THE MONSTER LET LOOSE.
Neither man spoke. Phelan's amazement had bereft him of words. He knew
the place thoroughly. He had known and feared it from his earliest
years. To left and right were perpendicular cliffs. In front stretched
the evil Black Rock. From where they stood descended the pathway to
the table rock below. On the broken ground around them was nothing
taller than dwarf bushes, which could not conceal a goat and to reach
which the sure-footedness of a goat would have been needed. In his
youth Phelan had been as bold as any lad in the village. But neither
he nor any other lad of the village had ever dared to tempt death on
those steep, friable, rotten slopes.
Beyond all doubt he had seen the figure of a man disappear over this
cliff a few moments ago. Where was he--it--now? The Black Rock lay
bare, naked, at their feet. A man's head could not be hidden there.
Whither had that figure gone? It could not have reached the sea in the
time. The monster had not yet broken loose, and the man could not have
been swept into the water. No shattered corpse lay on the greasy rock
beneath. A man cannot fly. What had become of this man? Or had they
seen a ghost?
He turned to O'Brien and noticed that the latter looked pale and
scared.
"You saw him?" he shouted above the storm. "You saw him as plain as
daylight?"
"Yes."
"What do you make of it?"
"I don't know."
Once more Phelan looked carefully around him. Absolutely no trace of
man was to be seen. Except for their presence, the place might have
been alone since the making of the world. He again turned to O'Brien.
"Heaven be between us and all harm, but it must have been a ghost!"
"He could not have got to the Hole in the time."
"Not if he had wings."
"Did you ever see Fahey? Of course you did. You told me about him."
"Merciful Lord, it was Fahey!"
The two men looked mutely into each other's faces. Anything like a
regular conversation was now impossible owing to the force and noise
of the storm.
O'Brien had had a theory. The events of the last two minutes had
shattered his theory to atoms. The two policemen who had seen Fahey
jump into the Hole had not been mistaken. It was no ghost they saw.
They had tracked their man as surely as they had ever tracked any one
on whom they laid hands. He, being innocent, was suspected of a crime;
or, rather, he had innocently, in ignorance, committed a criminal act,
and being pursued and hard pressed, had flung himself headlong into
that awful pit. Within a couple of weeks or so, O'Hanlon had seen that
same figure in this place, and now he (O'Brien) had seen such a
figure, and Phelan had identified it. This was monstrous. What came of
all his inquiries respecting the Whalers Mouth and the accessibility
of the cave? Nothing--absolutely nothing. His theory was childish. He
was glad he had spoken of it to no man.
What was to be his theory now?
Phelan was stupefied, and stood staring at the cliffs and the rock as
if he expected them to undergo some stupendous change, display some
more incomprehensible marvel. O'Brien stood back a few paces from the
brink, and kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, which had lowered and
come nearer.
Suddenly Phelan stepped back to O'Brien, and, putting his mouth close
to the ear of the other, shouted--
"She blows!"
O'Brien dropped his eyes to the Black Rock.
From the Hole a thin wreath of sea-smoke rose, and, bent sharply by
the gale, almost touched the cliff. A booming, hollow sound, like the
flapping of distant thunder among hills, weighed on the air, and then
came a shrill, loud hiss, as of falling water, and again the wind was
drenched in sea-smoke.
Phelan stretched out his hands towards the Hole, and shouted--
"Look!"
The word was scarcely uttered when the ground shook, and from that
Hole a solid column of water sprang aloft with a shriek that drowned
the raging of the storm. It rose fifty feet into the air, turned
inward towards the cliff, and then toppled and fell with a mighty
crash that again made the gigantic bases of the immemorial cliffs
tremble to their lowest depths.
The monster had broken loose!
O'Brien started back. He had from childhood heard of the awful Puffing
Hole, but had never seen it in action before. His first feeling was
that this could be no display of ordinary power, but that the cliffs
and rocks were riven by some Titanic force never exercised before. He
felt certain that when again he looked down he should see the Black
Rock shattered, disintegrated, annihilated. What could withstand such
a blow?
The boatman drew him towards the edge of the cliff once more. He was
scarcely in position when the huge shaft of water sprang once more
into the air, this time to twice its former height. He was appalled,
and again sprang back. The gale caught the capital of the column and
lifted it bodily, dashing it against the cliff. O'Brien was covered
from head to foot with water.
The two men shifted their position, so as to get out of the reach of
the water, and then stood mutely looking at the terrible phenomenon.
When O'Brien's alarm subsided, and he knew by the conduct of his
companion that there was no occasion for fear, he stood fascinated by
the stupendous spectacle. He had heard this described hundreds of
times, but his imagination had not had space for grandeur such as
this. The Hole did not spout at every wave, but took breathing space
like a living thing. Now he understood why the opening of the cave was
called the Whale's Mouth. Now he understood why the people said "she
spouts" when the Puffing Hole flung its hundreds of tons of water a
hundred feet into the air. It was a daring fancy which saw in the
strange freak of nature a colossal representation of the spouting of
the whale. The Black Rock was the head, the cave the jaws, the shaft
in the rock the blow-hole of a whale multiplied a thousand times.
And he, presumptuous fool that he was, had imagined a boat might enter
that cave and come out uninjured--that a man might throw himself into
that awful funnel and survive!
In half an hour O'Brien and Phelan left the edge of the cliff and
turned their faces towards the village. Notwithstanding the oilskins,
both were wet through, for the spray and fine mist from the sea
penetrated at the neck, the wrists, and under the buttons in front.
They kept more inland on their way back. Phelan was the first to speak
of the mysterious figure they had seen. He had no difficulty in the
matter. They had seen the ghost of Fahey, who had committed suicide
there ten or eleven years ago. Nothing could be simpler or more
natural than this explanation. It was a horribly wicked thing to
commit suicide, but to throw one's self into the Puffing Hole was a
double crime; for, in addition to making away with life, it was
defying Providence--it was courting the most awful death that could be
sought by man. The supernatural appearance that day was to be a
warning to O'Brien, who had displayed an unwise curiosity as to the
Puffing Hole and the Whale's Nose. From the nature of O'Brien's
inquiries, it was, notwithstanding his denials, almost certain that he
had formed a design of going in a boat up the cavern. The spirit of
the dead man had been sent to show him the penalty of any such impious
risking of life, and to remind him of the fate he would surely
encounter if he dared to do anything so rash.