Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

It is not often that the Post Office van favours us with a mid-morning call in our isolated district. On one memorable day last August, however, it swung up our drive in a cloud of dust and deposited a letter whose superscription, addressed to “Messrs. Granville and Wayne” (as though we were a firm of grocers or something) was written in a sufficiently scholarly hand to arouse interest. I happened to be crossing the hall at the time, so took it in from our obliging district postman, and conveyed it to the study, where Alan looked up in surprise.

“What’s that in aid of?” he demanded.

“Something in Yorkshire,” said I, inspecting the postmark, which was that of Adel, Leeds. “I deduce, my dear Watson,” I added, “that it is something to do with our Anglo-Saxon researches, since (a) nobody in Yorkshire is likely to write to us for any other reason, and (b) Adel is the ‘home’ of the famous Anglian gravestones.”

“All right, Sherlock,” laughed Alan, “when you’ve finished the forensic lecture, what about opening the thing?”

I did, and proceeded to read:—

The signature aroused our interest at once, for Mr. Martin Latouche, M.A., had already attracted our attention as a young scholar of promise, by virtue of the articles to which he modestly alluded.

“Well,” said Alan, “he has a very long journey by car, and if you are agreeable, I suggest we offer him hospitality overnight, both on his way down and on the return trip.”

I agreed warmly, reeling also that this visit of a fellow-worker would be of mutual advantage, besides being a pleasant break for us; for, though we are in correspondence with scholars all over Europe, we rarely have a visitor to our Wolds stronghold. The invitation was therefore sent off the same day, giving Mr. Latouche a free hand as to his arrangements and pointing out that we should be at home all the next week.

In due course our new acquaintance, who had acknowledged the invitation with prompt courtesy and grace, arrived in an ancient but serviceable four-seater saloon, from which he extracted with great care, in addition to his suitcase, a leather-covered box about a foot square; this, he explained, contained a delicate whole-plate camera, and he insisted on carrying it to his room himself.

Mr. Latouche, who in appearance was the typical lanky, untidy and rather ascetic-looking young University lecturer, proved to be as well-informed as his articles indicated, and by no means a narrow specialist, but a man of wide culture. I need not inflict on the general reader our conversation over the excellent dinner produced by our man, for—as may be supposed—it was highly technical. I may say, however, that our guest had explored some queer byways of knowledge connected with his period and was able to cast light on some matters that had puzzled both Alan and myself, though we were getting on for twice his age. When at last we all did decide to retire, he announced his intention of making a reasonably early start in the morning, so that, as it is not so far across country from our place to Rawton, he could return to us the same night.

Accordingly, 8 a.m. saw him on his way, complete with his precious camera-case. He pressed us to join him in the expedition, but Alan was ‘up to the eyes’ in proof-correcting for a small popular book which a publisher had inveigled him into writing, and I was woefully in arrears with several book-reviews for a learned quarterly, and was near the time-limit through my dilatory habits. Poor Latouche! I wish now that I had laid aside my work and gone with him, for I might then have prevented the tragedy that robbed the world, by a means beyond mortal understanding, of a brilliant young scholar.

However—about an hour after our guest’s departure, John, who in addition to his more “butlerian” duties acts as our gardener and odd-job man, interrupted my reviewing to inform me he had just noticed that the head of a rainwater stackpipe from the roof-gutter was dangerously loose, “and please will the guv’nor see what can be done abaht it, for we’re going to ’ave ’eavy rine soon.”

Looking at the damage from below, I found I could best inspect it by going upstairs and sticking my head out of the guest-room window. Entering, the first thing that met my eye was a fine and expensive whole-plate camera, standing on an occasional table.

“Oh, dear!” I thought, “Latouche will be annoyed when he gets to Rawton and finds he’s left that behind.”

I could only vaguely suppose that before retiring, he had been overhauling the camera, had forgotten to put it back, and had seized the case without noticing. “Yet surely,” I thought, “he must have seen it, right under his nose, and it seems strange he didn’t notice the difference in weight when he picked the case up—still, perhaps he’s as absentminded as I am.”

So, after mentioning the fact to Alan, who agreed with me that it was useless to think of pursuing Latouche with the camera in our car, as he had over an hour’s start and was, indeed, probably at Rawton by now, I dismissed the matter from my mind and, having given John instructions about the offending spout, returned to my interrupted reviewing.

We dine at seven, and, as we have not yet descended to the modern barbarity of a “cocktail hour,” Alan and I were strolling in the garden when, about 6.30, our guest returned. He narrowly missed the gatepost in negotiating the drive entrance, and as he stepped out of the car, I thought from his face that he did not look very well.

“Did you have a tiring drive back?”, I asked sympathetically.

“Not so very,” replied Latouche, “but I think I’ve caught a touch of the sun—it’s been very hot, you know, and I’ve been out in the sun taking photographs.

“Photographs!” exclaimed Alan, “Why, you went off and forgot your camera.”

Mr. Latouche looked, I thought, slightly sheepish. “Oh,” he said after a slight pause, turning at the same time to get his camera-case off the back seat, “I had another camera with me, a small pocket Leica, and decided I didn’t want the big one.”

Then why on earth, I wondered, as we strolled towards the porch, did he want to lug the whole-plate case about? Something of my thoughts must have been visible on my face (for I am no actor), for Latouche said rather hastily; “I often eject the big camera on a job like this—the case is very useful for carrying my instruments and notebooks.”

He went off to his room with his precious case to wash before dinner, while I attended to the ritual of sherry, and our excellent Amontillado put some colour back into his face, though he still complained of feeling a little dizzy; and at dinner he made only the barest pretence of eating.

However, conversation was lively enough, and our guest got us deeply interested in a theory he had developed about Anglo-Saxon racial mixtures. It now came out that one of his chief objects in visiting Rawton had been to test this theory by measurement of a large number of the skulls in the parish-church bone-crypt (which, my readers may be aware, is one of the best in England, the others being at Hythe in Kent, and Rothwell in Northants). Latouche’s theme was that no anthropologist had yet tried to distinguish between the skulls of the Anglian, Saxon, Jutish, and Frisian peoples who comprised our “Anglo-Saxon” invaders, and he was confident that his own research was casting light on the matter.

“Good gracious!” said Alan, “if you set about measuring dozens of those skulls, I should think the verger wished you in blazes!”

“He did, rather,” replied Latouche, “till I thought of giving him a good tip and telling him he could lock me in if he wished, as I should be some hours on the job.”

“It is years since I visited Rawton,” I put in. “So far as I remember, I always understood that the bone-collection was reputed to contain skulls of every conceivable sort—including even negro—but the only thing I do clearly remember about the place is an enormous thigh-bone that must have belonged to a seven-foot giant of a man.”

“My own idea,” I added, “speaking of course quite without any authority, is that these crypts, like Rawton, Rothwell, and Hythe, were filled up with the bones of medieval or later plague-victims.

“It’s a pity we have no written records on the subject,” remarked Alan, doing the honours with the port. “Kohler’s standard work on the Black Death doesn’t mention it, and parish clerks in the 17th-century epidemics, for instance, never tell us in their registers where they buried plague victims in a heavy mortality—I suppose they must have generally made a communal pit in the churchyard; and later sextons, finding the ground over-full, would regard these rare crypts as a godsend when they wanted to re-bury the surplus bones.”

From this somewhat macabre discussion, in which our guest took little part, sitting with a very thoughtful look, we veered round to a highly-technical argument about the architecture and dates of these crypts and, as we had lingered long over the table and thoroughly punished the port, I suggested an adjournment to the library.

Latouche, however, on rising, went very queer. His face became a pasty yellow, and perspiration came out on his forehead. He looked as I have seen men look in the first stages of malarial attack, and I summoned James to get him a glass of hot whisky, lemon and aspirin—the best medicine for anyone suffering from fever.

Drinking the concoction gratefully, Latouche went off to bed, declaring that he would be “as right as rain” in the morning; and Alan and I, always late birds, retired to the study and did our respective writing for another couple of hours. I remember noticing, when I decided to pack up for the night, that the grandfather clock registered just 12.30 a.m.

It had been a glorious late-summer day, and the night was equally lovely. A full harvest moon shone through the ancient window of armorial glass as I crossed the hall, and there was hardly a breath of air stirring anywhere. My way to my own room led past the guest-chamber along a rambling, panel-led corridor, and as I passed Latouche’s door I was surprised to hear what sounded like a window banging violently to and fro. Puzzled, I walked to the end of the corridor, inspecting each of the windows, and finally put my head out of the one at the end and looked to my left along the wall, since from here I could see the whole range of windows containing Latouche’s room. His window was open, but firmly kept so by its iron pivot-bar. So, being able to make nothing of the noise, and feeling very sleepy, I turned in.

It must have been an hour later, that I was awakened by the most extraordinary collection of noises. My room was ice-cold, and there was a great roar and rushing as of a freezing wind right through it, though the heavy curtains were absolutely motionless; and at the same time, there came from somewhere within the ancient house a series of unearthly groans, a furious hammering on a door, the deep sound of a throaty, unpleasant voice calling something I could not distinguish, and the clang, clang of a bell.

I leapt out of bed, flung on a dressing-gown, and rushed for the corridor and stairs, thinking—so imperfectly does the whole mind function in an emergency—that the house was on fire and that someone was trying to warn us.

Downstairs, however, all was calm and undisturbed, and as I flung open the porch door, the balmy night floated to me all the scents of the old English garden.

Telling myself I must have had a particularly unpleasant nightmare, I set off back to my room along the corridor; but on passing Latouche’s room, I heard again the dreadful groaning and that grim, throaty voice. The door was unlocked, and I burst in, to be confronted by a terrible spectacle, the like of which I hope never to see again.

Our guest lay on his bed, a fearful sight, twisted and arched up as is the victim of cholera. His face and lips were black, and the flesh so sunken that he more resembled a skull than anything living. His pyjama coat was off; he was ice-cold, and all over is torso were weird yellow and black patches of skin, while his armpits were swollen into hideous bulbous lumps. Groaning and muttering inaudibly, he twisted and retched in agony. After one look at him, I rushed to awaken Alan, but he too had been roused, and I met him hurrying along the corridor, with the frightened figure of the manservant in his rear.

Luckily, we had quite recently had the telephone installed in the house; it was the result of a visiting Professor being seized with a heart attack, when our car was out of order and I had to ride three miles into Tilton on a cycle for a doctor. So in a very short time I was through to our own practitioner, Dr. Dolben, who is a neighbour and ranks as a personal friend. Rapidly I described the condition of our guest. The doctor whistled softly, and promised to be with us in ten minutes, for he had only just returned from an emergency call to a farm, and had not even had time to put his car away. Meantime, he ordered, we must get a collection of steaming hot blankets ready by plunging them in boiling water.

Dr. Dolben lost no time; he arrived in the midst of these preparations, and accompanied us straight to Latouche’s room. As we opened the door, we were almost knocked back by a dreadful stench, as of decaying flesh, which was not there a few minutes before. The sick man was now sitting up, muttering and gasping, with an arm stretched out pointing to an object on his dressing-table, from which there radiated a weird bluish phosphorescence. It was his camera-case.

As the doctor bent over the patient, there came, from the direction of the camera-case, that horrible, hoarse voice I had heard before, and we could now hear distinctly what it said. It kept croaking, with fiendish relish: Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! More chalk for the doors, Master Will. The cart be full.

At the same time, apparently from mid-air over the head of the bed, there came the deep clanging note of a handbell that I had also already heard.

Henry appeared in the doorway with a zinc bath full of steaming blankets as Dr. Dolben straightened himself up and looked very grave.

“This is incredible, Wayne,” he said, addressing me as the nearest to him. “This young man is apparently suffering from cholera plus bubonic plague—every symptom present. I’m not sure we can save him. Quick now, with those blankets—wrap him up and keep him sweating.”

We had just got Latouche into the blankets, and succeeded somewhat in easing the rigid tension of his body, when the doctor became aware of the extraordinary phenomena in the room.

Bring out your dead! croaked the voice.

“Where on earth is that coming from?” asked the doctor, “It’s not the patient—he can’t speak.”

His eyes fell on the camera-case.

“Good God,” he exclaimed, “What’s the matter with that box?”

He too, had noticed the phosphorescent glow it was emitting.

“Look here,” he added, “we can do no more for this poor fellow—what’s his name, by the way?—for several hours, and if he has caught anything infectious, we run a risk staying here. What’s more, I don’t like the smell of your drains. Let’s go downstairs, and tell me what you know about the start of your guest’s illness.”

So saying, he stepped across and shut the window, and the three of us trooped downstairs to the library. I did not realise until we got there that I had automatically picked up the camera-case. This I placed on the library table while Alan was putting out whisky and cigars.

Dr. Dolben sniffed as we seated ourselves. “If that young man upstairs has caught cholera—which I doubt in the English countryside,” he said testily, “I imagine your drains have something to do with ft. That awful smell’s even in here!”

“I rather think,” replied Alan quietly, “that we have brought it in with us”—and he gestured towards the leather camera-case on the table.

“I suggest,” he added, “that we open it, and see exactly what Latouche brought back in it, since we know he left the camera behind.”

“Well,” said I rather lamely, ‘he did say he had his instruments and notebooks in it. Still, perhaps we ought to make sure.” Here I mentioned the strange phenomenon of the phosphorescent glow, which Alan had not noticed upstairs, and which had now entirely gone.

Very gingerly, not knowing what might confront us, I lifted the lid of the case, to reveal to our astonished gaze a human skull. As the lid went up, though the skull was itself clean and bleached, that overpowering odour of corruption seemed to fill the whole room.

As I lifted the thing out and placed it on the table, the french windows of the library rattled as though a high storm-wind raged outside, and, right in my ear, the damnable voice I was beginning to dread croaked: Bring out your dead!

We all heard it, and exchanged glances; and a few seconds later, there came again, as from a distance, the clang of the handbell.

“Well!” exclaimed Dr. Dolben. “This is the strangest case I’ve ever attended. It is utterly impossible, yet that man upstairs is steering from the Great Plague of 1665. Incredible as it seems to anyone of scientific training, I can only conclude he got it from that”—jerking a finger at the grinning skull.

Dolben, as his name indicates, is a Cornishman, and the Cornish are a queer, ancient race, with deep-rooted beliefs in occult matters that would astonish the average Englishman. He has often told us, dropping in for a chat and a drink at night, of the queer, nameless things that haunt the Cornish coast churches where, they say, “the dead come up out of the sea;” and my own experiences in the realm of the unknown have rather appealed to the Kelt in him than astonished the scientist.

“You fellows know,” he said, reaching out for his glass and a fresh cigar, “better than I (being historians), the circumstances and setting of the Plague. It suddenly dawned on me just now, when I heard that voice and the bell while puzzling over the medical features of the case.”

“Yes,” I said gravely. “The corpses were too numerous to bury, and as Defoe’s account tells us, men went round with the death-cart, calling out ‘Bring out your dead’, ringing a handbell, and putting a cross in red chalk on the doors of the infected houses. They had to fling the bodies into pits”.—

“Or crypts!”, put in Alan quickly.

“Good God!”, I exclaimed, as the truth dawned on me, “so that’s why Latouche left his camera behind and took its case. He evidently wanted to abstract what he thought to be an Anglo-Saxon skull from the crypt—but the poor devil got hold of one from the Plague period instead.”

The doctor looked a question; remembering that he had not yet been furnished with the facts, I related briefly the circumstances of Latouche’s visit and its ostensible purpose.

“Yes,” he said calmly, when I had finished. “There is no doubt what happened; the poor fellow has by some occult means become infected with the Plague—though for my reputation’s sake I daren’t let the narrow-minded General Medical Council know I think so. Observe that none of us three is any the worse, though we have been in dangerous infective contact: all of us with the patient, and you, Wayne, with the skull. Therefore there is nothing inherently infectious about the skull; indeed, it must be scientifically impossible that the germs of the disease could have lurked in the thing for three centuries or so—to say nothing of the fact that the Plague organism attacks the blood and tissues, not the bone-structure.”

“It seems to me,” he added, “that your unfortunate guest has either been singled out by some malignant power because the original Plague victim whose skull it is had been buried in an unconsecrated pit (I remember reading accounts of such pits being outside town ditches) and the bones only later tipped into the church crypt, and that his connection with the skull has released an Elemental dormant all this time; or because he committed sacrilege in taking the thing.”

Hardly had Dolben finished speaking, when a dreadful yell of agony rang through the house, and the skull, under our very noses, rose in the air a few inches off the table, and crashed with great violence on to the carpet, where it cracked across, while a thunderous hammering rained on the library door, and above it could be heard the dread call: Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

Leaping to our feet, Alan and I were for making a concerted rush to the sick-chamber, but Dr. Dolben rose leisurely and put up a hand.

“Best take it calmly,” he said. “That was the passing of a soul, by laws science will probably never understand.”

Poor Latouche was, of course, beyond our aid by the time we reached his room.

The next day, there fell to me the sad office of telephoning his University to discover and notify his people, while Dr. Dolben specially visited the Coroner, an understanding man, not nearly so officious as most of his tribe—and left him a much-puzzled officer of the Crown.

Dolben did the post-mortem, and at the inquest, for which Latouche’s father came down from Leeds, it was given out that on his return to us the young archæologist had ascribed his feeling ill to his having stopped and drunk water from a wayside pool in the heat. Dolben was consequently able to depose to a condition of acute gastro-enteritis, and a verdict of Death from Natural Causes was returned.

Natural causes, indeed! I wonder what the two bored-looking country reporters who attended the inquest would have written, could they have seen me that very night, after the undertakers had gone, unscrewing the lid of Martin Latouche’s coffin to slip in the deadly skull; or if I had let out in evidence that on the fatal morning we went to the guest-room after hearing his last scream of agony, we found a Plague cross in red chalk on its door-post, and another on that of the library—which crosses, rub as we would, could not be entirely eradicated until the day after scholar and skull had been given Christian burial in our country churchyard.