We rose, simultaneously, for we had planned carefully on what we were to do, and followed. We were in time to see the articles ‘float’ around the corner, and, increasing our pace – for we had been puzzled about how anything material, like the boots, could get through the locked door – watched, in the rather dim light of that short hallway, what would happen.
What happened was that the ‘harness’ and pistols reached the door, and then the door opened. They went through, and the door shut behind them precisely as though someone, invisible to us, were carrying them. We heard distinctly the slight sound which a gently closed door makes as it came to, and there we were, standing outside in the hallway looking at each other. It is one thing to figure out, beforehand, the science of occult occurrences, even upon the basis of such experience as Carruth and I both possessed. It is, distinctly, another, to face the direct operation of something motivated by the Powers beyond the ordinary ken of humanity. I confess to certain ‘cold chills’, and Carruth’s face was very pale.
We switched on our electric torches as we had arranged to do, and Carruth, with a firm hand which I admired if I did not, precisely, envy, reached out and turned the knob of the door. We walked into ‘the shut room’ . . .
Not all our joint experience had prepared us for what we saw. I could not forbear clutching Carruth’s free arm, the one not engaged with the torch, as he stood beside me. And I testify that his arm was as still and firm as a rock. It steadied me to realize such fortitude, for the sight which was before us was enough to unnerve the most hardened investigator of the unearthly.
Directly in front of us, but facing the blank wall at the far end of the room, stood a half-materialized man. The gleam of my torch threw a faint shadow on the wall in front of him, the rays passing through him as though he were not there, and yet with a certain dimming. The shadow visibly increased in the few brief instants of our utter silence, and then we observed that the figure was struggling with something. Mechanically we concentrated both electric rays on the figure and then we saw clearly. A bulky man, with a bull-neck and close-cropped, iron-gray hair, wearing a fine satin coat and what were called, in their day, ‘small cloths’, or tight-fitting knee-trousers with silk stockings and heavy, buckled shoes, was raising and fitting about his waist, over the coat, the ‘harness’ with the pistols.
Abruptly, the materialization appearing to be now complete, he turned upon us, with an audible snarl and baleful, glaring little eyes like a pig’s, deep set in a hideous, scarred face, and then he spoke – he spoke, and he had been dead for more than a century!
‘Ah-h-h-h!’ he snarled, evilly, ‘ye would come in upon me, eh, my fine gents – into this my chamber, eh! I’ll teach ye manners . . . ’ and he ended this diatribe with a flood of the foulest language imaginable, stepping, with little, almost mincing, down-toed steps toward us all the time he poured out his filthy curses and revilings. I was completely at a loss what to do. I realized – these ideas went through my mind with the rapidity of thought – that the pistols were unloaded! I told myself that this was some weird hallucin-ation – that the shade of no dead-and-gone desperado could harm us. Yet – it was a truly terrifying experience, be the man shade or true flesh and blood.
Then Carruth spoke to him, in quiet, persuasive tones.
‘But – you have your pistols now, Simon Forrester. It was we who put them where you could find them, your pretty boys, “Jem and Jack”. That was what you were trying to find, was it not? And now – you have them. There is nothing further for you to do – you have them, they are just under your hands where you can get at them whenever you wish.’
At this the specter, or materialization of Simon Forrester, blinked at us, a cunning light in his evil little eyes, and dropped his hands with which he had but now been gesticulating violently on the grips of the pistols. He grinned, evilly, and spat in a strange fashion, over his shoulder.
‘Ay,’ said he, more moderately now, ‘ay – I have ’em – Jemmy and Jack, my trusties, my pretty boys.’ He fondled the butts with his huge hands, hands that could have strangled an ox, and spat over his shoulder.
‘There is no necessity for you to remain, then, is there?’ said Carruth softly, persuasively.
The simulacrum of Simon Forrester frowned, looked a bit puzzled, then nodded its head several times.
‘You can rest now – now that you have Jem and Jack,’ suggested Carruth, almost in a whisper, and as he spoke, Forrester turned away and stepped over to the blank wall at the far side of the room, opposite the doorway, and I could hear Carruth draw in his breath softly and feel the iron grip of his fingers on my arm. ‘Watch!’ he whispered in my ear; ‘watch now.’
The solid wall seemed to wave and buckle before Forrester, almost as though it were not a wall but a sheet of white cloth, held and waved by hands as cloth is waved in a theater to simulate waves. More and more cloth-like the wall became, and, as we gazed at this strange sight, the simulacrum of Simon Forrester seemed to become less opaque, to melt and blend in with the wavering wall, which gradually ceased to move, and then he was gone and the wall was as it had been before . . .
On Monday morning, at Carruth’s urgent solicitation, Snow assembled a force of laborers, and we watched while they broke down the wall of ‘the shut room’ opposite the doorway. At last, as Carruth had expected, a pick went through, and, the interested workmen, laboring with a will, broke through into a small, narrow, cell-like room the plaster of which indicated that it had been walled up perhaps two centuries before, or even earlier – a ‘priest’s hole’ in all probability, of the early post-reformation period near the end of the Sixteenth Century.
Carruth stopped the work as soon as it was plain what was here, and turned out the workmen, who went protestingly. Then, with only our host working beside us, and the door of the room locked on the inside, we continued the job. At last the aperture was large enough, and Carruth went through. We heard an exclamation from him, and then he began to hand out articles through the rough hole in the masonry – leather articles – boots innumerable, ladies’ reticules, hand-luggage, the missing jeweler’s sample case with its contents intact – innumerable other articles, and, last of all, the ‘harness’ with the pistols in the holsters.
Carruth explained the ‘jester case’ to Snow, who shook his head over it. ‘It’s quite beyond me, Lord Carruth,’ said he, ‘but, as you say this annoyance is at an end, I am quite satisfied; and – I’ll take your advice and make sure by pulling down the whole room, breaking out the corridor walls, and joining it to the room across the way. I confess I can not make head or tail of your explanation – the unfulfilled wish, the “sympathetic pervasion” of the room as you call it, the “materialization”, and the strange fact that this business began only a short time ago. But – I’ll do exactly what you have recommended, about the room, that is. The restoration of the jeweler’s case will undoubtedly make it possible for me to get back the sum I paid Messrs Hopkins and Barth of Liverpool when it disappeared in my house. Can you give any explanation of why the “shade” of Forrester remained quiet for a century and more and only started up the other day, so to speak?’
‘It is because the power to materialize came very slowly,’ answered Carruth, ‘coupled as it undoubtedly was with the gradual breaking down of the room’s material resistance. It is very difficult to realize the extraordinary force of an unfulfilled wish, on the part of a forceful, brutal, wholly selfish personality like Forrester’s. It is, really, what we must call spiritual power, even though the “spirituality” was the reverse of what we commonly understand by that term. The wish and the force of Forrester’s persistent desire, through the century, have been working steadily, and, as you have told us, the room has been out of use for more than a century. There were no common, everyday affairs to counteract that malign influence – no “interruptions”, if I make myself clear.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Snow. ‘I do not clearly understand. These matters are outside my province. But �
� I am exceedingly grateful – to you both.’ Our host bowed courteously. ‘Anything that I can possibly do, in return – ’
‘There is nothing – nothing whatever,’ said Carruth quietly; ‘but, Mr Snow, there is another problem on your hands which perhaps you will have some difficulty in solving, and concerning which, to our regret’ – he looked gravely at me – ‘I fear neither Mr Canevin with his experience, nor I with mine, will be able to assist you.’
‘And what, pray, is that?’ asked Mr Snow, turning slightly pale. He would, I perceive, be very well satisfied to have his problems behind him.
‘The problem is,’ said Carruth, even more gravely I imagined, ‘it is – what disposal are you to make of fifty-eight pairs of assorted boots and shoes!’
And Snow’s relieved laughter was the last of the impressions which I took with me as we rode back to London in Carruth’s car, of The Coach and Horses inn on the Brighton Road.
The Left Eye
Pierre Godard was a French Canadian by descent, whose grandfather had departed the purlieus of Montreal for the good of his miserable hide in the days of Riel’s Rebellion and settled in that indefinite area of scanty-soiled farmland along the western shore of Lake Champlain between Keeseville and Plattsburg.
The degenerate stock of the Godards, long impoverished since the era of its plebeian origins in France, did not recover in the descendants of the original fugitive. Pierre, the grandson, combined in his make-up the native cussedness of the lower class ‘canuck’ with the skinflint qualities which his lifelong residence among the narrow-minded yokels with whom he consorted had readily imparted. Shiftless, furtive, mean-souled, he eked out an existence on his few barren acres of poor land which was endurable only because there was neither in his heredity nor his experience any better standard by which he could realize to the full the utter meanness of everything that conspired to make up his life’s record.
At nineteen Pierre had married Katie Burton, a flat-chested, sallow-faced slattern of his own age. At the end of five years of sordid married life, four brats of their begetting littered up the dirty kitchen of Pierre’s cabin through the long, cold days of the northern New York winter, and spent their summers rolling about in the dirt at the roadside and making faces at the occupants of the automobiles which passed in a wavering, irregular string, all day and most of the early evening, along the State road between Keeseville and Plattsburg.
That is, there were four brats – and Kathleen. To what ancestors of Pierre or Katie Kathleen could have been a ‘throw-back’ is one of those obscure ethnic mysteries which are so baffling when they emerge in the families of recognized people. In Kathleen’s case, it baffled no one, since there was no one in particular to remark this fairy among the ugly gnomes who pretended to be her brothers and sisters, this glorious little swan among the rough ducklings of the Godard brood.
Kathleen had always been utterly different from the rest. By the time she was six or seven, her positive characteristics were already strongly developed. She stood out from the rest of her sordid family like a new-minted gold coin among pocket-worn pennies. By natural choice, and habitually, she was dainty and neat. Dirt never stuck to her, somehow. The rest of the brood were different from each other only in the varying ugliness of their budding dispositions and the equally variant qualities of their general detestability of appearance and habit. All the rest, for example, would fight at the drop of the hat to gain possession of anything that turned up unappropriated, that even vaguely suggested value to their joint scrutiny. In these snarling contests, Kathleen, coolly aloof, was uninterested. The rest possessed in common that coarse, scrubby hair of indeterminate color which characterizes the children of outdoor-living peasants the world over. Kathleen’s, a shimmering glory of delicate ringlets, shone burnished copper in the afternoon sun when she swept off the rickety back porch or daintily threw a few grains of hard corn to Pierre’s scraggly hens.
At sixteen she was as coolly aloof from the blandishments of the coarse young men of her neighborhood as ever she had been to the scrambling bickerings of her family. All such advances left her wholly uninterested. What dreams and aspirations lay behind those clear blue eyes, those eyes like the blue of the Caribbean at noon, no one had ever guessed, that is, no one except the good priest, Father Tracy, who came over from one of the neighboring towns for mass every Sunday morning, and on alternate Saturday nights and before First Fridays, to hear the confessions of his outlying portion of his difficult flock. To Father Tracy it had been some time clear that the lovely body of the little Kathleen harbored one of those rare souls, delicate and fragrant, which burn with the desire to offer themselves wholly to the Love of God. Here, the good father knew, or strongly suspected, was a budding vocation for the religious life, a vocation which it was one of his rewards to cultivate and foster.
As yet Kathleen was too young to leave her home, even if that had been feasible, and enter upon a novitiate with the good sisters at Plattsburg, or, perhaps better still, in her case, with some other good sisters much farther away from the place of her sordid origins, but for this vocation, as he watched it grow, at first weak and trembling up toward the dim light of a possible fulfillment, then later with a kind of thin, but pure and steady flame, Father Tracy said many novenas of thanks-giving. It was one of his chief sources of happiness, and, as was natural in such cases, Kathleen responded to his interest in her, and through his gentle, kindly leading of her soul, was beginning, as she fulfilled her maturity, to see the distant light more and more clearly.
This vision she cherished with all her heart, and if it begot in her an almost perceptible wistfulness, it did nothing to minimize the cheerful kindliness with which she went about the performance of her daily tasks, or the cultivated discretion with which she had laboriously learned to meet and neutralize the changeable moods of her vicious father and slatternly, loose-minded mother.
The wind-swept habitation for God which she had made of her pure little heart was rudely battered on a certain Thursday morning in the month of August in her seventeenth year.
Pierre, her father, who combined with the shiftless existence of a small peasant-farmer the more adventurous and profitable avocation of a bootlegger’s runner for a Plattsburg operator, was frequently away from home at night and even for days at a time, when he was engaged in doing his part in bringing consignments of illicit merchandise down from unknown points in nearby Canada, either overland along the State road or by devious and rutted byways, or, what was an easier though somewhat less direct method much favored by ‘the profession’, ‘up’ the lake on dark nights, a process which was more lucrative because there were less people to bribe, and correspondingly somewhat more dangerous, as requiring a landing on the shores of Vermont across the lake, or somewhere on the New York side.
He had been away on one of these expeditions for two days, and had returned some time during the small hours Wednesday night. On that Thursday morning, after two nearly sleepless nights, unkempt, ugly as a bear with a sore nose, he pushed his way into the kitchen about nine o’clock and demanded something to eat.
Kathleen brought him his food and he ate in a brooding silence. She waited, sitting on the step below the open doorway, for him to finish, so that she might wash his dishes and tidy up the table after him, softly humming a tuneless little song, her mind entirely other-worldly.
Pierre, having finished his breakfast, came straight to the point of a certain matter which he had been cogitating for several weeks.
‘Come here,’ he said.
She rose and came to the table, expecting that he required another cup of coffee or something of the sort.
‘Shut the door,’ barked her father.
She closed the door leading into the small hallway out of the kitchen, wonderingly, and returned to her father’s side.
‘How old are you?’ he asked, looking at her as though he were appraising her.
‘Seventeen.’
‘Seventeen, eh?’ His eyes went ove
r her again, in such fashion that, without knowing why, she felt suddenly choked.
‘Ah, seventeen. Old enough! Now listen. That is old enough. You are going to marry Steve Benham. I got that all fixed, see. Me an’ him, we talk about it a lot, and Steve is all right for it.’
The choking feeling nearly overcame her. The blood seemed to suffuse her whole body and then recede somewhere, leaving her icy cold and afraid. Marriage had never entered Kathleen’s mind. And Steve Benham! Benham was a brutal-faced young tough who, with greater advantages such as are offered to the denizens of great cities in their worst aspects, might have shone as a criminal of the lower type – a yegg, a killer for hire, the ready and effective tool of some brutal organized gang. As it was, he had taken advantage of such opportunities as presented themselves to his somewhat restricted field of development. He was one of Levin’s crowd in the bootlegging operations, a close associate of Pierre Godard’s.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you, now?’ roared Pierre, curbing his voice slightly in view of his desire for secrecy. This was his lookout, and none of Katie’s business. He could handle his own girl all by himself without his wife’s having any part in it. Benham had offered him two hundred dollars to put it through for him, and that two hundred he meant to have – as soon as possible, too.
‘Steve’s all right, ain’t he? What’s the matter with Steve? Now cut out this blubberin’.’ Kathleen’s lips were trembling in a colorless face, her eyes big and bright with the tears she was forcing to remain unshed. She knew the resources of this brute of a father which an inscrutably unkind Providence had inflicted upon her.
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 10