THE INVISIBLE WORLD
It is natural for readers of supernatural fiction to wonder what beliefs an author might hold. Do they believe in ghosts? Vampires? Psychic phenomenon? The answer, invariably, varies. M. R. James, the master of the English ghost story, did not believe in ghosts (He said he’d consider the evidence.); while Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes (“No ghosts need apply!”) was firmly committed to the psychic world, even fairies!
In 1933, Agatha Christie published a collection of early stories known as The Hound of Death. Unlike her other eighty-odd books, the stories were largely horror tales or mysteries seasoned with the supernatural. This becomes less surprising when one learns that many of these stories were written before Agatha had taken to the mystery field. “The Call of Wings” was the second story she had ever written , probably when she was still in her teens. The Hound of Death also contains “The Last Seance” which existed in an earlier form as: “… a grisly story about a seance (which I re-wrote many years later)” . It is only natural to wonder at Mrs. Christie’s beliefs, at least in 1933.
The stories in The Hound of Death themselves offer some small answer to the question of Christie’s own beliefs in the supernatural, but the best possible source is her autobiography, published in 1977. Written extensively two decades before, Christie’s own version of her life is wonderfully explicit on some things (like her childhood and her travels in the Middle East) but totally lacking in others (like her mysterious disappearance in 1926). Of the supernatural, she speaks only tangentially. Her upbringing was sheltered and Victorian. She does recount some of her earliest nightmares, often the source for horror fiction. The Gunman dream is suggestive for a future mystery writer:
… All children have nightmares, and I doubt if they are a result of nursemaids or others “frightening” them, or of any happening in real life. My own particular nightmare centred round someone I called “The Gunman”. I never read a story about anyone of the kind. I called him The Gunman because he carried a gun, not because I was frightened of his shooting me, or for any reason connected with the gun. The gun was part of his appearance, which seems to me now to have been that of a Frenchman in grey-blue uniform, powdered hair in a queue and a kind of three-cornered hat, and the gun was some old-fashioned kind of musket. It was his mere presence that was frightening. The dream would be quite ordinary — a tea-party or a walk with various people … Then suddenly a feeling of uneasiness would come. There was someone — someone who ought not to be there — a horrid feeling of fear: and then I would see him … and I would wake up shrieking: “The Gunman, the Gunman!” … I didn’t know why he was frightening. later the dream varied. The Gunman was not always in costume. Sometimes, as we sat round a tea-table, I would look across at a friend … and would suddenly realize that it was not … whoever it might be. The pale blue eyes in the familiar face met mine — under the familiar appearance. It was really the Gunman.
Agatha used these reminiscences in her non-mystery novel Unfinished Portrait (1934), writing as Mary Westmacott, and in “The Gipsy” though she substituted a gipsy woman for the Gunman. “‘She — the gipsy, you know — would just come into any old dream — even a good dream (or a kid’s idea of what’s good — a party and crackers and things). I’d be enjoying myself no end, and then I’d feel, I’d know, that if I looked up, she’d be there, standing as she always stood, watching me …'”
Christie never wrote a straight horror novel but since her horror stories date to her youngest days as a writer, this may not be surprising. Still, references in her work suggest she had read a few : the ship Otranto in “Ingots of Gold” hints at Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) and the pub in Easy to Kill is called the Seven Stars, possibly after Stoker’s Egyptian novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903). Gillian Gill tells us in Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries that Madge Miller, Agatha’s sister, had read to her the works of Wilkie Collins, A. Conan Doyle, Gaston Leroux and Edgar Allan Poe as young as eight.
Spiritualism appears in many forms in her horror tales and often in her mysteries (Tuesday Club Murders, Murder at Hazelmoor, Murder in Mesopotamia to name but a few). Agatha’s own exposure to spiritualism is also detailed in her autobiography. Christie courted several gentlemen in her youth, including a Wilfred Pirie, student of Spiritualism, to whom she became engaged. She recounts:
… He became interested in spiritualism, therefore I became interested in Spiritualism. So far all was well. But now Wilfred began to produce books that he was eager for me to read and pronounce on. They were very large books — theosophical mostly. The illusion that you enjoyed whatever your man enjoyed didn’t work; naturally it didn’t work — I wasn’t really in love with him. I found the books on theosophy tedious; not only tedious, I thought they were completely false; worse still, I thought a great many of them were nonsense! I also got rather tired of Wilfred’s descriptions of the mediums he knew. There were two girls in Portsmouth, and the things those girls saw you wouldn’t believe. They could hardly ever go into a house without gasping, stretching, clutching their hearts and being upset because there was a terrible spirit standing behind one of the company. “The other day,” said Wilfred, “Mary — she’s the elder of the two — she went into a house and up to the bathroom to wash her hands, and do you know she couldn’t walk over the threshold? No, she absolutely couldn’t. There were two figures there — one was holding a razor to the throat of the other. Would you believe it?”
I nearly said, “No, I wouldn’t,: but controlled myself in time. “That’s very interesting,” I said. “Had anyone ever held a razor to the throat of somebody there?”
“They must have,” said Wilfred. “The house had been let to several people before, so an incident of that kind must have occurred. Don’t you think so? Well, you can see it for yourself, can’t you?”
But I didn’t see it for myself. I was always of an agreeable nature however, and so I said cheerfully, of course, it certainly must have been so.
Wilfred broke off his engagement to Agatha to voyage to South America in a business venture. Agatha, happily, let him go.
The fact that Christie did not support much that the Spiritualists claimed in the 1920-30’s can be seen from this passage. The mistrust of individuals like the psychic girls from Portsmouth is often translated into fiction with characters like Eurydice Spragge (“Motive vs. Opportunity”) and Zarinda, Psychic Reader of the Future (“The Blue Geranium”). Agatha saw these people as attention-seekers or outright confidence tricksters. Their methods supplied the young author with modus operandi for her mystery stories.
Even if Agatha did not largely share Wilfred’s beliefs in Spiritualism, the vocabulary of those beliefs find their way into her autobiography. “After that, the shadow was there, faint, felt only by a child as one of those atmospheric disturbances which are to the psychic world as an approaching thunderstorm is to the physical one.” The diction allows her to convey her message without necessarily supporting any supernatural ideas. Perhaps she may have believed in some psychic phenomenon, such as premonitions, despite Pirie and his psychic twins. She tells of the death of her mother: “I was going up in the train to Manchester then knew, quite suddenly, that my mother was dead. I felt a coldness, as though I was invaded all over, from head to feet, with some deadly chill — and I thought: ‘Mother is dead’.”
THE HOUND OF DEATH
The title story opens The Hound of Death. The tale within the tale concerns an American newspaper man, William P. Ryan, who is visiting his sister in Cornwall when he hears about a group of Belgian nuns that have been evacuated to the small town during the War. One sister, in particular, interests Ryan, a Sister Marie Angelique, who claims to have destroyed a German battalion that attacked the convent. Sister Angelique was said to have “‘… called down the lightning to blast the impious Hun.'” One wall of the convent stands after the apocalypse, marked with a black stain. “‘The peasants call it the Hound of Death.'”
After the War, the nuns return to the Continent, except Sister Angelique. The people of Folbridge think of her as a harmless crack pot: “‘… She has hallucinations and things, you know …'” but one man takes a particular interest in her, a Dr. Rose. The physician claims to be writing a monograph on the woman. When Ryan meets the doctor he has a strange reaction to him: “Rose was reassuring, but as he smiled I noticed how extraordinarily pointed his canine teeth were, and it occurred to me that there was something wolf-like about the man.”
Sister Angelique demonstrates her trance state for the newspaper man. Dr. Rose reluctantly agrees to assist. Ryan gets his first taste of the nun’s fantastic visions:
“Tell me about the City,” he said. “The City of the Circles, I think you said?”
She answered absently and mechanically.
“Yes — there were three circles. The first circle for the chosen, the second for the priestesses and the outer circle for the priests.”
“And in the centre?”
She drew her breath sharply and her voice sank to a tone of indescribable awe. “The House of Crystal …”
A second experiment with a crystal proves even stranger. This time using the stone as a focus, Sister Angelique learns that the crystal was a holy emblem. In a past life she had been a Priestess of the Fifth Sign in the House of the Crystal, a kind of second Christ, whose followers were hunted but survived “‘ … for fifteen thousand full moons — I mean, for fifteen thousand years.'”
Using word association therapy, Rose discovers some of the seven Holy Signs, the first is blood, the fourth yellow, the fifth telepathy, the seventh life. The sixth one is The Hound of Death. The last part of the story takes place after Ryan leaves Folbridge. We read Dr. Rose’s diary and learn for a fact that he has no scientific intentions at all. He seeks the destruction power of The Hound of Death. “… Am I mad? Or shall I be the Superman, with the Power of Death in my hands?”
A letter from Sister Angelique tells how in the past :
“He Who Was Guardian of the Crystal revealed the Sixth Sign to the people too soon …. Evil entered into their hearts. They had the power to slay at will — and they slew without justice — in anger. They were drunk with the lust of Power … That the old Guardian of the Crystal was bidden to act … he loosed the Hound of Death upon the sea … and the sea rose up in the shape of a Hound and swallowed the land utterly ….
Thus the Atlantean civilization dies. Dr. Rose, the nun informs Ryan: “He is of the Brotherhood. He knows the First Sign, and the form of the Second, though its meaning is hidden to all save a chosen few. He would learn of me the Sixth … Kitty, Ryan’s sister, has appended the letter with news that Dr. Rose’s little cottage was “swept away by a landslide last night, the doctor and that poor nun, Sister Marie Angelique, were killed. The debris on the beach is too awful — all piled up in a fantastic mass — from a distance it looks like a great hound …”
If this weren’t enough of a clincher, Christie finishes the tale with one last piece of mystical irony. Ryan dreams of the ancient continent under the seas and its civilization that attained such tremendous power. “Or did Sister Marie Angelique remember backwards — as some say is possible — and is this City of the Circles in the future and not the past?”
The sources of this tale show despite Christie’s marvelous writing. The Blavatsky-style Atlantis might have come from Pirie’s tedious books. The “great hound” is an obvious Conan Doyle tid-bit from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Agatha would question the linear nature of time again in “The Gipsy” and “In A Glass Darkly”.
“The Red Signal” is another horror tale dated by Spiritualist themes. This time it is the idea of precognition or “premonitions”, a plot device Agatha would use a number of times in all her work. At a dinner party the topic of a “sixth sense” is discussed by Sir Alington, a psychologist, the flighty hostess, Mrs. Eversleigh, and Alington’s nephew, Dermot West. Mr. Eversleigh and Alington represent the materialist side of the argument: “‘Bunkum Violet! Your best friend is killed in a railway accident. Straight away you remember that you dreamt of a black cat last Tuesday — marvellous, you felt all along that something was going to happen!'”
The nephew and the hostess take the other point of view. Dermot tells of an experience in Mesopotamia:
“… just after the Armistice, I came into my tent on evening with the feeling strong upon me. Danger! Hadn’t the ghost of a notion what it was all about … I took a blanket outside, rolled myself in it and slept there … The next morning, when I went inside the tent, first thing I saw was a great knife arrangement — about a half yard long — struck down through my bunk, just where I would have lain. I soon found out about it — one of the Arab servants. His son had been shot as a spy …”
West calls these premonitions his “red signal”.
After this little discussion, the story veers off into a love triangle story. Dermot is in love with Claire Trent who is married to West’s best friend, Jack. The nephew suspects his uncle is not attending the seance party just for his entertainment. He is observing someone and the celebration is merely a blind.
Before the seance, the hostess engages Alington in a discussion of madness. “‘… what is madness?” the Alienist wonders. Mrs. Everlseigh comments: “I’ve always heard they are very cunning … Loonies I mean.'” Alington confirms this, “‘Remarkably so … But the man — or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community.'” The medium, Mrs. Thompson, “… a plump middle-aged woman, atrociously dressed in magenta velvet, with a loud rather common voice”, performs the seance with the help of Shiromako, “my Japanese control, you know. The ghostly spirit has a very important message “‘… for one of the gentlemen. Don’t go home!'” The crowd take the warning lightly, Dermot, Claire and Jack going to a dance afterwards.
West believes it is Claire who is going to be committed. At the dance, he can’t bear the thought. While dancing with her, he admits his love to her, offering to run off to the South Seas with her. Claire is distressed, for at one time she might have taken Dermot up on his offer, but not now. West leaves the dance determined to visit his uncle and change his mind about Claire.
Alington is the first to disregard the medium’s warning, having gone home after the seance. Dermot goes to his house and they quarrel over the fate of the insane person, though never speaking his or her name. The nephew leaves in anger after threatening his uncle’s life in front of the butler. Dermot is the second person to ignore the warning and goes home too.
It is on his doorstep that Dermot once again experiences the red signal. He ignores it and enters his apartment. Getting ready for bed he finds a revolver in his drawer. He has never seen the pistol before. A knock at the door reveals a policeman with a warrant for West’s arrest. Sir Alington has been shot in his home and Dermot’s death threat hasn’t gone unnoticed. Alington is the first to suffer the curse. West is the second. To avoid capture the young man poses as his own butler, Milson. The policeman wishes to stay until the master of the house returns, so Dermot escapes out a window. He meets Jack outside his apartment and tells him everything. Jack takes him to his home, the third to cross the medium’s words.
It is here that Jack Trent reveals the truth. He killed Sir Alington, framed West (because of his affections for Claire) and now plans to call the police and hand him over. Dermot reveals the final result of the prediction “‘… You’d have done better, Trent, not to come home.'” Claire and the officers of Scotland Yard enter, having heard the maniac’s confession. Trent raises the gun and shots himself. And so the spirit’s warning proves true for all three men attending the seance: one murdered, one framed and one caught.
Despite the story’s reliance on long explanations (disguised as conversation) the machinations of the warning are clever and well thought out. As a story of the supernatural, the seance and premonition elements are perhaps less effective. If Christie had written this story later in life she might have engineered the plot without the use of supernatural forces.
“The Fourth Man” is a tale of possession. Four men share a train carriage. Three are professional men, Canon Parfitt, Sir George Durand, a lawyer, and Dr. Campbell Clark, famed mental specialist and author of The Problem of the Unconscious Mind. The fourth is a silent “slight dark man”, a foreigner.
The three English men fall into a conversation about multiple personalities. Campbell states of the body and mind:
“Are you so sure … that there is only one occupant of this structure … You’re the master of the house … but aren’t you ever conscious of the of others — soft-footed servants, hardly noticed … Or friends — moods that take hold of you and make you, for the time being, a “different man’ … You’re the king of the castle, right enough, but be very sure the ‘dirty rascal’ is there too.”
From this discussion the men remember a famous case, a Felicie Bault, a Norman peasant girl who saw her father murder her mother. Taken in by an English philanthropist, Felicie was found to be stupid and clumsy, while her alternate selves Felicie 2, and Felicie 3 were intelligent and multilingual. Felicie 3 was an “‘… utterly depraved creature …'” and may have been fooling investigators into believing in a Felicie 4. The three separate identities were unaware of themselves. Or so the doctors thought until Miss Bault was found strangled in her own bed by her own hands.
At hearing all this, the mysterious fourth man introduces himself. He is Raoul Lepardeau, and coincidentally, in the way of many ghost stories, a fellow orphan in the home of Felicie Bault, and another girl, Annette Ravel. Lepardeau offers to explain the entire tale to the three listeners.
The Frenchman’s account is one of cruelty and revenge. Annette Ravel, the daughter of a dancer, liked to torment the beefy Felicie. One day she hypnotized the larger girl, making her eat a candle in front of all the children in the orphanage, saying “‘… it is the best galette I ever tasted.'” Felicie awakens from the hypnotic trance, swearing she will kill the diminutive Annette.
But Felicie never gets the chance. Annette grows up to become the singer, Annette Ravelli, but dies tragically like her mother, from consumption. It is after Annette’s death that Felicie is observed doing things thought beyond her: playing the piano, using foreign languages. It is only when the stupid Felicie speaks that Raoul begins to understand:
“‘Monsieur Raoul, there are strange things going on in this house! They play tricks upon you. They alter the clocks. Yes, yes, I know what I am saying. And it is all her doing … That Annette’s. That wicked one’s. When she was alive she always tormented me. Now that she is dead, she comes back from the dead to torment me … She is bad, that one. She is bad, I tell you. She would take the bread from your mouth, the clothes from your back, the soul from your body ….’
As Felicie tells of her fears, the sudden change comes over her again. It is the other personality, Felicie 2. She admires her strong body and her big hands. “I had never noticed her hands particularly before. I looked at them now and shuddered in spite of myself. Squat fingers … With hands such as these her father must have strangled her mother …. “
That was the last time Lepardeau saw Felicie, having gone to South America. Later he had news of her death, but the particulars only now as the three men had discussed her case. Dr. Campbell wonders at the explanation. The fourth man replies: “‘I say to you, Messieurs, that the history of Felicie Bault is the history of Annette Ravel. You did not know her, gentlemen. I did. She was very fond of life … Tell me, if you find a burglar in your house what do you do? Shoot him, do you not?'” With a flourish, the mystery man disappears.
Many of Christie’s horror stories question the soul and identity. In “The Hound of Death” it is the nature of the soul throughout time (ala reincarnation). In “The Fourth Man” as with “The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael” it is possession by another. Much of the atmosphere and the hypnotism incident are reminiscent of A. Conan Doyle’s “John Barrington Cowles”(1886) and “The Parasite”(1894), likely influences.
In “The Gipsy” Agatha writes her best story on just about every Spiritualist concept: reincarnation, premonitions, portents, the universality of time, Second Sight, the immobility of Fate, many of which she had already used in “The Hound of Death” and would later use in “In A Glass Darkly”. But where as those two tales only give a faint hint at how the past, present and future are one, “The Gipsy” uses the idea as the crux of the story.
Dickie Carpenter is a man haunted by a recurring vision, a dark gipsy woman in a red handkerchief. This ghostly figure appears without warning, warning Carpenter in the same words :”‘I shouldn’t go that way, if I were you.'” The first time he disregards the warning is when he is a boy. The result is Carpenter falls into the river and almost drowns.
Many years pass and Dickie goes to meet a girl he has been corresponding with for some time, Esther Lawes. The night before meeting Esther, at the Lawes home, Dickie meets Mrs. Haworth, a beautiful Scandinavian woman, who reminds him of the gipsy figure. Like the gipsy, Mrs. Alistair Haworth warns Dickie. “‘I shouldn’t go in if I were you ….'” Carpenter, of course, disregards her and meets Esther for the first time. A week later they are engaged. “‘… It took her about a fortnight after that to find out that she didn’t care after all ….'” And so Mrs. Haworth’s prediction comes true. One more time, Dickie experiences the gipsy woman/Mrs. Haworth vision. He is to have surgery because of a war wound. A nurse who looks like Alistair Haworth tells him :”‘I wouldn’t have that operation, if I were you ….'” Carpenter does and dies from a weak heart under anaesthetic.
There the story of Dickie Carpenter ends. His friend, Macfarlane, who has been following Dickie’s story, as well as being the fiancee of Rachel Lawes, Esther’s sister, becomes interested in Mrs. Haworth. He goes to her odd rural home. “The maid left him in a low long room, with windows that gave on the wilderness of the moorland …” Here he meets Mr. Maurice Haworth, “A heavy, rather foolish-looking man …” Macfarlane can’t imagine why a woman as beautiful as Alistair Haworth would marry such a loser.
Mrs. Haworth explains about her gift of prophecy:
“I always know when bad things are coming … Of course it’s natural that I should have the gift. I’m a Ferguesson. There’s second sight in the family. And my mother was a medium until my father married her. Cristine was her name. She was rather celebrated.”
“Do you mean by ‘the gift’ the power of being able to see things before they happen?”
“Yes, forwards or backwards — it’s all the same …”
The prophetess explains then why she married poor Maurice. “‘… It’s simply because I’ve always known that there’s something dreadful hanging over him …. I wanted to save him from it …. Women are like that. With my gift, I ought to be able to prevent it happening …. if one ever can ….'”
Macfarlane leaves Mrs. Haworth wishing to see her again. She welcomes him, but says: “‘… I — I fancied that we shouldn’t meet again — that’s all …. Goodbye.'” This proclamation gives Macfarlane a sense of impending doom. A car nearly misses him on the way home, “… Then the chimney pot that had fallen off the inn, and the smell of burning in the night which he traced to a cinder on his hearthrug …” The man feels condemned by Fate. He thinks the only way to break the curse is to see Mrs. Haworth again, thus defying her words.
But Mrs. Haworth has died. Her words prove doubly true. Not only will Macfarlane never see her alive again, but the terrible event in Maurice’s life has arrived as well. Her husband wanting to give her tonic had taken the wrong bottle from the shelf. His savior proves to be his downfall.
Macfarlane looks on Mrs. Haworth’s body for the last time. The stain glass window casts a red light over her head, just like the gipsy with the red handkerchief. Despite all of Fate’s nasty tricks, MacFarlane leaves worrying about destiny behind him and finds solace in the arms of his beloved, Rachel.
“The Lamp” is a haunted house story. No. 19 was “Austere, forbidding, and stamped with that particular desolation attaching to all houses that have been long untenanted …” To this home Mrs. Lancaster, her father, Mr. Winburn, and little Geoff come to live, at a “ridiculously low rent” for the house is haunted. Mrs. Lancaster worries that the house is the scene of horrible murder, but Mr. Raddysh, the sales agent admits it is only a child’s spirit. The sad story of the boy, forgotten by his father, a captured criminal who committed suicide, is no deterrent to the practical Scotswoman.
After moving into the house, the inhabitants hear soft pitter-patter noises. Winburn suggests that they sound like a child’s footsteps. His daughter scolds him, telling him not to say so in front of Geoff, because “‘He’s so imaginative.'”
The grandfather has a strange dream that night: “He dreamt that he was walking through a town, a great city it seemed to him. But it was a children’s city; there were no grown-up people there, nothing but children, crowds of them. In his dream they all rushed to the stranger, crying: ‘Have you brought him?'” Upon waking. he hears a sobbing, but it stops when he lights a match.
For all the grown-ups worries about Geoff getting wind of the ghost, the matter is resolved quickly. Geoff asks his mother, “‘I wish you’d let me play with that little boy … I don’t know his name. He was in a attic, sitting on the floor crying, but he ran away when he saw me …'” Geoff can tell the boy is shy and lonely, but when he tells Jane the maid about him, she chastises him “‘… there wasn’t no little boy on the ‘ouse and not to tell naughty stories.'”
Mrs. Lancaster’s reaction is to blame it all on the servants. But the grandfather tells her it is not idle maids’ tales, but something else. He quotes: “‘What Lamp has Destiny to guide/Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?/’A Blind Understanding’, Heaven replied’ … Geoffrey has that — a blind understanding. All children possess it … That is why I think Geoffrey may help.'” It is Winburn’s idea that Geoff could lay the ghost to rest, only he doesn’t know how it can be done.
The answer comes when Geoff becomes very ill. The ghost is attracted to the dying boy. “It was when nursing Geoff that Mrs. Lancaster became aware of that — other child …” Geoff ” … sunk in oblivion” detects him too, whispering, “‘All right, I’m comin’ … The mother felt suddenly terrified, she crossed the room to her father. Somewhere near them the other child was laughing. Joyful, contented, triumphant, and silvery laughter echoed through the room.”
The inevitable comes with the sound of pitter-patter, pitter-patter. Two sets of laughing running children fill the room. The mother turns to her dying son, but the grandfather restrains her, pointing. “‘There.’ he said simply … Pitter-patter, pitter-patter — fainter and fainter .. And then — silence.”
The ending is poignant and sad. “The Lamp”, like “The Gipsy” is a special kind of story for Agatha Christie, who wrote most often from a detached analytical point-of-view. Here is the sentiment of her early years which later work — with exception of her Mary Westmacott novels — she was most often devoid. Unlike mystery writing, horror tales deal with emotions, fear, sorrow etc.
“The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael” is a story about the transmutation of souls, a spiritualist belief related to possession. Unlike possession, two spirits trade bodies, rather than inhabit the same one as in “The Fourth Man”.
The narrator is Dr. Edward Carstairs. The story is taken from the notes of this eminent psychologist. Carstairs is a medical man with a belief in the occult. When asked about haunted houses, his reply is: “‘In nine cases of ten, fraud … But the tenth — well, I have come cross phenomena that is absolutely unexplainable from the ordinary materialistic standpoint. I am a believer in the occult.'”
In the tradition of John Silence, a popular psychic doctor character created by pro-Spiritualism fictioneer, Algernon Blackwood, Carstairs is something of a ghost-breaker.
The doctor is called in by a colleague, Settle, to review an extraordinary case. A young nobleman has unexplainably lost all memory. He recognizes no one, not even his fiancee, Miss Phyllis Patterson. His only sign of affection is to his step-mother, the second Lady Carmichael. “‘… once I saw him rub his head against her shoulder in a dumb expression of love.'”
On his way to the Carmichael mansion, Settle and Carstairs come upon Miss Patterson. The new doctor sees a grey cat rubbing his head against her leg. Neither the girl or Settle see anything. Settle refuses to discuss the case, not wanting to prejudice the newcomer’s report.
Once at the house, Carstairs meets Lady Carmichael. “A middle-aged but still beautiful woman …” She has a son of her own who is eight. The doctor has a strong reaction to the mother. No one else in the house cares for her either. “‘I must confess … that for no cause or reason, I dislike her intensely. You are quite right, she has Eastern blood, and I should say, possesses marked occult powers. She is a woman of extraordinary magnetic force.'”
Dr. Carstairs examines his patient. Sir Arthur is locked in his room to prevent him from wandering off and getting injured. Carstairs find him:
… sitting on the window seat … He sat curiously still, rather hunched together, with every muscle relaxed. I thought at first he was quite unaware of our presence until I suddenly saw that, under immovable lids, he was watching us closely. His eyes dropped as they met mine, and he blinked. But he did not move … In a moment or two, without undue haste, Sir Arthur uncoiled himself, limb by limb, from his huddled position, and walked slowly over to the table. I recognized suddenly that his movements were absolutely silent, his feet made no sound as they trod. Just as he reached the table he gave a tremendous stretch, poised on one leg forward, the other stretching out behind him. He prolonged this exercise to its utmost extent, and then yawned. Never have I seen such a yawn! It seemed to swallow up his entire face.
He now turned his attention to the milk, bending down to the table until his lip touched the fluid …
The next strange events are phantom cats meowing in the hall, dreams about the grey cat, and finally, after wondering who the presence that haunts the house will attack, a shredded chair cushion. The chair belongs to Lady Carmichael. When Carstairs warns her, she disregards him. When asked if she ever had a cat she says never. Despite the woman’s cold affront, Settle and Carstairs must break down her door one night when they hear a cat wailing and human screams. The woman has been scratched severely, especially around the throat, though no cat is found in the room.
Carstairs does more investigating. From the footman, he finds out that the Lady did have a grey Persian, which she had to put down only a week ago. It is buried under the copper beech. The doctor leaves the grave untouched until he experiences a dream, one in which the grey Persian leads him to the library and to a specific spot on a shelf. The next day he goes there and finds that book missing. All there is is a torn corner which reads “The cat …”.
After this and the attack on the woman, the doctor digs up the animal, which is exactly like the one he has seen. The feline has been poisoned with prussic acid, but even with this evidence, Carstairs and Settle can not force the woman to admit to any wrong-doing. It is an incident at the pond that betrays her. Arthur falls in and is thought drowned. Carstairs pulls him from the water but his body is dead. Only the loving voice of Miss Patterson can recall him from death, the real Arthur Carmichael, not the cat’s soul that has been inhabiting his body. When Lady Carmichael sees the boy returned to his own body she dies of shock. Her plans to make her son heir to the Carmichael estate are shattered. Carstairs encourages the young couple to forget everything. The doctor and his fellow practitioner, Settle, never discuss what has happened.
The portrayal of Lady Carmichael demonstrates the old English prejudice against Asians to which Christie herself was susceptible in her early years. The fact that Lady Carmichael is partly of Eastern extraction makes her immediately evil, magnetic and a practitioner of the occult. This kind of racial stereotyping, popularized by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels, can be found in The Big Four, “The Adventure of the Western Star” and in other mysteries. As Christie grew older, traveled more, these kinds of characterizations disappeared from her work.
“The Call of Wings” is probably the most unChristie-like story she ever wrote. This, perhaps, can be attributed to her very young age when she wrote it. The story is more of a fantasy or religious allegory than a horror tale. The plot concerns a happy millionaire, Silas Hamer. “‘I used to be a wretched shivering little newspaper boy. I wanted then — what I’ve got now — the comfort and the luxury of money, not its power. I wanted money, not to wield as a force, but to spend lavishly — on myself!'”
A materialist, Hamer has a hard time reconciling what happens to him next. One night, after a dinner party, he experiences the suddenness of death when a derelict is struck and killed by a car. Hamer makes no effort to save him. After this shock he sees a strange creature:
“… Sitting against the wall was a man playing the flute … Hamer’s reflections were interrupted suddenly as he realized with a shock the man had no legs. A pair of crutches rested against the wall beside him. Hamer saw now that it was not a flute he was playing but a strange instrument whose notes were much higher and clearer than those of a flute … It was a strange tune — strictly speaking, it was not a tune at all, but a single phrase, not unlike the slow turn given out by the violins of Rienzi, repeated again and again, passing from key to key, from harmony to harmony, but always rising and attaining each time to a greater and more boundless freedom … A Lamp just over his head and revealed every feature. Silas Hamer caught his breath in involuntary surprise. The man possessed the most singularly beautiful head he had ever seen. He might have been any age; assuredly he was not a boy, yet youth was the most predominant characteristic — youth and vigour in passionate intensity!…
If the player was not strange enough, his music has an even stranger effect. While the man blows on the flute, Hamer can feel himself rise into the air, feeling freer and younger. Wanting to know more about the song, he asks about it. The man says: “‘It was an old tune — a very old tune …. Years old — centuries old.'”
The millionaire asks the player about himself. “‘You’re not English? Where do you come from?'” The answer: “‘From over the sea, sir. I came — a long time ago — a very long time ago.'” Hamer asks about the loss of his legs. The flute-players reply is the strangest: “‘It was well … They were evil.'” The man plays the song again. Hamer calls it “uncanny” and says “‘its got wings to it …'”
The song haunts the rich man. He goes to see a friend, Seldon, who is a mental specialist. Hamer explains that he doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but whenever he remembers the song he can feel himself uplifted. Only his earthly love of money keeps him grounded.
Seldon can offer little advice, except seek the flute player, which he thinks will break Hamer’s neurosis and return him to his old self. Silas does as Seldon suggests and hunts for the strange man. He finds him in an alley, amidst his own angelic light, drawing in chalk on the paving stones. His pictures include “… sylvan scenes of marvellous beauty and delicacy”. One picture in particular catches Hamer’s attention. It is a picture of a man “seated on a boulder … playing an instrument of pipes. A man with a strangely beautiful face — and goat’s legs ….” The musician/artist reiterates “‘They were evil.'”
Hamer gains understanding then. He is being offered two different realities. The mundane world of riches or “The Call of Wings” which will take him to a freer, more beautiful plane. “… So sacrifice was being asked of him, the sacrifice of that which was most dear to him, that which was part of himself. Part of himself — he remembered the man without legs ….”
And sacrifice Hamer does. He gives all his money to a friend, who runs a mission for the homeless. He has nothing but twopence in his pocket. He decides to spend the money on a subway ride to the park where he can be in the open air. Christie, the immature writer, tells more than perhaps she should when she explains: “… there was a special significance to him in reaching it by Tube. For the tube represented to him all the horrors of buried, shut-in life …. He would ascend from its imprisonment free to the wide green and the trees that concealed the menace of the pressing houses.”
This subtlety might have been seen without actually vocalizing it.
The story ends with Hamer repeating his experience with the derelict. A drunk lad falls onto the tracks before an oncoming train. Silas realizes “… this life could only be saved, if it were saved, by himself.” The penniless man makes the sacrifice. “… He flung the lad forward on to the platform falling himself ….” In dying Silas finds his wings: “… He fancied for a moment that he heard the joyous piping of Pan. Then — nearer and louder — swallowing up all else — came the glad rushing of innumerable wings … enveloping and encircling him ….”.
“The Call of Wings” and “The Hound of Death” show Christie’s gift for fantasy. The message of the joys of freedom and the mundane traps of civilization is surprisingly sophisticated for a writer still in her teens. Had the lure of the weird and fantastic only been stronger in Agatha, perhaps her fame would lie today, outside the mystery field.
“The Last Seance”, that “… grisly story about a seance (which I re-wrote many years later)”, is probably Christie’s best use of the seance in all of her fiction. Unlike “The Red Signal”, we see the dangers to the medium as well as the observers.
Simone, Raoul Daubreuil’s fiancee, is “‘ … the most wonderful medium in Paris — more, in France.'” As Elise, the maid says: “‘… I always thought that these mediums, as they call themselves, were just clever cheats who imposed on the poor souls who had lost their near and dear ones. But Madame is certainly not like that at all. Madame is good. Madame is honest …'”
Raoul reluctantly accepts that she will give up Spiritualism after today, after one last seance. Simone’s reasons for quitting are her health and a forbidding sense of disaster: “‘… There is a danger. I tell you. I can feel it, great danger.'” Elise also believes in the risks of playing with the dead. “‘… It is against nature and le bon Dieu, and somebody will have to pay.'”
The one who will pay for this final seance is Madame Exe, a large black woman who recently lost a child, Amelie. Exe is not her last name, but a pseudonym to protect her identity. Simone describes her customer, reminiscent of Felicie Bault in “The Fourth Man”: “‘… she is so big and black, and her hands — have you ever noticed her hands, Raoul? Great big strong hands, as strong as a man’s … The first moment I saw her I felt — … Fear! You remember, it was a long time before I would consent to sit for her? I felt sure in some way she would bring me misfortune.'”
Simone describes the horrors of being a medium:
“‘One sits in the cabinet in the darkness, waiting, and the darkness is terrible, Raoul, for it is the darkness of emptiness, of nothingness. Deliberately one gives oneself up to be lost in it. After that one knows nothing, one feels nothing, but then at last there comes the slow, painful return, the slow awakening out of sleep, but so tired — so terribly tired.'”
Raoul, despite his insistence, seems more interested in Mrs. Exe’s money than Simone’s agonies. When his fiancee speaks her fears about the woman, Raoul berates her with a lecture on the purity of motherhood. Simone disagrees: “‘There are certain primitive elementary forces, Raoul. Most of them have been destroyed by civilization, but motherhood stands where it stood at the beginning … It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.'”
Madame Exe arrives a little late. Raoul tries to put her off but she becomes irate at the suggestion that Simone will not mediate. The medium reluctantly gives in for it is the last and final time. Madame Exe hopes this last time she will be able to touch her dead child. Daubreuil warns her:
” … A spirit, to manifest itself, has to use the actual physical substance of the medium. You have seen the vapour of fluid issuing from the lips of the medium. This finally condenses and is built up into the physical semblance of the spirit’s dead body. But this ectoplasm we believe to be the actual substance of the medium. We hope to prove this some day by careful weighing and testing — but the great difficulty is the danger and pain which attends the medium on any handling of the phenomena. were anyone to seize hold of the materialization roughly the death of the medium might result.'”
The seance begins and to Raoul’s surprise, Mrs. Exe insists on precautions to prove that no tomfoolery is taking place. Raoul is tied into his chair by those powerful man-like hands and the door is locked. Simone resurrects the lost girl to an amazing degree, a solid manifestation. The black woman grabs her child and runs. Simone, behind her screen gives “… a long-drawn scream of utter anguish … such a scream as Raoul had never heard. It died away in a horrible kind of gurgle. Then there came the thud of a falling body.”
Christie delivers the final stroke as Raoul is trying to struggle from his bonds, Elise enters the room to ask: “‘So Madame is dead. It is ended. But tell me, Monsieur, what has happened. Why is Madame all shrunken away — why is she half her usual size? What has happened here?'” As for Mrs. Exe’s child, we can only guess whether it remained whole or became a mass of bloody parts.
Like the best of Christie’s mystery stories, “The Last Seance” is constructed with a method of placing down a concept, then layering it with more details until the final outcome. Though the reader can predict what will happen, the grisly results still shock, leaving the details to the imagination.
“In a Glass Darkly”, from The Regatta Mystery and Others (1939), is one of those odd Christie surprises, a true supernatural story with a happy ending. Charles Crawly and Sylvia Carslake are to be wed at the family mansion, a large spooky house:
“… I remember saying with a laugh that it was the kind of house where one expected to meet ghosts in the passages, and he said carelessly that he believed the place was said to be haunted but that none of them had ever seen anything, and he didn’t even know what form the ghost was supposed to take.”
While dressing for dinner, the unidentified narrator sees a strange scene in the mirror of his room, a man with a scar on his neck strangling the beautiful Sylvia. He tells her of this vision and the wedding is off. The narrator goes to war (partly out of duty and partly because he is in love with Sylvia) and is wounded slightly behind the ear. After the war, he and Sylvia meet again and admit their true feelings to each other. They marry.
The narrator, now a happy husband, suffers from uncontrollable jealousy, especially when Derek Wainwright enters the picture. One night he attacks his wife, seeing in the mirror his own reflection and the scene that had been played out on the mirror so long ago. Unlike the terrible vision, the man stops and begs forgiveness, never to be jealous again. He wonders at the story’s end if time really is separate: “Or are the past and future all one?” Unlike “The Gipsy” and “The Hound of Death”, the weird universality of time saves two lives rather than destroying them.
Double Sin (1961) features the only other true supernatural story to appear after The Hound of Death, “The Dressmaker’s Doll”. In this tale, a doll in a dressmaker’s shop gives the employees an odd feeling: “‘I tell you … it gives me the creeps … It ain’t natural, if you know what I mean. All those long hanging legs and the way she’s slouched down there and the cunning look she has in her eye. It doesn’t look healthy, that’s what I say.'”
Everyone tries to remember when they first saw the doll, where it had come from. No one can recall:
“But really, Miss Coombe, I don’t remember. I mean I looked at her yesterday and thought there was something — well, Mrs. Groves is quite right — something creepy about her. And then I thought I’d already thought so, and then I tried to remember when I first thought so … well, I just couldn’t remember anything! In a way, it was as if I’d never seen her before — only it didn’t feel like that. It felt as though she’d been here a long time but I’d only just noticed her.”
“Perhaps she flew in through the window one day on a broomstick …”
The women dismiss their ill feelings until the doll begins to move about the room without human help. At first it is thought to be a joke until the doll is locked in the room and watched. The thing moves on its own, from sofa to desk to window sill. (Christie wisely never shows the actual locomotion of the toy.) The dressmaker would like to destroy the doll but has her misgivings: “‘… But I’ve got a nasty frightened feeling — a horrid feeling that she’s too strong for us.'”
No one can find an answer to the doll’s power. One person suggests it might be a poltergeist. The dressmaker locks her room, choosing to give it up to the doll rather than fight it. This proves a pointless measure, for the doll begins to appear in the workroom as well. Finally in a fit of pique, the doll is dropped out the window to the street below the shop, where a small girl picks it up . The dressmakers are horrified that a child should pick up such an evil thing. When they try to retrieve it, the little girl is adamant, explaining: “‘… She’s my very own. I love her. You don’t love her. You hate her. If you didn’t hate her you wouldn’t of pushed her out of the window. I love her, I tell you, and that’s what she wants. She wants to be loved.'” The girl and doll depart happily.
SKEPTIC OR BELIEVER?
Agatha Christie wrote more than eighty books and plays in her long career. Perhaps understandably as the Psychical Research era of the 1930’s faded under the scrutiny of men like Harry Houdini, who exposed mediumistic frauds whenever possible, Agatha wrote fewer and fewer stories with real or false supernatural events. As a ghost-story writer her career began and ended for all intents with The Hound of Death. By 1936, Christie’s preference for archeology replaced any youthful imaginings about the occult.
But was the Agatha Christie of the 1930’s a believer or a skeptic? There can be no doubt she was a child of her times, the age of Spiritualism, a movement that would surface again briefly under the guise of E. S. P. in the 1976 book, Halloween Party. But Christie was never like Conan Doyle to give her full belief, but remain aware but wary. Perhaps this is best illustrated by her alter-ego, Hercule Poirot, who said: “I, too, believe in the force of superstition, one of the greatest forces the world has ever known.”… You misunderstand me, Hastings. What I meant was that I believe in the terrific force of superstition. Once get it firmly established that a series of deaths are supernatural, and you might almost stab a man in broad daylight, and it would still be put down to the curse, so strongly is the instinct of the supernatural implanted in the human race …”
