(The tumbler of spirits that he held had not been diluted.) “I try to
paint the essence of what I see, not the mere husk and skin of it, but
its nature, where it comes from and what gave it birth. There’s much
in common between a cat and a fuchsia-bush if you look at them closely
enough. Everything came out of the slime of the pit, and it’s all going
back there. I should like to do a picture of you some day. I’d hold the
mirror up to Nature, as that old lunatic said.”
After this first meeting I saw him occasionally throughout the months
of that wonderful summer. Often he kept to his house and to his
painting for days together, and then perhaps some evening I would find
him lounging on the pier, always alone, and every time we met thus the
repulsion and interest grew, for every time he seemed to have gone
farther along a path of secret knowledge towards some evil shrine
where complete initiation awaited him.... And then suddenly the end
came.
I had met him thus one evening on the cliffs while the October sunset
still burned in the sky, but over it with amazing rapidity there spread
from the west a great blackness of cloud such as I have never seen for
denseness. The light was sucked from the sky, the dusk fell in ever
thicker layers. He suddenly became conscious of this.
“I must get back as quick as I can,” he said. “It will be dark in a few
minutes, and my servant is out. The lamps will not be lit.”
He stepped out with extraordinary briskness for one who shambled and
could scarcely lift his feet, and soon broke out into a stumbling run.
In the gathering darkness I could see that his face was moist with the
dew of some unspoken terror.
“You must come with me,” he panted, “for so we shall get the lights
burning the sooner. I cannot do without light.”
I had to exert myself to the full to keep up with him, for terror
winged him, and even so I fell behind, so that when I came to the
garden gate, he was already half-way up the path to the house. I saw
him enter, leaving the door wide, and found him fumbling with matches.
But his hand so trembled that he could not transfer the light to the
wick of the lamp.
“But what’s the hurry about?” I asked.
Suddenly his eyes focused themselves on the open door behind me, and he
jumped from his seat beside the table which had once been the altar of
God, with a gasp and a scream.
“No, no!” he cried. “Keep it off!...”
I turned and saw what he had seen. The Thing had entered and now was
swiftly sliding across the floor towards him, like some gigantic
caterpillar. A stale phosphorescent light came from it, for though the
dusk had grown to blackness outside, I could see it quite distinctly in
the awful light of its own presence. From it too there came an odour
of corruption and decay, as from slime that has long lain below water.
It seemed to have no head, but on the front of it was an orifice of
puckered skin which opened and shut and slavered at the edges. It was
hairless, and slug-like in shape and in texture. As it advanced its
fore-part reared itself from the ground, like a snake about to strike,
and it fastened on him....
At that sight, and with the yells of his agony in my ears, the panic
which had struck me relaxed into a hopeless courage, and with palsied,
impotent hands I tried to lay hold of the Thing. But I could not:
though something material was there, it was impossible to grasp it;
my hands sunk in it as in thick mud. It was like wrestling with a
nightmare.
I think that but a few seconds elapsed before all was over. The screams
of the wretched man sank to moans and mutterings as the Thing fell
on him: he panted once or twice and was still. For a moment longer
there came gurglings and sucking noises, and then it slid out even as
it had entered. I lit the lamp which he had fumbled with, and there
on the floor he lay, no more than a rind of skin in loose folds over
projecting bones.
At the Farmhouse
At the Farmhouse
The dusk of a November day was falling fast when John Aylsford came
out of his lodging in the cobbled street and started to walk briskly
along the road which led eastwards by the shore of the bay. He had been
at work while the daylight served him, and now, when the gathering
darkness weaned him from his easel, he was accustomed to go out for air
and exercise and cover half a dozen miles before he returned to his
solitary supper.
To-night there were but few folk abroad, and those scudded along before
the strong south-westerly gale which had roared and raged all day, or,
leaning forward, beat their way against it. No fishing-boats had put
forth on that maddened sea, but had lain moored behind the quay-wall,
tossing uneasily with the backwash of the great breakers that swept
by the pier-head. The tide was low now, and they rested on the sandy
beach, black blots against the smooth wet surface which sombrely
reflected the last flames in the west. The sun had gone down in a wrack
of broken and flying clouds, angry and menacing with promise of a wild
night to come.
For many days past, at this hour John Aylsford had started eastwards
for his tramp along the rough coast road by the bay. The last high
tide had swept shingle and sand over sections of it, and fragments of
seaweed, driven by the wind, bowled along the ruts. The heavy boom of
the breakers sounded sullenly in the dusk, and white towers of foam
appearing and disappearing showed how high they leaped over the reefs
of rock beyond the headland. For half a mile or so, slanting himself
against the gale he pursued this road, then turned up a narrow muddy
lane sunk deep between the banks on either side of it. It ran steeply
uphill, dipped down again, and joined the main road inland. Having
arrived at the junction, John Aylsford went eastwards no more, but
turned his steps to the west, arriving, half an hour after he had set
out, on the top of the hill above the village he had quitted, though
five minutes’ ascent would have taken him from his lodgings to the spot
where he now stood looking down on the scattered lights below him. The
wind had blown all wayfarers indoors, and now in front of him the road
that crossed this high and desolate table-land, sprinkled here and
there with lonely cottages and solitary farms, lay empty and greyly
glimmering in the wind-swept darkness, not more than faintly visible.
Many times during this past month had John Aylsford made this long
detour, starting eastwards from the village and coming back by a wide
circuit, and now, as on these other occasions, he paused in the black
shelter of the hedge through which the wind hissed and whistled,
crouching there in the shadow as if to make sure that none had followed
him, and that the road in front lay void of passengers, for he had no
mind to be observed by any on these journeyings. And as he paused he
let his hate blaze up, warming him for the work the accomplishment of
which alone could enable him to recapture any peace or profit from
life. To-night he was determined to release himself from the millstone
which for so many years had hung round his neck, drowning him in bitter
waters. From long brooding over the idea of the deed, he had quite
ceased to feel any horror of it. The death of that drunken slut was not
a matter for qualms or uneasiness; the world would be well rid of her,
and he more than well.
No spark of tenderness for the handsome fisher-girl who once had been
his model and for twenty years had been his wife pierced the blackness
of his purpose. Just here it was that he had seen her first when on a
summer holiday he had lodged with a couple of friends in the farmhouse
towards which his way now lay. She was coming up the hill with the
late sunset gilding her face, and, breathing quickly from the ascent,
had leaned on the wall close by with a smile and a glance for the
young man. She had sat to him, and the autumn brought the sequel to
the summer in his marriage. He had bought from her uncle the little
farmhouse where he had lodged, adding to its modest accommodation a
studio and a bedroom above it, and there he had seen the flicker of
what had never been love, die out, and over the cold ashes of its
embers the poisonous lichen of hatred spread fast. Early in their
married life she had taken to drink, and had sunk into a degradation of
soul and body that seemed bottomless, dragging him with her, down and
down, in the grip of a force that was hardly human in its malignity.
Often during the wretched years that followed he had tried to leave
her; he had offered to settle the farm on her and make adequate
provision for her, but she had clung to the possession of him, not,
it would seem, from any affection for him, but for a reason exactly
opposite, namely, that her hatred of him fed and glutted itself on the
sight of his ruin. It was as if, in obedience to some hellish power,
she set herself to spoil his life, his powers, his possibilities, by
tying him to herself. And by the aid of that power, so sometimes he had
thought, she enforced her will on him, for, plan as he might to cut the
whole dreadful business and leave the wreck behind him, he had never
been able to consolidate his resolve into action. There, but a few
miles away, was the station from which ran the train that would bear
him out of this ancient western kingdom, where the beliefs in spells
and superstitions grew rank as the herbage in that soft enervating air,
and set him in the dry hard light of cities. The way lay open, but he
could not take it; something unseen and potent, of grim inflexibility,
held him back....
He had passed no one on his way here, and satisfied now that in the
darkness he could proceed without fear of being recognised if a chance
wayfarer came from the direction in which he was going, he left the
shelter of the hedge, and struck out into the stormy sea of that
stupendous gale. Even as a man in the grip of imminent death sees his
past life spread itself out in front of him for his final survey before
the book is closed, so now, on the brink of the new life from which the
deed on which he was determined alone separated him, John Aylsford, as
he battled his advance through this great tempest, turned over page
after page of his own wretched chronicles, feeling already strangely
detached from them; it was as if he read the sordid and enslaved annals
of another, wondering at them, half-pitying, half-despising him who had
allowed himself to be bound so long in this ruinous noose.
Yes; it had been just that, a noose drawn ever tighter round his neck,
while he choked and struggled all unavailingly. But there was another
noose which should very soon now be drawn rapidly and finally tight,
and the drawing of that in his own strong hands would free him. As he
dwelt on that for a moment, his fingers stroked and patted the hank of
whipcord that lay white and tough in his pocket. A noose, a knot drawn
quickly taut, and he would have paid her back with justice and swifter
mercy for the long strangling which he had suffered.
Voluntarily and eagerly at the beginning had he allowed her to slip the
noose about him, for Ellen Trenair’s beauty in those days, so long past
and so everlastingly regretted, had been enough to ensnare a man. He
had been warned at the time, by hint and half-spoken suggestion, that
it was ill for a man to mate with a girl of that dark and ill-famed
family, or for a woman to wed a boy in whose veins ran the blood of
Jonas Trenair, once Methodist preacher, who learned on one All-Hallows’
Eve a darker gospel than he had ever preached before. What had happened
to the girls who had married into that dwindling family, now all
but extinct? One, before her marriage was a year old, had gone off
her head, and now, a withered and ancient crone, mowed and gibbered
about the streets of the village, picking garbage from the gutter and
munching it in her toothless jaws. Another, Ellen’s own mother, had
been found hanging from the banister of her stairs, stark and grim.
Then there was young Frank Pencarris, who had wed Ellen’s sister.
He had sunk into an awful melancholy, and sat tracing on sheets of
paper the visions that beset his eyes, headless shapes, and foaming
mouths, and the images of the spawn of hell.... John Aylsford, in those
early days, had laughed to scorn these old-wife tales of spells and
sorceries: they belonged to ages long past, whereas fair Ellen Trenair
was of the lovely present, and had lit desire in his heart which she
alone could assuage. He had no use, in the brightness of her eye, for
such shadows and superstitions; her beams dispelled them.
Bitter and black as midnight had his enlightenment been, darkening
through dubious dusks till the mirk of the pit itself enveloped him.
His laughter at the notion that in this twentieth century spells and
sorceries could survive, grew silent on his lips. He had seen the
cattle of a neighbour who had offended one whom it was wiser not to
cross, dwindle and pine, though there were rich pastures for their
grazing, till the rib-bones stuck out like the timbers of stranded
wrecks. He had seen the spring on another farm run dry at lambing-time
because the owner, sceptic like himself, had refused that bounty, which
all prudent folk paid to the wizard of Mareuth, who, like Ellen, was of
the blood of Jonas Trenair. From scorn and laughter he had wavered to
an uneasy wonder, and from wonder his mind had passed to the conviction
that there were powers occult and terrible which strove in darkness and
prevailed, secrets and spells that could send disease on man and beast,
dark incantations, known to few, which could maim and cripple, and of
these few his wife was one. His reason revolted, but some conviction,
deeper than reason, held its own. To such a view it seemed that the
deed he contemplated was no crime, but rather an act of obedience to
the ordinance “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And the sense of
detachment was over that, even as over the memories that oozed up in
his mind. Somebody--not he--who had planned everything very carefully
was in the next hour going to put an end to his bondage.
So the years had passed, he floundering ever deeper in the slough into
which he was plunged, out of which while she lived he could never
emerge. For the last year, she, wearying of his perpetual presence at
the farm, had allowed him to take a lodging in the village. She did
not loose her hold over him, for the days were few on which she did
not come with demands for a handful of shillings to procure her the
raw spirits which alone could slake her thirst. Sometimes as he sat
at work there in the north room looking on to the small garden-yard,
she would come lurching up the path, with her bloated crimson face set
on the withered neck, and tap at his window with fingers shrivelled
like bird’s claws. Body and limbs were no more than bones over which
the wrinkled skin was stretched, but her face bulged monstrously with
layers of fat. He would give her whatever he had about him, and if
it was not enough, she would plant herself there, grinning at him
and wheedling him, or with screams and curses threatening him with
such fate as he had known to overtake those who crossed her will. But
usually he gave her enough to satisfy her for that day and perhaps the
next, for thus she would the more quickly drink herself to death. Yet
death seemed long in coming....
He remembered well how first the notion of killing her came into his
head, just a little seed, small as that of mustard, which lay long
in barrenness. Only the bare idea of it was there, like an abstract
proposition. Then imperceptibly in the fruitful darkness of his mind,
it must have begun to sprout, for presently a tendril, still soft and
white, prodded out into the daylight. He almost pushed it back again,
for fear that she, by some divining art, should probe his purpose.
But when next she came for supplies, he saw no gleam of surmise in
her red-rimmed eyes, and she took her money and went her way, and
his purpose put forth another leaf, and the stem of it grew sappy.
All autumn through it had flourished, and grown tree-like, and fresh
ideas, fresh details, fresh precautions, flocked there like building
birds and made it gay with singing. He sat under the shadow of it and
listened with brightening hopes to their song; never had there been
such peerless melody. They knew their tunes now, there was no need for
any further rehearsal.
He began to wonder how soon he would be back on the road again, with
face turned from this buffeting wind, and on his way home. His business
would not take him long; the central deed of it would be over in a
couple of minutes, and he did not anticipate delay about the setting
to work on it, for by seven o’clock of the evening, as well he knew,
she was usually snoring in the oblivion of complete drunkenness,
and even if she was not as far gone as that, she would certainly be
incapable of any serious resistance. After that, a quarter of an hour
more would finish the job, and he would leave the house secure already
from any chance of detection. Night after night during these last ten
days he had been up here, peering from the darkness into the lighted
room where she sat, then listening for her step on the stairs as
she stumbled up to bed, or hearing her snorings as she slept in her
chair below. The out-house, he knew, was well stocked with paraffin;
he needed no further apparatus than the whipcord and the matches he
carried with him. Then back he would go along the exact route by which
he had come, re-entering the village again from the eastwards, in which
direction he had set out.
This walk of his was now a known and established habit; half the
village during the last week or two had seen him every evening set
forth along the coast road, for a tramp in the dusk when the light
failed for his painting, and had seen him come back again as they hung
about and smoked in the warm dusk, a couple of hours later. None knew
of his detour to the main road which took him westwards again above
the village and so to the stretch of bleak upland along which now he
fought his way against the gale. Always round about the hour of eight
he had entered the village again from the other side, and had stopped
and chatted with the loiterers. To-night, no later than was usual, he
would come up the cobbled road again, and give “good night” to any who
lingered there outside the public-house. In this wild wind it was not
likely that there would be such, and if so, no matter; he had been seen
already setting forth on his usual walk by the coast of the bay, and
if none outside saw him return, none could see the true chart of his
walk. By eight he should be back to his supper, there would be a soused
herring for him, and a cut of cheese, and the kettle would be singing
on the hob for his hot whisky-toddy. He would have a keen edge for the
enjoyment of them to-night; he would drink long healths to the damned
and the dead. Not till to-morrow, probably, would the news of what had
happened reach him, for the farmhouse lay lonely and sheltered by the
wood of firs. However high might mount the beacon of its blazing, it
would scarcely, screened by the tall trees, light up the western sky,
and be seen from the village nestling below the steep hill-crest.
By now John Aylsford had come to the fir wood which bordered the road
on the left, and, as he passed into its shelter, cut off from him the
violence of the gale. All its branches were astir with the sound of
some vexed, overhead sea, and the trunks that upheld them creaked and
groaned in the fury of the tempest. Somewhere behind the thick scud
of flying cloud the moon must have risen, for the road glimmered more
visibly, and the tossing blackness of the branches was clear enough
against the grey tumult overhead. Behind the tempest she rode in serene
skies, and in the murderous clarity of his mind he likened himself to
her. Just for half an hour more he would still grope and scheme and
achieve in this hurly-burly, and then, like a balloon released, soar
through the clouds and find serenity. A couple of hundred yards now
would take him round the corner of the wood; from there the miry lane
led from the high-road to the farm.
He hastened rather than retarded his going as he drew near, for the
wood, though it roared with the gale, began to whisper to him of
memories. Often in that summer before his marriage had he strayed
out at dusk into it, certain that before he had gone many paces he
would see a shadow flitting towards him through the firs, or hear the
crack of dry twigs in the stillness. Here was their tryst; she would
come up from the village with the excuse of bringing fish to the
farmhouse, after the boats had come in, and deserting the high-road
make a short cut through the wood. Like some distant blink of lightning
the memory of those evenings quivered distantly on his mind, and he
quickened his step. The years that followed had killed and buried
those recollections, but who knew what stirring of corpses and dry
bones might not yet come to them if he lingered there? He fingered the
whipcord in his pocket, and launched out, beyond the trees, into the
full fury of the gale.
The farmhouse was near now and in full view, a black blot against
the clouds. A beam of light shone from an uncurtained window on the
ground-floor, and the rest was dark. Even thus had he seen it for many
nights past, and well knew what sight would greet him as he stole up
nearer. And even so it was to-night, for there she sat in the studio he
had built, betwixt table and fireplace with the bottle near her, and
her withered hands stretched out to the blaze, and the huge bloated
face swaying on her shoulders. Beside her to-night were the wrecked
remains of a chair, and the first sight that he caught of her was to
show her feeding the fire with the broken pieces of it. It had been too
troublesome to bring fresh logs from the store of wood; to break up a
chair was the easier task.
She stirred and sat more upright, then reached out for the bottle that
stood beside her, and drank from the mouth of it. She drank and licked
her lips and drank again, and staggered to her feet, tripping on the
edge of the hearthrug. For the moment that seemed to anger her, and
with clenched teeth and pointing finger she mumbled at it; then once
more she drank, and lurching forward, took the lamp from the table.
With it in her hand she shuffled to the door, and the room was left to
the flickering firelight. A moment afterwards, the bedroom window above
sprang into light, an oblong of bright illumination.
As soon as that appeared he crept round the house to the door. He
gently turned the handle of it, and found it unlocked. Inside was a
small passage entrance, on the left of which ascended the stairs to
the bedroom above the studio. All was silent there, but from where he
stood he could see that the door into the bedroom was open, for a shaft
of light from the lamp she had carried up with her was shed on to the
landing there.... Everything was smoothing itself out to render his
course most easy. Even the gale was his friend, for it would be bellows
for the fire. He slipped off his shoes, leaving them on the mat, and
drew the whipcord from his pocket. He made a noose in it, and began to
ascend the stairs. They were well-built of seasoned oak, and no creak
betrayed his advancing footfall.
At the top he paused, listening for any stir of movement within, but
there was nothing to be heard but the sound of heavy breathing from
the bed that lay to the left of the door and out of sight. She had
thrown herself down there, he guessed, without undressing, leaving
the lamp to burn itself out. He could see it through the open door
already beginning to flicker; on the wall behind it were a couple of
water-colours, pictures of his own, one of the little walled garden by
the farm, the other of the pinewood of their tryst. Well he remembered
painting them: she would sit by him as he worked with prattle and
singing. He looked at them now quite detachedly; they seemed to him
wonderfully good, and he envied the artist that fresh, clean skill.
Perhaps he would take them down presently and carry them away with him.
Very softly now he advanced into the room, and looking round the corner
of the door, he saw her, sprawling and fully dressed on the broad
bed. She lay on her back, eyes closed and mouth open, her dull grey
hair spread over the pillow. Evidently she had not made the bed that
day, for she lay stretched on the crumpled back-turned blankets. A
hair-brush was on the floor beside her; it seemed to have fallen from
her hand. He moved quickly towards her.
* * * * *