Chapter 3

And we all breathed a pious hope that we might get there.

Whizz: hoot: purr! The last boot held, the spoon went busily to the
monster’s mouth, and we just flowed into King’s Lynn. The return
journey, so I vaguely gathered, would be made by other roads; but
personally, intoxicated with air and movement, I neither asked nor
desired to know what those roads would be. This one small but rather
salient fact is necessary to record here, that as we waited at King’s
Lynn, and as we buzzed homewards afterwards, no thought of Bircham
entered my head at all. The subsequent hallucination, if hallucination
it was, was not, as far as I know, self-suggested. That we had gone out
of our way for the sake of the garage, I knew, and that was all. Harry
also told me that he did not know where our road would take us.

The rest that follows is the baldest possible narrative of what actually
occurred. But it seems to me, a humble student of the occult, to be
curious.

While we waited we had tea in a hotel looking on to a big empty square
of houses, and after tea we waited a very long time for our monster to
pick us up. Then the telephone from the garage inquired for “the
gentleman on the motor,” and since Harry had strolled out to get a local
evening paper with news of the last Test Match, I applied ear and mouth
to that elusive instrument. What I heard was not encouraging: the
ignition had gone very wrong indeed, and “perhaps” in an hour we should
be able to start. It was then about half-past six, and we were just
seventy-eight miles from Dunwich.

Harry came back soon after this, and I told him what the message from
the garage had been. What he said was this: “Then we shan’t get back
till long after dinner. We might just as well have camped out to see
your ghost.”

As I have already said, no notion of Bircham was in my mind, and I
mention this as evidence that, even if it had been, Harry’s remark
would have implied that we were not going through Bircham.

The hour lengthened itself into an hour and a half. Then the monster,
quite well again, came hooting round the corner, and we got in.

“Whack her up, Jack,” said Harry to the chauffeur. “The roads will be
empty. You had better light up at once.”

The monster, with its eyes agleam, was whacked up, and never in my life
have I been carried so cautiously and yet so swiftly. Jack never took a
risk or the possibility of a risk, but when the road was clear and open
he let the monster run just as fast as it was able. Its eyes made day of
the road fifty yards ahead, and the romance of night was fairyland round
us. Hares started from the roadside, and raced in front of us for a
hundred yards, then just wheeled in time to avoid the ear-flaps of the
great triumphant brute that carried us. Moths flitted across, struck
sometimes by the lenses of its eyes, and the miles peeled over our
shoulders. When It occurred we were going top-speed. And this was
It--quite unsensational, but to us quite inexplicable unless my midnight
imaginings happened to be true.

As I have said, I was in command of the hooter and of the syren. We were
flying along on a straight down-grade, as fast as ever we could go, for
the engines were working, though the decline was considerable. Then
quite suddenly I saw in front of us a thick cloud of dust, and knew
instinctively and on the instant, without thought or reasoning, what
that must mean. Evidently something going very fast (or else so large a
cloud could not have been raised) was in front of us, and going in the
same direction as ourselves. Had it been something on the road coming to
meet us, we should of course have seen the vehicle first and run into
the dust-cloud afterwards. Had it, again, been something of low speed--a
horse and dog-cart, for instance--no such dust could have been raised.
But, as it was, I knew at once that there was a motor travelling swiftly
just ahead of us, also that it was not going as fast as we were, or we
should have run into its dust much more gradually. But we went into it
as into a suddenly lowered curtain.

Then I shouted to Jack. “Slow down, and put on the brake,” I shrieked.
“There’s something just ahead of us.”

As I spoke I wrought a wild concerto on the hooter, and with my right
hand groped for the syren, but did not find it. Simultaneously I heard a
wild, frightened shriek, just as if I had sounded the syren myself. Jack
had felt for it too, and our hands fingered each other. Then we entered
the dust-cloud.

We slowed down with extraordinary rapidity, and still peering ahead we
went dead-slow through it. I had not put on my goggles after leaving
King’s Lynn, and the dust stung and smarted in my eyes. It was not,
therefore, a belt of fog, but real road-dust. And at the moment we crept
through it I felt Harry’s hands on my shoulder.

“There’s something just ahead,” he said. “Look! don’t you see the tail
light?”

As a matter of fact, I did not; and, still going very slow, we came out
of that dust-cloud. The broad empty road stretched in front of us; a
hedge was on each side, and there was no turning either to right or
left. Only, on the right, was a lodge, and gates which were closed. The
lodge had no lights in any window.

Then we came to a standstill; the air was dead-calm, not a leaf in the
hedgerow trees was moving, not a grain of dust was lifted from the road.
But, behind, the dust-cloud still hung in the air, and stopped
dead-short at the closed lodge-gates. We had moved very slowly for the
last hundred yards: it was difficult to suppose that it was of our
making. Then Jack spoke, with a curious crack in his voice.

“It must have been a motor, sir,” he said. “But where is it?”

I had no reply to this, and from behind another voice, Harry’s voice,
spoke. For the moment I did not recognise it, for it was strained and
faltering.

“Did you open the syren?” he asked. “It didn’t sound like our syren. It
sounded like, like----”

“I didn’t open the syren,” said I.

Then we went on again. Soon we came to scattered lights in houses by the
wayside.

“What’s this place?” I asked Jack.

“Bircham, sir,” said he.

GAVON’S EVE

It is only the largest kind of ordnance map that records the existence
of the village of Gavon, in the shire of Sutherland, and it is perhaps
surprising that any map on whatever scale should mark so small and
huddled a group of huts, set on a bare, bleak headland between moor and
sea, and, so one would have thought, of no import at all to any who did
not happen to live there. But the river Gavon, on the right bank of
which stand this half-dozen of chimneyless and wind-swept habitations,
is a geographical fact of far greater interest to outsiders, for the
salmon there are heavy fish, the mouth of the river is clear of nets,
and all the way up to Gavon Loch, some six miles inland, the
coffee-coloured water lies in pool after deep pool, which verge, if the
river is in order and the angler moderately sanguine, on a fishing
probability amounting almost to a certainty. In any case during the
first fortnight of September last I had no blank day on those delectable
waters, and up till the 15th of that month there was no day on which
some one at the lodge in which I was stopping did not land a fish out of
the famous Picts’ pool. But after the 15th that pool was not fished
again. The reason why is here set forward.

The river at this point, after some hundred yards of rapid, makes a
sudden turn round a rocky angle, and plunges madly into the pool itself.
Very deep water lies at the head of it, but deeper still further down on
the east side, where a portion of the stream flicks back again in a
swift dark backwater towards the top of the pool again. It is fishable
only from the western bank, for to the east, above this backwater, a
great wall of black and basaltic rock, heaved up no doubt by some fault
in strata, rises sheer from the river to the height of some sixty feet.
It is in fact nearly precipitous on both sides, heavily serrated at the
top, and of so curious a thinness, that at about the middle of it where
a fissure breaks its topmost edge, and some twenty feet from the top,
there exists a long hole, a sort of lancet window, one would say, right
through the rock, so that a slit of daylight can be seen through it.
Since, therefore, no one would care to cast his line standing perched on
that razor-edged eminence, the pool must needs be fished from the
western bank. A decent fly, however, will cover it all.

It is on the western bank that there stand the remains of that which
gave its title to the pool, namely, the ruins of a Pict castle, built
out of rough and scarcely hewn masonry, unmortared but on a certain
large and impressive scale, and in a very well-preserved condition
considering its extreme antiquity. It is circular in shape and measures
some twenty yards of diameter in its internal span. A staircase of large
blocks with a rise of at least a foot leads up to the main gate, and
opposite this on the side towards the river is another smaller postern
through which down a rather hazardously steep slope a scrambling path,
where progress demands both caution and activity, conducts to the head
of the pool which lies immediately beneath it. A gate-chamber still
roofed over exists in the solid wall: inside there are foundation
indications of three rooms, and in the centre of all a very deep hole,
probably a well. Finally, just outside the postern leading to the river
is a small artificially levelled platform, some twenty feet across, as
if made to support some super-incumbent edifice. Certain stone slabs and
blocks are dispersed over it.

Brora, the post-town of Gavon, lies some six miles to the south-west,
and from it a track over the moor leads to the rapids immediately above
the Picts’ pool, across which by somewhat extravagant striding from
boulder to boulder a man can pass dry-foot when the river is low, and
make his way up a steep path to the north of the basaltic rock, and so
to the village. But this transit demands a steady head, and at the best
is a somewhat giddy passage. Otherwise the road between it and Brora
lies in a long detour higher up the moor, passing by the gates of Gavon
Lodge, where I was stopping. For some vague and ill-defined reason the
pool itself and the Picts’ Castle had an uneasy reputation on the
country side, and several times trudging back from a day’s fishing I
have known my gillie take a longish circuit, though heavy with fish,
rather than make this short cut in the dusk by the castle. On the first
occasion when Sandy, a strapping yellow-bearded viking of twenty-five,
did this he gave as a reason that the ground round about the castle was
“mossy,” though as a God-fearing man, he must have known he lied. But on
another occasion he was more frank, and said that the Picts’ pool was
“no canny” after sunset. I am now inclined to agree with him, though,
when he lied about it, I think it was because as a God-fearing man he
feared the devil also.

It was on the evening of September 14 that I was walking back with my
host, Hugh Graham, from the forest beyond the lodge. It had been a day
unseasonably hot for the time of year, and the hills were blanketed with
soft, furry clouds. Sandy, the gillie of whom I have spoken, was behind
with the ponies, and, idly enough, I told Hugh about his strange
distaste for the Picts’ pool after sunset. He listened, frowning a
little.

“That’s curious,” he said. “I know there is some dim local superstition
about the place, but last year certainly Sandy used to laugh at it. I
remember asking him what ailed the place, and he said he thought
nothing about the rubbish folk talked. But this year you say he avoids
it.”

“On several occasions with me he has done so.”

Hugh smoked a while in silence, striding noiselessly over the dusky
fragrant heather.

“Poor chap,” he said, “I don’t know what to do about him. He’s becoming
useless.”

“Drink?” I asked.

“Yes, drink in a secondary manner. But trouble led to drink, and
trouble, I am afraid, is leading him to worse than drink.”

“The only thing worse than drink is the devil,” I remarked.

“Precisely. That’s where he is going. He goes there often.”

“What on earth do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, it’s rather curious,” said Hugh. “You know I dabble a bit in
folklore and local superstition, and I believe I am on the track of
something odder than odd. Just wait a moment.”

We stood there in the gathering dusk till the ponies laboured up the
hillside to us, Sandy with his six feet of lithe strength strolling
easily beside them up the steep brae, as if his long day’s trudging had
but served to half awaken his dormant powers of limb.

“Going to see Mistress Macpherson again to-night?” asked Hugh.

“Aye, puir body,” said Sandy. “She’s auld, and she’s lone.”

“Very kind of you, Sandy,” said Hugh, and we walked on.

“What then?” I asked when the ponies had fallen behind again.

“Why, superstition lingers here,” said Hugh, “and it’s supposed she’s a
witch. To be quite candid with you, the thing interests me a good deal.
Supposing you asked me, on oath, whether I believed in witches, I should
say ‘No.’ But if you asked me again, on oath, whether I suspected I
believed in them, I should, I think, say ‘Yes.’ And the fifteenth of
this month--to-morrow--is Gavon’s Eve.”

“And what in Heaven’s name is that?” I asked. “And who is Gavon? And
what’s the trouble?”

“Well, Gavon is the person, I suppose, not saint, who is what we should
call the eponymous hero of this district. And the trouble is Sandy’s
trouble. Rather a long story. But there’s a long mile in front of us
yet, if you care to be told.”

During that mile I heard. Sandy had been engaged a year ago to a girl of
Gavon who was in service at Inverness. In March last he had gone,
without giving notice, to see her, and as he walked up the street in
which her mistress’ house stood, had met her suddenly face to face, in
company with a man whose clipped speech betrayed him English, whose
manner a kind of gentleman. He had a flourish of his hat for Sandy,
pleasure to see him, and scarcely any need of explanation as to how he
came to be walking with Catrine. It was the most natural thing possible,
for a city like Inverness boasted its innocent urbanities, and a girl
could stroll with a man. And for the time, since also Catrine was so
frankly pleased to see him, Sandy was satisfied. But after his return to
Gavon, suspicion, fungus-like, grew rank in his mind, with the result
that a month ago he had, with infinite pains and blottings, written a
letter to Catrine, urging her return and immediate marriage. Thereafter
it was known that she had left Inverness; it was known that she had
arrived by train at Brora. From Brora she had started to walk across the
moor by the path leading just above the Picts’ Castle, crossing the
rapids to Gavon, leaving her box to be sent by the carrier. But at Gavon
she had never arrived. Also it was said that, though it was a hot
afternoon, she wore a big cloak.

By this time we had come to the lodge, the lights of which showed dim
and blurred through the thick hill-mists that had streamed sullenly down
from the higher ground.

“And the rest,” said Hugh, “which is as fantastic as this is sober fact,
I will tell you later.”

Now, a fruit-bearing determination to go to bed is, to my mind, as
difficult to ripen as a fruit-bearing determination to get up, and in
spite of our long day, I was glad when Hugh (the rest of the men having
yawned themselves out of the smoking-room) came back from the hospitable
dispensing of bedroom candlesticks with a briskness that denoted that,
as far as he was concerned, the distressing determination was not
imminent.

“As regards Sandy,” I suggested.

“Ah, I also was thinking of that,” he said. “Well, Catrine Gordon left
Brora, and never arrived here. That is fact. Now for what remains. Have
you any remembrance of a woman always alone walking about the moor by
the loch? I think I once called your attention to her.”

“Yes, I remember,” I said. “Not Catrine, surely; a very old woman, awful
to look at. Moustache, whiskers, and muttering to herself. Always
looking at the ground, too.”

“Yes, that is she--not Catrine. Catrine! My word, a May morning! But the
other--it is Mrs Macpherson, reputed witch. Well, Sandy trudges there, a
mile and more away, every night to see her. You know Sandy: Adonis of
the north. Now, can you account by any natural explanation for that
fact? That he goes off after a long day to see an old hag in the hills?”

“It would seem unlikely,” said I.

“Unlikely! Well, yes, unlikely.”

Hugh got up from his chair and crossed the room to where a bookcase of
rather fusty-looking volumes stood between windows. He took a small
morocco-backed book from a top shelf.

“Superstitions of Sutherlandshire,” he said, as he handed it to me.
“Turn to page 128, and read.”

I obeyed, and read.

“September 15 appears to have been the date of what we may call this
devil festival. On the night of that day the powers of darkness held
pre-eminent dominion, and over-rode for any who were abroad that night
and invoked their aid, the protective Providence of Almighty God.
Witches, therefore, above all, were peculiarly potent. On this night any
witch could entice to herself the heart and the love of any young man
who consulted her on matters of philtre or love charm, with the result
that on any night in succeeding years of the same date, he, though he
was lawfully affianced and wedded, would for that night be hers. If,
however, he should call on the name of God through any sudden grace of
the Spirit, her charm would be of no avail. On this night, too, all
witches had the power by certain dreadful incantations and indescribable
profanities, to raise from the dead those who had committed suicide.”

“Top of the next page,” said Hugh. “Leave out this next paragraph; it
does not bear on this last.”

“Near a small village in this country,” I read, “called Gavon, the moon
at midnight is said to shine through a certain gap or fissure in a wall
of rock close beside the river on to the ruins of a Pict castle, so
that the light of its beams falls on to a large flat stone erected there
near the gate, and supposed by some to be an ancient and pagan altar. At
that moment, so the superstition still lingers in the country side, the
evil and malignant spirits which hold sway on Gavon’s Eve, are at the
zenith of their powers, and those who invoke their aid at this moment
and in this place, will, though with infinite peril to their immortal
souls, get all that they desire of them.”

The paragraph on the subject ended here, and I shut the book.

“Well?” I asked.

“Under favourable circumstances two and two make four,” said Hugh.

“And four means----”

“This. Sandy is certainly in consultation with a woman who is supposed
to be a witch, whose path no crofter will cross after nightfall. He
wants to learn, at whatever cost, poor devil, what happened to Catrine.
Thus I think it more than possible that to-morrow, at midnight, there
will be folk by the Picts’ pool. There is another curious thing. I was
fishing there yesterday, and just opposite the river gate of the castle,
someone has set up a great flat stone, which has been dragged (for I
noticed the crushed grass) from the débris at the bottom of the slope.”

“You mean that the old hag is going to try to raise the body of Catrine,
if she is dead?”

“Yes, and I mean to see myself what happens. Come too.”

The next day Hugh and I fished down the river from the lodge, taking
with us not Sandy, but another gillie, and ate our lunch on the slope of
the Picts’ Castle after landing a couple of fish there. Even as Hugh had
said, a great flat slab of stone had been dragged on to the platform
outside the river gate of the castle, where it rested on certain rude
supports, which, now that it was in place, seemed certainly designed to
receive it. It was also exactly opposite that lancet window in the
basaltic rock across the pool, so that if the moon at midnight did shine
through it, the light would fall on the stone. This then was the almost
certain scene of the incantations.

Below the platform, as I have said, the ground fell rapidly away to the
level of the pool, which owing to rain on the hills was running very
high, and, streaked with lines of greyish bubbles, poured down in
amazing and ear-filling volume. But directly underneath the steep
escarpment of rock on the far side of the pool it lay foamless and
black, a still backwater of great depth. Above the altar-like erection
again the ground rose up seven rough-hewn steps to the gate itself, on
each side of which, to the height of about four feet, ran the circular
wall of the castle. Inside again were the remains of partition walls
between the three chambers, and it was in the one nearest to the river
gate that we determined to conceal ourselves that night. From there,
should the witch and Sandy keep tryst at the altar, any sound of
movement would reach us, and through the aperture of the gate itself we
could see, concealed in the shadow of the wall, whatever took place at
the altar or down below at the pool. The lodge, finally, was but a short
ten minutes away, if one went in the direct line, so that by starting at
a quarter to twelve that night, we could enter the Picts’ Castle by the
gate away from the river, thus not betraying our presence to those who
might be waiting for the moment when the moon should shine through the
lancet window in the wall of rock on to the altar in front of the river
gate.

Night fell very still and windless, and when not long before midnight we
let ourselves silently out of the lodge, though to the east the sky was
clear, a black continent of cloud was creeping up from the west, and had
now nearly reached the zenith. Out of the remote fringes of it
occasional lightning winked, and the growl of very distant thunder
sounded drowsily at long intervals after. But it seemed to me as if
another storm hung over our heads, ready every moment to burst, for the
oppression in the air was of a far heavier quality than so distant a
disturbance could have accounted for. To the east, however, the sky was
still luminously clear; the curiously hard edges of the western cloud
were star-embroidered, and by the dove-coloured light in the east it was
evident that the moonrise over the moor was imminent. And though I did
not in my heart believe that our expedition would end in anything but
yawns, I was conscious of an extreme tension and rawness of nerves,
which I set down to the thunder-charged air.

For noiselessness of footstep we had both put on india-rubber soled
shoes, and all the way down to the pool we heard nothing but the distant
thunder and our own padded tread. Very silently and cautiously we
ascended the steps of the gate away from the river, and keeping close to
the wall inside, sidled round to the river gate and peered out. For the
first moment I could see nothing, so black lay the shadow of the
rock-wall opposite across the pool, but by degrees I made out the lumps
and line of the glimmering foam which streaked the water. High as the
river was running this morning it was infinitely more voluminous and
turbulent now, and the sound of it filled and bewildered the ear with
its sonorous roaring. Only under the very base of the rock opposite it
ran quite black and unflecked by foam: there lay the deep still surface
of the backwater. Then suddenly I saw something black move in the
dimness in front of me, and against the grey foam rose up first the
head, then the shoulders, and finally the whole figure of a woman
coming towards us up the bank. Behind her walked another, a man, and the
two came to where the altar of stone had been newly erected and stood
there side by side silhouetted against the churned white of the stream.
Hugh had seen too, and touched me on the arm to call my attention. So
far then he was right: there was no mistaking the stalwart proportions
of Sandy.

Suddenly across the gloom shot a tiny spear of light, and momentarily as
we watched, it grew larger and longer, till a tall beam, as from some
window cut in the rock opposite, was shed on the bank below us. It moved
slowly, imperceptibly to the left till it struck full between the two
black figures standing there, and shone with a curious bluish gleam on
the flat stone in front of them. Then the roar of the river was suddenly
overscored by a dreadful screaming voice, the voice of a woman, and from
her side her arms shot up and out as if in invocation of some power. At
first I could catch none of the words, but soon from repetition they
began to convey an intelligible message to my brain, and I was listening
as in the paralytic horror of nightmare to a bellowing of the most
hideous and un-nameable profanity. What I heard I cannot bring myself to
record; suffice it to say that Satan was invoked by every adoring and
reverent name, that cursing and unspeakable malediction was poured forth
on Him whom we hold most holy. Then the yelling voice ceased as
suddenly as it had begun, and for a moment there was silence again, but
for the reverberating river.

Then once more that horror of sound was uplifted.

“So, Catrine Gordon,” it cried, “I bid ye in the name of my master and
your’s to rise from where ye lie. Up with ye--up!”

Once more there was silence; then I heard Hugh at my elbow draw a quick
sobbing breath, and his finger pointed unsteadily to the dead black
water below the rock. And I too looked and saw.

Right under the rock there appeared a pale subaqueous light, which waved
and quivered in the stream. At first it was very small and dim, but as
we looked it seemed to swim upwards from remote depths and grew larger
till I suppose the space of some square yard was illuminated by it. Then
the surface of the water was broken, and a head, the head of a girl,
dead-white and with long, flowing hair, appeared above the stream. Her
eyes were shut, the corners of her mouth drooped as in sleep, and the
moving water stood in a frill round her neck. Higher and higher rose the
figure out of the tide, till at last it stood, luminous in itself, so it
appeared, up to the middle. The head was bent down over the breast, and
the hands clasped together. As it emerged from the water it seemed to
get nearer, and was by now half-way across the pool, moving quietly and
steadily against the great flood of the hurrying river.

Then I heard a man’s voice crying out in a sort of strangled agony.

“Catrine!” it cried; “Catrine! In God’s name; in God’s name!”

In two strides Sandy had rushed down the steep bank, and hurled himself
out into that mad swirl of waters. For one moment I saw his arms flung
up into the sky, the next he had altogether gone. And on the utterance
of that name the unholy vision had vanished too, while simultaneously
there burst in front of us a light so blinding, followed by a crack of
thunder so appalling to the senses, that I know I just hid my face in my
hands.