Hag's Nook dgf-1

by John Dickson Carr

  "Are you sure?"

  "Of course."

  "Well, that's all right, then. You see-"

  She gestured at the train, and he swung aboard just as it got under way. He was craning out of one corridor window, trying to get a glimpse of her, when he heard the throaty voice call something after him, very distinctly. The voice said an extraordinary thing. It called:

  "If you see any ghosts, save them for me."

  What the devil! Rampole stared at the dark lines of idle carriages sweeping past, the murky station lights which seemed to shake to the vibration of the train, and tried to understand that last sentence. The words were not exactly disturbing, but they were a little-well, cockeyed. That was the only way to express it. Had the whole business been a joke? Was this the English version of the needles, the raspberry, or any similar picturesque and delicate term? For a moment his neckband grew warm. No, damn it! You could always tell. A train guard, passing through the corridor at this moment, perceived an obviously American Young Gen'lman thrusting his face blindly out of the window into a hurricane of cinders, and breathing them with deep joyous breaths, like mountain air.

  The depressed feeling had vanished. This little, swaying train, almost empty of passengers, made him feel like a man in a speedboat. London was not big and powerful now, nor the countryside a lonely place. He had drunk strong liqueur in a strange land, and he felt suddenly close to somebody.

  Luggage? He froze for a moment before remembering that a porter had already stowed it into a compartment somewhere along here. That was all right. Under his feet he could feel the floor vibrating; the train jerked and whirled with a clackety roar, and a long blast of the whistle was torn backwards as it gathered speed. This was the way to begin adventure. "If you see any ghosts, save them for me." A husky voice-which somehow suggested a person standing on tiptoe-drifting down the platform....

  If she had been an American, now, he could have asked her name. If she had been an American ... but, he suddenly realized, he didn't want her to be an American. The wide-set blue eyes, the face which was just a trifle too square for complete beauty, the red and crinky-smiling mouth; all were at once exotic and yet as honestly Anglo-Saxon as the brick staunchness of Whitehall. He liked the way she pronounced her words, as though with a half mockery. She seemed cool and clean, like a person swinging through the countryside. Turning from the window, Rampole had a strong desire to chin himself on the top of one of the compartment doors. He would have done so but for the presence of a very glum and very rigid man with a large pipe, who was staring glassily out of a near-by window, with the top of his travelling-cap pulled over one ear like a beret. This person looked so exactly like a comic-strip Englishman that Rampole would have expected him to exclaim, "What, what, what, what?" and go puffing and stumping down the corridor, had he seen any such athletic activity indulged in here.

  The American was to remember this person presently. For the moment, he knew only that he felt hilarious, hungry, and in need of a drink. There was, he remembered, a restaurant-car ahead. Locating his luggage in a smoking-compartment, he groped his way along narrow corridors in search of food. The train was clattering through suburbs now, creaking and plunging and swaying under the shrillness of its whistle, and lighted walls streamed past on either side. To Rampole's surprise, the restaurant-car was almost full; it was somewhat cramped, and smelt heavily of beer and salad oil. Sliding into a chair opposite another diner, he thought that there were rather more crumbs and blotches than were necessary; whereupon he again damned himself for provincialism. The table shook to the swaying of the train, lights jolted on nickel and woodwork, and he watched the man opposite skilfully introduce a large glass of Guinness under, a corresponding moustache. After a healthy pull, the other set down the glass and spoke.

  "Good evening," he said, affably. "You're young Rampole, aren't you?"

  If the stranger had added, "You come from Afghanistan, I perceive," Rampole could not have been more startled. A capacious chuckle enlivened the other man's several chins. He had a way of genially chuckling, "Heh-heh-heh," precisely like a burlesque villain on the stage. Small eyes beamed on the American over eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon. His big face grew more ruddy; his great mop of hair danced to the chuckles, or the motion of the train, or both; and he thrust out his hand.

  "I'm Gideon Fell, d'ye see? Bob Melson wrote me about you, and I knew you must be the person as soon as you walked in the car. We must have a bottle of wine on this. We must have two bottles of wine. One for you, and one for me, d'ye see? Heh-heh-heh. Waiter!"

  He rolled in his chair like a feudal baron, beckoning imperiously.

  "My wife," continued Dr. Fell, after he had given a Gargantuan order -"my wife would never have forgiven me if I'd missed you. She's in a stew as it is, what with plaster falling off in the best bedroom, and the new revolving sprinkler for the lawn, which wouldn't work until the rector came to call, and then it doused him like a shower-bath. Heh-heh. Have a drink. I don't know what kind of wine it is, and I never ask; it's wine, and that's enough for me."

  "Your health, sir."

  "Thank'e, my boy. Permit me," said Dr. Fell, apparently with some vague recollections of his stay in America, "to jump the gutter. Nunc bibendum est. Heh.- So you're Bob Melson's senior wrangler, eh? English history, I think he said. You're thinking of a Ph.D., and then teaching?"

  Rampole suddenly felt very young and very foolish, despite the doctor's amiable eye. He mumbled something noncommittal.

  "That's fine," said the other. "Bob praised you, but he said, `Too imaginative by half"; that's what he said. Bah! give 'em the glory, I say; give 'em the glory. Now, when I lectured at your Haverford, they may not have learned much about English history, but they cheered, my boy, they cheered when I described battles. I remember," continued the doctor, his vast face glowing as with a joyous sunset, and puffing beneath it "I remember teaching 'em the Drinking Song of Godfrey of Bouillon's men on the First Crusade in 1187, leading the chorus myself. Then they all got to singing and stamping on the floor, as it were; and a maniacal professor of mathematics came stamping up with his hands entangled in his hair - as it were-and said (admirably restrained chap) would we kindly stop shaking the blackboards off the wall in the room below? `It is unseemly,' says he; 'burpf, burpf, ahem, very unseemly.' `Not at all,' says I. `It is the "Laus Vini Exercitus Crucis," `It is, like hell,' says he. `Do you think I don't know "We Won't Be Home until Morning" when I hear it?' And then I had to explain the classic derivation.

  “Hallo, Payne!" the doctor boomed, breaking off to flourish his napkin at the aisle.

  Turning, Rampole saw the exceedingly glum and rigid man with the pipe, whom he had noticed before in the corridor of the train. The cap was off now, to show a close-shaven skull of wiry white hair, a long brown face, and a general air of doddering down the aisle, looking for a place to fall. He grumbled something, not very civilly, and paused by the table.

  "Mr. Payne, Mr. Rampole," said Dr. Fell. Payne's eyes turned on the American with a startling flash of their whites; they seemed suspicious. "Mr. Payne is Chatterham's legal adviser," the doctor explained. "I say, Payne, where are your charges? I wanted young Starberth to have a glass of wine with us."

  A thin hand fluttered to Payne's brown chin, and stroked it. His voice was dry, with a premonitory rasp and difficulty, as though he were winding himself up.

  "Didn't arrive," replied the lawyer, shortly.

  "Humf. Heh. Didn't arrive?"

  The rattle of the train, Rampole thought, must shake Payne's bones apart. He blinked, and continued to massage his chin.

  "No. I expect," said the lawyer, suddenly pointing to the wine-bottle, "he's had too much of that already. Perhaps Mr.-ah-Rampole can tell us more about it. I knew he didn't fancy his little hour in the Hag's Nook, but I hardly thought any prison superstitions would keep him away. There's still time, of course."

  This, Rampole thought, was undoubtedly the most bewildering gibberish he had ever hea
rd. "His little hour in the Hag's Nook." "Prison superstitions." And here was this loose-jointed brown man, with the deep wrinkles round his nose, turning the whites of his eyes round and fixing Rampole with the same pale-blue, glassy stare he had fixed on the corridor window awhile ago. The American was already beginning to feel flushed with wine. What the devil was all this, anyhow?

  He said, "I - I beg your pardon?" and pushed his glass away.

  Another rasp and whir in Payne's throat. "I may have been mistaken, sir. But I believe I saw you in conversation with Mr. Starberth's sister just before the train started. I thought perhaps-?"

  "With Mr. Starberth's sister, yes," said the American, beginning to feel a pounding in his throat. He tried to seem composed. "I am not acquainted with Mr: Starberth himself."

  "Ah," said Payne, clicking in his throat. "Just so. Well-"

  Rampole was conscious of Dr. Fell's small, clever eyes watching through the joviality of his glasses; watching Payne closely.

  "I say, Payne," the doctor observed, "he isn't afraid of meeting some one going out to be hanged, is he?"

  "No," said the lawyer. "Excuse me, gentlemen. I must go and dine."

  Chapter 2

  THE rest of that ride often came back to Rampole as a sinking into the deep countryside; a flight into cool and mysterious places as the lights of towns went out with the hours, and the engine's whistle called more thinly against an emptier sky. Dr. Fell had not referred to Payne again, except to dismiss him with a snort.

  "Don't mind him," he said, wheezing contemptuously. "He's a stickler for things. Worst of all, the man's a mathematician. Pah! A mathematician," repeated Dr. Fell, glaring at his salad as though he expected to find a binomial theorem lurking in the lettuce. "He oughtn't to talk."

  The old lexicographer did not even manifest any surprise at Rampole's acquaintance with the unknown Starberth's sister, for which the American felt grateful. Rampole, in his turn, refrained from asking questions about the odd statements he had heard that evening. He sat back, pleasantly padded by the wine, and listened to his host talk.

  Although he was no critic in the matter of mixing drinks, he was nevertheless a trifle appalled at the way Dr. Fell poured down wine on top of stout, and followed both with beer towards the close of the meal; but he kept up valiantly with every glass. "As for this beverage, sir," said the doctor, his great voice rumbling down the car, "as for this drink, witness what the Alvismal says: `Called ale among men; but by the gods called beer.' Hah!"

  His face fiery, spilling cigar-ashes down the front of his necktie, rolling and chuckling in his seat, he talked. It was only when the waiters began to hover and cough discreetly round the table that he could be persuaded to leave. Growling on his two canes, he lumbered out ahead of Rampole. Presently they were established facing each other in corner seats of an empty compartment. Ghostly in the dim lights, this small place seemed darker than the landscape outside. Dr. Fell, piled into his dusky comer, was a great goblin figure against the faded red upholstery and the indistinguishable pictures above the 'seats. He had fallen silent; he felt this unreal quality, too. A cool wind had freshened from the north and there was a moon. Beyond the flying click of the wheels, the hills were tired and thick-grown and old, and the trees were mourning bouquets. Then Rampole spoke at last. He could not keep it back. They had chugged in to a stop at the platform of a village. Now there was absolute silence but for a long expiring sigh from the engine....

  "Would you mind telling me, sir," said the American, "what Mr. Payne meant by all that talk about `an hour at the Hag's Nook, and-and all the rest of it?"

  Dr. Fell, roused out of a reverie, seemed startled. He bent forward, the moon on his eyeglasses. In the stillness they could hear the engine panting in hoarse breaths, and a wiry hum of insects. Something clanked and shivered through the train. A lantern swung and winked:

  "Eh?-Why, Good Lord, boy! I thought you knew Dorothy Starberth. I didn't like to ask..:."

  The sister, apparently. Handle with care. Rampole said:

  "I just met her today. I scarcely know her at all."

  "Then you've never heard of Chatterham prison?"

  "Never."

  The doctor clucked his tongue. "You've got something out of Payne, then. He took you for an old friend... . Chatterham isn't a prison now, you know. It hasn't been in use since 1837, and it's falling to ruin."

  A baggage truck rumbled. There was a brief glare in the darkness, and Rampole saw a curious expression on the doctor's big face, momentarily.

  "Do you know why they abandoned it?" he asked. "It was the cholera, of course; cholera-and something else. But they said the other thing was worse."

  Rampole got out a cigarette and lighted it. He could not analyse his feeling then, though it was sharp and constricting; he thought afterwards that it was as though something had gone wrong with his lungs. In the dark he drew a deep, breath of the cool, moist air.

  "Prison," continued the doctor, "particularly prisons of that day, were hellish places. And they built this one round the Hag's Nook."

  "The Hag's Nook?"

  "That was where they used to hang witches. All the common malefactors were hanged there, of course. H'mf." Dr. Fell cleared his throat, a long rumble. "I say witches because that fact made the most impression on the popular mind

  "Lincolnshire's the fen country, you know. The old British called Lincoln Llyn-dune, the fen town; the Romans made it Lindum-Colonia. Chatterham is some distance from Lincoln, but then Lincoln's modern nowadays. We're not. We have the rich soil, the bogs and marshes, the waterfowl, and the soft thick air-where people see things, after sunset. Eh?"

  The train was rumbling out again. Rampole managed a little laugh. In the restaurant-car this swilling, chuckling fat man had seemed as hearty as an animated side of beef; now he seemed subdued and a trifle sinister.

  "See things, sir?" the other repeated.

  "They built the prison," Fell went on, "round a gallows. . . . Two generations of the Starberth family were governors there. In your country you'd call 'em wardens. It's traditional that the Starberths die of broken necks. Which isn't a very pleasant thing to look forward to."

  Fell struck a match for his cigar, and Rampole saw that he was smiling.

  "I'm not trying to scare you with ghost stories," he added, after he had sucked wheezingly on the cigar for a time. "I'm only trying to prepare you. We haven't your American briskness. It's in the air; the whole countryside is full of belief. So don't laugh if you hear about Peggy-with-the-Lantern, or the imp on Lincoln cathedral, or, more particularly, anything concerned with the prison."

  There was a silence. Then Rampole said: "I'm not apt to .laugh. All my life I've been wanting to see a haunted house. I don't believe, of course, but that doesn't detract from my interest.... What is the story concerned with the prison?"

  " Too imaginative by half,"' the doctor muttered, staring at the ash on his cigar. "That was what Bob Melson said. - You shall have the full story tomorrow. I've kept copies of the papers. But young Martin has got to spend his hour in the Governor's Room, and open the safe and look at what's in there. You see, for about two hundred years the Starberths have owned the land on which Chatterham prison was built. They still own it; the borough never took it over, and it's held in what the lawyer chaps call `entail' by the eldest son - can't be sold. On the evening of his twenty-fifth birthday, the eldest Starberth has got to go to the prison, open the safe in the Governor's Room, and take his chances...."

  "On what, sir?"

  "I don't know. Nobody knows what's inside. It's not to be mentioned by the heir himself, until the keys are handed over to his son."

  Rampole shifted. His brain pictured a grey ruin, an iron door, and a man with a lamp in his hand turning a rusty key. He said: "Good Lord! it sounds like-" but he could not find words, and he found himself wryly smiling.

  "It's England. What's the matter?"

  "I was only thinking that if this were America, there would be reporters
, news-reel cameras, and a crowd ten deep round the prison to see what happened."

  He knew that he had said something wrong. He was always finding it out. Being with these English was like shaking hands with a friend whom you thought you knew, and suddenly finding the hand turned to a wisp of fog. There was a place where thoughts never met, and no similarity of language could cover the gap. He saw Dr. Fell looking at him with eyes screwed up behind his glasses; then, to his relief, the lexicographer laughed.

  "I told you it was England," he replied. "Nobody will bother him. It's too much concerned with the belief that the Starberths die of broken necks."

  "Well, sir?"

  "That's the odd part of it," said Dr. Fell, inclining his big head. "They generally do."

  No more was said on the subject. The wine at dinner seemed to have dulled the doctor's rolling spirits, or else he was occupied with some meditations which were to be seen only in the slow, steady pulsing and dimming of his cigar from the comer. Over his shoulders he pulled a frayed plaid shawl; the great mop of hair nodded forward. Rampole might have thought him asleep but for the gleam under his eyelids, the bright shrewd steadiness behind those eyeglasses on the black ribbon....

  The American's sense of unreality had closed in fully by the time they reached Chatterham. Now the red lights of the train were sinking away down the tracks; a whistle fluttered and sank with it, and the air of the station platform was chill. A dog barked distantly at the passage of the train, followed by a chorus which sullenly died. Their footsteps crunched with startling loudness on gravel as Rampole followed his host up from the platform.

  A white road, winding between trees and flat meadows. Marshy ground, with a mist rising from it, and a gleam of black water under the moon. Then hedgerows, odorous with hawthorn; the pale green of corn stretching across rolling fields; crickets pulsing; the fragrance of dew on grass. Here was Dr. Fell, in a rakish slouch-hat, and the plaid shawl over his shoulders, stumping along on two canes. He had been up to London just for the day, he explained, and he had no luggage. Swinging a heavy valise, Rampole strode beside him. He had been startled, momentarily, to see a figure ahead of them - a figure in a nondescript coat and a travelling-cap, beating along the road, with sparks from a pipe flying out behind. Then he realized it was Payne. Despite his doddering walk, the lawyer covered ground with speed. Unsociable dog! Rampole could almost hear him growling to himself as he walked along: Yet there was small time to think of Payne; here he was, singing with adventure under a great alien sky, where not even the stars were familiar. He was very small and lost in this ancient England.