The Uncanny Stories MEGAPACK ™: 16 Classic Chillers

by Roy Vickers

  As if the first faint streaks of light ended her vigil she dropped her face on her arms and burst into tears.

  “Fool that I was! Why couldn’t I ’ave ’eld me jore about Mabel Owen till we was spliced proper? And now he’s left me, and Pete—”

  The passion of weeping rose to its height, spent itself, and left her in another mood.

  “’E needn’t think ’e can get away as easy as all that,” she muttered savagely. “If I’m a fool, he’s a worse one—as ’e’ll soon find to ’is cost.”

  At eight o’clock she washed herself and donned her black dress. Thus arrayed as a respectable woman of the working-class she made her way to the nearest police-station and asked for the Inspector.

  “I’m Mrs. Pete Comber,” she explained. “My husband used to be a driver on the Underground. Circle train, he druv.”

  “Well?” said the Inspector.

  She did not hesitate in her confession. She had weighed the cost of her revenge, and did not shrink from paying it.

  “A man called George Raoul used to lodge with us—a signaler, ’e was, and worked at Baker Street. Me and ’im got friendly, if you understand, only I wouldn’t ’ave nothing to do with him while I was livin’ with my ’usband, not being that sort.

  “’Bout a couple of months ago George come to me and says, ‘Jinny,’ he says, ‘you won’t see Pete no more,’ he says. ‘Why not,’ I says. ‘Cos he’s gone off with Carrie Page,’ he says. ‘Chucked up his job and everythink,’ he says; ‘Met him when we was bein’ paid,’ he says, ‘an’ he asked me to tell you quite friendly like,’ he says.”

  “Look here,” interrupted the Inspector, “we can’t have anything to do with all this.”

  “You wait,” replied Jinny, scarcely noticing the interruption. “As soon as George told me, I was that wild with my ’usbin that I let George take me off—me that had always been a respectable woman. Never entered my ’ead as he wasn’t tellin’ the truth. Next day George was turned on to Cheyne Road an’ we come to live up ’ere.

  “Well, first he begun tellin’ me as he’d bin seein’ things on the Underground. That started me thinkin’. I can put two an’ two together, same as anyone else, an’ I started takin’ notice of what he was talking about in ’is sleep. And I tell you as sure as I stand here, George Raoul killed my ’usbin, and I dessay ’e’s put ’im in one of the old holes in the Baker Street tunnel wot they used to use for storin’ the tools.”

  The Inspector began to take notes and to ask a number of questions. Of one thing only was he sure—that the woman before him was giving a genuine expression of opinion.

  “And now George has left you, I suppose, and that’s why you’ve come along to us?” he suggested.

  “He has left me,” replied the woman. “But I only found all this out properly night before last, an’ I couldn’t be sure. I’d have come along ’ere any’ow.”

  The Inspector guessed that the last statement was a lie. But unless the man, when they caught him, definitely implicated the woman he knew that the Crown would not prosecute her.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll find George for you. Leave your address and call here tomorrow.”

  The Inspector, after instructing a plain-clothes man to shadow Jinny to her home, went to interview the Cheyne Road station-master.

  On the following morning, when Jinny called at the police-station, she was asked to examine a suit of clothing, a pocket-knife, and a greasy case containing a number of small personal papers and other belongings.

  “Yes, they’re Pete’s right enough, pore dear!” she exclaimed, and then burst into a flood of maudlin tears.

  The Inspector waited unmoved. He believed not at all in the genuineness of Jinny’s grief; but convention had its claims, and he said nothing until the storm of tears had subsided.

  “Now, Mrs. Comber,” he said presently, “I want you to dry your face and come along o’ me.

  “It’s all right,” he added. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.” He took her for some distance in a taxi-cab to a low, vault-like building near the river. There, after parley with the local officials, he led her to an inner room.

  “Steady now,” he warned her. “We’re going to show you a dead body.”

  Someone removed a cloth, and at the same moment, the Inspector demanded:

  “Who’s that?”

  “George Raoul!” gasped Jinny.

  As the Inspector, taking her by the arm, led her from the room a question forced itself to her lips. “You—you ain’t ’ung him already?”

  “No,” replied the Inspector, with a grim laugh, “we ain’t ’ung him. Wasn’t needed. We found your husband in that disused hole, same as you said—and we found George Raoul alongside him—like that. Heart failure, the doctor says. Funny thing! As far as I can make out, he must have been skeered or something and run all the way through the tunnel from Cheyne Road to Baker Street where he done it. Must have been the running as did for his heart.”

  That, at any rate, was the explanation based on the findings of the Coroner’s Court.

  BILL DIXON STANDS, by J. Chapman Andrews

  Chapter I

  The Fortune of War

  U. 502 was the pride of Bremen. When she came in from a cruise folk hung out flags and the Burgomaster invited Commander Max Fielder to luncheon, where there were speeches, many “Hoch, hochs!” and much sweet champagne.

  That was over a year ago. In the meantime U. 502 had been baptized and re-christened of a more glorious fellowship. The baptism had been a long ceremony and one which I am not at liberty to reveal. One circumstance marred the complete perfection of the work. When U. 502 was constrained by divers to leave the mud on which she had lain for a week and had been escorted ceremoniously by two tugs and three destroyers into Nidport, she was persuaded to give up her dead: Max, the darling of Bremen, sixteen seamen of the German Navy, and an officer of the British Mercantile Marine.

  This last was Bill Dixon, Captain William Dixon of the S.S. Utopia, owned by the Blue Triangle Line. Everyone in shipping knew Bill, and a very large circle mourned his death when the Utopia appeared under “Boats Sunk” in the evening papers. The pluck and the sea-knowledge of the man, his whole-hearted hatred of the thugs of the sea, had earned him a great reputation. How he had been saved no one could tell, but the irony of his death at the hands of his own countrymen on a German submarine added poignancy to the tragedy.

  However, U. 502 was duly swept and garnished and reappeared one fine autumn morning in a new coat of slate grey, a couple of new plates in her bows, her new title, U.C. 07, on her conning-tower and a new old flag on her flag-staff—the White Ensign. So she went forth on the very secret, importunate occasions for which she and her sisters use the undersea.

  It is well understood that she had finally washed off the gross acquaintance of the darling of Bremen. She had quickly found a new love, Stanton Towers, Lieut., R.N. Towers was a middle-aged, old-man boy of twenty-five; that is to say, he had the steady nerve of the first period, the prudent sagacity of the second, and the merry daring of the last. He could teach professors the higher mathematics of the lower seas, hold with confidence and full realization the lives of a dozen honest seamen in his hand unperturbed, and make himself the merry center of a kids’ Christmas party with equal facility. They make them like that at Dartmouth.

  There was, however, one corner of U.C. 07 where the paintbrush had stopped short. It was the captain’s state-room. In the wicked old days the state-room had been given up by the darling of Bremen to the housing of captive captains and, for the four days between the sinking of the Utopia and the accident which led to the redemption of U. 502, Bill Dixon had occupied it. What thoughts he had, plucked from the sea when his whole ship’s company went down, no man may say, nor how he bore himself among that fiend fellowship where fate had c
ast him; but one mark he left of his tenancy. On the enameled plating of the room he had scratched two lines of verse:

  “I’m sorry for Mr. Bluebeard:

  I’m sorry to cause him pain:

  But-”

  W.D.” (Then came the date.)

  Towers had looked over his new command while painting was in progress. He had seen the lines and ordered them to be left. Most people in the service could have named the author and understood.

  At any rate, Towers did. He saw why Bill had chosen something cryptic; a Shakespeare reference would have been easy reading to a German. The Teuton psychology cannot grasp Kipling.

  “You’ll never fill in your ‘but,’ old man,” said Towers thoughtfully, “but I may help. We’ll let it stay.”

  In a curious way the lines got hold of him. Into his brain; his throbbing engines went to the tune of it.

  “We’re sorry for Mr. Bluebeard:

  We’re sorry to cause him pain:

  But a terrible spree there’s sure to be

  When he comes here again.”

  He knew that Bill Dixon had Max and the whole personnel of the Imperial Navy in mind under that most disrespectful nickname.

  Chapter II

  An Unknown Quantity

  In due time U.C. 07 went out on her trials, which she endured patiently and with credit, and received the wages of going on. She was given her fill of fireworks and oil, a gramophone with records for all occasions (from the Bishop of London to George Robey), a large complement of woollies, and a kitten. Thus equipped, she crept out one night into the grey seaways entirely unchaperoned and laid a course for three days over shoals and through tide-ripped deeps till she came up at last with a captivating bonnet of drift ice beside a low island in a sea dressed in mud-banks and blue mist. Thereafter she lay secretly down on the mud in the daytime and slunk furtively across the seas after dark, while Towers and his men strove to keep warm.

  That was the time that George Robey and the Bishop of London came in useful. (The perspicuous reader will have noticed that submarine conditions demand a varied order of precedence.) The men crawled sluggishly about while Findlay, Engineer-Lieut., did wonderful things to keep his engines from freezing. Of course, in these days they were mostly on top, where the crew could keep their blood in circulation by exercise on the fifty-foot, ice-covered deck. Stanton Towers found the lady somewhat fickle in the circumstances. She packed up drift ice on her nose until it altered all her diving angles, while every time she came up the periscope froze over and left her blind. Then the hatches froze; when open they would not close, and when closed they refused to open.

  To add to the catalogue a weird spirit got about the ship. No one could account for it; no one could define it even, but there it was. There were little bits of evidence which one could only laugh at in judicial moments, nothing tangible.

  Mainly it was the “someone standing beside you” feeling, which is curious in a submarine, where from the officers’ mess you can put your right hand on the galley stove and your left on the engine-room controls. There was a failure of the lights once, which left fourteen men abjectly cursing in the varied argots of Whitechapel, Sauciehall Street, Tyneside, Devonport and Osborne.

  As a matter of fact the occasion was trying. U.C. 07, with her periscope flirting with the wave-tops, had spotted smoke on the horizon. They were only thirty-six hours out at the time and still in open sea. Towers received the report, and, though strange smoke was not specifically mentioned on his orders, he decided to proceed as requisite. A certain latitude is granted mariners of the underseas.

  U.C. 07 bobbed up tentatively a few minutes later and conned the stranger. Towers had taken command. He called up Calthrop, his second, and took him into council.

  “What d’ye make of her, Mabel?”

  Calthrop had a complexion that won for him a nickname and much feminine admiration, both of which he loathed.

  “She’s nothing British on God’s earth,” said Mabel.

  “And so say all of us,” returned the owner, and ordered: “No. 1 torpedo tube, ready.”

  Now, as a matter of fact, both Towers and Calthrop were in error, though they need not be blamed. The mysterious stranger, carrying twelve hundred men and two million pounds in steel to her doom was a changeling child. She had been built on the Tyne to the specifications of the Government of—Moravia, let us say. Moravia—let us say—built and was not able to finish, therefore the hulk had remained the standing joke of Tyneside till the Sultan of Morocco—or any other old place—had bought her up as a bargain to lay the foundations of his navy. She was on the point of completion when war broke out, and had accordingly been seized by order from Whitehall, while Morocco had to be content with mere hard cash instead of cold steel. It may be guessed that she was a monster, for Moravia followed the Admiralty designs of Berlin, while Morocco added a liberal flavor of Saharan architecture.

  Towers and Calthrop recognized Germany in her shape and weight. Her very location was suspicious, and, though they saw no flag, there was no doubt in their minds that she was an enemy, and down she should go. So they edged nearer, for a drift of sea fog was coming down, and Towers made his calculations and shifted the helm over.

  It was, maybe, two seconds before he would send the order to No. 1 tube to shut down. His hand was on the signal lever when, on a sudden, the lights failed. The whole ship was in darkness except the table where the periscope threw its panorama of the sea above. That was plainer than ever.

  “Lights,” yelled Towers to the engines. “Oh, you blighted greasers, lights!”

  There was the patter of feet up the steps into the conning-tower and an A.B.’s head rose into the grey circle of light spilt from the table.

  “No. 1 tube reports light failure, sir, and waits orders.”

  “Stand fast to carry on,” said Towers curtly.

  Findlay’s voice came through its appointed tube. “Cannot account for failure. Auxiliaries at work in thairrty seconds.”

  “Very good, carry on,” said the owner, but he knew that thirty seconds would have spoilt his present chance, though another might present itself.

  In twenty-seven seconds by Findlay’s watch the miracle was accomplished, and the crew at No, l tube sprang to position again like leashed whippets. Slowly the boat swung round on her rudder to aim. But Towers did not give the word.

  His hand had been on the firing lever, his eye on the periscope table and, as the image of the great ship above him swung into view, he suddenly bent forward.

  Then—

  “Good God!” he whispered between his teeth. “Good God!”

  For from the shadow of the big ship up above emerged, clear of the after turret, the jackstaff and the White Ensign.

  Chapter III

  The Spirit Moves

  Findlay came to report some ten minutes later.

  “I have tested the lighting, lock, stock and barrel,” he said. “Man, it’s a’ pairfect. Yon failure wus juist a contradiction o’ a’ the laws of pheesics.”

  It had to go at that.

  For the benefit of the crew, Towers put it down to Frillish. Frillish was the only supernumerary. She had come aboard at Nidport with one of the artificers. Calthrop had named her Phyllis; the owner had added Frisky, a concession to her exuberance. It remained for the “Tiffy” responsible for her presence to evolve in a state of rum the soul-satisfying amalgamation. Frillish was an intelligent tabby of three months.

  Towers said Frillish must have dug her teeth into a wire and short-circuited. Findlay knew that in that case she would have been a cinder in the thousandth part of a second, but he did not say so. In the Service you are paid to do things, not to prove them.

  Anyhow, Frillish carried the guilt of the occasion and was not worried thereby. She was not worried by anything
except the captain’s state-room. That she hated like the plague. Twice she had been taken in there and each time she had fought a way out, leaving marks of her displeasure on the owner’s hands. Not that she disliked Towers; she had a large heart and loved all the crew, so she took her telling-off from the Number 1 tube team with great dignity and forgave them all. Then she went down to the engine room and tried to mesmerize the dynamos.

  It was well for the men that they had Frillish, for the brooding spirit of the ship grew more intense as time passed. Findlay spoke to the owner about it once.

  “There’s something not canny about her, sir.”

  “Anyway, if it saves us from sinking our own battleships, I don’t care what it is,” laughed Towers.

  But it didn’t make for harmony. It got on the nerves in that grey, ice-cold desert of bluff seas where they kept station. It made them do strange things. Once, after an eight hours’ vigil, they had gone down for rest and warmth to lie on the mud, when an overpowering desire came to Towers to get to the surface again, to get there at once, to go up and look round at any cost. It was unreasonable; he fought it for half-an-hour, then up he went, wondering what his men would think. A full moon hung in air above them, and as the periscope nosed around to seek for prey it showed a covey of enemy destroyers which had just passed them. If U.C. 07 had been on the surface five minutes earlier they would have been an easy mark.

  “There’s some sense in this old spook, anyway,” said Towers, while he lamented his luck. “Next time you give orders, old sport, we’ll make it so.”

  Then came the affair of the Cuxhaven. The moments that U.C. 07 had been freezing for, three weeks beneath the sea, arrived just before sunset of a frosty day. There was no mist and the horizon showed on the table like a silver string dividing gold from grey.