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CASE V
THE SALLOW-FACED WOMAN OF NO. — FORREST ROAD, EDINBURGH
The Public unfortunately
includes a certain set of people, of the middle class very “middlish,”
who are ever on the look-out for some opportunity, however slight and
seemingly remote, of bettering themselves socially; and, learning that
those in a higher strata of society are interested in the supernatural,
they think that they may possibly get in touch with them by working up a
little local reputation for psychical research. I have often had letters
from this type of “ pusher ” (letters from genuine believers in the
Occult I always welcome) stating that they have been greatly interested
in my books— would I be so very kind as to grant them a brief interview,
or permit them to accompany me to a haunted house, or give them certain
information with regard to Lady So-and-so, whom they have long wanted to
know ? Occasionally, I have been so taken in as to give permission to
the writer to call on me, and almost always I have bitterly repented.
The wily one — no matter how wily — cannot conceal the cloven hoof for
long, and he has either tried to thrust himself into the bosom of my
family, or has written to my neighbours declaring himself to be my
dearest friend; and when, in desperation, I have shown him the cold
shoulder, he has attacked me virulently in some “rag” of a local paper,
the proprietor, editor, or office-boy of which happens to be one of his
own clique. I have even known an instance where this type of person has,
through trickery, actually gained access to some notoriously haunted
house, and from its owners—the family he has long had his eyes on, from
a motive anything but psychic—has ferreted out the secret and private
history of the haunting. Then, when he has been “found out” and forced
to see that his friendship is not wanted, he has, in revenge for the
slight, unblushingly revealed the facts that were only entrusted to him
in the strictest confidence; and, through influence with the lower
stratum of the Press, caused a most glaring and sensational account of
the ghost to be published.
With such a case in view, I cannot be surprised that possessors of
family ghosts and haunted houses should show the greatest reluctance to
be approached on the subject, save by those they feel assured will treat
it with the utmost delicacy.
But I have quoted the above breach of confidence merely to give another
reason for my constant use of fictitious names with regard to people and
places, and having done so (I hope to some purpose), I will proceed with
the following story:—
Miss Dulcie Vincent, some of whose reminiscences appeared in my book of
Ghostly Phenomena last year, is nearly connected with Lady Adela Minkon,
who owns a considerable amount of house property, including No. —
Forrest Road, in Edinburgh, and whose yacht at Cowes is the envy of all
who have cruised in her. Three years ago, Lady Adela stayed at No. —
Forrest Road. She had heard that the house was haunted, and was anxious
to put it to the test. Lady Adela was perfectly open-minded. She had
never experienced any occult phenomena herself, but, very rationally,
she did not consider that her non-acquaintance with the superphysical in
any way negatived the evidence of those who declare that they have
witnessed manifestations; their statements, she reasoned, were just as
worthy of credence as hers. She thus commenced her occupation of the
house with a perfectly unbiased mind, resolved to stay there for at
least a year, so as to give it a fair trial. The hauntings, she was
told, were at their height in the late summer and early autumn. It is, I
think, unnecessary to enter into any detailed description of her house.
In appearance, it differed very little, if at all, from those adjoining
it; in construction, it was if anything a trifle larger. The basement,
which included the usual kitchen offices and cellars, was very dark, and
the atmosphere—after sunset on Fridays, only on Fridays—was tainted with
a smell of damp earth, shockingly damp earth, and of a sweet and
nauseating something that greatly puzzled Lady Adela. All the rooms in
the house were of fair dimensions, and cheerful, excepting on this
particular evening of the week; a distinct gloom settled on them then,
and the strangest of shadows were seen playing about the passages and on
the landings.
“It may be fancy,” Lady Adela said to herself, “merely fancy! And, after
all, if I encounter nothing worse than a weekly menu of aromatic smells
and easily digested shadows, I shall not suffer any harm ” ; but it was
early summer then—the psychic season had yet to come. As the weeks went
by, the shadows and the smell grew more and more pronounced, and by the
arrival of August had become so emphatic that Lady Adela could not help
thinking that they were both hostile and aggressive.
About eight o’clock on the evening of the second Friday in the month,
Lady Adela was purposely alone in the basement of the house. The
servants especially irritated her; like the majority of present-day
domestics, products of the County Council schools, they were so
intensely supercilious and silly, and Lady Adela felt that their
presence in the house minimised her chances of seeing the ghost. No
apparition with the smallest amount of self-respect could risk coming in
contact with such inane creatures, so she sent them all out for a motor
drive, and, for once, rejoiced in the house to herself. A curious
proceeding for a lady! True! but then, Lady Adela was a lady, and, being
a lady, was not afraid of being thought anything else; and so acted just
as unconventionally as she chose. But stay a moment; she was not alone
in the house, for she had three of her dogs with her—three beautiful
boarhounds, trophies of her last trip to the Baltic. With such colossal
and perfectly trained companions Lady Adela felt absolutely safe, and
ready—as she acknowledged afterwards— to face a whole army of spooks.
She did not even shiver when the front door of the basement closed, and
she heard the sonorous birring of the motor, drowning the giddy voices
of the servants, grow fainter and fainter until it finally ceased
altogether.
When the last echoes of the vehicle had died away in the distance, Lady
Adela made a tour of the premises. The housekeeper’s room pleased her
immensely—at least she persuaded herself it did. “Why, it is quite as
nice as any of the rooms upstairs,” she said aloud, as she stood with
her face to the failing sunbeams and rested her strong white hand on the
edge of the table. “Quite as nice. Karl and Max, come here!”
But the boarhounds for once in their lives did not obey her with a good
grace. There was something in the room they did not like, and they
showed how strong was their resentment by slinking unwillingly through
the doorway.
“I wonder why that is?” Lady Adela mused; “I have never known them do it
before.” Then her eyes wandered round the walls, and struggled in vain
to reach the remoter angles of the room, which had suddenly grown dark.
She tried to assure herself that this was but the natural effect of the
departing daylight, and that, had she watched in other houses at this
particular time, she would have noticed the same thing. To show how
little she minded the gloom, she went up to the darkest corner and
prodded the walls with her riding - whip. She laughed—there was nothing
there, nothing whatsoever to be afraid of, only shadows. With a careless
shrug of her shoulders, she strutted into the passage, and, whistling to
Karl and Max who, contrary to their custom, would not keep to heel, made
another inspection of the kitchens. At the top of the cellar steps she
halted. The darkness had now set in everywhere, and she argued that it
would be foolish to venture into such dungeon - like places without a
light. She soon found one, and, armed with candle and matches, began her
descent. There were several cellars, and they presented such a dismal,
dark appearance, that she instinctively drew her skirts tightly round
her, and exchanged the slender riding-whip for a poker. She whistled
again to her dogs. They did not answer, so she called them both by name
angrily. But for some reason (some quite unaccountable reason, she told
herself) they would not come.
She ransacked her mind to recall some popular operatic air, and although
she knew scores she could not remember one. Indeed, the only air that
filtered back to her was one she detested—a Vaudeville tune she had
heard three nights in succession, when she was staying with a student
friend in the Latin Quarter in Paris. She hummed it loudly, however,
and, holding the lighted candle high above her head, walked down the
steps. At the bottom she stood still and listened. From high above her
came noises which sounded like the rumbling of distant thunder, but
which, on analysis, proved to be the rattling of window-frames.
Reassured that she had no cause for alarm, Lady Adela advanced.
Something black scudded across the red-tiled floor, and she made a dash
as it with her poker. The concussion awoke countless echoes in the
cellars, and called into existence legions of other black things that
darted hither and thither in all directions. She burst out laughing
—they were only beetles! Facing her she now perceived an inner cellar,
which was far gloomier thap the one in which, she stood. The ceiling was
very low, and appeared to be crushed down beneath the burden of a
stupendous weight; and as she advanced beneath it she half expected that
it would “cave in” and bury her.
A few feet from the centre of this cellar she stopped; and, bending
down, examined the floor carefully. The tiles were unmistakably newer
here than elsewhere, and presented the appearance of having been put in
at no very distant date. The dampness of the atmosphere was intense; a
fact which struck Lady Adela as somewhat odd, since the floor and walls
looked singularly dry. To find out if this were the case, she ran her
fingers over the walls, and, on removing them, found they showed no
signs of moisture. Then she rapped the floor and walls, and could
discover no indications of hollowness. She sniffed the air, and a great
wave of something .sweet and sickly half choked her. She drew out her
handkerchief and beat the air vigorously with it; but the smell
remained, and she could not in any way account for it. She turned to
leave the cellar, and the flame of her candle burned blue. Then for the
first time that evening —almost, indeed, for the first time in her
life—she felt afraid, so afraid that she made no attempt to diagnose her
fear; she understood the dogs’ feelings now, and caught herself
wondering how much they knew.
She whistled to them again, not because she thought they would
respond,—she knew only too well they would not,—but because she wanted
company, even the company of her own voice; and she had some faint hope,
too, that whatever might be with her in the cellar, would not so readily
disclose itself if she made a noise. The one cellar was passed, and she
was nearly across the floor of the other when she heard a crash. The
candle dropped from her hand, and all the blood in her body rushed to
her heart. She could never have imagined it was so terrible to be
frightened. She tried to pull herself together and be calm, but she was
no longer mistress of her limbs. Her knees knocked together and her
hands shook. “ It was only the dogs,” she feebly told herself, “I will
call them” ; but when she opened her mouth, she found her throat was
paralysed—not a syllable would come. She knew, too, that she had lied,
and that the hounds could not have been responsible for the noise. It
was like nothing she had ever heard, nothing she could imagine; and
although she struggled hard against the idea, she could not help
associating the sound with the cause of the candle burning blue, and the
sweet, sickly smell. Incapable of moving, a step, she was forced to
listen in breathless expectancy for a recurrence of the crash. Her
thoughts become ghastly. The inky sea of darkness that hemmed her in on
every side suggested every sort of ghoulish possibility, and with each
pulsation of her overstrained heart her flesh crawled. Another
sound—this time not a crash, nothing half so loud or definite—drew her
eyes in the direction of the steps. An object was now standing at the
top of them, and something lurid, like the faint, phosphorescent glow of
decay, emanated from all over it; but what it was, she could not for the
life of her tell. It might have been the figure of a man, or a woman, or
a beast, or of anything that was inexpressibly antagonistic and nasty.
She would have given her soul to have looked elsewhere, but her eyes
were fixed—she could neither turn nor shut them. For some seconds the
shape remained motionless, and then with a sly, subtle motion it lowered
its head, and came stealing stealthily down the stairs towards her. She
followed its approach like one in a hideous dream— her heart ready to
burst, her brain on the verge of madness. Another step, another, yet
another; till there were only three left between her and it; and she was
at length enabled to form some idea of what the thing was like.
It was short and squat, and appeared to be partly clad in a loose,
flowing garment, that was not long enough to conceal the glistening
extremities of its limbs. From its general contour and the tangled mass
of hair that fell about its neck and shoulders, Lady Adela concluded it
was the phantasm of a woman. Its head being kept bent, she was unable to
see the face in full, but every instant she expected the revelation
would take place, and with each separate movement of the phantasm her
suspense became more and more intolerable. At last it stood on the floor
of the cellar, a broad, ungainly, horribly ungainly figure, that glided
up to and past her into the far cellar. There it halted, as nearly as
she could judge on the new tiles, and remained standing. As she gazed at
it, too fascinated to remove her eyes, there was a loud, reverberating
crash, a hideous sound of wrenching and tearing, and the whole of the
ceiling of the inner chamber came down with an appalling roar. Lady
Adela thinks that she must then have fainted, for she distinctly
remembers falling—falling into what seemed to her a black, interminable
abyss. When she recovered consciousness, she was lying on the tiles, and
all around was still and normal. She got up, found and lighted her
candle, and spent the rest of the evening, without further adventure, in
the drawing-room.
All the week Lady Adela struggled hard to master a disinclination to
spend another evening alone in the house, and when Friday came she
succumbed to her fears. The servants were poor, foolish things, but it
was nice to feel that there was something in the house besides ghosts.
She sat reading in the drawing-room till late that night, and when she
lolled out of the window to take a farewell look at the sky and stars
before retiring to rest, the sounds of traffic had completely ceased and
the whole city lay bathed in a refreshing silence. It was very heavenly
to stand there and feel the cool, soft air— unaccompanied, for the first
time during the day, by the rattling rumbling sounds of locomotion and
the jarring discordant murmurs of unmusical voices—fanning her neck and
face.
Lady Adela, used as she was to the privacy of her yacht, and the freedom
of her big country mansion, where all sounds were regulated at her will,
chafed at the near proximity of her present habitation to the noisy
thoroughfare, and vaguely looked forward to the hours when shops and
theatres were closed, and all screeching, harsh-voiced products of the
gutter were in bed. To her the nights in Waterloo Place were all too
short; the days too long, too long for anything. The heavy, lumbering
steps of a policeman at last broke her reverie. She had no desire to
arouse his curiosity; besides, her costume had become somewhat
disordered, and she had the strictest sense of propriety, at least in
the presence of the lower orders. Retiring, therefore, with a sigh of
vexation, she sought her bedroom, and, after the most scrupulous
attention to her toilet, put out the lights and got into bed. It was
just one when she fell asleep, and three when she awoke with a violent
start. Why she started puzzled her. She did not recollect experiencing
any very dreadful dream, in fact no dream at all, and there seemed
nothing in the hush—the apparently unbroken hush—that could in any way
account for her action. Why, then, had she started ? She lay still and
wondered. Surely everything was just as it was when she went to sleep !
And yet! When she ventured on a diagnosis, there was something
different, something new ; she did not think it was actually in the
atmosphere, nor in the silence; she did not know where it was until she
opened her eyes — and then she knew. Bending over her, within a few
inches of her face, was another face, the ghastly caricature of a human
face. It was on a larger scale than that of any mortal Lady Adela had
ever seen; it was long in proportion to its width—indeed, she could not
make out where the cranium terminated at the back, as the hinder portion
of it was lost in a mist. The forehead, which was very receding, was
partly covered with a mass of lank, black hair, that fell straight down
into space; there were no neck nor shoulders, at least none had
materialised; the skin was leaden-hued, and the emaciation so extreme
that the raw cheek-bones had burst through in places; the size of the
eye sockets which appeared monstrous, was emphasised by the fact that
the eyes were considerably sunken; the lips were curled downwards and
tightly shut, and the whole expression of the withered mouth, as indeed
that of the entire face, was one of bestial, diabolical malignity. Lady
Adela’s heart momentarily stopped, her blood ran cold, she was
petrified; and as she stared helplessly at the dark eyes pressed close
to hers, she saw them suddenly suffuse with fiendish glee. The most
frightful change then took place: the upper lip writhed away from a few
greenish yellow stumps ; the lower jaw fell with a metallic click,
leaving the mouth widely open, and disclosing to Lady Adela’s shocked
vision a black and bloated tongue ; the eyeballs rolled up and entirely
disappeared, whilst their places were immediately filled with the
foulest and most loathsome indications of advanced decay. A strong,
vibratory movement suddenly made all the bones in the head rattle and
the tongue wag, whilst from the jaws, as if belched up from some
deep-down well, came a gust of wind, putrescent with the ravages of the
tomb, and yet, at the same time, tainted with the same sweet, sickly
odour with which Lady Adela had latterly become so familiar. This was
the culminating act; the head then receded, and, growing fainter and
fainter, gradually disappeared altogether. Lady Adela was now more than
satisfied,—there was not a house more horribly haunted in Scotland, —and
nothing on earth would induce her to remain in it another night.
However, being anxious, naturally, to discover something that might, in
some degree, account for the apparitions, Lady Adela made endless
inquiries concerning the history of former occupants of the house; but,
failing to find out anything remarkable in this direction, she was
eventually obliged to content herself with the following tradition: It
was said that on the site of No. — Forrest Road there had once stood a
cottage occupied by two sisters (both nurses), and that one was
suspected of poisoning the other; and that the cottage, moreover, having
through their parsimonious habits got into a very bad state of repair,
was blown down during a violent storm, the surviving sister perishing in
the ruins. Granted that this story is correct, it was in all probability
the ghost of this latter sister that appeared to Lady Adela. Her
ladyship is, of course, anxious to let No. — Forrest Road, and as only
about one in a thousand people seem to possess the faculty of seeing
psychic phenomena, she hopes she may one day succeed in getting a
permanent tenant. In the meanwhile, she is doing her level best to
suppress the rumour that the house is haunted. |
