The dream detective: being some account of the methods of Moris Klaw (22 page)

I shall swim in blood! Assassins will come stealing to me, murdered ones will scream in my ears, the secret knife will flash, the honest ax do its deadly work; for in the moment of such deeds two imperishable thought-forms are created: the thought-form of the slayer, strong to survive, because a blood-lustful thought, a revengeful thought; and the thought of the slain, likewise a long-surviving thought because a thought of wildest despair, a final massing of the mental forces greater than any generally possible in life, upon that last awful grievance."

He paused, looking around him.

"From the phantom company," he said, "I must pick out that one whose thought is of laughter, of firing guns, and of evil whisperings. What a task! Wondrous is the science of the mental negative!"

The meeting broke up, then, and Isis Klaw, having brought from a large case, which formed part of her father's luggage, two huge red cushions, bade us good-night and retired to her own room. Moris Klaw, with a cushion swinging in each hand, went shuffling ungainly from room to room like some strange animal seeking a lair.

"Do I understand," Clement Leyland whispered to me, "that your friend proposes to sleep down here?"

"Yes," I replied, smiling at his evident wonderment; "such is his method of investigation, eccentric, but effective."

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"It is really effective, then? The experiences given in 'Psychic Angles' are not fabulous?"

"In no way. Moris Klaw is a very remarkable man. I have yet to meet the mystery which is beyond him."

Moris Klaw's rumbling voice, which frequently reminded me of the rolling of casks in a distant cellar, broke in upon our conversation:

"Here is the ideal spot; here upon this settee by the door of the gun room I am in the centre of these psychic storms which nightly arise in Grange."

"If you are determined to remain here, Mr. Klaw," said Sir James, "I shall not endeavour to dissuade you, of course; but I should prefer to see you turn into more comfortable quarters."

"No, no," was the reply; "it is here I shall lay down my old head, it is here I shall lie and wait for him, the one who laughs."

Accordingly, since the hour grew late, we left this novel ghost-hunter stretched out upon the settee in the billiard room; and as I knew his objection to any disturbance, I suggested to Sir James that we should retire out of earshot for a final smoke ere seeking our separate apartments.

We sat chatting for close upon an hour, I suppose. Then Clement Leyland left us, saying that he had had a heavy day.

"Clement's been working real hard," the baronet confided to me. "In the circumstances, as I think

I told you, I have decided to abandon Grange, and we are having the old Friars House, a mile from here, but on part of the estate, restored. It hasn't been inhabited for about three generations, and it's very much older than Grange; part of it dates back to King John. Perhaps I can get servants to stop there, though, and it's quite impossible to keep up Grange without a staff. Clement has been superintending the work over there all day; he's one of the best."

A few moments later we parted for the night. I left Sir James at the door of his room, which had formerly opened off the balcony overlooking the banqueting hall. That door was now walled up, however, and the entrance was from the corridor beyond. The room allotted to me was upon the opposite side of the same corridor and farther to the north.

I felt particularly unlike sleep. The extremely modern furniture of my room could not rob the walls, with their small square panelling, of the air of hoary antiquity which was theirs. The one window, deep set and overlooking an extensive orchard, was such as might have formed the focus for cavalierly glance, was such as might have framed the head of a romantic maid of Stuart days. And with it all was that gloomy air that had a more remote antiquity, that harked back to darker times than those of the Merry Monarch: the air of ghostly evil, the cloud from which

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proceeded the devilish laughter, the obscene whisperings.

Where the shadows of the trees lay beneath me on the turf, I could fancy a gray cowled figure flitting across the lighted patches and lurking, evilly watching, amid the pools of darkness. Sleep was impossible. Moris Klaw, to whom such fears as mine were utterly unknown, might repose, nay, was actually reposing, in the very vortex of this psychical storm; but I was otherwise constituted. I had been with him in many cases of dark enough evil-doing, but this purely ghostly menace was something that sapped my courage.

Grange stood upon rather high ground, and in a northeasterly direction, peeping out from the trees of a wooded slope, showed a gray tower almost like a giant monkish figure under the moon. I watched it with a vague interest. It was Friars House, to which the baronet projected retreat from the haunted Grange. Lighting my pipe, I leaned from the window, idly watching that ancient tower and wondering if more evil deeds had taken place within it—long as it had stood there amid the trees—than those which had left their ghostly mark upon Grange.

The night was very beautiful and very still. Not the slightest sound could I detect within or without the house. How long I had lounged there in this half-dreamy, but vaguely fearful, mood I cannot say, but I was aroused by a tremendous outcry. Loud

it broke in upon the silence of the night, broke in on my mood with nerve-racking effect. My pipe dropped to the floor, and taking one step across the room I stood there, rooted to the spot with indefinable horror.

"Father!" it came in a piercing scream, and again: "Father! O God! save him! save him!"

in

The voice was that of Isis Klaw!

Whenever I accompanied her father upon any of his inquiries I came armed, and now, with a magazine pistol held in my hand, I leapt out into the corridor and turned toward the stair. A door slammed open in front of me and Sir James Leyland also came running out, pulling on his dressing gown as he ran. One quick glance he gave me; his face was very pale; and together we went racing down the stairs into the hall patched with ghostly moonlight.

"You heard it?" he breathed, hoarsely. "It was Miss Klaw! What in God's name has happened? Where is she?"

But even as he asked the question, and as we pressed on into the billiard room, it was answered. For Isis Klaw, with a dressing gown thrown over her night apparel, was kneeling beside the settee upon which her father lay.

"What has happened? What has happened?"

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groaned Sir James. Then, as we approached together: "Mr. Klaw! Mr. Klaw!" he cried.

"All right, my friend!" came the rumbling voice, and to my inestimable relief Moris Klaw sat up and looked around upon us, adjusting his pince-nez to the bridge of his massive nose: "I live! It has saved me, the Science of the Mind!"

Isis Klaw bowed her head upon the red cushion, and I saw that she was trembling violently. It was the first time I had known her to lose her regal composure, and, utterly mystified, I wondered what awful danger had threatened Moris Klaw.

"Thank Heaven for that!" said the baronet, earnestly.

Approaching footsteps sounded now, and a group of frightened servants, headed by the butler, appeared at the door of the billiard room. Through them came pressing Mr. Clement Leyland. His face was ghastly, showing a startling white against the dull red of the dressing gown he wore.

"James!" he said, huskily. "James! that awful screaming! What was it? What has occurred?"

I knew that he slept in the west wing and that he must have been unable to distinguish the words which Isis had cried. Thus heard, the shrill scream must have sounded even more terrifying.

Moris Klaw raised his hand protestingly.

"No fuss, dear friends," he implored, in rumbling

accents, "no wonderings and botherings. They so disturb the nerves. Let us be calm, let us be peaceful." He laid his hand upon the head of the girl who knelt beside him. "Isis, my child, what a delicate instrument is the psychic perception! You knew it, the danger to your poor old father, to the poor old fool who lies here waiting to be slaughtered! Almost you knew it before I knew it myself!"

"For God's sake, Mr. Klaw," said Clement Ley-land, shakily, "what has happened? Who, or what, came to you here? What occasioned Miss Klaw's terror?"

"My friend," replied Klaw, "you ask me conundrum-riddles. Some dreadful thing haunts this Grange, some deadly thing. The man has not lived who has not tasted fear, and I, the old foolish, have lived indeed to-night! I fail, my friend. There is some evil intelligence ruling this Grange, which I cannot capture upon my negative"—he tapped his brow characteristically—"to attempt it would be to die. It is too powerful for me. Grange is unclean, Sir James. You will leave Grange without delay; it is I, the old experienced who knows, that warns you. Fly from Grange. Take up your residence to-morrow at Friars House!"

No further explanation would he vouchsafe.

"I am defeated, my friends!" he declared, shrugging, resignedly.

Accordingly, Isis, her beautiful face deathly pale

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and her great eyes feverishly bright, returned to her room. She covered her face with her hands as she passed to the door. Moris Klaw accepted the use of an apartment next to mine, and we all sought our couches again in states of varying perturbation.

That there was some profound mystery underlying these happenings of the night was evident to me. Moris Klaw and Isis Klaw were keeping something back. They shared some dark secret and guarded it jealously; but with what motive they acted in this fashion was a problem that defied my efforts at solution.

The morning came and brought a haggard company to the breakfast table. Few, if any, beneath the roof of Grange, had known sleep that night, although, so far as I could gather, there had been no manifestations of anv kind.

Moris Klaw talked incessantly about the fauna of the Sahara Desert, and so monopolized the conversation with his queer anecdotes of snakes and scorpions that no other topic found entrance.

After breakfast the whole party, in Sir James's car, drove over to Friars House; and despite the up-to-date furniture and upholstery, I found it a very gloomy residence. Stripped of its ghostly atmosphere, Grange had been quite a charming seat for any man; but this dungeonesque place, with its lichened tower that had dominated the valley when John signed Magna Charta, with its massive walls

and arrow-slit windows, its eccentrically designed apartments and crypt-like smell, was altogether too archaic to be comfortable.

Moris Klaw, standing in the room which had been fitted up as a library, removed his flat-topped brown bowler and fumbled for his scent spray.

"This place," he said, "smells abominably of dead abbots!"

He squirted verbena upon himself and upon Isis. He replaced the scent spray in the lining of the hat, and was about to replace the hat on his head, when he paused, staring straight up at the ceiling reflectively.

"My notes!" he said, abruptly; "I have left those notes in my valise. I must have them. Curse me, for an old foolish! Sir James, you will show Isis this charming old tower in my absence? Do I intrude? But I would borrow the car and return to Grange for my notes!"

"Not a bit!" replied the baronet, readily. "Clement can go with you!"

"No, no! Certainly no! I could not think of it! My old friend, Mr. Searles, may come if he so likes; if not, I go alone."

Naturally, I agreed to accompany him; and, leaving the others at the ancient gateway, we set oflP in Sir James's car back to Grange. Down into the valley we swept and up the slope to Grange, Moris Klaw sitting muttering in his beard, but offering no

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remark and patently desirous to avoid conversation.

"Come, my friend/' he said, as the car drew up before the house, "and I will show you what my mental negative recorded to me last night, just before the great danger came."

He led the way into the billiard room, curtly directing the butler to leave us. When we were alone—

"You will note something," he rumbled, swinging his arm vaguely around in the direction of the banqueting hall. "What you will note is this: the laughter—where is it heard? It is heard here, in the gun room on my right, in the banquet room before me. Great is the Science of the Mind! I will now test my negative."

I followed him with wondering gaze as he stepped into the deep old-fashioned fireplace which formed one of the quaintest features of the room. He bent his tall figure to avoid striking his head upon the stonework, and placed the historic brown bowler upon one of the settles.

"Perhaps I cannot find it," came his rumbling voice; "my negative was fogged by assassinations, murderous sieges, candle-light duels, and other thought-forms of the troubled past; but I may triumph—I may triumph!"

He was standing on a settle with his head far up the chimney, and presently a faint grating sound proceeded from that sooty darkness.

"I have it!" he rumbled, triumphantly. "And in my pocket reposes the electric lamp. I ascend; you, my good friend, will follow."

True enough he scrambled upward and, to my unspeakable amazement, disappeared in the chimney. Filled with great wonder I followed and saw him standing in a recess high above my head, a recess which he must have opened in some way unknown to me. He extended a long arm and grasped my hand in his.

"Up!" he cried, exerted his surprising strength, and jerked me up beside him with as little effort as though I had been a child.

He pressed the button of a torch which he held and I saw that we stood upon an exceedingly steep and narrow wooden stair.

"It is in the thickness of the wall between the panellings," he whispered, solemnly; "a Jacobite hiding place. Sir James knows nothing of it, for has he not spent his life in the Bush? v

He mounted the stair.

"On the right," his voice came back to me, "the gun room, the billiard room! On the left, the banquet room. From here comes the laughter— from here comes the danger."