A Bottomless Grave

by A Bottomless Grave

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘and you can hear the camp at work. Then you’ll believe me.’

  We did listen, and as I live we could distinctly hear the rattling of sluice-boxes and cradles, the groaning of windlasses—in fact, the noise you hear on a goldfield at the busiest hour of the day. We moved a little closer, and, believe me or not, I swear to you I could see, or thought I could see, the shadowy forms of men moving about in that ghostly moonlight. Meanwhile the wind sighed across the plain, flapping what remained of the old tents and giving an additional touch of horror to the general desolation. I could hear Spicer’s teeth chattering behind me, and, for my own part, I felt as if my blood were turning to ice.

  ‘That’s the claim, the Golden South, away to the right there,’ said the old man, ‘and if you will come along with me, I’ll introduce you to my mates.’

  But this was an honour we declined, and without hesitation. I wouldn’t have gone any further among those tents for the wealth of all the Indies.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Spicer, and I can tell you I hardly recognised his voice. ‘Let’s get back to camp.’

  By this time our guide had left us, and was making his way in the direction he had indicated. We could plainly hear him addressing imaginary people as he marched along. As for ourselves, we turned about and hurried back to our camp as fast as we could go.

  Once there, the grog bottle was produced, and never did three men stand more in need of stimulants. Then we set to work to find some explanation of what we had seen, or had fancied we saw. But it was impossible. The wind might have rattled the old windlasses, but it could not be held accountable for those shadowy grey forms that had moved about among the claims.

  ‘I give it up,’ said Spicer, at last. ‘I know that I never want to see it again. What’s more, I vote that we clear out of here to-morrow morning.’

  We all agreed, and then retired to our blankets, but for my part I do not mind confessing I scarcely slept a wink all night. The thought that that hideous old man might be hanging about the camp would alone be sufficient for that.

  Next morning, as soon as it was light, we breakfasted, but, before we broke camp, Matthews and I set off along the cliff in an attempt to discover our acquaintance of the previous evening. Though, however, we searched high and low for upwards of an hour, no success rewarded us. By mutual consent we resolved not to look for him on the Field. When we returned to Spicer we placed such tobacco and stores as we could spare under the shadow of the big rock, where the Mystery would be likely to see them, then mounted our camels and resumed our journey, heartily glad to be on our way once more.

  Gurunya Goldfield is a place I never desire to visit again. I don’t like its population.

  An Alpine Divorce

  by ROBERT BARR

  Now for a story years ahead of its time, from a book far in advance of its contemporary works. Revenge! by Robert Barr (1850–1912) was a unique volume for the time it was written, being short stories dealing uncompromisingly with passion and greed, all using the motif of revenge.

  Robert Barr, one of the most popular and prolific contributors to magazines and journals of the late 1800s, was born in Glasgow and emigrated to Canada as a young man. Strangely, his early career was in the field of education, as the headmaster of a public school, and he began his journalistic work when he moved to Detroit. He returned to England in 1881, where he eventually went into partnership with Jerome K. Jerome on the popular journal The Idler. Most of Barr’s journalism was published under the pen–name of Luke Sharp and he reserved his own name for his highly successful fiction career.

  Barr is now mainly remembered for his detective stories, but he also wrote romances and occasional tales of terror. Revenge! contains his best work in this field and ‘An Alpine Divorce’ is one of the finest tales he ever wrote. The fact that it utilises a plot device since flogged to death by less skilled writers contributing to mystery magazines and the like does not detract from it in the slightest, in my opinion. Just remember when reading it that Barr was probably the first to use this idea and, certainly in his day, he was unique in not being afraid to tackle such a sardonic plot.

  In some natures there are no half-tones; nothing but raw primary colours. John Bodman was a man who was always at one extreme or the other. This probably would have mattered little had he not married a wife whose nature was an exact duplicate of his own.

  Doubtless there exists in this world precisely the right woman for any given man to marry, and vice versa; but when you consider that a human being has the opportunity of being acquainted with only a few hundred people, and out of the few hundred that there are but a dozen or less whom he knows intimately, and out of the dozen, one or two friends at most, it will easily be seen, when we remember the number of millions who inhabit this world, that probably, since the earth was created, the right man has never yet met the right woman. The mathematical chances are all against such a meeting, and this is the reason that divorce courts exist. Marriage at best is but a compromise, and if two people happen to be united who are of an uncompromising nature there is trouble.

  In the lives of these two young people there was no middle distance. The result was bound to be either love or hate, and in the case of Mr and Mrs Bodman it was hate of the most bitter and arrogant kind.

  In some parts of the world incompatibility of temper is considered a just case for obtaining a divorce, but in England no such subtle distinction is made, and so, until the wife became criminal, or the man became both criminal and cruel, these two were linked together by a bond that only death could sever. Nothing can be worse than this state of things, and the matter was only made the more hopeless by the fact that Mrs Bodman lived a blameless life, and her husband was no worse, but rather better, than the majority of men. Perhaps, however, that statement held only up to a certain point, for John Bodman had reached a state of mind in which he resolved to get rid of his wife at all hazards. If he had been a poor man he would probably have deserted her, but he was rich, and a man cannot freely leave a prospering business because his domestic life happens not to be happy.

  When a man’s mind dwells too much on any one subject, no one can tell just how far he will go. The mind is a delicate instrument, and even the law recognises that it is easily thrown from its balance. Bodman’s friends—for he had friends—claim that his mind was unhinged; but neither his friends nor his enemies suspected the truth of the episode, which turned out to be the most important, as it was the most ominous, event in his life.

  Whether John Bodman was sane or insane at the time he made up his mind to murder his wife, will never be known, but there was certainly craftiness in the method he devised to make the crime appear the result of an accident. Nevertheless, cunning is often a quality in a mind that has gone wrong.

  Mrs Bodman well knew how much her presence afflicted her husband, but her nature was as relentless as his, and her hatred of him was, if possible, more bitter than his hatred of her. Wherever he went she accompanied him, and perhaps the idea of murder would never have occurred to him if she had not been so persistent in forcing her presence upon him at all times and on all occasions. So, when he announced to her that he intended to spend the month of July in Switzerland, she said nothing, but made her preparations for the journey. On this occasion he did not protest, as was usual with him, and so to Switzerland this silent couple departed.

  There is an hotel near the mountain-tops which stands on a ledge over one of the great glaciers. It is a mile and a half above the level of the sea, and it stands alone, reached by a toilsome road that zigzags up the mountain for six miles. There is a wonderful view of snow-peaks and glaciers from the verandahs of this hotel, and in the neighbourhood are many picturesque walks to points more or less dangerous.

  John Bodman knew the hotel well, and in happier days he had been intimately acquainted with the vicinity. Now that the thought of murder arose in his mind, a certain spot two miles distant from this inn continually haunted him.
It was a point of view overlooking everything, and its extremity was protected by a low and crumbling wall. He arose one morning at four o’clock, slipped unnoticed out of the hotel, and went to this point, which was locally named the Hanging Outlook. His memory had served him well. It was exactly the spot, he said to himself. The mountain which rose up behind it was wild and precipitous. There were no inhabitants near to overlook the place. The distant hotel was hidden by a shoulder of rock. The mountains on the other side of the valley were too far away to make it possible for any casual tourist or native to see what was going on on the Hanging Outlook. Far down in the valley the only town in view seemed like a collection of little toy houses.

  One glance over the crumbling wall at the edge was generally sufficient for a visitor of even the strongest nerves. There was a sheer drop of more than a mile straight down, and at the distant bottom were jagged rocks and stunted trees that looked, in the blue haze, like shrubbery.

  ‘This is the spot,’ said the man to himself, ‘and to-morrow morning is the time.’

  John Bodman had planned his crime as grimly and relentlessly, and as coolly, as ever he had concocted a deal on the Stock Exchange. There was no thought in his mind of mercy for his unconscious victim. His hatred had carried him far.

  The next morning after breakfast, he said to his wife: ‘I intend to take a walk in the mountains. Do you wish to come with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered briefly.

  ‘Very well, then,’ he said; ‘I shall be ready at nine o’clock.’

  ‘I shall be ready at nine o’clock,’ she repeated after him.

  At that hour they left the hotel together, to which he was shortly to return alone. They spoke no word to each other on their way to the Hanging Outlook. The path was practically level, skirting the mountains, for the Hanging Outlook was not much higher above the sea than the hotel.

  John Bodman had formed no fixed plan for his procedure when the place was reached. He resolved to be guided by circumstances. Now and then a strange fear arose in his mind that she might cling to him and possibly drag him over the precipice with her. He found himself wondering whether she had any premonition of her fate, and one of his reasons for not speaking was the fear that a tremor in his voice might possibly arouse her suspicions. He resolved that his action should be sharp and sudden, that she might have no chance either to help herself, or to drag him with her. Of her screams in that desolate region he had no fear. No one could reach the spot except from the hotel, and no one that morning had left the house, even for an expedition to the glacier—one of the easiest and most popular trips from the place.

  Curiously enough, when they came within sight of the Hanging Outlook, Mrs Bodman stopped and shuddered. Bodman looked at her through the narrow slits of his veiled eyes, and wondered again if she had any suspicion. No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another.

  ‘What is the matter?’ he asked gruffly. ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘John,’ she cried with a gasp in her voice, calling him by his Christian name for the first time in years, ‘don’t you think that if you had been kinder to me at first, things might have been different?’

  ‘It seems to me,’ he answered, not looking at her, ‘that it is rather late in the day for discussing that question.’

  ‘I have much to regret,’ she said quaveringly. ‘Have you nothing?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘Very well,’ replied his wife, with the usual hardness returning to her voice. ‘I was merely giving you a chance. Remember that.’

  Her husband looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, ‘giving me a chance? I want no chance nor anything else from you. A man accepts nothing from one he hates. My feeling towards you is, I imagine, no secret to you. We are tied together, and you have done your best to make the bondage insupportable.’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, with her eyes on the ground, ‘we are tied together—we are tied together!’

  She repeated these words under her breath as they walked the few remaining steps to the Outlook. Bodman sat down upon the crumbling wall. The woman dropped her alpenstock on the rock, and walked nervously to and fro, clasping and unclasping her hands. Her husband caught his breath as the terrible moment drew near.

  ‘Why do you walk about like a wild animal?’ he cried. ‘Come here and sit down beside me, and be still.’

  She faced him with a light he had never before seen in her eyes—a light of insanity and of hatred.

  ‘I walk like a wild animal,’ she said, ‘because I am one. You spoke a moment ago of your hatred of me; but you are a man, and your hatred is nothing to mine. Bad as you are, much as you wish to break the bond which ties us together, there are still things which I know you would not stoop to. I know there is no thought of murder in your heart, but there is in mine. I will show you, John Bodman, how much I hate you.’

  The man nervously clutched the stone beside him, and gave a guilty start as she mentioned murder.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘I have told all my friends in England that I believed you intended to murder me in Switzerland.’

  ‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘How could you say such a thing?’

  ‘I say it to show how much I hate you—how much I am prepared to give for revenge. I have warned the people at the hotel, and when we left two men followed us. The proprietor tried to persuade me not to accompany you. In a few moments those two men will come in sight of the Outlook. Tell them, if you think they will believe you, that it was an accident.’

  The mad woman tore from the front of her dress shreds of lace and scattered them around.

  Bodman started up to his feet, crying, ‘What are you about?’ But before he could move towards her she precipitated herself over the wall, and went shrieking and whirling down the awful abyss.

  The next moment two men came hurriedly round the edge of the rock, and found the man standing alone. Even in his bewilderment he realised that if he told the truth he would not be believed.

  The Story of Baelbrow

  by E. and H. HERON

  Victorian London can be summed up in so many popular images—foggy streets, horses’ hooves and hansom cabs, gaslight, the music hall, Jack the Ripper—but probably the most popular image of all is that of a certain gentleman who lived at 221b Baker Street and had a partner named Doctor Watson. That even this famous man was not alone in his chosen profession has been admirably illustrated in the anthology series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. But Holmes and his friends dealt in the natural; there were others who dealt in the supernatural, and for want of a better name, might be termed the psychic detectives.

  Probably the most famous was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, who has even influenced Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richelieu. Among the other noted ghost hunters were Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Mrs L. T. Meade’s Mr Bell, M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, and E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low.

  Flaxman Low’s adventures were originally recorded in Pearson’s Magazine and collected into a brief volume Ghost Stories (1916). E. and H. Heron was the pen–name of the mother and son writing pair, Kate and Hesketh Prichard, and Flaxman Low was reputed to be a thinly–disguised portrait of one of the leading scientists of the Victorian era. The Prichards were rather proud of Mr Low, for, as they said, ‘he is the first student in this field of inquiry who has had the boldness and originality to break free from old and conventional methods and to approach the elucidation of so-called supernatural problems on the lines of natural law.’ Flaxman Low was most definitely a scientist, and rightly so: in Victorian times science had not acquired the bad name which it has today. At Baelbrow, however, Flaxman Low encounters a creature from the days before science was even thought of, and a very nasty one at that.

  It is a matter for regret that so many of Mr Flaxman Low’s reminiscences should deal with the darker episodes of his experiences. Yet this is almost unavoidable,
as the more purely scientific and less strongly marked cases would not, perhaps, contain the same elements of interest for the general public, however valuable and instructive they might be to the expert student. It has also been considered better to choose the completer cases, those that ended in something like satisfactory proof, rather than the many instances where the thread broke off abruptly amongst surmisings, which it was never possible to subject to convincing tests.

  North of a low-lying strip of country on the East Anglian coast, the promontory of Bael Ness thrusts out a blunt nose into the sea. On the Ness, backed by pinewoods, stands a square, comfortable stone mansion, known to the countryside as Baelbrow. It has faced the east winds for close upon three hundred years, and during the whole period has been the home of the Swaffam family, who were never in anywise put out of conceit of their ancestral dwelling by the fact that it had always been haunted. Indeed, the Swaffams were proud of the Baelbrow Ghost, which enjoyed a wide notoriety, and no one dreamt of complaining of its behaviour until Professor Van der Voort of Louvain laid information against it, and sent an urgent appeal for help to Mr Flaxman Low.

  The Professor, who was well acquainted with Mr Low, detailed the circumstances of his tenancy of Baelbrow, and the unpleasant events that had followed thereupon.

  It appeared that Mr Swaffam, senior, who spent a large portion of his time abroad, had offered to lend his house to the Professor for the summer season. When the Van der Voorts arrived at Baelbrow, they were charmed with the place. The prospect, though not very varied, was at least extensive, and the air exhilarating. Also the Professor’s daughter enjoyed frequent visits from her betrothed—Harold Swaffam —and the Professor was delightfully employed in overhauling the Swaffam library.