by Gafford, Sam
“It was topped with an open stone lantern, bestriding a dome lifted by jagged and unnecessary buttresses. It looked heavier than the church but was not much larger than a policeman’s telephone box, a quarter of the footprint that the church took up. The five-sided box was surrounded by a rampart and gateway, ornately decorated but lichen-encrusted in gnarly burrs, its finials shaped like frozen torches. The twin catafalques were open to the elements, as the door was wedged open at the bottom of the steps that lead down beneath two eroded statues that guarded the entrance.
“It was an impressive sight, accentuated by the intensely diffused white light of the hanging fog that seemed immobile despite a blustery wind slapping the long cemetery choke grass about like reeds in floodwater.
“As I raked around the graveyard, febrile ether seemed to vibrate around us, as if the patterns that the wind tore in the grass and the ringing of the heather were signals transmitted by some subterranean antenna.
“I found nothing but sheep droppings and the pellets of hardy moor rabbits.
“‘We found his camera here.’ Ridley pointed to the gateway to the mausoleum. ‘Fallen but undamaged. He’d been here for three days and taken not one more photograph. Only his plate of the Grey Mare’s Tail remained. Everything else was blank. And his notebooks . . . blank. We put them in the church for safekeeping. His theodolite is still stabbed into the earth by the loadstone. We found no other trace, and we know these hills inside and out. The Constable, Sapper Sproats (the shepherd), the Liddle Boys, and the terrier men, none of us found neither hide nor hair of the fellow.
“‘Master Popper paid your train fare because he knows that there have been . . . others.
“‘Others have vanished from this spot.
“‘You are the only one who could shed light upon it. I told him what I knew about you, and he was sold.’
“‘Well, thank you for the recommendation,’ I genuinely imparted to my former reprobate.
“Crossland’s theodolite was just out of sight in the veil of hill fog, so I skulked about the chamber itself, where there were two sepulchres with carved stone figures on the lids, similar to the statues that were so damaged on the outside. It was oddly calm beneath the arch, with Ridley standing behind me in the open, his greatcoat dancing in the eddies.
“Sheep droppings, pellets, straw, and moss.
“No trace of Crossland, other than the possibility that he too had squirmed into this tight space, for the lichen was abraded and its drier, bushy procrastinations were lying upside down by the back stone coffin. To my untrained eye, the sepulchres seemed too close together, or rather, a little bit wrong.
“One might even say sunken.
“The sound of the wind spiraled in a flanging sibilance inside, almost like a murmured oath or atonal choral music, the dust tinkling in a pitch not unlike the high pitched whistle of our endocrine systems.
“I spent some time listening, listening and hearing . . . they are two very different things my friends.
“I let the vibrations speak.
“I could feel the outer realm pressing against my tympanic membranes like a mystic pressure. I was right to bring the Ediphone with me, ensconced in green baize alongside the electric pentacle. It would be ideal. There was something redundant about vision here. The only clue that eyes could perceive now was carved in the mausoleum plaque beneath the organic carbuncles. The legend read:
“‘Erected by Benton Hickey of Black Hedley, in memory of his wife Vivienne of Avila, Spain, who died February 29th, 1752, aged 27.’
“I had augmented the recording machine with occult paraphernalia. It was now more than anything a Carnackophone, and its hearing trumpet was crisscrossed with seven human hairs, each one consecrated in the manner prescribed by the Sigsand Manuscript to be sensitive to the ‘antic frequency.’ It prescribed that ‘man shalle not imbibe the song of the Night Jarred,’ but I knew the surface of the wax could deduce this secret language as it was more intuitive than any of our human senses.
“I left the pentacle unpacked, as I had already realised that it would not be required to solve this mystery.
“Having set up the recorder in the niche of the mausoleum chamber amongst the stone coffins and sealed up the entrance with Ridley’s help, I carefully enclosed the kit and protected it from the elements by forcing the grating door shut behind it. We then took my final embellishment: a remote monitor attached to the cabinet by wires in the same way a detonator could be secured to a pile of dynamite.
“We both retreated to the church, where we made ourselves as comfortable as possible in an austere stone bunker in poor repair. We ate some hard cheese with a stotty cake, a flatbread of the region, and drank some stout which I must say I have grown a taste for.
“Night fell, or rather rose from the shadow swathe of the steep valley of the Blackstarr, the long gnomon of St. Martin’s pointing towards the kennels as the terrier men put the hounds down for the night on Ridley’s behalf.
“Crossland had told more of his night matters to the whipper-in, making me understand just why he had suspected an occult cause to the mystery. It had reminded him of the creeping atmosphere so common to our own trip to the Near East, a creeping sense of immanence, that the other realm was around us, caught in the corners of our eyes . . . or caught in the whispers half-heard by our ears.
“‘The second night,’ said Ridley, ‘he told me he was further awakened by a dolorous knocking, like a submarine float knocking against a pier strut. And the low yellow lamp of the full moon again found its way into his room, and at this hour the spotlight fell not upon the far wall as before, but full square upon his bedclothes.
“‘This time the uneven surface of the bedspread draped over his own prone body caused the sharp mooncast to distort in rumpled folds. To his horror, the shadow of the window was wide open, and before his eyes the curtains began to billow like fanned flames. Plainly in the same view he could see that the actual window was closed firmly shut, and that the actual curtains still hung lifeless!
“‘He saw a shadow slither across the square aperture of the window, it was the crisp outline of a woman.
“‘Her voluptuous silhouette slid over him, the curtains in tumult like a gale force wind, until they flickered as fast as the wings of a hummingbird. He leapt out of bed and clasped the drapes shut, then slowly opened them, his fists clenching the fabric. He could see the mausoleum on the bright moonlit plain, and he felt as if he were on the surface of our silent, airless satellite. There was a female figure standing before the entrance of the crypt. She could have been made from stone had her gown not whipped around her as if animated by an updrafting whirlwind, almost tearing the translucent gauze off her body. And she was knocking on the door.
“‘And yet the night was so still!’
“I was interested in this development in the story but also able to concentrate on firing up the battery of the recorder, giving precisely half of my attention to Ridley’s yarn and half to arranging the ceramic earpieces or headphones so that one sat firmly over my left ear while the other sat just behind the right, allowing me to hear him tell the story.
“With the dedicated Carnackophone ear I had begun to pick up the spectral resonances to which the machine was attuned.
“I must have missed the end of the story, because Ridley was finishing with an old saying: ‘It’s like what my old mother used to say to my infantile assumptions. I would say, “I thought this, Mother,” or “I thought that, Mother,” and her reply was always: “Well, do you know what ‘Thought’ did?”’
“‘(She had personified Thought as a dunce.)
“‘Thought’ thought that his leg was sticking out of bed, so he got up to put it back in again.’
“By this point I had pulled the headphones closely over my ears, through the gaseous breath of the ether I could hear a livid, moaning wind.
“It wasn’t the sound of the hounds, which were silent.
“It wasn’t the sound of a moanin
g wind.
“I felt fear. And I heard a knock . . . knock . . . knock.
“Knock . . . knock . . . knock.
“And the moan became a rushing hiss.
“The recording was high quality, at least as good as listening down a telephone line. I stared at the cable leading along the floor of the darkened church and under the heavy door. It ran across the graveyard to the door of Hickey’s Mausoleum. Inside in abject darkness the wax cylinder was turning and changing, electricity prickling along its wires as ebon horror spreads along the dendrites of a nerve, along my nerves.
“The knock, knock, knocking and the sibilant hiss of subterranean exhalation crackled along the connection to my ears.
“‘What is it?’ said Ridley. ‘What can you hear?’
“I passed him the headphones and we huddled together, each craning over one of the cups.
“I knew what had happened.
“We took our lanterns and ran out of the church, following the cable to the mausoleum as if it were a breadcrumb trail. I swung open the door and crouched into the chamber, closely followed by Ridley, our torchlights flashing wildly around the claustrophobic tomb.
“It was Vivienne’s sepulcher that was out of place, and together we started to heave the vast sandstone block aside, the gravel of the floor squeaking in popping knuckles of stone, draining down into the sinkhole that had opened up beneath the cistern. We moved it quite well, but it would have been impossible for one to lift up from inside.
“We smashed the recorder over in our haste to gain egress to the interior of the stone coffin, but we were too late. Inside the hole a chasm had formed, no doubt from the millennial groining of the Blackstarr watercourse under the moor. For one moment we saw the lifeless body of Crossland hung knocking back and forth between the closed lid and the rushing flume of the underground stream, hung by his own camera case strap.
“By shifting the coffin his corpse was released, and it fell before our eyes into the black and bubbling water until it was dragged in the intermittent light of the lanterns into the unfathomable tunnels of the burn.
“At that point the floor of the chamber began to collapse, and both sepulchers crashed down into the sinkhole and disappeared under the rushing maelstrom. Ridley saved me from following suit by grabbing my arm and lassoing the headphone cable like a cross between a garrote and a sling in order to gain enough purchase to haul me from the collapse.
“I had realised that Crossland had identified the architectural anomaly with his measuring device and must have attempted to gain access to the foundations for deeper study through the coffin of Vivienne. Not foreseeing the precariousness of the moorland rock above the hidden watercourse, he had fallen into the hole and been sealed in by the closing lid and either died immediately by hanging or slowly perished, unable to escape from his bizarre entombment.
“‘It’s still strange,’ concluded Ridley. ‘His final description of the window shadow was that he had felt that the only way to keep the spectral twin of the real opening shut was to stand upon the cruciform sills of the shadow all night; but when he had stood upon them, on his unmade bed in the yellow moonlight, the dream window had opened the opposite way and he had fallen through like the trapdoor of a gallows, with the bedclothes going with him into a bottomless plummet. I put his hallucinations down to lack of sleep and the hypnotic song of the hounds.’”
“I thought they would never recover the poor soul’s body, but within days it appeared in the spout of the Blackstarr source, washed out forlornly into the mouth of the Grey Mare’s Tail.
“The most curious and most impossible to explain aspect of the whole affair was that the only photograph that Crossland took on his ill-fated trip to the braes of the Blackstarr, at least three days before his death, was his impromptu snapping of the waterfall itself.
“I developed that photograph in my studio only last night.”
Carnacki turned to his side table and proffered the freshly printed and crisply realised photograph to our little party.
“This is a photograph he took himself, and it is a photograph of his own corpse in the water. Who the woman is, we can only guess.”
It was a rather terrible moment, and it knocked all my questions clean off the tip of my tongue. The photograph seemed to be a double exposure, a beautiful woman, her long hair alive in a thermal updraft, hovering over the time slip picture of the dead academic.
“Right. That’s it, so out you go.”
Our glasses were empty and our powers of enquiry stunned into silence. We spilled out into a night street beneath the new moon half obscured by the orange glow of the city, with the stars invisible.
The Magician’s Study
Buck Weiss
It was a warm summer night in Chelsea as I arrived at No. 472 Cheyne Walk for dinner with my friend Carnacki and our usual cohorts. Jessop, Arkright, and Taylor were already in the foyer, and after shaking everyone’s hand and making the usual inquiries of wife and family our gracious host stepped out to greet us.
I search for the words to portray the man, whose tales of ghost detection were the reason for our gathering.
On this night, he could only be described as dishevelled. His usually impeccable suit was covered in the dark brown stains of dirt and something much darker—a red that could only be the stains of blood. His tie was removed and shoved into his breast pocket; his shirt unbuttoned and wet with sweat.
“Dear God, man!” escaped from Taylor’s lips as we stepped closer, but Carnacki held up a hand to quiet our concerns.
“All in good time, gentlemen,” he relayed as he turned and bid us to follow him to the dining room.
We passed the meal in relative silence, as is the way almost every time our group of confidants meets. After a small affair of cold beef and salad greens, we removed to the study and to the story.
No fire had been prepared in the hearth as a result of the rare heat of the season, yet all else was familiar as our good host sat down in his great chair and produced a pipe from the side table.
Anxious to hear what could bring the appearance of Carnacki so low, the rest of us found seats and awaited the moment where his ruminations would cease and his story begin.
“You have no doubt read about the death of Garnald Renaldy in the local press?” Carnacki stated plainly.
Jessop looked for the merest second as if he were about to answer, but the question was rhetorical and our host moved forward without pause.
“He was a travelling magician and illusionist of some note who settled here in Chelsea after making a name for himself throughout the Continent.
“His signature piece was Solomon’s Choice—a gruesome but easily achieved trick of sawing his assistant in half while she was trapped inside a rigged box.”
Carnacki paused for a moment to contemplate the work, and I thought back to the night that my wife and I had seen Garnald Renaldy do that very act. He was known as Renaldy the Great. His lovely assistant was also his wife, and I remembered distinctly his tasteless statement about having two wives to nag him instead of one. My own wife, holding tightly to my side, whispered in my ear at the ludicrous connexion of the trick’s name.
“Of course,” Carnacki continued as if he had read my mind, “the name Solomon's Choice has very little to do with the trick itself, given that King Solomon was neither cutting a woman in half nor actually making the choice in question.
“However, these performers all have a flair for conjuring up fanciful connexions to things that haunt the psyche of their core audience. Biblical allusion, no matter how fleeting, can have its intended effect.”
Our host was rarely prone to digression and I began to wonder what had shaken him so much, when he moved forward with the tale from where he entered the scene.
“I was called across town late last night by Renaldy’s widow and assistant, Anastasia Renaldy.
“She was a slip of a girl, who appeared not much older than twenty. Her long white dressing-gown hung limp
ly at her sides as she hastened me into the foyer.
“Her husband had been dead less than two days, and she believed beyond reason that he had returned as a presence haunting the bowels of the home they shared.
“‘Not only has he come back,’ said the frightened woman, ‘he has murdered our driver, Shonks, this very night.’
“Needless to say, I urged the woman to take me to the scene of the crime; and as she led me through the winding corridors of the illusionist’s mansion, I asked if the police had been called. She paused our progress and turned to look into my eyes as she begged me to assess the situation first.
“‘I could only think of calling an expert,’ she said as she took my hand in hers and led me on.
“‘How had you heard of me?’
“‘Renaldy spoke of you often,’ she replied. ‘He had heard stories of your dealing with the supernatural and had always wanted to meet the Ghost-Finder, Thomas Carnacki.’
“For a moment I wanted to ask her for more information, but my mind was quickly distracted by the grisly scene at the end of our journey.
“Two large doors stood open wide.” Carnacki leaned forward in the chair and took a puff on his pipe. “Inside was a large room that must have been Renaldy’s study. Books of every size and colour sat on shelves that lined every wall, and a great oak desk sat at the far end of the room.
“Lying on the floor between the doors and the desk were the two halves of a very tall man. He had been sliced apart at the stomach, and his internal organs had slid out of his upper torso to darken the wood floor with blackish-red blood.
“Seeing the body spurred me to action, and I turned to ask Anastasia to go slowly through the events that led up to her driver’s death.
“She placed her head in her hands as she tried to gather her wits enough to relate the tale.
“‘As I was secluded in the house, mourning my husband,’ she began, “I decided to gather the important papers for when the inevitable lawyers came to call.