answer to my inquiries about his patient he said that he was afraid
the boy was dying. The case, he confessed, completely puzzled him:
some obscure form of pernicious anæmia was all he could suggest. But
he wondered whether Mr. Urcombe would consent to see the boy, on
the chance of his being able to throw some new light on the case,
and since Urcombe was dining with me that night, I proposed to Dr.
Ross to join us. He could not do this, but said he would look in
later. When he came, Urcombe at once consented to put his skill at
the other’s disposal, and together they went off at once. Being thus
shorn of my sociable evening, I telephoned to Mrs. Amworth to know if
I might inflict myself on her for an hour. Her answer was a welcoming
affirmative, and between piquet and music the hour lengthened itself
into two. She spoke of the boy who was lying so desperately and
mysteriously ill, and told me that she had often been to see him,
taking him nourishing and delicate food. But to-day--and her kind eyes
moistened as she spoke--she was afraid she had paid her last visit.
Knowing the antipathy between her and Urcombe, I did not tell her that
he had been called into consultation; and when I returned home she
accompanied me to my door, for the sake of a breath of night air, and
in order to borrow a magazine which contained an article on gardening
which she wished to read.
“Ah, this delicious night air,” she said, luxuriously sniffing in the
coolness. “Night air and gardening are the great tonics. There is
nothing so stimulating as bare contact with rich mother earth. You are
never so fresh as when you have been grubbing in the soil--black hands,
black nails, and boots covered with mud.” She gave her great jovial
laugh.
“I’m a glutton for air and earth,” she said. “Positively I look forward
to death, for then I shall be buried and have the kind earth all round
me. No leaden caskets for me--I have given explicit directions. But
what shall I do about air? Well, I suppose one can’t have everything.
The magazine? A thousand thanks, I will faithfully return it. Good
night: garden and keep your windows open, and you won’t have anæmia.”
“I always sleep with my windows open,” said I.
I went straight up to my bedroom, of which one of the windows looks
out over the street, and as I undressed I thought I heard voices
talking outside not far away. But I paid no particular attention, put
out my lights, and falling asleep plunged into the depths of a most
horrible dream, distortedly suggested no doubt, by my last words with
Mrs. Amworth. I dreamed that I woke, and found that both my bedroom
windows were shut. Half-suffocating I dreamed that I sprang out of
bed, and went across to open them. The blind over the first was drawn
down, and pulling it up I saw, with the indescribable horror of
incipient nightmare, Mrs. Amworth’s face suspended close to the pane
in the darkness outside, nodding and smiling at me. Pulling down the
blind again to keep that terror out, I rushed to the second window on
the other side of the room, and there again was Mrs. Amworth’s face.
Then the panic came upon me in full blast; here was I suffocating in
the airless room, and whichever window I opened Mrs. Amworth’s face
would float in, like those noiseless black gnats that bit before one
was aware. The nightmare rose to screaming point, and with strangled
yells I awoke to find my room cool and quiet with both windows open
and blinds up and a half-moon high in its course, casting an oblong
of tranquil light on the floor. But even when I was awake the horror
persisted, and I lay tossing and turning. I must have slept long before
the nightmare seized me, for now it was nearly day, and soon in the
east the drowsy eyelids of morning began to lift.
I was scarcely downstairs next morning--for after the dawn I slept
late--when Urcombe rang up to know if he might see me immediately. He
came in, grim and preoccupied, and I noticed that he was pulling on a
pipe that was not even filled.
“I want your help,” he said, “and so I must tell you first of all
what happened last night. I went round with the little doctor to see
his patient, and found him just alive, but scarcely more. I instantly
diagnosed in my own mind what this anæmia, unaccountable by any other
explanation, meant. The boy is the prey of a vampire.”
He put his empty pipe on the breakfast-table, by which I had just
sat down, and folded his arms, looking at me steadily from under his
overhanging brows.
“Now about last night,” he said. “I insisted that he should be moved
from his father’s cottage into my house. As we were carrying him on a
stretcher, whom should we meet but Mrs. Amworth? She expressed shocked
surprise that we were moving him. Now why do you think she did that?”
With a start of horror, as I remembered my dream that night before, I
felt an idea come into my mind so preposterous and unthinkable that I
instantly turned it out again.
“I haven’t the smallest idea,” I said.
“Then listen, while I tell you about what happened later. I put out
all light in the room where the boy lay, and watched. One window was
a little open, for I had forgotten to close it, and about midnight I
heard something outside, trying apparently to push it farther open. I
guessed who it was--yes, it was full twenty feet from the ground--and
I peeped round the corner of the blind. Just outside was the face of
Mrs. Amworth and her hand was on the frame of the window. Very softly I
crept close, and then banged the window down, and I think I just caught
the tip of one of her fingers.”
“But it’s impossible,” I cried. “How could she be floating in the air
like that? And what had she come for? Don’t tell me such----”
Once more, with closer grip, the remembrance of my nightmare seized me.
“I am telling you what I saw,” said he. “And all night long, until it
was nearly day, she was fluttering outside, like some terrible bat,
trying to gain admittance. Now put together various things I have told
you.”
He began checking them off on his fingers.
“Number one,” he said: “there was an outbreak of disease similar to
that which this boy is suffering from at Peshawar, and her husband
died of it. Number two: Mrs. Amworth protested against my moving the
boy to my house. Number three: she, or the demon that inhabits her
body, a creature powerful and deadly, tries to gain admittance. And add
this, too: in mediæval times there was an epidemic of vampirism here
at Maxley. The vampire, so the accounts run, was found to be Elizabeth
Chaston ... I see you remember Mrs. Amworth’s maiden name. Finally, the
boy is stronger this morning. He would certainly not have been alive if
he had been visited again. And what do you make of it?”
There was a long silence, during which I found this incredible horror
assuming the hues of reality.
“I have something to add,” I said, “which may or may not bear on it.
You say that the--the spectre went away shortly before dawn.”
“Yes.”
I told him of my dream, and he smiled grimly.
“Yes, you did well to awake,” he said. “That warning came from your
subconscious self, which never wholly slumbers, and cried out to you
of deadly danger. For two reasons, then, you must help me: one to save
others, the second to save yourself.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“I want you first of all to help me in watching this boy, and ensuring
that she does not come near him. Eventually I want you to help me in
tracking the thing down, in exposing and destroying it. It is not
human: it is an incarnate fiend. What steps we shall have to take I
don’t yet know.”
It was now eleven of the forenoon, and presently I went across to his
house for a twelve-hour vigil while he slept, to come on duty again
that night, so that for the next twenty-four hours either Urcombe or
myself was always in the room where the boy, now getting stronger
every hour, was lying. The day following was Saturday and a morning
of brilliant, pellucid weather, and already when I went across to his
house to resume my duty the stream of motors down to Brighton had
begun. Simultaneously I saw Urcombe with a cheerful face, which boded
good news of his patient, coming out of his house, and Mrs. Amworth,
with a gesture of salutation to me and a basket in her hand, walking up
the broad strip of grass which bordered the road. There we all three
met. I noticed (and saw that Urcombe noticed it too) that one finger of
her left hand was bandaged.
“Good morning to you both,” said she. “And I hear your patient is doing
well, Mr. Urcombe. I have come to bring him a bowl of jelly, and to sit
with him for an hour. He and I are great friends. I am overjoyed at his
recovery.”
Urcombe paused a moment, as if making up his mind, and then shot out a
pointing finger at her.
“I forbid that,” he said. “You shall not sit with him or see him. And
you know the reason as well as I do.”
I have never seen so horrible a change pass over a human face as that
which now blanched hers to the colour of a grey mist. She put up her
hand as if to shield herself from that pointing finger, which drew the
sign of the cross in the air, and shrank back cowering on to the road.
There was a wild hoot from a horn, a grinding of brakes, a shout--too
late--from a passing car, and one long scream suddenly cut short. Her
body rebounded from the roadway after the first wheel had gone over it,
and the second followed. It lay there, quivering and twitching, and was
still.
She was buried three days afterwards in the cemetery outside Maxley,
in accordance with the wishes she had told me that she had devised
about her interment, and the shock which her sudden and awful death
had caused to the little community began by degrees to pass off. To
two people only, Urcombe and myself, the horror of it was mitigated
from the first by the nature of the relief that her death brought;
but, naturally enough, we kept our own counsel, and no hint of what
greater horror had been thus averted was ever let slip. But, oddly
enough, so it seemed to me, he was still not satisfied about something
in connection with her, and would give no answer to my questions on
the subject. Then as the days of a tranquil mellow September and
the October that followed began to drop away like the leaves of the
yellowing trees, his uneasiness relaxed. But before the entry of
November the seeming tranquillity broke into hurricane.
I had been dining one night at the far end of the village, and about
eleven o’clock was walking home again. The moon was of an unusual
brilliance, rendering all that it shone on as distinct as in some
etching. I had just come opposite the house which Mrs. Amworth had
occupied, where there was a board up telling that it was to let, when I
heard the click of her front gate, and next moment I saw, with a sudden
chill and quaking of my very spirit, that she stood there. Her profile,
vividly illuminated, was turned to me, and I could not be mistaken in
my identification of her. She appeared not to see me (indeed the shadow
of the yew hedge in front of her garden enveloped me in its blackness)
and she went swiftly across the road, and entered the gate of the
house directly opposite. There I lost sight of her completely.
My breath was coming in short pants as if I had been running--and now
indeed I ran, with fearful backward glances, along the hundred yards
that separated me from my house and Urcombe’s. It was to his that my
flying steps took me, and next minute I was within.
“What have you come to tell me?” he asked. “Or shall I guess?”
“You can’t guess,” said I.
“No; it’s no guess. She has come back and you have seen her. Tell me
about it.”
I gave him my story.
“That’s Major Pearsall’s house,” he said. “Come back with me there at
once.”
“But what can we do?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea. That’s what we have got to find out.”
A minute later, we were opposite the house. When I had passed it
before, it was all dark; now lights gleamed from a couple of windows
upstairs. Even as we faced it, the front door opened, and next moment
Major Pearsall emerged from the gate. He saw us and stopped.
“I’m on my way to Dr. Ross,” he said quickly. “My wife has been taken
suddenly ill. She had been in bed an hour when I came upstairs, and
I found her white as a ghost and utterly exhausted. She had been to
sleep, it seemed---- but you will excuse me.”
“One moment, Major,” said Urcombe. “Was there any mark on her throat?”
“How did you guess that?” said he. “There was: one of those beastly
gnats must have bitten her twice there. She was streaming with blood.”
“And there’s someone with her?” asked Urcombe.
“Yes, I roused her maid.”
He went off, and Urcombe turned to me. “I know now what we have to do,”
he said. “Change your clothes, and I’ll join you at your house.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you on our way. We’re going to the cemetery.”
* * * * *
He carried a pick, a shovel, and a screwdriver when he rejoined me, and
wore round his shoulders a long coil of rope. As we walked, he gave me
the outlines of the ghastly hour that lay before us.
“What I have to tell you,” he said, “will seem to you now too fantastic
for credence, but before dawn we shall see whether it outstrips
reality. By a most fortunate happening, you saw the spectre, the
astral body, whatever you choose to call it, of Mrs. Amworth, going on
its grisly business, and therefore, beyond doubt, the vampire spirit
which abode in her during life animates her again in death. That is
not exceptional--indeed, all these weeks since her death I have been
expecting it. If I am right, we shall find her body undecayed and
untouched by corruption.”
“But she has been dead nearly two months,” said I.
“If she had been dead two years it would still be so, if the vampire
has possession of her. So remember: whatever you see done, it will be
done not to her, who in the natural course would now be feeding the
grasses above her grave, but to a spirit of untold evil and malignancy,
which gives a phantom life to her body.”
“But what shall I see done?” said I.
“I will tell you. We know that now, at this moment, the vampire clad in
her mortal semblance is out; dining out. But it must get back before
dawn, and it will pass into the material form that lies in her grave.
We must wait for that, and then with your help I shall dig up her
body. If I am right, you will look on her as she was in life, with the
full vigour of the dreadful nutriment she has received pulsing in her
veins. And then, when dawn has come, and the vampire cannot leave the
lair of her body, I shall strike her with this”--and he pointed to his
pick--“through the heart, and she, who comes to life again only with
the animation the fiend gives her, she and her hellish partner will be
dead indeed. Then we must bury her again, delivered at last.”
We had come to the cemetery, and in the brightness of the moonshine
there was no difficulty in identifying her grave. It lay some twenty
yards from the small chapel, in the porch of which, obscured by shadow,
we concealed ourselves. From there we had a clear and open sight of
the grave, and now we must wait till its infernal visitor returned
home. The night was warm and windless, yet even if a freezing wind had
been raging I think I should have felt nothing of it, so intense was
my preoccupation as to what the night and dawn would bring. There was
a bell in the turret of the chapel, that struck the quarters of the
hour, and it amazed me to find how swiftly the chimes succeeded one
another.
The moon had long set, but a twilight of stars shone in a clear sky,
when five o’clock of the morning sounded from the turret. A few minutes
more passed, and then I felt Urcombe’s hand softly nudging me; and
looking out in the direction of his pointing finger, I saw that the
form of a woman, tall and large in build, was approaching from the
right. Noiselessly, with a motion more of gliding and floating than
walking, she moved across the cemetery to the grave which was the
centre of our observation. She moved round it as if to be certain
of its identity, and for a moment stood directly facing us. In the
greyness to which now my eyes had grown accustomed, I could easily see
her face, and recognise its features.
She drew her hand across her mouth as if wiping it, and broke into a
chuckle of such laughter as made my hair stir on my head. Then she
leaped on to the grave, holding her hands high above her head, and inch
by inch disappeared into the earth. Urcombe’s hand was laid on my arm,
in an injunction to keep still, but now he removed it.
“Come,” he said.
With pick and shovel and rope we went to the grave. The earth was light
and sandy, and soon after six struck we had delved down to the coffin
lid. With his pick he loosened the earth round it, and, adjusting the
rope through the handles by which it had been lowered, we tried to
raise it. This was a long and laborious business, and the light had
begun to herald day in the east before we had it out, and lying by the
side of the grave. With his screwdriver he loosed the fastenings of
the lid, and slid it aside, and standing there we looked on the face
of Mrs. Amworth. The eyes, once closed in death, were open, the cheeks
were flushed with colour, the red, full-lipped mouth seemed to smile.
“One blow and it is all over,” he said. “You need not look.”
Even as he spoke he took up the pick again, and, laying the point of it
on her left breast, measured his distance. And though I knew what was
coming I could not look away....
He grasped the pick in both hands, raised it an inch or two for the
taking of his aim, and then with full force brought it down on her
breast. A fountain of blood, though she had been dead so long, spouted
high in the air, falling with the thud of a heavy splash over the
shroud, and simultaneously from those red lips came one long, appalling
cry, swelling up like some hooting siren, and dying away again. With
that, instantaneous as a lightning flash, came the touch of corruption
on her face, the colour of it faded to ash, the plump cheeks fell in,
the mouth dropped.
“Thank God, that’s over,” said he, and without pause slipped the coffin
lid back into its place.
Day was coming fast now, and, working like men possessed, we lowered
the coffin into its place again, and shovelled the earth over it....
The birds were busy with their earliest pipings as we went back to
Maxley.
In the Tube
In the Tube
“It’s a convention,” said Anthony Carling cheerfully, “and not a very
convincing one. Time, indeed! There’s no such thing as Time really; it
has no actual existence. Time is nothing more than an infinitesimal
point in eternity, just as space is an infinitesimal point in infinity.
At the most, Time is a sort of tunnel through which we are accustomed
to believe that we are travelling. There’s a roar in our ears and a
darkness in our eyes which makes it seem real to us. But before we came
into the tunnel we existed for ever in an infinite sunlight, and after
we have got through it we shall exist in an infinite sunlight again.
So why should we bother ourselves about the confusion and noise and
darkness which only encompass us for a moment?”
For a firm-rooted believer in such immeasurable ideas as these, which
he punctuated with brisk application of the poker to the brave sparkle
and glow of the fire, Anthony has a very pleasant appreciation of the
measurable and the finite, and nobody with whom I have acquaintance has
so keen a zest for life and its enjoyments as he. He had given us this
evening an admirable dinner, had passed round a port beyond praise,
and had illuminated the jolly hours with the light of his infectious
optimism. Now the small company had melted away, and I was left with
him over the fire in his study. Outside the tattoo of wind-driven sleet
was audible on the window-panes, over-scoring now and again the flap
of the flames on the open hearth, and the thought of the chilly blasts
and the snow-covered pavement in Brompton Square, across which, to
skidding taxicabs, the last of his other guests had scurried, made my
position, resident here till to-morrow morning, the more delicately
delightful. Above all there was this stimulating and suggestive
companion, who, whether he talked of the great abstractions which were
so intensely real and practical to him, or of the very remarkable
experiences which he had encountered among these conventions of time
and space, was equally fascinating to the listener.
“I adore life,” he said. “I find it the most entrancing plaything. It’s
a delightful game, and, as you know very well, the only conceivable
way to play a game is to treat it extremely seriously. If you say to
yourself, ‘It’s only a game,’ you cease to take the slightest interest
in it. You have to know that it’s only a game, and behave as if it
was the one object of existence. I should like it to go on for many
years yet. But all the time one has to be living on the true plane as
well, which is eternity and infinity. If you come to think of it, the
one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the
infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.”
“That sounds rather paradoxical,” said I.
“Only because you’ve made a habit of thinking about things that seem
bounded and limited. Look it in the face for a minute. Try to imagine
finite Time and Space, and you find you can’t. Go back a million
years, and multiply that million of years by another million, and you
find that you can’t conceive of a beginning. What happened before
that beginning? Another beginning and another beginning? And before
that? Look at it like that, and you find that the only solution
comprehensible to you is the existence of an eternity, something that
never began and will never end. It’s the same about space. Project
yourself to the farthest star, and what comes beyond that? Emptiness?
Go on through the emptiness, and you can’t imagine it being finite and
having an end. It must needs go on for ever: that’s the only thing
you can understand. There’s no such thing as before or after, or
beginning or end, and what a comfort that is! I should fidget myself
to death if there wasn’t the huge soft cushion of eternity to lean
one’s head against. Some people say--I believe I’ve heard you say it
yourself--that the idea of eternity is so tiring; you feel that you
want to stop. But that’s because you are thinking of eternity in terms
of Time, and mumbling in your brain, ‘And after that, and after that?’
Don’t you grasp the idea that in eternity there isn’t any ‘after,’
any more than there is any ‘before’? It’s all one. Eternity isn’t a
quantity: it’s a quality.”
Sometimes, when Anthony talks in this manner, I seem to get a glimpse
of that which to his mind is so transparently clear and solidly
real, at other times (not having a brain that readily envisages
abstractions) I feel as though he was pushing me over a precipice,
and my intellectual faculties grasp wildly at anything tangible or
comprehensible. This was the case now, and I hastily interrupted.
“But there is a ‘before’ and ‘after,’” I said. “A few hours ago you
gave us an admirable dinner, and after that--yes, after--we played
bridge. And now you are going to explain things a little more clearly
to me, and after that I shall go to bed----”
He laughed.
“You shall do exactly as you like,” he said, “and you shan’t be a slave
to Time either to-night or to-morrow morning. We won’t even mention
an hour for breakfast, but you shall have it in eternity whenever you
awake. And as I see it is not midnight yet, we’ll slip the bonds of
Time, and talk quite infinitely. I will stop the clock, if that will
assist you in getting rid of your illusion, and then I’ll tell you a
story, which to my mind, shows how unreal so-called realities are; or,
at any rate, how fallacious are our senses as judges of what is real
and what is not.”
“Something occult, something spookish?” I asked, pricking up my ears,
for Anthony has the strangest clairvoyances and visions of things
unseen by the normal eye.
“I suppose you might call some of it occult,” he said, “though there’s
a certain amount of rather grim reality mixed up in it.”
“Go on; excellent mixture,” said I.
He threw a fresh log on the fire.