ALFRED HITCHc.o.c.k PRESENTS.
FEAR AND TREMBLING.
CONTENTS.
THE FORMS OF FEAR - ALFRED J. HITCHc.o.c.k.
Ca.s.sIUS - HENRY S. WHITEHEAD.
THE TARN - HUGH WALPOLE.
LITTLE MEMENTO - JOHN COLLIER.
OH, WHISTLE, AND I"LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD - M. R. JAMES.
ONE SUMMER NIGHT - AMBROSE BIERCE.
TELLING - ELIZABETH BOWEN.
THE JAR - RAY BRADBURY.
THE BAD LANDS - JOHN METCALFE.
GHOST HUNT - H. R. WAKEFIELD.
SKULE SKERRY - JOHN BUCHAN.
THE RED ROOM - H. G. WELLS.
THE SACK OF EMERALDS - LORD DUNSANY.
THE NIGHT REVEALS - WILLIAM IRISH.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..
ALFRED HITCHc.o.c.k.
THE FORMS OF FEAR.
They tell me - I have never had occasion to experiment - that "there is more than one way to skin a cat." I know, by reason of many delightfully quaking hours while equipped with slippers and easy chair, that there are a good many ways to induce shivery sensations in a reader.
It doesn"t take a ghost story, necessarily; fear has many forms, and the spectral tale has lost the monopoly it once enjoyed. That type was, perhaps, written most effectively by M. R. James, and I have included here his wonderfully t.i.tled, "Oh, Whistle, and I"ll Come to You, My Lad," as well as "Ghost Hunt," which H. R. Wakefield gives a distinctively modern twist.
The eleven other stories, however, produce shivers of other, widely varying kinds. The malignant creature which attacks the terrified servant night after night in Henry S. Whitehead"s "Ca.s.sius" high-lights a fine example of the strange-beast theme. Ambrose Bierce"s little shocker, "One Summer Night," is typical of this writer"s bold delineation of brutality and callousness; its grave-robbing scene, with the ghoulish enterprise illumined by fitful lightning flashes, is appropriately eerie.
Our fear of the unknown, of elemental nature, gives us some terrifying moments in John Buchan"s "Skule Skerry" when the venturesome scientist, alone on the tiny islet, realizes he is close to "the world which has only death in it" and, shuddering, stands "next door to the Abyss - that blanched wall of the North which is the negation of life." John Metcalfe takes us to "The Bad Lands," where ordinary things become charged with "sinister suggestion" and the scenery develops "an unpleasant tendency to the macabre" - small wonder that it evokes a dream in which, with Brent Ormerod, we walk "up and up into a strange dim country full of signs and whisperings and somber trees, where hollow breezes blow fitfully and a queer house set with lofty pines shines out white against a lurid sky." Br-rrr! And, accompanying H. G. Wells"s foolhardy young hero into "The Red Room," we discover, with him, that it contains not "haunts," but simply Fear - black Fear.
Along with Hugh Walpole"s evildoer, we cringe under the terrible whips of conscience in "The Tarn." In contrast, Elizabeth Bowen presents in "Telling" a killer whose mind is incapable of knowing remorse for his b.l.o.o.d.y deed, but only a dim comprehension that at last he has found Something he can do - Something that others cannot. The havoc wrought by a twisted mind holds us enthralled in "The Night Reveals," William Irish"s account of a man who finds he does not really know his wife; and John Collier, in "Little Memento", affords us a brief but memorable peek into the machinations of a devious and morbid old man.
Lastly, two tales which are far, far different from each other, but in their own ways equally effective. When you read Lord Dunsany"s "The Sack of Emeralds," forget the real world and surrender yourself to his magic as he tells us of "one bad October night in the high wolds, with a north wind chaunting of winter," when an old man, his face hopeless, totters along under the weight of a heavy sack; listen to the click, clack, clop coming nearer in the darkness, first faintly, then louder and louder, at last to reveal the rider: a figure wearing a sword in a huge scabbard, looking blacker than the darkness - Ray Bradbury, whose unique talent for horror-writing is beginning to receive just recognition, makes us share with his simple swamp folk their awe at the silent thing sloshing in "The Jar"; like them we ask, "Wonder what it is? Wonder if it"s a he or a she or just a plain old it?"
Whether you like your shivers old-fashioned or newfangled, or both, you should get plenty of them from these pages!
ALFRED HITCHc.o.c.k.
HENRY S. WHITEHEAD.
Ca.s.sIUS.
My houseman, Stephen Penn, who presided over the staff of my residence in St. Thomas, was not, strictly speaking, a native of that city. Penn came from the neighboring island of St. Jan. It is one of the ancient West Indian names, although there remain in the islands nowadays no Caucasians to bear that honorable cognomen.
Stephen"s travels, however, had not been limited to the crossing from St. Jan - which, incidentally, is the authentic scene of R. L. Stevenson"s Treasure Island - which lies little more than a rowboat"s journey away from the capital of the Virgin Islands. Stephen had been "down the Islands," which means that he had been actually as far from home as Trinidad, or perhaps, British Guiana, down through the great sweep of former mountaintops, submerged by some vast, cataclysmic, prehistoric inundation and named the Bow of Ulysses by some fanciful, antique geographer. That odyssey of humble Stephen Penn had taken place because of his love for ships. He had had various jobs afloat and his exact knowledge of the houseman"s art had been learned under various man-driving ship"s stewards.
During this preliminary training for his life"s work, Stephen had made many acquaintances. One of these, an upstanding, slim, parchment-colored Negro of 30 or so, was Brutus h.e.l.lman. Brutus, like Stephen, had settled down in St. Thomas as a houseman. It was, in fact, Stephen who had talked him into leaving his native British Antigua, to try his luck in our American Virgin Islands. Stephen had secured for him his first job in St. Thomas, in the household of a naval officer.
For this friend of his youthful days, Stephen continued to feel a certain sense of responsibility; because, when Brutus happened to be abruptly thrown out of employment by the sudden illness and removal by the Naval Department of his employer in the middle of the winter season in St. Thomas, Stephen came to me and requested that his friend Brutus be allowed to come to me "on board-wages" until he was able to secure another place.
I acquiesced. I knew Brutus as a first-rate houseman. I was glad to give him a hand, to oblige the always agreeable and highly efficient Stephen, and, indeed, to have so skillful a servant added to my little staff in my bachelor quarters. I arranged for something more substantial than the remuneration asked for, and Brutus h.e.l.lman added his skilled services to those of the admirable Stephen. I was very well served that season and never had any occasion to regret what both men alluded to as my "very great kindness!"
It was not long after Brutus h.e.l.lman had moved his simple belongings into one of the servants"-quarters cabins in my stone-paved yard that I had another opportunity to do something for him. It was Stephen once more who presented his friend"s case to me. Brutus, it appeared, had need of a minor operation, and, Negro-like, the two of them, talking the matter over between themselves, had decided to ask me, their present patron, to arrange it.
I did so, with my friend, Doctor Pelletier, chief surgeon, in charge of our Naval Station Hospital and regarded in Naval circles as the best man in the Medical Corps. I had not inquired about the nature of Brutus"s affliction. Stephen had stressed the minor aspect of the required surgery, and that was all I mentioned to Doctor Pelletier.
It is quite possible that if Doctor Pelletier had not been going to Puerto Rico on Thursday of that week, this narrative, the record of one of the most curious experiences I have ever had, would never have been set down. If Pelletier, his mind set on sailing at 11:00, had not merely walked out of his operating-room as soon as he had finished with Brutus a little after 8:00 that Thursday morning, left the dressing of the slight wound upon Brutus"s groin to be performed by his a.s.sistants, then that incredible affair which I can only describe as the persecution of the unfortunate Brutus h.e.l.lman would never have taken place.
It was on Wednesday, about 2 p.m., that I telephoned to Doctor Pelletier to ask him to perform an operation on Brutus.
"Send him over to the hospital this afternoon," Pelletier had answered, "and I"ll look him over about five and operate the first thing in the morning - if there is any need for an operation! I"m leaving for San Juan at eleven, for a week."
I thanked him and went upstairs to my siesta, after giving Stephen the message to Brutus, who started off for the hospital about an hour later. He remained in the hospital until the following Sunday afternoon. He was entirely recovered from the operation, he reported. It had been a very slight affair, really, merely the removal of some kind of growth. He thanked me for my part in it when he came to announce dinner while I was reading on the gallery.
It was on the Sat.u.r.day morning, the day before Brutus got back, that I discovered something very curious in an obscure corner of my house-yard, just around the corner of the wall of the three small cabins which occupy its north side. These cabins were tenantless except for the one at the east end of the row. That one was Brutus h.e.l.lman"s. Stephen Penn, like my cook, washer, and scullery maid, lived somewhere in the town.
I had been looking over the yard which was paved with old-fashioned flagging. I found it in excellent condition, weeded, freshly swept, and clean. The three stone servants" cubicles had been recently whitewashed and glistened like cake icing in the morning sun. I looked over this portion of my domain with approval, for I like things shipshape. I glanced into the two narrow air s.p.a.ces between the little, two-room houses. There were no cobwebs visible. Then I took a look around the east corner of Brutus h.e.l.lman"s little house where there was a narrow pa.s.sageway between the house and the high wall of antique Dutch brick, and there, well in toward the north wall, I saw on the ground what I first took to be a discarded toy which some child had thrown there, probably, it occurred to me, over the wall at the back of the stone cabins.
It looked like a doll"s house, which, if it had been thrown there, had happened to land right side up. It looked more or less like one of the quaint old-fashioned beehives one still sees occasionally in the conservative Lesser Antilles. But it could hardly be a beehive. It was far too small.
My curiosity mildly aroused, I stepped into the alley way and looked down at the odd little thing. Seen from where I stopped it rewarded scrutiny. For it was, although made in a somewhat bungling way, a reproduction of an African village hut, thatched, circular, conical. The thatching, I suspected, had formerly been most of the business end of a small house-broom of tine twigs tied together around the end of a stick. The little house"s upright "logs" were a heterogeneous medley of little round sticks among which I recognized three dilapidated lead pencils and the broken-off handle of a toothbrush. These details will serve to indicate its size and to justify my original conclusion that the thing was a rather cleverly made child"s toy. How such a thing had got into my yard unless over the wall, was an unimportant little mystery. The little hut, from the ground up to its thatched peak, stood about seven inches in height. Its diameter was, perhaps, eight or nine inches.
My first reaction was to pick it up, look at it more closely, and then throw it into the wire cage in another corner of the yard where Stephen burned up wastepaper and sc.r.a.ps at frequent intervals. The thing was plainly a discarded toy, and had no business cluttering up my spotless yard. Then I suddenly remembered the washer"s pick"ny, a small, silent, very black child of six or seven, who sometimes played quietly in the yard while his stout mother toiled over the washtub set up on a backless chair near the kitchen door where she could keep up a continuous stream of chatter with my cook.
I stayed my hand accordingly. Quite likely this little thatched hut was a valued item of that pick"ny"s possessions. Thinking pleasantly to surprise little Aesculapius, or whatever the child"s name might be, I took from my pocket a fifty-bit piece - value ten cents - intending to place the coin inside the little house, through its rounded, low entranceway.
Stooping down, I shoved the coin through the doorway, and, as I did so, something suddenly scuttered about inside the hut, and pinched viciously at the ends of my thumb and forefinger.
I was, naturally, startled. I s.n.a.t.c.hed my fingers away, and stood hastily erect. A mouse, perhaps even a rat, inside there! I glanced at my fingers. There was no mark on them. The skin was not broken. The rodent"s vicious little sharp teeth had fortunately missed their grip as he snapped at me, intruding on his sacred privacy. Wondering a little, I stepped out of the alleyway and into the sunny, open yard, somewhat upset at this Lilliputian contretemps, and resolved upon telling Stephen to see to it that there was no ugly rodent there when next little Aesculapius should retrieve his plaything.
But when I arrived at the gallery steps my friend Colonel Lorriquer"s car was just drawing up before the house, and, in hastening to greet welcome early-morning callers and later in accepting Mrs. Lorriquers invitation to dinner and contract at their house that evening, the little hut and its unpleasant inhabitant were driven wholly out of my mind.
I did not think of it again until several days later, on the night when my premises had become the theater for one of the most inexplicable, terrifying, and uncanny happenings I have ever experienced.
My gallery is a very pleasant place to sit evenings, except in that spring period during which the West Indian candlemoths hatch in their myriads and, for several successive days, make it impossible to sit outdoors in any lighted, unscreened place.
It was much too early for the candlemoths, however, at the time I am speaking of, and on the evening of that Sunday upon which Brutus h.e.l.lman returned from the hospital, a party of four persons, including myself, occupied the gallery.
The other man was Arthur Carswell, over from Haiti on a short visit. The two ladies were Mrs. Spencer, Colonel Lorriquer"s widowed daughter, and her friend, Mrs. Squire. We had dined an hour previously at the Grand Hotel as guests of Carswell, and, having taken our coffee at my house, were remaining outdoors on the gallery for a breath of air on a rather warm and sultry February evening. We were sitting quietly talking in a rather desultory manner, all of us unspokenly reluctant to move inside the house for a projected evening at contract.
It was, as I recall the hour, about nine o"clock, the night warm, as I have said, and very still. Above, in a cloudless sky of luminous indigo, the tropical stars glowed enormous. The intoxicating sweet odors of white jasmine and tuberoses made the still air redolent. No sound, except an occasional rather languid remark from one of ourselves, broke the exquisite, balmy stillness.
Then, all at once, without any warning and with an abruptness which caused Carswell and me to stand up, the exquisite perfection of the night was rudely shattered by an appalling, sustained scream of sheer mortal terror.
That scream inaugurated what seems to me as I look back upon the next few days, to be one of the most unnerving, devastating, and generally horrible periods I can recall in a lifetime not devoid of adventure. I formulated at that time, and still retain, mentally, a phrase descriptive of it. It was "the Reign of Terror."
Carswell and I, following the direction of the scream, rushed down the outer gallery steps and back through the yard toward the Negro cabins. As I have mentioned, only one of these was occupied, Brutus h.e.l.lman"s. As we rounded the corner of the house a faint light - it was Brutus"s oil lamp - appeared in the form of a wide vertical strip at the entrance of the occupied cabin. To that we ran as to a beacon, and pushed into the room.
The lamp, newly lighted, and smoking, its gla.s.s chimney set on askew as though in great haste, dimly illuminated a strange scene. Doubled up and sitting on the side of his bed, the bedclothes lumped together near the bed"s foot where he had flung them, cowered Brutus. His face was a dull, ashen gray in the smoky light, his back was bent, his hands clasped tightly about his shin. And, from between those clenched hands, a steady stream of blood stained the white sheet which hung over the bed"s edge and spread below into a small pool on the cabin room"s stone-paved floor.
Brutus, groaning dismally, rocked back and forth, clutching his leg. The lamp smoked steadily, defiling the close air, while, incongruously, through the now open doorway poured streams and great pulsing breaths of night-blooming tropical flowers, mingling strangely with the hot, acrid odor of the smoking lampwick.
Carswell went directly to the lamp, straightened the chimney, turned down the flame. The lamp ceased its ugly reek and the air of the cabin cleared as Carswell, turning away from the lamp, threw wide the shutters of the large window which, like most West Indian Negroes, Brutus had closed against the "night air" when he retired.
I gave my attention directly to the man, and by the time the air had cleared somewhat I had him over on his back in a reclining position, and with a great strip torn from one of his bedsheets, was binding up the ugly deep little wound in the lower muscle of his leg just at the outside of the shinbone. I pulled the improvised bandage tight, and the flow of blood ceased, and Brutus, his mind probably somewhat relieved by this timely aid, put an end to his moaning, and turned his ashy face up to mine.
"Did you see it, sar?" he inquired, biting back the trembling of his mouth.
I paid practically no attention to this remark. Indeed, I barely heard it. I was, you see, very busily engaged in stanching the flow of blood. Brutus had already lost a considerable quant.i.ty, and my rough bandaging was directed entirely to the end of stopping this. Instead of replying to Brutus"s question I turned to Carswell, who had finished with the lamp and the window, and now stood by, ready to lend a hand in his efficient way.
"Run up to the bathroom, will you, Carswell, and bring me a couple of rolls of bandage, from the medicine closet, and a bottle of mercurochrome." Carswell disappeared on this errand and I sat, holding my hands tightly around Brutus"s leg, just above the bandage. Then he repeated his question, and this time I paid attention to what he was saying.
"See what, Brutus?" I inquired, and looked at him, almost for the first time - into his eyes, I mean. Hitherto I had been looking at my bandaging.
I saw a stark terror in those eyes.
"It," said Brutus, "de T"ing, sar."
I sat on the side of the bed and looked at him. I was, naturally, puzzled. "What thing, Brutus?" I asked very quietly, almost soothingly. Such terror possessed my second houseman that, I considered, he must, for the time being, be treated like a frightened child.
"De T"ing what attack me, sar," explained Brutus.
"What was it like?" I countered. "Do you mean it is still here - in your room?"
At that Brutus very nearly collapsed. His eyes rolled up and their irises nearly disappeared; he shuddered as though with a violent chill, from head to foot. I let go his leg. The blood would be no longer flowing, I felt sure, under that tight bandaging of mine. I turned back the bedclothes, rolled poor Brutus under them, tucked him in. I took his limp hands and rubbed them smartly. At this instant Carswell came in through the still-open doorway, his hands full of first-aid material. This he laid without a word on the bed beside me, and stood, looking at Brutus, slightly shaking his head. I turned to him.
"And would you mind bringing some brandy, old man? He"s rather down and out, I"m afraid - trembling from head to foot."
"It"s the reaction, of course," remarked Carswell quietly.
"I have the brandy here." The efficient fellow drew a small flask from his jacket pocket, uncorked it, and poured out a dose in the small silver cup which covered the patent stopper.
I raised Brutus"s head from the pillow, his teeth audibly chattering as I did so, and just as I was getting the brandy between his lips, there came a slight scuttering sound from under the bed, and something, a small, dark, sinister-looking animal of about the size of a mongoose, dashed on all fours across the open s.p.a.ce between the bed"s corner and the still-open doorway and disappeared into the night outside. Without a word Carswell ran after it, turning sharply to the left and running past the open window. I dropped the empty brandy cup, lowered Brutus"s head hastily to its pillow, and dashed out of the cabin. Carswell was at the end of the cabins, his flashlight stabbing the narrow alleyway where I had found the miniature African hut. I ran up to him.
"It went up here," said Carswell laconically.
I stood beside him in silence, my hand on his shoulder. He brightened every nook and cranny of the narrow alleyway with his light. There was nothing, nothing alive, to be seen. The Thing had had, of course, ample time to turn some hidden corner behind the cabins, to bury itself out of sight in some accustomed hiding-place, even to climb over the high, rough-surfaced back wall. Carswell brought his flashlight to rest finally on the little hutlike thing which still stood in the alleyway.
"What"s that?" he inquired. "Looks like some child"s toy."
"That"s what I supposed when I discovered it," I answered. "I imagine it belongs to the washer"s pickaninny." We stepped into the alleyway. It was not quite wide enough for us to walk abreaSt. Carswell followed me in. I turned over the little hut with my foot. There was nothing under it. I daresay the possibility of this as a cache for the Thing had occurred to Carswell and me simultaneously. The Thing, mongoose, or whatever it was, had got clean away.
We returned to the cabin and found Brutus recovering from his aguelike trembling fit. His eyes were calmer now. The rea.s.surance of our presence, the bandaging, had had their effect. Brutus proceeded to thank us for what we had done for him.
Helped by Carswell, I gingerly removed my rough bandage. The blood about that ugly bite - for a bite it certainly was, with unmistakable tooth marks around its badly torn edges - was clotted now. The flow had ceased. We poured mercurochrome over and through the wound, disinfecting it, and then I placed two entire rolls of three-inch bandage about Brutus"s wounded ankle. Then, with various encouragements and rea.s.surances, we left him, the lamp still burning at his request, and went back to the ladies.
Our contract game was, somehow, a jumpy one, the ladies having been considerably upset by the scare down there in the yard, and we concluded it early, Carswell driving Mrs. Spencer home and I walking down the hill with Mrs. Squire to the Grand Hotel where she was spending that winter.
It was still several minutes short of midnight when I returned, after a slow walk up the hill, to my house. I had been thinking of the incident all the way up the hill. I determined to look in upon Brutus Bellman before retiring, but first I went up to my bedroom and loaded a small automatic pistol, and this I carried with me when I went down to the cabins in the yard. Brutus"s light was still going, and he was awake, for he responded instantly to my tap on his door.
I went in and talked with the man for a few minutes. I left him the gun, which he placed carefully under his pillow. At the door I turned and addressed him.
"How do you suppose the thing - whatever it was that attacked you, Brutus - could have got in, with everything closed up tight?"
Brutus replied that he had been thinking of this himself and had come to the conclusion that "de T"ing" had concealed itself in the cabin before he had retired and closed the window and door. He expressed himself as uneasy with the window open, as Carswell and I had left it.
"But, man, you should have the fresh air while you sleep. You don"t want your place closed up like a field laborer"s, do you?" said I rallyingly.