Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (13 page)

‘It was destroyed, burned. No one claimed his effects. Perhaps he had no relatives. Possibly no one dared to come forward. Everything in his possession was stolen, or, what is the same, the fruit of his thefts.’

‘And – the pistols, “Jem and Jack?” Those names rather intrigued me! What disposition was made of them, if you happen to know? Old Titmarsh had them, of course, concealed somewhere; probably in that “cubby-hole” of his which you mentioned.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Snow, rising, ‘there I can really give you some evidence. The pistols are in my office – in the Chubbs’ safe, along with the holster-apparatus, the harness which Forrester wore under his laced coat. I will bring them in.’

‘Have you the connection, Mr Canevin?’ Lord Carruth enquired of me as soon as Snow had left the dining-room.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘the connection is clear enough; clear as a pikestaff, to use one of your time-honored British expressions, although I confess never to have seen a pikestaff in my life! But – apart from the fact that the holsters are made of leather; the well-known background of the unfulfilled desire persisting after death; and the obvious connection between the point of disappearance of those “walking-boots” of Billings, with “the shut room”, I must confess myself at a loss. The veriest tyro at this sort of thing would connect those points, I imagine. There it is, laid out for us, directly before our mental eyes, so to speak. But – what I fail to understand is not so much who takes them – that by a long stretch of the imagination might very well be the persistent “shade”, “Ka”, “projected embodiment” of Simon Forrester. No – what gets me is
– where does the carrier of boots and satchels and jewelers’ sample-cases put them
? That room is utterly, absolutely, physically empty, and boots and shoes are material affairs, Lord Carruth.’

Carruth nodded gravely. ‘You have put your finger on the main difficulty, Mr Canevin. I am not at all sure that I can explain it, or even that we shall be able to solve the mystery after all. My experience in India does not help. But – there is one very vague case, right here in England, which may be a parallel one. I suspect, not to put too fine a point upon the matter, that the abstracted things may very well be behind that rear-most wall, the wall opposite the doorway in “the shut room”.’

‘But,’ I interjected, ‘that is impossible, is it not? The wall is material – brick and stone and plaster. It is not subject to the strange laws of personality. How – ?’

The return of the gentleman-landlord of The Coach and Horses at this moment put an end to our conversation, but not to my wonder. I imagined that the ‘case’ alluded to by my companion would be that of the tortured ‘ghost’ of the jester which, with a revenge-motive, haunted a room in an ancient house and even managed to equip the room itself with some of its revengeful properties or motives. The case had been recorded by Mr Hodgson, and later Carruth told me that this was the one he had in mind. This, it seemed to me, was a very different matter. However –

Mr Snow laid the elaborate and beautifully made ‘harness’ of leather straps out on the table beside the after-dinner coffee service. The grips of ‘Jem and Jack’ peeped out of their holsters. The device was not unlike those used by our own American desperadoes, men like the famous Earp brothers and ‘Doc’ Holliday whose ‘six-guns’ were carried handily in slung holsters in front of the body. We examined these antique weapons, murderous-looking pistols of the ‘bulldog’ type, built for business, and Carruth ascertained that neither ‘Jem’ nor ‘Jack’ was loaded.

‘Is there anyone on that top floor?’ enquired Carruth.

‘No one save yourselves, excepting some of the servants, who are in the other end of the house,’ returned Snow.

‘I am going to request you to let us take these pistols and the “harness” with us upstairs when we retire,’ said Carruth, and again the obliging Snow agreed. ‘Everything I have is at your disposal, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘in the hope that you will be able to end this annoyance for me. It is too early in the season at present for the inn to have many guests. Do precisely as you wish, in all ways.’

Shortly after nine o’clock, we took leave of our pleasant host, and, carrying the ‘harness’ and pistols divided between us, we mounted to our commodious bedchamber. A second bed had been moved into it, and the fire in the grate took off the slight chill of the spring evening. We began our preparations by carrying the high-powered electric torches we had obtained from Snow along the corridor and around the corner to ‘the shut room’. We unlocked the door and ascertained that the two torches would be quite sufficient to work by. Then we closed but did not lock the door, and returned to our room.

Between us, we moved a solidly built oak table to a point diagonally across the corridor from our open bedroom door, and on this we placed the ‘harness’ and pistols. Then, well provided with smoke-materials, we sat down to wait, seated in such positions that both of us could command the view of our trap. It was during the conversation which followed that Carruth informed me that the case to which he had alluded was the one recorded by the occult writer, Hodgson. It was familiar to both of us. I will not cite it. It may be read by anybody who has the curiosity to examine it in the collection entitled
Carnacki the Ghost-Finder
by William Hope Hodgson. In that account it is the floor of the ‘haunted’ room which became adapted to the revenge-motive of the persistent ‘shade’ of the malignant court jester, tortured to death many years before his ‘manifestation’ by his fiendish lord and master.

We realized that, according to the man Billings’s testimony, we need not be on the alert before midnight. Carruth therefore read from a small book which he had brought with him, and I busied my-self in making the careful notes which I have consulted in recording Mr Snow’s narrative of Simon Forrester, while that narrative was fresh in my memory. It was a quarter before midnight when I had finished. I took a turn about the room to refresh my somewhat cramped muscles, and returned to my comfortable chair.

Midnight struck from the French clock on our mantelpiece, and Carruth and I both, at that signal, began to give our entire attention to the articles on the table in the hallway out there.

It occurred to me that this joint watching, as intently as the circumstances seemed to warrant to both of us, might prove very wearing, and I suggested that we watch alternately, for about fifteen minutes each. We did so, I taking the first turn. Nothing occurred – not a sound, not the smallest indication that there might be anything untoward going on out there in the corridor.

At twelve-fifteen, Carruth began to watch the table, and it was, I should imagine, about five minutes later that his hand fell lightly on my arm, pressing it and arousing me to the keenest attention. I looked intently at the things on the table. The ‘harness’ was moving toward the left-hand edge of the table. We could both hear, now, the slight scraping sound made by the leather weighted by the twin pistols, and, even as we looked, the whole apparatus lifted itself – or so it appeared to us – from the supporting table, and began, as it were, to float through the air a distance of about four feet from the ground toward the turn which led to ‘the shut room’.

We rose, simultaneously, for we had planned carefully on what we were to do, and followed. We were in time to see the articles ‘float’ around the corner, and, increasing our pace – for we had been puzzled about how anything material, like the boots, could get through the locked door – watched, in the rather dim light of that short hallway, what would happen.

What happened was that the ‘harness’ and pistols reached the door, and then the door opened. They went through, and the door shut behind them precisely as though someone, invisible to us, were carrying them. We heard distinctly the slight sound which a gently closed door makes as it came to, and there we were, standing outside in the hallway looking at each other. It is one thing to figure out, beforehand, the science of occult occurrences, even upon the basis of such experience as Carruth and I both possessed. It is, distinctly, another, to face the direct operation of something motivated by the Powers beyond the ordinary ken of humanity. I confess to certain ‘cold chills’, and Carruth’s face was
very pale
.

We switched on our electric torches as we had arranged to do, and Carruth, with a firm hand which I admired if I did not, precisely, envy, reached out and turned the knob of the door. We walked into ‘the shut room’ . . .

Not all our joint experience had prepared us for what we saw. I could not forbear clutching Carruth’s free arm, the one not engaged with the torch, as he stood beside me. And I testify that his arm was as still and firm as a rock. It steadied me to realize such fortitude, for the sight which was before us was enough to unnerve the most hardened investigator of the unearthly.

Directly in front of us, but facing the blank wall at the far end of the room, stood a half-materialized man. The gleam of my torch threw a faint shadow on the wall in front of him, the rays passing through him as though he were not there, and yet with a certain dimming. The shadow visibly increased in the few brief instants of our utter silence, and then we observed that the figure was struggling with something. Mechanically we concentrated both electric rays on the figure and then we saw clearly. A bulky man, with a bull-neck and close-cropped, iron-gray hair, wearing a fine satin coat and what were called, in their day, ‘small cloths’, or tight-fitting knee-trousers with silk stockings and heavy, buckled shoes, was raising and fitting about his waist, over the coat, the ‘harness’ with the pistols.

Abruptly, the materialization appearing to be now complete, he turned upon us, with an audible snarl and baleful, glaring little eyes like a pig’s, deep set in a hideous, scarred face, and then he spoke – he spoke, and he had been dead for more than a century!

‘Ah-h-h-h!’ he snarled, evilly, ‘ye would come in upon me, eh, my fine gents – into this my chamber, eh! I’ll teach ye manners  . . . ’ and he ended this diatribe with a flood of the foulest language imaginable, stepping, with little, almost mincing, down-toed steps toward us all the time he poured out his filthy curses and revilings. I was completely at a loss what to do. I realized – these ideas went through my mind with the rapidity of thought – that the pistols were unloaded! I told myself that this was some weird hallucin-ation – that the shade of no dead-and-gone desperado could harm us. Yet – it was a truly terrifying experience, be the man shade or true flesh and blood.

Then Carruth spoke to him, in quiet, persuasive tones.

‘But – you have your pistols now, Simon Forrester. It was we who put them where you could find them, your pretty boys, “Jem and Jack”. That was what you were trying to find, was it not? And now – you have them. There is nothing further for you to do – you have them, they are just under your hands where you can get at them whenever you wish.’

At this the specter, or materialization of Simon Forrester, blinked at us, a cunning light in his evil little eyes, and dropped his hands with which he had but now been gesticulating violently on the grips of the pistols. He grinned, evilly, and spat in a strange fashion, over his shoulder.

‘Ay,’ said he, more moderately now, ‘ay – I have ’em – Jemmy and Jack, my trusties, my pretty boys.’ He fondled the butts with his huge hands, hands that could have strangled an ox, and spat over his shoulder.

‘There is no necessity for you to remain, then, is there?’ said Carruth softly, persuasively.

The simulacrum of Simon Forrester frowned, looked a bit puzzled, then nodded its head several times.

‘You can rest now – now that you have Jem and Jack,’ suggested Carruth, almost in a whisper, and as he spoke, Forrester turned away and stepped over to the blank wall at the far side of the room, opposite the doorway, and I could hear Carruth draw in his breath softly and feel the iron grip of his fingers on my arm. ‘Watch!’ he whispered in my ear; ‘watch now.’

The solid wall seemed to wave and buckle before Forrester, almost as though it were not a wall but a sheet of white cloth, held and waved by hands as cloth is waved in a theater to simulate waves. More and more cloth-like the wall became, and, as we gazed at this strange sight, the simulacrum of Simon Forrester seemed to become less opaque, to melt and blend in with the wavering wall, which gradually ceased to move, and then he was gone and the wall was as it had been before . . .

On Monday morning, at Carruth’s urgent solicitation, Snow assembled a force of laborers, and we watched while they broke down the wall of ‘the shut room’ opposite the doorway. At last, as Carruth had expected, a pick went through, and, the interested workmen, laboring with a will, broke through into a small, narrow, cell-like room the plaster of which indicated that it had been walled up perhaps two centuries before, or even earlier – a ‘priest’s hole’ in all probability, of the early post-reformation period near the end of the Sixteenth Century.

Carruth stopped the work as soon as it was plain what was here, and turned out the workmen, who went protestingly. Then, with only our host working beside us, and the door of the room locked on the inside, we continued the job. At last the aperture was large enough, and Carruth went through. We heard an exclamation from him, and then he began to hand out articles through the rough hole in the masonry – leather articles – boots innumerable, ladies’ reticules, hand-luggage, the missing jeweler’s sample case with its contents intact – innumerable other articles, and, last of all, the ‘harness’ with the pistols in the holsters.

Carruth explained the ‘jester case’ to Snow, who shook his head over it. ‘It’s quite beyond me, Lord Carruth,’ said he, ‘but, as you say this annoyance is at an end, I am quite satisfied; and – I’ll take your advice and make sure by pulling down the whole room, breaking out the corridor walls, and joining it to the room across the way. I confess I can not make head or tail of your explanation – the unfulfilled wish, the “sympathetic pervasion” of the room as you call it, the “materialization”, and the strange fact that this business began only a short time ago. But – I’ll do exactly what you have recommended, about the room, that is. The restoration of the jeweler’s case will undoubtedly make it possible for me to get back the sum I paid Messrs Hopkins and Barth of Liverpool when it disappeared in my house. Can you give any explanation of why the “shade” of Forrester remained quiet for a century and more and only started up the other day, so to speak?’