The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (91 page)

The actual, physical danger did not exist, however, and never had existed. The threat of the law hanging over Ben had been based on a dream.

“I— dreamed it all. I must have,” she admitted. “Yet it was so horribly clear and I wasn’t asleep.” Her voice broke. “I thought— oh, Ben, I thought—”

“What did you think, my dear?” His voice was odd, not like Ben’s at all. It had a cold, cutting edge to it.

He stood looking down at her with an immobility that chilled her more than the cold wind that swept in through the broken window. She tried to read his face, but the light from the little bulb was too weak. It left his features shadowed in broad, dark planes that made him look like a stranger, and somehow sinister.

She said, “I—” and faltered.

He still did not move, but his voice hardened. “What was it you thought?”

She backed away from him.

He moved, then. It was only to take his hands from his pockets, to stretch his arms toward her; but she stood for an instant staring at the thing that left her stricken, with a voiceless scream forming in her throat.

She was never to know whether his arms had been outstretched to take her within their shelter or to clutch at her white neck. For she turned and fled, stumbling up the stairs in a mad panic of escape.

He shouted: “Janet! Janet!” His steps were heavy behind her. He tripped on the bottom step and fell on one knee and cursed.

Terror lent her strength and speed. She could not be mistaken. Although she had seen it only once, she knew that on the little finger of his left hand there had been the same, the unmistakable ring the dead woman had worn.

The blessed wind snatched the front door from her and flung it wide, and she was out in the safe, dark shelter of the storm.

The Waxwork

A. M. Burrage

The manager was a youngish man, stout, blond and of medium height. He wore his clothes well and contrived to look extremely smart without appearing over-dressed. Raymond Hewson looked neither. His clothes, which had been good when new and which were still carefully brushed and pressed, were beginning to show signs of their owner’s losing battle with the world. He was a small, spare, pale man, with lank, errant brown hair, and although he spoke plausibly and even forcibly he had the defensive and somewhat furtive air of a man who was used to rebuffs. He looked what he was, a man gifted somewhat above the ordinary who was a failure through his lack of self-assertion.

The manager was speaking.

“There is nothing new in your request,” he said. “In fact we refuse it to different people – mostly young bloods who have tried to make bets – about three times a week. We have nothing to gain and something to lose by letting people spend the night in our Murderers’ Den. If I allowed it, and some young idiot lost his senses, what would be my position? But your being a journalist somewhat alters the case.”

Hewson smiled.

“I suppose you mean that journalists have no senses to lose.”

“No, no,” laughed the manager, “but one imagines them to be reasonable people. Besides, here we have something to gain; publicity and advertisement.”

“Exactly,” said Hewson, “and there I thought we might come to terms.”

The manager laughed again.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, “I know what’s coming. You want to be paid twice, do you? It used to be said years ago that Madame Tussaud’s would give a man a hundred pounds for sleeping alone in the Chamber of Horrors. I hope you don’t think that we have made any such offer. Er – what is your paper, Mr Hewson?”

“I am freelancing at present,” Hewson confessed, “working on space for several papers. However, I should find no difficulty in getting the story printed. The
Morning Echo
would use it like a shot. ‘A night with Marriner’s Murderers.’ No live paper could turn it down.”

The manager rubbed his chin.

“Ah! And how do you propose to treat it?”

“I shall make it gruesome, of course; gruesome with just a saving touch of humour.”

The other nodded and offered Hewson his cigarette-case.

“Very well, Mr. Hewson,” he said. “Get your story printed in the
Morning Echo
, and there will be a five-pound note waiting for you here when you care to come and call for it. But first of all, it’s no small ordeal that you’re proposing to undertake. I’d like to be quite sure about you, and I’d like you to be quite sure about yourself. I own I shouldn’t care to take it on. I’ve seen those figures dressed and undressed, I know all about the process of their manufacture, I can walk about in company downstairs as unmoved as if I were walking among so many skittles, but I should hate having to sleep down there alone among them.”

“Why?” asked Hewson.

“I don’t know. There isn’t any reason. I don’t believe in ghosts. If I did I should expect them to haunt the scene of their crimes or the spot where their bodies were laid, instead of a cellar which happens to contain their waxwork effigies. It’s just that I couldn’t sit alone among them at night, with their seeming to stare at me the way they do. After all, they represent the lowest and most appalling types of humanity, and – although I would not own it publicly – the people who come to see them are not generally charged with the very highest motives. The whole atmosphere of the place is unpleasant, and if you are susceptible to atmosphere I warn you that you are in for a very uncomfortable night.”

Hewson had known that from the moment when the idea had first occurred to him. His soul sickened at the prospect, even while he smiled casually upon the manager. But he had a wife and family to keep, and for the past month he had been living on paragraphs, eked out by his rapidly dwindling store of savings. Here was a chance not to be missed – the price of a special story in the
Morning Echo
, with a five-pound note to add to it. It meant comparative wealth and luxury for a week, and freedom from the worst anxieties for a fortnight. Besides, if he wrote the story well, it might lead to an offer of regular employment.

“The way of transgressors – and newspaper men – is hard,” he said. “I have already promised myself an uncomfortable night because your Murderers’ Den is obviously not fitted up as an hotel bedroom. But I don’t think your wax-works will worry me much.”

“You’re not superstitious?”

“Not a bit,” Hewson laughed.

“But you’re a journalist; you must have a strong imagination.”

“The news editors for whom I’ve worked have always complained that I haven’t any. Plain facts are not considered sufficient in our trade, and the papers don’t like offering their readers unbuttered bread.”

The manager smiled and rose.

“Right,” he said. “I think the last of the people have gone. Wait a moment. I’ll give orders for the figures downstairs not to be draped, and let the night people know that you’ll be here. Then I’ll take you down and show you round.”

He picked up the receiver of a house telephone, spoke into it and presently replaced it.

“One condition I’m afraid I must impose on you,” he remarked. “I must ask you not to smoke. We had a fire scare down in the Murderers’ Den this evening. I don’t know who gave the alarm, but whoever it was it was a false one. Fortunately there were very few people down there at the time, or there might have been a panic. And now, if you’re ready, we’ll make a move.”

Hewson followed the manager through half a dozen rooms where attendants were busy shrouding the kings and queens of England, the generals and prominent statesmen of this and other generations, all the mixed herd of humanity whose fame or notoriety had rendered them eligible for this kind of immortality. The manager stopped once and spoke to a man in uniform, saying something about an arm-chair in the Murderers’ Den.

“It’s the best we can do for you, I’m afraid,” he said to Hewson. “I hope you’ll be able to get some sleep.”

He led the way through an open barrier and down ill-lit stone stairs which conveyed a sinister impression of giving access to a dungeon. In a passage at the bottom were a few preliminary horrors, such as relics of the Inquisition, a rack taken from a mediaeval castle, branding irons, thumbscrews, and other mementoes of man’s one-time cruelty to man. Beyond the passage was the Murderers’ Den.

It was a room of irregular shape with vaulted roof, and dimly lit by electric lights burning behind inverted bowls of frosted glass. It was, by design, an eerie and uncomfortable chamber – a chamber whose atmosphere invited its visitors to speak in whispers. There was something of the air of a chapel about it, but a chapel no longer devoted to the practice of piety and given over now for base and impious worship.

The waxwork murderers stood on low pedestals with numbered tickets at their feet. Seeing them elsewhere, and without knowing whom they represented, one would have thought them a dull-looking crew, chiefly remarkable for the shabbiness of their clothes, and as evidence of the changes of fashion even among the unfashionable.

Recent notorieties rubbed dusty shoulders with the old “favourites”. Thurtell, the murderer of Weir, stood as if frozen in the act of making a shop-window gesture to young Bywaters. There was Lefroy the poor half-baked little snob who killed for gain so that he might ape the gentleman. Within five yards of him sat Mrs. Thompson, that erotic romanticist, hanged to propitiate British middle-class matronhood. Charles Peace, the only member of that vile company who looked uncompromisingly and entirely evil, sneered across a gangway at Norman Thorne. Browne and Kennedy, the two most recent additions stood between Mrs. Dyer and Patrick Mahon.

The manager, walking around with Hewson, pointed out several of the more interesting of these unholy notabilities.

“That’s Crippen; I expect you recognise him. Insignificant little beast who looks as if he couldn’t tread on a worm. That’s Armstrong. Looks like a decent, harmless country gentleman, doesn’t he? There’s old Vaquier; you can’t miss him because of his beard. And of course this—”

“Who’s that?” Hewson interrupted in a whisper, pointing.

“Oh, I was coming to him,” said the manager in a light undertone. “Come and have a good look at him. This is our star turn. He’s the only one of the bunch that hasn’t been hanged.”

The figure which Hewson had indicated was that of a small, slight man not much more than five feet in height. It wore little waxed moustaches, large spectacles, and a caped coat. There was something so exaggeratedly French in its appearance that it reminded Hewson of a stage caricature. He could not have said precisely why the mild-looking face seemed to him so repellent, but he had already recoiled a step and, even in the manager’s company, it cost him an effort to look again.