‘O, law, ma’am, what is it?’ asked Kate.
‘Don’t be a fool, girl,’ said Mrs Farwell, with a shiver. ‘It’s only a hand.’
‘Only—oh Lord! I won’t touch it,’ said the girl. ‘There’s a dead mouse by it.’
‘Then take out the dead mouse,’ said the housekeeper. The girl did so, and slammed the cupboard door to and locked it. The mouse was a poor shriveled little thing, but how interesting it would have been to dead Simcox Smith neither Kate nor the housekeeper knew. It went into the dustbin as if it did not bear witness to a horror.
That afternoon Mrs Farwell spoke to Hayling.
‘If you please, sir, there’s a hand in that cupboard, and I couldn’t get Kate to clean it out.’
‘A hand! Oh yes, I remember,’ said Hayling. ‘The girl’s a fool. Does she think it will hurt her? How did she know it was there? I wrapped it up. Some one’s been meddling.’
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said Mrs Farwell, with dignity. ‘She is much too frightened to meddle, and so am I.’
‘Mrs Farwell, you are a fool,’ said Hayling.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mrs Farwell. When Mrs Farwell had sailed out of the room Hayling opened the cupboard and found the hand out of its package.
‘Some one has been meddling,’ growled Hayling.‘They pretend that they are frightened and come hunting here to get a sensation. I know ‘em. They’re all savages, and so are all of us. Civilization!’
He gave a snort when he thought of what civilization was. That is an anthropological way of looking at it. It’s not a theological way at all.
He looked at the hand. It was a curious hand.
‘It’s contracted a little,’ said Hayling. ‘The fist has closed, I think. Drying unequally. But it’s interesting; I’ll show it to Sacconi.’
He put the hand into its coverings, and took it that very afternoon to Sacconi.
Personally Hayling believed in chiromancy. As I have said, it really was his only weakness. I never used to believe it when he argued with me, but now I have my doubts. When Sacconi took the thing into his own white and beautiful hands and turned it over to look at the palm, his eyebrows went up in a very odd way. Hayling said so.
‘This, oh, ah,’ said Sacconi. His real name was Flynn. He came from Limerick. ‘This is very odd—very–’
‘Very what?’ asked Hayling.
‘Horrible, quite horrible,’ said Sacconi.
‘Can you read it, man?’
Sacconi grunted.
‘Can I read the Times? I can, but I don’t. I’ve half the mind not to read this. It’s very horrible, Hayling.’
‘The devil,’ said Hayling;‘what d’ye mean?’
‘This is a negro’s hand.’
‘Any fool can see that,’ said Hayling rudely.
‘A murderer’s hand.’
‘That’s likely enough,’ said Hayling.
‘A cannibal’s hand.’
‘You don’t say so!’ said Hayling.
‘Oh, worse than that.’
‘What’s worse?’
Sacconi said a lot that Hayling denounced as fudge. Probably it was fudge. And yet—
‘I’d burn it,’ said Sacconi, with a shiver, as he handed it back to Hayling, and went to wash his hands. ‘I’d burn it.’
‘There’s a damn weak spot in you, Sacconi,’ said the anthropologist.
‘Perhaps,’ said Sacconi, ‘but I’d burn it.’
‘Damn nonsense,’ said Hayling. ‘Why should I?’
‘I believe a lot of things you don’t,’ said Sacconi.
‘I disbelieve a lot that you don’t,’ retorted Hayling.
‘You see, I’m a bit of a clairvoyant,’ said Sacconi.
‘I’ve heard you say that before,’ said Hayling, as he went away.
When he got home again he put the hand in the cupboard. He forgot to lock it up. And he locked the cat up in his room when he went to bed.
There was an awful crying of cats, or a cat, in the middle of the night. But cats fight about that time.
And when Kate opened the door of Hayling’s working-room in the morning she saw the hand upon the hearthrug, and gave a horrid scream. It brought Mrs Farwell out of the drawling room, and Hayling out of the bathroom in a big towel.
‘What the devil—’ said Hayling.
‘What is it, Kate?’ cried Mrs Farwell.
‘The hand! the hand!’ said Kate. ‘It’s on the floor.’
Mrs Farwell saw it. Hayling put on his dressing-gown, and came down and saw it, too.
‘Give that fool a month’s notice,’ said Hayling. ‘She’s been meddling again.’
‘I haven’t,’ said Kate, sobbing. And then Mrs Farwell saw the cat lying stretched out under Hayling’s desk.
‘It was the cat. There she is,’ said Mrs Farwell.
‘Damn the cat,’ said Hayling. He took Kate’s broom and gave the cat a push with it.
The cat was dead.
‘I don’t want a month’s notice,’ said Kate, quavering. ‘I’ll go now.’
‘Send the fool off,’ said Hayling angrily. He took up the cat, of which he had been very fond, and put it outside, and shut the door on the crying girl and Mrs Farwell. He picked up the hand and looked at it.
‘Very odd,’ said Hayling.
He looked again.
‘Very beastly,’ said Hayling. ‘I suppose it’s my imagination.’
He looked once more.
‘Looks fresher,’ said Hayling. ‘These fools of women have infected me.’
He put the hand down on his desk by the side of a very curious Maori skull, and went upstairs again to finish dressing.
That morning the scientific monthlies were out, and there was much of interest in them that Hayling forgot all about the hand. He had an article in one of them abusing Robins-Gunter, whose views on anthropology were coloured by his fanaticism in religion. ‘Imagine a man like that thinking he is an authority on anything scientific,’ said Hayling. It was a pleasure to slaughter him on his own altar, and indeed this time Hayling felt he had offered Robins-Gunter up to the outraged deity of Truth.
‘It’s a massacre,’ said Hayling; ‘it’s not a criticism—it’s a massacre.’
He said ‘Ha-ha!’ and went to town to hear what others had to say about it. They had so much to say that he remained at the club till very late, and got rather too much wine to drink. Or perhaps it was the whisky-and-soda. He left his working-room door open and unlocked.
Kate had gone, sacrificing a fortnight’s wages. Mrs Farwell said she was a fool. Kate said she would rather be a fool outside that house. She also said a lot of foolish things about the hand, which had a very silly effect upon the housekeeper. For how else can we account for what happened that night? Kate said that the beastly hand was alive, and that it had killed the cat. Uneducated superstitious girls from the country often say things as silly. But Mrs Farwell was a woman of nerves. She only went to sleep when heard her master come in.
She woke screaming at three o’clock, and Hayling was still so much under the influence of Robins-Gunter’s scientific blood and the club whisky that he didn’t wake. But Mary Hayling woke and so did the cook, and they came running to Mrs Farwell’s room. They found her door open.
‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ screamed Mary Hayling. She brought a candle and found Mrs Farwell sitting up in bed.
She was as white as a ghost, bloodlessly white. ‘There’s been a horrible thing in my room,’ she whispered.
The cook collapsed on a chair; Mary Hayling say on the bed and put her arms round the housekeeper.
‘What?’
‘I saw it,’ whispered Mrs Farwell. ‘A black man, reddish black, very horrible—‘
She fainted, and Mary laid her down.
‘Stay with her,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll go and wake my uncle.’
The cook whimpered, but she lighted the gas and stayed, while Mary hammered on Hayling’s door. He thought it was thunderous applau
se at a dinner given him by the Royal Society.Then he woke.
‘What is it?’
Mary opened the door and told him to get up.
‘Oh, these women,’ he said.
His head ached. He went upstairs cursing and found Mrs Farwell barely conscious.
The cook was shaking like a jelly, and Hayling thrust her aside. He had some medical training before he turned to anthropology, and he took hold of the housekeeper’s wrist, and found her pulse a mere running thread.
‘Go and bring brandy,’ said Hayling, ‘and fetch Dr Sutton from next door.’
He was very white himself. So far as he could guess she looked as if she were dying of loss of blood. But she didn’t die. Sutton, when he came in, said the same.
‘She’s not white only from fainting, she’s blanched,’ he declared.
He turned back her nightgown, and found a very strange red patch on her shoulder. It was redder than the white skin, and moist. He touched it with a handkerchief, and the linen was faintly reddened. He turned and stared at Hayling.
‘This is very extraordinary,’ he said, and Hayling nodded.
He tried to speak and could not. At last he got his voice. It was dry and thick.
‘Don’t you think the patch is the shape of a hand?’ asked Hayling.
‘Yes, rather,’ replied Sutton; ‘somewhat like it, I should say.’
They were all in the room then: Mary Hayling and the cook. There was no other person in the house. They could have sworn that was a fact. They heard a noise below.
‘What’s that?’ asked Hayling.
‘Someone gone out the front door, sir,’ said the trembling cook.
‘Nonsense,’ said Hayling.
But the door slammed. When he ran down he found no one about. He went upstairs again shaking. For he had looked for something in his own room and had not found it.
The next day there was a curious paragraph in all the evening papers.
‘The freshly severed hand of a negro was picked up early this morning in Lansdown Road, St John’s Wood, just outside the residence of the well-known anthropologist, Mr A.J. Hayling. The police are investigating the mystery.’
But Hayling destroyed the article in which he proposed to massacre the poor credulous Simcox Smith.
Appendix: Charles Dickens, Jr.: Vampyres and Ghouls (1871)
Charles Dickens (i.e., Charles John Huffman Dickens) founded the weekly literary magazine All the Year Round in 1859. Many important novels, including Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, were serialized in this publication.
Following his death in 1870, his son Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (1837-1896), became the owner and editor of the magazine. He remained in charge of it until the magazine ceased publication in 1895.
Most of the anonymous articles that appeared in All the Year Round were written by Charles Dickens and his son, so it can be assumed that Dickens, Jr. wrote the essay “Vampyres and Ghouls,” which appeared on the 20th of May, 1871.
These gentry are not yet quite dead. At least the belief in them still lingers in some country districts; while in South-Eastern Europe, and South-Western Asia, the credence prevails among whole tribes, and even nations. There appears to be no essential difference between the European vampyre and the Asiatic ghoul–a sort of demon, delighting to animate the bodies of dead persons, and feed upon their blood. It is believed that the superstition has existed in the Levant since the time of the ancient Greeks; but among that artistic people the vampyre was a lamia, a beautiful woman, who allured youths to her, and then fed upon their young flesh and blood. Be that as it may, the Byzantine Christians, after the time of Constantine, entertained a belief that the bodies of those who died excommunicated were kept by an emissary of the Evil One, who endowed them with a sort of life, sufficient to enable them to go forth at night from their graves, and feast on other men.The only way to get rid of these passive agents of mischief was to dig the bodies up from the graves, dis-excommunicate them, and bury them.
William of Newbury, who lived in the twelfth century, narrates that in Buckinghamshire a man appeared several times to his wife after he had been buried. The archdeacon and clergy, on being applied to, thought it right to ask the advice of the bishop of the diocese, as to the proper course to be pursued. He advised that the body should be burned–the only cure for vampyres. On opening the grave, the corpse was found to be in the same state as when interred; a property, we are told, generally possessed by vampyres.
The most detailed vampyre stories belong to the Danubian and Greek countries. Tournefort describes a scene that came under his personal notice in Greece. A peasant of Mycone was murdered in the fields in the year 1701. He had been a man of quarrelsome, ill-natured disposition: just the sort of man, according to the current belief of the peasantry, to be haunted by vampyres after death. Two days after his burial, it was noised abroad that he had been seen to walk in the might with great haste, overturning people’s goods, putting out their lights, pinching them, and playing them strange pranks. The rumour was so often repeated, that at length the priests avowed their belief in its truth. Masses were said in the chapels, and ceremonies were performed, having for their object to drive out the vampyre that inhabited the dead man. On the tenth clay after the burial, a mass was said, the body was disinterred, and the heart taken out. Frankincense was burned to ward off infection; but the bystanders insisted on the smoke of the frankincense being a direct emanation from the dead body–a sure sign, according to popular belief, of vampyrism. They burned the heart on the sea-shore, the conventional way of getting rid of vampyres. Still this did not settle the matter. Positive statements went the round of the village that the dead man was still tip to all kinds Of mischief, beating people in the night, breaking down doors, unroofing houses, shaking windows. The matter became serious. Many of the inhabitants were so thoroughly frightened and panic-stricken as to flee; while those who remained nearly lost all self-control.They debated, they fasted, they made processions through the village, they sprinkled the doors of the houses with holy water, they speculated as to whether mass had been properly said, and the heart properly burned. At length they resolved to burn the body itself; they collected plenty of wood, pitch, and tar, and carried out their plan. Tournefort (who had found it necessary to be cautious as to expressing his incredulity), states that no more was heard of the supposed vampyre.
In the year 1725, on the borders of Hungary and Transylvania, a vampyre story arose, which was renewed afterwards in a noteworthy way. A peasant of Madveiga, named Arnold Paul, was crushed to death by the fall of a waggon-load of hay. Thirty days afterwards, four persons died, with all the symptoms (according to popular belief) of their blood having, been sucked by vainpyres. Some of the neighbours remembered having heard Arnold say that he had often been tormented by a vampyre; and they jumped to a conclusion that the passive vampyre had now become active. This was in accordance with a kind of formula or theorem on the subject: that a man who, when alive, has had his blood sucked by a vampyre, will, after his death, deal with other persons in like manner. The neighbours exhumed Arnold Paul, drove a stake through the heart, cut off the head, and burned the body.The bodies of the four persons who had recently died were treated in a similar way, to make surety doubly sure. Nevertheless, even this did not suffice. In 1732, seven years after these events, seventeen persons died in the village near about one time. The memory of the unlucky Arnold recurred to the viilagers; the vampyre theory was again appealed to: he was believed to have dealt with the seventeen as be had previously dealt with the four; and they were therefore disinterred, the heads cut off, the hearts staked, the bodies burned, and the ashes dispersed. One supposition was that Arnold bad vampyrised some cattle, that the seventeen villagers had eaten of the beef, and had fallen victims in consequence. This affair attracted much attention at the time. Louis the Fifteenth directed his ambassador at Vienna to make inquiries in the matter. Many of the witnesses attested on oath that the disinterred bodies were full of blo
od, and exhibited few of the usual symptoms of death: indications which the believers in vampyres stoutly maintained to be always present in such cases. This has induced many physicians to think that real cases of catalepsy or trance were mixed up with the popular belief, and were supplemented by a large allowance of epidemic fanaticism.
In Epirus and Thessaly there is a belief in living vampyres, men who leave their shepherd dwellings by night, and roam about, biting and tearing men and animals. In Moldavia the traditional priccolitsch, and in Wallachia the murony, must be somewhat remarkable beings. They are real living men, who become dogs at night, with the backbone prolonged to form a sort of tail, they roam through the villages, delighting to kill cattle.
Calmet, in his curious work relating to the marvels of the phantom world, quotes a letter which was written in 1738, and which added one to the long list of vampyre stories belonging to the Danubian provinces. “We have just had in this part of Hungary a scene of vampyrism, duly attested by two officials of the tribunal of Belgrade, who went down to the places specified; and by an officer of the emperor’s troops at Graditz, who was an ocular witness of the proceedings. At the beginning of September there died in the village of Kisilony, three leagues from Graditz, a man sixty-two years of age. Three days after his burial he appeared in the night to his son, and asked for something to eat. The son having given him something, he ate and disappeared. The next day the son recounted to his neighbours what had occurred. That night the father did not appear; but on the following night he showed himself, and asked again for food. They do not know whether the son gave him any on that occasion or not; but on the following day the son was found dead in his bed. On that same day five or six persons in the village fell suddenly ill, and died one after another in a few days.” The villagers resolved to open the grave of the old man, and examine the body; they did so, and declared that the symptoms presented were such as usually pertain to vampirism–eyes open, fresh colour, &c. The executioner drove a stake into the heart, and reduced the body to ashes. All the other persons recently dead were similarly exhumed; but as they did not exhibit the suspicious symptoms, they were quietly reinterred.
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