The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  “I’m glad to see you never speak when Marx is in the room,” said Garvey presently. “I’m sure it’s better not. Don’t you think so?”

  He appeared to wait eagerly for the answer.

  “Undoubtedly,” said the puzzled secretary.

  “Yes,” the other went on quickly. “He’s an excellent man, but he has one drawback—a really horrid one. You may—but, no, you could hardly have noticed it yet.”

  “Not drink, I trust,” said Shorthouse, who would rather have discussed any other subject than the odious Jew.

  “Worse than that a great deal,” Garvey replied, evidently expecting the other to draw him out. But Shorthouse was in no mood to hear anything horrible, and he declined to step into the trap.

  “The best of servants have their faults,” he said coldly.

  “I’ll tell you what it is if you like,” Garvey went on, still speaking very low and leaning forward over the table so that his face came close to the flame of the lamp, “only we must speak quietly in case he’s listening. I’ll tell you what it is—if you think you won’t be frightened.”

  “Nothing frightens me,” he laughed. (Garvey must understand that at all events.) “Nothing can frighten me,” he repeated.

  “I’m glad of that; for it frightens me a good deal sometimes.”

  Shorthouse feigned indifference. Yet he was aware that his heart was beating a little quicker and that there was a sensation of chilliness in his back. He waited in silence for what was to come.

  “He has a horrible predilection for vacuums,” Garvey went on presently in a still lower voice and thrusting his face farther forward under the lamp.

  “Vacuums!” exclaimed the secretary in spite of himself. “What in the world do you mean?”

  “What I say of course. He’s always tumbling into them, so that I can’t find him or get at him. He hides there for hours at a time, and for the life of me I can’t make out what he does there.”

  Shorthouse stared his companion straight in the eyes. What in the name of Heaven was he talking about?

  “Do you suppose he goes there for a change of air, or—or to escape?” he went on in a louder voice.

  Shorthouse could have laughed outright but for the expression of the other’s face.

  “I should not think there was much air of any sort in a vacuum,” he said quietly.

  “That’s exactly what I feel,” continued Garvey with ever growing excitement. “That’s the horrid part of it. How the devil does he live there? You see—”

  “Have you ever followed him there?” interrupted the secretary. The other leaned back in his chair and drew a deep sigh.

  “Never! It’s impossible. You see I can’t follow him. There’s not room for two. A vacuum only holds one comfortably. Marx knows that. He’s out of my reach altogether once he’s fairly inside. He knows the best side of a bargain. He’s a regular Jew.”

  “That is a drawback to a servant, of course—” Shorthouse spoke slowly, with his eyes on his plate.

  “A drawback,” interrupted the other with an ugly chuckle, “I call it a draw-in, that’s what I call it.”

  “A draw-in does seem a more accurate term,” assented Shorthouse. “But,” he went on, “I thought that nature abhorred a vacuum. She used to, when I was at school—though perhaps—it’s so long ago—”

  He hesitated and looked up. Something in Garvey’s face—something he had felt before he looked up—stopped his tongue and froze the words in his throat. His lips refused to move and became suddenly dry. Again the mist rose before his eyes and the appalling shadow dropped its veil over the face before him. Garvey’s features began to burn and glow. Then they seemed to coarsen and somehow slip confusedly together. He stared for a second—it seemed only for a second—into the visage of a ferocious and abominable animal; and then, as suddenly as it had come, the filthy shadow of the beast passed off, the mist melted out, and with a mighty effort over his nerves he forced himself to finish his sentence.

  “You see it’s so long since I’ve given attention to such things,” he stammered. His heart was beating rapidly, and a feeling of oppression was gathering over it.

  “It’s my peculiar and special study on the other hand,” Garvey resumed. “I’ve not spent all these years in my laboratory to no purpose, I can assure you. Nature, I know for a fact,” he added with unnatural warmth, “does not abhor a vacuum. On the contrary, she’s uncommonly fond of ‘em, much too fond, it seems, for the comfort of my little household. If there were fewer vacuums and more abhorrence we should get on better—a damned sight better in my opinion.”

  “Your special knowledge, no doubt, enables you to speak with authority,” Shorthouse said, curiosity and alarm warring with other mixed feelings in his mind; “but how can a man tumble into a vacuum?”

  “You may well ask. That’s just it. How can he? It’s preposterous and I can’t make it out at all. Marx knows, but he won’t tell me. Jews know more than we do. For my part I have reason to believe—” He stopped and listened. “Hush! here he comes,” he added, rubbing his hands together as if in glee and fidgeting in his chair.

  Steps were heard coming down the passage, and as they approached the door Garvey seemed to give himself completely over to an excitement he could not control. His eyes were fixed on the door and he began clutching the tablecloth with both hands. Again his face was screened by the loathsome shadow. It grew wild, wolfish. As through a mask, that concealed, and yet was thin enough to let through a suggestion of, the beast crouching behind, there leaped into his countenance the strange look of the animal in the human—the expression of the were-wolf, the monster. The change in all its loathsomeness came rapidly over his features, which began to lose their outline. The nose flattened, dropping with broad nostrils over thick lips. The face rounded, filled, and became squat. The eyes, which, luckily for Shorthouse, no longer sought his own, glowed with the light of untamed appetite and bestial greed. The hands left the cloth and grasped the edges of the plate, and then clutched the cloth again.

  “This is my course coming now,” said Garvey, in a deep guttural voice. He was shivering. His upper lip was partly lifted and showed the teeth, white and gleaming.

  A moment later the door opened and Marx hurried into the room and set a dish in front of his master. Garvey half rose to meet him, stretching out his hands and grinning horribly. With his mouth he made a sound like the snarl of an animal. The dish before him was steaming, but the slight vapour rising from it betrayed by its odour that it was not born of a fire of coals. It was the natural heat of flesh warmed by the fires of life only just expelled. The moment the dish rested on the table Garvey pushed away his own plate and drew the other up close under his mouth. Then he seized the food in both hands and commenced to tear it with his teeth, grunting as he did so. Shorthouse closed his eyes, with a feeling of nausea. When he looked up again the lips and jaw of the man opposite were stained with crimson. The whole man was transformed. A feasting tiger, starved and ravenous, but without a tiger’s grace—this was what he watched for several minutes, transfixed with horror and disgust.

  Marx had already taken his departure, knowing evidently what was not good for the eyes to look upon, and Shorthouse knew at last that he was sitting face to face with a madman.

  The ghastly meal was finished in an incredibly short time and nothing was left but a tiny pool of red liquid rapidly hardening. Garvey leaned back heavily in his chair and sighed. His smeared face, withdrawn now from the glare of the lamp, began to resume its normal appearance. Presently he looked up at his guest and said in his natural voice—

  “I hope you’ve had enough to eat. You wouldn’t care for this, you know,” with a downward glance.

  Shorthouse met his eyes with an inward loathing, and it was impossible not to show some of the repugnance he felt. In the other’s face, however, he thought he saw a subdued, cowed expression. But he found nothing to say.

  “Marx will be in presently,” Garvey went on. “He’
s either listening, or in a vacuum.”

  “Does he choose any particular time for his visits?” the secretary managed to ask.

  “He generally goes after dinner; just about this time, in fact. But he’s not gone yet,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “for I think I hear him coming.”

  Shorthouse wondered whether vacuum was possibly synonymous with wine cellar, but gave no expression to his thoughts. With chills of horror still running up and down his back, he saw Marx come in with a basin and towel, while Garvey thrust up his face just as an animal puts up its muzzle to be rubbed.

  “Now we’ll have coffee in the library, if you’re ready,” he said, in the tone of a gentleman addressing his guests after a dinner party.

  Shorthouse picked up the bag, which had lain all this time between his feet, and walked through the door his host held open for him. Side by side they crossed the dark hall together, and, to his disgust, Garvey linked an arm in his, and with his face so close to the secretary’s ear that he felt the warm breath, said in a thick voice—

  “You’re uncommonly careful with that bag, Mr. Shorthouse. It surely must contain something more than the bundle of papers.”

  “Nothing but the papers,” he answered, feeling the hand burning upon his arm and wishing he were miles away from the house and its abominable occupants.

  “Quite sure?” asked the other with an odious and suggestive chuckle. “Is there any meat in it, fresh meat—raw meat?”

  The secretary felt, somehow, that at the least sign of fear the beast on his arm would leap upon him and tear him with his teeth.

  “Nothing of the sort,” he answered vigorously. “It wouldn’t hold enough to feed a cat.”

  “True,” said Garvey with a vile sigh, while the other felt the hand upon his arm twitch up and down as if feeling the flesh. “True, it’s too small to be of any real use. As you say, it wouldn’t hold enough to feed a cat.”

  Shorthouse was unable to suppress a cry. The muscles of his fingers, too, relaxed in spite of himself and he let the black bag drop with a bang to the floor. Garvey instantly withdrew his arm and turned with a quick movement. But the secretary had regained his control as suddenly as he had lost it, and he met the maniac’s eyes with a steady and aggressive glare.

  “There, you see, it’s quite light. It makes no appreciable noise when I drop it.” He picked it up and let it fall again, as if he had dropped it for the first time purposely. The ruse was successful.

  “Yes. You’re right,” Garvey said, still standing in the doorway and staring at him. “At any rate it wouldn’t hold enough for two,” he laughed. And as he closed the door the horrid laughter echoed in the empty hall.

  They sat down by a blazing fire and Shorthouse was glad to feel its warmth. Marx presently brought in coffee. A glass of the old whisky and a good cigar helped to restore equilibrium. For some minutes the men sat in silence staring into the fire. Then, without looking up, Garvey said in a quiet voice—

  “I suppose it was a shock to you to see me eat raw meat like that. I must apologise if it was unpleasant to you. But it’s all I can eat and it’s the only meal I take in the twenty-four hours.”

  “Best nourishment in the world, no doubt; though I should think it might be a trifle strong for some stomachs.”

  He tried to lead the conversation away from so unpleasant a subject, and went on to talk rapidly of the values of different foods, of vegetarianism and vegetarians, and of men who had gone for long periods without any food at all. Garvey listened apparently without interest and had nothing to say. At the first pause he jumped in eagerly.

  “When the hunger is really great on me,” he said, still gazing into the fire, “I simply cannot control myself. I must have raw meat—the first I can get—” Here he raised his shining eyes and Shorthouse felt his hair beginning to rise.

  “It comes upon me so suddenly too. I never can tell when to expect it. A year ago the passion rose in me like a whirlwind and Marx was out and I couldn’t get meat. I had to get something or I should have bitten myself. Just when it was getting unbearable my dog ran out from beneath the sofa. It was a spaniel.”

  Shorthouse responded with an effort. He hardly knew what he was saying and his skin crawled as if a million ants were moving over it.

  There was a pause of several minutes.

  “I’ve bitten Marx all over,” Garvey went on presently in his strange quiet voice, and as if he were speaking of apples; “but he’s bitter. I doubt if the hunger could ever make me do it again. Probably that’s what first drove him to take shelter in a vacuum.” He chuckled hideously as he thought of this solution of his attendant’s disappearances.

  Shorthouse seized the poker and poked the fire as if his life depended on it. But when the banging and clattering was over Garvey continued his remarks with the same calmness. The next sentence, however, was never finished. The secretary had got upon his feet suddenly.

  “I shall ask your permission to retire,” he said in a determined voice; “I’m tired to-night; will you be good enough to show me to my room?”

  Garvey looked up at him with a curious cringing expression behind which there shone the gleam of cunning passion.

  “Certainly,” he said, rising from his chair. “You’ve had a tiring journey. I ought to have thought of that before.”

  He took the candle from the table and lit it, and the fingers that held the match trembled.

  “We needn’t trouble Marx,” he explained. “That beast’s in his vacuum by this time.”

  III

  They crossed the hall and began to ascend the carpetless wooden stairs. They were in the well of the house and the air cut like ice. Garvey, the flickering candle in his hand throwing his face into strong outline, led the way across the first landing and opened a door near the mouth of a dark passage. A pleasant room greeted the visitor’s eyes, and he rapidly took in its points while his host walked over and lit two candles that stood on a table at the foot of the bed. A fire burned brightly in the grate. There were two windows, opening like doors, in the wall opposite, and a high canopied bed occupied most of the space on the right. Panelling ran all round the room reaching nearly to the ceiling and gave a warm and cosy appearance to the whole; while the portraits that stood in alternate panels suggested somehow the atmosphere of an old country house in England. Shorthouse was agreeably surprised.

  “I hope you’ll find everything you need,” Garvey was saying in the doorway. “If not, you have only to ring that bell by the fireplace. Marx won’t hear it of course, but it rings in my laboratory, where I spend most of the night.”

  Then, with a brief good-night, he went out and shut the door after him. The instant he was gone Mr. Sidebotham’s private secretary did a peculiar thing. He planted himself in the middle of the room with his back to the door, and drawing the pistol swiftly from his hip pocket levelled it across his left arm at the window. Standing motionless in this position for thirty seconds he then suddenly swerved right round and faced in the other direction, pointing his pistol straight at the keyhole of the door. There followed immediately a sound of shuffling outside and of steps retreating across the landing.

  “On his knees at the keyhole,” was the secretary’s reflection. “Just as I thought. But he didn’t expect to look down the barrel of a pistol and it made him jump a little.”

  As soon as the steps had gone downstairs and died away across the hall, Shorthouse went over and locked the door, stuffing a piece of crumpled paper into the second keyhole which he saw immediately above the first. After that, he made a thorough search of the room. It hardly repaid the trouble, for he found nothing unusual. Yet he was glad he had made it. It relieved him to find no one was in hiding under the bed or in the deep oak cupboard; and he hoped sincerely it was not the cupboard in which the unfortunate spaniel had come to its vile death. The French windows, he discovered, opened on to a little balcony. It looked on to the front, and there was a drop of less than twenty feet to the ground below. The
bed was high and wide, soft as feathers and covered with snowy sheets—very inviting to a tired man; and beside the blazing fire were a couple of deep armchairs.

  Altogether it was very pleasant and comfortable; but, tired though he was, Shorthouse had no intention of going to bed. It was impossible to disregard the warning of his nerves. They had never failed him before, and when that sense of distressing horror lodged in his bones he knew there was something in the wind and that a red flag was flying over the immediate future. Some delicate instrument in his being, more subtle than the senses, more accurate than mere presentiment, had seen the red flag and interpreted its meaning.

  Again it seemed to him, as he sat in an armchair over the fire, that his movements were being carefully watched from somewhere; and, not knowing what weapons might be used against him, he felt that his real safety lay in a rigid control of his mind and feelings and a stout refusal to admit that he was in the least alarmed.

  The house was very still. As the night wore on the wind dropped. Only occasional bursts of sleet against the windows reminded him that the elements were awake and uneasy. Once or twice the windows rattled and the rain hissed in the fire, but the roar of the wind in the chimney grew less and less and the lonely building was at last lapped in a great stillness. The coals clicked, settling themselves deeper in the grate, and the noise of the cinders dropping with a tiny report into the soft heap of accumulated ashes was the only sound that punctuated the silence.

  In proportion as the power of sleep grew upon him the dread of the situation lessened; but so imperceptibly, so gradually, and so insinuatingly that he scarcely realised the change. He thought he was as wide awake to his danger as ever. The successful exclusion of horrible mental pictures of what he had seen he attributed to his rigorous control, instead of to their true cause, the creeping over him of the soft influences of sleep. The faces in the coals were so soothing; the armchair was so comfortable; so sweet the breath that gently pressed upon his eyelids; so subtle the growth of the sensation of safety. He settled down deeper into the chair and in another moment would have been asleep when the red flag began to shake violently to and fro and he sat bolt upright as if he had been stabbed in the back.