Shivers for Christmas (51 page)

‘How about the coincidence of the names on the box?’ I interjected. ‘One suited what I saw, one what she said she saw.’

‘Let’s look at the box,’ he suggested.

He looked at it on all sides.

‘There’s not a letter on it,’ he announced. ‘Except “picture puzzle” on top and “50 cents” on the end.’

‘I don’t feel insane,’ I declared.

‘You aren’t,’ he reassured me. ‘Nor in any danger of being insane. Let me look you over.’

He felt my pulse, looked at my tongue, examined both eyes with his ophthalmoscope, and took a drop of my blood.

‘I’ll report further,’ he said, ‘in confirmation tomorrow. You’re all right, or nearly so, and you’ll soon be really all right. All you need is a little rest. Don’t worry about this idea of your wife’s, humour her. There won’t be any terrible consequences. After Christmas go to Florida or somewhere for a week or so. And don’t exert yourself from now till after that change.’

When I reached home, I went down into the cellar, threw that puzzle and its box into the furnace and stood and watched it burn to ashes.

When I came upstairs from the furnace Helen met me as if nothing had happened. By one of her sudden revulsions of mood she was even more gracious than usual, and was at dinner altogether charming. She did not refer to our quarrel or to the puzzle.

The next morning over our breakfast we were both opening our mail. I had told her that I should not go to the office until after Christmas and that I wanted her to arrange for a little tour that would please her. I had phoned to the office not to expect me until after New Year’s.

My mail contained nothing of moment.

Helen looked up from hers with an expression curiously mingled of disappointment, concern and a pleased smile.

‘It is so fortunate you have nothing to do,’ she said. ‘I spent four whole days choosing toys and found most of those I selected at Bleich’s. They were to have been delivered day before yesterday but they did not come. I telephoned yesterday and they said they would try to trace them. Here is a letter saying that the whole lot was missent out to Roundwood. You noticed that Roundwood station burned Monday night. They were all burnt up. Now I’ll have to go and find more like them. You can go with me.’

I went.

The two days were a strange mixture of sensations and emotions.

Helen had picked over Bleich’s stock pretty carefully and could duplicate from it few of the burned articles, could find acceptable substitutes for fewer. There followed an exhausting pursuit of the unattainable through a bewildering series of toy-shops and department-stores. We spent most of our time at counters and much of the remainder in a taxicab.

In a way it was very trying. I did not mind the smells and bad air and other mere physical discomforts. But the mental strain continually intensified. Helen’s confidence that Amy would be restored to us was steadily waning and her outward exhibition of it was becoming more and more artificial, and consciously sustained, and more and more of an effort. She was coming to foresee, in spite of herself, that our Christmas celebration would be a most terrible mockery of our bereavement. She was forcing herself not to confess it to herself and not to show it to me. The strain told on her. It told on me to watch it, to see the inevitable crash coming nearer and nearer and to try to put away from myself the pictures of her collapse, of her probable loss of reason, of her possible death, which my imagination kept thrusting before me.

On the other hand Helen was to all appearance, if one had no prevision by which to read her, her most charming self. Her manner to shop-girls and other sales-people was a delight to watch. Her little speeches to me were full of her girlish whimsicality and unexpectedness. Her good will towards all the world, her resolution that everything must come right and would come right haloed her in a sort of aureole of romance. Our lunches were ideal hours, full of the atmosphere of courtship, of lovemaking, of exquisite companionship. In spite of my forebodings, I caught the contagion of the Christmas shopping crowds; in spite of her self-deception, Helen revelled in it. The purpose to make as many people as possible as happy as might be irradiated Helen with the light of fairyland; her resolve to be happy herself in spite of everything made her a sort of fairy queen. I found myself less and less anxious and more and more almost expectant. I knew Helen was looking for Amy every instant. I found myself in the same state of mind.

Our lunch on Christmas Eve was a strange blend of artificiality and genuine exhilaration. After it we had but one purchase to make.

‘We are in no hurry,’ Helen said, ‘Let’s take a horse-hansom for old sake’s sake.’

In it we were like boy and girl together until the jeweller’s was reached.

There gloom, in spite of us, settled down over our hopes and feelings. Helen walked to the hansom like a grey ghost. Like the whisper of some far-off stranger I heard myself order the driver to take us home.

In the hansom we sat silent, looking straight in front of us at nothing. I stole a glance at Helen and saw a tear in the corner of her eye. I sat choking.

All at once she seized my hand.

‘Look!’ she exclaimed, ‘Look!’

I looked where she pointed, but discerned nothing to account for her excitement.

‘What is it?’ I queried.

‘The old man!’ she exclaimed.

‘What old man?’ I asked bewildered.

‘The old man on the puzzle,’ she told me. ‘The old man who was leading Amy.’

Then I was sure she was demented. To humour her I asked:

‘The old man with the brown coat?’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘The old man with the long grey hair over his collar.’

‘With the walking stick?’ I inquired.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘With the crooked walking stick.’

I saw him too! This was no figment of Helen’s imagination.

It was absurd of course, but my eagerness caught fire from hers. I credited the absurdity. In what sort of vision it mattered not she had seen an old man like this leading our lost Amy.

I spoke to the driver, pointed out to him the old man, told him to follow him without attracting his attention and offered him anything he asked to keep him in sight.

Helen became possessed with the idea that we should lose sight of the old man in the crowds. Nothing would do but we must get out and follow him on foot. I remonstrated that we were much more likely to lose sight of him that way, and still more likely to attract his notice, which would be worse than losing him. She insisted and I told the man to keep us in view.

A weary walk we had, though most of it was mere strolling after a tottering figure or loitering about shops he entered.

It was near dusk and full time for us to be at home when he began to walk fast. So fast he drew away from us in spite of us. He turned a corner a half a square ahead of us. When we turned into that street he was nowhere to be seen.

Helen was ready to faint with disappointment. With no hope of helping her, but some instinctive idea of postponing the evil moment I urged her to walk on, saying that perhaps we might see him. About the middle of the square I suddenly stood still.

‘What is the matter?’ Helen asked.

‘The house!’ I said.

‘What house?’ she queried.

‘The house in the puzzle picture,’ I explained. ‘The house where I saw Amy at the window.’

Of course she had not seen any house on the puzzle, but she caught at the last straw of hope.

It was a poor neighbourhood of crowded tenements, not quite a slum, yet dirty and unkempt and full of poor folks.

The house door was shut, I could find no sign of any bell. I knocked. No one answered. I tried the door. It was not fastened and we entered a dirty hallway, cold and damp and smelling repulsively. A fat woman stuck her head out of a door and jabbered at us in an unknown tongue. A man with a fez on his greasy black hair came from the back of the hallway and was equally unintelligible.

‘Does nobody here speak English?’ I asked.

The answer was as incomprehensible as before.

I made to go up the stairs.

The man, and the woman, who was now standing before her door, both chattered at once, but neither made any attempt to stop me. They waved vaguely explanatory, deprecating hands towards the blackness of the stairway. We went up.

On the second floor landing we saw just the old man we had been following.

He stared at us when I spoke to him.

‘Son-in-law,’ he said, ‘son-in-law.’

He called and a door opened. An oldish woman answered him in apparently the same jargon. Behind was a young woman holding a baby.

‘What is it?’ she asked with a great deal of accent but intelligibly.

Three or four children held on by her skirts.

Behind her I saw a little girl in a blue-check dress.

Helen screamed.

The people turned out to be refugees from the settlement about the sacked German Mission at Dehkhargan near Tabriz, Christianized Persians, such stupid villagers that they had never thought or had been incapable of reporting their find to the police, so ignorant that they knew nothing of rewards or advertisements, such simple-hearted folk that they had shared their narrow quarters and scanty fare with the unknown waif their grandfather had found wandering alone, after dark, months before.

Amy, when we had leisure to ask questions and hear her experiences, declared they had treated her as they treated their own children. She could give no description of her kidnappers except that the woman had on a hat with roses in it and the man had a little yellow moustache. She could not tell how long they had kept her nor why they had left her to wander in the streets at night.

It needed no common language, far less any legal proof, to convince Amy’s hosts that she belonged to us. I had a pocket full of Christmas money, new five and ten-dollar gold pieces and bright silver quarters for the servants and children. I filled the old grandfather’s hands and plainly overwhelmed him. They all jabbered at us, blessings, if I judged the tone right. I tried to tell the young woman we should see them again in a day or two and I gave her a card to make sure.

I told the cabman to stop the first taxicab he should see empty. In the hansom we hugged Amy alternately and hugged each other.

Once in the taxicab we were home in half an hour; more, much more than half an hour late. Helen whisked Amy in by the servants’ door and flew upstairs with her by the back way. I faced a perturbed and anxious parlourful of interrogative relatives and in-laws.

‘You’ll know before many minutes,’ I said, ‘why we were both out and are in late. Helen will want to surprise you and I’ll say nothing to spoil the effect.’

Nothing I could have said would have spoiled the effect because they would not have believed me. As it was Helen came in sooner than I could have thought possible, looking her best and accurately playing the formal hostess with a feeble attempt at a surprise in store.

The dinner was a great success, with much laughter and high spirits, everybody carried away by Helen’s sallies and everybody amazed that she could be so gay.

‘I cannot understand,’ Paul’s wife whispered to me, ‘how she can ever get through the party. It would kill me in her place.’

‘It won’t kill her,’ I said confidently. ‘You may be sure of that.’

The children had arrived to the number of more than thirty and only the inevitably late Amstelhuysens had not come. Helen announced that she would not wait for them.

‘The tree is lighted,’ she said. ‘We’ll have the doors thrown open and go in.’

We were all gathered in the front parlour. The twins panted in at the last instant. The grown-ups were pulling motto-crackers and the children were throwing confetti. The doors opened, the tree filled all the back of the room. The candles blazed and twinkled. And in front of it, in a simple little white dress, with a fairy’s wand in her hand, tipped with a silver star, clean, healthy-looking and full of spirits was Amy, the fairy of the hour.

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Amelia B. Edwards (1831–92) was a celebrated Victorian traveller, feminist and novelist, and author of the classic travel book
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile
.

The following narrative (which was first published in Routledge’s Christmas Annual in December 1864) is probably the earliest ‘Bermuda Triangle’ mystery story, describing a particularly bizarre and horrifying Christmas Day on a very strange island situated in a parallel dimension somewhere between Puerto Rico and Bermuda.

I
t was on the 26th of October, 1760, at twenty-seven minutes past ten o’clock, a.m., that I shook hands for the last time with those worthy merchants and shipowners, Messrs Fisher, Clarke, and Fisher, of Bristol. I went at once on board the
Mary-Jane
, then lying alongside the drawbridge by St Augustine’s parade, in the very heart of the old city. It was my first command, so I stepped on deck with some little pride of heart, and bade the men weigh anchor. My exultation may be pardoned when it is recollected that I was only twenty-six years of age, and naturally thought it a fine thing to be captain of a tight little trading schooner like the
Mary-Jane
, with a valuable cargo on board, and a mate, three sailors, and a boy under my absolute authority.

The flags were flying from every masthead and steeple, and the bells were pealing clamorously, as we worked out of port that morning; for it was the very day of the king’s
*
accession, and all Bristol was wild with loyalty. I remember as well as if it were yesterday, how the sailors cheered from the ships as we went down the Avon; and how my men threw up their hats in reply, and shouted, ‘Long live King George!’ The Avon, however, was soon left behind, and we entered the Bristol Channel with a favourable wind, all sail set, and a sky brilliant with sunshine above our heads. We were bound, I should observe, for Jamaica, and carried a cargo consisting chiefly of printed goods, hardware, and cutlery, which it was my duty to deliver to the consignee at Kingston. This done, my instructions were to ship a return cargo of cotton, indigo, rum, and other West Indian products. Perhaps it may be as well to add, that the
Mary-Jane
carried about a hundred tons burthen, that my name is William Burton, and my mate’s name was Aaron Taylor.