‘Often I feel I must take the book in that safe and throw it into the middle of the sea,’ he continued, ‘but I can’t do it. I’m too afraid. Only one small book, yet it is evil itself. That one book seizes a man by the throat and strangles him to death.’
I looked at him in astonishment. Could it be Allan who was saying all this, and who was holding my arm so tightly that his fingers were biting into my flesh?
‘Whatever do you mean?’ I asked, partly disturbed, and partly angry at being held as though I were a child faced with something which might be dangerous.
‘I wish I knew,’ he replied slowly, and in a quieter tone. ‘All I can tell you is that within the last eighteen months two men have been strangled to death after looking into that book, That’s all.’
I was dumbstruck. And not without reason. We stood there, tense and silent, like two conspirators surprised by something they couldn’t name and fearful of what it might mean.
The Collection came to us towards the end of the war, said Allan, breaking the silence at last. It came from the local Antiquarian Society, and it came in the wooden boxes in which it had been stored when Gowrie House was pulled down in 1805 and in which it had remained, untouched, until we opened those boxes in this very room nearly one hundred and fifty years later. It is said that the books were discovered in a wall closet which had been panelled in and so lost to sight. It may well be so. Perhaps Gowrie himself entombed them that way. Perhaps he, too, tried to rid himself of an evil incubus. Perhaps Gowrie put one particular book, with all its fellows, into a hidden closet, as I have put that one particular book into a safe. Perhaps he, too, was afraid to do the one thing he ought to have done. Or perhaps he did something else. Perhaps he put his own curse upon the book that no one should again open its pages and live. That, at any rate, has been its history here.
First it was Fraser, who, you will remember, was our Professor of Chemistry before you came. As soon as the Collection arrived he was all agog to see it. Day after day he was here with his note-book. ‘Working out their formulæ,’ he would say to me. ‘Damned interesting, some of them.’
But one day he read too much. I had been in the Reid Room that afternoon, and I didn’t come here until nearly closing time. Fraser, as usual, was in his seat by the window there; but, that afternoon, he didn’t look up with his usual cheery nod. Instead, as he looked up at my entrance, I saw that his face was drawn and white. ‘My God, Allan,’ he said in a strained voice, ‘this book is the Devil himself. It should be burned. Burned to ashes.’ He pushed his chair back and seemed to recover himself. ‘Look,’ he continued, glaring at me with fierce earnestness, ‘I’m putting it here, in this empty case. Lock it in. And let no one, no one, ever read it again!
He strode to that wire-fronted case over there — it was empty then — thrust in the book, and waited for me to lock the door with my master key. Then he pushed past me and went out. It was the last I saw of him.
That same night he was found dead in his own room in the lab. Strangled. And no one could explain how or why.
He had a queer kind of lab-coat of which he was very proud. It was like an old-fashioned smock which was tied by a fancy cord running through the neck. When he was found his hands were gripping that cord. It had been drawn so tight that it had throttled him. The students working in the lab had seen no one go into his room or come out of it. I know now that they wouldn’t see anyone. I know, too, that Fraser’s hands were at that cord in a vain struggle to loosen it, and live.
No one thought of connecting Fraser’s death with the book he had been reading. At first I hardly associated the two events myself. Yet it was not long before I found I was growing frightened of that book, lying by itself in its locked case. I tried to avoid looking at it, but it seemed to force its presence upon me. Perhaps a fortnight passed before I realized the truth. Then, suddenly, I knew. I knew that Fraser’s death had been caused by it.
Frightened as I was, I still had courage enough to do one thing. Unknown to the rest of the staff, I removed from the library catalogue all the entries relating to it. Fraser’s death should not go unheeded. No one should read that book again. No one should even know of its existence. Had I dared, I would have burned it — as Fraser had said it should be burned. But I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. Already it had me in its power. I was afraid of it. And so young Inglis had to die. A second victim.
He had come to us as a part-time student assistant, and had quickly proved his worth. So much so that special tasks were soon assigned to him automatically. And, at a time when I was unluckily absent for a few days with influenza, he was given the task of checking the shelf catalogue of the Special Collections. You can imagine my horror when, on the day of my return to duty, I found him here, holding the book in his hands, open, and reading it.
As soon as he saw me he called out: ‘I’ve found an incunabulum which is not in the catalogue. It’s filthy with dust . . .’
But I rushed up and seized the thing from him. I shoved it back into the case and relocked the door, while he looked at me open-mouthed. But what could I say? I simply dare not tell him the truth. As I saw it, to tell him the truth would be to tell him his own sentence of death. I made some feeble excuse, which I know he didn’t believe, and sent him off. Then I sat down, sick and faint. What could I do to save him? Nothing. He was doomed. The evil thing was upon him, and he could never escape. I cursed myself for my own cowardice. Why, at least, had I not warned him? Had the book so laid its spell upon me that I even feared the ridicule which might follow my warning?
Poor beggar. He didn’t escape. When the library was closing that night, one of the staff found that the automatic lift wouldn’t work. Naturally he assumed that someone, on one of the floors, had failed to shut the door properly; and he went to look. He found the door which wasn’t shut. He also found Inglis. He was trapped by the outer door, and, strangely, he was trapped by the neck. Almost as though he had entered the lift and then, as the door was sliding-to, had put out his head to look at something. Stranger still, but only to those who didn’t know what I knew, the poor fellow was dead. I tell you, the pressure of the outer doors on that lift is so light that you can hold them back easily with one hand. Yet Inglis was dead. He had been throttled by the light pressure of a lift-door. Fraser had been strangled on the day he had opened the book. So had Inglis.
Can you wonder that the same night I had what was called a nervous breakdown?
I was away for over a year and, as you probably know, I have only been back for some six weeks or so. Surprisingly, I have kept my reason — though sometimes I’m not sure. Perhaps I am mad; or perhaps I am suffering from some delusion. Yet I was the only person who knew that Inglis had opened the book; I was the only person who knew that Inglis was doomed to die. And he did die. As Fraser had died.
God forgive me! I should destroy the thing. But I daren’t. I am too afraid of it. Yet about a fortnight ago, the day I spoke to you in the Upper Hall, I was brave enough to move it out of the bookcase and to lock it away in that safe. You gave me the courage to do that — even though you didn’t know you had done so. Now, I am afraid again. I feel it is laughing at me behind that steel door . . . and biding its time.
You must forgive me; but I had to tell you all this. One day I, too, may be found strangled. And you, at least, will know the reason why.
As you may imagine, I was not particularly pleased at having this extraordinary burden of knowledge so suddenly thrust upon me. Yet, as I crossed the Quad back to my own room, my thoughts ran in a different vein. ‘Poor old Allan,’ I thought. ‘No wonder he had a breakdown. No wonder he is “queer”. Fancy living with that on your mind all the time. Poor wretch! A victim to his own imagination: with a harmless book locked up in his safe, and fearing it as though it possessed all the malignant power of some genie in the Arabian Nights. And mortally afraid to do the one thing which would bring relief’
But I did Allan an injustice.
I had given my l
ecture next morning, and was talking to a student in my retiring-room, when Wallace, one of the lecturers in the Modern Languages Department, and Allan’s next-door neighbour, opened the door and beckoned me outside.
‘Did you know Maitland Allan was dead?’ he asked.
‘Dead?’ I repeated.
‘Yes. Apparently last night he was all worked up about something. Kept walking up and down his study, saying in a loud voice: “I will do it. I will do it”; and generally worrying his housekeeper out of her wits. Then, suddenly, about nine o’clock, she heard him go into the hall. Peeping round her door she saw him put on a cap, his scarf and his overcoat, and literally rush out of the house.
‘By this time thoroughly alarmed, she came to us. I did my best to calm her down, but she was so upset that in the end I offered to go back with her and to wait up with her for Allan’s return.
‘He didn’t come in until nearly two o’clock in the morning. We heard him open the front door and then, just when he had shut it again, we heard him give a queer kind of strangled, choking cry. We rushed into the hall and saw him half-hanging from the door and half-sprawled on the rug in the hall. One end of his scarf had caught in the door as he had shut it and, when he had turned away, it had pulled tight round his neck and had trapped him. We opened the door at once and released him, but, when we tried to help him to his feet again, we discovered to our horror that he was dead . . . I came over to tell you for I believe he had taken quite a liking to you . . .’
But I was no longer listening. My thoughts were rushing madly towards one word which seemed to loom larger and larger. And the one word was ‘strangled’. Fraser; Inglis; Allan. Could it all be coincidence? Or could such things indeed be true?
Naturally the Procurator Fiscal conducted an inquiry into Allan’s death.
A boatman stated that Allan (whom he identified) had knocked him up about midnight and had asked to be rowed ‘a full mile out to sea’. At first he had demurred, for Allan had seemed ‘fair demented’; but an offer of five pounds had seemingly settled the matter. He had rowed Allan out to sea and, when he had told him that they were well beyond the full mile for which he had asked, Allan, to his utter surprise, had suddenly plucked a small book from his coat pocket, had raised it with both hands above his head, and had hurled it down into the water with all his force. Then, said the boatman, ‘he crouched him down in the boat as though he were afraid someone was going to hit him. And he stayed like that till I tied up again, when he jumped out of the boat and fair ran along the quay as if the Devil himself was chasing him.’
The doctors were puzzled, but unanimous. Despite the softness and natural elasticity of the scarf, they had been surprised to find a sharp mark around Allan’s neck. But they were convinced he had died of shock. His heart, they said, was in poor condition; any shock would probably be too much for it.
And I alone knew what that ‘shock’ would be. I alone knew what would flash through the poor wretch’s mind when he felt that sudden, unexpected tightening of his scarf around his neck.
So much I had written yesterday when my mind was free. But how different is today! Today all Allan’s fear and dread are now my own. Today, at the close of the Library Committee, our Librarian spoke casually, as of a matter of little importance. He had looked over the Rare Book Room, he said, after Allan’s death, and there he had found, inside the safe, a book that belonged to the Gowrie Collection but which, to his surprise, had no entry in the catalogue.
Dazed and bewildered, I have found my way back to my room. And, as I write this down, I am a prey to every wild imagining. Can it be that Allan, deranged and overwrought on that last fearful night, cast the wrong book away? How could he? It was the only book within the safe. Yet reason recoils from that other thought — that a book can return from the depths of the sea. Reason? How long can reason prevail against this fearful question that is now pulsing through my mind? Already our Librarian has handled the book, and opened it.
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
‘THE TROUBLE WITH ALL YOU SCOTS is that you live too much in the past.’
Galbraith was trailing his coat as usual, but this time it was MacDonald, our visiting Fulbright Professor, who took up the challenge.
‘The trouble is that sometimes we cannot escape the past,’ he said.
‘None of us can,’ retorted Galbraith. ‘The past in the present is obvious all the time.’
‘I meant something a little different from that,’ replied MacDonald. ‘I meant a past that may come back, unexpectedly, to disturb the present.’
For once Galbraith seemed to be at a loss. ‘In what way?’ he asked, lamely.
‘Well,’ answered MacDonald. ‘I could give you one instance from my own experience, if you’d care for it. It’s a story I don’t often tell, and I can’t say that I emerged with credit; but it certainly underlines the point I wanted to make.’
Our American guest looked at us a little shyly, as though wondering whether he had broken one of the rules of the Common Room in offering to recount a ‘personal experience’. He was quickly reassured: and this was his story of a past which could not be escaped.
About a year after the end of World War II, when I was still an officer in the American Intelligence, and stationed in London, I decided to seize the opportunity of visiting Scotland and seeing, for the first time, the land of my folk. I had little difficulty in obtaining a fortnight’s leave and, after spending a weekend in Edinburgh, I hired a small car to drive to Arisaig and Morar — the district from which I knew my forbears had emigrated some two hundred ago.
Setting off from Edinburgh on the Monday morning, I made that marvellous drive through Callander, Lochearnhead, and Tyndrum, and on through Glencoe to Ballachulish, where I put up for the night. Passing through Balquhidder country on my way from Callander to Tyndrum, I had recalled the story of assembled Macgregors swearing their oaths on the severed head of a royal forester; and, as I had passed through Glencoe, I had recalled the tragedy of sleeping MacDonalds who were massacred by those to whom they had given food and shelter. Yet that night, in the inn at Ballachulish, as I brooded over the stories of the past, I little thought that I myself was soon to be touched by the past — touched too closely for my liking — and simply because I, too, was a MacDonald, though a MacDonald of a different sept from the MacIans of Glencoe.
The Tuesday morning broke fine and clear. Leaving Ballachulish, I crossed by the ferry and took the lovely road by the shores of Loch Linnhe and Loch Eil, and on to Glenfinnan, where Prince Charlie’s standard was raised, and where I thought the monument a poor thing to commemorate so stirring an event. From Glenfinnan the scenery became more wonderful still, as the narrow road, still ‘unimproved’, twisted and turned on its ledge between the hills and the sea: and I remembered I was on ‘The Road to the Isles’.
It may be that my head was too full of the tales of the Young Chevalier, or it may be that my eyes strayed too often to the beauty of land and sea: I do not know. But, almost too late, I caught sight of an enormous boulder crashing down the hillside and almost on top of my car. Braking hard, and wrenching the wheel violently to the right, I lost control of the car and ran into the bank of the hill, while the boulder, missing the front of the car by inches, thundered across the road and bounded over the opposite verge.
Slightly shaken, I got out to see what damage I had done, and, as I did so, I was astonished to see an old woman standing on the other side of the road just where the boulder had crashed across. For a moment I wondered how she had escaped; then, something in her appearance made me look at her more closely. I was startled to see that her dark and deep-set eyes were glaring at me with a look of intense hate. I saw, too, that water was dripping from her clothes and that her grey hair was hanging round her shoulders, dank and wet. And, looking at her, I experienced a strange sense of danger, or it might even have been fear, which it is wholly impossible to describe.
So we stood, facing one another, and myself in a kind of tranc
e, until, suddenly, the woman turned away and, apparently stepping down from the road, disappeared over the edge. Recovering my wits, I ran across the road, only to pull myself up with a jerk. On that side of the road, and guarded only by a single strand of wire, there was a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more to the rocks on the loch-side below. Had I wrenched my wheel the other way, or had that boulder crashed into my small car, broadside on, nothing could have saved me.
I made myself look again at that sheer drop. What had happened to the old woman? There was no sign of her anywhere. Not even a ghastly huddle of body and clothes on the rocks below. Yet I had seen her clearly enough; and she had stepped down from the road at this very spot. And why had she glared at me with such bitter hate? Surely I had not fallen asleep at the wheel and dreamed the whole thing — a boulder crashing down and a malevolent old hag with dripping clothes?
I walked slowly back to the car, trying to puzzle things out. Fortunately the car was not badly damaged: a buckled wing and little more. But it was firmly wedged in the bank and would not move. I sat down beside it and waited for help. And help soon came in the shape of a delivery van; its driver fortunately had a length of rope; and within a few minutes he had hauled me clear.
‘You were lucky in your skid,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Had you skidded the other way you’d have finished driving for good. And it would have been pretty difficult to recover your remains for the funeral. However, all’s well now. And that front wheel seems all right, too. But it’s queer the way you managed to skid on a dry surface like this.’
‘I didn’t skid,’ I replied, slowly. ‘I was trying to avoid a boulder that was rolling down the hillside on to the road.’
‘Boulder!’ he answered, looking me hard in the eye. ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard of a boulder rolling down on to this road. And I’ve driven over it six days a week for the last twelve years or so.’ Then, still looking me straight in the eye, he wavered a little and condescended to add: ‘However, strange things do happen. But I’d like to know where that boulder came from. So long.’
Dark Encounters: Ghost Stories Page 6