Eltonsbrody

by Edgar Mittelholzer

  ‘Would you be so good as to accompany me outside to the shed?’ I said, deciding to call her bluff. But she showed no dismay. She said: ‘Why, certainly, my boy! Certainly. With pleasure. You won’t have to drag me along. I love coffins. And surgical instruments are my playthings. Haven’t I told you how fond I am of cutting up dead bodies! Come, let’s go.’

  I admit I felt something of a fool as we began to move along the corridor in the direction of the stairs. I saw Miss Linton staring at us, troubled and frightened looking, and this did not help to decrease my discomfiture. ‘Any objections if I came along, too?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know . . .’ I began, then said: ‘All right. Might as well. Only for a few minutes.’

  I could sense that the idea of being left alone in the house did not appeal to her.

  I led the way along the track to the tool-shed, flashing my torch about as we went. Mrs. Scaife kept indulging in bantering remarks, but I took no notice of her. I was too angry and puzzled. Her manner baffled me. I had expected her to show alarm, or confusion of some sort.

  ‘Well, here we are!’ she exclaimed as we emerged into the small clearing where the shed stood. ‘I do hope the corpse will have appeared by now. After all, a coffin ought to have a corpse to go along with it, oughtn’t it, Mr. Woodsley?’

  Without replying, I led the way round to the back of the shed.

  But the coffin had vanished. And so had the Gladstone bag.

  Mrs. Scaife, as only to be expected, uttered clicking sounds of deprecation and wagged her finger at me. ‘Now, what wild-goose chase is this you’ve brought us on, my boy! Where is the coffin?’

  ‘Perhaps you can tell us that!’ I barked.

  ‘I! But wasn’t it you who came rushing into the house with the news?’

  ‘You don’t fool me. You know all about it.’

  ‘Really, I wish I did. I seldom have the good fortune to find coffins. Was it a pretty one with nickel-plated fittings?’

  ‘What about surgical instruments? Do you seldom come upon those?’

  ‘Oh, no. There’s Michael’s set—and a very fine set it is. I often take them out to have a look at them, and to imagine myself carving up some succulent dead body.’

  ‘So your late husband’s surgical instruments were never disposed of after his death?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! I kept them. I not only kept them but I’ve taken great care of them. Surgical instruments fascinate me. I’ve used them myself. Only the night before last I did a very neat little job with them—though please don’t think me conceited. Borkum assisted me. He brought his own instruments. Oh, we had such fun on Monday night!’ She smacked her lips and murmured as though half to herself: ‘We might even have some more to-night if we’re lucky!’ She squeezed my arm and laughed softly. It was a sound of genuine amusement. I could detect nothing sinister in it.

  Standing there, I felt a perfect and complete ass.

  Miss Linton said: ‘Mr. Woodsley, did you really see a coffin—and surgical instruments behind this shed?’

  ‘As plainly as I see you in this beam of light,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t dream it. The instruments were in a Gladstone bag—and the name embossed on the lining inside the bag was Simeon Borkum.’

  Mrs. Scaife uttered more deprecatory noises. ‘Borkum is an extremely careless fellow. Indiscreet, clumsy. Oh, it’s really terrible! If he isn’t dropping leaden boxes with human remains so as to cause heavy bumps on the floor he’s scaring innocent housemaids or strewing freshly plucked locks of hair on some stairway. I’m going to give him a severe scolding. Not that it will make much difference. He’s incurable.’

  She gave me a droll glance and went on: ‘Yes, he’s a case, my boy. I’m always warning him not to leave his instruments lying about. One day he’ll lose them, and then I’ll see what he’ll do!’ She glanced at Miss Linton. ‘He’s an expert dissector, you know, Nurse. Had three years at Edinburgh University. Oh, yes. He simply adores cutting up dead bodies—it’s his chief weakness. He has the Mark deep on him, of course, so it’s not surprising. In fact, I won’t at all be amazed to learn that he’s planning one or two murders to-night. If so I hope he lets me know, for I’d love to help him slice up a limb or two.’ She sighed and added: ‘Perhaps he was only pulling my leg, but once he did confide in me that he has a partiality for female bodies. Dismembering them, I mean.’ She squeezed my arm again and tittered. ‘Shall we return to the house now, Mr. Holmes?’

  Back in the house, I accompanied Miss Linton into the room with the patient, and for a while we discussed the situation.

  ‘I’m seriously beginning to think she’s doing this to pull our legs,’ I said. ‘I can’t see what else could be behind it. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m not putting up with it,’ she said. ‘I’m not fond of jokes that have to do with coffins and human bones. I’m leaving tomorrow morning—that’s definite.’

  ‘Have you ’phoned Doctor Dayton already?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve asked him to come tomorrow morning and bring another nurse. I told him I’d explain fully when I see him in person.’

  ‘I’d like to travel back with you, but I’m a determined sort of blighter. I don’t give up easily. I mean to find out what it’s all about, and you may be sure I’m going to.’

  ‘Personally, it’s no mystery to me. I know the solution already. She’s out of her mind. That explains everything.’

  ‘I try to keep telling myself that, too,’ I said. ‘But somehow I still feel inside me she’s not quite as potty as she seems.’

  She made no comment, and for an interval we sat immersed in our own reflections, with the moaning wind as a background accompaniment. Now and then Malverne, on the bed, would stir slightly and groan or mumble. My gaze kept straying often to her pale face. Once or twice a whiff of that sweet, sickly smell came to my nostrils, and I’d find my gaze moving across to the locked door of the small room.

  Outside in the road, a mule-cart lumbered past, lulling and with a rustic note of reassurance. Hearing it and envisaging the load of canes it carried, I forgot for the moment my gruesome thoughts. Instead, the first three days of my stay in the house came back to me, and I remembered my exploring jaunts down in Martin’s Bay and Bathsheba and even as far west as a place called Cattlewash. I remembered the fisher-folk and farmers in their tiny cottages dotted over the landscape. Certainly nothing sinister or suspicious about them. I had talked to quite a number of them, and had succeeded in not seeming too unapproachable, so that they had lost their shyness and discussed their occupations—and their struggle to exist on the sparse means that Nature and their own ingenuity supplied. Perhaps even at this moment the darkness of the pebbly beach was splotched with the ruddy glow of torches as the menfolk waded out on to the reef and amid the rocks to hunt for crabs and lobsters and cuttle-fish. Mrs. Scaife herself had told me something concerning their methods. As torches they used pieces of rubber cut from old tyres. They tied these to poles, set the rubber afire, and holding the torch aloft, waded out. More than once I had stood at a window in the sitting-room and watched the shuddering blobs of fire travel along the shore, die out, then come alive again in the distant wind-swept dark.

  I remembered, too, the Well Pit, the crevasse over which the sea boiled day and night—the spot where boats were sometimes sucked down, never to come up again or be seen—and this thought seemed to align itself with the troubled atmosphere of uncertainty and menace in Eltonsbrody this evening, so that once again I found myself glancing round the room uneasily.

  Before leaving her, I gave Miss Linton the same caution as the night before. ‘Just let out a good shout and I’ll be with you,’ I told her. ‘And put a chair behind your door.’

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ she smiled. ‘If anything comes in here to trouble me they’ll hear me screaming all the way down at Bathsheba.’

  Closing the door after me, I stood in the blackness of the corridor listening to the wind and letting the draught
s frolic and run riot round me. The one window at the western end was shut, as it had been from the first evening I had arrived in the house. Occasionally a leaf from the mahogany trees would be blown against the clouded panes, and when this happened there would be a flicking sound as though some spectral finger had tapped on the glass.

  Mrs. Scaife had evidently retired, for the streak of light under her door was no longer there.

  I moved round the well of the stairway and approached the door of the doctor’s old room. Somehow, I could not go into my room in this tame way and settle down for bed. I felt I had to do something, potter around a bit, listen, probe, keep my senses cocked.

  I stood for several minutes outside the door of the doctor’s room listening. Listening and waiting.

  The old wardrobe creaked more than once, but I had got too used to that to be seriously affected by it.

  Downstairs the windows kept rattling often as though the wind stretched out hands, salt and sea-clammy, and shook them in fierce tantrums. This disturbed me, made me wriggle and shudder even though I tried to deafen my ears to the sound.

  Outside, the dogs had grown quiet, so that now the wind and the trees and Eltonsbrody remained the only disrupters of the night silence.

  I was gazing down into the inky gloom of the stairway when the new sound came to my hearing.

  Perhaps I am wrong in describing it as new, for it had its origin within the house and might have been a very old sound. This banister might have heard it many a time—especially when the doctor was alive. But to me standing there in the draughty corridor, with the dark swirling round me like funereal swathes of crepe, it was no ordinary sound. It was new to me.

  It came either from in the doctor’s old room or from somewhere in the cut off portion of the corridor that was now the small bedroom. I couldn’t be certain because the wind warped and muffled everything, played tricks on the hearing. And what was more, it was a dim sound—so dim and intangible that I had to cock my head and strain my senses to convince myself I was really hearing it and not imagining it.

  I heard it again.

  A frail metallic clink. Soft but clear and with a sharp ring. Not a musical tinkle but a flat, brittle click and clink. It made you think of someone fumbling in a drawer of cutlery with great care.

  Either in the doctor’s old room—or in Gregory’s.

  Then it stopped. And even though I stood there stiffly alert for several minutes I didn’t hear it again. Only the wind I heard. The wind. Just the wind whooping now, moaning now, whining in under the eaves, shaking the windows downstairs.

  18

  It was a weird night—and an exasperating one.

  After my fruitless pottering about in the corridor, I went into my room but didn’t get into pyjamas at once. I sat by the window smoking and trying to read. More than once I got up, crossed to the door, opened it and had a look up and down the corridor. But there was never anything except the draughty darkness—never any sound but the wind outside and in the windward rooms—or the creaking of the wardrobe against the background of the wind. Or the rattle of the windows downstairs. Tappin must have taken away the canvas sacking from the pantry window, for I didn’t hear the usual flap-flap that mimicked so closely the sound of stealthy footsteps.

  On two occasions I simply stared at the door of Mrs. Scaife’s room directly opposite mine, expectant and tense. And once I even tiptoed silently across and stood listening. Another time I moved along the corridor and listened outside Miss Linton’s door.

  At length, I got into pyjamas and put out the lamp. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing that coffin behind the tool-shed, and the Gladstone bag with the surgical instruments. I knew for a certainty that Borkum was somewhere near. I knew that it must have been he who had taken away the coffin after I had dashed back to the house here to tackle Mrs. Scaife about my find. He must have been waiting about somewhere in the vicinity of the tool-shed watching me and perhaps alarmed at my investigations.

  Then I began to ask myself why he should be at Eltonsbrody to-night. I recalled what the old lady had said about liking to cut up dead bodies and about the ‘little jobs’ she and Borkum had done together. On the night of the thirteenth of January, eight years ago, she and Borkum had done one of these jobs. That would have been the night after the doctor’s death. And then there was the thousand dollars she had paid to him a few days before. And from what I could adduce from the odds and ends I’d heard from Tappin, it seemed certain that Borkum had been paid a similar sum shortly after the doctor’s death, too. Could there be any connection between the doctor’s death eight years before and Gregory’s on Monday last?

  I must have dozed off at this point. The next thing I knew was that I was staring round into the darkness with a wide-eyed alertness. I flashed on my torch and looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to eleven. It had been five to ten when I put out the lamp.

  I sat up and listened.

  The wind. The droning and whisking and whining.

  And Malverne moaning and mumbling.

  I lit the lamp and looked round the room again.

  Pale blue walls, the plaster in places cracked and flaked. My gaze paused at one crack. It wriggled like a river on a map out of sight behind the big wardrobe. The desire to get up and see if anything were behind the wardrobe took hold of me, but I told myself not to be absurd and sat where I was.

  Suddenly I got up and crossed to the door, pulled it open and looked out into the corridor.

  There was a streak of light under Mrs. Scaife’s door.

  A leaf from one of the mahogany trees flicked against the window at the western end of the corridor. The wardrobe in the doctor’s room creaked.

  I swore softly. All the old creepy effects! A feeling of monotony and weary pointlessness came upon me. Wind and old wardrobe creaking, windows downstairs rattling, leaf against the window. It was getting tiresome now. My nerves were beginning to protest.

  It was I myself who was making a mystery out of nothing, I tried to scold myself. I had let myself build up a whole situation of doubt and intangibility out of the incidents of the past few days, out of what was probably only the eccentricity of a flighty old lady. This house was the ideal example of the romantic haunted house, and Mrs. Scaife was aware of this, so she must have hit on the idea of providing macabre entertainment for me.

  I withdrew into the room and shut the door.

  I got back into bed and blew out the lamp. But my head had hardly touched the pillow when I heard something that made me sit up again, stiff and alert.

  For the second time I heard it. The wind did its best to muffle the sound, to warp it, but my ears caught it just the same.

  A sharp metallic clink.

  I hopped out of bed, went to the door once again, and put my head out into the dark corridor.

  Only the wind. But I waited and listened.

  From the room opposite I heard a soft swish as of some sort of cloth material being moved—of some garment being shifted or pulled off. Then nothing. Only the monotony of wind, wind.

  Suddenly it came again. The swish of cloth. And then a clink-clink. As though someone had put aside a pair of scissors—or some surgical instrument.

  The draughts whirled around me, shooting up my pyjamas legs. I shivered—either from being chilled or from horror and fear.

  I tried to convince myself in favour of the chill, because I still wanted to fight shy of taking the thing seriously. It was leg-pull. The old lady was doing this to lead me up the garden path. Tomorrow morning she would have a good laugh at me.

  Again I heard the sound. A clink . . . Now there was a tiny tinkling splash of water. And another of those swishing noises, as of some cloth material being shifted.

  Silence followed. The silence seemed to waver and fold itself about me like sylph-like gowns trying to smother me.

  Suddenly—a new sound. A continuous sound. A lisping and grating. Something was being ground down or cut. Sawn. I remembered the Gladstone bag. There
had been a saw among the surgical instruments.

  It went on—swift, almost with a whine.

  The impulse to rush across the corridor and hammer on the door came upon me. It began to develop into an obsession. Yet I held back. I thought: Suppose it really were some loathsome orgy I barged in upon, then, in desperation, they might murder me to protect themselves, to prevent me turning evidence against them. Or suppose it were a harmless eccentric hobby Mrs. Scaife was indulging in, then she would open the door and wave her hand and laugh. ‘See! Only a fret-saw, my boy! Not a corpse as you imagine. Ah, what a young man you are for investigating!’

  I should want to hit her hard if it proved only a joke.

  I swore to myself, and returned into my room. Went back to bed.

  Every now and then I raised my head and listened. But I heard only the wind. And the casuarinas. Once I was certain I caught a whiff of ether, but dismissed this as pure imagination. It was probably the smell from the small room.

  At length, I dozed off and had a nightmare. I strode through the wall into the corridor. The walls were translucent. A violet light enveloped everything and through it I saw into the doctor’s old room. I saw a pile of surgical instruments on the floor. Scalpels and catheters and saws and gouges and forceps. The forceps worked like the bills of birds and seemed determined to devour the scalpels which, in turn, slashed back furiously, glinting with bloody menace. They made a terrifying tinkle-jingle. Then a shroud of silk slowly swished over the lot and they grew still and silent, anaesthetized. Mrs. Scaife appeared and gave a deep curtsy. She smiled at me and said: ‘See! Only a magic shadow-show, my boy. Played in a box whose candle is the moon. The phantom-figures are in your own fancy!’ She vanished and the shroud swished aside to reveal a coffin piled high with the phalanges of human fingers. They overflowed in a rattling cascade.

  I woke with a feeling of suffocation. Downstairs the windows were rattling in a strong gust, and a draught tickled the soles of my feet.

  I realised the room was not as dark as it had been when last I had seen it. There was a violet radiance upon everything. The moon, of course. The moon had risen. The time was twenty-five past twelve.