Chapter 2

Something I knew was in the
room with me, and instinctively I put out my right hand, which was
nearest the wall, to keep it away. And my hand touched the edge of a
picture-frame hanging close to me.

I sprang out of bed, upsetting the small table that stood by it, and I
heard my watch, candle, and matches clatter on to the floor. But for the
moment there was no need of light, for a blinding flash leaped out of
the clouds, and showed me that by my bed again hung the picture of Mrs
Stone. And instantly the room went into blackness again. But in that
flash I saw another thing also, namely a figure that leaned over the end
of my bed, watching me. It was dressed in some close-clinging white
garment, spotted and stained with mould, and the face was that of the
portrait.

Overhead the thunder cracked and roared, and when it ceased and the
deathly stillness succeeded, I heard the rustle of movement coming
nearer me, and, more horrible yet, perceived an odour of corruption and
decay. And then a hand was laid on the side of my neck, and close beside
my ear I heard quick-taken, eager breathing. Yet I knew that this thing,
though it could be perceived by touch, by smell, by eye and by ear, was
still not of this earth, but something that had passed out of the body
and had power to make itself manifest. Then a voice, already familiar to
me, spoke.

“I knew you would come to the room in the tower,” it said. “I have been
long waiting for you. At last you have come. To-night I shall feast;
before long we will feast together.”

And the quick breathing came closer to me; I could feel it on my neck.

At that the terror, which I think had paralyzed me for the moment, gave
way to the wild instinct of self-preservation. I hit wildly with both
arms, kicking out at the same moment, and heard a little animal-squeal,
and something soft dropped with a thud beside me. I took a couple of
steps forward, nearly tripping up over whatever it was that lay there,
and by the merest good-luck found the handle of the door. In another
second I ran out on the landing, and had banged the door behind me.
Almost at the same moment I heard a door open somewhere below, and John
Clinton, candle in hand, came running upstairs.

“What is it?” he said. “I sleep just below you, and heard a noise as
if--Good heavens, there’s blood on your shoulder.”

I stood there, so he told me afterwards, swaying from side to side,
white as a sheet, with the mark on my shoulder as if a hand covered with
blood had been laid there.

“It’s in there,” I said, pointing. “She, you know. The portrait is in
there, too, hanging up on the place we took it from.”

At that he laughed.

“My dear fellow, this is mere nightmare,” he said.

He pushed by me, and opened the door, I standing there simply inert with
terror, unable to stop him, unable to move.

“Phew! What an awful smell,” he said.

Then there was silence; he had passed out of my sight behind the open
door. Next moment he came out again, as white as myself, and instantly
shut it.

“Yes, the portrait’s there,” he said, “and on the floor is a thing--a
thing spotted with earth, like what they bury people in. Come away,
quick, come away.”

How I got downstairs I hardly know. An awful shuddering and nausea of
the spirit rather than of the flesh had seized me, and more than once he
had to place my feet upon the steps, while every now and then he cast
glances of terror and apprehension up the stairs. But in time we came
to his dressing-room on the floor below, and there I told him what I
have here described.

* * * * *

The sequel can be made short; indeed, some of my readers have perhaps
already guessed what it was, if they remember that inexplicable affair
of the churchyard at West Fawley, some eight years ago, where an attempt
was made three times to bury the body of a certain woman who had
committed suicide. On each occasion the coffin was found in the course
of a few days again protruding from the ground. After the third attempt,
in order that the thing should not be talked about, the body was buried
elsewhere in unconsecrated ground. Where it was buried was just outside
the iron gate of the garden belonging to the house where this woman had
lived. She had committed suicide in a room at the top of the tower in
that house. Her name was Julia Stone.

Subsequently the body was again secretly dug up, and the coffin was
found to be full of blood.

THE DUST-CLOUD

The big French windows were open on to the lawn, and, dinner being over,
two or three of the party who were staying for the week at the end of
August with the Combe-Martins had strolled out on to the terrace to look
at the sea, over which the moon, large and low, was just rising and
tracing a path of pale gold from horizon to shore, while others, less
lunar of inclination, had gone in search of bridge or billiards. Coffee
had come round immediately after dessert, and the end of dinner,
according to the delectable custom of the house, was as informal as the
end of breakfast. Every one, that is to say, remained or went away,
smoked, drank port or abstained, according to his personal tastes. Thus,
on this particular evening it so happened that Harry Combe-Martin and I
were very soon left alone in the dining-room, because we were talking
unmitigated motor “shop,” and the rest of the party (small wonder) were
bored with it, and had left us. The shop was home-shop, so to speak, for
it was almost entirely concerned with the manifold perfections of the
new six-cylinder Napier which my host in a moment of extravagance, which
he did not in the least regret, had just purchased; in which, too, he
proposed to take me over to lunch at a friend’s house near Hunstanton on
the following day. He observed with legitimate pride that an early start
would not be necessary as the distance was only eighty miles and there
were no police traps.

“Queer things these big motors are,” he said, relapsing into
generalities as we rose to go. “Often I can scarcely believe that my new
car is merely a machine. It seems to me to possess an independent life
of its own. It is really much more like a thoroughbred with a
wonderfully fine mouth.”

“And the moods of a thoroughbred?” I asked.

“No; it’s got an excellent temper, I’m glad to say. It doesn’t mind
being checked, or even stopped, when it’s going its best. Some of these
big cars can’t stand that. They get sulky--I assure you it is literally
true--if they are checked too often.”

He paused on his way to ring the bell. “Guy Elphinstone’s car, for
instance,” he said: “it was a bad-tempered brute, a violent, vicious
beast of a car.”

“What make?” I asked.

“Twenty-five horse-power Amédée. They are a fretful strain of car; too
thin, not enough bone--and bone is very good for the nerves. The brute
liked running over a chicken or a rabbit, though perhaps it was less the
car’s ill-temper than Guy’s, poor chap. Well, he paid for it--he paid
to the uttermost farthing. Did you know him?”

“No; but surely I have heard the name. Ah, yes, he ran over a child, did
he not?”

“Yes,” said Harry, “and then smashed up against his own park gates.”

“Killed, wasn’t he?”

“Oh yes, killed instantly, and the car just a heap of splinters. There’s
an odd story about it, I’m told, in the village: rather in your line.”

“Ghosts?” I asked.

“Yes, the ghost of his motor-car. Seems almost too up-to-date, doesn’t
it?”

“And what’s the story?” I demanded.

“Why, just this. His place was outside the village of Bircham, ten miles
out from Norwich; and there’s a long straight bit of road there--that’s
where he ran over the child--and a couple of hundred yards farther on, a
rather awkward turn into the park gates. Well, a month or two ago, soon
after the accident, one old gaffer in the village swore he had seen a
motor there coming full tilt along the road, but without a sound, and it
disappeared at the lodge gates of the park, which were shut. Soon after
another said he had heard a motor whirl by him at the same place,
followed by a hideous scream, but he saw nothing.”

“The scream is rather horrible,” said I.

“Ah, I see what you mean! I only thought of his syren. Guy had a syren
on his exhaust, same as I have. His had a dreadful frightened sort of
wail, and always made me feel creepy.”

“And is that all the story?” I asked: “that one old man thought he saw a
noiseless motor, and another thought he heard an invisible one?”

Harry flicked the ash off his cigarette into the grate. “Oh dear no!” he
said. “Half a dozen of them have seen something or heard something. It
is quite a heavily authenticated yarn.”

“Yes, and talked over and edited in the public-house,” I said.

“Well, not a man of them will go there after dark. Also the lodge-keeper
gave notice a week or two after the accident. He said he was always
hearing a motor stop and hoot outside the lodge, and he was kept running
out at all hours of the night to see what it was.”

“And what was it?”

“It wasn’t anything. Simply nothing there. He thought it rather uncanny,
anyhow, and threw up a good post. Besides, his wife was always hearing a
child scream, and while her man toddled out to the gate she would go and
see whether the kids were all right. And the kids themselves----”

“Ah, what of them?” I asked.

“They kept coming to their mother, asking who the little girl was who
walked up and down the road and would not speak to them or play with
them.”

“It’s a many-sided story,” I said. “All the witnesses seem to have heard
and seen different things.”

“Yes, that is just what to my mind makes the yarn so good,” he said.
“Personally I don’t take much stock in spooks at all. But given that
there are such things as spooks, and given that the death of the child
and the death of Guy have caused spooks to play about there, it seems to
me a very good point that different people should be aware of different
phenomena. One hears the car, another sees it, one hears the child
scream, another sees the child. How does that strike you?”

This, I am bound to say, was a new view to me, and the more I thought of
it the more reasonable it appeared. For the vast majority of mankind
have all those occult senses by which is perceived the spiritual world
(which, I hold, is thick and populous around us), sealed up, as it were;
in other words, the majority of mankind never hear or see a ghost at
all. Is it not, then, very probable that of the remainder--those, in
fact, to whom occult experiences have happened or can happen--few should
have every sense unsealed, but that some should have the unsealed ear,
others the unsealed eye--that some should be clairaudient, others
clairvoyant?

“Yes, it strikes me as reasonable,” I said. “Can’t you take me over
there?”

“Certainly! If you will stop till Friday I’ll take you over on
Thursday. The others all go that day, so that we can get there after
dark.”

I shook my head. “I can’t stop till Friday, I’m afraid,” I said. “I must
leave on Thursday. But how about to-morrow? Can’t we take it on the way
to or from Hunstanton?”

“No; it’s thirty miles out of our way. Besides, to be at Bircham after
dark means that we shouldn’t get back here till midnight. And as host to
my guests----”

“Ah! things are only heard and seen after dark, are they?” I asked.
“That makes it so much less interesting. It is like a séance where all
lights are put out.”

“Well, the accident happened at night,” he said. “I don’t know the
rules, but that may have some bearing on it, I should think.”

I had one question more in the back of my mind, but I did not like to
ask it. At least, I wanted information on this subject without appearing
to ask for it.

“Neither do I know the rules of motors,” I said; “and I don’t understand
you when you say that Guy Elphinstone’s machine was an irritable,
cross-grained brute, that liked running over chickens and rabbits. But I
think you subsequently said that the irritability may have been the
irritability of its owner. Did he mind being checked?”

“It made him blind-mad if it happened often,” said Harry. “I shall never
forget a drive I had with him once: there were hay-carts and
perambulators every hundred yards. It was perfectly ghastly; it was like
being with a madman. And when we got inside his gate, his dog came
running out to meet him. He did not go an inch out of his course: it was
worse than that--he went for it, just grinding his teeth with rage. I
never drove with him again.”

He stopped a moment, guessing what might be in my mind. “I say, you
mustn’t think--you mustn’t think----” he began.

“No, of course not,” said I.

Harry Combe-Martin’s house stood close to the weather-eaten, sandy
cliffs of the Suffolk shore, which are being incessantly gnawed away by
the hunger of the insatiable sea. Fathoms deep below it, and now many
hundred yards out, lies what was once the second port in England; but
now of the ancient town of Dunwich, and of its seven great churches,
nothing remains but one, and that ruinous and already half destroyed by
the falling cliff and the encroachments of the sea. Foot by foot, it too
is disappearing, and of the graveyard which surrounded it more than half
is gone, so that from the face of the sandy cliff on which it stands
there stick out like straws in glass, as Dante says, the bones of those
who were once committed there to the kindly and stable earth.

Whether it was the remembrance of this rather grim spectacle as I had
seen it that afternoon, or whether Harry’s story had caused some
trouble in my brain, or whether it was merely that the keen bracing air
of this place, to one who had just come from the sleepy languor of the
Norfolk Broads, kept me sleepless, I do not know; but, anyhow, the
moment I put out my light that night and got into bed, I felt that all
the footlights and gas-jets in the internal theatre of my mind sprang
into flame, and that I was very vividly and alertly awake. It was in
vain that I counted a hundred forwards and a hundred backwards, that I
pictured to myself a flock of visionary sheep coming singly through a
gap in an imaginary hedge, and tried to number their monotonous and
uniform countenances, that I played noughts and crosses with myself,
that I marked out scores of double lawn-tennis courts,--for with each
repetition of these supposedly soporific exercises I only became more
intensely wakeful. It was not in remote hope of sleep that I continued
to repeat these weary performances long after their inefficacy was
proved to the hilt, but because I was strangely unwilling in this
timeless hour of the night to think about those protruding relics of
humanity; also I quite distinctly did not desire to think about that
subject with regard to which I had, a few hours ago, promised Harry that
I would not make it the subject of reflection. For these reasons I
continued during the black hours to practise these narcotic exercises of
the mind, knowing well that if I paused on the tedious treadmill my
thoughts, like some released spring, would fly back to rather gruesome
subjects. I kept my mind, in fact, talking loud to itself, so that it
should not hear what other voices were saying.

Then by degrees these absurd mental occupations became impossible; my
mind simply refused to occupy itself with them any longer; and next
moment I was thinking intently and eagerly, not about the bones
protruding from the gnawed section of sand-cliff, but about the subject
I had said I would not dwell upon. And like a flash it came upon me why
Harry had bidden me not think about it. Surely in order that I should
not come to the same conclusion as he had come to.

Now the whole question of “haunt”--haunted spots, haunted houses, and so
forth--has always seemed to me to be utterly unsolved, and to be neither
proved nor disproved to a satisfactory degree. From the earliest times,
certainly from the earliest known Egyptian records, there has been a
belief that the scene of a crime is often revisited, sometimes by the
spirit of him who has committed it--seeking rest, we must suppose, and
finding none; sometimes, and more inexplicably, by the spirit of his
victim, crying perhaps, like the blood of Abel, for vengeance. And
though the stories of these village gossips in the alehouse about
noiseless visions and invisible noises were all as yet unsifted and
unreliable, yet I could not help wondering if they (such as they were)
pointed to something authentic and to be classed under this head of
appearances. But more striking than the yarns of the gaffers seemed to
me the questions of the lodge-keeper’s children. How should children
have imagined the figure of a child that would not speak to them or play
with them? Perhaps it was a real child, a sulky child. Yes--perhaps. But
perhaps not. Then after this preliminary skirmish I found myself
settling down to the question that I had said I would not think about;
in other words, the possible origin of these phenomena interested me
more than the phenomena themselves. For what exactly had Guy
Elphinstone, that savage driver, done? Had or had not the death of the
child been entirely an accident, a thing (given he drove a motor at all)
outside his own control? Or had he, irritated beyond endurance at the
checks and delays of the day, not pulled up when it was just possible he
might have, but had run over the child as he would have run over a
rabbit or a hen, or even his own dog? And what, in any case, poor
wretched brute, must have been his thoughts in that terrible instant
that intervened between the child’s death and his own, when a moment
later he smashed into the closed gates of his own lodge? Was remorse
his--bitter, despairing contrition? That could hardly have been so; or
else surely, knowing only for certain that he had knocked a child down,
he would have stopped; he would have done his best, whatever that might
be, to repair the irreparable harm. But he had not stopped: he had gone
on, it seemed, at full speed, for on the collision the car had been
smashed into matchwood and steel shavings. Again, with double force, had
this dreadful thing been a complete accident, he would have stopped. So
then--most terrible question of all--had he, after making murder, rushed
on to what proved to be his own death, filled with some hellish glee at
what he had done? Indeed, as in the churchyard on the cliff, bones of
the buried stuck starkly out into the night.

* * * * *

The pale tired light of earliest morning had turned the window-blinds
into glimmering squares before I slept; and when I woke, the servant who
called me was already rattling them briskly up on their rollers, and
letting the calm serenity of the August day stream into the room.
Through the open windows poured in sunlight and sea-wind, the scent of
flowers and the song of birds; and each and all were wonderfully
reassuring, banishing the hooded forms that had haunted the night, and I
thought of the disquietude of the dark hours as a traveller may think of
the billows and tempests of the ocean over which he has safely
journeyed, unable, now that they belong to the limbo of the past, to
recall his qualms and tossings with any vivid uneasiness. Not without a
feeling of relief, too, did I dwell on the knowledge that I was
definitely not going to visit this equivocal spot. Our drive to-day, as
Harry had said, would not take us within thirty miles of it, and
to-morrow I but went to the station and away. Though a thorough-paced
seeker after truth might, no doubt, have regretted that the laws of time
and space did not permit him to visit Bircham after the sinister dark
had fallen, and test whether for him there was visible or audible truth
in the tales of the village gossips, I was conscious of no such regret.
Bircham and its fables had given me a very bad night, and I was
perfectly aware that I did not in the least want to go near it, though
yesterday I had quite truthfully said I should like to do so. In this
brightness, too, of sun and sea-wind I felt none of the _malaise_ at my
waking moments which a sleepless night usually gives me; I felt
particularly well, particularly pleased to be alive, and also, as I have
said, particularly content not to be going to Bircham. I was quite
satisfied to leave my curiosity unsatisfied.

* * * * *

The motor came round about eleven, and we started at once, Harry and Mrs
Morrison, a cousin of his, sitting behind in the big back seat, large
enough to hold a comfortable three, and I on the left of the driver, in
a sort of trance--I am not ashamed to confess it--of expectancy and
delight. For this was in the early days of motors, when there was still
the sense of romance and adventure round them. I did not want to drive,
any more than Harry wanted to; for driving, so I hold, is too absorbing;
it takes the attention in too firm a grip: the mania of the true
motorist is not consciously enjoyed. For the passion for motors is a
taste--I had almost said a gift--as distinct and as keenly individual as
the passion for music or mathematics. Those who use motors most (merely
as a means of getting rapidly from one place to another) are often
entirely without it, while those whom adverse circumstances (over which
they have no control) compel to use them least may have it to a supreme
degree. To those who have it, analysis of their passion is perhaps
superfluous; to those who have it not, explanation is almost
unintelligible. Pace, however, and the control of pace, and above all
the sensuous consciousness of pace, is at the root of it; and pleasure
in pace is common to most people, whether it be in the form of a
galloping horse, or the pace of the skate hissing over smooth ice, or
the pace of a free-wheel bicycle humming down-hill, or, more
impersonally, the pace of the smashed ball at lawn-tennis, the driven
ball at golf, or the low boundary hit at cricket. But the sensuous
consciousness of pace, as I have said, is needful: one might experience
it seated in front of the engine of an express train, though not in a
wadded, shut-windowed carriage, where the wind of movement is not felt.
Then add to this rapture of the rush through riven air the knowledge
that huge relentless force is controlled by a little lever, and
directed by a little wheel on which the hands of the driver seem to lie
so negligently. A great untamed devil has there his bridle, and he
answers to it, as Harry had said, like a horse with a fine mouth. He has
hunger and thirst, too, unslakeable, and greedily he laps of his soup of
petrol which turns to fire in his mouth: electricity, the force that
rends clouds asunder, and causes towers to totter, is the spoon with
which he feeds himself; and as he eats he races onward, and the road
opens like torn linen in front of him. Yet how obedient, how amenable is
he!--for with a touch on his snaffle his speed is redoubled, or melts
into thin air, so that before you know you have touched the rein he has
exchanged his swallow-flight for a mere saunter through the lanes. But
he ever loves to run; and knowing this, you will bid him lift up his
voice and tell those who are in his path that he is coming, so that he
will not need the touch that checks. Hoarse and jovial is his voice,
hooting to the wayfarer; and if his hooting be not heard he has a great
guttural falsetto scream that leaps from octave to octave, and echoes
from the hedges that are passing in blurred lines of hanging green. And,
as you go, the romantic isolation of divers in deep seas is yours;
masked and hooded companions may be near you also, in their
driving-dress for this plunge through the swift tides of air; but you,
like them, are alone and isolated, conscious only of the ripped riband
of road, the two great lantern-eyes of the wonderful monster that look
through drooped eyelids by day, but gleam with fire by night, the two
ear-laps of splash-boards, and the long lean bonnet in front which is
the skull and brain-case of that swift, untiring energy that feeds on
fire, and whirls its two tons of weight up hill and down dale, as if
some new law as everlasting as gravity, and like gravity making it go
ever swifter, was its sole control.

For the first hour the essence of these joys, any description of which
compared to the real thing is but as a stagnant pond compared to the
bright rushing of a mountain stream, was mine. A straight switchback
road lay in front of us, and the monster plunged silently down hill, and
said below his breath, “Ha-ha--ha-ha--ha-ha,” as, without diminution of
speed, he breasted the opposing slope. In my control were his great
vocal chords (for in those days hooter and syren were on the driver’s
left, and lay convenient, to the hand of him who occupied the box-seat),
and it rejoiced me to let him hoot to a pony-cart, three hundred yards
ahead, with a hand on his falsetto scream if his ordinary tones of
conversation were unheard or disregarded. Then came a road crossing ours
at right angles, and the dear monster seemed to say, “Yes, yes,--see how
obedient and careful I am. I stroll with my hands in my pockets.” Then
again a puppy from a farmhouse staggered warlike into the road, and the
monster said, “Poor little chap! get home to your mother, or I’ll talk
to you in earnest.” The poor little chap did not take the hint, so the
monster slackened speed and just said, “Whoof!” Then it chuckled to
itself as the puppy scuttled into the hedge, seriously alarmed; and next
moment our self-made wind screeched and whistled round us again.

Napoleon, I believe, said that the power of an army lay in its feet:
that is true also of the monster. There was a loud bang, and in thirty
seconds we were at a standstill. The monster’s off fore-foot troubled
it, and the chauffeur said, “Yes, sir,--burst.”

So the burst boot was taken off and a new one put on, a boot that had
never been on foot before. The foot in question was held up on a jack
during this operation, and the new boot laced up with a pump. This took
exactly twenty-five minutes. Then the monster got his spoon going again,
and said, “Let me run: oh, let me run!” And for fifteen miles on a
straight and empty road it ran. I timed the miles, but shall not produce
their chronology for the benefit of a forsworn constabulary.

But there were no more dithyrambics that morning. We should have reached
Hunstanton in time for lunch. Instead, we waited to repair our fourth
puncture at 1.45 P.M., twenty-five miles short of our destination. This
fourth puncture was caused by a spicule of flint three-quarters of an
inch long--sharp, it is true, but weighing perhaps two pennyweights,
while we weighed two tons. It seemed an impertinence. So we lunched at a
wayside inn, and during lunch the pundits held a consultation, of which
the upshot was this:

We had no more boots for our monster, for his off fore-foot had burst
once, and punctured once (thus necessitating two socks and one boot).
Similarly, but more so, his off hind-foot had burst twice (thus
necessitating two boots and two socks). Now, there was no certain
shoemaker’s shop at Hunstanton, as far as we knew, but there was a
regular universal store at King’s Lynn, which was about equidistant.

And, so said the chauffeur, there was something wrong with the monster’s
spoon (ignition), and he didn’t rightly know what, and therefore it
seemed the prudent part not to go to Hunstanton (lunch, a thing of the
preterite, having been the object), but to the well-supplied King’s
Lynn.