Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

THE HAUNTED DRAWERS

“Nasty-looking piece of handwriting, Alan,” I remarked to my colleague Granville at breakfast one misty September morning, handing over a letter I had just slit open and perused.

“Hm! Rather,” he rejoined as, with a mouth full of toast, he squinted to decipher the address. “Looks like a person of violent temper plus rakish temperament. What’s he want, anyway? I hate reading letters!”

I interpreted and deciphered for him.

“Alberic!” said Alan, “Sounds like something out of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, doesn’t it? From where does he write?”

“That,” I replied, “seems a more difficult matter than the rest of his epistle. So far as I can make out, it looks like Rockington Manor—it’s Rocksomething manor, anyhow—Bedfordshire. I don’t know it, but—

“Yes, yes, I do,” my colleague interrupted. “I did some Bedfordshire records once in which it was mentioned. It’s not far from the north border of Bucks., Newport Pagnell way.”

“You know I hate travelling, Gregs,” he added, “so fix up to go down on your own if you want to. It’s probably the usual run of manorial documents, and you can tell me if there is anything particularly, in my line, or worth any joint work on it.”

“All right then, I will,” I agreed, for I had been engaged in close work of late, and felt the change would clear away the cobwebs. “The fellow seems quite generous, offering lodging and a fee—but I must say I agree with you about his writing.”

So it came about that a few days later, after a prompt exchange of correspondence, I found myself driving through the mournful flats that lie south of that forsaken hole Market Harborough, and down Northants, to Rockington.

My host was awaiting me, and somewhat belied his calligraphy. He was a big, red-faced person, a typical squire-farmer, and he certainly gave me a very good lunch before carting me off to a hay-loft where, to my horror as a historian, his precious family archives were stored. I spent a happy afternoon weeding them out, and found that he had not been misinformed as to the great age of the manorial charters, connected as they were with several important local abbeys.

Farm-duties calling him, my host was not in to tea, but sent his excuses by the maid who served me in solitary state in a somewhat severe Queen Anne drawing-room.

Coming down dressed for dinner, Mr. Sharman met me in the hall accompanied by a vivacious brunette who was obviously his daughter, and who was attired in a skin-tight jade-green evening dress which showed far more than it covered.

“Mr. Wayne, the historian, m’dear—Eva, my daughter,” he announced in his curious, jerky way of speaking. “Wife’s dead. I have a son, but he’s not here. Come on in. Dinner’s ready.” I silently thanked heaven there were no barbarous cocktails in this old house.

Over dinner my host was keenly anxious to know what I had found in his manuscripts, and I was rather surprised to find that Eva showed an interest in the subject quite out of keeping with her ultramodern attire and rather bubbling manner. By the time dessert was reached, I had secured Mr. Sharman’s promise that his archives should be presented to the fine county muniment-rooms Bedfordshire has set up.

“You historical blokes must come across some queer things,” remarked Miss Eva, in that appalling mixture of slang plus educated interest, which the modern young woman seems able to combine. “I mean, all sorts of fascinating dead memories, and that kind of thing. No, Dad, I’m not going to leave you men to guff over the port, besides I like port myself, so I’ll stay,” (this, as we had made a gesture to rise.)

We sat down again, her father with a curious twisted grin, but saying nothing.

“F’r instance,” went on the astonishing Eva in a sudden gush, “do you know my drawers are haunted?”

I nearly choked in my port with bachelor embarrassment, just managing to splutter, “Er—I beg your pardon?”

“Oh Lord, I don’t mean what you think!” she exploded with frank amusement. “Never wear the things—no, I mean a chest of drawers in my bedroom.”

The information she had just conveyed as to attire was quite superfluous, from the merest glance at her costume, I thought, but I made no comment. I was getting used to waiting for shocks with this young woman.

The next, however, came from her father, who was now staring moodily into the fire and idly caressing the head of a huge Great Dane which, he had remarked, always sat at his feet at dinner.

“You’d better tell Mr. Wayne, Eva,” he said, slowly for him. “He’ll have to know anyway, if he comes across any Georgian letters in his search.”

Scenting something unusual here in the way of a family skeleton in the cupboard, I remarked tactfully:

“Well, one does occasionally come across things that are puzzling in connection with the past in that way, Miss Sharman.”

“Then here goes,” she replied, moving from the table and flopping into a fireside settee, while lighting up a cigarette.

“You must know that there’s a queer, wild strain in our family. I know I’ve got it. Dad says I’m a disgraceful harum-scarum and will probably finish up in a strange bed, other occupant hitherto unknown! It’s worse in the sons. My brother ran off with a chorus-girl while a student at London University, and the last we heard of him was they were living together in Paris. Dad made a runaway marriage at Gretna with Mother; and his father painted late Victorian London red—too late for your periods, no doubt, but he was the fellow that coshed a policeman on the head and then rode round Piccadilly in a nightshirt and bed-cap with the copper strapped on the back of his racehorse.

“Anyway, back in the 18th century, the family tradition says, the eldest son at one time was such a disgrace that he was turned out by the squire and only came home when he was dying and starving. Then, they say, the squire did the Prodigal Son stunt over him, but too late, as he most inconsiderately died in the house that night.

“They say my bedroom, was the room he died in and it’s been haunted ever since.

“Haunted that damn room certainly is. There’s an ancient chest of drawers in one corner of it, and every night invisible feet are heard tramping upstairs, then the whole contents of this chest are flung out. It’s a curious bit of furniture—drawers below, and a kind of secretaire at the top. An antique dealer who saw it said it was a rare piece, date about 1730 or so.

“What’s even more weird,” she went on, after gulping another glass of port at a draught—how that girl could drink the stuff—“is that several times we’ve tried moving it and putting another piece of furniture in the corner, and whatever is put there gets treated the same way. Only a fortnight ago—you remember that very hot week we had in August—we tried a shift-round, moving the chest to a spare room next door and putting my bed in the corner.

“I got home about 1 a.m. from a party, to find the whole of the bedclothes violently tossed about all over the floor; made the bed again as best I could—being a bit soused—and would you believe it, about 3 a.m. I was awakened to find myself lying naked on the sheet, with the top sheet and coverlet on the floor, and I could feel hands pulling the rest from under me. I yanked on the bedside standard lamp—but bless your life, never a sign of anybody in the room. So back goes my bed out of danger next night, and we left the corner bare.

“That night, I woke again, to hear vicious scrabbling in the corner, and the following morning, behold a series of nail-scratchings right down my dinky wallpaper. What d’you make of it?”

“Hm!” I said after reflection, “it hardly comes within the province of a worker among documents, but I think one may hazard a guess—that the disturbance is intimately, and indeed only, connected with that one piece of furniture, and that one spot.

“I don’t suppose,” I added, “you have ever read a rather heavy work published in America by a student of the occult, T. Jay Hudson, about fifty years ago—in 1892, to be exact—called The Law of Psychic Phenomena?”

“Good Lord, no!” exclaimed Eva, but rather surprisingly, her father who now stirred for the first time since her recital began, put in:—

“I have just been reading it, Mr. Wayne, and I have the very book here. That is exactly why I asked you to come down, though I didn’t want to give any impression of ‘ghost-hunting’ in my letter. I thought that as a worker among old records you would probably have considerable knowledge of secret hiding-places.”

He emphasised these words, and went on:

“I know what you are going to remark, and you seem to have hit upon the same idea as myself. Hudson’s theory, my dear,” (turning to Eva) “is that so-called ghosts are thought-forms that have lived on, as it were, being projected from the subconscious brain, at the point of death, of persons dying in circumstances of great stress.

“Thus, I have an idea that when the 18th-century prodigal son—named, like myself, Alberic Sharman—was dying, his subconscious personality sent out (without his consciously knowing it, of course) a thought of horror as to what would happen if some incriminating secret he alone knew, which lay hidden in that chest and secretaire, were discovered; and that this thought-form has persisted so strongly, that it is translated into material energy—a kind of electrical wave of some violence—which takes the shape of the attack on that object.”

“Mr. Sharman,” I said gravely, “you have touched on a very deep subject, and I must say you are one of the few men I have yet met, who do realise that there is this scientific way of looking at what most people term haunting. I gather, then, that what you want me to do is to search that chest and see if we cannot put a stop to what has evidently become a very material nuisance to the household?”

“I do!” he exclaimed with sudden and astonishing fervour. “My dear sir, I feel that there is a kind of cursed streak in the family line somehow, and that if this is settled, it will not occur in future generations—I am not a vain man, but I am proud of my long line, and I want to see it go on—in honour; more honour than I or my son have given it.”

“Well,” said young Eva, breaking with a woman’s intuition what threatened to be an uncomfortable tension, “I’m fed up with these disturbed nights ever since I got home from Coll. for the long vac., so if a bachelor scholar won’t faint at a girl’s bedroom, come on up and do the exorcising right now.”

Concealing a wince at the mixture of suggestiveness and slang that appeared to be this young woman’s notable characteristics, I consented, and we formed a procession up the gracious old staircase to a great wide room of the early Georges which, by violent contrast, was in very modern feminine disorder.

“There,” said Eva pointing dramatically to the corner facing the door, “is the offending furniture.”

It was certainly a very rare piece, if not a unique one. I must have looked inquiringly as to whether it was in order for me to begin operations.

“Oh, carry on,” she laughed, “I don’t mind you seeing my wardrobe!”

So we went to it, the young wretch obviously enjoying my embarrassment as I struggled with the slithery piles of silk stockings, under-slips and garters, which were all the drawers contained.

I subjected each empty drawer in turn to most careful scrutiny and tapping, besides making minute measurements, but could find no space unaccounted for, there or in the framework.

“As a matter of fact,” I remarked, “I did not for a minute expect we should have any luck with that part—but there was just the chance that a Georgian cabinet-maker had played a trick and put a secret drawer in the unlikely portion.”

When I turned my attention to the top, or secretaire part, however, after getting the owner to remove a litter of bills and what looked suspiciously like a packet of boys’ photographs and love-letters, evidence was soon forthcoming as to a concealed receptacle. When you have worked on many old bureaux, you somehow sense these things. It took some ten minutes of pressing at various portions of the structure, including knobs and carving, however, before I finally hit on the right one, which sent a cunning panel sliding back to reveal quite a deep cavity.

In this lay a packet of papers yellow with age, and musty with long exile from the air. I took them carefully out and handed them to Mr. Sharman.

“Thank you, Mr. Wayne,” he said with a sad little smile, and the suspicion of a sigh. “I think we’d better take these downstairs and see, with the aid of a decanter, what my ancestor was up to.”

This time we adjourned to the library, and while my host was producing whisky and soda, I had just time for a rapid glance, and was surprised to see the cultured type of books my host possessed, obviously in use.

Over the desk, Mr. Sharman almost reverently undid a faded tape and, motioning his daughter and myself to take some, began to open up the letters. It was as we had suspected; when we got them into order of date, we read a story sordid and brutal indeed even for the eighteenth century, an age not over-given to sympathy by the land-owning class for all whom it considered to be below it.

Young Alberic Sharman, it transpired, had got a local farmer’s daughter into trouble in 1738. These were her letters of desperate appeal to him; from them we gathered that his father would turn him out if it became known, and that he had broken the news to her and told her roughly that she must trouble him no more.

Here—I could almost see her writing it, numbed with cold and fear, on the dark December night of 1738 whose date it bore—was her last frantic appeal:

“Poor devils, both of ’em,” said the Squire, refilling our glasses, “so that was why he went away, eh? You can see Long Pond from Eva’s window in daylight.”

The ebullient Eva herself was for once reduced to silence, and I, accustomed as I am to the revelations of family scandal in old letters, did not break the hush. Who could remain unaffected by this living tragedy of two centuries ago? At last:

“What are we going to do about it?” demanded my host.

“Well,” I replied, “you know, and like myself appear to agree with, Hudson’s theory of haunting. I suggest that if you burn these letters, you will never be troubled by the unquiet spirit again; it seems to me evident that when your ancestor was dying, some part of his subconscious brain sent fourth the thought: ‘My God, what if someone finds those letters, and my folly and shame are revealed?’”

“I do think,” I added, “that this thought has persisted in intensity—for what we call Time is purely a convention—and takes the form of the violent nightly disturbance, the frantic search of the drawers.”

We carried the tragic papers to the library fire and solemnly consigned them to it.

To stay up talking after this would have been an anticlimax, and with one accord we said goodnight.

At breakfast Eva reported, with all her old verve, that she had slept undisturbed and that it was “quite a change not to be stripped by someone you couldn’t see.”

I spent another very pleasant day with the Squire’s archives, and made arrangements with him for their transfer to Bedford; only yesterday there came a delightful invitation from Eva to go down and spend a week-end with them, recalling my visit of a year ago and ending, characteristically: