The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“You think I might have sent for a locksmith; but the fact is, there is a small crypt to the church, and I have used that crypt as a supplementary laboratory. If I had called anyone in to see to the lock they would have gossiped. I should have been turned out of my laboratory – perhaps out of my house.”

“I see.”

“Now the curious thing is,” Mr Prior went on, lowering his voice, “that it is only since that grating was opened that this house has been what they call ‘haunted’. It is since then that all the things have happened.”

“What things?”

“People staying here, suddenly ill – just as you were. And the attacks always seem to indicate loss of blood. And—” He hesitated a moment. “That wound in your throat. I told you you had hurt yourself falling when you rang the bell. But that was not true. What is true is that you had on your throat just the same little white wound that all the others have had. I wish” – he frowned – “that I could get that vault gate shut again. The key won’t turn.”

“I wonder if I could do anything?” Desmond asked, secretly convinced that he had hurt his throat in falling, and that his host’s story was, as he put it, “all moonshine”. Still, to put a lock right was but a slight return for all the care and kindness. “I’m an engineer, you know,” he added, awkwardly, and rose. “Probably a little oil. Let’s have a look at this same lock.”

He followed Mr Prior through the house to the church. A bright, smooth old key turned readily, and they passed into the building, musty and damp, where ivy crawled through the broken windows, and the blue sky seemed to be laid close against the holes in the roof. Another key clicked in the lock of a low door beside what had once been the Lady Chapel, a thick oak door grated back, and Mr Prior stopped a moment to light a candle that waited in its rough iron candlestick on a ledge of the stonework. Then down narrow stairs, chipped a little at the edges and soft with dust. The crypt was Norman, very simply beautiful. At the end of it was a recess, masked with a grating of rusty ironwork.

“They used to think,” said Mr Prior, “that iron kept off witchcraft. This is the lock,” he went on, holding the candle against the gate, which was ajar.

They went through the gate, because the lock was on the other side. Desmond worked a minute or two with the oil and feather that he had brought. Then with a little wrench the key turned and returned.

“I think that’s all right,” he said, looking up, kneeling on one knee, with the key still in the lock and his hand on it.

“May I try it?”

Mr Prior took Desmond’s place, turned the key, pulled it out, and stood up. Then the key and the candlestick fell rattling on the stone floor, and the old man sprang upon Desmond.

“Now I’ve got you,” he growled, in the darkness, and Desmond says that his spring and his clutch and his voice were like the spring and the clutch and the growl of a strong savage beast.

Desmond’s little strength snapped like a twig at his first bracing of it to resistance. The old man held him as a vice holds. He had got a rope from somewhere. He was tying Desmond’s arms.

Desmond hates to know that there in the dark he screamed like a caught hare. Then he remembered that he was a man, and shouted “Help! Here! Help!”

But a hand was on his mouth, and now a handkerchief was being knotted at the back of his head. He was on the floor, leaning against something. Prior’s hands had left him.

“Now,” said Prior’s voice, a little breathless, and the match he struck showed Desmond the stone shelves with long things on them – coffins he supposed. “Now, I’m sorry I had to do it, but science before friendship, my dear Desmond,” he went on, quite courteous and friendly. “I will explain to you, and you will see that a man of honour could not act otherwise. Of course, you having no friends who know where you are is most convenient. I saw that from the first. Now I’ll explain. I didn’t expect you to understand by instinct. But no matter. I am, I say it without vanity, the greatest discoverer since Newton. I know how to modify men’s natures. I can make men what I choose. It’s all done by transfusion of blood. Lopez – you know, my man Lopez – I’ve pumped the blood of dogs into his veins, and he’s my slave – like a dog. Verney, he’s my slave, too – part dog’s blood and partly the blood of people who’ve come from time to time to investigate the ghost, and partly my own, because I wanted him to be clever enough to help me. And there’s a bigger thing behind all this. You’ll understand me when I say” – here he became very technical indeed, and used many words that meant nothing to Desmond, whose thoughts dwelt more and more on his small chance of escape.

To die like a rat in a hole, a rat in a hole! If he could only loosen the handkerchief and shout again!