Chapter II

In the silence that followed the ghostly disturbance we sat around the table listening. Sir James was the first to speak.

“A demonstration, Mr. Klaw!” he said. “This sort of thing happens every night!”

“Ah!” rumbled Moris Klaw, “every night, eh? That laughing? You have investigated--yes--no?”

“I tried to investigate,” explained the baronet, “but quite frankly I didn’t know where to begin.”

We were all recovering our composure somewhat, I think.

“You hear that laughter nowhere but in this room?” asked Klaw.

“I have always heard it when we have been seated at this table,” was the reply; “at no other time, but it can be heard clearly beyond the room. The servants have heard it. Excepting the housekeeper and the butler, they are leaving almost immediately.”

“Ah! _canaille!_” grunted Moris Klaw; “fear-pigs! It is always so, these servants. So you have not located the one that laughs, no?”

“No,” answered Sir James; “and he doesn’t stop at laughing--does he, Clem?”

Clement Leyland shook his head. He looked even paler than usual, I thought, and the uncanny incident seemed to have disturbed him greatly.

“What else?” rumbled Moris Klaw. “The gray monk is forgetting his manners. He becomes rude, eh--that gray monk?”

“The house has practically become uninhabitable,” said the baronet, bitterly. “None of the usual phenomena are missing. We have slamming doors, phantom footsteps, and, if the servants are to be believed, half the forces of hell loose here at night!”

“But your _own_ experiences?” interrupted Klaw.

“My own experiences in brief amount to this: I rarely sit at this table at night without hearing that beastly laughter, at least once. I never go into the billiard room, which opens out under the gallery yonder, without feeling a cold wind blowing upon my face or head, even in perfectly still weather, or with all the windows closed. To the left of the billiard room, and opening out of it, is a third centre of these disturbances. It’s the gun room, and guns have been fired there in the night, with the door locked, on no fewer than five occasions!”

Moris Klaw, from a tail pocket of his coat, produced a cylindrical scent spray and squirted verbena upon his high yellow forehead.

“It grows exciting, this,” he said. “I require the cool brain.”

“Finally,” added Sir James, “the only other point worth mentioning is the ghostly voice which regularly wakes me from my sleep at night.”

“A voice,” rumbled Klaw; “what voice, and what does it say, that voice?”

“I won’t repeat what it says!” replied the baronet, glancing at Isis; “but it offers obscene suggestions or that is the impression I have of it--a low, filthy mumbling; if you can follow me, the voice of something dead and infinitely evil.”

Moris Klaw stood up.

“This intelligence,” he rumbled, “a living or a dead one, has thoughts then, and thoughts, Sir James, are things. I shall sleep in one of the centres of its activity to-night, perhaps here, perhaps in the billiard room or the gun room. Isis, my child, bring for me my odically sterilized pillows. This is a charming case and worthy of the subtle method.”

He placed his hands upon the shoulders of Sir James Leyland, who stood facing him.

“Evil thoughts live, Sir James,” he said. “I cannot explain to you how hard it is to slay them. Few good thoughts survive; but such an ancient abode as this”--he waved his long hands characteristically about him--“is peopled with thought-forms surviving from the dark ages. I have opened the inner eye, my friend. Mercifully, perhaps, the inner eye is closed in most of us; in some it is blind. But I have opened that eye and trained it. As I sleep”--he lowered his voice oddly--“those thought things come to me. It is an uncomfortable gift, yes; for here in Grange I shall find myself to-night in evil company. Murders long forgotten will be accomplished again before that inner eye of mine! I shall swim in blood! Assassins will come stealing to me, murdered ones will scream in my ears, the secret knife will flash, the honest ax do its deadly work; for in the moment of such deeds two imperishable thought-forms are created: the thought-form of the slayer, strong to survive, because a blood-lustful thought, a revengeful thought; and the thought of the slain, likewise a long-surviving thought because a thought of wildest despair, a final massing of the mental forces greater than any generally possible in life, upon that last awful grievance.”

He paused, looking around him.

“From the phantom company,” he said, “I must pick out that one whose thought is of laughter, of firing guns, and of evil whisperings. What a task! Wondrous is the science of the mental negative!”

The meeting broke up, then, and Isis Klaw, having brought from a large case, which formed part of her father’s luggage, two huge red cushions, bade us good-night and retired to her own room. Moris Klaw, with a cushion swinging in each hand, went shuffling ungainly from room to room like some strange animal seeking a lair.

“Do I understand,” Clement Leyland whispered to me, “that your friend proposes to sleep down here?”

“Yes,” I replied, smiling at his evident wonderment; “such is his method of investigation, eccentric, but effective.”

“It is really effective, then? The experiences given in ‘Psychic Angles’ are not fabulous?”

“In no way. Moris Klaw is a very remarkable man. I have yet to meet the mystery which is beyond him.”

Moris Klaw’s rumbling voice, which frequently reminded me of the rolling of casks in a distant cellar, broke in upon our conversation:

“Here is the ideal spot; here upon this settee by the door of the gun room I am in the centre of these psychic storms which nightly arise in Grange.”

“If you are determined to remain here, Mr. Klaw,” said Sir James, “I shall not endeavour to dissuade you, of course; but I should prefer to see you turn into more comfortable quarters.”

“No, no,” was the reply; “it is here I shall lay down my old head, it is here I shall lie and wait for him, the one who laughs.”

Accordingly, since the hour grew late, we left this novel ghost-hunter stretched out upon the settee in the billiard room; and as I knew his objection to any disturbance, I suggested to Sir James that we should retire out of earshot for a final smoke ere seeking our separate apartments.

We sat chatting for close upon an hour, I suppose. Then Clement Leyland left us, saying that he had had a heavy day.

“Clement’s been working real hard,” the baronet confided to me. “In the circumstances, as I think I told you, I have decided to abandon Grange, and we are having the old Friars House, a mile from here, but on part of the estate, restored. It hasn’t been inhabited for about three generations, and it’s very much older than Grange; part of it dates back to King John. Perhaps I can get servants to stop there, though, and it’s quite impossible to keep up Grange without a staff. Clement has been superintending the work over there all day; he’s one of the best.”

A few moments later we parted for the night. I left Sir James at the door of his room, which had formerly opened off the balcony overlooking the banqueting hall. That door was now walled up, however, and the entrance was from the corridor beyond. The room allotted to me was upon the opposite side of the same corridor and farther to the north.

I felt particularly unlike sleep. The extremely modern furniture of my room could not rob the walls, with their small square panelling, of the air of hoary antiquity which was theirs. The one window, deep set and overlooking an extensive orchard, was such as might have formed the focus for cavalierly glance, was such as might have framed the head of a romantic maid of Stuart days. And with it all was that gloomy air that had a more remote antiquity, that harked back to darker times than those of the Merry Monarch: the air of ghostly evil, the cloud from which proceeded the devilish laughter, the obscene whisperings.

Where the shadows of the trees lay beneath me on the turf, I could fancy a gray cowled figure flitting across the lighted patches and lurking, evilly watching, amid the pools of darkness. Sleep was impossible. Moris Klaw, to whom such fears as mine were utterly unknown, might repose, nay, was actually reposing, in the very vortex of this psychical storm; but I was otherwise constituted. I had been with him in many cases of dark enough evil-doing, but this purely ghostly menace was something that sapped my courage.

Grange stood upon rather high ground, and in a northeasterly direction, peeping out from the trees of a wooded slope, showed a gray tower almost like a giant monkish figure under the moon. I watched it with a vague interest. It was Friars House, to which the baronet projected retreat from the haunted Grange. Lighting my pipe, I leaned from the window, idly watching that ancient tower and wondering if more evil deeds had taken place within it--long as it had stood there amid the trees--than those which had left their ghostly mark upon Grange.

The night was very beautiful and very still. Not the slightest sound could I detect within or without the house. How long I had lounged there in this half-dreamy, but vaguely fearful, mood I cannot say, but I was aroused by a tremendous outcry. Loud it broke in upon the silence of the night, broke in on my mood with nerve-racking effect. My pipe dropped to the floor, and taking one step across the room I stood there, rooted to the spot with indefinable horror.

“Father!” it came in a piercing scream, and again: “Father! O God! save him! save him!”