The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (78 page)

I had been away for a couple of months one winter in Egypt; the night after my return Hugh dined with me, and after dinner I produced those trophies which the strongest-minded are unable to refrain from purchasing, when they are offered by an engaging burnoused ruffian in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. There were some beads (not quite so blue as they had appeared there), a scarab or two, and for the last I kept the piece of which I was really proud, namely, a small lapis-lazuli statuette, a few inches high, of a cat. It sat square and stiff on its haunches, with upright forelegs, and, in spite of the small scale, so good were the proportions and so accurate the observation of the artist, that it gave the impression of being much bigger. As it stood on Hugh’s palm it was certainly small, but if, without the sight of it, I pictured it to myself, it represented itself as far larger than it really was.

“And the odd thing is,” I said, “that though it is far and away the best thing I picked up, I cannot for the life of me remember where I bought it. Somehow I feel that I’ve always had it.”

He had been looking very intently at it. Then he jumped up from his chair and put it down on the chimney-piece.

“I don’t think I quite like it,” he said, “and I can’t tell you why. Oh, a jolly bit of workmanship; I don’t mean that. And you can’t remember where you got it, did you say? That’s odd . . . Well, what about a game of chess?”

We played a couple of games, without much concentration or fervour, and more than once I saw him glance with a puzzled look at my little image on the chimney-piece. But he said nothing more about it, and when our games were over he gave me the discursive news of the Terrace. A house had fallen vacant and been instantly snapped up.

“Not Naboth’s?” I asked.

“No, not Naboth’s. Naboth is in possession still. Very much in possession; going strong.”

“Anything new?” I asked.

“Oh, just bits of things. I’ve seen him a good many times lately, and yet I can’t get any clear idea of him. I met him three days ago, as I was coming out of my gate, and had a good look at him, and for a moment I agreed with you and thought he was a young man. Then he turned and stared me in the face for a second, and I thought I had never seen anyone so old. Frightfully alive, but more than old – antique, primeval.”

“And then?” I asked.

“He passed on, and I found myself, as has so often happened before, quite unable to remember what his face was like. Was he old or young? I didn’t know. What was his mouth like, or his nose? But it was the question of his age which was the most baffling.”

Hugh stretched his feet out towards the blaze, and sank back in his chair, with one more frowning look at my lapis lazuli cat.

“Though after all, what is age?” he said. “We measure age by time, we say ‘so many years’, and forget that we’re in eternity here and now, just as we say we’re in a room or in Bagnell Terrace, though we’re much more truly in infinity.”

“What has that got to do with Naboth?” I asked.

Hugh beat his pipe out against the bars of the grate before he answered.

“Well, it will probably sound quite cracked to you,” he said, “unless Egypt, the land of ancient mystery, has softened your rind of materialism, but it struck me then that Naboth belonged to eternity much more obviously than we do. We belong to it, of course; we can’t help that; but he’s less involved in this error or illusion of time than we are. Dear me, it sounds amazing nonsense when I put it into words.”

I laughed.

“I’m afraid my rind of materialism isn’t soft enough yet,” I said. “What you say implies that you think Naboth is a sort of apparition, a ghost, a spirit of the dead that manifests itself as a human being, though it isn’t one!”

He drew his legs up to him again.

“Yes; it must be nonsense,” he said. “Besides, he has been so much in evidence lately, and we can’t all be seeing a ghost. It doesn’t happen. And there have been noises coming from his house, loud and cheerful noises, which I’ve never heard before. Somebody plays an instrument like a flute in that big, square room you envy so much, and somebody beats an accompaniment as if with drums. Odd sort of music; it goes on often now at night . . . Well, it’s time to go to bed.”

Again he glanced up at the chimney-piece.

“Why, it’s quite a little cat,” he said.

This rather interested me, for I had said nothing to him about the impression left on my mind that it was bigger than its actual dimensions.

“Just the same size as ever,” I said.

“Naturally. But I had been thinking of it as lifesize for some reason,” said he.

I went with him to the door, and strolled out with him into the darkness of an overcast night. As we neared his house I saw that big patches of light shone into the road from the windows of the square room next door. Suddenly Hugh laid his hand on my arm.

“There!” he said. “The flutes and drums are at it to-night.”

The night was very still, but, listen as I would, I could hear nothing but the rumble of traffic in the street beyond the terrace.

“I can’t hear it,” I said.

Even as I spoke, I heard it, and the wailing noise whisked me back to Egypt again. The boom of the traffic became for me the beat of the drum, and upon it floated just that squeal and wail of the little reed-pipes which accompany the Arab dances, tuneless and rhythmless, and as old as the temples of the Nile.

“It’s like the Arab music that you hear in Egypt,” I said.

As we stood listening it ceased to his ears as well as mine, as suddenly as it had begun, and simultaneously the lights in the windows of the square room were extinguished.

We waited a moment in the roadway opposite Hugh’s house, but from next door came no sound at all, nor glimmer of illumination from any of its windows . . .

I turned; it was rather chilly to one lately arrived from the south.

“Good night,” I said; “we’ll meet tomorrow sometime.”

I went straight to bed, slept at once, and woke with the impress of a very vivid dream on my mind. There was music in it, familiar Arab music, and there was an immense cat somewhere. Even as I tried to recall it, it faded, and I had but time to recognize it as a hash-up of the happenings of the evening before I went to sleep again.

The normal habits of life quickly reasserted themselves. I had work to do, and there were friends to see; all the minute events of each day stitched themselves into the tapestry of life. But somehow a new thread began to be woven into it, though at the time I did not recognize it as such. It seemed trivial and extraneous that I should so often hear a few staves of that odd music from Naboth’s house, or that as often as it fixed my attention it was silent again, as if I had imagined, rather than actually heard it. It was trivial, too, that I should so often see Naboth entering or leaving his house. And then one day I had a sight of him which was unlike any previous experience of mine.

I was standing one morning in the window of my front room. I had idly picked up my lapis lazuli cat, and was holding it in the splash of sunlight that poured in, admiring the texture of its surface which, though it was of hard stone, somehow suggested fur. Then, quite casually, I looked up, and there, a few yards in front of me, leaning on the railings of my garden, and intently observing not me, but what I held, was Naboth. His eyes, fixed on it, blinked in the April sunshine with some purring sensuous content, and Hugh was right on the question of his age; he was neither old nor young, but timeless.

The moment of perception passed; it flashed on and off my mind like the revolving beam of some distant lighthouse. It was just a ray of illumination, and was instantly shut off again, so that it appeared to my conscious mind like some hallucination. He suddenly seemed aware of me, and, turning, walked briskly off down the pavement.

I remember being rather startled, but the effect soon faded, and the incident became to me one of those trivial little things that make a momentary impression and vanish. It was odd, too, but in no way remarkable, that more than once I saw one of those discreet cats of which I have spoken sitting on the little balcony outside my front room, and gravely regarding the interior. I am devoted to cats, and several times I got up in order to open the window and invite it to enter; but each time on my movement it jumped down and slunk away. And April passed into May.

I came back after dining out one night in this month, and found a telephone message from Hugh that I should ring him up on my return. A rather excited voice answered me.

“I thought you would like to know at once,” he said. “An hour ago a board was put up on Naboth’s house to say that the freehold was for sale. Martin and Smith are the agents. Good night; I’m in bed already.”

“You’re a true friend,” I said.

Early next morning, of course, I presented myself at the house-agent’s. The price asked was very moderate, the title perfectly satisfactory. He could give me the keys at once, for the house was empty, and he promised that I could have a couple of days to make up my mind, during which time I was to have the prior right of purchase if I was disposed to pay the full price asked. If, however, I only made an offer, he could not guarantee that the trustees would accept it . . . Hot-foot, with the keys in my pocket, I sped back up the Terrace again.

I found the house completely empty, not of inhabitants only, but of all else. There was not a blind, not a strip of drugget, not a curtain-rod in it from garret to cellar. So much the better, thought I, for there would be no tenants’ fixtures to take on. Nor was there any debris of removal, of straw and waste-paper; the house looked as if it was prepared for an occupant instead of just rid of one. All was in apple-pie order, the windows clean, the floors swept, the paint and woodwork bright; it was a clean and polished shell ready for its occupier. My first inspection, of course, was of the big built-out room, which was its chief attraction, and my heart leaped at the sight of its plain spaciousness. On one side was an open fireplace, on the other a coil of pipes for central heating, and at the end, between the windows, a niche let into the wall, as if a statue had once stood there; it might have been designed expressly for my bronze Perseus. The rest of the house presented no particular features; it was on the same plan as my own, and my builder, who inspected it that afternoon, pronounced it to be in excellent condition.

“It looks as if it had been newly done up, and never lived in,” he said, “and at the price you mention is a decided bargain.”

The same thing struck Hugh when, on his return from his office, I dragged him over to see it.

“Why, it all looks new,” he said, “and yet we know that Naboth has been here for years, and was certainly here a week ago. And then there’s another thing. When did he remove his furniture? There have been no vans at the house that I have seen.”

I was much too pleased at getting my heart’s desire to consider anything except that I had got it.

“Oh, I can’t bother about little things like that,” I said. “Look at my beautiful big room. Piano there, bookcases all along the wall, sofa in front of the fire, Perseus in the niche. Why, it was made for me.”

Within the specified two days the house was mine, and within a month papering and distempering, electric fittings, and blinds and curtain-rods were finished, and my move began. Two days were sufficient for the transport of my goods, and at the close of the second my old house was dismantled, except for my bedroom, the contents of which would be moved next day. My servants were installed in the new abode, and that night, after a hurried dinner with Hugh, I went back for a couple more hours’ work of hauling and tugging and arranging books in the large room, which it was my purpose to finish first. It was a chilly night for May, and I had had a log-fire lit on the hearth, which from time to time I replenished, in intervals of dusting and arranging. Eventually, when the two hours had lengthened themselves into three, I determined to give over for the present, and, much tired, sat down for a recuperative pause on the edge of my sofa and contemplated with satisfaction the result of my labours. At that moment I was conscious that there was a stale, but aromatic, smell in the room that reminded me of the curious odour that hangs about an Egyptian temple. But I put it down to the dust from my books and the smouldering logs.

The move was completed next day, and after another week I was installed as firmly as if I had been there for years. May slipped by, and June, and my new house never ceased to give me a vivid pleasure; it was always a treat to return to it. Then came a certain afternoon when a strange thing happened.

The day had been wet, but towards evening it cleared up; the pavements soon dried, but the road remained moist and miry. I was close to my house on my way home when I saw form itself on the paving-stones a few yards in front of me the mark of a wet shoe, as if someone invisible to the eye had just stepped off the road. Another and yet another briskly imprinted themselves, going up towards my house. For the moment I stood stockstill, and then, with a thumping heart I followed. The marks of these strange footsteps preceded me right up to my door; there was one on the very threshold faintly visible.

I let myself in, closing the door, I confess, very quickly behind me. As I stood there I heard a resounding crash from my room, which so to speak, startled my fright from me, and I ran down the little passage and burst in. There, at the far end of the room was my bronze Perseus fallen from its niche and lying on the floor. And I knew, by what sixth sense I cannot tell, that I was not alone in the room and that the presence there was no human presence.