Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

THE HAUNTED HELMET

Alan Granville stood in the wide, stone-flagged Tudor hall of our manor-house in the Leicestershire Wolds with hands thrust deep into dressing-gown pockets and a curved pipe in his mouth, looking even more than usual like Sherlock Holmes. The morning sun streamed down and stained him many-coloured through a fine window of fifteenth-century German glass we had picked up a few years before on the Continent.

“What is biting me learned colleague?” I asked jocularly, emerging from the dining-room.

“I was just thinking, Gregs,” he replied, “that the one thing lacking to complete the atmosphere is a nice suit of armour. It would go splendidly in that corner there, guarding the staircase.”

“Yes,” I retorted, “and where the devil do you think that we, not being Randolph Hearsts, are going to pick up a genuine suit without going bankrupt—you know what they cost, I suppose?”

“Oh, rather!” he replied airily, “only when I went up to Nottingham to give that wretched lecture at the University last week, I happened to see a suit going quite reasonably in a good antique shop—Mason’s, you know, where we’ve often bought odd things.”

I inquired cautiously what he called reasonable, and whether he had made sure the suit was genuine.

“Only £250,” Alan replied, “you see, it’s all of one period—late 15th to early 16th century—but it has been made from different parts; for instance, the elbow-guards don’t quite match, the gorget-piece is from a different suit, and the helmet from another.”

“I should think so, for that price!” I exclaimed, “why, you couldn’t get a pukka complete suit for much under £700.”

I was as anxious as my colleague to see a suit of armour in our hall—a sneaking fancy I had harboured in silence, for fear of being laughed at, for some time, in fact—and as our last joint volume of historical labours had produced quite a good sum from its subscription method of publication, I felt, as he did, that we might spread our wings a little without touching other capital or the income from it. Anyway, I was not going to let a bargain like this pass without an effort. So within an hour and a half, we were off in the car to Nottingham.

We knew the antique dealer well, a thoroughly straightforward man, who flatly refused to deal in fakes.

“Ah, Mr. Granville,” he said, “I wondered if you’d be back—and pleased to see you, too, Mr. Wayne. You don’t often give me a visit these days.”

“Well, Mr. Mason, for one thing we’ve been very busy, and for another, we have about all we need in the way of period furniture and so on—you’ve sold us most of it, you know; but Mr. Granville told me about the suit of armour you have, and that’s the one thing we have been wanting to complete the layout of the manor-house.”

“Ha! precise as ever, Mr. Wayne,” chuckled the old man, no mean scholar himself, “now most people would have said ‘the manor’—but we don’t catch you tripping. Funny, isn’t it, how many folks seem to think a manor meant the house, not the area the lord ruled?”

He prattled on pleasantly, leading the way meantime round a perilous stack of furniture to the back of the shop, where stood the armour. It was certainly very skilfully made up, and showed the style of a late ceremonial tilting-suit.

“Did you make it up yourself, Mr. Mason?” I asked.

“No, sir. I can tell you its exact provenance. Curiously enough, I got it just as it stands from a place called Warcott Hall, in north Nottinghamshire. Seems they’ve had it standing there for years and years—one of the family about 1850 was by way of being an antiquary, and apparently collected the bits; well, he made a good job of it, as to period. You know what it is, these scandalous death-duties forcing old families to sell their treasures. Still, the present people have no brains or culture—you may know their name, the Mandelays.”

We did. Who has not got sick and tired of seeing the couple of inane-looking, fast Mandelay wenches huntin’, tidin’, shootin’, dancin,’ and generally queening it, in the sickening pages of certain brainless illustrated papers? If the gossip-writer creatures let a week pass without mentioning them, it is little short of a miracle.

We felt really glad that the Mandelay armour had passed into worthier hands, though we regretted the thought that the money it fetched would probably be wasted in more dogs and horses for slaughtering foxes with, or in the cocktail-bill.

After an hour’s technical examination, mixed with talk of the family high-stepping, we decided to purchase, and our honest old dealer produced his receipt. He didn’t mind admitting that he had bought the suit for £150!

A cheque and the ironmongery changed hands, and we carted off our purchase in triumph. It must have looked a comic sight, the shell of a warrior reclining in the back of a modern car, with its knees up—for having a somewhat bizarre sense of humour, we arranged it like a passenger—but we cared nothing for that, and were all anxiety to get it home.

The armour, which needed no more than a rub over, certainly did full justice to its setting. We agreed it looked, in the jargon of people like the Mandelay wenches, “too utterly baronial”; then, having got over our first enthusiasm, we reverted to our scientific selves and subjected it to a leisurely examination piece by piece.

The most curious thing was the helmet. We had noticed in Mason’s shop, and remarked to him, that it did not seem a helmet which one could put to practical use, for the chin-piece, instead of being hinged, was firmly riveted to the skull-piece; so were the visor and the mesaille, the plate which comes over the brow to join the visor.

“It looks suspiciously to me like a funeral helm,” declared Alan, “though of course I’m not disputing that it’s in period all right, and it looks right for a jousting helm, even down to the crest and plume—which plume of course is the only modern thing about the whole outfit. You couldn’t expect a plume to last from the sixteenth century, anyway.”

The crest alluded to was a sitting lion, in wood, fixed into the top of the helm. For the non-technical reader, a word is necessary on what Alan meant by a funerary helm. A custom grew up late in the sixteenth century of having a model helmet, very often made up from pieces of genuine ones, put with the shield, gauntlets (often themselves models) and sword of the dead knight or squire over his tomb at his funeral.

You may still see some of this funeral armour in our village churches; the custom lasted until late in the 18th century, when we find dummy swords and poor silvered helmet-models knocked together from any old iron handy.

“Well,” I said, “that in itself is a curiosity, anyway; but I wonder how the antiquary of the Mandelay family got hold of it, unless of course he claimed the helmet from some ancestor’s tomb up at this place Warcott.”

After this, well satisfied, we left our new acquisition in peace and retired to the study for the evening.

About eleven o’clock—we are late birds, and like working often until the small hours—James knocked at the door and burst violently into the room with a gasped apology, his face like putty and his eyes bulging, his customary dignity utterly vanished.

“Good lord, James, whatever’s the matter?” I inquired.

“Oh, Gawd, sir!” he spluttered, “it’s that there suit of harmour wot you brought ’ome today!” When excited, poor James’ carefully-nurtured h’s went wandering.

“What on earth do you mean?”, I asked testily. “What’s the matter with it? Has it fallen down and given you a fright, or something? Come on, man, do pull yourself together!”

“Nn-no, sir!” he stuttered out, “its the ’ead—the ’ead’s out there in the ’all a-walkin’ about in the air all by hitself without no body—and John’s seen it too!”

“Impossible,” declared Alan and I together, “Have you been drinking, James?”, Alan asked severely.

“No, sir, s’welp me Gawd I ’aven’t,” he protested, “if you don’t believe me, sir, come an’ see for yerself.”

There seemed nothing else for it. We rose and followed him into the great hall—and there, in mid-air, was the helmet from our suit of armour, apparently wandering to and fro as though it capped an invisible body, John, almost reduced to a state of gibbering, sat on an oak settle gasping at the thing.

“Well I’m damned!” said Alan, “James, I owe you an apology.”

“So do I,” I added hastily. “No wonder you got a shock.”

James, mollified, was recovering his dignity and his grammar. “What do we do about it, sir?” he said addressing nobody in particular, “do we try to catch the thing, or let it come to rest when it feels like it?”

“I think,” said Alan, “we’d better leave it alone, and see what happens by morning—but really, my man, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Our Apostle looked at us rather reproachfully, as though he at any rate was not accustomed to such unorthodox behaviour on the part of antiques. He and John departed to their quarters, having respectfully inquired if they would be wanted again that night.

When they had gone, Alan mused: “I wonder if it is really the helmet, or if it’s an optical illusion in the moonlight?”

“Oh, we’ll soon test that,” I replied, and, stepping to the foot of the staircase, put out my hand to the suit of armour. The helmet was quite definitely missing! Yes, there it was, in and out of the moonlight and shadows, careering steadily round, most uncannily remaining at a steady shoulder-level.

Gradually its movement grew less animated, and it returned nearer and nearer to the remainder of the suit. Finally, it came to rest with a decided, metallic clank on to the shoulder-piece of the body.

Then a surprising thing happened. There came a deep groan, apparently from within the suit of armour; the helmet now shook in a violent convulsion on the shoulders, the whole structure rattled, and the legs—though we had fixed it firmly on its stand with straps and mounting-stanchions—kicked wildly out in the air. The helmet rose, as though some unseen occupant of the suit was being suddenly whisked up by the neck in a noose.

We stood spellbound, hidden in a deep shadow of the staircase, wondering what would happen next; and by now, we were scarcely surprised when the arms of the cumbersome plate-armour rose painfully to the helmet and went through the motions of trying to wrench it off an invisible head.

“Come on,” I whispered to Alan, “let’s rush it—then if anyone’s playing a joke inside that suit, we’ve got him.”

Stealthily we crept round, one each side, and ‘rushed it’—and proceeded to look a pair of fools, each clasping the armour round its middle, and finding it void of any occupant.

I felt a cold shiver run down my spine, though, as the arms fell in a sudden collapse and clash to the sides, one hitting each of us on a forearm.

We retired, completely defeated by the phenomenon, and decided that we had better leave it, as neither of us had any wish to sit up all night watching the thing.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Alan, firmly, back in the study, “we go over to Nottingham and discover just how much old Mason knows about this!”

We did, but all we got out of the dealer was a sad smile and a queer, grave look.

“It’s extraordinary,” he said. “Do you know, only a few days ago, I came down to find the helmet lying beside the suit, though I had mounted it all up firmly for display. Naturally, I thought my cat had been rampaging about—but what you tell me puts a different interpretation on it. Honestly, gentlemen, I had not a notion there was anything queer about the suit in that way. Sir William—that’s the head of the Mandelay family, you know—merely said, when he called me in, that he had got to sell it for family reasons; those were his exact words, I remember, and naturally, I took them to mean that, like so many other old families, they were feeling the pinch.”

Mr. Mason made the very constructive suggestion that we should go over the Warcott Hall and interview Sir William, warning us that he was a crusty, peppery old fellow and that we should have to go carefully.

We decided to telephone first, finding that the Hall was on the ’phone, and a cultured voice answered. It proved to be young Geoffrey Mandelay, the son and heir, who explained that “the guv’nor” was away, but he would be glad to see us and tell us anything he could—we had merely explained that we had bought a suit of armour that had come from the Hall, and as historians, would be grateful for any information obtainable about it.

Our car soon ate up the fifteen miles or so across Sherwood Forest to Warcott Hall, and as we halted on the drive in front of a singularly ugly Queen Anne stucco facade, there strolled across the lawn to meet us the son of the house. He, it appeared, was down from Oxford for the Long Vacation, and was attired in flannels and swinging a tennis-racquet.

“Come in an’ have a gargle,” he said hospitably, “then tell me what you want to know—too damn hot to talk out here.”

He led the way into a cool, spacious Georgian hall and bawled for “George,” whereat a butler made his appearance and was commanded to bring beer.

“Now,” said Geoffrey, swinging a leg over a chaise-longue, “I understand you are the chaps who bought our armour from old Mason. You needn’t tell me what you’ve come for—I bet the damn thing’s been doing its tricks again!”

“Oh,” I gasped, “so you do know about it?”

“Good God, yes!” said the young man frankly. “Too tell you the truth, that’s why the guv’nor’s got rid of it—not that he has much taste for antiques anyway; but it wasn’t a question of bein’ hard-up or anything like that.

“You see,” he went on, only pausing now to interject “Here’s all the best,” as our welcome glasses arrived,” I’m reading History at Balliol, and I’ve gone rather deeply into the family’s black past.”

“It transpires to start with that our revered ancestor, one Sir Everard Mandelay, was one of the national heroes and martyrs of 1605—i.e., he was one of the noble band of far-seeing men who tried to blow up James’ fool Parliament in Gunpowder Plot, and lost his head at the Tower in consequence. His Christian name, and other facts I’ve unearthed, point to his being a relative of the Digbys, several of whom as you know were also mixed up in it—one with fatal consequences also.

“Now Sir Everard was buried in the family vault in Warcott church—I’ll take you over afterwards if you like, as it’s only across through the grounds. They put up a rather vulgar recumbent-effigy tomb to him, which is still there, and according to an early-eighteenth century Notts. antiquary’s manuscript notes which I unearthed in the Bodleian, his funeral achievement, consisting of helmet, gauntlets, and sword, was hanging over the tomb complete in 1725.

“About 1840 my great-grandfather started amassing a vast collection of antiquities here in the house, and he has left it on record in his papers that he got the then Vicar—being the squire, he could bully the parson of those days into obeying any orders—to let him have the helmet and gauntlets to complete a suit of armour he was making up from bits he’d picked up all over the shop.

“Great-grandsire apparently regretted his church-looting, for in 1842 his diary contains a queer note. I’ll go and get it.”

Geoffrey disappeared up the staircase, leaving us to digest our beer and gaze on the vision that now appeared silhouetted very revealingly in the doorway. This, we realised with distaste, was the much publicised and over-photographed Miss Phoebe Mandelay of the gossip-fools. She now lounged against the doorway, clad in practically transparent tennis-shorts, very short indeed, inspecting us as though we were some new and strange species of insects.

We rose politely, but the young wretch merely drawled a casual “Mornin’” and passed on indifferently through a door at the end of the hall, with the usual manners of her kind and class.

Young Geoffrey now returned, clutching a leather-bound volume, which he opened at a page marked by a slip of paper. He handed the book to us, and we read, in the copper-plate hand of his antiquary-ancestor:

“You see,” said Geoffrey, when we had done reading this recital, “the thing beat the old boy; and in the lumber-room that armour remained till I got busy when, on coming down for the Long Vac. three weeks ago, I found this diary in the library—the guv’nor had never even seen it, and he’s no brains for anything above sporting books and the Justices’ Manual to help him sentence poor poachers, anyway.

“On reading of great-grandsire’s troubles, I at once went rooting round a filthy and god-forsaken attic nobody seems to have entered in this generation, found the armour—in a sad state of rust and disrepair—cleaned it, an’ set it up again with my own lily-white hands!”

“Well, the trouble started all over again, exactly as the old boy describes it, when the bally suit had been parked gracefully in the hall only forty-eight hours.

“The butler came tottering into the library after dinner the next night, and we thought he was going to throw a fit. He announced that the helmet had been waltzing round his head in the air, and alleged that as he went to pass the suit on the stairs, the arms shot out and a pair of cold steel hands—the gauntlets, no doubt—tried to clutch him round the throat.

“Of course we wouldn’t believe him, but as true as I sit here, when we trooped into the hall, there was the ruddy helmet cavorting about at head-level just as if Wells’ invisible man was wearing the thing.”

Alan and I laughed heartily, and recounted our own almost identical experience.

“Ah, but that wasn’t the worst,” grinned Geoffrey, “my wretched younger sister Phoebe—you probably saw It, when It went through the hall just now—kicked up a hell of a row the next night. She came dashing into the billiard-room half-naked, simply clutching her dinner-frock round the upper storey, and announced that as she was goin’ upstairs to get her gaspers, the darned suit’s arms reached out and tried to rip her dress off. She added that it cost twenty quid, and that as I had set up the suit, ‘what was going to be done about it?’”

“Next morning the parlour-maid threw a faint—declared she’d seen the hands go up and lift off the helmet, after which the legs struggled violently. She gave notice on the spot.

“Obviously, the thing was getting a bit beyond a joke, so that night I decided to risk an experiment—sort of see if I could lay the spook, you know. So after dinner I slipped away, got into a tight fencing suit, and girded myself in that suit of armour to see what would happen. What did happen was a damn sight more than I bargained for. There came a fearful jerk, as though my head was being wrenched off at the end of a rope.

“I must have let out a dreadful yell, for everybody came running, and the next thing I remember was lying on my bed being brought round, with the doc. bending over me along with the guv’nor, and saying, “He’s had a narrow escape. What happened? Did he try to hang himself? Look here—this is queer—there’s a red mark like a thin knife-cut right round the back of his neck, too!”

“Well, I was in bed all next day with shock, and my neck hurt like hell. When I got up, the guv’nor told me that when everybody poured into the hall on hearing my yell, they found my arms and legs flailing about all over the place. I fought like a madman—it took the butler and the chauffeur to get me down—and for some time they couldn’t get the helmet off because they couldn’t stop my neck being wrenched back and forth by some unseen force.

“So there it is,” the young man concluded. “The guv’nor said he was getting rid of the suit before it found itself in the dock on a charge of murdering somebody; and furthermore, servants were hard enough to get already, and the whole staff had sent in an ultimatum that either the armour went, or they did.

“No,” he added sadly, “he wouldn’t even let me park it in my rooms at Balliol. Anyway, let’s hope it taught that extravagant little bitch Phoebe a lesson about buying expensive frocks—she’d borrowed the twenty quid from me to get the one that got ruined, and that’s the last I shall see of it, I suppose!”

“You weren’t by any chance inside the armour the night it did that damage, were you?” asked Alan with a twinkle in his eye.

“Shut up, you fool, she’s comin’ downstairs!” growled Geoffrey. “Have some more beer.”