There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man Read online

  “Well, sir” I said, “may he give me one sometimes?” The Chief was in a good humour, luckily, and passed this rather saucy remark. In fact, he said it showed I had a promising eye to the main commercial chance. (After the Chief died he did go to America and some years later he sent me his photograph seated at the wheel of a Rolls-Royce, a cigar in his mouth and an Alsatian sitting beside him. An eagle amongst doves!) Well, on this occasion we were strolling about on the lawn and I asked him, glancing up at its windows, why the room was never occupied. “His Lordship's brother, Sir Alfred, had an unpleasant experience there,” he replied, “but please do not say I told you.”

  “I don't quite know, but he started screaming out one night and went straight back to London first thing in the morning. He never came here again and died very soon after.”

  “And it has never been used since?”

  “Only on one occasion, sir; the editor of the Evening Sentinel slept there later on and he looked very green at breakfast the next morning. I think he must have said something to his Lordship, for he gave me orders the room wasn't to be used again.”

  “Was that Mr. Spenland, the present editor?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Cocks, the former editor: He also died soon— within a week, as I remember it.”

  “Odd, Chumley!”

  “Possibly, sir, but keep what I've told you under your hat, if I may use that expression. I made some inquiries in the village and they weren't surprised at all. Until his Lordship took the house the end of that wing was blocked up and never used.”

  “Why?”

  “Hard to say, sir. Not considered lucky, I gathered.”

  “That's nice for me, sleeping there!”

  “Have you been bothered, sir?”

  “I don't think so. I get some funny dreams, but that's the food and drink, I expect. Not what I'm used to. But how d’you mean, not lucky?”

  “They kept a tight mouth about that, but Morton, the game-keeper, told me there's supposed to be somebody or something still living on in that room.”

  “What a yarn!”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Chumley doubtfully. “None of the maids will go in there alone after dark.”

  “Just because they've heard tales about it!”

  “I suppose so, though one of them got a fright some years back. Anyway, don't tell his Lordship I said anything. He's a bit touchy about it; he likes all his possessions to be perfect.” A very shrewd remark!

  “No, all right,” I promised, and we resumed discussing the business of the hour.

  That night, just before going to bed, I paid a visit to the room. I had been busy with mundane and concrete matters. I had dined well, so it was with a very disdainful and nonchalant air that I climbed the stairs. At once, it is no use denying it, my psychic outlook changed. I suddenly realized that Caston when empty, was a very quiet, brooding place, and that I had never quite liked being alone in it, it was a bit “much” overpowering for a “singleton.”

  The weather had soured during the evening, clouding over with a falling glass and a fitful rising summer wind. My little enclave at the end of the passage seemed peculiarly aloof and dispiriting. Chumley's enigmatic remarks recurred to me with some force at that moment and with a heightened significance. I thought of those two dead men, the one who'd screamed and the other who'd looked “green”—what a word!—at breakfast. However, you know the feeling. I didn't want to open that door, and yet I knew if I didn't I should have kicked myself for a craven and never—or at least not for a long time—got it out of my system. My year at the War had taught me that each time one funks one finds it harder not to do it next time. All of which may sound much ado about precious little, but you weren't standing facing that door at midnight on July 20th, 1923! Well, with a small whistle of defiance I turned the handle of that door and flipped on the lights. Anti-climax, of course! Just a huge old room like any other of its kind. And yet was it quite normal? Well, there was that commonplace feeling everyone has experienced that someone had been in there a moment before, that the air was still warm from that someone's presence; perhaps rather more than that; perhaps, quite absurd, of course, that one was being observed by someone unseen. My eyes ran round the room swiftly and then settled on those criminal types athwart the fireplace. They had their eyes on me pretty starkly. “Avaunt!” they seemed to be saying, or whatever was the contemporary phrase for “Beat it!” I stared back at them. “Not till I'm ready!” I replied out loud in a would-be jocular way. There was an odd echo in that room. It seemed to swing round the walls and come back to hit me in the face. Then I heard a scraping noise from the chimney, Jack-daws nesting in it, no doubt second-brood; my voice had disturbed their slumbers. I moved further into the room. The rustling in the chimney grew louder. “Well, good night, all!” I said facetiously, but there was no echo. I tried again; no echo at all. That was a puzzle. I shifted my position and said good night to them once more. This time the echo nearly blew my head off and something tapped three times on one of the windows. I suddenly felt that uncontrollable atavistic dread of ambush and glanced sharply round behind my back. “I'm not afraid of you,” I said loudly. “Do your worst!” But somehow I knew it was time to go. I paced back slowly and deliberately, turned out the light, banged the door and went to bed. What a history that room must have had, I thought, to have been blocked off from the world like that for years. And now the ban was up once more. Strong medicine there of some sort! What sort? And there was only some thin panelling and plaster between me and it. I kept my ears pricked, for I was a bit on edge, my subconscious was alert and receptive.

  I went to bed and presently to sleep. Sometime in the night I awoke hearing something, which, my subconscious told me, I had heard several times before, but now, consciously for the first time; it was a kind of crack like the flipping of giant fingers, twice repeated. A displeasing, staccato, urgent and peremptory sound, the source of which I quite failed to trace.

  Now the Chief, like most self-made men, especially in his profession, had some queer “old friends,” many of whom had been associated with him in his days of struggle, but had, for the most part, been left far behind in the success marathon. The Chief had not a trace of snobbery about these; so long as he liked them and they amused him they remained his friends, rich or poor, success or duds and, in several cases, reputable or not. Perhaps the queerest of all these was one Apuleius Charlton. This person was generally deemed a very dubious type and a complete back-number, the last belated survivor of the Mauve decade, with a withered green carnation in his frayed buttonhole and trailing thin clouds of obsolete diabolism. Incidentally, he belonged to a cadet branch of a very “old family.” As a sinister monster of depravity I found him sheer Disney and so did the Chief, but he had unarguably superior brains, a kind of charm, and an ebullient personality. In fact, personality is quite too flaccid a word; he was sui generis, the sole member of his species. There was a strong tinge of Casanova about him; he shared his brazen candour, occasional brilliant insight, his refusal to accept the silly laws of God and man as binding upon himself, his essential spiritual loneliness. He was a big hefty creature, an athlete by right of birth, with a huge domed head, large watery eyes and jet-black hair, the fringe of which he tortured into twin spiral locks. Between them was a small, red magical mark, a three-pronged “moon” swastika. He had been everywhere in the world, I think, and his travel tales were legion and sensational and owing something, no doubt, to an ebullient imagination. He was then barred from a number of countries, rather unhumorously, for while his bark was Cerberian, his bite was vastly over-rated. He had, no doubt, acquired certain monies by various modes of false pretenses, but never a sizable hoard; and those he diddled were, I am sure, consummate mugs who just asked to be “taken.” He said so himself and I believed him.

  He had written copiously on many subjects with an air of complete confidence and authority, and in his youth had been a goodish minor poet of the erotic, adjectival Swinburne school, but somehow he
never had any real money. That was his incurable malady. There are a number of such vagrant oddities in the world, lone wolves, or rather, I think, they remind me of great ostracized, solitary birds, forever winging their way fearlessly and hopefully from one barren place to another, wiry, wary, and shunned by the timourous and “respectable” flock. He had written stuff for the Chief's publication before his name became so odoriferous, climbed with him in several parts of the world, for he was brilliant and scientific mountaineer, and gone with him on esoteric drinking bouts in the wine countries, for he knew his epicurean tipples and taught the Chief to judge a vintage. Lastly, and immensely most important to himself, he was a magician with a cult or mystery of his very own invention and a small band of very odd initiates indeed. Hence the swastika and much ponderous and eleusinian jewelry on convenient parts of his person, including a perfectly superb jade ring. I know jade and this piece was incomparably fine. (You will hear of it again.) For this aspect of his ego the Chief, not necessarily rightly, expressed the most caustic contempt, telling him the only reason why he and his rival Merlins and Fingals shrouded their doings in veils of secrecy—and this went for Masons, Buffaloes, Elks, and all other mumbo-jumbo practitioners—was that they had nothing to conceal except the most puerile and humiliating drivel worthy of their Woolworth regalia, and they were ashamed to disclose such infantile lucubrations and primitive piffle. All the same some people were definitely scared of old Apuleius, and no doubt he had a formidable and impressive side. He was sixty odd at this time and very well preserved in spite of his hard boozing, addiction to drugs and sexual fervour, for it was alleged that joy-maidens or Hierodoules were well represented in his mystic entourage. (If I were a Merlin, they would be in mine!) Of course he never figured in house parties, but the Chief had him down to Caston now and again and, I know, sent him a most welcome cheque at regular intervals.

  In November of this same year, the Chief and his Lady went away for a month's holiday to the Riviera, and just before he met old Apuleius in the street looking a bit down at heel and told him he could doss down at Caston while he was away, that I would look after him, and that the cellar was at his disposal, but that this invitation did not extend to his coterie, particularly the Hierodoules! Poor Apuleius leaped at this timely and handsome offer and the day after the Chief's departure he appeared at the house bearing his invariable baggage, one small, dejected cardboard suitcase—at least, it looked like cardboard. I was on holiday, too, or rather half-holiday, for I got six to a dozen telegrams a day from the Chief and had made a rash promise to begin the cataloguing of his library. (I may say he had two other secretaries to do the donkey-work.) But I had plenty of spare time to shoot, golf and catch some of the nice little trout in the stream. So there were old Apuleius and I almost alone for a month and all the best at our disposal. He treated me always with some pleasing but quite unnecessary deference, for I was the Czar's little shadow and a lad worth cultivating. Beside he liked me a little and he didn't like anyone very much. I resolved covertly to examine this psychological freak, because I never could decide how much of a charlatan he was and how much he believed in his own bunkum. Such characters are very dark little forests and it's a job to blaze any sort of trail through them.

  He arrived, very sensibly, just in time for lunch and did himself extremely well. He was in great spirits and splendid form talking with vast verve and rather above my jejune head. I quite forget what it was all about. He slept for a while after lunch and then began a prolonged prowl around the establishment, which he had never properly inspected before. I went with him, for the unworthy reason that the house was full of small, highly-saleable articles and he had a reputation for sometimes confusing meum with tuum when confronted with such. At length we reached my little enclave and there facing him was the room. “What's that?” he asked, staring hard at the door. “Oh, just a bedroom,” I replied. Suddenly he moved forward quickly, opened the door, and drew a quick, dramatic breath. At once he seemed transformed. You have seen the life come to a drowsy cat's eyes when it hears the rustle of a mouse. You may have noted the changed demeanour of some oafish and lugubrious athlete when he spies a football or a bag of golf clubs. Just such a metamorphosis occurred in Apuleius when he opened that door. He became intent, absorbed, professional. I felt compensatingly insignificant and meager.

  “Nobody sleeps here?” he said.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Not twice anyway,” he said sharply.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He went up to the criminal types and scrutinized them carefully. And then he pointed out to me some things I had not noticed before, a tiny figure of a hare with a human and very repulsive face at the right-hand side of the gentleman, a crescent moon with something enigmatic peering out between its horns on the same side of the lady. “As I expected,” he observed in his most impressive manner, and left it at that.

  “Well, what about it?” I asked impatiently.

  “That would take rather a long time to explain, my dear Pelham,” he replied, “and with all respect, I doubt if you would ever quite understand. Let me just say this. Such places as these are as rare as they are perilous. In a sense this is a timeless place. What once happened here didn't change, didn't pass on, it was crystallized. What happened herein eternally repeats itself. Here time, as it were, was trapped and can't move on. Man is life and life is change so such places are deadly to man. If man cannot change, he dies. Death is the end of a stage in a certain process of change. Only the dead can live in this room.”

  “And do they?” I asked, bemused by this rigamarole. “In a sense, yes.”

  The effusion didn't commend itself to me. (Besides it was still daylight.) I countered with vivacity. “Well,” I said, “you may be right, but the moment anyone begins philosophizing about time I get a bellyache. It is one of the prevailing infirmities of third-rate minds. Personally I believe it to be no more a genuine mystery than say, money, with which it is vulgarly identified. All this pother about both is due to a confusion of thought based on a confusion of terms. The word ‘time’ is habitually used in about sixteen different senses. If I were asked to define metaphysics, I should describe it as an acrimonious and sterile controversy about the connotation of certain abstract terms. But I'll give you this, the room has a bad name.” (There was no getting round that, and he'd instantly spotted it. How?)

  “It should not even be entered after dark,” he said, “save by those who—well—understand it and enter it fore-armed.”

  “You say something happened here and eternally reacts itself. What?”

  “Those two,” he replied, pointing to the types, “made an experiment which in a sense succeeded.”

  “And that was?”

  “Once again I am in a difficulty. These dark territories are such new ground to you. You must understand there are no such entities as good and evil, there are merely forces, some beneficent, some injurious, indeed, fatal, to man. He exists precariously poised between these forces. Those two, as it were, allied themselves with the forces noxious to man; what used to be called selling oneself to the devil. These things are beyond you, my dear Pelham, and I should not pursue them. It is one of the oldest mysteries of the world, the idea that if one can become all evil, drink the soma of the fiend, one immortalizes oneself; one becomes impervious to change and so to death. Actually, it is not so. It cannot be done. One cannot defeat death, but one can become what is loosely called an evil spirit, a focus for a concentration of destructive energy, and, in that limited sense, undying.”

  “Of course, you're right, that's all cuneiform to me,” I replied staring up at the ambitious pair. “But what's the result? What happens then?”

  “Well, those two made that attempt. I can tell that for certain reasons, and achieved that limited success. They practised every conceivable wicked and unspeakable thing. This room was their laboratory, their torture-chamber; it reeks of it. When they died, they became chained to this room. It is their Hell, if
you like so to put it.”

  “In what state are they?” I asked not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “I mean are they conscious? Do they know, for example, you are discussing them?”

  “To begin with ‘they’ is a misnomer. ‘They’ are one; male and female principles have been fused and the feminine predominates, for it is the more primitive, potent and dangerous. The resultant ‘It’ is not conscious in our sense of the word, it has no illusion of will. It is a state we cannot understand and so cannot describe. It has been absorbed into the very soul of that power which is inimicable to man and is endowed with its venom. But it cannot roam; it is anchored to this room. To destroy man is It's delight. In that It finds It's orgasm. What occurs in this room is the eternal generation, condensation and release of murderous energy. After dark, for it cannot be released in daylight, this whole room will be soaked in and embued with that energy.”

  “How does It destroy?”

  “It can do so simply by fear and fear can kill. Once in India I passed through a cholera-infected area. The very road was thick with bodies, but more of them had died from sheer fear than the disease. It would kill you by fear, but It could not so kill me. It would have to—well—overpower me to destroy me. I am coming here tonight.”

  “I shouldn't!” I said hastily. “I'm not sure the Chief would permit it. If anything happened to you, he'd be furious.”

  “It will not. I know the only safeguards against and antidotes to these forces. So leave me now. I will start to prepare my defences. I will see you at dinner.”

  So I went off to do some work, completely baffled and somewhat uneasy in mind.