"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost
to frighten me." And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my
hand.
"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and
glanced at me askance.
"Eight-and-twenty years," said I, "I have lived, and never a ghost
have I seen as yet."
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide
open. "Ay," she broke in, "and eight-and-twenty years you have
lived, and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a
many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty." She
swayed her head slowly from side to side. "A many things to see and
sorrow for."
I half suspected these old people were trying to enhance the spectral
terrors of their house by this droning insistence. I put down my
empty glass on the table, and, looking about the room, caught a
glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible
sturdiness, in the queer old mirror beside the china cupboard.
"Well," I said, "if I see anything to-night, I shall be so much the
wiser. For I come to the business with an open mind."
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm once
more.
I heard the faint sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags
in the passage outside. The door creaked on its hinges as a second
old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the
first. He supported himself by the help of a crutch, his eyes were
covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and
pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an
armchair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and
began to cough. The man with the withered hand gave the new-comer a
short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his
arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.
"I said--it's your own choosing," said the man with the withered
hand, when the coughing had ceased for a while.
"It's my own choosing," I answered.
The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first
time, and threw his head back for a moment, and sidewise, to see me.
I caught a momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and
inflamed. Then he began to cough and splutter again.
"Why don't you drink?" said the man with the withered arm, pushing
the beer toward him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful
with a shaking hand, that splashed half as much again on the deal
table. A monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall, and mocked
his action as he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarcely
expected these grotesque custodians. There is, to my mind, something
inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human
qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The
three of them made me feel uncomfortable with their gaunt silences,
their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one
another. And that night, perhaps, I was in the mood for
uncomfortable impressions. I resolved to get away from their vague
foreshadowings of the evil things upstairs.
"If," said I, "you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will
make myself comfortable there."
The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it
startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from out
of the darkness under the shade, but no one answered me. I waited a
minute, glancing from one to the other. The old woman stared like a
dead body, glaring into the fire with lack-lustre eyes.
"If," I said, a little louder, "if you will show me to this haunted
room of yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me."
"There's a candle on the slab outside the door," said the man with
the withered hand, looking at my feet as he addressed me. "But if
you go to the Red Room to-night--"
"This night of all nights!" said the old woman, softly.
"--You go alone."
"Very well," I answered, shortly, "and which way do I go?"
"You go along the passage for a bit," said he, nodding his head on
his shoulder at the door, "until you come to a spiral staircase; and
on the second landing is a door covered with green baize. Go through
that, and down the long corridor to the end, and the Red Room is on
your left up the steps."
"Have I got that right?" I said, and repeated his directions.
He corrected me in one particular.
"And you are really going?" said the man with the shade, looking at
me again for the third time with that queer, unnatural tilting of the
face.
"This night of all nights!" whispered the old woman.
"It is what I came for," I said, and moved toward the door. As I did
so, the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so
as to be closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned
and looked at them, and saw they were all close together, dark
against the firelight, staring at me over their shoulders, with an
intent expression on their ancient faces.
"Good-night," I said, setting the door open.
"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm.
I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then
I shut them in, and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.
I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in
whose charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned,
old-fashioned furniture of the housekeeper's room, in which they
foregathered, had affected me curiously in spite of my effort to keep
myself at a matter-of-fact phase. They seemed to belong to another
age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were indeed to be
feared, when common sense was uncommon, an age when omens and witches
were credible, and ghosts beyond denying. Their very existence,
thought I, is spectral; the cut of their clothing, fashions born in
dead brains; the ornaments and conveniences in the room about them
even are ghostly--the thoughts of vanished men, which still haunt
rather than participate in the world of to-day. And the passage I
was in, long and shadowy, with a film of moisture glistening on the
wall, was as gaunt and cold as a thing that is dead and rigid. But
with an effort I sent such thoughts to the right-about. The long,
drafty subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my candle
flared and made the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang up and
down the spiral staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me,
and another fled before me into the darkness overhead. I came to the
wide landing and stopped there for a moment listening to a rustling
that I fancied I heard creeping behind me, and then, satisfied of the
absolute silence, pushed open the unwilling baize-covered door and
stood in the silent corridor.
The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in
by the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in
vivid black shadow or reticulated silvery illumination. Everything
seemed in its proper position; the house might have been deserted on
the yesterday instead of twelve months ago. There were candles in
the sockets of the sconces, and whatever dust had gathered on the
carpets or upon the polished flooring was distributed so evenly as to
be invisible in my candlelight. A waiting stillness was over
everything. I was about to advance, and stopped abruptly. A bronze
group stood upon the landing hidden from me by a corner of the wall;
but its shadow fell with marvelous distinctness upon the white
paneling, and gave me the impression of some one crouching to waylay
me. The thing jumped upon my attention suddenly. I stood rigid for
half a moment, perhaps. Then, with my hand in the pocket that held
the revolver, I advanced, only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle,
glistening in the moonlight. That incident for a time restored my
nerve, and a dim porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head
rocked as I passed, scarcely startled me.
The door of the Red Room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy
corner. I moved my candle from side to side in order to see clearly
the nature of the recess in which I stood, before opening the door.
Here it was, thought I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory
of that story gave me a sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced
over my shoulder at the black Ganymede in the moonlight, and opened
the door of the Red Room rather hastily, with my face half turned to
the pallid silence of the corridor.
I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found
in the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft surveying
the scene of my vigil, the great Red Room of Lorraine Castle, in
which the young Duke had died; or rather in which he had begun his
dying, for he had opened the door and fallen headlong down the steps
I had just ascended. That had been the end of his vigil, of his
gallant attempt to conquer the ghostly tradition of the place, and
never, I thought, had apoplexy better served the ends of
superstition. There were other and older stories that clung to the
room, back to the half-incredible beginning of it all, the tale of a
timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband's jest of
frightening her. And looking round that huge shadowy room with its
black window bays, its recesses and alcoves, its dusty brown-red
hangings and dark gigantic furniture, one could well understand the
legends that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating
darknesses. My candle was a little tongue of light in the vastness
of the chamber; its rays failed to pierce to the opposite end of the
room, and left an ocean of dull red mystery and suggestion, sentinel
shadows and watching darknesses beyond its island of light. And the
stillness of desolation brooded over it all.
I must confess some impalpable quality of that ancient room disturbed
me. I tried to fight the feeling down. I resolved to make a
systematic examination of the place, and so, by leaving nothing to
the imagination, dispel the fanciful suggestions of the obscurity
before they obtained a hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the
fastening of the door, I began to walk round the room, peering round
each article of furniture, tucking up the valances of the bed and
opening its curtains wide. In one place there was a distinct echo to
my footsteps, the noises I made seemed so little that they enhanced
rather than broke the silence of the place. I pulled up the blinds
and examined the fastenings of the several windows. Attracted by the
fall of a particle of dust, I leaned forward and looked up the
blackness of the wide chimney. Then, trying to preserve my
scientific attitude of mind, I walked round and began tapping the oak
paneling for any secret opening, but I desisted before reaching the
alcove. I saw my face in a mirror--white.
There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces
bearing candles, and on the mantelshelf, too, were candles in china
candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was
laid--an unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper--and I lit
it, to keep down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning
well I stood round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I
had pulled up a chintz-covered armchair and a table to form a kind of
barricade before me. On this lay my revolver, ready to hand. My
precise examination had done me a little good, but I still found the
remoter darkness of the place and its perfect stillness too
stimulating for the imagination. The echoing of the stir and
crackling of the fire was no sort of comfort to me. The shadow in
the alcove at the end of the room began to display that undefinable
quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking living thing
that comes so easily in silence and solitude. And to reassure
myself, I walked with a candle into it and satisfied myself that
there was nothing tangible there. I stood that candle upon the floor
of the alcove and left it in that position.
By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension,
although to my reason there was no adequate cause for my condition.
My mind, however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite
unreservedly that nothing supernatural could happen, and to pass the
time I began stringing some rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion,
concerning the original legend of the place. A few I spoke aloud,
but the echoes were not pleasant. For the same reason I also
abandoned, after a time, a conversation with myself upon the
impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My mind reverted to the three
old and distorted people downstairs, and I tried to keep it upon that
topic.
The sombre reds and grays of the room troubled me; even with its
seven candles the place was merely dim. The light in the alcove
flaring in a draft, and the fire flickering, kept the shadows and
penumbra perpetually shifting and stirring in a noiseless flighty
dance. Casting about for a remedy, I recalled the wax candles I had
seen in the corridor, and, with a slight effort, carrying a candle
and leaving the door open, I walked out into the moonlight, and
presently returned with as many as ten. These I put in the various
knick-knacks of china with which the room was sparsely adorned, and
lit and placed them where the shadows had lain deepest, some on the
floor, some in the window recesses, arranging and rearranging them
until at last my seventeen candles were so placed that not an inch of
the room but had the direct light of at least one of them. It
occurred to me that when the ghost came I could warn him not to trip
over them. The room was now quite brightly illuminated. There was
something very cheering and reassuring in these little silent
streaming flames, and to notice their steady diminution of length
offered me an occupation and gave me a reassuring sense of the
passage of time.
Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil
weighed heavily enough upon me. I stood watching the minute hand of
my watch creep towards midnight.
Then something happened in the alcove. I did not see the candle go
out, I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one
might start and see the unexpected presence of a stranger. The black
shadow had sprung back to its place. "By Jove," said I aloud,
recovering from my surprise, "that draft's a strong one;" and taking
the matchbox from the table, I walked across the room in a leisurely
manner to relight the corner again. My first match would not strike,
and as I succeeded with the second, something seemed to blink on the
wall before me. I turned my head involuntarily and saw that the two
candles on the little table by the fireplace were extinguished. I
rose at once to my feet.
"Odd," I said. "Did I do that myself in a flash of
absent-mindedness?"
I walked back, relit one, and as I did so I saw the candle in the
right sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost
immediately its companion followed it. The flames vanished as if the
wick had been suddenly nipped between a finger and thumb, leaving the
wick neither glowing nor smoking, but black. While I stood gaping
the candle at the foot of the bed went out, and the shadows seemed to
take another step toward me.
"This won't do!" said I, and first one and then another candle on the
mantelshelf followed.
"What's up?" I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice
somehow. At that the candle on the corner of the wardrobe went out,
and the one I had relit in the alcove followed.
"Steady on!" I said, "those candles are wanted," speaking with a
half-hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the
while, "for the mantel candlesticks." My hands trembled so much that
twice I missed the rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel
emerged from darkness again, two candles in the remoter end of the
room were eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit the larger
mirror candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for
the moment I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a
noiseless volley there vanished four lights at once in different
corners of the room, and I struck another match in quivering haste,
and stood hesitating whither to take it.
As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two
candles on the table. With a cry of terror I dashed at the alcove,
then into the corner and then into the window, relighting three as
two more vanished by the fireplace, and then, perceiving a better
way, I dropped matches on the iron-bound deedbox in the corner, and
caught up the bedroom candlestick. With this I avoided the delay of
striking matches, but for all that the steady process of extinction
went on, and the shadows I feared and fought against returned, and
crept in upon me, first a step gained on this side of me, then on
that. I was now almost frantic with the horror of the coming
darkness, and my self-possession deserted me. I leaped panting from
candle to candle in a vain struggle against that remorseless advance.
I bruised myself in the thigh against the table, I sent a chair
headlong, I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in
my fall. My candle rolled away from me and I snatched another as I
rose. Abruptly this was blown out as I swung it off the table by the
wind of my sudden movement, and immediately the two remaining candles
followed. But there was light still in the room, a red light, that
streamed across the ceiling and staved off the shadows from me. The
fire! Of course I could still thrust my candle between the bars and
relight it!
I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing
coals and splashing red reflections upon the furniture; made two
steps toward the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and
vanished, the glow vanished, the reflections rushed together and
disappeared, and as I thrust the candle between the bars darkness
closed upon me like the shutting of an eye, wrapped about me in a
stifling embrace, sealed my vision, and crushed the last vestiges of
self-possession from my brain. And it was not only palpable
darkness, but intolerable terror. The candle fell from my hands. I
flung out my arms in a vain effort to thrust that ponderous blackness
away from me, and lifting up my voice, screamed with all my might,
once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must have staggered to my feet.
I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor, and with my head
bowed and my arms over my face, made a stumbling run for the door.
But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and I struck
myself heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back,
turned, and was either struck or struck myself against some other
bulky furnishing. I have a vague memory of battering myself thus to
and fro in the darkness, of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, of
a horrible sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last
frantic effort to keep my footing, and then I remember no more.
I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the
man with the withered hand was watching my face. I looked about me
trying to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not
recollect. I rolled my eyes into the corner and saw the old woman,
no longer abstracted, no longer terrible, pouring out some drops of
medicine from a little blue phial into a glass. "Where am I?" I
said. "I seem to remember you, and yet I can not remember who you
are."
They told me then, and I heard of the haunted Red Room as one who
hears a tale. "We found you at dawn," said he, "and there was blood
on your forehead and lips."
I wondered that I had ever disliked him. The three of them in the
daylight seemed commonplace old folk enough. The man with the green
shade had his head bent as one who sleeps.
It was very slowly I recovered the memory of my experience. "You
believe now," said the old man with the withered hand, "that the room
is haunted?" He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but
as one who condoles with a friend.
"Yes," said I, "the room is haunted."
"And you have seen it. And we who have been here all our lives have
never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared. Tell us, is it
truly the old earl who--"
"No," said I, "it is not."
"I told you so," said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. "It
is his poor young countess who was frightened--"
"It is not," I said. "There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of
countess in that room; there is no ghost there at all, but worse, far
worse, something impalpable--"
"Well?" they said.
"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men," said I;
"and that is, in all its nakedness--'Fear!' Fear that will not have
light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and
darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it
fought against me in the room--"
I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went
up to my bandages. "The candles went out one after another, and I
fled--"
Then the man with the shade lifted his face sideways to see me and
spoke.
"That is it," said he. "I knew that was it. A Power of Darkness.
To put such a curse upon a home! It lurks there always. You can
feel it even in the daytime, even of a bright summer's day, in the
hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind you however you face about.
In the dusk it creeps in the corridor and follows you, so that you
dare not turn. It is even as you say. Fear itself is in that room.
Black Fear... And there it will be ... so long as this house of sin
endures."