In the Shadow of Agatha Christie

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “Of the terror caused by my own shadow on the wall as I made the turn in the hall below, I have as keen a recollection today as though it happened yesterday. But that did not deter me; nothing deterred me, till safe in the cellar I crouched down behind the casks to get my breath again before entering the hole beyond.

  “I had made some noise in feeling my way around these casks, and I trembled lest these sounds had been heard upstairs! But this fear soon gave place to one far greater. Other sounds were making themselves heard. A din of small skurrying feet above, below, on every side of me! Rats! rats in the wall! rats on the cellar bottom! How I ever stirred from the spot I do not know, but when I did stir, it was to go forward, and enter the uncanny hole.

  “I had intended to light my candle when I got inside; but for some reason I went stumbling along in the dark, following the wall till I got to the steps where I had dropped the box. Here a light was necessary, but my hand did not go to my pocket. I thought it better to climb the steps first, and softly one foot found the tread and then another. I had only three more to climb and then my right hand, now feeling its way along the wall, would be free to strike a match. I climbed the three steps and was steadying myself against the door for a final plunge, when something happened—something so strange, so unexpected, and so incredible that I wonder I did not shriek aloud in my terror. The door was moving under my hand. It was slowly opening inward. I could feel the chill made by the widening crack. Moment by moment this chill increased; the gap was growing—a presence was there—a presence before which I sank in a small heap upon the landing. Would it advance? Had it feet—hands? Was it a presence which could be felt?

  “Whatever it was, it made no attempt to pass, and presently I lifted my head only to quake anew at the sound of a voice—a human voice—my mother’s voice—so near me that by putting out my arms I might have touched her.

  “She was speaking to my father. I knew it from the tone. She was saying words which, little understood as they were, made such a havoc in my youthful mind that I have never forgotten them.

  “‘I have come!’ she said. ‘They think I have fled the house and are looking far and wide for me. We shall not be disturbed. Who would think of looking here for either you or me?’

  “Here! The word sank like a plummet in my breast. I had known for some few minutes that I was on the threshold of the forbidden room; but they were in it. I can scarcely make you understand the tumult which this awoke in my brain. Somehow, I had never thought that any such braving of the house’s law would be possible.

  “I heard my father’s answer, but it conveyed no meaning to me. I also realized that he spoke from a distance,—that he was at one end of the room while we were at the other. I was presently to have this idea confirmed, for while I was striving with all my might and main to subdue my very heart-throbs so that she would not hear me or suspect my presence, the darkness—I should rather say the blackness of the place yielded to a flash of lightning—heat lightning, all glare and no sound—and I caught an instantaneous vision of my father’s figure standing with gleaming things about him, which affected me at the moment as supernatural, but which, in later years, I decided to have been weapons hanging on a wall.

  “She saw him too, for she gave a quick laugh and said they would not need any candles; and then, there was another flash and I saw something in his hand and something in hers, and though I did not yet understand, I felt myself turning deathly sick and gave a choking gasp which was lost in the rush she made into the centre of the room, and the keenness of her swift low cry.

  “‘Garde toi! for only one of us will ever leave this room alive!’

  “A duel! a duel to the death between this husband and wife—this father and mother—in this hole of dead tragedies and within the sight and hearing of their child! Has Satan ever devised a scheme more hideous for ruining the life of an eleven-year-old boy!

  “Not that I took it all in at once. I was too innocent and much too dazed to comprehend such hatred, much less the passions which engendered it. I only knew that something horrible—something beyond the conception of my childish mind—was going to take place in the darkness before me; and the terror of it made me speechless; would to God it had made me deaf and blind and dead!

  “She had dashed from her corner and he had slid away from his, as the next fantastic gleam which lit up the room showed me. It also showed the weapons in their hands, and for a moment I felt reassured when I saw these were swords, for I had seen them before with foils in their hands practising for exercise, as they said, in the great garret. But the swords had buttons on them, and this time the tips were sharp and shone in the keen light.

  “An exclamation from her and a growl of rage from him were followed by movements I could scarcely hear, but which were terrifying from their very quiet. Then the sound of a clash. The swords had crossed.

  “Had the lightning flashed forth then, the end of one of them might have occurred. But the darkness remained undisturbed, and when the glare relit the great room again, they were already far apart. This called out a word from him; the one sentence he spoke—I can never forget it:

  “Rhoda, there is blood on your sleeve; I have wounded you. Shall we call it off and fly, as the poor creatures in there think we have, to the opposite ends of the earth?”

  “I almost spoke; I almost added my childish plea to his for them to stop—to remember me and stop. But not a muscle in my throat responded to my agonized effort. Her cold, clear ‘No!’ fell before my tongue was loosed or my heart freed from the ponderous weight crushing it.

  “‘I have vowed and I keep my promises,’ she went on in a tone quite strange to me. ‘What would either’s life be worth with the other alive and happy in this world?’

  “He made no answer; and those subtle movements—shadows of movements I might almost call them—recommenced. Then there came a sudden cry, shrill and poignant—had Grandfather been in his room he would surely have heard it—and the flash coming almost simultaneously with its utterance, I saw what has haunted my sleep from that day to this, my father pinned against the wall, sword still in hand, and before him my mother, fiercely triumphant, her staring eyes fixed on his and—

  “Nature could bear no more; the band loosened from my throat; the oppression lifted from my breast long enough for me to give one wild wail and she turned, saw (heaven sent its flashes quickly at this moment) and recognizing my childish form, all the horror of her deed (or so I have fondly hoped) rose within her, and she gave a start and fell full upon the point upturned to receive her.

  “A groan; then a gasping sigh from him, and silence settled upon the room and upon my heart and so far as I knew upon the whole created world.”

  “That is my story, friends. Do you wonder that I have never been or lived like other men?”

  After a few moments of sympathetic silence, Mr. Van Broecklyn went on to say:

  “I don’t think I ever had a moment’s doubt that my parents both lay dead on the floor of that great room. When I came to myself—which may have been soon, and may not have been for a long while—the lightning had ceased to flash, leaving the darkness stretching like a blank pall between me and that spot in which were concentrated all the terrors of which my imagination was capable. I dared not enter it. I dared not take one step that way. My instinct was to fly and hide my trembling body again in my own bed; and associated with this, in fact dominating it and making me old before my time, was another—never to tell; never to let anyone, least of all my grandfather—know what that forbidden room now contained. I felt in an irresistible sort of way that my father’s and mother’s honour was at stake. Besides, terror held me back; I felt that I should die if I spoke. Childhood has such terrors and such heroisms. Silence often covers in such, abysses of thought and feeling which astonish us in later years. There is no suffering like a child’s, terrified by a secret it dare not for some reason disclose.

  “Events aided me. When, in desperation to see once more the light
and all the things which linked me to life—my little bed, the toys on the windowsill, my squirrel in its cage—I forced myself to retraverse the empty house, expecting at every turn to hear my father’s voice or come upon the image of my mother—yes, such was the confusion of my mind, though I knew well enough even then that they were dead and that I should never hear the one or see the other. I was so benumbed with the cold in my half-dressed condition, that I woke in a fever next morning after a terrible dream which forced from my lips the cry of ‘Mother! Mother!’—only that.

  “I was cautious even in delirium. This delirium and my flushed cheeks and shining eyes led them to be very careful to me. I was told that my mother was away from home; and when after two days of search they were quite sure that all efforts to find either her or my father were likely to prove fruitless, that she had gone to Europe where we would follow her as soon as I was well. This promise, offering as it did, a prospect of immediate release from the terrors which were consuming me, had an extraordinary effect upon me. I got up out of my bed saying that I was well now and ready to start on the instant. The doctor, finding my pulse equable, and my whole condition wonderfully improved, and attributing it, as was natural, to my hope of soon joining my mother, advised my whim to be humoured and this hope kept active till travel and intercourse with children should give me strength and prepare me for the bitter truth ultimately awaiting me. They listened to him and in twenty-four hours our preparations were made. We saw the house closed—with what emotions surging in one small breast, I leave you to imagine—and then started on our long tour. For five years we wandered over the continent of Europe, my grandfather finding distraction, as well as myself, in foreign scenes and associations.

  “But return was inevitable. What I suffered on re-entering this house, God and my sleepless pillow alone know. Had any discovery been made in our absence; or would it be made now that renovation and repairs of all kinds were necessary? Time finally answered me. My secret was safe and likely to continue so, and this fact once settled, life became endurable, if not cheerful. Since then I have spent only two nights out of this house, and they were unavoidable. When my grandfather died I had the wainscot door cemented in. It was done from this side and the cement painted to match the wood. No one opened the door nor have I ever crossed its threshold. Sometimes I think I have been foolish; and sometimes I know that I have been very wise. My reason has stood firm; how do I know that it would have done so if I had subjected myself to the possible discovery that one or both of them might have been saved if I had disclosed instead of concealed my adventure.”

  A pause during which white horror had shone on every face; then with a final glance at Violet, he said:

  “What sequel do you see to this story, Miss Strange? I can tell the past, I leave you to picture the future.”

  Rising, she let her eye travel from face to face till it rested on the one awaiting it, when she answered dreamily: “If some morning in the news column there should appear an account of the ancient and historic home of the Van Broecklyns having burned to the ground in the night, the whole country would mourn, and the city feel defrauded of one of its treasures. But there are five persons who would see in it the sequel which you ask for.”

  When this happened, as it did happen, some few weeks later, the astonishing discovery was made that no insurance had been put upon this house. Why was it that after such a loss Mr. Van Broecklyn seemed to renew his youth? It was a constant source of comment among his friends.

  Carolyn Wells (1870–1942) was an American writer, poet, and critic. Despite being deaf from early childhood, Wells wrote more than 170 books of crime fiction, parodies, and humorous verse. She penned sixty-one titles about a detective named Fleming Stone and created the American series of “year’s best mystery stories” in 1931. Among her titles is The Technique of the Mystery Story: Complete Practical Study of the Theory and Structure of the Form with Examples from the Best Mystery Writers, first published in 1913, which includes numerous examples from the Sherlock Holmes canon. Wells was a devotee of the Master. She befriended Harry Thurston Peck and Arthur Bartlett Maurice, respectively the senior and junior editors of the influential Bookman magazine in the early twentieth century, and the three friends celebrated their love of all things Sherlockian in numerous essays, reviews, and poems in early issues of the Bookman.* However, the following first appeared in the Century Magazine for May 1915 with illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele, who regularly illustrated the American publications of the Holmes stories beginning in 1903.

  * See S.E. Dahlinger and Leslie S. Klinger, eds., Sherlock Holmes and the Bookman: An Anthology of Literary Treasures (1895–1933) (Indianapolis: Wessex Press, 2010).

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE CLOTHES-LINE

  CAROLYN WELLS

  The members of the Society of Infallible Detectives* were just sitting around and being socially infallible in their rooms in Fakir Street, when President Holmes strode in. He was much saturniner than usual, and the others at once deduced there was something toward.

  “And it’s this,” said Holmes, perceiving that they had perceived it. “A reward is offered for the solution of a great mystery—so great, my colleagues, that I fear none of you will be able to solve it, or even to help me in the marvelous work I shall do when ferreting it out.”

  “Humph!” grunted the Thinking Machine,† riveting his steel-blue eyes upon the speaker.

  “He voices all our sentiments, said Raffles,‡ with his winning smile. “Fire away, Holmes. What’s the prob?”

  “To explain a most mysterious proceeding down on the East Side.”

  Though a tall man, Holmes spoke shortly, for he was peeved at the inattentive attitude of his collection of colleagues. But of course he still had his Watson, so he put up with the indifference of the rest of the cold world.

  “Aren’t all proceedings down on the East Side mysterious?” asked Arsène Lupin§ with an aristocratic look.

  Holmes passed his brow wearily under his hand.

  “Inspector Spyer,” he said, “was riding on the Elevated Road—one of the small numbered Avenues—when, as he passed a tenement-house district, he saw a clothes-line strung from one high window to another across a courtyard.”

  “Was it Monday?” asked the Thinking Machine, who for the moment was thinking he was a washing machine.

  “That doesn’t matter. About the middle of the line was suspended—”

  “By clothes-pins?” asked two or three of the Infallibles at once.

  “Was suspended a beautiful woman.”

  “Hanged?”

  “No. Do listen! She hung by her hands and was evidently trying to cross from one house to the other. By her exhausted and agonized face, the inspector feared she could not hold on much longer. He sprang from his seat to rush to her assistance, but the train had already started, and he was too late to get off.”

  “What was she doing there?” “Did she fall?” “What did she look like?” and various similar nonsensical queries fell from the lips of the great detectives.

  “Be silent, and I will tell you all the known facts. She was a society woman, it is clear, for she was robed in a chiffon evening gown, one of those roll-top things. She wore rich jewelry and dainty slippers with jeweled buckles. Her hair, unloosed from its moorings, hung in heavy masses far down her back.”

  “How extraordinary! What does it all mean?” asked M. Dupin,¶ ever straightforward of speech.

  “I don’t know yet,” answered Holmes, honestly. “I’ve studied the matter only a few months. But I will find out, if I have to raze the whole tenement block. There must be a clue somewhere.”

  “Marvelous! Holmes, marvelous!” said a phonograph in the corner, which Watson had fixed up, as he had to go out.

  “The police have asked us to take up the case and have offered a reward for its solution. Find out who was the lady, what she was doing, and why she did it.”

  “Are there any clues?” asked M. Vidocq,# while M. Lecoq** said simu
ltaneously, “Any footprints?”

  “There is one footprint; no other clue.”

  “Where is the footprint?”

  “On the ground, right under where the lady was hanging.”

  “But you said the rope was high from the ground.”

  “More than a hundred feet.”

  “And she stepped down and made a single footprint. Strange! Quite strange!” and the Thinking Machine shook his yellow old head.

  “She did nothing of the sort,” said Holmes, petulantly. “If you fellows would listen, you might hear something. The occupants of the tenement houses have been questioned. But, as it turns out, none of them chanced to be at home at the time of the occurrence. There was a parade in the next street, and they had all gone to see it.”

  “Had a light snow fallen the night before?” asked Lecoq, eagerly.

  “Yes, of course,” answered Holmes. “How could we know anything, else? Well, the lady had dropped her slipper, and although the slipper was not found, it having been annexed by the tenement people who came home first, I had a chance to study the footprint. The slipper was a two and a half D. It was too small for her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Women always wear slippers too small for them.”

  “Then how did she come to drop it off?” This from Raffles, triumphantly.

  Holmes looked at him pityingly.

  “She kicked it off because it was too tight. Women always kick off their slippers when playing bridge or in an opera box or at a dinner.”