She kept her head, realizing that it was time to give up.
‘My nerve’s crashed,’ she thought. ‘That figure was only my fancy. I’m just like the others. Defeated by wax.’
Instinctively, she paid the figures her homage. It was the cumulative effect of their grim company, with their simulated life and sinister associations, that had rushed her defences. Although it was bitter to fail, she comforted herself with the reminder that she had enough copy for her article. She could even make capital out of her own capitulation to the force of suggestion.
With a slight grimace, she picked up her notebook. There would be no more on-the-spot impressions. But young Wells, if he was still there, would be grateful for the end of his vigil, whatever the state of mind of the porter.
She groped in the darkness for her signal-lamp. But her fingers only scraped bare polished boards.
The torch had disappeared.
In a panic, she dropped down on her knees, and searched for yards around the spot where she was positive it had lain.
It was the instinct of self-preservation which caused her to give up her vain search.
‘I’m in danger,’ she thought. ‘And I’ve no one to help me now. I must see this through myself.’
She pushed back her hair from a brow which had grown damp.
‘There’s a brain working against mine. When I was asleep, someone – or something – stole my torch.’
Something? The waxworks became instinct with terrible possibility as she stared at them. Some were merely blurred shapes – their faces opaque oblongs or ovals. But others – illuminated from the street – were beginning to reveal themselves in a new guise.
Queen Elizabeth, with peaked chin and fiery hair, seemed to regard her with intelligent malice. The countenance of Napoléon was heavy with brooding power, as though he were willing her to submit. Cardinal Wolsey held her with a glittering eye.
Sonia realized that she was letting herself be hypnotised by creatures of wax – so many pounds of candles moulded to human form.
‘This is what happened to those others,’ she thought. ‘Nothing happened. But I’m afraid of them. I’m terribly afraid . .. There’s only one thing to do. I must count them again.’
She knew that she must find out whether her torch had been stolen through human agency; but she shrank from the experiment, not knowing which she feared more – a tangible enemy or the unknown.
As she began to count, the chilly air inside the building seemed to throb with each thud of her heart.
‘Seventeen, eighteen.’ She was scarcely conscious of the numerals she murmured. ‘Twenty-two, twenty-three.’
She stopped. Twenty-three? If her tally were correct, there was an extra waxwork in the Gallery.
On the shock of the discovery came a blinding flash of light, which veined the sky with fire. It seemed to run down the figure of Joan of Arc like a flaming torch. By a freak of atmospherics, the storm, which had been a starved, whimpering affair of flicker and murmur, culminated, and ended, in what was apparently a thunderbolt.
The explosion which followed was stunning; but Sonia scarcely noticed it, in her terror. The unearthly violet glare had revealed to her a figure which she had previously overlooked.
It was seated in a chair, its hand supporting its peaked chin, and its pallid, clean-shaven features nearly hidden by a familiar broad-brimmed felt hat, which – together with the black cape – gave her the clue to its identity.
It was Hubert Poke.
Three o’clock.
Sonia heard it strike, as her memory began to reproduce, with horrible fidelity, every word of Poke’s conversation on murder.
‘Artistic strangulation.’ She pictured the cruel agony of life leaking – bubble by bubble, gasp by gasp. It would be slow – for he had boasted of a method which left no tell-tale marks.
‘Another death,’ she thought dully. ‘If it happens everyone will say that the Waxworks have killed me. What a story … Only, I shall not write it up.’
The tramp of feet rang out on the pavement below. It might have been the policeman on his beat; but Sonia wanted to feel that young Wells was still faithful to his post.
She looked up at the window, set high in the wall, and, for a moment, was tempted to shout. But the idea was too desperate. If she failed to attract outside attention, she would seal her own fate, for Poke would be prompted to hasten her extinction.
‘Awful to feel he’s so near, and yet I cannot reach him,’ she thought. ‘It makes it so much worse.’
She crouched there, starting and sweating at every faint sound in the darkness. The rain, which still pattered on the sky-light, mimicked footsteps and whispers. She remembered her dream and the nightmare spring and clutch.
It was an omen. At any moment it would come …
Her fear jolted her brain. For the first time she had a glimmer of hope.
‘I didn’t see him before the flash, because he looked exactly like one of the waxworks. Could I hide among them, too?’ she wondered.
She knew that her white coat alone revealed her position to him. Holding her breath, she wriggled out of it, and hung it on the effigy of Charles II. In her black coat, with her handkerchief-scarf tied over her face, burglar fashion, she hoped that she was invisible against the sable-draped walls.
Her knees shook as she crept from her shelter. When she had stolen a few yards, she stopped to listen … In the darkness, someone was astir. She heard a soft padding of feet, moving with the certainty of one who sees his goal.
Her coat glimmered in her deserted corner.
In a sudden panic, she increased her pace, straining her ears for other sounds. She had reached the far end of the Gallery where no gleam from the window penetrated the gloom. Blindfolded and muffled, she groped her way towards the akoves which held the tableaux.
Suddenly she stopped, every nerve in her body quivering. She had heard a thud, like rubbered soles alighting after a spring.
‘He knows now.’ Swift on the trail of her thought flashed another. ‘He will look for me. Oh, quick! ’
She tried to move, but her muscles were bound, and she stood as though rooted to the spot, listening. It was impossible to locate the footsteps. They seemed to come from every quarter of the Gallery. Sometimes they sounded remote, but, whenever she drew a freer breath, a sudden creak of the boards close to where she stood made her heart leap.
At last she reached the limit of endurance. Unable to bear the suspense of waiting, she moved on.
Her pursuer followed her at a distance. He gained on her, but still withheld his spring. She had the feeling that he held her at the end of an invisible string.
‘He’s playing with me, like a cat with a mouse,’ she thought.
If he had seen her, he let her creep forward until the darkness was no longer absolute. There were gradations in its density, so that she was able to recognize the first alcove. Straining her eyes, she could distinguish the outlines of the bed where the Virtuous Man made his triumphant exit from life, surrounded by a flock of his sorrowing family and their progeny.
Slipping inside the circle, she added one more mourner to the tableau.
The minutes passed, but nothing happened. There seemed no sound save the tiny gong beating inside her temples. Even the raindrops had ceased to patter on the sky-light. Sonia began to find the silence more deadly than noise. It was like the lull before the storm. Question after question came rolling into her mind.
‘Where is he? What will he do next? Why doesn’t he strike a light?’
As though someone were listening-in to her thoughts, she suddenly heard a faint splutter as of an ignited match. Or it might have been the click of an exhausted electric torch.
With her back turned to the’room, she could see no light. She heard the half-hour strike, with a faint wonder that she was still alive.
‘What will have happened before the next quarter?’ she asked.
Presently she began to feel the strain of her pos
e, which she held as rigidly as any artist’s model. For the time – if her presence were not already detected – her life depended on her immobility.
As an overpowering weariness began to steal over her a whisper stirred in her brain:
‘The alderman was found dead on a bed.’
The newspaper account had not specified which especial tableau had been the scene of the tragedy, but she could not remember another alcove which held a bed. As she stared at the white dimness of the quilt she seemed to see it blotched with a dark, sprawling form, writhing under the grip of long fingers.
To shut out the suggestion of her fancy, she closed her eyes. The cold, dead air in the alcove was sapping her exhausted vitality, so that once again she began to nod. She dozed as she stood, rocking to and fro on her feet.
Her surroundings grew shadowy. Sometimes she knew that she was in the alcove, but at others she strayed momentarily over strange borders … She was back in the summer, walking in a garden with young Wells. Roses and sunshine …
She awoke with a start at the sound of heavy breathing. It sounded close to her – almost by her side. The figure of a mourner kneeling by the bed seemed to change its posture slightly.
Instantly maddened thoughts began to flock and flutter wildly inside her brain.
‘Who was it? Was it Hubert Poke? Would history be repeated? Was she doomed also to be strangled inside the alcove? Had Fate led her there?’
She waited, but nothing happened. Again she had the sensation of being played with by a master mind – dangled at the end of his invisible string.
Presently she was emboldened to steal from the alcove, to seek another shelter. But though she held on to the last flicker of her will, she had reached the limit of endurance. Worn out with the violence of her emotions and physically spent from the strain of long periods of standing, she staggered as she walked.
She blundered round the Gallery, without any sense of direction, colliding blindly with the groups of waxwork figures. When she reached the window her knees shook under her and she sank to the ground – dropping immediately into a sleep of utter exhaustion.
She awoke with a start as the first grey gleam of dawn was stealing into the Gallery. It fell on the row of waxworks, imparting a sickly hue to their features, as though they were creatures stricken with plague.
It seemed to Sonia that they were waiting for her to wake. Their peaked faces were intelligent and their eyes held interest, as though they were keeping some secret.
She pushed back her hair, her brain still thick with clouded memories. Disconnected thoughts began to stir, to slide about.. . Then suddenly her mind cleared, and she sprang up – staring at a figure wearing a familiar black cape.
Hubert Poke was also waiting for her to wake.
He sat in the same chair, and in the same posture, as when she had first seen him, in the flash of lightning. He looked as though he had never moved from his place – as though he could not move. His face had not the appearance of flesh.
As Sonia stared at him, with the feeling of a bird hypnotised by a snake, a doubt began to gather in her mind. Growing bolder, she crept closer to the figure.
It was a waxwork – a libellous representation of the actor – Kean.
Her laugh rang joyously through the Gallery as she realized that she had passed a night of baseless terrors, cheated by the power of imagination. In her relief she turned impulsively to the waxworks.
‘My congratulations,’ she said. ‘You are my masters.’
They did not seem entirely satisfied by her homage, for they continued to watch her with an expression half-benevolent and half-sinister.
‘Wait!’ they seemed to say.
Sonia turned from them and opened her bag to get out her mirror and comb. There, among a jumble of notes, letters, lipsticks, and powder-compresses, she saw the electric torch.
‘Of course!’ she cried. ‘I remember now, I put it there. I was too windy to think properly … Well, I have my story. I’d better get my coat.’
The Gallery seemed smaller in the returning light. As she approached Charles Stuart, who looked like an umpire in her white coat, she glanced down the far end of the room, where she had groped in its shadows before the pursuit of imaginary footsteps.
A waxwork was lying prone on the floor. For the second time she stood and gazed down upon a familiar black cape – a broad-brimmed conspirator’s hat. Then she nerved herself to turn the figure so that its face was visible.
She gave a scream. There was no mistaking the glazed eyes and ghastly grin. She was looking down on the face of a dead man.
It was Hubert Poke.
The shock was too much for Sonia. She heard a singing in her ears, while a black mist gathered before her eyes. For the first time in her life she fainted.
When she recovered consciousness she forced herself to kneel beside the body and cover it with its black cape. The pallid face resembled a death-mask, which revealed only too plainly the lines of egotism and cruelty in which it had been moulded by a gross spirit.
Yet Sonia felt no repulsion – only pity. It was Christmas morning, and he was dead, while her own portion was life triumphant. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer of supplication for his warped soul.
Presently, as she grew calmer, her mind began to work on the problem of his presence. His motive seemed obvious. Not knowing that she had changed her plan, he had concealed himself in the Gallery, in order to poach her story.
‘He was in the Hall of Horrors at first,’ she thought, remembering the opened door. ‘When he came out he hid at this end. We never saw each other, because of the waxworks between us; but we heard each other.’
She realized that the sounds which had terrified her had not all been due to imagination, while it was her agency which had converted the room into a whispering gallery of strange murmurs and voices. The clue to the cause of death was revealed by his wrist-watch, which had smashed when he fell. Its hands had stopped at three minutes to three, proving that the flash and explosion of the thunderbolt had been too much for his diseased heart – already overstrained by superstitious fears.
Sonia shuddered at a mental vision of his face, distraught with terror and pulped by raw primal impulses, after a night spent in a madman’s world of phantasy.
She turned to look at the waxworks. At last she understood what they seemed to say.
‘But for Us, you should have met – at dawn.’
‘Your share shall be acknowledged, I promise you,’ she said, as she opened her notebook.
Eight o’clock. The Christmas bells are ringing and it is wonderful just to be alive. I’m through the night, and none the worse for the experience, although I cracked badly after three o’clock. A colleague who, unknown to me, was also concealed in the Gallery has met with a tragic fate, caused, I am sure, by the force of suggestion. Although his death is due to heart-failure, the superstitious will certainly claim it is another victory for the Waxworks.
Twixt the Cup and the Lip
Julian Symons
‘Beautiful morning, Miss Oliphant. I shall take a short constitutional.’
‘Very well, Mr Payne.’
Mr Rossiter Payne put on his good thick Melton overcoat, took his bowler hat off its peg, carefully brushed it and put it on. He looked at himself in a small glass and nodded approvingly at what he saw.
He was a man in his early fifties, but he might have passed for ten years less, so square were his shoulders, so ruler-straight his back. Two fine wings of grey hair showed under the bowler. He looked like a retired Guards officer, although he had, in fact, no closer relationship with the Army than an uncle who had been cashiered.
At the door he paused, his eyes twinkling. ‘Don’t let anybody steal the stock while I’m out, Miss Oliphant.’
Miss Oliphant, a thin spinster of indeterminate middle age, blushed. She adored Mr Payne.
He had removed his hat to speak to her. Now he clapped it on his head again, cast an appreciative look at
the bow window of his shop, which displayed several sets of standard authors with the discreet legend above – Rossiter Payne, Bookseller. Specialist in First Editions and Manuscripts – and made his way up New Bond Street towards Oxford Street.
At the top of New Bond Street he stopped, as he did five days a week, at the stall on the corner. The old woman put the carnation into his buttonhole.
‘Fourteen shopping days to Christmas now, Mrs Shankly. We’ve all got to think about it, haven’t we?’
A ten shilling note changed hands instead of the usual half crown. He left her blessing him confusedly.
This was perfect December weather – crisply cold, the sun shining. Oxford Street was wearing its holiday decorations – enormous gold and silver coins from which depended ropes of pearls, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. When lighted up in the afternoon they looked pretty, although a little garish for Mr Payne’s refined taste. But still, they had a certain symbolic feeling about them, and he smiled at them.
Nothing, indeed, could disturb Mr Payne’s good temper this morning – not the jostling crowds on the pavements or the customary traffic jams, which seemed, indeed, to please him. He walked along until he came to a large store that said above it, in enormous letters, ORBIN’S. These letters were picked out in coloured lights, and the lights themselves were festooned with Christmas trees and holly wreaths and the figures of the Seven Dwarfs, all of which lighted up.
Orbin’s department store went right round the corner into the comparatively quiet Jessiter Street. Once again Mr Payne went through a customary ceremony. He crossed the road and went down several steps into an establishment unique of its kind – Danny’s Shoe Parlour. Here, sitting on a kind of throne in this semi-basement, one saw through a small window the lower halves of passers-by. Here Danny, with two assistants almost as old as himself, had been shining shoes for almost thirty years.
Leather-faced, immensely lined but still remarkably sharp-eyed, Danny knelt down now in front of Mr Payne, turned up the cuffs of his trousers and began to put an altogether superior shine on already well-polished shoes.
‘Lovely morning, Mr Payne.’
Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season Page 15