Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (12 page)

He took the down train to Lahore that day and cleared out, he didn't tell us where to, on a few days' leave. We did not look at his quarters. Three of us went over to the Club that afternoon, and the first thing a man asked us was ‘What we thought of it?' Then all the Johnnies in the smoking-room began to laugh, and then they began to roar. It seems that that blackguard Tick had been over to the Club directly after parade and told all the men there about his yarn overnight, and the way we'd sucked it in from the Colonel downwards. It was all over Pindi before nightfall; and you may guess how they chaffed us about ‘pukka waltzes' and men with ‘dandy rugs' and whether a ‘betrothal to a dead woman was binding in law.' Just you ask one of the 45th that question and see what happens! When we three rode back to Mess I can tell you we didn't feel proud of ourselves. There was a regular indignation meeting on, and everybody was talking at the top of his voice. Fellows who had just come in from polo, or from making calls, had all been told of it; and they wanted Tick's blood.

The whole blessed business was a
berow
from beginning to end, and we had believed it! We moved over to Tick's quarters to begin by making hay there. Nothing except the chairs and the charpoy (and those belonged to Government) had been left behind.

Over the mantelpiece a double sheet of notepaper had been pinned, and above this, in letters about two foot high, waswritten in charcoal on the wall – ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau.' The Beast had carefully written out the whole yarn from beginning to end, with stage directions for himself about yelling and looking half mad, in red ink at the sides. And he had left that behind for our benefit.

It was a magnificent ‘sell'; but nothing except Tick's acting would have pulled it off in the perfect way it went. We stopped dead, and just pondered over the length and the breadth and the thickness of it. If we'd only thought for a minute about the improbability of a woman dying at a Mussoorie ball without the whole of Upper India knowing it we might have saved ourselves. But that's just what we didn't do. And if you'd listened to Tick you'd have followed our lead.

Tick never came back. I fancy he had a sort of notion it wouldn't have been healthy for him if he had. But we've started a sort of Land League – what do you call it? Velungericht? – in our Mess; and if we come across him anywhere we're going to make things lively for him. He sent in his papers and went down to Pachmarri; where it seems he really was engaged to a girl with money – something like two thousand a year, I've heard – married her, and went home. Of course he had spent his three months' leave at Pachmarri too. We found that out afterwards.

I don't think I should have taken all that trouble and expense (for the Mess room is full of those horns and heads) to work out a sell like that, even if it had been as grand a one as ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau.'

P.S. – Just you ask any of us if ‘a betrothal to a dead woman is binding in law,' and see what happens. I think you'll find that I have written the truth pretty much.

IN THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO

A stone's throw out on either hand

from that well-ordered road we tread,

And all the world is wild and strange:

Churel
and ghoul and
Djinn
and sprite

Shall bear us company tonight,

For we have reached the Oldest land

Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.

From the Dusk to the Dawn

The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognise it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun, and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman's house and given to Janoo by a soldier. To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes' Gate, and than he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits – outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient andmore or less honourable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary for the four principal tenants in the House of Suddhoo. Then there is Me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all – Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie – except Janoo. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo's son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo's anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son's health. And here the story begins.

Suddhoo's cousin's son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be conferring an everlasting honour on the House of Suddhoo if I went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well off Suddhoo was then, that he might have sent something better than an
ekka,
which jolted fearfully, to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April evening. The
ekka
did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh's Tomb near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo, and he said that by reason of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes, in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there was an order of the
Sirkar
against magic, because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I don't know anything about the state ofthe law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the Financial Statement isn't magic, I don't know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was any
jadoo
afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean
jadoo –
white magic, as distinguished from the unclean
jadoo
which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorceror of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be removed by clean
jadoo
;and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little
jadoo
in the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the
jadoo
of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son's danger; but I do not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter's shop-front, as if someone were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs told me that
the jadoo
had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the
jadoo
-workwas coming off in their rooms, because more was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a free-thinking turn of mind. She whispered that the
jadoo
was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son's nameover and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were, up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal-gutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two
huqas
that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees: Janoo with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist round his forehead, a salmon-coloured loincloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-grey in the first place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face of a demon – a ghoul – anything you please except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the daytime over his turning-lathe downstairs. He was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him, as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale-green light floating in the centre like a night-light. Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he didit I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl of the labouring back-muscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventy to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo, fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no sound – only crawled! And, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that unspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as, high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now I knew how fire-spouting is done – I can do it myself– so I felt at ease. The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head dropped, chin-down on the floor, with a thud; the whole body lying then like a corpse with its arms trussed. There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo's
huqa,
and she slid it across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped-paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and to my thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach-up. There was a faint ‘plop' from the basin – exactly like the noise a fish makes when it takes a fly – and the green light in the centre revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, thedried, shrivelled, black head of a native baby — open eyes, open mouth, and shaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling exhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerised dying man, and you will realise less than one-half of the horror of that head's voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of ‘ring, ring, ring,' in the note of the voice, like the timbre of a bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man's regular breathing twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphin that one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was ‘lip-lip-lapping' against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and day watching over the man's life; and that he would eventually recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in the basin, were doubled.