The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
sitting face to face with a madman.
The ghastly meal was finished in an incredibly short time and nothing
was left but a tiny pool of red liquid rapidly hardening. Garvey leaned
back heavily in his chair and sighed. His smeared face, withdrawn now
from the glare of the lamp, began to resume its normal appearance.
Presently he looked up at his guest and said in his natural voice--
"I hope you've had enough to eat. You wouldn't care for this, you know,"
with a downward glance.
Shorthouse met his eyes with an inward loathing, and it was impossible
not to show some of the repugnance he felt. In the other's face,
however, he thought he saw a subdued, cowed expression. But he found
nothing to say.
"Marx will be in presently," Garvey went on. "He's either listening, or
in a vacuum."
"Does he choose any particular time for his visits?" the secretary
managed to ask.
"He generally goes after dinner; just about this time, in fact. But he's
not gone yet," he added, shrugging his shoulders, "for I think I hear
him coming."
Shorthouse wondered whether vacuum was possibly synonymous with wine
cellar, but gave no expression to his thoughts. With chills of horror
still running up and down his back, he saw Marx come in with a basin and
towel, while Garvey thrust up his face just as an animal puts up its
muzzle to be rubbed.
"Now we'll have coffee in the library, if you're ready," he said, in the
tone of a gentleman addressing his guests after a dinner party.
Shorthouse picked up the bag, which had lain all this time between his
feet, and walked through the door his host held open for him. Side by
side they crossed the dark hall together, and, to his disgust, Garvey
linked an arm in his, and with his face so close to the secretary's ear
that he felt the warm breath, said in a thick voice--
"You're uncommonly careful with that bag, Mr. Shorthouse. It surely must
contain something more than the bundle of papers."
"Nothing but the papers," he answered, feeling the hand burning upon his
arm and wishing he were miles away from the house and its abominable
occupants.
"Quite sure?" asked the other with an odious and suggestive chuckle. "Is
there any meat in it, fresh meat--raw meat?"
The secretary felt, somehow, that at the least sign of fear the beast on
his arm would leap upon him and tear him with his teeth.
"Nothing of the sort," he answered vigorously. "It wouldn't hold enough
to feed a cat."
"True," said Garvey with a vile sigh, while the other felt the hand upon
his arm twitch up and down as if feeling the flesh. "True, it's too
small to be of any real use. As you say, it wouldn't hold enough to feed
a cat."
Shorthouse was unable to suppress a cry. The muscles of his fingers,
too, relaxed in spite of himself and he let the black bag drop with a
bang to the floor. Garvey instantly withdrew his arm and turned with a
quick movement. But the secretary had regained his control as suddenly
as he had lost it, and he met the maniac's eyes with a steady and
aggressive glare.
"There, you see, it's quite light. It makes no appreciable noise when I
drop it." He picked it up and let it fall again, as if he had dropped it
for the first time purposely. The ruse was successful.
"Yes. You're right," Garvey said, still standing in the doorway and
staring at him. "At any rate it wouldn't hold enough for two," he
laughed. And as he closed the door the horrid laughter echoed in the
empty hall.
They sat down by a blazing fire and Shorthouse was glad to feel its
warmth. Marx presently brought in coffee. A glass of the old whisky and
a good cigar helped to restore equilibrium. For some minutes the men sat
in silence staring into the fire. Then, without looking up, Garvey said
in a quiet voice--
"I suppose it was a shock to you to see me eat raw meat like that. I
must apologise if it was unpleasant to you. But it's all I can eat and
it's the only meal I take in the twenty-four hours."
"Best nourishment in the world, no doubt; though I should think it might
be a trifle strong for some stomachs."
He tried to lead the conversation away from so unpleasant a subject, and
went on to talk rapidly of the values of different foods, of
vegetarianism and vegetarians, and of men who had gone for long periods
without any food at all. Garvey listened apparently without interest and
had nothing to say. At the first pause he jumped in eagerly.
"When the hunger is really great on me," he said, still gazing into the
fire, "I simply cannot control myself. I must have raw meat--the first I
can get--" Here he raised his shining eyes and Shorthouse felt his hair
beginning to rise.
"It comes upon me so suddenly too. I never can tell when to expect it. A
year ago the passion rose in me like a whirlwind and Marx was out and I
couldn't get meat. I had to get something or I should have bitten
myself. Just when it was getting unbearable my dog ran out from beneath
the sofa. It was a spaniel."
Shorthouse responded with an effort. He hardly knew what he was saying
and his skin crawled as if a million ants were moving over it.
There was a pause of several minutes.
"I've bitten Marx all over," Garvey went on presently in his strange
quiet voice, and as if he were speaking of apples; "but he's bitter. I
doubt if the hunger could ever make me do it again. Probably that's what
first drove him to take shelter in a vacuum." He chuckled hideously as
he thought of this solution of his attendant's disappearances.
Shorthouse seized the poker and poked the fire as if his life depended
on it. But when the banging and clattering was over Garvey continued his
remarks with the same calmness. The next sentence, however, was never
finished. The secretary had got upon his feet suddenly.
"I shall ask your permission to retire," he said in a determined voice;
"I'm tired to-night; will you be good enough to show me to my room?"
Garvey looked up at him with a curious cringing expression behind which
there shone the gleam of cunning passion.
"Certainly," he said, rising from his chair. "You've had a tiring
journey. I ought to have thought of that before."
He took the candle from the table and lit it, and the fingers that held
the match trembled.
"We needn't trouble Marx," he explained. "That beast's in his vacuum by
this time."
III
They crossed the hall and began to ascend the carpetless wooden stairs.
They were in the well of the house and the air cut like ice. Garvey,
the flickering candle in his hand throwing his face into strong outline,
led the way across the first landing and opened a door near the mouth of
a dark passage. A pleasant room greeted the visitor's eyes, and he
rapidly took in its points while his host walked over and lit two
candles that stood on a table at the foot of the bed. A fire burned
brightly in the grate. There were two windows, opening like doors, in
the wall opposite, and a high canopied bed occupied most of the space on
the right. Panelling ran all round the room reaching nearly to the
ceiling and gave a warm and cosy appearance to the whole; while the
portraits that stood in alternate panels suggested somehow the
atmosphere of an old country house in England. Shorthouse was agreeably
surprised.
"I hope you'll find everything you need," Garvey was saying in the
doorway. "If not, you have only to ring that bell by the fireplace. Marx
won't hear it of course, but it rings in my laboratory, where I spend
most of the night."
Then, with a brief good-night, he went out and shut the door after him.
The instant he was gone Mr. Sidebotham's private secretary did a
peculiar thing. He planted himself in the middle of the room with his
back to the door, and drawing the pistol swiftly from his hip pocket
levelled it across his left arm at the window. Standing motionless in
this position for thirty seconds he then suddenly swerved right round
and faced in the other direction, pointing his pistol straight at the
keyhole of the door. There followed immediately a sound of shuffling
outside and of steps retreating across the landing.
"On his knees at the keyhole," was the secretary's reflection. "Just as
I thought. But he didn't expect to look down the barrel of a pistol and
it made him jump a little."
As soon as the steps had gone downstairs and died away across the hall,
Shorthouse went over and locked the door, stuffing a piece of crumpled
paper into the second keyhole which he saw immediately above the first.
After that, he made a thorough search of the room. It hardly repaid the
trouble, for he found nothing unusual. Yet he was glad he had made it.
It relieved him to find no one was in hiding under the bed or in the
deep oak cupboard; and he hoped sincerely it was not the cupboard in
which the unfortunate spaniel had come to its vile death. The French
windows, he discovered, opened on to a little balcony. It looked on to
the front, and there was a drop of less than twenty feet to the ground
below. The bed was high and wide, soft as feathers and covered with
snowy sheets--very inviting to a tired man; and beside the blazing fire
were a couple of deep armchairs.
Altogether it was very pleasant and comfortable; but, tired though he
was, Shorthouse had no intention of going to bed. It was impossible to
disregard the warning of his nerves. They had never failed him before,
and when that sense of distressing horror lodged in his bones he knew
there was something in the wind and that a red flag was flying over the
immediate future. Some delicate instrument in his being, more subtle
than the senses, more accurate than mere presentiment, had seen the red
flag and interpreted its meaning.
Again it seemed to him, as he sat in an armchair over the fire, that his
movements were being carefully watched from somewhere; and, not knowing
what weapons might be used against him, he felt that his real safety lay
in a rigid control of his mind and feelings and a stout refusal to admit
that he was in the least alarmed.
The house was very still. As the night wore on the wind dropped. Only
occasional bursts of sleet against the windows reminded him that the
elements were awake and uneasy. Once or twice the windows rattled and
the rain hissed in the fire, but the roar of the wind in the chimney
grew less and less and the lonely building was at last lapped in a great
stillness. The coals clicked, settling themselves deeper in the grate,
and the noise of the cinders dropping with a tiny report into the soft
heap of accumulated ashes was the only sound that punctuated the
silence.
In proportion as the power of sleep grew upon him the dread of the
situation lessened; but so imperceptibly, so gradually, and so
insinuatingly that he scarcely realised the change. He thought he was as
wide awake to his danger as ever. The successful exclusion of horrible
mental pictures of what he had seen he attributed to his rigorous
control, instead of to their true cause, the creeping over him of the
soft influences of sleep. The faces in the coals were so soothing; the
armchair was so comfortable; so sweet the breath that gently pressed
upon his eyelids; so subtle the growth of the sensation of safety. He
settled down deeper into the chair and in another moment would have been
asleep when the red flag began to shake violently to and fro and he sat
bolt upright as if he had been stabbed in the back.
Someone was coming up the stairs. The boards creaked beneath a stealthy
weight.
Shorthouse sprang from the chair and crossed the room swiftly, taking up
his position beside the door, but out of range of the keyhole. The two
candles flared unevenly on the table at the foot of the bed. The steps
were slow and cautious--it seemed thirty seconds between each one--but