The Red Room
and solitude. And to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it
and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I stood that
candle upon the floor of the alcove and left it in that position.
By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although
to my reason there was no adequate cause for my condition. My mind,
however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that
nothing supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began
stringing some rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, concerning the
original legend of the place. A few I spoke aloud, but the echoes were
not pleasant. For the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a
conversation with myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting.
My mind reverted to the three old and distorted people downstairs, and I
tried to keep it upon that topic.
The sombre reds and grays of the room troubled me; even with its seven
candles the place was merely dim. The light in the alcove flaring in
a draft, and the fire flickering, kept the shadows and penumbra
perpetually shifting and stirring in a noiseless flighty dance. Casting
about for a remedy, I recalled the wax candles I had seen in the
corridor, and, with a slight effort, carrying a candle and leaving the
door open, I walked out into the moonlight, and presently returned with
as many as ten. These I put in the various knick-knacks of china with
which the room was sparsely adorned, and lit and placed them where
the shadows had lain deepest, some on the floor, some in the window
recesses, arranging and rearranging them until at last my seventeen
candles were so placed that not an inch of the room but had the direct
light of at least one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost
came I could warn him not to trip over them. The room was now quite
brightly illuminated. There was something very cheering and reassuring
in these little silent streaming flames, and to notice their steady
diminution of length offered me an occupation and gave me a reassuring
sense of the passage of time.
Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed
heavily enough upon me. I stood watching the minute hand of my watch
creep towards midnight.
Then something happened in the alcove. I did not see the candle go out,
I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one might start
and see the unexpected presence of a stranger. The black shadow had
sprung back to its place. “By Jove,” said I aloud, recovering from my
surprise, “that draft’s a strong one;” and taking the matchbox from the
table, I walked across the room in a leisurely manner to relight the
corner again. My first match would not strike, and as I succeeded with
the second, something seemed to blink on the wall before me. I turned my
head involuntarily and saw that the two candles on the little table by
the fireplace were extinguished. I rose at once to my feet.
“Odd,” I said. “Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness?”
I walked back, relit one, and as I did so I saw the candle in the
right sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost
immediately its companion followed it. The flames vanished as if the
wick had been suddenly nipped between a finger and thumb, leaving the
wick neither glowing nor smoking, but black. While I stood gaping the
candle at the foot of the bed went out, and the shadows seemed to take
another step toward me.
“This won’t do!” said I, and first one and then another candle on the
mantelshelf followed.
“What’s up?” I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice
somehow. At that the candle on the corner of the wardrobe went out, and
the one I had relit in the alcove followed.
“Steady on!” I said, “those candles are wanted,” speaking with a
half-hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the
while, “for the mantel candlesticks.” My hands trembled so much that
twice I missed the rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel emerged
from darkness again, two candles in the remoter end of the room were
eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit the larger mirror
candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for the moment
I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a noiseless volley
there vanished four lights at once in different corners of the room, and
I struck another match in quivering haste, and stood hesitating whither
to take it.
As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two
candles on the table. With a cry of terror I dashed at the alcove, then
into the corner and then into the window, relighting three as two more
vanished by the fireplace, and then, perceiving a better way, I dropped
matches on the iron-bound deedbox in the corner, and caught up the
bedroom candlestick. With this I avoided the delay of striking matches,
but for all that the steady process of extinction went on, and the
shadows I feared and fought against returned, and crept in upon me,
first a step gained on this side of me, then on that. I was now almost
frantic with the horror of the coming darkness, and my self-possession
deserted me. I leaped panting from candle to candle in a vain struggle
against that remorseless advance.
I bruised myself in the thigh against the table, I sent a chair
headlong, I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in
my fall. My candle rolled away from me and I snatched another as I rose.
Abruptly this was blown out as I swung it off the table by the wind of
my sudden movement, and immediately the two remaining candles followed.
But there was light still in the room, a red light, that streamed across
the ceiling and staved off the shadows from me. The fire! Of course I
could still thrust my candle between the bars and relight it.
I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing
coals and splashing red reflections upon the furniture; made two steps
toward the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished,
the glow vanished, the reflections rushed together and disappeared, and
as I thrust the candle between the bars darkness closed upon me like the
shutting of an eye, wrapped about me in a stifling embrace, sealed my
vision, and crushed the last vestiges of self-possession from my brain.
And it was not only palpable darkness, but intolerable terror. The
candle fell from my hands. I flung out my arms in a vain effort to
thrust that ponderous blackness away from me, and lifting up my voice,
screamed with all my might, once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must
have staggered to my feet. I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit
corridor, and with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a
stumbling run for the door.
But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and I struck myself
heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was
either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furnishing. I
have a vague memory of battering myself thus to and fro in the darkness,
of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, of a horrible sensation
of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to keep my
footing, and then I remember no more.
I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the man
with the withered hand was watching my face. I looked about me trying
to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect.
I rolled my eyes into the corner and saw the old woman, no longer
abstracted, no longer terrible, pouring out some drops of medicine
from a little blue phial into a glass. “Where am I?” I said. “I seem to
remember you, and yet I can not remember who you are.”
They told me then, and I heard of the haunted Red Room as one who hears
a tale. “We found you at dawn,” said he, “and there was blood on your
forehead and lips.”
I wondered that I had ever disliked him. The three of them in the
daylight seemed commonplace old folk enough. The man with the green
shade had his head bent as one who sleeps.
It was very slowly I recovered the memory of my experience. “You
believe now,” said the old man with the withered hand, “that the room is
haunted?” He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one
who condoles with a friend.
“Yes,” said I, “the room is haunted.”
“And you have seen it. And we who have been here all our lives have
never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared. Tell us, is it
truly the old earl who--”
“No,” said I, “it is not.”
“I told you so,” said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. “It is
his poor young countess who was frightened--”
“It is not,” I said. “There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of
countess in that room; there is no ghost there at all, but worse, far
worse, something impalpable--”
“Well?” they said.
“The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men,” said I; “and
that is, in all its nakedness--‘Fear!’ Fear that will not have light
nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and
overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in
the room--”
I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to
my bandages. “The candles went out one after another, and I fled--”
Then the man with the shade lifted his face sideways to see me and
spoke.
“That is it,” said he. “I knew that was it. A Power of Darkness. To put
such a curse upon a home! It lurks there always. You can feel it even
in the daytime, even of a bright summer’s day, in the hangings, in the
curtains, keeping behind you however you face about. In the dusk it
creeps in the corridor and follows you, so that you dare not turn. It is
even as you say. Fear itself is in that room. Black Fear.... And there
it will be... so long as this house of sin endures.”