imagination, but what I believed to have happened was this. A piano with
music on it was standing at the far end of the room by the door, and a
sudden draught entered the room, so strong that the leaves turned. Next
the draught troubled a vase of daffodils, and the yellow heads nodded.
Then it reached the candles that stood close to us, and they fluttered,
burning blue and low. Then it reached me, and the draught was cold, and
stirred my hair. Then it eddied, so to speak, and went across to Louis,
and his hair also moved, as I could see. Then it went downwards towards
the fire, and flames suddenly started up in its path, blown upwards. The
rug by the fireplace flapped also.
‘Funny, wasn’t it?’ he asked.
‘And has the Elementa gone up the chimney?’ said I.
‘Oh, no,’ said he, ‘the Thing only passed us.’
Then suddenly he pointed at the wall just behind my chair, and his voice
cracked as he spoke.
‘Look, what’s that?’ he said. ‘There on the wall.’
Considerably startled I turned in the direction of his shaking finger.
The wall was pale grey in tone, and sharp-cut against it was a shadow
that, as I looked, moved. It was like the shadow of some enormous slug,
legless and fat, some two feet high by about four feet long. Only at one
end of it was a head shaped like the head of a seal, with open mouth and
panting tongue.
Then even as I looked it faded, and from somewhere close at hand there
sounded another of those shattering knocks.
For a moment after there was silence between us, and horror was thick as
snow in the air. But, somehow neither Louis or I were frightened for
more than one moment. The whole thing was so absorbingly interesting.
‘That’s what I mean by its being outside my control,’ he said. ‘I said I
was ready for any--any visitor to come in, and by God, we’ve got a
beauty.’
* * * * *
Now I was still, even in spite of the appearance of this shadow, quite
convinced that I was only taking observations of a most curious case of
disordered brain accompanied by the most vivid and remarkable
thought-transference. I believed that I had not seen a slug-like shadow
at all, but that Louis had visualised this dreadful creature so
intensely that I saw what he saw. I found also that his spiritualistic
trash-books which I thought a truer nomenclature than text-books,
mentioned this as a common form for Elementals to take. He on the other
hand was more firmly convinced than ever that we were dealing not with a
subjective but an objective phenomenon.
* * * * *
For the next six months or so we sat constantly, but made no further
progress, nor did the Thing or its shadow appear again, and I began to
feel that we were really wasting time. Then it occurred to me, to get in
a so-called medium, induce hypnotic sleep, and see if we could learn
anything further. This we did, sitting as before round the dining-room
table. The room was not quite dark, and I could see sufficiently clearly
what happened.
The medium, a young man, sat between Louis and myself, and without the
slightest difficulty I put him into a light hypnotic sleep. Instantly
there came a series of the most terrific raps, and across the table
there slid something more palpable than a shadow, with a faint luminance
about it, as if the surface of it was smouldering. At the moment the
medium’s face became contorted to a mask of hellish terror; mouth and
eyes were both open, and the eyes were focussed on something close to
him. The Thing waving its head came closer and closer to him, and
reached out towards his throat. Then with a yell of panic, and warding
off this horror with his hands, the medium sprang up, but It had already
caught hold, and for the moment he could not get free. Then
simultaneously Louis and I went to his aid, and my hands touched
something cold and slimy. But pull as we could we could not get it away.
There was no firm hand-hold to be taken; it was as if one tried to grasp
slimy fur, and the touch of it was horrible, unclean, like a leper.
Then, in a sort of despair, though I still could not believe that the
horror was real, for it must be a vision of diseased imagination, I
remembered that the switch of the four electric lights was close to my
hand. I turned them all on. There on the floor lay the medium, Louis was
kneeling by him with a face of wet paper, but there was nothing else
there. Only the collar of the medium was crumpled and torn, and on his
throat were two scratches that bled.
The medium was still in hypnotic sleep, and I woke him. He felt at his
collar, put his hand to his throat and found it bleeding, but, as I
expected, knew nothing whatever of what had passed. We told him that
there had been an unusual manifestation, and he had, while in sleep,
wrestled with something. We had got the result we wished for, and were
much obliged to him.
I never saw him again. A week after that he died of blood-poisoning.
* * * * *
From that evening dates the second stage of this adventure. The Thing
had materialised (I use again spiritualistic language which I still did
not use at the time). The huge slug, the Elemental, manifested itself
no longer by knocks and waltzing tables, nor yet by shadows. It was
there in a form that could be seen and felt. But it still--this was my
strong point--was only a thing of twilight; the sudden kindling of the
electric light had shown us that there was nothing there. In this
struggle perhaps the medium had clutched his own throat, perhaps I had
grasped Louis’ sleeve, he mine. But though I said these things to
myself, I am not sure that I believed them in the same way that I
believe the sun will rise to-morrow.
Now as a student of brain-functions and a student in hypnotic affairs, I
ought perhaps to have steadily and unremittingly pursued this
extraordinary series of phenomena. But I had my practice to attend to,
and I found that with the best will in the world, I could think of
nothing else except the occurrence in the hall next door. So I refused
to take part in any further séance with Louis. I had another reason
also. For the last four or five months he was becoming depraved. I have
been no prude or Puritan in my own life, and I hope I have not turned a
Pharisaical shoulder on sinners. But in all branches of life and morals,
Louis had become infamous. He was turned out of a club for cheating at
cards, and narrated the event to me with gusto. He had become cruel; he
tortured his cat to death; he had become bestial. I used to shudder as I
passed his house, expecting I knew not what fiendish thing to be
looking at me from the window.
Then came a night only a week ago, when I was awakened by an awful cry,
swelling and falling and rising again. It came from next door. I ran
downstairs in my pyjamas, and out into the street. The policeman on the
beat had heard it too, and it came from the hall of Louis’ house, the
window of which was open. Together we burst the door in. You know what
we found. The screaming had ceased but a moment before, but he was dead
already. Both jugulars were severed, torn open.
* * * * *
It was dawn, early and dusky when I got back to my house next door. Even
as I went in something seemed to push by me, something soft and slimy.
It could not be Louis’ imagination this time. Since then I have seen
glimpses of it every evening. I am awakened at night by tappings, and in
the shadows in the corner of my room there sits something more
substantial than a shadow.”
* * * * *
Within an hour of my leaving Dr Assheton, the quiet street was once more
aroused by cries of terror and agony. He was already dead, and in no
other manner than his friend, when they got into the house.
THE HOUSE WITH THE BRICK-KILN
The hamlet of Trevor Major lies very lonely and sequestered in a hollow
below the north side of the south downs that stretch westward from
Lewes, and run parallel with the coast. It is a hamlet of some three or
four dozen inconsiderable houses and cottages much girt about with
trees, but the big Norman church and the manor house which stands a
little outside the village are evidence of a more conspicuous past. This
latter, except for a tenancy of rather less than three weeks, now four
years ago, has stood unoccupied since the summer of 1896, and though it
could be taken at a rent almost comically small, it is highly improbable
that either of its last tenants, even if times were very bad, would
think of passing a night in it again. For myself--I was one of the
tenants--I would far prefer living in a workhouse to inhabiting those
low-pitched oak-panelled rooms, and I would sooner look from my garret
windows on to the squalor and grime of Whitechapel than from the
diamond-shaped and leaded panes of the Manor of Trevor Major on to the
boskage of its cool thickets, and the glimmering of its clear
chalk-streams where the quick trout glance among the waving water-weeds
and over the chalk and gravel of its sliding rapids.
It was the news of these trout that led Jack Singleton and myself to
take the house for the month between mid-May and mid-June, but as I have
already mentioned a short three weeks was all the time we passed there,
and we had more than a week of our tenancy yet unexpired when we left
the place, though on the very last afternoon we enjoyed the finest
dry-fly fishing that has ever fallen to my lot. Singleton had originally
seen the advertisement of the house in a Sussex paper, with the
statement that there was good dry-fly fishing belonging to it, but it
was with but faint hopes of the reality of the dry-fly fishing that we
went down to look at the place, since we had before this so often
inspected depopulated ditches which were offered to the unwary under
high-sounding titles. Yet after a half-hour’s stroll by the stream, we
went straight back to the agent, and before nightfall had taken it for a
month with option of renewal.
* * * * *
We arrived accordingly from town at about five o’clock on a cloudless
afternoon in May, and through the mists of horror that now stand between
me and the remembrance of what occurred later, I cannot forget the
exquisite loveliness of the impression then conveyed. The garden, it is
true, appeared to have been for years untended; weeds half-choked the
gravel paths, and the flower-beds were a congestion of mingled wild and
cultivated vegetations. It was set in a wall of mellowed brick, in which
snap-dragon and stone-crop had found an anchorage to their liking, and
beyond that there stood sentinel a ring of ancient pines in which the
breeze made music as of a distant sea. Outside that the ground sloped
slightly downwards in a bank covered with a jungle of wild-rose to the
stream that ran round three sides of the garden, and then followed a
meandering course through the two big fields which lay towards the
village. Over all this we had fishing-rights; above, the same rights
extended for another quarter of a mile to the arched bridge, over which
there crossed the road which led to the house. In this field above the
house on the fourth side, where the ground had been embanked to carry
the road, stood a brick-kiln in a ruinous state. A shallow pit, long
overgrown with tall grasses and wild field-flowers, showed where the
clay had been digged.
The house itself was long and narrow; entering, you passed direct into a
square panelled hall, on the left of which was the dining-room which
communicated with the passage leading to the kitchen and offices. On the
right of the hall were two excellent sitting-rooms looking out, the one
on to the gravel in front of the house, the other on to the garden. From
the first of these you could see, through the gap in the pines by which
the road approached the house, the brick-kiln of which I have already
spoken. An oak staircase went up from the hall, and round it ran a
gallery on to which the three principal bedrooms opened. These were
commensurate with the dining-room and the two sitting-rooms below. From
this gallery there led a long narrow passage shut off from the rest of
the house by a red-baize door, which led to a couple more guestrooms and
the servant’s quarters.
Jack Singleton and I share the same flat in town, and we had sent down
in the morning Franklyn and his wife, two old and valued servants, to
get things ready at Trevor Major, and procure help from the village to
look after the house, and Mrs Franklyn with her stout comfortable face
all wreathed in smiles opened the door to us. She had had some previous
experience of the “comfortable quarters” which go with fishing, and had
come down prepared for the worst, but found it all of the best. The
kitchen-boiler was not furred; hot and cold water were laid on in the
most convenient fashion, and could be obtained from taps that neither
stuck nor leaked. Her husband, it appeared, had gone into the village to
buy a few necessaries, and she brought up tea for us, and then went
upstairs to the two rooms over the dining-room and bigger sitting-room,
which we had chosen for our bedrooms, to unpack. The doors of these were
exactly opposite one another to right and left of the gallery, and Jack
who chose the bedroom above the sitting-room had thus a smaller room,
above the second sitting-room, unoccupied, next his and opening out from
it.
We had a couple of hours’ fishing before dinner, each of us catching
three or four brace of trout, and came back in the dusk to the house.
Franklyn had returned from the village from his errand, reported that he
had got a woman to come in to do housework in the mornings, and
mentioned that our arrival had seemed to arouse a good deal of interest.
The reason for this was obscure; he could only tell us that he was
questioned a dozen times as to whether we really intended to live in the
house, and his assurance that we did produced silence and a shaking of
heads. But the country-folk of Sussex are notable for their silence and
chronic attitude of disapproval, and we put this down to local
idiosyncrasy.
The evening was exquisitely warm, and after dinner we pulled out a
couple of basket-chairs on to the gravel by the front door, and sat for
an hour or so, while the night deepened in throbs of gathering darkness.
The moon was not risen and the ring of pines cut off much of the pale
starlight, so that when we went in, allured by the shining of the lamp
in the sitting-room, it was curiously dark for a clear night in May. And
at that moment of stepping from the darkness into the cheerfulness of
the lighted house, I had a sudden sensation, to which, during the next
fortnight, I became almost accustomed, of there being something unseen
and unheard and dreadful near me. In spite of the warmth, I felt myself
shiver, and concluded instantly that I had sat out-of-doors long enough,
and without mentioning it to Jack, followed him into the smaller
sitting-room in which we had scarcely yet set foot. It like the hall was
oak-panelled, and in the panels hung some half-dozen of water-colour
sketches, which we examined, idly at first, and then with growing
interest, for they were executed with extraordinary finish and delicacy,
and each represented some aspect of the house or garden. Here you looked
up the gap in the fir-trees into a crimson sunset; here the garden, trim
and carefully tended, dozed beneath some languid summer noon; here an
angry wreath of storm-cloud brooded over the meadow where the
trout-stream ran grey and leaden below a threatening sky, while another,
the most careful and arresting of all, was a study of the brick-kiln. In
this, alone of them all, was there a human figure; a man, dressed in
grey, peered into the open door from which issued a fierce red glow. The
figure was painted with miniature-like elaboration; the face was in
profile, and represented a youngish man, clean-shaven with a long
aquiline nose and singularly square chin. The sketch was long and narrow
in shape, and the chimney of the kiln appeared against a dark sky. From
it there issued a thin streamer of grey smoke.
Jack looked at this with attention.
“What a horrible picture,” he said, “and how beautifully painted. I feel
as if it meant something, as if it was a representation of something
that happened, not a mere sketch. By Jove!----”
He broke off suddenly, and went in turn to each of the other pictures.
“That’s a queer thing,” he said. “See if you notice what I mean.”
With the brick-kiln rather vividly impressed on my mind, it was not
difficult to see what he had noticed. In each of the pictures appeared
the brick-kiln, chimney and all, now seen faintly between trees, now in
full view, and in each the chimney was smoking.
“And the odd part is that from the garden side, you can’t really see the
kiln at all,” observed Jack, “it’s hidden by the house, and yet the
artist F. A., as I see by his signature, puts it in just the same.”
“What do you make of that?” I asked.
“Nothing. I suppose he had a fancy for brick-kilns. Let’s have a game of
picquet.”
* * * * *
A fortnight of our three weeks passed without incident, except that
again and again the curious feeling of something dreadful being close at
hand was present in my mind. In a way, as I said, I got used to it, but
on the other hand the feeling itself seemed to gain in poignancy. Once
just at the end of the fortnight I mentioned it to Jack.
“Odd you should speak of it,” he said, “because I’ve felt the same. When
do you feel it? Do you feel it now for instance?”
We were again sitting out after dinner, and as he spoke I felt it with
far greater intensity than ever before. And at the same moment the
house-door which had been closed, though probably not latched, swung
gently open, letting out a shaft of light from the hall, and as gently
swung to again, as if something had stealthily entered.
“Yes,” I said. “I felt it then. I only feel it in the evening. It was
rather bad that time.”
Jack was silent a moment.
“Funny thing the door opening and shutting like that,” he said. “Let’s
go indoors.”
We got up and I remember seeing at that moment that the windows of my
bedroom were lit; Mrs Franklyn probably was making things ready for the
night. Simultaneously, as we crossed the gravel, there came from just
inside the house the sound of a hurried footstep on the stairs, and
entering we found Mrs Franklyn in the hall, looking rather white and
startled.
“Anything wrong?” I asked.
She took two or three quick breaths before she answered:
“No, sir,” she said, “at least nothing that I can give an account of. I
was tidying up in your room, and I thought you came in. But there was
nobody, and it gave me a turn. I left my candle there; I must go up for
it.”
I waited in the hall a moment, while she again ascended the stairs, and
passed along the gallery to my room. At the door, which I could see was
open, she paused, not entering.
“What is the matter?” I asked from below.
“I left the candle alight,” she said, “and it’s gone out.”
Jack laughed.
“And you left the door and window open,” said he.
“Yes, sir, but not a breath of wind is stirring,” said Mrs Franklyn,
rather faintly.
This was true, and yet a few moments ago the heavy hall-door had swung
open and back again. Jack ran upstairs.
“We’ll brave the dark together, Mrs Franklyn,” he said.
He went into my room, and I heard the sound of a match struck. Then
through the open door came the light of the rekindled candle and
simultaneously I heard a bell ring in the servant’s quarters. In a
moment came steps, and Franklyn appeared.
“What bell was that?” I asked.
“Mr Jack’s bedroom, sir,” he said.
I felt there was a marked atmosphere of nerves about for which there was
really no adequate cause. All that had happened of a disturbing nature
was that Mrs Franklyn had thought I had come into my bedroom, and had
been startled by finding I had not. She had then left the candle in a
draught, and it had been blown out. As for a bell ringing, that, even if
it had happened, was a very innocuous proceeding.
“Mouse on a wire,” I said. “Mr Jack is in my room this moment lighting
Mrs Franklyn’s candle for her.”
Jack came down at this juncture, and we went into the sitting-room. But
Franklyn apparently was not satisfied, for we heard him in the room
above us, which was Jack’s bedroom, moving about with his slow and
rather ponderous tread. Then his steps seemed to pass into the bedroom
adjoining, and we heard no more.
I remember feeling hugely sleepy that night, and went to bed earlier
than usual, to pass rather a broken night with stretches of dreamless
sleep interspersed with startled awakenings, in which I passed very
suddenly into complete consciousness. Sometimes the house was absolutely
still, and the only sound to be heard was the sighing of the night
breeze outside in the pines, but sometimes the place seemed full of
muffled movements, and once I could have sworn that the handle of my
door turned. That required verification, and I lit my candle, but found
that my ears must have played me false. Yet even as I stood there, I
thought I heard steps just outside, and with a considerable qualm, I
must confess, I opened the door and looked out. But the gallery was
quite empty, and the house quite still. Then from Jack’s room opposite I
heard a sound that was somehow comforting, the snorts of the snorer, and
I went back to bed and slept again, and when next I woke, morning was
already breaking in red lines on the horizon, and the sense of trouble
that had been with me ever since last evening had gone.
Heavy rain set in after lunch next day, and as I had arrears of
letter-writing to do, and the water was soon both muddy and rising, I
came home alone about five, leaving Jack still sanguine by the stream,
and worked for a couple of hours sitting at a writing-table in the room
overlooking the gravel at the front of the house, where hung the
water-colours. By seven I had finished, and just as I got up to light
candles, since it was already dusk, I saw, as I thought, Jack’s figure
emerge from the bushes that bordered the path to the stream, on to the
space in front of the house. Then instantaneously and with a sudden
queer sinking of the heart, quite unaccountable, I saw that it was not
Jack at all, but a stranger. He was only some six yards from the window,
and after pausing there a moment he came close up to the window, so that
his face nearly touched the glass, looking intently at me. In the light
from the freshly-kindled candles I could distinguish his features with
great clearness, but though, as far as I knew, I had never seen him
before, there was something familiar about both his face and figure. He
appeared to smile at me, but the smile was one of inscrutable evil and
malevolence, and immediately he walked on, straight towards the
house-door opposite him, and out of sight of the sitting-room window.
Now, little though I liked the look of the man, he was, as I have said,
familiar to my eye, and I went out into the hall, since he was clearly
coming to the front-door, to open it to him and learn his business. So
without waiting for him to ring, I opened it, feeling sure I should find
him on the step. Instead, I looked out into the empty gravel-sweep, the
heavy-falling rain, the thick dusk. And even as I looked, I felt
something that I could not see push by me through the half-opened door
and pass into the house. Then the stairs creaked, and a moment after a
bell rang.
Franklyn is the quickest man to answer a bell I have ever seen, and next
instant he passed me going upstairs. He tapped at Jack’s door, entered,
and then came down again.
“Mr Jack still out, sir?” he asked.
“Yes. His bell ringing again?”
“Yes, sir,” said Franklyn, quite imperturbably.
I went back into the sitting-room, and soon Franklyn brought a lamp. He
put it on the table above which hung the careful and curious picture of
the brick-kiln, and then with a sudden horror I saw why the stranger on
the gravel outside had been so familiar to me. In all respects he
resembled the figure that peered into the kiln; it was more than a
resemblance, it was an identity. And what had happened to this man who
had inscrutably and evilly smiled at me? And what had pushed in through
the half-closed door?