groping into new regions of this endless devil's dyke, in clambering up
and down the pitiless heights, in wandering about the summits, and in
watching the drifting faces, Plattner states that he spent the better part
of seven or eight days. He did not keep count, he says. Though once or
twice he found eyes watching him, he had word with no living soul. He
slept among the rocks on the hillside. In the gorge things earthly were
invisible, because, from the earthly standpoint, it was far underground.
On the altitudes, so soon as the earthly day began, the world became
visible to him. He found himself sometimes stumbling over the dark green
rocks, or arresting himself on a precipitous brink, while all about him
the green branches of the Sussexville lanes were swaying; or, again, he
seemed to be walking through the Sussexville streets, or watching unseen
the private business of some household. And then it was he discovered,
that to almost every human being in our world there pertained some of
these drifting heads; that everyone in the world is watched intermittently
by these helpless disembodiments.
What are they--these Watchers of the Living? Plattner never learned. But
two, that presently found and followed him, were like his childhood's
memory of his father and mother. Now and then other faces turned their
eyes upon him: eyes like those of dead people who had swayed him, or
injured him, or helped him in his youth and manhood. Whenever they looked
at him, Plattner was overcome with a strange sense of responsibility. To
his mother he ventured to speak; but she made no answer. She looked sadly,
steadfastly, and tenderly--a little reproachfully, too, it seemed--into
his eyes.
He simply tells this story: he does not endeavour to explain. We are left
to surmise who these Watchers of the Living may be, or, if they are indeed
the Dead, why they should so closely and passionately watch a world they
have left for ever. It may be--indeed to my mind it seems just--that, when
our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we
may still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we
have laid. If human souls continue after death, then surely human
interests continue after death. But that is merely my own guess at the
meaning of the things seen. Plattner offers no interpretation, for none
was given him. It is well the reader should understand this clearly. Day
after day, with his head reeling, he wandered about this strange lit world
outside the world, weary and, towards the end, weak and hungry. By day--by
our earthly day, that is--the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery
of Sussexville, all about him, irked and worried him. He could not see
where to put his feet, and ever and again with a chilly touch one of these
Watching Souls would come against his face. And after dark the multitude
of these Watchers about him, and their intent distress, confused his mind
beyond describing. A great longing to return to the earthly life that was
so near and yet so remote consumed him. The unearthliness of things about
him produced a positively painful mental distress. He was worried beyond
describing by his own particular followers. He would shout at them to
desist from staring at him, scold at them, hurry away from them. They were
always mute and intent. Run as he might over the uneven ground, they
followed his destinies.
On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible footsteps
approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering over the broad
crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this
strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge,
feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that
was happening in a room in a back street near the school. Both of the
people in the room he knew by sight. The windows were open, the blinds up,
and the setting sun shone clearly into it, so that it came out quite
brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying like a magic-lantern
picture upon the black landscape and the livid green dawn. In addition to
the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in the room.
On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the
tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little
table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and water,
and an empty glass. Every now and then the lank man's lips fell apart,
to indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman did not notice
that he wanted anything, because she was busy turning out papers from an
old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the room. At first the
picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn behind it grew
brighter and brighter, so it became fainter and more and more transparent.
As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps that
sound so loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this, Plattner
perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering together out
of the darkness and watching the two people in the room. Never before had
he seen so many of the Watchers of the Living. A multitude had eyes only
for the sufferer in the room, another multitude, in infinite anguish,
watched the woman as she hunted with greedy eyes for something she could
not find. They crowded about Plattner, they came across his sight and
buffeted his face, the noise of their unavailing regrets was all about
him. He saw clearly only now and then. At other times the picture quivered
dimly, through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the
room it must have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame
streamed up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each
footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces!
Two, more particularly near the woman's: one a woman's also, white and
clear-featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard, but which
was now softened by the touch of a wisdom strange to earth. The other
might have been the woman's father. Both were evidently absorbed in the
contemplation of some act of hateful meanness, so it seemed, which they
could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind were others, teachers,
it may be, who had taught ill, friends whose influence had failed. And
over the man, too--a multitude, but none that seemed to be parents or
teachers! Faces that might once have been coarse, now purged to strength
by sorrow! And in the forefront one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor
remorseful, but merely patient and weary, and, as it seemed to Plattner,
waiting for relief. His powers of description fail him at the memory of
this multitude of ghastly countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the
bell. He saw them all in the space of a second. It would seem that he was
so worked on by his excitement that, quite involuntarily, his restless
fingers took the bottle of green powder out of his pocket and held it
before him. But he does not remember that.
Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was
silence, and then suddenly, cutting through the unexpected stillness like
a keen, thin blade, came the first stroke of the bell. At that the
multitudinous faces swayed to and fro, and a louder crying began all about
him. The woman did not hear; she was burning something now in the candle
flame. At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of wind, icy
cold, blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about him like an
eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke something was
extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a beam of light. This
was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at it, Plattner saw that it
was a shadowy arm and hand.
The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon, and
the vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that the white
of the bed struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman looked round
over her shoulder at it, startled.
The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the
wind, and swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then
suddenly Plattner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that
stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare turn
his head to see the Shadow behind the arm. With a violent effort, and
covering his eyes, he set himself to run, made, perhaps, twenty strides,
then slipped on a boulder, and fell. He fell forward on his hands; and the
bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the ground.
In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face to
face with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.
* * * * *
There the story of Plattner's experiences ends. I have resisted, I believe
successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up
incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the
order in which Plattner told it to me. I have carefully avoided any
attempt at style, effect, or construction. It would have been easy, for
instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed into a kind of plot in
which Plattner might have been involved. But, quite apart from the
objectionableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such
trite devices would spoil, to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark
world, with its livid green illumination and its drifting Watchers of the
Living, which, unseen and unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.
It remains to add that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace, just
beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at the moment of
Plattner's return. Deceased was a rate-collector and insurance agent. His
widow, who was much younger than himself, married last month a Mr.
Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the portion of this story
given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussexville, she has
consented to my use of her name, on condition that I make it distinctly
known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Plattner's account
of her husband's last moments. She burnt no will, she says, although
Plattner never accused her of doing so; her husband made but one will, and
that just after their marriage. Certainly, from a man who had never seen
it, Plattner's account of the furniture of the room was curiously
accurate.
One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must insist
upon, lest I seem to favour the credulous, superstitious view. Plattner's
absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved. But that does
not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even outside space
hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the reader must bear
distinctly in mind.
XVI.
THE RED ROOM.
"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to
frighten me." And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.
"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and glanced
at me askance.
"Eight-and-twenty years," said I, "I have lived, and never a ghost have I
seen as yet."
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.
"Ay," she broke in; "and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never
seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when
one's still but eight-and-twenty." She swayed her head slowly from side to
side. "A many things to see and sorrow for."
I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual
terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty
glass on the table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of
myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the
queer old mirror at the end of the room. "Well," I said, "if I see
anything to-night, I shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the
business with an open mind."
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the
passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man
entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He
supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade,
and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying
yellow teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of
the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the
withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the
old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed
steadily on the fire.
"I said--it's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, when
the coughing had ceased for a while.
"It's my own choosing," I answered.
The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time, and
threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a
momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he
began to cough and splutter again.
"Why don't you drink?" said the man with the withered arm, pushing the
beer towards him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful with a
shaky hand that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous
shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as he poured
and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these grotesque
custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something
crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people
insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with
their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to
me and to one another.
"If," said I, "you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will make
myself comfortable there."
The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it
startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under the
shade; but no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one to the
other.
"If," I said a little louder, "if you will show me to this haunted room of
yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me."
"There's a candle on the slab outside the door," said the man with the
withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. "But if you go to the
red room to-night----"
("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)
"You go alone."
"Very well," I answered. "And which way do I go?"
"You go along the passage for a bit," said he, "until you come to a door,
and through that is a spiral staircase, and half-way up that is a landing
and another door covered with baize. Go through that and down the long
corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the steps."
"Have I got that right?" I said, and repeated his directions. He corrected
me in one particular.
"And are you really going?" said the man with the shade, looking at me
again for the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the face.
("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)
"It is what I came for," I said, and moved towards the door. As I did so,
the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as to be
closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned and looked at
them, and saw they were all close together, dark against the firelight,
staring at me over their shoulders, with an intent expression on their
ancient faces.
"Good-night," I said, setting the door open.
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm.
I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I
shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.
I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose
charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old-fashioned
furniture of the housekeeper's room in which they foregathered, affected
me in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase. They
seemed to belong to another age, an older age, an age when things
spiritual were different from this of ours, less certain; an age when
omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying. Their very
existence was spectral; the cut of their clothing, fashions born in dead
brains. The ornaments and conveniences of the room about them were
ghostly--the thoughts of vanished men, which still haunted rather than
participated in the world of to-day. But with an effort I sent such
thoughts to the right-about. The long, draughty subterranean passage was
chilly and dusty, and my candle flared and made the shadows cower and
quiver. The echoes rang up and down the spiral staircase, and a shadow
came sweeping up after me, and one fled before me into the darkness
overhead. I came to the landing and stopped there for a moment, listening
to a rustling that I fancied I heard; then, satisfied of the absolute
silence, I pushed open the baize-covered door and stood in the corridor.
The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in by
the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid
black shadow or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place: the
house might have been deserted on the yesterday instead of eighteen months
ago. There were candles in the sockets of the sconces, and whatever dust
had gathered on the carpets or upon the polished flooring was distributed
so evenly as to be invisible in the moonlight. I was about to advance, and
stopped abruptly. A bronze group stood upon the landing, hidden from me by
the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell with marvellous distinctness
upon the white panelling, and gave me the impression of someone crouching
to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a minute perhaps. Then, with my hand
in the pocket that held my revolver, I advanced, only to discover a
Ganymede and Eagle glistening in the moonlight. That incident for a time
restored my nerve, and a porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head
rocked silently as I passed him, scarcely startled me.
The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy corner.
I moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the nature of
the recess in which I stood before opening the door. Here it was, thought
I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that story gave me a
sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced over my shoulder at the Ganymede
in the moonlight, and opened the door of the red room rather hastily, with
my face half turned to the pallid silence of the landing.
I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in
the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the scene
of my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young
duke had died. Or, rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he had
opened the door and fallen headlong down the steps I had just ascended.
That had been the end of his vigil, of his gallant attempt to conquer the
ghostly tradition of the place, and never, I thought, had apoplexy better
served the ends of superstition. And there were other and older stories
that clung to the room, back to the half-credible beginning of it all, the
tale of a timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband's jest of
frightening her. And looking around that large sombre room, with its
shadowy window bays, its recesses and alcoves, one could well understand
the legends that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating
darkness. My candle was a little tongue of light in its vastness, that
failed to pierce the opposite end of the room, and left an ocean of
mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light.
I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and
dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a
hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I
began to walk about the room, peering round each article of furniture,
tucking up the valances of the bed, and opening its curtains wide. I
pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of the several windows
before closing the shutters, leant forward and looked up the blackness
of the wide chimney, and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret
opening. There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of
sconces bearing candles, and on the mantelshelf, too, were more candles in
china candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was
laid, an unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper,--and I lit it,
to keep down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning well, I
stood round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I had pulled
up a chintz-covered arm-chair and a table, to form a kind of barricade
before me, and on this lay my revolver ready to hand. My precise
examination had done me good, but I still found the remoter darkness of
the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for the imagination.
The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was no sort of comfort
to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular, had that
undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking,
living thing, that comes so easily in silence and solitude. At last, 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 the condition. My mind, however,
was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that nothing
supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began to string some
rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, of 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 blacks of the room troubled, me; even with seven
candles the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove flared in a
draught, and the fire-flickering kept the shadows and penumbra perpetually
shifting and stirring. Casting about for a remedy, I recalled the candles
I had seen in the passage, and, with a slight effort, walked out into the
moonlight, carrying a candle and leaving the door open, and presently
returned with as many as ten. These I put in various knick-knacks of china
with which the room was sparsely adorned, lit and placed where the shadows
had lain deepest, some on the floor, some in the window recesses, until at
last my seventeen candles were so arranged 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 cheery and
reassuring in these little streaming flames, and snuffing them gave me an
occupation, and afforded a helpful sense of the passage of time. Even with
that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon
me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out,
and the black shadow sprang back to its place there. 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. "By Jove!" said
I aloud; "that draught's a strong one!" and, taking the matches 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?"