The dream detective
“Including the ghost!” interpolated his cousin, laughing.
“That’s the trouble,” said Sir James, banging his fist upon the table;
“the very first night I dined in this room there was a most uncanny
manifestation. Clement and I were sitting here at this very table; we
had dined--not unwisely, don’t think that--and were just smoking and
chatting, when----”
He ceased abruptly; in fact, the effect was similar to that which
would have resulted had a solid door suddenly been closed upon the
speaker. But the stark silence which ensued was instantly interrupted.
My blood seemed to freeze in my veins; a horrid, supernatural dread
held me fast in my chair. For, echoing hollowly around and about the
huge, ancient apartment, rolled, booming, a peal of demoniacal
laughter! From whence it proceeded I was wholly unable to imagine. It
seemed to be all about, above us, and beneath us. It was mad,
devilish, a hell-sound impossible to describe. It rose, it fell, it
rose again--and ceased abruptly.
“My God!” I whispered. “What was it?”
II
In the silence that followed the ghostly disturbance we sat around the
table listening. Sir James was the first to speak.
“A demonstration, Mr. Klaw!” he said. “This sort of thing happens
every night!”
“Ah!” rumbled Moris Klaw, “every night, eh? That laughing? You have
investigated--yes--no?”
“I tried to investigate,” explained the baronet, “but quite frankly I
didn’t know where to begin.”
We were all recovering our composure somewhat, I think.
“You hear that laughter nowhere but in this room?” asked Klaw.
“I have always heard it when we have been seated at this table,” was
the reply; “at no other time, but it can be heard clearly beyond the
room. The servants have heard it. Excepting the housekeeper and the
butler, they are leaving almost immediately.”
“Ah! _canaille!_” grunted Moris Klaw; “fear-pigs! It is always so,
these servants. So you have not located the one that laughs, no?”
“No,” answered Sir James; “and he doesn’t stop at laughing--does he,
Clem?”
Clement Leyland shook his head. He looked even paler than usual, I
thought, and the uncanny incident seemed to have disturbed him
greatly.
“What else?” rumbled Moris Klaw. “The gray monk is forgetting his
manners. He becomes rude, eh--that gray monk?”
“The house has practically become uninhabitable,” said the baronet,
bitterly. “None of the usual phenomena are missing. We have slamming
doors, phantom footsteps, and, if the servants are to be believed,
half the forces of hell loose here at night!”
“But your _own_ experiences?” interrupted Klaw.
“My own experiences in brief amount to this: I rarely sit at this
table at night without hearing that beastly laughter, at least once. I
never go into the billiard room, which opens out under the gallery
yonder, without feeling a cold wind blowing upon my face or head, even
in perfectly still weather, or with all the windows closed. To the
left of the billiard room, and opening out of it, is a third centre of
these disturbances. It’s the gun room, and guns have been fired there
in the night, with the door locked, on no fewer than five occasions!”
Moris Klaw, from a tail pocket of his coat, produced a cylindrical
scent spray and squirted verbena upon his high yellow forehead.
“It grows exciting, this,” he said. “I require the cool brain.”
“Finally,” added Sir James, “the only other point worth mentioning is
the ghostly voice which regularly wakes me from my sleep at night.”
“A voice,” rumbled Klaw; “what voice, and what does it say, that
voice?”
“I won’t repeat what it says!” replied the baronet, glancing at Isis;
“but it offers obscene suggestions or that is the impression I have of
it--a low, filthy mumbling; if you can follow me, the voice of
something dead and infinitely evil.”
Moris Klaw stood up.
“This intelligence,” he rumbled, “a living or a dead one, has thoughts
then, and thoughts, Sir James, are things. I shall sleep in one of the
centres of its activity to-night, perhaps here, perhaps in the
billiard room or the gun room. Isis, my child, bring for me my
odically sterilized pillows. This is a charming case and worthy of the
subtle method.”
He placed his hands upon the shoulders of Sir James Leyland, who stood
facing him.
“Evil thoughts live, Sir James,” he said. “I cannot explain to you how
hard it is to slay them. Few good thoughts survive; but such an
ancient abode as this”--he waved his long hands characteristically
about him--“is peopled with thought-forms surviving from the dark
ages. I have opened the inner eye, my friend. Mercifully, perhaps, the
inner eye is closed in most of us; in some it is blind. But I have
opened that eye and trained it. As I sleep”--he lowered his voice
oddly--“those thought things come to me. It is an uncomfortable gift,
yes; for here in Grange I shall find myself to-night in evil company.
Murders long forgotten will be accomplished again before that inner
eye of mine! I shall swim in blood! Assassins will come stealing to
me, murdered ones will scream in my ears, the secret knife will flash,
the honest ax do its deadly work; for in the moment of such deeds two
imperishable thought-forms are created: the thought-form of the
slayer, strong to survive, because a blood-lustful thought, a
revengeful thought; and the thought of the slain, likewise a
long-surviving thought because a thought of wildest despair, a final
massing of the mental forces greater than any generally possible in
life, upon that last awful grievance.”
He paused, looking around him.
“From the phantom company,” he said, “I must pick out that one whose
thought is of laughter, of firing guns, and of evil whisperings. What
a task! Wondrous is the science of the mental negative!”
The meeting broke up, then, and Isis Klaw, having brought from a large
case, which formed part of her father’s luggage, two huge red
cushions, bade us good-night and retired to her own room. Moris Klaw,
with a cushion swinging in each hand, went shuffling ungainly from
room to room like some strange animal seeking a lair.
“Do I understand,” Clement Leyland whispered to me, “that your friend
proposes to sleep down here?”
“Yes,” I replied, smiling at his evident wonderment; “such is his
method of investigation, eccentric, but effective.”
“It is really effective, then? The experiences given in ‘Psychic
Angles’ are not fabulous?”
“In no way. Moris Klaw is a very remarkable man. I have yet to meet
the mystery which is beyond him.”
Moris Klaw’s rumbling voice, which frequently reminded me of the
rolling of casks in a distant cellar, broke in upon our conversation:
“Here is the ideal spot; here upon this settee by the door of the gun
room I am in the centre of these psychic storms which nightly arise in
Grange.”
“If you are determined to remain here, Mr. Klaw,” said Sir James, “I
shall not endeavour to dissuade you, of course; but I should prefer to
see you turn into more comfortable quarters.”
“No, no,” was the reply; “it is here I shall lay down my old head, it
is here I shall lie and wait for him, the one who laughs.”
Accordingly, since the hour grew late, we left this novel ghost-hunter
stretched out upon the settee in the billiard room; and as I knew his
objection to any disturbance, I suggested to Sir James that we should
retire out of earshot for a final smoke ere seeking our separate
apartments.
We sat chatting for close upon an hour, I suppose. Then Clement
Leyland left us, saying that he had had a heavy day.
“Clement’s been working real hard,” the baronet confided to me. “In
the circumstances, as I think I told you, I have decided to abandon
Grange, and we are having the old Friars House, a mile from here, but
on part of the estate, restored. It hasn’t been inhabited for about
three generations, and it’s very much older than Grange; part of it
dates back to King John. Perhaps I can get servants to stop there,
though, and it’s quite impossible to keep up Grange without a staff.
Clement has been superintending the work over there all day; he’s one
of the best.”
A few moments later we parted for the night. I left Sir James at the
door of his room, which had formerly opened off the balcony
overlooking the banqueting hall. That door was now walled up, however,
and the entrance was from the corridor beyond. The room allotted to me
was upon the opposite side of the same corridor and farther to the
north.
I felt particularly unlike sleep. The extremely modern furniture of my
room could not rob the walls, with their small square panelling, of
the air of hoary antiquity which was theirs. The one window, deep set
and overlooking an extensive orchard, was such as might have formed
the focus for cavalierly glance, was such as might have framed the
head of a romantic maid of Stuart days. And with it all was that
gloomy air that had a more remote antiquity, that harked back to
darker times than those of the Merry Monarch: the air of ghostly evil,
the cloud from which proceeded the devilish laughter, the obscene
whisperings.
Where the shadows of the trees lay beneath me on the turf, I could
fancy a gray cowled figure flitting across the lighted patches and
lurking, evilly watching, amid the pools of darkness. Sleep was
impossible. Moris Klaw, to whom such fears as mine were utterly
unknown, might repose, nay, was actually reposing, in the very vortex
of this psychical storm; but I was otherwise constituted. I had been
with him in many cases of dark enough evil-doing, but this purely
ghostly menace was something that sapped my courage.
Grange stood upon rather high ground, and in a northeasterly
direction, peeping out from the trees of a wooded slope, showed a gray
tower almost like a giant monkish figure under the moon. I watched it
with a vague interest. It was Friars House, to which the baronet
projected retreat from the haunted Grange. Lighting my pipe, I leaned
from the window, idly watching that ancient tower and wondering if
more evil deeds had taken place within it--long as it had stood there
amid the trees--than those which had left their ghostly mark upon
Grange.
The night was very beautiful and very still. Not the slightest sound
could I detect within or without the house. How long I had lounged
there in this half-dreamy, but vaguely fearful, mood I cannot say, but
I was aroused by a tremendous outcry. Loud it broke in upon the
silence of the night, broke in on my mood with nerve-racking effect.
My pipe dropped to the floor, and taking one step across the room I
stood there, rooted to the spot with indefinable horror.
“Father!” it came in a piercing scream, and again: “Father! O God!
save him! save him!”
III
The voice was that of Isis Klaw!
Whenever I accompanied her father upon any of his inquiries I came
armed, and now, with a magazine pistol held in my hand, I leapt out
into the corridor and turned toward the stair. A door slammed open in
front of me and Sir James Leyland also came running out, pulling on
his dressing gown as he ran. One quick glance he gave me; his face was
very pale; and together we went racing down the stairs into the hall
patched with ghostly moonlight.
“You heard it?” he breathed, hoarsely. “It was Miss Klaw! What in
God’s name has happened? Where is she?”
But even as he asked the question, and as we pressed on into the
billiard room, it was answered. For Isis Klaw, with a dressing gown
thrown over her night apparel, was kneeling beside the settee upon
which her father lay.
“What has happened? What has happened?” groaned Sir James. Then, as we
approached together: “Mr. Klaw! Mr. Klaw!” he cried.
“All right, my friend!” came the rumbling voice, and to my inestimable
relief Moris Klaw sat up and looked around upon us, adjusting his