The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes

‘Cartaphilus.’

‘Any other?’

‘The Wandering Jew.’

The Inspector laid down his pen and leaned forward, bridging his finger-tips under his chin.

‘If you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you’ll go and have a Turkish bath.’

The young man grasped and frowned.

‘You won’t take my information?’

‘Not in that form. Come again by-and-by.’

Amos walked straight out of the building and retraced his steps to Wardour Street.

‘I’ll watch for his coming out,’ he thought, ‘and have him arrested, on one charge only, by the constable on the beat. Where’s the place?’

Twice he walked the length of the street and back, with dull increasing amazement. The sunlight had edged its way into the fog by this time, and every door and window stood out sleek and self-evident. But amongst them all was none that corresponded to the door or window of his adventure.

He hung about till day was bright in the air, and until it occurred to him that his woeful and bloodstained appearance was beginning to excite unflattering comment. At that he trudged for the third time the entire length to and fro, and so coming out into Oxford Street stood on the edge of the pavement, as though it were the brink of Cocytus.

‘Well, she called me a boy,’ he muttered; ‘what does it matter?’

He hailed an early hansom and jumped in.

THE SHADOW-DANCE (#ulink_c6236c0a-9216-5cd8-a67d-75528a45a892)

‘Yes, it was a rum start,’ said the modish young man.

He was a modern version of the crutch and toothpick genus, a derivative from the ‘Gaiety boy’ of the Nellie Farren epoch, very spotless, very superior, very – fundamentally and combatively – simple. I don’t know how he had found his way into Carleon’s rooms and our company, but Carleon had a liking for odd characters. He was a collector, as it were, of human pottery, and to the collector, as we know, primitive examples are of especial interest.

The bait in this instance, I think, had been Bridge, which, since some formal ‘Ducdame’ must serve for calling fools into a circle, was our common pretext for assembling for an orgy of talk. We had played, however, for insignificant stakes and, on the whole, irreverently as regarded the sanctity of the game; and the young man was palpably bored. He thought us, without question, outsiders, and not altogether good form; and it was even a relief to him when the desultory play languished, and conversation became general in its place.

Somebody – I don’t remember on what provocation – had referred to the now historic affair of the Hungarian Ballet, which, the rage in London for a season, had voluntarily closed its own career a week before the date advertised for its termination; and the modish young man, it appeared, was the only one of us all who had happened to be present in the theatre on the occasion of the final performance. He told us so; and added that ‘it was a rum start’.

‘The abrupt finish was due, of course,’ said Carleon, bending forward, hectic, bright-eyed, and hugging himself, as was his wont, ‘to Kaunitz’s death. She was the bright particular “draw”. It would have been nothing without her. Besides, there was the tragedy. What was the “rum start”? Tell us.’

‘The way it ended that night,’ said the young man. He was a little abashed by the sudden concentration of interest on himself; but carried it off with sang-froid. Only a slight flush of pink on his youthful cheek, as he flicked the ash from his cigarette with the delicate little finger of the hand that held it, confessed to a certain uneasy self-consciousness.

‘I have heard something about it,’ said Carleon. ‘Give us your version.’

‘I’m no hand at describing things,’ responded the young man, committed and at bay; ‘never wrote a line of description in my life, nor wanted to. It was the Shadow-Dance, you know – the last thing on the programme. I dare say some of you have seen Kaunitz in it.’

One or two of us had. It was incomparably the most beautiful, the most mystic, idyll achieved by even that superlative dancer; a fantasia of moonlight, supported by an ethereal, only half-revealed, shimmer of attendant sylphids.

‘Yes,’ said Carleon eagerly.

‘Well, you know,’ said the young man, ‘there is a sort of dance first, in and out of the shadows, a mysterious, gossamery kind of business, with nobody made out exactly, and the moon slowly rising behind the trees. And then, suddenly, the moon reaches a gap in the branches, and – and it’s full moon, don’t you know, a regular white blaze of it, and all the shapes have vanished; only you sort of guess them, get a hint of their arms and faces hiding behind the leaves and under the shrubs and things. And that was the time when Kaunitz ought to have come on.’

‘Didn’t she come on?’

‘Not at first; not when she ought to. There was a devil of a pause, and you could see something was wrong. And after a bit there was a sort of rustle in the house, and people began to cough; and the music slipped round to the beginning again; and they danced it all over a second time, until it came to the full moonlight – and there she was this time all right – how, I don’t know, for I hadn’t seen her enter.’

‘How did she dance – when she did appear?’

The young man blew the ash from his cigarette. ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ he said.

‘You must know. Wasn’t it something quite out of the common? You called it a rum start, you remember.’

‘Well, if you insist upon it, it was – the most extraordinary thing I ever witnessed – more like what they describe the Pepper’s Ghost business than anything else I can think. She was here, there, anywhere; seemingly independent of what d’ye call – gravitation, you know; she seemed to jump and hang in the air before she came down. And there was another thing. The idea was to dance to her own shadow, you see – follow it, run away from it, flirt with it – and it was the business of the moon, or the limelight man, to keep the shadow going.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, there was no shadow – not a sign of one.’

‘That may have been the limelight man’s fault.’

‘Very likely; but I don’t think so. There was something odd about it all; and most in the way she went.’

‘How was that?’

‘Why, she just gave a spring, and was gone.’

Carleon sank back, with a sigh as if of repletion, and sat softly cracking his fingers together.

‘Didn’t you notice anything strange about the house, the audience?’ he said – ‘people crying out; girls crouching and hiding their faces, for instance?’

‘Perhaps, now I think of it,’ answered the modish youth. ‘I noticed, anyhow, that the curtain came down with a bang, and that there seemed a sort of general flurry and stampede of things, both behind it and on our side.’

‘Well, as to that, it is a fact, though you may not know it, that after that night the company absolutely refused to complete its engagement on any terms.’

‘I dare say. They had lost Kaunitz.’

‘To be sure they had. She was already lying dead in her dressing-room when the Shadow-Dance began.’

‘Not when it began?’

‘So, anyhow, it was whispered.’

‘Oh I say,’ said the young man, looking rather white; ‘I’m not going to believe that, you know.’

WILLIAM TYRWHITT’S ‘COPY’ (#ulink_1cfad1ac-98ea-54ae-9e33-38d7b49e1584)

This is the story of William Tyrwhitt, who went to King’s Cobb for rest and change, and, with the latter, at least, was so far accommodated as for a time to get beyond himself and into regions foreign to his experiences or his desires. And for this condition of his I hold myself something responsible, inasmuch as it was my inquisitiveness was the means of inducing him to an exploration, of which the result, with its measure of weirdness, was for him alone. But, it seems, I was appointed an agent of the unexplainable without my knowledge, and it was simply my misfortune to find my first unwitting commission in the selling of a friend.

I was for a few days, about the end of a particular July, lodged in that little old seaboard town of Dorset that is called King’s Cobb. Thither there came to me one morning a letter from William Tyrwhitt, the polemical journalist (a queer fish, like the cuttle, with an ink-bag for the confusion of enemies), complaining that he was fagged and used up, and desiring me to say that nowhere could complete rest be obtained as in King’s Cobb.