Algernon Blackwood

The Empty House

Algernon Blackwood

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Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim

at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no

particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open

countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company

leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically

amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to

communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes

those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a

thing diseased.

And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it

is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long

after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh

come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the

evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of

the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling

nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is

terror-stricken without apparent cause.

There was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this

particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to

reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood, crowded

into a corner of the square, and looked exactly like the houses on

either side of it. It had the same number of windows as its

neighbours; the same balcony overlooking the gardens; the same white

steps leading up to the heavy black front door; and, in the rear, there

was the same narrow strip of green, with neat box borders, running up

to the wall that divided it, from the backs of the adjoining houses.

Apparently, too, the number of chimney pots on the roof was the same;

the breadth and angle of the eaves; and even the height of the dirty

area railings.

And yet this house in the square, that seemed precisely similar to

its fifty ugly neighbours, was as a matter of fact entirely

different—horribly different.

Wherein lay this marked, invisible difference is impossible to say.

It cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination, because persons who

had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had

declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would

rather die than enter them again, and that the atmosphere of the whole

house produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror; while the series

of innocent tenants who had tried to live in it and been forced to

decamp at the shortest possible notice, was indeed little less than a

scandal in the town.

When Shorthouse arrived to pay a “week-end” visit to his Aunt Julia

in her little house on the sea-front at the other end of the town, he

found her charged to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only

received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating

bore-dom; but the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple-skin

wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition.

The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other

visitors, and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special

object.

Something was in the wind, and the “something” would doubtless bear

fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical

research, had brains as well as willpower, and by hook or by crook she

usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon

after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along

the sea-front in the dusk.

“I’ve got the keys,” she announced in a delighted, yet half awesome

voice. “Got them till Monday!”

“The keys of the bathing-machine, or—?” he asked innocently,

looking from the sea to the town. Nothing brought her so quickly to

the point as feigning stupidity.

“Neither,” she whispered. “I’ve got the keys of the haunted house

in the square—and I’m going there to-night.”

Shorthouse was conscious of the slightest possible tremor down his

back. He dropped his teasing tone. Something in her voice and manner

thrilled him. She was in earnest.

“But you can’t go alone—” he began.

“That’s why I wired for you,” she said with decision.

He turned to look at her.