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Chapter fourteen. Things That Go Bump in the Night. |
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phantom voices; poltergeist leaves |
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The fifth and last visitation was, perhaps, the oddest. The cook and the rest of the staff had gone to a village party, but Namkia remained behind on his usual bodyguard duty. We sat up talking by the fire, and it was perhaps eleven or after when we both heard a low murmur of voices in the cookhouse, which was at the bungalow end of the lines and only about twenty feet in a direct line from us. Namkia, saying he wanted to have a word with the cook, jumped up and went out by the back door, and I sat on waiting, listening, half-consciously, for the sound of normal conversation, for obviously the cook and the others supposed me asleep, and had been whispering. But there was no sound, though the murmuring had now stopped; and there, all of a sudden, was Namkia back again, to say that the lines were in darkness and quite deserted, and that everything, the cook- house included, was fast barred from the outside and just as it had been left. We looked at one another for a moment, in silence; and then, without comment, turned in. (112) There were no more manifestations after that inside the bungalow, but the phenomena continued in the lines for another month or so. They grew gradually less, however, at much the same speed as they had increased, until at the end of March they ceased entirely. They never recurred. I offer no explanation. We had rats before the spook appeared. Rats and rat-noises continued during its activities, but, as Namkia rightly claimed, they were distinct from it, either at once or upon investigation, and, when the ghost had vanished, rats and rat-noises unhappily remained. There was no child, servant or villager who was even a candidate for suspicion. To take the case most susceptible of human explanation, that of the voices in the cookhouse, when Namkia came out of the bungalow door a few seconds after hearing the voices, he overlooked, at once, the cookhouse, the lines, and the cleared belt between them and the scrub, for they lay below him and to the right. No one could have got out and reached cover in the time available, and still have left the doors fastened tight behind him with strings tied and heavy logs laid against them, as Namkia found them all. The time-factor still holds good for anyone standing outside the lines and not in them. The cleared belt was steep, wide and rough, and I do not think a running man could have got across it both unseen and unheard. Had an intruder, on the other hand, run back past the bungalow out of Namkia's sight, I, sitting there listening, would have heard him; bare feet running on hard ground are not noiseless. |
