said rather sharply. “If it’s betting, what do you put on it, sir?”

  “Put on what?” asked Ballantyne.

  “On my nerve. What d’you bet I don’t take a star part? What d’you bet I don’t bring down a Zepp from the sky before you touch one from the ground?” Raymond Holt seemed awake at last.

  The Commander looked at him but made no reply.

  “Any odds you like,” went on Holt. “Here you are; my motorcycle to your fountain-pen. How’s that, sir?”

  Ballantyne wrinkled his brows a moment, then: “That’s a cheap cycle,” he said. “I’ll take you on—always provided you get into the Service.”

  And so it was.

  Lieutenant Holt passed from the view of H.M.S. Recorder, and his old life saw him no more. Instead he donned khaki, went to Salisbury Plain, and was rushed through a course of training which left him at the end with two silvery-looking wings outspread upon the left breast of his plastron tunic.

  As a matter of fact Holt made rather a good airman. There was something about that high nerve tension—the swift swoops through space, the sense of holding one wide, empty stage seen and wondered at by all—that reminded him of his old life and his former triumphs. It rejoiced him to hold his life cheap; as, in the old days, it shocked the conventions. The delicate, nervous sympathy which had made him famous in his art gave him an uncanny understanding of all those high-strung, trembling, indicator fingers which now ministered to him. With just that same skill which before he had used to play on human hearts, he played on his fierce, fragile cylinders and the wild winds of the sky. Men whose business it was to watch the brood of fledglings marked him as a likely bird, and he found himself, at the end of four months, back in London with a different role to play.

  Now the Recorder had followed its daily routine through spring to summer. As the days began to shorten they found headquarters starting to call them up at unearthly hours and bid them stand by till dawn.

  So the Zepp season came in with long periods of waiting for all hands braced and steady in the blind night, while the engine buzzed and the engineer conned his clocks, and the men stood ready on the light to fling their ten thousand candle-power into the menacing dark.

  One night a little before twelve (23.52 O.C. it appears on the log) they were called up from headquarters. They had waited thus a bare half-hour when they caught the buzz of aircraft engines high above. The Admiralty rang through again, passing on the news gleaned by the little dot-lights busy in the sky.

  “Zepp in Q.14 making W.N.W.”

  “Ready to cut in,” signaled the man on the light, a full circle with his flash lamp.

  “Elevation 46,” the man on the range-finder spoke through to the gun.

  “All lights on,” called mother in Whitehall to her children in every suburb.

  “All on,” sang the Commander joyously to the light.

  “One, two, three,” whispered the man on the switch to himself, counting the seconds, and threw the arm over.

  On a sudden, as the Recorder’s beam shot up, the heavens split in jets and arms of light ready centered upon Q.14, and there, blinded in the apex of bright, crisscrossing rays, lay the foe, a small, ribbed opal in the vivid night. A moment more there was silence, while every range-finder swung his sighting wires on to the object; then for three minutes every gun roared into the air its stream of shells as quick as hand could swing the breech-block home, as swift as No. 1 could correct his errant fire. Up above the Zepp seemed dizzy, swaying, in the tempest she evoked, then up she went into the higher air; yet still the Recorder’s light hung on to her. Others would have lost her, but Ballantyne himself had taken the two great handles and, while the sweat poured from his face, and grim, unheard curses from his lips, he held his light upon the fleeing foe.

  Suddenly a red flare glowed above the great balloon, and every gun was still.

  The old known drama was being played again. David had gone forth, his sling was swinging in his hand, and Goliath knew not where to hold his shield. Followed the glow, the blaze of white-hot metal shreds, the great radiance over earth while men shouted, and the night closed in upon the raider’s last grim voyage to land.

  Not all men shouted, however, for there were some who watched to see within that ruby glow the emerald flares that told of David’s safety.

  They did not find them.

  On board the Recorder the hands still stood by, for they had not yet had the call from the Admiralty to make all fast. The whole company then was at stations, and the sentry on the outer gate was Seaman Lovyer.

  About ten minutes after the fall of the Zepp, a shadow came silently up the path towards the gate.

  “’Alt! Who goes there?” cried Seaman Lovyer.

  The shadow paused, then came the reply “Rounds,” briefly.

  “Rounds,” said the sentry curiously. “What Rounds?”

  The suppliant gave a little laugh.

  “Visiting Rounds,” he said.

  “Stand, Rounds, and wait escort,” returned Lovyer, whistling for the guard.

  In thirty seconds the guard under C.P.O. Chubb was on the scene and passed the visitor through. It was too dark for any of the men to see more than that their charge was wearing a curious Balaclava-like helmet.

  Thus they came to the commander.

  Ballantyne flashed his light on the visitor for a moment, then:

  “Fall out the guard,” he said to the C.P.O. abruptly, and a moment after: “What on earth are you doing here at this time of night, Holt?”

  “Came to see you,” said Holt.

  “Nice time for a visit. Should have thought you’d be fairly busy.” The commander was not cordial.

  “Oh, I’ve been rather rushed,” returned Holt, “but nothing on hand now.”

  “How d’you get in?”

  “I gave ‘Visiting Rounds.’ They passed me through like a bird.”

  “You did, did you?” growled the Commander. “It was most irregular.”

  “Yes,” assented Holt, grinning. “The circumstances altogether are most irregular, most irregular.”

  “What d’you want, anyhow?” asked the Commander irritably.

  “Three things,” said Holt hurriedly, rather nervously. “First to thank you for what you did, licking me into shape, y’know.”

  “Wouldn’t tomorrow have done?” asked Ballantyne ungraciously.

  “Tomorrow would not have done,” said Holt. “Tomorrow would never have done.” He was quite grave, solemn even.

  “And I want to thank you for the way you worked the light just now,” he went on.

  “Damn condescendin�
��,” said Ballantyne, biting his moustache.

  “And last I’ve come for my fountain-pen.”

  “What’s that!” asked the Commander alertly.

  “Come for my fountain-pen, y’know,” repeated Holt, grinning joyously.

  “Good Lord, man!” Ballantyne broke out. “It was you up there, was it?”

  “And other good lads,” the airman interjected.

  “It was you that brought her down? Well, I’d never have thought it. I’m damn glad you won your bet. Shake hands on it, Holt; shake hands.”

  He passed the pen across and took Holt’s hand; it was clammy cold.

  “Where did you come down?” he asked.

  “Hanstead,” said Holt briefly. Of a sudden the spirit seemed to have gone out of him.

  “Easy?”

  “No, rotten.”

  At that moment came the release, and the Commander walked into the office. When he came out again Holt was no longer to be seen.

  The next day Ballantyne saw certain news in the paper and, as a consequence, looked up a friend in the motor transport.

  “Holt?” said the motor-man. “Yes, I took the body home last night. Dead? Of course he was dead. Dead long before he touched earth. Petrol tank fired, poor chap. Why, a bunch of keys in one of his pockets had fused.”

  “He was second on my station for a month or two,” said Ballantyne rather aimlessly.

  There was a moment’s silence; the commander wanted to ask a certain question, but felt that he was a fool to do so. Strangely enough it was not necessary.

  “Queer thing,” said the motor-man abruptly. “He’d got a fountain-pen in his pocket untouched, and they say the stuff’s inflammable—untouched. As for the rest of him, he was pretty well a cinder.”