The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Desmond wrote his letters quickly, Mr Prior just then reappearing.

“Now I’ll take you to your room,” he said, gathering the letters in long, white hands. “You’ll like a rest. Dinner at eight.”

The bed-chamber, like the parlour, had a pleasant air of worn luxury and accustomed comfort.

“I hope you will be comfortable,” the host said, with courteous solicitude. And Desmond was quite sure that he would.

Three covers were laid, the swarthy man who had driven Desmond from the station stood behind the host’s chair, and a figure came towards Desmond and his host from the shadows beyond the yellow circles of the silver-sticked candles.

“My assistant, Mr Verney,” said the host, and Desmond surrendered his hand to the limp, damp touch of the man who had seemed to say to him, from the window of the porch, “Go away!” Was Mr Prior perhaps a doctor who received “paying guests”, persons who were, in Desmond’s phrase, “a bit balmy”? But he had said “assistant”.

“I thought,” said Desmond, hastily, “you would be a clergyman. The Rectory, you know – I thought Wildon, my friend Wildon, was staying with an uncle who was a clergyman.”

“Oh no,” said Mr Prior. “I rent the Rectory. The rector thinks it is damp. The church is disused, too. It is not considered safe, and they can’t afford to restore it. Claret to Mr Desmond, Lopez.” And the swarthy, blunt-faced man filled his glass.

“I find this place very convenient for my experiments. I dabble a little in chemistry, Mr Desmond, and Verney here assists me.”

Verney murmured something that sounded like “only too proud”, and subsided.

“We all have our hobbies, and chemistry is mine,” Mr Prior went on. “Fortunately, I have a little income which enables me to indulge it. Wildon, my nephew, you know, laughs at me, and calls it the science of smells. But it’s absorbing, very absorbing.”

After dinner Verney faded away, and Desmond and his host stretched their feet to what Mr Prior called a “handful of fire”, for the evening had grown chill.

“And now,” Desmond said, “won’t you tell me the ghost story?”

The other glanced round the room.

“There isn’t really a ghost story at all. It’s only that – well, it’s never happened to me personally, but it happened to Verney, poor lad, and he’s never been quite his own self since.”

Desmond flattered himself on his insight.

“Is mine the haunted room?” he asked.

“It doesn’t come to any particular room,” said the other, slowly, “nor to any particular person.”

“Anyone may happen to see it?”

“No one sees it. It isn’t the kind of ghost that’s seen or heard.”

“I’m afraid I’m rather stupid, but I don’t understand,” said Desmond, roundly. “How can it be a ghost, if you neither hear it nor see it?”

“I did not say it was a ghost,” Mr Prior corrected. “I only say that there is something about this house which is not ordinary. Several of my assistants have had to leave; the thing got on their nerves.”

“What became of the assistants?” asked Desmond.

“Oh, they left, you know; they left,” Prior answered, vaguely. “One couldn’t expect them to sacrifice their health. I sometimes think – village gossip is a deadly thing, Mr Desmond – that perhaps they were prepared to be frightened; that they fancy things. I hope that that Psychical Society’s expert won’t be a neurotic. But even without being a neurotic one might – but you don’t believe in ghosts, Mr Desmond. Your Anglo-Saxon common sense forbids it.”

“I’m afraid I’m not exactly Anglo-Saxon,” said Desmond. “On my father’s side I’m pure Celt; though I know I don’t do credit to the race.”

“And on your mother’s side?” Mr Prior asked, with extraordinary eagerness; an eagerness so sudden and disproportioned to the question that Desmond stared. A faint touch of resentment as suddenly stirred in him, the first spark of antagonism to his host.

“Oh,” he said lightly, “I think I must have Chinese blood, I get on so well with the natives in Shanghai, and they tell me I owe my nose to a Red Indian great grandmother.”

“No negro blood, I suppose?” the host asked, with almost discourteous insistence.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Desmond answered. He meant to say it laughing, but he didn’t. “My hair, you know – it’s a very stiff curl it’s got, and my mother’s people were in the West Indies a few generations ago. You’re interested in distinctions of race, I take it?”

“Not at all, not at all,” Mr Prior surprisingly assured him; “but, of course, any details of your family are necessarily interesting to me. I feel,” he added, with another of his winning smiles, “that you and I are already friends.”

Desmond could not have reasoningly defended the faint quality of dislike that had begun to tinge his first pleasant sense of being welcomed and wished for as a guest.

“You’re very kind,” he said; “it’s jolly of you to take in a stranger like this.”

Mr Prior smiled, handed him the cigar-box, mixed whisky and soda, and began to talk about the history of the house.