"I have been so lonely since mother died, that my health, never of
the strongest, as you know, has suffered seriously. My physician
tells me that something is wrong with the periphrastic action, if
you know what that is," [I suppose Miss Fellows meant the
peristaltic action,] "and prophesies something dreadful, (I've
forgotten whether it was to be in the head, or the heart, or the
stomach,) if I cannot have change of air and scene this winter. I
should dearly love to spend some time with you in your new home, (I
fancy it will be drier than the old one,) if convenient to you. If
inconvenient, don't hesitate to say so, of course. I hope to hear
from you soon.
"In haste, your aff. cousin,
"Gertrude Fellows.
"P.S.--I shall of course insist upon being a boarder if I come.
"G.F."
"Hum-m. Insipid sort of letter."
"Exactly. That's Gertrude. No more flavor than a frozen pear. If she had
one distinguishing peculiarity, good or bad, I believe I should like
her better. But I'm sorry for the woman."
"Sorry enough to stand a winter of her?"
"If we hadn't just been through this moving! A new house and
all,--nobody knows how the flues are yet, or whether we can heat a spare
room. She hasn't had a home, though, since Cousin Dorothy died. But I
was thinking about you, you see."
"O, she can't hurt me. She won't want the library, I suppose; nor my
slippers, and the small bootjack. Let her come."
My wife sighed a small sigh of relief out from the depths of her
hospitable heart, and the little matter was settled and dismissed as
lightly as are most little matters out of which grow the great ones.
I had just begun to dream that night that Gertrude Fellows, in the shape
of a large wilted pear, had walked in and sat down on a dessert plate,
when Allis gave me a little pinch and woke me.
"My dear, Gertrude has _one_ peculiarity. I never thought of it till
this minute."
"Confound Gertrude's peculiarities! I want to go to sleep. Well, let's
have it."
"Why, you see, she took up with some Spiritualistic notions after her
mother's death; thought she held communications with her, and all that,
Aunt Solomon says."
"Stuff and nonsense!"
"Of course. But, Fred, dear, I'm inclined to think she _must_ have made
her sewing-table walk into the front entry; and Aunt Solomon says the
spirits rapped out the whole of Cousin Dorothy's history on the
mantel-piece, behind those blue china vases,--you must have noticed them
at the funeral,--and not a human hand within six feet."
"Alison Hotchkiss!" I said, waking thoroughly, and sitting up in bed to
emphasize the opinion, "when I hear a spirit rap on _my_ mantel-piece,
and see _my_ tables walk about the front entry, I'll believe that,--not
before!"
"O, I know it! I'm not a Spiritualist, I'm sure, and nothing would tempt
me to be. But still that sort of reasoning has a flaw in it, hasn't it,
dear? The King of Siam, you know--"
I had heard of the King of Siam before, and I politely informed my wife
that I did not care to hear of him again. Spiritualism was a system of
refined jugglery. Just another phase of the same thing which brings the
doves out of Mr. Hermann's empty hat. It might be entertaining if it had
not become such an abominable imposition. There would always be nervous
women and hypochondriac men enough for its dupes. I thanked Heaven that
I was neither, and went to sleep.
Our new house was light and dry; the flues worked well, and the spare
chamber heated admirably. The baby exchanged the champagne-basket for
his dainty pink-curtained crib; Tip began to recover from the perpetual
cold with which three weeks' sitting in draughts, and tumbling into
water-pails, and playing in the sink, had sweetened his temper; Allis
forsook her bandboxes for the crimson easy-chair (very becoming, that
chair), or tripped about on her own rested feet; we returned to
table-cloths, civilized life, and a fork apiece.
In short, nothing at all worth mentioning happened, till that one
night,--I think it was our first Sunday,--when Allis waked me at twelve
o'clock with the announcement that some one was knocking at the door.
Supposing it to be Bridget with the baby,--croup, probably, or a fit,--I
unlocked and unlatched it promptly. No one was there, however; and
telling my wife, in no very gentle tone, if I remember correctly, that
it would be a convenience, on such cold nights, if she could keep her
dreams to herself, I shut the door distinctly and returned to my own.
In the morning I observed a little white circle about each of Allis's
blue eyes, and after some urging she confessed to me that her sleep had
been much broken by a singular disturbance in the room. I might laugh at
her if I chose, and she had not meant to tell me, but somebody had
rapped in that room all night long.
"On the door?"
"On the door, on the mantel, on the foot of the bed, on the
head-board,--Fred, right on the head-board! I listened till I grew cold
listening, but it rapped and it rapped, and by and by it was morning,
and it stopped."
"Rats!" said I.
"Then rats have knuckles," said she.
"Mice!" said I, "wind! broken plaster! crickets! imagination! dreams!
fancies! blind headache! nonsense! Next time wake me up, and fire
pillows at me till I'm pleasant to you. Now I'll have a kiss and a cup
of coffee. Any sugar in it?"
Tip fell down the cellar stairs that day, and the baby swallowed a
needle and two gutta-percha buttons, which I had been waiting a week to
have sewed on my vest, so that Alison had enough else to think about,
and the little incident of the raps was forgotten. I believe it was not
recalled by either of us till after Gertrude Fellows came.
It was on a Monday and in a drizzly storm that I brought her from the
station. She was a thin, cold, phantom-like woman, shrouded in
water-proofs and green _barège_ veils. Why is it that homely women
always wear green _barège_ veils? She did not improve in appearance when
her wraps were off, and she was seated by my parlor grate. Her large
green eyes had no speculation in them. Her mouth--an honest mouth, that
was one mercy--quivered and shrank when she was addressed suddenly, as
if she felt herself to be a sort of foot-ball that the world was kicking
about at pleasure,--your gentlest smile might prove a blow. She seldom
spoke unless she were spoken to, and fell into long reveries, with her
eyes on the window or the coals. She wore a horrible sort of
ruff,--"illusion," I think Allis called it,--which, of all contrivances
that she could have chosen to encircle her sallow neck, was exactly the
most unbecoming. She was always knitting blue stockings,--I never
discovered for what or whom; and she wore her lifeless hair in the shape
of a small toy cartwheel, on the back of her head.
However, she brightened a little in the course of the first week, helped
Alison about the baby, kept herself out of my way, read her Bible and
the "Banner of Light" in about equal proportion, and became a mild,
inoffensive, and, on the whole, not unpleasant addition to the family.
She had been in the house about ten days, I think, when Alison, with a
disturbed face, confided to me that she had spent another wakeful night
with those "rats" behind the head-board; I had been down with a
sick-headache the day before, and she had not wakened me. I promised to
set a trap and buy a cat before evening, and was closing the door upon
the subject, being already rather late at the office, when the
expression of Gertrude Fellows's face detained me.
"If I were you, I--wouldn't--really buy a very expensive trap, Mr.
Hotchkiss. It will be a waste of money, I am afraid. I heard the noise
that disturbed Cousin Alison"; and she sighed.
I shut the door with a snap, and begged her to be so good as to explain
herself.
"It's of no use," she said, doggedly. "You know you won't believe me.
But that makes no difference. They come all the same."
"_They_?" asked Allis, smiling. "Do you mean some of your spirits?"
The cold little woman flushed. "These are not _my_ spirits. I know
nothing about them. I did not mean to obtrude a subject so disagreeable
to you while I was in your family; but I have seldom been in a house in
which the Influences were so strong. I don't know what they mean, nor
anything about them, but just that they're here. They wake me up,
twitching my elbows, nearly every night."
"Wake you up _how_?"
"Twitching my elbows," she repeated, gravely.
I broke into a laugh, from which neither my politeness nor the woman's
heightened color could save me, bought the cat and ordered the rat-trap
without delay.
That night, when Miss Fellows had "retired,"--she never "went to bed" in
simple English like other people,--I stole softly out in my stockings
and screwed a little brass button outside of her door. I had made a
gimlet-hole for it in the morning when our guest was out shopping; it
fitted into place without noise. Without noise I turned it, and went
back to my own room.
"You suspect her, then?" said Alison.
"One is always justified in suspecting a Spiritualistic medium."
"I don't know about that," Allis said, decidedly. "It may have been
mice that I heard last night, or the wind in a bottle, or any of the
other proper and natural causes that explain away the ghost stories in
the children's papers; but it was not Gertrude. Women know something
about one another, my dear; and I tell you it was not Gertrude."
"I don't assert that it was; but with the bolt on Gertrude's door, the
cat in the kitchen, and the rat-trap on the garret stairs, I am strongly
inclined to anticipate a peaceful night. I will watch for a while,
however, and you can go to sleep."
She went to sleep, and I watched. I lay till half past eleven with my
eyes staring at the dark, wide awake and undisturbed and triumphant.
At half past eleven I must confess that I heard a singular sound.
Something whistled at the keyhole. It could not have been the wind, by
the way, for there was no wind that night. Something else than the wind
whistled in at the keyhole, sighed through into the room as much like a
long-drawn breath as anything, and fell with a slight clink upon the
floor.
I lighted my candle and got up. I searched the floor of the room, and
opened the door and searched the entry. Nothing was visible or audible,
and I went back to bed. For about ten minutes I heard no further
disturbance, and was concluding myself to be in some undefined manner
the victim of my own imagination, when there suddenly fell upon the
headboard of my bed a blow so distinct and loud that I involuntarily
sprang at the sound of it. It wakened Alison, and I had the satisfaction
of hearing her sleepily inquire if I had caught that rat yet? By way of
reply I relighted the candle, and gave the bed a shove which sent it
rolling half across the room. I examined the wall; I examined the floor;
I examined the headboard; I made Alison get up, so that I could shake
the mattresses. Meantime the pounding had recommenced, in rapid,
irregular, blows, like the blows of a man's fist. The room adjoining
ours was the nursery. I went in with my light. It was empty and silent.
Bridget, with Tip and the baby, slept soundly in the large chamber
across the hall. While I was searching the room my wife called loudly to
me, and I ran back.
"It is on the mantel now," she said. "It struck the mantel just after
you left; then the ceiling, three times, very loud; then the mantel
again,--don't you hear?"
I heard distinctly; moreover, the mantel shook a little with the
concussion. I took out the fire-board and looked up the chimney; I took
out the register and looked down the furnace-pipe; I ransacked the
garret and the halls; finally, I examined Miss Fellows's door,--it was
locked as I had left it, upon the outside; and that locked door was the
only means of egress from the room, unless the occupant fancied that of
jumping from a two-story window upon a broad flight of stone steps.
I came thoughtfully back across the hall; an invisible trip-hammer
appeared to hit the floor beside me at every step; I attempted to step
aside from it, over it, away from it; but it followed me, pounding into
my room.
"Wind?" suggested Allis. "Plaster cracking? Fancies? Dreams? Blind
headaches?--I should like to know which you have decided upon?"
Quiet fell upon the house after that for an hour, and I was dropping
into my first nap, when there came a light tap upon the door. Before I
could reach it, it had grown into a thundering blow.
"Whatever it is I'll have it now!" I whispered, turned the latch without
noise, and flung the door wide into the hall. It was silent, dark, and
cold. A little glimmer of moonlight fell in and showed me the figures
upon the carpet, outlined in a frosty bar. No hand or hammer, human or
superhuman, was there.
Determined to investigate matters a little more thoroughly, I asked my
wife to stand upon the inside of the doorway while I kept watch upon the
outside. We took our position, and I closed the door between us.
Instantly a series of furious blows struck the door; the sound was such
as would be made by a stick of oaken wood. The solid door quivered under
it.
"It's on your side!" said I.
"No, it's on yours!" said she.
"You're pounding yourself to fool me," cried I.
"You're pounding yourself to frighten me," sobbed she.
And we nearly had a quarrel. The sound continued with more or less
intermission till daybreak. Allis fell asleep, but I spent the time in
appropriate reflections.
Early in the morning I removed the button from Miss Fellows's door. She
never knew anything about it.
I believe, however, that I had the fairness to exculpate her in my
secret heart from any trickish connection with the disturbances of that
night.
"Just keep quiet about this little affair," I said to my wife; "we shall
come across an explanation in time, and may never have any more of it."
We kept quiet, and for five days so did "the spirits," as Miss Fellows
was pleased to pronounce the trip-hammers.
The fifth day I came home early, as it chanced, from the office. Miss
Fellows was writing letters in the parlor. Allis, upstairs, was sorting
and putting away the weekly wash. I came into the room and sat down by
the register to watch her. I always liked to watch her sitting there on
the floor with the little heaps of linen and cotton stuff piled like
blocks of snow about her, and her pink hands darting in and out of the
uncertain sleeves that were just ready to give way in the gathers,
trying the stockings' heels briskly, and testing the buttons with a
little jerk.
She laid aside some under-clothing presently from the rest. "It will
not be needed again this winter," she observed, "and had better go into
the cedar closet." The garments, by the way, were marked and numbered in
indelible ink. I heard her run over the figures in a busy, housekeeper's
undertone, before carrying them into the closet. She locked the closet
door, I think, for I remember the click of the key. If I remember
accurately, I stepped into the hall after that to light a cigar, and
Alison flitted to and fro with her clothes, dropping the baby's little
white stockings every step or two, and anathematizing them
daintily--within orthodox bounds, of course. In about five minutes she
called me; her voice was sharp and alarmed.
"Come quick! O Fred, look here! All those clothes that I locked into the
cedar closet are out here on the bed!"
"My dear wife," I blandly observed, as I sauntered into the room, "too
much of Gertrude Fellows hath made thee mad. Let _me_ see the clothes!"
She pointed to the bed. Some white clothing lay upon it, folded in an
ugly way, to represent a corpse, with crossed hands.
"Is it meant for a joke, Alison? You did it yourself, I suppose!"
"Fred! I have not touched it with the tip of my little finger!"
"Gertrude, then?"
"Gertrude is in the parlor writing."
So she was. I called her up. She looked surprised and troubled.
"It must have been Bridget," I proceeded, authoritatively, "or Tip."
"Bridget is out walking with Tip and the baby. Jane is in the kitchen
making pies."
"At any rate these are not the clothes which you locked into the closet,
however they came here."
"The very same, Fred. See, I noticed the numbers 6 upon the stockings, 2
on the night-caps, and--"
"Give me the key," I interrupted.
She gave me the key. I went to the cedar closet and tried the door. It
was locked. I unlocked it, and opened the drawer in which my wife
assured me that the clothes had lain. Nothing was to be seen in it but
the linen towel which neatly covered the bottom. I lifted it and shook
it. The drawer was empty.
"Give me those clothes, if you please."
She brought them to me. I made in my diary a careful memorandum of their
naming and numbering; placed the articles myself in the drawer,--an
upper drawer, so that there could be no mistake in identifying it;
locked the drawer, put the key in my pocket; locked the door of the
closet, put the key in my pocket; locked the door of the room in which
the closet was, and put that key in my pocket.
We sat down then in the hall, all of us; Allis and Gertrude to fill the
mending-basket, I to smoke and consider. I saw Tip coming home with his
nurse presently, and started to go down and let him in, when a faint
scream from my wife arrested me. I ran past Miss Fellows, who was
sitting on the stairs, and into my room. Allis, going in to put away
Tip's little plaid aprons, had stopped, rather pale, upon the threshold.
Upon the bed lay some clothing, folded, as before, in rude, hideous
imitation of the dead.
I took each article in turn, and compared the name and number with the
names and numbers in my diary. They were identical throughout. I took
the clothes, took the three keys from my pocket, unlocked the
"cedar-room" door, unlocked the closet door, unlocked the upper drawer,
and looked in. The drawer was empty.
To say that from this time I failed to own--to myself, if not to other
people--that some mysterious influence, inexplicable by common or
scientific causes, was at work in my house, would be to accuse myself of
more obstinacy than even I am capable of. I propounded theory after
theory, and gave it up. I arrived at conclusion upon conclusion, and
threw them aside. Finally, I held my peace, ceased to talk of "rats,"
kept my mind in a state of passive vacancy, and narrowly and quietly
watched the progress of affairs.
From the date of that escapade with the underclothes confusion reigned
in our corner of Nemo's Avenue. That night neither my wife nor myself
closed an eye, the house so resounded and re-echoed with the blows of
unseen hammers, fists, logs, and knuckles.
Miss Fellows, too, was pale with her vigils, looked troubled, and
proposed going home. This I peremptorily vetoed, determined if the woman
had any connection, honest or otherwise, with the mystery, to ferret it
out.
The following day, just after dinner, I was writing in the library, when
a child's cry of fright and pain startled me. It seemed to come from the
little yard behind the house, and I hurried thither to behold a singular
sight. There was one apple-tree in the yard,--an old, stunted, crooked
thing; and in that tree I found my son and heir, Tip, tied fast with a
small stout rope. "Tied" does not express it; he was gagged, manacled,
twisted, contorted, wound about, crossed and recrossed, held without a
chance of motion, scarcely of breath.
"You never tied yourself up here, child?" I asked, as I cut the knots.
The question certainly was unnecessary. No juggler could have bound
himself in such a fashion; scarcely, then, a four-years' child. To my
continued, clear, and gentle inquiries, the boy replied, persistently
and consistently, that nobody tied him there,--"not Cousin Gertrude, nor
Bridget, nor the baby, nor mamma, nor Jane, nor papa, nor the black
kitty"; he was "just tooken up all at once into the tree, and that was
all there was about it." He "s'posed it must have been God, or something
like that, did it."
Poor Tip had a hard time of it. Two days after that, while his mother
and I sat discussing the incident, and the child was at play upon the
floor, he suddenly threw himself at full length, writhing with pain, and
begging to "have them pulled out quick!"
"Have _what_ pulled out?" exclaimed his terrified mother. She took the
child into her lap, and found that he was stuck over from head to foot
with large white pins.
"We haven't so many large pins in all the house," she said as soon as he
was relieved.
As she spoke the words thirty or forty _small_ pins pierced the boy.
Where they came from no one could see. How they came there no one knew.
We looked, and there they were, and Tip was crying and writhing as
before.
For the remainder of that winter we had scarcely a day of quiet. The
rumor that "the Hotchkisses had rented a haunted house" leaked out and
spread abroad. The frightened servants gave warning, and other
frightened servants took their place, to leave in turn. My wife was her
own cook and nursery-maid a quarter of the time. The disturbances varied
in character with every week, assuming, as time went on, an importunity
which, had we not quietly settled it in our own minds "not to be beaten
by a noise," would have driven us from the house.
Night after night the mysterious fingers rapped at the windows, the
doors, the floors, the walls. Day after day uncomfortable tricks were
sprung upon us by invisible agencies. We became used to the noises, so
that we slept through them easily; but many of the phenomena were so
strikingly unpleasant, and so singularly unsuited to the ordinary
conditions of human happiness and housekeeping, that we scarcely
became--as one of our excellent deacons had a cheerful habit of
exhorting us to become--"resigned."
Upon one occasion we had invited a small and select number of friends to
dine. It was to be rather a _recherché_ affair for Nemo's Avenue, and my
wife had spared no painstaking to suit herself with her table. We had
had a comparatively quiet house the night before, so that our cook, who
had been with us three days, consented to remain till our guests had
been provided for. The soup was good, the pigeons better, the bread was
_not_ sour, and Allis looked hopeful, and inclined to trust Providence
for the gravies and dessert.
It was just as I had begun to carve the beef that I observed my wife
suddenly pale, and a telegram from her eyes turned mine in the direction
of General Popgun, who sat at her right hand. My sensations "can better
be imagined than described" when I saw General Popgun's fork, untouched
by any human hand, dancing a jig on his plate. He grasped it and laid it
firmly down. As soon as he released his hold it leaped from the table.
"Really--aw--very singular phenomena," began the General; "very
singular! I was not prepared to credit the extraordinary accounts of
spiritual manifestations in this house, but--aw--Well, I must say--"
Instantly it was Pandemonium at that dinner-table. Dr. Jump's knife,
Mrs. M'Ready's plate, and Colonel Hope's tumbler sprang from their
places. The pigeons flew from the platter, the caster rattled and
rolled, the salt-cellars bounded to and fro, and the gravies, moved by
some invisible disturber, spattered all over Mrs. Elias P. Critique's
_moire antique_.
Mortified and angered beyond endurance, I for the first time addressed
the spirits,--wrenched for the moment into a profound belief that they
must be spirits indeed.
"Whatever you are, and wherever you are," I shouted, bringing my hand
down hard upon the table, "go out of this room and let us alone!"
The only reply was a furious mazourka of all the dishes on the table. A
gentleman present, who had, as he afterward told us, studied the subject
of spiritualism somewhat, very sceptically and with unsatisfactory
results, observed the performance keenly, and suggested that I should
try a gentler method of appeal. Whatever the agent was,--and what it was
he had not yet discovered,--he had noticed repeatedly that the quiet
modes of meeting it were most effective.
Rather amused, I spoke more softly, addressing the caster, and
intimating in my blandest manner that I and my guests would feel under
obligations if we could have the room to ourselves till after we had
dined. The disturbance gradually ceased, and we had no more of it that
day.
A morning or two after Alison chanced to leave half a dozen teaspoons
upon the sideboard in the breakfast-room; they were of solid silver, and
quite thick. She was going to rub them herself, I believe, and went into
the china-closet, which opens from the room, for the silver-soap. The
breakfast-room was left vacant, and it was vacant when she returned to
it, and she insists, with a quiet conviction which it is hardly
reasonable to doubt, that no human being did or could have entered the
room without her knowledge. When she came back to the sideboard every
one of those spoons lay there _bent double_. She showed them to me when
I came home at noon. Had they been pewter toys they could not have been
more completely twisted out of shape than they were. I took them without
any remarks (I began to feel as if this mystery were assuming
uncomfortable proportions), put them away, just as I found them, into a
small cupboard in the wall of the breakfast-room, locked the cupboard
door with the only key in the house which fitted it, put the key in my
inner vest pocket, and meditatively ate my dinner.
About half an hour afterward a neighbor dropped in to groan over the
weather and see the baby, and Allis chanced to mention the incident of
the spoons.
"Really, Mrs. Hotchkiss!" said the lady, with a slight smile, and that
indefinite, quickly smothered change of eye which signifies, "I don't
believe a word of it!" "Are you sure that there is not a mistake
somewhere, or a little mental hallucination? The story is very
entertaining, but--I beg your pardon--I should be interested to see
those spoons."
"Your curiosity shall be gratified, madam," I said, a little testily;
and taking the key from my pocket, I led her to the cupboard and
unlocked the door. I found those spoons as straight, smooth, and fair as
ever spoons had been;--not a dent, not a wrinkle, not a bend nor untrue
line could we discover anywhere upon them.
"_Oh!_" said our visitor, significantly.
That lady, be it recorded, then and thenceforward spared no pains to
found and strengthen throughout Nemo's Avenue the theory that "the
Hotchkisses were getting up all that spiritual nonsense to force their
landlord into lower rents. And such respectable people too! It did seem
a pity, didn't it?"
One night I was alone in the library. It was late; about half-past
eleven, I think. The brightest gas jet was lighted, so that I could see
to every portion of the small room. The door was shut. There was no
furniture but the book-cases, my table, and chair; no sliding: doors or
concealed corners; no nook or cranny in which any human creature could
lurk unseen by me; and I say that I was alone.
I had been writing to a confidential friend a somewhat minute account
of the disturbances in my house, which were now of about six weeks'
duration. I had begged him to come and observe them for himself, and help
me out with a solution,--I myself was at a loss for a reasonable one.
There certainly seemed to be evidence of superhuman agency; but I was
hardly ready yet to commit myself thoroughly to that view of the matter,
and--
In the middle of that sentence I laid down my pen. A consciousness,
sudden and distinct, came to me that I was not alone in that bright
little silent room. Yet to mortal eyes alone I was. I pushed away my
writing and looked about. The warm air was empty of outline; the
curtains were undisturbed; the little recess under the library table
held nothing but my own feet; there was no sound but the ordinary
rap-rapping on the floor, to which I had by this time become so
accustomed that often it passed unnoticed. I rose and examined the room
thoroughly, until quite satisfied that I was its only visible occupant;
then sat down again. The rappings had meantime become loud and
impatient.
I had learned that very week from Miss Fellows the spiritual alphabet
with which she was in the habit of "communicating with her dead mother."
I had never asked her, nor had she proposed, to use it herself for my
benefit. I had meant to try all other means of investigation before
resorting to it. Now, however being alone, and being perplexed and
annoyed by my sense of having invisible company, I turned and spelled
out upon the table, so many raps to a letter till the question was
complete:--
"_What do you want of me?_"