Saturday 8 March 2014

The Great God Pan (Part 1) by Arthur Machen

THE EXPERIMENT

"I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was not sure you could  spare the time."
"I was able to make arrangements for a few days; things are not very lively  just now. But have you no misgivings, Raymond? Is it absolutely safe?"
The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond's  house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone  with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet  breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at  intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long  lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as  the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, began  to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend.
"Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any  surgeon could do it."
"And there is no danger at any other stage?"
"None; absolutely no physical danger whatsoever, I give you my word. You  are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted  myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard  myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I  was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then  every day has been a preparation for what we shall do tonight."
"I should like to believe it is all true." Clarke knit his brows, and looked  doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. "Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your  theory is not a phantasmagoria— a splendid vision, certainly, but a mere  vision after all?"
Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a  middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he  answered Clarke and faced him, there was a flush on his cheek.
"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after  hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe  corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me  standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these  things - yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid  ground beneath our feet-I say that all these are but dreams and shadows;  the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world,  but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras,  dreams in a career, 'beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know  whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke,  that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes.  You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true,  and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the  god Pan."
Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.
"It is wonderful indeed," he said. "We are standing on the brink of a strange  world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely  necessary?"
"Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all; a trifling rearrangement  of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention  of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred. I don't want to bother you  with 'shop,'Clarke; I might give you a mass of technical detail which would  sound very imposing, and would leave you as enlightened as you are now.  But I suppose you have read, casually, in out-of-the-way comers of your paper, that immense strides have been made recently in the physiology of  the brain. I saw a paragraph the other day about Digby's theory, and  Browne Faber's discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are  standing now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I have  not been standing still for the last fifteen years. It will be enough if I say  that five years ago I made the discovery that I alluded to when I said that  ten years ago I reached the goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling  and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and  sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and grow  cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I  sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I  knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems  a chance, the suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon  familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great  truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world,  a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no  ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld  the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think  this all high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I  do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and  lonely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with  the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed  of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the  floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were  suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with  pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that  such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of  men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and  the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our  thought. As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have done;  you can understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening; it  was a summer evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; I stood  here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns  profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I  saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge  of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned. You may look in Browne Faber's book, if you like, and you will  find that to the present day men of science are unable to account for the  presence, or to specify the functions of a certain group of nerve-cells in the  brain. That group is, as it were, land to let, a mere waste place for fanciful  theories. I am not in the position of Browne Faber and the specialists, I am  perfectly instructed as to the possible functions of those nerve-centers in the  scheme of things. With a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch, I  say, I can set free the current, with a touch I can complete the  communication between this world of sense and-we shall be able to finish  the sentence later on. Yes, the knife is necessary; but think what that knife  will effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and probably, for the  first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke,  Mary will see the god Pan!"
"But you remember what you wrote to me? I thought it would be requisite  that she-"
He whispered the rest into the doctor's ear.
"Not at all, not at all. That is nonsense. I assure you. Indeed, it is better as it  is; I am quite certain of that."
"Consider the matter well, Raymond. It's a great responsibility. Something  might go wrong; you would be a miserable man for the rest of your days."
"No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary  from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I  think her life is mine, to use as I see fit. Come, it's getting late; we had  better go in."
Dr. Raymond led the way into the house, through the hall, and down a long  dark passage. He took a key from his pocket and opened a heavy door, and  motioned Clarke into his laboratory. It had once been a billiard-room, and  was lighted by a glass dome in the centre of the ceiling, whence there still  shone a sad grey light on the figure of the doctor as he lit a lamp with a  heavy shade and placed it on a table in the middle of the room.
Clarke looked about him. Scarcely a foot of wall remained bare; there were  shelves all around laden with bottles and phials of all shapes and colours,  and at one end stood a little Chippendale book-case. Raymond pointed to  this.
"You see that parchment Oswald Crollius? He was one of the first to show  me the way, though I don't think he ever found it himself. That is a strange  saying of his: In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.'"
There was not much furniture in the laboratory. The table in the centre, a  stone slab with a drain in one comer, the two armchairs on which Raymond  and Clarke were sitting; that was all, except an odd-looking chair at the  furthest end of the room. Clarke looked at it, and raised his eyebrows.
"Yes, that is the chair," said Raymond. "We may as well place it in  position." He got up and wheeled the chair to the light, and began raising  and lowering it, letting down the seat, setting the back at various angles,  and adjusting the foot-rest. It looked comfortable enough, and Clarke  passed his hand over the soft green velvet, as the doctor manipulated the  levers.
"Now, Clarke, make yourself quite comfortable. I have a couple hours'  work before me; I was obliged to leave certain matters to the last."
Raymond went to the stone slab, and Clarke watched him drearily as he  bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor  had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the larger one, on a ledge above his  apparatus, and Clarke, who sat in the shadows, looked down at the great  shadowy room, wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and  undefined darkness contrasting with one another. Soon he became  conscious of an odd odour, at first the merest suggestion of odour, in the  room, and as it grew more decided he felt surprised that he was not  reminded of the chemist's shop or the surgery. Clarke found himself idly  endeavouring to analyse the sensation, and half conscious, he began to  think of a day, fifteen years ago, that he had spent roaming through the  woods and meadows near his own home. It was a burning day at the beginning of August, the heat had dimmed the outlines of all things and all  distances with a faint mist, and people who observed the thermometer  spoke of an abnormal register, of a temperature that was almost tropical.  Strangely that wonderful hot day of the fifties rose up again in Clarke's  imagination; the sense of dazzling all-pervading sunlight seemed to blot out  the shadows and the lights of the laboratory, and he felt again the heated air  beating in gusts about his face, saw the shimmer rising from the turf, and  heard the myriad murmur of the summer.
"I hope the smell doesn't annoy you, Clarke; there's nothing unwholesome  about it. It may make you a bit sleepy, that's all."
Clarke heard the words quite distinctly, and knew that Raymond was  speaking to him, but for the life of him he could not rouse himself from his  lethargy. He could only think of the lonely walk he had taken fifteen years  ago; it was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was  a child, and now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before him.  Above all there came to his nostrils the scent of summer, the smell of  flowers mingled, and the odour of the woods, of cool shaded places, deep  in the green depths, drawn forth by the sun's heat; and the scent of the good  earth, lying as it were with arms stretched forth, and smiling lips,  overpowered all. His fancies made him wander, as he had wandered long  ago, from the fields into the wood, tracking a little path between the shining  undergrowth of beech-trees; and the trickle of water dropping from the  limestone rock sounded as a clear melody in the dream. Thoughts began to  go astray and to mingle with other thoughts; the beech alley was  transformed to a path between ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed  from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple  grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out  against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream,  was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an  undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all,  when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite  silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a  moment in time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither  man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the
form of all things but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the  sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry "Let  us go hence," and then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the  darkness of everlasting.
When Clarke woke up with a start he saw Raymond pouring a few drops of  some oily fluid into a green phial, which he stoppered tightly.
"You have been dozing," he said; "the journey must have tired you out. It is  done now. I am going to fetch Mary; I shall be back in ten minutes."
Clarke lay back in his chair and wondered. It seemed as if he had but  passed from one dream into another. He half expected to see the walls of  the laboratory melt and disappear, and to awake in London, shuddering at  his own sleeping fancies. But at last the door opened, and the doctor  returned, and behind him came a girl of about seventeen, dressed all in  white. She was so beautiful that Clarke did not wonder at what the doctor  had written to him. She was blushing now over face and neck and arms, but  Raymond seemed unmoved.
"Mary," he said, "the time has come. You are quite free. Are you willing to  trust yourself to me entirely?"
"Yes, dear."
"Do you hear that, Clarke? You are my witness. Here is the chair, Mary. It  is quite easy. Just sit in it and lean back. Are you ready?"
"Yes, dear, quite ready. Give me a kiss before you begin."
The doctor stooped and kissed her mouth, kindly enough. "Now shut your  eyes," he said. The girl closed her eyelids, as if she were tired, and longed  for sleep, and Raymond placed the green phial to her nostrils. Her face  grew white, whiter than her dress; she struggled faintly, and then with the  feeling of submission strong within her, crossed her arms upon her breast as  a little child about to say her prayers. The bright light of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes fleeting over her face as the changes  of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun. And then she lay  all white and still, and the doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was  quite unconscious. Raymond pressed hard on one of the levers and the chair  instantly sank back. Clarke saw him cutting away a circle, like a tonsure,  from her hair, and the lamp was moved nearer. Raymond took a small  glittering instrument from a little case, and Clarke turned away  shudderingly. When he looked again the doctor was binding up the wound  he had made.
"She will awake in five minutes." Raymond was still perfectly cool. "There  is nothing more to be done; we can only wait."
The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow, heavy, ticking. There  was an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick and faint; his knees shook  beneath him, he could hardly stand.
Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did  the colour that had vanished return to the girl's cheeks, and suddenly her  eyes opened. Clarke quailed before them. They shone with an awful light,  looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands  stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder  faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of her face  were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed  struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight,  and Clarke rushed forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor.
Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary's bedside. She was lying  wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.
"Yes," said the doctor, still quite cool, "it is a great pity; she is a hopeless  idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great  God Pan."  


Tuesday 18 February 2014

THE CHILD THAT WENT WITH THE FAIRIES by Sheridan Le Fanu



Eastward of the old city of Limerick, about ten Irish miles under the range of mountains known as the Slieveelim hills, famous as having afforded Sarsfield a shelter among their rocks and hollows, when he crossed them in his gallant descent upon the cannon and ammunition of King William, on its way to the beleaguering army, there runs a very old and narrow road. It connects the Limerick road to Tipperary with the old road from Limerick to Dublin, and runs by bog and pasture, hill and hollow, straw-thatched village, and roofless castle, not far from twenty miles.
Skirting the healthy mountains of which I have spoken, at one part it becomes singularly lonely. For more than three Irish miles it traverses a deserted country. A wide, black bog, level as a lake, skirted with copse, spreads at the left, as you journey northward, and the long and irregular line of mountain rises at the right, clothed in heath, broken with lines of grey rock that resemble the bold and irregular outlines of fortifications, and riven with many a gully, expanding here and there into rocky and wooded glens, which open as they approach the road.
A scanty pasturage, on which browsed a few scattered sheep or kine, skirts this solitary road for some miles, and under shelter of a hillock, and of two or three great ash-trees, stood, not many years ago, the little thatched cabin of a widow named Mary Ryan.
Poor was this widow in a land of poverty. The thatch had acquired the grey tint and sunken outlines, that show how the alternations of rain and sun have told upon that perishable shelter.
But whatever other dangers threatened, there was one well provided against by the care of other times. Round the cabin stood half a dozen mountain ashes, as the rowans, inimical to witches, are there called. On the worn planks of the door were nailed two horse-shoes, and over the lintel and spreading along the thatch, grew, luxuriant, patches of that ancient cure for many maladies, and prophylactic against the machinations of the evil one, the house-leek. Descending into the doorway, in thechiaroscuro of the interior, when your eye grew sufficiently accustomed to that dim light, you might discover, hanging at the head of the widow's wooden-roofed bed, her beads and a phial of holy water.
Here certainly were defences and bulwarks against the intrusion of that unearthly and evil power, of whose vicinity this solitary family were constantly reminded by the outline of Lisnavoura, that lonely hillhaunt of the "Good people," as the fairies are called euphemistically, whose strangely dome-like summit rose not half a mile away, looking like an outwork of the long line of mountain that sweeps by it.
It was at the fall of the leaf, and an autumnal sunset threw the lengthening shadow of haunted Lisnavoura, close in front of the solitary little cabin, over the undulating slopes and sides of Slieveelim. The birds were singing among the branches in the thinning leaves of the melancholy ash-trees that grew at the roadside in front of the door. The widow's three younger children were playing on the road, and their voices mingled with the evening song of the birds. Their elder sister, Nell, was "within in the house," as their phrase is, seeing after the boiling of the potatoes for supper.
Their mother had gone down to the bog, to carry up a hamper of turf on her back. It is, or was at least, a charitable custom—and if not disused, long may it continue—for the wealthier people when cutting their turf and stacking it in the bog, to make a smaller stack for the behoof of the poor, who were welcome to take from it so long as it lasted, and thus the potato pot was kept boiling, and hearth warm that would have been cold enough but for that good-natured bounty, through wintry months.
Moll Ryan trudged up the steep "bohereen" whose banks were overgrown with thorn and brambles, and stooping under her burden, re-entered her door, where her dark-haired daughter Nell met her with a welcome, and relieved her of her hamper.
Moll Ryan looked round with a sigh of relief, and drying her forehead, uttered the Munster ejaculation:
"Eiah, wisha! It's tired I am with it, God bless it. And where's the craythurs, Nell?"
"Playin' out on the road, mother; didn't ye see them and you comin' up?"
"No; there was no one before me on the road," she said, uneasily; "not a soul, Nell; and why didn't ye keep an eye on them?"
"Well, they're in the haggard, playin' there, or round by the back o' the house. Will I call them in?"
"Do so, good girl, in the name o' God. The hens is comin' home, see, and the sun was just down over Knockdoulah, an' I comin' up."
So out ran tall, dark-haired Nell, and standing on the road, looked up and down it; but not a sign of her two little brothers, Con and Bill, or her little sister, Peg, could she see. She called them; but no answer came from the little haggard, fenced with straggling bushes. She listened, but the sound of their voices was missing. Over the stile, and behind the house she ran—but there all was silent and deserted.
She looked down toward the bog, as far as she could see; but they did not appear. Again she listened—but in vain. At first she had felt angry, but now a different feeling overcame her, and she grew pale. With an undefined boding she looked toward the heathy boss of Lisnavoura, now darkening into the deepest purple against the flaming sky of sunset.
Again she listened with a sinking heart, and heard nothing but the farewell twitter and whistle of the birds in the bushes around. How many stories had she listened to by the winter hearth, of children stolen by the fairies, at nightfall, in lonely places! With this fear she knew her mother was haunted.
No one in the country round gathered her little flock about her so early as this frightened widow, and no door "in the seven parishes" was barred so early.
Sufficiently fearful, as all young people in that part of the world are of such dreaded and subtle agents, Nell was even more than usually afraid of them, for her terrors were infected and redoubled by her mother's. She was looking towards Lisnavoura in a trance of fear, and crossed herself again and again, and whispered prayer after prayer. She was interrupted by her mother's voice on the road calling her loudly. She answered, and ran round to the front of the cabin, where she found her standing.
"And where in the world's the craythurs—did ye see sight o' them anywhere?" cried Mrs. Ryan, as the girl came over the stile.
"Arrah! mother, 'tis only what they're run down the road a bit. We'll see them this minute coming back. It's like goats they are, climbin' here and runnin' there; an' if I had them here, in my hand, maybe I wouldn't give them a hiding all round."
"May the Lord forgive you, Nell! the childhers gone. They're took, and not a soul near us, and Father Tom three miles away! And what'll I do, or who's to help us this night? Oh, wirristhru, wirristhru! The craythurs is gone!"
"Whisht, mother, be aisy: don't ye see them comin' up?"
And then she shouted in menacing accents, waving her arm, and beckoning the children, who were seen approaching on the road, which some little way off made a slight dip, which had concealed them. They were approaching from the westward, and from the direction of the dreaded hill of Lisnavoura.
But there were only two of the children, and one of them, the little girl, was crying. Their mother and sister hurried forward to meet them, more alarmed than ever.
"Where is Billy—where is he?" cried the mother, nearly breathless, so soon as she was within hearing.
"He's gone—they took him away; but they said he'll come back again," answered little Con, with the dark brown hair.
"He's gone away with the grand ladies," blubbered the little girl.
"What ladies—where? Oh, Leum, asthora! My darlin', are you gone away at last? Where is he? Who took him? What ladies are you talkin' about? What way did he go?" she cried in distraction.
"I couldn't see where he went, mother; 'twas like as if he was going to Lisnavoura."
With a wild exclamation the distracted woman ran on towards the hill alone, clapping her hands, and crying aloud the name of her lost child.
Scared and horrified, Nell, not daring to follow, gazed after her, and burst into tears; and the other children raised high their lamentations in shrill rivalry.
Twilight was deepening. It was long past the time when they were usually barred securely within their habitation. Nell led the younger children into the cabin, and made them sit down by the turf fire, while she stood in the open door, watching in great fear for the return of her mother.
After a long while they did see their mother return. She came in and sat down by the fire, and cried as if her heart would break.
"Will I bar the doore, mother?" asked Nell.
"Ay, do—didn't I lose enough, this night, without lavin' the doore open, for more o' yez to go; but first take an' sprinkle a dust o' the holy waters over ye, acuishla, and bring it here till I throw a taste iv it over myself and the craythurs; an' I wondher, Nell, you'd forget to do the like yourself, lettin' the craythurs out so near nightfall. Come here and sit on my knees, asthora, come to me, mavourneen, and hould me fast, in the name o' God, and I'll hould you fast that none can take yez from me, and tell me all about it, and what it was—the Lord between us and harm—an' how it happened, and who was in it."
And the door being barred, the two children, sometimes speaking together, often interrupting one another, often interrupted by their mother, managed to tell this strange story, which I had better relate connectedly and in my own language.
The Widow Ryan's three children were playing, as I have said, upon the narrow old road in front of her door. Little Bill or Leum, about five years old, with golden hair and large blue eyes, was a very pretty boy, with all the clear tints of healthy childhood, and that gaze of earnest simplicity which belongs not to town children of the same age. His little sister Peg, about a year older, and his brother Con, a little more than a year elder than she, made up the little group.
Under the great old ash-trees, whose last leaves were falling at their feet, in the light of an October sunset, they were playing with the hilarity and eagerness of rustic children, clamouring together, and their faces were turned toward the west and storied hill of Lisnavoura.
Suddenly a startling voice with a screech called to them from behind, ordering them to get out of the way, and turning, they saw a sight, such as they never beheld before. It was a carriage drawn by four horses that were pawing and snorting, in impatience, as it just pulled up. The children were almost under their feet, and scrambled to the side of the road next their own door.
This carriage and all its appointments were old-fashioned and gorgeous, and presented to the children, who had never seen anything finer than a turf car, and once, an old chaise that passed that way from Killaloe, a spectacle perfectly dazzling.
Here was antique splendour. The harness and trappings were scarlet, and blazing with gold. The horses were huge, and snow white, with great manes, that as they tossed and shook them in the air, seemed to stream and float sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, like so much smoke—their tails were long, and tied up in bows of broad scarlet and gold ribbon. The coach itself was glowing with colours, gilded and emblazoned. There were footmen in gay liveries, and three-cocked hats, like the coachman's; but he had a great wig, like a judge's, and their hair was frizzed out and powdered, and a long thick "pigtail," with a bow to it, hung down the back of each.
All these servants were diminutive, and ludicrously out of proportion with the enormous horses of the equipage, and had sharp, sallow features, and small, restless fiery eyes, and faces of cunning and malice that chilled the children. The little coachman was scowling and showing his white fangs under his cocked hat, and his little blazing beads of eyes were quivering with fury in their sockets as he whirled his whip round and round over their heads, till the lash of it looked like a streak of fire in the evening sun, and sounded like the cry of a legion of "fillapoueeks" in the air.
"Stop the princess on the highway!" cried the coachman, in a piercing treble.
"Stop the princess on the highway!" piped each footman in turn, scowling over his shoulder down on the children, and grinding his keen teeth.
The children were so frightened they could only gape and turn white in their panic. But a very sweet voice from the open window of the carriage reassured them, and arrested the attack of the lackeys.
A beautiful and "very grand-looking" lady was smiling from it on them, and they all felt pleased in the strange light of that smile.
"The boy with the golden hair, I think," said the lady, bending her large and wonderfully clear eyes on little Leum.
The upper sides of the carriage were chiefly of glass, so that the children could see another woman inside, whom they did not like so well.
This was a black woman, with a wonderfully long neck, hung round with many strings of large variously-coloured beads, and on her head was a sort of turban of silk striped with all the colours of the rainbow, and fixed in it was a golden star.
This black woman had a face as thin almost as a death's-head, with high cheekbones, and great goggle eyes, the whites of which, as well as her wide range of teeth, showed in brilliant contrast with her skin, as she looked over the beautiful lady's shoulder, and whispered something in her ear.
"Yes; the boy with the golden hair, I think," repeated the lady.
And her voice sounded sweet as a silver bell in the children's ears, and her smile beguiled them like the light of an enchanted lamp, as she leaned from the window with a look of ineffable fondness on the golden-haired boy, with the large blue eyes; insomuch that little Billy, looking up, smiled in return with a wondering fondness, and when she stooped down, and stretched her jewelled arms towards him, he stretched his little hands up, and how they touched the other children did not know; but, saying, "Come and give me a kiss, my darling," she raised him, and he seemed to ascend in her small fingers as lightly as a feather, and she held him in her lap and covered him with kisses.
Nothing daunted, the other children would have been only too happy to change places with their favoured little brother. There was only one thing that was unpleasant, and a little frightened them, and that was the black woman, who stood and stretched forward, in the carriage as before. She gathered a rich silk and gold handkerchief that was in her fingers up to her lips, and seemed to thrust ever so much of it, fold after fold, into her capacious mouth, as they thought to smother her laughter, with which she seemed convulsed, for she was shaking and quivering, as it seemed, with suppressed merriment; but her eyes, which remained uncovered, looked angrier than they had ever seen eyes look before.
But the lady was so beautiful they looked on her instead, and she continued to caress and kiss the little boy on her knee; and smiling at the other children she held up a large russet apple in her fingers, and the carriage began to move slowly on, and with a nod inviting them to take the fruit, she dropped it on the road from the window; it rolled some way beside the wheels, they following, and then she dropped another, and then another, and so on. And the same thing happened to all; for just as either of the children who ran beside had caught the rolling apple, somehow it slipt into a hole or ran into a ditch, and looking up they saw the lady drop another from the window, and so the chase was taken up and continued till they got, hardly knowing how far they had gone, to the old cross-road that leads to Owney. It seemed that there the horses' hoofs and carriage wheels rolled up a wonderful dust, which being caught in one of those eddies that whirl the dust up into a column, on the calmest day, enveloped the children for a moment, and passed whirling on towards Lisnavoura, the carriage, as they fancied, driving in the centre of it; but suddenly it subsided, the straws and leaves floated to the ground, the dust dissipated itself, but the white horses and the lackeys, the gilded carriage, the lady and their little golden-haired brother were gone.
At the same moment suddenly the upper rim of the clear setting sun disappeared behind the hill of Knockdoula, and it was twilight. Each child felt the transition like a shock—and the sight of the rounded summit of Lisnavoura, now closely overhanging them, struck them with a new fear.
They screamed their brother's name after him, but their cries were lost in the vacant air. At the same time they thought they heard a hollow voice say, close to them, "Go home."
Looking round and seeing no one, they were scared, and hand in hand—the little girl crying wildly, and the boy white as ashes, from fear, they trotted homeward, at their best speed, to tell, as we have seen, their strange story.
Molly Ryan never more saw her darling. But something of the lost little boy was seen by his former playmates.
Sometimes when their mother was away earning a trifle at haymaking, and Nelly washing the potatoes for their dinner, or "beatling" clothes in the little stream that flows in the hollow close by, they saw the pretty face of little Billy peeping in archly at the door, and smiling silently at them, and as they ran to embrace him, with cries of delight, he drew back, still smiling archly, and when they got out into the open day, he was gone, and they could see no trace of him anywhere.
This happened often, with slight variations in the circumstances of the visit. Sometimes he would peep for a longer time, sometimes for a shorter time, sometimes his little hand would come in, and, with bended finger, beckon them to follow; but always he was smiling with the same arch look and wary silence—and always he was gone when they reached the door. Gradually these visits grew less and less frequent, and in about eight months they ceased altogether, and little Billy, irretrievably lost, took rank in their memories with the dead.
One wintry morning, nearly a year and a half after his disappearance, their mother having set out for Limerick soon after cockcrow, to sell some fowls at the market, the little girl, lying by the side of her elder sister, who was fast asleep, just at the grey of the morning heard the latch lifted softly, and saw little Billy enter and close the door gently after him. There was light enough to see that he was barefoot and ragged, and looked pale and famished. He went straight to the fire, and cowered over the turf embers, and rubbed his hands slowly, and seemed to shiver as he gathered the smouldering turf together.
The little girl clutched her sister in terror and whispered, "Waken, Nelly, waken; here's Billy come back!"
Nelly slept soundly on, but the little boy, whose hands were extended close over the coals, turned and looked toward the bed, it seemed to her, in fear, and she saw the glare of the embers reflected on his thin cheek as he turned toward her. He rose and went, on tiptoe, quickly to the door, in silence, and let himself out as softly as he had come in.
After that, the little boy was never seen any more by any one of his kindred.
"Fairy doctors," as the dealers in the preternatural, who in such cases were called in, are termed, did all that in them lay—but in vain. Father Tom came down, and tried what holier rites could do, but equally without result. So little Billy was dead to mother, brother, and sisters; but no grave received him. Others whom affection cherished, lay in holy ground, in the old churchyard of Abington, with headstone to mark the spot over which the survivor might kneel and say a kind prayer for the peace of the departed soul. But there was no landmark to show where little Billy was hidden from their loving eyes, unless it was in the old hill of Lisnavoura, that cast its long shadow at sunset before the cabin-door; or that, white and filmy in the moonlight, in later years, would occupy his brother's gaze as he returned from fair or market, and draw from him a sigh and a prayer for the little brother he had lost so long ago, and was never to see again.

Saturday 8 February 2014

The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood

THE EMPTY HOUSE


Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once
their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular
feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an
ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the
unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with
their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate
an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their
immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.

And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the
aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the
actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the
hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of
the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher,
and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin,
and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent
cause.

There was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this
particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to
reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood, crowded into
a corner of the square, and looked exactly like the houses on either
side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbours; the
same balcony overlooking the gardens; the same white steps leading up to
the heavy black front door; and, in the rear, there was the same narrow
strip of green, with neat box borders, running up to the wall that
divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses. Apparently, too, the
number of chimney pots on the roof was the same; the breadth and angle
of the eaves; and even the height of the dirty area railings.

And yet this house in the square, that seemed precisely similar to its
fifty ugly neighbours, was as a matter of fact entirely
different--horribly different.

Wherein lay this marked, invisible difference is impossible to say. It
cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination, because persons who had
spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared
positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die
than enter them again, and that the atmosphere of the whole house
produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror; while the series of
innocent tenants who had tried to live in it and been forced to decamp
at the shortest possible notice, was indeed little less than a scandal
in the town.

When Shorthouse arrived to pay a "week-end" visit to his Aunt Julia in
her little house on the sea-front at the other end of the town, he found
her charged to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only
received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating
boredom; but the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple-skin
wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition.
The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other
visitors, and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special
object.

Something was in the wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear
fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical
research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she
usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon
after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along
the sea-front in the dusk.

"I've got the keys," she announced in a delighted, yet half awesome
voice. "Got them till Monday!"

"The keys of the bathing-machine, or--?" he asked innocently, looking
from the sea to the town. Nothing brought her so quickly to the point as
feigning stupidity.

"Neither," she whispered. "I've got the keys of the haunted house in the
square--and I'm going there to-night."

Shorthouse was conscious of the slightest possible tremor down his back.
He dropped his teasing tone. Something in her voice and manner thrilled
him. She was in earnest.

"But you can't go alone--" he began.

"That's why I wired for you," she said with decision.

He turned to look at her. The ugly, lined, enigmatical face was alive
with excitement. There was the glow of genuine enthusiasm round it like
a halo. The eyes shone. He caught another wave of her excitement, and a
second tremor, more marked than the first, accompanied it.

"Thanks, Aunt Julia," he said politely; "thanks awfully."

"I should not dare to go quite alone," she went on, raising her voice;
"but with you I should enjoy it immensely. You're afraid of nothing, I
know."

"Thanks _so_ much," he said again. "Er--is anything likely to happen?"

"A great deal _has_ happened," she whispered, "though it's been most
cleverly hushed up. Three tenants have come and gone in the last few
months, and the house is said to be empty for good now."

In spite of himself Shorthouse became interested. His aunt was so very
much in earnest.

"The house is very old indeed," she went on, "and the story--an
unpleasant one--dates a long way back. It has to do with a murder
committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in
the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and
when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters,
chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come
to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below."

"And the stableman--?"

"Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder; but it all happened a
century ago, and I've not been able to get more details of the story."

Shorthouse now felt his interest thoroughly aroused; but, though he was
not particularly nervous for himself, he hesitated a little on his
aunt's account.

"On one condition," he said at length.

"Nothing will prevent my going," she said firmly; "but I may as well
hear your condition."

"That you guarantee your power of self-control if anything really
horrible happens. I mean--that you are sure you won't get too
frightened."

"Jim," she said scornfully, "I'm not young, I know, nor are my nerves;
but _with you_ I should be afraid of nothing in the world!"

This, of course, settled it, for Shorthouse had no pretensions to being
other than a very ordinary young man, and an appeal to his vanity was
irresistible. He agreed to go.

Instinctively, by a sort of sub-conscious preparation, he kept himself
and his forces well in hand the whole evening, compelling an
accumulative reserve of control by that nameless inward process of
gradually putting all the emotions away and turning the key upon them--a
process difficult to describe, but wonderfully effective, as all men who
have lived through severe trials of the inner man well understand.
Later, it stood him in good stead.

But it was not until half-past ten, when they stood in the hall, well in
the glare of friendly lamps and still surrounded by comforting human
influences, that he had to make the first call upon this store of
collected strength. For, once the door was closed, and he saw the
deserted silent street stretching away white in the moonlight before
them, it came to him clearly that the real test that night would be in
dealing with _two fears_ instead of one. He would have to carry his
aunt's fear as well as his own. And, as he glanced down at her
sphinx-like countenance and realised that it might assume no pleasant
aspect in a rush of real terror, he felt satisfied with only one thing
in the whole adventure--that he had confidence in his own will and power
to stand against any shock that might come.

Slowly they walked along the empty streets of the town; a bright autumn
moon silvered the roofs, casting deep shadows; there was no breath of
wind; and the trees in the formal gardens by the sea-front watched them
silently as they passed along. To his aunt's occasional remarks
Shorthouse made no reply, realising that she was simply surrounding
herself with mental buffers--saying ordinary things to prevent herself
thinking of extra-ordinary things. Few windows showed lights, and from
scarcely a single chimney came smoke or sparks. Shorthouse had already
begun to notice everything, even the smallest details. Presently they
stopped at the street corner and looked up at the name on the side of
the house full in the moonlight, and with one accord, but without
remark, turned into the square and crossed over to the side of it that
lay in shadow.

"The number of the house is thirteen," whispered a voice at his side;
and neither of them made the obvious reference, but passed across the
broad sheet of moonlight and began to march up the pavement in silence.

It was about half-way up the square that Shorthouse felt an arm slipped
quietly but significantly into his own, and knew then that their
adventure had begun in earnest, and that his companion was already
yielding imperceptibly to the influences against them. She needed
support.

A few minutes later they stopped before a tall, narrow house that rose
before them into the night, ugly in shape and painted a dingy white.
Shutterless windows, without blinds, stared down upon them, shining here
and there in the moonlight. There were weather streaks in the wall and
cracks in the paint, and the balcony bulged out from the first floor a
little unnaturally. But, beyond this generally forlorn appearance of an
unoccupied house, there was nothing at first sight to single out this
particular mansion for the evil character it had most certainly
acquired.

Taking a look over their shoulders to make sure they had not been
followed, they went boldly up the steps and stood against the huge black
door that fronted them forbiddingly. But the first wave of nervousness
was now upon them, and Shorthouse fumbled a long time with the key
before he could fit it into the lock at all. For a moment, if truth were
told, they both hoped it would not open, for they were a prey to various
unpleasant emotions as they stood there on the threshold of their
ghostly adventure. Shorthouse, shuffling with the key and hampered by
the steady weight on his arm, certainly felt the solemnity of the
moment. It was as if the whole world--for all experience seemed at that
instant concentrated in his own consciousness--were listening to the
grating noise of that key. A stray puff of wind wandering down the empty
street woke a momentary rustling in the trees behind them, but otherwise
this rattling of the key was the only sound audible; and at last it
turned in the lock and the heavy door swung open and revealed a yawning
gulf of darkness beyond.

With a last glance at the moonlit square, they passed quickly in, and
the door slammed behind them with a roar that echoed prodigiously
through empty halls and passages. But, instantly, with the echoes,
another sound made itself heard, and Aunt Julia leaned suddenly so
heavily upon him that he had to take a step backwards to save himself
from falling.

A man had coughed close beside them--so close that it seemed they must
have been actually by his side in the darkness.

With the possibility of practical jokes in his mind, Shorthouse at once
swung his heavy stick in the direction of the sound; but it met nothing
more solid than air. He heard his aunt give a little gasp beside him.

"There's someone here," she whispered; "I heard him."

"Be quiet!" he said sternly. "It was nothing but the noise of the front
door."

"Oh! get a light--quick!" she added, as her nephew, fumbling with a box
of matches, opened it upside down and let them all fall with a rattle on
to the stone floor.

The sound, however, was not repeated; and there was no evidence of
retreating footsteps. In another minute they had a candle burning, using
an empty end of a cigar case as a holder; and when the first flare had
died down he held the impromptu lamp aloft and surveyed the scene. And
it was dreary enough in all conscience, for there is nothing more
desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit,
silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumour with the memories of
evil and violent histories.

They were standing in a wide hall-way; on their left was the open door
of a spacious dining-room, and in front the hall ran, ever narrowing,
into a long, dark passage that led apparently to the top of the kitchen
stairs. The broad uncarpeted staircase rose in a sweep before them,
everywhere draped in shadows, except for a single spot about half-way up
where the moonlight came in through the window and fell on a bright
patch on the boards. This shaft of light shed a faint radiance above and
below it, lending to the objects within its reach a misty outline that
was infinitely more suggestive and ghostly than complete darkness.
Filtered moonlight always seems to paint faces on the surrounding gloom,
and as Shorthouse peered up into the well of darkness and thought of the
countless empty rooms and passages in the upper part of the old house,
he caught himself longing again for the safety of the moonlit square, or
the cosy, bright drawing-room they had left an hour before. Then
realising that these thoughts were dangerous, he thrust them away again
and summoned all his energy for concentration on the present.

"Aunt Julia," he said aloud, severely, "we must now go through the house
from top to bottom and make a thorough search."

The echoes of his voice died away slowly all over the building, and in
the intense silence that followed he turned to look at her. In the
candle-light he saw that her face was already ghastly pale; but she
dropped his arm for a moment and said in a whisper, stepping close in
front of him--

"I agree. We must be sure there's no one hiding. That's the first
thing."

She spoke with evident effort, and he looked at her with admiration.

"You feel quite sure of yourself? It's not too late--"

"I think so," she whispered, her eyes shifting nervously toward the
shadows behind. "Quite sure, only one thing--"

"What's that?"

"You must never leave me alone for an instant."

"As long as you understand that any sound or appearance must be
investigated at once, for to hesitate means to admit fear. That is
fatal."

"Agreed," she said, a little shakily, after a moment's hesitation. "I'll
try--"

Arm in arm, Shorthouse holding the dripping candle and the stick, while
his aunt carried the cloak over her shoulders, figures of utter comedy
to all but themselves, they began a systematic search.

Stealthily, walking on tip-toe and shading the candle lest it should
betray their presence through the shutterless windows, they went first
into the big dining-room. There was not a stick of furniture to be
seen. Bare walls, ugly mantel-pieces and empty grates stared at them.
Everything, they felt, resented their intrusion, watching them, as it
were, with veiled eyes; whispers followed them; shadows flitted
noiselessly to right and left; something seemed ever at their back,
watching, waiting an opportunity to do them injury. There was the
inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty
had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of the way again.
The whole dark interior of the old building seemed to become a malignant
Presence that rose up, warning them to desist and mind their own
business; every moment the strain on the nerves increased.

Out of the gloomy dining-room they passed through large folding doors
into a sort of library or smoking-room, wrapt equally in silence,
darkness, and dust; and from this they regained the hall near the top of
the back stairs.

Here a pitch black tunnel opened before them into the lower regions,
and--it must be confessed--they hesitated. But only for a minute. With
the worst of the night still to come it was essential to turn from
nothing. Aunt Julia stumbled at the top step of the dark descent, ill
lit by the flickering candle, and even Shorthouse felt at least half
the decision go out of his legs.

"Come on!" he said peremptorily, and his voice ran on and lost itself in
the dark, empty spaces below.

"I'm coming," she faltered, catching his arm with unnecessary violence.

They went a little unsteadily down the stone steps, a cold, damp air
meeting them in the face, close and mal-odorous. The kitchen, into which
the stairs led along a narrow passage, was large, with a lofty ceiling.
Several doors opened out of it--some into cupboards with empty jars
still standing on the shelves, and others into horrible little ghostly
back offices, each colder and less inviting than the last. Black beetles
scurried over the floor, and once, when they knocked against a deal
table standing in a corner, something about the size of a cat jumped
down with a rush and fled, scampering across the stone floor into the
darkness. Everywhere there was a sense of recent occupation, an
impression of sadness and gloom.

Leaving the main kitchen, they next went towards the scullery. The door
was standing ajar, and as they pushed it open to its full extent Aunt
Julia uttered a piercing scream, which she instantly tried to stifle by
placing her hand over her mouth. For a second Shorthouse stood
stock-still, catching his breath. He felt as if his spine had suddenly
become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.

Facing them, directly in their way between the doorposts, stood the
figure of a woman. She had dishevelled hair and wildly staring eyes, and
her face was terrified and white as death.

She stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the
candle flickered and she was gone--gone utterly--and the door framed
nothing but empty darkness.

"Only the beastly jumping candle-light," he said quickly, in a voice
that sounded like someone else's and was only half under control. "Come
on, aunt. There's nothing there."

He dragged her forward. With a clattering of feet and a great appearance
of boldness they went on, but over his body the skin moved as if
crawling ants covered it, and he knew by the weight on his arm that he
was supplying the force of locomotion for two. The scullery was cold,
bare, and empty; more like a large prison cell than anything else. They
went round it, tried the door into the yard, and the windows, but found
them all fastened securely. His aunt moved beside him like a person in
a dream. Her eyes were tightly shut, and she seemed merely to follow the
pressure of his arm. Her courage filled him with amazement. At the same
time he noticed that a certain odd change had come over her face, a
change which somehow evaded his power of analysis.

"There's nothing here, aunty," he repeated aloud quickly. "Let's go
upstairs and see the rest of the house. Then we'll choose a room to wait
up in."

She followed him obediently, keeping close to his side, and they locked
the kitchen door behind them. It was a relief to get up again. In the
hall there was more light than before, for the moon had travelled a
little further down the stairs. Cautiously they began to go up into the
dark vault of the upper house, the boards creaking under their weight.

On the first floor they found the large double drawing-rooms, a search
of which revealed nothing. Here also was no sign of furniture or recent
occupancy; nothing but dust and neglect and shadows. They opened the big
folding doors between front and back drawing-rooms and then came out
again to the landing and went on upstairs.

They had not gone up more than a dozen steps when they both
simultaneously stopped to listen, looking into each other's eyes with a
new apprehension across the flickering candle flame. From the room they
had left hardly ten seconds before came the sound of doors quietly
closing. It was beyond all question; they heard the booming noise that
accompanies the shutting of heavy doors, followed by the sharp catching
of the latch.

"We must go back and see," said Shorthouse briefly, in a low tone, and
turning to go downstairs again.

Somehow she managed to drag after him, her feet catching in her dress,
her face livid.

When they entered the front drawing-room it was plain that the folding
doors had been closed--half a minute before. Without hesitation
Shorthouse opened them. He almost expected to see someone facing him in
the back room; but only darkness and cold air met him. They went through
both rooms, finding nothing unusual. They tried in every way to make the
doors close of themselves, but there was not wind enough even to set the
candle flame flickering. The doors would not move without strong
pressure. All was silent as the grave. Undeniably the rooms were utterly
empty, and the house utterly still.

"It's beginning," whispered a voice at his elbow which he hardly
recognised as his aunt's.

He nodded acquiescence, taking out his watch to note the time. It was
fifteen minutes before midnight; he made the entry of exactly what had
occurred in his notebook, setting the candle in its case upon the floor
in order to do so. It took a moment or two to balance it safely against
the wall.

Aunt Julia always declared that at this moment she was not actually
watching him, but had turned her head towards the inner room, where she
fancied she heard something moving; but, at any rate, both positively
agreed that there came a sound of rushing feet, heavy and very
swift--and the next instant the candle was out!

But to Shorthouse himself had come more than this, and he has always
thanked his fortunate stars that it came to him alone and not to his
aunt too. For, as he rose from the stooping position of balancing the
candle, and before it was actually extinguished, a face thrust itself
forward so close to his own that he could almost have touched it with
his lips. It was a face working with passion; a man's face, dark, with
thick features, and angry, savage eyes. It belonged to a common man, and
it was evil in its ordinary normal expression, no doubt, but as he saw
it, alive with intense, aggressive emotion, it was a malignant and
terrible human countenance.

There was no movement of the air; nothing but the sound of rushing
feet--stockinged or muffled feet; the apparition of the face; and the
almost simultaneous extinguishing of the candle.

In spite of himself, Shorthouse uttered a little cry, nearly losing his
balance as his aunt clung to him with her whole weight in one moment of
real, uncontrollable terror. She made no sound, but simply seized him
bodily. Fortunately, however, she had seen nothing, but had only heard
the rushing feet, for her control returned almost at once, and he was
able to disentangle himself and strike a match.

The shadows ran away on all sides before the glare, and his aunt stooped
down and groped for the cigar case with the precious candle. Then they
discovered that the candle had not been _blown_ out at all; it had been
_crushed_ out. The wick was pressed down into the wax, which was
flattened as if by some smooth, heavy instrument.

How his companion so quickly overcame her terror, Shorthouse never
properly understood; but his admiration for her self-control increased
tenfold, and at the same time served to feed his own dying flame--for
which he was undeniably grateful. Equally inexplicable to him was the
evidence of physical force they had just witnessed. He at once
suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of "physical mediums" and
their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt
or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were
simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to
the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered
stores of gun-powder.

So, with as little reflection as possible, he simply relit the candle
and went up to the next floor. The arm in his trembled, it is true, and
his own tread was often uncertain, but they went on with thoroughness,
and after a search revealing nothing they climbed the last flight of
stairs to the top floor of all.

Here they found a perfect nest of small servants' rooms, with broken
pieces of furniture, dirty cane-bottomed chairs, chests of drawers,
cracked mirrors, and decrepit bedsteads. The rooms had low sloping
ceilings already hung here and there with cobwebs, small windows, and
badly plastered walls--a depressing and dismal region which they were
glad to leave behind.

It was on the stroke of midnight when they entered a small room on the
third floor, close to the top of the stairs, and arranged to make
themselves comfortable for the remainder of their adventure. It was
absolutely bare, and was said to be the room--then used as a clothes
closet--into which the infuriated groom had chased his victim and
finally caught her. Outside, across the narrow landing, began the stairs
leading up to the floor above, and the servants' quarters where they had
just searched.

In spite of the chilliness of the night there was something in the air
of this room that cried for an open window. But there was more than
this. Shorthouse could only describe it by saying that he felt less
master of himself here than in any other part of the house. There was
something that acted directly on the nerves, tiring the resolution,
enfeebling the will. He was conscious of this result before he had been
in the room five minutes, and it was in the short time they stayed there
that he suffered the wholesale depletion of his vital forces, which
was, for himself, the chief horror of the whole experience.

They put the candle on the floor of the cupboard, leaving the door a few
inches ajar, so that there was no glare to confuse the eyes, and no
shadow to shift about on walls and ceiling. Then they spread the cloak
on the floor and sat down to wait, with their backs against the wall.

Shorthouse was within two feet of the door on to the landing; his
position commanded a good view of the main staircase leading down into
the darkness, and also of the beginning of the servants' stairs going to
the floor above; the heavy stick lay beside him within easy reach.

The moon was now high above the house. Through the open window they
could see the comforting stars like friendly eyes watching in the sky.
One by one the clocks of the town struck midnight, and when the sounds
died away the deep silence of a windless night fell again over
everything. Only the boom of the sea, far away and lugubrious, filled
the air with hollow murmurs.

Inside the house the silence became awful; awful, he thought, because
any minute now it might be broken by sounds portending terror. The
strain of waiting told more and more severely on the nerves; they
talked in whispers when they talked at all, for their voices aloud
sounded queer and unnatural. A chilliness, not altogether due to the
night air, invaded the room, and made them cold. The influences against
them, whatever these might be, were slowly robbing them of
self-confidence, and the power of decisive action; their forces were on
the wane, and the possibility of real fear took on a new and terrible
meaning. He began to tremble for the elderly woman by his side, whose
pluck could hardly save her beyond a certain extent.

He heard the blood singing in his veins. It sometimes seemed so loud
that he fancied it prevented his hearing properly certain other sounds
that were beginning very faintly to make themselves audible in the
depths of the house. Every time he fastened his attention on these
sounds, they instantly ceased. They certainly came no nearer. Yet he
could not rid himself of the idea that movement was going on somewhere
in the lower regions of the house. The drawing-room floor, where the
doors had been so strangely closed, seemed too near; the sounds were
further off than that. He thought of the great kitchen, with the
scurrying black-beetles, and of the dismal little scullery; but,
somehow or other, they did not seem to come from there either. Surely
they were not _outside_ the house!

Then, suddenly, the truth flashed into his mind, and for the space of a
minute he felt as if his blood had stopped flowing and turned to ice.

The sounds were not downstairs at all; they were _upstairs_--upstairs,
somewhere among those horrid gloomy little servants' rooms with their
bits of broken furniture, low ceilings, and cramped windows--upstairs
where the victim had first been disturbed and stalked to her death.

And the moment he discovered where the sounds were, he began to hear
them more clearly. It was the sound of feet, moving stealthily along the
passage overhead, in and out among the rooms, and past the furniture.

He turned quickly to steal a glance at the motionless figure seated
beside him, to note whether she had shared his discovery. The faint
candle-light coming through the crack in the cupboard door, threw her
strongly-marked face into vivid relief against the white of the wall.
But it was something else that made him catch his breath and stare
again. An extraordinary something had come into her face and seemed to
spread over her features like a mask; it smoothed out the deep lines
and drew the skin everywhere a little tighter so that the wrinkles
disappeared; it brought into the face--with the sole exception of the
old eyes--an appearance of youth and almost of childhood.

He stared in speechless amazement--amazement that was dangerously near
to horror. It was his aunt's face indeed, but it was her face of forty
years ago, the vacant innocent face of a girl. He had heard stories of
that strange effect of terror which could wipe a human countenance clean
of other emotions, obliterating all previous expressions; but he had
never realised that it could be literally true, or could mean anything
so simply horrible as what he now saw. For the dreadful signature of
overmastering fear was written plainly in that utter vacancy of the
girlish face beside him; and when, feeling his intense gaze, she turned
to look at him, he instinctively closed his eyes tightly to shut out the
sight.

Yet, when he turned a minute later, his feelings well in hand, he saw to
his intense relief another expression; his aunt was smiling, and though
the face was deathly white, the awful veil had lifted and the normal
look was returning.

"Anything wrong?" was all he could think of to say at the moment. And
the answer was eloquent, coming from such a woman.

"I feel cold--and a little frightened," she whispered.

He offered to close the window, but she seized hold of him and begged
him not to leave her side even for an instant.

"It's upstairs, I know," she whispered, with an odd half laugh; "but I
can't possibly go up."

But Shorthouse thought otherwise, knowing that in action lay their best
hope of self-control.

He took the brandy flask and poured out a glass of neat spirit, stiff
enough to help anybody over anything. She swallowed it with a little
shiver. His only idea now was to get out of the house before her
collapse became inevitable; but this could not safely be done by turning
tail and running from the enemy. Inaction was no longer possible; every
minute he was growing less master of himself, and desperate, aggressive
measures were imperative without further delay. Moreover, the action
must be taken _towards_ the enemy, not away from it; the climax, if
necessary and unavoidable, would have to be faced boldly. He could do it
now; but in ten minutes he might not have the force left to act for
himself, much less for both!

Upstairs, the sounds were meanwhile becoming louder and closer,
accompanied by occasional creaking of the boards. Someone was moving
stealthily about, stumbling now and then awkwardly against the
furniture.

Waiting a few moments to allow the tremendous dose of spirits to produce
its effect, and knowing this would last but a short time under the
circumstances, Shorthouse then quietly got on his feet, saying in a
determined voice--

"Now, Aunt Julia, we'll go upstairs and find out what all this noise is
about. You must come too. It's what we agreed."

He picked up his stick and went to the cupboard for the candle. A limp
form rose shakily beside him breathing hard, and he heard a voice say
very faintly something about being "ready to come." The woman's courage
amazed him; it was so much greater than his own; and, as they advanced,
holding aloft the dripping candle, some subtle force exhaled from this
trembling, white-faced old woman at his side that was the true source of
his inspiration. It held something really great that shamed him and gave
him the support without which he would have proved far less equal to the
occasion.

They crossed the dark landing, avoiding with their eyes the deep black
space over the banisters. Then they began to mount the narrow staircase
to meet the sounds which, minute by minute, grew louder and nearer.
About half-way up the stairs Aunt Julia stumbled and Shorthouse turned
to catch her by the arm, and just at that moment there came a terrific
crash in the servants' corridor overhead. It was instantly followed by a
shrill, agonised scream that was a cry of terror and a cry for help
melted into one.

Before they could move aside, or go down a single step, someone came
rushing along the passage overhead, blundering horribly, racing madly,
at full speed, three steps at a time, down the very staircase where they
stood. The steps were light and uncertain; but close behind them sounded
the heavier tread of another person, and the staircase seemed to shake.

Shorthouse and his companion just had time to flatten themselves against
the wall when the jumble of flying steps was upon them, and two persons,
with the slightest possible interval between them, dashed past at full
speed. It was a perfect whirlwind of sound breaking in upon the midnight
silence of the empty building.

The two runners, pursuer and pursued, had passed clean through them
where they stood, and already with a thud the boards below had received
first one, then the other. Yet they had seen absolutely nothing--not a
hand, or arm, or face, or even a shred of flying clothing.

There came a second's pause. Then the first one, the lighter of the two,
obviously the pursued one, ran with uncertain footsteps into the little
room which Shorthouse and his aunt had just left. The heavier one
followed. There was a sound of scuffling, gasping, and smothered
screaming; and then out on to the landing came the step--of a single
person _treading weightily_.

A dead silence followed for the space of half a minute, and then was
heard a rushing sound through the air. It was followed by a dull,
crashing thud in the depths of the house below--on the stone floor of
the hall.

Utter silence reigned after. Nothing moved. The flame of the candle was
steady. It had been steady the whole time, and the air had been
undisturbed by any movement whatsoever. Palsied with terror, Aunt Julia,
without waiting for her companion, began fumbling her way downstairs;
she was crying gently to herself, and when Shorthouse put his arm round
her and half carried her he felt that she was trembling like a leaf. He
went into the little room and picked up the cloak from the floor, and,
arm in arm, walking very slowly, without speaking a word or looking once
behind them, they marched down the three flights into the hall.

In the hall they saw nothing, but the whole way down the stairs they
were conscious that someone followed them; step by step; when they went
faster IT was left behind, and when they went more slowly IT caught them
up. But never once did they look behind to see; and at each turning of
the staircase they lowered their eyes for fear of the following horror
they might see upon the stairs above.

With trembling hands Shorthouse opened the front door, and they walked
out into the moonlight and drew a deep breath of the cool night air
blowing in from the sea.