costume of shirt and trousers only. He had not dressed, and during
dinner, so Darcy remembered, he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt
to above the elbow. Later, as they sat and talked after dinner on the
close sultriness of the evening, he had unbuttoned the front of his
shirt to let what little breath of wind there was play on his skin. The
sleeves were rolled up now, the front of the shirt was unbuttoned, and
on his arms and on the brown skin of his chest were strange
discolorations which grew momently more clear and defined, till they saw
that the marks were pointed prints, as if caused by the hoofs of some
monstrous goat that had leaped and stamped upon him.
BETWEEN THE LIGHTS
The day had been one unceasing fall of snow from sunrise until the
gradual withdrawal of the vague white light outside indicated that the
sun had set again. But as usual at this hospitable and delightful house
of Everard Chandler where I often spent Christmas, and was spending it
now, there had been no lack of entertainment, and the hours had passed
with a rapidity that had surprised us. A short billiard tournament had
filled up the time between breakfast and lunch, with Badminton and the
morning papers for those who were temporarily not engaged, while
afterwards, the interval till teatime had been occupied by the majority
of the party in a huge game of hide-and-seek all over the house, barring
the billiard-room, which was sanctuary for any who desired peace. But
few had done that; the enchantment of Christmas, I must suppose, had,
like some spell, made children of us again, and it was with palsied
terror and trembling misgivings that we had tip-toed up and down the dim
passages, from any corner of which some wild screaming form might dart
out on us. Then, wearied with exercise and emotion, we had assembled
again for tea in the hall, a room of shadows and panels on which the
light from the wide open fireplace, where there burned a divine mixture
of peat and logs, flickered and grew bright again on the walls. Then, as
was proper, ghost-stories, for the narration of which the electric light
was put out, so that the listeners might conjecture anything they
pleased to be lurking in the corners, succeeded, and we vied with each
other in blood, bones, skeletons, armour and shrieks. I had just given
my contribution, and was reflecting with some complacency that probably
the worst was now known, when Everard, who had not yet administered to
the horror of his guests, spoke. He was sitting opposite me in the full
blaze of the fire, looking, after the illness he had gone through during
the autumn, still rather pale and delicate. All the same he had been
among the boldest and best in the exploration of dark places that
afternoon, and the look on his face now rather startled me.
“No, I don’t mind that sort of thing,” he said. “The paraphernalia of
ghosts has become somehow rather hackneyed, and when I hear of screams
and skeletons I feel I am on familiar ground, and can at least hide my
head under the bed-clothes.”
“Ah, but the bed-clothes were twitched away by my skeleton,” said I, in
self-defence.
“I know, but I don’t even mind that. Why, there are seven, eight
skeletons in this room now, covered with blood and skin and other
horrors. No, the nightmares of one’s childhood were the really
frightening things, because they were vague. There was the true
atmosphere of horror about them because one didn’t know what one feared.
Now if one could recapture that----”
Mrs Chandler got quickly out of her seat.
“Oh, Everard,” she said, “surely you don’t wish to recapture it again. I
should have thought once was enough.”
This was enchanting. A chorus of invitation asked him to proceed: the
real true ghost-story first-hand, which was what seemed to be indicated,
was too precious a thing to lose.
Everard laughed. “No, dear, I don’t want to recapture it again at all,”
he said to his wife. Then to us: “But really the--well, the nightmare
perhaps, to which I was referring, is of the vaguest and most
unsatisfactory kind. It has no apparatus about it at all. You will
probably all say that it was nothing, and wonder why I was frightened.
But I was; it frightened me out of my wits. And I only just saw
something, without being able to swear what it was, and heard something
which might have been a falling stone.”
“Anyhow tell us about the falling stone,” said I.
There was a stir of movement about the circle round the fire, and the
movement was not of purely physical order. It was as if--this is only
what I personally felt--it was as if the childish gaiety of the hours
we had passed that day was suddenly withdrawn; we had jested on certain
subjects, we had played hide-and-seek with all the power of earnestness
that was in us. But now--so it seemed to me--there was going to be real
hide-and-seek, real terrors were going to lurk in dark corners, or if
not real terrors, terrors so convincing as to assume the garb of
reality, were going to pounce on us. And Mrs Chandler’s exclamation as
she sat down again, “Oh, Everard, won’t it excite you?” tended in any
case to excite us. The room still remained in dubious darkness except
for the sudden lights disclosed on the walls by the leaping flames on
the hearth, and there was wide field for conjecture as to what might
lurk in the dim corners. Everard, moreover, who had been sitting in
bright light before, was banished by the extinction of some flaming log
into the shadows. A voice alone spoke to us, as he sat back in his low
chair, a voice rather slow but very distinct.
“Last year,” he said, “on the twenty-fourth of December, we were down
here, as usual, Amy and I, for Christmas. Several of you who are here
now were here then. Three or four of you at least.”
I was one of these, but like the others kept silence, for the
identification, so it seemed to me, was not asked for. And he went on
again without a pause.
“Those of you who were here then,” he said, “and are here now, will
remember how very warm it was this day year. You will remember, too,
that we played croquet that day on the lawn. It was perhaps a little
cold for croquet, and we played it rather in order to be able to
say--with sound evidence to back the statement--that we had done so.”
Then he turned and addressed the whole little circle.
“We played ties of half-games,” he said, “just as we have played
billiards to-day, and it was certainly as warm on the lawn then as it
was in the billiard-room this morning directly after breakfast, while
to-day I should not wonder if there was three feet of snow outside.
More, probably; listen.”
A sudden draught fluted in the chimney, and the fire flared up as the
current of air caught it. The wind also drove the snow against the
windows, and as he said “Listen,” we heard a soft scurry of the falling
flakes against the panes, like the soft tread of many little people who
stepped lightly, but with the persistence of multitudes who were
flocking to some rendezvous. Hundreds of little feet seemed to be
gathering outside; only the glass kept them out. And of the eight
skeletons present four or five anyhow turned and looked at the windows.
These were small-paned, with leaden bars. On the leaden bars little
heaps of snow had accumulated, but there was nothing else to be seen.
“Yes, last Christmas Eve was very warm and sunny,” went on Everard. “We
had had no frost that autumn, and a temerarious dahlia was still in
flower. I have always thought that it must have been mad.”
He paused a moment.
“And I wonder if I were not mad too,” he added.
No one interrupted him; there was something arresting, I must suppose,
in what he was saying; it chimed in anyhow with the hide-and-seek, with
the suggestions of the lonely snow. Mrs Chandler had sat down again, but
I heard her stir in her chair. But never was there a gay party so
reduced as we had been in the last five minutes. Instead of laughing at
ourselves for playing silly games, we were all taking a serious game
seriously.
“Anyhow I was sitting out,” he said to me, “while you and my wife played
your half-game of croquet. Then it struck me that it was not so warm as
I had supposed, because quite suddenly I shivered. And shivering I
looked up. But I did not see you and her playing croquet at all. I saw
something which had no relation to you and her--at least I hope not.”
Now the angler lands his fish, the stalker kills his stag, and the
speaker holds his audience. And as the fish is gaffed, and as the stag
is shot, so were we held. There was no getting away till he had finished
with us.
“You all know the croquet lawn,” he said, “and how it is bounded all
round by a flower border with a brick wall behind it, through which,
you will remember, there is only one gate. Well, I looked up and saw
that the lawn--I could for one moment see it was still a lawn--was
shrinking, and the walls closing in upon it. As they closed in too, they
grew higher, and simultaneously the light began to fade and be sucked
from the sky, till it grew quite dark overhead and only a glimmer of
light came in through the gate.
“There was, as I told you, a dahlia in flower that day, and as this
dreadful darkness and bewilderment came over me, I remember that my eyes
sought it in a kind of despair, holding on, as it were, to any familiar
object. But it was no longer a dahlia, and for the red of its petals I
saw only the red of some feeble firelight. And at that moment the
hallucination was complete. I was no longer sitting on the lawn watching
croquet, but I was in a low-roofed room, something like a cattle-shed,
but round. Close above my head, though I was sitting down, ran rafters
from wall to wall. It was nearly dark, but a little light came in from
the door opposite to me, which seemed to lead into a passage that
communicated with the exterior of the place. Little, however, of the
wholesome air came into this dreadful den; the atmosphere was oppressive
and foul beyond all telling, it was as if for years it had been the
place of some human menagerie, and for those years had been uncleaned
and unsweetened by the winds of heaven. Yet that oppressiveness was
nothing to the awful horror of the place from the view of the spirit.
Some dreadful atmosphere of crime and abomination dwelt heavy in it, its
denizens, whoever they were, were scarce human, so it seemed to me, and
though men and women, were akin more to the beasts of the field. And in
addition there was present to me some sense of the weight of years; I
had been taken and thrust down into some epoch of dim antiquity.”
He paused a moment, and the fire on the hearth leaped up for a second
and then died down again. But in that gleam I saw that all faces were
turned to Everard, and that all wore some look of dreadful expectancy.
Certainly I felt it myself, and waited in a sort of shrinking horror for
what was coming.
“As I told you,” he continued, “where there had been that unseasonable
dahlia, there now burned a dim firelight, and my eyes were drawn there.
Shapes were gathered round it; what they were I could not at first see.
Then perhaps my eyes got more accustomed to the dusk, or the fire burned
better, for I perceived that they were of human form, but very small,
for when one rose, with a horrible chattering, to his feet, his head was
still some inches off the low roof. He was dressed in a sort of shirt
that came to his knees, but his arms were bare and covered with hair.
Then the gesticulation and chattering increased, and I knew that they
were talking about me, for they kept pointing in my direction. At that
my horror suddenly deepened, for I became aware that I was powerless and
could not move hand or foot; a helpless, nightmare impotence had
possession of me. I could not lift a finger or turn my head. And in the
paralysis of that fear I tried to scream, but not a sound could I utter.
“All this I suppose took place with the instantaneousness of a dream,
for at once, and without transition, the whole thing had vanished, and I
was back on the lawn again, while the stroke for which my wife was
aiming was still unplayed. But my face was dripping with perspiration,
and I was trembling all over.
“Now you may all say that I had fallen asleep, and had a sudden
nightmare. That may be so; but I was conscious of no sense of sleepiness
before, and I was conscious of none afterwards. It was as if someone had
held a book before me, whisked the pages open for a second and closed
them again.”
Somebody, I don’t know who, got up from his chair with a sudden movement
that made me start, and turned on the electric light. I do not mind
confessing that I was rather glad of this.
Everard laughed.
“Really I feel like Hamlet in the play-scene,” he said, “and as if there
was a guilty uncle present. Shall I go on?”
I don’t think anyone replied, and he went on:
“Well, let us say for the moment that it was not a dream exactly, but a
hallucination. Whichever it was, in any case it haunted me; for months,
I think, it was never quite out of my mind, but lingered somewhere in
the dusk of consciousness, sometimes sleeping quietly, so to speak, but
sometimes stirring in its sleep. It was no good my telling myself that I
was disquieting myself in vain, for it was as if something had actually
entered into my very soul, as if some seed of horror had been planted
there. And as the weeks went on the seed began to sprout, so that I
could no longer even tell myself that that vision had been a moment’s
disorderment only. I can’t say that it actually affected my health. I
did not, as far as I know, sleep or eat insufficiently, but morning
after morning I used to wake, not gradually and through pleasant dozings
into full consciousness, but with absolute suddenness, and find myself
plunged in an abyss of despair. Often too, eating or drinking, I used to
pause and wonder if it was worth while.
“Eventually I told two people about my trouble, hoping that perhaps the
mere communication would help matters, hoping also, but very distantly,
that though I could not believe at present that digestion or the
obscurities of the nervous system were at fault, a doctor by some simple
dose might convince me of it. In other words I told my wife, who laughed
at me, and my doctor who laughed also, and assured me that my health
was quite unnecessarily robust. At the same time he suggested that
change of air and scene does wonders for the delusions that exist merely
in the imagination. He also told me, in answer to a direct question,
that he would stake his reputation on the certainty that I was not going
mad.
“Well, we went up to London as usual for the season, and though nothing
whatever occurred to remind me in any way of that single moment on
Christmas Eve, the reminding was seen to all right, the moment itself
took care of that, for instead of fading as is the way of sleeping or
waking dreams, it grew every day more vivid, and ate, so to speak, like
some corrosive acid into my mind, etching itself there. And to London
succeeded Scotland.
“I took last year for the first time a small forest up in Sutherland,
called Glen Callan, very remote and wild, but affording excellent
stalking. It was not far from the sea, and the gillies used always to
warn me to carry a compass on the hill, because sea-mists were liable to
come up with frightful rapidity, and there was always a danger of being
caught by one, and of having perhaps to wait hours till it cleared
again. This at first I always used to do, but, as every one knows, any
precaution that one takes which continues to be unjustified gets
gradually relaxed, and at the end of a few weeks, since the weather had
been uniformly clear, it was natural that, as often as not, my compass
remained at home.
“One day the stalk took me on to a part of my ground that I had seldom
been on before, a very high table-land on the limit of my forest, which
went down very steeply on one side to a loch that lay below it, and on
the other, by gentler gradations, to the river that came from the loch,
six miles below which stood the lodge. The wind had necessitated our
climbing up--or so my stalker had insisted--not by the easier way, but
up the crags from the loch. I had argued the point with him, for it
seemed to me that it was impossible that the deer could get our scent if
we went by the more natural path, but he still held to his opinion, and
therefore, since after all this was his part of the job, I yielded. A
dreadful climb we had of it, over big boulders with deep holes in
between, masked by clumps of heather, so that a wary eye and a prodding
stick were necessary for each step if one wished to avoid broken bones.
Adders also literally swarmed in the heather; we must have seen a dozen
at least on our way up, and adders are a beast for which I have no
manner of use. But a couple of hours saw us to the top, only to find
that the stalker had been utterly at fault, and that the deer must quite
infallibly have got wind of us, if they had remained in the place where
we last saw them. That, when we could spy the ground again, we saw had
happened; in any case they had gone. The man insisted the wind had
changed, a palpably stupid excuse, and I wondered at that moment what
other reason he had--for reason I felt sure there must be--for not
wishing to take what would clearly now have been a better route. But
this piece of bad management did not spoil our luck, for within an hour
we had spied more deer, and about two o’clock I got a shot, killing a
heavy stag. Then sitting on the heather I ate lunch, and enjoyed a
well-earned bask and smoke in the sun. The pony meantime had been
saddled with the stag, and was plodding homewards.
“The morning had been extraordinarily warm, with a little wind blowing
off the sea, which lay a few miles off sparkling beneath a blue haze,
and all morning in spite of our abominable climb I had had an extreme
sense of peace, so much so that several times I had probed my mind, so
to speak, to find if the horror still lingered there. But I could
scarcely get any response from it. Never since Christmas had I been so
free of fear, and it was with a great sense of repose, both physical and
spiritual, that I lay looking up into the blue sky, watching my
smoke-whorls curl slowly away into nothingness. But I was not allowed to
take my ease long, for Sandy came and begged that I would move. The
weather had changed, he said, the wind had shifted again, and he wanted
me to be off this high ground and on the path again as soon as possible,
because it looked to him as if a sea-mist would presently come up.
“‘And yon’s a bad place to get down in the mist,’ he added, nodding
towards the crags we had come up.
“I looked at the man in amazement, for to our right lay a gentle slope
down on to the river, and there was now no possible reason for again
tackling those hideous rocks up which we had climbed this morning. More
than ever I was sure he had some secret reason for not wishing to go the
obvious way. But about one thing he was certainly right, the mist was
coming up from the sea, and I felt in my pocket for the compass, and
found I had forgotten to bring it.
“Then there followed a curious scene which lost us time that we could
really ill afford to waste, I insisting on going down by the way that
common-sense directed, he imploring me to take his word for it that the
crags were the better way. Eventually, I marched off to the easier
descent, and told him not to argue any more but follow. What annoyed me
about him was that he would only give the most senseless reasons for
preferring the crags. There were mossy places, he said, on the way I
wished to go, a thing patently false, since the summer had been one
spell of unbroken weather; or it was longer, also obviously untrue; or
there were so many vipers about. But seeing that none of these arguments
produced any effect, at last he desisted, and came after me in silence.
“We were not yet half down when the mist was upon us, shooting up from
the valley like the broken water of a wave, and in three minutes we were
enveloped in a cloud of fog so thick that we could barely see a dozen
yards in front of us. It was therefore another cause for
self-congratulation that we were not now, as we should otherwise have
been, precariously clambering on the face of those crags up which we had
come with such difficulty in the morning, and as I rather prided myself
on my powers of generalship in the matter of direction, I continued
leading, feeling sure that before long we should strike the track by the
river. More than all, the absolute freedom from fear elated me; since
Christmas I had not known the instinctive joy of that; I felt like a
school-boy home for the holidays. But the mist grew thicker and thicker,
and whether it was that real rain-clouds had formed above it, or that it
was of an extraordinary density itself, I got wetter in the next hour
than I have ever been before or since. The wet seemed to penetrate the
skin, and chill the very bones. And still there was no sign of the track
for which I was making. Behind me, muttering to himself, followed the
stalker, but his arguments and protestations were dumb, and it seemed as
if he kept close to me, as if afraid.
“Now there are many unpleasant companions in this world; I would not for
instance care to be on the hill with a drunkard or a maniac, but worse
than either, I think, is a frightened man, because his trouble is
infectious, and, insensibly, I began to be afraid of being frightened
too. From that it is but a short step to fear. Other perplexities too
beset us. At one time we seemed to be walking on flat ground, at another
I felt sure we were climbing again, whereas all the time we ought to
have been descending, unless we had missed the way very badly indeed.
Also, for the month was October, it was beginning to get dark, and it
was with a sense of relief that I remembered that the full moon would
rise soon after sunset. But it had grown very much colder, and soon,
instead of rain, we found we were walking through a steady fall of snow.
“Things were pretty bad, but then for the moment they seemed to mend,
for, far away to the left, I suddenly heard the brawling of the river.
It should, it is true, have been straight in front of me and we were
perhaps a mile out of our way, but this was better than the blind
wandering of the last hour, and turning to the left, I walked towards
it. But before I had gone a hundred yards, I heard a sudden choked cry
behind me, and just saw Sandy’s form flying as if in terror of pursuit,
into the mists. I called to him but got no reply, and heard only the
spurned stones of his running. What had frightened him I had no idea,
but certainly with his disappearance, the infection of his fear
disappeared also, and I went on, I may almost say, with gaiety. On the
moment, however, I saw a sudden well-defined blackness in front of me,
and before I knew what I was doing I was half stumbling, half walking up
a very steep grass slope.
“During the last few minutes the wind had got up, and the driving snow
was peculiarly uncomfortable, but there had been a certain consolation
in thinking that the wind would soon disperse these mists, and I had
nothing more than a moonlight walk home. But as I paused on this slope,
I became aware of two things, one, that the blackness in front of me was
very close, the other that, whatever it was, it sheltered me from the
snow. So I climbed on a dozen yards into its friendly shelter, for it
seemed to me to be friendly.
“A wall some twelve feet high crowned the slope, and exactly where I
struck it there was a hole in it, or door rather, through which a little
light appeared. Wondering at this I pushed on, bending down, for the
passage was very low, and in a dozen yards came out on the other side.
Just as I did this the sky suddenly grew lighter, the wind, I suppose,
having dispersed the mists, and the moon, though not yet visible through
the flying skirts of cloud, made sufficient illumination.
“I was in a circular enclosure, and above me there projected from the
walls some four feet from the ground, broken stones which must have been
intended to support a floor. Then simultaneously two things occurred.
“The whole of my nine months’ terror came back to me, for I saw that the
vision in the garden was fulfilled, and at the same moment I saw
stealing towards me a little figure as of a man, but only about three
foot six in height. That my eyes told me; my ears told me that he
stumbled on a stone; my nostrils told me that the air I breathed was of
an overpowering foulness, and my soul told me that it was sick unto
death. I think I tried to scream, but could not, I know I tried to move
and could not. And it crept closer.
“Then I suppose the terror which held me spellbound so spurred me that I
must move, for next moment I heard a cry break from my lips, and was
stumbling through the passage. I made one leap of it down the grass
slope, and ran as I hope never to have to run again. What direction I
took I did not pause to consider, so long as I put distance between me
and that place. Luck, however, favoured me, and before long I struck the
track by the river, and an hour afterwards reached the lodge.