Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

He still stood blocking that light from the library door, and I tried putting my hand out and feeling along the wall for the hall switch. But either I was standing an inch or two further to the left than I thought, or else the switch had moved... That sounds damn silly. But perhaps it isn’t... I mean, you never know...

The still small voice said: “What I want, sir, is advice.”

That doesn’t look much written down, does it? It’s the sort of ordinary remark that any ordinary man might make at any ordinary time. But, believe me, that isn’t how it sounded. Whether it was in that voice — though the voice was toneless — or in the words — though the words were senseless — or in the man — though the man was indeterminate — wherever it was, there was urgency there. A compelling urgency. An urgency which it would have been impossible to deny.

I said: “All right. I can give you a few minutes. Come in here!” And I pointed towards the library door...

Only the queer thing was that my lips, though they moved, didn’t make any sound. And my hand that I had meant to point stayed where it was, bunched into a fist in my right-hand trouser pocket...

A sort of shiver went through me, standing there in that dark hall... Mind you, I don’t know what it was about. For I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t even particularly interested. It was as if something else, somebody outside me, had taken charge and had said, not to the internal me, but to the external husk of me: “Look out! Look out! Look out!”

I swallowed hard and had another try. This time I got the words out. They sounded all right. I believe I smiled to myself as I heard them. Smiled inside, I mean, because my face was too stiff to smile with.

I pointed at the library. The full lights weren’t on there. There was only the reading lamp on the table. It made a sort of dull gold pool, a clearly defined pool which yet sent out beyond its defined circle a luminous, rather febrile light which cut a dim path to the door, and had been the origin of that splash across the hall which my visitor’s bulk had swallowed up.

I went in ahead of him. I remember stiffening my shoulders. Not only squaring them, but actually giving them that straining tension which tries to make shoulder-blades meet; that movement which a man makes semi-consciously when he is walking away from an enemy, and doesn’t look round though he knows there may be danger...

It wasn’t, you know, that I felt any kind of physical danger... Mental danger, then, you say?... No. Not a feeling of that, either. That’s my, difficulty in putting all this down. I had impressions — my God, I had impressions! — but what they were impressions of I couldn’t tell you to save my life...

I dropped into my chair and waved my visitor to one that faced me across the table. I could see him better now. He was, all of him, well within the pool of light from the reading lamp, because now I had turned the shade so that the little lake it had spilt over the table left me in shadow, and flooded the chair in which my visitor sat.

I say “in which he sat,” but that’s wrong. Because he didn’t sit in it. He balanced himself, in that precarious way the lower classes have when sitting in the presence of those they term their superiors, on the chair’s front edge. Right forward he was, and, looking at him, I got a silly idea.

So silly that it made me feel for a moment very much as if I was going actually to vomit. The fellow had a great oilskin round him. Oilskin of that patchy, dirty, greeny-yellow which comes to oilskin which has seen many years use upon hard and dangerous seas. And this coat, as he sat there perched like some damned great ugly bird, hung down right to the floor in front of him. It didn’t only just touch the floor; it coiled up on the floor, and made him look as if, perhaps, he hadn’t any legs... As if, perhaps, there was of him only that great bulk of his torso and head and arms balanced by some devilish means on the chair’s edge...

I had to make quite an effort to pull myself together after that silly idea. But I did it all right, and as the light wasn’t on me, but on him, I don’t suppose he could have seen.

I was waiting for him to begin talking. But he seemed to be thinking the same about me. I wanted to look at the time. Wanted to badly. But, d’you know, it cost me what seemed like a full minute to take my eyes off that shapeless bulk, and turn them to the clock. When I did, I saw that if I gave this visitor more than three minutes I should be late. I shouldn’t be at the flat at ten exactly — nor should I be there at half a minute past — not half a minute to. I should be there at a quarter past... And had I not been told that it was at ten o’clock I must come?