‘It’s terrible,’ I said. ‘I wish you hadn’t found it.’
Frank was on his knees by it, examining the surface of it. ‘I can’t say I agree with you,’ he said. ‘It just puts the final touch of certainty on my discovery. Besides, whether I had found it or not, it would have been there just the same.’
‘Well, I’m going on with my work,’ I said. ‘It’s more cheerful than stones of sacrifice.’
He laughed.
‘I hope it’s as interesting,’ he said.
It appeared, when I went back to it, that it was not, and try as I would I could not recapture the interest which is necessary to production of any kind. Even my eye wandered from the words I wrote; as for my mind, it would give only the most cursory glance at that for which I demanded its fixed attention. It was busy elsewhere. I found myself, at its bidding, scrutinising the shadowy corners of the room; but there was nothing there, and all the time some strange darkness, blacker than that which pressed in upon the house, began to grow upon my spirit. There was fear mingled with it, though I did not know what I was afraid of; but chiefly it was some sort of despair and depression, distant as yet and undefined, but quietly closing in upon me . . . As I sat with my pen still in my hand, trying to analyse these perturbed and troubled sensations, I heard Frank call out sharply from the kitchen, the door of which, on my return, I had left open.
‘Hullo!’ he cried. ‘What’s that? Is anyone there?’
I jumped from my seat and went to join him. He was standing close to the stove, holding his candle above his head, and looking at the door into the garden, which Mrs Fennell had locked on her departure.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
He looked round at me, startled by the sound of my voice.
‘Curious,’ he said; ‘I was just measuring the stone, when out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw that door open. But it’s locked, isn’t it?’
He tried the handle, but sure enough it was locked.
‘Optical illusion,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve finished here for the present. But what a night! Frightfully oppressive, isn’t it? And not a breath of air stirring.’
We went back to the sitting-room. I put away my laboured manuscript and we got out the cards for a game of piquet. But after one partie, he rose with a yawn.
‘I really don’t think I could keep awake for another,’ he said; ‘I’m heavy with sleep. Let’s have a breath of air, the rain seems to have stopped, and go to bed. Or are you going to sit up and work?’
I had not meant to do so, but his suggestion made me determine to have another try. There was certainly some mysterious pall of depression on me, and the wisest thing to do was to fight it.
‘I shall try for half an hour,’ I said, ‘and see how it goes,’ and I followed him to the front door of the house. The rain, as he said, had ceased, but the darkness was impenetrable, and shuffling with our feet we took a few steps along the gravel path to the corner of the house. There the light from the sitting-room windows cast a circle of illumination, and one could see the flower-beds glistening with the wet. Though it was night, the air was still so hot that the gravel path was steaming. Beyond that nothing was visible of the lawn or the hill that sloped up to the firwood. But, as we stood there, I saw, as last night, a light moving up there. Now, however, it seemed to be outside the wood, for its progress was not interrupted by the tree trunks.
Frank saw it too, and pointed at it.
‘It’s too wet tonight,’ he said, ‘but tomorrow evening I vote we go up there, and see who these nightly wanderers are. It’s coming closer, and there’s another of them.’
Even as we looked a third light sprang up, and in another moment all had vanished again.
I carried out my intention of trying to work, but I could make nothing of it, and presently I found myself nodding over a page that contained nothing but erasures. With head bent forward, I drifted into a doze and from dozing into sleep, and when I woke I found the lamp burning low and the wick smouldering. I seemed to have come back from some very distant place, and, only half awake, I lit a candle and quenched the lamp and went to the windows to bolt them. And then my heart stood still, for I thought I saw someone standing outside and looking in through the intervening glass. But it must have been a sleepy fancy, for now, broad awake again, I was staring at my own reflection cast by the candle on the window. I told myself that what I had seen was no more than that, but as I creaked my way upstairs I found myself asking if I really believed that . . .
As I dressed next morning, after another long but unrefreshing night, I began puzzling over a lost memory to which I had tried to find the clue yesterday. There was a bookcase in the sitting-room with some two or three dozen volumes in it, and opening one or two of these I had found the name Samuel Townwick inscribed in them. I knew I had seen that name not so many months ago in the daily Press, but I could not recapture the connection in which I had read it; but from the recurrence of it in these books it was reasonable to conjecture that he was the owner of the house we occupied. In taking it, his name had not come up; the house-agent had plenary powers, and our deposit of a fortnight’s rent clinched the contract. But this morning the name still haunted me. And since I had other small businesses in St Caradoc’s, I settled to walk down there and make some definite inquiry at the agent’s. Frank was too busy with his plan to accompany me, and I set out alone.
The feeling of depression and vague foreboding was more leaden than ever this morning, and I was aware, by that sixth sense which needs no speech or language, that he was a prey to the same causeless weight. But I had not gone fifty yards from the house when the burden of it was lifted from me, and I knew again the exhilaration proper to such a morning. The rain of last evening had cleared the air, the sea breeze drew lightly landwards, and, as if I had come out of some tunnel, I rejoiced in the morning splendour. The village hummed with holiday: Mr Cranston received me with polite enquiries as to our comfort and Mrs Fennell’s capability, and having assured him on that score, I approached my point.
‘Mr Samuel Townwick is the owner, is he not?’ I asked.
The agent’s smile faded a little.
‘He was, sir,’ he said. ‘I act for the executors.’
Suddenly, in a flash, some of what I had been groping for came back to me. ‘I begin to remember,’ I said. ‘He died suddenly; there was an inquest. I want to know the rest. Hadn’t you better tell me?’
He shifted his glance and came back to me again.
‘It was a painful affair,’ he said. ‘The executors naturally do not want it talked about.’
Another glimpse of what I had forgotten blinked on my memory.
‘Suicide,’ I said. ‘The usual verdict of unsound mind was brought in. And – and is that why Mrs Fennell won’t sleep in the house? She left last night in a deluge of rain.’
I readily gave him my promise of secrecy, for I had not the slightest desire to tell Frank, and he told me the rest. Mr Townwick had been for some days in a very depressed state of mind, and one morning the servants coming down had found him lying underneath the kitchen table with his throat cut. Beside him was a sharp, curiously shaped fragment of flint covered with blood. The jagged nature of the wound had confirmed the idea that he had sawn at his throat till he had severed the jugular vein. Murder was ruled out, for he was a strong man, and there were no marks on his body or about the room of there having been any struggle, nor any sign of an assailant having entered. Both kitchen doors were locked on the inside, his valuables were untouched, and from the position of the body the only reasonable inference was that he had laid down under the table, and there deliberately done himself to death . . . I repeated my assurance of silence and went out.
I knew now what the source of my nameless horror and depression had been. It was no haunting spectre of Townwick that I feared; it was the power, whateve
r that was, which had driven him to kill himself on the stone of sacrifice.
I went back up the hill: there was the garden blazing in the July noon, and the sweet tranquillity of the place was spread abroad in the air. But I had no sooner passed the copse and come within the circle than the dead weight of something unseen began to lay its burden on me again. There was something here, horrible and menacing and potent.
I found Frank in the sitting-room. His head was bent over his plan, and he started as I entered.
‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘I’ve made all my measurements and I want to sit tight and finish my plan today. I don’t know why, but I feel I must hurry about it and get it done. And I’ve got the most awful fit of the blues. I can’t account for it, but, anyhow, occupation is the best thing. Go into lunch, will you; I don’t want any.’
I looked at him and saw some indefinable change had come over his face. There was terror in his eyes that came from within; I can express it in no other way than that.
‘Anything wrong?’ I asked.
‘No; just blues. I want to go on working. This evening, you know, we have to see where those lights come from.’
All afternoon he sat close over his work, and it was not till the day was fading that he got up.
‘That’s done,’ he said. ‘Good Lord, we have found a temple and a half! And I’m horribly tired. I shall have a snooze till dinner.’
The invasion of fear beleaguered me, it seemed to pour in through the open windows in the gathering dusk; it gathered its reinforcements outside, ready to support the onrush of it. And yet how childish it was to yield to it. By now we were alone in the house, for we had told Mrs Fennell that a cold meal would serve us in this heat, and while Frank slept I had heard the lock of the outside kitchen door turn and she and the girl went by the window.
Presently he stirred and awoke. I had lit the lamp, and I saw his hand feel in his waistcoat pocket, and he drew out a small object which he held out to me.
‘A flint knife,’ he said. ‘I picked it up in the garden this morning. It’s got a fine edge to it.’
At that I felt a prickle of terror run through the hair of my head, and I jumped up.
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘you’ve had no walk today, and that always gives you the blues. Let’s go down and dine at the hotel.’
His head was outside the illumination of the lamp, and from the dimness there came a curious cackle of laughter.
‘But I can’t,’ he said. ‘How strange that you don’t know that I can’t! They’ve surrounded the place, and there’s no way out. Listen! Can’t you hear the drums and the squeal of their pipes? And their hands are about me. Christ! It’s terrible to die.’
He got up and began to move with curious little shuffling steps towards the kitchen. I had laid the flint knife down on the table and he snatched it up. The horror of presences unseen and multitudinous closed in round me, but I knew they were concentrated not on me, but on him. They poured in, not through the window alone, but through the solid walls of the house; outside on the lawn there were lights moving, slow and orderly.
I had still control of my mind; the awfulness and the imminence of what so closely beset us gave me the courage and clearness of despair. I darted from my chair and stood with my back to the kitchen door.
‘You’re not to go in there,’ I said. ‘You must come away with me out of this. Pull yourself together, Frank. We’ll get through yet; once outside the garden we’re safe.’
He paid no attention to what I said; it was as if he did not hear me. He laid his hand on my shoulder, and I felt his fingers press through the muscles and grind like points of steel on the underlying bone. Some maniac force possessed them, and he pulled me aside as if I had been a feather.
There was one thing only to be done. With my disengaged arm I hit him full on the chin, and he fell like a log across the floor. Without pausing for a second I gripped him round the knees and began dragging him, senseless and inert, towards the door.
It is difficult to state in words what those next few minutes held. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I felt no touch of invisible hands upon me, but I can imagine no grinding agony of pain that wrenches body and soul asunder to equal that war of the evil and the unseen that raged about me. I struggled against no visible adversary, and there was the horror of it, for I am sure that no phantom of the dead that die not could have evoked so unnerving a terror.
Before those intangible hosts had fully closed in round me and my unconscious burden I had got him on to the lawn, and it was then that the full stress of their beleaguering might poured in upon me. Strange fugitive lights wavered round me and muttered voices filled the air, and as I dragged Frank over the grass his weight seemed to grow till it was not a man’s body that I was pulling along, but something well-nigh immovable, so that I had to tug and pant for breath and tug again.
‘God help us both,’ I heard myself muttering. ‘Deliver us from our ghostly enemies . . . ’ And again I tugged and panted for breath. Close at hand now was the ring of enclosing copse, where the stones of the circle stood, and I made one final effort of concentration, for I knew that my spirit was spent, and soon there would be no power of fight left in me at all.
‘In the name of the Holiest, and by the power of the Highest!’ I cried aloud, and waited for a moment, gathering what dregs of strength were still left in me. And then I leaned forward, and the strained sinews of my legs were slackened as the weight of Frank’s body moved after me, and I made another step, and yet another, and we had passed beyond the copse, and out of the accursed precinct.
I knew no more after that. I had fallen forwards half across him, and when I regained my senses he was stirring, and the dew of the grass was on my face. There stood the house, with the lamp still burning in the window of the sitting-room, and the quiet night was around us, with a clear and starry heaven.
The Step
John Cresswell was returning home one night from the Britannia Club at Alexandria, where, as was his custom three or four times in the week, he had dined very solidly and fluidly, and played bridge afterwards as long as a table could be formed. It had been rather an expensive evening, for all his skill at cards had been unable to cope with such a continuous series of ill-favoured hands as had been his. But he had consoled himself with reasonable doses of whisky, and now he stepped homewards in very cheerful spirits, for his business affairs were going most prosperously and a loss of twenty-five or thirty pounds tonight would be amply compensated for in the morning. Besides, his bridge-account for the year showed a credit which proved that cards were a very profitable pleasure.
It was a hot night of October, and, being a big plethoric man, he strolled at a very leisurely pace across the square and up the long street at the far end of which was his house. There were no taxis on the rank, or he would have taken one and saved himself this walk of nearly a mile; but he had no quarrel with that, for the night air with a breeze from the sea was refreshing after so long a session in a smoke-laden atmosphere. Above, a moon near to its full cast a very clear white light on his road. There was a narrow strip of sharp-cut shadow beneath the houses on his right, but the rest of the street and the pavement on the left of it, where he walked, were in bright illumination.
At first his way lay between rows of shops, European for the most part, with here and there a café where a few customers still lingered. Pleasant thoughts beguiled his progress; the Egyptian sugar-crop, in which he was much interested, had turned out very well and he saw a big profit on his options. Not less satisfactory were other businesses in which he did not figure so openly. He lent money, for instance, on a large scale, to the native population, and these operations extended far up the Nile. Only last week he had been at Luxor, where he had concluded a transaction of a very remunerative sort. He had made a loan some months ago to a small merchant there and now the appropriate interest on this was in defa
ult: in consequence the harvest of a very fruitful acreage of sugar-cane was his. A similar and even richer windfall had just come his way in Alexandria, for he had advanced money a year ago to a Levantine tobacco merchant on the security of his freehold store. This had brought him in very handsome interest, but a day or two ago the unfortunate fellow had failed, and Cresswell owned a most desirable freehold. The whole affair had been very creditable to his enterprise and sagacity, for he had privately heard that the municipality was intending to lay out the neighbourhood, a slum at present, where this store was situated, in houses of flats, and make it a residential quarter, and his newly acquired freehold would thus become a valuable property.
At present the tobacco merchant lived with his family in holes and corners of the store, and they must be evicted tomorrow morning. John Cresswell had already arranged for this, and had told the man that he would have to quit: he would go round there in the forenoon and see that they and their sticks of furniture were duly bundled out into the street. He would see personally that this was done, and looked forward to doing so. The old couple were beastly creatures, the woman a perfect witch who eyed him and muttered, but there was a daughter who was not ill-looking, and someone of the beggared family would be obliged to earn bread. He did not dwell on this, but the thought just flitted through his brain . . . Then doors would be locked and windows barred in the store that was now his, and he would lunch at the club afterwards. He was popular there; he had a jovial geniality about him, and a habit of offering drinks before they could be offered to him. That, too, was good for business.
Ten minutes’ strolling brought him to the end of the shops and cafés that formed the street, and now the road ran between residential houses, each detached and with a space of garden surrounding it, where dry-leaved palms rattled in this wind from the sea. He was approaching the flamboyant Roman Catholic church, to which was attached a monastic establishment, a big white barrack-looking house where the Brothers of Poverty or some such order lived. Something to do with St Mark, he vaguely remembered, who by tradition had brought Christianity to Egypt nearly nineteen hundred years ago. Often he met one of these odd sandal-footed creatures with his brown habit, his rosary and his cowled head going in or out of their gate, or toiling in their garden. He did not like them: lousy fellows he would have called them. Sometimes in their mendicant errands they came to his door asking alms for the indigent Copts. Not long ago he had found one actually ringing the bell of his front door, instead of going humbly round to the back, as befitted his quality, and Cresswell told him that he would loose his bulldog on the next of their breed who ventured within his garden gate. How the fellow had skipped off when he heard talk of the dog! He dropped one of his sandals in his haste to be gone, and not sparing the time to adjust it again, had hopped and hobbled over the sharp gravel to gain the street. Cresswell had laughed aloud to see his precipitancy, and the best of the joke was that he had not got any sort of dog on his premises at all. At the remembrance of that humorous incident he grinned to himself as he passed the porch of the church.