by E. F. Benson
They had a hasty cup of tea, and hurried out to enjoy the last hours of daylight in exploration among the sand-dunes and along the beach, and came back soon after sunset. Though the day had been warm, the evening air had a nip in it, and Sylvia gave a little shiver as they stepped in from the verandah to the sitting-room.
‘It’s rather cold,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll light the fire.’
Ludovic shared her sensations.
‘An excellent idea,’ he said. ‘And we’ll draw the curtains and be cosy. What a charming room! I shall take some interiors tomorrow – time exposure, I think they told me, for an interior.’
Their supper was soon ready, and presently they came back to the sitting-room and laid out a hectic Patience. But they were both strangely absent-minded, neglecting the most glaring opportunities for getting spaces and putting up kings.
‘I can’t concentrate on it tonight,’ said Ludovic. ‘I feel as if someone was trying to attract my attention . . . I wonder if Asteria wants to communicate.’
Sylvia looked up at him.
‘Now it’s very odd that you should say that,’ she observed. ‘I feel exactly as if Violetta was wanting to come through, and yet it doesn’t seem quite like Violetta.’
He gave an uneasy glance round the room.
‘A curious sensation,’ he said. ‘I have the consciousness of some presence here which isn’t quite Asteria. But it may be she. Tiresome of her, if it is, for she ought to know I came down here for a holiday, considering that she recommended it herself. I think I’ll get a pencil and paper, and see if she wants to say anything.’
He composed himself in a chair, with the stationery for Asteria on his knee.
‘Ask her a question or two, Sylvia,’ he said, ‘when I go off.’
Sylvia waited till her brother’s eyelids fluttered and fell.
‘Is that you, Asteria?’ she asked.
His hand twitched and quivered. Then the pencil scribbled ‘Certainly not’ in large, firm letters, quite unlike Asteria’s pretty writing.
Sylvia asked if it was Violetta, but got an emphatic denial.
‘Who is it, then?’ she said.
And then a very absurd thing happened. The pencil spelt out ‘Thomas Spinach’.
Sylvia was puzzled for a moment. Then the explanation occurred to her, and she laughed.
‘Wake up, dear,’ she said to Ludovic. ‘It says it is Thomas Spinach. Of course, that’s your subconscious self trying to remember Carrot.’
But Ludovic did not stir, and to her surprise the pencil began writing again.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ wrote the unknown control. ‘But I’m Spinach, young Spinach. And – ’ there was a long pause – ‘I want you to help me. I can’t remember . . . I’m very unhappy.’
As she followed the words, there suddenly came a very loud rap on the wall just above her, which considerably startled her, for why, if ‘Spinach’ was an attempt on the part of Ludovic’s subconsciousness to write ‘Carrot’, should he announce his presence? She sprang up, and shook Ludovic by the shoulder.
‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘There’s a strange spirit here, and I don’t like it. Wake up, Ludovic.’
He came drowsily to himself.
‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘Anything been happening? Was it Asteria?’ His eye fell on the paper.
‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘Thomas Spinach? That’s only me. My subconsciousness said it was Asparagus once.’
‘But look what it has been writing,’ said Sylvia.
He read it.
‘That’s queer,’ he said. ‘That can’t be me. I’m not very unhappy. I don’t want my own help. I know who I am.’
He jumped up.
‘Most interesting,’ he said. ‘It looks like a new control. Young Spinach must be powerful, too; he came through the first time he tried. We’ll investigate this, Sylvia. It would be fine to get a new control for our séances.’
‘But not tonight, Ludovic,’ said she. ‘I really shouldn’t sleep if you went on now. And he’s violent. He made the loudest rap I ever heard.’
‘Did he, indeed?’ said Ludovic. ‘I must have been in deep trance then, for I never heard it. We’ll certainly try to snap him with the camera tomorrow.’
The morning was bright and sunny, and directly after breakfast Ludovic set to work with his photography. The first three or four films showed nothing but impenetrable blackness, and a consultation of his handbook convinced him that they must have been overexposed. He corrected this, and after a few errors on the other side, produced a negative which quite clearly showed Sylvia sitting by the long window into the verandah. This, though it revealed no ‘extra’, was an encouraging achievement, and he took half a dozen more exposures, with which he hurried away into the small dark cupboard under the stairs, where he had installed his developing and fixing baths. Shortly afterwards Sylvia heard her name called in crowing, exultant tones, and ran to see what had happened.
‘Don’t open the door,’ he called, ‘or you’ll spoil it. But I’ve got a picture of you with a magnificent extra – a face hanging in the air by your shoulder.’
‘How lovely!’ shouted Sylvia. ‘Do be quick and fix it.’
There was no sort of doubt about it. There she sat by the window, and close by her was a strange, inexplicable face. So much could be seen from the negative, and when a print was taken of it the details were wonderfully clear. It was the face of a young man; his handsome features wore an expression of agonised entreaty.
‘Poor boy!’ said Sylvia sympathetically. ‘So good-looking too; but somehow I don’t like him.’
Then a brilliant idea struck her.
‘Oh, Ludovic,’ she said, ‘is it young Spinach?’
He snatched the print from her.
‘I must fix it,’ he said, ‘or it will be ruined. Of course it’s young Spinach. Who else could it be, I should like to know? We’ll find out more about him this evening. Fancy obtaining that the very first morning!’
They spent the afternoon on the beach, in order to get in an elevated frame of mind by contemplating the beauties of nature, and after a light supper, prepared for a double séance. Two hooks, so to speak, were baited for Spinach, for in one chair sat Sylvia, with pencil and paper, ready to take down his slightest word, and in another Ludovic, similarly equipped. They both let themselves sink into that drowsy and vacant condition which they knew to be favourable to communications from the unseen, but for a long time they neither of them got a bite. Then Ludovic heard the dash and clatter of his sister’s pencil, suddenly beginning to write very rapidly, and this aroused in him disturbing feelings of envy and jealousy, for something was coming through to Sylvia and not to him.
This inharmonious emotion quite dissipated the tranquillity which was a sine qua non of the receptive state, and he got up to see what was coming through to her. Probably some mawkish rubbish from Violetta about Savonarola’s sermons. But the moment he saw her paper he was thrilled to the marrow.
‘Yes, I’m Thomas Spinach,’ he read, ‘and I’m very unhappy. I came and stood by you this morning when the man was photographing. I want you to help me. Oh, do help me! It’s something I’ve forgotten, though it is so important. I want you to look everywhere and see if you can’t find something very unusual, and tell them. It is somewhere here. It must be, because I put it there, and I hardly like to tell you what it is, because it’s terrible . . . .’
The pencil stopped. Ludovic was wildly excited, and his jealousy of Sylvia was almost forgotten. After all, it was he who had taken Spinach’s photograph . . . .
Sylvia’s hand continued idle so long that Ludovic, in order to stir it into activity again, began to ask questions.
‘Have you passed over, Spinach?’ he said.
Her hand began to write in a swift and irritated manner. ‘Of course I have,’ it scribbled. ‘Otherwise I should know where it was.’
‘Used you to live here?’ asked Ludovic. ‘And when did you pass over?’
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‘Yes, I lived here,’ came the answer. ‘I passed over a week ago. Very suddenly. There was a thunderstorm that night, and I had just finished it all, and was in the garden cooling down, when lightning struck me, and when I came to – on this side, you understand – I couldn’t remember where it was.’
‘Where what was?’ asked Ludovic. ‘Do you mean the thing you had finished? What was it you had finished?’
The pencil seemed to give a loud squeak, as if it was a slate pencil.
‘Oh, here it is again,’ it wrote in trembling characters. ‘I can’t go on now. It’s terrible. I’m so frightened. Please, please find it.’
Just as on the previous evening, there came an appalling rap somewhere on the wall close to him, and, seriously startled, Ludovic sprang up, and shook Sylvia into consciousness. Whoever this spirit was, it was not a good, kind, mild one like Asteria, who, whenever she rapped, did so very softly and pleasantly.
Sylvia yawned and stretched herself.
‘Spinach?’ she said, drowsily. ‘Any Spinach?’
‘Yes, dear, quantities,’ said Ludovic.
‘And what did he say? Oh, I went off deep then, Ludovic. I don’t know what’s been happening. Violetta isn’t nearly so powerful. Such an odd feeling! Did I write all that?’
‘Yes, in answer to some pretty good questions of mine,’ he said. ‘It’s really wonderful. We’re on the track of young Spinach, or, rather, he’s on ours.’
Sylvia was reading her manuscript.
‘ “I passed over a week ago,” ’ she said. ‘ “Very suddenly – there was a thunderstorm that night – ” Why, Ludovic, there was! That’s quite true. You slept through it, but I didn’t, and I remember reading in the paper that it had been very violent in the Rye district. How strange!’
Ludovic clicked his fingers.
‘I know what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I shall send a telegram to Mrs Sapson. Give me a piece of paper. She said that wonderful visitors might perhaps come to me here.’
Sylvia grasped his thoughts.
‘I see!’ she cried. ‘You mean to tell her that her late tenant, young Thomas Spinach, who was killed by lightning last week, has communicated with us. That will impress her tremendously, if you think she’s had enough of Asteria. Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if she lent us this cottage just in order to test us, and see if we really received messages from the other side. What a score!’
She hastily scribbled on a leaf of her writing-block, counting up the words on her fingers. Her economical mind exerted itself to contrive the message in exactly twelve words.
‘There!’ she read out triumphantly. ‘Listen! “Sapson, 29 Brompton Avenue, London. Tenant Spinach killed last week, thunderstorm, communicated.” Just twelve. You needn’t sign it, as it will have the Rye postmark.’
‘My dear,’ said he, ‘it’s no time for such petty economies. Better spend a few pence more and make it impressive and rather more intelligible. Give me some paper; I asked you before. And we must make it clear that it’s not a chance word of local gossip that has inspired it. I shall tell her about the photograph too.’
Before they went to bed, Ludovic composed a more explicit telegram, and in the course of the next morning he received an enthusiastic reply from Mrs Sapson.
ALL QUITE CORRECT AND MOST WONDERFUL [she wrote]. DELIGHTED YOU HAVE GOT INTO COMMUNICATION. FIND OUT MORE, AND ASK HIM ABOUT HIS UNCLE. WIRE AGAIN IF FRESH REVELATIONS OCCUR.
In order to secure themselves from the possibility of interruption, Sylvia gave Gramsby an afternoon out, which she proposed to spend in the excitements of Rye, and as soon as she was gone the mediums prepared for a séance. As Spinach seemed to fancy Sylvia, she composed herself for the trance-condition, with pencil and paper handy, and Ludovic sat by to ask questions. Very soon Sylvia’s eyes closed, her head fell forward, and the pencil she held began to tremble violently, like a motor-car ready to start.
‘Are you Spinach?’ asked Ludovic, observing these signs of possession. Instantly the pencil began to write.
‘Yes. Have you found it?’
‘We don’t know what it is,’ said Ludovic. Then he remembered Mrs Sapson’s telegram. ‘Has it anything to do with your uncle?’ he asked.
There was a long pause. Then the pencil began to move again.
‘Please find him,’ it wrote.
‘But how are we to find your uncle?’ asked Ludovic. ‘We don’t know where to look or what he’s like. Tell us where to look.’
The pencil moved in a most agitated fashion.
‘I don’t know,’ it wrote. ‘If I knew I would tell you. But it’s somewhere about. I had just put it somewhere, when the lightning came and killed me, and I can’t remember. My memory’s gone like – like after concussion of the brain.’
An uneasy thought struck Ludovic. Why did young Spinach allude to his uncle as ‘it’?
‘Is your uncle dead?’ he asked. ‘Is it his body that you mean by “it”?’
Sylvia’s fingers writhed as if in mortal agony. Then the pencil jerked out, ‘Yes.’
Ludovic, accustomed as he was to spirits, felt an icy shudder run through him. But he waited in silence, for the pencil looked as if it had something more to write. Then – great heavens – it came.
‘I will tell you all,’ it wrote. ‘I killed him, and I can’t remember where I put him.’
A spasm of moral indignation seized Ludovic.
‘That was very wrong of you,’ he justly observed. ‘But we’ll try to help you if you will tell us all about it. Come; you’re dead. Nobody can hang you.’
Shocked as Ludovic was, and extremely uneasy also at the thought of the proximity not only of the spirit of a murderer, but the corpse of young Spinach’s uncle, it was only natural that he should feel an overwhelming professional interest in the revelations that appeared to be imminent. It would be a glorious thing for his career to receive from a departed spirit the first-hand account of this undetected crime, and to be able to corroborate it by the discovery of the corpse. Though he had come down here for a holiday, the chance of such a unique piece of work made him feel quite rested already, for it was impossible to conceive a more magnificent advertisement. What a wonderful confirmation it would be also to Mrs Sapson’s wavering faith in his psychical powers. She would publish the news of it far and wide, and the séances would be more popular than ever. Moreover, there was the chance of learning all sorts of fresh information about the conditions that prevailed on the other side, of a far more sensational and exciting quality than the method of the production of thought-flowers and flowing robes and general love and helpfulness . . . . He waited with the intensest expectation for anything that Spinach might vouchsafe.
At last it began, and now there was no need for further questions, for the pencil streamed across the page. Sheet after sheet of the writing-block was filled, and twice Ludovic had to sharpen Sylvia’s pencil, for the point was quite worn down with these remarkable disclosures, and only made illegible scratches on the paper. For half an hour it careered over the sheets; then finally it made a great scrawl, and Sylvia’s hand dropped inert. She stretched and yawned, and came to herself.
The next hour was the most absorbing that Ludovic had ever spent in his professional work. Together they read the account of the crime. Alexander Spinach, the uncle, was the most wicked of elderly gentlemen, who made his nephew’s life an intolerable burden to him. He had found out that the orphan boy had committed a petty forgery with regard to a cheque which he had signed with his uncle’s name, and, holding exposure and arrest over his head, had made him work for him day and night, fishing and farming and doing the work of the house without a penny-piece of wages, while he himself boozed his days away in the chimney-corner.
Long brooding over his wrongs and the misery of his life made young Spinach (very properly, as he still thought) determine to kill the odious old wretch, and he adroitly poisoned his whisky with weed-killer. He went out to his work next morning as usual, leaving the corpse
in the locked-up house, and casually mentioned to the folk he came across that his uncle had gone up to London and would probably not be back for some time. When he returned in the evening he hid the body somewhere, meaning to dig a handsome excavation in the garden, and having buried it, plant some useful vegetables above it. But hardly had he made this temporary disposition of the corpse, than he was struck by lightning in the terrific storm that visited the district a week ago, and killed. When he came to himself on the spiritual plane he could not remember what he had done with the body.
So far the story was ordinary enough, apart from the interest in the manner of its communication, but now came that part of the confession which these ardent young psychicists saw would be a veritable gold-mine to them. For on emerging on the other side young Spinach found himself terrifyingly haunted not by the spirit, but by the body of his uncle. Just as on the material plane, so he explained, murderers are sometimes haunted by the spirit of their victim, so on the spiritual plane, quite logically, they may be haunted by the body of their victim. His uncle’s bodily and palpable presence grimly pursued him wherever he went; even as he gathered sweet thought-flowers or thought-fruits, the terrible body appeared. If he woke at night he found it watching by his bed, if he bathed in the crystal rivers it swam beside him, and he had learned that he could never find peace till it was given proper burial. No doubt, he said, Ludovic had heard of the skeletons of murdered folk being walled up in secret chambers, and how their spirits haunted the place till their bones were discovered and interred. The converse was true on the other side, and while murdered corpses lay about unburied in the material world, their bodies haunted the perpetrator of the crime.
It was here that poor young Spinach’s difficulty came in. The sudden lightning-stroke had bereft him of all memory of what he was doing just before, and, puzzle as he might, he could not recollect where he had put the corpse . . . . Then he broke out into passionate entreaties: ‘Help me, help me, kind mediums,’ he wrote. ‘I know it is somewhere about, so search for it and get it buried. He was an awful old man and I can’t describe the agony of being haunted by his beastly body. Find it and have it buried, and then I shall be free from its dreadful presence.’