Death on a Pale Horse (24 page)

“What practical use is that to him?”

“The greatest use, old fellow. It is intended to rattle our nerves, to unbalance our judgment, and to tip us headlong into doing something foolish. Now, if you do not mind, I think I shall retire for the night with a volume of Mr. George Meredith. He is the only master of fiction who I can tolerate for very long. I have intended for some time to re-read
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
, his first endeavour and in many respects still his best.”

And so a remarkable few days in our lives came to an end, bringing in its wake what I think of as the night in question. A night of terror.

2

I
had known fear on the battlefield, where I expected to find it. But then I had been in company with my comrades. Terror, I was to learn, is faced alone. There is no comrade to turn to, no rhyme nor reason to what is happening. The image of Captain Joshua Sellon's body lingered ghostlike in my mind, but that was far from the irrationality of terror.

I learned that terror is not the ghost before the eyes, like some student prank played with an owl's hoot and a white sheet. It is a heart-jump of fright at what has become inexplicable, as if one were waking in the silence and stillness of one's very own coffin. It is a brief irrational movement, alone in a familiar room, caught in the corner of the eye. The flicker is quick as a darting mouse, where there can be no mouse. Or a sudden shriek that teases the very edge of hearing, where no one else can hear it. Terror at its worst comes in solitude and silence. In terror, as in pain, each must feel his own.

Perhaps worst of all, terror is malignant because it pounces in familiar surroundings, like a loyal guardian turned traitor. It immobilises the brain and annihilates reason. On that night, in my own Baker Street room, I knew that what could not be happening to me was none the less happening. And yet I was a man who would laugh outright at a ghost beyond the window-glass or a spirit knocking on the wall.

It began when I woke drowsily and without apparent reason from an uninterrupted sleep. I felt as though I had risen suddenly and rapidly from a far greater depth of unconsciousness than usual. The speed of it had almost left me dizzy. I could not at first tell where I was or guess what the time might be, except that it was deep night. My surroundings were out of kilter. I could not recognise the dim landmarks of my familiar surroundings. Had the room changed its shape, or had I been taken somewhere else? Reason told me that I must be in the bed where I had fallen asleep.

I was aware at first only of light filtering into a dark room. If it was my own room, the bed and the light were in the wrong place and at the wrong angle. Nor was this the familiar reflection of yellow street lamps at my curtains' edge. The light was thick and tawny, as if I lay under foul water or something opaque had blemished my vision. Suddenly I could feel a cold draught where the curtains of the window above me might be. They were wide open, not pulled together as I had always left them when I went to bed.

My first thought was that there must surely have been an intruder. Where was he? I had the sense to lie quite still and give no indication of having stirred. I went back quietly in my thoughts through the first seconds of consciousness. I believed that perhaps I had heard a whispering at my ear and even a laugh. Yet now I heard nothing, nor could I see anyone. So after all I must be alone in my room, if it was my room. What of the objects around me?

As I looked cautiously, it seemed that someone or something had also changed the angle of a chest of drawers, if it was a chest of drawers. Perhaps that was what had made me think the bed had been moved. Though it was dark, I began to get my bearings again. Waking at night, I have always had some innate sense of time. I now felt that it must be three or four o'clock in the morning. But I could see no clock face and could hear no bell.

Someone, somehow, must be watching me. There was no sense to it otherwise. But why? I still made no movement to betray my consciousness. I listened meticulously. At this hour, no sound came from the street at the front of the house. A very faint mouselike scratching was audible from the slates or brickwork outside the back wall. I could tell there was no moon but only starlight at the rear. It was framed by an open window with the curtain drawn aside, rising above me where there should be no window. I moved my eyes as far as I could. Had there been a burglar? I would surely not have slept through the coming and going of a housebreaker.

As my sight adjusted to the faint light of the stars, I made out something luminous. Or, rather, it was something seen in a faint and tawny glow. I saw now that the chest of drawers had indeed been moved to provide a flat surface. A murky half-light fell upon an object that seemed to be standing upon it. Yet the object had no explicable outline. I twisted my head a little. The thing was just above me, blocking my vision at this angle. The light was not falling upon it but coming through it. I saw that it was not even on the chest of drawers itself, but in the window embrasure.

Something had been left there or strung up there. Someone had come and gone. Now I was alone in the room. I pulled myself up and sat looking at the thing. It was not stationary, but moving or twisting at a slant as it came slowly into my view. What the devil was it? There was such an unclean light within it. I felt a shock of repugnance that it had been so very close all the time and I had not known it. It was like waking to find a snail moving on one's cheek or a rat licking one's neck.

The object was not even standing on the window-sill, within the casement or embrasure. When it moved as it did, I knew it must be suspended in the opening, not quite touching the surface. It was, after all, bottled in a jar of some sort, a curious amorphous shape, almost translucent, as if it had been fished from the depths of the sea.

I looked more closely at the only feature I could begin to distinguish from the rest. I doubted for no more than a second or two. It was surely a human ear that appeared to float before me in a tawny liquid. As I looked, it turned very slowly away. Wet hair, dark in colour, drifted about it, for all the world like weed in tidal shallows. Thick though the light might be, I knew my eyes were not playing tricks upon me. As it twisted away, I was looking at the upper section of a bare brown neck, severed from its shoulders. I had seen a score of cadavers in the course of my training, but never before one in which the entire head had been cut off so cleanly from the body to which it belonged.

I am not squeamish by nature. The thing had given me a fright only because it caught me with my guard down as I came to the surface of sleep. For a split second, I had thought I might be still asleep, in a mortuary nightmare of some kind. I had struggled to pull out of it. But what the devil was this object, suspended in the dim space of my own bedroom? A severed head? It turned a little more. I glimpsed in profile the curve of a dark-skinned cheekbone. The tip of a nose came next as the invisible cords that must be supporting its bulk unwound themselves a little more.

In reaction to this trick, as I thought of it, I now felt a growing anger with the object and the perpetrator. The grotesque image revealed itself a little further—or, rather, it was grotesque by what it did
not
reveal. It was not a head after all but, much worse, half a head severed vertically. The nose I was now looking at had only one nostril. The profile had only one cheek. The face had only one eye, which was open and blank as it stared at me with the pupil rolled upwards. The mouth had only half a cherry-bud lip at top and bottom. However horrible it might be, my defiance now drew me upright until I sat on the edge of the bed.

I was on my own ground now. This gargoyle of flesh and blood had got the better of me before I could rally my senses. My momentary instinct had been to call out for someone to come and wake me from a grotesque dumb-show. What a fool I should have looked, lying there petrified by some commonplace relic of the anatomy theatre—a joke at my own expense. The object continued to turn a little more, as if to give its expressionless eye a better view of me. The hair still drifted aimlessly as if in a yellow tide.

At last this “terror” was nothing but an anatomical specimen such as one passes in a bell-jar along a row of students in a lecture room. Still unwinding at the end of whatever cord suspended it, the jar gradually displayed the human brain that had been laid open for examination, a cerebrum the colour and texture of greyish-brown meat that has been first cooked and then served cold.

The tightness in my throat had passed as mundanely as a fit of indigestion. Now that I understood what was happening, it was nothing. As a medical student, I had a dozen times examined a brain laid open in just such a manner as this, preserved in a bell-jar of spirit. What floated before me was not borne aloft from the underworld of nightmares, but pickled in formaldehyde. The “thing,” for I still caught myself thinking of the word, had no more power to harm me. The erratic beat of the heart that had woken me with a jolt was steady again. Reason no longer ran squealing into its corner, like the wainscot mouse on the far rim of human vision.

I put a lighted match to the gas-mantle. A pale glow strengthened. It fell across the window where the rear wall dropped to a little yard at the back of the house and the roof of a shed for coal and tools, a dozen feet below me. I neither heard nor saw a movement.

The severed head, or rather the wizened skin of its face, had a colour and texture which suggested that this had been an elder of some Indian tribe. I proved to be a little wrong in that diagnosis, but I was not to know it at the time. Now that I could see the bell jar more plainly, it sat in a shallow dish. The dish itself had been suspended by three chains from the lintel of the window, rather like a hanging lamp in the chancel of a church. That was how it had been kept aloft, apparently floating in the air.

Only a professional roof-top thief could have put this object and its container in place without rousing me from sleep. By now I knew a good deal from Holmes about the skills of London's so-called cat-burglars, quite enough to conclude that none could have climbed the outside wall without alerting either of us. Once again I confronted the sightless eye and its floating hair. How had this head been put there—and why—and by whom? No doubt the sole aim was to scare me out of my wits; but for what reason?

It was not a practical joke. For a second only, I imagined some ingenious pleasantry on the part of Sherlock Holmes. But his whimsies always had a purpose to them, and I was damned if I could see any purpose in this pathological monstrosity. Instead, if it had a dark humour it also had a whiff of mania about it. However eccentric his impulses might be, my friend and housemate was no maniac.

I must wake him, of course, if only because the perpetrator might still be close at hand. I went to the open window and glanced out. There was no one in sight. I was about to draw away from my survey of the back yard when I saw by the faint reflection of gaslight and stars that there was a message of some kind written on the slates of the outhouse roof a dozen feet below. The night was cold and the roof slates had been humid enough to cause a chilly condensation. It was presumably a finger that had traced darker lines on the lighter moisture of the slates in large uneven capitals.

I COME IN SILENCE AND I KILL WITHOUT A SOUND

I VANISH LIKE THE SMOKE UPON THE WIND
.

READ THIS, WHOEVER YOU MAY BE
,

AND TAKE GOOD CARE YOU DO NOT CHALLENGE ME
.

It seemed that the writer feared that he had still not made his purpose sufficiently plain. There was a further line, detached from the quatrain and drawn lower down across the roof. It appeared to have been done as an after-thought, just before he dropped softly from the outhouse guttering to the ground.

BEWARE ALL
—
I WARN BUT ONCE
.

If I was to beware of anything, it was that the wretch might still be down there waiting for me to appear at the window. I found my key and unlocked the bureau bookcase, inherited from my father. This piece of furniture had for years been my companion as I slept.

My Army service revolver, a reliable and efficient Webley Mark 1, lay in the top drawer, carefully wrapped in lint, cleaned and oiled only the week before. With this faithful friend loaded in my hand, I felt more than equal to confronting any roof-top burglar or any spectre of the dead alike. At such a range, I was confident that my first bullet would settle all accounts between us.

I had no idea how Holmes would take to being roused from sleep at this unsocial hour by such a wild story as mine. I had still not consulted my watch; but as I crossed the landing, I heard the distant winter chimes of St. Marylebone Church striking four in the morning. I paused, then tapped gently at the door of his room. I pushed it open without waiting for an invitation. I kept my revolver drawn. For all I knew, he might be in mortal danger from an intruder standing over him.

I realised, as he looked up at me expressionlessly from the pillow, that he had been lying there wide awake during my silent ordeal.

“Holmes!” I said quietly. “We have had an intruder in the house!”

“Indeed?” he said equably. “And has anything been taken? Have Mrs. Hudson, Billy, and the maid been roused?”

“It is not what has been taken, but what has been brought!” As I went on, my story sounded more and more fatuous. Holmes listened without expression or reply, patiently pulling his dressing-gown about his shoulders.

“A bell-jar with half a human head, preserved in formaldehyde by the look of it, is hanging in my window. It was put there while I was fast asleep. I have heard nothing since I woke just now, and I have seen no one.”

How ridiculous it sounded! What if the thing was no longer there when we went to investigate? He looked up sharply.

“Is that all?”

“All? Is it not enough? But no—it is by no means all. Someone has left a message written in the dew on the slate roof of the shed. Someone who claims to move and kill without a sound. He warns only once and this is our warning. It is mad; the whole business is insane.”