Vintage Vampire Stories (35 page)

‘Simcox Smith is an ass,' said Hayling, quite oblivious to the fact that Smith had done good work in many directions and offered some conjectural hypotheses to the world which had much merit and might some day rank as theories. ‘Simcox Smith is an ass. He believed in occultism. He believed, I am prepared to swear, in witchcraft. He mistook the horrible ideas of a savage race for realities. Would you believe it, he even said that everything believed in utter and simple faith had a kind of reality? He said this was a law of nature!'

Obviously Simcox Smith had been mad. But some easily affected and imaginative people said it was a dreadful idea, just as Winslow had said the notion of Suja's blood fetish was a beastly one. Imagine for an instant that the idea was true! It meant that the frightful imaginations of madmen had a quasi existence at least! It meant that there was a dreadful element of truth (for who knew what truth was?) in any conceived folly. A man had but to imagine something to create it. One of Smith's friends really believed this. He was an atheist, he said, but he believed (in a way, he added, as he laughed) that mankind had really created a kind of anthropomorphic deity, with the passions and feelings attributed to him by belief and tradition. No wonder, said this friend of Smith's, that the world was a horrible place to anyone who could grasp its misery and had ears for its groans.

It must be acknowledged that this idea of Simcox Smith's was a horrible one. It really affected some men. One tried it on a child (he was very scientific, and believed in his experiments he could more or less control) and the child saw things which threw it into a fit and injured it for life. Nevertheless, it was a very interesting experiment, for something happened to the child (there were odd marks on it) which looked like something more than suggestion, unless it all true that we hear of stigmata. Perhaps it is, but personally I have an idea (I knew Smith) that there is something in his damnable creating theory.

But to return to Hayling. He got the parcel from the Coast, and he read Winslow's letter.

‘Poor fellow,' said Hayling; ‘so he's dead at last. Well, well! And what is this that he sends? A blood fetish? Ah, he thinks he can convert me at the last, the poor mad devil.'

He opened the parcel, and inside the matting and the leaves, which smelt of the West Coast of Africa (the smell being muddy and very distinctive to those who have smelt it), he found a dried black hand, severed at the wrist joint.There was nothing else, only this hand.

‘Humph,' said Hayling, who had nerves which had never been shaken by the bush and the fevers of the bush, and had never heard black men whispering dreadfully of the lost soulds of the dead. ‘Humph.'

He picked it up and looked at it. It was an ordinary hand, a right hand, and there was nothing remarkable about it at first. On a further look the nails seemed remarkably long, and that gave the hand a rather cruel look. Hayling said ‘humph,' again. He examined it carefully and saw that it was very deeply marked on the palm.

‘Very interesting,' said Hayling. Curiously enough (or rather it would have been curious if we didn't know that the strongest of us have our weak spots), he had a belief or some belief in palmistry. He had never acknowledged it to a soul but a well-known palmist in the west of London. ‘Very interesting. I wonder what Sacconi would say of these lines?'

Sacconi was the palmist. He was an Irishman.

‘I'll show it to Sacconi,' said Hayling. He packed it up in its box again and put it in a cupboard, which he locked up. He dismissed the matter, for he had a good deal to do. He had to write something about Simcox Smith, for instance, and he was working on totemism. He hardly thought of the dried hand for some days.

Hayling was a bachelor, and lived with a niece and a housekeeper. He was a nice man to live with unless one knew anything about anthropology and totems and such like, and Mary Hayling knew nothing about them whatever. She said ‘Yes, uncle dear,' and ‘No, uncle dear,' just as she ought to do, and when he abused Simcox Smith, or Robins-Gunter, or Williams, who were rivals of his, she was always sympathetic and said it was a shame.

‘What's a shame?' said Hayling.

‘I don't know, dear uncle,' said Mary Hayling.

And Hayling laughed.

Then there was the housekeeper. She was fair, stout and ruddy, and very cheerful in spite of the fact that skulls and bones and specimen things in bottles made her flesh creep. She knew nothing whatever about them, and wondered what they mattered. Why Mr Hayling raged and rumbled about other men's opinions on such horrid subjects she didn't know. However, she took everything easily, and only remonstrated when the fullness of the house necessitated skulls being exposed to public view. The passage even had some of them and the maids objected to dusting them, as was only natural. Hayling said he didn't want'em dusted, but what would any housekeeper who was properly constituted think of that? She made the girls dust them, though she herself shivered. She even saw that they wiped glass bottles with awful things inside them. She and the housemaid cleaned up Mr Hayling's own room and opened the cupboard where the hand was. The girl gave a horrid squeak as she put her hand in and touched it.

‘O, law, ma'am, what is it?' asked Kate.

‘Don't be a fool, girl,' said Mrs Farwell, with a shiver. ‘It's only a hand.'

‘Only—oh Lord! I won't touch it,' said the girl. ‘There's a dead mouse by it.'

‘Then take out the dead mouse,' said the housekeeper. The girl did so, and slammed the cupboard door to and locked it. The mouse was a poor shriveled little thing, but how interesting it would have been to dead Simcox Smith neither Kate nor the housekeeper knew. It went into the dustbin as if it did not bear witness to a horror.

That afternoon Mrs Farwell spoke to Hayling.

‘If you please, sir, there's a hand in that cupboard, and I couldn't get Kate to clean it out.'

‘A hand! Oh yes, I remember,' said Hayling. ‘The girl's a fool. Does she think it will hurt her? How did she know it was there? I wrapped it up. Some one's been meddling.'

‘I don't think so, sir,' said Mrs Farwell, with dignity. ‘She is much too frightened to meddle, and so am I.'

‘Mrs Farwell, you are a fool,' said Hayling.

‘Thank you, sir,' said Mrs Farwell. When Mrs Farwell had sailed out of the room Hayling opened the cupboard and found the hand out of its package.

‘Some one has been meddling,' growled Hayling.‘They pretend that they are frightened and come hunting here to get a sensation. I know ‘em. They're all savages, and so are all of us. Civilization!'

He gave a snort when he thought of what civilization was. That is an anthropological way of looking at it. It's not a theological way at all.

He looked at the hand. It was a curious hand.

‘It's contracted a little,' said Hayling. ‘The fist has closed, I think. Drying unequally. But it's interesting; I'll show it to Sacconi.'

He put the hand into its coverings, and took it that very afternoon to Sacconi.

Personally Hayling believed in chiromancy. As I have said, it really was his only weakness. I never used to believe it when he argued with me, but now I have my doubts. When Sacconi took the thing into his own white and beautiful hands and turned it over to look at the palm, his eyebrows went up in a very odd way. Hayling said so.

‘This, oh, ah,' said Sacconi. His real name was Flynn. He came from Limerick. ‘This is very odd—very–'

‘Very what?' asked Hayling.

‘Horrible, quite horrible,' said Sacconi.

‘Can you read it, man?'

Sacconi grunted.

‘Can I read the Times? I can, but I don't. I've half the mind not to read this. It's very horrible, Hayling.'

‘The devil,' said Hayling;‘what d'ye mean?'

‘This is a negro's hand.'

‘Any fool can see that,' said Hayling rudely.

‘A murderer's hand.'

‘That's likely enough,' said Hayling.

‘A cannibal's hand.'

‘You don't say so!' said Hayling.

‘Oh, worse than that.'

‘What's worse?'

Sacconi said a lot that Hayling denounced as fudge. Probably it was fudge. And yet—

‘I'd burn it,' said Sacconi, with a shiver, as he handed it back to Hayling, and went to wash his hands. ‘I'd burn it.'

‘There's a damn weak spot in you, Sacconi,' said the anthropologist.

‘Perhaps,' said Sacconi, ‘but I'd burn it.'

‘Damn nonsense,' said Hayling. ‘Why should I?'

‘I believe a lot of things you don't,' said Sacconi.

‘I disbelieve a lot that you don't,' retorted Hayling.

‘You see, I'm a bit of a clairvoyant,' said Sacconi.

‘I've heard you say that before,' said Hayling, as he went away.

When he got home again he put the hand in the cupboard. He forgot to lock it up. And he locked the cat up in his room when he went to bed.

There was an awful crying of cats, or a cat, in the middle of the night. But cats fight about that time.

And when Kate opened the door of Hayling's working-room in the morning she saw the hand upon the hearthrug, and gave a horrid scream. It brought Mrs Farwell out of the drawling room, and Hayling out of the bathroom in a big towel.

‘What the devil—' said Hayling.

‘What is it, Kate?' cried Mrs Farwell.

‘The hand! the hand!' said Kate. ‘It's on the floor.'

Mrs Farwell saw it. Hayling put on his dressing-gown, and came down and saw it, too.

‘Give that fool a month's notice,' said Hayling. ‘She's been meddling again.'

‘I haven't,' said Kate, sobbing. And then Mrs Farwell saw the cat lying stretched out under Hayling's desk.

‘It was the cat. There she is,' said Mrs Farwell.

‘Damn the cat,' said Hayling. He took Kate's broom and gave the cat a push with it.

The cat was dead.

‘I don't want a month's notice,' said Kate, quavering. ‘I'll go now.'

‘Send the fool off,' said Hayling angrily. He took up the cat, of which he had been very fond, and put it outside, and shut the door on the crying girl and Mrs Farwell. He picked up the hand and looked at it.

‘Very odd,' said Hayling.

He looked again.

‘Very beastly,' said Hayling. ‘I suppose it's my imagination.'

He looked once more.

‘Looks fresher,' said Hayling. ‘These fools of women have infected me.'

He put the hand down on his desk by the side of a very curious Maori skull, and went upstairs again to finish dressing.

That morning the scientific monthlies were out, and there was much of interest in them that Hayling forgot all about the hand. He had an article in one of them abusing Robins-Gunter, whose views on anthropology were coloured by his fanaticism in religion. ‘Imagine a man like that thinking he is an authority on anything scientific,' said Hayling. It was a pleasure to slaughter him on his own altar, and indeed this time Hayling felt he had offered Robins-Gunter up to the outraged deity of Truth.

‘It's a massacre,' said Hayling; ‘it's not a criticism—it's a massacre.'

He said ‘Ha-ha!' and went to town to hear what others had to say about it. They had so much to say that he remained at the club till very late, and got rather too much wine to drink. Or perhaps it was the whisky-and-soda. He left his working-room door open and unlocked.

Kate had gone, sacrificing a fortnight's wages. Mrs Farwell said she was a fool. Kate said she would rather be a fool outside that house. She also said a lot of foolish things about the hand, which had a very silly effect upon the housekeeper. For how else can we account for what happened that night? Kate said that the beastly hand was alive, and that it had killed the cat. Uneducated superstitious girls from the country often say things as silly. But Mrs Farwell was a woman of nerves. She only went to sleep when heard her master come in.

She woke screaming at three o'clock, and Hayling was still so much under the influence of Robins-Gunter's scientific blood and the club whisky that he didn't wake. But Mary Hayling woke and so did the cook, and they came running to Mrs Farwell's room. They found her door open.

‘What's the matter? What's the matter?' screamed Mary Hayling. She brought a candle and found Mrs Farwell sitting up in bed.

She was as white as a ghost, bloodlessly white. ‘There's been a horrible thing in my room,' she whispered.

The cook collapsed on a chair; Mary Hayling say on the bed and put her arms round the housekeeper.

‘What?'

‘I saw it,' whispered Mrs Farwell. ‘A black man, reddish black, very horrible—‘

She fainted, and Mary laid her down.

‘Stay with her,' said Mary. ‘I'll go and wake my uncle.'