Devitt’s Clerk

by Mary Monk

I first became acquainted with Ezekiel Ingram in my ‘varsity days when I was training to become a doctor. We became good friends and remained so for some years until graduation, when we drifted our separate ways. It was some years later that, by chance, we met again and soon rented a flat together in central London.

At that time, Ezekiel was unemployed and seeking a job that would adequately pay his share of the rent, but one that would not be too strenuous, for he had suffered an attack of brain fever a few months earlier and had not yet fully recovered.

One day, in perusing the ‘Situations Vacant’ column of the newspaper, I came across an advertisement for an office clerk that seemed suitable for my friend. He applied and received the following letter by return of post:

“Mr Jeremiah Devitt will be pleased to interview Mr Ingram on Monday next at 11a.m.” and giving an address east of the City.

The weather that Monday morning was particularly harsh, with rain lashing down in torrents, the cobbles under an inch of water in places. I happened to have an appointment not far from Ingram’s destination, so agreed to share a cab with him

It took some time to reach our destination, and I was starting to fear that we would be late, when the hansom jerked to a halt. Both my friend and I were surprised that the street seemed so poor and desolate, not at all the sort of place in which a flourishing business might thrive. So dingy was the prospect that I decided then and there to wait for my friend, rather than leave him alone in so dubious a haunt.

The house to which we were directed had once been prosperous but was now weathered and blackened with the smoke of many years. The door was opened by a tall, thin man about my age. His appearance was striking, with short-cropped curly red hair, an aquiline nose, and the most intense blue eyes I had ever seen. He was well-dressed, with a fine cream waistcoat and a distinctive silver watch chain.

“You must be Ingram,” he said, smiling in a way that made me inexplicably uneasy. He invited us in out of the rain, and my friend shook his hand. “Devitt. Jeremiah Devitt”, the man said, offering to take our hats and coats. I was somewhat surprised at the proprietor answering the door himself but reflected that he was in need of a clerk, and perhaps his previous employee had left at short notice.

I cannot fully describe what I felt in the man’s presence, but he had a peculiar aura about him which I found intensely disquieting.  

While Ingram followed his interviewer into an office, leaving me in the foyer, I busied myself looking about the place. It was as weathered inside as out, the ceiling made of dark, oppressive wood, the yellowing plaster on the walls cracking with age, and stained with damp, the wooden floor worn with heavy usage. Everything was coated with a layer of dust, as if nobody had cleaned for years.

The place felt deserted, but there were two other doors further down the corridor, with names engraved on tarnished brass plates. As I was inspecting one of these name plates, a man appeared from further down the corridor, shutting a door behind him.

He turned, and started violently upon seeing me. As he approached, I could not help but notice that he looked most dreadfully ill: his eyes were tired and pink, his skin a ghastly grey, so pale it was almost translucent, the bones clearly visible beneath. What little hair he had was in small, uneven clumps of white, his scalp covered in liver spots, but the worst thing was his hands… good lord, his hands… They were so thin as to be skeletal, and he clutched his papers tightly to his breast in stick-like, bony fingers. I instinctively moved as he approached, but he suddenly lunged at me and grasped my arm so tightly that I was quite unable to shake him off. “Do not accept,” he said, in a hollow voice that rasped in his throat. I tried to move, but his grip was far stronger than I would have thought possible for so emaciated a man. “For God’s sake, do not accept,” he said again, more forcefully this time.

 “Excuse me, but it is my friend who is applying for the position…” I stuttered, my arm still in his steely grasp. His awful eyes widened, and he removed his grip in apparent embarrassment, but kept his gaze on me. “Then may God have mercy on his soul,” he said, and as suddenly as he had grabbed me, he dropped his gaze and retraced his steps to the end of the corridor, where he promptly disappeared from view.

I was so shaken by the encounter that I leant on the wall, feeling rather faint. To my relief, Ingram emerged from the room just a few moments later. His spirits seemed far higher than my own, and he told me that he was to look over the terms and conditions and return in the morning if he wished to accept the rôle. He looked at me worriedly, but assumed I was just tired for I had admitted over breakfast that I had had a poor night’s sleep, and we left for home.

On the way home in our cab, Ingram made attempts at light conversation, but I was unable to utter a word; and when we reached our lodgings, he expressed the hope that I had not taken cold. “You are very pale, you know. What is the matter?” he said.

 “Ingram,” I faltered, slightly embarrassed now to look back upon my reaction to the clerk’s odd behaviour, “Did anything strike you as odd about Mr Devitt?” He looked at me in puzzlement and shook his head. “No, not at all. He seemed a most amiable gentleman and said he reckoned I would be admirably suited to the position. He has been without a clerk for some months now. Are you sure you’re all right? You are looking awfully pale.” I shook my head, continuing. “While you were in his office, Ingram, I had a most disturbing encounter. A gentleman, he must have been another clerk, was leaving his office and the man suddenly lunged at me. He gripped my arm and was adamant that I should not accept Devitt’s offer. He was most insistent; he thought it was I who wanted the position. His appearance… oh God, he looked like the living dead!” I poured myself a brandy in an attempt to calm myself. “That is odd,” said Ingram, his brow furrowed, “for Devitt said there was currently nobody else in his employment.”

I retired early to bed with a headache and noticed as I was changing into my nightgown that my arm was badly bruised where the man had gripped it. How a man in his state of health could have caused such injury was beyond me, but I applied a medicinal balm and went to bed, my sleep peppered with disturbing dreams.

When I awoke it was past ten o’clock. I arose and saw a note at the end of the bed from Ingram, stating that he had decided to accept the position and had gone to inform Mr Devitt of his decision.

On my return from work, the housekeeper greeted me worriedly. “Something is wrong, Sir, something is very wrong”, she said, shaking her head so violently that she almost dropped my coat. “Oh, Sir, I don’t know what’s to be done. Mr Ingram, he ain’t returned home and it’s getting dark outside”. She had cared for Ingram during his recent illness, and worried constantly that he was at risk of relapse. It was unusual for him to be out after nightfall, but not unheard of. I assured her that there would be a reasonable explanation; maybe he had seen a friend and gone out to dine, maybe he had decided to go for a walk, and so forth. “In this weather, Sir?” she said, shaking her head.

The night passed quietly, but Ingram did not return.

By morning I was seriously concerned. Could Ingram have been involved in an accident? I decided to go to the last place I knew he had visited, Jeremiah Devitt’s place, to see if I could find news of him.

When I arrived at the address, I saw that the house was in a terrible state of disrepair. There was rubble surrounding the small porch, and the front door was wide open, the interior in ruins. What had been Devitt’s office door now lay in the middle of the corridor, glass shattered all around. Floorboards had been pulled up and holes gaped across the floor. Inside the office, the desk had been smashed with some heavy object, and old, yellowing papers were strewn everywhere. How could so much destruction have occurred in the space of one night?

I heard a noise inside and came face to face with a filthy vagrant who was clearly taking the opportunity to hunt for valuables. “Whadder ye want?” he demanded suspiciously “What happened here?” I asked. “I was here only yesterday, and all has fallen to ruin.”

He looked at me strangely. “Whaddya mean? The ‘ole ‘ouse been like this fer years. I bin biding ‘ere fer months now,” he growled

“That’s not possible!” I cried. “We came here yesterday, my friend and I; this was the office of one Mr Jeremiah Devitt, he interviewed my friend for a position! And there was another man in that room there!” I pointed at the office from which the emaciated clerk had emerged. The man shook his head. “Yer must’a gotten the wrong address lad, this place ain’t no ‘awffice’ (he pronounced this word with exaggerated care, in mockery of my accent) ‘or whatever it’a bin. An’ there defn’tly been no other man two doors down, that door bin locked since we got ‘ere. Canny pick the lock, n’ nobody bin able t’ break in ter it – bin locked fer years I ‘spect,” he said.

“No, this is wrong. I must see this for myself,” I said and stepped past, leaving him staring after me and shaking his head.

I made sure to tread carefully as I headed for the clerk’s room, putting slight pressure on each board until I was satisfied that it would not collapse under my weight. I periodically shouted “Ingram!” as loudly as I dared but received no response. It wasn’t difficult to find the door to the emaciated clerk’s office, for it was the only door in the house that hadn’t been ripped off its hinges.

The door was solid and locked fast, although I could see boot marks where someone had tried to break in. But when I gripped the handle, to my surprise, the door flew open. I took a step and tripped downwards, steadying myself on the wall, for it was not an office at all but the entrance to some sort of cellar: there was a set of stairs leading downwards into total darkness. I felt around in my breast pocket and found a match which I struck on the wall. I saw an old stub of candle among the debris and lit it.

I was thoroughly confused at what I was seeing: why would the clerk have been in a cellar? I descended cautiously, for the stairs were uneven to the tread, and the ground at the bottom was loosely compacted dirt. I covered my mouth and nose with my jacket, for the stench was appalling, and held the candle aloft. Even now, I blanch at the horror of what I saw.

A pile of bodies lay at the back of the room, in varying states of decomposition, with assorted bones strewn across the room where some bodies had collapsed under the weight of others. Most still bore the remains of their clothing; some were women, some were men. The nearest body looked like the most recent and was wearing a brown waistcoat without a jacket.

I could see two more shapes above them, human shapes, apparently embedded in the wall, as if they had been placed there and covered haphazardly with thin plaster. I cautiously reached forward, tracing the shape of what looked like a face, when, to my horror, a large chunk of plaster fell to the floor and revealed a ghastly brown skull, only half decomposed, the remaining teeth clenched in a rictus of terror. As I turned, suppressing a retch, my hand brushed against something. I heard a creak of movement just above my head, and staggered back with a loud cry at the sight of a man hanging from the ceiling, a noose tight around his neck. This corpse, too, was half rotted, but there was enough intact to keep it from falling to the ground.

Small clumps of curled ginger hair clung to what remained of the scalp, and a cream waistcoat hung loosely from the bones. A distinctive silver watch chain protruding from the breast pocket confirmed my horrible suspicion; the man before me, hanging from a rope, was Jeremiah Devitt. But this man had clearly been deceased for years. At the hanging corpse’s feet was a second shape, and to my terror I recognised the body of the emaciated clerk, his grey skin sallow and waxy, his eyes glazed over.

My heart was slamming in my chest, my breath uneven and panicked. But the worst was still to come.

As I reeled against the wall, I saw again the most recent corpse, and recognition hit me.  I knew that brown waistcoat. I stepped forward, and turned over the body. Ingram – oh God, how had I not recognised him before? I placed the candle on the floor to provide what feeble light it could, and gripped the rigid face of my friend between my hands, shaking him violently, praying that he was somehow still alive. “INGRAM!” I cried, but I knew from the moment I touched that ice-cold skin that my friend was gone. I let out an anguished cry, clutching my head in my hands, and ran stumbling up the steps two at a time.

There was a full-scale investigation. Ten bodies in total were discovered in that cellar, and it was concluded that Devitt had murdered his entire staff, in a fit of madness, including his housekeeper and a clerk. It then appeared that he had killed himself. But all were found to have been dead for over a decade. But newspaper clippings among the papers left by Devitt shewed that every year since his suicide, an advertisement, like the one Ezekiel had answered, had been placed in the --Gazette. And those who answered those advertisements had never been seen again.