The Revenant of Thraxton Hall

CHAPTER 20 DEATH COMES TO THRAXTON HALL

The sound of weeping dredged Conan Doyle up from a suffocating tangle of dreams. He lay still a moment, ears straining, uncertain whether the sound was real, or merely the residue of a dream evaporating from his mind.

And then he heard it again: a child’s sobbing, the faint scratching of nails on wood, and a small voice whispering a barely audible string of sibilants.

Beware.

Heart thumping, he sat up in bed. Holding his breath. Listening.

Beware.

He slipped quietly from bed and crept barefoot across the cold rug to the door, where he hovered motionless.

Nails scratched on the far side of the door.

Beware.

His hand tightened on the knob, slowly turning. When he felt the latch ease open, he tensed himself and snatched the door wide.

Shadows. Emptiness. Nothing.

He stepped out into the dark hallway and peered along its length. At the corridor’s end he could dimly perceive the shadowy silhouette of a small girl. As he moved toward her, she took a step backward into the light. The glow of a paraffin lamp left burning at the top of the staircase fell across her face. It was a young girl in a grubby blue dress: the ghostly figure he had seen in the coppice. But she was real, of that he was certain, for she was solid, and the lamplight gleamed in her eye.

“Who are you, little girl?” he called in a hoarse whisper.

She took a step backward. Beware.

“Beware of what?” He took a step toward her, holding a hand out, beckoning. “I have children of my own. A little girl almost your age. Won’t you let me help you?”

Beware of the mirror.

“What mirror?” He eased a step forward. “Please tell me what you mean.”

It was the same girl in the blue dress he first spotted in the coppice. He was certain of it.

Find the mirror and you will find her.

He took another step, but the child turned and bolted, running down the hallway that led to the grand staircase. Without thinking, Conan Doyle gave chase. As he thundered around the corner, she was thirty feet ahead. And she was definitely real: he could hear her small feet drumming as she ran away. She turned right down another corner and he followed, gaining ground until he was mere feet behind. This hallway ended in a blank wall and he knew he had her cornered. But the little girl continued running until she reached the end of the corridor…

… and went straight through the wall.

Conan Doyle slid to a halt, breathless and amazed.

The next morning, as he descended the grand staircase, still groggy from lack of sleep, Conan Doyle reached the fateful step that made the entire staircase shake like jelly. Unprepared, he missed his footing and barely avoided a breakneck tumble by seizing a banister. The shock was enough to jolt him fully awake. As he regained his footing, he looked down at the entrance hall and found it was not empty. Lord Philipp Webb stood beneath the extinguished candelabrum, staring up at the portrait of Mariah Thraxton. Although he was some distance away, Conan Doyle thought he could detect a look of sensual longing on the patrician face.

Just then, Mister Greaves shuffled into the entrance hall, startling Lord Webb. He straightened his posture, his face regaining its usual haughty expression as he hastily replaced the black pince-nez on his nose.

“You there — servant,” he snarled. “Where is breakfast being served?”

Mister Greaves paused. “In the conservatory, sir. If you like I could lead you—”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Lord Webb, cutting him off in mid-sentence. He turned on his heel and strode off down the hallway. Conan Doyle paused a moment and then followed at a distance. Webb was a fast walker, and Conan Doyle had a job to keep up as the aristocrat strode along the hallways, devouring the distance with his long legs, and swept into the conservatory. Conan Doyle lingered a moment outside and then entered. Once again, he was late arriving and most everyone else had already breakfasted, as evidenced by the wreckage of plates the domestics were clearing away. Lord Webb was already seated at a small table, giving his breakfast order to the maid, while a lone figure sat at a small wrought-iron table next to the windows: Oscar Wilde, who was scribbling in a notebook as the Scottish doctor flopped heavily into the chair beside him.

“What are you writing, Oscar?”

“A poem,” Wilde said. “Like the Romantic Poets, I am inspired by ruins, especially when I am residing in one.” He finished a line and looked up at his friend. “Good Lord, Arthur. You’ve been in a fight. Tell me, did you win?”

Conan Doyle shook a head spun full of cobwebs. “Once again I slept poorly. Keep having the most beastly nightmares.”

“Ask them to move you.”

Conan Doyle massaged his eyes with the palms of his hands until flocks of black crows swarmed his vision. “Oddly enough, I don’t want to. The dreams are quite fascinating. Much dross for future stories.”

Wilde responded with a baffled shake of his head. “Arthur, only you would find something good in nightmares.”

Conan Doyle glanced down at Wilde’s plate. A large fish, skeletal from the gills down, stared up reproachfully. “What are, or rather were, you breakfasting on, Oscar?”

“Trout,” Wilde replied. “Caught from the very stream that is currently holding me hostage.” He dabbed a linen napkin to the corner of his smirk. “I consider that a form of revenge.”

The only fish Conan Doyle ever ate at breakfast was kippers. He looked up as the head housekeeper, Mrs. Kragan, entered with Mr. Greaves at her shoulder. She scanned the tables, spotted him, and walked swiftly over.

“I’ll have porridge followed by bacon and—”

“Doctor Doyle,” she interrupted, “you are a medical doctor, are you not, sir?”

The question took him by surprise. “Uh, why yes. That is correct.”

A look of discomfort swept her haggard features. “Then we may have need of your services.”

Conan Doyle thought of the blue girl he had seen or dreamed of the night before — the spectral girl whose appearance presaged death — and felt a cold current of dread flood through him.

“It is Madame Zhozhovsky,” Mrs. Kragan explained as they hurried along the second floor hallway. “She asked to be awakened at seven A.M. each morning. I’ve knocked repeatedly and so has Mister Greaves, but there’s no answer.”

When they reached the room, Toby the gardener, a rustic chap in a stained smock, was holding a pickaxe, apparently ready to break the door down.

Conan Doyle had been present at a number of police investigations and immediately took command. “I take it the door is locked and you have no second key?”

“Alas,” Mr. Greaves said, “the second key to this room was lost forty years ago.”

“What’s more, the door is locked from the inside,” Mrs. Kragan interjected. “We have no choice but to break it down.”

Conan Doyle knelt and peered in through the keyhole. Fortunately, the key had not been left in the lock. He thought a moment and then addressed the head housekeeper: “Mrs. Kragan, I shall need two hairpins, the longest and stoutest you have.”

The matron blinked at the request, but after a moment’s hesitation pulled two such pins from her enormous pile of hair, releasing two long gray strands.

“Thank you,” Conan Doyle said, receiving them. “I will need to recompense you for these pins, as I’m about to destroy them.”

With practiced, deft moves, Conan Doyle inserted the ends of the hairpins into the lock and, with his strong hands and some grimacing, bent the ends. He then reinserted them into the keyhole, twisting one and vibrating the other in the lock. A moment later the lock snapped open to the surprise of everyone watching, earning him a round of applause and a clap on the shoulder and a “good show!” from Oscar Wilde.

He blushed at the response. “Research for my detective fiction,” he explained to all. “I swear I have never used this knowledge for untoward purposes.”

Conan Doyle turned the door handle, cracked the door six inches, and called inside: “Madame Zhozhovsky, are you decent?”

When he received no reply, he lingered a moment and then slipped inside the room, drawing the door shut behind him. Several minutes passed.

“I hate suspense, don’t you?” Wilde asked of no one in particular. “The only suspense I enjoy comes between the popping of the cork and the first sip of champagne.”

No one laughed. He cleared his throat and fidgeted, for once at a loss for what to say. Finally, the door opened slightly and Conan Doyle’s head popped out.

“Will you come inside, please, Oscar?”

“Me? Whatever for?”

“I require your assistance.”

“Are you quite certain?” Wilde looked around. “I’m sure there must be a multitude of people, far more qualified than I—”

“Now, if you please, Oscar,” Conan Doyle said, seizing his friend roughly by the sleeve and dragging him inside.

As soon as Conan Doyle had Wilde inside the room, he thrust the door shut. “I’m sorry, Oscar, if the taint of death disturbs you, but I need a second of pair eyes to see what I don’t see. And I need your keen mind.”

“It’s not dead people I’m afraid of,” Wilde said. “After all, I was born and raised in Ireland. I have seen my share of dead siblings and deceased uncles, of layings’ out and wakes. It is that peculiar old lady smell I recoil from.”

The room did, indeed, hold the reek of stale sweat, mothballs, and cheap perfume along with the kind of funk one often associates with the aged. Madame Zhozhovsky lay atop her bed, fully clothed. Her small feet dangled over the end of the mattress. Her head was tilted back, mouth agape, eyes wide open. But instead of her uncanny gaze, the pupils were clouded with the opaque stare of death. Wilde took one look and recoiled.

“Ugh!” he exclaimed. “My life is a constant struggle to fill my mind with the beautiful and the sublime and now you make me look upon this. I shall never eat monkfish again.”

“Come now, Oscar. Look not only at her. Look around the room. I’m counting on your artist’s perception to catch what I might have overlooked.”

Wilde snatched a lavender-scented handkerchief from his breast pocket and clamped it over his nose and mouth as he bent over the corpse, scrutinizing it.

“Looks like she died of fear,” he said in a muffled voice. “She wears an expression of consuming horror upon her face — as if she perished mid-scream.”

“Yes,” Conan Doyle agreed. “Exactly how I would have described it.”

“Whatever could have caused it?” Wilde looked at the door, which had been locked from within, and then around at the room. It was small and sparsely furnished with a few hardback chairs, a small dressing table, and an ancient chestnut wardrobe against one wall. Then he noticed the windows, one of which had been opened at the very top, allowing a two-foot gap. His eyes returned to meet Conan Doyle’s.

“Yes,” Conan Doyle said. “I noticed the very same thing.”

“Do you think?”

“It seems an uncanny coincidence.”

Conan Doyle cleared his throat and said, “There is something I must tell you of, Oscar. Something I observed from my bedroom window last night.”

Wilde’s bushy eyebrows rose, his large lips pursed in a lascivious expression. “Observed from your bedroom window? A promisingly naughty beginning. I hope your story has an equally ribald ending.”

Conan Doyle shook his head. “Sorry to disappoint, Oscar, but no.” He shifted his feet uneasily. “In truth, it may be of no consequence at all, because I am still not certain of what I saw.”

“Please do not keep me in suspense any longer, Arthur, or I may strain a muscle.”

Conan Doyle related the story of seeing what he took to be the shadowy form of Daniel Dunglas Hume levitating from his window. “But it was so dark I could scarcely make out any particular detail and besides…” He looked rather embarrassed. “The room I occupy is conducive to the most vivid dreams and hallucinations. “I might very well have imagined the whole event.”

He threw an exasperated look at his friend and returned to examining the corpse.

“Something is missing,” Wilde said, looking around.

“What?”

“Not entirely certain. Something that should be here.”

Wilde prowled the room, nosing into cupboards and opening and closing drawers, prying open the giant wardrobe only to find little more than a sacklike dress and Madame Zhozhovsky’s nether garments dangling amid the cobwebs.

“Oscar,” Conan Doyle said quietly. “I am now certain our elderly lady did not die of natural causes or because of a fright. Come here.”

Wilde reluctantly returned to the bedside. “Look at this,” Conan Doyle said. He lifted the enormous double chins of Madame Zhozhovsky to reveal a narrow leather strap wound tightly around her throat.

“Strangled!” He looked up at Conan Doyle in astonishment. “But by whom?”

“Precisely,” Conan Doyle replied. His fingers traced the strap until he came to a frazzled end. “The leather looks like it’s been chewed through.” He unraveled the strap and traced its other end to a loop around Madame Zhozhovsky’s left wrist. “It is a leash, not a garrote!”

The realization hit them in synchrony and they both spoke aloud at the same moment:

“The monkey!”

He and Wilde stepped away from the body and looked around the room with fresh urgency. “Her death could be a complete fluke, an accident,” Conan Doyle said. “She sits on the edge of the bed to begin undressing and the monkey, which was often perched on one shoulder, could have entangled her neck with its leash. She struggles and the monkey panics, inadvertently choking her to death. Finding itself trapped, the monkey eventually chews through the leash and escapes.”

“Escapes where?” Wilde asked. It was an apt question and for the next few minutes they probed under the bed and into every drawer, nook, and cupboard that could possibly harbor a small primate. But found nothing.

“The open window,” Wilde concluded. “It must have gone out the window.”

The two friends moved to the window where they stood looking out, eyeing the façade skeptically. “There’s not a ledge nor a handhold in sight — even for a monkey.” Conan Doyle’s eyes scoured the ground below the window. “And no monkey sprawled dead on the ground below.” He turned his back on the window and swept the room with a furious gaze. “Well, he must be somewhere!”

“That’s what Stanley said about Livingstone,” Wilde quipped, “and look how long it took him to track the fellow down.”

“Oscar,” the Scots writer said after several moments pondering, “have you read Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’?”

“Yes.” A light went on in Wilde’s eyes. “The chimney!”

But a quick perusal of the fireplace revealed not the slightest speck of dislodged soot on the cream-colored hearth tiles. Conan Doyle crouched down and peered up the chimney. “The flue is shut tight. So there’s no possible way the monkey went up the chimney.”

He clambered to his feet and the two friends exchanged a mystified look.

“So where is our monkey, then?” Wilde asked.

The words he had famously put into the mouth of Sherlock Holmes echoed in his mind: Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Accepting it, he turned and eyed the open window with resignation. “The monkey is not in this room — therefore it must have gone out the window. It either fell to its death and was carried off by wild animals, or it successfully clambered down the walls somehow and may never be recovered.”

“So what do we tell the others?”

Conan Doyle stroked his moustache, lower lip thrust out. “The truth. We have a murder suspect who has escaped.”

“Or a possible witness who cannot speak.”

The two men fell into a thoughtful silence, contemplating the conundrum set before them. And then, at the same moment, both raised their eyes and gazed once again at the open window.

“It does seem a coincidence, does it not?”

“Yes,” Conan Doyle agreed. “I think we should speak to our levitating American cousin.”

They found Daniel Dunglas Hume perched on a damp park bench in the formal garden. The Yankee psychic watched them approach with a guarded smile. “I take it you gents are not here to enjoy the soft English air between rain squalls?”

Conan Doyle answered with a question. “You heard about the death of Madame Zhozhovsky?”

The handsome head nodded. “I did, sir, and was greatly aggrieved to hear of it.”

“And yet you never came to her room this morning? Everyone else was there. Your absence was noted.”

Hume would not meet Conan Doyle’s gaze. “I understand the old lady died of natural causes.”

“It is possible that Nature played a role,” Wilde said. “But there was nothing natural about her death.”

“Then I was misinformed,” Hume said.

“But why did you not come?”

Hume looked peeved. “I was… indisposed. I have been under considerable strain recently. I was resting—”

“Resting?” Conan Doyle’s face hardened. “And yet I saw you levitate from your window last night and float back in at another. It must have been one o’clock in the morning.”

Hume attempted to laugh it off. “One in the morning, you say? I believe Mister Doyle, you must have been dreaming—”

“Doctor Doyle, if you please, sir. I know what I saw and I saw you levitate from room to room. Do you deny it?”

“It never happened.” The American got up from the bench and made to leave.

Conan Doyle arrested him with a hand on his sleeve. “I have a few more questions, Mister Hume.”

Hume’s friendly demeanor dissolved. He snatched loose his sleeve. “As I said, sir, it never happened.”

“The window of Madame Zhozhovsky’s room was lowered.” Wilde said. “A two-foot gap at the top.”

“Just the same as you levitated through,” Conan Doyle added.

Hume’s expression never wavered. It was obvious the American was a formidable card player. “I heard the old lady’s death had something to do with the monkey — its leash wound around her throat. Sounds like a tragic accident to me.”

“Except there are some vexing anomalies,” Conan Doyle said. “For one, the room was locked from the inside. Therefore, the only way in and out was through the open window.”

“And yet the monkey has vanished,” Wilde added.

“Surely it climbed out the open window. Isn’t that what monkeys do?”

“Except there are no handholds outside the window — even for a monkey. Just a sheer drop of forty feet — and we found no dead monkey on the ground below.”

“Doctor Doyle, are you now also an expert on monkeys and their climbing techniques?”

Conan Doyle bit his lip. It was different writing the dialogue for his Sherlock Holmes stories, where Holmes was always cleverer than those he interrogated.

“Forget the monkey. Here is a fact known only to Mister Wilde and myself. Last night, around one in the morning, I looked out my bedroom window and saw you clearly. You levitated out your window, floated toward where the other guests were sleeping, and went in through another open window. If not Madame Zhozhovsky’s, then whose room did you enter?”

Hume’s gaze clashed with Conan Doyle’s. “You are mistaken. I had nothing to do with Madame Zhozhovsky’s death. I believe she was a fraud, but I held no enmity toward her. How could I? She was just a silly old woman who wanted the same thing I have sought all my life — fame. Now you gentlemen must excuse me.”

He pushed past Conan Doyle, who halted him with a final question. “Very well, I am not accusing you of murder. Just tell me I did not witness you levitate from your window.”

Hume’s back stiffened with anger. When he turned there were storm clouds gathering in his eyes. “Perhaps you did or did not see me. About that I will say nothing more. Do not ask again. I would sooner take the truth to my grave, or… if you insist upon it… yours.”