Free Dark Entries by Robert Aickman

to the lounge: a desire, after those few minutes of reflection, to cross-examine.
    ‘Thanks very much,’ said Mrs Pascoe, as if relieved of a similar apprehension. ‘Room One. Next to the suit of Japanese armour.’ She went on tipping and banging. To Gerald’s inflamed nerves, her behaviour seemed too consciously normal.
    He collected the book and made his way upstairs. The volume was bound in real leather, and the top of its pages were gilded: apparently a presentation copy. Outside the lounge, Gerald looked at the fly-leaf: in a very large hand was written ‘To my dear Son, Raglan, on his being honoured by the Queen. From his proud Father, B. Shotcroft, Major-General.’ Beneath the inscription a very ugly military crest had been appended by a stamper of primitive type.
    The suit of Japanese armour lurked in a dark corner as the Commandant himself had done when Gerald had first encountered him. The wide brim of the helmet concealed the black eyeholes in the headpiece; the moustache bristled realistically. It was exactly as if the figure stood guard over the door behind it. On this door was no number, but, there being no other in sight, Gerald took it to be the door of Number One. A short way down the dim, empty passage was a window, the ancient sashes of which shookin the din and blast of the bells. Gerald knocked sharply.
    If there was a reply, the bells drowned it; and he knocked again. When to the third knocking there was still no answer, he gently opened the door. He really had to know whether all would or could be well if Phrynne, and doubtless he also, were at all costs to remain in their room until it was dawn. He looked into the room and caught his breath.
    There was no artificial light, but the curtains, if there were any, had been drawn back from the single window, and the bottom sash forced up as far as it would go. On the floor by the dusky void, a maelstrom of sound, knelt the Commandant, his cropped white hair faintly catching the moonless glimmer, as his head lay on the sill, like that of a man about to be guillotined. His face was in his hands, but slightly sideways, so that Gerald received a shadowy distorted idea of his expression. Some might have called it ecstatic, but Gerald found it agonised. It frightened him more than anything which had yet happened. Inside the room the bells were like plunging, roaring lions.
    He stood for some considerable time quite unable to move. He could not determine whether or not the Commandant knew he was there. The Commandant gave no direct sign of it, but more than once he writhed and shuddered in Gerald’s direction, like an unquiet sleeper made more unquiet by an interloper. It was a matter of doubt whether Gerald should leave the book; and he decided to do so mainly because the thought of further contact with it displeased him. He crept into the room and softly laid it on a hardly visible wooden trunk at the foot of the plain metal bedstead. There seemed no other furniture in the room. Outside the door, the hanging mailed fingers of the Japanese figure touched his wrist.
    He had not been away from the lounge for long, but it was long enough for Mrs Pascoe to have begun to drink again. She had left the tidying up half-completed, or rather the room half-disarranged; and was leaning against the overmantel, drawing heavily on a dark tumbler of whisky. Phrynne had not yet finished her Ovaltine.
    ‘How long before the bells stop?’ asked Gerald assoon as he opened the lounge door. Now he was resolved that, come what might, they must go. The impossibility of sleep should serve as an excuse.
    ‘I don’t expect Mrs Pascoe can know any more than we can,’ said Phrynne.
    ‘You should have told us about this – this annual event before accepting our booking.’
    Mrs Pascoe drank some more whisky. Gerald suspected that it was neat. ‘It’s not always the same night,’ she said throatily, looking at the floor.
    ‘We’re not staying,’ said Gerald