The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just
possibly have noticed, as he bowled along over the bare high plateau
between Penzance and the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing
down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger the faded
inscription “Polearn 2 miles,” but probably very few have had the
curiosity to traverse those two miles in order to see a place to which
their guide-books award so cursory a notice. It is described there, in a
couple of unattractive lines, as a small fishing village with a church
of no particular interest except for certain carved and painted wooden
panels (originally belonging to an earlier edifice) which form an
altar-rail. But the church at St. Creed (the tourist is reminded) has a
similar decoration far superior in point of preservation and interest,
and thus even the ecclesiastically disposed are not lured to Polearn. So
meagre a bait is scarce worth swallowing, and a glance at the very steep
lane which in dry weather presents a carpet of sharp-pointed stones, and
after rain a muddy watercourse, will almost certainly decide him not to
expose his motor or his bicycle to risks like these in so sparsely
populated a district. Hardly a house has met his eye since he left
Penzance, and the possible trundling of a punctured bicycle for half a
dozen weary miles seems a high price to pay for the sight of a few
painted panels.
Polearn, therefore, even in the high
noon of the tourist season, is little liable to invasion, and for the
rest of the year I do not suppose that a couple of folk a day traverse
those two miles (long ones at that) of steep and stony gradient. I am
not forgetting the postman in this exiguous estimate, for the days are
few when, leaving his pony and cart at the top of the hill, he goes as
far as the village, since but a few hundred yards down the lane there
stands a large white box, like a sea-trunk, by the side of the road,
with a slit for letters and a locked door. Should he have in his wallet
a registered letter or be the bearer of a parcel too large for insertion
in the square lips of the sea-trunk, he must needs trudge down the hill
and deliver the troublesome missive, leaving it in person on the owner,
and receiving some small reward of coin or refreshment for his kindness.
But such occasions are rare, and his
general routine is to take out of the box such letters as may have been
deposited there, and insert in their place such letters as he has
brought. These will be called for, perhaps that day or perhaps the next,
by an emissary from the Polearn post-office. As for the fishermen of the
place, who, in their export trade, constitute the chief link of movement
between Polearn and the outside world, they would not dream of taking
their catch up the steep lane and so, with six miles farther of travel,
to the market at Penzance. The sea route is shorter and easier, and they
deliver their wares to the pier-head. Thus, though the sole industry of
Polearn is sea-fishing, you will get no fish there unless you have
bespoken your requirements to one of the fishermen. Back come the
trawlers as empty as a haunted house, while their spoils are in the
fish-train that is speeding to London.
Such isolation of a little community,
continued, as it has been, for centuries, produces isolation in the
individual as well, and nowhere will you find greater independence of
character than among the people of Polearn. But they are linked
together, so it has always seemed to me, by some mysterious
comprehension: it is as if they had all been initiated into some ancient
rite, inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible. The winter
storms that batter the coast, the vernal spell of the spring, the hot,
still summers, the season of rains and autumnal decay, have made a spell
which, line by line, has been communicated to them, concerning the
powers, evil and good, that rule the world, and manifest themselves in
ways benignant or terrible . . .
I came to Polearn first at the age of
ten, a small boy, weak and sickly, and threatened with pulmonary
trouble. My father’s business kept him in London, while for me
abundance of fresh air and a mild climate were considered essential
conditions if I was to grow to manhood. His sister had married the vicar
of Polearn, Richard Bolitho, himself native to the place, and so it came
about that I spent three years, as a paying guest, with my relations.
Richard Bolitho owned a fine house in the place, which he inhabited in
preference to the vicarage, which he let to a young artist, John Evans,
on whom the spell of Polearn had fallen for from year’s beginning to
year’s end he never let it. There was a solid roofed shelter, open on
one side to the air, built for me in the garden, and here I lived and
slept, passing scarcely one hour out of the twenty-four behind walls and
windows. I was out on the bay with the fisher-folk, or wandering along
the gorse-clad cliffs that climbed steeply to right and left of the deep
combe where the village lay, or pottering about on the pier-head, or
bird’s-nesting in the bushes with the boys of the village. Except on
Sunday and for the few daily hours of my lessons, I might do what I
pleased so long as I remained in the open air. About the lessons there
was nothing formidable; my uncle conducted me through flowering bypaths
among the thickets of arithmetic, and made pleasant excursions into the
elements of Latin grammar, and above all, he made me daily give him an
account, in clear and grammatical sentences, of what had been occupying
my mind or my movements. Should I select to tell him about a walk along
the cliffs, my speech must be orderly, not vague, slip-shod notes of
what I had observed. In this way, too, he trained my observation, for he
would bid me tell him what flowers were in bloom, and what birds hovered
fishing over the sea or were building in the bushes. For that I owe him
a perennial gratitude, for to observe and to express my thoughts in the
clear spoken word became my life’s profession.
But far more formidable than my weekday
tasks was the prescribed routine for Sunday. Some dark embers
compounded of Calvinism and mysticism smouldered in my uncle’s soul,
and made it a day of terror. His sermon in the morning scorched us with
a foretaste of the eternal fires reserved for unrepentant sinners, and
he was hardly less terrifying at the children’s service in the
afternoon. Well do I remember his exposition of the doctrine of guardian
angels. A child, he said, might think himself secure in such angelic
care, but let him beware of committing any of those numerous offences
which would cause his guardian to turn his face from him, for as sure as
there were angels to protect us, there were also evil and awful
presences which were ready to pounce; and on them he dwelt with peculiar
gusto. Well, too, do I remember in the morning sermon his commentary on
the carved panels of the altar-rails to which I have already alluded.
There was the angel of the Annunciation there, and the angel of the
Resurrection, but not less was there the witch of Endor, and, on the
fourth panel, a scene that concerned me most of all. This fourth panel
(he came down from his pulpit to trace its time-worn features)
represented the lych-gate of the church-yard at Polearn itself, and
indeed the resemblance when thus pointed out was remarkable. In the
entry stood the figure of a robed priest holding up a Cross, with which
he faced a terrible creature like a gigantic slug, that reared itself up
in front of him. That, so ran my uncle’s interpretation, was some evil
agency, such as he had spoken about to us children, of almost infinite
malignity and power, which could alone be combated by firm faith and a
pure heart. Below ran the legend “Negotium perambulans in tenebris”
from the ninety-first Psalm. We should find it translated there, “the
pestilence that walketh in darkness,” which but feebly rendered the
Latin. It was more deadly to the soul than any pestilence that can only
kill the body: it was the Thing, the Creature, the Business that
trafficked in the outer Darkness, a minister of God’s wrath on the
unrighteous ...
I
could see, as he spoke, the looks which the congregation exchanged with
each other, and knew that his words were evoking a surmise, a
remembrance. Nods and whispers passed between them, they understood to
what he alluded, and with the inquisitiveness of boyhood I could not
rest till I had wormed the story out of my friends among the
fisher-boys, as, next morning, we sat basking and naked in the sun after
our bathe. One knew one bit of it, one another, but it pieced together
into a truly alarming legend. In bald outline it was as follows:
A church far more ancient than that in
which my uncle terrified us every Sunday had once stood not three
hundred yards away, on the shelf of level ground below the quarry from
which its stones were hewn. The owner of the land had pulled this down,
and erected for himself a house on the same site out of these materials,
keeping, in a very ecstasy of wickedness, the altar, and on this he
dined and played dice afterwards. But as he grew old some black
melancholy seized him, and he would have lights burning there all night,
for he had deadly fear of the darkness. On one winter evening there
sprang up such a gale as was never before known, which broke in the
windows of the room where he had supped, and extinguished the lamps.
Yells of terror brought in his servants, who found him lying on the
floor with the blood streaming from his throat. As they entered some
huge black shadow seemed to move away from him, crawled across the floor
and up the wall and out of the broken window.
“There he lay a-dying,” said the
last of my informants, “and him that had been a great burly man was
withered to a bag o’ skin, for the critter had drained all the blood
from him. His last breath was a scream, and he hollered out the same
words as passon read off the screen.”
“Negotium
perambulans in tenebris,” I suggested eagerly.
“Thereabouts. Latin anyhow.”
“And after that?” I asked.
“Nobody would go near the place, and
the old house rotted and fell in ruins till three years ago, when along
comes Mr. Dooliss from Penzance, and built the half of it up again. But
he don’t care much about such critters, nor about Latin neither. He
takes his bottle of whisky a day and gets drunk’s a lord in the
evening. Eh, I’m gwine home to my dinner.”
Whatever the authenticity of the
legend, I had certainly heard the truth about Mr. Dooliss from Penzance,
who from that day became an object of keen curiosity on my part, the
more so because the quarry-house adjoined my uncle’s garden. The Thing
that walked in the dark failed to stir my imagination, and already I was
so used to sleeping alone in my shelter that the night had no terrors
for me. But it would be intensely exciting to wake at some timeless hour
and hear Mr. Dooliss yelling, and conjecture that the Thing had got him.
But by degrees the whole story faded
from my mind, overscored by the more vivid interests of the day, and,
for the last two years of my out-door life in the vicarage garden, I
seldom thought about Mr. Dooliss and the possible fate that might await
him for his temerity in living in the place where that Thing of darkness
had done business. Occasionally I saw him over the garden fence, a great
yellow lump of a man, with slow and staggering gait, but never did I set
eyes on him outside his gate, either in the village street or down on
the beach. He interfered with none, and no one interfered with him. If
he wanted to run the risk of being the prey of the legendary nocturnal
monster, or quietly drink himself to death, it was his affair. My uncle,
so I gathered, had made several attempts to see him when first he came
to live at Polearn, but Mr. Dooliss appeared to have no use for parsons,
but said he was not at home and never returned the call.
After three years of sun,
wind, and rain, I had completely outgrown my early symptoms and had
become a tough, strapping youngster of thirteen. I was sent to Eton and
Cambridge, and in due course ate my dinners and became a barrister. In
twenty years from that time I was earning a yearly income of five
figures, and had already laid by in sound securities a sum that brought
me dividends which would, for one of my simple tastes and frugal habits,
supply me with all the material comforts I needed on this side of the
grave. The great prizes of my profession were already within my reach,
but I had no ambition beckoning me on, nor did I want a wife and
children, being, I must suppose, a natural celibate. In fact there was
only one ambition which through these busy years had held the lure of
blue and far-off hills to me, and that was to get back to Polearn, and
live once more isolated from the world with the sea and the gorse-clad
hills for play-fellows, and the secrets that lurked there for
exploration. The spell of it had been woven about my heart, and I can
truly say that there had hardly passed a day in all those years in which
the thought of it and the desire for it had been wholly absent from my
mind. Though I had been in frequent communication with my uncle there
during his lifetime, and, after his death, with his widow who still
lived there, I had never been back to it since I embarked on my
profession, for I knew that if I went there, it would be a wrench beyond
my power to tear myself away again. But I had made up my mind that when
once I had provided for my own independence, I would go back there not
to leave it again. And yet I did leave it again, and now nothing in the
world would induce me to turn down the lane from the road that leads
from Penzance to the Land’s End, and see the sides of the combe rise
steep above the roofs of the village and hear the gulls chiding as they
fish in the bay. One of the things invisible, of the dark powers, leaped
into light, and I saw it with my eyes.
The house where I had spent those three
years of boyhood had been left for life to my aunt, and when I made
known to her my intention of coming back to Polearn, she suggested that,
till I found a suitable house or found her proposal unsuitable, I should
come to live with her.
“The house is too big for a lone old
woman,” she wrote, “and I have often thought of quitting and taking
a little cottage sufficient for me and my requirements. But come and
share it, my dear, and if you find me troublesome, you or I can go. You
may want solitude — most people in Polearn do — and will leave me.
Or else I will leave you: one of the main reasons of my stopping here
all these years was a feeling that I must not let the old house starve.
Houses starve, you know, if they are not lived in. They die a lingering
death; the spirit in them grows weaker and weaker, and at last fades out
of them. Isn’t this nonsense to your London notions?...”
Naturally I accepted with warmth this
tentative arrangement, and on an evening in June found myself at the
head of the lane leading down to Polearn, and once more I descended into
the steep valley between the hills. Time had stood still apparently for
the combe, the dilapidated signpost (or its successor) pointed a rickety
finger down the lane, and a few hundred yards farther on was the white
box for the exchange of letters. Point after remembered point met my
eye, and what I saw was not shrunk, as is often the case with the
revisited scenes of childhood, into a smaller scale. There stood the
post-office, and there the church und close beside it the vicarage, and
beyond, the tall shrubberies which separated the house for which I was
bound from the road, and beyond that again the grey roofs of the
quarry-house damp and shining with the moist evening wind from the sea.
All was exactly as I remembered it, and, above all, that sense of
seclusion and isolation. Somewhere above the tree-tops climbed the lane
which joined the main road to Penzance, but all that had become
immeasurably distant. The years that had passed since last I turned in
at the well-known gate faded like a frosty breath, and vanished in this
warm, soft air. There were law-courts somewhere in memory’s dull book
which, if I cared to turn the pages, would tell me that I had made a
name and a great income there. But the dull book was closed now, for I
was back in Polearn, and the spell was woven around me again.
And if Polearn was unchanged, so too
was Aunt Hester, who met me at the door. Dainty and china-white she had
always been, and the years had not aged but only refined her. As we sat
and talked after dinner she spoke of all that had happened in Polearn in
that score of years, and yet somehow the changes of which she spoke
seemed but to confirm the immutability of it all. As the recollection of
names came back to me, I asked her about the quarry-house and Mr.
Dooliss, and her face gboomed a little as with the shadow of a cloud on
a spring day.
“Yes, Mr. Dooliss,” she said,
“poor Mr. Dooliss, how well I remember him, though it must be ten
years and more since he died. I never wrote to you about it, for it was
all very dreadful, my dear, and I did not want to darken your memories
of Polearn. Your uncle always thought that something of the sort might
happen if he went on in his wicked, drunken ways, and worse than that,
and though nobody knew exactly what took place, it was the sort of thing
that might have been anticipated.”
“But what more or less happened, Aunt
Hester?” I asked.
“Well, of course I can’t tell you
everything, for no one knew it. But he was a very sinful man, and the
scandal about him at Newlyn was shocking. And then he lived, too, in the
quarry-house... I wonder if by any chance you remember a sermon of your
uncle’s when he got out of the pulpit and explained that panel in the
altar-rails, the one, I mean, with the horrible creature rearing itself
up outside the lych-gate?”
“Yes, I remember perfectly,” said
I.
“Ah. It made an impression on you, I
suppose, and so it did on all who heard him, and that impression got
stamped and branded on us all when the catastrophe occurred. Somehow Mr.
Dooliss got to hear about your uncle’s sermon, and in some drunken fit
he broke into the church and smashed the panel to atoms. He seems to
have thought that there was some magic in it, and that if he destroyed
that he would get rid of the terrible fate that was threatening him. For
I must tell you that before he committed that dreadful sacrilege he had
been a haunted man: he hated and feared darkness, for he thought that
the creature on the panel was on his track, but that as long as he kept
lights burning it could not touch him. But the panel, to his disordered
mind, was the root of his terror, and so, as I said, he broke into the
church and attempted — you will see why I said ‘attempted’ — to
destroy it. It certainly was found in splinters next morning, when your
uncle went into church for matins, and knowing Mr. Dooliss’s fear of
the panel, he went across to the quarry-house afterwards and taxed him
with its destruction. The man never denied it; he boasted of what he had
done. There he sat, though it was early morning, drinking his whisky.
“‘I’ve settled your Thing for
you,’ he said, ‘and your sermon too. A fig for such
superstitions.’
“Your uncle left him without
answering his blasphemy, meaning to go straight into Penzance and give
information to the police about this outrage to the church, but on his
way back from the quarry-house he went into the church again, in order
to be able to give details about the damage, and there in the screen was
the panel, untouched and uninjured. And yet he had himself seen it
smashed, and Mr. Dooliss had confessed that the destruction of it was
his work. But there it was, and whether the power of God had mended it
or some other power, who knows?”
This was Polearn indeed, and it was the
spirit of Polearn that made me accept all Aunt Hester was telling me as
attested fact. It had happened like that. She went on in her quiet
voice.
“Your uncle recognised that some
power beyond police was at work, and he did not go to Penzance or give
informations about the outrage, for the evidence of it had vanished.”
A sudden spate of scepticism swept over
me.
“There must have been some
mistake,” I said. “It hadn’t been broken...”
She smiled.
“Yes, my dear, but you have been in
London so long,” she said. “Let me, anyhow, tell you the rest of my
story. That night, for some reason, I could not sleep. It was very hot
and airless; I dare say you will think that the sultry conditions
accounted for my wakefulness. Once and again, as I went to the window to
see if I could not admit more air, I could see from it the quarry-house,
and I noticed the first time that I left my bed that it was blazing with
lights. But the second time I saw that it was all in darkness, and as I
wondered at that, I heard a terrible scream, and the moment afterwards
the steps of someone coming at full speed down the road outside the
gate. He yelled as he ran; ‘Light, light!’ he called out. ‘Give me
light, or it will catch me!’ It was very terrible to hear that, and I
went to rouse my husband, who was sleeping in the dressing-room across
the passage. He wasted no time, but by now the whole village was aroused
by the screams, and when he got down to the pier he found that all was
over. The tide was low, and on the rocks at its foot was lying the body
of Mr. Dooliss. He must have cut some artery when he fell on those sharp
edges of stone, for he had bled to death, they thought, and though he
was a big burly man, his corpse was but skin and bones. Yet there was no
pool of blood round him, such as you would have expected. Just skin and
bones as if every drop of blood in his body had been sucked out of
him!”
She leaned forward.
“You and I, my dear, know what
happened,” she said, “or at least can guess. God has His instruments
of vengeance on those who bring wickedness into places that have been
holy. Dark and mysterious are His ways.”
Now what I should-have thought of such
a story if it had been told me in London I can easily imagine. There was
such an obvious explanation: the man in question had been a drunkard,
what wonder if the demons of delirium pursued him? But here in Polearn
it was different.
“And who is in the quarry-house
now?” I asked. “Years ago the fisher-boys told me the story of the
man who first built it and of his horrible end. And now again it has
happened. Surely no one has ventured to inhabit it once more?”
I saw in her face, even before I asked
that question, that somebody had done so.
“Yes, it is lived in again,” said
she, “for there is no end to the blindness... I don’t know if you
remember him. He was tenant of the vicarage many years ago.”
“John Evans,” said I.
“Yes. Such a nice fellow he was too.
Your uncle was pleased to get so good a tenant. And now—
She rose.
“Aunt Hester, you shouldn’t leave
your sentences unfinished,” I said.
She shook her head.
“My dear, that sentence will finish
itself,” she said. “But what a time of night! I must go to bed, and
you too, or they will think we have to keep lights burning here through
the dark hours.”
Before getting into bed I
drew my curtains wide and opened all the windows to the warm tide of the
sea air that flowed softly in. Looking out into the garden I could see
in the moonlight the roof of the shelter, in which for three years I had
lived, gleaming with dew. That, as much as anything, brought back the
old days to which I had now returned, and they seemed of one piece with
the present, as if no gap of more than twenty years sundered them. The
two flowed into one like globules of mercury uniting into a softly
shining globe, of mysterious lights and reflections. Then, raising my
eyes a little, I saw against the black hill-side the windows of the
quarry-house still alight.
Morning, as is so often the case,
brought no shattering of my illusion. As I began to regain
consciousness, I fancied that I was a boy again waking up in the shelter
in the garden, and though, as I grew more widely awake, I smiled at the
impression, that on which it was based I found to be indeed true. It was
sufficient now as then to be here, to wander again on the cliffs, and
hear the popping of the ripened seed-pods on the gorse-bushes; to stray
along the shore to the bathing-cove, to float and drift and swim in the
warm tide, and bask on the sand, and watch the gulls fishing, to lounge
on the pier-head with the fisher-folk, to see in their eyes and hear in
their quiet speech the evidence of secret things not so much known to
them as part of their instincts and their very being. There were powers
and presences about me; the white poplars that stood by the stream that
babbled down the valley knew of them, and showed a glimpse of their
knowledge sometimes, like the gleam of their white underleaves; the very
cobbles that paved the street were soaked in it
All that I wanted was to lie there and
grow soaked in it too; unconsciously, as a boy, I had done that, but now
the process must be conscious. I must know what stir of forces, fruitful
and mysterious, seethed along the hill-side at noon, and sparkled at
night on the sea. They could be known, they could even be controlled by
those who were masters of the spell, but never could they be spoken of,
for they were dwellers in the innermost, grafted into the eternal life
of the world. There were dark secrets as well as these clear, kindly
powers, and to these no doubt belonged the negotium
perambulans in tenebris which, though of deadly malignity, might be
regarded not only as evil, but as the avenger of sacrilegious and
impious deeds... All this was part of the spell of Polearn, of which the
seeds had long lain dormant in me. But now they were sprouting, and who
knew what strange flower would unfold on their stems?
It was not long before I came across
John Evans. One morning, as I lay on the beach, there came shambling
across the sand a man stout and middle-aged with the face of Silenus. He
paused as he drew near and regarded me from narrow eyes.
“Why, you’re the little chap that
used to live in the parson’s garden,” he said. “Don’t you
recognise me?”
I saw who it was when he spoke: his
voice, I think, instructed me, and recognising it, I could see the
features of the strong, alert young man in this gross caricature.
“Yes, you’re John Evans,” I said.
“You used to be very kind to me: you used to draw pictures for me.”
“So I did, and I’ll draw you some
more. Been bathing? That’s a risky performance. You never know what
lives in the sea, nor what lives on the land for that matter. Not that I
heed them. I stick to work and whisky. God! I’ve learned to paint
since I saw you, and drink too for that matter. I live in the
quarry-house, you know, and it’s a powerful thirsty place. Come and
have a look at my things if you’re passing. Staying with your aunt,
are you? I could do a wonderful portrait of her. Interesting face; she
knows a lot. People who live at Polearn get to know a lot, though I
don’t take much stock in that sort of knowledge myself.”
I do not know when I have been at once
so repelled and interested. Behind the mere grossness of his face there
lurked something which, while it appalled, yet fascinated me. His thick
lisping speech had the same quality. And his paintings, what would they
be like? ...
“I
was just going home,” I said. “I’ll gladly come in, if you’ll
allow me.”
He took me through the untended and
overgrown garden into the house which I had never yet entered. A great
grey cat was sunning itself in the window, and an old woman was laying
lunch in a corner of the cool hall into which the door opened. It was
built of stone, and the carved mouldings let into the walls, the
fragments of gargoyles and sculptured images, bore testimony to the
truth of its having been built out of the demolished church. In one
corner was an oblong and carved wooden table littered with a painter’s
apparatus and stacks of canvases leaned against the walls.
He jerked his thumb towards a head of
an angel that was built into the mantelpiece and giggled.
“Quite a sanctified air,” he said,
“so we tone it down for the purposes of ordinary life by a different
sort of art. Have a drink? No? Well, turn over some of my pictures while
I put myself to rights.”
He was justified in his own estimate of
his skill: he could paint (and apparently he could paint anything), but
never have I seen pictures so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite
studies of trees, and you knew that something lurked in the flickering
shadows. There was a drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window,
even as I had just now seen it, and yet it was no cat but some beast of
awful malignity. There was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not
human, but some evil thing which had come out of the sea. Above all
there were pictures of his garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you
knew that in the bushes were presences ready to spring out on you ...
“Well, do you like my style?” he said as he came up, glass in
hand. (The tumbler of spirits that he held had not been diluted.) “I
try to paint the essence of what I see, not the mere husk and skin of
it, but its nature, where it comes from and what gave it birth.
There’s much in common between a cat and a fuchsia-bush if you look at
them closely enough. Everything came out of the slime of the pit, and
it’s all going back there. I should like to do a picture of you some
day. I’d hold the mirror up to Nature, as that old lunatic said.”
After this first meeting I saw him
occasionally throughout the months of that wonderful summer. Often he
kept to his house and to his painting for days together, and then
perhaps some evening I would find him lounging on the pier, always
alone, and every time we met thus the repulsion and interest grew, for
every time he seemed to have gone farther along a path of secret
knowledge towards some evil shrine where complete initiation awaited
him... And then suddenly the end came.
I had met him thus one evening on the
cliffs while the October sunset still burned in the sky, but over it
with amazing rapidity there spread from the west a great blackness of
cloud such as I have never seen for denseness. The light was sucked from
the sky, the dusk fell in ever thicker layers. He suddenly became
conscious of this.
“I must get back as quick as I
can,” he said. “It will be dark in a few minutes, and my servant is
out. The lamps will not be lit.”
He stepped out with extraordinary
briskness for one who shambled and could scarcely lift his feet, and
soon broke out into a stumbling run. In the gathering darkness I could
see that his face was moist with the dew of some unspoken terror.
“You must come with me,” he panted,
“for so we shall get the lights burning the sooner. I cannot do
without light.”
I had to exert myself to the full to
keep up with him, for terror winged him, and even so I fell behind, so
that when I came to the garden gate, he was already half-way up the path
to the house. I saw him enter, leaving the door wide, and found him
fumbling with matches. But his hand so trembled that he could not
transfer the light to the wick of the lamp.
“But what’s the hurry about?” I
asked.
Suddenly his eyes focused themselves on
the open door behind me, and he jumped from his seat beside the table
which had once been the altar of God, with a gasp and a scream.
“No, no!” he cried. “Keep it off!
...”
I turned and saw what he had seen. The Thing had entered and now
was swiftly sliding across the floor towards him, like some gigantic
caterpillar. A stale phosphorescent light came from it, for though the
dusk had grown to blackness outside, I could see it quite distinctly in
the awful light of its own presence. From it too there came an odour of
corruption and decay, as from slime that has long lain below water. It
seemed to have no head, but on the front of it was an orifice of
puckered skin which opened and shut and slavered at the edges. It was
hairless, and slug-like in shape and in texture. As it advanced its
fore-part reared itself from the ground, like a snake about to strike,
and it fastened on him ...
At that sight, and with the yells of his agony in my ears, the
panic which had struck me relaxed into a hopeless courage, and with
palsied, impotent hands I tried to lay hold of the Thing. But I could
not: though something material was there, it was impossible to grasp it;
my hands sunk in it as in thick mud. It was like wrestling with a
nightmare.
I think that but a few seconds elapsed
before all was over. The screams of the wretched man sank to moans and
mutterings as the Thing fell on him: he panted once or twice and was
still. For a moment longer there came gurglings and sucking noises, and
then it slid out even as it had entered. I lit the lamp which he had
fumbled with, and there on the floor he lay, no more than a rind of skin
in loose folds over projecting bones.
<<---
From Your Dark Side
