|
CASE III
THE BOUNDING FIGURE OF “HOUSE,” NEAR BUCKINGHAM TERRACE, EDINBURGH
No one is more interested
in Psychical Investigation Work than Miss Torfrida Vincent, one of the
three beautiful daughters of Mrs. H. de B. Vincent, who is, herself,
still in the heyday of life, and one of the loveliest of the society
women I have met. Though I have known her sisters several years, I only
met Torfrida for the first time a few months ago, when she was
superintending the nursing of her mother, who had just undergone an
operation for appendicitis. One day, when I was visiting my convalescent
friend, Torfrida informed me that she knew of a haunted house in
Edinburgh, a case which she felt sure would arouse my interest and
enthusiasm. “It is unfortunate,” she added somewhat regretfully, “that’
I cannot tell you the number of the house, but as I have given my word
of honour to disclose it to no one, I feel sure you will excuse me.
Indeed, my friends the Gordons, who extracted the promise from me, have
got into sad trouble with their landlord for leaving the house under the
pretext that it was haunted, and he has threatened to prosecute them for
slander of title.
The house in question has no claim to antiquity. It may be eighty years
old— perhaps a little older—and was, at the time of which I speak, let
out in flats. The Gordons occupied the second storey; the one above them
was untenanted, and used as a storage place for furniture; the first
floor and ground floor were divided into chambers and offices. They had
not been in their new quarters more than a week, when Mrs. Gordon asked
the night porter who it was that made such a noise, racing up their
stairs between two and three in the morning. It had awakened her every
nighty she told him, and she would be glad if the disturbance were
discontinued. “I am sorry, Madam, but I cannot imagine who it can be,”
the man replied. “Of course, it may be some one next door, sounds are so
often deceptive ; no one inhabits the rooms above you.” But Mrs. Gordon
was not at all convinced, and made up her mind to complain to the
landlord should it occur again. That night nothing happened, but the
night after she was roused from her sleep at two o’clock, by a feeling
that something dreadful, some dire catastrophe, was about to take place.
The house was very still, and beyond the far-away echoes of a
policeman’s patrol on the hard pavement outside, nothing, absolutely
nothing, broke the universal, and as it seemed to her, unnatural
silence. Generally at night-time there are sounds one likes to assure
oneself are too trivial to be heard during the day— the creaking of
boards, stairs (nearly always stairs), and the tapping of some leaf (of
course some leaf) at the windows. Who has not heard such sounds, and who
in his heart of hearts has not been only too well aware that they are
nocturnal, exclusively nocturnal. The shadows of evening bring with them
visitors; prying, curious visitors ; grim and ghastly visitors ; grey,
esoteric visitors; visitors from a world seemingly inconsequent, wholly
incomprehensible. Mrs. Gordon did not believe in ghosts. She scoffed at
the idea of ghosts, and, like so many would-be wits, unreasonably brave
by day, and the reverse by night, had hitherto attributed banshees and
the like to cats and other animals. But now,—now when all was
dark,—pitch dark and hushed, and she, for aught she knew to the
contrary, the only one, in that great rambling building, awake, she
reviewed again and again, in her mind, that rushing up the stairs. The
wind! It could not have been the wind. The wind shuts doors, and rattles
windows, and moans, and sighs, and howls and screeches, but it does not
walk the house in boots. Neither do rats! And if she had imagined the
noises, why did she not imagine other things ; why, for example, did she
not see tables dance, and tea-urns walk ? All that would be fancy,
unblushing, genuine fancy, and if she conjured up one absurdity, why not
another! That was a conundrum for any sceptic. Thus did she argue,
naturally and logically, in the quite sensible fashion of a lawyer, or a
scientist; yet,^all the while, her senses told her that the atmosphere
of the house had undergone some profoundly subtle and unaccountable
change,—a change that brought with it a presence, at once sinister and
hostile. She longed to strike a light and awake one of her
daughters—Diana, by preference ; since Diana was the least likely to
mind being disturbed, and had the strongest nerves. She made a start,
and, loosening the bedclothes that she always liked tightly tucked round
her, thrust out a quivering toe. The next instant she drew it back with
a tiny gasp of terror. The cold darkness without had suggested to her
mind a great, horny hand, mal-shaped and murderous, that was lying in
wait to seize her. A deadly sickness overcame her, and she lay back on
the pillow, her heart beating with outrageous irregularity and loudness.
Very slowly she recovered, and, holding her breath, sidled to the far
edge of the bed, and with a dexterous movement, engendered by the
desperation of fear, made a lightning-like dab in the direction of the
electric bell. Her soft, pink finger missed the mark, and coming in
violent contact with the wall, bent the carefully polished nail. She bit
her lips to stop a cry of pain, and shrinking back within the folds of
her dainty lace embroidered nightdress, abandoned herself to despair.
Her consciousness of the Unknown Presence increased, and she
instinctively felt the thing pass through the closed door, down on to
the landing outside, when it dashed upstairs with a loud clatter, and,
entering the lumber-room immediately overhead, began bounding as if its
feet were tied together, backwards and forwards across the floor. After
continuing for fully half an hour, the noises abruptly ceased and the
house resumed its accustomed quiet. At breakfast, Mrs. Gordon asked her
daughters if they had heard anything in the night, and they laughingly
said “No, not even a mouse!”
There was now an intermission of the disturbances, and no further
demonstration occurred for about a month. Diana was then sleeping in her
mother’s room, Mrs. Gordon being away on a visit to Lady Voss, who was
entertaining a party of friends at her shooting-box in Argyle. One
evening, as Diana was going into her bedroom to prepare for dinner, she
saw the door suddenly swing open, and something, she could not tell
what—it was so blurred and indistinct—come out with a bound. Tearing
past her on to the landing, it rushed up the stairs with so much clatter
that Diana imagined, though she could see nothing, that it must have on
its feet, heavy lumbering boots. Filled with an irresistible curiosity,
in spite of her alarm, Diana ran after it, and, on reaching the upper
storey, heard it making a terrific racket in the room above the one in
which she now slept. Nothing daunted, however, she boldly approached,
and, flinging open the door, perceived its filmy outline standing before
a shadowy and .very antique eight-day clock, which apparently it was in
the habit of winding. A great fear now fell on Diana. What was the
thing? And supposing it should turn round and face her, what should she
see? She was entirely isolated from her sisters, and the
servants—alone—the light fading—in a big, gloomy room full of strange
old furniture which suggested hiding-places for all sorts of grim
possibilities. She was assured now that the thing she had followed was
nothing human, neither was it a delusion, for when she shut her eyes and
opened them, it was still there—and, oddly enough, it was now 4 more
distinct than it was when she had seen it downstairs. A curious feeling
of helplessness stole over Diana; the power of speech forsook her; and
her limbs grew rigid. She was so fearful, too, of attracting the notice
of the mysterious thing that she hardly dare breathe, and each pulsation
of her heart sent cold chills of apprehension down her spine. Once she
endured agonies through a mad desire to sneeze, and once her lips opened
to scream as something suspiciously like the antennae of a huge beetle,
and which she subsequently discovered was a “devil's coach-horse,”
tickled the calf of her leg. She fancied, too, that all sorts of queer
shapes lurked in the passage behind her, and that innumerable unseen
eyes were malignantly rejoicing in her terror. At last, the climax to
her suspense seemed at hand. The unknown thing, until now too busy with
the clock to take heed of her, paused for a moment or so, as if
undecided what to do next, and then slowly began to veer round. But the
faint echo of a voice below, calling her by name, broke the hypnotic
spell that bound Diana to the floor, and with a frantic spring she
cleared the threshold of the room. She then tore madly downstairs, never
halting till she reached the dining-room, where she sank on a sofa, and,
more dead than alive, panted out to her amazed sisters a full account of
all that had transpired.
That night she shared her sister's bedroom, but neither she nor her
sister slept.
From this time till the return of Mrs. Gordon, nothing happened. It was
one evening after she came back, when she was preparing to get into bed,
that the door of her own room unexpectedly opened, and she saw standing,
on the threshold, the unmistakable figure of a man, short and broad,
with a great width of shoulders, and very long arms. He was clad in a
peajaeket, blue serge trousers, and jackboots. He had a big, round,
brutal head, . covered with a tangled mass of yellow hair, but where his
face ought to have been there was only a blotch, underlying which Mrs.
Gordon detected the semblance to something fiendishly vindictive and
immeasurably nasty. But, in spite of the horror his appearance produced,
her curiosity was aroused with regard to the two objects he carried in
his hands, one of which looked like a very bizarre bundle of red and
white rags, and the other a small bladder of lard. Whilst she was
staring at them in dumb awe, he swung round, and, hitching them savagely
under his armpits, rushed across the landing, and, with a series of
apish bounds, sprang up the staircase and disappeared in the gloom.
This was the climax; Mrs. Gordon felt another such encounter would kill
her. So, in spite of the fact that she had taken the flat for a year,
and had only just commenced her tenancy, she packed up her goods and
left the very next day. The report that the building was haunted spread
rapidly, and Mrs. Gordon had many indignant letters from the landlord.
She naturally made inquiries as to the early history of the house, but
of the many tales she listened to, only one, the authenticity of which
she could not guarantee, seemed to suggest any clue to the haunting.
It was said that a retired Captain in the Merchant Service, many years
previously, had rented the rooms she had occupied.
He was an extraordinary individual, and, despite the fact that he had
lived so far inland, would never wear any but nautical clothes—blue
jersey and trousers, reefer ’ coat and jack-boots. But this was not his
only peculiarity. His love of grog eventually brought on delirium
tremens, and his excessive irritability in the interval between each
attack was a source of -anxiety to all who came in contact with him. At
that time there happened to be a baby in the rooms overhead, whose
crying so annoyed the Captain that he savagely informed its mother that
if she did not keep it quiet, he would not be answerable for the
consequences. His warnings having no effect, he flew upstairs one day,
when she was temporarily absent, and, snatching up the bread knife from
the table, decapitated the infant. He then stuffed both its head and
body into a grandfather's clock which stood in one corner of the room,
and, retiring to his own quarters, drank till he was insensible.
He was, of course, arrested on a charge of murder, but being found “
insane ” he was committed during His Majesty's pleasure to a lunatic
asylum.
He eventually committed suicide by opening an artery in his leg with one
of his finger-nails.
As the details of this tragedy filled in so well with the phenomena they
had witnessed, the Gordons could not help regarding the story as a very
probable explanation of the hauntings. But, remember, its authenticity
is dubious. |
