Smee & Other Stories

Smee

‘No,’ said Jackson, with a deprecatory smile, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset your game. I shan’t be doing that because you’ll have plenty without me. But I’m not playing any games of hide-and-seek.’

It was Christmas Eve, and we were a party of fourteen with just the proper leavening of youth. We had dined well; it was the season for childish games; and we were all in the mood for playing them—all, that is, except Jackson. When somebody suggested hide-and-seek there was rapturous and almost unanimous approval. His was the one dissentient voice.

It was not like Jackson to spoil sport or refuse to do as others wanted. Somebody asked him if he were feeling seedy.

‘No,’ he answered, ‘I feel perfectly fit, thanks. But,’ he added with a smile which softened without retracting the flat refusal, ‘I’m not playing hide-and-seek.’

One of us asked him why not. He hesitated for some seconds before replying.

‘I sometimes go and stay at a house where a girl was killed through playing hide-and-seek in the dark. She didn’t know the house very well. There was a servants’ staircase with a door to it. When she was pursued she opened the door and jumped into what she must have thought was one of the bedrooms—and she broke her neck at the bottom of the stairs.’

We all looked concerned, and Mrs Femley said:

‘Brenda Ford—she told me her name was.’

Sangston put down his glass and laid a hand on my shoulder.

‘Look here, old man,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind a joke, but don't let it go too far. We don’t want all the women in the house getting hysterical. Brenda Ford is the name of the girl who broke her neck on the stairs playing hide-and-seek here ten years ago.’

‘There was somebody there,’ I maintained, ‘because I touched her.’

‘So did I,’ said Mrs Gorman in a voice which had lost its steadiness.

‘And I don’t see how she could have got up and gone without our knowing it.’

Reggie uttered a queer, shaken laugh. He, too, had had an unpleasant experience that evening.

‘Somebody’s been playing the goat,’ he remarked. ‘Coming down?’

We were not very popular when we arrived in the drawing-room. Reggie rather tactlessly gave it out that he had found us sitting on a window-seat behind a curtain. I taxed the tall, dark girl with having pretended to be ‘Smee’ and afterwards slipping away. She denied it. After which we settled down and played other games. ‘Smee’ was done with for the evening, and I for one was glad of it.

Some long while later, during an interval Sangston told me, if I wanted a drink, to go into the smoke-room and help myself. I went, and he presently followed me. I could see that he was rather peeved with me, and the reason came out during the following minute or two. It seemed that in his opinion, if I must sit out and flirt with Mrs Gorman—in circumstances which would have been considered highly compromising in his young days—I needn’t do
it during a round game and keep everybody else waiting for us.

‘But there was somebody else there,’ I protested, ‘somebody pretending to be “Smee”. I believe it was that tall, dark girl, Miss Ford, although she denied it. She even whispered her name to me.’

Sangston stared at me and nearly dropped his glass.

‘Miss Who?’ he shouted.

mething when we go down? There’s something rather uncanny in this particular amusement. I can’t quite shed the delusion that there’s somebody in this game who oughtn’t to be in at all.’

That was just how I had been feeling but I didn’t say so. But for my part the worst of my qualms were now gone; the arrival of Mrs Gorman had dissipated them. We sat on talking, wondering from time to time when the rest of the party would arrive.

I don’t know how long elapsed before we heard a clatter of feet on the landing and young Reggie’s voice shouting, ‘Hullo! Hullo, there! Anybody there?’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Mrs Gorman with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’re a nice pair! You’re both forfeited. We’ve all been waiting for you for hours.’

'Why, you haven’t found “Smee” yet,’ I objected.

‘You haven’t, you mean. I happen to have been “Smee” myself.’

‘But “Smee’s” here with us,’ I cried.

‘Yes,’ agreed Mrs Gorman.

The curtain was stripped aside and in a moment we were blinking into the eye of Reggie’s electric torch. I looked at Mrs Gorman and then on my other side. Between me and the wall there was an empty space on the window seat. I stood up at once and wished I hadn’t, for I found myself sick and dizzy.

foreboding into actual terror. I firmly believe that I should have got up and run if I had not felt that at my first movement she would have divined my intention and compelled me to stay, by some means of which I could not bear to think. The memory of having touched her bare arm made me wince and draw in my lips. I prayed that somebody else would come along soon.

My prayer was answered. Light footfalls sounded on the landing. Somebody on the other side of the curtain brushed against my knees. The curtain was drawn aside and a woman’s hand, fumbling in the darkness, presently rested on my shoulder. I “Smee”?’ whispered a voice which I instantly recognized as Mrs Gorman’s.

Of course she received no answer. She came and settled down beside me with a rustle, and I can’t describe the sense of relief she brought me.

‘It’s Tony, isn’t it?’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ I whispered back.

‘You’re not “Smee” are you?’

‘No, she’s on my other side.’

She reached a hand across me, and I heard one of her nails scratch the surface of a woman’s silk gown.

‘Hullo, “Smee”! How are you? Who are you? Oh, is it against the rules to talk? Never mind. Tony, we’ll break the rules. Do you know, Tony, this game is beginning to irk me a little. I hope they’re not going to run it to death by playing it all the evening. I’d like to play some game where we can all be together in the same room with a nice bright fire.’

‘Same here,’ I agreed fervently.

‘Can’t you suggest so

I didn’t know the name, but because I didn’t know it I guessed at once who she was. The tall, pale, dark girl was the only person in the house I didn’t know by name. Ergo my companion was the tall, pale, dark girl. It seemed rather intriguing to be there with her, shut in between a heavy curtain and a window, and I rather wondered whether she was enjoying the game we were all playing. Somehow she hadn’t seemed to me to be one of the romping sort. I muttered one or two commonplace questions to her and had no answer.

‘Smee’ is a game of silence. ‘Smee’ and the person or persons who have found ‘Smee’ are supposed to keep quiet to make it hard for the others. But there was nobody else about, and it occurred to me that she was playing the game a little too much to the letter. I spoke again and got no answer, and then I began to be annoyed. She was of that cold, ‘superior’ type which affects to despise men; she didn’t like me; and she was sheltering behind the rules of a game for children to be discourteous. Well, if she didn’t like sitting there with me, I certainly didn’t want to be sitting there with her! I half turned from her and began to hope that we should both be discovered without much more delay.

Having discovered that I didn’t like being there alone with her, it was queer how soon I found myself hating it, and that for a reason very different from the one which had at first whetted my annoyance. The girl I had met for the first time before dinner, and seen diagonally across the table, had a sort of cold charm about her which had attracted while it had half angered me. For the girl who was with me, imprisoned in the opaque darkness between the curtain and the window, I felt no attraction at all. It was so very much the
reverse that I should have wondered at myself if, after the first shock of the discovery that she had suddenly become repellent to me, I had no room in my mind for anything besides the consciousness that her close presence was an increasing horror to me.
It came upon me just as quickly as I’ve uttered the words. My flesh suddenly shrank from her as you see a strip of gelatine shrink and wither before the heat of a fire. That feeling of something being wrong had come back to me, but multiplied to an extent which turned

‘Smee?’ I whispered.

I had no answer. ‘Smee’ when challenged does not answer. So I sat down beside her, first in the field, to await the others. Then, having settled myself I leaned over to her and whispered:

‘Who is it? What’s your name, “Smee”?’

And out of the darkness beside me the whisper came back: ‘Brenda Ford.’

‘Payment in advance,’ said Tim, ‘ensures honesty and promotes good feeling. You are therefore sentenced to tell the story here and now.’ And here follows Jackson’s story, unrevised by me and passed on without comment to a wider public:

‘Payment in advance,’ said Tim, ‘ensures honesty and promotes good feeling. You are therefore sentenced to tell the story here and now.’

And here follows Jackson’s story, unrevised by me and passed on without comment to a wider public:

Smee & Other Short Stories by AM Burrage

Alfred McLelland Burrage was born in Hillingdon, Middlesex on 1st July, 1889. His father and uncle were both writers, primarily of boy’s fiction, and by age 16 AM Burrage had joined them. The young man had ambitions to write for the adult market too. The money was better and so was his writing.

From 1890 to 1914, prior to the mainstream appeal of cinema and radio the printed word, mainly in magazines, was the foremost mass entertainment. AM Burrage quickly became a master of the market publishing his stories regularly across a number of publications.
By the start of the Great War Burrage was well established but in 1916 he was conscripted to fight on the Western Front. He continued to write during these years documenting his experiences in the classic book War is War by Ex-Private X.

For the remainder of his life Burrage was rarely printed in book form but continued to write and be published on a prodigious scale in magazines and newspapers. In this volume we concentrate on his supernatural stories which are, by common consent, some of the best ever written. Succinct yet full of character each reveals a twist and a flavour that is unsettling…..sometimes menacing….always disturbing.

There are many other volumes available in this series together with a number of audiobooks. All are available from iTunes, Amazon and other fine digital stores.

Table Of Contents
Smee
The Last of the Kerstons
Someone in the Room
The Shadowy Escort
The Garden in Glenister Square
The Affair at Paddock Cross
Auntie Kate
The Lady of The Elms
The Supernatural in Fiction
Un-Paying Guests
AM Burrage – The Life And Times

Smee

‘No,’ said Jackson, with a deprecatory smile, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset your game. I shan’t be doing that because you’ll have plenty without me. But I’m not playing any games of hide-and-seek.’

It was Christmas Eve, and we were a party of fourteen with just the proper leavening of youth. We had dined well; it was the season for childish games; and we were all in the mood for playing them—all, that is, except Jackson. When somebody suggested hide-and-seek there was rapturous and almost unanimous approval. His was the one dissentient voice.

It was not like Jackson to spoil sport or refuse to do as others wanted. Somebody asked him if he were feeling seedy.

‘No,’ he answered, ‘I feel perfectly fit, thanks. But,’ he added with a smile which softened without retracting the flat refusal, ‘I’m not playing hide-and-seek.’

One of us asked him why not. He hesitated for some seconds before replying.

‘I sometimes go and stay at a house where a girl was killed through playing hide-and-seek in the dark. She didn’t know the house very well. There was a servants’ staircase with a door to it. When she was pursued she opened the door and jumped into what she must have thought was one of the bedrooms—and she broke her neck at the bottom of the stairs.’

We all looked concerned, and Mrs Femley said:

‘How awful! And you were there when it happened?’

Jackson shook his head very gravely.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but I was there when something else happened. Something worse.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought anything could be worse.’

‘This was,’ said Jackson and shuddered visibly. ‘Or so it seemed to me.’

I think he wanted to tell the story and was angling for encouragement. A few requests, which may have seemed to him to lack urgency, he affected to ignore and went off at a tangent.

‘I wonder if any of you have played a game called “Smee”? It’s a great improvement on the ordinary game of hide-and-seek. The name derives from the ungrammatical colloquialism, “It’s me”. You might care to play if you’re going to play a game of that sort. Let me tell you the rules.

‘Every player is presented with a sheet of paper. All the sheets are blank except one, on which is written “Smee”. Nobody knows who is “Smee” except “Smee” himself—or herself as the case may be. The lights are then turned out and “Smee” slips from the room and goes off to hide, and after an interval the other players go off in search, without knowing whom they are actually in search of. One player meeting another challenges with the word Smee”, and the other player, if not the one concerned, answers “Smee”.

‘The real “Smee” makes no answer when challenged, and the second player remains quietly by him. Presently they will be discovered by a third player who, having challenged and received no answer, will link up with the first two. This goes on until all the players have formed a chain, and the last to join it is marked down for a forfeit. It’s a good noisy, romping game, and in a big house it often takes a long time to complete the chain. You might care to try it; and I’ll pay my forfeit and smoke one of Tim’s excellent cigars here by the fire, until you get tired of it.’

I remarked that it sounded a good game and asked Jackson if he had played it himself.

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I played it in the house I was telling you about.’

‘And she was there? The girl who broke’

‘No, no,’ Mrs Femley interrupted. ‘He told us he wasn’t there when it happened.’

Jackson considered.

‘I don’t know if she were there or not. I’m afraid she was. I know that there were thirteen of us and there ought only to have been twelve. And I’ll swear that I didn’t know her name, or I think I should have gone clean off my head when I heard that whisper in the dark. No, you don’t catch me playing that game, or any other like it, any more. It spoilt my nerve quite a
while, and I can’t afford to take long holidays. Besides, it saves a lot of trouble and inconvenience to own up at once to being a coward.’

Tim Vouce, the best of hosts, smiled around at us, and in that smile there was a meaning which is sometimes vulgarly expressed by the slow closing of an eye. ‘There’s a story coming,’ he announced.

‘There’s certainly a story of sorts,’ said Jackson, ‘but whether it’s coming or not’

He paused and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, you’re going to pay a forfeit instead of playing?’

‘Please. But have a heart and let me down lightly. It’s a not just sheer cussedness on my part.’