The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

He made up his mind after an interval of silence.

  ‘There’s something uncanny in my neighbourhood. Who’s confined in the next cell – there, to the left?’

  ‘To my knowledge it’s empty.’

  He shook his head incredulously.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘I don’t mean to bandy words with you’; and I turned to go.

  At that he came after me with a frightened choke.

  ‘Doctor, your mission’s a merciful one. I’m not trying to sauce you. For God’s sake have me moved! I can see further than most, I tell you!’

  The fellow’s manner gave me pause. He was patently and beyond the pride of concealment terrified.

  ‘What do you see?’ I repeated stubbornly.

  ‘It isn’t that I see, but I know. The cell’s not empty!’

  I stared at him in considerable wonderment.

  ‘I will make inquiries,’ I said. ‘You may take that for a promise. If the cell proves empty, you stop where you are.’

  I noticed that he dropped his hands with a lost gesture as I left him. I was sufficiently moved to accost the warder who awaited me on the spot.

  ‘Johnson,’ I said, ‘is that cell—’

  ‘Empty, sir,’ answered the man sharply and at once.

  Before I could respond, F— came suddenly to the door, which I still held open.

  ‘You lying cur!’ he shouted. ‘You damned lying cur!’

  The warder thrust the man back with violence.

  ‘Now you, 49,’ he said, ‘dry up, and none of your sauce!’ and he banged to the door with a sounding slap, and turned to me with a lowering face. The prisoner inside yelped and stormed at the studded panels.

  ‘That cell’s empty, sir,’ repeated Johnson.

  ‘Will you, as a matter of conscience, let me convince myself? I promised the man.’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘You can’t?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘This is a piece of stupid discourtesy. You can have no reason, of course?’

  ‘I can’t open it – that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, Johnson! Then I must go to the fountainhead.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  Quite baffled by the man’s obstinacy, I said no more, but walked off. If my anger was roused, my curiosity was piqued in proportion.

  I had no opportunity of interviewing the Governor all day, but at night I visited him by invitation to play a game of piquet.

  He was a man without ‘incumbrances’ – as a severe conservatism designates the lares of the cottage – and, at home, lived at his ease and indulged his amusements without comment.

  I found him ‘tasting’ his books, with which the room was well lined, and drawing with relish at an excellent cigar in the intervals of the courses.

  He nodded to me, and held out an open volume in his left hand.

  ‘Listen to this fellow,’ he said, tapping the page with his fingers:

  The most tolerable sort of Revenge, is for those wrongs which there is no Law to remedy. But then, let a man take heed, the Revenge be such, as there is no law to punish. Else, a man’s Enemy, is still before hand, and it is two for one. Some, when they take Revenge, are Desirous the party should know, whence it cometh. This is the more Generous. For the Delight seemeth to be, not so much in doing the Hurt, as in making the Party repent: But Base and Crafty Cowards, are like the Arrow that flyeth in the Dark. Cosmus, Duke of Florence, had a Desperate Saying against Perfidious or Neglecting Friends, as if these wrongs were unpardonable. You shall read (saith he) that we are commanded to forgive our Enemies: But you never read, that we are commanded to forgive our Friends.

  ‘Is he not a rare fellow?’

  ‘Who?’ said I.

  ‘Francis Bacon, who screwed his wit to his philosophy, like a hammer-head to its handle, and knocked a nail in at every blow. How many of our friends round about here would be picking oakum now if they had made a gospel of that quotation?’

  ‘You mean they take no heed that the Law may punish for that for which it gives no remedy?’

  ‘Precisely; and specifically as to revenge. The criminal, from the murderer to the petty pilferer, is actuated solely by the spirit of vengeance – vengeance blind and speechless – towards a system that forces him into a position quite outside his natural instincts.’

  ‘As to that, we have left Nature in the thicket. It is hopeless hunting for her now.’

  ‘We hear her breathing sometimes, my friend. Otherwise Her Majesty’s prison locks would rust. But, I grant you, we have grown so unfamiliar with her that we call her simplest manifestations supernatural nowadays.’

  ‘That reminds me. I visited F— this afternoon. The man was in a queer way – not foxing, in my opinion. Hysteria, probably.’

  ‘Oh! What was the matter with him?’

  ‘The form it took was some absurd prejudice about the next cell – number 47. He swore it was not empty – was quite upset about it – said there was some infernal influence at work in his neighbourhood. Nerves, he finds, I suppose, may revenge themselves on one who has made a habit of playing tricks with them. To satisfy him, I asked Johnson to open the door of the next cell—’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He refused.’

  ‘It is closed by my orders.’

  ‘That settles it, of course. The manner of Johnson’s refusal was a bit uncivil, but—’

  He had been looking at me intently all this time – so intently that I was conscious of a little embarrassment and confusion. His mouth was set like a dash between brackets, and his eyes glistened. Now his features relaxed, and he gave a short high neigh of a laugh.

  ‘My dear fellow, you must make allowances for the rough old lurcher. He was a soldier. He is all cut and measured out to the regimental pattern. With him Major Shrike, like the king, can do no wrong. Did I ever tell you he served under me in India? He did; and, moreover, I saved his life there.’

  ‘In an engagement?’

  ‘Worse – from the bite of a snake. It was a mere question of will. I told him to wake and walk, and he did. They had thought him already in rigor mortis; and, as for him – well, his devotion to me since has been single to the last degree.’

  ‘That’s as it should be.’

  ‘To be sure. And he’s quite in my confidence. You must pass over the old beggar’s churlishness.’

  I laughed an assent. And then an odd thing happened. As I spoke, I had walked over to a bookcase on the opposite side of the room to that on which my host stood. Near this bookcase hung a mirror – an oblong affair, set in brass repoussé work – on the wall; and, happening to glance into it as I approached, I caught sight of the Major’s reflection as he turned his face to follow my movement.

  I say ‘turned his face’ – a formal description only. What met my startled gaze was an image of some nameless horror – of features grooved, and battered, and shapeless, as if they had been torn by a wild beast.

  I gave a little indrawn gasp and turned about. There stood the Major, plainly himself, with a pleasant smile on his face.

  ‘What’s up?’ said he.

  He spoke abstractedly, pulling at his cigar; and I answered rudely, ‘That’s a damned bad looking-glass of yours!’

  ‘I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it,’ he said, still abstracted and apart. And, indeed, when by sheer mental effort I forced myself to look again, there stood my companion as he stood in the room.

  I gave a tremulous laugh, muttered something or nothing, and fell to examining the books in the case. But my fingers shook a trifle as I aimlessly pulled out one volume after another.

  ‘Am I getting fanciful?’ I thought – ‘I whose business it is to give practical account of every bugbear of the nerves. Bah! My liver must be out of order. A speck of bile in one’s eye may look a flying dragon.’

  I dismissed the folly from my mind, and set myself resolutely to inspecting the books marshalled before me. Roving amongst them, I pulled out, entirely at ran
dom, a thin, worn duodecimo, that was thrust well back at a shelf end, as if it shrank from comparison with its prosperous and portly neighbours. Nothing but chance impelled me to the choice; and I don’t know to this day what the ragged volume was about. It opened naturally at a marker that lay in it – a folded slip of paper, yellow with age; and glancing at this, a printed name caught my eye.

  With some stir of curiosity, I spread the slip out. It was a title-page to a volume, of poems, presumably; and the author was James Shrike.

  I uttered an exclamation, and turned, book in hand.

  ‘An author!’ I said. ‘You an author, Major Shrike!’

  To my surprise, he snapped round upon me with something like a glare of fury on his face. This the more startled me as I believed I had reason to regard him as a man whose principles of conduct had long disciplined a temper that was naturally hasty enough.

  Before I could speak to explain, he had come hurriedly across the room and had rudely snatched the paper out of my hand.

  ‘How did this get—’ he began; then in a moment came to himself, and apologised for his ill manners.

  ‘I thought every scrap of the stuff had been destroyed,’ he said, and tore the page into fragments. ‘It is an ancient effusion, doctor – perhaps the greatest folly of my life; but it’s something of a sore subject with me, and I shall be obliged if you’ll not refer to it again.’

  He courted my forgiveness so frankly that the matter passed without embarrassment; and we had our game and spent a genial evening together. But memory of the queer little scene stuck in my mind, and I could not forbear pondering it fitfully.

  Surely here was a new side-light that played upon my friend and superior a little fantastically.

  Conscious of a certain vague wonder in my mind, I was traversing the prison, lost in thought, after my sociable evening with the Governor, when the fact that dim light was issuing from the open door of cell number 49 brought me to myself and to a pause in the corridor outside.

  Then I saw that something was wrong with the cell’s inmate, and that my services were required.

  The medium was struggling on the floor, in what looked like an epileptic fit, and Johnson and another warder were holding him from doing an injury to himself.

  The younger man welcomed my appearance with relief.

  ‘Heard him guggling,’ he said, ‘and thought as something were up. You come timely, sir.’

  More assistance was procured, and I ordered the prisoner’s removal to the infirmary. For a minute, before following him, I was left alone with Johnson.

  ‘It came to a climax, then?’ I said, looking the man steadily in the face.

  ‘He may be subject to ’em, sir,’ he replied evasively.

  I walked deliberately up to the closed door of the adjoining cell, which was the last on that side of the corridor. Huddled against the massive end wall, and half embedded in it, as it seemed, it lay in a certain shadow, and bore every sign of dust and disuse. Looking closely, I saw that the trap in the door was not only firmly bolted, but screwed into its socket.

  I turned and said to the warder quietly—

  ‘Is it long since this cell was in use?’

  ‘You’re very fond of asking questions,’ he answered doggedly.

  It was evident he would baffle me by impertinence rather than yield a confidence. A queer insistence had seized me – a strange desire to know more about this mysterious chamber. But, for all my curiosity, I flushed at the man’s tone.

  ‘You have your orders,’ I said sternly, ‘and do well to hold by them. I doubt, nevertheless, if they include impertinence to your superiors.’

  ‘I look straight on my duty, sir,’ he said, a little abashed. ‘I don’t wish to give offence.’

  He did not, I feel sure. He followed his instinct to throw me off the scent, that was all.

  I strode off in a fume, and after attending F— in the infirmary, went promptly to my own quarters.

  I was in an odd frame of mind, and for long tramped my sitting-room to and fro, too restless to go to bed, or, as an alternative, to settle down to a book. There was a welling up in my heart of some emotion that I could neither trace nor define. It seemed neighbour to terror, neighbour to an intense fainting pity, yet was not distinctly either of these. Indeed, where was cause for one, or the subject of the other? F— might have endured mental sufferings which it was only human to help to end, yet F— was a swindling rogue, who, once relieved, merited no further consideration.

  It was not on him my sentiments were wasted. Who, then, was responsible for them?

  There was a very plain line of demarcation between the legitimate spirit of inquiry and mere apish curiosity. I could recognise it, I have no doubt, as a rule, yet in my then mood, under the influence of a kind of morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I could not whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o’-wisp; and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it fell into a state of collapse, and was useful for nothing else.

  I went to bed and to sleep without difficulty, but I was conscious of myself all the time, and of a shadowless horror that seemed to come stealthily out of corners and to bend over and look at me, and to be nothing but a curtain or a hanging coat when I started and stared.

  Over and over again this happened, and my temperature rose by leaps, and suddenly I saw that if I failed to assert myself, and promptly, fever would lap me in a consuming fire. Then in a moment I broke into a profuse perspiration, and sank exhausted into delicious unconsciousness.

  Morning found me restored to vigour, but still with the maggot of curiosity in my brain. It worked there all day, and for many subsequent days, and at last it seemed as if my every faculty were honeycombed with its ramifications. Then ‘this will not do’, I thought, but still the tunnelling process went on.

  At first I would not acknowledge to myself what all this mental to-do was about. I was ashamed of my new development, in fact, and nervous, too, in a degree of what it might reveal in the matter of moral degeneration; but gradually, as the curious devil mastered me, I grew into such harmony with it that I could shut my eyes no longer to the true purpose of its insistence. It was the closed cell about which my thoughts hovered like crows circling round carrion.

  ‘In the dead waste and middle’ of a certain night I awoke with a strange, quick recovery of consciousness. There was the passing of a single expiration, and I had been asleep and was awake. I had gone to bed with no sense of premonition or of resolve in a particular direction; I sat up a monomaniac. It was as if, swelling in the silent hours, the tumour of curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it was necessary to operate upon it.

  I make no excuse for my then condition. I am convinced I was the victim of some undistinguishable force, that I was an agent under the control of the supernatural, if you like. Some thought had been in my mind of late that in my position it was my duty to unriddle the mystery of the closed cell. This was a sop timidly held out to and rejected by my better reason. I sought – and I knew it in my heart – solution of the puzzle, because it was a puzzle with an atmosphere that vitiated my moral fibre. Now, suddenly, I knew I must act, or, by forcing self-control, imperil my mind’s stability.

  All strung to a sort of exaltation, I rose noiselessly and dressed myself with rapid, nervous hands. My every faculty was focused upon a solitary point. Without and around there was nothing but shadow and uncertainty. I seemed conscious only of a shaft of light, as it were, traversing the darkness and globing itself in a steady disc of radiance on a lonely door.

  Slipping out into the great echoing vault of the prison in stockinged feet, I sped with no hesitation of purpose in the direction of the corridor that was my goal. Surely some resolute Providence guided and encompassed me, for no meeting with the night patrol occurred at any point to embarrass or deter me. Like a ghost myself, I flitted along the stone flags of the passages, hardly waking a murmur from them in my progress.

 
; Without, I knew, a wild and stormy wind thundered on the walls of the prison. Within, where the very atmosphere was self-contained, a cold and solemn peace held like an irrevocable judgement.

  I found myself as if in a dream before the sealed door that had for days harassed my waking thoughts. Dim light from a distant gas jet made a patch of yellow upon one of its panels; the rest was buttressed with shadow.

  A sense of fear and constriction was upon me as I drew softly from my pocket a screwdriver I had brought with me. It never occurred to me, I swear, that the quest was no business of mine, and that even now I could withdraw from it, and no one be the wiser. But I was afraid – I was afraid. And there was not even the negative comfort of knowing that the neighbouring cell was tenanted. It gaped like a ghostly garret next door to a deserted house.

  What reason had I to be there at all, or, being there, to fear? I can no more explain than tell how it was that I, an impartial follower of my vocation, had allowed myself to be tricked by that in the nerves I had made it my interest to study and combat in others.

  My hand that held the tool was cold and wet. The stiff little shriek of the first screw, as it turned at first uneasily in its socket, sent a jarring thrill through me. But I persevered, and it came out readily by and by, as did the four or five others that held the trap secure.

  Then I paused a moment; and, I confess, the quick pant of fear seemed to come grey from my lips. There were sounds about me – the deep breathing of imprisoned men; and I envied the sleepers their hard-wrung repose.

  At last, in one access of determination, I put out my hand, and sliding back the bolt, hurriedly flung open the trap. An acrid whiff of dust assailed my nostrils as I stepped back a pace and stood expectant of anything – or nothing. What did I wish, or dread, or foresee? The complete absurdity of my behaviour was revealed to me in a moment. I could shake off the incubus here and now, and be a sane man again.

  I giggled, with an actual ring of self-contempt in my voice, as I made a forward movement to close the aperture. I advanced my face to it, and inhaled the sluggish air that stole forth, and – God in heaven!

  I had staggered back with that cry in my throat, when I felt fingers like iron clamps close on my arm and hold it. The grip, more than the face I turned to look upon in my surging terror, was forcibly human.