Philip was slightly offended. It was a vulgar error to think a ghost needed a long pedigree. His house was quite old enough to be haunted; and this recent visitation, if it was one, had nothing to do with the house’s age as a resort for ghosts.
He was not unduly superstitious but there was a nerve in him that vibrated to supernatural fears, and though he tried to calm them during the following days, by the reflection that he had lived in the house for over twenty years without any trouble other than the normal troubles—burst pipes, gas escapes, failures of electricity and so on, that are the lot of many old and decaying houses—he didn’t feel so comfortable, so at home with his home, with his thoughts as he used to be.
Supposing?
But was there anything, abstract or concrete, spiritual or material, to suppose?
Alfred professed to be psychic, and familiar with poltergeists and other familiars (Philip laughed to himself, rather half-heartedly, at this mental joke), otherwise he wouldn’t have taken the manifestations on the staircase so lightly; but that didn’t explain why they had such an obvious bearing on the recent history of the house.
Forget about it, forget about it, and Philip had almost forgotten about it when, a few nights later, he was awakened by a thunderous knock on his bedroom door, three times repeated. It was the loudest sound he had ever heard; the footsteps of the Commendatore coming up the staircase in Don Giovanni, were nothing like as loud.
‘Come in!’ he shouted, unaware of the time, and almost unaware, having taken a sleeping pill, where he himself was. ‘Come in!’ he shouted again, thinking that perhaps it was Alfred with his early morning tea.
But no one came; and it couldn’t have been Alfred, for when he looked at his watch, it was five o’clock in the morning.
Turning over in bed, he tried to go to sleep; but his subconscious mind had taken alarm and wouldn’t let him; and he lay awake listening for another summons until three hours later, when a much gentler, hardly audible knock, that didn’t even expect an answer, announced Alfred with Philip’s early morning tea.
Philip turned a tired, sleep-deprived face towards him.
‘Did you have a good night, Alfred?’
‘Oh yes, sir, pretty good. A few noises, you know.’
‘You didn’t hear a terrific hammering on my door’ (Alfred’s bedroom door was only an arm’s length from Philip’s) ‘about five o’clock this morning?’
‘Oh no, sir, nothing like that. A few scurrying noises, could have been rats.’
Philip, with lack-lustre eyes, sipped his tea. Could he have imagined the knocking? No, it was much too loud. But could it have been a sound heard in a dream—the tail-end of a dream? Philip hadn’t had many dreams of late years. Sleeping-pills inhibited them; that was one of their side-effects, and a bad one, for dreams were an outlet for the subconscious mind, and if denied this outlet, it took its revenge in other ways. In madness, perhaps? One saw things in dreams of course and one was aware of conversations; but were these conversations conveyed by sound, or by the illusion of the dream? As far as his recollections went, communication in dreams went by sight, and by some telepathic process, and not by sound—certainly not by such sounds as the four tremendous thumps which had awakened him.
So convinced was he of their material reality that while he was dressing he opened his bedroom door, and examined its other side, fully expecting to see marks on it which might have been made by a sledgehammer. There were none; the off-white paint was as smooth and undented as it had always been. To make assurance doubly sure, he held the door open, where the light could catch it at different angles; and then he saw something which in all his twenty-odd years of opening the door, he had never seen.
Beneath its coating of thick paint, something was written, printed rather. White over white, very hard to decipher, but at last he made it out:
Well, that explained itself. Lieut.-Col. McCreeth had occupied Philip’s bedroom.
Sometime during the war years he may have used it as an orderly-room, a sitting-room, or a bedroom, but when using it he didn’t want to be disturbed. Was the repeated rat-tat-tat meant to disturb his privacy, perhaps for military reasons? The previous owners of the house, who had occupied it for a year or two after the Army left, had redecorated it, and tried to wipe out all trace of their military predecessors. They must have spent a lot of money on it, and then gone away, quite ready to go, apparently, for they had sold it to Philip at a reasonable price. No haggling. Why?
It was years since he had seen the vendors and he didn’t even know their whereabouts. And if he had, what could he ask them?
He began to entertain absurd fancies, such as that it was he who had been ordered to fall in at the double and the mysterious knocking was meant to awaken him to the urgency of some military exercise, for which he would otherwise be late. Perhaps the safety of the country depended on it. Perhaps an invasion was imminent?
Not now, of course, but then.
Gradually these fancies began to wear off, and only showed themselves in an almost invincible reluctance, on Philip’s part, to ask Alfred if he had had any more psychic experience. At last, when all seemed set fair, he put the question.
‘Oh yes, sir, often. But I didn’t want to tell you, because I thought it might bother you.’
Philip’s heart sank.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, nothing that I’ve heard myself, except those noises I’ve told you about, and the voice saying “Fall in at the double!” But anything may happen in an old house like this.’
‘But you haven’t heard anything else?’
‘As a matter of fact I have, sir, but it’s only gossip, things they natter about at the local. Places like this, so far from civilization, they haven’t much to talk about.’
‘Tell me what it was.’
‘May I sit down, sir?’
Alfred sat down, bent forward to get his shirt-cuffs into the correct position, leaned back and said:
‘Well, it was about this Colonel.’
‘You mean Colonel McCreeth?’
‘Yes, Colonel McCreeth. They couldn’t pronounce his name properly—they’re uneducated here. But they said he was unpopular with the other men who were living here, in this house I mean, at the time. He was a dictatorial type, like some of them are, and they had it in for him. He used to get them up from bed when it wasn’t a bit necessary, just to look at the moon, so to say, pretending there was an air raid, when there wasn’t. And so they got fed up.’
‘I don’t wonder. And then?’
‘Well, he picked on a certain bloke who had said or done something out of turn and gave him C.B.—this house counted as a barracks, I believe—and this bloke, and three or four others, slept in my room—you may remember how it was in the Army, sir, they didn’t always pay much attention to the comfort of the men.’
‘Yes, I do remember,’ Philip said.
‘Well, this fellow was a sort of trouble-maker, and he had it in for the Colonel, who wasn’t liked by any of them, and he got their sergeant, who didn’t like him either, to make a sort of plot. Very wrong of them, of course, and against discipline, but you can’t try people, even soldiers, beyond a certain point.’