Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

FATAL OAK

“Why the devil didn’t you buy a car while you were about it, Alan?” I exclaimed with some asperity to my friend and co-historian Alan Granville, as the ominous noise from our vehicle’s intestinal regions grew worse and worse.

It was getting on for 9.30 at night, and here we were, lost in those desolate lanes that cross the flats of Buckinghamshire east of Aylesbury, having taken a wrong turning in trying to get back to Buckingham, our temporary headquarters. We had come down to Bucks, in connection with research for the subject of our next joint volume of historical studies, on the Saxon kingdoms, to see if we could gain any light on that much-disputed question, the site of the famous battle of Bedcanford, which was almost certainly in this region, and not at Bedford.

Our thoughts at the moment, however, were very much in the present. The car was getting steadily worse.

“Brr-rr-pup-pup-brr-brr-pup-pup” it went—a sure sign that a ‘big-end’ was giving up the ghost.

Alan ignored my sarcasm, only remarking: “I think we shall just make that village over there—it can’t be far from Aylesbury, surely.

“Half a minute,” I said, “there’s a signpost. I’ll get out and see what it says, but for goodness sake keep the engine running if you can!”

Both feats were accomplished successfully, and as the result we found ourselves heading cautiously for a place announced to be Bierton. Here, most obligingly right outside the door of a friendly-looking public house, our car gave a final chorus of brr-puppup-pup and was silent. It refused to budge another foot.

I had noticed that we had crawled up an extraordinarily long village street before this final indignity, and that by the looks of the cottages, we should have some difficulty in getting put up anywhere for the night. The inn seemed the likeliest place, and as the car had so considerately deposited us right on its doorstep, in we went and ordered double whiskies, for it was a bitterly cold night, and a nasty drizzle had begun to fall.

As one does, we got chatting with the landlord, who soon heard about our trouble—the genius of country innkeepers for unobtrusive pumping is amazing. He however, had no accommodation available.

Standing beside us at the bar was a tall man with a cultured, ascetic face, but a bitter mouth drawn down at the corners. This individual, who merely waved silently at the landlord to refill his glass, now addressed us, in a very refined voice.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “can I help you? We’re only three miles from Aylesbury, but it is a godforsaken hole even at 10 p.m. and I doubt if you would get a garage there on the phone now, for a tow-in. I don’t know anywhere in the village you could put up—except my place, if you care to accept a shake-down.”

We thanked him profusely, and exchanged cards.

His simply read:

Mr. Reval excused himself for a moment, to see about getting the tow-rope out of his own car, which was parked in the inn yard, and I turned to the landlord.

“I say,” I inquired, “that’s Reval the great collector and authority on antiques, isn’t it?”

“Aye, sir, that’s him, an’ a rare good genelman too. He’s given me a good price for several o’ my bits, an’ he comes in most evenings just for a quiet drink and chat—knows everybody in the place, as you might say and keepin’ his ears open, no doubt, to hear of more old stuff.

“You’re lucky, genelman, to be seein’ his place. He came down here a couple of years ago, got for a song a lovely old couple o’ Tudor cottages on what we call Broughton lane, an’ restored ’em—and a rare job he’s made of it, too, from what I hear.”

By this time our rescuer had returned, just in time to hear mine host chant his “Time—genelmen—please!” (first warning). Mr. Reval cheerfully joined us in a last drink, and we were able to express pleasure at so unexpectedly meeting a connoisseur whose name was known in every auction-room of Europe. He returned the compliment with some nice remarks about our historical works, which, I must say, he had read pretty thoroughly.

“Time-genelmen-please!” was now chanted inexorably for the last time, so we trooped out into the drizzle, to find that Reval had already got his car round and hitched ours up to it.

“You’re right,” he said, “there’s a big-end gone; you can’t do a thing about it till morning. However, my garage will hold both cars.”

So the undignified procession set off, with Alan steering our car in the rear. We seemed to go back down that interminable village street, then sharp to the right, and kept bearing right round the back of the place, finally coming to rest outside a noble half-timbered structure in a narrow, winding lane.

The cars were soon run into the garage, a huge building, evidently an ancient barn, beside the erstwhile cottages, and we entered the house, to step right back into the time of the Armada.

I never have seen in any one house so marvellous a collection of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean furniture, or one so perfectly arranged. Our host led the way into a dining-room that went back even further, for it had a priceless monastery refectory table, and into this room, as he was producing a welcome decanter, there walked a woman of about thirty, at least ten years younger than Reval. She might have stepped straight out of a Burne-Jones canvas; flaming red hair done up in a towering mass surmounted a deadly-pale face, and she wore a medieval-looking gown of heavy, sombre green brocaded material.

“My wife,” said Reval, giving her a queer, old-fashioned bow as he presented us and explained our breakdown.

Mrs. Reval inclined her head almost indifferently, and merely continued what had evidently been her original progress through the room to a door on the far side. She uttered none of the conventional banalities whatever. All she said was, in an accent definitely foreign, but which I could not place: “Yes? Please to excuse me. I go to bed”—and disappeared through the curtain.

Queer hostess, I thought, but we were soon too busy examining the exquisite antique treasures of the room to give the woman a second thought.

Reval did the honours of his collection with the deep knowledge and charm one finds in the true connoisseur. Finally he remarked:

“That corner looks a bit unbalanced. It has just lost a chair, which I gave this morning to a friend and fellow-collector. It was a queer piece and not very beautiful, being a bit of that imitation, chancel-chair style of Gothic they turned out about 1830; but it had a curious history, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Well,” our host went on, when we were comfortably settled by the fire with our glasses, “that chair was actually made out of a gibbet-post. In the year 1773, a small farmer of Bierton named Richard Holt was murdered in his bed the night after his daughter had died. Earlier in the evening, a ratcatcher and chimney-sweep of Tring—just across in Herts—named Edward Corbet, had come along intent on robbing the house; but, seeing the farmer praying at the bedside of his dead daughter, he lay low till the man had retired, then got in down the wide chimney with the aid of a ladder from the farmyard, and slew him.

“Unfortunately for him, Corbet accidentally shut his dog in the house when decamping with the booty; the milk-boy and neighbours forced the door next morning, on getting no reply, and the first thing they saw was Corbet’s dog. This of course led to his arrest—some of Holt’s property was found on him. He was duly tried and hanged at Aylesbury, and his body was hung in chains from a post in a field ever since called Corbet’s Piece, between here and the hamlet of Hulcott. Oral tradition in the village, handed down from father to son, says his skull was still in the rusted irons in 1795.

“A few years later, the post was taken down, and part of it served for years as a farm gate-post. The rest was taken away by a chair-maker and turned into a chair and small fancy “memento” articles—but I have never seen any of those.

“Naturally, as a collector, I prowl the district for antiques, and know pretty well every cottager and farmer for miles round, to say nothing of the parsons; for they, being called to cottage bedsides, get more chance than any collector, let alone a dealer, of seeing the good old stuff. Well, only a week or so ago, I dropped along to see an old acquaintance, one of the retired cottagers, who has often (for a commission, of course) put me on to a good article he has spotted around the houses of his cronies—he’s a great old gossip and quite a character hereabouts.

“On this particular morning, I could see the old boy was agog with excitement, and he piloted me without ceremony into his kitchen, where, behold, was the hideous example of a churchwarden-gothic chair.

“‘Look-ee, Mister Reval’ he said, ‘now what do ee think o’ that for a fine piece—’tis the very chair made from the gibbet on Corbet’s Piece a ’undred years agone.’”

‘Naturally, I got out of him the story I have just told you, and asked how on earth he had picked it up. The explanation was curious. He said his son had insisted, during the previous week-end, on at last having a long-threatened turnout of the stable-loft—they have an old one-horse stable beside the cottage—with the result that this chair had come to light.

“My old man (his name, by the way, is Jim Holt Wilson) is, by a weird coincidence, a descendant of the murdered man, and that appears to be how his great-grandfather got hold of the chair from its maker. The old chap had clean forgotten its existence till this turnout and then, with the countryman’s usual ideas on anything that looks a bit antique, he thought it might interest me. Heaven knows how long it had been in that loft, for it was covered with grime, but—”

Here Mr. Reval paused, and finished in what I thought was a curiously strained voice:

“Its story did interest me—very much. So I bought it. My—my friend and rival collector, who lives a quarter of a mile away, makes a speciality of collecting things with a queer history. He put me on to this refectory table when I first came here two years ago, so I gave him the chair—to repay a debt, as it were. He’s half Portuguese—John Ribeiro is his name—and I rather suspect he has inherited a taste for weird things from that side; I understand that Portugal to this day is riddled with witchcraft and superstition.”

“Yes,” Alan confirmed with a laugh, “I remember a Portuguese scholar I knew at Orford, who tried to kill one of the dons by magic with the aid of an extraordinary thing he called a witch’s moon-dial. In everything else he was a most enlightened man, but he really was the embodiment of superstition run riot.”

“I too,” I was able to add to the discussion, “know a Portuguese-Indian of the same stamp; he swore that the village witch-doctor had blasted a house in his native Goa a century ago, and that the curse worked itself out even to-day. A charming race, but with the most incredible ideas, the Portuguese. This friend of mine, for instance—”

I got no further. These was a sudden violent hammering at the front door, and with hardly a pause after it, Reval’s manservant burst into the room without knocking.

“Excuse me, sir,” he gasped, “it’s Mr. Ribeery’s man—he says can you come at oust—something terrible’s happened at his place.”

Granville and I jumped to our feet at once, but, to our surprise, Reval heaved himself out of his chair in a leisurely manner as if the agitated servant had merely announced that the gas-man had called.

“I think,” he said, without a trace of excitement or emotion, “that we had better go along and see what is the matter. You will come with me, gentlemen?”

We at once assented, and exchanged raised eyebrows behind his back, for in his manner we scented something very strange indeed. If this was his friend in trouble, why the icy calmness?

Out in the hall, we found Senhor Ribeiro’s English valet in a state of collapse, he could only mutter “’Orrible, ’orrible! Come, sir—come quick for Gawd’s sake!”

I patted the man on the shoulder, for he was very near hysteria, and within a few moments we had all piled into Reval’s car in the downpour, and were heading on down the Broughton lane. It only seemed a stone’s throw before we halted at another old house, from the open door of which streamed a hall-light.

Alan and I threw ourselves out of the car and rushed up the drive, with the manservant panting after us. Glancing hurriedly round, I saw that Reval was strolling leisurely behind, actually stopping to light a cigarette, and resuming with his hands in his pockets; but not until later did we recall his amazing behaviour, forgetting it in the rush of the moment.

“Where? What’s happened?” I snapped to the servitor, “come on, man, pull yourself together!”

“In th-th-there, sir!” he gibbered, pointing to an open door at the end of the hall on the right.

We flung ourselves into the room—and stopped short, for such a sight met my eyes as I hope I never may see again.

In a massive pseudo-gothic chair against the wall of the room sat all that was left of Mrs. Reval. The striking pre-Raphaelite hair was all scorched to a horrible tuft right on the crown of the head, the rest of which was bald, blackened skull. The face was a hideous charred and seared mass, from which grinned two rows of teeth from which the lips had utterly gone; and the once-statuesque body was a thing of shrivelled skin on which the Renaissance gown hung grotesquely as from a clothes-peg. It looked as though the woman had been struck by lightning.

On his knees at her feet, clutching frantically at the gown, sobbing wildly and gibbering in a mixture of English and Portuguese, was an olive-skinned man whom we guessed at once to be Senhor Ribeiro.

The first shock of the spectacle over, we plunged forward, only to be halted by a steely grip on the shoulder. Reval had come up behind, and now detained us with out-thrust arms. In a voice of ice, he remarked:

“I do not think I would touch it, if I were you, gentlemen.”

Something in his tone made us stay rooted there in the middle of the floor.

We whipped round and stared at him, but there was no hint of madness in the connoisseur’s cold eyes.

“But good God, man, can’t you see it’s your wife?” shouted Alan.

The stern, bitter mouth gave a sardonic laugh.

“The tense is slightly inaccurate, gentlemen: It was my wife.”

The gibbering wretch grovelling at the brocaded horror in the chair suddenly rose, let out a scream of hysterical rage, and made a flying leap at Reval.

Quickly Alan and I interposed ourselves and gripped him, forced him into a chair, Alan, who speaks fairly good Portuguese, though his French is bad, rapped at the poor wretch in his own tongue:

“Now, come, come, better tell us what happened.”

Reval interposed, a delicate hand waving all to silence.

“There is no need for that object to explain. I will! You see, gentlemen, this—er—tragedy is not entirely unexpected by me, though it has perhaps hardly taken the turn I had planned.

“I told you some of the story of the chair, but not all of it. The reason it was left in the cottager’s stable-loft was that, according to a manuscript left by his great-grandfather, which he showed me, the earth-bound elemental, which is all that remains of the murderer Corbet, is still attached to the oak, and it appears that if an evil person uses that chair, the result is fatal. Death has come thus horribly to—the adulteress!”

He pointed dramatically at the thing that had been his wife, and went on inexorably:

“You see, this manuscript states that when the great-grandfather’s brother, who had betrayed his friend’s wife, sat in it, he was shrivelled as if struck by lightning. Another of the family, who had been sentenced to transportation for homicide but escaped and crept home, sat in it, with the like result.

“They had inquiries made, and discovered that the chair-maker who fashioned that piece was closely related to Corbet. On his death-bed, the old man confessed that he knew the power of the earthbound Thing that lurked in the oaken post, and had made the chair as a present to my cottager’s ancestor in revenge for the kinsman’s hanging.”

“You, you fool!” he blazed, suddenly turning on Ribeiro, who sat moaning with his head between his hands and calling on a large variety of saints, “d’you think I didn’t know about my wife’s visits to you here? Eh? Under cover of friendship you stole her! I valued her more than any of my treasures—very well, my friend. I sent you a present today—Death!

“Unfortunately—not that it matters, for I ceased to love her when I found she had betrayed me—my wife—your mistress—sat in the chair first.”

Reval turned to us, still calm and apparently utterly, dangerously sane.

“What do you say, gentlemen? Don’t you think it would be a good idea if we remove That and make him occupy the throne of honour?”

“God, man, are you out of your mind?” I shouted, clutching him wildly, while Alan got between us and the chair.

“Look out!” yelled Alan a second later.

The Portuguese had drawn a knife and flung it like lightning at Reval who, with me, as I was still gripping him, ducked hurriedly behind the table.

Reval was now too quick for me. He slipped out of my grasp like an eel, and, in what seemed a simultaneous movement, raised his head above the table, shot out an arm, and grabbed a heavy barrel-shaped tobacco-jar from it, with the evident intention of hurling it at Ribeiro.

Before he could do so, however, he let out a scream of agony. There was a flash that seemed to come from the jar and run right up his arm. There came a ghastly smell of burning flesh, and Reval crumpled across the table, a travesty of a human being, charred to a cinder like his wife.

Ribeiro gibbered wildly for a moment, flung up his arms, and fell on the carpet in a dead faint.

“Quick, Gregory—I saw a phone in the hall as we came in. Get that fool of a servant and get him to put you on to the nearest doctor! We can’t save Reval, but we may pull Ribeiro round.”

The servant, who had been crouching under the stairs in a half-conscious state of terror, summoned sufficient wits to do what was required, and within a few seconds, despite the lateness of the hour, I was speaking to a Dr. Mason at the other end of the wire.

He promised to be along immediately, and within five minutes of the call he thundered up the drive in a high-powered car.

“Good God!” he exclaimed. A rapid glance showed him that the Revals were beyond recall, but he set to work at once on the Portuguese and managed to bring him round. We got the poor wretch on to a couch, and Dr. Mason turned his attention to the two charred bodies.

“Extraordinary! How did this happen? Somebody been playing about with electric fuses?” he snapped, “and may I ask who you gentlemen are?”

We explained our identity and presence briefly while the medico was examining the woman’s body.

Bending over that of Reval, he exclaimed suddenly, “What’s this? Hm! Damn funny!” He took from beneath the shrivelled hand the massive oak-brass-bound tobacco-jar, straightened his back, and put the object down again on the table, eyeing it somewhat gingerly.

“Come and sit down, you fellows, and let’s have a drink before we do anything else,” he said, adding “especially before we send for the police, as we shall have to do. Ribeiro’ll be all right now—chiefly shock.”

We helped ourselves unbidden to drinks from Ribeiro’s decanter. Dr. Mason leaned forward confidentially.

“Now look here,” he said, “I know all these three people well—should say, I knew the Revals. Do you care to tell me anything you know about this affair? I think I can cast a bit of light on it.”

We told the amazing story of the evening’s events. Here and there Dr. Mason nodded, but he made no interruption. When we had finished, he jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the tobacco-jar on the table.

“What Reval didn’t know,” he said, puffing his pipe reflectively, “was that that jar was also made from the gibbet-oak. Ribeiro only got it a few days ago. I often used to drop in and have dinner and a game of chess with him, and he showed me the jar for the first time the night before last. He bought it in a junk-shop in Aylesbury, he said; but I recognised the thing, for I’m a local man, and when I was a boy my grandfather owned it, and told me its story, and that of the chair.”

“Knowing how superstitious the Portuguese are, I didn’t pass on the yarn to Ribeiro. I wish to God I had done, now. What I don’t understand is why the jar didn’t, so to speak, ‘get’ Ribeiro before the chair got his partner in sin. I can understand its getting Reval, with the will to murder in his heart—but the moral values seem all wrong! I’d have thought Reval’s anger, being justifiable, less heinous than Ribeiro’s calculated treachery, but I suppose we shall never know what degree of sinfulness is required to bring these queer forces into action.

“Well, it’s past 1 a.m., and I’m afraid we shall have to drag our fourteen stone Sergeant Bunnett out of bed. Y’know,” he finished whimsically, knocking out his pipe as he made for the telephone, “I think this is the sort of case that ought to be put in the hands of some Scottish officer from the Yard, preferably named Inspector MacAbre!”

Author’s note: The story of the Bierton murder and gibbet is actually taken from Ms. notes on the history of the district, collected by a former rector of Aston Clinton, a neighbouring village. There does exist in Aylesbury to this day a snuff-box made out of the gruesome relic.—I have seen it. M.P.D.