A Bottomless Grave

by A Bottomless Grave

‘Departed! Good God! what are you talking about?’

  ‘A few hours after monsieur’s departure—I will not be positive as to the exact time, but it must have been between one and two o’clock as the midday table d’hôte was in progress—a gentleman came and asked for madame——’

  ‘Yes—be quick.’

  ‘I demanded whether I should take up his card, but he said “No,” that was unnecessary, as he was perfectly well known to madame; and, in fact, a short time afterwards, without saying anything to anyone, she departed with him.’

  ‘And did not return in the evening?’

  ‘No, monsieur; madame has not returned since that day.’

  I clench my hands in an agony of rage and grief. ‘So this is it With that pure child-face, with that divine ignorance—only three weeks married-this is the trick she has played me !’ I am recalled to myself by a compassionate suggestion from the garçon.

  ‘Perhaps it was the brother of madame.’

  Elizabeth has no brother, but the remark brings back to me the necessity of self-command. ‘Very probably,’ I answer, speaking with infinite difficulty. ‘What sort of looking gentleman was he?’

  ‘He was a very tall and dark gentleman with a most peculiar nose—not quite like any nose that I ever saw before—and most singular eyes. Never have I seen a gentleman who at all resembled him.’

  I sink into a chair, while a cold shudder creeps over me as I think of my poor child’s dream—of her fainting fit at Wiesbaden—of her unconquerable dread of and aversion from my departure. And this happened twelve days ago ! I catch up my hat, and prepare to rush like a madman in pursuit.

  ‘How did they go?’ I ask incoherently; ‘by train?—driving?—walking ?’

  ‘They went in a carriage.’

  ‘What direction did they take? Whither did they go?’

  He shakes his head. ‘It is not known.’

  ‘It must be known,’ I cry, driven to frenzy by every second’s delay. ‘Of course the driver could tell; where is he?—where can I find him?’

  ‘He did not belong to Lucerne, neither did the carriage; the gentleman brought them with him.’

  ‘But madame’s maid,’ say I, a gleam of hope flashing across my mind; ‘did she go with her?’

  ‘No, monsieur, she is still here; she was as much surprised as monsieur at madame’s departure.’

  ‘Send her at once,’ I cry eagerly; but when she comes I find that she can throw no light on the matter. She weeps noisily and says many irrelevant things, but I can obtain no information from her beyond the fact that she was unaware of her mistress’s departure until long after it had taken place, when, surprised at not being rung for at the usual time, she had gone to her room and found it empty, and on inquiring in the hotel, had heard of her sudden departure; that, expecting her to return at night, she had sat up waiting for her till two o’clock in the morning, but that, as I knew, she had not returned, neither had anything since been heard of her.

  Not all my inquiries, not all my cross-questionings of the whole staff of the hotel, of the visitors, of the railway officials, of nearly all the inhabitants of Lucerne and its environs, procure me a jot more knowledge. On the next few weeks I look back as on a hellish and insane dream. I can neither eat nor sleep; I am unable to remain one moment quiet; my whole existence, my nights and my days, are spent in seeking, seeking. Everything that human despair and frenzied love can do is done by me. I advertise, I communicate with the police, I employ detectives; but that fatal twelve days’ start for ever baffles me. Only on one occasion do I obtain one tittle of information. In a village a few miles from Lucerne the peasants, on the day in question, saw a carriage driving rapidly through their little street. It was closed, but through the windows they could see the occupants—a dark gentleman, with the peculiar physiognomy which has been so often described, and, on the opposite seat a lady lying apparently in a state of utter insensibility. But even this leads to nothing.

  Oh, reader, these things happened twenty years ago; since then I have searched sea and land, but never have I seen my little Elizabeth again.

  My Nightmare

  by DOROTHEA GERARD

  Those Victorian ladies who wrote their splendid ghost stories very often performed this task to much better effect than their male rivals. However, thanks to the era’s lingering prejudice against female writers, many of them were forced to adopt, male pseudonyms. The more famous, as I listed in my introduction to Rhoda Broughton’s story, did not need to make such a concession to Victorian male chauvinism.

  But ar well as the more famous female writers in this vein during the last century, there were a host of others who did not achieve the same degree of fame or who are now remembered for just one macabre story. They include Amelia Edwards (noted for her fine tale ‘The Phantom Coach’), Helen Zimmern, Rosa Mulholland, Vernon Lee (the pen-name of Violet Paget), Emma Dawson (a protégée of Ambrose Bierce), Katharine Macquoid, Gertrude Atherton, Florence Marryat (daughter of the famous Captain Frederick Marryat), Mrs Baillie Reynolds, Jessie L. Weston, Lucas Malet (the pen-name of Mary Harrison who produced in 1900 a splendid supernatural novel The Gateless Barrier), Violet Tweedale (herself a psychic researcher), Sarah Tytler and our next two contributors.

  Our first lesser known female writer of macabre tales is Dorothea Gerard (1855–1915), who wrote several novels and books of short stories in the 1890s, including Things That Have Happened (1899) and On The Way Through (1892). ‘My Nightmare’ comes from the latter and is a grim tragedy set in an unusual location. The story’s colourful setting would have been familiar to the author; in 1887, she married Captain Julius Longard of the 7th Austrian Lancers.

  Most people have a pet nightmare. Mine consists of a single human figure, sitting immovable, in an attitude which is stamped so deeply on my memory that, although almost twenty years have passed since the day on which I saw it, I could draw it to-day—supposing I could draw at all—down to the most trivial details of its appearance, down to the last touch of its immediate surroundings.

  How it happened that I came to look upon this haunting figure I propose to make the subject of this reminiscence.

  In the year 1867 the Lancer regiment in which I was then serving and which for eleven years had lain in Eastern Galicia, received, marching orders for Silberstadt, a large town in one of the German speaking provinces of the Empire. The officers were all delighted with the change, the men, on the contrary, were deeply dejected. Recruited, as they all were, in the neighbourhood, the hardships of service had for them been hitherto much lightened by the familiarity of their surroundings. The roads they now marched on were the same they had played on as children; the mountain-chain which they saw on the horizon was the same they had looked on all their lives, and though they were no longer free men yet they remained in contact with their own people.

  Our men appeared, as it were, stunned by the noise and bustle of the town. The size of the barrack-building, the huge rooms, the heavily grated windows, the long vaulted passages where every step echoed back from the stone floor, all was strange and bewildering. Originally the building had been a convent.

  At the time we reached Silberstadt I belonged to the squadron of Captain Stigler. The Captain had in his service a lancer by the name of Jan Baryuk, whom he had selected as valet, principally I believe from a species of instinctive fellow-feeling. Captain Stigler was a pedant of the first water. From the quantity of beer which he drank at dinner to the number of pieces of glycerine soap which he used in a year, everything was done systematically, by rules which were to him as. immovable as the laws which guide the universe. Of the servant it will be sufficient to say that in point of pedantry he was an aggravated copy of his master. Baryuk accomplished all his duties with a certain conscientious, immovable and ponderous thoroughness which I have never seen equalled. He was capable of cleaning away at one boot of his parade pair for a whole morning and of filling up the afternoon of that same day with his operations upon the second boot. H
e was a tall, good-looking young fellow, with somewhat mournful brown eyes; the sort of man who never shows emotion of any sort, and never speaks unless he is addressed.

  We had been in Silberstadt for a little more than three weeks, when one morning my servant entered the room with a message from Captain Stigler, whose lodging adjoined mine. Would I oblige him by the loan of my bottle of spirits of wine for his coffee-machine? He could not find his own.

  The idea of Captain Stigler not being able to find anything that belonged to him was so startling and unnatural that I immediately supposed he must be ill. Accordingly I betook myself to his rooms with the intention of inquiring after his health. I found the Captain in his shirt sleeves, struggling with a coffee-machine, his face half-shaved.

  ‘Where is Baryuk?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘If I knew where Baryuk was,’ answered the Captain with some irritation, ‘I should certainly not be burning my fingers with this intolerable machine. First time since he entered my service that he has not called me at the proper time.’

  ‘Was he at home last night?’

  ‘I can’t, say. Everything was laid out as usual for the night. His bed is made. Whether he slept in it or not I can’t possibly say. It’s a great nuisance; it puts out one’s arrangements so.’ The poor Captain looked thoroughly wretched. A long course of Baryuk had evidently had an enervating effect upon him.

  ‘The chances are,’ I remarked, ‘that he has begun to appreciate town life at last, and has been at some nocturnal jollification where he has failed to observe the appearance of daylight.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the Captain, ‘such a man as Baryuk would feel about as comfortable at a jollification as a herring would feel in a meal-tub.’

  I then suggested the possibility of Baryuk having ventured out of the barracks and lost his way. ‘We all know how the rattle of an omnibus or the jingle of a tram-car upsets the composure of these men, and deprives them of all sense of locality,’ I argued, ‘but he is pretty sure to turn up before midday.’

  The Captain grunted out a hope to the same effect, and thereupon I withdrew.

  I did not happen to see Captain Stigler again till next day, when we met in the riding-school.

  ‘Well,’ I asked him, ‘what explanation does Baryuk give?’

  ‘None,’ said the Captain, whose face still bore the same expression of angry perplexity which I had seen on it yesterday. ‘It’s becoming more mysterious every moment, and I hate mysteries, they put out one’s calculations.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that you have not seen him since yesterday?’

  ‘Not so much as the lobe of his ear.’

  My attention began to be aroused, for there is a distinct touch of the detective in my nature.

  ‘Do you believe in a desertion?’ I asked. ‘Somehow that doesn’t seem to me very probable.’

  ‘Of course not; it’s all a mixture of improbabilities. Still there’s no denying that we have had desertions, and there’s no denying either that the corners of Baryuk’s mouth have been going down lower ever since we got into barracks;—homesick, I suppose.’

  Several days passed during which I scarcely exchanged a word with Captain Stigler. I was enjoying town-life immensely and thought no more of Baryuk. When at last it did occur to me to ask a question I was told that he had not reappeared. Notice had been given to the Colonel and inquiries had been made, which, however, had produced a purely negative result. Nothing had been seen of Baryuk at his home.

  ‘The desertion theory must then be thrown overboard,’ I remarked. ‘How about a theft? Have you missed nothing?’

  Instead of answering me at once Captain Stigler stood with his hands deep in his pockets, gazing into my face with a perplexed air.

  ‘I have missed one thing,’ he said at last, somewhat reluctantly, ‘but it isn’t a thing that any man in his senses would steal. Come along, I will show you.’

  We had been standing in the passage, and I now followed him into his bedroom. On the wall at the head of his bed there was, hanging upon brass hooks, a row of weapons in carefully graduated order, according to their size. One of the nails was unoccupied.

  ‘There used to be a revolver upon that nail,’ said the Captain.

  A revolver? The detective in me immediately pricked up his ears. ‘Do you believe in the possibility of a suicide?’

  Captain Stigler burst out laughing rather loudly.

  ‘Suicide with that revolver! Why, it would be a much simpler process to chop oneself to pieces with a blunt pen-knife.’

  He then explained to me that the missing weapon dated from the time when the idea of the modern revolver was still struggling into existence, being, in fact, a species of cross-bred production, no longer quite a pistol and not yet quite a revolver. It was solely as a curiosity that Captain Stigler had preserved it so long.

  ‘Besides,’ said the Captain, following his own train of thought, ‘even though he might have shot himself he couldn’t well have buried himself at the same time, and he can’t have got so very far, either; something would have been heard of him by this time.’

  I could not do otherwise than assent to this, and yet the idea of that missing revolver remained obstinately fixed in my head.

  There passed another few days. It was in the end of September that we had come to Silberstadt, and .we were now getting on towards the end of October. The weather was getting cold. ‘Where are we to store our fuel?’ the soldiers’ ladies asked of their husbands, and the much-worried husbands passed the question on to the yet more worried Colonel and asked: ‘Where are we to store our fuel?’

  It was ascertained that the cellars, which were very extensive and not of much use owing to the distance at which they lay from the different lodgings, had, for years past, been assigned to the officers as store-places for wood and coal. Presently there came out an order which decreed that on a given day the cellars should be visited by a commission. The officer who had the day’s inspection received orders to accompany the commission, and as on the 29th of October the inspection happened to fall to my lot, I thus came to be of the party. There existed an old tattered plan of the cellars, showing the various cross-passages, which document was to guide us in our expedition. Two lancers carrying lanterns accompanied us.

  The key of the cellar region, somewhat rusty with disuse, hung in the guard-room. It was a certain old Sergeant Baum who first tried and failed to unlock the heavy iron door. Captain Wertel, who was the commander of the expedition, had the next try with the same result. Then I took my turn, and in doing so my sword, which I had tucked under my arm, happened to run against the door, upon which it immediately swung back upon its hinges. No wonder we had failed to unlock it since it was unlocked already. There was nothing wrong with the lock, however, as an examination proved. We supposed therefore that it could only have been from an oversight that the last person who had descended to the cellars—now months ago, presumably—had omitted to turn the key.

  From the door a stone staircase led us straight down to the lower regions. Arrived at the bottom we ascertained that we were in a long and tolerably broad vaulted stone passage, sparely lighted at intervals by grated openings from above, probably from the yard. The expedition we had embarked on was by no means a trifling one, as we soon recognised, but on the contrary a true voyage of discovery. We were in the midst of a network of passages, branching off in all directions from our first point of departure. Some of these ended abruptly and forced us to turn back again, others took unexpected twists which we had considerable difficulty in following .up on the old map, so as .not to lose all idea of locality:

  We had not taken very many turns round the various corners, when I made a halt and declared that I could not go a step further without the assistance of a lighted cigar. I likewise offered one to Captain Wertel, who declined it with a laugh, adding jocularly, that it was a pity I had not brought my scent-bottle with me, as I might have known, that cellars, especially when they have been shut up for mont
hs, don’t generally smell as sweet as a lady’s boudoir. Here was probably damp wood lying about, possibly also a few stray dead rats, not to speak of the want of ventilation.

  We went on for a hundred yards or so, and presently Captain Wertel, who had quite dropped the jocular tone, remarked that, after all, he wouldn’t mind taking that cigar, in case I thought of repeating the offer. There certainly could be no doubt that these lower regions were shockingly ill ventilated.

  I gave him the cigar, . and for a few minutes longer we moved onwards, Lieutenant Meyer, of the Engineers, meanwhile doing his best to decipher the numbers over the cellar entrances, and to compare them by the dim lantern light with the figures on the old plan.

  Looking at Captain Wertel after a little time it struck me that he was strangely white.

  ‘Captain,’ I said, making a halt, ‘I don’t think this atmosphere is agreeing with you. Hadn’t we better go back for a doctor and disinfectants ? The air down here has been shut up for so long that it is scarcely fit for human breathing.’

  The Captain began by demurring, but ended by acquiescing, and, with great alacrity on the part of all the members of the party, we retraced our steps.

  The doctor on inspection was fetched, and two more lancers with lanterns were put into requisition, and presently the reinforced expedition started once more on its quest. What idea Captain Wertel had in his mind when he called for the two extra lancers, or whether he had any distinct idea at all, I am not able to say. Though we avoided exchanging words on the subject, I cannot help fancying that we both had a presentiment of an unpleasant discovery in store.

  Probably it was for this reason. that the numbering of the doors was now somewhat slurred over, and that we instinctively pushed on, bent upon reaching the extreme limits of this underground region. One of the lancers with a lantern walked at the head; I trod close upon his heels, feeling more and more like a detective on some burning quest. Each door as we passed it, was pushed open and a lantern held into the entrance. There was nothing to be seen but now and then a few scattered pieces of wood, once an old tub, rotten and burst, once again the handle of an axe. Some of the cellars were still black with coal-dust. We had walked for fully ten minutes when the man in front of me pushed open another door in one of the narrow cross-passages and again held the lantern forward. At the same instant there was a crash; he had dropped the lantern to the ground and started back so suddenly that he all but knocked me over. I could hear his teeth chattering.