"There are a lot of tumble-down outbuildings there where they used to
keep the chickens he bought, and one in particular--I don't know if
you noticed it--a sort of lean-to near the open wagon shed, painted
green. I don't know what it was built for, but it had a door and a
square window-hole, high up, about the height of a man's head. I
don't suppose the whole floor space inside would be more than about
eight foot square, about the size of a calf-pen, and I shouldn't
wonder if that was what it was. I'd walked over to it because I
wanted to get my pipe started, out of the breeze. The door was shut,
and I'm certain there wasn't anything moving in there, or I'd have
heard it.
"I'd struck a match, and was just bending over to draw on my pipe
when something shot past me. It seemed to come out of the uncleared
patch of woods back of the sheds. I didn't get more than a half
glimpse of it, and I can't even tell you what it looked like, except
that it was biggish, and it seemed to shamble on all fours, and it
panted, the way an animal does that's been running, and it _smelt_
like an animal too--I seemed to get a whiff of it as it went past.
It came by me so close I could almost have touched it, and flung
itself straight at that window-hole and slithered through, and I
could hear the thud of its body on the inside.
"I'm a short man. That window-hole was well above the level of my
head. My first thought was to pull myself up and look through, and
then--well, you can put it down to what you like, but the thing had
given me such a queer turn when it shot past, like cold water down my
spine, and I believe if I could have touched that window I wouldn't
have had the physical strength to pull myself up and look through.
Instead I backed away and just stood there, staring. The door was
tight shut. It had all happened in such a flash that I began to
wonder, then, if I'd imagined the whole thing. I might have stood
there for a couple of minutes, though it seemed to me longer, and
then suddenly the door was flung wide open and Aaron himself--or as I
know now, Jakey--walked out.
"The door opened outward, and I could see straight past into the
shed. There was a heap of broken harness and some rags lying in one
corner, and except for that the place was as bare as my hand.
"I daresay I must have looked queer--I know I felt it--for Menning
gave me a pretty surly look. He asked me what I wanted, and I told
him I'd stopped for the chickens. He said they weren't ready, that
he'd bring them over, but just at that minute his mother came out
from the house with them in her hand, and I tell you I was glad
enough to grab those chickens and drive off. I didn't want to ask
questions or to stop near the place."
"This thing--what did you think it looked like?"
"I can't even tell you. It--it didn't look like anything."
"But it ran?"
"Yes, it ran. It's no good trying to tell you what my impression
was, any more than I have done."
"Do you suppose Menning kept something shut up there?"
"If he did, where was it when he opened the door? I tell you the
shed was empty."
"There was no trapdoor?"
"I went back to see. I didn't just give it up, either. I went back
a few days later, one time when Menning had passed our house and I
knew he'd be away on his rounds some time. I saw the old woman. She
was surly in a way, but friendly to me. You see, I'd tended her
before when Menning had been beating her up--oh, yes, he'd done that
more than once to my knowledge. The Nevills knew it, but there was
no good interfering; she'd deny it, and no one dared tackle Menning.
But she had to come to me, once, and though she put up some story, I
could tell what had happened. Well, I chatted with her there, and
just to see what she'd say I asked her if they didn't keep some sort
of a dog on the place. She said no, that they'd had a dog and her
son shot it because it howled at night. After a while I left her
settled there in the kitchen and before I left I took my chance to go
over every hole and corner out of doors. Except for the cow and a
couple of pigs there wasn't the sign of any animal round the place
bigger than a cat. And there was no opening in that shed except the
window and the door Menning came out by.
"So now you know the whole thing--all Mary Lessing claimed I was
keeping back from you--and I imagine you're about as wise as I am,
and that isn't much."
"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" I asked.
"What could I do? If I went telling that around anyone would have a
right to say I was crazy and that I'd imagined the whole thing. You
might say--and I've tried to think myself--that what I heard was just
something running in the bushes and what I saw was an old hen
fluttering in at the window. And maybe it was. And I've known men
who've been just as startled, and have told circumstantial tales,
over nothing more."
"You could have told it at its face value."
"No," said Lennox, "I couldn't. My mind doesn't work that way. I've
got to weigh things. And I've got to exhaust every possible
reasonable explanation, including my own physical state at the time,
before I'll admit that a thing is so when I know it can't be so. If
I've kept this to myself it's because I wanted to find some sort of
explanation in my own mind first."
He faced me, stolid and obstinate. Even in that moment I admired his
self-possession, his dogged, common sense determination not to be
drawn into admission of the existence of any thing that, as Lessing
said, he couldn't stick a pin into and label. And I knew, too, that
it had cost him something to tell me that story.
"Well," I said, "that's only one more to the list of things we don't
seem able to clear up. There's one point; that whatever the
explanation may be, it all seems to centre, in the end, round Menning
himself."
Lennox rose and went to his desk. "It's what I've always said," he
threw back over his shoulder. "Get Menning, and you get the root of
all this mystery."
I sat pondering his story. It was not long before my ears caught the
sound of a motor cycle along the road, and a few minutes after
Herrick appeared. He looked as if he had ridden far and fast; his
clothes were covered with dust and there were grimy circles round his
eyes.
"No, I don't want to eat," he said. "I got a sandwich coming along.
Just let me get this dirt off, that's all."
He went through to the kitchen, and we could hear him splashing at
the sink. When he came back, still vigorously towelling his face,
Lennox had already mixed him a drink at the sideboard.
"Well," Herrick said, settling himself in the chair Lennox had
vacated, "let's begin at the beginning. When I left this morning,
Austin, I couldn't tell you where I was going, because I didn't know
myself. I had to pick up my information on the way. I was on the
track of something which, it seems to me, none of us has so far taken
into account, and that is, Jakey Menning's early life."
"He was born right in this county," said Lennox.
"He was not. That's where you make your mistake. He was between
eight and nine years old when he first came here. His mother, when
we first hear of her, was employed with a travelling show, owned by a
German Jew called Goldstein, a sort of fourth rate circus that used
to do one-night stands in the small towns and villages. She cooked
for the men and looked after the wardrobe. While she was working
with them Jakey was born. No one seems to have known just who his
father was. The mother passed as a kind of half-wit. She was
cunning under an appearance of heavy stupidity, spoke a poor English,
was easily teased and enraged, and seems to have been treated as the
butt of the company. They wintered usually in Pottsville, where the
proprietor's brother kept a saloon. The proprietor's wife took
rather a fancy to Jakey, and later on, when Jakey's mother, during
the slack season, took a job as cook in a cheap eating-joint there,
she simply abandoned the baby to the circus people. While she was
employed there she met Menning, married him, and doesn't seem to have
troubled about Jakey for several years. Probably she never told
Menning of his existence.
"They settled in the country, where Aaron was born, and a few years
after, for reasons unknown, Menning deserted her. Then, for the
first time, she seems to have remembered Jakey, now growing to an age
when he might begin to make himself useful about the farm. She set
about claiming him. The circus people, from what I could hear, made
some opposition. Jakey was being trained as an acrobat and showed
some promise, though he was a difficult child to manage. Moreover,
they had kept him all this time and expected some return. Times,
however, were slack, they probably foresaw trouble with the school
inspectors also, and in the end they let the boy go.
"He worked about the farm, off and on, for some eight or ten years,
and got himself thoroughly disliked, as you know, by all the
Mennings' neighbours. The criminal streak in him was already
apparent, though in those days it only took the form of spitefulness
and mental deficiency. He was idle and vagrant and finally, at about
seventeen years old, took himself off one fine day and went back to
the travelling show, which he managed to trace up through the
Pottsville saloon-keeper. They took him back as an extra hand, to
help with the wagons. He was not good enough for a performer, his
training being interrupted, but the proprietor about that time had
the idea of running one or two freak side-shows, and they tried Jakey
out as the hoary old fake of 'wild man.'"
Herrick paused a moment to light a fresh cigarette, and in that
instant I saw Lennox's eye turn to me with something very like relief.
"It seems," Herrick went on, "that he was quite a successful
attraction and I can certainly believe it. There was naturally
something apish and uncouth about him, and very little make-up would
have turned the trick most naturalistically. He stayed with the show
nearly two years, doing odd jobs by day and playing his wild-man
stunt at the performances. And then some sort of queer thing must
have happened.
"I couldn't get the whole truth of it from the Pottsville brother,
who told me most of the story. Either he didn't know or he was
unwilling to tell, but the gist of it is that there was some row and
Jakey got suddenly fired. From what the Pottsville brother
'guessed,' Jakey played his rôle too realistically, and the
proprietor refused then and there to keep him another day. He had a
little money in his pockets, he turned up in Pottsville, where he
hung about for two or three days, and then made his way back to the
farm.
"I would give a great deal to have ten minutes with Goldstein
himself, and know exactly what did happen and why Jakey was fired. I
gathered that it was something pretty unpleasant. But Goldstein is
somewhere out in Ohio, and try as I would, I could get nothing more
from the brother than what I have told you. I think myself there was
something hushed up at the time, and that he is afraid even now of
its coming out. But I got enough I think to throw some interesting
light on what has happened since."
"Did you get any idea," Lennox asked, "of Jakey's make-up when he was
with these people?"
"No. Why?"
"Tell him your story, Lennox," I said.
He repeated briefly what he had already told me. Herrick listened,
his face intent.
"So that was----" He pulled himself up short. "Well, it isn't
difficult to put two and two together. The obvious explanation is
that Jakey has fallen back on his old circus stunt as a means of
terrorizing the neighbourhood. It wouldn't be difficult. No one
here, from what I can make out--possibly not even his own
family--knew how he spent those two years while he was away. There
is a form of mania which takes just that expression, and it is
possible that in Jakey's case it began out of sheer maliciousness,
and developed later into something a great deal worse--a fixed mania
which, with the rousing of the homicidal instinct, turned him
actually, at moments, into the wild beast he pretended to be."
"You think it was Menning--it was--well, what I saw--that attacked
Lessing?"
"I am certain of it. Go over the thing carefully, Lennox. There was
no stunt outside the possibility of a man with unusual physical
strength and ability, who had had acrobatic training in boyhood. And
remember that a maniac can perform feats that in his sane moments
might be outside his powers. We are not dealing with a normal
person. That's the one thing in this whole business we've got to
remember." He rose. "Austin, will you come over to the bungalow
with me? I'd like to see Lessing tonight."
I looked at my watch. "Ten o'clock. I told them I'd be over. We'll
take the cycle. It'll carry two of us."
He had left the motor cycle outside the porch. As we wheeled it out
to the roadway I said: "You think that is the explanation of the
whole thing?"
Herrick gave me a quick look.
"I said it was the obvious explanation. It is. But there's more
mixed up with it than that. And it's the other side of it that we
shall never get to the truth of until we get hold of Menning himself."
I thought of Lennox's description of what he had seen, in that
fleeting glimpse, and in spite of myself a shudder went over me.
"Do you mean that mania can actually transform a human being to that
degree?"
"Haven't you see enough, Austin, in your own experience, to answer
that question?"
I was silent. Every doctor, I imagine, has had experiences which he
is glad enough to put out of his mind, and though my own were limited
so far, I had heard enough tales of abnormality, at second hand, to
know that there was truth in Herrick's words.
I took my seat on the back of the motor cycle, and in a few minutes
we had reached the rise of hill. Turning the corner, we could see
the bungalow through the trees. There was still a light burning. As
we approached, the deep melancholy howl of the dog broke on our ears.
Evidently Lessing had not yet let him out.
We left the cycle against a tree and went up to the porch. The door
stood wide open, the light streaming through it from the lamp on the
table inside. Of Lessing or his sister there was no sign. Except
for the steady howling of the dog in the shed, the place was
absolutely silent.
We went through the empty rooms, came out again on the porch. A
chair was drawn up near the doorway, with a book dropped in it
face-downward, as though someone had risen in haste. That, and the
lamp left flaring on the table, gave me for the first time a definite
thrill of uneasiness.
Herrick went back and lowered the flame. "They can't have gone far,"
he said. "They wouldn't have left the light that way. Let's try the
studio."
We crossed the little space of ground beside the house. The studio
was dark; the door was locked and the key on the outside. As we
passed the tool-shed there was a tumult within. The dog, hearing our
footsteps, flung himself against the door in a frenzy of eagerness,
whining, scratching, tearing at the wood with his nails. There was
something in the deep, agonized, almost human anxiety in his voice,
raised, not in yelps, but in steady entreaty, that sent a queer
thrill down by spine. Herrick felt it too. He stopped short.
"What's _got_ that dog?"
"Lessing shut him in this evening. It was after----"
I paused. All at once there came back to my mind the dog's behaviour
that afternoon, when Lessing dragged him back from the saw-mill,
bristling and rebellious--Lessing's own face when he joked about the
rat. It was near the identical spot where we had missed the dog
before, when he broke away from us on our way down, just before we
saw Menning's mother. Menning's mother ... and Menning himself had
been seen in the neighbourhood the night before. In a flash I saw
the whole thing clearly--Freeman's action, the ghost that haunted the
milldam, Rebecca's rifled cream-pans and the old woman with her
basket of chips. What a fool I had been!
In a moment I had drawn the bolt and the setter was free. He barely
stopped to notice us; with a flash of his white chest and a
wide-flung yelp of relief he was off across the road and into the
woods.
I caught Herrick's arm. "Lessing is at the saw-mill. Come on--I'll
tell you later!"
"The saw-mill?"
I saw his hand slip down to his pocket as we ran. The same thought
was in both our minds. We broke through the underbrush on the far
side of the road, stumbled by chance on the footpath and were racing
along it, shoulder to shoulder, while the setter's barking still
echoed in our ears.
For a while his voice guided us. Then, abruptly, he was silent. We
paused on the edge of the clearing to take breath. All was
still--that closed-in stillness of the woods at night, when all
daytime life hushed. Before us loomed the old mill, its broken roof
and ruined timbers black against the sky. For a moment there was no
sound but the pounding of the blood in our ears, the dry rustle of a
dead bush as Herrick leaned forward, listening.
Then suddenly, from somewhere in the recesses of the old building
itself, there broke on that tense stillness another sound--more
horrible to me than anything else--the hoarse choking breaths and
muffled worrying of a dog at grips with his enemy. It came, not from
the main floor of the mill, but from the basement where the
water-wheel hung. There was a doorway on the near side of the mill,
formerly used for carting away the sawdust, but it had been nailed
up, and remembering this I called to Herrick as I ran directly for
the steep slope on the side by the sluice. Here there was open space
to squeeze through, and with Herrick close on my heels I trampled a
way through the breast-high weeds and bushes round the corner of the
building and gained an entrance.
Within all was pitch black. The water was shut off, but a little
trickle still flowed through, dripping from the slimy motionless bulk
of the great wheel above us. The air was warm, heavy with the smell
of rotting sawdust and of something else, fetid and nauseous. The
worrying had ceased; we could hear the broken rapid breathing of two
bodies, there, unseen, somewhere within a few feet of us in the
darkness. I made a step forward, but Herrick clutched my arm, and as
he did so the fight broke out again with renewed fury, somewhere it
seemed up in the far corner, among the drifted sawdust. I could
recognize the setter's deep-throated snarls, the snap of teeth
seeking a grip, and with it was another voice, deeper and more
guttural--something wholly strange and horrible--something that
snarled and panted and coughed in choking gasps. The darkness moved;
there came the breath of a warm animal body, the straining of a heavy
weight flung against resisting wood, and then the nailed planks gave
way, the sudden square of the doorway was obscured by a tumbling,
heaving mass and the next instant we were alone--alone in the
darkness with silence round us and that fetid unforgettable smell on
the air.
It was the same smell that Mary had complained of that evening,
wafted to us as we sat on the porch--the smell, I knew now, that I
had first noticed on the day I passed the Mennings' place in the
early summer.
"Phew!" said Herrick.
He struck a match, shielding the flame with his hands. The little
flicker threw out shadows high on the piled sawdust and gray ruined
walls. We could make out the huge mass of the wheel, the shafts that
ran to the story above, the great beams supporting the broken
flooring over our heads. The match spluttered and went out, but in
that instant it had shown us what we sought, a dark motionless figure
lying huddled in the far corner, where the sawdust sloped up in a
shadowy drift under the rafters.
Herrick reached it first, his feet sinking deep at every step as he
scrambled up. I heard him draw his breath in sharply as I struck
another match, and by its gleam saw Lessing, one arm doubled under
him and the clothes nearly torn from his body, lying unconscious in a
saturated pool of blood.
Of Mary there was no sign.