Short Stories

by Agatha Christie

  "Maisie told you," she said. "You know?"

  He nodded.

  "But what does it matter? You're all right. It - it leaves some people out."

  She looked at him somberly, mournfully.

  "You are all right," he repeated.

  "I don't know," she almost whispered it. "I don't know. I told you about my dreams. And when I play - when I'm at the piano - those others come and take hold of my hands."

  He was staring at her - paralyzed. For one instant, as she spoke, something looked out from her eyes. It was gone in a flash - but he knew it. It was the Thing that had looked out from the House.

  She caught his momentary recoil.

  "You see," she whispered. "You see - But I wish Maisie hadn't told you.

  It takes everything from you."

  "Everything?"

  "Yes. There won't even be the dreams left. For now - you'll never dare to dream of the House again."

  The West African sun poured down, and the heat was intense.

  John Segrave continued to moan.

  "I can't find it. I can't find it."

  The little English doctor with the red head and the tremendous jaw scowled down upon his patient in that bullying manner which he had made his own.

  "He's always saying that. What does he mean?"

  "He speaks, I think, of a house, monsieur." The soft-voiced Sister of Charity from the Roman Catholic Mission spoke with her gentle detachment, as she too looked down on the stricken man.

  "A house, eh? Well, he's got to get it out of his head, or we shan't pull him through. It's on his mind. Segrave! Segrave!"

  The wandering attention was fixed. The eyes rested with recognition on the doctor's face.

  "Look here, you're going to pull through. I'm going to pull you through.

  But you've got to stop worrying about this house. It can't run away, you know. So don't bother about looking for it now."

  "All right." He seemed obedient. "I suppose it can't very well run away if it's never been there at all."

  "Of course not!" The doctor laughed his cheery laugh. "Now you'll be all right in no time." And with a boisterous bluntness of manner he took his departure.

  Segrave lay thinking. The fever had abated for the moment, and he could think clearly and lucidly. He must find that House.

  For ten years he had dreaded finding it - the thought that he might come upon it unawares had been his greatest terror. And then, he remembered, when his fears were quite lulled to rest, one day it had found him. He recalled clearly his first haunting terror, and then his sudden, his exquisite, relief. For, after all, the House was empty!

  Quite empty and exquisitely peaceful. It was as he remembered it ten years before. He had not forgotten. There was a huge black furniture van moving slowly away from the House. The last tenant, of course, moving out with his goods. He went up to the men in charge of the van and spoke to them. There was something rather sinister about that van, it was so very black. The horses were black, too, with freely flowing manes and tails, and the men all wore black clothes and gloves. It all reminded him of something else, something that he couldn't remember.

  Yes, he had been quite right. The last tenant was moving out, as his lease was up. The House was to stand empty for the present, until the owner came back from abroad.

  And waking, he had been full of the peaceful beauty of the empty House.

  A month after that, he had received a letter from Maisie (she wrote to him perseveringly, once a month). In it she told him that Allegra Kerr had died in the same home as her mother, and wasn't it dreadfully sad? Though of course a merciful release.

  It had really been very odd indeed. Coming after his dream like that.

  He didn't quite understand it all. But it was odd.

  And the worst of it was that he'd never been able to find the House since. Somehow, he'd forgotten the way.

  The fever began to take hold of him once more. He tossed restlessly.

  Of course, he'd forgotten, the House was on high ground! He must climb to get there. But it was hot work climbing cliffs - dreadfully hot.

  Up, up, up - Oh! he had slipped! He must start again from the bottom.

  Up, up, up - days passed, weeks - he wasn't sure that years didn't go by! And he was still climbing.

  Once he heard the doctor's voice. But he couldn't stop climbing to listen. Besides the doctor would tell him to leave off looking for the House. He thought it was an ordinary house. He didn't know.

  He remembered suddenly that he must be calm, very calm. You couldn't find the House unless you were very calm. It was no use looking for the House in a hurry, or being excited.

  If he could only keep calm! But it was so hot! Hot? It was cold - yes, cold. These weren't cliffs, they were icebergs - jagged, cold icebergs.

  He was so tired. He wouldn't go on looking - it was no good - Ah! here was a lane - that was better than icebergs, anyway. How pleasant and shady it was in the cool, green lane. And those trees - they were splendid! They were rather like - what? He couldn't remember, but it didn't matter.

  Ah! here were flowers. All golden and blue! How lovely it all was - and how strangely familiar. Of course, he had been here before. There, through the trees, was the gleam of the House, standing on the high ground. How beautiful it was. The green lane and the trees and the flowers were as nothing to the paramount, the all-satisfying beauty of the House.

  He hastened his steps. To think that he had never yet been inside! How unbelievably stupid of him - when he had the key in his pocket all the time!

  And of course the beauty of the exterior was as nothing to the beauty that lay within - especially now that the Owner had come back from abroad. He mounted the steps to the great door.

  Cruel strong hands were dragging him back! They fought him, dragging him to and fro, backwards and forwards.

  The doctor was shaking him, roaring in his ear.

  "Hold on, man, you can. Don't let go. Don't let go." His eyes were alight with the fierceness of one who sees an enemy. Segrave wondered who the Enemy was.

  The black-robed nun was praying. That, too, was strange.

  And all he wanted was to be left alone. To go back to the House. For every minute the House was growing fainter.

  That, of course, was because the doctor was so strong. He wasn't strong enough to fight the doctor. If he only could.

  But stop! There was another way - the way dreams went in the moment of waking. No strength could stop them - they just flitted past. The doctor's hands wouldn't be able to hold him if he slipped - just slipped!

  Yes, that was the way! The white walls were visible once more, the doctor's voice was fainter, his hands were barely felt. He knew now how dreams laugh when they give you the slip!

  He was at the door of the House. The exquisite stillness was unbroken.

  He put the key in the lock and turned it.

  Just a moment he waited, to realize to the full the perfect, the ineffable, the all-satisfying completeness of joy.

  Then - he passed over the Threshold.

  THE ACTRESS

  The shabby man in the fourth row of the pit leaned forward and stared incredulously at the stage. His shifty eyes narrowed furtively.

  "Nancy Taylor!" he muttered. "By the Lord, little Nancy Taylor!"

  His glance dropped to the program in his hand. One name was printed in slightly larger type than the rest.

  "Olga Stormer! So that's what she calls herself. Fancy yourself a star, don't you, my lady? And you must be making a pretty little pot of money, too. Quite forgotten your name was ever Nancy Taylor, I daresay. I wonder now - I wonder now what you'd say if Jake Levitt should remind you of the fact?"

  The curtain fell on the close of the first act. Hearty applause filled the auditorium. Olga Stormer, the great emotional actress, whose name in a few short years had become a household word, was adding yet another triumph to her list of successes as "Cora", in The Avenging Angel .

  Jake Levitt did not joi
n in the clapping, but a slow, appreciative grin gradually distended his mouth. God! What luck! Just when he was on his beam-ends, too. She'd try to bluff it out, he supposed, but she couldn't put it over on him. Properly worked, the thing was a gold mine!

  On the following morning the first workings of Jake Levitt's gold mine became apparent. In her drawing room, with its red lacquer and black hangings, Olga Stormer read and reread a letter thoughtfully. Her pale face, with its exquisitely mobile features, was a little more set than usual, and every now and then the grey-green eyes under the level brows steadily envisaged the middle distance, as though she contemplated the threat behind rather than the actual words of the letter.

  In that wonderful voice of hers, which could throb with emotion or be as clear-cut as the click of a typewriter, Olga called: "Miss Jones!"

  A neat young woman with spectacles, a shorthand pad and a pencil clasped in her hand, hastened from an adjoining room.

  "Ring up Mr. Danahan, please, and ask him to come round, immediately."

  Syd Danahan, Olga Stormer's manager, entered the room with the usual apprehension of the man whose life it is to deal with and overcome the vagaries of the artistic feminine. To coax, to soothe, to bully, one at a time or all together, such was his daily routine. To his relief, Olga appeared calm and reposed, and merely flicked a note across the table to him.

  "Read that."

  The letter was scrawled in an illiterate hand, of cheap paper.

  Dear Madam, I much appreciated your performance in The Avenging Angel last night. I fancy we have a mutual friend in Miss Nancy Taylor, late of Chicago. An article regarding her is to be published shortly. If you would care to discuss same, I could call upon you at any time convenient to yourself.

  Yours respectfully, Jake Levitt Danahan looked lightly bewildered, "I don't quite get it. Who is this Nancy Taylor?"

  "A girl who would be better dead, Danny." There was bitterness in her voice and a weariness that revealed her thirty-four years. "A girl who was dead until this carrion crow brought her to life again."

  "Oh! Then..."

  "Me, Danny. Just me."

  "This means blackmail, of course?"

  She nodded. "Of course, and by a man who knows the art thoroughly."

  Danahan frowned, considering the matter. Olga, her cheek pillowed on a long, slender hand, watched him with unfathomable eyes.

  "What about bluff? Deny everything. He can't be sure that he hasn't been misled by a chance resemblance."

  Olga shook her head.

  "Levitt makes his living by blackmailing women. He's sure enough."

  "The police?" hinted Danahan doubtfully.

  Her faint, derisive smile was answer enough. Beneath her self-control, though he did not guess it, was the impatience of the keen brain watching a slower brain laboriously cover the ground it had already traversed in a flash.

  "You don't - er - think it might be wise for you to - er - say something yourself to Sir Richard? That would partly spike his guns."

  The actress's engagement to Sir Richard Everard, M.P., had been announced a few weeks previously.

  "I told Richard everything when he asked me to marry him."

  "My word, that was clever of you!" said Danahan admiringly.

  Olga smiled a little.

  "It wasn't cleverness, Danny dear. You wouldn't understand. All the same, if this man Levitt does what he threatens, my number is up, and incidentally Richard's Parliamentary career goes smash, too. No, as far as I can see, there are only two things to do."

  "Well?"

  "To pay - and that of course is endless! Or to disappear, start again."

  The weariness was again very apparent in her voice.

  "It isn't even as though I'd done anything I regretted. I was a halfstarved little gutter waif, Danny, striving to keep straight. I shot a man, a beast of a man who deserved to be shot. The circumstances under which I killed him were such that no jury on earth would have convicted me. I know that now, but at the time I was only a frightened kid - and - I ran."

  Danahan nodded.

  "I suppose," he said doubtfully, "there's nothing against this man Levitt we could get hold of?"

  Olga shook her head.

  "Very unlikely. He's too much of a coward to go in for evil-doing." The sound of her own words seemed to strike her. "A coward! I wonder if we couldn't work on that in some way."

  "If Sir Richard were to see him and frighten him," suggested Danahan.

  "Richard is too fine an instrument. You can't handle that sort of man with gloves on."

  "Well, let me see him."

  "Forgive me, Danny, but I don't think you're subtle enough. Something between gloves and bare fists is needed. Let us say mittens! That means a woman! Yes, I rather fancy a woman might do the trick. A woman with a certain amount of finesse, but who knows the baser side of life from bitter experience. Olga Stormer, for instance! Don't talk to me, I've got a plan coming."

  She leaned forward, burying her face in her hands. She lifted it suddenly.

  "What's the name of that girl who wants to understudy me? Margaret Ryan, isn't it? The girl with the hair like mine?"

  "Her hair's all right," admitted Danahan grudgingly, his eyes resting on the bronze-gold coil surrounding Olga's head. "It's just like yours, as you say. But she's no good any other way. I was going to sack her next week."

  "If all goes well, you'll probably have to let her understudy 'Cora'." She smothered his protests with a wave of her hand. "Danny, answer me one question honestly. Do you think I can act? Really act, I mean. Or am I just an attractive woman who trails round in pretty dresses?"

  "Act? My God! Olga, there's been nobody like you since Duse!"

  "Then if Levitt is really a coward, as I suspect, the thing will come off.

  No, I'm not going to tell you about it. I want you to get hold of the Ryan girl. Tell her I'm interested in her and want her to dine here tomorrow night. She'll come fast enough."

  "I should say she would!"

  "The other thing I want is some good strong knockout drops, something that will put anyone out of action for an hour or two, but leave them none the worse the next day."

  Danahan grinned.

  "I can't guarantee our friend won't have a headache, but there will be no permanent damage done."

  "Good! Run away now, Danny, and leave the rest to me." She raised her voice: "Miss Jones!"

  The spectacled young woman appeared with her usual alacrity.

  "Take down this, please."

  Walking slowly up and down, Olga dictated the day's correspondence.

  But one answer she wrote with her own hand.

  Jake Levitt, in his dingy room, grinned as he tore open the expected envelope.

  Dear Sir, I cannot recall the lady of whom you speak, but I meet so many people that my memory is necessarily uncertain. I am always pleased to help any fellow actress, and shall be at home if you will call this evening at nine o'clock.

  Yours faithfully, Olga Stormer Levitt nodded appreciatively. Clever note! She admitted nothing.

  Nevertheless she was willing to treat.

  The gold mine was developing.

  At nine o'clock precisely Levitt stood outside the door of the actress's flat and pressed the bell. No one answered the summons, and he was about to press it again when he realized that the door was not latched.

  He pushed the door open and entered the hall. To his right was an open door leading into a brilliantly lighted room, a room decorated in scarlet and black. Levitt walked in. On the table under the lamp lay a sheet of paper on which were written the words:

  "Please wait until I return. - O. Stormer."

  Levitt sat down and waited. In spite of himself a feeling of uneasiness was stealing over him. The flat was so very quiet. There was something eerie about the silence.

  Nothing wrong, of course, how could there be? But the room was so deadly quiet; and yet, quiet as it was, he had the preposterous, uncomfortable notion that he wasn't
alone in it. Absurd! He wiped the perspiration from his brow. And still the impression grew stronger. He wasn't alone! With a muttered oath he sprang up and began to pace up and down. In a minute the woman would return and then -

  He stopped dead with a muffled cry. From beneath the black velvet hangings that draped the window a hand protruded! He stooped and touched it. Cold - horribly cold - a dead hand.

  With a cry he flung back the curtains. A woman was lying there, one arm flung wide, the other doubled under her as she lay face downwards, her golden-bronze hair lying in dishevelled masses on her neck.

  Olga Stormer! Tremblingly his fingers sought the icy coldness of that wrist and felt for the pulse. As he thought, there was none. She was dead. She had escaped him, then, by taking the simplest way out.

  Suddenly his eyes were arrested by two ends of red cord finishing in fantastic tassels, and half hidden by the masses of her hair. He touched them gingerly; the head sagged as he did so, and he caught a glimpse of a horrible purple face. He sprang back with a cry, his head whirling. There was something here he did not understand. His brief glimpse of the face, disfigured as it was, had shown him one thing.

  This was murder, not suicide. The woman had been strangled and she was not Olga Stormer!

  Ah! What was that? A sound behind him. He wheeled round and looked straight into the terrified eyes of a maidservant crouching against the wall. Her face was as white as the cap and apron she wore, but he did not understand the fascinated horror in her eyes until her halfbreathed words enlightened him to the peril in which he stood.

  "Oh, my God! You've killed 'er!"

  Even then he did not quite realize. He replied:

  "No, no, she was dead when I found her."

  "I saw yer do it! You pulled the cord and strangled her. I 'eard the gurgling cry she give."

  The sweat broke out upon his brow in earnest. His mind went rapidly over his actions of the previous few minutes. She must have come in just as he had the two ends of co rd in his hands; she had seen the sagging head and had taken his own cry as coming from the victim. He stared at her helplessly. There was no doubting what he saw in her face - terror and stupidity. She would tell the police she had seen the crime committed, and no cross-examination would shake her, he was sure of that. She would swear away his life with the unshakable conviction that she was speaking the truth.