HOME
But it was the sound of something crashing heavily through the top
branches of the elms that made the boy realise he was actually being
followed; and all his efforts became concentrated into the desire to put
as much distance as possible between himself and the horror of the Empty
House.
He heard the noise of big wings far beneath him, and his one idea was to
out-distance his pursuer and then come down again to earth and rest his
wings in the branches of a tree till he could devise some plan how to
find the governess. So at first he raced at full speed through the air,
taking no thought of direction.
When he looked down, all he could see was that something vague and
shadowy, shaking out a pair of enormous wings between him and the earth,
move along with him. Its path was parallel with his own, but apparently
it made no effort to rise up to his higher level. It thundered along far
beneath him, and instinctively he raised his head and steered more and
more upwards and away from the world.
The gap at the end of his right wing where the feathers had been torn
out seemed to make no difference in his power of flight or steering, and
he went tearing through the night at a pace he had never dared to try
before, and at a height he had never yet reached in any of the practice
flights. He soared higher even than he knew; and perhaps this was
fortunate, for the friction of the lower atmosphere might have heated
him to the point of igniting, and some watcher at one of earth's windows
might have suddenly seen a brilliant little meteor flash through the
night and vanish into dust.
At first the joy of escape was the only idea his mind seemed able to
grasp; he revelled in a passionate sense of freedom, and all his
energies poured themselves into one concentrated effort to fly faster,
faster, faster. But after a time, when the pursuer had been apparently
outflown, and he realised that escape was an accomplished fact, he began
to search for the governess, calling to her, rising and falling,
darting in all directions, and then hovering on outstretched wings to
try and catch some sound of a friendly voice.
But no answer came, either from the stars that crowded the vault above,
or from the dark surface of the world below; only silence answered his
cries, and his voice was swallowed up and lost in the immensity of space
almost the moment it left his lips.
Presently he began to realise to what an appalling distance he had risen
above the world, and with anxious eyes he tried to pierce the gaping
emptiness beneath him and on all sides. But this vast sea of air had
nothing to reveal. The stars shone like pinholes of gold pricked in a
deep black curtain; and the moon, now rising slowly, spread a veil of
silver between him and the upper regions. There was not a cloud anywhere
and the winds were all asleep. He was alone in space. Yet, as the
swishing of his feathers slackened and the roar in his ears died away,
he heard in the short pause the ominous beating of great wings somewhere
in the depths beneath him, and knew that the great pursuer was still on
his track.
The glare of the moon now made it impossible to distinguish anything
properly, and in these huge spaces, with nothing to guide the eye, it
was difficult to know exactly from what direction the sound came. He was
only sure of one thing--that it was far below him, and that for the
present it did not seem to come much nearer. The cry for help that kept
rising to his lips he suppressed, for it would only have served to guide
his pursuer; and, moreover, a cry--a little thin, despairing cry--was
instantly lost in these great heavens. It was less than a drop in an
ocean.
On and on he flew, always pointing away from the earth, and trying hard
to think where he would find safety. Would this awful creature hunt him
all night long into the daylight, or would he be forced back into the
Empty House in sheer exhaustion? The thought gave him new impetus, and
with powerful strokes he dashed onwards and upwards through the
wilderness of space in which the only pathways were the little golden
tracks of the starbeams. The governess would turn up somewhere; he was
positive of that. She had never failed him yet.
So, alone and breathless, he pursued his flight, and the higher he went
the more the tremendous vault opened up into inconceivable and untold
distances. His speed kept increasing; he thought he had never found
flying so easy before; and the thunder of the following wings that held
persistently on his track made it dangerous for him to slacken up for
more than a minute here and there. The earth became a dark blot beneath
him, while the moon, rising higher and higher, grew weirdly bright and
close. How black the sky was; how piercing the points of starlight; how
stimulating the strong, new odours of these lofty regions! He realised
with a thrill of genuine awe that he had flown over the very edge of the
world, and the moment the thought entered his mind it was flung back at
him by a voice that seemed close to his ear one moment, and the next was
miles away in the space overhead. Light thoughts, born of the stars and
the moon and of his great speed, danced before his mind in fanciful
array. Once he laughed aloud at them, but once only. The sound of his
voice in these echoless spaces made him afraid.
The speed, too, affected his vision, for at one moment thin clouds
stretched across his face, and the next he was whirling through
perfectly clear air again with no vestige of a cloud in sight. The same
reason doubtless explained the sudden presence of sheets of light in
the air that reflected the moonlight like particles of glittering ice,
and then suddenly disappeared again. The terrific speed would explain a
good many things, but certainly it was curious how creatures formed out
of the hollow darkness, like foam before a steamer's bows, and moved
noiselessly away on either side to join the army of dim life that
crowded everywhere and watched his passage. For, in front and on both
sides, there gathered a vast assembly of silent forms more than shadows,
less than bodily shapes, that opened up a pathway as he rushed through
them, and then immediately closed up their ranks again when he had
passed. The air seemed packed with living creatures. Space was filled
with them. They surrounded him on all sides. Yet his passage through
them was like the passage of a hand through smoke; it was easy to make a
pathway, but the pathway left no traces behind it. More smoke rushed in
and filled the void.
He could never see these things properly, face to face; they always kept
just out of the line of vision, like shadows that follow a lonely walker
in a wood and vanish the moment he turns to look at them over his
shoulder. But ever by his side, with a steady, effortless motion, he
knew they kept up with him--strange inhabitants of the airless heights,
immense and misty-winged, with veiled, flaming eyes and silent feathers.
He was not afraid of them; for they were neither friendly nor hostile;
they were simply the beings of another world, alien and unknown.
But what puzzled him more was that the light and the darkness seemed
separate things, each distinctly visible. After each stroke of his wings
he _saw the darkness_ sift downwards past him through the air like dust.
It floated all round him in thinnest diaphanous texture--visible, not
because the moonlight made it so, but because in its inmost soul it was
itself luminous. It rose and fell in eddies, swirling wreaths, and
undulations; inwoven with starbeams, as with golden thread, it clothed
him about in circles of some magical primordial substance.
Even the stars, looking down upon him from terrifying heights, seemed
now draped, now undraped, as if by the sweeping of enormous wings that
stirred these sheets of visible darkness into a vast system of
circulation through the heavens. Everything in these oceans of upper
space apparently made use of wings, or the idea of wings. Perhaps even
the great earth itself, rolling from star to star, was moved by the
power of gigantic, invisible wings!...
Jimbo realised he had entered a forbidden region. He began to feel
afraid.
But the only possible expression of his fear, and its only possible
relief, lay in his own wings--and he used them with redoubled energy. He
dashed forward so fast that his face begun to burn, and he kept turning
his head in every direction for a sign of the governess, or for some
indication of where he could _escape to_. In the pauses of the wild
flight he heard the thunder of the following wings below. They were
still on his trail, and it seemed that they were gaining on him.
He took a new angle, realising that his only chance was to fly high; and
the new course took him perpendicularly away from the earth and straight
towards the moon. Later, when he had out-distanced the other creature,
he would drop down again to safer levels.
Yet the hours passed and it never overtook him. A measured distance was
steadily kept up between them as though with calculated purpose.
Curious distant voices shouted from time to time all manner of sentences
and rhymes in his ears, but he could neither understand nor remember
them. More and more the awful stillness of the vast regions that lie
between the world and the moon appalled him.
Then, suddenly, a new sound reached him that at first he could not in
the least understand. It reached him, however, not through the ears, but
by a steady trembling of the whole surface of his body. It set him in
vibration all over, and for some time he had no idea what it meant. The
trembling ran deeper and deeper into his body, till at last a single,
powerful, regular vibration took complete possession of his whole being,
and he felt as though he was being wrapped round and absorbed by this
vast and gigantic sound. He had always thought that the voice of Fright,
like the roar of a river, was the loudest and deepest sound he had ever
heard. Even that set his soul a-trembling. But this new, tremendous,
rolling-ocean of a voice came not that way, and could not be compared to
it. The voice of the other was a mere tickling of the ear compared to
this awful crashing of seas and mountains and falling worlds. It must
break him to pieces, he felt.
Suddenly he knew what it was,--and for a second his wings failed
him:--he had reached such a height that he could hear the roar of the
world as it thundered along its journey through space! That was the
meaning of this voice of majesty that set him all a-trembling. And
before long he would probably hear, too, the voices of the planets, and
the singing of the great moon. The governess had warned him about this.
At the first sound of these awful voices she told him to turn instantly
and drop back to the earth as fast as ever he could drop.
Jimbo turned instinctively and began to fall. But, before he had dropped
half a mile, he met once again the ascending sound of the wings that had
followed him from the Empty House.
It was no good flying straight into destruction. He summoned all his
courage and turned once more towards the stars. Anything was better than
being caught and held for ever by Fright, and with a wild cry for help
that fell dead in the empty spaces, he renewed his unending flight
towards the stars.
But, meanwhile, the pursuer had distinctly gained. Appalled by the
mighty thunder of the stars' voices above, and by the prospect of
immediate capture if he turned back, Jimbo flew blindly on towards the
moon, regardless of consequences. And below him the Pursuer came closer
and closer. The strokes of its wings were no longer mere distant thuds
that he heard when he paused in his own flight to listen; they were the
audible swishing of feathers. It was near enough for that.
Jimbo could never properly see what was following him. A shadow between
him and the earth was all he could distinguish, but in the centre of
that shadow there seemed to burn two glowing eyes. Two brilliant lights
flashed whenever he looked down, like the lamps of a revolving
lighthouse. But other things he saw, too, when he looked down, and once
the earth rose close to his face so that he could have touched it with
his hands. The same instant it dropped away again with a rush of
whirlwinds, and became a distant shadow miles and miles below him. But
before it went, he had time to see the Empty House standing within its
gloomy yard, and the horror of it gave him fresh impetus.
Another time when the world raced up close to his eyes he saw a scene of
a different kind that stirred a passionately deep yearning within him--a
house overgrown with ivy and standing among trees and gardens, with
laburnums and lilacs flowering on smooth green lawns, and a clean
gravel drive leading down to a big pair of iron gates. Oh, it all seemed
so familiar! Perhaps in another minute the well-known figures would have
appeared and spoken to him. Already he heard their voices behind the
bushes. But, just before they appeared, the earth dropped back with a
roar of a thousand winds, and Jimbo saw instead the shadow of the
Pursuer mounting, mounting, mounting towards him. Up he shot again with
terror in his heart, and all trembling with the thunder of the great
star-voices above. He felt like a leaf in a hurricane, "lost, dizzy,
shelterless."
Voices, too, now began to be heard more frequently. They dropped upon
him out of the reaches of this endless void; and with them sometimes
came forms that shot past him with amazing swiftness, racing into the
empty Beyond as though sucked into a vast vacuum. The very stars seemed
to move. He became part of some much larger movement in which he was
engulfed and merged. He could no longer think of himself as Jimbo. When
he uttered his own name he saw merely a mass of wind and colour through
which the great pulses of space and the planets beat tumultuously,
lapping him round with the currents of a terrific motion that seemed to
swallow up his own little personality entirely, while giving him
something infinitely greater....
But surely these small voices, shrill and trumpet-like, did not come
from the stars! these deep whispers that ran round the immense vault
overhead and sounded almost familiarly in his ears--
"Give it him the moment he wakes."
"Bring the ice-bag ... quick!"
"Put the hot bottle to his feet IMMEDIATELY!"
The voices shrieked all round him, turning suddenly into soft whispers
that died away somewhere among his feathers. The soles of his feet began
to glow, and he felt a gigantic hand laid upon his throat and head.
Almost it seemed as if he were lying somewhere on his back, and people
were bending over him, shouting and whispering.
"Why hangs the moon so red?" cried a voice that was instantly drowned in
a chorus of unintelligible whispering.
"The black cow must be killed," whispered some one deep within the sky.
"Why drips the rain so cold?" yelled one of the hideous children close
behind him. And a third called with a distant laughter from behind a
star--
"Why sings the wind so shrill?"
"QUIET!" roared an appalling voice below, as if all the rivers of the
world had suddenly turned loose into the sky. "QUIET!"
Instantly a star, that had been hovering for some time on the edge of a
fantastic dance, dropped down close in front of his face. It had a
glaring disc, with mouth and eyes. An icy hand seemed laid on his head,
and the star rushed back into its place in the sky, leaving a trail of
red flame behind it. A little voice seemed to go with it, growing
fainter and fainter in the distance--
"We dance with phantoms and with shadows play."
But, regardless of everything, Jimbo flew onwards and upwards, terrified
and helpless though he was. His thoughts turned without ceasing to the
governess, and he felt sure that she would yet turn up in time to save
him from being caught by the Fright that pursued, or lost among the
fearful spaces that lay beyond the stars.
For a long time, however, his wings had been growing more and more
tired, and the prospect of being destroyed from sheer exhaustion now
presented itself to the boy vaguely as a possible alternative--vaguely
only, because he was no longer able to think, properly speaking, and
things came to him more by way of dull feeling than anything else.
It was all the more with something of a positive shock, therefore, that
he realised the change. For a change had come. He was now sudden by
conscious of an influx of new power--greater than anything he had ever
known before in any of his flights. His wings now suddenly worked as if
by magic. Never had the motion been so easy, and it became every minute
easier and easier. He simply flashed along without apparent effort. An
immense driving power had entered into him. He realised that he could
fly for ever without getting tired. His pace increased tenfold--
increased alarmingly. The possibility of exhaustion vanished utterly.
Jimbo knew now that something was wrong. This new driving power was
something wholly outside himself. His wings were working far too easily.
Then, suddenly, he understood: _His wings were not working at all!_
He was not being driven forward from behind; he was being drawn forward
from in front.
He saw it all in a flash: Miss Lake's warning long ago about the danger
of flying too high; the last song of the Frightened Children, "Dare you
fly out alone through the shadows that wave, when the course is unknown
and there's no one to save?" the strange words sung to him about the
"relentless misty moon," and the object of the dreadful Pursuer in
steadily forcing him upwards and away from the earth. It all flashed
across his poor little dazed mind. He understood at last.
He had soared too high and had entered the sphere of the moon's
attraction.
"The moon is too strong, and there's death in the stars!" a voice
bellowed below him like the roar of a falling mountain, shaking the sky.
The child flew screaming on. There was nothing else he could do. But
hardly had the roar died away when another voice was heard, a tender
voice, a whispering, sympathetic voice, though from what part of the sky
it came he could not tell--
"Arrange the pillows for his little head."
But below him the wings of the Pursuer were mounting closer and closer.
He could almost feel the mighty wind from their feathers, and hear the
rush of the great body between them. It was impossible to slacken his
speed even had he wished; no strength on earth could have resisted that
terrible power drawing upwards towards the moon. Instinctively, however,
he realised that he would rather have gone forwards than backwards. He
never could have faced capture by that dreadful creature behind. All the
efforts of the past weeks to escape from Fright, the owner of the Empty
House, now acted upon him with a cumulative effect, and added to the
suction of the moon-life. He shot forward at a pace that increased with
every second.
At the back of his mind, too, lay some kind of faint perception that the
governess would, after all, be there to help him. She had always turned
up before when he was in danger, and she would not fail him now. But
this was a mere ghost of a thought that brought little comfort, and
merely added its quota of force to the speed that whipped him on, ever
faster, into the huge white moon-world in front.
For this, then, he had escaped from the horror of the Empty House! To be
sucked up into the moon, the "relentless, misty moon"--to be drawn into
its cruel, silver web, and destroyed. The Song to the Misty Moon
outside the window came back in snatches and added to his terror; only
it seemed now weeks ago since he had heard it. Something of its real
meaning, too, filtered down into his heart, and he trembled anew to
think that the moon could be a great, vast, moving Being, alive and with
a purpose....
But why, oh, why did they keep shouting these horrid snatches of the
song through the sky? Trapped! Trapped! The word haunted him through the
night:
Thy songs are nightly driven,
From sky to sky,
Eternally,
O'er the old, grey hills of heaven!
_Caught!_ Caught at last! The moon's prisoner, a captive in her airless
caves; alone on her dead white plains; searching for ever in vain for
the governess; wandering alone and terrified.
By the awful grace
Of thy weird white face.
The thought crazed him, and he struggled like a bird caught in a net.
But he might as well have struggled to push the worlds out of their
courses. The power against him was the power of the universe in which he
was nothing but a little, lost, whirling atom. It was all of no avail,
and the moon did not even smile at his feeble efforts. He was too light
to revolve round her, too impalpable to create his own orbit; he had not
even the consistency of a comet; he had reached the point of stagnation,
as it were--the dead level--the neutral zone where the attractions of
the earth and moon meet and counterbalance one another--where bodies
have no weight and existence no meaning.
Now the moon was close upon him; he could see nothing else. There lay
the vast, shining sea of light in front of him. Behind, the roar of the
following creature grew fainter and fainter, as he outdistanced it in
the awful swiftness of the huge drop down upon the moon mountains.
Already he was close enough to its surface to hear nothing of its great
singing but a deep, confused murmur. And, as the distance increased, he
realised that the change in his own condition increased. He felt as if
he were flying off into a million tiny particles--breaking up under the
effects of the deadly speed and the action of the new moon-forces.
Immense, invisible arms, half-silver and half-shadow, grew out of the
white disc and drew him downwards upon her surface. He was being merged
into the life of the moon.
There was a pause. For a moment his wings stopped dead. Their vain
fluttering was all but over....
Hark! Was that a voice borne on the wings of some lost wind? Why should
his heart beat so tumultuously all at once?
He turned and stared into the ocean of black air overhead till it turned
him dizzy. A violent trembling ran through his tired being from head to
foot. He had heard a voice--a voice that he knew and loved--a voice of
help and deliverance. It rang in shrill syllables up the empty spaces,
and it reached new centres of force within him that touched his last
store of courage and strength.
"Jimbo, hold on!" it cried, like a faint, thin, pricking current of
sound almost unable to reach him through the seas of distance. "I'm
coming; hold on a little longer!"
It was the governess. She was true to the end. Jimbo felt his heart
swell within him. She was mounting, mounting behind him with incredible
swiftness. The sound of his own name in these terrible regions recalled
to him some degree of concentration, and he strove hard to fight
against the drawing power that was seeking his destruction.
He struggled frantically with his wings. But between him and the
governess there was still the power of Fright to be overcome--the very
Power she had long ago invoked. It was following him still, preventing
his turning back, and driving him ever forward to his death.
Again the voice sounded in the night; and this time it was closer. He
could not quite distinguish the words. They buzzed oddly in his ears ...
other voices mingled with them ... the hideous children began to shriek
somewhere underneath him ... wings with eyes among their burning
feathers flashed past him.
His own wings folded close over his little body, drooping like dead
things. His eyes closed, and he turned on his side. A huge face that was
one-half the governess and the other half the head gardener at home,
thrust itself close against his own, and blew upon his eyelids till he
opened them. Already he was falling, sinking, tumbling headlong through
a space that offered no resistance.
"Jimbo!" shrieked a voice that instantly died away into a wail behind
him.
He opened his eyes once more--for it was that loved voice again--but
the glare from the moon so dazzled him that he could only fancy he saw
the figure of the governess, not a hundred feet away, struggling and
floundering in the clutch of a black creature that beat the air with
enormous wings all round her. He saw her hair streaming out into the
night, and one wing seemed to hang broken and useless at her side.
He was turning over and over, like a piece of wood in the waves of the
sea, and the governess, caught by Fright, the monster of her own
creation, drifted away from his consciousness as a dream melts away in
the light of the morning.... From the gleaming mountains and treeless
plains below Jimbo thought there rose a hollow roar like the mocking
laughter of an immense multitude of people, shaking with mirth. The Moon
had got him at last, and her laughter ran through the heavens like a
wave. Revolving upon his own little axis so swiftly that he neither saw
nor heard anything more, he dropped straight down upon the great
satellite.
The light of the moon flamed up into his eyes and dazzled him.
But what in the world was this?
How could the moon dwindle so suddenly to the size of a mere lamp
flame?
How could the whole expanse of the heavens shrink in an instant to the
limits of a little, cramped room?
In a single second, before he had time to realise that he felt surprise,
the entire memory of his recent experiences vanished from his mind. The
past became an utter blank. Like a wreath of smoke everything melted
away as if it had never been at all. The functions of the brain resumed
their normal course. The delirium of the past few hours was over.
Jimbo was lying at home on his bed in the night-nursery, and his mother
was bending over him. At the foot of the bed stood the doctor in black.
The nurse held a lamp, only half shaded by her hand, as she approached
the bedside.
This lamp was the moon of his delirium--only he had quite forgotten now
that there had ever been any moon at all.
The little thermometer, thrust into his teeth among the stars, was still
in his mouth. A hot-water bottle made his feet glow and burn. And from
the walls of the sick-room came as it were the echoes of
recently-uttered sentences: "Take his temperature! Give him the
medicine the moment he wakes! Put the hot bottle to his feet.... Fetch
the ice-bag.... Quick!"
"Where am I, mother?" he asked in a whisper.
"You're in bed, darling, and must keep quite quiet. You'll soon be all
right again. It was the old black cow that tossed you. The gardener
found you by the swinging gate and carried you in.... You've been
unconscious!"
"How long have I been uncon----?" Jimbo could not manage the whole word.
"About three hours, darling."
Then he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when he woke long after
it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old
family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something--some dim
memory--that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his
lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even
frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into
the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of deep
sleep.
But the old nurse, watching every movement, waiting upon the child's
very breath, had caught the question, and she answered soothingly in a
whisper--
"Oh, Miss Lake died a few days after she left here," she said in a very
low voice. "But don't think about her any more, dearie! She'll never
frighten children again with her silly stories."
"_DIED!_"
Jimbo sat up in bed and stared into the shadows behind her, as though
his eyes saw something she could not see. But his voice seemed almost to
belong to some one else.
"She was really dead all the time, then," he said below his breath.
Then the child fell back without another word, and dropped off into the
sleep which was the first step to final recovery.
THE END
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
[Transcriber's Note:
The following corrections were made:
p. 52: removed paragraph break after comma (whispered, "My darling boy,)
p. 87: acccomplish to accomplish (she would accomplish)
p. 96: removed paragraph break after comma (and said very gravely, with
her serious eyes fixed on his face, "Miss Lake,)
p. 123: achoed to echoed ("Long!" he echoed,)
p. 181: existance to existence (an existence far antedating)
p. 197: conciousness to consciousness (the consciousness cannot)
p. 204: so to no (no sequence in the order)
Minor punctuation errors and missing spaces between words have been
corrected without note. An oe-ligature in the word manoeuvre has been
replaced with "oe" in the plain text versions.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have not been corrected.]