Carnacki: The Watcher at the Gate

by William Meikle

“‘I believe so,’ I replied. ‘They are the focus, at least.’

  “‘Then they can bally well focus somewhere else,’ he replied, and left for the stairs. The next thing I heard was the sound of china breaking on the tiled floor in the hallway. I went to the door to see Atwell high above, tossing the dolls—which, as you know, cost a pretty penny—over the banister, sending them tumbling to their broken doom at my feet. All ten of them came down that way, one after the other, until they lay in a sprawl of broken faces and limbs and tattered clothing, strewn all across the hallway.

  “Even then Atwell was not satisfied. He had me help him take the whole broken lot out to the rear garden, where we burned them in a fire that burned so hot we had to step back from it. At the end, as the embers died down, I thought I saw a black cloud rise up and disperse in the breeze, accompanied by a soft, fading murmur that was gone almost as soon as I noticed it.

  “‘That should do the trick,’ Atwell said. He led me back inside and poured us both a stiff brandy.

  “Unfortunately, he had spoken too soon. Just as I was finishing my drink and getting ready to leave, a woman came in the main door, escorting two girls, both of whom had obviously been crying hard.

  “‘It’s in the dolls,’ the younger girl—Margaret, I guessed—said. “Lizzie’s dolls are whispering too.’

  “Of course there was much consternation in the household, and it took some time to get things settled down, but I was finally able to ascertain that both girls’ dolls had come from the same source—Gamages department store in Holborn.

  “I paid them a visit the very next morning.”

  c

  “As you know, Gamages has the reputation of being run with almost military precision and prides itself on the speed, efficiency and grace with which it fulfills the needs of its customers. So you can imagine my bafflement at arriving to find the place in uproar.

  “There was a long queue at the main desk, mainly irate ladies, dragging weeping children behind, all seemingly intent on being reimbursed for purchases. And it quickly became obvious that all the purchases had been of similar origin—the desk was already laden to overflowing with grinning, blue-eyed princesses, and two stock lads were hard-pressed to cart them away, for as soon as they had taken a batch, more arrived.

  “A flustered gentleman in a tall hat looked on with dismay—it was almost as if I could see his profits flow out of his wallet like water down a drain.

  “I went over and offered him a smoke.

  “‘I have never seen a chap more in need,’ I said.

  “He took my cigarette gladly, although I had to light it for him, for he had a tremor in his hands that spoke of the amount of strain he was under.

  “‘This affair will ruin us,’ he said softly, keeping his voice low so that the queuing ladies would not overhear. “And it’s all bloody Goss’s fault with his blasted dolls. Better than the German models? My Aunt Fanny!’

  “‘Am I to take it that all of the … affected merchandise … came from the same supplier?’

  “The man puffed on the cigarette as if his life depended on it before answering.

  “‘They did indeed. I don’t know what he’s doing up there in Stoke, but I wish he’d jolly well stop it.’

  “‘And how many dolls have you sold from the affected batch?’ I asked.

  “‘Batch? It’s no batch. It feels like half the girls of London have one—or indeed several. I do not know what we shall do if they are all returned. There must be ten thousand at least.’

  “I thought of all those dolls, up on shelves in dark rooms, staring down at their sleeping quarry, whispering and plotting long into the night.

  “There was nothing else for it. After making provision for my defenses to be sent on after me, I headed north at all speed.

  “I am there now, writing to you from a coaching inn on the outskirts of the city.

  “Tomorrow I shall visit the Goss factory and see what is what.”

  c

  The first letter ended there. I refilled my brandy and lit another smoke before opening the second. It was postmarked and dated the morning after the first one, so I surmised it had been written in the evening of the day immediately following the first. My suspicions were confirmed as I started to read.

  c

  “It is worse than I could ever have feared. If I tell you that I am on my third—or possibly my fourth—stiffener of the evening and it is not yet ten o’ clock you may get some inkling of what terrors have assailed me this day. Mere words will never be enough to describe it, and yet I have always found writing to you in this manner to be therapeutic, so I shall set it all down and let you make of it what you will.

  “The day began quietly enough. I left the inn after a hearty breakfast—my gear, including the box of defenses, arrived while I was on my toast. I spent twenty minutes getting it stowed away and ensuring it had survived the journey. I then perused the Thunderer over a smoke, checking for any tales of young girls in distress, before making my way the mile or so along the road to the Goss China factory.

  “The factory sits at the end of a spur from the main railway line, in a goods yard that obviously serves many different businesses. On that morning, however, all the activity was going in just one direction. Carriage after carriage of cargo—of dolls—all coming off the trains and being carted back to what was also obviously my destination.

  “The doll problem appeared to be even bigger than I had thought, for as I passed, I saw the shipping labels on the carriages—yes, some came from London, but there were others, too, from Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Newcastle—and those were just the ones I spotted.

  “If I’d thought the poor floor manager in Gamages was having a bad day, it was nothing to the logistics nightmare being suffered at the Goss factory.

  “The building was a reinvigorated mill of the old type—all rough brick and tall chimneys, with a central courtyard large enough to hold a decent game of cricket. When I arrived on the scene, the whole area was packed with carts and sacks and discarded baskets. Thousands of pale blue eyes looked up at me from the china faces of the returned dolls, and once again I heard the whisper, faint but most definitely there, attempting to work its way into my mind.

  “I shut it out and went in search of someone in charge.

  “That task proved more difficult than you might think, for although there were laborers and foremen aplenty, I was hard-pressed to find the floor manager—the owner, Mr. Goss, was said to be abroad on business, which, given the circumstances, was probably circumspect of him.

  “I finally found the factory floor manager in a long storeroom that ran the length of the full western wing of the establishment.

  “It was full of dolls—and getting fuller by the minute.

  “Understandably, the chap was not best pleased to see me, thinking me to have been sent by Goss himself.

  “‘If you’re here to check on progress, there’s not going to be any,’ were his first words. ‘I’ve stopped production, but it’s these bloody returns that are going to put us under. I can’t keep a worker more than a day; not a single man will work a night shift despite offers of double time; and I have no bleeding idea what I’m going to do with all these bloody dolls.’

  “It took me several minutes and two of my smokes to persuade him that I was not, in fact, a boss’ man sent to keep an eye on him. I broached the actual purpose of my visit casually and in a somewhat roundabout manner, but the chap—George Brown—was far more open to my area of expertise than Lord Atwell had been in London.

  “‘I’ll take help anywhere I can find it, Mr. Carnacki,’ he said. ‘If you tell me you can stop that bally whispering—and stop the shadows shifting and dancing in the dark—then I’m not about to stop you trying. Now excuse me: there’s another trainload due at the top of the hour, and I need to find somewhere to put all these bally dolls before they overrun the place completely.’

  “I took that as permission to do a little sl
euthing on the premises before deciding on a course of action.”

  c

  “Over the next couple of hours I wandered about the factory, getting a feel for the place and talking to the workers. As the foreman had intimated, most of them were new to the job, having but recently been taken on to replace others who had left in rather a hurry. And it was clear that most of those who were still on the job were in quite a funk, scared out of their wits by the whispering, the shifting darkness, and the cold, implacable blue-eyed stares.

  “I did manage to discover several items of note. The dolls were manufactured on the premises—and the carpentry shed where the bodies were made seemed immune to any supernatural effects. All of the whispering, all of the shadows, were associated with the china heads themselves, and in particular ones that came from a new kiln, only fired up a few months previously.

  “I knew that I would have to investigate that kiln sooner rather than later, but my first priority was the long storage warehouse, and the whispering emanating from it—a whispering that was getting louder and more insistent by the hour.

  “Indeed, it got so bad that to a man the staff all up and left shortly after lunch, and no amount of cajoling, entreaties or, finally, threats, from Mr. Brown could persuade them to return. By mid-afternoon there were only the two of us left on the premises.

  “I shared a cup of tea and a smoke with the man while I waited for my defenses to be fetched from the inn. He was clearly distracted.

  “‘There are more bloody trainloads due later,’ he said. ‘But they’ll have to stay down there in the goods yard—there’s just nowhere else to put them.’

  “‘How in blazes did things get to this state of affairs?’ I asked, more to pass the time than in any hope of illumination from the man.

  “‘It were that blasted new kiln that started it all. Before that, the new dolls were selling as fast as we could make them—three shifts a day and the ovens working full-time. That’s why we needed the new one in the first place. Dug up the old mill pond especially, and that cost Mr. Goss a pretty penny, I can tell you—but the clay down there made wonderful bricks—and the kiln fired up just fine. We were able to increase production to over a thousand dolls a day.

  “‘But the whispering started not long after. At first we just ignored it—the money was coming in and the dolls were going off and away all across the country and life was just fine—for a while. Then the dark shadows started to creep, and staff stopped turning up at night—then stopped coming altogether. And soon after that, folks started sending the dolls back.’

  “Told baldly like that, it sounded like a simple enough sequence of events, but even sitting there in the man’s tiny office I could feel the whispering, like something burrowing away at the back of my skull.

  “My defenses could scarcely arrive quickly enough for either of us. I could see that Brown was becoming ever more agitated as the shadows lengthened and afternoon turned round toward evening, and he cast agitated glances toward the warehouse where the dolls were stacked. He kept up a constant flow of conversation—and tea—and I was fair swilling in both by the time the carriage arrived from the inn.

  “The foreman stayed just long enough to help me lug the boxes into the long shed, then, with obvious relief on his face, left me alone there in the growing dark, with only several thousand smiling faces and a chorus of dark whispers for company.

  c

  “I set up my circle in the center of the floor—just about the only clear space available, as the returned dolls had been stacked, one on top of the other, along both aisles as high as my head and in walls several feet deep.

  “I was lucky in one aspect—the warehouse was wired to the town electrical system, so that I was able to hook the electric pentacle in directly—there would be no worries about any battery failure in this instance. I got the wiring and valves in place just as the last of the light went from the sky. When I switched the pentacle on it was as if thousands of those pale blue eyes turned to stare directly at me, and I stepped into the circle just as the shadows started to shift and thicken all around.

  “The sense of presence was immediate, and far stronger here than it had been back in Margaret Atwell’s bedroom. The murmuring and whispering hissed loudly in my ears, but now, inside the circle, it carried no sense of the pervasive darkness and evil. It felt little more than an annoying distraction to the task at hand. The shadows, however, were another matter entirely.

  “The darkness crept around the interior of the warehouse like a prowling cat, just beyond the light cast by the pentacle. The whispers seemed to move with it, as if the presence had coalesced into a single entity—but any thoughts I had in that direction were quickly quashed.

  “It began when a doll tumbled from one of the higher stacks. Velvet and lace rustled, wood cracked where the legs hit the floor—and then there was another sound, the scrape and whisper—wood on wood, velvet on wood. The blue valve flared, and in the sudden light I saw it—pale blue eyes stared straight at me as the doll started to crawl across the warehouse floor—coming straight for my protections.

  “There were three more thuds to my left—I did not have to turn to know that more of the dolls were now crawling on the floor. And soon the walls of china and wood and velvet came tumbling down—a mass of dolls, all crawling frantically across the floor, over and around each other, mounds of them that looked like thrashing children in a temper. All too soon they were all implacably coming forward with a single intent—to reach me where I stood in my circle.

  “You know me, Dodgson—I have stood in some dashed strange places and seen sights another man might not endure, but those eerie blue eyes, all staring into mine as the small bodies crawled toward me, almost had me turning on my heel and fleeing for my sanity. It was only the thought of the plight of Atwell’s young daughter that made me stand and trust to my defense.

  “The valves started to whine as the press of dolls’ bodies reached my outer circle. The blue valve flared again, brighter than ever, and I saw that every doll in the room had its attention on me, and they were still coming out of the stacks, tumbling and crawling and staring. But more than that—just beyond the light—the creeping shadow still circled the room, still watching, still whispering.

  “The dolls pressed tight against the outer circle, but did not breach it. The green valve dimmed, almost went black, and the whispering shadow took advantage, surging forward to fill the void left by the absence of light. The dolls pushed even harder on the outer circle. The yellow valve was next to go dim, expiring with a soft despairing whine as the shadow surged again, and again.

  “If I did not do something quickly, I was going to be submerged—if not in shadow, then most certainly buried under the weight and press of dolls’ bodies as they started to pile up, three, four and five high around the circle.

  “The blackness pushed against the blue valve, which flared alarmingly. Aware that it, too, might expire at any moment, I did the only thing open to me in the situation. I stepped forward, lifted the valve from the floor and thrust it deep into the looming shadow.

  “A scream filled the warehouse—I was not too sure it had not come from me—and the blackness swelled around me. The remaining valves of the pentacle all flared at once, a light so bright that all darkness was dispelled from the shed. This time I spotted the source of the next scream—it came from the creeping shadow as it fled away along the length of the hall and went through the wall at the north end as if sinking into the stone.

  “The valves dimmed, the echoing scream faded, and I was left standing inside a circle of thankfully inert dolls—once again mere bits of china and wood, velvet and glass.

  “I had to push my way through the bally things to exit the circle, and I had a bad moment when I thought they might suddenly spring to life again and grasp at me. When the hand of one of them caught in my jacket pocket I dashed near lost my composure altogether, and I was utterly relieved to finally step free of the last of them and leave the
confines of the warehouse.”

  c

  “I am writing this now back at the inn—I could not bring myself to stay in the factory one second more. But a smoke and some more single malt has now quite restored my equanimity, and in the morning I intend to return and seek out the source of this manifestation, for only then will I be able to banish it.

  “I will go and investigate the kiln where the heads are made, and I will do so immediately after sending this note to you. I hope it will not be too long before I am able to send you another telling of a successful conclusion to this matter.

  “Yours, as ever, C.”

  c

  It was approaching late evening by this time, and I had not yet eaten, but I decided to forego any sustenance apart from another brandy as I cut the last envelope open and spread out the pages. Carnacki picked up where he had left off.

  c

  “I had little appetite for breakfast in the morning, but forced myself to eat, as one never knows how much fortification will be required to get through the day. I ate early, for I had left my defenses in the warehouse in my hurry to depart, and I wanted to get everything stowed away before the morning shift discovered what I had been up to.

  “I need not have worried on that score. Apart from Mr. Brown, none of the staff showed up for work that day—and the foreman looked as if he would rather be somewhere else as he quizzed me on my activities of the previous night.

  “I could see he did not believe my tale, but he went quite pale when I showed him the evidence in the warehouse—the tangled circle of dolls strewn on the floor around the burned-out remains of my valves. He assisted me in getting the cabling and anything that could be salvaged back into the traveling box, and even helped me carry it to the north end of the factory, but he would go no further than the doors to the kilns.

  “‘I cannot—not if what you say is true—I just cannot put my soul in such peril—I have children of my own to consider. You see that—do you not?’