Produced by David Clarke, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
BLACK SPIRITS AND WHITE
CARNATION SERIES
Black Spirits & White
_A Book of Ghost Stories_
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
[Device]
CHICAGO
STONE & KIMBALL
MDCCCXCV
COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY
STONE AND KIMBALL
Transcriber's Note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. The oe
ligature is represented by [oe].
"BLACK SPIRITS AND WHITE,
RED SPIRITS AND GRAY,
MINGLE, MINGLE, MINGLE,
YE THAT MINGLE MAY."
Contents
PAGE
NO. 252 RUE M. LE PRINCE 3
IN KROPFSBERG KEEP 33
THE WHITE VILLA 55
SISTER MADDELENA 83
NOTRE DAME DES EAUX 115
THE DEAD VALLEY 133
POSTSCRIPT 151
No. 252 RUE M. LE PRINCE.
No. 252 Rue M. le Prince.
When in May, 1886, I found myself at last in Paris, I naturally
determined to throw myself on the charity of an old chum of mine, Eugene
Marie d'Ardeche, who had forsaken Boston a year or more ago on receiving
word of the death of an aunt who had left him such property as she
possessed. I fancy this windfall surprised him not a little, for the
relations between the aunt and nephew had never been cordial, judging
from Eugene's remarks touching the lady, who was, it seems, a more or
less wicked and witch-like old person, with a penchant for black magic,
at least such was the common report.
Why she should leave all her property to d'Ardeche, no one could tell,
unless it was that she felt his rather hobbledehoy tendencies towards
Buddhism and occultism might some day lead him to her own unhallowed
height of questionable illumination. To be sure d'Ardeche reviled her as
a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation
which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite
of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him
her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to
infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the "King of the Sorcerers." This
malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the
Rue M. le Prince during the life of Mlle. de Tartas had, it seems, fully
expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared
that she had left him only the contents of the gloomy old house in the
Quartier Latin, giving the house itself and all else of which she died
possessed to her nephew in America, the Sar proceeded to remove
everything from the place, and then to curse it elaborately and
comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell therein.
Whereupon he disappeared.
This final episode was the last word I received from Eugene, but I knew
the number of the house, 252 Rue M. le Prince. So, after a day or two
given to a first cursory survey of Paris, I started across the Seine to
find Eugene and compel him to do the honors of the city.
Every one who knows the Latin Quarter knows the Rue M. le Prince,
running up the hill towards the Garden of the Luxembourg. It is full of
queer houses and odd corners,--or was in '86,--and certainly No. 252
was, when I found it, quite as queer as any. It was nothing but a
doorway, a black arch of old stone between and under two new houses
painted yellow. The effect of this bit of seventeenth-century masonry,
with its dirty old doors, and rusty broken lantern sticking gaunt and
grim out over the narrow sidewalk, was, in its frame of fresh plaster,
sinister in the extreme.
I wondered if I had made a mistake in the number; it was quite evident
that no one lived behind those cobwebs. I went into the doorway of one
of the new hotels and interviewed the concierge.
No, M. d'Ardeche did not live there, though to be sure he owned the
mansion; he himself resided in Meudon, in the country house of the late
Mlle. de Tartas. Would Monsieur like the number and the street?
Monsieur would like them extremely, so I took the card that the
concierge wrote for me, and forthwith started for the river, in order
that I might take a steamboat for Meudon. By one of those coincidences
which happen so often, being quite inexplicable, I had not gone twenty
paces down the street before I ran directly into the arms of Eugene
d'Ardeche. In three minutes we were sitting in the queer little garden
of the Chien Bleu, drinking vermouth and absinthe, and talking it all
over.
"You do not live in your aunt's house?" I said at last, interrogatively.
"No, but if this sort of thing keeps on I shall have to. I like Meudon
much better, and the house is perfect, all furnished, and nothing in it
newer than the last century. You must come out with me to-night and see
it. I have got a jolly room fixed up for my Buddha. But there is
something wrong with this house opposite. I can't keep a tenant in
it,--not four days. I have had three, all within six months, but the
stories have gone around and a man would as soon think of hiring the
Cour des Comptes to live in as No. 252. It is notorious. The fact is,
it is haunted the worst way."
I laughed and ordered more vermouth.
"That is all right. It is haunted all the same, or enough to keep it
empty, and the funny part is that no one knows _how_ it is haunted.
Nothing is ever seen, nothing heard. As far as I can find out, people
just have the horrors there, and have them so bad they have to go to the
hospital afterwards. I have one ex-tenant in the Bicetre now. So the
house stands empty, and as it covers considerable ground and is taxed
for a lot, I don't know what to do about it. I think I'll either give it
to that child of sin, Torrevieja, or else go and live in it myself. I
shouldn't mind the ghosts, I am sure."
"Did you ever stay there?"
"No, but I have always intended to, and in fact I came up here to-day to
see a couple of rake-hell fellows I know, Fargeau and Duchesne, doctors
in the Clinical Hospital beyond here, up by the Parc Mont Souris. They
promised that they would spend the night with me some time in my aunt's
house,--which is called around here, you must know, 'la Bouche
d'Enfer,'--and I thought perhaps they would make it this week, if they
can get off duty. Come up with me while I see them, and then we can go
across the river to Vefour's and have some luncheon, you can get your
things at the Chatham, and we will go out to Meudon, where of course you
will spend the night with me."
The plan suited me perfectly, so we went up to the hospital, found
Fargeau, who declared that he and Duchesne were ready for anything, the
nearer the real "bouche d'enfer" the better; that the following Thursday
they would both be off duty for the night, and that on that day they
would join in an attempt to outwit the devil and clear up the mystery of
No. 252.
"Does M. l'Americain go with us?" asked Fargeau.
"Why of course," I replied, "I intend to go, and you must not refuse me,
d'Ardeche; I decline to be put off. Here is a chance for you to do the
honors of your city in a manner which is faultless. Show me a real live
ghost, and I will forgive Paris for having lost the Jardin Mabille."
So it was settled.
Later we went down to Meudon and ate dinner in the terrace room of the
villa, which was all that d'Ardeche had said, and more, so utterly was
its atmosphere that of the seventeenth century. At dinner Eugene told me
more about his late aunt, and the queer goings on in the old house.
Mlle. Blaye lived, it seems, all alone, except for one female servant of
her own age; a severe, taciturn creature, with massive Breton features
and a Breton tongue, whenever she vouchsafed to use it. No one ever was
seen to enter the door of No. 252 except Jeanne the servant and the Sar
Torrevieja, the latter coming constantly from none knew whither, and
always entering, _never leaving_. Indeed, the neighbors, who for eleven
years had watched the old sorcerer sidle crab-wise up to the bell almost
every day, declared vociferously that _never_ had he been seen to leave
the house. Once, when they decided to keep absolute guard, the watcher,
none other than Maitre Garceau of the Chien Bleu, after keeping his eyes
fixed on the door from ten o'clock one morning when the Sar arrived
until four in the afternoon, during which time the door was unopened (he
knew this, for had he not gummed a ten-centime stamp over the joint and
was not the stamp unbroken) nearly fell down when the sinister figure
of Torrevieja slid wickedly by him with a dry "Pardon, Monsieur!" and
disappeared again through the black doorway.
This was curious, for No. 252 was entirely surrounded by houses, its
only windows opening on a courtyard into which no eye could look from
the hotels of the Rue M. le Prince and the Rue de l'Ecole, and the
mystery was one of the choice possessions of the Latin Quarter.
Once a year the austerity of the place was broken, and the denizens of
the whole quarter stood open-mouthed watching many carriages drive up to
No. 252, many of them private, not a few with crests on the door panels,
from all of them descending veiled female figures and men with coat
collars turned up. Then followed curious sounds of music from within,
and those whose houses joined the blank walls of No. 252 became for the
moment popular, for by placing the ear against the wall strange music
could distinctly be heard, and the sound of monotonous chanting voices
now and then. By dawn the last guest would have departed, and for
another year the hotel of Mlle. de Tartas was ominously silent.
Eugene declared that he believed it was a celebration of
"Walpurgisnacht," and certainly appearances favored such a fancy.
"A queer thing about the whole affair is," he said, "the fact that every
one in the street swears that about a month ago, while I was out in
Concarneau for a visit, the music and voices were heard again, just as
when my revered aunt was in the flesh. The house was perfectly empty, as
I tell you, so it is quite possible that the good people were enjoying
an hallucination."
I must acknowledge that these stories did not reassure me; in fact, as
Thursday came near, I began to regret a little my determination to spend
the night in the house. I was too vain to back down, however, and the
perfect coolness of the two doctors, who ran down Tuesday to Meudon to
make a few arrangements, caused me to swear that I would die of fright
before I would flinch. I suppose I believed more or less in ghosts, I am
sure now that I am older I believe in them, there are in fact few things
I can _not_ believe. Two or three inexplicable things had happened to
me, and, although this was before my adventure with Rendel in Paestum, I
had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not
explain, wherein I was out of sympathy with the age.
Well, to come to the memorable night of the twelfth of June, we had made
our preparations, and after depositing a big bag inside the doors of No.
252, went across to the Chien Bleu, where Fargeau and Duchesne turned up
promptly, and we sat down to the best dinner Pere Garceau could create.
I remember I hardly felt that the conversation was in good taste. It
began with various stories of Indian fakirs and Oriental jugglery,
matters in which Eugene was curiously well read, swerved to the horrors
of the great Sepoy mutiny, and thus to reminiscences of the
dissecting-room. By this time we had drunk more or less, and Duchesne
launched into a photographic and Zolaesque account of the only time (as
he said) when he was possessed of the panic of fear; namely, one night
many years ago, when he was locked by accident into the dissecting-room
of the Loucine, together with several cadavers of a rather unpleasant
nature. I ventured to protest mildly against the choice of subjects,
the result being a perfect carnival of horrors, so that when we finally
drank our last _creme de cacao_ and started for "la Bouche d'Enfer," my
nerves were in a somewhat rocky condition.
It was just ten o'clock when we came into the street. A hot dead wind
drifted in great puffs through the city, and ragged masses of vapor
swept the purple sky; an unsavory night altogether, one of those nights
of hopeless lassitude when one feels, if one is at home, like doing
nothing but drink mint juleps and smoke cigarettes.
Eugene opened the creaking door, and tried to light one of the lanterns;
but the gusty wind blew out every match, and we finally had to close the
outer doors before we could get a light. At last we had all the lanterns
going, and I began to look around curiously. We were in a long, vaulted
passage, partly carriageway, partly footpath, perfectly bare but for the
street refuse which had drifted in with eddying winds. Beyond lay the
courtyard, a curious place rendered more curious still by the fitful
moonlight and the flashing of four dark lanterns. The place had
evidently been once a most noble palace. Opposite rose the oldest
portion, a three-story wall of the time of Francis I., with a great
wisteria vine covering half. The wings on either side were more modern,
seventeenth century, and ugly, while towards the street was nothing but
a flat unbroken wall.
The great bare court, littered with bits of paper blown in by the wind,
fragments of packing cases, and straw, mysterious with flashing lights
and flaunting shadows, while low masses of torn vapor drifted overhead,
hiding, then revealing the stars, and all in absolute silence, not even
the sounds of the streets entering this prison-like place, was weird and
uncanny in the extreme. I must confess that already I began to feel a
slight disposition towards the horrors, but with that curious
inconsequence which so often happens in the case of those who are
deliberately growing scared, I could think of nothing more reassuring
than those delicious verses of Lewis Carroll's:--
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice,
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice,
What I tell you three times is true,"--
which kept repeating themselves over and over in my brain with feverish
insistence.
Even the medical students had stopped their chaffing, and were studying
the surroundings gravely.
"There is one thing certain," said Fargeau, "_anything_ might have
happened here without the slightest chance of discovery. Did ever you
see such a perfect place for lawlessness?"
"And _anything_ might happen here now, with the same certainty of
impunity," continued Duchesne, lighting his pipe, the snap of the match
making us all start. "D'Ardeche, your lamented relative was certainly
well fixed; she had full scope here for her traditional experiments in
demonology."
"Curse me if I don't believe that those same traditions were more or
less founded on fact," said Eugene. "I never saw this court under these
conditions before, but I could believe anything now. What's that!"
"Nothing but a door slamming," said Duchesne, loudly.
"Well, I wish doors wouldn't slam in houses that have been empty eleven
months."
"It is irritating," and Duchesne slipped his arm through mine; "but we
must take things as they come. Remember we have to deal not only with
the spectral lumber left here by your scarlet aunt, but as well with the
supererogatory curse of that hell-cat Torrevieja. Come on! let's get
inside before the hour arrives for the sheeted dead to squeak and gibber
in these lonely halls. Light your pipes, your tobacco is a sure
protection against 'your whoreson dead bodies'; light up and move on."
We opened the hall door and entered a vaulted stone vestibule, full of
dust, and cobwebby.
"There is nothing on this floor," said Eugene, "except servants' rooms
and offices, and I don't believe there is anything wrong with them. I
never heard that there was, any way. Let's go up stairs."
So far as we could see, the house was apparently perfectly uninteresting
inside, all eighteenth-century work, the facade of the main building
being, with the vestibule, the only portion of the Francis I. work.
"The place was burned during the Terror," said Eugene, "for my
great-uncle, from whom Mlle. de Tartas inherited it, was a good and true
Royalist; he went to Spain after the Revolution, and did not come back
until the accession of Charles X., when he restored the house, and then
died, enormously old. This explains why it is all so new."
The old Spanish sorcerer to whom Mlle. de Tartas had left her personal
property had done his work thoroughly. The house was absolutely empty,
even the wardrobes and bookcases built in had been carried away; we went
through room after room, finding all absolutely dismantled, only the
windows and doors with their casings, the parquet floors, and the florid
Renaissance mantels remaining.
"I feel better," remarked Fargeau. "The house may be haunted, but it
don't look it, certainly; it is the most respectable place imaginable."
"Just you wait," replied Eugene. "These are only the state apartments,
which my aunt seldom used, except, perhaps, on her annual
'Walpurgisnacht.' Come up stairs and I will show you a better _mise en
scene_."
On this floor, the rooms fronting the court, the sleeping-rooms, were
quite small,--("They are the bad rooms all the same," said
Eugene,)--four of them, all just as ordinary in appearance as those
below. A corridor ran behind them connecting with the wing corridor,
and from this opened a door, unlike any of the other doors in that it
was covered with green baize, somewhat moth-eaten. Eugene selected a key
from the bunch he carried, unlocked the door, and with some difficulty
forced it to swing inward; it was as heavy as the door of a safe.
"We are now," he said, "on the very threshold of hell itself; these
rooms in here were my scarlet aunt's unholy of unholies. I never let
them with the rest of the house, but keep them as a curiosity. I only
wish Torrevieja had kept out; as it was, he looted them, as he did the
rest of the house, and nothing is left but the walls and ceiling and
floor. They are something, however, and may suggest what the former
condition must have been. Tremble and enter."
The first apartment was a kind of anteroom, a cube of perhaps twenty
feet each way, without windows, and with no doors except that by which
we entered and another to the right. Walls, floor, and ceiling were
covered with a black lacquer, brilliantly polished, that flashed the
light of our lanterns in a thousand intricate reflections. It was like
the inside of an enormous Japanese box, and about as empty. From this
we passed to another room, and here we nearly dropped our lanterns. The
room was circular, thirty feet or so in diameter, covered by a
hemispherical dome; walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with gold
stars; and reaching from floor to floor across the dome stretched a
colossal figure in red lacquer of a nude woman kneeling, her legs
reaching out along the floor on either side, her head touching the
lintel of the door through which we had entered, her arms forming its
sides, with the fore arms extended and stretching along the walls until
they met the long feet. The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely
terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw. From the navel hung a great white
object, like the traditional roe's egg of the Arabian Nights. The floor
was of red lacquer, and in it was inlaid a pentagram the size of the
room, made of wide strips of brass. In the centre of this pentagram was
a circular disk of black stone, slightly saucer-shaped, with a small
outlet in the middle.
The effect of the room was simply crushing, with this gigantic red
figure crouched over it all, the staring eyes fixed on one, no matter
what his position. None of us spoke, so oppressive was the whole thing.
The third room was like the first in dimensions, but instead of being
black it was entirely sheathed with plates of brass, walls, ceiling, and
floor,--tarnished now, and turning green, but still brilliant under the
lantern light. In the middle stood an oblong altar of porphyry, its
longer dimensions on the axis of the suite of rooms, and at one end,
opposite the range of doors, a pedestal of black basalt.
This was all. Three rooms, stranger than these, even in their emptiness,
it would be hard to imagine. In Egypt, in India, they would not be
entirely out of place, but here in Paris, in a commonplace _hotel_, in
the Rue M. le Prince, they were incredible.
We retraced our steps, Eugene closed the iron door with its baize
covering, and we went into one of the front chambers and sat down,
looking at each other.
"Nice party, your aunt," said Fargeau. "Nice old party, with amiable
tastes; I am glad we are not to spend the night in _those_ rooms."
"What do you suppose she did there?" inquired Duchesne. "I know more or
less about black art, but that series of rooms is too much for me."
"My impression is," said d'Ardeche, "that the brazen room was a kind of
sanctuary containing some image or other on the basalt base, while the
stone in front was really an altar,--what the nature of the sacrifice
might be I don't even guess. The round room may have been used for
invocations and incantations. The pentagram looks like it. Any way it is
all just about as queer and _fin de siecle_ as I can well imagine. Look
here, it is nearly twelve, let's dispose of ourselves, if we are going
to hunt this thing down."
The four chambers on this floor of the old house were those said to be
haunted, the wings being quite innocent, and, so far as we knew, the
floors below. It was arranged that we should each occupy a room, leaving
the doors open with the lights burning, and at the slightest cry or
knock we were all to rush at once to the room from which the warning
sound might come. There was no communication between the rooms to be
sure, but, as the doors all opened into the corridor, every sound was
plainly audible.
The last room fell to me, and I looked it over carefully.
It seemed innocent enough, a commonplace, square, rather lofty Parisian
sleeping-room, finished in wood painted white, with a small marble
mantel, a dusty floor of inlaid maple and cherry, walls hung with an
ordinary French paper, apparently quite new, and two deeply embrasured
windows looking out on the court.
I opened the swinging sash with some trouble, and sat down in the window
seat with my lantern beside me trained on the only door, which gave on
the corridor.
The wind had gone down, and it was very still without,--still and hot.
The masses of luminous vapor were gathering thickly overhead, no longer
urged by the gusty wind. The great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with
here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the
window in the sluggish air. Across the roofs I could hear the sound of a
belated _fiacre_ in the streets below. I filled my pipe again and
waited.
For a time the voices of the men in the other rooms were a
companionship, and at first I shouted to them now and then, but my
voice echoed rather unpleasantly through the long corridors, and had a
suggestive way of reverberating around the left wing beside me, and
coming out at a broken window at its extremity like the voice of another
man. I soon gave up my attempts at conversation, and devoted myself to
the task of keeping awake.
It was not easy; why did I eat that lettuce salad at Pere Garceau's? I
should have known better. It was making me irresistibly sleepy, and
wakefulness was absolutely necessary. It was certainly gratifying to
know that I could sleep, that my courage was by me to that extent, but
in the interests of science I must keep awake. But almost never, it
seemed, had sleep looked so desirable. Half a hundred times, nearly, I
would doze for an instant, only to awake with a start, and find my pipe
gone out. Nor did the exertion of relighting it pull me together. I
struck my match mechanically, and with the first puff dropped off again.
It was most vexing. I got up and walked around the room. It was most
annoying. My cramped position had almost put both my legs to sleep. I
could hardly stand. I felt numb, as though with cold. There was no
longer any sound from the other rooms, nor from without. I sank down in
my window seat. How dark it was growing! I turned up the lantern. That
pipe again, how obstinately it kept going out! and my last match was
gone. The lantern, too, was _that_ going out? I lifted my hand to turn
it up again. It felt like lead, and fell beside me.
_Then_ I awoke,--absolutely. I remembered the story of "The Haunters and
the Haunted." _This_ was the Horror. I tried to rise, to cry out. My
body was like lead, my tongue was paralyzed. I could hardly move my
eyes. And the light was going out. There was no question about that.
Darker and darker yet; little by little the pattern of the paper was
swallowed up in the advancing night. A prickling numbness gathered in
every nerve, my right arm slipped without feeling from my lap to my
side, and I could not raise it,--it swung helpless. A thin, keen humming
began in my head, like the cicadas on a hillside in September. The
darkness was coming fast.
Yes, this was it. Something was subjecting me, body and mind, to slow
paralysis. Physically I was already dead. If I could only hold my mind,
my consciousness, I might still be safe, but could I? Could I resist
the mad horror of this silence, the deepening dark, the creeping
numbness? I knew that, like the man in the ghost story, my only safety
lay here.
It had come at last. My body was dead, I could no longer move my eyes.
They were fixed in that last look on the place where the door had been,
now only a deepening of the dark.
Utter night: the last flicker of the lantern was gone. I sat and waited;
my mind was still keen, but how long would it last? There was a limit
even to the endurance of the utter panic of fear.
Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky,
opalescent, small, far away,--awful eyes, like a dead dream. More
beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the
perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a never ending flow
of opal water into a circular tunnel. I could not have moved my eyes had
I possessed the power: they devoured the fearful, beautiful things that
grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more
beautiful, the white flakes of light sweeping more swiftly into the
blazing vortices, the awful fascination deepening in its insane
intensity as the white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger.
Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the unknown
Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous,
terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical
regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, in its
charnel-house deadliness.
With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the
presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror
of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. Again
and again I tried to shriek, to make some noise, but physically I was
utterly dead. I could only feel myself go mad with the terror of hideous
death. The eyes were close on me,--their movement so swift that they
seemed to be but palpitating flames, the dead breath was around me like
the depths of the deepest sea.
Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless,
jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from
me, but, as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept
sinuously around me, my will came back, my body awoke with the reaction
of final fear, and I closed with the nameless death that enfolded me.
What was it that I was fighting? My arms sunk through the unresisting
mass that was turning me to ice. Moment by moment new folds of cold
jelly swept round me, crushing me with the force of Titans. I fought to
wrest my mouth from this awful Thing that sealed it, but, if ever I
succeeded and caught a single breath, the wet, sucking mass closed over
my face again before I could cry out. I think I fought for hours,
desperately, insanely, in a silence that was more hideous than any
sound,--fought until I felt final death at hand, until the memory of all
my life rushed over me like a flood, until I no longer had strength to
wrench my face from that hellish succubus, until with a last mechanical
struggle I fell and yielded to death.
* * * * *
Then I heard a voice say, "If he is dead, I can never forgive myself; I
was to blame."
Another replied, "He is not dead, I know we can save him if only we
reach the hospital in time. Drive like hell, _cocher_! twenty francs for
you, if you get there in three minutes."
Then there was night again, and nothingness, until I suddenly awoke and
stared around. I lay in a hospital ward, very white and sunny, some
yellow _fleurs-de-lis_ stood beside the head of the pallet, and a tall
sister of mercy sat by my side.
To tell the story in a few words, I was in the Hotel Dieu, where the men
had taken me that fearful night of the twelfth of June. I asked for
Fargeau or Duchesne, and by and by the latter came, and sitting beside
the bed told me all that I did not know.
It seems that they had sat, each in his room, hour after hour, hearing
nothing, very much bored, and disappointed. Soon after two o'clock
Fargeau, who was in the next room, called to me to ask if I was awake. I
gave no reply, and, after shouting once or twice, he took his lantern
and came to investigate. The door was locked on the inside! He instantly
called d'Ardeche and Duchesne, and together they hurled themselves
against the door. It resisted. Within they could hear irregular
footsteps dashing here and there, with heavy breathing. Although frozen
with terror, they fought to destroy the door and finally succeeded by
using a great slab of marble that formed the shelf of the mantel in
Fargeau's room. As the door crashed in, they were suddenly hurled back
against the walls of the corridor, as though by an explosion, the
lanterns were extinguished, and they found themselves in utter silence
and darkness.
As soon as they recovered from the shock, they leaped into the room and
fell over my body in the middle of the floor. They lighted one of the
lanterns, and saw the strangest sight that can be imagined. The floor
and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something
that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for me,
I was drenched with the same cursed liquid. The odor of musk was
nauseating. They dragged me away, stripped off my clothing, wrapped me
in their coats, and hurried to the hospital, thinking me perhaps dead.
Soon after sunrise d'Ardeche left the hospital, being assured that I was
in a fair way to recovery, with time, and with Fargeau went up to
examine by daylight the traces of the adventure that was so nearly
fatal. They were too late. Fire engines were coming down the street as
they passed the Academie. A neighbor rushed up to d'Ardeche: "O
Monsieur! what misfortune, yet what fortune! It is true _la Bouche
d'Enfer_--I beg pardon, the residence of the lamented Mlle. de
Tartas,--was burned, but not wholly, only the ancient building. The
wings were saved, and for that great credit is due the brave firemen.
Monsieur will remember them, no doubt."
It was quite true. Whether a forgotten lantern, overturned in the
excitement, had done the work, or whether the origin of the fire was
more supernatural, it was certain that "the Mouth of Hell" was no more.
A last engine was pumping slowly as d'Ardeche came up; half a dozen
limp, and one distended, hose stretched through the _porte cochere_, and
within only the facade of Francis I. remained, draped still with the
black stems of the wisteria. Beyond lay a great vacancy, where thin
smoke was rising slowly. Every floor was gone, and the strange halls of
Mlle. Blaye de Tartas were only a memory.
With d'Ardeche I visited the place last year, but in the stead of the
ancient walls was then only a new and ordinary building, fresh and
respectable; yet the wonderful stories of the old _Bouche d'Enfer_ still
lingered in the quarter, and will hold there, I do not doubt, until the
Day of Judgment.
IN KROPFSBERG KEEP.
In Kropfsberg Keep.
To the traveller from Innsbrueck to Munich, up the lovely valley of the
silver Inn, many castles appear, one after another, each on its beetling
cliff or gentle hill,--appear and disappear, melting into the dark fir
trees that grow so thickly on every side,--Laneck, Lichtwer, Ratholtz,
Tratzberg, Matzen, Kropfsberg, gathering close around the entrance to
the dark and wonderful Zillerthal.
But to us--Tom Rendel and myself--there are two castles only: not the
gorgeous and princely Ambras, nor the noble old Tratzberg, with its
crowded treasures of solemn and splendid mediaevalism; but little Matzen,
where eager hospitality forms the new life of a never-dead chivalry, and
Kropfsberg, ruined, tottering, blasted by fire and smitten with
grievous years,--a dead thing, and haunted,--full of strange legends,
and eloquent of mystery and tragedy.
We were visiting the von C----s at Matzen, and gaining our first
wondering knowledge of the courtly, cordial castle life in the
Tyrol,--of the gentle and delicate hospitality of noble Austrians.
Brixleg had ceased to be but a mark on a map, and had become a place of
rest and delight, a home for homeless wanderers on the face of Europe,
while Schloss Matzen was a synonym for all that was gracious and kindly
and beautiful in life. The days moved on in a golden round of riding and
driving and shooting: down to Landl and Thiersee for chamois, across the
river to the magic Achensee, up the Zillerthal, across the Schmerner
Joch, even to the railway station at Steinach. And in the evenings after
the late dinners in the upper hall where the sleepy hounds leaned
against our chairs looking at us with suppliant eyes, in the evenings
when the fire was dying away in the hooded fireplace in the library,
stories. Stories, and legends, and fairy tales, while the stiff old
portraits changed countenance constantly under the flickering firelight,
and the sound of the drifting Inn came softly across the meadows far
below.
If ever I tell the Story of Schloss Matzen, then will be the time to
paint the too inadequate picture of this fair oasis in the desert of
travel and tourists and hotels; but just now it is Kropfsberg the Silent
that is of greater importance, for it was only in Matzen that the story
was told by Fraeulein E----, the gold-haired niece of Frau von C----, one
hot evening in July, when we were sitting in the great west window of
the drawing-room after a long ride up the Stallenthal. All the windows
were open to catch the faint wind, and we had sat for a long time
watching the Otzethaler Alps turn rose-color over distant Innsbrueck,
then deepen to violet as the sun went down and the white mists rose
slowly until Lichtwer and Laneck and Kropfsberg rose like craggy islands
in a silver sea.
And this is the story as Fraeulein E---- told it to us,--the Story of
Kropfsberg Keep.
* * * * *
A great many years ago, soon after my grandfather died, and Matzen came
to us, when I was a little girl, and so young that I remember nothing
of the affair except as something dreadful that frightened me very much,
two young men who had studied painting with my grandfather came down to
Brixleg from Munich, partly to paint, and partly to amuse
themselves,--"ghost-hunting" as they said, for they were very sensible
young men and prided themselves on it, laughing at all kinds of
"superstition," and particularly at that form which believed in ghosts
and feared them. They had never seen a real ghost, you know, and they
belonged to a certain set of people who believed nothing they had not
seen themselves,--which always seemed to me _very_ conceited. Well, they
knew that we had lots of beautiful castles here in the "lower valley,"
and they assumed, and rightly, that every castle has at least _one_
ghost story connected with it, so they chose this as their hunting
ground, only the game they sought was ghosts, not chamois. Their plan
was to visit every place that was supposed to be haunted, and to meet
every reputed ghost, and prove that it really was no ghost at all.
There was a little inn down in the village then, kept by an old man
named Peter Rosskopf, and the two young men made this their
headquarters. The very first night they began to draw from the old
innkeeper all that he knew of legends and ghost stories connected with
Brixleg and its castles, and as he was a most garrulous old gentleman he
filled them with the wildest delight by his stories of the ghosts of the
castles about the mouth of the Zillerthal. Of course the old man
believed every word he said, and you can imagine his horror and
amazement when, after telling his guests the particularly blood-curdling
story of Kropfsberg and its haunted keep, the elder of the two boys,
whose surname I have forgotten, but whose Christian name was Rupert,
calmly said, "Your story is most satisfactory: we will sleep in
Kropfsberg Keep to-morrow night, and you must provide us with all that
we may need to make ourselves comfortable."
The old man nearly fell into the fire. "What for a blockhead are you?"
he cried, with big eyes. "The keep is haunted by Count Albert's ghost, I
tell you!"
"That is why we are going there to-morrow night; we wish to make the
acquaintance of Count Albert."
"But there was a man stayed there once, and in the morning he was
dead."
"Very silly of him; there are two of us, and we carry revolvers."
"But it's a _ghost_, I tell you," almost screamed the innkeeper; "are
ghosts afraid of firearms?"
"Whether they are or not, we are _not_ afraid of _them_."
Here the younger boy broke in,--he was named Otto von Kleist. I remember
the name, for I had a music teacher once by that name. He abused the
poor old man shamefully; told him that they were going to spend the
night in Kropfsberg in spite of Count Albert and Peter Rosskopf, and
that he might as well make the most of it and earn his money with
cheerfulness.
In a word, they finally bullied the old fellow into submission, and when
the morning came he set about preparing for the suicide, as he
considered it, with sighs and mutterings and ominous shakings of the
head.
You know the condition of the castle now,--nothing but scorched walls
and crumbling piles of fallen masonry. Well, at the time I tell you of,
the keep was still partially preserved. It was finally burned out only a
few years ago by some wicked boys who came over from Jenbach to have a
good time. But when the ghost hunters came, though the two lower floors
had fallen into the crypt, the third floor remained. The peasants said
it _could_ not fall, but that it would stay until the Day of Judgment,
because it was in the room above that the wicked Count Albert sat
watching the flames destroy the great castle and his imprisoned guests,
and where he finally hung himself in a suit of armor that had belonged
to his mediaeval ancestor, the first Count Kropfsberg.
No one dared touch him, and so he hung there for twelve years, and all
the time venturesome boys and daring men used to creep up the turret
steps and stare awfully through the chinks in the door at that ghostly
mass of steel that held within itself the body of a murderer and
suicide, slowly returning to the dust from which it was made. Finally it
disappeared, none knew whither, and for another dozen years the room
stood empty but for the old furniture and the rotting hangings.
So, when the two men climbed the stairway to the haunted room, they
found a very different state of things from what exists now. The room
was absolutely as it was left the night Count Albert burned the castle,
except that all trace of the suspended suit of armor and its ghastly
contents had vanished.
No one had dared to cross the threshold, and I suppose that for forty
years no living thing had entered that dreadful room.
On one side stood a vast canopied bed of black wood, the damask hangings
of which were covered with mould and mildew. All the clothing of the bed
was in perfect order, and on it lay a book, open, and face downward. The
only other furniture in the room consisted of several old chairs, a
carved oak chest, and a big inlaid table covered with books and papers,
and on one corner two or three bottles with dark solid sediment at the
bottom, and a glass, also dark with the dregs of wine that had been
poured out almost half a century before. The tapestry on the walls was
green with mould, but hardly torn or otherwise defaced, for although the
heavy dust of forty years lay on everything the room had been preserved
from further harm. No spider web was to be seen, no trace of nibbling
mice, not even a dead moth or fly on the sills of the diamond-paned
windows; life seemed to have shunned the room utterly and finally.
The men looked at the room curiously, and, I am sure, not without some
feelings of awe and unacknowledged fear; but, whatever they may have
felt of instinctive shrinking, they said nothing, and quickly set to
work to make the room passably inhabitable. They decided to touch
nothing that had not absolutely to be changed, and therefore they made
for themselves a bed in one corner with the mattress and linen from the
inn. In the great fireplace they piled a lot of wood on the caked ashes
of a fire dead for forty years, turned the old chest into a table, and
laid out on it all their arrangements for the evening's amusement: food,
two or three bottles of wine, pipes and tobacco, and the chess-board
that was their inseparable travelling companion.
All this they did themselves: the innkeeper would not even come within
the walls of the outer court; he insisted that he had washed his hands
of the whole affair, the silly dunderheads might go to their death their
own way. _He_ would not aid and abet them. One of the stable boys
brought the basket of food and the wood and the bed up the winding stone
stairs, to be sure, but neither money nor prayers nor threats would
bring him within the walls of the accursed place, and he stared
fearfully at the hare-brained boys as they worked around the dead old
room preparing for the night that was coming so fast.
At length everything was in readiness, and after a final visit to the
inn for dinner Rupert and Otto started at sunset for the Keep. Half the
village went with them, for Peter Rosskopf had babbled the whole story
to an open-mouthed crowd of wondering men and women, and as to an
execution the awe-struck crowd followed the two boys dumbly, curious to
see if they surely would put their plan into execution. But none went
farther than the outer doorway of the stairs, for it was already growing
twilight. In absolute silence they watched the two foolhardy youths with
their lives in their hands enter the terrible Keep, standing like a
tower in the midst of the piles of stones that had once formed walls
joining it with the mass of the castle beyond. When a moment later a
light showed itself in the high windows above, they sighed resignedly
and went their ways, to wait stolidly until morning should come and
prove the truth of their fears and warnings.
In the mean time the ghost hunters built a huge fire, lighted their
many candles, and sat down to await developments. Rupert afterwards told
my uncle that they really felt no fear whatever, only a contemptuous
curiosity, and they ate their supper with good appetite and an unusual
relish. It was a long evening. They played many games of chess, waiting
for midnight. Hour passed after hour, and nothing occurred to interrupt
the monotony of the evening. Ten, eleven, came and went,--it was almost
midnight. They piled more wood in the fireplace, lighted new candles,
looked to their pistols--and waited. The clocks in the village struck
twelve; the sound coming muffled through the high, deep-embrasured
windows. Nothing happened, nothing to break the heavy silence; and with
a feeling of disappointed relief they looked at each other and
acknowledged that they had met another rebuff.
Finally they decided that there was no use in sitting up and boring
themselves any longer, they had much better rest; so Otto threw himself
down on the mattress, falling almost immediately asleep. Rupert sat a
little longer, smoking, and watching the stars creep along behind the
shattered glass and the bent leads of the lofty windows; watching the
fire fall together, and the strange shadows move mysteriously on the
mouldering walls. The iron hook in the oak beam, that crossed the
ceiling midway, fascinated him, not with fear, but morbidly. So, it was
from that hook that for twelve years, twelve long years of changing
summer and winter, the body of Count Albert, murderer and suicide, hung
in its strange casing of mediaeval steel; moving a little at first, and
turning gently while the fire died out on the hearth, while the ruins of
the castle grew cold, and horrified peasants sought for the bodies of
the score of gay, reckless, wicked guests whom Count Albert had gathered
in Kropfsberg for a last debauch, gathered to their terrible and
untimely death. What a strange and fiendish idea it was, the young,
handsome noble who had ruined himself and his family in the society of
the splendid debauchees, gathering them all together, men and women who
had known only love and pleasure, for a glorious and awful riot of
luxury, and then, when they were all dancing in the great ballroom,
locking the doors and burning the whole castle about them, the while he
sat in the great keep listening to their screams of agonized fear,
watching the fire sweep from wing to wing until the whole mighty mass
was one enormous and awful pyre, and then, clothing himself in his
great-great-grandfather's armor, hanging himself in the midst of the
ruins of what had been a proud and noble castle. So ended a great
family, a great house.
But that was forty years ago.
He was growing drowsy; the light flickered and flared in the fireplace;
one by one the candles went out; the shadows grew thick in the room. Why
did that great iron hook stand out so plainly? why did that dark shadow
dance and quiver so mockingly behind it?--why-- But he ceased to wonder
at anything. He was asleep.
It seemed to him that he woke almost immediately; the fire still burned,
though low and fitfully on the hearth. Otto was sleeping, breathing
quietly and regularly; the shadows had gathered close around him, thick
and murky; with every passing moment the light died in the fireplace; he
felt stiff with cold. In the utter silence he heard the clock in the
village strike two. He shivered with a sudden and irresistible feeling
of fear, and abruptly turned and looked towards the hook in the ceiling.
Yes, It was there. He knew that It would be. It seemed quite natural, he
would have been disappointed had he seen nothing; but now he knew that
the story was true, knew that he was wrong, and that the dead _do_
sometimes return to earth, for there, in the fast-deepening shadow, hung
the black mass of wrought steel, turning a little now and then, with the
light flickering on the tarnished and rusty metal. He watched it
quietly; he hardly felt afraid; it was rather a sentiment of sadness and
fatality that filled him, of gloomy forebodings of something unknown,
unimaginable. He sat and watched the thing disappear in the gathering
dark, his hand on his pistol as it lay by him on the great chest. There
was no sound but the regular breathing of the sleeping boy on the
mattress.
It had grown absolutely dark; a bat fluttered against the broken glass
of the window. He wondered if he was growing mad, for--he hesitated to
acknowledge it to himself--he heard music; far, curious music, a strange
and luxurious dance, very faint, very vague, but unmistakable.
Like a flash of lightning came a jagged line of fire down the blank wall
opposite him, a line that remained, that grew wider, that let a pale
cold light into the room, showing him now all its details,--the empty
fireplace, where a thin smoke rose in a spiral from a bit of charred
wood, the mass of the great bed, and, in the very middle, black against
the curious brightness, the armored man, or ghost, or devil, standing,
not suspended, beneath the rusty hook. And with the rending of the wall
the music grew more distinct, though sounding still very, very far away.
Count Albert raised his mailed hand and beckoned to him; then turned,
and stood in the riven wall.