The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
sighings became fainter and fainter, till at last I could not hear them
at all; and, strangest of all, the light emitted by the circle, as well
as by the designs round it, increased to a steady glow, casting their
radiance upwards with the weirdest possible effect upon his features.
Slowly, by the power of his voice, behind which lay undoubtedly a
genuine knowledge of the occult manipulation of sound, this man
dominated the forces that had escaped from their proper sphere, until
at length the room was reduced to silence and perfect order again.
"Judging by the immense relief which also communicated itself to my
nerves I then felt that the crisis was over and Smith was wholly master
of the situation.
"But hardly had I begun to congratulate myself upon this result, and to
gather my scattered senses about me, when, uttering a loud cry, I saw
him leap out of the circle and fling himself into the air--as it seemed
to me, into the empty air. Then, even while holding my breath for dread
of the crash he was bound to come upon the floor, I saw him strike with
a dull thud against a solid body in mid-air, and the next instant he was
wrestling with some ponderous thing that was absolutely invisible to me,
and the room shook with the struggle.
"To and fro _they_ swayed, sometimes lurching in one direction,
sometimes in another, and always in horrible proximity to myself, as I
leaned trembling against the wall and watched the encounter.
"It lasted at most but a short minute or two, ending as suddenly as it
had begun. Smith, with an unexpected movement, threw up his arms with a
cry of relief. At the same instant there was a wild, tearing shriek in
the air beside me and something rushed past us with a noise like the
passage of a flock of big birds. Both windows rattled as if they would
break away from their sashes. Then a sense of emptiness and peace
suddenly came over the room, and I knew that all was over.
"Smith, his face exceedingly white, but otherwise strangely composed,
turned to me at once.
"'God!--if you hadn't come--You deflected the stream; broke it up--' he
whispered. 'You saved me.'"
The doctor made a long pause. Presently he felt for his pipe in the
darkness, groping over the table behind us with both hands. No one spoke
for a bit, but all dreaded the sudden glare that would come when he
struck the match. The fire was nearly out and the great hall was pitch
dark.
But the story-teller did not strike that match. He was merely gaining
time for some hidden reason of his own. And presently he went on with
his tale in a more subdued voice.
"I quite forget," he said, "how I got back to my own room. I only know
that I lay with two lighted candles for the rest of the night, and the
first thing I did in the morning was to let the landlady know I was
leaving her house at the end of the week.
"Smith still has my Rabbinical Treatise. At least he did not return it
to me at the time, and I have never seen him since to ask for it."
A SUSPICIOUS GIFT
Blake had been in very low water for months--almost under water part of
the time--due to circumstances he was fond of saying were no fault of
his own; and as he sat writing in his room on "third floor back" of a
New York boarding-house, part of his mind was busily occupied in
wondering when his luck was going to turn again.
It was his room only in the sense that he paid the rent. Two friends,
one a little Frenchman and the other a big Dane, shared it with him,
both hoping eventually to contribute something towards expenses, but so
far not having accomplished this result. They had two beds only, the
third being a mattress they slept upon in turns, a week at a time. A
good deal of their irregular "feeding" consisted of oatmeal, potatoes,
and sometimes eggs, all of which they cooked on a strange utensil they
had contrived to fix into the gas jet. Occasionally, when dinner failed
them altogether, they swallowed a little raw rice and drank hot water
from the bathroom on the top of it, and then made a wild race for bed so
as to get to sleep while the sensation of false repletion was still
there. For sleep and hunger are slight acquaintances as they well knew.
Fortunately all New York houses are supplied with hot air, and they only
had to open a grating in the wall to get a plentiful, if not a wholesome
amount of heat.
Though loneliness in a big city is a real punishment, as they had
severally learnt to their cost, their experiences, three in a small room
for several months, had revealed to them horrors of quite another kind,
and their nerves had suffered according to the temperament of each. But,
on this particular evening, as Blake sat scribbling by the only window
that was not cracked, the Dane and the Frenchman, his companions in
adversity, were in wonderful luck. They had both been asked out to a
restaurant to dine with a friend who also held out to one of them a
chance of work and remuneration. They would not be back till late, and
when they did come they were pretty sure to bring in supplies of one
kind or another. For the Frenchman never could resist the offer of a
glass of absinthe, and this meant that he would be able to help himself
plentifully from the free-lunch counters, with which all New York bars
are furnished, and to which any purchaser of a drink is entitled to help
himself and devour on the spot or carry away casually in his hand for
consumption elsewhere. Thousands of unfortunate men get their sole
subsistence in this way in New York, and experience soon teaches where,
for the price of a single drink, a man can take away almost a meal of
chip potatoes, sausage, bits of bread, and even eggs. The Frenchman and
the Dane knew their way about, and Blake looked forward to a supper more
or less substantial before pulling his mattress out of the cupboard and
turning in upon the floor for the night.
Meanwhile he could enjoy a quiet and lonely evening with the room all to
himself.
In the daytime he was a reporter on an evening newspaper of sensational
and lying habits. His work was chiefly in the police courts; and in his
spare hours at night, when not too tired or too empty, he wrote sketches
and stories for the magazines that very rarely saw the light of day on
their printed and paid-for sentences. On this particular occasion he was
deep in a most involved tale of a psychological character, and had just
worked his way into a sentence, or set of sentences, that completely
baffled and muddled him.
He was fairly out of his depth, and his brain was too poorly supplied
with blood to invent a way out again. The story would have been
interesting had he written it simply, keeping to facts and feelings, and
not diving into difficult analysis of motive and character which was
quite beyond him. For it was largely autobiographical, and was meant to
describe the adventures of a young Englishman who had come to grief in
the usual manner on a Canadian farm, had then subsequently become
bar-keeper, sub-editor on a Methodist magazine, a teacher of French and
German to clerks at twenty-five cents per hour, a model for artists, a
super on the stage, and, finally, a wanderer to the goldfields.
Blake scratched his head, and dipped the pen in the inkpot, stared out
through the blindless windows, and sighed deeply. His thoughts kept
wandering to food, beefsteak and steaming vegetables. The smell of
cooking that came from a lower floor through the broken windows was a
constant torment to him. He pulled himself together and again attacked
the problem.
" . . . for with some people," he wrote, "the imagination is so vivid as
to be almost an extension of consciousness. . . ." But here he stuck
absolutely. He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, and how to
finish the sentence puzzled him into blank inaction. It was a difficult
point to decide, for it seemed to come in appropriately at this point in
his story, and he did not know whether to leave it as it stood, change
it round a bit, or take it out altogether. It might just spoil its
chances of being accepted: editors were such clever men. But, to rewrite
the sentence was a grind, and he was so tired and sleepy. After all,
what did it matter? People who were clever would force a meaning into
it; people who were not clever would pretend--he knew of no other
classes of readers. He would let it stay, and go on with the action of
the story. He put his head in his hands and began to think hard.
His mind soon passed from thought to reverie. He fell to wondering when
his friends would find work and relieve him of the burden--he
acknowledged it as such--of keeping them, and of letting another man
wear his best clothes on alternate Sundays. He wondered when his "luck"
would turn. There were one or two influential people in New York whom
he could go and see if he had a dress suit and the other conventional
uniforms. His thoughts ran on far ahead, and at the same time, by a sort
of double process, far behind as well. His home in the "old country"
rose up before him; he saw the lawn and the cedars in sunshine; he
looked through the familiar windows and saw the clean, swept rooms. His
story began to suffer; the psychological masterpiece would not make much
progress unless he pulled up and dragged his thoughts back to the
treadmill. But he no longer cared; once he had got as far as that cedar
with the sunshine on it, he never could get back again. For all he
cared, the troublesome sentence might run away and get into someone
else's pages, or be snuffed out altogether.
There came a gentle knock at the door, and Blake started. The knock was
repeated louder. Who in the world could it be at this late hour of the
night? On the floor above, he remembered, there lived another
Englishman, a foolish, second-rate creature, who sometimes came in and
made himself objectionable with endless and silly chatter. But he was an
Englishman for all that, and Blake always tried to treat him with
politeness, realising that he was lonely in a strange land. But
to-night, of all people in the world, he did not want to be bored with
Perry's cackle, as he called it, and the "Come in" he gave in answer to
the second knock had no very cordial sound of welcome in it.
However, the door opened in response, and the man came in. Blake did not
turn round at once, and the other advanced to the centre of the room,
but _without speaking_. Then Blake knew it was not his enemy, Perry, and
turned round.
He saw a man of about forty standing in the middle of the carpet, but
standing sideways so that he did not present a full face. He wore an
overcoat buttoned up to the neck, and on the felt hat which he held in
front of him fresh rain-drops glistened. In his other hand he carried a
small black bag. Blake gave him a good look, and came to the conclusion
that he might be a secretary, or a chief clerk, or a confidential man of
sorts. He was a shabby-respectable-looking person. This was the
sum-total of the first impression, gained the moment his eyes took in
that it was _not_ Perry; the second impression was less pleasant, and
reported at once that something was wrong.
Though otherwise young and inexperienced, Blake--thanks, or curses, to
the police court training--knew more about common criminal
blackguardism than most men of fifty, and he recognised that there was
somewhere a suggestion of this undesirable world about the man. But
there was more than this. There was something singular about him,
something far out of the common, though for the life of him Blake could
not say wherein it lay. The fellow was out of the ordinary, and in some
very undesirable manner.
All this, that takes so long to describe, Blake saw with the first and
second glance. The man at once began to speak in a quiet and respectful
voice.