The Haunted Pipe and Other Mysteries

The Haunted Pipe-2

“Tress! Come back! What do you mean by talking such nonsense?”

“Of course it’s only nonsense. We know that that sort of thing always is nonsense. But if you should have reason to suppose that there is something in it besides nonsense, you may think it worth your while to make inquiries of me. But I won’t have that pipe back again in my possession on any terms – mind that!”

The bang of the front door told me that he had gone out into the street. I let him go.

I laughed to myself as I re-entered the room. Haunted! That was not a bad idea of his. I saw the whole position at a glance. The truth of the matter was that he did regret his generosity, and he was ready to go any lengths if he could only succeed in cajoling me into restoring his gift. He was aware that I have views upon certain matters which are not wholly in accordance with those which are popularly supposed to be the views of the day, and particularly that on the question of what are commonly called supernatural visitations I have a standpoint of my own. Therefore it was not a bad move on his part to try to make me believe that about the pipe on which he knew I had set my heart there was something which could not be accounted for by ordinary laws. Yet, as his own sense would have told him it would do, if he had only allowed himself to reflect for a moment, the move failed. Because I am not yet so far gone as to suppose that a pipe, a thing of meerschaum and of amber, in the sense in which I understand the word, could be haunted – a pipe, a mere pipe.

“Hullo! I thought the creature’s legs were twined right round the bowl!”

I was holding the pipe in my hand, regarding it with the affectionate eyes with which a connoisseur does regard a curio, when I was induced to make this exclamation. I was certainly under the impression that, when I first took the pipe out of the box, two, if not three, of the feelers had been twined about the bowl – twined tightly, so that you could not see daylight between them and it. Now they were almost entirely detached, only the tips touching the meerschaum, and those particular feelers were gathered up as though the creature were in the act of taking a spring. Of course I was under a misapprehension: the feelers couldn’t have been twined, though, a moment before, I should have been ready to bet a thousand to one that they were. Still, one does make mistakes, and very egregious mistakes, at times. At the same time, I confess that when I saw that dreadful-looking animal poised on the extreme edge of the bowl, for all the world as though it were just going to spring at me, I was a little startled. I remembered that when I was smoking the pipe I did think I saw the uplifted tentacle moving, as though it were reaching out at me. And I had a clear recollection that just as I had been sinking into that strange state of unconsciousness, I had been under the impression that the creature was writhing and twisting as though it had suddenly become instinct with life. Under the circumstances, these reflections were not pleasant. I wished Tress had not talked that nonsense about the thing being haunted. It was surely sufficient to know that it was drugged and poisonous, without anything else.

I replaced it in the sandalwood box. I locked the box in a cabinet. Quite apart from the question as to whether that pipe was or was not haunted, I know it haunted me. It was with me, in a figurative – which was worse than an actual – sense, all the day. Still worse, it was with me all the night. It was with me in my dreams. Such dreams! Possibly I had not yet wholly recovered from the effects of that insidious drug, but, whether or no, it was very wrong of Tress to set my thoughts into such a channel. He knows that I am of a highly imaginative temperament, and that it is easier to get morbid thoughts into my mind than to get them out again.

Before that night was through I wished very heartily that I had never seen the pipe! I woke from one nightmare to fall into another. One dreadful dream was with me all the time – of a hideous, green reptile which advanced towards me out of some awful darkness, slowly, inch by inch, until it clutched me round the neck, and, gluing its lips to mine, sucked the life’s blood out of my veins as it embraced me with a slimy hiss. Such dreams are not restful. I woke anything but refreshed when the morning came. And when I got up and dressed I felt that, on the whole, it would perhaps have been better if I never had gone to bed. My nerves were unstrung, and I had that generally tremulous feeling which is, I believe, an inseparable companion of the more advanced stages of dipsomania. I ate no breakfast. I am no breakfast-eater as a rule, but that morning I ate absolutely nothing.

“If this sort of thing is to continue, I will let Tress have his pipe again. He may have the laugh of me, but anything is better than this.”

It was with almost funereal forebodings that I went to the cabinet in which I had placed the sandalwood box. But when I opened it my feelings of gloom partially vanished. Of what fantasies had I been guilty! It must have been an entire delusion on my part to have supposed that those tentacula had ever been twined about the bowl. The creature was in exactly the same position in which I had left it the day before as, of course, I knew it would be! poised, as if about to spring. I was telling myself how foolish I had been to allow myself to dwell for a moment on Tress’ words, when Martin Brasher was shown in.

Brasher is an old friend of mine. We have a common ground – ghosts. Only we approach them from different points of view. He takes the scientific – psychological – inquiry side. He is always anxious to hear of a ghost, so that he may have an opportunity of “showing it up.”

“I’ve something in your line here,” I observed, as he came in.

“In my line? How so? I’m not pipe mad.”

“No, but you’re ghost mad. And this is a haunted pipe.”

“A haunted pipe! I think you’re rather more mad about ghosts, my dear Pugh, than I am.”

Then I told him all about it. He was deeply interested, especially when I told him that the pipe was drugged. But when I repeated Tress’s words about its being haunted, and mentioned my own delusion about the creature moving, he took a more serious view of the case than I had expected he would do.

“I propose that we act on Tress’s suggestion, and go and make inquiries of him.”

“But you don’t really think that there is anything in it?”

“On these subjects I never allow myself to think at all. There are Tress’s words, and there is your story. It is agreed on all hands that the pipe has peculiar properties. It seems to me that there is a sufficient case here to merit inquiry.”

He persuaded me. I went with him. The pipe, in the sandalwood box, went too.

Tress received us with a grin a grin which was accentuated when I placed the sandalwood box upon the table.

“You understand,” he said, “that a gift is a gift. On no terms will I consent to receive that pipe back in my possession.”

I was rather nettled by his tone.

“You need be under no alarm. I have no intention of suggesting anything of the kind.”

“Our business here,” began Brasher – I must own that his manner is a little ponderous – “is of a scientific, I may say also, and at the same time, of a judicial nature. Our object is the Pursuit of Truth and the Advancement of Inquiry.”

“Have you been trying another smoke?” inquired Tress, nodding his head towards me.

Before I had time to answer, Brasher went droning on:

“Our friend here tells me that you say this pipe is haunted.”

“I say it is haunted because it is haunted.”

I looked at Tress. I half suspected that he was poking fun at us. But he appeared to be serious enough.

“In these matters,” remarked Brasher, as though he were giving utterance to a new and important truth, “there is a scientific and a non-scientific method of inquiry. The scientific method is to begin at the beginning. May I ask how this pipe came into your possession?”

Tress paused before he answered.

“You may ask.” He paused again. “Oh, you certainly may ask. But it doesn’t follow that I shall tell you.”

“Surely your object, like ours, can be but the Spreading About of the Truth?”

“I don’t see it at all. It is possible to imagine a case in which the spreading about of the truth might make me look a little awkward.”

“Indeed!” Brasher pursed up his lips. “Your words would almost lead one to suppose that there was something about your method of acquiring the pipe which you have good and weighty reasons for concealing.”

“I don’t know why I should conceal the thing from you. I don’t suppose either of you is any better than I am. I don’t mind telling you how I got the pipe. I stole it.”

“Stole it!”

Brasher seemed both amazed and shocked. But I, who had had previous experience of Tress’s methods of adding to his collection, was not at all surprised. Some of the pipes which he calls his, if only the whole truth about them were publicly known, would send him to gaol.

“That’s nothing!” he continued. “All collectors steal! The eighth commandment was not intended to apply to them. Why, Pugh there has ‘conveyed’ three-fourths of the pipes which he flatters himself are his.”

I was so dumbfounded by the charge that it took my breath away. I sat in astounded silence. Tress went raving on:

“I was so shy of this particular pipe when I had obtained it, that I put it away for quite three months. When I took it out to have a look at it, something about the thing so tickled me that I resolved to smoke it. Owing to peculiar circumstances attending the manner in which the thing came into my possession, and on which I need not dwell – you don’t like to dwell on those sort of things, do you, Pugh? – I knew really nothing about the pipe. As was the case with Pugh, one peculiarity I learned from actual experience. It was also from actual experience that I learned that the thing was – well, I said haunted, but you may use any other word you like.”

“Tell us, as briefly as possible, what it was you really did discover.”

“Take the pipe out of the box!”

Brasher took the pipe out of the box, and held it in his hand. “You see that creature on it. Well, when I first had it it was underneath the pipe.”

“How do you mean that it was underneath the pipe?”

“It was bunched together underneath the stem, just at the end of the mouthpiece, in the same way in which a fly might be suspended from the ceiling. When I began to smoke the pipe I saw the creature move.”

“But I thought that unconsciousness immediately followed.”

“It did follow, but not before I saw that the thing was moving. It was because I thought that I had been, in a way, a victim of delirium that I tried the second smoke. Suspecting that the thing was drugged I swallowed what I believed would prove a powerful antidote. It enabled me to resist the influence of the narcotic much longer than before, and while I still retained my senses I saw the creature crawl along under the stem, and over the bowl. It was that sight, I believe, as much as anything else, which sent me silly. When I came to again, I then and there decided to present the pipe to Pugh. There is one more thing I would remark. When the pipe left me the creature’s legs were twined about the bowl. Now they are withdrawn. Possibly you, Pugh, are able to cap my story with a little one which is all your own.”