by Otto Penzler
“It was on a day in November when ’er precious Ted’s ship docked at Sheerness. I knew which pub ’e’d make for as soon as ’e came ashore, an’ I was there ready for ’im. It was easy enough ter get pally. A few drinks an’ we was bosom friends. I ’ad a little shed down in Blue Town—a shack I rented fer storing me show. I told the sailor I’d some whisky there an’ ’e didn’t think twice about comin’ along with me. ’E wasn’t expecting a blow between the eyes with a lump of lead piping. But that’s what ’e got an’ it split ’is skull like an egg-shell. Later I packed ’im all nice an’ comfortable into my little booth, covered it with the mackintosh sheet, an’ left ’im fer the night.
“Perhaps yer knows the Isle of Sheppey an’ perhaps yer don’t. Sheerness is the only place of any size on the island, but there are a number of villages where a Punch and Judy man could always be certain of a few bob. I used ter work ’em pretty regular, an’ I knew the whole island like the palm of me ’and. There is a part of the coast, between Minster and Leysdown, where the mud cliffs are always givin’ way—or they used ter be always tumblin’ down in them days. Usually only small falls took place, but sometimes a whole great chunk just toppled over into the sea. Once a blinkin’ church disappeared in a night. I had explored those cliffs fer days on end an’ knew all the most dangerous places.
“There was a light railway which ran to the different villages—a ragtime sort of affair where the drive ’ad ter get out at every level-crossin’ to open the gates, an’ then wait fer the guard to shut ’em again after they ’ad driven through.
“The next morning I wheeled my show down to the railway station. I ’ad a little dorg then—a black and white terrier what took part in the show, an’ I remember ’ow the animal whimpered at my ’eels as I pushed the barrer through the streets. The guard, who knew me quite well, passed the usual joke about the ‘coffin on wheels,’ little thinkin’ that this time ’e was nearer the truth than ’e guessed. I travelled in ’is van so as ter keep me eyes on the barrer an’, all the way, that blarsted dorg whimpered and yapped, although I nearly kicked the guts out of it.
“It was barely eight o’clock when we got to Leysdown an’ nobody seemed to take any interest in me or me barrer. I wheeled it out to the cliffs an’ along the sea path ’til I reached the spot I ’ad chosen. It was a tiny bay where the waves ’ad washed away the under part of the cliff, makin’ a kind of cave. There was no one about an’ it didn’t take me long to unload the body, drop it to the beach, an’ drag it into the ’ole. An’ then that damned dorg started ’owling loud enough to be ’eard in Sheerness. I grabbed ’old of it, bashed its ’ead against a rock, an’ chucked it in to keep the sailor company. I’d brought a couple of crowbars with me an’ struck them into the top of the cliff. By using them as levers I soon managed to dislodge about ten tons of soil an’ Daisy’s lover was beneath it.
“I went back to Leysdown an’ gave a show for the kids at the school. I also gave shows that day at Eastchurch and Minster, an’ only one person asked me where me little dorg ’ad gorn.” He glanced uneasily towards the barrow and started to his feet with a cry. “There ’e is, there ’e is,” he whimpered, pointing with a shaking hand. “Can’t you see ’im now, mister, sittin’ on the barrer?”
I assured him that no dog was visible to me. But, I must confess, I was badly frightened and ready to take to my heels at any moment. The man seemed to gain control of himself again and came closer to me.
“It all ’appened ten years ago,” he croaked, “an’ now they’ve both got out. I daren’t set up me show ’cause, when I did it last Monday at Cranbrook, the sailor an’ the dorg both got inside with me an’ nearly sent me screamin’ mad.” He looked towards the barrow again and gripped my arm. “Tell me, ’onest, guv’ner,” he pleaded. “Can’t yer see that bleedin’ dorg sittin’ there an’ grinnin’ at me?”
Once again I told him that no dog was to be seen and tried to soothe him.
“You bloody liar,” the Professor yelled. “You can see the dorg all right an’ yer think I don’t know. It’s been there ever since I read that bit in the paper four days ago. An’ I’ll tell yer somethin’ else.” He came closer and I recoiled from his foetid breath. “The sailor’s inside the booth an’ I daresn’t open it. Now I’ve got to push them both around for the rest of me life.” Wild bursts of hideous laughter broke from his throat. “It’s a good joke, ain’t it?” he screamed. “Ted Richards is livin’ at Chatham with my wife. The sailor killed wasn’t ’im at all.”
Still laughing wildly he rushed across to the barrow, seized the handles, and went pelting off down the lane as if the devil was after him.
III
Chief Inspector Stanton, of the Sussex Constabulary, is an old friend of mine, and I suppose I should have gone to him at once with my story. But I hate to be laughed at and, on reflection, the tale seemed most improbable. The Professor was obviously the victim of delusions induced by alcoholic excesses.
More than twenty-four hours passed before I mentioned the business to Stanton and I only did so then because we happened to meet at the club. I could see a gleam of interest flicker in his eyes as soon as I began the tale of my encounter. He listened quietly whilst I described the ramblings of the Punch and Judy man, and then he said, “I suppose there was a name painted on the barrow and I dare wager it happened to be Jack Smith.”
“True enough,” I replied. “You don’t mean to say you’ve nabbed him already.”
“Not exactly. He hanged himself last night in an old barn on the Brighton road.”
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Then the man was mad and his delusions got the better of him.”
“I’m not so certain about the delusions. We managed to trace his wife this afternoon and she is living at Chatham with a sailor called Edward Richards. That part of the tale was true enough and so was the bit about the murder. We found this in Smith’s pocket. It was evidently torn from one of the East Kent newspapers and is about five days old.”
He extracted a dirty slip of printed paper from his notebook and handed it over to me. It was a short paragraph recounting the fall of a portion of the cliffs near Leysdown, on Sheppey, and the subsequent discovery of the skeleton of a man with the bones of a dog at his side. “From an identity disc found near the remains,” the report concluded, “there is reason to believe that the unfortunate person was a seaman. The police have the matter in hand and we are given to understand there is suspicion of foul play.”
“Then he did get the wrong man?” I said, handing back the slip of paper.
“That’s about the sum of it,” replied Stanton in his laconic manner. “But there are a couple of points about the suicide which puzzle me. In the soft earth under the body were the marks of a dog’s paws and, from the state of Smith’s trousers and legs, it was obvious that the animal had been jumping up at him as he swung from the beam. The paw-marks were only in that one spot and we haven’t found any traces of a stray dog. I suppose you are certain there wasn’t a terrier with him yesterday afternoon.”
“There was no dog there,” I stated without hesitation. “Smith swore he could see one, but it wasn’t visible to my eyes.”
“Curious,” said Stanton. “The other thing is even more mysterious. When we came to examine the booth it was saturated with water and mud, and a most unholy stench hung around it. The doctor says the dampness was undoubtedly caused by sea water, and maintains that the smell was that of a decomposing corpse.”
THE FIREPLACE
Henry S. Whitehead
THE FIRST PUBLISHED STORY of Reverend Henry St. Clair Whitehead (1882–1932) was “The Intarsia Box,” which appeared in Adventure in 1923, and he began a lifelong connection to Weird Tales with the publication of “Tea Leaves” the following year. He developed a steady correspondence and friendship with H. P. Lovecraft, with whom he collaborated on a story, “The Trap,” in 1931. In his relatively brief career of less than a decade, he published more than forty pulp stories, twent
y-five for Weird Tales. Two collections of his stories were published posthumously, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946).
Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he graduated from Harvard University, where he played football and studied with the poet and philosopher George Santayana, earning a doctorate in philosophy in 1904. He became a newspaper editor and served as the commissioner of the Amateur Athletic Union, then went to the Berkeley Divinity School in Middletown, Connecticut. He was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1912, serving in a series of increasingly important and responsible positions, progressing from rector and children’s pastor to the post of Archdeacon to the Virgin Islands in the West Indies from 1921 to 1929. He wrote frequently of ecclesiastical matters and, while living on St. Croix, gathered ideas and background material on voodoo and native legends and superstitions for the fiction he was to write for such pulp magazines as Adventure, Weird Tales, and Strange Tales.
“The Fireplace” was originally published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales; it was first collected in Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1944).
The Fireplace
HENRY S. WHITEHEAD
WHEN THE PLANTER’S HOTEL in Jackson, Mississippi, burned to the ground in the notable fire of 1922, the loss to that section of the South could not be measured in terms of that ancient hostelry’s former grandeur. The days had indeed long passed when a Virginia ham was therein stewed in no medium meaner than good white wine; and as the rambling old building was heavily insured, the owners suffered no great material loss. The real loss was the community’s, in the deaths by fire of two of its prominent citizens, Lieutenant-Governor Frank Stacpoole and Mayor Cassius L. Turner. These gentlemen, just turning elderly, had been having a reunion in the hotel with two of their old associates, Judge Varney J. Baker of Memphis, Tennessee, and the Honorable Valdemar Peale, a prominent Georgian, from Atlanta. Thus, two other Southern cities had a share in the mourning, for Judge Baker and Mr. Peale both likewise perished in the flames. The fire took place just before Christmas on the twenty-third of December, and among the many sympathetic and regretful comments which ensued upon this holocaust was the many-times-repeated conjecture that these gentlemen had been keeping a kind of Christmas anniversary, a fact which added no little to the general feeling of regret and horror.
On the request of these prominent gentlemen, the hotel management had cleared out and furnished a second floor room with a great fireplace, a room for long used only for storage, but for which, the late mayor and lieutenant-governor had assured them, the four old cronies cherished a certain sentiment. The fire, which gained headway despite the truly desperate efforts of the occupants of the room, had its origin in the fireplace, and it was believed that the four, who were literally burned to cinders, had been trapped. The fire had started, it appeared, about half an hour before midnight, when everybody else in the hotel had retired. No other occupant of the house suffered from its effects, beyond a few incidental injuries sustained in the hurried departure at dead of night from the blazing old firetrap.
Some ten years before this regrettable incident ended the long and honorable career of this one-time famous hostelry, a certain Mr. James Callender, breaking a wearisome journey north at Jackson, turned into the hospitable vestibule of the Planter’s, with a sigh of relief. He had been shut up for nine hours in the mephitic atmosphere of a soft-coal train. He was tired, hungry, thirsty, and begrimed with soot.
Two grinning negro porters deposited his ample luggage, toted from the railway station in the reasonable hope of a large emolument, promised by their patron’s prosperous appearance and the imminence of the festival season of Christmas. They received their reward and left Mr. Callender in the act of signing the hotel register.
“Can you let me have number twenty-eight?” he required of the clerk. “That, I believe, is the room with the large fireplace, is it not? My friend, Mr. Tom Culbertson of Sweetbriar, recommended it to me in case I should be stopping here.”
Number twenty-eight was fortunately vacant, and the new guest was shortly in occupation, a great fire, at his orders, roaring up the chimney, and he himself engaged in preparing for the luxury of a hot bath.
After a leisurely dinner of the sort for which the old hotel was famous, Mr. Callender first sauntered slowly through the lobby, enjoying the first fragrant whiffs of a good cigar. Then, seeing no familiar face which gave promise of a conversation, he ascended to his room, replenished the fire, and got himself ready for a solitary evening. Soon, in pajamas, bathrobe, and comfortable slippers, he settled himself in a comfortable chair at just the right distance from the fire and began to read a new book which he had brought with him. His dinner had been a late one, and it was about half-past nine when he really settled to his book. It was Arthur Machen’s House of Souls, and Mr. Callender soon found himself absorbed in the eery ecstasy of reading for the first time a remarkable work which transcended all his previous secondhand experiences of the occult. It had, he found, anything but a soporific effect upon him. He was reading carefully, well into the book, with all his faculties alert, when he was interrupted by a knock on the door of his room.
Mr. Callender stopped reading, marked his place, and rose to open the door. He was wondering who should summon him at such an hour. He glanced at his watch on the bureau in passing and was surprized to note that it was eleven-twenty. He had been reading for nearly two hours, steadily. He opened the door, and was surprized to find no one in the corridor. He stepped through the doorway and glanced right and then left. There were, he observed, turns in both directions at short distances from his door, and Mr. Callender, whose mind was trained in the sifting of evidence, worked out an instantaneous explanation in his mind. The occupant of a double room (so he guessed) had returned late, and, mistaking the room, had knocked to apprize his fellow occupant of his return. Seeing at once that he had knocked prematurely, on the wrong door, the person had bolted around one of the corners to avoid an awkward explanation!
Mr. Callender, smiling at this whimsical idea of his, turned back into his room and shut the door behind him.
A gentleman was sitting in the place he had vacated. Mr. Callender stopped short and stared at this intruder. The man who had appropriated his comfortable chair was a few years older than himself, it appeared—say about thirty-five. He was tall, well-proportioned, and very well dressed, although there seemed to Mr. Callender’s hasty scrutiny something indefinably odd about his clothes.
The two men looked at each other appraisingly for the space of a few seconds, in silence, and then abruptly Mr. Callender saw what was wrong with the other’s appearance. He was dressed in the fashion of about fifteen years back, in the style of the late nineties. No one was wearing such a decisive-looking piccadilly collar, nor such a huge puff tie which concealed every vestige of the linen except the edges of the cuffs. These, on Mr. Callender’s uninvited guest, were immaculate and round, and held in place by a pair of large, round, cut-cameo black buttons.
The strange gentleman, without rising, broke the silence in a well-modulated voice with a deprecatory wave of a very well kept hand.
“I owe you an apology, sir. I trust that you will accept what amends I can make. This room has for me a peculiar interest which you will understand if you will allow me to speak further, but for the present I confine myself to asking your pardon.”
This speech was delivered in so frank and pleasing a fashion that Mr. Callendar could take no offense at the intrusion of the speaker.
“You are quite welcome, sir, but perhaps you will be good enough to continue, as you suggest. I confess to being mightily puzzled as to the precise manner in which you came to be here. The only way of approach is through the door, and I’ll take my oath no one came through it. I heard a knock, went to the door, and there was no one there.”
“I imagine I would do well to begin at the beginning,” said the stranger, gravely. “The facts are somewhat unusual, as you wil
l see when I have related them; otherwise I should hardly be here, at this time of night, and trespassing upon your good nature. That this is no mere prank I beg that you will believe.”
“Proceed, sir, by all means,” returned Mr. Callender, his curiousity aroused and keen. He drew up another chair and seated himself on the side of the fireplace opposite the stranger, who at once began his explanation.
“My name is Charles Bellinger, a fact which I will ask you kindly to note and keep well in mind. I come from Biloxi, down on the Gulf, and, unlike yourself, I am a Southerner, a native of Mississippi. You see, sir, I know something about you, or at least who you are.”
Mr. Callender inclined his head, and the stranger waved his hand again, this time as if to express acknowledgment of an introduction.
“I may as well add to this, since it explains several matters, though in itself sounding somewhat odd, that actually I am dead.”
Mr. Bellinger, at this astounding statement, met Mr. Callender’s facial expression of amazement with a smile clearly meant to be reassuring, and again, with a kind of unspoken eloquence, waved his expressive hand.
“Yes, sir, what I tell you is the plain truth. I passed out of this life in this room where we are sitting almost exactly sixteen years ago. My death occurred on the twenty-third of December. That will be precisely sixteen years ago the day after tomorrow. I came here tonight for the express purpose of telling you the facts, if you will bear with me and suspend your judgment as to my sanity. It was I who knocked at your door, and I passed through it, and, so to speak, through you, my dear sir!
“On the late afternoon of the day I have mentioned I arrived in this hotel in company with Mr. Frank Stacpoole, an acquaintance, who still lives here in Jackson. I met him as I got off the train, and invited him to come here with me for dinner. Being a bachelor, he made no difficulty, and just after dinner we met in the lobby another man named Turner—Cassius L. Turner, also a Jacksonian—who proposed a game of cards and offered to secure two more gentlemen to complete the party. I invited him to bring them here to my room, and Stacpoole and I came up in advance to get things ready for an evening of poker.