The Thing in the Hall

Edition and rights: Complete original English text from Project Gutenberg ebook #72421. This edition is identified as public domain in the USA; the original author died in 1940, satisfying the ordinary Pakistan copyright term. This is the original work, not an AI retelling.

More horror stories.

THE THING IN THE HALL


The following pages are the account given me by Dr Assheton of the Thing
in the Hall. I took notes, as copious as my quickness of hand allowed
me, from his dictation, and subsequently read to him this narrative in
its transcribed and connected form. This was on the day before his
death, which indeed probably occurred within an hour after I had left
him, and, as readers of inquests and such atrocious literature may
remember, I had to give evidence before the coroner’s jury. Only a week
before Dr Assheton had to give similar evidence, but as a medical
expert, with regard to the death of his friend, Louis Fielder, which
occurred in a manner identical with his own. As a specialist, he said he
believed that his friend had committed suicide while of unsound mind,
and the verdict was brought in accordingly. But in the inquest held over
Dr Assheton’s body, though the verdict eventually returned was the same,
there was more room for doubt.

For I was bound to state that only shortly before his death, I read what
follows to him; that he corrected me with extreme precision on a few
points of detail, that he seemed perfectly himself, and that at the end
he used these words:

“I am quite certain as a brain specialist that I am completely sane, and
that these things happened not merely in my imagination, but in the
external world. If I had to give evidence again about poor Louis, I
should be compelled to take a different line. Please put that down at
the end of your account, or at the beginning, if it arranges itself
better so.”

There will be a few words I must add at the end of this story, and a few
words of explanation must precede it. Briefly, they are these.

Francis Assheton and Louis Fielder were up at Cambridge together, and
there formed the friendship that lasted nearly till their death. In
general attributes no two men could have been less alike, for while Dr
Assheton had become at the age of thirty-five the first and final
authority on his subject, which was the functions and diseases of the
brain, Louis Fielder at the same age was still on the threshold of
achievement. Assheton, apparently without any brilliance at all, had by
careful and incessant work arrived at the top of his profession, while
Fielder, brilliant at school, brilliant at college and brilliant ever
afterwards, had never done anything. He was too eager, so it seemed to
his friends, to set about the dreary work of patient investigation and
logical deductions; he was for ever guessing and prying, and striking
out luminous ideas, which he left burning, so to speak, to illumine the
work of others. But at bottom, the two men had this compelling interest
in common, namely, an insatiable curiosity after the unknown, perhaps
the most potent bond yet devised between the solitary units that make up
the race of man. Both--till the end--were absolutely fearless, and Dr
Assheton would sit by the bedside of the man stricken with bubonic
plague to note the gradual surge of the tide of disease to the reasoning
faculty with the same absorption as Fielder would study X-rays one week,
flying machines the next, and spiritualism the third. The rest of the
story, I think, explains itself--or does not quite do so. This, anyhow,
is what I read to Dr Assheton, being the connected narrative of what he
had himself told me. It is he, of course, who speaks.

       *       *       *       *       *

“After I returned from Paris, where I had studied under Charcot, I set
up practice at home. The general doctrine of hypnotism, suggestion, and
cure by such means had been accepted even in London by this time, and,
owing to a few papers I had written on the subject, together with my
foreign diplomas, I found that I was a busy man almost as soon as I had
arrived in town. Louis Fielder had his ideas about how I should make my
début (for he had ideas on every subject, and all of them original), and
entreated me to come and live not in the stronghold of doctors,
‘Chloroform Square,’ as he called it, but down in Chelsea, where there
was a house vacant next his own.

‘Who cares where a doctor lives,’ he said, ‘so long as he cures people?
Besides you don’t believe in old methods; why believe in old localities?
Oh, there is an atmosphere of painless death in Chloroform Square! Come
and make people live instead! And on most evenings I shall have so much
to tell you; I can’t “drop in” across half London.’

Now if you have been abroad for five years, it is a great deal to know
that you have any intimate friend at all still left in the metropolis,
and, as Louis said, to have that intimate friend next door, is an
excellent reason for going next door. Above all, I remembered from
Cambridge days, what Louis’ ‘dropping in’ meant. Towards bed-time, when
work was over, there would come a rapid step on the landing, and for an
hour, or two hours, he would gush with ideas. He simply diffused life,
which is ideas, wherever he went. He fed one’s brain, which is the one
thing which matters. Most people who are ill, are ill because their
brain is starving, and the body rebels, and gets lumbago or cancer. That
is the chief doctrine of my work such as it has been. All bodily disease
springs from the brain. It is merely the brain that has to be fed and
rested and exercised properly to make the body absolutely healthy, and
immune from all disease. But when the brain is affected, it is as useful
to pour medicines down the sink, as make your patient swallow them,
unless--and this is a paramount limitation--unless he believes in them.

I said something of the kind to Louis one night, when, at the end of a
busy day, I had dined with him. We were sitting over coffee in the hall,
or so it is called, where he takes his meals. Outside, his house is just
like mine, and ten thousand other small houses in London, but on
entering, instead of finding a narrow passage with a door on one side,
leading into the dining-room, which again communicates with a small back
room called ‘the study,’ he has had the sense to eliminate all
unnecessary walls, and consequently the whole ground floor of his house
is one room, with stairs leading up to the first floor. Study,
dining-room and passage have been knocked into one; you enter a big room
from the front door. The only drawback is that the postman makes loud
noises close to you, as you dine, and just as I made these commonplace
observations to him about the effect of the brain on the body and the
senses, there came a loud rap, somewhere close to me, that was
startling.

‘You ought to muffle your knocker,’ I said, ‘anyhow during the time of
meals.’

Louis leaned back and laughed.

‘There isn’t a knocker,’ he said. ‘You were startled a week ago, and
said the same thing. So I took the knocker off. The letters slide in
now. But you heard a knock, did you?’

‘Didn’t you?’ said I.

‘Why, certainly. But it wasn’t the postman. It was the Thing. I don’t
know what it is. That makes it so interesting.’

Now if there is one thing that the hypnotist, the believer in
unexplained influences, detests and despises, it is the whole
root-notion of spiritualism. Drugs are not more opposed to his belief
than the exploded, discredited idea of the influence of spirits on our
lives. And both are discredited for the same reason; it is easy to
understand how brain can act on brain, just as it is easy to understand
how body can act on body, so that there is no more difficulty in the
reception of the idea that the strong mind can direct the weak one, than
there is in the fact of a wrestler of greater strength overcoming one of
less. But that spirits should rap at furniture and divert the course of
events is as absurd as administering phosphorus to strengthen the brain.
That was what I thought then.

However, I felt sure it was the postman, and instantly rose and went to
the door. There were no letters in the box, and I opened the door. The
postman was just ascending the steps. He gave the letters into my hand.

Louis was sipping his coffee when I came back to the table.

‘Have you ever tried table-turning?’ he asked. ‘It’s rather odd.’

‘No, and I have not tried violet-leaves as a cure for cancer,’ I said.

‘Oh, try everything,’ he said. ‘I know that that is your plan, just as
it is mine. All these years that you have been away, you have tried all
sorts of things, first with no faith, then with just a little faith, and
finally with mountain-moving faith. Why, you didn’t believe in hypnotism
at all when you went to Paris.’

He rang the bell as he spoke, and his servant came up and cleared the
table. While this was being done we strolled about the room, looking at
prints, with applause for a Bartolozzi that Louis had bought in the New
Cut, and dead silence over a ‘Perdita’ which he had acquired at
considerable cost. Then he sat down again at the table on which we had
dined. It was round, and mahogany-heavy, with a central foot divided
into claws.

‘Try its weight,’ he said; ‘see if you can push it about.’

So I held the edge of it in my hands, and found that I could just move
it. But that was all; it required the exercise of a good deal of
strength to stir it.

‘Now put your hands on the top of it,’ he said, ‘and see what you can
do.’

I could not do anything, my fingers merely slipped about on it. But I
protested at the idea of spending the evening thus.

‘I would much sooner play chess or noughts and crosses with you,’ I
said, ‘or even talk about politics, than turn tables. You won’t mean to
push, nor shall I, but we shall push without meaning to.’

Louis nodded.

‘Just a minute,’ he said, ‘let us both put our fingers only on the top
of the table and push for all we are worth, from right to left.’

We pushed. At least I pushed, and I observed his finger-nails. From pink
they grew to white, because of the pressure he exercised. So I must
assume that he pushed too. Once, as we tried this, the table creaked.
But it did not move.

Then there came a quick peremptory rap, not I thought on the front door,
but somewhere in the room.

‘It’s the Thing,’ said he.

To-day, as I speak to you, I suppose it was. But on that evening it
seemed only like a challenge. I wanted to demonstrate its absurdity.

‘For five years, on and off, I’ve been studying rank spiritualism,’ he
said. ‘I haven’t told you before, because I wanted to lay before you
certain phenomena, which I can’t explain, but which now seem to me to be
at my command. You shall see and hear, and then decide if you will help
me.’

‘And in order to let me see better, you are proposing to put out the
lights,’ I said.

‘Yes; you will see why.’

‘I am here as a sceptic,’ said I.

‘Scep away,’ said he.

Next moment the room was in darkness, except for a very faint glow of
firelight. The window-curtains were thick, and no street-illumination
penetrated them, and the familiar, cheerful sounds of pedestrians and
wheeled traffic came in muffled. I was at the side of the table towards
the door; Louis was opposite me, for I could see his figure dimly
silhouetted against the glow from the smouldering fire.

‘Put your hands on the table,’ he said, ‘quite lightly, and--how shall I
say it--expect.’

Still protesting in spirit, I expected. I could hear his breathing
rather quickened, and it seemed to me odd that anybody could find
excitement in standing in the dark over a large mahogany table,
expecting. Then--through my finger-tips, laid lightly on the table,
there began to come a faint vibration, like nothing so much as the
vibration through the handle of a kettle when water is beginning to boil
inside it. This got gradually more pronounced and violent till it was
like the throbbing of a motor-car. It seemed to give off a low humming
note. Then quite suddenly the table seemed to slip from under my fingers
and began very slowly to revolve.

‘Keep your hands on it and move with it,’ said Louis, and as he spoke I
saw his silhouette pass away from in front of the fire, moving as the
table moved.

For some moments there was silence, and we continued, rather absurdly,
to circle round keeping step, so to speak, with the table. Then Louis
spoke again, and his voice was trembling with excitement.

‘Are you there?’ he said.

There was no reply, of course, and he asked it again. This time there
came a rap like that which I had thought during dinner to be the
postman. But whether it was that the room was dark, or that despite
myself I felt rather excited too, it seemed to me now to be far louder
than before. Also it appeared to come neither from here nor there, but
to be diffused through the room.

Then the curious revolving of the table ceased, but the intense, violent
throbbing continued. My eyes were fixed on it, though owing to the
darkness I could see nothing, when quite suddenly a little speck of
light moved across it, so that for an instant I saw my own hands. Then
came another and another, like the spark of matches struck in the dark,
or like fire-flies crossing the dusk in southern gardens. Then came
another knock of shattering loudness, and the throbbing of the table
ceased, and the lights vanished.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such were the phenomena at the first séance at which I was present, but
Fielder, it must be remembered, had been studying, ‘expecting,’ he
called it, for some years. To adopt spiritualistic language (which at
that time I was very far from doing), he was the medium, I merely the
observer, and all the phenomena I had seen that night were habitually
produced or witnessed by him. I make this limitation since he told me
that certain of them now appeared to be outside his own control
altogether. The knockings would come when his mind, as far as he knew,
was entirely occupied in other matters, and sometimes he had even been
awakened out of sleep by them. The lights were also independent of his
volition.

Now my theory at the time was that all these things were purely
subjective in him, and that what he expressed by saying that they were
out of his control, meant that they had become fixed and rooted in the
unconscious self, of which we know so little, but which, more and more,
we see to play so enormous a part in the life of a man. In fact, it is
not too much to say that the vast majority of our deeds spring,
apparently without volition, from this unconscious self. All hearing is
the unconscious exercise of the aural nerve, all seeing of the optic,
all walking, all ordinary movement seem to be done without the exercise
of will on our part. Nay more, should we take to some new form of
progression, skating, for instance, the beginner will learn with falls
and difficulty the outside edge, but within a few hours of his having
learned his balance on it, he will give no more thought to what he
learned so short a time ago as an acrobatic feat, than he gives to the
placing of one foot before the other.

But to the brain specialist all this was intensely interesting, and to
the student of hypnotism, as I was, even more so, for (such was the
conclusion I came to after this first séance), the fact that I saw and
heard just what Louis saw and heard was an exhibition of
thought-transference which in all my experience in the Charcot-schools I
had never seen surpassed, if indeed rivalled. I knew that I was myself
extremely sensitive to suggestion, and my part in it this evening I
believed to be purely that of the receiver of suggestions so vivid that
I visualised and heard these phenomena which existed only in the brain
of my friend.

We talked over what had occurred upstairs. His view was that the Thing
was trying to communicate with us. According to him it was the Thing
that moved the table and tapped, and made us see streaks of light.

‘Yes, but the Thing,’ I interrupted, ‘what do you mean? Is it a
great-uncle--oh, I have seen so many relatives appear at séances, and
heard so many of their dreadful platitudes--or what is it? A spirit?
Whose spirit?’

Louis was sitting opposite to me, and on the little table before us
there was an electric light. Looking at him I saw the pupil of his eye
suddenly dilate. To the medical man--provided that some violent change
in the light is not the cause of the dilation--that meant only one
thing, terror. But it quickly resumed its normal proportion again.

Then he got up, and stood in front of the fire.

‘No, I don’t think it is great-uncle anybody,’ he said, ‘I don’t know,
as I told you, what the Thing is. But if you ask me what my conjecture
is, it is that the Thing is an Elemental.’

‘And pray explain further. What is an Elemental?’

Once again his eye dilated.

‘It will take two minutes,’ he said. ‘But, listen. There are good things
in this world, are there not, and bad things? Cancer, I take it is bad,
and--and fresh air is good; honesty is good, lying is bad. Impulses of
some sort direct both sides, and some power suggests the impulses. Well,
I went into this spiritualistic business impartially. I learned to
“expect,” to throw open the door into the soul, and I said, “Anyone may
come in.” And I think Something has applied for admission, the Thing
that tapped and turned the table and struck matches, as you saw, across
it. Now the control of the evil principle in the world is in the hands
of a power which entrusts its errands to the things which I call
Elementals. Oh, they have been seen; I doubt not that they will be seen
again. I did not, and do not ask good spirits to come in. I don’t want
“The Church’s one foundation” played on a musical box. Nor do I _want_
an Elemental. I only threw open the door. I believe the Thing has come
into my house, and is establishing communication with me. Oh, I want to
go the whole hog. What is it? In the name of Satan, if necessary, what
is it? I just want to know.’

       *       *       *       *       *

What followed I thought then might easily be an invention of the
imagination, but what I believed to have happened was this. A piano with
music on it was standing at the far end of the room by the door, and a
sudden draught entered the room, so strong that the leaves turned. Next
the draught troubled a vase of daffodils, and the yellow heads nodded.
Then it reached the candles that stood close to us, and they fluttered,
burning blue and low. Then it reached me, and the draught was cold, and
stirred my hair. Then it eddied, so to speak, and went across to Louis,
and his hair also moved, as I could see. Then it went downwards towards
the fire, and flames suddenly started up in its path, blown upwards. The
rug by the fireplace flapped also.

‘Funny, wasn’t it?’ he asked.

‘And has the Elementa gone up the chimney?’ said I.

‘Oh, no,’ said he, ‘the Thing only passed us.’

Then suddenly he pointed at the wall just behind my chair, and his voice
cracked as he spoke.

‘Look, what’s that?’ he said. ‘There on the wall.’

Considerably startled I turned in the direction of his shaking finger.
The wall was pale grey in tone, and sharp-cut against it was a shadow
that, as I looked, moved. It was like the shadow of some enormous slug,
legless and fat, some two feet high by about four feet long. Only at one
end of it was a head shaped like the head of a seal, with open mouth and
panting tongue.

Then even as I looked it faded, and from somewhere close at hand there
sounded another of those shattering knocks.

For a moment after there was silence between us, and horror was thick as
snow in the air. But, somehow neither Louis or I were frightened for
more than one moment. The whole thing was so absorbingly interesting.

‘That’s what I mean by its being outside my control,’ he said. ‘I said I
was ready for any--any visitor to come in, and by God, we’ve got a
beauty.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Now I was still, even in spite of the appearance of this shadow, quite
convinced that I was only taking observations of a most curious case of
disordered brain accompanied by the most vivid and remarkable
thought-transference. I believed that I had not seen a slug-like shadow
at all, but that Louis had visualised this dreadful creature so
intensely that I saw what he saw. I found also that his spiritualistic
trash-books which I thought a truer nomenclature than text-books,
mentioned this as a common form for Elementals to take. He on the other
hand was more firmly convinced than ever that we were dealing not with a
subjective but an objective phenomenon.

       *       *       *       *       *

For the next six months or so we sat constantly, but made no further
progress, nor did the Thing or its shadow appear again, and I began to
feel that we were really wasting time. Then it occurred to me, to get in
a so-called medium, induce hypnotic sleep, and see if we could learn
anything further. This we did, sitting as before round the dining-room
table. The room was not quite dark, and I could see sufficiently clearly
what happened.

The medium, a young man, sat between Louis and myself, and without the
slightest difficulty I put him into a light hypnotic sleep. Instantly
there came a series of the most terrific raps, and across the table
there slid something more palpable than a shadow, with a faint luminance
about it, as if the surface of it was smouldering. At the moment the
medium’s face became contorted to a mask of hellish terror; mouth and
eyes were both open, and the eyes were focussed on something close to
him. The Thing waving its head came closer and closer to him, and
reached out towards his throat. Then with a yell of panic, and warding
off this horror with his hands, the medium sprang up, but It had already
caught hold, and for the moment he could not get free. Then
simultaneously Louis and I went to his aid, and my hands touched
something cold and slimy. But pull as we could we could not get it away.
There was no firm hand-hold to be taken; it was as if one tried to grasp
slimy fur, and the touch of it was horrible, unclean, like a leper.
Then, in a sort of despair, though I still could not believe that the
horror was real, for it must be a vision of diseased imagination, I
remembered that the switch of the four electric lights was close to my
hand. I turned them all on. There on the floor lay the medium, Louis was
kneeling by him with a face of wet paper, but there was nothing else
there. Only the collar of the medium was crumpled and torn, and on his
throat were two scratches that bled.

The medium was still in hypnotic sleep, and I woke him. He felt at his
collar, put his hand to his throat and found it bleeding, but, as I
expected, knew nothing whatever of what had passed. We told him that
there had been an unusual manifestation, and he had, while in sleep,
wrestled with something. We had got the result we wished for, and were
much obliged to him.

I never saw him again. A week after that he died of blood-poisoning.

       *       *       *       *       *

From that evening dates the second stage of this adventure. The Thing
had materialised (I use again spiritualistic language which I still did
not use at the time). The huge slug, the Elemental, manifested itself
no longer by knocks and waltzing tables, nor yet by shadows. It was
there in a form that could be seen and felt. But it still--this was my
strong point--was only a thing of twilight; the sudden kindling of the
electric light had shown us that there was nothing there. In this
struggle perhaps the medium had clutched his own throat, perhaps I had
grasped Louis’ sleeve, he mine. But though I said these things to
myself, I am not sure that I believed them in the same way that I
believe the sun will rise to-morrow.

Now as a student of brain-functions and a student in hypnotic affairs, I
ought perhaps to have steadily and unremittingly pursued this
extraordinary series of phenomena. But I had my practice to attend to,
and I found that with the best will in the world, I could think of
nothing else except the occurrence in the hall next door. So I refused
to take part in any further séance with Louis. I had another reason
also. For the last four or five months he was becoming depraved. I have
been no prude or Puritan in my own life, and I hope I have not turned a
Pharisaical shoulder on sinners. But in all branches of life and morals,
Louis had become infamous. He was turned out of a club for cheating at
cards, and narrated the event to me with gusto. He had become cruel; he
tortured his cat to death; he had become bestial. I used to shudder as I
passed his house, expecting I knew not what fiendish thing to be
looking at me from the window.

Then came a night only a week ago, when I was awakened by an awful cry,
swelling and falling and rising again. It came from next door. I ran
downstairs in my pyjamas, and out into the street. The policeman on the
beat had heard it too, and it came from the hall of Louis’ house, the
window of which was open. Together we burst the door in. You know what
we found. The screaming had ceased but a moment before, but he was dead
already. Both jugulars were severed, torn open.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was dawn, early and dusky when I got back to my house next door. Even
as I went in something seemed to push by me, something soft and slimy.
It could not be Louis’ imagination this time. Since then I have seen
glimpses of it every evening. I am awakened at night by tappings, and in
the shadows in the corner of my room there sits something more
substantial than a shadow.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Within an hour of my leaving Dr Assheton, the quiet street was once more
aroused by cries of terror and agony. He was already dead, and in no
other manner than his friend, when they got into the house.