interrupted service continued, the handful of wet earth splashed on the
coffin-lid, and when all was over I left the cemetery, still feeling,
I knew not why, that all was _not_ over. Some restlessness and want of
certainty possessed me, and instead of going home I fared forth into
the rolling wooded country inland, with the intention of walking off
these bat-like terrors that flapped around me. The rain had ceased, and
a blurred sunlight penetrated the sea-mist which still blanketed the
fields and woods, and for half an hour, moving briskly, I endeavoured
to fight down some fantastic conviction that had gripped my mind in its
claws. I refused to look straight at that conviction, telling myself
how fantastic, how unreasonable it was; but as often as I put out a
hand to throttle it there came the echo of Madge’s words: “The sea will
not suffer her; the kindly earth will not receive her.” And if I could
shut my eyes to that there came some remembrance of the day she died,
and of half-forgotten fragments of Charles’s superstitious belief in
reincarnation. The whole thing, incredible though its component parts
were, hung together with a terrible tenacity.
* * * * *
Before long the rain began again, and I turned, meaning to go by the
main-road into Tarleton, which passes in a wide-flung curve some
half-mile outside the cemetery. But as I approached the path through
the fields, which, leaving the less direct route, passes close to the
cemetery and brings you by a steeper and shorter descent into the
town, I felt myself irresistibly impelled to take it. I told myself,
of course, that I wished to make my wet walk as short as possible;
but at the back of my mind was the half-conscious, but none the less
imperative need to know by ocular evidence that the grave by which I
had stood that afternoon had been filled in, and that the body of Mrs.
Acres now lay tranquil beneath the soil. My path would be even shorter
if I passed through the graveyard, and so presently I was fumbling in
the gloom for the latch of the gate, and closed it again behind me.
Rain was falling now thick and sullenly, and in the bleared twilight I
picked my way among the mounds and slipped on the dripping grass, and
there in front of me was the newly turned earth. All was finished: the
grave-diggers had done their work and departed, and earth had gone back
again into the keeping of the earth.
It brought me some great lightening of the spirit to know that, and I
was on the point of turning away when a sound of stir from the heaped
soil caught my ear, and I saw a little stream of pebbles mixed with
clay trickle down the side of the mound above the grave: the heavy
rain, no doubt, had loosened the earth. And then came another and yet
another, and with terror gripping at my heart I perceived that this was
no loosening from without, but from within, for to right and left the
piled soil was falling away with the press of something from below.
Faster and faster it poured off the grave, and ever higher at the head
of it rose a mound of earth pushed upwards from beneath. Somewhere out
of sight there came the sound as of creaking and breaking wood, and
then through that mound of earth there protruded the end of the coffin.
The lid was shattered: loose pieces of the boards fell off it, and from
within the cavity there faced me white features and wide eyes. All this
I saw, while sheer terror held me motionless; then, I suppose, came the
breaking-point, and with such panic as surely man never felt before I
was stumbling away among the graves and racing towards the kindly human
lights of the town below.
I went to the parson who had conducted the service that afternoon with
my incredible tale, and an hour later he, Charles Alington, and two
or three men from the undertaker’s were on the spot. They found the
coffin, completely disinterred, lying on the ground by the grave, which
was now three-quarters full of the earth which had fallen back into it.
After what had happened it was decided to make no further attempt to
bury it; and next day the body was cremated.
* * * * *
Now, it is open to anyone who may read this tale to reject the incident
of this emergence of the coffin altogether, and account for the other
strange happenings by the comfortable theory of coincidence. He can
certainly satisfy himself that one Bertha Acres did die at sea on this
particular Thursday before Easter, and was buried at sea: there is
nothing extraordinary about that. Nor is it the least impossible that
the weights should have slipped from the canvas shroud, and that the
body should have been washed ashore on the coast by Tarleton (why not
Tarleton, as well as any other little town near the coast?); nor is
there anything inherently significant in the fact that the grave, as
originally dug, was not of sufficient dimensions to receive the coffin.
That all these incidents should have happened to the body of a single
individual is odd, but then the nature of coincidence is to be odd.
They form a startling series, but unless coincidences are startling
they escape observation altogether. So, if you reject the last incident
here recorded, or account for it by some local disturbance, an
earthquake, or the breaking of a spring just below the grave, you can
comfortably recline on the cushion of coincidence....
* * * * *
For myself, I give no explanation of these events, though my
brother-in-law brought forward one with which he himself is perfectly
satisfied. Only the other day he sent me, with considerable jubilation,
a copy of some extracts from a mediæval treatise on the subject of
reincarnation which sufficiently indicates his theory. The original
work was in Latin, which, mistrusting my scholarship, he kindly
translated for me. I transcribe his quotations exactly as he sent them
to me.
“We have these certain instances of his reincarnation. In one his
spirit was incarnated in the body of a man; in the other, in that of
a woman, fair of outward aspect, and of a pleasant conversation, but
held in dread and in horror by those who came into more than casual
intercourse with her.... She, it is said, died on the anniversary of
the day on which he hanged himself, after the betrayal, but of this I
have no certain information. What is sure is that, when the time came
for her burial, the kindly earth would receive her not, but though the
grave was dug deep and well it spewed her forth again.... Of the man
in whom his cursed spirit was reincarnated it is said that, being on a
voyage when he died, he was cast overboard with weights to sink him;
but the sea would not suffer him to rest in her bosom, but slipped the
weights from him, and cast him forth again on to the coast.... Howbeit,
when the full time of his expiation shall have come and his deadly
sin forgiven, the corporal body which is the cursed receptacle of his
spirit shall at length be purged with fire, and so he shall, in the
infinite mercy of the Almighty, have rest, and shall wander no more.”
The Horror-Horn
The Horror-Horn
For the past ten days Alhubel had basked in the radiant midwinter
weather proper to its eminence of over 6,000 feet. From rising to
setting the sun (so surprising to those who have hitherto associated
it with a pale, tepid plate indistinctly shining through the murky air
of England) had blazed its way across the sparkling blue, and every
night the serene and windless frost had made the stars sparkle like
illuminated diamond dust. Sufficient snow had fallen before Christmas
to content the skiers, and the big rink, sprinkled every evening, had
given the skaters each morning a fresh surface on which to perform
their slippery antics. Bridge and dancing served to while away the
greater part of the night, and to me, now for the first time tasting
the joys of a winter in the Engadine, it seemed that a new heaven and
a new earth had been lighted, warmed, and refrigerated for the special
benefit of those who like myself had been wise enough to save up their
days of holiday for the winter.
But a break came in these ideal conditions: one afternoon the sun grew
vapour-veiled and up the valley from the north-west a wind frozen with
miles of travel over ice-bound hill-sides began scouting through the
calm halls of the heavens. Soon it grew dusted with snow, first in
small flakes driven almost horizontally before its congealing breath
and then in larger tufts as of swansdown. And though all day for a
fortnight before the fate of nations and life and death had seemed
to me of far less importance than to get certain tracings of the
skate-blades on the ice of proper shape and size, it now seemed that
the one paramount consideration was to hurry back to the hotel for
shelter: it was wiser to leave rocking-turns alone than to be frozen in
their quest.
I had come out here with my cousin, Professor Ingram, the celebrated
physiologist and Alpine climber. During the serenity of the last
fortnight he had made a couple of notable winter ascents, but this
morning his weather-wisdom had mistrusted the signs of the heavens, and
instead of attempting the ascent of the Piz Passug he had waited to see
whether his misgivings justified themselves. So there he sat now in the
hall of the admirable hotel with his feet on the hot-water pipes and
the latest delivery of the English post in his hands. This contained
a pamphlet concerning the result of the Mount Everest expedition, of
which he had just finished the perusal when I entered.
“A very interesting report,” he said, passing it to me, “and they
certainly deserve to succeed next year. But who can tell, what that
final six thousand feet may entail? Six thousand feet more when you
have already accomplished twenty-three thousand does not seem much,
but at present no one knows whether the human frame can stand exertion
at such a height. It may affect not the lungs and heart only, but
possibly the brain. Delirious hallucinations may occur. In fact, if I
did not know better, I should have said that one such hallucination had
occurred to the climbers already.”
“And what was that?” I asked.
“You will find that they thought they came across the tracks of some
naked human foot at a great altitude. That looks at first sight like
an hallucination. What more natural than that a brain excited and
exhilarated by the extreme height should have interpreted certain marks
in the snow as the footprints of a human being? Every bodily organ
at these altitudes is exerting itself to the utmost to do its work,
and the brain seizes on those marks in the snow and says ‘Yes, I’m
all right, I’m doing my job, and I perceive marks in the snow which
I affirm are human footprints.’ You know, even at this altitude, how
restless and eager the brain is, how vividly, as you told me, you dream
at night. Multiply that stimulus and that consequent eagerness and
restlessness by three, and how natural that the brain should harbour
illusions! What after all is the delirium which often accompanies high
fever but the effort of the brain to do its work under the pressure
of feverish conditions? It is so eager to continue perceiving that it
perceives things which have no existence!”
“And yet you don’t think that these naked human footprints were
illusions,” said I. “You told me you would have thought so, if you had
not known better.”
He shifted in his chair and looked out of the window a moment. The air
was thick now with the density of the big snow-flakes that were driven
along by the squealing north-west gale.
“Quite so,” he said. “In all probability the human footprints were
real human footprints. I expect that they were the footprints, anyhow,
of a being more nearly a man than anything else. My reason for saying
so is that I know such beings exist. I have even seen quite near at
hand--and I assure you I did not wish to be nearer in spite of my
intense curiosity--the creature, shall we say, which would make such
footprints. And if the snow was not so dense, I could show you the
place where I saw him.”
He pointed straight out of the window, where across the valley lies
the huge tower of the Ungeheuerhorn with the carved pinnacle of rock
at the top like some gigantic rhinoceros-horn. On one side only, as I
knew, was the mountain practicable, and that for none but the finest
climbers; on the other three a succession of ledges and precipices
rendered it unscalable. Two thousand feet of sheer rock form the tower;
below are five hundred feet of fallen boulders, up to the edge of which
grow dense woods of larch and pine.
“Upon the Ungeheuerhorn?” I asked.
“Yes. Up till twenty years ago it had never been ascended, and I, like
several others, spent a lot of time in trying to find a route up it.
My guide and I sometimes spent three nights together at the hut beside
the Blumen glacier, prowling round it, and it was by luck really that
we found the route, for the mountain looks even more impracticable
from the far side than it does from this. But one day we found a long,
transverse fissure in the side which led to a negotiable ledge; then
there came a slanting ice couloir which you could not see till you got
to the foot of it. However, I need not go into that.”
The big room where we sat was filling up with cheerful groups driven
indoors by this sudden gale and snowfall, and the cackle of merry
tongues grew loud. The band, too, that invariable appanage of tea-time
at Swiss resorts, had begun to tune up for the usual potpourri from the
works of Puccini. Next moment the sugary, sentimental melodies began.
“Strange contrast!” said Ingram. “Here are we sitting warm and cosy,
our ears pleasantly tickled with these little baby tunes and outside is
the great storm growing more violent every moment, and swirling round
the austere cliffs of the Ungeheuerhorn: the Horror-Horn, as indeed it
was to me.”
“I want to hear all about it,” I said. “Every detail: make a short
story long, if it’s short. I want to know why it’s _your_ Horror-horn?”
“Well, Chanton and I (he was my guide) used to spend days prowling
about the cliffs, making a little progress on one side and then being
stopped, and gaining perhaps five hundred feet on another side and then
being confronted by some insuperable obstacle, till the day when by
luck we found the route. Chanton never liked the job, for some reason
that I could not fathom. It was not because of the difficulty or danger
of the climbing, for he was the most fearless man I have ever met
when dealing with rocks and ice, but he was always insistent that we
should get off the mountain and back to the Blumen hut before sunset.
He was scarcely easy even when we had got back to shelter and locked
and barred the door, and I well remember one night when, as we ate our
supper, we heard some animal, a wolf probably, howling somewhere out in
the night. A positive panic seized him, and I don’t think he closed his
eyes till morning. It struck me then that there might be some grisly
legend about the mountain, connected possibly with its name, and next
day I asked him why the peak was called the Horror-horn. He put the
question off at first, and said that, like the Schreckhorn, its name
was due to its precipices and falling stones; but when I pressed him
further he acknowledged that there was a legend about it, which his
father had told him. There were creatures, so it was supposed, that
lived in its caves, things human in shape, and covered, except for
the face and hands, with long black hair. They were dwarfs in size,
four feet high or thereabouts, but of prodigious strength and agility,
remnants of some wild primeval race. It seemed that they were still
in an upward stage of evolution, or so I guessed, for the story ran
that sometimes girls had been carried off by them, not as prey, and
not for any such fate as for those captured by cannibals, but to be
bred from. Young men also had been raped by them, to be mated with
the females of their tribe. All this looked as if the creatures, as I
said, were tending towards humanity. But naturally I did not believe a
word of it, as applied to the conditions of the present day. Centuries
ago, conceivably, there may have been such beings, and, with the
extraordinary tenacity of tradition, the news of this had been handed
down and was still current round the hearths of the peasants. As for
their numbers, Chanton told me that three had been once seen together
by a man who owing to his swiftness on skis had escaped to tell the
tale. This man, he averred, was no other than his grandfather, who
had been benighted one winter evening as he passed through the dense
woods below the Ungeheuerhorn, and Chanton supposed that they had
been driven down to these lower altitudes in search of food during
severe winter weather, for otherwise the recorded sights of them
had always taken place among the rocks of the peak itself. They had
pursued his grandfather, then a young man, at an extraordinarily swift
canter, running sometimes upright as men run, sometimes on all-fours
in the manner of beasts, and their howls were just such as that we had
heard that night in the Blumen hut. Such at any rate was the story
Chanton told me, and, like you, I regarded it as the very moonshine
of superstition. But the very next day I had reason to reconsider my
judgment about it.
“It was on that day that after a week of exploration we hit on the
only route at present known to the top of our peak. We started as soon
as there was light enough to climb by, for, as you may guess, on very
difficult rocks it is impossible to climb by lantern or moonlight.
We hit on the long fissure I have spoken of, we explored the ledge
which from below seemed to end in nothingness, and with an hour’s
step-cutting ascended the couloir which led upwards from it. From there
onwards it was a rock-climb, certainly of considerable difficulty, but
with no heart-breaking discoveries ahead, and it was about nine in the
morning that we stood on the top. We did not wait there long, for that
side of the mountain is raked by falling stones loosened, when the sun
grows hot, from the ice that holds them, and we made haste to pass the
ledge where the falls are most frequent. After that there was the long
fissure to descend, a matter of no great difficulty, and we were at
the end of our work by midday, both of us, as you may imagine, in the
state of the highest elation.
“A long and tiresome scramble among the huge boulders at the foot of
the cliff then lay before us. Here the hill-side is very porous and
great caves extend far into the mountain. We had unroped at the base of
the fissure, and were picking our way as seemed good to either of us
among these fallen rocks, many of them bigger than an ordinary house,
when, on coming round the corner of one of these, I saw that which
made it clear that the stories Chanton had told me were no figment of
traditional superstition.
“Not twenty yards in front of me lay one of the beings of which he
had spoken. There it sprawled naked and basking on its back with face
turned up to the sun, which its narrow eyes regarded unwinking. In form
it was completely human, but the growth of hair that covered limbs and
trunk alike almost completely hid the sun-tanned skin beneath. But its
face, save for the down on its cheeks and chin, was hairless, and I
looked on a countenance the sensual and malevolent bestiality of which
froze me with horror. Had the creature been an animal, one would have
felt scarcely a shudder at the gross animalism of it; the horror lay in
the fact that it was a man. There lay by it a couple of gnawed bones,
and, its meal finished, it was lazily licking its protuberant lips,
from which came a purring murmur of content. With one hand it scratched
the thick hair on its belly, in the other it held one of these bones,
which presently split in half beneath the pressure of its finger and
thumb. But my horror was not based on the information of what happened
to those men whom these creatures caught, it was due only to my
proximity to a thing so human and so infernal. The peak, of which the
ascent had a moment ago filled us with such elated satisfaction, became
to me an Ungeheuerhorn indeed, for it was the home of beings more awful
than the delirium of nightmare could ever have conceived.
“Chanton was a dozen paces behind me, and with a backward wave of
my hand I caused him to halt. Then withdrawing myself with infinite
precaution, so as not to attract the gaze of that basking creature,
I slipped back round the rock, whispered to him what I had seen, and
with blanched faces we made a long detour, peering round every corner,
and crouching low, not knowing that at any step we might not come upon
another of these beings, or that from the mouth of one of these caves
in the mountain-side there might not appear another of those hairless
and dreadful faces, with perhaps this time the breasts and insignia of
womanhood. That would have been the worst of all.
“Luck favoured us, for we made our way among the boulders and shifting
stones, the rattle of which might at any moment have betrayed us,
without a repetition of my experience, and once among the trees we ran
as if the Furies themselves were in pursuit. Well now did I understand,
though I dare say I cannot convey, the qualms of Chanton’s mind when he
spoke to me of these creatures. Their very humanity was what made them
so terrible, the fact that they were of the same race as ourselves, but
of a type so abysmally degraded that the most brutal and inhuman of men
would have seemed angelic in comparison.”
The music of the small band was over before he had finished the
narrative, and the chattering groups round the tea-table had dispersed.
He paused a moment.
“There was a horror of the spirit,” he said, “which I experienced
then, from which, I verily believe, I have never entirely recovered.
I saw then how terrible a living thing could be, and how terrible, in
consequence, was life itself. In us all I suppose lurks some inherited
germ of that ineffable bestiality, and who knows whether, sterile as it
has apparently become in the course of centuries, it might not fructify
again. When I saw that creature sun itself, I looked into the abyss
out of which we have crawled. And these creatures are trying to crawl
out of it now, if they exist any longer. Certainly for the last twenty
years there has been no record of their being seen, until we come to
this story of the footprint seen by the climbers on Everest. If that
is authentic, if the party did not mistake the footprint of some bear,
or what not, for a human tread, it seems as if still this bestranded
remnant of mankind is in existence.”
Now, Ingram, had told his story well; but sitting in this warm
and civilised room, the horror which he had clearly felt had not
communicated itself to me in any very vivid manner. Intellectually, I
agreed, I could appreciate his horror, but certainly my spirit felt no
shudder of interior comprehension.
“But it is odd,” I said, “that your keen interest in physiology did
not disperse your qualms. You were looking, so I take it, at some form
of man more remote probably than the earliest human remains. Did not
something inside you say ‘This is of absorbing significance’?”
He shook his head.
“No: I only wanted to get away,” said he. “It was not, as I have told
you, the terror of what according to Chanton’s story, might await us if
we were captured; it was sheer horror at the creature itself. I quaked
at it.”
* * * * *
The snowstorm and the gale increased in violence that night, and I
slept uneasily, plucked again and again from slumber by the fierce
battling of the wind that shook my windows as if with an imperious
demand for admittance. It came in billowy gusts, with strange noises
intermingled with it as for a moment it abated, with flutings and
moanings that rose to shrieks as the fury of it returned. These noises,
no doubt, mingled themselves with my drowsed and sleepy consciousness,
and once I tore myself out of nightmare, imagining that the creatures
of the Horror-horn had gained footing on my balcony and were rattling
at the window-bolts. But before morning the gale had died away, and I
awoke to see the snow falling dense and fast in a windless air. For
three days it continued, without intermission, and with its cessation
there came a frost such as I have never felt before. Fifty degrees were
registered one night, and more the next, and what the cold must have
been on the cliffs of the Ungeheuerhorn I cannot imagine. Sufficient,
so I thought, to have made an end altogether of its secret inhabitants:
my cousin, on that day twenty years ago, had missed an opportunity for
study which would probably never fall again either to him or another.