The Empty House Read online

  He picked tip his stick and went to the cupboard for the candle. A limp form rose shakily beside him breathing hard, and he heard a voice say very faintly something about being ‘ready to come’. The woman’s courage amazed him; it was so much greater than his own: and, as they advanced, holding aloft the dripping candle, some subtle force exhaled from this trembling, white-faced old woman at his side that was the true source of his inspiration. It held something really great that shamed him and gave him the support without which he would have proved far less equal to the occasion.

  They crossed the dark landing, avoiding with their eyes the deep black space over the banisters. Then they began to mount the narrow staircase to meet the sounds which, minute by minute, grew louder and nearer. About half-way up the stairs Aunt Julia stumbled and Shorthouse turned to catch her by the arm, and just at that moment there came a terrific crash in the servants’ corridor overhead. It was instantly followed by a shrill, agonized scream that was a cry of terror and a cry for help melted into one.

  Before they could move aside, or go down a single step, someone came rushing along the passage overhead, blundering horribly, racing madly, at full speed, three steps at a time, down the very staircase where they stood. The steps were light and uncertain; but close behind them sounded the heavier tread of another person, and the staircase seemed to shake.

  Shorthouse and his companion just had time to flatten themselves against the wall when the jumble of flying steps was upon them, and two persons, with the slightest possible interval between them, dashed past at full speed. It was a perfect whirlwind of sound breaking in upon the midnight silence of the empty building.

  The two runners, pursuer and pursued, had passed clean through them where they stood, and already with a thud the boards below had received first one, then the other. Yet they had seen absolutely nothing—not a hand, or arm, or face, or even a shred of flying clothing.

  There came a second’s pause. Then the first one, the lighter of the two, obviously the pursued one, ran with uncertain footsteps into the little room which Shorthouse and his aunt had just left. The heavier one followed. There was a sound of scuffling, gasping, and smothered screaming; and then out on to the landing came the step—of a single person treading weightily.

  A dead silence followed for the space of half a minute, and then was heard a rushing sound through the air. It was followed by a dull, crashing thud in the depths of the house below—on the stone floor of the hall.

  Utter silence reigned after. Nothing moved. The flame of the candle was steady. It had been steady the whole time, and the air had been undisturbed by any movement whatsoever. Palsied with terror, Aunt Julia, without waiting for her companion, began fumbling her way downstairs; she was crying gently to herself, and when Shorthouse put his arm round her and half carried her he felt that she was trembling like a leaf. He went into the little room and picked up the cloak from the floor, and, arm in arm, walking very slowly, without speaking a word or looking once behind them, they marched down the three flights into the hall.

  In the hall they saw nothing, but the whole way down the stairs they were conscious that someone followed them; step by step; when they went faster IT was left behind, and when they went more slowly IT caught them up. But never once did they look behind to see; and at each turning of the staircase they lowered their eyes for fear of the following horror they might see upon the stairs above.

  With trembling hands Shorthouse opened the front door, and they walked out into the moonlight and drew a deep breath of the cool night air blowing in from the sea.

  Mrs Raeburn’s Waxwork

  Lady Eleanor Smith

  The rain, which had poured with a pitiless ferocity for so long upon the chimneys and roofs of the great manufacturing city, seemed at length to enclose the whole town within towering prison walls of burnished steel. It was now afternoon; the short winter day was nearly over, and it had rained thus from dawn, would probably continue to rain throughout the night. A dark, wet dusk began to envelop the city like a sable blanket; the street lamps sprang into life, looming ahead like the ghosts of drowned and weary daffodils, casting watery and trembling reflections upon the shining rivers that were pavements. There were few people walking the mournful streets, and those that were had to struggle and batter their way through sharp gusts of wind, bent double beneath dripping and top-heavy umbrellas.

  Such a one was Patrick Lamb, and so great was his hurry that more than once as he stumbled over an unperceived kerb he ran the risk of entangling both himself and his umbrella in the foaming, muddy torrents of the gutters beneath his feet. He had every reason to hurry; he was on his way to apply for a job, and he feared that unless he hastened he would be too late to secure this vacancy which meant so much to him.

  Turning at last into a dark and narrow street, he saw opposite to him a ramshackle building of yellow brick, from the roof of which swelled forth a glass dome encrusted with the dirt and soot of ages. A flight of shallow steps led to a swing door. This was his destination.

  He flung open the door and was immediately confronted by a turnstile, near which sat a seedy-looking man in an ill-fitting uniform not unlike that of a fireman.

  ‘Sixpence, please,’ said the man, and whistled through his teeth. Patrick Lamb shook his head.

  ‘No … I’m not a visitor. I have an appointment with Mr Mugivan, the manager.’

  ‘Ah—ha,’ said the attendant knowingly, and showed him into a tiny slice of a room filled with papers, files, account books and dust. Here sat Mr Mugivan, a fat, podgy man with thick legs and a face like a tomato.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Patrick Lamb hesitatingly; ‘I hear that you have a vacancy here for an—an attendant.’

  Mr Mugivan stared for a moment at the young man’s sallow, rather long face, at his deep-set grey eyes and slender, puny body.

  ‘Who told you so?’

  ‘My landlady, in Bury Street. She knew the last man you had here.’ ‘And what made you come?’

  ‘Necessity. I’m in need of work. I was stranded here a week ago with a theatrical company.’

  There was a silence. Mr Mugivan suddenly laughed, looking at his visitor rather defiantly with little red-rimmed eyes that were not unlike the eyes of a pig.

  ‘Rather a come-down, isn’t it, for an actor to find himself minding Mugivan’s Waxworks?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, sir. And, if you’ll only let me, I’ll mind them damn well.’

  ‘It’s long hours,’ said the proprietor, still speaking contemptuously. ‘Nine in the morning till seven at night. An hour for lunch and an hour for tea. Two pounds a week—and the attendant has to wear a uniform. An actor wouldn’t fancy that, would he?’

  ‘Maybe I’m not an actor,’ said Patrick Lamb.

  Mr Mugivan spat upon the floor.

  ‘I’ll give you a trial, anyhow. What’s your name?’

  Patrick told him.

  ‘Well, Lamb,’ and the proprietor creaked himself out of his chair, revealing incidentally that he wore carpet slippers and had bunions, ‘come with me and I’ll show you Mugivan’s Beauties before you go. You can start tomorrow morning.

  Obediently Patrick followed his new employer through the turnstile, which was swung round obligingly by the other attendant, down a narrow whitewashed tunnel into a large apartment.

  ‘Ever seen figures before?’ inquired Mr Mugivan.

  ‘Waxworks? Not since I was a lad.’

  ‘Hall of Monarchs,’ said Mr Mugivan, sucking his teeth with a deprecating sound.

  The room in which they found themselves was bare and vault-like; here, too, the walls were whitewashed; the floor was covered with a red drugget, and in the middle of the room was placed a sofa upholstered in shabby crimson plush. Yet although bare the room was not empty but crowded, crowded with a pale throng of mute and stiff and silent figures. They stood in groups, a dais to each group, and were protected from the public by a red cord which imprisoned them, like sheep in a pen, so th
at had they wished they could not have strayed, but must forever remain captive. There they stood and would no doubt stand throughout the ages, these tinsel kings and queens, Plantagenets and Stuarts, Tudors and Hanoverians, calm and blank and dreadfully remote, pallid of check and glassy of eye, indifferent to all who passed by to gape at them—a host of waxen princes, all dead, many of them forgotten, terribly isolated in their garish splendour, uncannily galvanized into a crude semblance of life that yet denied them even the elements of life, leaving them fixed, frozen and staring, while the dust thickened upon their cheap and fusty robes of purple and sham ermine.

  Opposite the door through which they had come was another door leading to yet another chamber. Mr Mugivan led the way

  ‘Curiosities and Horrors,’ he explained carelessly. They passed through the second door.

  Here was another room, replica of the first, but more dimly lit, more melancholy than even the Hall of Monarchs, since the illumination that winked upon this dreary scene was greenish, ghastly; such a light as might have been expected to proceed from a sconce of corpse candles. Here were more massed ranks of still, impassive figures, paler these than the monarchs in the dim grotto of their melancholy chamber, and more repellent perhaps because their stiff, indifferent bodies were clothed in the garments of everyday and borrowed no majesty from princes’ robes, however sham. A skeleton gleamed white in one corner of the room, there was a stuffed ox with six legs, a tiny waxen midget and a giant of local fame. Save for these the room was peopled only with men who had killed and who had paid the penalty for killing. A throng staring before them, expressionless, rigid, mask-like, brooding perhaps upon their cringes.

  Mr Mugivan seemed more at home in the second room. He became almost conversational.

  ‘Here’s Hopkins, the Norwich strangler … Tracey, who shot a policeman … John Joseph Gilmore, cut the throats of his wife and two children …’

  They moved across the room. Then, near the slit of a window, crossed by iron bars, Patrick saw her for the first time. She stood on a little dais by herself, a young woman, or, rather, the effigy of a young woman, dressed neatly in dark clothes that were already old fashioned in cut. She carried herself proudly; like a queen, and whereas the other waxworks were completely expressionless of countenance, this one alone, with proudly curling lips and short, imperious nose, seemed, he thought, actually to live, perhaps because she was disdain incarnate. She stood there easily, gracefully, long, pale hands folded upon her breast, and Patrick, gazing, felt the cool, amused stare of her grey eyes. For a moment his heart leaped sharply; startling him, and he had a sudden impulse to move forward and look more closely at her; then this sensation was succeeded by a creeping feeling of curious discomfort. He was embarrassed; he had to avert his eyes.

  ‘Who’s that woman?’ he asked impetuously, and then wished that he had not spoken.

  Mr Mugivan answered him casually, with his back turned to the effigy

  ‘That’s Mrs Raeburn, the poisoner … and that’s the lot, so come on.’

  ‘Mrs Raeburn? I seem to know the name.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt. It was well enough known at one time.’

  They walked away, towards the Hall of Monarchs, and Patrick was acutely conscious of the supercilious grey eyes that must be gazing after them. The sham eyes of a sham woman, a waxen effigy! He felt acutely ridiculous.

  Mr Mugivan said no more until they found themselves once again in the little office. Then, offering Patrick a cigarette, he asked suddenly:

  ‘You’re not a fanciful sort of chap by any chance?’

  ‘Fanciful? You mean nervous? No, I can’t say that I am. Why?’

  ‘No place for fancies, this,’ confided Mr Mugivan, waving his hand in the direction of the exhibition; ‘it’s a lonely sort of a job most of the time, and once you start thinking the figures are looking at you, well, you’re done, that’s all. Last chap we had here took to having fancies. That’s why you’ve got his job.’

  Patrick felt suddenly rebellious.

  ‘I can safely say I shan’t have fancies,’ he said, laughing. ‘I may not be particularly brave—in fact I’m not—but I must say it would take more than a parcel of wax dolls to scare me.’

  ‘Figures aren’t dolls,’ Mr Mugivan corrected, shocked.

  ‘Figures, then,’ and he thought: ‘Talking of figures, that woman Mrs Raeburn’s got a good one.’

  But neither he nor Mr Mugivan mentioned the name of the woman poisoner aloud.

  ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow, then,’ said Mr Mugivan.

  ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow.’

  And so they parted.

  He discovered, the next day two things about his new job. One was that his long and often lonely vigil with the waxworks gave him at times the curious and eerie sensation of being buried alive in a vault filled with the dead, the other that, with the morning, Mrs Raeburn, poisoner, had become once more a waxen effigy and was no longer a living, breathing woman. This was comforting, yet in some strange way disappointing, for it was idle to deny that he had thought of her very frequently during the course of the night, and that the prospect of meeting once more the direct gaze of her rather mocking eyes had undoubtedly stimulated him and sent him forth into the cheerless streets kindled with an eager, sparkling excitement which he rattler half-heartedly strove to suppress.

  As the morning dragged by he studied a catalogue of the exhibition, trying to memorize the many dossiers of princes and murderers. He was accustomed to learn by heart, and in three hours his task was almost complete, yet with one exception. A curious revulsion prevented hill, from reading even to himself, the brief account in the catalogue of Mrs Raeburn’s cringe, of discovering, through the medium of one cheap, smudged paragraph, that she had been an infamous woman, a monster of vice and cruelty. Taking a pen-knife from his pocket he cut away from his catalogue all record of her dark deeds. Yet she remained throughout the morning a lifeless effigy and after glancing at her once, he gladly looked away.

  He went out to lunch and returned for the long vigil of the afternoon. Few people came to visit the exhibition: a pair of schoolchildren in charge of a maiden aunt, two girls, who giggled and eyed him coyly, an old mall, and all amorous couple who plainly regarded his presence as a nuisance.

  It was foggy outside; dusk fell early. For the first time that day as he paced the Hall of Monarchs, he became sensible of the loneliness of his position. Once again the feeling of being buried among the dead returned to him, intensified this time by a bored and brooding melancholy whereas in the morning there had also been a sense of adventure. The very tread of his feet, the only sound in the still apartment, smote lugubriously upon his ears. He would have liked to smoke, but this was, of course, forbidden.

  At length he turned, and obeying an impulse which was becoming every second stronger, he moved towards the farther chamber, the Hall of Curiosities and Horrors. Here the twilight struck gloomily upon the wan and glimmering faces of the murderers, upturned to greet the first dark, smoky greyness of night: greenish they were once more, and dismal; and very hopeless in the blank resignation of their weary vigil in this dim room that was filled with the very breath of genteel decay.

  He went straight towards the figure of Mrs Raeburn, standing tall and quiet and erect on her dais below the barred window. He had never been so near to her before; their eyes met, and once more she had recaptured that spark of life which had so curiously impressed him on the previous day. He gazed for some moments at her pale, clear-cut face, at her direct, ironic eyes. She appeared to return his scrutiny gravely, earnestly; scornfully; yet with a glint of interest and humour in her regard. She seemed, he thought, a woman well used to curious eyes, well able to defend herself against the stares of the inquisitive. Suddenly; to his immense astonishment, he spoke to her, and his voice rang out strangely enough in that silent room.

  ‘I wonder what you have done?’ he asked her abruptly ‘For God’s sake, what can you have done that you should be here?�
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  There was a long pause, during the course of which he continued to examine her closely. Was it his imagination, or did her lips really curve, was there an answering twinkle in her eye? And then he turned sharply, for he had caught, or thought that he had caught, a soft, eager rustling sound from the throng of effigies behind his back. And suddenly he was saved, for two little boys came pattering in to visit the Curiosities and Horrors.

  The next day saw him resolutely keeping to the Hall of Monarchs. Here, with the lifeless dummies of long dead kings, he was safe. In that other room he realized that he was in peril. And the day after, although he hungered for a glimpse of Mrs Raeburn’s pale face, he still remained aloof. The next day was Saturday; with a steady stream of patrons who would have made the dankest vault seem homely and prosaic. Then Sunday, a holiday.

  On Monday, he returned to the exhibition ready to laugh at himself for a morbid fool. The rain had stopped; a feeble ray of primrose sunshine, filtering through the barred window of the second chamber, made even Mrs Raeburn seem little more than a cunningly fashioned doll of life size. And he had spoken to her, as though she were alive and could hear and understand him! He was disgusted with himself.

  Yet, with the swiftly flowing dusk the murderers changed once more; assumed as was their wont with the shades of night the vivid and evil personalities they must have worn during their lifetime; seemed to stretch themselves as though released from some long spell of immobility; nodded, perhaps, to one another—even winked; perhaps brushed the dust from their shabby garments, smothered yawns, and waited, quietly expectant, for the closing of the exhibition. So Patrick thought, but it was difficult to see, for the shadows were thick in this lost and forgotten room.

  He went towards the effigy of Mrs Raeburn and was not surprised to find that her eyes, alive and brilliant, almost feverish in their eager intensity; remained fixed direct upon him as though she waited to see whether he would, after his three days’ absence, speak once more to her.