have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his
"messes" and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the
atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He
attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as
meat attracts flies, and jam wasps. It is to the meat and jam of his
life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all
pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the
interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became
regular as the sun's instead of erratic as a comet's.
The first experience in order of time that he related to me shows that
somewhere latent behind his disarranged nervous system there lay psychic
perceptions of an uncommon order. About the age of twenty-two--I think
after his second rustication--his father's purse and patience had
equally given out, and Jim found himself stranded high and dry in a
large American city. High and dry! And the only clothes that had no
holes in them safely in the keeping of his uncle's wardrobe.
Careful reflection on a bench in one of the city parks led him to the
conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of
one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a
ready pen, and that he could "do good work for your paper, sir, as a
reporter." This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle
between the editor and the window to conceal the whereabouts of the
holes.
"Guess we'll have to give you a week's trial," said the editor, who,
ever on the lookout for good chance material, took on shoals of men in
that way and retained on the average one man per shoal. Anyhow it gave
Jim Shorthouse the wherewithal to sew up the holes and relieve his
uncle's wardrobe of its burden.
Then he went to find living quarters; and in this proceeding his unique
characteristics already referred to--what theosophists would call his
Karma--began unmistakably to assert themselves, for it was in the house
he eventually selected that this sad tale took place.
There are no "diggings" in American cities. The alternatives for small
incomes are grim enough--rooms in a boarding-house where meals are
served, or in a room-house where no meals are served--not even
breakfast. Rich people live in palaces, of course, but Jim had nothing
to do with "sich-like." His horizon was bounded by boarding-houses and
room-houses; and, owing to the necessary irregularity of his meals and
hours, he took the latter.
It was a large, gaunt-looking place in a side street, with dirty windows
and a creaking iron gate, but the rooms were large, and the one he
selected and paid for in advance was on the top floor. The landlady
looked gaunt and dusty as the house, and quite as old. Her eyes were
green and faded, and her features large.
"Waal," she twanged, with her electrifying Western drawl, "that's the
room, if you like it, and that's the price I said. Now, if you want it,
why, just say so; and if you don't, why, it don't hurt me any."
Jim wanted to shake her, but he feared the clouds of long-accumulated
dust in her clothes, and as the price and size of the room suited him,
he decided to take it.
"Anyone else on this floor?" he asked.
She looked at him queerly out of her faded eyes before she answered.
"None of my guests ever put such questions to me before," she said; "but
I guess you're different. Why, there's no one at all but an old gent
that's stayed here every bit of five years. He's over thar," pointing
to the end of the passage.
"Ah! I see," said Shorthouse feebly. "So I'm alone up here?"
"Reckon you are, pretty near," she twanged out, ending the conversation
abruptly by turning her back on her new "guest," and going slowly and
deliberately downstairs.
The newspaper work kept Shorthouse out most of the night. Three times a
week he got home at 1 a.m., and three times at 3 a.m. The room proved
comfortable enough, and he paid for a second week. His unusual hours had
so far prevented his meeting any inmates of the house, and not a sound
had been heard from the "old gent" who shared the floor with him. It
seemed a very quiet house.
One night, about the middle of the second week, he came home tired after
a long day's work. The lamp that usually stood all night in the hall had
burned itself out, and he had to stumble upstairs in the dark. He made
considerable noise in doing so, but nobody seemed to be disturbed. The
whole house was utterly quiet, and probably everybody was asleep. There
were no lights under any of the doors. All was in darkness. It was after
two o'clock.
After reading some English letters that had come during the day, and
dipping for a few minutes into a book, he became drowsy and got ready
for bed. Just as he was about to get in between the sheets, he stopped
for a moment and listened. There rose in the night, as he did so, the
sound of steps somewhere in the house below. Listening attentively, he
heard that it was somebody coming upstairs--a heavy tread, and the owner
taking no pains to step quietly. On it came up the stairs, tramp, tramp,
tramp--evidently the tread of a big man, and one in something of a
hurry.
At once thoughts connected somehow with fire and police flashed through
Jim's brain, but there were no sounds of voices with the steps, and he
reflected in the same moment that it could only be the old gentleman
keeping late hours and tumbling upstairs in the darkness. He was in the
act of turning out the gas and stepping into bed, when the house resumed
its former stillness by the footsteps suddenly coming to a dead stop
immediately outside his own room.
With his hand on the gas, Shorthouse paused a moment before turning it
out to see if the steps would go on again, when he was startled by a
loud knocking on his door. Instantly, in obedience to a curious and
unexplained instinct, he turned out the light, leaving himself and the
room in total darkness.
He had scarcely taken a step across the room to open the door, when a
voice from the other side of the wall, so close it almost sounded in his
ear, exclaimed in German, "Is that you, father? Come in."
The speaker was a man in the next room, and the knocking, after all, had
not been on his own door, but on that of the adjoining chamber, which he
had supposed to be vacant.
Almost before the man in the passage had time to answer in German, "Let
me in at once," Jim heard someone cross the floor and unlock the door.
Then it was slammed to with a bang, and there was audible the sound of
footsteps about the room, and of chairs being drawn up to a table and
knocking against furniture on the way. The men seemed wholly regardless
of their neighbour's comfort, for they made noise enough to waken the
dead.
"Serves me right for taking a room in such a cheap hole," reflected Jim
in the darkness. "I wonder whom she's let the room to!"
The two rooms, the landlady had told him, were originally one. She had
put up a thin partition--just a row of boards--to increase her income.
The doors were adjacent, and only separated by the massive upright beam
between them. When one was opened or shut the other rattled.
With utter indifference to the comfort of the other sleepers in the
house, the two Germans had meanwhile commenced to talk both at once and
at the top of their voices. They talked emphatically, even angrily. The
words "Father" and "Otto" were freely used. Shorthouse understood
German, but as he stood listening for the first minute or two, an
eavesdropper in spite of himself, it was difficult to make head or tail
of the talk, for neither would give way to the other, and the jumble of
guttural sounds and unfinished sentences was wholly unintelligible.
Then, very suddenly, both voices dropped together; and, after a moment's
pause, the deep tones of one of them, who seemed to be the "father,"
said, with the utmost distinctness--
"You mean, Otto, that you refuse to get it?"
There was a sound of someone shuffling in the chair before the answer
came. "I mean that I don't know how to get it. It is so much, father. It
is _too_ much. A part of it--"
"A part of it!" cried the other, with an angry oath, "a part of it, when
ruin and disgrace are already in the house, is worse than useless. If
you can get half you can get all, you wretched fool. Half-measures only
damn all concerned."
"You told me last time--" began the other firmly, but was not allowed to
finish. A succession of horrible oaths drowned his sentence, and the
father went on, in a voice vibrating with anger--
"You know she will give you anything. You have only been married a few
months. If you ask and give a plausible reason you can get all we want
and more. You can ask it temporarily. All will be paid back. It will
re-establish the firm, and she will never know what was done with it.
With that amount, Otto, you know I can recoup all these terrible losses,
and in less than a year all will be repaid. But without it. . . . You must
get it, Otto. Hear me, you must. Am I to be arrested for the misuse of
trust moneys? Is our honoured name to be cursed and spat on?" The old
man choked and stammered in his anger and desperation.
Shorthouse stood shivering in the darkness and listening in spite of
himself. The conversation had carried him along with it, and he had been
for some reason afraid to let his neighbourhood be known. But at this
point he realised that he had listened too long and that he must inform
the two men that they could be overheard to every single syllable. So he
coughed loudly, and at the same time rattled the handle of his door. It
seemed to have no effect, for the voices continued just as loudly as
before, the son protesting and the father growing more and more angry.
He coughed again persistently, and also contrived purposely in the
darkness to tumble against the partition, feeling the thin boards yield
easily under his weight, and making a considerable noise in so doing.
But the voices went on unconcernedly, and louder than ever. Could it be
possible they had not heard?
By this time Jim was more concerned about his own sleep than the
morality of overhearing the private scandals of his neighbours, and he
went out into the passage and knocked smartly at their door. Instantly,
as if by magic, the sounds ceased. Everything dropped into utter
silence. There was no light under the door and not a whisper could be
heard within. He knocked again, but received no answer.
"Gentlemen," he began at length, with his lips close to the keyhole and
in German, "please do not talk so loud. I can overhear all you say in
the next room. Besides, it is very late, and I wish to sleep."
He paused and listened, but no answer was forthcoming. He turned the
handle and found the door was locked. Not a sound broke the stillness of
the night except the faint swish of the wind over the skylight and the
creaking of a board here and there in the house below. The cold air of a
very early morning crept down the passage, and made him shiver. The
silence of the house began to impress him disagreeably. He looked behind
him and about him, hoping, and yet fearing, that something would break
the stillness. The voices still seemed to ring on in his ears; but that
sudden silence, when he knocked at the door, affected him far more
unpleasantly than the voices, and put strange thoughts in his
brain--thoughts he did not like or approve.
Moving stealthily from the door, he peered over the banisters into the
space below. It was like a deep vault that might conceal in its shadows
anything that was not good. It was not difficult to fancy he saw an
indistinct moving to-and-fro below him. Was that a figure sitting on the
stairs peering up obliquely at him out of hideous eyes? Was that a sound
of whispering and shuffling down there in the dark halls and forsaken
landings? Was it something more than the inarticulate murmur of the
night?
The wind made an effort overhead, singing over the skylight, and the
door behind him rattled and made him start. He turned to go back to his
room, and the draught closed the door slowly in his face as if there
were someone pressing against it from the other side. When he pushed it
open and went in, a hundred shadowy forms seemed to dart swiftly and
silently back to their corners and hiding-places. But in the adjoining
room the sounds had entirely ceased, and Shorthouse soon crept into bed,
and left the house with its inmates, waking or sleeping, to take care of
themselves, while he entered the region of dreams and silence.
Next day, strong in the common sense that the sunlight brings, he
determined to lodge a complaint against the noisy occupants of the next
room and make the landlady request them to modify their voices at such
late hours of the night and morning. But it so happened that she was not
to be seen that day, and when he returned from the office at midnight it
was, of course, too late.
Looking under the door as he came up to bed he noticed that there was no
light, and concluded that the Germans were not in. So much the better.
He went to sleep about one o'clock, fully decided that if they came up
later and woke him with their horrible noises he would not rest till he
had roused the landlady and made her reprove them with that
authoritative twang, in which every word was like the lash of a metallic
whip.
However, there proved to be no need for such drastic measures, for
Shorthouse slumbered peacefully all night, and his dreams--chiefly of
the fields of grain and flocks of sheep on the far-away farms of his
father's estate--were permitted to run their fanciful course unbroken.
Two nights later, however, when he came home tired out, after a
difficult day, and wet and blown about by one of the wickedest storms he
had ever seen, his dreams--always of the fields and sheep--were not
destined to be so undisturbed.
He had already dozed off in that delicious glow that follows the removal
of wet clothes and the immediate snuggling under warm blankets, when his
consciousness, hovering on the borderland between sleep and waking, was
vaguely troubled by a sound that rose indistinctly from the depths of
the house, and, between the gusts of wind and rain, reached his ears
with an accompanying sense of uneasiness and discomfort. It rose on the
night air with some pretence of regularity, dying away again in the roar
of the wind to reassert itself distantly in the deep, brief hushes of
the storm.
For a few minutes Jim's dreams were coloured only--tinged, as it were,
by this impression of fear approaching from somewhere insensibly upon
him. His consciousness, at first, refused to be drawn back from that
enchanted region where it had wandered, and he did not immediately
awaken. But the nature of his dreams changed unpleasantly. He saw the
sheep suddenly run huddled together, as though frightened by the
neighbourhood of an enemy, while the fields of waving corn became
agitated as though some monster were moving uncouthly among the crowded
stalks. The sky grew dark, and in his dream an awful sound came
somewhere from the clouds. It was in reality the sound downstairs
growing more distinct.
Shorthouse shifted uneasily across the bed with something like a groan
of distress. The next minute he awoke, and found himself sitting
straight up in bed--listening. Was it a nightmare? Had he been dreaming
evil dreams, that his flesh crawled and the hair stirred on his head?
The room was dark and silent, but outside the wind howled dismally and
drove the rain with repeated assaults against the rattling windows. How
nice it would be--the thought flashed through his mind--if all winds,
like the west wind, went down with the sun! They made such fiendish
noises at night, like the crying of angry voices. In the daytime they
had such a different sound. If only--
Hark! It was no dream after all, for the sound was momentarily growing
louder, and its _cause_ was coming up the stairs. He found himself
speculating feebly what this cause might be, but the sound was still too
indistinct to enable him to arrive at any definite conclusion.
The voice of a church clock striking two made itself heard above the
wind. It was just about the hour when the Germans had commenced their
performance three nights before. Shorthouse made up his mind that if
they began it again he would not put up with it for very long. Yet he
was already horribly conscious of the difficulty he would have of
getting out of bed. The clothes were so warm and comforting against his
back. The sound, still steadily coming nearer, had by this time become
differentiated from the confused clamour of the elements, and had
resolved itself into the footsteps of one or more persons.
"The Germans, hang 'em!" thought Jim. "But what on earth is the matter
with me? I never felt so queer in all my life."
He was trembling all over, and felt as cold as though he were in a
freezing atmosphere. His nerves were steady enough, and he felt no
diminution of physical courage, but he was conscious of a curious sense
of malaise and trepidation, such as even the most vigorous men have been
known to experience when in the first grip of some horrible and deadly
disease. As the footsteps approached this feeling of weakness increased.
He felt a strange lassitude creeping over him, a sort of exhaustion,
accompanied by a growing numbness in the extremities, and a sensation of
dreaminess in the head, as if perhaps the consciousness were leaving its
accustomed seat in the brain and preparing to act on another plane. Yet,
strange to say, as the vitality was slowly withdrawn from his body, his
senses seemed to grow more acute.
Meanwhile the steps were already on the landing at the top of the
stairs, and Shorthouse, still sitting upright in bed, heard a heavy body
brush past his door and along the wall outside, almost immediately
afterwards the loud knocking of someone's knuckles on the door of the
adjoining room.
Instantly, though so far not a sound had proceeded from within, he
heard, through the thin partition, a chair pushed back and a man quickly
cross the floor and open the door.
"Ah! it's you," he heard in the son's voice. Had the fellow, then, been
sitting silently in there all this time, waiting for his father's
arrival? To Shorthouse it came not as a pleasant reflection by any
means.
There was no answer to this dubious greeting, but the door was closed
quickly, and then there was a sound as if a bag or parcel had been
thrown on a wooden table and had slid some distance across it before
stopping.
"What's that?" asked the son, with anxiety in his tone.
"You may know before I go," returned the other gruffly. Indeed his voice
was more than gruff: it betrayed ill-suppressed passion.
Shorthouse was conscious of a strong desire to stop the conversation
before it proceeded any further, but somehow or other his will was not
equal to the task, and he could not get out of bed. The conversation
went on, every tone and inflexion distinctly audible above the noise of
the storm.
In a low voice the father continued. Jim missed some of the words at the
beginning of the sentence. It ended with: " . . . but now they've all left,
and I've managed to get up to you. You know what I've come for." There
was distinct menace in his tone.
"Yes," returned the other; "I have been waiting."
"And the money?" asked the father impatiently.
No answer.
"You've had three days to get it in, and I've contrived to stave off the
worst so far--but to-morrow is the end."
No answer.
"Speak, Otto! What have you got for me? Speak, my son; for God's sake,
tell me."
There was a moment's silence, during which the old man's vibrating
accents seemed to echo through the rooms. Then came in a low voice the
answer--
"I have nothing."
"Otto!" cried the other with passion, "nothing!"
"I can get nothing," came almost in a whisper.
"You lie!" cried the other, in a half-stifled voice. "I swear you lie.
Give me the money."
A chair was heard scraping along the floor. Evidently the men had been
sitting over the table, and one of them had risen. Shorthouse heard the
bag or parcel drawn across the table, and then a step as if one of the
men was crossing to the door.
"Father, what's in that? I must know," said Otto, with the first signs
of determination in his voice. There must have been an effort on the
son's part to gain possession of the parcel in question, and on the
father's to retain it, for between them it fell to the ground. A curious
rattle followed its contact with the floor. Instantly there were sounds
of a scuffle. The men were struggling for the possession of the box. The
elder man with oaths, and blasphemous imprecations, the other with short
gasps that betokened the strength of his efforts. It was of short
duration, and the younger man had evidently won, for a minute later was
heard his angry exclamation.
"I knew it. Her jewels! You scoundrel, you shall never have them. It is
a crime."
The elder man uttered a short, guttural laugh, which froze Jim's blood
and made his skin creep. No word was spoken, and for the space of ten
seconds there was a living silence. Then the air trembled with the sound
of a thud, followed immediately by a groan and the crash of a heavy body
falling over on to the table. A second later there was a lurching from
the table on to the floor and against the partition that separated the
rooms. The bed quivered an instant at the shock, but the unholy spell
was lifted from his soul and Jim Shorthouse sprang out of bed and across
the floor in a single bound. He knew that ghastly murder had been
done--the murder by a father of his son.
With shaking fingers but a determined heart he lit the gas, and the
first thing in which his eyes corroborated the evidence of his ears was
the horrifying detail that the lower portion of the partition bulged
unnaturally into his own room. The glaring paper with which it was
covered had cracked under the tension and the boards beneath it bent
inwards towards him. What hideous load was behind them, he shuddered to
think.
All this he saw in less than a second. Since the final lurch against the
wall not a sound had proceeded from the room, not even a groan or a
foot-step. All was still but the howl of the wind, which to his ears
had in it a note of triumphant horror.
Shorthouse was in the act of leaving the room to rouse the house and
send for the police--in fact his hand was already on the door-knob--when
something in the room arrested his attention. Out of the corner of his
eyes he thought he caught sight of something moving. He was sure of it,
and turning his eyes in the direction, he found he was not mistaken.
Something was creeping slowly towards him along the floor. It was
something dark and serpentine in shape, and it came from the place where
the partition bulged. He stooped down to examine it with feelings of
intense horror and repugnance, and he discovered that it was moving
toward him from the _other side_ of the wall. His eyes were fascinated,
and for the moment he was unable to move. Silently, slowly, from side to
side like a thick worm, it crawled forward into the room beneath his
frightened eyes, until at length he could stand it no longer and
stretched out his arm to touch it. But at the instant of contact he
withdrew his hand with a suppressed scream. It was sluggish--and it was
warm! and he saw that his fingers were stained with living crimson.
A second more, and Shorthouse was out in the passage with his hand on
the door of the next room. It was locked. He plunged forward with all
his weight against it, and, the lock giving way, he fell headlong into a
room that was pitch dark and very cold. In a moment he was on his feet
again and trying to penetrate the blackness. Not a sound, not a
movement. Not even the sense of a presence. It was empty, miserably
empty!
Across the room he could trace the outline of a window with rain
streaming down the outside, and the blurred lights of the city beyond.
But the room was empty, appallingly empty; and so still. He stood there,
cold as ice, staring, shivering listening. Suddenly there was a step
behind him and a light flashed into the room, and when he turned quickly
with his arm up as if to ward off a terrific blow he found himself face
to face with the landlady. Instantly the reaction began to set in.