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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14471 ***
+
+THE EMPTY HOUSE
+
+AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
+
+
+BY
+
+ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+"JOHN SILENCE" "THE LOST VALLEY" ETC.
+
+
+LONDON
+EVELEIGH NASH COMPANY
+LIMITED
+
+1916
+
+
+First Printed    1906
+Uniform Edition  1915
+Reprinted        1916
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE EMPTY HOUSE
+
+A HAUNTED ISLAND
+
+A CASE OF EAVESDROPPING
+
+KEEPING HIS PROMISE
+
+WITH INTENT TO STEAL
+
+THE WOOD OF THE DEAD
+
+SMITH: AN EPISODE IN A LODGING-HOUSE
+
+A SUSPICIOUS GIFT
+
+THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE SECRETARY IN NEW YORK
+
+SKELETON LAKE: AN EPISODE IN CAMP
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+A HAUNTED ISLAND
+
+
+The following events occurred on a small island of isolated position in
+a large Canadian lake, to whose cool waters the inhabitants of Montreal
+and Toronto flee for rest and recreation in the hot months. It is only
+to be regretted that events of such peculiar interest to the genuine
+student of the psychical should be entirely uncorroborated. Such
+unfortunately, however, is the case.
+
+Our own party of nearly twenty had returned to Montreal that very day,
+and I was left in solitary possession for a week or two longer, in order
+to accomplish some important "reading" for the law which I had foolishly
+neglected during the summer.
+
+It was late in September, and the big trout and maskinonge were stirring
+themselves in the depths of the lake, and beginning slowly to move up to
+the surface waters as the north winds and early frosts lowered their
+temperature. Already the maples were crimson and gold, and the wild
+laughter of the loons echoed in sheltered bays that never knew their
+strange cry in the summer.
+
+With a whole island to oneself, a two-storey cottage, a canoe, and only
+the chipmunks, and the farmer's weekly visit with eggs and bread, to
+disturb one, the opportunities for hard reading might be very great. It
+all depends!
+
+The rest of the party had gone off with many warnings to beware of
+Indians, and not to stay late enough to be the victim of a frost that
+thinks nothing of forty below zero. After they had gone, the loneliness
+of the situation made itself unpleasantly felt. There were no other
+islands within six or seven miles, and though the mainland forests lay a
+couple of miles behind me, they stretched for a very great distance
+unbroken by any signs of human habitation. But, though the island was
+completely deserted and silent, the rocks and trees that had echoed
+human laughter and voices almost every hour of the day for two months
+could not fail to retain some memories of it all; and I was not
+surprised to fancy I heard a shout or a cry as I passed from rock to
+rock, and more than once to imagine that I heard my own name called
+aloud.
+
+In the cottage there were six tiny little bedrooms divided from one
+another by plain unvarnished partitions of pine. A wooden bedstead, a
+mattress, and a chair, stood in each room, but I only found two mirrors,
+and one of these was broken.
+
+The boards creaked a good deal as I moved about, and the signs of
+occupation were so recent that I could hardly believe I was alone. I
+half expected to find someone left behind, still trying to crowd into a
+box more than it would hold. The door of one room was stiff, and refused
+for a moment to open, and it required very little persuasion to imagine
+someone was holding the handle on the inside, and that when it opened I
+should meet a pair of human eyes.
+
+A thorough search of the floor led me to select as my own sleeping
+quarters a little room with a diminutive balcony over the verandah roof.
+The room was very small, but the bed was large, and had the best
+mattress of them all. It was situated directly over the sitting-room
+where I should live and do my "reading," and the miniature window looked
+out to the rising sun. With the exception of a narrow path which led
+from the front door and verandah through the trees to the boat-landing,
+the island was densely covered with maples, hemlocks, and cedars. The
+trees gathered in round the cottage so closely that the slightest wind
+made the branches scrape the roof and tap the wooden walls. A few
+moments after sunset the darkness became impenetrable, and ten yards
+beyond the glare of the lamps that shone through the sitting-room
+windows--of which there were four--you could not see an inch before your
+nose, nor move a step without running up against a tree.
+
+The rest of that day I spent moving my belongings from my tent to the
+sitting-room, taking stock of the contents of the larder, and chopping
+enough wood for the stove to last me for a week. After that, just before
+sunset, I went round the island a couple of times in my canoe for
+precaution's sake. I had never dreamed of doing this before, but when a
+man is alone he does things that never occur to him when he is one of a
+large party.
+
+How lonely the island seemed when I landed again! The sun was down, and
+twilight is unknown in these northern regions. The darkness comes up at
+once. The canoe safely pulled up and turned over on her face, I groped
+my way up the little narrow pathway to the verandah. The six lamps were
+soon burning merrily in the front room; but in the kitchen, where I
+"dined," the shadows were so gloomy, and the lamplight was so
+inadequate, that the stars could be seen peeping through the cracks
+between the rafters.
+
+I turned in early that night. Though it was calm and there was no wind,
+the creaking of my bedstead and the musical gurgle of the water over the
+rocks below were not the only sounds that reached my ears. As I lay
+awake, the appalling emptiness of the house grew upon me. The corridors
+and vacant rooms seemed to echo innumerable footsteps, shufflings, the
+rustle of skirts, and a constant undertone of whispering. When sleep at
+length overtook me, the breathings and noises, however, passed gently to
+mingle with the voices of my dreams.
+
+A week passed by, and the "reading" progressed favourably. On the tenth
+day of my solitude, a strange thing happened. I awoke after a good
+night's sleep to find myself possessed with a marked repugnance for my
+room. The air seemed to stifle me. The more I tried to define the cause
+of this dislike, the more unreasonable it appeared. There was something
+about the room that made me afraid. Absurd as it seems, this feeling
+clung to me obstinately while dressing, and more than once I caught
+myself shivering, and conscious of an inclination to get out of the room
+as quickly as possible. The more I tried to laugh it away, the more real
+it became; and when at last I was dressed, and went out into the
+passage, and downstairs into the kitchen, it was with feelings of
+relief, such as I might imagine would accompany one's escape from the
+presence of a dangerous contagious disease.
+
+While cooking my breakfast, I carefully recalled every night spent in
+the room, in the hope that I might in some way connect the dislike I now
+felt with some disagreeable incident that had occurred in it. But the
+only thing I could recall was one stormy night when I suddenly awoke and
+heard the boards creaking so loudly in the corridor that I was convinced
+there were people in the house. So certain was I of this, that I had
+descended the stairs, gun in hand, only to find the doors and windows
+securely fastened, and the mice and black-beetles in sole possession of
+the floor. This was certainly not sufficient to account for the strength
+of my feelings.
+
+The morning hours I spent in steady reading; and when I broke off in the
+middle of the day for a swim and luncheon, I was very much surprised,
+if not a little alarmed, to find that my dislike for the room had, if
+anything, grown stronger. Going upstairs to get a book, I experienced
+the most marked aversion to entering the room, and while within I was
+conscious all the time of an uncomfortable feeling that was half
+uneasiness and half apprehension. The result of it was that, instead of
+reading, I spent the afternoon on the water paddling and fishing, and
+when I got home about sundown, brought with me half a dozen delicious
+black bass for the supper-table and the larder.
+
+As sleep was an important matter to me at this time, I had decided that
+if my aversion to the room was so strongly marked on my return as it had
+been before, I would move my bed down into the sitting-room, and sleep
+there. This was, I argued, in no sense a concession to an absurd and
+fanciful fear, but simply a precaution to ensure a good night's sleep. A
+bad night involved the loss of the next day's reading,--a loss I was not
+prepared to incur.
+
+I accordingly moved my bed downstairs into a corner of the sitting-room
+facing the door, and was moreover uncommonly glad when the operation
+was completed, and the door of the bedroom closed finally upon the
+shadows, the silence, and the strange _fear_ that shared the room with
+them.
+
+The croaking stroke of the kitchen clock sounded the hour of eight as I
+finished washing up my few dishes, and closing the kitchen door behind
+me, passed into the front room. All the lamps were lit, and their
+reflectors, which I had polished up during the day, threw a blaze of
+light into the room.
+
+Outside the night was still and warm. Not a breath of air was stirring;
+the waves were silent, the trees motionless, and heavy clouds hung like
+an oppressive curtain over the heavens. The darkness seemed to have
+rolled up with unusual swiftness, and not the faintest glow of colour
+remained to show where the sun had set. There was present in the
+atmosphere that ominous and overwhelming silence which so often precedes
+the most violent storms.
+
+I sat down to my books with my brain unusually clear, and in my heart
+the pleasant satisfaction of knowing that five black bass were lying in
+the ice-house, and that to-morrow morning the old farmer would arrive
+with fresh bread and eggs. I was soon absorbed in my books.
+
+As the night wore on the silence deepened. Even the chipmunks were
+still; and the boards of the floors and walls ceased creaking. I read on
+steadily till, from the gloomy shadows of the kitchen, came the hoarse
+sound of the clock striking nine. How loud the strokes sounded! They
+were like blows of a big hammer. I closed one book and opened another,
+feeling that I was just warming up to my work.
+
+This, however, did not last long. I presently found that I was reading
+the same paragraphs over twice, simple paragraphs that did not require
+such effort. Then I noticed that my mind began to wander to other
+things, and the effort to recall my thoughts became harder with each
+digression. Concentration was growing momentarily more difficult.
+Presently I discovered that I had turned over two pages instead of one,
+and had not noticed my mistake until I was well down the page. This was
+becoming serious. What was the disturbing influence? It could not be
+physical fatigue. On the contrary, my mind was unusually alert, and in a
+more receptive condition than usual. I made a new and determined effort
+to read, and for a short time succeeded in giving my whole attention to
+my subject. But in a very few moments again I found myself leaning back
+in my chair, staring vacantly into space.
+
+Something was evidently at work in my sub-consciousness. There was
+something I had neglected to do. Perhaps the kitchen door and windows
+were not fastened. I accordingly went to see, and found that they were!
+The fire perhaps needed attention. I went in to see, and found that it
+was all right! I looked at the lamps, went upstairs into every bedroom
+in turn, and then went round the house, and even into the ice-house.
+Nothing was wrong; everything was in its place. Yet something _was_
+wrong! The conviction grew stronger and stronger within me.
+
+When I at length settled down to my books again and tried to read, I
+became aware, for the first time, that the room seemed growing cold. Yet
+the day had been oppressively warm, and evening had brought no relief.
+The six big lamps, moreover, gave out heat enough to warm the room
+pleasantly. But a chilliness, that perhaps crept up from the lake, made
+itself felt in the room, and caused me to get up to close the glass door
+opening on to the verandah.
+
+For a brief moment I stood looking out at the shaft of light that fell
+from the windows and shone some little distance down the pathway, and
+out for a few feet into the lake.
+
+As I looked, I saw a canoe glide into the pathway of light, and
+immediately crossing it, pass out of sight again into the darkness. It
+was perhaps a hundred feet from the shore, and it moved swiftly.
+
+I was surprised that a canoe should pass the island at that time of
+night, for all the summer visitors from the other side of the lake had
+gone home weeks before, and the island was a long way out of any line of
+water traffic.
+
+My reading from this moment did not make very good progress, for somehow
+the picture of that canoe, gliding so dimly and swiftly across the
+narrow track of light on the black waters, silhouetted itself against
+the background of my mind with singular vividness. It kept coming
+between my eyes and the printed page. The more I thought about it the
+more surprised I became. It was of larger build than any I had seen
+during the past summer months, and was more like the old Indian war
+canoes with the high curving bows and stern and wide beam. The more I
+tried to read, the less success attended my efforts; and finally I
+closed my books and went out on the verandah to walk up and down a bit,
+and shake the chilliness out of my bones.
+
+The night was perfectly still, and as dark as imaginable. I stumbled
+down the path to the little landing wharf, where the water made the very
+faintest of gurgling under the timbers. The sound of a big tree falling
+in the mainland forest, far across the lake, stirred echoes in the heavy
+air, like the first guns of a distant night attack. No other sound
+disturbed the stillness that reigned supreme.
+
+As I stood upon the wharf in the broad splash of light that followed me
+from the sitting-room windows, I saw another canoe cross the pathway of
+uncertain light upon the water, and disappear at once into the
+impenetrable gloom that lay beyond. This time I saw more distinctly than
+before. It was like the former canoe, a big birch-bark, with
+high-crested bows and stern and broad beam. It was paddled by two
+Indians, of whom the one in the stern--the steerer--appeared to be a
+very large man. I could see this very plainly; and though the second
+canoe was much nearer the island than the first, I judged that they were
+both on their way home to the Government Reservation, which was situated
+some fifteen miles away upon the mainland.
+
+I was wondering in my mind what could possibly bring any Indians down to
+this part of the lake at such an hour of the night, when a third canoe,
+of precisely similar build, and also occupied by two Indians, passed
+silently round the end of the wharf. This time the canoe was very much
+nearer shore, and it suddenly flashed into my mind that the three canoes
+were in reality one and the same, and that only one canoe was circling
+the island!
+
+This was by no means a pleasant reflection, because, if it were the
+correct solution of the unusual appearance of the three canoes in this
+lonely part of the lake at so late an hour, the purpose of the two men
+could only reasonably be considered to be in some way connected with
+myself. I had never known of the Indians attempting any violence upon
+the settlers who shared the wild, inhospitable country with them; at the
+same time, it was not beyond the region of possibility to suppose. . . .
+But then I did not care even to think of such hideous possibilities, and
+my imagination immediately sought relief in all manner of other
+solutions to the problem, which indeed came readily enough to my mind,
+but did not succeed in recommending themselves to my reason.
+
+Meanwhile, by a sort of instinct, I stepped back out of the bright light
+in which I had hitherto been standing, and waited in the deep shadow of
+a rock to see if the canoe would again make its appearance. Here I could
+see, without being seen, and the precaution seemed a wise one.
+
+After less than five minutes the canoe, as I had anticipated, made its
+fourth appearance. This time it was not twenty yards from the wharf, and
+I saw that the Indians meant to land. I recognised the two men as those
+who had passed before, and the steerer was certainly an immense fellow.
+It was unquestionably the same canoe. There could be no longer any doubt
+that for some purpose of their own the men had been going round and
+round the island for some time, waiting for an opportunity to land. I
+strained my eyes to follow them in the darkness, but the night had
+completely swallowed them up, and not even the faintest swish of the
+paddles reached my ears as the Indians plied their long and powerful
+strokes. The canoe would be round again in a few moments, and this time
+it was possible that the men might land. It was well to be prepared. I
+knew nothing of their intentions, and two to one (when the two are big
+Indians!) late at night on a lonely island was not exactly my idea of
+pleasant intercourse.
+
+In a corner of the sitting-room, leaning up against the back wall, stood
+my Marlin rifle, with ten cartridges in the magazine and one lying
+snugly in the greased breech. There was just time to get up to the house
+and take up a position of defence in that corner. Without an instant's
+hesitation I ran up to the verandah, carefully picking my way among the
+trees, so as to avoid being seen in the light. Entering the room, I shut
+the door leading to the verandah, and as quickly as possible turned out
+every one of the six lamps. To be in a room so brilliantly lighted,
+where my every movement could be observed from outside, while I could
+see nothing but impenetrable darkness at every window, was by all laws
+of warfare an unnecessary concession to the enemy. And this enemy, if
+enemy it was to be, was far too wily and dangerous to be granted any
+such advantages.
+
+I stood in the corner of the room with my back against the wall, and my
+hand on the cold rifle-barrel. The table, covered with my books, lay
+between me and the door, but for the first few minutes after the lights
+were out the darkness was so intense that nothing could be discerned at
+all. Then, very gradually, the outline of the room became visible, and
+the framework of the windows began to shape itself dimly before my eyes.
+
+After a few minutes the door (its upper half of glass), and the two
+windows that looked out upon the front verandah, became specially
+distinct; and I was glad that this was so, because if the Indians came
+up to the house I should be able to see their approach, and gather
+something of their plans. Nor was I mistaken, for there presently came
+to my ears the peculiar hollow sound of a canoe landing and being
+carefully dragged up over the rocks. The paddles I distinctly heard
+being placed underneath, and the silence that ensued thereupon I rightly
+interpreted to mean that the Indians were stealthily approaching the
+house. . . .
+
+While it would be absurd to claim that I was not alarmed--even
+frightened--at the gravity of the situation and its possible outcome, I
+speak the whole truth when I say that I was not overwhelmingly afraid
+for myself. I was conscious that even at this stage of the night I was
+passing into a psychical condition in which my sensations seemed no
+longer normal. Physical fear at no time entered into the nature of my
+feelings; and though I kept my hand upon my rifle the greater part of
+the night, I was all the time conscious that its assistance could be of
+little avail against the terrors that I had to face. More than once I
+seemed to feel most curiously that I was in no real sense a part of the
+proceedings, nor actually involved in them, but that I was playing the
+part of a spectator--a spectator, moreover, on a psychic rather than on
+a material plane. Many of my sensations that night were too vague for
+definite description and analysis, but the main feeling that will stay
+with me to the end of my days is the awful horror of it all, and the
+miserable sensation that if the strain had lasted a little longer than
+was actually the case my mind must inevitably have given way.
+
+Meanwhile I stood still in my corner, and waited patiently for what was
+to come. The house was as still as the grave, but the inarticulate
+voices of the night sang in my ears, and I seemed to hear the blood
+running in my veins and dancing in my pulses.
+
+If the Indians came to the back of the house, they would find the
+kitchen door and window securely fastened. They could not get in there
+without making considerable noise, which I was bound to hear. The only
+mode of getting in was by means of the door that faced me, and I kept my
+eyes glued on that door without taking them off for the smallest
+fraction of a second.
+
+My sight adapted itself every minute better to the darkness. I saw the
+table that nearly filled the room, and left only a narrow passage on
+each side. I could also make out the straight backs of the wooden chairs
+pressed up against it, and could even distinguish my papers and inkstand
+lying on the white oilcloth covering. I thought of the gay faces that
+had gathered round that table during the summer, and I longed for the
+sunlight as I had never longed for it before.
+
+Less than three feet to my left the passage-way led to the kitchen, and
+the stairs leading to the bedrooms above commenced in this passage-way,
+but almost in the sitting-room itself. Through the windows I could see
+the dim motionless outlines of the trees: not a leaf stirred, not a
+branch moved.
+
+A few moments of this awful silence, and then I was aware of a soft
+tread on the boards of the verandah, so stealthy that it seemed an
+impression directly on my brain rather than upon the nerves of hearing.
+Immediately afterwards a black figure darkened the glass door, and I
+perceived that a face was pressed against the upper panes. A shiver ran
+down my back, and my hair was conscious of a tendency to rise and stand
+at right angles to my head.
+
+It was the figure of an Indian, broad-shouldered and immense; indeed,
+the largest figure of a man I have ever seen outside of a circus hall.
+By some power of light that seemed to generate itself in the brain, I
+saw the strong dark face with the aquiline nose and high cheek-bones
+flattened against the glass. The direction of the gaze I could not
+determine; but faint gleams of light as the big eyes rolled round and
+showed their whites, told me plainly that no corner of the room escaped
+their searching.
+
+For what seemed fully five minutes the dark figure stood there, with the
+huge shoulders bent forward so as to bring the head down to the level of
+the glass; while behind him, though not nearly so large, the shadowy
+form of the other Indian swayed to and fro like a bent tree. While I
+waited in an agony of suspense and agitation for their next movement
+little currents of icy sensation ran up and down my spine and my heart
+seemed alternately to stop beating and then start off again with
+terrifying rapidity. They must have heard its thumping and the singing
+of the blood in my head! Moreover, I was conscious, as I felt a cold
+stream of perspiration trickle down my face, of a desire to scream, to
+shout, to bang the walls like a child, to make a noise, or do anything
+that would relieve the suspense and bring things to a speedy climax.
+
+It was probably this inclination that led me to another discovery, for
+when I tried to bring my rifle from behind my back to raise it and have
+it pointed at the door ready to fire, I found that I was powerless to
+move. The muscles, paralysed by this strange fear, refused to obey the
+will. Here indeed was a terrifying complication!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a faint sound of rattling at the brass knob, and the door was
+pushed open a couple of inches. A pause of a few seconds, and it was
+pushed open still further. Without a sound of footsteps that was
+appreciable to my ears, the two figures glided into the room, and the
+man behind gently closed the door after him.
+
+They were alone with me between the four walls. Could they see me
+standing there, so still and straight in my corner? Had they, perhaps,
+already seen me? My blood surged and sang like the roll of drums in an
+orchestra; and though I did my best to suppress my breathing, it sounded
+like the rushing of wind through a pneumatic tube.
+
+My suspense as to the next move was soon at an end--only, however, to
+give place to a new and keener alarm. The men had hitherto exchanged no
+words and no signs, but there were general indications of a movement
+across the room, and whichever way they went they would have to pass
+round the table. If they came my way they would have to pass within six
+inches of my person. While I was considering this very disagreeable
+possibility, I perceived that the smaller Indian (smaller by comparison)
+suddenly raised his arm and pointed to the ceiling. The other fellow
+raised his head and followed the direction of his companion's arm. I
+began to understand at last. They were going upstairs, and the room
+directly overhead to which they pointed had been until this night my
+bedroom. It was the room in which I had experienced that very morning so
+strange a sensation of fear, and but for which I should then have been
+lying asleep in the narrow bed against the window.
+
+The Indians then began to move silently around the room; they were going
+upstairs, and they were coming round my side of the table. So stealthy
+were their movements that, but for the abnormally sensitive state of the
+nerves, I should never have heard them. As it was, their cat-like tread
+was distinctly audible. Like two monstrous black cats they came round
+the table toward me, and for the first time I perceived that the smaller
+of the two dragged something along the floor behind him. As it trailed
+along over the floor with a soft, sweeping sound, I somehow got the
+impression that it was a large dead thing with outstretched wings, or a
+large, spreading cedar branch. Whatever it was, I was unable to see it
+even in outline, and I was too terrified, even had I possessed the power
+over my muscles, to move my neck forward in the effort to determine its
+nature.
+
+Nearer and nearer they came. The leader rested a giant hand upon the
+table as he moved. My lips were glued together, and the air seemed to
+burn in my nostrils. I tried to close my eyes, so that I might not see
+as they passed me; but my eyelids had stiffened, and refused to obey.
+Would they never get by me? Sensation seemed also to have left my legs,
+and it was as if I were standing on mere supports of wood or stone.
+Worse still, I was conscious that I was losing the power of balance, the
+power to stand upright, or even to lean backwards against the wall. Some
+force was drawing me forward, and a dizzy terror seized me that I should
+lose my balance, and topple forward against the Indians just as they
+were in the act of passing me.
+
+Even moments drawn out into hours must come to an end some time, and
+almost before I knew it the figures had passed me and had their feet
+upon the lower step of the stairs leading to the upper bedrooms. There
+could not have been six inches between us, and yet I was conscious only
+of a current of cold air that followed them. They had not touched me,
+and I was convinced that they had not seen me. Even the trailing thing
+on the floor behind them had not touched my feet, as I had dreaded it
+would, and on such an occasion as this I was grateful even for the
+smallest mercies.
+
+The absence of the Indians from my immediate neighbourhood brought
+little sense of relief. I stood shivering and shuddering in my corner,
+and, beyond being able to breathe more freely, I felt no whit less
+uncomfortable. Also, I was aware that a certain light, which, without
+apparent source or rays, had enabled me to follow their every gesture
+and movement, had gone out of the room with their departure. An
+unnatural darkness now filled the room, and pervaded its every corner so
+that I could barely make out the positions of the windows and the glass
+doors.
+
+As I said before, my condition was evidently an abnormal one. The
+capacity for feeling surprise seemed, as in dreams, to be wholly absent.
+My senses recorded with unusual accuracy every smallest occurrence, but
+I was able to draw only the simplest deductions.
+
+The Indians soon reached the top of the stairs, and there they halted
+for a moment. I had not the faintest clue as to their next movement.
+They appeared to hesitate. They were listening attentively. Then I heard
+one of them, who by the weight of his soft tread must have been the
+giant, cross the narrow corridor and enter the room directly
+overhead--my own little bedroom. But for the insistence of that
+unaccountable dread I had experienced there in the morning, I should at
+that very moment have been lying in the bed with the big Indian in the
+room standing beside me.
+
+For the space of a hundred seconds there was silence, such as might
+have existed before the birth of sound. It was followed by a long
+quivering shriek of terror, which rang out into the night, and ended in
+a short gulp before it had run its full course. At the same moment the
+other Indian left his place at the head of the stairs, and joined his
+companion in the bedroom. I heard the "thing" trailing behind him along
+the floor. A thud followed, as of something heavy falling, and then all
+became as still and silent as before.
+
+It was at this point that the atmosphere, surcharged all day with the
+electricity of a fierce storm, found relief in a dancing flash of
+brilliant lightning simultaneously with a crash of loudest thunder. For
+five seconds every article in the room was visible to me with amazing
+distinctness, and through the windows I saw the tree trunks standing in
+solemn rows. The thunder pealed and echoed across the lake and among the
+distant islands, and the flood-gates of heaven then opened and let out
+their rain in streaming torrents.
+
+The drops fell with a swift rushing sound upon the still waters of the
+lake, which leaped up to meet them, and pattered with the rattle of shot
+on the leaves of the maples and the roof of the cottage. A moment later,
+and another flash, even more brilliant and of longer duration than the
+first, lit up the sky from zenith to horizon, and bathed the room
+momentarily in dazzling whiteness. I could see the rain glistening on
+the leaves and branches outside. The wind rose suddenly, and in less
+than a minute the storm that had been gathering all day burst forth in
+its full fury.
+
+Above all the noisy voices of the elements, the slightest sounds in the
+room overhead made themselves heard, and in the few seconds of deep
+silence that followed the shriek of terror and pain I was aware that the
+movements had commenced again. The men were leaving the room and
+approaching the top of the stairs. A short pause, and they began to
+descend. Behind them, tumbling from step to step, I could hear that
+trailing "thing" being dragged along. It had become ponderous!
+
+I awaited their approach with a degree of calmness, almost of apathy,
+which was only explicable on the ground that after a certain point
+Nature applies her own anæsthetic, and a merciful condition of numbness
+supervenes. On they came, step by step, nearer and nearer, with the
+shuffling sound of the burden behind growing louder as they approached.
+
+They were already half-way down the stairs when I was galvanised afresh
+into a condition of terror by the consideration of a new and horrible
+possibility. It was the reflection that if another vivid flash of
+lightning were to come when the shadowy procession was in the room,
+perhaps when it was actually passing in front of me, I should see
+everything in detail, and worse, be seen myself! I could only hold my
+breath and wait--wait while the minutes lengthened into hours, and the
+procession made its slow progress round the room.
+
+The Indians had reached the foot of the staircase. The form of the huge
+leader loomed in the doorway of the passage, and the burden with an
+ominous thud had dropped from the last step to the floor. There was a
+moment's pause while I saw the Indian turn and stoop to assist his
+companion. Then the procession moved forward again, entered the room
+close on my left, and began to move slowly round my side of the table.
+The leader was already beyond me, and his companion, dragging on the
+floor behind him the burden, whose confused outline I could dimly make
+out, was exactly in front of me, when the cavalcade came to a dead halt.
+At the same moment, with the strange suddenness of thunderstorms, the
+splash of the rain ceased altogether, and the wind died away into utter
+silence.
+
+For the space of five seconds my heart seemed to stop beating, and then
+the worst came. A double flash of lightning lit up the room and its
+contents with merciless vividness.
+
+The huge Indian leader stood a few feet past me on my right. One leg was
+stretched forward in the act of taking a step. His immense shoulders
+were turned toward his companion, and in all their magnificent
+fierceness I saw the outline of his features. His gaze was directed upon
+the burden his companion was dragging along the floor; but his profile,
+with the big aquiline nose, high cheek-bone, straight black hair and
+bold chin, burnt itself in that brief instant into my brain, never again
+to fade.
+
+Dwarfish, compared with this gigantic figure, appeared the proportions
+of the other Indian, who, within twelve inches of my face, was stooping
+over the thing he was dragging in a position that lent to his person the
+additional horror of deformity. And the burden, lying upon a sweeping
+cedar branch which he held and dragged by a long stem, was the body of a
+white man. The scalp had been neatly lifted, and blood lay in a broad
+smear upon the cheeks and forehead.
+
+Then, for the first time that night, the terror that had paralysed my
+muscles and my will lifted its unholy spell from my soul. With a loud
+cry I stretched out my arms to seize the big Indian by the throat, and,
+grasping only air, tumbled forward unconscious upon the ground.
+
+I had recognised the body, and _the face was my own_! . . .
+
+It was bright daylight when a man's voice recalled me to consciousness.
+I was lying where I had fallen, and the farmer was standing in the room
+with the loaves of bread in his hands. The horror of the night was still
+in my heart, and as the bluff settler helped me to my feet and picked up
+the rifle which had fallen with me, with many questions and expressions
+of condolence, I imagine my brief replies were neither self-explanatory
+nor even intelligible.
+
+That day, after a thorough and fruitless search of the house, I left the
+island, and went over to spend my last ten days with the farmer; and
+when the time came for me to leave, the necessary reading had been
+accomplished, and my nerves had completely recovered their balance.
+
+On the day of my departure the farmer started early in his big boat with
+my belongings to row to the point, twelve miles distant, where a little
+steamer ran twice a week for the accommodation of hunters. Late in the
+afternoon I went off in another direction in my canoe, wishing to see
+the island once again, where I had been the victim of so strange an
+experience.
+
+In due course I arrived there, and made a tour of the island. I also
+made a search of the little house, and it was not without a curious
+sensation in my heart that I entered the little upstairs bedroom. There
+seemed nothing unusual.
+
+Just after I re-embarked, I saw a canoe gliding ahead of me around the
+curve of the island. A canoe was an unusual sight at this time of the
+year, and this one seemed to have sprung from nowhere. Altering my
+course a little, I watched it disappear around the next projecting point
+of rock. It had high curving bows, and there were two Indians in it. I
+lingered with some excitement, to see if it would appear again round the
+other side of the island; and in less than five minutes it came into
+view. There were less than two hundred yards between us, and the
+Indians, sitting on their haunches, were paddling swiftly in my
+direction.
+
+I never paddled faster in my life than I did in those next few minutes.
+When I turned to look again, the Indians had altered their course, and
+were again circling the island.
+
+The sun was sinking behind the forests on the mainland, and the
+crimson-coloured clouds of sunset were reflected in the waters of the
+lake, when I looked round for the last time, and saw the big bark canoe
+and its two dusky occupants still going round the island. Then the
+shadows deepened rapidly; the lake grew black, and the night wind blew
+its first breath in my face as I turned a corner, and a projecting bluff
+of rock hid from my view both island and canoe.
+
+
+
+
+A CASE OF EAVESDROPPING
+
+
+Jim Shorthouse was the sort of fellow who always made a mess of things.
+Everything with which his hands or mind came into contact issued from
+such contact in an unqualified and irremediable state of mess. His
+college days were a mess: he was twice rusticated. His schooldays were a
+mess: he went to half a dozen, each passing him on to the next with a
+worse character and in a more developed state of mess. His early boyhood
+was the sort of mess that copy-books and dictionaries spell with a big
+"M," and his babyhood--ugh! was the embodiment of howling, yowling,
+screaming mess.
+
+At the age of forty, however, there came a change in his troubled life,
+when he met a girl with half a million in her own right, who consented
+to marry him, and who very soon succeeded in reducing his most messy
+existence into a state of comparative order and system.
+
+Certain incidents, important and otherwise, of Jim's life would never
+have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his
+"messes" and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the
+atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He
+attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as
+meat attracts flies, and jam wasps. It is to the meat and jam of his
+life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all
+pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the
+interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became
+regular as the sun's instead of erratic as a comet's.
+
+The first experience in order of time that he related to me shows that
+somewhere latent behind his disarranged nervous system there lay psychic
+perceptions of an uncommon order. About the age of twenty-two--I think
+after his second rustication--his father's purse and patience had
+equally given out, and Jim found himself stranded high and dry in a
+large American city. High and dry! And the only clothes that had no
+holes in them safely in the keeping of his uncle's wardrobe.
+
+Careful reflection on a bench in one of the city parks led him to the
+conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of
+one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a
+ready pen, and that he could "do good work for your paper, sir, as a
+reporter." This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle
+between the editor and the window to conceal the whereabouts of the
+holes.
+
+"Guess we'll have to give you a week's trial," said the editor, who,
+ever on the lookout for good chance material, took on shoals of men in
+that way and retained on the average one man per shoal. Anyhow it gave
+Jim Shorthouse the wherewithal to sew up the holes and relieve his
+uncle's wardrobe of its burden.
+
+Then he went to find living quarters; and in this proceeding his unique
+characteristics already referred to--what theosophists would call his
+Karma--began unmistakably to assert themselves, for it was in the house
+he eventually selected that this sad tale took place.
+
+There are no "diggings" in American cities. The alternatives for small
+incomes are grim enough--rooms in a boarding-house where meals are
+served, or in a room-house where no meals are served--not even
+breakfast. Rich people live in palaces, of course, but Jim had nothing
+to do with "sich-like." His horizon was bounded by boarding-houses and
+room-houses; and, owing to the necessary irregularity of his meals and
+hours, he took the latter.
+
+It was a large, gaunt-looking place in a side street, with dirty windows
+and a creaking iron gate, but the rooms were large, and the one he
+selected and paid for in advance was on the top floor. The landlady
+looked gaunt and dusty as the house, and quite as old. Her eyes were
+green and faded, and her features large.
+
+"Waal," she twanged, with her electrifying Western drawl, "that's the
+room, if you like it, and that's the price I said. Now, if you want it,
+why, just say so; and if you don't, why, it don't hurt me any."
+
+Jim wanted to shake her, but he feared the clouds of long-accumulated
+dust in her clothes, and as the price and size of the room suited him,
+he decided to take it.
+
+"Anyone else on this floor?" he asked.
+
+She looked at him queerly out of her faded eyes before she answered.
+
+"None of my guests ever put such questions to me before," she said; "but
+I guess you're different. Why, there's no one at all but an old gent
+that's stayed here every bit of five years. He's over thar," pointing
+to the end of the passage.
+
+"Ah! I see," said Shorthouse feebly. "So I'm alone up here?"
+
+"Reckon you are, pretty near," she twanged out, ending the conversation
+abruptly by turning her back on her new "guest," and going slowly and
+deliberately downstairs.
+
+The newspaper work kept Shorthouse out most of the night. Three times a
+week he got home at 1 a.m., and three times at 3 a.m. The room proved
+comfortable enough, and he paid for a second week. His unusual hours had
+so far prevented his meeting any inmates of the house, and not a sound
+had been heard from the "old gent" who shared the floor with him. It
+seemed a very quiet house.
+
+One night, about the middle of the second week, he came home tired after
+a long day's work. The lamp that usually stood all night in the hall had
+burned itself out, and he had to stumble upstairs in the dark. He made
+considerable noise in doing so, but nobody seemed to be disturbed. The
+whole house was utterly quiet, and probably everybody was asleep. There
+were no lights under any of the doors. All was in darkness. It was after
+two o'clock.
+
+After reading some English letters that had come during the day, and
+dipping for a few minutes into a book, he became drowsy and got ready
+for bed. Just as he was about to get in between the sheets, he stopped
+for a moment and listened. There rose in the night, as he did so, the
+sound of steps somewhere in the house below. Listening attentively, he
+heard that it was somebody coming upstairs--a heavy tread, and the owner
+taking no pains to step quietly. On it came up the stairs, tramp, tramp,
+tramp--evidently the tread of a big man, and one in something of a
+hurry.
+
+At once thoughts connected somehow with fire and police flashed through
+Jim's brain, but there were no sounds of voices with the steps, and he
+reflected in the same moment that it could only be the old gentleman
+keeping late hours and tumbling upstairs in the darkness. He was in the
+act of turning out the gas and stepping into bed, when the house resumed
+its former stillness by the footsteps suddenly coming to a dead stop
+immediately outside his own room.
+
+With his hand on the gas, Shorthouse paused a moment before turning it
+out to see if the steps would go on again, when he was startled by a
+loud knocking on his door. Instantly, in obedience to a curious and
+unexplained instinct, he turned out the light, leaving himself and the
+room in total darkness.
+
+He had scarcely taken a step across the room to open the door, when a
+voice from the other side of the wall, so close it almost sounded in his
+ear, exclaimed in German, "Is that you, father? Come in."
+
+The speaker was a man in the next room, and the knocking, after all, had
+not been on his own door, but on that of the adjoining chamber, which he
+had supposed to be vacant.
+
+Almost before the man in the passage had time to answer in German, "Let
+me in at once," Jim heard someone cross the floor and unlock the door.
+Then it was slammed to with a bang, and there was audible the sound of
+footsteps about the room, and of chairs being drawn up to a table and
+knocking against furniture on the way. The men seemed wholly regardless
+of their neighbour's comfort, for they made noise enough to waken the
+dead.
+
+"Serves me right for taking a room in such a cheap hole," reflected Jim
+in the darkness. "I wonder whom she's let the room to!"
+
+The two rooms, the landlady had told him, were originally one. She had
+put up a thin partition--just a row of boards--to increase her income.
+The doors were adjacent, and only separated by the massive upright beam
+between them. When one was opened or shut the other rattled.
+
+With utter indifference to the comfort of the other sleepers in the
+house, the two Germans had meanwhile commenced to talk both at once and
+at the top of their voices. They talked emphatically, even angrily. The
+words "Father" and "Otto" were freely used. Shorthouse understood
+German, but as he stood listening for the first minute or two, an
+eavesdropper in spite of himself, it was difficult to make head or tail
+of the talk, for neither would give way to the other, and the jumble of
+guttural sounds and unfinished sentences was wholly unintelligible.
+Then, very suddenly, both voices dropped together; and, after a moment's
+pause, the deep tones of one of them, who seemed to be the "father,"
+said, with the utmost distinctness--
+
+"You mean, Otto, that you refuse to get it?"
+
+There was a sound of someone shuffling in the chair before the answer
+came. "I mean that I don't know how to get it. It is so much, father. It
+is _too_ much. A part of it--"
+
+"A part of it!" cried the other, with an angry oath, "a part of it, when
+ruin and disgrace are already in the house, is worse than useless. If
+you can get half you can get all, you wretched fool. Half-measures only
+damn all concerned."
+
+"You told me last time--" began the other firmly, but was not allowed to
+finish. A succession of horrible oaths drowned his sentence, and the
+father went on, in a voice vibrating with anger--
+
+"You know she will give you anything. You have only been married a few
+months. If you ask and give a plausible reason you can get all we want
+and more. You can ask it temporarily. All will be paid back. It will
+re-establish the firm, and she will never know what was done with it.
+With that amount, Otto, you know I can recoup all these terrible losses,
+and in less than a year all will be repaid. But without it. . . . You must
+get it, Otto. Hear me, you must. Am I to be arrested for the misuse of
+trust moneys? Is our honoured name to be cursed and spat on?" The old
+man choked and stammered in his anger and desperation.
+
+Shorthouse stood shivering in the darkness and listening in spite of
+himself. The conversation had carried him along with it, and he had been
+for some reason afraid to let his neighbourhood be known. But at this
+point he realised that he had listened too long and that he must inform
+the two men that they could be overheard to every single syllable. So he
+coughed loudly, and at the same time rattled the handle of his door. It
+seemed to have no effect, for the voices continued just as loudly as
+before, the son protesting and the father growing more and more angry.
+He coughed again persistently, and also contrived purposely in the
+darkness to tumble against the partition, feeling the thin boards yield
+easily under his weight, and making a considerable noise in so doing.
+But the voices went on unconcernedly, and louder than ever. Could it be
+possible they had not heard?
+
+By this time Jim was more concerned about his own sleep than the
+morality of overhearing the private scandals of his neighbours, and he
+went out into the passage and knocked smartly at their door. Instantly,
+as if by magic, the sounds ceased. Everything dropped into utter
+silence. There was no light under the door and not a whisper could be
+heard within. He knocked again, but received no answer.
+
+"Gentlemen," he began at length, with his lips close to the keyhole and
+in German, "please do not talk so loud. I can overhear all you say in
+the next room. Besides, it is very late, and I wish to sleep."
+
+He paused and listened, but no answer was forthcoming. He turned the
+handle and found the door was locked. Not a sound broke the stillness of
+the night except the faint swish of the wind over the skylight and the
+creaking of a board here and there in the house below. The cold air of a
+very early morning crept down the passage, and made him shiver. The
+silence of the house began to impress him disagreeably. He looked behind
+him and about him, hoping, and yet fearing, that something would break
+the stillness. The voices still seemed to ring on in his ears; but that
+sudden silence, when he knocked at the door, affected him far more
+unpleasantly than the voices, and put strange thoughts in his
+brain--thoughts he did not like or approve.
+
+Moving stealthily from the door, he peered over the banisters into the
+space below. It was like a deep vault that might conceal in its shadows
+anything that was not good. It was not difficult to fancy he saw an
+indistinct moving to-and-fro below him. Was that a figure sitting on the
+stairs peering up obliquely at him out of hideous eyes? Was that a sound
+of whispering and shuffling down there in the dark halls and forsaken
+landings? Was it something more than the inarticulate murmur of the
+night?
+
+The wind made an effort overhead, singing over the skylight, and the
+door behind him rattled and made him start. He turned to go back to his
+room, and the draught closed the door slowly in his face as if there
+were someone pressing against it from the other side. When he pushed it
+open and went in, a hundred shadowy forms seemed to dart swiftly and
+silently back to their corners and hiding-places. But in the adjoining
+room the sounds had entirely ceased, and Shorthouse soon crept into bed,
+and left the house with its inmates, waking or sleeping, to take care of
+themselves, while he entered the region of dreams and silence.
+
+Next day, strong in the common sense that the sunlight brings, he
+determined to lodge a complaint against the noisy occupants of the next
+room and make the landlady request them to modify their voices at such
+late hours of the night and morning. But it so happened that she was not
+to be seen that day, and when he returned from the office at midnight it
+was, of course, too late.
+
+Looking under the door as he came up to bed he noticed that there was no
+light, and concluded that the Germans were not in. So much the better.
+He went to sleep about one o'clock, fully decided that if they came up
+later and woke him with their horrible noises he would not rest till he
+had roused the landlady and made her reprove them with that
+authoritative twang, in which every word was like the lash of a metallic
+whip.
+
+However, there proved to be no need for such drastic measures, for
+Shorthouse slumbered peacefully all night, and his dreams--chiefly of
+the fields of grain and flocks of sheep on the far-away farms of his
+father's estate--were permitted to run their fanciful course unbroken.
+
+Two nights later, however, when he came home tired out, after a
+difficult day, and wet and blown about by one of the wickedest storms he
+had ever seen, his dreams--always of the fields and sheep--were not
+destined to be so undisturbed.
+
+He had already dozed off in that delicious glow that follows the removal
+of wet clothes and the immediate snuggling under warm blankets, when his
+consciousness, hovering on the borderland between sleep and waking, was
+vaguely troubled by a sound that rose indistinctly from the depths of
+the house, and, between the gusts of wind and rain, reached his ears
+with an accompanying sense of uneasiness and discomfort. It rose on the
+night air with some pretence of regularity, dying away again in the roar
+of the wind to reassert itself distantly in the deep, brief hushes of
+the storm.
+
+For a few minutes Jim's dreams were coloured only--tinged, as it were,
+by this impression of fear approaching from somewhere insensibly upon
+him. His consciousness, at first, refused to be drawn back from that
+enchanted region where it had wandered, and he did not immediately
+awaken. But the nature of his dreams changed unpleasantly. He saw the
+sheep suddenly run huddled together, as though frightened by the
+neighbourhood of an enemy, while the fields of waving corn became
+agitated as though some monster were moving uncouthly among the crowded
+stalks. The sky grew dark, and in his dream an awful sound came
+somewhere from the clouds. It was in reality the sound downstairs
+growing more distinct.
+
+Shorthouse shifted uneasily across the bed with something like a groan
+of distress. The next minute he awoke, and found himself sitting
+straight up in bed--listening. Was it a nightmare? Had he been dreaming
+evil dreams, that his flesh crawled and the hair stirred on his head?
+
+The room was dark and silent, but outside the wind howled dismally and
+drove the rain with repeated assaults against the rattling windows. How
+nice it would be--the thought flashed through his mind--if all winds,
+like the west wind, went down with the sun! They made such fiendish
+noises at night, like the crying of angry voices. In the daytime they
+had such a different sound. If only--
+
+Hark! It was no dream after all, for the sound was momentarily growing
+louder, and its _cause_ was coming up the stairs. He found himself
+speculating feebly what this cause might be, but the sound was still too
+indistinct to enable him to arrive at any definite conclusion.
+
+The voice of a church clock striking two made itself heard above the
+wind. It was just about the hour when the Germans had commenced their
+performance three nights before. Shorthouse made up his mind that if
+they began it again he would not put up with it for very long. Yet he
+was already horribly conscious of the difficulty he would have of
+getting out of bed. The clothes were so warm and comforting against his
+back. The sound, still steadily coming nearer, had by this time become
+differentiated from the confused clamour of the elements, and had
+resolved itself into the footsteps of one or more persons.
+
+"The Germans, hang 'em!" thought Jim. "But what on earth is the matter
+with me? I never felt so queer in all my life."
+
+He was trembling all over, and felt as cold as though he were in a
+freezing atmosphere. His nerves were steady enough, and he felt no
+diminution of physical courage, but he was conscious of a curious sense
+of malaise and trepidation, such as even the most vigorous men have been
+known to experience when in the first grip of some horrible and deadly
+disease. As the footsteps approached this feeling of weakness increased.
+He felt a strange lassitude creeping over him, a sort of exhaustion,
+accompanied by a growing numbness in the extremities, and a sensation of
+dreaminess in the head, as if perhaps the consciousness were leaving its
+accustomed seat in the brain and preparing to act on another plane. Yet,
+strange to say, as the vitality was slowly withdrawn from his body, his
+senses seemed to grow more acute.
+
+Meanwhile the steps were already on the landing at the top of the
+stairs, and Shorthouse, still sitting upright in bed, heard a heavy body
+brush past his door and along the wall outside, almost immediately
+afterwards the loud knocking of someone's knuckles on the door of the
+adjoining room.
+
+Instantly, though so far not a sound had proceeded from within, he
+heard, through the thin partition, a chair pushed back and a man quickly
+cross the floor and open the door.
+
+"Ah! it's you," he heard in the son's voice. Had the fellow, then, been
+sitting silently in there all this time, waiting for his father's
+arrival? To Shorthouse it came not as a pleasant reflection by any
+means.
+
+There was no answer to this dubious greeting, but the door was closed
+quickly, and then there was a sound as if a bag or parcel had been
+thrown on a wooden table and had slid some distance across it before
+stopping.
+
+"What's that?" asked the son, with anxiety in his tone.
+
+"You may know before I go," returned the other gruffly. Indeed his voice
+was more than gruff: it betrayed ill-suppressed passion.
+
+Shorthouse was conscious of a strong desire to stop the conversation
+before it proceeded any further, but somehow or other his will was not
+equal to the task, and he could not get out of bed. The conversation
+went on, every tone and inflexion distinctly audible above the noise of
+the storm.
+
+In a low voice the father continued. Jim missed some of the words at the
+beginning of the sentence. It ended with: " . . . but now they've all left,
+and I've managed to get up to you. You know what I've come for." There
+was distinct menace in his tone.
+
+"Yes," returned the other; "I have been waiting."
+
+"And the money?" asked the father impatiently.
+
+No answer.
+
+"You've had three days to get it in, and I've contrived to stave off the
+worst so far--but to-morrow is the end."
+
+No answer.
+
+"Speak, Otto! What have you got for me? Speak, my son; for God's sake,
+tell me."
+
+There was a moment's silence, during which the old man's vibrating
+accents seemed to echo through the rooms. Then came in a low voice the
+answer--
+
+"I have nothing."
+
+"Otto!" cried the other with passion, "nothing!"
+
+"I can get nothing," came almost in a whisper.
+
+"You lie!" cried the other, in a half-stifled voice. "I swear you lie.
+Give me the money."
+
+A chair was heard scraping along the floor. Evidently the men had been
+sitting over the table, and one of them had risen. Shorthouse heard the
+bag or parcel drawn across the table, and then a step as if one of the
+men was crossing to the door.
+
+"Father, what's in that? I must know," said Otto, with the first signs
+of determination in his voice. There must have been an effort on the
+son's part to gain possession of the parcel in question, and on the
+father's to retain it, for between them it fell to the ground. A curious
+rattle followed its contact with the floor. Instantly there were sounds
+of a scuffle. The men were struggling for the possession of the box. The
+elder man with oaths, and blasphemous imprecations, the other with short
+gasps that betokened the strength of his efforts. It was of short
+duration, and the younger man had evidently won, for a minute later was
+heard his angry exclamation.
+
+"I knew it. Her jewels! You scoundrel, you shall never have them. It is
+a crime."
+
+The elder man uttered a short, guttural laugh, which froze Jim's blood
+and made his skin creep. No word was spoken, and for the space of ten
+seconds there was a living silence. Then the air trembled with the sound
+of a thud, followed immediately by a groan and the crash of a heavy body
+falling over on to the table. A second later there was a lurching from
+the table on to the floor and against the partition that separated the
+rooms. The bed quivered an instant at the shock, but the unholy spell
+was lifted from his soul and Jim Shorthouse sprang out of bed and across
+the floor in a single bound. He knew that ghastly murder had been
+done--the murder by a father of his son.
+
+With shaking fingers but a determined heart he lit the gas, and the
+first thing in which his eyes corroborated the evidence of his ears was
+the horrifying detail that the lower portion of the partition bulged
+unnaturally into his own room. The glaring paper with which it was
+covered had cracked under the tension and the boards beneath it bent
+inwards towards him. What hideous load was behind them, he shuddered to
+think.
+
+All this he saw in less than a second. Since the final lurch against the
+wall not a sound had proceeded from the room, not even a groan or a
+foot-step. All was still but the howl of the wind, which to his ears
+had in it a note of triumphant horror.
+
+Shorthouse was in the act of leaving the room to rouse the house and
+send for the police--in fact his hand was already on the door-knob--when
+something in the room arrested his attention. Out of the corner of his
+eyes he thought he caught sight of something moving. He was sure of it,
+and turning his eyes in the direction, he found he was not mistaken.
+
+Something was creeping slowly towards him along the floor. It was
+something dark and serpentine in shape, and it came from the place where
+the partition bulged. He stooped down to examine it with feelings of
+intense horror and repugnance, and he discovered that it was moving
+toward him from the _other side_ of the wall. His eyes were fascinated,
+and for the moment he was unable to move. Silently, slowly, from side to
+side like a thick worm, it crawled forward into the room beneath his
+frightened eyes, until at length he could stand it no longer and
+stretched out his arm to touch it. But at the instant of contact he
+withdrew his hand with a suppressed scream. It was sluggish--and it was
+warm! and he saw that his fingers were stained with living crimson.
+
+A second more, and Shorthouse was out in the passage with his hand on
+the door of the next room. It was locked. He plunged forward with all
+his weight against it, and, the lock giving way, he fell headlong into a
+room that was pitch dark and very cold. In a moment he was on his feet
+again and trying to penetrate the blackness. Not a sound, not a
+movement. Not even the sense of a presence. It was empty, miserably
+empty!
+
+Across the room he could trace the outline of a window with rain
+streaming down the outside, and the blurred lights of the city beyond.
+But the room was empty, appallingly empty; and so still. He stood there,
+cold as ice, staring, shivering listening. Suddenly there was a step
+behind him and a light flashed into the room, and when he turned quickly
+with his arm up as if to ward off a terrific blow he found himself face
+to face with the landlady. Instantly the reaction began to set in.
+
+It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, and he was standing there
+with bare feet and striped pyjamas in a small room, which in the
+merciful light he perceived to be absolutely empty, carpetless, and
+without a stick of furniture, or even a window-blind. There he stood
+staring at the disagreeable landlady. And there she stood too, staring
+and silent, in a black wrapper, her head almost bald, her face white as
+chalk, shading a sputtering candle with one bony hand and peering over
+it at him with her blinking green eyes. She looked positively hideous.
+
+"Waal?" she drawled at length, "I heard yer right enough. Guess you
+couldn't sleep! Or just prowlin' round a bit--is that it?"
+
+The empty room, the absence of all traces of the recent tragedy, the
+silence, the hour, his striped pyjamas and bare feet--everything
+together combined to deprive him momentarily of speech. He stared at her
+blankly without a word.
+
+"Waal?" clanked the awful voice.
+
+"My dear woman," he burst out finally, "there's been something awful--"
+So far his desperation took him, but no farther. He positively stuck at
+the substantive.
+
+"Oh! there hasn't been nothin'," she said slowly still peering at him.
+"I reckon you've only seen and heard what the others did. I never can
+keep folks on this floor long. Most of 'em catch on sooner or
+later--that is, the ones that's kind of quick and sensitive. Only you
+being an Englishman I thought you wouldn't mind. Nothin' really happens;
+it's only thinkin' like."
+
+Shorthouse was beside himself. He felt ready to pick her up and drop her
+over the banisters, candle and all.
+
+"Look there," he said, pointing at her within an inch of her blinking
+eyes with the fingers that had touched the oozing blood; "look there, my
+good woman. Is that only thinking?"
+
+She stared a minute, as if not knowing what he meant.
+
+"I guess so," she said at length.
+
+He followed her eyes, and to his amazement saw that his fingers were as
+white as usual, and quite free from the awful stain that had been there
+ten minutes before. There was no sign of blood. No amount of staring
+could bring it back. Had he gone out of his mind? Had his eyes and ears
+played such tricks with him? Had his senses become false and perverted?
+He dashed past the landlady, out into the passage, and gained his own
+room in a couple of strides. Whew! . . . the partition no longer bulged.
+The paper was not torn. There was no creeping, crawling thing on the
+faded old carpet.
+
+"It's all over now," drawled the metallic voice behind him. "I'm going
+to bed again."
+
+He turned and saw the landlady slowly going downstairs again, still
+shading the candle with her hand and peering up at him from time to time
+as she moved. A black, ugly, unwholesome object, he thought, as she
+disappeared into the darkness below, and the last flicker of her candle
+threw a queer-shaped shadow along the wall and over the ceiling.
+
+Without hesitating a moment, Shorthouse threw himself into his clothes
+and went out of the house. He preferred the storm to the horrors of that
+top floor, and he walked the streets till daylight. In the evening he
+told the landlady he would leave next day, in spite of her assurances
+that nothing more would happen.
+
+"It never comes back," she said--"that is, not after he's killed."
+
+Shorthouse gasped.
+
+"You gave me a lot for my money," he growled.
+
+"Waal, it aren't my show," she drawled. "I'm no spirit medium. You take
+chances. Some'll sleep right along and never hear nothin'. Others, like
+yourself, are different and get the whole thing."
+
+"Who's the old gentleman?--does he hear it?" asked Jim.
+
+"There's no old gentleman at all," she answered coolly. "I just told
+you that to make you feel easy like in case you did hear anythin'. You
+were all alone on the floor."
+
+"Say now," she went on, after a pause in which Shorthouse could think of
+nothing to say but unpublishable things, "say now, do tell, did you feel
+sort of cold when the show was on, sort of tired and weak, I mean, as if
+you might be going to die?"
+
+"How can I say?" he answered savagely; "what I felt God only knows."
+
+"Waal, but He won't tell," she drawled out. "Only I was wonderin' how
+you really did feel, because the man who had that room last was found
+one morning in bed--"
+
+"In bed?"
+
+"He was dead. He was the one before you. Oh! You don't need to get
+rattled so. You're all right. And it all really happened, they do say.
+This house used to be a private residence some twenty-five years ago,
+and a German family of the name of Steinhardt lived here. They had a big
+business in Wall Street, and stood 'way up in things."
+
+"Ah!" said her listener.
+
+"Oh yes, they did, right at the top, till one fine day it all bust and
+the old man skipped with the boodle--"
+
+"Skipped with the boodle?"
+
+"That's so," she said; "got clear away with all the money, and the son
+was found dead in his house, committed soocide it was thought. Though
+there was some as said he couldn't have stabbed himself and fallen in
+that position. They said he was murdered. The father died in prison.
+They tried to fasten the murder on him, but there was no motive, or no
+evidence, or no somethin'. I forget now."
+
+"Very pretty," said Shorthouse.
+
+"I'll show you somethin' mighty queer any-ways," she drawled, "if you'll
+come upstairs a minute. I've heard the steps and voices lots of times;
+they don't pheaze me any. I'd just as lief hear so many dogs barkin'.
+You'll find the whole story in the newspapers if you look it up--not
+what goes on here, but the story of the Germans. My house would be
+ruined if they told all, and I'd sue for damages."
+
+They reached the bedroom, and the woman went in and pulled up the edge
+of the carpet where Shorthouse had seen the blood soaking in the
+previous night.
+
+"Look thar, if you feel like it," said the old hag. Stooping down, he
+saw a dark, dull stain in the boards that corresponded exactly to the
+shape and position of the blood as he had seen it.
+
+That night he slept in a hotel, and the following day sought new
+quarters. In the newspapers on file in his office after a long search he
+found twenty years back the detailed story, substantially as the woman
+had said, of Steinhardt & Co.'s failure, the absconding and subsequent
+arrest of the senior partner, and the suicide, or murder, of his son
+Otto. The landlady's room-house had formerly been their private
+residence.
+
+
+
+
+KEEPING HIS PROMISE
+
+
+It was eleven o'clock at night, and young Marriott was locked into his
+room, cramming as hard as he could cram. He was a "Fourth Year Man" at
+Edinburgh University and he had been ploughed for this particular
+examination so often that his parents had positively declared they could
+no longer supply the funds to keep him there.
+
+His rooms were cheap and dingy, but it was the lecture fees that took
+the money. So Marriott pulled himself together at last and definitely
+made up his mind that he would pass or die in the attempt, and for some
+weeks now he had been reading as hard as mortal man can read. He was
+trying to make up for lost time and money in a way that showed
+conclusively he did not understand the value of either. For no ordinary
+man--and Marriott was in every sense an ordinary man--can afford to
+drive the mind as he had lately been driving his, without sooner or
+later paying the cost.
+
+Among the students he had few friends or acquaintances, and these few
+had promised not to disturb him at night, knowing he was at last reading
+in earnest. It was, therefore, with feelings a good deal stronger than
+mere surprise that he heard his door-bell ring on this particular night
+and realised that he was to have a visitor. Some men would simply have
+muffled the bell and gone on quietly with their work. But Marriott was
+not this sort. He was nervous. It would have bothered and pecked at his
+mind all night long not to know who the visitor was and what he wanted.
+The only thing to do, therefore, was to let him in--and out again--as
+quickly as possible.
+
+The landlady went to bed at ten o'clock punctually, after which hour
+nothing would induce her to pretend she heard the bell, so Marriott
+jumped up from his books with an exclamation that augured ill for the
+reception of his caller, and prepared to let him in with his own hand.
+
+The streets of Edinburgh town were very still at this late hour--it was
+late for Edinburgh--and in the quiet neighbourhood of F---- Street,
+where Marriott lived on the third floor, scarcely a sound broke the
+silence. As he crossed the floor, the bell rang a second time, with
+unnecessary clamour, and he unlocked the door and passed into the
+little hallway with considerable wrath and annoyance in his heart at the
+insolence of the double interruption.
+
+"The fellows all know I'm reading for this exam. Why in the world do
+they come to bother me at such an unearthly hour?"
+
+The inhabitants of the building, with himself, were medical students,
+general students, poor Writers to the Signet, and some others whose
+vocations were perhaps not so obvious. The stone staircase, dimly
+lighted at each floor by a gas-jet that would not turn above a certain
+height, wound down to the level of the street with no pretence at carpet
+or railing. At some levels it was cleaner than at others. It depended on
+the landlady of the particular level.
+
+The acoustic properties of a spiral staircase seem to be peculiar.
+Marriott, standing by the open door, book in hand, thought every moment
+the owner of the footsteps would come into view. The sound of the boots
+was so close and so loud that they seemed to travel disproportionately
+in advance of their cause. Wondering who it could be, he stood ready
+with all manner of sharp greetings for the man who dared thus to disturb
+his work. But the man did not appear. The steps sounded almost under
+his nose, yet no one was visible.
+
+A sudden queer sensation of fear passed over him--a faintness and a
+shiver down the back. It went, however, almost as soon as it came, and
+he was just debating whether he would call aloud to his invisible
+visitor, or slam the door and return to his books, when the cause of the
+disturbance turned the corner very slowly and came into view.
+
+It was a stranger. He saw a youngish man short of figure and very broad.
+His face was the colour of a piece of chalk and the eyes, which were
+very bright, had heavy lines underneath them. Though the cheeks and chin
+were unshaven and the general appearance unkempt, the man was evidently
+a gentleman, for he was well dressed and bore himself with a certain
+air. But, strangest of all, he wore no hat, and carried none in his
+hand; and although rain had been falling steadily all the evening, he
+appeared to have neither overcoat nor umbrella.
+
+A hundred questions sprang up in Marriott's mind and rushed to his lips,
+chief among which was something like "Who in the world are you?" and
+"What in the name of heaven do you come to me for?" But none of these
+questions found time to express themselves in words, for almost at once
+the caller turned his head a little so that the gas light in the hall
+fell upon his features from a new angle. Then in a flash Marriott
+recognised him.
+
+"Field! Man alive! Is it you?" he gasped.
+
+The Fourth Year Man was not lacking in intuition, and he perceived at
+once that here was a case for delicate treatment. He divined, without
+any actual process of thought, that the catastrophe often predicted had
+come at last, and that this man's father had turned him out of the
+house. They had been at a private school together years before, and
+though they had hardly met once since, the news had not failed to reach
+him from time to time with considerable detail, for the family lived
+near his own and between certain of the sisters there was great
+intimacy. Young Field had gone wild later, he remembered hearing about
+it all--drink, a woman, opium, or something of the sort--he could not
+exactly call to mind.
+
+"Come in," he said at once, his anger vanishing. "There's been something
+wrong, I can see. Come in, and tell me all about it and perhaps I can
+help--" He hardly knew what to say, and stammered a lot more besides.
+The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that
+lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.
+But he had a man's heart for all that.
+
+He led the way across the hall, shutting the front door carefully behind
+him, and noticed as he did so that the other, though certainly sober,
+was unsteady on his legs, and evidently much exhausted. Marriott might
+not be able to pass his examinations, but he at least knew the symptoms
+of starvation--acute starvation, unless he was much mistaken--when they
+stared him in the face.
+
+"Come along," he said cheerfully, and with genuine sympathy in his
+voice. "I'm glad to see you. I was going to have a bite of something to
+eat, and you're just in time to join me."
+
+The other made no audible reply, and shuffled so feebly with his feet
+that Marriott took his arm by way of support. He noticed for the first
+time that the clothes hung on him with pitiful looseness. The broad
+frame was literally hardly more than a frame. He was as thin as a
+skeleton. But, as he touched him, the sensation of faintness and dread
+returned. It only lasted a moment, and then passed off, and he ascribed
+it not unnaturally to the distress and shock of seeing a former friend
+in such a pitiful plight.
+
+"Better let me guide you. It's shamefully dark--this hall. I'm always
+complaining," he said lightly, recognising by the weight upon his arm
+that the guidance was sorely needed, "but the old cat never does
+anything except promise." He led him to the sofa, wondering all the time
+where he had come from and how he had found out the address. It must be
+at least seven years since those days at the private school when they
+used to be such close friends.
+
+"Now, if you'll forgive me for a minute," he said, "I'll get supper
+ready--such as it is. And don't bother to talk. Just take it easy on the
+sofa. I see you're dead tired. You can tell me about it afterwards, and
+we'll make plans."
+
+The other sat down on the edge of the sofa and stared in silence, while
+Marriott got out the brown loaf, scones, and huge pot of marmalade that
+Edinburgh students always keep in their cupboards. His eyes shone with a
+brightness that suggested drugs, Marriott thought, stealing a glance at
+him from behind the cupboard door. He did not like yet to take a full
+square look. The fellow was in a bad way, and it would have been so like
+an examination to stare and wait for explanations. Besides, he was
+evidently almost too exhausted to speak. So, for reasons of
+delicacy--and for another reason as well which he could not exactly
+formulate to himself--he let his visitor rest apparently unnoticed,
+while he busied himself with the supper. He lit the spirit lamp to make
+cocoa, and when the water was boiling he drew up the table with the good
+things to the sofa, so that Field need not have even the trouble of
+moving to a chair.
+
+"Now, let's tuck in," he said, "and afterwards we'll have a pipe and a
+chat. I'm reading for an exam, you know, and I always have something
+about this time. It's jolly to have a companion."
+
+He looked up and caught his guest's eyes directed straight upon his own.
+An involuntary shudder ran through him from head to foot. The face
+opposite him was deadly white and wore a dreadful expression of pain and
+mental suffering.
+
+"By Gad!" he said, jumping up, "I quite forgot. I've got some whisky
+somewhere. What an ass I am. I never touch it myself when I'm working
+like this."
+
+He went to the cupboard and poured out a stiff glass which the other
+swallowed at a single gulp and without any water. Marriott watched him
+while he drank it, and at the same time noticed something else as
+well--Field's coat was all over dust, and on one shoulder was a bit of
+cobweb. It was perfectly dry; Field arrived on a soaking wet night
+without hat, umbrella, or overcoat, and yet perfectly dry, even dusty.
+Therefore he had been under cover. What did it all mean? Had he been
+hiding in the building? . . .
+
+It was very strange. Yet he volunteered nothing; and Marriott had pretty
+well made up his mind by this time that he would not ask any questions
+until he had eaten and slept. Food and sleep were obviously what the
+poor devil needed most and first--he was pleased with his powers of
+ready diagnosis--and it would not be fair to press him till he had
+recovered a bit.
+
+They ate their supper together while the host carried on a running
+one-sided conversation, chiefly about himself and his exams and his "old
+cat" of a landlady, so that the guest need not utter a single word
+unless he really wished to--which he evidently did not! But, while he
+toyed with his food, feeling no desire to eat, the other ate
+voraciously. To see a hungry man devour cold scones, stale oatcake, and
+brown bread laden with marmalade was a revelation to this inexperienced
+student who had never known what it was to be without at least three
+meals a day. He watched in spite of himself, wondering why the fellow
+did not choke in the process.
+
+But Field seemed to be as sleepy as he was hungry. More than once his
+head dropped and he ceased to masticate the food in his mouth. Marriott
+had positively to shake him before he would go on with his meal. A
+stronger emotion will overcome a weaker, but this struggle between the
+sting of real hunger and the magical opiate of overpowering sleep was a
+curious sight to the student, who watched it with mingled astonishment
+and alarm. He had heard of the pleasure it was to feed hungry men, and
+watch them eat, but he had never actually witnessed it, and he had no
+idea it was like this. Field ate like an animal--gobbled, stuffed,
+gorged. Marriott forgot his reading, and began to feel something very
+much like a lump in his throat.
+
+"Afraid there's been awfully little to offer you, old man," he managed
+to blurt out when at length the last scone had disappeared, and the
+rapid, one-sided meal was at an end. Field still made no reply, for he
+was almost asleep in his seat. He merely looked up wearily and
+gratefully.
+
+"Now you must have some sleep, you know," he continued, "or you'll go to
+pieces. I shall be up all night reading for this blessed exam. You're
+more than welcome to my bed. To-morrow we'll have a late breakfast
+and--and see what can be done--and make plans--I'm awfully good at
+making plans, you know," he added with an attempt at lightness.
+
+Field maintained his "dead sleepy" silence, but appeared to acquiesce,
+and the other led the way into the bedroom, apologising as he did so to
+this half-starved son of a baronet--whose own home was almost a
+palace--for the size of the room. The weary guest, however, made no
+pretence of thanks or politeness. He merely steadied himself on his
+friend's arm as he staggered across the room, and then, with all his
+clothes on, dropped his exhausted body on the bed. In less than a minute
+he was to all appearances sound asleep.
+
+For several minutes Marriott stood in the open door and watched him;
+praying devoutly that he might never find himself in a like predicament,
+and then fell to wondering what he would do with his unbidden guest on
+the morrow. But he did not stop long to think, for the call of his books
+was imperative, and happen what might, he must see to it that he passed
+that examination.
+
+Having again locked the door into the hall, he sat down to his books and
+resumed his notes on _materia medica_ where he had left off when the
+bell rang. But it was difficult for some time to concentrate his mind on
+the subject. His thoughts kept wandering to the picture of that
+white-faced, strange-eyed fellow, starved and dirty, lying in his
+clothes and boots on the bed. He recalled their schooldays together
+before they had drifted apart, and how they had vowed eternal
+friendship--and all the rest of it. And now! What horrible straits to be
+in. How could any man let the love of dissipation take such hold upon
+him?
+
+But one of their vows together Marriott, it seemed, had completely
+forgotten. Just now, at any rate, it lay too far in the background of
+his memory to be recalled.
+
+Through the half-open door--the bedroom led out of the sitting-room and
+had no other door--came the sound of deep, long-drawn breathing, the
+regular, steady breathing of a tired man, so tired that, even to listen
+to it made Marriott almost want to go to sleep himself.
+
+"He needed it," reflected the student, "and perhaps it came only just in
+time!"
+
+Perhaps so; for outside the bitter wind from across the Forth howled
+cruelly and drove the rain in cold streams against the window-panes, and
+down the deserted streets. Long before Marriott settled down again
+properly to his reading, he heard distantly, as it were, through the
+sentences of the book, the heavy, deep breathing of the sleeper in the
+next room.
+
+A couple of hours later, when he yawned and changed his books, he still
+heard the breathing, and went cautiously up to the door to look round.
+
+At first the darkness of the room must have deceived him, or else his
+eyes were confused and dazzled by the recent glare of the reading lamp.
+For a minute or two he could make out nothing at all but dark lumps of
+furniture, the mass of the chest of drawers by the wall, and the white
+patch where his bath stood in the centre of the floor.
+
+Then the bed came slowly into view. And on it he saw the outline of the
+sleeping body gradually take shape before his eyes, growing up strangely
+into the darkness, till it stood out in marked relief--the long black
+form against the white counterpane.
+
+He could hardly help smiling. Field had not moved an inch. He watched
+him a moment or two and then returned to his books. The night was full
+of the singing voices of the wind and rain. There was no sound of
+traffic; no hansoms clattered over the cobbles, and it was still too
+early for the milk carts. He worked on steadily and conscientiously,
+only stopping now and again to change a book, or to sip some of the
+poisonous stuff that kept him awake and made his brain so active, and on
+these occasions Field's breathing was always distinctly audible in the
+room. Outside, the storm continued to howl, but inside the house all was
+stillness. The shade of the reading lamp threw all the light upon the
+littered table, leaving the other end of the room in comparative
+darkness. The bedroom door was exactly opposite him where he sat. There
+was nothing to disturb the worker, nothing but an occasional rush of
+wind against the windows, and a slight pain in his arm.
+
+This pain, however, which he was unable to account for, grew once or
+twice very acute. It bothered him; and he tried to remember how, and
+when, he could have bruised himself so severely, but without success.
+
+At length the page before him turned from yellow to grey, and there were
+sounds of wheels in the street below. It was four o'clock. Marriott
+leaned back and yawned prodigiously. Then he drew back the curtains. The
+storm had subsided and the Castle Rock was shrouded in mist. With
+another yawn he turned away from the dreary outlook and prepared to
+sleep the remaining four hours till breakfast on the sofa. Field was
+still breathing heavily in the next room, and he first tip-toed across
+the floor to take another look at him.
+
+Peering cautiously round the half-opened door his first glance fell upon
+the bed now plainly discernible in the grey light of morning. He stared
+hard. Then he rubbed his eyes. Then he rubbed his eyes again and thrust
+his head farther round the edge of the door. With fixed eyes he stared
+harder still, and harder.
+
+But it made no difference at all. He was staring into an empty room.
+
+The sensation of fear he had felt when Field first appeared upon the
+scene returned suddenly, but with much greater force. He became
+conscious, too, that his left arm was throbbing violently and causing
+him great pain. He stood wondering, and staring, and trying to collect
+his thoughts. He was trembling from head to foot.
+
+By a great effort of the will he left the support of the door and walked
+forward boldly into the room.
+
+There, upon the bed, was the impress of a body, where Field had lain and
+slept. There was the mark of the head on the pillow, and the slight
+indentation at the foot of the bed where the boots had rested on the
+counterpane. And there, plainer than ever--for he was closer to it--was
+_the breathing_!
+
+Marriott tried to pull himself together. With a great effort he found
+his voice and called his friend aloud by name!
+
+"Field! Is that you? Where are you?"
+
+There was no reply; but the breathing continued without interruption,
+coming directly from the bed. His voice had such an unfamiliar sound
+that Marriott did not care to repeat his questions, but he went down on
+his knees and examined the bed above and below, pulling the mattress off
+finally, and taking the coverings away separately one by one. But
+though the sounds continued there was no visible sign of Field, nor was
+there any space in which a human being, however small, could have
+concealed itself. He pulled the bed out from the wall, but the sound
+_stayed where it was_. It did not move with the bed.
+
+Marriott, finding self-control a little difficult in his weary
+condition, at once set about a thorough search of the room. He went
+through the cupboard, the chest of drawers, the little alcove where the
+clothes hung--everything. But there was no sign of anyone. The small
+window near the ceiling was closed; and, anyhow, was not large enough to
+let a cat pass. The sitting-room door was locked on the inside; he could
+not have got out that way. Curious thoughts began to trouble Marriott's
+mind, bringing in their train unwelcome sensations. He grew more and
+more excited; he searched the bed again till it resembled the scene of a
+pillow fight; he searched both rooms, knowing all the time it was
+useless,--and then he searched again. A cold perspiration broke out all
+over his body; and the sound of heavy breathing, all this time, never
+ceased to come from the corner where Field had lain down to sleep.
+
+Then he tried something else. He pushed the bed back exactly into its
+original position--and himself lay down upon it just where his guest had
+lain. But the same instant he sprang up again in a single bound. The
+breathing was close beside him, almost on his cheek, and between him and
+the wall! Not even a child could have squeezed into the space.
+
+He went back into his sitting-room, opened the windows, welcoming all
+the light and air possible, and tried to think the whole matter over
+quietly and clearly. Men who read too hard, and slept too little, he
+knew were sometimes troubled with very vivid hallucinations. Again he
+calmly reviewed every incident of the night; his accurate sensations;
+the vivid details; the emotions stirred in him; the dreadful feast--no
+single hallucination could ever combine all these and cover so long a
+period of time. But with less satisfaction he thought of the recurring
+faintness, and curious sense of horror that had once or twice come over
+him, and then of the violent pains in his arm. These were quite
+unaccountable.
+
+Moreover, now that he began to analyse and examine, there was one other
+thing that fell upon him like a sudden revelation: _During the whole
+time Field had not actually uttered a single word!_ Yet, as though in
+mockery upon his reflections, there came ever from that inner room the
+sound of the breathing, long-drawn, deep, and regular. The thing was
+incredible. It was absurd.
+
+Haunted by visions of brain fever and insanity, Marriott put on his cap
+and macintosh and left the house. The morning air on Arthur's Seat would
+blow the cobwebs from his brain; the scent of the heather, and above
+all, the sight of the sea. He roamed over the wet slopes above Holyrood
+for a couple of hours, and did not return until the exercise had shaken
+some of the horror out of his bones, and given him a ravening appetite
+into the bargain.
+
+As he entered he saw that there was another man in the room, standing
+against the window with his back to the light. He recognised his
+fellow-student Greene, who was reading for the same examination.
+
+"Read hard all night, Marriott," he said, "and thought I'd drop in here
+to compare notes and have some breakfast. You're out early?" he added,
+by way of a question. Marriott said he had a headache and a walk had
+helped it, and Greene nodded and said "Ah!" But when the girl had set
+the steaming porridge on the table and gone out again, he went on with
+rather a forced tone, "Didn't know you had any friends who drank,
+Marriott?"
+
+This was obviously tentative, and Marriott replied drily that he did not
+know it either.
+
+"Sounds just as if some chap were 'sleeping it off' in there, doesn't
+it, though?" persisted the other, with a nod in the direction of the
+bedroom, and looking curiously at his friend. The two men stared
+steadily at each other for several seconds, and then Marriott said
+earnestly--
+
+"Then you hear it too, thank God!"
+
+"Of course I hear it. The door's open. Sorry if I wasn't meant to."
+
+"Oh, I don't mean that," said Marriott, lowering his voice. "But I'm
+awfully relieved. Let me explain. Of course, if you hear it too, then
+it's all right; but really it frightened me more than I can tell you. I
+thought I was going to have brain fever, or something, and you know what
+a lot depends on this exam. It always begins with sounds, or visions, or
+some sort of beastly hallucination, and I--"
+
+"Rot!" ejaculated the other impatiently. "What _are_ you talking about?"
+
+"Now, listen to me, Greene," said Marriott, as calmly as he could, for
+the breathing was still plainly audible, "and I'll tell you what I
+mean, only don't interrupt." And thereupon he related exactly what had
+happened during the night, telling everything, even down to the pain in
+his arm. When it was over he got up from the table and crossed the room.
+
+"You hear the breathing now plainly, don't you?" he said. Greene said he
+did. "Well, come with me, and we'll search the room together." The
+other, however, did not move from his chair.
+
+"I've been in already," he said sheepishly; "I heard the sounds and
+thought it was you. The door was ajar--so I went in."
+
+Marriott made no comment, but pushed the door open as wide as it would
+go. As it opened, the sound of breathing grew more and more distinct.
+
+"_Someone_ must be in there," said Greene under his breath.
+
+"_Someone_ is in there, but _where_?" said Marriott. Again he urged his
+friend to go in with him. But Greene refused point-blank; said he had
+been in once and had searched the room and there was nothing there. He
+would not go in again for a good deal.
+
+They shut the door and retired into the other room to talk it all over
+with many pipes. Greene questioned his friend very closely, but without
+illuminating result, since questions cannot alter facts.
+
+"The only thing that ought to have a proper, a logical, explanation is
+the pain in my arm," said Marriott, rubbing that member with an attempt
+at a smile. "It hurts so infernally and aches all the way up. I can't
+remember bruising it, though."
+
+"Let me examine it for you," said Greene. "I'm awfully good at bones in
+spite of the examiners' opinion to the contrary." It was a relief to
+play the fool a bit, and Marriott took his coat off and rolled up his
+sleeve.
+
+"By George, though, I'm bleeding!" he exclaimed. "Look here! What on
+earth's this?"
+
+On the forearm, quite close to the wrist, was a thin red line. There was
+a tiny drop of apparently fresh blood on it. Greene came over and looked
+closely at it for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair, looking
+curiously at his friend's face.
+
+"You've scratched yourself without knowing it," he said presently.
+
+"There's no sign of a bruise. It must be something else that made the
+arm ache."
+
+Marriott sat very still, staring silently at his arm as though the
+solution of the whole mystery lay there actually written upon the skin.
+
+"What's the matter? I see nothing very strange about a scratch," said
+Greene, in an unconvincing sort of voice. "It was your cuff links
+probably. Last night in your excitement--"
+
+But Marriott, white to the very lips, was trying to speak. The sweat
+stood in great beads on his forehead. At last he leaned forward close to
+his friend's face.
+
+"Look," he said, in a low voice that shook a little. "Do you see that
+red mark? I mean _underneath_ what you call the scratch?"
+
+Greene admitted he saw something or other, and Marriott wiped the place
+clean with his handkerchief and told him to look again more closely.
+
+"Yes, I see," returned the other, lifting his head after a moment's
+careful inspection. "It looks like an old scar."
+
+"It _is_ an old scar," whispered Marriott, his lips trembling. "_Now_ it
+all comes back to me."
+
+"All what?" Greene fidgeted on his chair. He tried to laugh, but without
+success. His friend seemed bordering on collapse.
+
+"Hush! Be quiet, and--I'll tell you," he said. "_Field made that scar._"
+
+For a whole minute the two men looked each other full in the face
+without speaking.
+
+"Field made that scar!" repeated Marriott at length in a louder voice.
+
+"Field! You mean--last night?"
+
+"No, not last night. Years ago--at school, with his knife. And I made a
+scar in his arm with mine." Marriott was talking rapidly now.
+
+"We exchanged drops of blood in each other's cuts. He put a drop into my
+arm and I put one into his--"
+
+"In the name of heaven, what for?"
+
+"It was a boys' compact. We made a sacred pledge, a bargain. I remember
+it all perfectly now. We had been reading some dreadful book and we
+swore to appear to one another--I mean, whoever died first swore to show
+himself to the other. And we sealed the compact with each other's blood.
+I remember it all so well--the hot summer afternoon in the playground,
+seven years ago--and one of the masters caught us and confiscated the
+knives--and I have never thought of it again to this day--"
+
+"And you mean--" stammered Greene.
+
+But Marriott made no answer. He got up and crossed the room and lay down
+wearily upon the sofa, hiding his face in his hands.
+
+Greene himself was a bit non-plussed. He left his friend alone for a
+little while, thinking it all over again. Suddenly an idea seemed to
+strike him. He went over to where Marriott still lay motionless on the
+sofa and roused him. In any case it was better to face the matter,
+whether there was an explanation or not. Giving in was always the silly
+exit.
+
+"I say, Marriott," he began, as the other turned his white face up to
+him. "There's no good being so upset about it. I mean--if it's all an
+hallucination we know what to do. And if it isn't--well, we know what to
+think, don't we?"
+
+"I suppose so. But it frightens me horribly for some reason," returned
+his friend in a hushed voice. "And that poor devil--"
+
+"But, after all, if the worst is true and--and that chap _has_ kept his
+promise--well, he has, that's all, isn't it?"
+
+Marriott nodded.
+
+"There's only one thing that occurs to me," Greene went on, "and that
+is, are you quite sure that--that he really ate like that--I mean that
+he actually _ate anything at all_?" he finished, blurting out all his
+thought.
+
+Marriott stared at him for a moment and then said he could easily make
+certain. He spoke quietly. After the main shock no lesser surprise could
+affect him.
+
+"I put the things away myself," he said, "after we had finished. They
+are on the third shelf in that cupboard. No one's touched 'em since."
+
+He pointed without getting up, and Greene took the hint and went over to
+look.
+
+"Exactly," he said, after a brief examination; "just as I thought. It
+was partly hallucination, at any rate. The things haven't been touched.
+Come and see for yourself."
+
+Together they examined the shelf. There was the brown loaf, the plate of
+stale scones, the oatcake, all untouched. Even the glass of whisky
+Marriott had poured out stood there with the whisky still in it.
+
+"You were feeding--no one," said Greene "Field ate and drank nothing. He
+was not there at all!"
+
+"But the breathing?" urged the other in a low voice, staring with a
+dazed expression on his face.
+
+Greene did not answer. He walked over to the bedroom, while Marriott
+followed him with his eyes. He opened the door, and listened. There was
+no need for words. The sound of deep, regular breathing came floating
+through the air. There was no hallucination about that, at any rate.
+Marriott could hear it where he stood on the other side of the room.
+
+Greene closed the door and came back. "There's only one thing to do," he
+declared with decision. "Write home and find out about him, and
+meanwhile come and finish your reading in my rooms. I've got an extra
+bed."
+
+"Agreed," returned the Fourth Year Man; "there's no hallucination about
+that exam; I must pass that whatever happens."
+
+And this was what they did.
+
+It was about a week later when Marriott got the answer from his sister.
+Part of it he read out to Greene--
+
+"It is curious," she wrote, "that in your letter you should have
+enquired after Field. It seems a terrible thing, but you know only a
+short while ago Sir John's patience became exhausted, and he turned him
+out of the house, they say without a penny. Well, what do you think? He
+has killed himself. At least, it looks like suicide. Instead of leaving
+the house, he went down into the cellar and simply starved himself to
+death. . . . They're trying to suppress it, of course, but I heard it all
+from my maid, who got it from their footman. . . . They found the body on
+the 14th and the doctor said he had died about twelve hours before. . . .
+He was dreadfully thin. . . ."
+
+"Then he died on the 13th," said Greene.
+
+Marriott nodded.
+
+"That's the very night he came to see you."
+
+Marriott nodded again.
+
+
+
+
+WITH INTENT TO STEAL
+
+
+To sleep in a lonely barn when the best bedrooms in the house were at
+our disposal, seemed, to say the least, unnecessary, and I felt that
+some explanation was due to our host.
+
+But Shorthouse, I soon discovered, had seen to all that; our enterprise
+would be tolerated, not welcomed, for the master kept this sort of thing
+down with a firm hand. And then, how little I could get this man,
+Shorthouse, to tell me. There was much I wanted to ask and hear, but he
+surrounded himself with impossible barriers. It was ludicrous; he was
+surely asking a good deal of me, and yet he would give so little in
+return, and his reason--that it was for my good--may have been perfectly
+true, but did not bring me any comfort in its train. He gave me sops now
+and then, however, to keep up my curiosity, till I soon was aware that
+there were growing up side by side within me a genuine interest and an
+equally genuine fear; and something of both these is probably necessary
+to all real excitement.
+
+The barn in question was some distance from the house, on the side of
+the stables, and I had passed it on several of my journeyings to and fro
+wondering at its forlorn and untarred appearance under a régime where
+everything was so spick and span; but it had never once occurred to me
+as possible that I should come to spend a night under its roof with a
+comparative stranger, and undergo there an experience belonging to an
+order of things I had always rather ridiculed and despised.
+
+At the moment I can only partially recall the process by which
+Shorthouse persuaded me to lend him my company. Like myself, he was a
+guest in this autumn house-party, and where there were so many to
+chatter and to chaff, I think his taciturnity of manner had appealed to
+me by contrast, and that I wished to repay something of what I owed.
+There was, no doubt, flattery in it as well, for he was more than twice
+my age, a man of amazingly wide experience, an explorer of all the
+world's corners where danger lurked, and--most subtle flattery of
+all--by far the best shot in the whole party, our host included.
+
+At first, however, I held out a bit.
+
+"But surely this story you tell," I said, "has the parentage common to
+all such tales--a superstitious heart and an imaginative brain--and has
+grown now by frequent repetition into an authentic ghost story? Besides,
+this head gardener of half a century ago," I added, seeing that he still
+went on cleaning his gun in silence, "who was he, and what positive
+information have you about him beyond the fact that he was found hanging
+from the rafters, dead?"
+
+"He was no mere head gardener, this man who passed as such," he replied
+without looking up, "but a fellow of splendid education who used this
+curious disguise for his own purposes. Part of this very barn, of which
+he always kept the key, was found to have been fitted up as a complete
+laboratory, with athanor, alembic, cucurbite, and other appliances, some
+of which the master destroyed at once--perhaps for the best--and which I
+have only been able to guess at--"
+
+"Black Arts," I laughed.
+
+"Who knows?" he rejoined quietly. "The man undoubtedly possessed
+knowledge--dark knowledge--that was most unusual and dangerous, and I
+can discover no means by which he came to it--no ordinary means, that
+is. But I _have_ found many facts in the case which point to the
+exercise of a most desperate and unscrupulous will; and the strange
+disappearances in the neighbourhood, as well as the bones found buried
+in the kitchen garden, though never actually traced to him, seem to me
+full of dreadful suggestion."
+
+I laughed again, a little uncomfortably perhaps, and said it reminded
+one of the story of Giles de Rays, maréchal of France, who was said to
+have killed and tortured to death in a few years no less than one
+hundred and sixty women and children for the purposes of necromancy, and
+who was executed for his crimes at Nantes. But Shorthouse would not
+"rise," and only returned to his subject.
+
+"His suicide seems to have been only just in time to escape arrest," he
+said.
+
+"A magician of no high order then," I observed sceptically, "if suicide
+was his only way of evading the country police."
+
+"The police of London and St. Petersburg rather," returned Shorthouse;
+"for the headquarters of this pretty company was somewhere in Russia,
+and his apparatus all bore the marks of the most skilful foreign make. A
+Russian woman then employed in the household--governess, or
+something--vanished, too, about the same time and was never caught. She
+was no doubt the cleverest of the lot. And, remember, the object of this
+appalling group was not mere vulgar gain, but a kind of knowledge that
+called for the highest qualities of courage and intellect in the
+seekers."
+
+I admit I was impressed by the man's conviction of voice and manner, for
+there is something very compelling in the force of an earnest man's
+belief, though I still affected to sneer politely.
+
+"But, like most Black Magicians, the fellow only succeeded in compassing
+his own destruction--that of his tools, rather, and of escaping
+himself."
+
+"So that he might better accomplish his objects _elsewhere and
+otherwise_," said Shorthouse, giving, as he spoke, the most minute
+attention to the cleaning of the lock.
+
+"Elsewhere and otherwise," I gasped.
+
+"As if the shell he left hanging from the rafter in the barn in no way
+impeded the man's spirit from continuing his dreadful work under new
+conditions," he added quietly, without noticing my interruption. "The
+idea being that he sometimes revisits the garden and the barn, chiefly
+the barn--"
+
+"The barn!" I exclaimed; "for what purpose?"
+
+"Chiefly the barn," he finished, as if he had not heard me, "that is,
+when there is anybody in it."
+
+I stared at him without speaking, for there was a wonder in me how he
+would add to this.
+
+"When he wants fresh material, that is--he comes to steal from the
+living."
+
+"Fresh material!" I repeated aghast. "To steal from the living!" Even
+then, in broad daylight, I was foolishly conscious of a creeping
+sensation at the roots of my hair, as if a cold breeze were passing over
+my skull.
+
+"The strong vitality of the living is what this sort of creature is
+supposed to need most," he went on imperturbably, "and where he has
+worked and thought and struggled before is the easiest place for him to
+get it in. The former conditions are in some way more easily
+reconstructed--" He stopped suddenly, and devoted all his attention to
+the gun. "It's difficult to explain, you know, rather," he added
+presently, "and, besides, it's much better that you should not know till
+afterwards."
+
+I made a noise that was the beginning of a score of questions and of as
+many sentences, but it got no further than a mere noise, and Shorthouse,
+of course, stepped in again.
+
+"Your scepticism," he added, "is one of the qualities that induce me to
+ask you to spend the night there with me."
+
+"In those days," he went on, in response to my urging for more
+information, "the family were much abroad, and often travelled for years
+at a time. This man was invaluable in their absence. His wonderful
+knowledge of horticulture kept the gardens--French, Italian, English--in
+perfect order. He had carte blanche in the matter of expense, and of
+course selected all his own underlings. It was the sudden, unexpected
+return of the master that surprised the amazing stories of the
+countryside before the fellow, with all his cleverness, had time to
+prepare or conceal."
+
+"But is there no evidence, no more recent evidence, to show that
+something is likely to happen if we sit up there?" I asked, pressing him
+yet further, and I think to his liking, for it showed at least that I
+was interested. "Has anything happened there lately, for instance?"
+
+Shorthouse glanced up from the gun he was cleaning so assiduously, and
+the smoke from his pipe curled up into an odd twist between me and the
+black beard and oriental, sun-tanned face. The magnetism of his look and
+expression brought more sense of conviction to me than I had felt
+hitherto, and I realised that there had been a sudden little change in
+my attitude and that I was now much more inclined to go in for the
+adventure with him. At least, I thought, with such a man, one would be
+safe in any emergency; for he is determined, resourceful, and to be
+depended upon.
+
+"There's the point," he answered slowly; "for there has apparently been
+a fresh outburst--an attack almost, it seems,--quite recently. There is
+evidence, of course, plenty of it, or I should not feel the interest I
+do feel, but--" he hesitated a moment, as though considering how much he
+ought to let me know, "but the fact is that three men this summer, on
+separate occasions, who have gone into that barn after nightfall, have
+been _accosted_--"
+
+"Accosted?" I repeated, betrayed into the interruption by his choice of
+so singular a word.
+
+"And one of the stablemen--a recent arrival and quite ignorant of the
+story--who had to go in there late one night, saw a dark substance
+hanging down from one of the rafters, and when he climbed up, shaking
+all over, to cut it down--for he said he felt sure it was a corpse--the
+knife passed through nothing but air, and he heard a sound up under the
+eaves as if someone were laughing. Yet, while he slashed away, and
+afterwards too, the thing went on swinging there before his eyes and
+turning slowly with its own weight, like a huge joint on a spit. The man
+declares, too, that it had a large bearded face, and that the mouth was
+open and drawn down like the mouth of a hanged man."
+
+"Can we question this fellow?"
+
+"He's gone--gave notice at once, but not before I had questioned him
+myself very closely."
+
+"Then this was quite recent?" I said, for I knew Shorthouse had not been
+in the house more than a week.
+
+"Four days ago," he replied. "But, more than that, only three days ago a
+couple of men were in there together in full daylight when one of them
+suddenly turned deadly faint. He said that he felt an overmastering
+impulse to hang himself; and he looked about for a rope and was furious
+when his companion tried to prevent him--"
+
+"But he did prevent him?"
+
+"Just in time, but not before he had clambered on to a beam. He was very
+violent."
+
+I had so much to say and ask that I could get nothing out in time, and
+Shorthouse went on again.
+
+"I've had a sort of watching brief for this case," he said with a smile,
+whose real significance, however, completely escaped me at the time,
+"and one of the most disagreeable features about it is the deliberate
+way the servants have invented excuses to go out to the place, and
+always after dark; some of them who have no right to go there, and no
+real occasion at all--have never been there in their lives before
+probably--and now all of a sudden have shown the keenest desire and
+determination to go out there about dusk, or soon after, and with the
+most paltry and foolish excuses in the world. Of course," he added,
+"they have been prevented, but the desire, stronger than their
+superstitious dread, and which they cannot explain, is very curious."
+
+"Very," I admitted, feeling that my hair was beginning to stand up
+again.
+
+"You see," he went on presently, "it all points to volition--in fact to
+deliberate arrangement. It is no mere family ghost that goes with every
+ivied house in England of a certain age; it is something real, and
+something very malignant."
+
+He raised his face from the gun barrel, and for the first time his eye
+caught mine in the full. Yes, he was very much in earnest. Also, he knew
+a great deal more than he meant to tell.
+
+"It's worth tempting--and fighting, _I_ think," he said; "but I want a
+companion with me. Are you game?" His enthusiasm undoubtedly caught me,
+but I still wanted to hedge a bit.
+
+"I'm very sceptical," I pleaded.
+
+"All the better," he said, almost as if to himself. "You have the pluck;
+I have the knowledge--"
+
+"The knowledge?"
+
+He looked round cautiously as if to make sure that there was no one
+within earshot.
+
+"I've been in the place myself," he said in a lowered voice, "quite
+lately--in fact only three nights ago--the day the man turned queer."
+
+I stared.
+
+"But--I was obliged to come out--"
+
+Still I stared.
+
+"Quickly," he added significantly.
+
+"You've gone into the thing pretty thoroughly," was all I could find to
+say, for I had almost made up my mind to go with him, and was not sure
+that I wanted to hear too much beforehand.
+
+He nodded. "It's a bore, of course, but I must do everything
+thoroughly--or not at all."
+
+"That's why you clean your own gun, I suppose?"
+
+"That's why, when there's any danger, I take as few chances as
+possible," he said, with the same enigmatical smile I had noticed
+before; and then he added with emphasis, "And that is also why I ask you
+to keep me company now."
+
+Of course, the shaft went straight home, and I gave my promise without
+further ado.
+
+Our preparations for the night--a couple of rugs and a flask of black
+coffee--were not elaborate, and we found no difficulty, about ten
+o'clock, in absenting ourselves from the billiard-room without
+attracting curiosity. Shorthouse met me by arrangement under the cedar
+on the back lawn, and I at once realised with vividness what a
+difference there is between making plans in the daytime and carrying
+them out in the dark. One's common-sense--at least in matters of this
+sort--is reduced to a minimum, and imagination with all her attendant
+sprites usurps the place of judgment. Two and two no longer make
+four--they make a mystery, and the mystery loses no time in growing into
+a menace. In this particular case, however, my imagination did not find
+wings very readily, for I knew that my companion was the most
+_unmovable_ of men--an unemotional, solid block of a man who would
+never lose his head, and in any conceivable state of affairs would
+always take the right as well as the strong course. So my faith in the
+man gave me a false courage that was nevertheless very consoling, and I
+looked forward to the night's adventure with a genuine appetite.
+
+Side by side, and in silence, we followed the path that skirted the East
+Woods, as they were called, and then led across two hay fields, and
+through another wood, to the barn, which thus lay about half a mile from
+the Lower Farm. To the Lower Farm, indeed, it properly belonged; and
+this made us realise more clearly how very ingenious must have been the
+excuses of the Hall servants who felt the desire to visit it.
+
+It had been raining during the late afternoon, and the trees were still
+dripping heavily on all sides, but the moment we left the second wood
+and came out into the open, we saw a clearing with the stars overhead,
+against which the barn outlined itself in a black, lugubrious shadow.
+Shorthouse led the way--still without a word--and we crawled in through
+a low door and seated ourselves in a soft heap of hay in the extreme
+corner.
+
+"Now," he said, speaking for the first time, "I'll show you the inside
+of the barn, so that you may know where you are, and what to do, in
+case anything happens."
+
+A match flared in the darkness, and with the help of two more that
+followed I saw the interior of a lofty and somewhat rickety-looking
+barn, erected upon a wall of grey stones that ran all round and extended
+to a height of perhaps four feet. Above this masonry rose the wooden
+sides, running up into the usual vaulted roof, and supported by a double
+tier of massive oak rafters, which stretched across from wall to wall
+and were intersected by occasional uprights. I felt as if we were inside
+the skeleton of some antediluvian monster whose huge black ribs
+completely enfolded us. Most of this, of course, only sketched itself to
+my eye in the uncertain light of the flickering matches, and when I said
+I had seen enough, and the matches went out, we were at once enveloped
+in an atmosphere as densely black as anything that I have ever known.
+And the silence equalled the darkness.
+
+We made ourselves comfortable and talked in low voices. The rugs, which
+were very large, covered our legs; and our shoulders sank into a really
+luxurious bed of softness. Yet neither of us apparently felt sleepy. I
+certainly didn't, and Shorthouse, dropping his customary brevity that
+fell little short of gruffness, plunged into an easy run of talking
+that took the form after a time of personal reminiscences. This rapidly
+became a vivid narration of adventure and travel in far countries, and
+at any other time I should have allowed myself to become completely
+absorbed in what he told. But, unfortunately, I was never able for a
+single instant to forget the real purpose of our enterprise, and
+consequently I felt all my senses more keenly on the alert than usual,
+and my attention accordingly more or less distracted. It was, indeed, a
+revelation to hear Shorthouse unbosom himself in this fashion, and to a
+young man it was of course doubly fascinating; but the little sounds
+that always punctuate even the deepest silence out of doors claimed some
+portion of my attention, and as the night grew on I soon became aware
+that his tales seemed somewhat disconnected and abrupt--and that, in
+fact, I heard really only part of them.
+
+It was not so much that I actually heard other sounds, but that I
+_expected_ to hear them; this was what stole the other half of my
+listening. There was neither wind nor rain to break the stillness, and
+certainly there were no physical presences in our neighbourhood, for we
+were half a mile even from the Lower Farm; and from the Hall and
+stables, at least a mile. Yet the stillness was being continually
+broken--perhaps _disturbed_ is a better word--and it was to these very
+remote and tiny disturbances that I felt compelled to devote at least
+half my listening faculties.
+
+From time to time, however, I made a remark or asked a question, to show
+that I was listening and interested; but, in a sense, my questions
+always seemed to bear in one direction and to make for one issue,
+namely, my companion's previous experience in the barn when he had been
+obliged to come out "quickly."
+
+Apparently I could not help myself in the matter, for this was really
+the one consuming curiosity I had; and the fact that it was better for
+me not to know it made me the keener to know it all, even the worst.
+
+Shorthouse realised this even better than I did. I could tell it by the
+way he dodged, or wholly ignored, my questions, and this subtle sympathy
+between us showed plainly enough, had I been able at the time to reflect
+upon its meaning, that the nerves of both of us were in a very sensitive
+and highly-strung condition. Probably, the complete confidence I felt in
+his ability to face whatever might happen, and the extent to which also
+I relied upon him for my own courage, prevented the exercise of my
+ordinary powers of reflection, while it left my senses free to a more
+than usual degree of activity.
+
+Things must have gone on in this way for a good hour or more, when I
+made the sudden discovery that there was something unusual in the
+conditions of our environment. This sounds a roundabout mode of
+expression, but I really know not how else to put it. The discovery
+almost rushed upon me. By rights, we were two men waiting in an alleged
+haunted barn for something to happen; and, as two men who trusted one
+another implicitly (though for very different reasons), there should
+have been two minds keenly alert, with the ordinary senses in active
+co-operation. Some slight degree of nervousness, too, there might also
+have been, but beyond this, nothing. It was therefore with something of
+dismay that I made the sudden discovery that there _was_ something more,
+and something that I ought to have noticed very much sooner than I
+actually did notice it.
+
+The fact was--Shorthouse's stream of talk was wholly unnatural. He was
+talking with a purpose. He did not wish to be cornered by my questions,
+true, but he had another and a deeper purpose still, and it grew upon
+me, as an unpleasant deduction from my discovery, that this strong,
+cynical, unemotional man by my side was talking--and had been talking
+all this time--to gain a particular end. And this end, I soon felt
+clearly, was to _convince himself_. But, of what?
+
+For myself, as the hours wore on towards midnight, I was not anxious to
+find the answer; but in the end it became impossible to avoid it, and I
+knew as I listened, that he was pouring forth this steady stream of
+vivid reminiscences of travel--South Seas, big game, Russian
+exploration, women, adventures of all sorts--_because he wished the past
+to reassert itself to the complete exclusion of the present_. He was
+taking his precautions. He was afraid.
+
+I felt a hundred things, once this was clear to me, but none of them
+more than the wish to get up at once and leave the barn. If Shorthouse
+was afraid already, what in the world was to happen to me in the long
+hours that lay ahead? . . . I only know that, in my fierce efforts to deny
+to myself the evidence of his partial collapse, the strength came that
+enabled me to play my part properly, and I even found myself helping
+him by means of animated remarks upon his stories, and by more or less
+judicious questions. I also helped him by dismissing from my mind any
+desire to enquire into the truth of his former experience; and it was
+good I did so, for had he turned it loose on me, with those great powers
+of convincing description that he had at his command, I verily believe
+that I should never have crawled from that barn alive. So, at least, I
+felt at the moment. It was the instinct of self-preservation, and it
+brought sound judgment.
+
+Here, then, at least, with different motives, reached, too, by opposite
+ways, we were both agreed upon one thing, namely, that temporarily we
+would forget. Fools we were, for a dominant emotion is not so easily
+banished, and we were for ever recurring to it in a hundred ways direct
+and indirect. A real fear cannot be so easily trifled with, and while we
+toyed on the surface with thousands and thousands of words--mere
+words--our sub-conscious activities were steadily gaining force, and
+would before very long have to be properly acknowledged. We could not
+get away from it. At last, when he had finished the recital of an
+adventure which brought him near enough to a horrible death, I admitted
+that in my uneventful life I had never yet been face to face with a
+real fear. It slipped out inadvertently, and, of course, without
+intention, but the tendency in him at the time was too strong to be
+resisted. He saw the loophole, and made for it full tilt.
+
+"It is the same with all the emotions," he said. "The experiences of
+others never give a complete account. Until a man has deliberately
+turned and faced for himself the fiends that chase him down the years,
+he has no knowledge of what they really are, or of what they can do.
+Imaginative authors may write, moralists may preach, and scholars may
+criticise, but they are dealing all the time in a coinage of which they
+know not the actual value. Their listener gets a sensation--but not the
+true one. Until you have faced these emotions," he went on, with the
+same race of words that had come from him the whole evening, "and made
+them your own, your slaves, you have no idea of the power that is in
+them--hunger, that shows lights beckoning beyond the grave; thirst, that
+fills with mingled ice and fire; passion, love, loneliness, revenge,
+and--" He paused for a minute, and though I knew we were on the brink I
+was powerless to hold him. " . . . _and fear_," he went on--"fear . . .
+I think that death from fear, or madness from fear, must sum up in a
+second of time the total of all the most awful sensations it is possible
+for a man to know."
+
+"Then you have yourself felt something of this fear," I interrupted;
+"for you said just now--"
+
+"I do not mean physical fear," he replied; "for that is more or less a
+question of nerves and will, and it is imagination that makes men
+cowards. I mean an _absolute_ fear, a physical fear one might call it,
+that reaches the soul and withers every power one possesses."
+
+He said a lot more, for he, too, was wholly unable to stem the torrent
+once it broke loose; but I have forgotten it; or, rather, mercifully I
+did not hear it, for I stopped my ears and only heard the occasional
+words when I took my fingers out to find if he had come to an end. In
+due course he did come to an end, and there we left it, for I then knew
+positively what he already knew: that somewhere here in the night, and
+within the walls of this very barn where we were sitting, there was
+waiting Something of dreadful malignancy and of great power. Something
+that we might both have to face ere morning, and Something that he had
+already tried to face once and failed in the attempt.
+
+The night wore slowly on; and it gradually became more and more clear to
+me that I could not dare to rely as at first upon my companion, and that
+our positions were undergoing a slow process of reversal. I thank Heaven
+this was not borne in upon me too suddenly; and that I had at least the
+time to readjust myself somewhat to the new conditions. Preparation was
+possible, even if it was not much, and I sought by every means in my
+power to gather up all the shreds of my courage, so that they might
+together make a decent rope that would stand the strain when it came.
+The strain would come, that was certain, and I was thoroughly well
+aware--though for my life I cannot put into words the reasons for my
+knowledge--that the massing of the material against us was proceeding
+somewhere in the darkness with determination and a horrible skill
+besides.
+
+Shorthouse meanwhile talked without ceasing. The great quantity of hay
+opposite--or straw, I believe it actually was--seemed to deaden the
+sound of his voice, but the silence, too, had become so oppressive that
+I welcomed his torrent and even dreaded the moment when it would stop. I
+heard, too, the gentle ticking of my watch. Each second uttered its
+voice and dropped away into a gulf, as if starting on a journey whence
+there was no return. Once a dog barked somewhere in the distance,
+probably on the Lower Farm; and once an owl hooted close outside and I
+could hear the swishing of its wings as it passed overhead. Above me, in
+the darkness, I could just make out the outline of the barn, sinister
+and black, the rows of rafters stretching across from wall to wall like
+wicked arms that pressed upon the hay. Shorthouse, deep in some involved
+yarn of the South Seas that was meant to be full of cheer and sunshine,
+and yet only succeeded in making a ghastly mixture of unnatural
+colouring, seemed to care little whether I listened or not. He made no
+appeal to me, and I made one or two quite irrelevant remarks which
+passed him by and proved that he was merely uttering sounds. He, too,
+was afraid of the silence.
+
+I fell to wondering how long a man could talk without stopping. . . . Then
+it seemed to me that these words of his went falling into the same gulf
+where the seconds dropped, only they were heavier and fell faster. I
+began to chase them. Presently one of them fell much faster than the
+rest, and I pursued it and found myself almost immediately in a land of
+clouds and shadows. They rose up and enveloped me, pressing on the
+eyelids. . . . It must have been just here that I actually fell asleep,
+somewhere between twelve and one o'clock, because, as I chased this word
+at tremendous speed through space, I knew that I had left the other
+words far, very far behind me, till, at last, I could no longer hear
+them at all. The voice of the story-teller was beyond the reach of
+hearing; and I was falling with ever increasing rapidity through an
+immense void.
+
+A sound of whispering roused me. Two persons were talking under their
+breath close beside me. The words in the main escaped me, but I caught
+every now and then bitten-off phrases and half sentences, to which,
+however, I could attach no intelligible meaning. The words were quite
+close--at my very side in fact--and one of the voices sounded so
+familiar, that curiosity overcame dread, and I turned to look. I was not
+mistaken; _it was Shorthouse whispering_. But the other person, who must
+have been just a little beyond him, was lost in the darkness and
+invisible to me. It seemed then that Shorthouse at once turned up his
+face and looked at me and, by some means or other that caused me no
+surprise at the time, I easily made out the features in the darkness.
+They wore an expression I had never seen there before; he seemed
+distressed, exhausted, worn out, and as though he were about to give in
+after a long mental struggle. He looked at me, almost beseechingly, and
+the whispering of the other person died away.
+
+"They're at me," he said.
+
+I found it quite impossible to answer; the words stuck in my throat. His
+voice was thin, plaintive, almost like a child's.
+
+"I shall have to go. I'm not as strong as I thought. They'll call it
+suicide, but, of course, it's really murder." There was real anguish in
+his voice, and it terrified me.
+
+A deep silence followed these extraordinary words, and I somehow
+understood that the Other Person was just going to carry on the
+conversation--I even fancied I saw lips shaping themselves just over my
+friend's shoulder--when I felt a sharp blow in the ribs and a voice,
+this time a deep voice, sounded in my ear. I opened my eyes, and the
+wretched dream vanished. Yet it left behind it an impression of a strong
+and quite unusual reality.
+
+"_Do_ try not to go to sleep again," he said sternly. "You seem
+exhausted. Do you feel so?" There was a note in his voice I did not
+welcome,--less than alarm, but certainly more than mere solicitude.
+
+"I do feel terribly sleepy all of a sudden," I admitted, ashamed.
+
+"So you may," he added very earnestly; "but I rely on you to keep awake,
+if only to watch. You have been asleep for half an hour at least--and
+you were so still--I thought I'd wake you--"
+
+"Why?" I asked, for my curiosity and nervousness were altogether too
+strong to be resisted. "Do you think we are in danger?"
+
+"I think _they_ are about here now. I feel my vitality going
+rapidly--that's always the first sign. You'll last longer than I,
+remember. Watch carefully."
+
+The conversation dropped. I was afraid to say all I wanted to say. It
+would have been too unmistakably a confession; and intuitively I
+realised the danger of admitting the existence of certain emotions until
+positively forced to. But presently Shorthouse began again. His voice
+sounded odd, and as if it had lost power. It was more like a woman's or
+a boy's voice than a man's, and recalled the voice in my dream.
+
+"I suppose you've got a knife?" he asked.
+
+"Yes--a big clasp knife; but why?" He made no answer. "You don't think a
+practical joke likely? No one suspects we're here," I went on. Nothing
+was more significant of our real feelings this night than the way we
+toyed with words, and never dared more than to skirt the things in our
+mind.
+
+"It's just as well to be prepared," he answered evasively. "Better be
+quite sure. See which pocket it's in--so as to be ready."
+
+I obeyed mechanically, and told him. But even this scrap of talk proved
+to me that he was getting further from me all the time in his mind. He
+was following a line that was strange to me, and, as he distanced me, I
+felt that the sympathy between us grew more and more strained. _He knew
+more_; it was not that I minded so much--but that he was willing to
+_communicate less_. And in proportion as I lost his support, I dreaded
+his increasing silence. Not of words--for he talked more volubly than
+ever, and with a fiercer purpose--but his silence in giving no hint of
+what he must have known to be really going on the whole time.
+
+The night was perfectly still. Shorthouse continued steadily talking,
+and I jogged him now and again with remarks or questions in order to
+keep awake. He paid no attention, however, to either.
+
+About two in the morning a short shower fell, and the drops rattled
+sharply on the roof like shot. I was glad when it stopped, for it
+completely drowned all other sounds and made it impossible to hear
+anything else that might be going on. Something _was_ going on, too, all
+the time, though for the life of me I could not say what. The outer
+world had grown quite dim--the house-party, the shooters, the
+billiard-room, and the ordinary daily incidents of my visit. All my
+energies were concentrated on the present, and the constant strain of
+watching, waiting, listening, was excessively telling.
+
+Shorthouse still talked of his adventures, in some Eastern country now,
+and less connectedly. These adventures, real or imaginary, had quite a
+savour of the Arabian Nights, and did not by any means make it easier
+for me to keep my hold on reality. The lightest weight will affect the
+balance under such circumstances, and in this case the weight of his
+talk was on the wrong scale. His words were very rapid, and I found it
+overwhelmingly difficult not to follow them into that great gulf of
+darkness where they all rushed and vanished. But that, I knew, meant
+sleep again. Yet, it was strange I should feel sleepy when at the same
+time all my nerves were fairly tingling. Every time I heard what seemed
+like a step outside, or a movement in the hay opposite, the blood stood
+still for a moment in my veins. Doubtless, the unremitting strain told
+upon me more than I realised, and this was doubly great now that I knew
+Shorthouse was a source of weakness instead of strength, as I had
+counted. Certainly, a curious sense of languor grew upon me more and
+more, and I was sure that the man beside me was engaged in the same
+struggle. The feverishness of his talk proved this, if nothing else. It
+was dreadfully hard to keep awake.
+
+But this time, instead of dropping into the gulf, I saw something come
+up out of it! It reached our world by a door in the side of the barn
+furthest from me, and it came in cautiously and silently and moved into
+the mass of hay opposite. There, for a moment, I lost it, but presently
+I caught it again higher up. It was clinging, like a great bat, to the
+side of the barn. Something trailed behind it, I could not make out
+what. . . . It crawled up the wooden wall and began to move out along one
+of the rafters. A numb terror settled down all over me as I watched it.
+The thing trailing behind it was apparently a rope.
+
+The whispering began again just then, but the only words I could catch
+seemed without meaning; it was almost like another language. The voices
+were above me, under the roof. Suddenly I saw signs of active movement
+going on just beyond the place where the thing lay upon the rafter.
+There was something else up there with it! Then followed panting, like
+the quick breathing that accompanies effort, and the next minute a black
+mass dropped through the air and dangled at the end of the rope.
+
+Instantly, it all flashed upon me. I sprang to my feet and rushed
+headlong across the floor of the barn. How I moved so quickly in the
+darkness I do not know; but, even as I ran, it flashed into my mind that
+I should never get at my knife in time to cut the thing down, or else
+that I should find it had been taken from me. Somehow or other--the
+Goddess of Dreams knows how--I climbed up by the hay bales and swung out
+along the rafter. I was hanging, of course, by my arms, and the knife
+was already between my teeth, though I had no recollection of how it got
+there. It was open. The mass, hanging like a side of bacon, was only a
+few feet in front of me, and I could plainly see the dark line of rope
+that fastened it to the beam. I then noticed for the first time that it
+was swinging and turning in the air, and that as I approached it seemed
+to move along the beam, so that the same distance was always maintained
+between us. The only thing I could do--for there was no time to
+hesitate--was to jump at it through the air and slash at the rope as I
+dropped.
+
+I seized the knife with my right hand, gave a great swing of my body
+with my legs and leaped forward at it through the air. Horrors! It was
+closer to me than I knew, and I plunged full into it, and the arm with
+the knife missed the rope and cut deeply into some substance that was
+soft and yielding. But, as I dropped past it, the thing had time to turn
+half its width so that it swung round and faced me--and I could have
+sworn as I rushed past it through the air, that it had the features of
+Shorthouse.
+
+The shock of this brought the vile nightmare to an abrupt end, and I
+woke up a second time on the soft hay-bed to find that the grey dawn was
+stealing in, and that I was exceedingly cold. After all I had failed to
+keep awake, and my sleep, since it was growing light, must have lasted
+at least an hour. A whole hour off my guard!
+
+There was no sound from Shorthouse, to whom, of course, my first
+thoughts turned; probably his flow of words had ceased long ago, and he
+too had yielded to the persuasions of the seductive god. I turned to
+wake him and get the comfort of companionship for the horror of my
+dream, when to my utter dismay I saw that the place where he had been
+was vacant. He was no longer beside me.
+
+It had been no little shock before to discover that the ally in whom lay
+all my faith and dependence was really frightened, but it is quite
+impossible to describe the sensations I experienced when I realised he
+had gone altogether and that I was alone in the barn. For a minute or
+two my head swam and I felt a prey to a helpless terror. The dream, too,
+still seemed half real, so vivid had it been! I was thoroughly
+frightened--hot and cold by turns--and I clutched the hay at my side in
+handfuls, and for some moments had no idea in the world what I should
+do.
+
+This time, at least, I was unmistakably awake, and I made a great effort
+to collect myself and face the meaning of the disappearance of my
+companion. In this I succeeded so far that I decided upon a thorough
+search of the barn, inside and outside. It was a dreadful undertaking,
+and I did not feel at all sure of being able to bring it to a
+conclusion, but I knew pretty well that unless something was done at
+once, I should simply collapse.
+
+But, when I tried to move, I found that the cold, and fear, and I know
+not what else unholy besides, combined to make it almost impossible. I
+suddenly realised that a tour of inspection, during the whole of which
+my back would be open to attack, was not to be thought of. My will was
+not equal to it. Anything might spring upon me any moment from the dark
+corners, and the growing light was just enough to reveal every movement
+I made to any who might be watching. For, even then, and while I was
+still half dazed and stupid, I knew perfectly well that someone was
+watching me all the time with the utmost intentness. I had not merely
+awakened; I had _been_ awakened.
+
+I decided to try another plan; I called to him. My voice had a thin weak
+sound, far away and quite unreal, and there was no answer to it. Hark,
+though! There was something that might have been a very faint voice near
+me!
+
+I called again, this time with greater distinctness, "Shorthouse, where
+are you? can you hear me?"
+
+There certainly was a sound, but it was not a voice. Something was
+moving. It was someone shuffling along, and it seemed to be outside the
+barn. I was afraid to call again, and the sound continued. It was an
+ordinary sound enough, no doubt, but it came to me just then as
+something unusual and unpleasant. Ordinary sounds remain ordinary only
+so long as one is not listening to them; under the influence of intense
+listening they become unusual, portentous, and therefore extraordinary.
+So, this common sound came to me as something uncommon, disagreeable. It
+conveyed, too, an impression of stealth. And with it there was another,
+a slighter sound.
+
+Just at this minute the wind bore faintly over the field the sound of
+the stable clock, a mile away. It was three o'clock; the hour when
+life's pulses beat lowest; when poor souls lying between life and death
+find it hardest to resist. Vividly I remember this thought crashing
+through my brain with a sound of thunder, and I realised that the strain
+on my nerves was nearing the limit, and that something would have to be
+done at once if I was to reclaim my self-control at all.
+
+When thinking over afterwards the events of this dreadful night, it has
+always seemed strange to me that my second nightmare, so vivid in its
+terror and its nearness, should have furnished me with no inkling of
+what was really going on all this while; and that I should not have been
+able to put two and two together, or have discovered sooner than I did
+_what_ this sound was and _where_ it came from. I can well believe that
+the vile scheming which lay behind the whole experience found it an easy
+trifle to direct my hearing amiss; though, of course, it may equally
+well have been due to the confused condition of my mind at the time and
+to the general nervous tension under which I was undoubtedly suffering.
+
+But, whatever the cause for my stupidity at first in failing to trace
+the sound to its proper source, I can only say here that it was with a
+shock of unexampled horror that my eye suddenly glanced upwards and
+caught sight of the figure moving in the shadows above my head among the
+rafters. Up to this moment I had thought that it was somebody outside
+the barn, crawling round the walls till it came to a door; and the rush
+of horror that froze my heart when I looked up and saw that it was
+Shorthouse creeping stealthily along a beam, is something altogether
+beyond the power of words to describe.
+
+He was staring intently down upon me, and I knew at once that it was he
+who had been watching me.
+
+This point was, I think, for me the climax of feeling in the whole
+experience; I was incapable of any further sensation--that is any
+further sensation in the same direction. But here the abominable
+character of the affair showed itself most plainly, for it suddenly
+presented an entirely new aspect to me. The light fell on the picture
+from a new angle, and galvanised me into a fresh ability to feel when I
+thought a merciful numbness had supervened. It may not sound a great
+deal in the printed letter, but it came to me almost as if it had been
+an extension of consciousness, for the Hand that held the pencil
+suddenly touched in with ghastly effect of contrast the element of the
+ludicrous. Nothing could have been worse just then. Shorthouse, the
+masterful spirit, so intrepid in the affairs of ordinary life, whose
+power increased rather than lessened in the face of danger--this man,
+creeping on hands and knees along a rafter in a barn at three o'clock in
+the morning, watching me all the time as a cat watches a mouse! Yes, it
+was distinctly ludicrous, and while it gave me a measure with which to
+gauge the dread emotion that caused his aberration, it stirred
+somewhere deep in my interior the strings of an empty laughter.
+
+One of those moments then came to me that are said to come sometimes
+under the stress of great emotion, when in an instant the mind grows
+dazzlingly clear. An abnormal lucidity took the place of my confusion of
+thought, and I suddenly understood that the two dreams which I had taken
+for nightmares must really have been sent me, and that I had been
+allowed for one moment to look over the edge of what was to come; the
+Good was helping, even when the Evil was most determined to destroy.
+
+I saw it all clearly now. Shorthouse had overrated his strength. The
+terror inspired by his first visit to the barn (when he had failed) had
+roused the man's whole nature to win, and he had brought me to divert
+the deadly stream of evil. That he had again underrated the power
+against him was apparent as soon as he entered the barn, and his wild
+talk, and refusal to admit what he felt, were due to this desire not to
+acknowledge the insidious fear that was growing in his heart. But, at
+length, it had become too strong. He had left my side in my sleep--had
+been overcome himself, perhaps, first in _his_ sleep, by the dreadful
+impulse. He knew that I should interfere, and with every movement he
+made, he watched me steadily, for the mania was upon him and he was
+_determined to hang himself_. He pretended not to hear me calling, and I
+knew that anything coming between him and his purpose would meet the
+full force of his fury--the fury of a maniac, of one, for the time
+being, truly possessed.
+
+For a minute or two I sat there and stared. I saw then for the first
+time that there was a bit of rope trailing after him, and that this was
+what made the rustling sound I had noticed. Shorthouse, too, had come to
+a stop. His body lay along the rafter like a crouching animal. He was
+looking hard at me. That whitish patch was his face.
+
+I can lay claim to no courage in the matter, for I must confess that in
+one sense I was frightened almost beyond control. But at the same time
+the necessity for decided action, if I was to save his life, came to me
+with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment,
+Shorthouse was only a _man_; it was flesh and blood I had to contend
+with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen
+him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls
+about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my
+mind with the most wholesome effect.
+
+Then I dashed across the floor of the barn and leaped upon the hay bales
+as a preliminary to climbing up the sides to the first rafter. It was
+far more difficult than in my dream. Twice I slipped back into the hay,
+and as I scrambled up for the third time I saw that Shorthouse, who thus
+far had made no sound or movement, was now busily doing something with
+his hands upon the beam. He was at its further end, and there must have
+been fully fifteen feet between us. Yet I saw plainly what he was doing;
+he was fastening the rope to the rafter. _The other end, I saw, was
+already round his neck!_
+
+This gave me at once the necessary strength, and in a second I had swung
+myself on to a beam, crying aloud with all the authority I could put
+into my voice--
+
+"You fool, man! What in the world are you trying to do? Come down at
+once!"
+
+My energetic actions and words combined had an immediate effect upon him
+for which I blessed Heaven; for he looked up from his horrid task,
+stared hard at me for a second or two, and then came wriggling along
+like a great cat to intercept me. He came by a series of leaps and
+bounds and at an astonishing pace, and the way he moved somehow inspired
+me with a fresh horror, for it did not seem the natural movement of a
+human being at all, but more, as I have said, like that of some lithe
+wild animal.
+
+He was close upon me. I had no clear idea of what exactly I meant to do.
+I could see his face plainly now; he was grinning cruelly; the eyes were
+positively luminous, and the menacing expression of the mouth was most
+distressing to look upon. Otherwise it was the face of a chalk man,
+white and dead, with all the semblance of the living human drawn out of
+it. Between his teeth he held my clasp knife, which he must have taken
+from me in my sleep, and with a flash I recalled his anxiety to know
+exactly which pocket it was in.
+
+"Drop that knife!" I shouted at him, "and drop after it yourself--"
+
+"Don't you dare to stop me!" he hissed, the breath coming between his
+lips across the knife that he held in his teeth. "Nothing in the world
+can stop me now--I have promised--and I must do it. I can't hold out any
+longer."
+
+"Then drop the knife and I'll help you," I shouted back in his face. "I
+promise--"
+
+"No use," he cried, laughing a little, "I must do it and you can't stop
+me."
+
+I heard a sound of laughter, too, somewhere in the air behind me. The
+next second Shorthouse came at me with a single bound.
+
+To this day I cannot quite tell how it happened. It is still a wild
+confusion and a fever of horror in my mind, but from somewhere I drew
+more than my usual allowance of strength, and before he could well have
+realised what I meant to do, I had his throat between my fingers. He
+opened his teeth and the knife dropped at once, for I gave him a squeeze
+he need never forget. Before, my muscles had felt like so much soaked
+paper; now they recovered their natural strength, and more besides. I
+managed to work ourselves along the rafter until the hay was beneath us,
+and then, completely exhausted, I let go my hold and we swung round
+together and dropped on to the hay, he clawing at me in the air even as
+we fell.
+
+The struggle that began by my fighting for his life ended in a wild
+effort to save my own, for Shorthouse was quite beside himself, and had
+no idea what he was doing. Indeed, he has always averred that he
+remembers nothing of the entire night's experiences after the time when
+he first woke me from sleep. A sort of deadly mist settled over him, he
+declares, and he lost all sense of his own identity. The rest was a
+blank until he came to his senses under a mass of hay with me on the top
+of him.
+
+It was the hay that saved us, first by breaking the fall and then by
+impeding his movements so that I was able to prevent his choking me to
+death.
+
+
+
+
+THE WOOD OF THE DEAD
+
+
+One summer, in my wanderings with a knapsack, I was at luncheon in the
+room of a wayside inn in the western country, when the door opened and
+there entered an old rustic, who crossed close to my end of the table
+and sat himself down very quietly in the seat by the bow window. We
+exchanged glances, or, properly speaking, nods, for at the moment I did
+not actually raise my eyes to his face, so concerned was I with the
+important business of satisfying an appetite gained by tramping twelve
+miles over a difficult country.
+
+The fine warm rain of seven o'clock, which had since risen in a kind of
+luminous mist about the tree tops, now floated far overhead in a deep
+blue sky, and the day was settling down into a blaze of golden light. It
+was one of those days peculiar to Somerset and North Devon, when the
+orchards shine and the meadows seem to add a radiance of their own, so
+brilliantly soft are the colourings of grass and foliage.
+
+The inn-keeper's daughter, a little maiden with a simple country
+loveliness, presently entered with a foaming pewter mug, enquired after
+my welfare, and went out again. Apparently she had not noticed the old
+man sitting in the settle by the bow window, nor had he, for his part,
+so much as once turned his head in our direction.
+
+Under ordinary circumstances I should probably have given no thought to
+this other occupant of the room; but the fact that it was supposed to be
+reserved for my private use, and the singular thing that he sat looking
+aimlessly out of the window, with no attempt to engage me in
+conversation, drew my eyes more than once somewhat curiously upon him,
+and I soon caught myself wondering why he sat there so silently, and
+always with averted head.
+
+He was, I saw, a rather bent old man in rustic dress, and the skin of
+his face was wrinkled like that of an apple; corduroy trousers were
+caught up with a string below the knee, and he wore a sort of brown
+fustian jacket that was very much faded. His thin hand rested upon a
+stoutish stick. He wore no hat and carried none, and I noticed that his
+head, covered with silvery hair, was finely shaped and gave the
+impression of something noble.
+
+Though rather piqued by his studied disregard of my presence, I came to
+the conclusion that he probably had something to do with the little
+hostel and had a perfect right to use this room with freedom, and I
+finished my luncheon without breaking the silence and then took the
+settle opposite to smoke a pipe before going on my way.
+
+Through the open window came the scents of the blossoming fruit trees;
+the orchard was drenched in sunshine and the branches danced lazily in
+the breeze; the grass below fairly shone with white and yellow daisies,
+and the red roses climbing in profusion over the casement mingled their
+perfume with the sweetly penetrating odour of the sea.
+
+It was a place to dawdle in, to lie and dream away a whole afternoon,
+watching the sleepy butterflies and listening to the chorus of birds
+which seemed to fill every corner of the sky. Indeed, I was already
+debating in my mind whether to linger and enjoy it all instead of taking
+the strenuous pathway over the hills, when the old rustic in the settle
+opposite suddenly turned his face towards me for the first time and
+began to speak.
+
+His voice had a quiet dreamy note in it that was quite in harmony with
+the day and the scene, but it sounded far away, I thought, almost as
+though it came to me from outside where the shadows were weaving their
+eternal tissue of dreams upon the garden floor. Moreover, there was no
+trace in it of the rough quality one might naturally have expected, and,
+now that I saw the full face of the speaker for the first time, I noted
+with something like a start that the deep, gentle eyes seemed far more
+in keeping with the timbre of the voice than with the rough and very
+countrified appearance of the clothes and manner. His voice set pleasant
+waves of sound in motion towards me, and the actual words, if I remember
+rightly, were--
+
+"You are a stranger in these parts?" or "Is not this part of the country
+strange to you?"
+
+There was no "sir," nor any outward and visible sign of the deference
+usually paid by real country folk to the town-bred visitor, but in its
+place a gentleness, almost a sweetness, of polite sympathy that was far
+more of a compliment than either.
+
+I answered that I was wandering on foot through a part of the country
+that was wholly new to me, and that I was surprised not to find a place
+of such idyllic loveliness marked upon my map.
+
+"I have lived here all my life," he said, with a sigh, "and am never
+tired of coming back to it again."
+
+"Then you no longer live in the immediate neighbourhood?"
+
+"I have moved," he answered briefly, adding after a pause in which his
+eyes seemed to wander wistfully to the wealth of blossoms beyond the
+window; "but I am almost sorry, for nowhere else have I found the
+sunshine lie so warmly, the flowers smell so sweetly, or the winds and
+streams make such tender music. . . ."
+
+His voice died away into a thin stream of sound that lost itself in the
+rustle of the rose-leaves climbing in at the window, for he turned his
+head away from me as he spoke and looked out into the garden. But it was
+impossible to conceal my surprise, and I raised my eyes in frank
+astonishment on hearing so poetic an utterance from such a figure of a
+man, though at the same time realising that it was not in the least
+inappropriate, and that, in fact, no other sort of expression could have
+properly been expected from him.
+
+"I am sure you are right," I answered at length, when it was clear he
+had ceased speaking; "or there is something of enchantment here--of real
+fairy-like enchantment--that makes me think of the visions of childhood
+days, before one knew anything of--of--"
+
+I had been oddly drawn into his vein of speech, some inner force
+compelling me. But here the spell passed and I could not catch the
+thoughts that had a moment before opened a long vista before my inner
+vision.
+
+"To tell you the truth," I concluded lamely, "the place fascinates me
+and I am in two minds about going further--"
+
+Even at this stage I remember thinking it odd that I should be talking
+like this with a stranger whom I met in a country inn, for it has always
+been one of my failings that to strangers my manner is brief to
+surliness. It was as though we were figures meeting in a dream, speaking
+without sound, obeying laws not operative in the everyday working world,
+and about to play with a new scale of space and time perhaps. But my
+astonishment passed quickly into an entirely different feeling when I
+became aware that the old man opposite had turned his head from the
+window again, and was regarding me with eyes so bright they seemed
+almost to shine with an inner flame. His gaze was fixed upon my face
+with an intense ardour, and his whole manner had suddenly become alert
+and concentrated. There was something about him I now felt for the first
+time that made little thrills of excitement run up and down my back. I
+met his look squarely, but with an inward tremor.
+
+"Stay, then, a little while longer," he said in a much lower and deeper
+voice than before; "stay, and I will teach you something of the purpose
+of my coming."
+
+He stopped abruptly. I was conscious of a decided shiver.
+
+"You have a special purpose then--in coming back?" I asked, hardly
+knowing what I was saying.
+
+"To call away someone," he went on in the same thrilling voice, "someone
+who is not quite ready to come, but who is needed elsewhere for a
+worthier purpose." There was a sadness in his manner that mystified me
+more than ever.
+
+"You mean--?" I began, with an unaccountable access of trembling.
+
+"I have come for someone who must soon move, even as I have moved."
+
+He looked me through and through with a dreadfully piercing gaze, but I
+met his eyes with a full straight stare, trembling though I was, and I
+was aware that something stirred within me that had never stirred
+before, though for the life of me I could not have put a name to it, or
+have analysed its nature. Something lifted and rolled away. For one
+single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist
+actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was _I_ who moved
+to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.
+
+The old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of
+a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a
+dull, limited kingdom.
+
+"Come to-night," I heard the old man say, "come to me to-night into the
+Wood of the Dead. Come at midnight--"
+
+Involuntarily I clutched the arm of the settle for support, for I then
+felt that I was speaking with someone who knew more of the real things
+that are and will be, than I could ever know while in the body, working
+through the ordinary channels of sense--and this curious half-promise of
+a partial lifting of the veil had its undeniable effect upon me.
+
+The breeze from the sea had died away outside, and the blossoms were
+still. A yellow butterfly floated lazily past the window. The song of
+the birds hushed--I smelt the sea--I smelt the perfume of heated summer
+air rising from fields and flowers, the ineffable scents of June and of
+the long days of the year--and with it, from countless green meadows
+beyond, came the hum of myriad summer life, children's voices, sweet
+pipings, and the sound of water falling.
+
+I knew myself to be on the threshold of a new order of experience--of an
+ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning
+towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a
+moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and
+to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for
+less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the
+same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past
+and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that
+pleasure and pain are one and the same force, for the joy I had just
+experienced included also all the pain I ever had felt, or ever could
+feel. . . .
+
+The sunshine grew to dazzling radiance, faded, passed away. The shadows
+paused in their dance upon the grass, deepened a moment, and then melted
+into air. The flowers of the fruit trees laughed with their little
+silvery laughter as the wind sighed over their radiant eyes the old,
+old tale of its personal love. Once or twice a voice called my name. A
+wonderful sensation of lightness and power began to steal over me.
+
+Suddenly the door opened and the inn-keeper's daughter came in. By all
+ordinary standards, her's was a charming country loveliness, born of the
+stars and wild-flowers, of moonlight shining through autumn mists upon
+the river and the fields; yet, by contrast with the higher order of
+beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost
+ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and
+insipid her whole presentment.
+
+For a moment she stood between me and the occupant of the window seat
+while I counted out the small change for my meal and for her services;
+but when, an instant later, she moved aside, I saw that the settle was
+empty and that there was no longer anyone in the room but our two
+selves.
+
+This discovery was no shock to me; indeed, I had almost expected it, and
+the man had gone just as a figure goes out of a dream, causing no
+surprise and leaving me as part and parcel of the same dream without
+breaking of continuity. But, as soon as I had paid my bill and thus
+resumed in very practical fashion the thread of my normal consciousness,
+I turned to the girl and asked her if she knew the old man who had been
+sitting in the window seat, and what he had meant by the Wood of the
+Dead.
+
+The maiden started visibly, glancing quickly round the empty room, but
+answering simply that she had seen no one. I described him in great
+detail, and then, as the description grew clearer, she turned a little
+pale under her pretty sunburn and said very gravely that it must have
+been the ghost.
+
+"Ghost! What ghost?"
+
+"Oh, the village ghost," she said quietly, coming closer to my chair
+with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding in a lower
+voice, "He comes before a death, they say!"
+
+It was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story she told
+me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered with the years
+round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure, was an interesting
+and peculiar one.
+
+The inn, she said, was originally a farmhouse, occupied by a yeoman
+farmer, evidently of a superior, if rather eccentric, character, who had
+been very poor until he reached old age, when a son died suddenly in
+the Colonies and left him an unexpected amount of money, almost a
+fortune.
+
+The old man thereupon altered no whit his simple manner of living, but
+devoted his income entirely to the improvement of the village and to the
+assistance of its inhabitants; he did this quite regardless of his
+personal likes and dislikes, as if one and all were absolutely alike to
+him, objects of a genuine and impersonal benevolence. People had always
+been a little afraid of the man, not understanding his eccentricities,
+but the simple force of this love for humanity changed all that in a
+very short space of time; and before he died he came to be known as the
+Father of the Village and was held in great love and veneration by all.
+
+A short time before his end, however, he began to act queerly. He spent
+his money just as usefully and wisely, but the shock of sudden wealth
+after a life of poverty, people said, had unsettled his mind. He claimed
+to see things that others did not see, to hear voices, and to have
+visions. Evidently, he was not of the harmless, foolish, visionary
+order, but a man of character and of great personal force, for the
+people became divided in their opinions, and the vicar, good man,
+regarded and treated him as a "special case." For many, his name and
+atmosphere became charged almost with a spiritual influence that was
+not of the best. People quoted texts about him; kept when possible out
+of his way, and avoided his house after dark. None understood him, but
+though the majority loved him, an element of dread and mystery became
+associated with his name, chiefly owing to the ignorant gossip of the
+few.
+
+A grove of pine trees behind the farm--the girl pointed them out to me
+on the slope of the hill--he said was the Wood of the Dead, because just
+before anyone died in the village he saw them walk into that wood,
+singing. None who went in ever came out again. He often mentioned the
+names to his wife, who usually published them to all the inhabitants
+within an hour of her husband's confidence; and it was found that the
+people he had seen enter the wood--died. On warm summer nights he would
+sometimes take an old stick and wander out, hatless, under the pines,
+for he loved this wood, and used to say he met all his old friends
+there, and would one day walk in there never to return. His wife tried
+to break him gently off this habit, but he always had his own way; and
+once, when she followed and found him standing under a great pine in the
+thickest portion of the grove, talking earnestly to someone she could
+not see, he turned and rebuked her very gently, but in such a way that
+she never repeated the experiment, saying--
+
+"You should never interrupt me, Mary, when I am talking with the others;
+for they teach me, remember, wonderful things, and I must learn all I
+can before I go to join them."
+
+This story went like wild-fire through the village, increasing with
+every repetition, until at length everyone was able to give an accurate
+description of the great veiled figures the woman declared she had seen
+moving among the trees where her husband stood. The innocent pine-grove
+now became positively haunted, and the title of "Wood of the Dead" clung
+naturally as if it had been applied to it in the ordinary course of
+events by the compilers of the Ordnance Survey.
+
+On the evening of his ninetieth birthday the old man went up to his wife
+and kissed her. His manner was loving, and very gentle, and there was
+something about him besides, she declared afterwards, that made her
+slightly in awe of him and feel that he was almost more of a spirit than
+a man.
+
+He kissed her tenderly on both cheeks, but his eyes seemed to look
+right through her as he spoke.
+
+"Dearest wife," he said, "I am saying good-bye to you, for I am now
+going into the Wood of the Dead, and I shall not return. Do not follow
+me, or send to search, but be ready soon to come upon the same journey
+yourself."
+
+The good woman burst into tears and tried to hold him, but he easily
+slipped from her hands, and she was afraid to follow him. Slowly she saw
+him cross the field in the sunshine, and then enter the cool shadows of
+the grove, where he disappeared from her sight.
+
+That same night, much later, she woke to find him lying peacefully by
+her side in bed, with one arm stretched out towards her, _dead_. Her
+story was half believed, half doubted at the time, but in a very few
+years afterwards it evidently came to be accepted by all the
+countryside. A funeral service was held to which the people flocked in
+great numbers, and everyone approved of the sentiment which led the
+widow to add the words, "The Father of the Village," after the usual
+texts which appeared upon the stone over his grave.
+
+This, then, was the story I pieced together of the village ghost as the
+little inn-keeper's daughter told it to me that afternoon in the
+parlour of the inn.
+
+"But you're not the first to say you've seen him," the girl concluded;
+"and your description is just what we've always heard, and that window,
+they say, was just where he used to sit and think, and think, when he
+was alive, and sometimes, they say, to cry for hours together."
+
+"And would you feel afraid if you had seen him?" I asked, for the girl
+seemed strangely moved and interested in the whole story.
+
+"I think so," she answered timidly. "Surely, if he spoke to me. He did
+speak to _you_, didn't he, sir?" she asked after a slight pause.
+
+"He said he had come for someone."
+
+"Come for someone," she repeated. "Did he say--" she went on
+falteringly.
+
+"No, he did not say for whom," I said quickly, noticing the sudden
+shadow on her face and the tremulous voice.
+
+"Are you really sure, sir?"
+
+"Oh, quite sure," I answered cheerfully. "I did not even ask him." The
+girl looked at me steadily for nearly a whole minute as though there
+were many things she wished to tell me or to ask. But she said nothing,
+and presently picked up her tray from the table and walked slowly out
+of the room.
+
+Instead of keeping to my original purpose and pushing on to the next
+village over the hills, I ordered a room to be prepared for me at the
+inn, and that afternoon I spent wandering about the fields and lying
+under the fruit trees, watching the white clouds sailing out over the
+sea. The Wood of the Dead I surveyed from a distance, but in the village
+I visited the stone erected to the memory of the "Father of the
+Village"--who was thus, evidently, no mythical personage--and saw also
+the monuments of his fine unselfish spirit: the schoolhouse he built,
+the library, the home for the aged poor, and the tiny hospital.
+
+That night, as the clock in the church tower was striking half-past
+eleven, I stealthily left the inn and crept through the dark orchard and
+over the hayfield in the direction of the hill whose southern slope was
+clothed with the Wood of the Dead. A genuine interest impelled me to the
+adventure, but I also was obliged to confess to a certain sinking in my
+heart as I stumbled along over the field in the darkness, for I was
+approaching what might prove to be the birth-place of a real country
+myth, and a spot already lifted by the imaginative thoughts of a
+considerable number of people into the region of the haunted and
+ill-omened.
+
+The inn lay below me, and all round it the village clustered in a soft
+black shadow unrelieved by a single light. The night was moonless, yet
+distinctly luminous, for the stars crowded the sky. The silence of deep
+slumber was everywhere; so still, indeed, that every time my foot kicked
+against a stone I thought the sound must be heard below in the village
+and waken the sleepers.
+
+I climbed the hill slowly, thinking chiefly of the strange story of the
+noble old man who had seized the opportunity to do good to his fellows
+the moment it came his way, and wondering why the causes that operate
+ceaselessly behind human life did not always select such admirable
+instruments. Once or twice a night-bird circled swiftly over my head,
+but the bats had long since gone to rest, and there was no other sign of
+life stirring.
+
+Then, suddenly, with a singular thrill of emotion, I saw the first trees
+of the Wood of the Dead rise in front of me in a high black wall. Their
+crests stood up like giant spears against the starry sky; and though
+there was no perceptible movement of the air on my cheek I heard a
+faint, rushing sound among their branches as the night breeze passed to
+and fro over their countless little needles. A remote, hushed murmur
+rose overhead and died away again almost immediately; for in these trees
+the wind seems to be never absolutely at rest, and on the calmest day
+there is always a sort of whispering music among their branches.
+
+For a moment I hesitated on the edge of this dark wood, and listened
+intently. Delicate perfumes of earth and bark stole out to meet me.
+Impenetrable darkness faced me. Only the consciousness that I was
+obeying an order, strangely given, and including a mighty privilege,
+enabled me to find the courage to go forward and step in boldly under
+the trees.
+
+Instantly the shadows closed in upon me and "something" came forward to
+meet me from the centre of the darkness. It would be easy enough to meet
+my imagination half-way with fact, and say that a cold hand grasped my
+own and led me by invisible paths into the unknown depths of the grove;
+but at any rate, without stumbling, and always with the positive
+knowledge that I was going straight towards the desired object, I
+pressed on confidently and securely into the wood. So dark was it that,
+at first, not a single star-beam pierced the roof of branches overhead;
+and, as we moved forward side by side, the trees shifted silently past
+us in long lines, row upon row, squadron upon squadron, like the units
+of a vast, soundless army.
+
+And, at length, we came to a comparatively open space where the trees
+halted upon us for a while, and, looking up, I saw the white river of
+the sky beginning to yield to the influence of a new light that now
+seemed spreading swiftly across the heavens.
+
+"It is the dawn coming," said the voice at my side that I certainly
+recognised, but which seemed almost like a whispering from the trees,
+"and we are now in the heart of the Wood of the Dead."
+
+We seated ourselves on a moss-covered boulder and waited the coming of
+the sun. With marvellous swiftness, it seemed to me, the light in the
+east passed into the radiance of early morning, and when the wind awoke
+and began to whisper in the tree tops, the first rays of the risen sun
+fell between the trunks and rested in a circle of gold at our feet.
+
+"Now, come with me," whispered my companion in the same deep voice, "for
+time has no existence here, and that which I would show you is already
+_there_!"
+
+We trod gently and silently over the soft pine needles. Already the sun
+was high over our heads, and the shadows of the trees coiled closely
+about their feet. The wood became denser again, but occasionally we
+passed through little open bits where we could smell the hot sunshine
+and the dry, baked pine needles. Then, presently, we came to the edge of
+the grove, and I saw a hayfield lying in the blaze of day, and two
+horses basking lazily with switching tails in the shafts of a laden
+hay-waggon.
+
+So complete and vivid was the sense of reality, that I remember the
+grateful realisation of the cool shade where we sat and looked out upon
+the hot world beyond.
+
+The last pitchfork had tossed up its fragrant burden, and the great
+horses were already straining in the shafts after the driver, as he
+walked slowly in front with one hand upon their bridles. He was a
+stalwart fellow, with sunburned neck and hands. Then, for the first
+time, I noticed, perched aloft upon the trembling throne of hay, the
+figure of a slim young girl. I could not see her face, but her brown
+hair escaped in disorder from a white sun-bonnet, and her still browner
+hands held a well-worn hay rake. She was laughing and talking with the
+driver, and he, from time to time, cast up at her ardent glances of
+admiration--glances that won instant smiles and soft blushes in
+response.
+
+The cart presently turned into the roadway that skirted the edge of the
+wood where we were sitting. I watched the scene with intense interest
+and became so much absorbed in it that I quite forgot the manifold,
+strange steps by which I was permitted to become a spectator.
+
+"Come down and walk with me," cried the young fellow, stopping a moment
+in front of the horses and opening wide his arms. "Jump! and I'll catch
+you!"
+
+"Oh, oh," she laughed, and her voice sounded to me as the happiest,
+merriest laughter I had ever heard from a girl's throat. "Oh, oh! that's
+all very well. But remember I'm Queen of the Hay, and I must ride!"
+
+"Then I must come and ride beside you," he cried, and began at once to
+climb up by way of the driver's seat. But, with a peal of silvery
+laughter, she slipped down easily over the back of the hay to escape
+him, and ran a little way along the road. I could see her quite clearly,
+and noticed the charming, natural grace of her movements, and the
+loving expression in her eyes as she looked over her shoulder to make
+sure he was following. Evidently, she did not wish to escape for long,
+certainly not for ever.
+
+In two strides the big, brown swain was after her, leaving the horses to
+do as they pleased. Another second and his arms would have caught the
+slender waist and pressed the little body to his heart. But, just at
+that instant, the old man beside me uttered a peculiar cry. It was low
+and thrilling, and it went through me like a sharp sword.
+
+HE had called her by her own name--and she had heard.
+
+For a second she halted, glancing back with frightened eyes. Then, with
+a brief cry of despair, the girl swerved aside and dived in swiftly
+among the shadows of the trees.
+
+But the young man saw the sudden movement and cried out to her
+passionately--
+
+"Not that way, my love! Not that way! It's the Wood of the Dead!"
+
+She threw a laughing glance over her shoulder at him, and the wind
+caught her hair and drew it out in a brown cloud under the sun. But the
+next minute she was close beside me, lying on the breast of my
+companion, and I was certain I heard the words repeatedly uttered with
+many sighs: "Father, you called, and I have come. And I come willingly,
+for I am very, very tired."
+
+At any rate, so the words sounded to me, and mingled with them I seemed
+to catch the answer in that deep, thrilling whisper I already knew: "And
+you shall sleep, my child, sleep for a long, long time, until it is time
+for you to begin the journey again."
+
+In that brief second of time I had recognised the face and voice of the
+inn-keeper's daughter, but the next minute a dreadful wail broke from
+the lips of the young man, and the sky grew suddenly as dark as night,
+the wind rose and began to toss the branches about us, and the whole
+scene was swallowed up in a wave of utter blackness.
+
+Again the chill fingers seemed to seize my hand, and I was guided by the
+way I had come to the edge of the wood, and crossing the hayfield still
+slumbering in the starlight, I crept back to the inn and went to bed.
+
+A year later I happened to be in the same part of the country, and the
+memory of the strange summer vision returned to me with the added
+softness of distance. I went to the old village and had tea under the
+same orchard trees at the same inn.
+
+But the little maid of the inn did not show her face, and I took
+occasion to enquire of her father as to her welfare and her whereabouts.
+
+"Married, no doubt," I laughed, but with a strange feeling that clutched
+at my heart.
+
+"No, sir," replied the inn-keeper sadly, "not married--though she was
+just going to be--but dead. She got a sunstroke in the hayfields, just a
+few days after you were here, if I remember rightly, and she was gone
+from us in less than a week."
+
+
+
+
+SMITH: AN EPISODE IN A LODGING-HOUSE
+
+
+"When I was a medical student," began the doctor, half turning towards
+his circle of listeners in the firelight, "I came across one or two very
+curious human beings; but there was one fellow I remember particularly,
+for he caused me the most vivid, and I think the most uncomfortable,
+emotions I have ever known.
+
+"For many months I knew Smith only by name as the occupant of the floor
+above me. Obviously his name meant nothing to me. Moreover I was busy
+with lectures, reading, cliniques and the like, and had little leisure
+to devise plans for scraping acquaintance with any of the other lodgers
+in the house. Then chance brought us curiously together, and this fellow
+Smith left a deep impression upon me as the result of our first meeting.
+At the time the strength of this first impression seemed quite
+inexplicable to me, but looking back at the episode now from a
+stand-point of greater knowledge I judge the fact to have been that he
+stirred my curiosity to an unusual degree, and at the same time awakened
+my sense of horror--whatever that may be in a medical student--about as
+deeply and permanently as these two emotions were capable of being
+stirred at all in the particular system and set of nerves called ME.
+
+"How he knew that I was interested in the study of languages was
+something I could never explain, but one day, quite unannounced, he came
+quietly into my room in the evening and asked me point-blank if I knew
+enough Hebrew to help him in the pronunciation of certain words.
+
+"He caught me along the line of least resistance, and I was greatly
+flattered to be able to give him the desired information; but it was
+only when he had thanked me and was gone that I realised I had been in
+the presence of an unusual individuality. For the life of me I could not
+quite seize and label the peculiarities of what I felt to be a very
+striking personality, but it was borne in upon me that he was a man
+apart from his fellows, a mind that followed a line leading away from
+ordinary human intercourse and human interests, and into regions that
+left in his atmosphere something remote, rarefied, chilling.
+
+"The moment he was gone I became conscious of two things--an intense
+curiosity to know more about this man and what his real interests were,
+and secondly, the fact that my skin was crawling and that my hair had a
+tendency to rise."
+
+The doctor paused a moment here to puff hard at his pipe, which,
+however, had gone out beyond recall without the assistance of a match;
+and in the deep silence, which testified to the genuine interest of his
+listeners, someone poked the fire up into a little blaze, and one or two
+others glanced over their shoulders into the dark distances of the big
+hall.
+
+"On looking back," he went on, watching the momentary flames in the
+grate, "I see a short, thick-set man of perhaps forty-five, with immense
+shoulders and small, slender hands. The contrast was noticeable, for I
+remember thinking that such a giant frame and such slim finger bones
+hardly belonged together. His head, too, was large and very long, the
+head of an idealist beyond all question, yet with an unusually strong
+development of the jaw and chin. Here again was a singular
+contradiction, though I am better able now to appreciate its full
+meaning, with a greater experience in judging the values of
+physiognomy. For this meant, of course, an enthusiastic idealism
+balanced and kept in check by will and judgment--elements usually
+deficient in dreamers and visionaries.
+
+"At any rate, here was a being with probably a very wide range of
+possibilities, a machine with a pendulum that most likely had an unusual
+length of swing.
+
+"The man's hair was exceedingly fine, and the lines about his nose and
+mouth were cut as with a delicate steel instrument in wax. His eyes I
+have left to the last. They were large and quite changeable, not in
+colour only, but in character, size, and shape. Occasionally they seemed
+the eyes of someone else, if you can understand what I mean, and at the
+same time, in their shifting shades of blue, green, and a nameless sort
+of dark grey, there was a sinister light in them that lent to the whole
+face an aspect almost alarming. Moreover, they were the most luminous
+optics I think I have ever seen in any human being.
+
+"There, then, at the risk of a wearisome description, is Smith as I saw
+him for the first time that winter's evening in my shabby student's
+rooms in Edinburgh. And yet the real part of him, of course, I have
+left untouched, for it is both indescribable and un-get-atable. I have
+spoken already of an atmosphere of warning and aloofness he carried
+about with him. It is impossible further to analyse the series of little
+shocks his presence always communicated to my being; but there was that
+about him which made me instantly on the _qui vive_ in his presence,
+every nerve alert, every sense strained and on the watch. I do not mean
+that he deliberately suggested danger, but rather that he brought forces
+in his wake which automatically warned the nervous centres of my system
+to be on their guard and alert.
+
+"Since the days of my first acquaintance with this man I have lived
+through other experiences and have seen much I cannot pretend to explain
+or understand; but, so far in my life, I have only once come across a
+human being who suggested a disagreeable familiarity with unholy things,
+and who made me feel uncanny and 'creepy' in his presence; and that
+unenviable individual was Mr. Smith.
+
+"What his occupation was during the day I never knew. I think he slept
+until the sun set. No one ever saw him on the stairs, or heard him move
+in his room during the day. He was a creature of the shadows, who
+apparently preferred darkness to light. Our landlady either knew
+nothing, or would say nothing. At any rate she found no fault, and I
+have since wondered often by what magic this fellow was able to convert
+a common landlady of a common lodging-house into a discreet and
+uncommunicative person. This alone was a sign of genius of some sort.
+
+"'He's been here with me for years--long before you come, an' I don't
+interfere or ask no questions of what doesn't concern me, as long as
+people pays their rent,' was the only remark on the subject that I ever
+succeeded in winning from that quarter, and it certainly told me nothing
+nor gave me any encouragement to ask for further information.
+
+"Examinations, however, and the general excitement of a medical
+student's life for a time put Mr. Smith completely out of my head. For a
+long period he did not call upon me again, and for my part, I felt no
+courage to return his unsolicited visit.
+
+"Just then, however, there came a change in the fortunes of those who
+controlled my very limited income, and I was obliged to give up my
+ground-floor and move aloft to more modest chambers on the top of the
+house. Here I was directly over Smith, and had to pass his door to
+reach my own.
+
+"It so happened that about this time I was frequently called out at all
+hours of the night for the maternity cases which a fourth-year student
+takes at a certain period of his studies, and on returning from one of
+these visits at about two o'clock in the morning I was surprised to hear
+the sound of voices as I passed his door. A peculiar sweet odour, too,
+not unlike the smell of incense, penetrated into the passage.
+
+"I went upstairs very quietly, wondering what was going on there at this
+hour of the morning. To my knowledge Smith never had visitors. For a
+moment I hesitated outside the door with one foot on the stairs. All my
+interest in this strange man revived, and my curiosity rose to a point
+not far from action. At last I might learn something of the habits of
+this lover of the night and the darkness.
+
+"The sound of voices was plainly audible, Smith's predominating so much
+that I never could catch more than points of sound from the other,
+penetrating now and then the steady stream of his voice. Not a single
+word reached me, at least, not a word that I could understand, though
+the voice was loud and distinct, and it was only afterwards that I
+realised he must have been speaking in a foreign language.
+
+"The sound of footsteps, too, was equally distinct. Two persons were
+moving about the room, passing and repassing the door, one of them a
+light, agile person, and the other ponderous and somewhat awkward.
+Smith's voice went on incessantly with its odd, monotonous droning, now
+loud, now soft, as he crossed and re-crossed the floor. The other person
+was also on the move, but in a different and less regular fashion, for I
+heard rapid steps that seemed to end sometimes in stumbling, and quick
+sudden movements that brought up with a violent lurching against the
+wall or furniture.
+
+"As I listened to Smith's voice, moreover, I began to feel afraid. There
+was something in the sound that made me feel intuitively he was in a
+tight place, and an impulse stirred faintly in me--very faintly, I
+admit--to knock at the door and inquire if he needed help.
+
+"But long before the impulse could translate itself into an act, or even
+before it had been properly weighed and considered by the mind, I heard
+a voice close beside me in the air, a sort of hushed whisper which I am
+certain was Smith speaking, though the sound did not seem to have come
+to me through the door. It was close in my very ear, as though he stood
+beside me, and it gave me such a start, that I clutched the banisters to
+save myself from stepping backwards and making a clatter on the stairs.
+
+"'There is nothing you can do to help me,' it said distinctly, 'and you
+will be much safer in your own room.'
+
+"I am ashamed to this day of the pace at which I covered the flight of
+stairs in the darkness to the top floor, and of the shaking hand with
+which I lit my candles and bolted the door. But, there it is, just as it
+happened.
+
+"This midnight episode, so odd and yet so trivial in itself, fired me
+with more curiosity than ever about my fellow-lodger. It also made me
+connect him in my mind with a sense of fear and distrust. I never saw
+him, yet I was often, and uncomfortably, aware of his presence in the
+upper regions of that gloomy lodging-house. Smith and his secret mode of
+life and mysterious pursuits, somehow contrived to awaken in my being a
+line of reflection that disturbed my comfortable condition of ignorance.
+I never saw him, as I have said, and exchanged no sort of communication
+with him, yet it seemed to me that his mind was in contact with mine,
+and some of the strange forces of his atmosphere filtered through into
+my being and disturbed my equilibrium. Those upper floors became haunted
+for me after dark, and, though outwardly our lives never came into
+contact, I became unwillingly involved in certain pursuits on which his
+mind was centred. I felt that he was somehow making use of me against my
+will, and by methods which passed my comprehension.
+
+"I was at that time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of
+materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to
+understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump
+at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in
+their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' and
+regarded a belief in anything beyond matter as the wanderings of weak,
+or at best, untrained minds. And this condition of mind, of course,
+added to the strength of this upsetting fear which emanated from the
+floor below and began slowly to take possession of me.
+
+"Though I kept no notes of the subsequent events in this matter, they
+made too deep an impression for me ever to forget the sequence in which
+they occurred. Without difficulty I can recall the next step in the
+adventure with Smith, for adventure it rapidly grew to be."
+
+The doctor stopped a moment and laid his pipe on the table behind him
+before continuing. The fire had burned low, and no one stirred to poke
+it. The silence in the great hall was so deep that when the speaker's
+pipe touched the table the sound woke audible echoes at the far end
+among the shadows.
+
+"One evening, while I was reading, the door of my room opened and Smith
+came in. He made no attempt at ceremony. It was after ten o'clock and I
+was tired, but the presence of the man immediately galvanised me into
+activity. My attempts at ordinary politeness he thrust on one side at
+once, and began asking me to vocalise, and then pronounce for him,
+certain Hebrew words; and when this was done he abruptly inquired if I
+was not the fortunate possessor of a very rare Rabbinical Treatise,
+which he named.
+
+"How he knew that I possessed this book puzzled me exceedingly; but I
+was still more surprised to see him cross the room and take it out of
+my book-shelf almost before I had had time to answer in the affirmative.
+Evidently he knew exactly where it was kept. This excited my curiosity
+beyond all bounds, and I immediately began asking him questions; and
+though, out of sheer respect for the man, I put them very delicately to
+him, and almost by way of mere conversation, he had only one reply for
+the lot. He would look up at me from the pages of the book with an
+expression of complete comprehension on his extraordinary features,
+would bow his head a little and say very gravely--
+
+"'That, of course, is a perfectly proper question,'--which was
+absolutely all I could ever get out of him.
+
+"On this particular occasion he stayed with me perhaps ten or fifteen
+minutes. Then he went quickly downstairs to his room with my Hebrew
+Treatise in his hand, and I heard him close and bolt his door.
+
+"But a few moments later, before I had time to settle down to my book
+again, or to recover from the surprise his visit had caused me, I heard
+the door open, and there stood Smith once again beside my chair. He made
+no excuse for his second interruption, but bent his head down to the
+level of my reading lamp and peered across the flame straight into my
+eyes.
+
+"'I hope,' he whispered, 'I hope you are never disturbed at night?'
+
+"'Eh?' I stammered, 'disturbed at night? Oh no, thanks, at least, not
+that I know of--'
+
+"'I'm glad,' he replied gravely, appearing not to notice my confusion
+and surprise at his question. 'But, remember, should it ever be the
+case, please let me know at once.'
+
+"And he was gone down the stairs and into his room again.
+
+"For some minutes I sat reflecting upon his strange behaviour. He was
+not mad, I argued, but was the victim of some harmless delusion that had
+gradually grown upon him as a result of his solitary mode of life; and
+from the books he used, I judged that it had something to do with
+mediæval magic, or some system of ancient Hebrew mysticism. The words he
+asked me to pronounce for him were probably 'Words of Power,' which,
+when uttered with the vehemence of a strong will behind them, were
+supposed to produce physical results, or set up vibrations in one's own
+inner being that had the effect of a partial lifting of the veil.
+
+"I sat thinking about the man, and his way of living, and the probable
+effects in the long-run of his dangerous experiments, and I can recall
+perfectly well the sensation of disappointment that crept over me when I
+realised that I had labelled his particular form of aberration, and that
+my curiosity would therefore no longer be excited.
+
+"For some time I had been sitting alone with these reflections--it may
+have been ten minutes or it may have been half an hour--when I was
+aroused from my reverie by the knowledge that someone was again in the
+room standing close beside my chair. My first thought was that Smith had
+come back again in his swift, unaccountable manner, but almost at the
+same moment I realised that this could not be the case at all. For the
+door faced my position, and it certainly had not been opened again.
+
+"Yet, someone was in the room, moving cautiously to and fro, watching
+me, almost touching me. I was as sure of it as I was of myself, and
+though at the moment I do not think I was actually afraid, I am bound to
+admit that a certain weakness came over me and that I felt that strange
+disinclination for action which is probably the beginning of the
+horrible paralysis of real terror. I should have been glad to hide
+myself, if that had been possible, to cower into a corner, or behind a
+door, or anywhere so that I could not be watched and observed.
+
+"But, overcoming my nervousness with an effort of the will, I got up
+quickly out of my chair and held the reading lamp aloft so that it shone
+into all the corners like a searchlight.
+
+"The room was utterly empty! It was utterly empty, at least, to the
+_eye_, but to the nerves, and especially to that combination of sense
+perception which is made up by all the senses acting together, and by no
+one in particular, there was a person standing there at my very elbow.
+
+"I say 'person,' for I can think of no appropriate word. For, if it
+_was_ a human being, I can only affirm that I had the overwhelming
+conviction that it was _not_, but that it was some form of life wholly
+unknown to me both as to its essence and its nature. A sensation of
+gigantic force and power came with it, and I remember vividly to this
+day my terror on realising that I was close to an invisible being who
+could crush me as easily as I could crush a fly, and who could see my
+every movement while itself remaining invisible.
+
+"To this terror was added the certain knowledge that the 'being' kept
+in my proximity for a definite purpose. And that this purpose had some
+direct bearing upon my well-being, indeed upon my life, I was equally
+convinced; for I became aware of a sensation of growing lassitude as
+though the vitality were being steadily drained out of my body. My heart
+began to beat irregularly at first, then faintly. I was conscious, even
+within a few minutes, of a general drooping of the powers of life in the
+whole system, an ebbing away of self-control, and a distinct approach of
+drowsiness and torpor.
+
+"The power to move, or to think out any mode of resistance, was fast
+leaving me, when there rose, in the distance as it were, a tremendous
+commotion. A door opened with a clatter, and I heard the peremptory and
+commanding tones of a human voice calling aloud in a language I could
+not comprehend. It was Smith, my fellow-lodger, calling up the stairs;
+and his voice had not sounded for more than a few seconds, when I felt
+something withdrawn from my presence, from my person, indeed from my
+_very skin_. It seemed as if there was a rushing of air and some large
+creature swept by me at about the level of my shoulders. Instantly the
+pressure on my heart was relieved, and the atmosphere seemed to resume
+its normal condition.
+
+"Smith's door closed quietly downstairs, as I put the lamp down with
+trembling hands. What had happened I do not know; only, I was alone
+again and my strength was returning as rapidly as it had left me.
+
+"I went across the room and examined myself in the glass. The skin was
+very pale, and the eyes dull. My temperature, I found, was a little
+below normal and my pulse faint and irregular. But these smaller signs
+of disturbance were as nothing compared with the feeling I had--though
+no outward signs bore testimony to the fact--that I had narrowly escaped
+a real and ghastly catastrophe. I felt shaken, somehow, shaken to the
+very roots of my being."
+
+The doctor rose from his chair and crossed over to the dying fire, so
+that no one could see the expression on his face as he stood with his
+back to the grate, and continued his weird tale.
+
+"It would be wearisome," he went on in a lower voice, looking over our
+heads as though he still saw the dingy top floor of that haunted
+Edinburgh lodging-house; "it would be tedious for me at this length of
+time to analyse my feelings, or attempt to reproduce for you the
+thorough examination to which I endeavoured then to subject my whole
+being, intellectual, emotional, and physical. I need only mention the
+dominant emotion with which this curious episode left me--the indignant
+anger against myself that I could ever have lost my self-control enough
+to come under the sway of so gross and absurd a delusion. This protest,
+however, I remember making with all the emphasis possible. And I also
+remember noting that it brought me very little satisfaction, for it was
+the protest of my reason only, when all the rest of my being was up in
+arms against its conclusions.
+
+"My dealings with the 'delusion,' however, were not yet over for the
+night; for very early next morning, somewhere about three o'clock, I was
+awakened by a curiously stealthy noise in the room, and the next minute
+there followed a crash as if all my books had been swept bodily from
+their shelf on to the floor.
+
+"But this time I was not frightened. Cursing the disturbance with all
+the resounding and harmless words I could accumulate, I jumped out of
+bed and lit the candle in a second, and in the first dazzle of the
+flaring match--but before the wick had time to catch--I was certain I
+_saw_ a dark grey shadow, of ungainly shape, and with something more or
+less like a human head, drive rapidly past the side of the wall farthest
+from me and disappear into the gloom by the angle of the door.
+
+"I waited one single second to be sure the candle was alight, and then
+dashed after it, but before I had gone two steps, my foot stumbled
+against something hard piled up on the carpet and I only just saved
+myself from falling headlong. I picked myself up and found that all the
+books from what I called my 'language shelf' were strewn across the
+floor. The room, meanwhile, as a minute's search revealed, was quite
+empty. I looked in every corner and behind every stick of furniture, and
+a student's bedroom on a top floor, costing twelve shillings a week, did
+not hold many available hiding-places, as you may imagine.
+
+"The crash, however, was explained. Some very practical and physical
+force had thrown the books from their resting-place. That, at least, was
+beyond all doubt. And as I replaced them on the shelf and noted that not
+one was missing, I busied myself mentally with the sore problem of how
+the agent of this little practical joke had gained access to my room,
+and then escaped again. _For my door was locked and bolted._
+
+"Smith's odd question as to whether I was disturbed in the night, and
+his warning injunction to let him know at once if such were the case,
+now of course returned to affect me as I stood there in the early
+morning, cold and shivering on the carpet; but I realised at the same
+moment how impossible it would be for me to admit that a more than
+usually vivid nightmare could have any connection with himself. I would
+rather stand a hundred of these mysterious visitations than consult such
+a man as to their possible cause.
+
+"A knock at the door interrupted my reflections, and I gave a start that
+sent the candle grease flying.
+
+"'Let me in,' came in Smith's voice.
+
+"I unlocked the door. He came in fully dressed. His face wore a curious
+pallor. It seemed to me to be under the skin and to shine through and
+almost make it luminous. His eyes were exceedingly bright.
+
+"I was wondering what in the world to say to him, or how he would
+explain his visit at such an hour, when he closed the door behind him
+and came close up to me--uncomfortably close.
+
+"'You should have called me at once,' he said in his whispering voice,
+fixing his great eyes on my face.
+
+"I stammered something about an awful dream, but he ignored my remark
+utterly, and I caught his eye wandering next--if any movement of those
+optics can be described as 'wandering'--to the book-shelf. I watched
+him, unable to move my gaze from his person. The man fascinated me
+horribly for some reason. Why, in the devil's name, was he up and
+dressed at three in the morning? How did he know anything had happened
+unusual in my room? Then his whisper began again.
+
+"'It's your amazing vitality that causes you this annoyance,' he said,
+shifting his eyes back to mine.
+
+"I gasped. Something in his voice or manner turned my blood into ice.
+
+"'That's the real attraction,' he went on. 'But if this continues one of
+us will have to leave, you know.'
+
+"I positively could not find a word to say in reply. The channels of
+speech dried up within me. I simply stared and wondered what he would
+say next. I watched him in a sort of dream, and as far as I can
+remember, he asked me to promise to call him sooner another time, and
+then began to walk round the room, uttering strange sounds, and making
+signs with his arms and hands until he reached the door. Then he was
+gone in a second, and I had closed and locked the door behind him.
+
+"After this, the Smith adventure drew rapidly to a climax. It was a week
+or two later, and I was coming home between two and three in the morning
+from a maternity case, certain features of which for the time being had
+very much taken possession of my mind, so much so, indeed, that I passed
+Smith's door without giving him a single thought.
+
+"The gas jet on the landing was still burning, but so low that it made
+little impression on the waves of deep shadow that lay across the
+stairs. Overhead, the faintest possible gleam of grey showed that the
+morning was not far away. A few stars shone down through the sky-light.
+The house was still as the grave, and the only sound to break the
+silence was the rushing of the wind round the walls and over the roof.
+But this was a fitful sound, suddenly rising and as suddenly falling
+away again, and it only served to intensify the silence.
+
+"I had already reached my own landing when I gave a violent start. It
+was automatic, almost a reflex action in fact, for it was only when I
+caught myself fumbling at the door handle and thinking where I could
+conceal myself quickest that I realised a voice had sounded close beside
+me in the air. It was the same voice I had heard before, and it seemed
+to me to be calling for help. And yet the very same minute I pushed on
+into the room, determined to disregard it, and seeking to persuade
+myself it was the creaking of the boards under my weight or the rushing
+noise of the wind that had deceived me.
+
+"But hardly had I reached the table where the candles stood when the
+sound was unmistakably repeated: 'Help! help!' And this time it was
+accompanied by what I can only describe as a vivid tactile
+hallucination. I was touched: the _skin_ of my arm was clutched by
+fingers.
+
+"Some compelling force sent me headlong downstairs as if the haunting
+forces of the whole world were at my heels. At Smith's door I paused.
+The force of his previous warning injunction to seek his aid without
+delay acted suddenly and I leant my whole weight against the panels,
+little dreaming that I should be called upon to give help rather than
+to receive it.
+
+"The door yielded at once, and I burst into a room that was so full of a
+choking vapour, moving in slow clouds, that at first I could distinguish
+nothing at all but a set of what seemed to be huge shadows passing in
+and out of the mist. Then, gradually, I perceived that a red lamp on the
+mantelpiece gave all the light there was, and that the room which I now
+entered for the first time was almost empty of furniture.
+
+"The carpet was rolled back and piled in a heap in the corner, and upon
+the white boards of the floor I noticed a large circle drawn in black of
+some material that emitted a faint glowing light and was apparently
+smoking. Inside this circle, as well as at regular intervals outside it,
+were curious-looking designs, also traced in the same black, smoking
+substance. These, too, seemed to emit a feeble light of their own.
+
+"My first impression on entering the room had been that it was full
+of--_people_, I was going to say; but that hardly expresses my meaning.
+_Beings_, they certainly were, but it was borne in upon me beyond the
+possibility of doubt, that they were not human beings. That I had caught
+a momentary glimpse of living, intelligent entities I can never doubt,
+but I am equally convinced, though I cannot prove it, that these
+entities were from some other scheme of evolution altogether, and had
+nothing to do with the ordinary human life, either incarnate or
+discarnate.
+
+"But, whatever they were, the visible appearance of them was exceedingly
+fleeting. I no longer saw anything, though I still felt convinced of
+their immediate presence. They were, moreover, of the same order of life
+as the visitant in my bedroom of a few nights before, and their
+proximity to my atmosphere in numbers, instead of singly as before,
+conveyed to my mind something that was quite terrible and overwhelming.
+I fell into a violent trembling, and the perspiration poured from my
+face in streams.
+
+"They were in constant motion about me. They stood close to my side;
+moved behind me; brushed past my shoulder; stirred the hair on my
+forehead; and circled round me without ever actually touching me, yet
+always pressing closer and closer. Especially in the air just over my
+head there seemed ceaseless movement, and it was accompanied by a
+confused noise of whispering and sighing that threatened every moment to
+become articulate in words. To my intense relief, however, I heard no
+distinct words, and the noise continued more like the rising and falling
+of the wind than anything else I can imagine.
+
+"But the characteristic of these 'Beings' that impressed me most
+strongly at the time, and of which I have carried away the most
+permanent recollection, was that each one of them possessed what seemed
+to be a _vibrating centre_ which impelled it with tremendous force and
+caused a rapid whirling motion of the atmosphere as it passed me. The
+air was full of these little vortices of whirring, rotating force, and
+whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in
+that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out,
+absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced--but
+replaced dead, flabby, useless.
+
+"Then, suddenly, for the first time my eyes fell upon Smith. He was
+crouching against the wall on my right, in an attitude that was
+obviously defensive, and it was plain he was in extremities. The terror
+on his face was pitiable, but at the same time there was another
+expression about the tightly clenched teeth and mouth which showed that
+he had not lost all control of himself. He wore the most resolute
+expression I have ever seen on a human countenance, and, though for the
+moment at a fearful disadvantage, he looked like a man who had
+confidence in himself, and, in spite of the working of fear, was waiting
+his opportunity.
+
+"For my part, I was face to face with a situation so utterly beyond my
+knowledge and comprehension, that I felt as helpless as a child, and as
+useless.
+
+"'Help me back--quick--into that circle,' I heard him half cry, half
+whisper to me across the moving vapours.
+
+"My only value appears to have been that I was not afraid to act.
+Knowing nothing of the forces I was dealing with I had no idea of the
+deadly perils risked, and I sprang forward and caught him by the arms.
+He threw all his weight in my direction, and by our combined efforts his
+body left the wall and lurched across the floor towards the circle.
+
+"Instantly there descended upon us, out of the empty air of that
+smoke-laden room, a force which I can only compare to the pushing,
+driving power of a great wind pent up within a narrow space. It was
+almost explosive in its effect, and it seemed to operate upon all parts
+of my body equally. It fell upon us with a rushing noise that filled my
+ears and made me think for a moment the very walls and roof of the
+building had been torn asunder. Under its first blow we staggered back
+against the wall, and I understood plainly that its purpose was to
+prevent us getting back into the circle in the middle of the floor.
+
+"Pouring with perspiration, and breathless, with every muscle strained
+to the very utmost, we at length managed to get to the edge of the
+circle, and at this moment, so great was the opposing force, that I felt
+myself actually torn from Smith's arms, lifted from my feet, and twirled
+round in the direction of the windows as if the wheel of some great
+machine had caught my clothes and was tearing me to destruction in its
+revolution.
+
+"But, even as I fell, bruised and breathless, against the wall, I saw
+Smith firmly upon his feet in the circle and slowly rising again to an
+upright position. My eyes never left his figure once in the next few
+minutes.
+
+"He drew himself up to his full height. His great shoulders squared
+themselves. His head was thrown back a little, and as I looked I saw the
+expression on his face change swiftly from fear to one of absolute
+command. He looked steadily round the room and then his voice began to
+_vibrate_. At first in a low tone, it gradually rose till it assumed the
+same volume and intensity I had heard that night when he called up the
+stairs into my room.
+
+"It was a curiously increasing sound, more like the swelling of an
+instrument than a human voice; and as it grew in power and filled the
+room, I became aware that a great change was being effected slowly and
+surely. The confusion of noise and rushings of air fell into the roll of
+long, steady vibrations not unlike those caused by the deeper pedals of
+an organ. The movements in the air became less violent, then grew
+decidedly weaker, and finally ceased altogether. The whisperings and
+sighings became fainter and fainter, till at last I could not hear them
+at all; and, strangest of all, the light emitted by the circle, as well
+as by the designs round it, increased to a steady glow, casting their
+radiance upwards with the weirdest possible effect upon his features.
+Slowly, by the power of his voice, behind which lay undoubtedly a
+genuine knowledge of the occult manipulation of sound, this man
+dominated the forces that had escaped from their proper sphere, until
+at length the room was reduced to silence and perfect order again.
+
+"Judging by the immense relief which also communicated itself to my
+nerves I then felt that the crisis was over and Smith was wholly master
+of the situation.
+
+"But hardly had I begun to congratulate myself upon this result, and to
+gather my scattered senses about me, when, uttering a loud cry, I saw
+him leap out of the circle and fling himself into the air--as it seemed
+to me, into the empty air. Then, even while holding my breath for dread
+of the crash he was bound to come upon the floor, I saw him strike with
+a dull thud against a solid body in mid-air, and the next instant he was
+wrestling with some ponderous thing that was absolutely invisible to me,
+and the room shook with the struggle.
+
+"To and fro _they_ swayed, sometimes lurching in one direction,
+sometimes in another, and always in horrible proximity to myself, as I
+leaned trembling against the wall and watched the encounter.
+
+"It lasted at most but a short minute or two, ending as suddenly as it
+had begun. Smith, with an unexpected movement, threw up his arms with a
+cry of relief. At the same instant there was a wild, tearing shriek in
+the air beside me and something rushed past us with a noise like the
+passage of a flock of big birds. Both windows rattled as if they would
+break away from their sashes. Then a sense of emptiness and peace
+suddenly came over the room, and I knew that all was over.
+
+"Smith, his face exceedingly white, but otherwise strangely composed,
+turned to me at once.
+
+"'God!--if you hadn't come--You deflected the stream; broke it up--' he
+whispered. 'You saved me.'"
+
+The doctor made a long pause. Presently he felt for his pipe in the
+darkness, groping over the table behind us with both hands. No one spoke
+for a bit, but all dreaded the sudden glare that would come when he
+struck the match. The fire was nearly out and the great hall was pitch
+dark.
+
+But the story-teller did not strike that match. He was merely gaining
+time for some hidden reason of his own. And presently he went on with
+his tale in a more subdued voice.
+
+"I quite forget," he said, "how I got back to my own room. I only know
+that I lay with two lighted candles for the rest of the night, and the
+first thing I did in the morning was to let the landlady know I was
+leaving her house at the end of the week.
+
+"Smith still has my Rabbinical Treatise. At least he did not return it
+to me at the time, and I have never seen him since to ask for it."
+
+
+
+
+A SUSPICIOUS GIFT
+
+
+Blake had been in very low water for months--almost under water part of
+the time--due to circumstances he was fond of saying were no fault of
+his own; and as he sat writing in his room on "third floor back" of a
+New York boarding-house, part of his mind was busily occupied in
+wondering when his luck was going to turn again.
+
+It was his room only in the sense that he paid the rent. Two friends,
+one a little Frenchman and the other a big Dane, shared it with him,
+both hoping eventually to contribute something towards expenses, but so
+far not having accomplished this result. They had two beds only, the
+third being a mattress they slept upon in turns, a week at a time. A
+good deal of their irregular "feeding" consisted of oatmeal, potatoes,
+and sometimes eggs, all of which they cooked on a strange utensil they
+had contrived to fix into the gas jet. Occasionally, when dinner failed
+them altogether, they swallowed a little raw rice and drank hot water
+from the bathroom on the top of it, and then made a wild race for bed so
+as to get to sleep while the sensation of false repletion was still
+there. For sleep and hunger are slight acquaintances as they well knew.
+Fortunately all New York houses are supplied with hot air, and they only
+had to open a grating in the wall to get a plentiful, if not a wholesome
+amount of heat.
+
+Though loneliness in a big city is a real punishment, as they had
+severally learnt to their cost, their experiences, three in a small room
+for several months, had revealed to them horrors of quite another kind,
+and their nerves had suffered according to the temperament of each. But,
+on this particular evening, as Blake sat scribbling by the only window
+that was not cracked, the Dane and the Frenchman, his companions in
+adversity, were in wonderful luck. They had both been asked out to a
+restaurant to dine with a friend who also held out to one of them a
+chance of work and remuneration. They would not be back till late, and
+when they did come they were pretty sure to bring in supplies of one
+kind or another. For the Frenchman never could resist the offer of a
+glass of absinthe, and this meant that he would be able to help himself
+plentifully from the free-lunch counters, with which all New York bars
+are furnished, and to which any purchaser of a drink is entitled to help
+himself and devour on the spot or carry away casually in his hand for
+consumption elsewhere. Thousands of unfortunate men get their sole
+subsistence in this way in New York, and experience soon teaches where,
+for the price of a single drink, a man can take away almost a meal of
+chip potatoes, sausage, bits of bread, and even eggs. The Frenchman and
+the Dane knew their way about, and Blake looked forward to a supper more
+or less substantial before pulling his mattress out of the cupboard and
+turning in upon the floor for the night.
+
+Meanwhile he could enjoy a quiet and lonely evening with the room all to
+himself.
+
+In the daytime he was a reporter on an evening newspaper of sensational
+and lying habits. His work was chiefly in the police courts; and in his
+spare hours at night, when not too tired or too empty, he wrote sketches
+and stories for the magazines that very rarely saw the light of day on
+their printed and paid-for sentences. On this particular occasion he was
+deep in a most involved tale of a psychological character, and had just
+worked his way into a sentence, or set of sentences, that completely
+baffled and muddled him.
+
+He was fairly out of his depth, and his brain was too poorly supplied
+with blood to invent a way out again. The story would have been
+interesting had he written it simply, keeping to facts and feelings, and
+not diving into difficult analysis of motive and character which was
+quite beyond him. For it was largely autobiographical, and was meant to
+describe the adventures of a young Englishman who had come to grief in
+the usual manner on a Canadian farm, had then subsequently become
+bar-keeper, sub-editor on a Methodist magazine, a teacher of French and
+German to clerks at twenty-five cents per hour, a model for artists, a
+super on the stage, and, finally, a wanderer to the goldfields.
+
+Blake scratched his head, and dipped the pen in the inkpot, stared out
+through the blindless windows, and sighed deeply. His thoughts kept
+wandering to food, beefsteak and steaming vegetables. The smell of
+cooking that came from a lower floor through the broken windows was a
+constant torment to him. He pulled himself together and again attacked
+the problem.
+
+" . . . for with some people," he wrote, "the imagination is so vivid as
+to be almost an extension of consciousness. . . ." But here he stuck
+absolutely. He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, and how to
+finish the sentence puzzled him into blank inaction. It was a difficult
+point to decide, for it seemed to come in appropriately at this point in
+his story, and he did not know whether to leave it as it stood, change
+it round a bit, or take it out altogether. It might just spoil its
+chances of being accepted: editors were such clever men. But, to rewrite
+the sentence was a grind, and he was so tired and sleepy. After all,
+what did it matter? People who were clever would force a meaning into
+it; people who were not clever would pretend--he knew of no other
+classes of readers. He would let it stay, and go on with the action of
+the story. He put his head in his hands and began to think hard.
+
+His mind soon passed from thought to reverie. He fell to wondering when
+his friends would find work and relieve him of the burden--he
+acknowledged it as such--of keeping them, and of letting another man
+wear his best clothes on alternate Sundays. He wondered when his "luck"
+would turn. There were one or two influential people in New York whom
+he could go and see if he had a dress suit and the other conventional
+uniforms. His thoughts ran on far ahead, and at the same time, by a sort
+of double process, far behind as well. His home in the "old country"
+rose up before him; he saw the lawn and the cedars in sunshine; he
+looked through the familiar windows and saw the clean, swept rooms. His
+story began to suffer; the psychological masterpiece would not make much
+progress unless he pulled up and dragged his thoughts back to the
+treadmill. But he no longer cared; once he had got as far as that cedar
+with the sunshine on it, he never could get back again. For all he
+cared, the troublesome sentence might run away and get into someone
+else's pages, or be snuffed out altogether.
+
+There came a gentle knock at the door, and Blake started. The knock was
+repeated louder. Who in the world could it be at this late hour of the
+night? On the floor above, he remembered, there lived another
+Englishman, a foolish, second-rate creature, who sometimes came in and
+made himself objectionable with endless and silly chatter. But he was an
+Englishman for all that, and Blake always tried to treat him with
+politeness, realising that he was lonely in a strange land. But
+to-night, of all people in the world, he did not want to be bored with
+Perry's cackle, as he called it, and the "Come in" he gave in answer to
+the second knock had no very cordial sound of welcome in it.
+
+However, the door opened in response, and the man came in. Blake did not
+turn round at once, and the other advanced to the centre of the room,
+but _without speaking_. Then Blake knew it was not his enemy, Perry, and
+turned round.
+
+He saw a man of about forty standing in the middle of the carpet, but
+standing sideways so that he did not present a full face. He wore an
+overcoat buttoned up to the neck, and on the felt hat which he held in
+front of him fresh rain-drops glistened. In his other hand he carried a
+small black bag. Blake gave him a good look, and came to the conclusion
+that he might be a secretary, or a chief clerk, or a confidential man of
+sorts. He was a shabby-respectable-looking person. This was the
+sum-total of the first impression, gained the moment his eyes took in
+that it was _not_ Perry; the second impression was less pleasant, and
+reported at once that something was wrong.
+
+Though otherwise young and inexperienced, Blake--thanks, or curses, to
+the police court training--knew more about common criminal
+blackguardism than most men of fifty, and he recognised that there was
+somewhere a suggestion of this undesirable world about the man. But
+there was more than this. There was something singular about him,
+something far out of the common, though for the life of him Blake could
+not say wherein it lay. The fellow was out of the ordinary, and in some
+very undesirable manner.
+
+All this, that takes so long to describe, Blake saw with the first and
+second glance. The man at once began to speak in a quiet and respectful
+voice.
+
+"Are you Mr. Blake?" he asked.
+
+"I am."
+
+"Mr. Arthur Blake?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Mr. Arthur _Herbert_ Blake?" persisted the other, with emphasis on the
+middle name.
+
+"That is my full name," Blake answered simply, adding, as he remembered
+his manners; "but won't you sit down, first, please?"
+
+The man advanced with a curious sideways motion like a crab and took a
+seat on the edge of the sofa. He put his hat on the floor at his feet,
+but still kept the bag in his hand.
+
+"I come to you from a well-wisher," he went on in oily tones, without
+lifting his eyes. Blake, in his mind, ran quickly over all the people he
+knew in New York who might possibly have sent such a man, while waiting
+for him to supply the name. But the man had come to a full stop and was
+waiting too.
+
+"A well-wisher of _mine_?" repeated Blake, not knowing quite what else
+to say.
+
+"Just so," replied the other, still with his eyes on the floor. "A
+well-wisher of yours."
+
+"A man or--" he felt himself blushing, "or a woman?"
+
+"That," said the man shortly, "I cannot tell you."
+
+"You can't tell me!" exclaimed the other, wondering what was coming
+next, and who in the world this mysterious well-wisher could be who sent
+so discreet and mysterious a messenger.
+
+"I cannot tell you the name," replied the man firmly. "Those are my
+instructions. But I bring you something from this person, and I am to
+give it to you, to take a receipt for it, and then to go away without
+answering any questions."
+
+Blake stared very hard. The man, however, never raised his eyes above
+the level of the second china knob on the chest of drawers opposite. The
+giving of a receipt sounded like money. Could it be that some of his
+influential friends had heard of his plight? There were possibilities
+that made his heart beat. At length, however, he found his tongue, for
+this strange creature was determined apparently to say nothing more
+until he had heard from him.
+
+"Then, what have you got for me, please?" he asked bluntly.
+
+By way of answer the man proceeded to open the bag. He took out a parcel
+wrapped loosely in brown paper, and about the size of a large book. It
+was tied with string, and the man seemed unnecessarily long untying the
+knot. When at last the string was off and the paper unfolded, there
+appeared a series of smaller packages inside. The man took them out very
+carefully, almost as if they had been alive, Blake thought, and set them
+in a row upon his knees. They were dollar bills. Blake, all in a
+flutter, craned his neck forward a little to try and make out their
+denomination. He read plainly the figures 100.
+
+"There are ten thousand dollars here," said the man quietly.
+
+The other could not suppress a little cry.
+
+"And they are for you."
+
+Blake simply gasped. "Ten thousand dollars!" he repeated, a queer
+feeling growing up in his throat. "_Ten thousand._ Are you sure? I
+mean--you mean they are for _me_?" he stammered. He felt quite silly
+with excitement, and grew more so with every minute, as the man
+maintained a perfect silence. Was it not a dream? Wouldn't the man put
+them back in the bag presently and say it was a mistake, and they were
+meant for somebody else? He could not believe his eyes or his ears. Yet,
+in a sense, it was possible. He had read of such things in books, and
+even come across them in his experience of the courts--the erratic and
+generous philanthropist who is determined to do his good deed and to get
+no thanks or acknowledgment for it. Still, it seemed almost incredible.
+His troubles began to melt away like bubbles in the sun; he thought of
+the other fellows when they came in, and what he would have to tell
+them; he thought of the German landlady and the arrears of rent, of
+regular food and clean linen, and books and music, of the chance of
+getting into some respectable business, of--well, of as many things as
+it is possible to think of when excitement and surprise fling wide open
+the gates of the imagination.
+
+The man, meanwhile, began quietly to count over the packages aloud from
+one to ten, and then to count the bills in each separate packet, also
+from one to ten. Yes, there were ten little heaps, each containing ten
+bills of a hundred-dollar denomination. That made ten thousand dollars.
+Blake had never seen so much money in a single lump in his life before;
+and for many months of privation and discomfort he had not known the
+"feel" of a twenty-dollar note, much less of a hundred-dollar one. He
+heard them crackle under the man's fingers, and it was like crisp
+laughter in his ears. The bills were evidently new and unused.
+
+But, side by side with the excitement caused by the shock of such an
+event, Blake's caution, acquired by a year of vivid New York experience,
+was meanwhile beginning to assert itself. It all seemed just a little
+too much out of the likely order of things to be quite right. The police
+courts had taught him the amazing ingenuity of the criminal mind, as
+well as something of the plots and devices by which the unwary are
+beguiled into the dark places where blackmail may be levied with
+impunity. New York, as a matter of fact, just at that time was literally
+undermined with the secret ways of the blackmailers, the green-goods
+men, and other police-protected abominations; and the only weak point
+in the supposition that this was part of some such proceeding was the
+selection of himself--a poor newspaper reporter--as a victim. It did
+seem absurd, but then the whole thing was so out of the ordinary, and
+the thought once having entered his mind, was not so easily got rid of.
+Blake resolved to be very cautious.
+
+The man meanwhile, though he never appeared to raise his eyes from the
+carpet, had been watching him closely all the time.
+
+"If you will give me a receipt I'll leave the money at once," he said,
+with just a vestige of impatience in his tone, as if he were anxious to
+bring the matter to a conclusion as soon as possible.
+
+"But you say it is quite impossible for you to tell me the name of my
+well-wisher, or why _she_ sends me such a large sum of money in this
+extraordinary way?"
+
+"The money is sent to you because you are in need of it," returned the
+other; "and it is a present without conditions of any sort attached. You
+have to give me a receipt only to satisfy the sender that it has reached
+your hands. The money will never be asked of you again."
+
+Blake noticed two things from this answer: first, that the man was not
+to be caught into betraying the sex of the well-wisher; and secondly,
+that he was in some hurry to complete the transaction. For he was now
+giving reasons, attractive reasons, why he should accept the money and
+make out the receipt.
+
+Suddenly it flashed across his mind that if he took the money and gave
+the receipt _before a witness_, nothing very disastrous could come of
+the affair. It would protect him against blackmail, if this was, after
+all, a plot of some sort with blackmail in it; whereas, if the man were
+a madman, or a criminal who was getting rid of a portion of his
+ill-gotten gains to divert suspicion, or if any other improbable
+explanation turned out to be the true one, there was no great harm done,
+and he could hold the money till it was claimed, or advertised for in
+the newspapers. His mind rapidly ran over these possibilities, though,
+of course, under the stress of excitement, he was unable to weigh any of
+them properly; then he turned to his strange visitor again and said
+quietly--
+
+"I will take the money, although I must say it seems to me a very
+unusual transaction, and I will give you for it such a receipt as I
+think proper under the circumstances."
+
+"A proper receipt is all I want," was the answer.
+
+"I mean by that a receipt before a proper witness--"
+
+"Perfectly satisfactory," interrupted the man, his eyes still on the
+carpet. "Only, it must be dated, and headed with your address here in
+the correct way."
+
+Blake could see no possible objection to this, and he at once proceeded
+to obtain his witness. The person he had in his mind was a Mr. Barclay,
+who occupied the room above his own; an old gentleman who had retired
+from business and who, the landlady always said, was a miser, and kept
+large sums secreted in his room. He was, at any rate, a perfectly
+respectable man and would make an admirable witness to a transaction of
+this sort. Blake made an apology and rose to fetch him, crossing the
+room in front of the sofa where the man sat, in order to reach the door.
+As he did so, he saw for the first time the _other side_ of his
+visitor's face, the side that had been always so carefully turned away
+from him.
+
+There was a broad smear of blood down the skin from the ear to the
+neck. It glistened in the gaslight.
+
+Blake never knew how he managed to smother the cry that sprang to his
+lips, but smother it he did. In a second he was at the door, his knees
+trembling, his mind in a sudden and dreadful turmoil.
+
+His main object, so far as he could recollect afterwards, was to escape
+from the room as if he had noticed nothing, so as not to arouse the
+other's suspicions. The man's eyes were always on the carpet, and
+probably, Blake hoped, he had not noticed the consternation that must
+have been written plainly on his face. At any rate he had uttered no
+cry.
+
+In another second he would have been in the passage, when suddenly he
+met a pair of wicked, staring eyes fixed intently and with a cunning
+smile upon his own. It was the other's face in the mirror calmly
+watching his every movement.
+
+Instantly, all his powers of reflection flew to the winds, and he
+thought only upon the desirability of getting help at once. He tore
+upstairs, his heart in his mouth. Barclay must come to his aid. This
+matter was serious--perhaps horribly serious. Taking the money, or
+giving a receipt, or having anything at all to do with it became an
+impossibility. Here was crime. He felt certain of it.
+
+In three bounds he reached the next landing and began to hammer at the
+old miser's door as if his very life depended on it. For a long time he
+could get no answer. His fists seemed to make no noise. He might have
+been knocking on cotton wool, and the thought dashed through his brain
+that it was all just like the terror of a nightmare.
+
+Barclay, evidently, was still out, or else sound asleep. But the other
+simply could not wait a minute longer in suspense. He turned the handle
+and walked into the room. At first he saw nothing for the darkness, and
+made sure the owner of the room was out; but the moment the light from
+the passage began a little to disperse the gloom, he saw the old man, to
+his immense relief, lying asleep on the bed.
+
+Blake opened the door to its widest to get more light and then walked
+quickly up to the bed. He now saw the figure more plainly, and noted
+that it was dressed and lay only upon the outside of the bed. It struck
+him, too, that he was sleeping in a very odd, almost an unnatural,
+position.
+
+Something clutched at his heart as he looked closer. He stumbled over a
+chair and found the matches. Calling upon Barclay the whole time to wake
+up and come downstairs with him, he blundered across the floor, a
+dreadful thought in his mind, and lit the gas over the table. It seemed
+strange that there was no movement or reply to his shouting. But it no
+longer seemed strange when at length he turned, in the full glare of the
+gas, and saw the old man lying huddled up into a ghastly heap on the
+bed, his throat cut across from ear to ear.
+
+And all over the carpet lay new dollar bills, crisp and clean like those
+he had left downstairs, and strewn about in little heaps.
+
+For a moment Blake stood stock-still, bereft of all power of movement.
+The next, his courage returned, and he fled from the room and dashed
+downstairs, taking five steps at a time. He reached the bottom and tore
+along the passage to his room, determined at any rate to seize the man
+and prevent his escape till help came.
+
+But when he got to the end of the little landing he found that his door
+had been closed. He seized the handle, fumbling with it in his violence.
+It felt slippery and kept turning under his fingers without opening the
+door, and fully half a minute passed before it yielded and let him in
+headlong.
+
+At the first glance he saw the room was empty, and the man gone!
+
+Scattered upon the carpet lay a number of the bills, and beside them,
+half hidden under the sofa where the man had sat, he saw a pair of
+gloves--thick, leathern gloves--and a butcher's knife. Even from the
+distance where he stood the blood-stains on both were easily visible.
+
+Dazed and confused by the terrible discoveries of the last few minutes,
+Blake stood in the middle of the room, overwhelmed and unable to think
+or move. Unconsciously he must have passed his hand over his forehead in
+the natural gesture of perplexity, for he noticed that the skin felt wet
+and sticky. His hand was covered with blood! And when he rushed in
+terror to the looking-glass, he saw that there was a broad red smear
+across his face and forehead. Then he remembered the slippery handle of
+the door and knew that it had been carefully moistened!
+
+In an instant the whole plot became clear as daylight, and he was so
+spellbound with horror that a sort of numbness came over him and he came
+very near to fainting. He was in a condition of utter helplessness, and
+had anyone come into the room at that minute and called him by name he
+would simply have dropped to the floor in a heap.
+
+"If the police were to come in now!" The thought crashed through his
+brain like thunder, and at the same moment, almost before he had time to
+appreciate a quarter of its significance, there came a loud knocking at
+the front door below. The bell rang with a dreadful clamour; men's
+voices were heard talking excitedly, and presently heavy steps began to
+come up the stairs in the direction of his room.
+
+It _was_ the police!
+
+And all Blake could do was to laugh foolishly to himself--and wait till
+they were upon him. He could not move nor speak. He stood face to face
+with the evidence of his horrid crime, his hands and face smeared with
+the blood of his victim, and there he was standing when the police burst
+open the door and came noisily into the room.
+
+"Here it is!" cried a voice he knew. "Third floor back! And the fellow
+caught red-handed!"
+
+It was the man with the bag leading in the two policemen.
+
+Hardly knowing what he was doing in the fearful stress of conflicting
+emotions, he made a step forward. But before he had time to make a
+second one, he felt the heavy hand of the law descend upon both
+shoulders at once as the two policemen moved up to seize him. At the
+same moment a voice of thunder cried in his ear--
+
+"Wake up, man! Wake up! Here's the supper, and good news too!"
+
+Blake turned with a start in his chair and saw the Dane, very red in the
+face, standing beside him, a hand on each shoulder, and a little further
+back he saw the Frenchman leering happily at him over the end of the
+bed, a bottle of beer in one hand and a paper package in the other.
+
+He rubbed his eyes, glancing from one to the other, and then got up
+sleepily to fix the wire arrangement on the gas jet to boil water for
+cooking the eggs which the Frenchman was in momentary danger of letting
+drop upon the floor.
+
+
+
+
+THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE SECRETARY IN NEW YORK
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was never quite clear to me how Jim Shorthouse managed to get his
+private secretaryship; but, once he got it, he kept it, and for some
+years he led a steady life and put money in the savings bank.
+
+One morning his employer sent for him into the study, and it was evident
+to the secretary's trained senses that there was something unusual in
+the air.
+
+"Mr. Shorthouse," he began, somewhat nervously, "I have never yet had
+the opportunity of observing whether or not you are possessed of
+personal courage."
+
+Shorthouse gasped, but he said nothing. He was growing accustomed to the
+eccentricities of his chief. Shorthouse was a Kentish man; Sidebotham
+was "raised" in Chicago; New York was the present place of residence.
+
+"But," the other continued, with a puff at his very black cigar, "I must
+consider myself a poor judge of human nature in future, if it is not one
+of your strongest qualities."
+
+The private secretary made a foolish little bow in modest appreciation
+of so uncertain a compliment. Mr. Jonas B. Sidebotham watched him
+narrowly, as the novelists say, before he continued his remarks.
+
+"I have no doubt that you are a plucky fellow and--" He hesitated, and
+puffed at his cigar as if his life depended upon it keeping alight.
+
+"I don't think I'm afraid of anything in particular, sir--except women,"
+interposed the young man, feeling that it was time for him to make an
+observation of some sort, but still quite in the dark as to his chief's
+purpose.
+
+"Humph!" he grunted. "Well, there are no women in this case so far as I
+know. But there may be other things that--that hurt more."
+
+"Wants a special service of some kind, evidently," was the secretary's
+reflection. "Personal violence?" he asked aloud.
+
+"Possibly (puff), in fact (puff, puff) probably."
+
+Shorthouse smelt an increase of salary in the air. It had a stimulating
+effect.
+
+"I've had some experience of that article, sir," he said shortly; "but
+I'm ready to undertake anything in reason."
+
+"I can't say how much reason or unreason there may prove to be in this
+particular case. It all depends."
+
+Mr. Sidebotham got up and locked the door of his study and drew down the
+blinds of both windows. Then he took a bunch of keys from his pocket and
+opened a black tin box. He ferreted about among blue and white papers
+for a few seconds, enveloping himself as he did so in a cloud of blue
+tobacco smoke.
+
+"I feel like a detective already," Shorthouse laughed.
+
+"Speak low, please," returned the other, glancing round the room. "We
+must observe the utmost secrecy. Perhaps you would be kind enough to
+close the registers," he went on in a still lower voice. "Open registers
+have betrayed conversations before now."
+
+Shorthouse began to enter into the spirit of the thing. He tiptoed
+across the floor and shut the two iron gratings in the wall that in
+American houses supply hot air and are termed "registers." Mr.
+Sidebotham had meanwhile found the paper he was looking for. He held it
+in front of him and tapped it once or twice with the back of his right
+hand as if it were a stage letter and himself the villain of the
+melodrama.
+
+"This is a letter from Joel Garvey, my old partner," he said at length.
+"You have heard me speak of him."
+
+The other bowed. He knew that many years before Garvey & Sidebotham had
+been well known in the Chicago financial world. He knew that the amazing
+rapidity with which they accumulated a fortune had only been surpassed
+by the amazing rapidity with which they had immediately afterwards
+disappeared into space. He was further aware--his position afforded
+facilities--that each partner was still to some extent in the other's
+power, and that each wished most devoutly that the other would die.
+
+The sins of his employer's early years did not concern him, however. The
+man was kind and just, if eccentric; and Shorthouse, being in New York,
+did not probe to discover more particularly the sources whence his
+salary was so regularly paid. Moreover, the two men had grown to like
+each other and there was a genuine feeling of trust and respect between
+them.
+
+"I hope it's a pleasant communication, sir," he said in a low voice.
+
+"Quite the reverse," returned the other, fingering the paper nervously
+as he stood in front of the fire.
+
+"Blackmail, I suppose."
+
+"Precisely." Mr. Sidebotham's cigar was not burning well; he struck a
+match and applied it to the uneven edge, and presently his voice spoke
+through clouds of wreathing smoke.
+
+"There are valuable papers in my possession bearing his signature. I
+cannot inform you of their nature; but they are extremely valuable _to
+me_. They belong, as a matter of fact, to Garvey as much as to me. Only
+I've got them--"
+
+"I see."
+
+"Garvey writes that he wants to have his signature removed--wants to cut
+it out with his own hand. He gives reasons which incline me to consider
+his request--"
+
+"And you would like me to take him the papers and see that he does it?"
+
+"And bring them back again with you," he whispered, screwing up his eyes
+into a shrewd grimace.
+
+"And bring them back again with me," repeated the secretary. "I
+understand perfectly."
+
+Shorthouse knew from unfortunate experience more than a little of the
+horrors of blackmail. The pressure Garvey was bringing to bear upon his
+old enemy must be exceedingly strong. That was quite clear. At the same
+time, the commission that was being entrusted to him seemed somewhat
+quixotic in its nature. He had already "enjoyed" more than one
+experience of his employer's eccentricity, and he now caught himself
+wondering whether this same eccentricity did not sometimes go--further
+than eccentricity.
+
+"I cannot read the letter to you," Mr. Sidebotham was explaining, "but I
+shall give it into your hands. It will prove that you are my--er--my
+accredited representative. I shall also ask you not to read the package
+of papers. The signature in question you will find, of course, on the
+last page, at the bottom."
+
+There was a pause of several minutes during which the end of the cigar
+glowed eloquently.
+
+"Circumstances compel me," he went on at length almost in a whisper, "or
+I should never do this. But you understand, of course, the thing is a
+ruse. Cutting out the signature is a mere pretence. It is nothing.
+_What Garvey wants are the papers themselves._"
+
+The confidence reposed in the private secretary was not misplaced.
+Shorthouse was as faithful to Mr. Sidebotham as a man ought to be to the
+wife that loves him.
+
+The commission itself seemed very simple. Garvey lived in solitude in
+the remote part of Long Island. Shorthouse was to take the papers to
+him, witness the cutting out of the signature, and to be specially on
+his guard against any attempt, forcible or otherwise, to gain possession
+of them. It seemed to him a somewhat ludicrous adventure, but he did not
+know all the facts and perhaps was not the best judge.
+
+The two men talked in low voices for another hour, at the end of which
+Mr. Sidebotham drew up the blinds, opened the registers and unlocked the
+door.
+
+Shorthouse rose to go. His pockets were stuffed with papers and his head
+with instructions; but when he reached the door he hesitated and turned.
+
+"Well?" said his chief.
+
+Shorthouse looked him straight in the eye and said nothing.
+
+"The personal violence, I suppose?" said the other. Shorthouse bowed.
+
+"I have not seen Garvey for twenty years," he said; "all I can tell you
+is that I believe him to be occasionally of unsound mind. I have heard
+strange rumours. He lives alone, and in his lucid intervals studies
+chemistry. It was always a hobby of his. But the chances are twenty to
+one against his attempting violence. I only wished to warn you--in
+case--I mean, so that you may be on the watch."
+
+He handed his secretary a Smith and Wesson revolver as he spoke.
+Shorthouse slipped it into his hip pocket and went out of the room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A drizzling cold rain was falling on fields covered with half-melted
+snow when Shorthouse stood, late in the afternoon, on the platform of
+the lonely little Long Island station and watched the train he had just
+left vanish into the distance.
+
+It was a bleak country that Joel Garvey, Esq., formerly of Chicago, had
+chosen for his residence and on this particular afternoon it presented a
+more than usually dismal appearance. An expanse of flat fields covered
+with dirty snow stretched away on all sides till the sky dropped down to
+meet them. Only occasional farm buildings broke the monotony, and the
+road wound along muddy lanes and beneath dripping trees swathed in the
+cold raw fog that swept in like a pall of the dead from the sea.
+
+It was six miles from the station to Garvey's house, and the driver of
+the rickety buggy Shorthouse had found at the station was not
+communicative. Between the dreary landscape and the drearier driver he
+fell back upon his own thoughts, which, but for the spice of adventure
+that was promised, would themselves have been even drearier than either.
+He made up his mind that he would waste no time over the transaction.
+The moment the signature was cut out he would pack up and be off. The
+last train back to Brooklyn was 7.15; and he would have to walk the six
+miles of mud and snow, for the driver of the buggy had refused
+point-blank to wait for him.
+
+For purposes of safety, Shorthouse had done what he flattered himself
+was rather a clever thing. He had made up a second packet of papers
+identical in outside appearance with the first. The inscription, the
+blue envelope, the red elastic band, and even a blot in the lower
+left-hand corner had been exactly reproduced. Inside, of course, were
+only sheets of blank paper. It was his intention to change the packets
+and to let Garvey see him put the sham one into the bag. In case of
+violence the bag would be the point of attack, and he intended to lock
+it and throw away the key. Before it could be forced open and the
+deception discovered there would be time to increase his chances of
+escape with the real packet.
+
+It was five o'clock when the silent Jehu pulled up in front of a
+half-broken gate and pointed with his whip to a house that stood in its
+own grounds among trees and was just visible in the gathering gloom.
+Shorthouse told him to drive up to the front door but the man refused.
+
+"I ain't runnin' no risks," he said; "I've got a family."
+
+This cryptic remark was not encouraging, but Shorthouse did not pause to
+decipher it. He paid the man, and then pushed open the rickety old gate
+swinging on a single hinge, and proceeded to walk up the drive that lay
+dark between close-standing trees. The house soon came into full view.
+It was tall and square and had once evidently been white, but now the
+walls were covered with dirty patches and there were wide yellow streaks
+where the plaster had fallen away. The windows stared black and
+uncompromising into the night. The garden was overgrown with weeds and
+long grass, standing up in ugly patches beneath their burden of wet
+snow. Complete silence reigned over all. There was not a sign of life.
+Not even a dog barked. Only, in the distance, the wheels of the
+retreating carriage could be heard growing fainter and fainter.
+
+As he stood in the porch, between pillars of rotting wood, listening to
+the rain dripping from the roof into the puddles of slushy snow, he was
+conscious of a sensation of utter desertion and loneliness such as he
+had never before experienced. The forbidding aspect of the house had the
+immediate effect of lowering his spirits. It might well have been the
+abode of monsters or demons in a child's wonder tale, creatures that
+only dared to come out under cover of darkness. He groped for the
+bell-handle, or knocker, and finding neither, he raised his stick and
+beat a loud tattoo on the door. The sound echoed away in an empty space
+on the other side and the wind moaned past him between the pillars as if
+startled at his audacity. But there was no sound of approaching
+footsteps and no one came to open the door. Again he beat a tattoo,
+louder and longer than the first one; and, having done so, waited with
+his back to the house and stared across the unkempt garden into the fast
+gathering shadows.
+
+Then he turned suddenly, and saw that the door was standing ajar. It had
+been quietly opened and a pair of eyes were peering at him round the
+edge. There was no light in the hall beyond and he could only just make
+out the shape of a dim human face.
+
+"Does Mr. Garvey live here?" he asked in a firm voice.
+
+"Who are you?" came in a man's tones.
+
+"I'm Mr. Sidebotham's private secretary. I wish to see Mr. Garvey on
+important business."
+
+"Are you expected?"
+
+"I suppose so," he said impatiently, thrusting a card through the
+opening. "Please take my name to him at once, and say I come from Mr.
+Sidebotham on the matter Mr. Garvey wrote about."
+
+The man took the card, and the face vanished into the darkness, leaving
+Shorthouse standing in the cold porch with mingled feelings of
+impatience and dismay. The door, he now noticed for the first time, was
+on a chain and could not open more than a few inches. But it was the
+manner of his reception that caused uneasy reflections to stir within
+him--reflections that continued for some minutes before they were
+interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps and the flicker of a
+light in the hall.
+
+The next instant the chain fell with a rattle, and gripping his bag
+tightly, he walked into a large ill-smelling hall of which he could only
+just see the ceiling. There was no light but the nickering taper held by
+the man, and by its uncertain glimmer Shorthouse turned to examine him.
+He saw an undersized man of middle age with brilliant, shifting eyes, a
+curling black beard, and a nose that at once proclaimed him a Jew. His
+shoulders were bent, and, as he watched him replacing the chain, he saw
+that he wore a peculiar black gown like a priest's cassock reaching to
+the feet. It was altogether a lugubrious figure of a man, sinister and
+funereal, yet it seemed in perfect harmony with the general character of
+its surroundings. The hall was devoid of furniture of any kind, and
+against the dingy walls stood rows of old picture frames, empty and
+disordered, and odd-looking bits of wood-work that appeared doubly
+fantastic as their shadows danced queerly over the floor in the shifting
+light.
+
+"If you'll come this way, Mr. Garvey will see you presently," said the
+Jew gruffly, crossing the floor and shielding the taper with a bony
+hand. He never once raised his eyes above the level of the visitor's
+waistcoat, and, to Shorthouse, he somehow suggested a figure from the
+dead rather than a man of flesh and blood. The hall smelt decidedly ill.
+
+All the more surprising, then, was the scene that met his eyes when the
+Jew opened the door at the further end and he entered a room brilliantly
+lit with swinging lamps and furnished with a degree of taste and comfort
+that amounted to luxury. The walls were lined with handsomely bound
+books, and armchairs were arranged round a large mahogany desk in the
+middle of the room. A bright fire burned in the grate and neatly framed
+photographs of men and women stood on the mantelpiece on either side of
+an elaborately carved clock. French windows that opened like doors were
+partially concealed by warm red curtains, and on a sideboard against the
+wall stood decanters and glasses, with several boxes of cigars piled on
+top of one another. There was a pleasant odour of tobacco about the
+room. Indeed, it was in such glowing contrast to the chilly poverty of
+the hall that Shorthouse already was conscious of a distinct rise in the
+thermometer of his spirits.
+
+Then he turned and saw the Jew standing in the doorway with his eyes
+fixed upon him, somewhere about the middle button of his waistcoat. He
+presented a strangely repulsive appearance that somehow could not be
+attributed to any particular detail, and the secretary associated him in
+his mind with a monstrous black bird of prey more than anything else.
+
+"My time is short," he said abruptly; "I hope Mr. Garvey will not keep
+me waiting."
+
+A strange flicker of a smile appeared on the Jew's ugly face and
+vanished as quickly as it came. He made a sort of deprecating bow by way
+of reply. Then he blew out the taper and went out, closing the door
+noiselessly behind him.
+
+Shorthouse was alone. He felt relieved. There was an air of obsequious
+insolence about the old Jew that was very offensive. He began to take
+note of his surroundings. He was evidently in the library of the house,
+for the walls were covered with books almost up to the ceiling. There
+was no room for pictures. Nothing but the shining backs of well-bound
+volumes looked down upon him. Four brilliant lights hung from the
+ceiling and a reading lamp with a polished reflector stood among the
+disordered masses of papers on the desk.
+
+The lamp was not lit, but when Shorthouse put his hand upon it he found
+it was _warm_. The room had evidently only just been vacated.
+
+Apart from the testimony of the lamp, however, he had already felt,
+without being able to give a reason for it, that the room had been
+occupied a few moments before he entered. The atmosphere over the desk
+seemed to retain the disturbing influence of a human being; an
+influence, moreover, so recent that he felt as if the cause of it were
+still in his immediate neighbourhood. It was difficult to realise that
+he was quite alone in the room and that somebody was not in hiding. The
+finer counterparts of his senses warned him to act as if he were being
+observed; he was dimly conscious of a desire to fidget and look round,
+to keep his eyes in every part of the room at once, and to conduct
+himself generally as if he were the object of careful human observation.
+
+How far he recognised the cause of these sensations it is impossible to
+say; but they were sufficiently marked to prevent his carrying out a
+strong inclination to get up and make a search of the room. He sat quite
+still, staring alternately at the backs of the books, and at the red
+curtains; wondering all the time if he was really being watched, or if
+it was only the imagination playing tricks with him.
+
+A full quarter of an hour passed, and then twenty rows of volumes
+suddenly shifted out towards him, and he saw that a door had opened in
+the wall opposite. The books were only sham backs after all, and when
+they moved back again with the sliding door, Shorthouse saw the figure
+of Joel Garvey standing before him.
+
+Surprise almost took his breath away. He had expected to see an
+unpleasant, even a vicious apparition with the mark of the beast
+unmistakably upon its face; but he was wholly unprepared for the
+elderly, tall, fine-looking man who stood in front of him--well-groomed,
+refined, vigorous, with a lofty forehead, clear grey eyes, and a hooked
+nose dominating a clean shaven mouth and chin of considerable
+character--a distinguished looking man altogether.
+
+"I'm afraid I've kept you waiting, Mr. Shorthouse," he said in a
+pleasant voice, but with no trace of a smile in the mouth or eyes. "But
+the fact is, you know, I've a mania for chemistry, and just when you
+were announced I was at the most critical moment of a problem and was
+really compelled to bring it to a conclusion."
+
+Shorthouse had risen to meet him, but the other motioned him to resume
+his seat. It was borne in upon him irresistibly that Mr. Joel Garvey,
+for reasons best known to himself, was deliberately lying, and he could
+not help wondering at the necessity for such an elaborate
+misrepresentation. He took off his overcoat and sat down.
+
+"I've no doubt, too, that the door startled you," Garvey went on,
+evidently reading something of his guest's feelings in his face. "You
+probably had not suspected it. It leads into my little laboratory.
+Chemistry is an absorbing study to me, and I spend most of my time
+there." Mr. Garvey moved up to the armchair on the opposite side of the
+fireplace and sat down.
+
+Shorthouse made appropriate answers to these remarks, but his mind was
+really engaged in taking stock of Mr. Sidebotham's old-time partner. So
+far there was no sign of mental irregularity and there was certainly
+nothing about him to suggest violent wrong-doing or coarseness of
+living. On the whole, Mr. Sidebotham's secretary was most pleasantly
+surprised, and, wishing to conclude his business as speedily as
+possible, he made a motion towards the bag for the purpose of opening
+it, when his companion interrupted him quickly--
+
+"You are Mr. Sidebotham's _private_ secretary, are you not?" he asked.
+
+Shorthouse replied that he was. "Mr. Sidebotham," he went on to explain,
+"has entrusted me with the papers in the case and I have the honour to
+return to you your letter of a week ago." He handed the letter to
+Garvey, who took it without a word and deliberately placed it in the
+fire. He was not aware that the secretary was ignorant of its contents,
+yet his face betrayed no signs of feeling. Shorthouse noticed, however,
+that his eyes never left the fire until the last morsel had been
+consumed. Then he looked up and said, "You are familiar then with the
+facts of this most peculiar case?"
+
+Shorthouse saw no reason to confess his ignorance.
+
+"I have all the papers, Mr. Garvey," he replied, taking them out of the
+bag, "and I should be very glad if we could transact our business as
+speedily as possible. If you will cut out your signature I--"
+
+"One moment, please," interrupted the other. "I must, before we proceed
+further, consult some papers in my laboratory. If you will allow me to
+leave you alone a few minutes for this purpose we can conclude the whole
+matter in a very short time."
+
+Shorthouse did not approve of this further delay, but he had no option
+than to acquiesce, and when Garvey had left the room by the private door
+he sat and waited with the papers in his hand. The minutes went by and
+the other did not return. To pass the time he thought of taking the
+false packet from his coat to see that the papers were in order, and the
+move was indeed almost completed, when something--he never knew
+what--warned him to desist. The feeling again came over him that he was
+being watched, and he leaned back in his chair with the bag on his knees
+and waited with considerable impatience for the other's return. For more
+than twenty minutes he waited, and when at length the door opened and
+Garvey appeared, with profuse apologies for the delay, he saw by the
+clock that only a few minutes still remained of the time he had allowed
+himself to catch the last train.
+
+"Now I am completely at your service," he said pleasantly; "you must, of
+course, know, Mr. Shorthouse, that one cannot be too careful in matters
+of this kind--especially," he went on, speaking very slowly and
+impressively, "in dealing with a man like my former partner, whose mind,
+as you doubtless may have discovered, is at times very sadly affected."
+
+Shorthouse made no reply to this. He felt that the other was watching
+him as a cat watches a mouse.
+
+"It is almost a wonder to me," Garvey added, "that he is still at large.
+Unless he has greatly improved it can hardly be safe for those who are
+closely associated with him."
+
+The other began to feel uncomfortable. Either this was the other side of
+the story, or it was the first signs of mental irresponsibility.
+
+"All business matters of importance require the utmost care in my
+opinion, Mr. Garvey," he said at length, cautiously.
+
+"Ah! then, as I thought, you have had a great deal to put up with from
+him," Garvey said, with his eyes fixed on his companion's face. "And, no
+doubt, he is still as bitter against me as he was years ago when the
+disease first showed itself?"
+
+Although this last remark was a deliberate question and the questioner
+was waiting with fixed eyes for an answer, Shorthouse elected to take
+no notice of it. Without a word he pulled the elastic band from the blue
+envelope with a snap and plainly showed his desire to conclude the
+business as soon as possible. The tendency on the other's part to delay
+did not suit him at all.
+
+"But never personal violence, I trust, Mr. Shorthouse," he added.
+
+"Never."
+
+"I'm glad to hear it," Garvey said in a sympathetic voice, "very glad to
+hear it. And now," he went on, "if you are ready we can transact this
+little matter of business before dinner. It will only take a moment."
+
+He drew a chair up to the desk and sat down, taking a pair of scissors
+from a drawer. His companion approached with the papers in his hand,
+unfolding them as he came. Garvey at once took them from him, and after
+turning over a few pages he stopped and cut out a piece of writing at
+the bottom of the last sheet but one.
+
+Holding it up to him Shorthouse read the words "Joel Garvey" in faded
+ink.
+
+"There! That's my signature," he said, "and I've cut it out. It must be
+nearly twenty years since I wrote it, and now I'm going to burn it."
+
+He went to the fire and stooped over to burn the little slip of paper,
+and while he watched it being consumed Shorthouse put the real papers in
+his pocket and slipped the imitation ones into the bag. Garvey turned
+just in time to see this latter movement.
+
+"I'm putting the papers back," Shorthouse said quietly; "you've done
+with them, I think."
+
+"Certainly," he replied as, completely deceived, he saw the blue
+envelope disappear into the black bag and watched Shorthouse turn the
+key. "They no longer have the slightest interest for me." As he spoke he
+moved over to the sideboard, and pouring himself out a small glass of
+whisky asked his visitor if he might do the same for him. But the
+visitor declined and was already putting on his overcoat when Garvey
+turned with genuine surprise on his face.
+
+"You surely are not going back to New York to-night, Mr. Shorthouse?" he
+said, in a voice of astonishment.
+
+"I've just time to catch the 7.15 if I'm quick."
+
+"But I never heard of such a thing," Garvey said. "Of course I took it
+for granted that you would stay the night."
+
+"It's kind of you," said Shorthouse, "but really I must return to-night.
+I never expected to stay."
+
+The two men stood facing each other. Garvey pulled out his watch.
+
+"I'm exceedingly sorry," he said; "but, upon my word, I took it for
+granted you would stay. I ought to have said so long ago. I'm such a
+lonely fellow and so little accustomed to visitors that I fear I forgot
+my manners altogether. But in any case, Mr. Shorthouse, you cannot catch
+the 7.15, for it's already after six o'clock, and that's the last train
+to-night." Garvey spoke very quickly, almost eagerly, but his voice
+sounded genuine.
+
+"There's time if I walk quickly," said the young man with decision,
+moving towards the door. He glanced at his watch as he went. Hitherto he
+had gone by the clock on the mantelpiece. To his dismay he saw that it
+was, as his host had said, long after six. The clock was half an hour
+slow, and he realised at once that it was no longer possible to catch
+the train.
+
+Had the hands of the clock been moved back intentionally? Had he been
+purposely detained? Unpleasant thoughts flashed into his brain and made
+him hesitate before taking the next step. His employer's warning rang in
+his ears. The alternative was six miles along a lonely road in the
+dark, or a night under Garvey's roof. The former seemed a direct
+invitation to catastrophe, if catastrophe there was planned to be. The
+latter--well, the choice was certainly small. One thing, however, he
+realised, was plain--he must show neither fear nor hesitancy.
+
+"My watch must have gained," he observed quietly, turning the hands back
+without looking up. "It seems I have certainly missed that train and
+shall be obliged to throw myself upon your hospitality. But, believe me,
+I had no intention of putting you out to any such extent."
+
+"I'm delighted," the other said. "Defer to the judgment of an older man
+and make yourself comfortable for the night. There's a bitter storm
+outside, and you don't put me out at all. On the contrary it's a great
+pleasure. I have so little contact with the outside world that it's
+really a god-send to have you."
+
+The man's face changed as he spoke. His manner was cordial and sincere.
+Shorthouse began to feel ashamed of his doubts and to read between the
+lines of his employer's warning. He took off his coat and the two men
+moved to the armchairs beside the fire.
+
+"You see," Garvey went on in a lowered voice, "I understand your
+hesitancy perfectly. I didn't know Sidebotham all those years without
+knowing a good deal about him--perhaps more than you do. I've no doubt,
+now, he filled your mind with all sorts of nonsense about me--probably
+told you that I was the greatest villain unhung, eh? and all that sort
+of thing? Poor fellow! He was a fine sort before his mind became
+unhinged. One of his fancies used to be that everybody else was insane,
+or just about to become insane. Is he still as bad as that?"
+
+"Few men," replied Shorthouse, with the manner of making a great
+confidence, but entirely refusing to be drawn, "go through his
+experiences and reach his age without entertaining delusions of one kind
+or another."
+
+"Perfectly true," said Garvey. "Your observation is evidently keen."
+
+"Very keen indeed," Shorthouse replied, taking his cue neatly; "but, of
+course, there are some things"--and here he looked cautiously over his
+shoulder--"there are some things one cannot talk about too
+circumspectly."
+
+"I understand perfectly and respect your reserve."
+
+There was a little more conversation and then Garvey got up and excused
+himself on the plea of superintending the preparation of the bedroom.
+
+"It's quite an event to have a visitor in the house, and I want to make
+you as comfortable as possible," he said. "Marx will do better for a
+little supervision. And," he added with a laugh as he stood in the
+doorway, "I want you to carry back a good account to Sidebotham."
+
+
+
+II
+
+The tall form disappeared and the door was shut. The conversation of the
+past few minutes had come somewhat as a revelation to the secretary.
+Garvey seemed in full possession of normal instincts. There was no doubt
+as to the sincerity of his manner and intentions. The suspicions of the
+first hour began to vanish like mist before the sun. Sidebotham's
+portentous warnings and the mystery with which he surrounded the whole
+episode had been allowed to unduly influence his mind. The loneliness of
+the situation and the bleak nature of the surroundings had helped to
+complete the illusion. He began to be ashamed of his suspicions and a
+change commenced gradually to be wrought in his thoughts. Anyhow a
+dinner and a bed were preferable to six miles in the dark, no dinner,
+and a cold train into the bargain.
+
+Garvey returned presently. "We'll do the best we can for you," he said,
+dropping into the deep armchair on the other side of the fire. "Marx is
+a good servant if you watch him all the time. You must always stand over
+a Jew, though, if you want things done properly. They're tricky and
+uncertain unless they're working for their own interest. But Marx might
+be worse, I'll admit. He's been with me for nearly twenty years--cook,
+valet, housemaid, and butler all in one. In the old days, you know, he
+was a clerk in our office in Chicago."
+
+Garvey rattled on and Shorthouse listened with occasional remarks thrown
+in. The former seemed pleased to have somebody to talk to and the sound
+of his own voice was evidently sweet music in his ears. After a few
+minutes, he crossed over to the sideboard and again took up the decanter
+of whisky, holding it to the light. "You will join me this time," he
+said pleasantly, pouring out two glasses, "it will give us an appetite
+for dinner," and this time Shorthouse did not refuse. The liquor was
+mellow and soft and the men took two glasses apiece.
+
+"Excellent," remarked the secretary.
+
+"Glad you appreciate it," said the host, smacking his lips. "It's very
+old whisky, and I rarely touch it when I'm alone. But this," he added,
+"is a special occasion, isn't it?"
+
+Shorthouse was in the act of putting his glass down when something drew
+his eyes suddenly to the other's face. A strange note in the man's voice
+caught his attention and communicated alarm to his nerves. A new light
+shone in Garvey's eyes and there flitted momentarily across his strong
+features the shadow of something that set the secretary's nerves
+tingling. A mist spread before his eyes and the unaccountable belief
+rose strong in him that he was staring into the visage of an untamed
+animal. Close to his heart there was something that was wild, fierce,
+savage. An involuntary shiver ran over him and seemed to dispel the
+strange fancy as suddenly as it had come. He met the other's eye with a
+smile, the counterpart of which in his heart was vivid horror.
+
+"It _is_ a special occasion," he said, as naturally as possible, "and,
+allow me to add, very special whisky."
+
+Garvey appeared delighted. He was in the middle of a devious tale
+describing how the whisky came originally into his possession when the
+door opened behind them and a grating voice announced that dinner was
+ready. They followed the cassocked form of Marx across the dirty hall,
+lit only by the shaft of light that followed them from the library door,
+and entered a small room where a single lamp stood upon a table laid for
+dinner. The walls were destitute of pictures, and the windows had
+Venetian blinds without curtains. There was no fire in the grate, and
+when the men sat down facing each other Shorthouse noticed that, while
+his own cover was laid with its due proportion of glasses and cutlery,
+his companion had nothing before him but a soup plate, without fork,
+knife, or spoon beside it.
+
+"I don't know what there is to offer you," he said; "but I'm sure Marx
+has done the best he can at such short notice. I only eat one course for
+dinner, but pray take your time and enjoy your food."
+
+Marx presently set a plate of soup before the guest, yet so loathsome
+was the immediate presence of this old Hebrew servitor, that the
+spoonfuls disappeared somewhat slowly. Garvey sat and watched him.
+
+Shorthouse said the soup was delicious and bravely swallowed another
+mouthful. In reality his thoughts were centred upon his companion, whose
+manners were giving evidence of a gradual and curious change. There was
+a decided difference in his demeanour, a difference that the secretary
+_felt_ at first, rather than saw. Garvey's quiet self-possession was
+giving place to a degree of suppressed excitement that seemed so far
+inexplicable. His movements became quick and nervous, his eye shifting
+and strangely brilliant, and his voice, when he spoke, betrayed an
+occasional deep tremor. Something unwonted was stirring within him and
+evidently demanding every moment more vigorous manifestation as the meal
+proceeded.
+
+Intuitively Shorthouse was afraid of this growing excitement, and while
+negotiating some uncommonly tough pork chops he tried to lead the
+conversation on to the subject of chemistry, of which in his Oxford days
+he had been an enthusiastic student. His companion, however, would none
+of it. It seemed to have lost interest for him, and he would barely
+condescend to respond. When Marx presently returned with a plate of
+steaming eggs and bacon the subject dropped of its own accord.
+
+"An inadequate dinner dish," Garvey said, as soon as the man was gone;
+"but better than nothing, I hope."
+
+Shorthouse remarked that he was exceedingly fond of bacon and eggs, and,
+looking up with the last word, saw that Garvey's face was twitching
+convulsively and that he was almost wriggling in his chair. He quieted
+down, however, under the secretary's gaze and observed, though evidently
+with an effort--
+
+"Very good of you to say so. Wish I could join you, only I never eat
+such stuff. I only take one course for dinner."
+
+Shorthouse began to feel some curiosity as to what the nature of this
+one course might be, but he made no further remark and contented himself
+with noting mentally that his companion's excitement seemed to be
+rapidly growing beyond his control. There was something uncanny about
+it, and he began to wish he had chosen the alternative of the walk to
+the station.
+
+"I'm glad to see you never speak when Marx is in the room," said Garvey
+presently. "I'm sure it's better not. Don't you think so?"
+
+He appeared to wait eagerly for the answer.
+
+"Undoubtedly," said the puzzled secretary.
+
+"Yes," the other went on quickly. "He's an excellent man, but he has
+one drawback--a really horrid one. You may--but, no, you could hardly
+have noticed it yet."
+
+"Not drink, I trust," said Shorthouse, who would rather have discussed
+any other subject than the odious Jew.
+
+"Worse than that a great deal," Garvey replied, evidently expecting the
+other to draw him out. But Shorthouse was in no mood to hear anything
+horrible, and he declined to step into the trap.
+
+"The best of servants have their faults," he said coldly.
+
+"I'll tell you what it is if you like," Garvey went on, still speaking
+very low and leaning forward over the table so that his face came close
+to the flame of the lamp, "only we must speak quietly in case he's
+listening. I'll tell you what it is--if you think you won't be
+frightened."
+
+"Nothing frightens me," he laughed. (Garvey must understand that at all
+events.) "Nothing can frighten me," he repeated.
+
+"I'm glad of that; for it frightens _me_ a good deal sometimes."
+
+Shorthouse feigned indifference. Yet he was aware that his heart was
+beating a little quicker and that there was a sensation of chilliness in
+his back. He waited in silence for what was to come.
+
+"He has a horrible predilection for vacuums," Garvey went on presently
+in a still lower voice and thrusting his face farther forward under the
+lamp.
+
+"Vacuums!" exclaimed the secretary in spite of himself. "What in the
+world do you mean?"
+
+"What I say of course. He's always tumbling into them, so that I can't
+find him or get at him. He hides there for hours at a time, and for the
+life of me I can't make out what he does there."
+
+Shorthouse stared his companion straight in the eyes. What in the name
+of Heaven was he talking about?
+
+"Do you suppose he goes there for a change of air, or--or to escape?" he
+went on in a louder voice.
+
+Shorthouse could have laughed outright but for the expression of the
+other's face.
+
+"I should not think there was much air of any sort in a vacuum," he said
+quietly.
+
+"That's exactly what _I_ feel," continued Garvey with ever growing
+excitement. "That's the horrid part of it. How the devil does he live
+there? You see--"
+
+"Have you ever followed him there?" interrupted the secretary. The
+other leaned back in his chair and drew a deep sigh.
+
+"Never! It's impossible. You see I can't follow him. There's not room
+for two. A vacuum only holds one comfortably. Marx knows that. He's out
+of my reach altogether once he's fairly inside. He knows the best side
+of a bargain. He's a regular Jew."
+
+"That is a drawback to a servant, of course--" Shorthouse spoke slowly,
+with his eyes on his plate.
+
+"A drawback," interrupted the other with an ugly chuckle, "I call it a
+draw-in, that's what I call it."
+
+"A draw-in does seem a more accurate term," assented Shorthouse. "But,"
+he went on, "I thought that nature abhorred a vacuum. She used to, when
+I was at school--though perhaps--it's so long ago--"
+
+He hesitated and looked up. Something in Garvey's face--something he had
+_felt_ before he looked up--stopped his tongue and froze the words in
+his throat. His lips refused to move and became suddenly dry. Again the
+mist rose before his eyes and the appalling shadow dropped its veil over
+the face before him. Garvey's features began to burn and glow. Then they
+seemed to coarsen and somehow slip confusedly together. He stared for a
+second--it seemed only for a second--into the visage of a ferocious and
+abominable animal; and then, as suddenly as it had come, the filthy
+shadow of the beast passed off, the mist melted out, and with a mighty
+effort over his nerves he forced himself to finish his sentence.
+
+"You see it's so long since I've given attention to such things," he
+stammered. His heart was beating rapidly, and a feeling of oppression
+was gathering over it.
+
+"It's my peculiar and special study on the other hand," Garvey resumed.
+"I've not spent all these years in my laboratory to no purpose, I can
+assure you. Nature, I know for a fact," he added with unnatural warmth,
+"does _not_ abhor a vacuum. On the contrary, she's uncommonly fond of
+'em, much too fond, it seems, for the comfort of my little household. If
+there were fewer vacuums and more abhorrence we should get on better--a
+damned sight better in my opinion."
+
+"Your special knowledge, no doubt, enables you to speak with authority,"
+Shorthouse said, curiosity and alarm warring with other mixed feelings
+in his mind; "but how _can_ a man tumble into a vacuum?"
+
+"You may well ask. That's just it. How can he? It's preposterous and I
+can't make it out at all. Marx knows, but he won't tell me. Jews know
+more than we do. For my part I have reason to believe--" He stopped and
+listened. "Hush! here he comes," he added, rubbing his hands together as
+if in glee and fidgeting in his chair.
+
+Steps were heard coming down the passage, and as they approached the
+door Garvey seemed to give himself completely over to an excitement he
+could not control. His eyes were fixed on the door and he began
+clutching the tablecloth with both hands. Again his face was screened by
+the loathsome shadow. It grew wild, wolfish. As through a mask, that
+concealed, and yet was thin enough to let through a suggestion of, the
+beast crouching behind, there leaped into his countenance the strange
+look of the animal in the human--the expression of the were-wolf, the
+monster. The change in all its loathsomeness came rapidly over his
+features, which began to lose their outline. The nose flattened,
+dropping with broad nostrils over thick lips. The face rounded, filled,
+and became squat. The eyes, which, luckily for Shorthouse, no longer
+sought his own, glowed with the light of untamed appetite and bestial
+greed. The hands left the cloth and grasped the edges of the plate, and
+then clutched the cloth again.
+
+"This is _my_ course coming now," said Garvey, in a deep guttural voice.
+He was shivering. His upper lip was partly lifted and showed the teeth,
+white and gleaming.
+
+A moment later the door opened and Marx hurried into the room and set a
+dish in front of his master. Garvey half rose to meet him, stretching
+out his hands and grinning horribly. With his mouth he made a sound like
+the snarl of an animal. The dish before him was steaming, but the slight
+vapour rising from it betrayed by its odour that it was not born of a
+fire of coals. It was the natural heat of flesh warmed by the fires of
+life only just expelled. The moment the dish rested on the table Garvey
+pushed away his own plate and drew the other up close under his mouth.
+Then he seized the food in both hands and commenced to tear it with his
+teeth, grunting as he did so. Shorthouse closed his eyes, with a feeling
+of nausea. When he looked up again the lips and jaw of the man opposite
+were stained with crimson. The whole man was transformed. A feasting
+tiger, starved and ravenous, but without a tiger's grace--this was what
+he watched for several minutes, transfixed with horror and disgust.
+
+Marx had already taken his departure, knowing evidently what was not
+good for the eyes to look upon, and Shorthouse knew at last that he was
+sitting face to face with a madman.
+
+The ghastly meal was finished in an incredibly short time and nothing
+was left but a tiny pool of red liquid rapidly hardening. Garvey leaned
+back heavily in his chair and sighed. His smeared face, withdrawn now
+from the glare of the lamp, began to resume its normal appearance.
+Presently he looked up at his guest and said in his natural voice--
+
+"I hope you've had enough to eat. You wouldn't care for this, you know,"
+with a downward glance.
+
+Shorthouse met his eyes with an inward loathing, and it was impossible
+not to show some of the repugnance he felt. In the other's face,
+however, he thought he saw a subdued, cowed expression. But he found
+nothing to say.
+
+"Marx will be in presently," Garvey went on. "He's either listening, or
+in a vacuum."
+
+"Does he choose any particular time for his visits?" the secretary
+managed to ask.
+
+"He generally goes after dinner; just about this time, in fact. But he's
+not gone yet," he added, shrugging his shoulders, "for I think I hear
+him coming."
+
+Shorthouse wondered whether vacuum was possibly synonymous with wine
+cellar, but gave no expression to his thoughts. With chills of horror
+still running up and down his back, he saw Marx come in with a basin and
+towel, while Garvey thrust up his face just as an animal puts up its
+muzzle to be rubbed.
+
+"Now we'll have coffee in the library, if you're ready," he said, in the
+tone of a gentleman addressing his guests after a dinner party.
+
+Shorthouse picked up the bag, which had lain all this time between his
+feet, and walked through the door his host held open for him. Side by
+side they crossed the dark hall together, and, to his disgust, Garvey
+linked an arm in his, and with his face so close to the secretary's ear
+that he felt the warm breath, said in a thick voice--
+
+"You're uncommonly careful with that bag, Mr. Shorthouse. It surely must
+contain something more than the bundle of papers."
+
+"Nothing but the papers," he answered, feeling the hand burning upon his
+arm and wishing he were miles away from the house and its abominable
+occupants.
+
+"Quite sure?" asked the other with an odious and suggestive chuckle. "Is
+there any meat in it, fresh meat--raw meat?"
+
+The secretary felt, somehow, that at the least sign of fear the beast on
+his arm would leap upon him and tear him with his teeth.
+
+"Nothing of the sort," he answered vigorously. "It wouldn't hold enough
+to feed a cat."
+
+"True," said Garvey with a vile sigh, while the other felt the hand upon
+his arm twitch up and down as if feeling the flesh. "True, it's too
+small to be of any real use. As you say, it wouldn't hold enough to feed
+a cat."
+
+Shorthouse was unable to suppress a cry. The muscles of his fingers,
+too, relaxed in spite of himself and he let the black bag drop with a
+bang to the floor. Garvey instantly withdrew his arm and turned with a
+quick movement. But the secretary had regained his control as suddenly
+as he had lost it, and he met the maniac's eyes with a steady and
+aggressive glare.
+
+"There, you see, it's quite light. It makes no appreciable noise when I
+drop it." He picked it up and let it fall again, as if he had dropped it
+for the first time purposely. The ruse was successful.
+
+"Yes. You're right," Garvey said, still standing in the doorway and
+staring at him. "At any rate it wouldn't hold enough for two," he
+laughed. And as he closed the door the horrid laughter echoed in the
+empty hall.
+
+They sat down by a blazing fire and Shorthouse was glad to feel its
+warmth. Marx presently brought in coffee. A glass of the old whisky and
+a good cigar helped to restore equilibrium. For some minutes the men sat
+in silence staring into the fire. Then, without looking up, Garvey said
+in a quiet voice--
+
+"I suppose it was a shock to you to see me eat raw meat like that. I
+must apologise if it was unpleasant to you. But it's all I can eat and
+it's the only meal I take in the twenty-four hours."
+
+"Best nourishment in the world, no doubt; though I should think it might
+be a trifle strong for some stomachs."
+
+He tried to lead the conversation away from so unpleasant a subject, and
+went on to talk rapidly of the values of different foods, of
+vegetarianism and vegetarians, and of men who had gone for long periods
+without any food at all. Garvey listened apparently without interest and
+had nothing to say. At the first pause he jumped in eagerly.
+
+"When the hunger is really great on me," he said, still gazing into the
+fire, "I simply cannot control myself. I must have raw meat--the first I
+can get--" Here he raised his shining eyes and Shorthouse felt his hair
+beginning to rise.
+
+"It comes upon me so suddenly too. I never can tell when to expect it. A
+year ago the passion rose in me like a whirlwind and Marx was out and I
+couldn't get meat. I had to get something or I should have bitten
+myself. Just when it was getting unbearable my dog ran out from beneath
+the sofa. It was a spaniel."
+
+Shorthouse responded with an effort. He hardly knew what he was saying
+and his skin crawled as if a million ants were moving over it.
+
+There was a pause of several minutes.
+
+"I've bitten Marx all over," Garvey went on presently in his strange
+quiet voice, and as if he were speaking of apples; "but he's bitter. I
+doubt if the hunger could ever make me do it again. Probably that's what
+first drove him to take shelter in a vacuum." He chuckled hideously as
+he thought of this solution of his attendant's disappearances.
+
+Shorthouse seized the poker and poked the fire as if his life depended
+on it. But when the banging and clattering was over Garvey continued his
+remarks with the same calmness. The next sentence, however, was never
+finished. The secretary had got upon his feet suddenly.
+
+"I shall ask your permission to retire," he said in a determined voice;
+"I'm tired to-night; will you be good enough to show me to my room?"
+
+Garvey looked up at him with a curious cringing expression behind which
+there shone the gleam of cunning passion.
+
+"Certainly," he said, rising from his chair. "You've had a tiring
+journey. I ought to have thought of that before."
+
+He took the candle from the table and lit it, and the fingers that held
+the match trembled.
+
+"We needn't trouble Marx," he explained. "That beast's in his vacuum by
+this time."
+
+
+
+III
+
+They crossed the hall and began to ascend the carpetless wooden stairs.
+They were in the well of the house and the air cut like ice. Garvey,
+the flickering candle in his hand throwing his face into strong outline,
+led the way across the first landing and opened a door near the mouth of
+a dark passage. A pleasant room greeted the visitor's eyes, and he
+rapidly took in its points while his host walked over and lit two
+candles that stood on a table at the foot of the bed. A fire burned
+brightly in the grate. There were two windows, opening like doors, in
+the wall opposite, and a high canopied bed occupied most of the space on
+the right. Panelling ran all round the room reaching nearly to the
+ceiling and gave a warm and cosy appearance to the whole; while the
+portraits that stood in alternate panels suggested somehow the
+atmosphere of an old country house in England. Shorthouse was agreeably
+surprised.
+
+"I hope you'll find everything you need," Garvey was saying in the
+doorway. "If not, you have only to ring that bell by the fireplace. Marx
+won't hear it of course, but it rings in my laboratory, where I spend
+most of the night."
+
+Then, with a brief good-night, he went out and shut the door after him.
+The instant he was gone Mr. Sidebotham's private secretary did a
+peculiar thing. He planted himself in the middle of the room with his
+back to the door, and drawing the pistol swiftly from his hip pocket
+levelled it across his left arm at the window. Standing motionless in
+this position for thirty seconds he then suddenly swerved right round
+and faced in the other direction, pointing his pistol straight at the
+keyhole of the door. There followed immediately a sound of shuffling
+outside and of steps retreating across the landing.
+
+"On his knees at the keyhole," was the secretary's reflection. "Just as
+I thought. But he didn't expect to look down the barrel of a pistol and
+it made him jump a little."
+
+As soon as the steps had gone downstairs and died away across the hall,
+Shorthouse went over and locked the door, stuffing a piece of crumpled
+paper into the second keyhole which he saw immediately above the first.
+After that, he made a thorough search of the room. It hardly repaid the
+trouble, for he found nothing unusual. Yet he was glad he had made it.
+It relieved him to find no one was in hiding under the bed or in the
+deep oak cupboard; and he hoped sincerely it was not the cupboard in
+which the unfortunate spaniel had come to its vile death. The French
+windows, he discovered, opened on to a little balcony. It looked on to
+the front, and there was a drop of less than twenty feet to the ground
+below. The bed was high and wide, soft as feathers and covered with
+snowy sheets--very inviting to a tired man; and beside the blazing fire
+were a couple of deep armchairs.
+
+Altogether it was very pleasant and comfortable; but, tired though he
+was, Shorthouse had no intention of going to bed. It was impossible to
+disregard the warning of his nerves. They had never failed him before,
+and when that sense of distressing horror lodged in his bones he knew
+there was something in the wind and that a red flag was flying over the
+immediate future. Some delicate instrument in his being, more subtle
+than the senses, more accurate than mere presentiment, had seen the red
+flag and interpreted its meaning.
+
+Again it seemed to him, as he sat in an armchair over the fire, that his
+movements were being carefully watched from somewhere; and, not knowing
+what weapons might be used against him, he felt that his real safety lay
+in a rigid control of his mind and feelings and a stout refusal to admit
+that he was in the least alarmed.
+
+The house was very still. As the night wore on the wind dropped. Only
+occasional bursts of sleet against the windows reminded him that the
+elements were awake and uneasy. Once or twice the windows rattled and
+the rain hissed in the fire, but the roar of the wind in the chimney
+grew less and less and the lonely building was at last lapped in a great
+stillness. The coals clicked, settling themselves deeper in the grate,
+and the noise of the cinders dropping with a tiny report into the soft
+heap of accumulated ashes was the only sound that punctuated the
+silence.
+
+In proportion as the power of sleep grew upon him the dread of the
+situation lessened; but so imperceptibly, so gradually, and so
+insinuatingly that he scarcely realised the change. He thought he was as
+wide awake to his danger as ever. The successful exclusion of horrible
+mental pictures of what he had seen he attributed to his rigorous
+control, instead of to their true cause, the creeping over him of the
+soft influences of sleep. The faces in the coals were so soothing; the
+armchair was so comfortable; so sweet the breath that gently pressed
+upon his eyelids; so subtle the growth of the sensation of safety. He
+settled down deeper into the chair and in another moment would have been
+asleep when the red flag began to shake violently to and fro and he sat
+bolt upright as if he had been stabbed in the back.
+
+Someone was coming up the stairs. The boards creaked beneath a stealthy
+weight.
+
+Shorthouse sprang from the chair and crossed the room swiftly, taking up
+his position beside the door, but out of range of the keyhole. The two
+candles flared unevenly on the table at the foot of the bed. The steps
+were slow and cautious--it seemed thirty seconds between each one--but
+the person who was taking them was very close to the door. Already he
+had topped the stairs and was shuffling almost silently across the bit
+of landing.
+
+The secretary slipped his hand into his pistol pocket and drew back
+further against the wall, and hardly had he completed the movement when
+the sounds abruptly ceased and he knew that somebody was standing just
+outside the door and preparing for a careful observation through the
+keyhole.
+
+He was in no sense a coward. In action he was never afraid. It was the
+waiting and wondering and the uncertainty that might have loosened his
+nerves a little. But, somehow, a wave of intense horror swept over him
+for a second as he thought of the bestial maniac and his attendant Jew;
+and he would rather have faced a pack of wolves than have to do with
+either of these men.
+
+Something brushing gently against the door set his nerves tingling
+afresh and made him tighten his grasp on the pistol. The steel was cold
+and slippery in his moist fingers. What an awful noise it would make
+when he pulled the trigger! If the door were to open how close he would
+be to the figure that came in! Yet he knew it was locked on the inside
+and could not possibly open. Again something brushed against the panel
+beside him and a second later the piece of crumpled paper fell from the
+keyhole to the floor, while the piece of thin wire that had accomplished
+this result showed its point for a moment in the room and was then
+swiftly withdrawn.
+
+Somebody was evidently peering now through the keyhole, and realising
+this fact the spirit of attack entered into the heart of the beleaguered
+man. Raising aloft his right hand he brought it suddenly down with a
+resounding crash upon the panel of the door next the keyhole--a crash
+that, to the crouching eavesdropper, must have seemed like a clap of
+thunder out of a clear sky. There was a gasp and a slight lurching
+against the door and the midnight listener rose startled and alarmed,
+for Shorthouse plainly heard the tread of feet across the landing and
+down the stairs till they were lost in the silences of the hall. Only,
+this time, it seemed to him there were four feet instead of two.
+
+Quickly stuffing the paper back into the keyhole, he was in the act of
+walking back to the fireplace when, over his shoulder, he caught sight
+of a white face pressed in outline against the outside of the window. It
+was blurred in the streams of sleet, but the white of the moving eyes
+was unmistakable. He turned instantly to meet it, but the face was
+withdrawn like a flash, and darkness rushed in to fill the gap where it
+had appeared.
+
+"Watched on both sides," he reflected.
+
+But he was not to be surprised into any sudden action, and quietly
+walking over to the fireplace as if he had seen nothing unusual he
+stirred the coals a moment and then strolled leisurely over to the
+window. Steeling his nerves, which quivered a moment in spite of his
+will, he opened the window and stepped out on to the balcony. The wind,
+which he thought had dropped, rushed past him into the room and
+extinguished one of the candles, while a volley of fine cold rain burst
+all over his face. At first he could see nothing, and the darkness came
+close up to his eyes like a wall. He went a little farther on to the
+balcony and drew the window after him till it clashed. Then he stood and
+waited.
+
+But nothing touched him. No one seemed to be there. His eyes got
+accustomed to the blackness and he was able to make out the iron
+railing, the dark shapes of the trees beyond, and the faint light coming
+from the other window. Through this he peered into the room, walking the
+length of the balcony to do so. Of course he was standing in a shaft of
+light and whoever was crouching in the darkness below could plainly see
+him. _Below?_--That there should be anyone _above_ did not occur to him
+until, just as he was preparing to go in again, he became aware that
+something was moving in the darkness over his head. He looked up,
+instinctively raising a protecting arm, and saw a long black line
+swinging against the dim wall of the house. The shutters of the window
+on the next floor, whence it depended, were thrown open and moving
+backwards and forwards in the wind. The line was evidently a thickish
+cord, for as he looked it was pulled in and the end disappeared in the
+darkness.
+
+Shorthouse, trying to whistle to himself, peered over the edge of the
+balcony as if calculating the distance he might have to drop, and then
+calmly walked into the room again and closed the window behind him,
+leaving the latch so that the lightest touch would cause it to fly open.
+He relit the candle and drew a straight-backed chair up to the table.
+Then he put coal on the fire and stirred it up into a royal blaze. He
+would willingly have folded the shutters over those staring windows at
+his back. But that was out of the question. It would have been to cut
+off his way of escape.
+
+Sleep, for the time, was at a disadvantage. His brain was full of blood
+and every nerve was tingling. He felt as if countless eyes were upon him
+and scores of stained hands were stretching out from the corners and
+crannies of the house to seize him. Crouching figures, figures of
+hideous Jews, stood everywhere about him where shelter was, creeping
+forward out of the shadows when he was not looking and retreating
+swiftly and silently when he turned his head. Wherever he looked, other
+eyes met his own, and though they melted away under his steady,
+confident gaze, he knew they would wax and draw in upon him the instant
+his glances weakened and his will wavered.
+
+Though there were no sounds, he knew that in the well of the house there
+was movement going on, _and preparation_. And this knowledge, inasmuch
+as it came to him irresistibly and through other and more subtle
+channels than those of the senses kept the sense of horror fresh in his
+blood and made him alert and awake.
+
+But, no matter how great the dread in the heart, the power of sleep will
+eventually overcome it. Exhausted nature is irresistible, and as the
+minutes wore on and midnight passed, he realised that nature was
+vigorously asserting herself and sleep was creeping upon him from the
+extremities.
+
+To lessen the danger he took out his pencil and began to draw the
+articles of furniture in the room. He worked into elaborate detail the
+cupboard, the mantelpiece, and the bed, and from these he passed on to
+the portraits. Being possessed of genuine skill, he found the occupation
+sufficiently absorbing. It kept the blood in his brain, and that kept
+him awake. The pictures, moreover, now that he considered them for the
+first time, were exceedingly well painted. Owing to the dim light, he
+centred his attention upon the portraits beside the fireplace. On the
+right was a woman, with a sweet, gentle face and a figure of great
+refinement; on the left was a full-size figure of a big handsome man
+with a full beard and wearing a hunting costume of ancient date.
+
+From time to time he turned to the windows behind him, but the vision of
+the face was not repeated. More than once, too, he went to the door and
+listened, but the silence was so profound in the house that he gradually
+came to believe the plan of attack had been abandoned. Once he went out
+on to the balcony, but the sleet stung his face and he only had time to
+see that the shutters above were closed, when he was obliged to seek the
+shelter of the room again.
+
+In this way the hours passed. The fire died down and the room grew
+chilly. Shorthouse had made several sketches of the two heads and was
+beginning to feel overpoweringly weary. His feet and his hands were cold
+and his yawns were prodigious. It seemed ages and ages since the steps
+had come to listen at his door and the face had watched him from the
+window. A feeling of safety had somehow come to him. In reality he was
+exhausted. His one desire was to drop upon the soft white bed and yield
+himself up to sleep without any further struggle.
+
+He rose from his chair with a series of yawns that refused to be stifled
+and looked at his watch. It was close upon three in the morning. He made
+up his mind that he would lie down with his clothes on and get some
+sleep. It was safe enough, the door was locked on the inside and the
+window was fastened. Putting the bag on the table near his pillow he
+blew out the candles and dropped with a sense of careless and delicious
+exhaustion upon the soft mattress. In five minutes he was sound asleep.
+
+There had scarcely been time for the dreams to come when he found
+himself lying side-ways across the bed with wide open eyes staring into
+the darkness. Someone had touched him, and he had writhed away in his
+sleep as from something unholy. The movement had awakened him.
+
+The room was simply black. No light came from the windows and the fire
+had gone out as completely as if water had been poured upon it. He gazed
+into a sheet of impenetrable darkness that came close up to his face
+like a wall.
+
+His first thought was for the papers in his coat and his hand flew to
+the pocket. They were safe; and the relief caused by this discovery left
+his mind instantly free for other reflections.
+
+And the realisation that at once came to him with a touch of dismay was,
+that during his sleep some definite _change_ had been effected in the
+room. He felt this with that intuitive certainty which amounts to
+positive knowledge. The room was utterly still, but the corroboration
+that was speedily brought to him seemed at once to fill the darkness
+with a whispering, secret life that chilled his blood and made the
+sheet feel like ice against his cheek.
+
+Hark! This was it; there reached his ears, in which the blood was
+already buzzing with warning clamour, a dull murmur of something that
+rose indistinctly from the well of the house and became audible to him
+without passing through walls or doors. There seemed no solid surface
+between him, lying on the bed, and the landing; between the landing and
+the stairs, and between the stairs and the hall beyond.
+
+He knew that the door of the room _was standing open_! Therefore it had
+been opened from the _inside_. Yet the window was fastened, also on the
+inside.
+
+Hardly was this realised when the conspiring silence of the hour was
+broken by another and a more definite sound. A step was coming along the
+passage. A certain bruise on the hip told Shorthouse that the pistol in
+his pocket was ready for use and he drew it out quickly and cocked it.
+Then he just had time to slip over the edge of the bed and crouch down
+on the floor when the step halted on the threshold of the room. The bed
+was thus between him and the open door. The window was at his back.
+
+He waited in the darkness. What struck him as peculiar about the steps
+was that there seemed no particular desire to move stealthily. There was
+no extreme caution. They moved along in rather a slipshod way and
+sounded like soft slippers or feet in stockings. There was something
+clumsy, irresponsible, almost reckless about the movement.
+
+For a second the steps paused upon the threshold, but only for a second.
+Almost immediately they came on into the room, and as they passed from
+the wood to the carpet Shorthouse noticed that they became wholly
+noiseless. He waited in suspense, not knowing whether the unseen walker
+was on the other side of the room or was close upon him. Presently he
+stood up and stretched out his left arm in front of him, groping,
+searching, feeling in a circle; and behind it he held the pistol, cocked
+and pointed, in his right hand. As he rose a bone cracked in his knee,
+his clothes rustled as if they were newspapers, and his breath seemed
+loud enough to be heard all over the room. But not a sound came to
+betray the position of the invisible intruder.
+
+Then, just when the tension was becoming unbearable, a noise relieved
+the gripping silence. It was wood knocking against wood, and it came
+from the farther end of the room. The steps had moved over to the
+fireplace. A sliding sound almost immediately followed it and then
+silence closed again over everything like a pall.
+
+For another five minutes Shorthouse waited, and then the suspense became
+too much. He could not stand that open door! The candles were close
+beside him and he struck a match and lit them, expecting in the sudden
+glare to receive at least a terrific blow. But nothing happened, and he
+saw at once that the room was entirely empty. Walking over with the
+pistol cocked he peered out into the darkness of the landing and then
+closed the door and turned the key. Then he searched the room--bed,
+cupboard, table, curtains, everything that could have concealed a man;
+but found no trace of the intruder. The owner of the footsteps had
+disappeared like a ghost into the shadows of the night. But for one fact
+he might have imagined that he had been dreaming: _the bag had
+vanished_!
+
+There was no more sleep for Shorthouse that night. His watch pointed to
+4 a.m. and there were still three hours before daylight. He sat down at
+the table and continued his sketches. With fixed determination he went
+on with his drawing and began a new outline of the man's head. There was
+something in the expression that continually evaded him. He had no
+success with it, and this time it seemed to him that it was the eyes
+that brought about his discomfiture. He held up his pencil before his
+face to measure the distance between the nose and the eyes, and to his
+amazement he saw that a change had come over the features. The eyes were
+no longer open. _The lids had closed!_
+
+For a second he stood in a sort of stupefied astonishment. A push would
+have toppled him over. Then he sprang to his feet and held a candle
+close up to the picture. The eye-lids quivered, the eye-lashes trembled.
+Then, right before his gaze, the eyes opened and looked straight into
+his own. Two holes were cut in the panel and this pair of eyes, human
+eyes, just fitted them.
+
+As by a curious effect of magic, the strong fear that had governed him
+ever since his entry into the house disappeared in a second. Anger
+rushed into his heart and his chilled blood rose suddenly to boiling
+point. Putting the candle down, he took two steps back into the room and
+then flung himself forward with all his strength against the painted
+panel. Instantly, and before the crash came, the eyes were withdrawn,
+and two black spaces showed where they had been. The old huntsman was
+eyeless. But the panel cracked and split inwards like a sheet of thin
+cardboard; and Shorthouse, pistol in hand, thrust an arm through the
+jagged aperture and, seizing a human leg, dragged out into the room--the
+Jew!
+
+Words rushed in such a torrent to his lips that they choked him. The old
+Hebrew, white as chalk, stood shaking before him, the bright pistol
+barrel opposite his eyes, when a volume of cold air rushed into the
+room, and with it a sound of hurried steps. Shorthouse felt his arm
+knocked up before he had time to turn, and the same second Garvey, who
+had somehow managed to burst open the window came between him and the
+trembling Marx. His lips were parted and his eyes rolled strangely in
+his distorted face.
+
+"Don't shoot him! Shoot in the air!" he shrieked. He seized the Jew by
+the shoulders.
+
+"You damned hound," he roared, hissing in his face. "So I've got you at
+last. That's where your vacuum is, is it? I know your vile hiding-place
+at last." He shook him like a dog. "I've been after him all night," he
+cried, turning to Shorthouse, "all night, I tell you, and I've got him
+at last."
+
+Garvey lifted his upper lip as he spoke and showed his teeth. They shone
+like the fangs of a wolf. The Jew evidently saw them too, for he gave a
+horrid yell and struggled furiously.
+
+Before the eyes of the secretary a mist seemed to rise. The hideous
+shadow again leaped into Garvey's face. He foresaw a dreadful battle,
+and covering the two men with his pistol he retreated slowly to the
+door. Whether they were both mad, or both criminal, he did not pause to
+inquire. The only thought present in his mind was that the sooner he
+made his escape the better.
+
+Garvey was still shaking the Jew when he reached the door and turned the
+key, but as he passed out on to the landing both men stopped their
+struggling and turned to face him. Garvey's face, bestial, loathsome,
+livid with anger; the Jew's white and grey with fear and horror;--both
+turned towards him and joined in a wild, horrible yell that woke the
+echoes of the night. The next second they were after him at full speed.
+
+Shorthouse slammed the door in their faces and was at the foot of the
+stairs, crouching in the shadow, before they were out upon the landing.
+They tore shrieking down the stairs and past him, into the hall; and,
+wholly unnoticed, Shorthouse whipped up the stairs again, crossed the
+bedroom and dropped from the balcony into the soft snow.
+
+As he ran down the drive he heard behind him in the house the yells of
+the maniacs; and when he reached home several hours later Mr. Sidebotham
+not only raised his salary but also told him to buy a new hat and
+overcoat, and send in the bill to him.
+
+
+
+
+SKELETON LAKE: AN EPISODE IN CAMP
+
+
+The utter loneliness of our moose-camp on Skeleton Lake had impressed us
+from the beginning--in the Quebec backwoods, five days by trail and
+canoe from civilisation--and perhaps the singular name contributed a
+little to the sensation of eeriness that made itself felt in the camp
+circle when once the sun was down and the late October mists began
+rising from the lake and winding their way in among the tree trunks.
+
+For, in these regions, all names of lakes and hills and islands have
+their origin in some actual event, taking either the name of a chief
+participant, such as Smith's Ridge, or claiming a place in the map by
+perpetuating some special feature of the journey or the scenery, such as
+Long Island, Deep Rapids, or Rainy Lake.
+
+All names thus have their meaning and are usually pretty recently
+acquired, while the majority are self-explanatory and suggest human and
+pioneer relations. Skeleton Lake, therefore, was a name full of
+suggestion, and though none of us knew the origin or the story of its
+birth, we all were conscious of a certain lugubrious atmosphere that
+haunted its shores and islands, and but for the evidences of recent
+moose tracks in its neighbourhood we should probably have pitched our
+tents elsewhere.
+
+For several hundred miles in any direction we knew of only one other
+party of whites. They had journeyed up on the train with us, getting in
+at North Bay, and hailing from Boston way. A common goal and object had
+served by way of introduction. But the acquaintance had made little
+progress. This noisy, aggressive Yankee did not suit our fancy much as a
+possible neighbour, and it was only a slight intimacy between his chief
+guide, Jake the Swede, and one of our men that kept the thing going at
+all. They went into camp on Beaver Creek, fifty miles and more to the
+west of us.
+
+But that was six weeks ago, and seemed as many months, for days and
+nights pass slowly in these solitudes and the scale of time changes
+wonderfully. Our men always seemed to know by instinct pretty well "whar
+them other fellows was movin'," but in the interval no one had come
+across their trails, or once so much as heard their rifle shots.
+
+Our little camp consisted of the professor, his wife, a splendid shot
+and keen woods-woman, and myself. We had a guide apiece, and hunted
+daily in pairs from before sunrise till dark.
+
+It was our last evening in the woods, and the professor was lying in my
+little wedge tent, discussing the dangers of hunting alone in couples in
+this way. The flap of the tent hung back and let in fragrant odours of
+cooking over an open wood fire; everywhere there were bustle and
+preparation, and one canoe already lay packed with moose horns, her nose
+pointing southwards.
+
+"If an accident happened to one of them," he was saying, "the survivor's
+story when he returned to camp would be entirely unsupported evidence,
+wouldn't it? Because, you see--"
+
+And he went on laying down the law after the manner of professors, until
+I became so bored that my attention began to wander to pictures and
+memories of the scenes we were just about to leave: Garden Lake, with
+its hundred islands; the rapids out of Round Pond; the countless vistas
+of forest, crimson and gold in the autumn sunshine; and the starlit
+nights we had spent watching in cold, cramped positions for the wary
+moose on lonely lakes among the hills. The hum of the professor's voice
+in time grew more soothing. A nod or a grunt was all the reply he looked
+for. Fortunately, he loathed interruptions. I think I could almost have
+gone to sleep under his very nose; perhaps I did sleep for a brief
+interval.
+
+Then it all came about so quickly, and the tragedy of it was so
+unexpected and painful, throwing our peaceful camp into momentary
+confusion, that now it all seems to have happened with the uncanny
+swiftness of a dream.
+
+First, there was the abrupt ceasing of the droning voice, and then the
+running of quick little steps over the pine needles, and the confusion
+of men's voices; and the next instant the professor's wife was at the
+tent door, hatless, her face white, her hunting bloomers bagging at the
+wrong places, a rifle in her hand, and her words running into one
+another anyhow.
+
+"Quick, Harry! It's Rushton. I was asleep and it woke me. Something's
+happened. You must deal with it!"
+
+In a second we were outside the tent with our rifles.
+
+"My God!" I heard the professor exclaim, as if he had first made the
+discovery. "It _is_ Rushton!"
+
+I saw the guides helping--dragging--a man out of a canoe. A brief space
+of deep silence followed in which I heard only the waves from the canoe
+washing up on the sand; and then, immediately after, came the voice of
+a man talking with amazing rapidity and with odd gaps between his words.
+It was Rushton telling his story, and the tones of his voice, now
+whispering, now almost shouting, mixed with sobs and solemn oaths and
+frequent appeals to the Deity, somehow or other struck the false note at
+the very start, and before any of us guessed or knew anything at all.
+Something moved secretly between his words, a shadow veiling the stars,
+destroying the peace of our little camp, and touching us all personally
+with an undefinable sense of horror and distrust.
+
+I can see that group to this day, with all the detail of a good
+photograph: standing half-way between the firelight and the darkness, a
+slight mist rising from the lake, the frosty stars, and our men, in
+silence that was all sympathy, dragging Rushton across the rocks towards
+the camp fire. Their moccasins crunched on the sand and slipped several
+times on the stones beneath the weight of the limp, exhausted body, and
+I can still see every inch of the pared cedar branch he had used for a
+paddle on that lonely and dreadful journey.
+
+But what struck me most, as it struck us all, was the limp exhaustion of
+his body compared to the strength of his utterance and the tearing rush
+of his words. A vigorous driving-power was there at work, forcing out
+the tale, red-hot and throbbing, full of discrepancies and the strangest
+contradictions; and the nature of this driving-power I first began to
+appreciate when they had lifted him into the circle of firelight and I
+saw his face, grey under the tan, terror in the eyes, tears too, hair
+and beard awry, and listened to the wild stream of words pouring forth
+without ceasing.
+
+I think we all understood then, but it was only after many years that
+anyone dared to confess what he thought.
+
+There was Matt Morris, my guide; Silver Fizz, whose real name was
+unknown, and who bore the title of his favourite drink; and huge Hank
+Milligan--all ears and kind intention; and there was Rushton, pouring
+out his ready-made tale, with ever-shifting eyes, turning from face to
+face, seeking confirmation of details none had witnessed but
+himself--and _one other_.
+
+Silver Fizz was the first to recover from the shock of the thing, and to
+realise, with the natural sense of chivalry common to most genuine
+back-woodsmen, that the man was at a terrible disadvantage. At any rate,
+he was the first to start putting the matter to rights.
+
+"Never mind telling it just now," he said in a gruff voice, but with
+real gentleness; "get a bite t'eat first and then let her go
+afterwards. Better have a horn of whisky too. It ain't all packed yet, I
+guess."
+
+"Couldn't eat or drink a thing," cried the other. "Good Lord, don't you
+see, man, I want to _talk_ to someone first? I want to get it out of me
+to someone who can answer--answer. I've had nothing but trees to talk
+with for three days, and I can't carry it alone any longer. Those
+cursed, silent trees--I've told it 'em a thousand times. Now, just see
+here, it was this way. When we started out from camp--"
+
+He looked fearfully about him, and we realised it was useless to stop
+him. The story was bound to come, and come it did.
+
+Now, the story itself was nothing out of the way; such tales are told by
+the dozen round any camp fire where men who have knocked about in the
+woods are in the circle. It was the way he told it that made our flesh
+creep. He was near the truth all along, but he was skimming it, and the
+skimming took off the cream that might have saved his soul.
+
+Of course, he smothered it in words--odd words, too--melodramatic,
+poetic, out-of-the-way words that lie just on the edge of frenzy. Of
+course, too, he kept asking us each in turn, scanning our faces with
+those restless, frightened eyes of his, "What would _you_ have done?"
+"What else could I do?" and "Was that _my_ fault?" But that was nothing,
+for he was no milk-and-water fellow who dealt in hints and suggestions;
+he told his story boldly, forcing his conclusions upon us as if we had
+been so many wax cylinders of a phonograph that would repeat accurately
+what had been told us, and these questions I have mentioned he used to
+emphasise any special point that he seemed to think required such
+emphasis.
+
+The fact was, however, the picture of what had actually happened was so
+vivid still in his own mind that it reached ours by a process of
+telepathy which he could not control or prevent. All through his
+true-false words this picture stood forth in fearful detail against the
+shadows behind him. He could not veil, much less obliterate, it. We
+knew; and, I always thought, _he knew that we knew_.
+
+The story itself, as I have said, was sufficiently ordinary. Jake and
+himself, in a nine-foot canoe, had upset in the middle of a lake, and
+had held hands across the upturned craft for several hours, eventually
+cutting holes in her ribs to stick their arms through and grasp hands
+lest the numbness of the cold water should overcome them. They were
+miles from shore, and the wind was drifting them down upon a little
+island. But when they got within a few hundred yards of the island,
+they realised to their horror that they would after all drift past it.
+
+It was then the quarrel began. Jake was for leaving the canoe and
+swimming. Rushton believed in waiting till they actually had passed the
+island and were sheltered from the wind. Then they could make the island
+easily by swimming, canoe and all. But Jake refused to give in, and
+after a short struggle--Rushton admitted there was a struggle--got free
+from the canoe--and disappeared _without a single cry_.
+
+Rushton held on and proved the correctness of his theory, and finally
+made the island, canoe and all, after being in the water over five
+hours. He described to us how he crawled up on to the shore, and fainted
+at once, with his feet lying half in the water; how lost and terrified
+he felt upon regaining consciousness in the dark; how the canoe had
+drifted away and his extraordinary luck in finding it caught again at
+the end of the island by a projecting cedar branch. He told us that the
+little axe--another bit of real luck--had caught in the thwart when the
+canoe turned over, and how the little bottle in his pocket holding the
+emergency matches was whole and dry. He made a blazing fire and searched
+the island from end to end, calling upon Jake in the darkness, but
+getting no answer; till, finally, so many half-drowned men seemed to
+come crawling out of the water on to the rocks, and vanish among the
+shadows when he came up with them, that he lost his nerve completely and
+returned to lie down by the fire till the daylight came.
+
+He then cut a bough to replace the lost paddles, and after one more
+useless search for his lost companion, he got into the canoe, fearing
+every moment he would upset again, and crossed over to the mainland. He
+knew roughly the position of our camping place, and after paddling day
+and night, and making many weary portages, without food or covering, he
+reached us two days later.
+
+This, more or less, was the story, and we, knowing whereof he spoke,
+knew that every word was literally true, and at the same time went to
+the building up of a hideous and prodigious lie.
+
+Once the recital was over, he collapsed, and Silver Fizz, after a
+general expression of sympathy from the rest of us, came again to the
+rescue.
+
+"But now, Mister, you jest _got_ to eat and drink whether you've a mind
+to, or no."
+
+And Matt Morris, cook that night, soon had the fried trout and bacon,
+and the wheat cakes and hot coffee passing round a rather silent and
+oppressed circle. So we ate round the fire, ravenously, as we had eaten
+every night for the past six weeks, but with this difference: that
+there was one among us who was more than ravenous--and he gorged.
+
+In spite of all our devices he somehow kept himself the centre of
+observation. When his tin mug was empty, Morris instantly passed the
+tea-pail; when he began to mop up the bacon grease with the dough on his
+fork, Hank reached out for the frying pan; and the can of steaming
+boiled potatoes was always by his side. And there was another difference
+as well: he was sick, terribly sick before the meal was over, and this
+sudden nausea after food was more eloquent than words of what the man
+had passed through on his dreadful, foodless, ghost-haunted journey of
+forty miles to our camp. In the darkness he thought he would go crazy,
+he said. There were voices in the trees, and figures were always lifting
+themselves out of the water, or from behind boulders, to look at him and
+make awful signs. Jake constantly peered at him through the underbrush,
+and everywhere the shadows were moving, with eyes, footsteps, and
+following shapes.
+
+We tried hard to talk of other things, but it was no use, for he was
+bursting with the rehearsal of his story and refused to allow himself
+the chances we were so willing and anxious to grant him. After a good
+night's rest he might have had more self-control and better judgment,
+and would probably have acted differently. But, as it was, we found it
+impossible to help him.
+
+Once the pipes were lit, and the dishes cleared away, it was useless to
+pretend any longer. The sparks from the burning logs zigzagged upwards
+into a sky brilliant with stars. It was all wonderfully still and
+peaceful, and the forest odours floated to us on the sharp autumn air.
+The cedar fire smelt sweet and we could just hear the gentle wash of
+tiny waves along the shore. All was calm, beautiful, and remote from the
+world of men and passion. It was, indeed, a night to touch the soul, and
+yet, I think, none of us heeded these things. A bull-moose might almost
+have thrust his great head over our shoulders and have escaped
+unnoticed. The death of Jake the Swede, with its sinister setting, was
+the real presence that held the centre of the stage and compelled
+attention.
+
+"You won't p'raps care to come along, Mister," said Morris, by way of a
+beginning; "but I guess I'll go with one of the boys here and have a
+hunt for it."
+
+"Sure," said Hank. "Jake an' I done some biggish trips together in the
+old days, and I'll do that much for'm."
+
+"It's deep water, they tell me, round them islands," added Silver Fizz;
+"but we'll find it, sure pop,--if it's thar."
+
+They all spoke of the body as "it."
+
+There was a minute or two of heavy silence, and then Rushton again burst
+out with his story in almost the identical words he had used before. It
+was almost as if he had learned it by heart. He wholly failed to
+appreciate the efforts of the others to let him off.
+
+Silver Fizz rushed in, hoping to stop him, Morris and Hank closely
+following his lead.
+
+"I once knew another travellin' partner of his," he began quickly; "used
+to live down Moosejaw Rapids way--"
+
+"Is that so?" said Hank.
+
+"Kind o' useful sort er feller," chimed in Morris.
+
+All the idea the men had was to stop the tongue wagging before the
+discrepancies became so glaring that we should be forced to take notice
+of them, and ask questions. But, just as well try to stop an angry
+bull-moose on the run, or prevent Beaver Creek freezing in mid-winter by
+throwing in pebbles near the shore. Out it came! And, though the
+discrepancy this time was insignificant, it somehow brought us all in a
+second face to face with the inevitable and dreaded climax.
+
+"And so I tramped all over that little bit of an island, hoping he
+might somehow have gotten in without my knowing it, and always thinking
+I _heard that awful last cry of his_ in the darkness--and then the night
+dropped down impenetrably, like a damn thick blanket out of the sky,
+and--"
+
+All eyes fell away from his face. Hank poked up the logs with his boot,
+and Morris seized an ember in his bare fingers to light his pipe,
+although it was already emitting clouds of smoke. But the professor
+caught the ball flying.
+
+"I thought you said he sank without a cry," he remarked quietly, looking
+straight up into the frightened face opposite, and then riddling
+mercilessly the confused explanation that followed.
+
+The cumulative effect of all these forces, hitherto so rigorously
+repressed, now made itself felt, and the circle spontaneously broke up,
+everybody moving at once by a common instinct. The professor's wife left
+the party abruptly, with excuses about an early start next morning. She
+first shook hands with Rushton, mumbling something about his comfort in
+the night.
+
+The question of his comfort, however, devolved by force of circumstances
+upon myself, and he shared my tent. Just before wrapping up in my double
+blankets--for the night was bitterly cold--he turned and began to
+explain that he had a habit of talking in his sleep and hoped I would
+wake him if he disturbed me by doing so.
+
+Well, he did talk in his sleep--and it disturbed me very much indeed.
+The anger and violence of his words remain with me to this day, and it
+was clear in a minute that he was living over again some portion of the
+scene upon the lake. I listened, horror-struck, for a moment or two, and
+then understood that I was face to face with one of two alternatives: I
+must continue an unwilling eavesdropper, or I must waken him. The former
+was impossible for me, yet I shrank from the latter with the greatest
+repugnance; and in my dilemma I saw the only way out of the difficulty
+and at once accepted it.
+
+Cold though it was, I crawled stealthily out of my warm sleeping-bag and
+left the tent, intending to keep the old fire alight under the stars and
+spend the remaining hours till daylight in the open.
+
+As soon as I was out I noticed at once another figure moving silently
+along the shore. It was Hank Milligan, and it was plain enough what he
+was doing: he was examining the holes that had been cut in the upper
+ribs of the canoe. He looked half ashamed when I came up with him, and
+mumbled something about not being able to sleep for the cold. But,
+there, standing together beside the over-turned canoe, we both saw that
+the holes were far too small for a man's hand and arm and could not
+possibly have been cut by two men hanging on for their lives in deep
+water. Those holes had been made afterwards.
+
+Hank said nothing to me and I said nothing to Hank, and presently he
+moved off to collect logs for the fire, which needed replenishing, for
+it was a piercingly cold night and there were many degrees of frost.
+
+Three days later Hank and Silver Fizz followed with stumbling footsteps
+the old Indian trail that leads from Beaver Creek to the southwards. A
+hammock was slung between them, and it weighed heavily. Yet neither of
+the men complained; and, indeed, speech between them was almost nothing.
+Their thoughts, however, were exceedingly busy, and the terrible secret
+of the woods which formed their burden weighed far more heavily than the
+uncouth, shifting mass that lay in the swinging hammock and tugged so
+severely at their shoulders.
+
+They had found "it" in four feet of water not more than a couple of
+yards from the lee shore of the island. And in the back of the head was
+a long, terrible wound which no man could possibly have inflicted upon
+himself.
+
+
+
+_Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+John Silence
+
+by Algernon Blackwood
+
+
+"Not since the days of Poe have we read anything in his peculiar genre
+fit to be compared with this remarkable book. . . . He brings to his work
+an extraordinary knowledge of strange and unusual forms of
+spiritualistic phenomena, and steeps his pages in an atmosphere of real
+terror and expectancy."--_Observer_.
+
+"When one says that Mr. Blackwood's work approaches genius, the phrase
+is used in no light connection. This very remarkable book is a
+considerable and lasting addition to the literature of our
+time."--_Morning Post_.
+
+"These are the most haunting and original ghost stories since 'Uncle
+Silas' appeared."--_Morning Leader_.
+
+"In the field which he has chosen, Mr. Blackwood stands without rival
+among contemporary writers."--_Manchester Guardian_.
+
+"As original, as powerful, and as artistically written as that little
+masterpiece of Lytton's, 'The Haunters and the Haunted.' He bears
+favourable comparison with Le Fanu. . . . A volume which has an
+extraordinary power of fascination."--_Birmingham Daily Post_.
+
+"The story is absolutely arresting in its imaginative power."--_Daily
+Telegraph_.
+
+
+UNIFORM EDITION
+
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+
+
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+
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+
+
+
+
+The Lost Valley
+
+by Algernon Blackwood
+
+
+"In one of the stories, 'The Wendigo,' the author gives us, perhaps, one
+of the most successful excursions into the grimly weird; quietly but
+surely he makes his reader come under the influence of the eerie, until
+the pages are half-reluctantly turned under the spell of a fearful
+fascination. Mr. Blackwood writes like a real artist."--_Daily
+Telegraph_.
+
+"The book of a remarkably gifted writer."--_Daily News_.
+
+"The stories are unforgettable. Through them all, too, runs the charm of
+an accomplished style. . . . Mr. Blackwood has indeed done well."--_Pall
+Mall Gazette_.
+
+"Whether concerned with beauty or terror, fact or fancy, there is an
+individuality in Mr. Blackwood's work which cannot be ignored, and there
+is also power which proceeds, we think, not so much from the fertility
+of a comprehensive imagination, but from the amazing conviction of the
+author's power of expression, and a literary quality rarely met with in
+contemporary stories of mystery and imagination."--_Globe_.
+
+"In his method of touching the well-springs of fear, of pity, and of
+horror, Mr. Blackwood often exhibits powers which can only properly be
+called masterly. In its way his work bids fair to become classical . . .
+an art superior to that of Bulwer-Lytton, at least as fine as Le Fanu's,
+and hardly, if at all, inferior to that exhibited by the supreme living
+masters of the short story, Mr. Kipling and Mr. James."--_Birmingham
+Daily Post_.
+
+
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+
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+
+
+EVELEIGH NASH COMPANY LIMITED
+
+36 King Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
+
+
+
+
+The Listener
+
+by Algernon Blackwood
+
+
+"These stories are literature . . . good stories, well imagined, carefully
+modelled, properly proportioned. . . . 'The Insanity of Jones' is perhaps
+the most remarkable _tour de force_ in this remarkable book. . . . If Mr.
+Blackwood keeps at his present level one or two very celebrated authors
+will have to look to their laurels."--_Daily Chronicle_.
+
+"Even Edgar Allan Poe never suggested more skilfully an atmosphere of
+horror than does Mr. Blackwood in his titular story, or again in his
+description of 'The Willows.'"--F.G. BETTANY in the _Sunday Times_.
+
+"Saying that Mr. Blackwood's latest stories reveal strong dramatic
+instinct is a dull way of expressing the series of thrills which their
+perusal causes. Without doubt Mr. Blackwood is designed to fill a high
+place as an author who is able to arouse the attention of his reader on
+the first page, and to hold it until the last has been turned. . . .
+A distinctive genius."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.
+
+"Full of imagination, and well told."--_Daily News_.
+
+"Mr. Blackwood is clearly a master of the art of the genuine sensation
+story."--_Liverpool Courier_.
+
+
+UNIFORM EDITION
+
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+
+
+EVELEIGH NASH COMPANY LIMITED
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories
+by Algernon Blackwood
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14471 ***