When Last I Died (18 page)

But for their compact, Pratt said afterwards, he himself would have made for the landing above, but as the Warden ran down the hall towards the passage leading to the kitchen and the scullery, he himself was bound to follow. They went as far as the scullery door, proved that it, too, was still sealed, and, coming back slowly, examining the passage walls and the dining-room as they came, discovered more scribbles.

Sucked-in
was scrawled in one place, and
Silly bastards
in another. They went up by the front stairs and down by the back stairs, opening every door they came to and waking Carris, who was lying on the spare-room bed. Mrs. Bradley, in an armchair, was already awake, but her wrist was secured to his by a length of string, to ensure that neither moved about the house without the knowledge of the other.

The string was then detached, and the four went down to breakfast. Experiences were compared, and after breakfast two pillows fell downstairs into the hall. No more phenomena occurred before the departure of the journalists. They went reluctantly, and declared that, with another night on the premises, they could have solved the mystery.

Mrs. Bradley picked up the pillows and replaced them on the spare-room bed, then, watched by the Warden, she erased the new scribblings on the walls, only to find that two more had been done on the wall of the bathroom passage.

"I know that writing," said the Warden, suddenly. Mrs. Bradley chuckled as she erased it.

"I've no doubt of it, Warden," she said, "but you had better forget all that. Tell me, have you enjoyed your experiences?"

The Warden confessed that he had.

"And what do you really think of the phenomena?" Mrs. Bradley continued.

"Very interesting and stimulating," said the Warden. "And now—
where are my boys
?"

"Returned to the fold this morning. They left the house immediately they had done this last bit of writing," Mrs. Bradley replied. "I chose Price and Watermallow for this job, and I think you must agree that they have been most intelligent."

"I hardly know whether the Board ..." began the Warden.

"Did you know the two boys called Piggy and Alec, who disappeared from the Institution just before Miss Foxley inherited her aunt's money?" Mrs. Bradley enquired, coming adroitly between the Warden and his conscience.

"No. I heard all about it, of course. In fact, if you remember, that was why I was so grateful when you captured those other little scoundrels for us. Perhaps, if they had had your help over the two who got clean away ..."

Mrs. Bradley shook her head, and assisted the Warden to come
to
the conclusion that he also ought to be going.

They had lunch together at the inn, and she saw him off. Then she returned to the haunted house. The time was a quarter to three, and the high, untidy grass and overgrown shrubs of the garden, a broken wicket gate on to a paddock and a neglected summer-house on a weedy gravel path gave, at that still, close time of the day, an odd and ghostly effect which the first view of the gabled house did nothing to alter or dispel.

She walked up to the front door and opened it with the key which the caretaker had provided. Sunshine danced in motes of dust in the hall. The staircase, uncarpeted—for Miss Foxley had left the house only partly furnished—turned on itself at the end of the first eight stairs with an air of reserve and chilly watchfulness. Beyond it the dim kitchen passage led direct to the realm of ghosts, and one of these ghosts—so it seemed at Mrs. Bradley's first half-glance within—was already in occupation of the premises.

Mrs. Bradley was quick and lithe as a woman one-third of her age. She flung herself flat, and the bottle flew over her prone body and crashed against the wall of the staircase. She rose and sped forward to grapple with the
poltergeist.
The voice of Miss Foxley, from the point of vantage of cover behind the dresser, called out deprecatingly:

"Oh, Lord! I thought you were one of the ghosts!"

"I had the same impression about you," replied Mrs. Bradley, dusting her skirt with her left hand, and keeping her right in the pocket of her skirt.

"You—you needn't shoot," said Miss Foxley, emerging. "I assure you I'm
not
a ghost."

"So I perceive," said Mrs. Bradley, keeping her right hand where it was. "You came to see how we were getting on, I presume? Well, I'm afraid you've missed all the fun. We did have a little, although not as much as
one
had hoped."

"I'm glad you don't feel you've wasted your money," said Miss Foxley, nervously. "So often people complain. After all, I can't
make
things happen, can I?"

As Mrs. Bradley had her doubts about this, she did not reply. She merely asked whether Miss Foxley proposed to stay long in the village.

"Oh, I'm not staying at all," Miss Foxley hastily answered. "I'm due to return on the four-thirty train."

"I'll walk as far as the station with you, shall I?" said Mrs. Bradley. Miss Foxley demurred, Mrs. Bradley insisted. Miss Foxley caught the train with ten minutes to spare, and, to Mrs. Bradley's great satisfaction, completely obscured her features with a thick veil, and the lines of her figure with a long, loose mackintosh cape, before they set out from the house.

"I am just sufficiently like poor old Bella to look at, that I don't feel I want to give people a shock," she remarked, apparently feeling that an explanation was called for, although Mrs. Bradley had asked for none.

"Very proper," said Mrs. Bradley. As soon as the train pulled out of the station she telephoned for the police, and then returned to the house. This time there was nobody in occupation. She passed from room to room, and then went to the courtyard. There she removed the wooden cover of the well and peered into the depths.

There were footholds in the brickwork, as had already been noted by one of her amateur searchers after truth. She glanced round—at the scullery door, which opened almost on to the well; at the kitchen window, which overlooked it; at the pantry window, which, with all their zeal, the seekers had not troubled to seal nor she to point out to them.

"Selah," said Mrs. Bradley, removing all traces of the
poltergeists
' ingress and egress by this means. She returned to the well and soliloquised it:

"In five minutes we were at the well, and for some little time we sat on the edge of the well-head to make sure that no one was stirring or spying on us ... and so we began to descend cautiously, feeling every step before we set foot on it, and scanning the walls in search of any marked stone ..."
^*

^*
"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas." From
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
By M. R. James.

Mrs. Bradley began to climb carefully into the well.

The police were as painstaking as usual. Led by Mrs. Bradley, who availed herself of her position as temporary tenant of the house to act as guide and showman, they also climbed warily into the well, felt their way along a narrow tunnel which opened out of its side about a dozen feet above the water-line, and, after groping forward a couple of yards, emerged, as she had already done, into the cellars of the house.

The cellars were ancient, and were interesting, not only from the point of view of their age. Frogs hopped on the floors, for dampness was everywhere, chiefly because of the proximity of the well. The chief interest, however, lay not in the frogs but in the great thick groins of stone upon which the roof of the cellars was supported.

"Good heavens!" said the inspector, straightening himself as he came out of the passage exit. "Looks like something built to hold up a bridge."

"It was built to hold up the floor, including the stone pillars of a Norman church," said Mrs. Bradley, resting one of her thin yellow hands affectionately on the stonework. "This is a Norman crypt, and, I should say, one of the most interesting in England."

"No wonder there's been funny goings-on," said the sergeant, who was inclined to be superstitious and was marked for promotion because of it, his superiors being under the impression that it betokened imagination, about which they had been hearing in staff talks.

Mrs. Bradley nodded, and suggested to them that in order to obtain the results she thought probable, they would need to dig. As they had brought nothing down with them—indeed, they could not have transported spades down the well—the inspector looked at her as respectfully as circumstances, and the crude illumination of his countenance by the beams of electric torches, would permit, but did not reply. Mrs. Bradley did not relieve his mind by picking up a very beautiful frog, caressing it gently with her forefinger, and cackling loudly, and with a horrid echo from the vault.

"This way," she said. The overhead arches of the vaulting descended to earth in the form of thick, heavy, crudely-carved, round-capitalled pillars. Mrs. Bradley suddenly disappeared behind one of these, and the inspector, thinking to follow, discovered that she was gone. Unpardonably, since the place must at one time have been consecrated, he swore nervously, and turned round to speak to the sergeant.

"Disappearing trick," he said, introducing a regrettable adjective.

"Snatched away ... and no wonder, with a physog like that," said the sergeant. Suddenly Mrs. Bradley's voice spoke right in his ear.

"Tell the inspector to mind the step," she said. The flight of stone steps was immediately visible to the sergeant. He blushed—fortunately in the darkness—and followed the inspector up to a little square trap-door.

"So if the one entrance or exit was not feasible or available, the other was," Mrs. Bradley explained, as the three of them emerged at the foot of the servants' staircase. "This passage, you see, is to the kitchen and scullery, and from the scullery the door opens almost on to the top of the well. The well is a good deal later in date than the crypt, of course, and may have existed independently of it for a hundred years or so. I know very little about such things, but I should put the date of the crypt as not much later than 1090. The well may have been sunk in the fifteenth century, and the passage connecting the two I should be inclined to associate with Tudor times, although I have nothing much to go on apart from the type of brickwork. I should think the connection was made to give protection to a Catholic priest. The Jesuits, I believe, were active towards the close of the sixteenth century.

"Anyhow, that's how the
poltergeist
worked. He could always be somewhere else—the essence of a good game of hide and seek. Let us return to the cellars. I have more to show you."

It was, the sergeant declared afterwards, as good as a film. They returned to the cellar by the way that they had used to ascend to the kitchen passage. A short length of linoleum had been removed to give free access to the trap-door.

"Accounts for the cold that people have noticed, I daresay," the inspector remarked, peering into the aperture which the open trap-door disclosed.

"And yet how necessary an adjunct to the presence of the supernatural," said Mrs. Bradley.
^*
"There is a way into this passage from the back stairs," she added. "You will have noticed that the back stairs have no doors."

^*
"Such cold air currents, or psychic winds, have been experienced, we should add, with many mediums....

... the chill feeling upon wrists and forehead which is a recognized sign that contact has been made and that the mysteries have begun."—Sacheverell Sitwell.—"
Poltergeists
"

The inspector could not see that this had anything to do with it, and said so, but received no answer except an accidental dig in the back from the sergeant who, at Mrs. Bradley's request, had provided himself with one of the crowbars which the police had brought with them in their car.

Upon reaching the cellar (or crypt, as Mrs. Bradley preferred to call it), they examined the floor with great care, but for some time could find no indication of anything out of the ordinary except a slight depression near the well-side entrance, which was to the west. The wall on this side was extremely damp, and the sergeant twice stepped into a pool of water before it occurred to him or to the inspector to enquire why there was water on the floor in this spot.

"Must be a depression, and fills from the well," he said. He climbed up the well again as the nearest way back to the house, and procured a birch broom which he brought back by way of the inside staircase. When he had swept away the water the cause of the sinking still was not apparent, but by testing the bricks with the crowbar he discovered that they were loose and could be prised up. Whilst they were being moved, however, a rush of water filled up each hole as it was made.

"Put 'em back," said the inspector, helping in this part of the work. "I'd say you've given us enough to go on, ma'am," he added, when the three of them were in the house once more, "and I'm inclined to pass on the information so that we can get our hooks on the lady before she makes a getaway. You say she was here this afternoon, so she can't have hopped it very far. Once we've got her, we can examine that cellar more carefully, and if we don't find what we expect to find, well, we shall still have enough to go on for a bit. She'll have to explain the sister's suicide, if nothing else, and why she's been passing herself off as her. You've no doubt about getting her identified, I suppose?" "No doubt at all," replied Mrs. Bradley. As they re-entered the kitchen the sound of footsteps was heard outside, and the caretaker came in by way of the scullery door.

"Ah, so you be still here, mam?" he said. He looked at the two policemen. Mrs. Bradley took out one of the snapshots. "Is this your employer?" she asked.

"Never set eyes on her," replied the old man, "as I telled 'ee before. This ...?" His face changed. "Why, this be the lady as was tried for the murder of the gentleman what fell out the window."

"Are you sure?" enquired the inspector. "No photographs were taken at the trial," he added, turning to Mrs. Bradley.

"Ah. But her was living here in the village when the poor fellow fell," said the caretaker.