The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
"By George, though, I'm bleeding!" he exclaimed. "Look here! What on
earth's this?"
On the forearm, quite close to the wrist, was a thin red line. There was
a tiny drop of apparently fresh blood on it. Greene came over and looked
closely at it for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair, looking
curiously at his friend's face.
"You've scratched yourself without knowing it," he said presently.
"There's no sign of a bruise. It must be something else that made the
arm ache."
Marriott sat very still, staring silently at his arm as though the
solution of the whole mystery lay there actually written upon the skin.
"What's the matter? I see nothing very strange about a scratch," said
Greene, in an unconvincing sort of voice. "It was your cuff links
probably. Last night in your excitement--"
But Marriott, white to the very lips, was trying to speak. The sweat
stood in great beads on his forehead. At last he leaned forward close to
his friend's face.
"Look," he said, in a low voice that shook a little. "Do you see that
red mark? I mean _underneath_ what you call the scratch?"
Greene admitted he saw something or other, and Marriott wiped the place
clean with his handkerchief and told him to look again more closely.
"Yes, I see," returned the other, lifting his head after a moment's
careful inspection. "It looks like an old scar."
"It _is_ an old scar," whispered Marriott, his lips trembling. "_Now_ it
all comes back to me."
"All what?" Greene fidgeted on his chair. He tried to laugh, but without
success. His friend seemed bordering on collapse.
"Hush! Be quiet, and--I'll tell you," he said. "_Field made that scar._"
For a whole minute the two men looked each other full in the face
without speaking.
"Field made that scar!" repeated Marriott at length in a louder voice.
"Field! You mean--last night?"
"No, not last night. Years ago--at school, with his knife. And I made a
scar in his arm with mine." Marriott was talking rapidly now.
"We exchanged drops of blood in each other's cuts. He put a drop into my
arm and I put one into his--"
"In the name of heaven, what for?"
"It was a boys' compact. We made a sacred pledge, a bargain. I remember
it all perfectly now. We had been reading some dreadful book and we
swore to appear to one another--I mean, whoever died first swore to show
himself to the other. And we sealed the compact with each other's blood.
I remember it all so well--the hot summer afternoon in the playground,
seven years ago--and one of the masters caught us and confiscated the
knives--and I have never thought of it again to this day--"
"And you mean--" stammered Greene.
But Marriott made no answer. He got up and crossed the room and lay down
wearily upon the sofa, hiding his face in his hands.
Greene himself was a bit non-plussed. He left his friend alone for a
little while, thinking it all over again. Suddenly an idea seemed to
strike him. He went over to where Marriott still lay motionless on the
sofa and roused him. In any case it was better to face the matter,
whether there was an explanation or not. Giving in was always the silly
exit.
"I say, Marriott," he began, as the other turned his white face up to
him. "There's no good being so upset about it. I mean--if it's all an
hallucination we know what to do. And if it isn't--well, we know what to
think, don't we?"
"I suppose so. But it frightens me horribly for some reason," returned
his friend in a hushed voice. "And that poor devil--"
"But, after all, if the worst is true and--and that chap _has_ kept his
promise--well, he has, that's all, isn't it?"
Marriott nodded.
"There's only one thing that occurs to me," Greene went on, "and that
is, are you quite sure that--that he really ate like that--I mean that
he actually _ate anything at all_?" he finished, blurting out all his
thought.
Marriott stared at him for a moment and then said he could easily make
certain. He spoke quietly. After the main shock no lesser surprise could
affect him.
"I put the things away myself," he said, "after we had finished. They
are on the third shelf in that cupboard. No one's touched 'em since."
He pointed without getting up, and Greene took the hint and went over to
look.
"Exactly," he said, after a brief examination; "just as I thought. It
was partly hallucination, at any rate. The things haven't been touched.
Come and see for yourself."
Together they examined the shelf. There was the brown loaf, the plate of
stale scones, the oatcake, all untouched. Even the glass of whisky
Marriott had poured out stood there with the whisky still in it.
"You were feeding--no one," said Greene "Field ate and drank nothing. He
was not there at all!"
"But the breathing?" urged the other in a low voice, staring with a
dazed expression on his face.
Greene did not answer. He walked over to the bedroom, while Marriott
followed him with his eyes. He opened the door, and listened. There was
no need for words. The sound of deep, regular breathing came floating
through the air. There was no hallucination about that, at any rate.
Marriott could hear it where he stood on the other side of the room.
Greene closed the door and came back. "There's only one thing to do," he
declared with decision. "Write home and find out about him, and
meanwhile come and finish your reading in my rooms. I've got an extra
bed."
"Agreed," returned the Fourth Year Man; "there's no hallucination about
that exam; I must pass that whatever happens."
And this was what they did.
It was about a week later when Marriott got the answer from his sister.
Part of it he read out to Greene--
"It is curious," she wrote, "that in your letter you should have
enquired after Field. It seems a terrible thing, but you know only a
short while ago Sir John's patience became exhausted, and he turned him
out of the house, they say without a penny. Well, what do you think? He
has killed himself. At least, it looks like suicide. Instead of leaving
the house, he went down into the cellar and simply starved himself to
death. . . . They're trying to suppress it, of course, but I heard it all
from my maid, who got it from their footman. . . . They found the body on
the 14th and the doctor said he had died about twelve hours before. . . .
He was dreadfully thin. . . ."
"Then he died on the 13th," said Greene.
Marriott nodded.
"That's the very night he came to see you."
Marriott nodded again.
WITH INTENT TO STEAL
To sleep in a lonely barn when the best bedrooms in the house were at
our disposal, seemed, to say the least, unnecessary, and I felt that
some explanation was due to our host.
But Shorthouse, I soon discovered, had seen to all that; our enterprise
would be tolerated, not welcomed, for the master kept this sort of thing
down with a firm hand. And then, how little I could get this man,
Shorthouse, to tell me. There was much I wanted to ask and hear, but he
surrounded himself with impossible barriers. It was ludicrous; he was
surely asking a good deal of me, and yet he would give so little in
return, and his reason--that it was for my good--may have been perfectly
true, but did not bring me any comfort in its train. He gave me sops now
and then, however, to keep up my curiosity, till I soon was aware that
there were growing up side by side within me a genuine interest and an
equally genuine fear; and something of both these is probably necessary
to all real excitement.
The barn in question was some distance from the house, on the side of
the stables, and I had passed it on several of my journeyings to and fro
wondering at its forlorn and untarred appearance under a régime where
everything was so spick and span; but it had never once occurred to me
as possible that I should come to spend a night under its roof with a
comparative stranger, and undergo there an experience belonging to an
order of things I had always rather ridiculed and despised.
At the moment I can only partially recall the process by which
Shorthouse persuaded me to lend him my company. Like myself, he was a
guest in this autumn house-party, and where there were so many to
chatter and to chaff, I think his taciturnity of manner had appealed to
me by contrast, and that I wished to repay something of what I owed.
There was, no doubt, flattery in it as well, for he was more than twice
my age, a man of amazingly wide experience, an explorer of all the
world's corners where danger lurked, and--most subtle flattery of
all--by far the best shot in the whole party, our host included.
At first, however, I held out a bit.
"But surely this story you tell," I said, "has the parentage common to
all such tales--a superstitious heart and an imaginative brain--and has
grown now by frequent repetition into an authentic ghost story? Besides,
this head gardener of half a century ago," I added, seeing that he still
went on cleaning his gun in silence, "who was he, and what positive
information have you about him beyond the fact that he was found hanging
from the rafters, dead?"
"He was no mere head gardener, this man who passed as such," he replied
without looking up, "but a fellow of splendid education who used this
curious disguise for his own purposes. Part of this very barn, of which
he always kept the key, was found to have been fitted up as a complete
laboratory, with athanor, alembic, cucurbite, and other appliances, some
of which the master destroyed at once--perhaps for the best--and which I
have only been able to guess at--"
"Black Arts," I laughed.
"Who knows?" he rejoined quietly. "The man undoubtedly possessed
knowledge--dark knowledge--that was most unusual and dangerous, and I
can discover no means by which he came to it--no ordinary means, that
is. But I _have_ found many facts in the case which point to the
exercise of a most desperate and unscrupulous will; and the strange
disappearances in the neighbourhood, as well as the bones found buried
in the kitchen garden, though never actually traced to him, seem to me
full of dreadful suggestion."
I laughed again, a little uncomfortably perhaps, and said it reminded
one of the story of Giles de Rays, maréchal of France, who was said to
have killed and tortured to death in a few years no less than one
hundred and sixty women and children for the purposes of necromancy, and
who was executed for his crimes at Nantes. But Shorthouse would not
"rise," and only returned to his subject.
"His suicide seems to have been only just in time to escape arrest," he
said.
"A magician of no high order then," I observed sceptically, "if suicide
was his only way of evading the country police."
"The police of London and St. Petersburg rather," returned Shorthouse;
"for the headquarters of this pretty company was somewhere in Russia,
and his apparatus all bore the marks of the most skilful foreign make. A
Russian woman then employed in the household--governess, or
something--vanished, too, about the same time and was never caught. She
was no doubt the cleverest of the lot. And, remember, the object of this
appalling group was not mere vulgar gain, but a kind of knowledge that
called for the highest qualities of courage and intellect in the
seekers."
I admit I was impressed by the man's conviction of voice and manner, for
there is something very compelling in the force of an earnest man's
belief, though I still affected to sneer politely.
"But, like most Black Magicians, the fellow only succeeded in compassing
his own destruction--that of his tools, rather, and of escaping
himself."
"So that he might better accomplish his objects _elsewhere and
otherwise_," said Shorthouse, giving, as he spoke, the most minute
attention to the cleaning of the lock.
"Elsewhere and otherwise," I gasped.