The Treasury Of The Fantastic

by David Sandner

  “Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home,” she said, as they sat at dinner.

  “I dare say,” said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; “but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I’ll swear to.”

  “You thought it did,” said the old lady soothingly.

  “I say it did,” replied the other. “There was no thought about it; I had just— What’s the matter?”

  His wife made no reply. She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter. In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed, and wore a silk hat of glossy newness. Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again. The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path. Mrs. White at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair.

  She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room. He gazed at her furtively, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologized for the appearance of the room, and her husband’s coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden. She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit, for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent.

  “I—was asked to call,” he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers. “I come from ‘Maw and Meggins.’”

  The old lady started. “Is anything the matter?” she asked, breathlessly. “Has anything happened to Herbert? What is it? What is it?”

  Her husband interposed. “There, there, mother,” he said, hastily. “Sit down, and don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve not brought bad news, I’m sure, sir”; and he eyed the other wistfully.

  “I’m sorry—” began the visitor.

  “Is he hurt?” demanded the mother, wildly.

  The visitor bowed in assent. “Badly hurt,” he said, quietly, “but he is not in any pain.”

  “Oh, thank God!” said the old woman, clasping her hands. “Thank God for that! Thank—”

  She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s perverted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence.

  “He was caught in the machinery,” said the visitor at length in a low voice.

  “Caught in the machinery,” repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, “yes.”

  He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before.

  “He was the only one left to us,” he said, turning gently to the visitor. “It is hard.”

  The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. “The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,” he said, without looking round. “I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.”

  There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

  “I was to say that Maw and Meggins disclaim all responsibility,” continued the other. “They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.”

  Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words, “How much?”

  “Two hundred pounds,” was the answer.

  Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

  III.

  In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen—something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

  But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

  It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

  “Come back,” he said, tenderly. “You will be cold.”

  “It is colder for my son,” said the old woman, and wept afresh.

  The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

  “The paw!” she cried wildly. “The monkey’s paw!”

  He started up in alarm. “Where? Where is it? What’s the matter?”

  She came stumbling across the room toward him. “I want it,” she said, quietly. “You’ve not destroyed it?”

  “It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,” he replied, marvelling. “Why?”

  She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

  “I only just thought of it,” she said, hysterically. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?”

  “Think of what?” he questioned.

  “The other two wishes,” she replied, rapidly. “We’ve only had one.”

  “Was not that enough?” he demanded, fiercely.

  “No,” she cried, triumphantly; “we’ll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.”

  The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs. “Good God, you are mad!” he cried, aghast.

  “Get it,” she panted; “get it quickly, and wish—Oh, my boy, my boy!”

  Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. “Get back to bed,” he said, unsteadily. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

  “We had the first wish granted,” said the old woman, feverishly; “why not the second?”

  “A coincidence,” stammered the old man.

  “Go and get it and wish,” cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

  The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. “He has been dead ten days, and besides he—I would not tell you else, but—I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?”

  “Bring him back,” cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door. “Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?”

  He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

  Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her.

  “Wish!” she cried, in a strong voice.

  “It is foolish and wicked,” he faltered.

  “Wish!” repeated his wife.

  He raised his hand. “I wish my son alive again.”

  The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes
, walked to the window and raised the blind.

  He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

  Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

  At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

  The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

  “What’s that?” cried the old woman, starting up.

  “A rat,” said the old man in shaking tones—“a rat. It passed me on the stairs.”

  His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house.

  “It’s Herbert!” she screamed. “It’s Herbert!”

  She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

  “What are you going to do?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” she cried, struggling mechanically. “I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.”

  “For God’s sake don’t let it in,” cried the old man, trembling.

  “You’re afraid of your own son,” she cried, struggling. “Let me go. I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming.”

  There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

  “The bolt,” she cried, loudly. “Come down. I can’t reach it.”

  But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

  The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

  RUDYARD KILPLING

  They

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer born in Bombay, India. He began as a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette and Pioneer. Many of Kipling’s earlier stories were published alongside his nonfiction pieces. He was both a well-regarded and popular writer who published a range of works, novels, short stories, and poems, in and out of the genres of adventure stories and fantasy. His most famous books include the novel Kim and his children’s collection, The Jungle Stories, and a number of iconic short stories and verse.

  Kipling’s “They” was first published in Traffics and Discoveries in 1904. It is a strangely haunting, semi-autobiographical piece that reflects on memory and death—on the frightening power of the imagination to bring us what we desire.

  One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels. The orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little further on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.

  As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would bring me across some westward-running road that went to his feet, but I did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged me first into a green cutting brimfull of liquid sunshine, next into a gloomy tunnel where last year’s dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked blue-bells nodded together. As the slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.

  Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.

  It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed maids of honour—blue, black, and glistening—all of clipped yew. Across the lawn— the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides—stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the screening wall.

  Here, then, I stayed; a horseman’s green spear laid at my breast; held by the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.

  “If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride a wallop at me,” thought I, “Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea.”

  A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.

  The garden door—heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall— opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf
. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

  “I heard you,” she said. “Isn’t that a motor car?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up above—I never dreamed—” I began.

  “But I’m very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be such a treat—” She turned and made as though looking about her. “You—you haven’t seen any one, have you—perhaps?”

  “No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance.”

  “Which?”

  “I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds.”

  “Oh, lucky you!” she cried, and her face brightened. “I hear them, of course, but that’s all. You’ve seen them and heard them?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “And if I know anything of children, one of them’s having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.”

  “You’re fond of children?”

  I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

  “Of course, of course,” she said. “Then you understand. Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice—quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but—” she threw out her hands towards the woods. “We’re so out of the world here.”

  “That will be splendid,” I said. “But I can’t cut up your grass.”

  She faced to the right. “Wait a minute,” she said. “We’re at the South gate, aren’t we? Behind those peacocks there’s a flagged path. We call it the Peacock’s Walk. You can’t see it from here, they tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and get on to the flags.”

  It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.