My foolish fear was gone, and opening my eyes I saw that my fire, not altogether burned out, had revived by the falling of a stick and was again lighting the room. I had probably slept only a few minutes, but my commonplace dream had somehow so strongly impressed me that I was no longer drowsy; and after a little while I rose, pushed the embers of my fire together, and lighting my pipe proceeded in a rather ludicrously methodical way to meditate upon my vision.
It would have puzzled me then to say in what respect it was worth attention. In the first moment of serious thought that I gave to the matter I recognised the city of my dream as Edinburgh, where I had never been; so if the dream was a memory it was a memory of pictures and description. The recognition somehow deeply impressed me; it was as if something in my mind insisted rebelliously against will and reason on the importance of all this. And that faculty, whatever it was, asserted also a control of my speech. ‘Surely,’ I said aloud, quite involuntarily, ‘the MacGregors must have come here from Edinburgh.’
At the moment, neither the substance of this remark nor the fact of my making it, surprised me in the least; it seemed entirely natural that I should know the name of my dreamfolk and something of their history. But the absurdity of it all soon dawned upon me: I laughed aloud, knocked the ashes from my pipe and again stretched myself upon my bed of boughs and grass, where I lay staring absently into my failing fire, with no further thought of either my dream or my surroundings. Suddenly the single remaining flame crouched for a moment, then, springing upward, lifted itself clear of its embers and expired in air. The darkness was absolute.
At that instant – almost, it seemed, before the gleam of the blaze had faded from my eyes – there was a dull, dead sound, as of some heavy body falling upon the floor, which shook beneath me as I lay. I sprang to a sitting posture and groped at my side for my gun; my notion was that some wild beast had leaped in through the open window. While the flimsy structure was still shaking from the impact I heard the sound of blows, the scuffling of feet upon the floor, and then – it seemed to come from almost within reach of my hand, the sharp shrieking of a woman in mortal agony. So horrible a cry I had never heard nor conceived; it utterly unnerved me; I was conscious for a moment of nothing but my own terror! Fortunately my hand now found the weapon of which it was in search, and the familiar touch somewhat restored me. I leaped to my feet, straining my eyes to pierce the darkness. The violent sounds had ceased, but more terrible than these, I heard, at what seemed long intervals, the faint intermittent gasping of some living, dying thing!
As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of the coals in the fireplace, I saw first the shapes of the door and window, looking blacker than the black of the walls. Next, the distinction between wall and floor became discernible, and at last I was sensible to the form and full expanse of the floor from end to end and side to side. Nothing was visible and the silence was unbroken.
With a hand that shook a little, the other still grasping my gun, I restored my fire and made a critical examination of the place. There was nowhere any sign that the cabin had been entered. My own tracks were visible in the dust covering the floor, but there were no others. I relit my pipe, provided fresh fuel by ripping a thin board or two from the inside of the house – I did not care to go into the darkness out of doors – and passed the rest of the night smoking and thinking, and feeding my fire; not for added years of life would I have permitted that little flame to expire again.
Some years afterward I met in Sacramento a man named Morgan, to whom I had a note of introduction from a friend in San Francisco. Dining with him one evening at his home I observed various ‘trophies’ upon the wall, indicating that he was fond of shooting. It turned out that he was, and in relating some of his feats he mentioned having been in the region of my adventure.
‘Mr Morgan,’ I asked abruptly, ‘do you know a place up there called Macarger’s Gulch?’
‘I have good reason to,’ he replied; ‘it was I who gave to the newspapers, last year, the accounts of the finding of the skeleton there.’
I had not heard of it; the accounts had been published, it appeared, while I was absent in the East.
‘By the way,’ said Morgan, ‘the name of the gulch is a corruption; it should have been called “MacGregor’s”. My dear,’ he added, speaking to his wife, ‘Mr Elderson has upset his wine.’
That was hardly accurate – I had simply dropped it, glass and all.
‘There was an old shanty once in the gulch,’ Morgan resumed when the ruin wrought by my awkwardness had been repaired, ‘but just previously to my visit it had been blown down, or rather blown away, for its debris was scattered all about, the very floor being parted, plank from plank. Between two of the sleepers still in position I and my companion observed the remnant of a plaid shawl, and examining it found that it was wrapped about the shoulders of the body of a woman, of which but little remained besides the bones, partly covered with fragments of clothing, and brown dry skin. But we will spare Mrs Morgan,’ he added with a smile. The lady had indeed exhibited signs of disgust rather than sympathy.
‘It is necessary to say, however,’ he went on, ‘that the skull was fractured in several places, as by blows of some blunt instrument; and that instrument itself – a pick-handle, still stained with blood – lay under the boards nearby.’
Mr Morgan turned to his wife. ‘Pardon me, my dear,’ he said with affected solemnity, ‘for mentioning these disagreeable particulars, the natural though regrettable incidents of a conjugal quarrel – resulting, doubtless, from the luckless wife’s insubordination.’
‘I ought to be able to overlook it,’ the lady replied with composure; ‘you have so many times asked me to in those very words.’
I thought he seemed rather glad to go on with his story.
‘From these and other circumstances,’ he said, ‘the coroner’s jury found that the deceased, Janet MacGregor, came to her death from blows inflicted by some person to the jury unknown; but it was added that the evidence pointed strongly to her husband, Thomas MacGregor, as the guilty person. But Thomas MacGregor has never been found nor heard of. It was learned that the couple came from Edinburgh, but not – my dear, do you not observe that Mr Elderson’s boneplate has water in it?’
I had deposited a chicken bone in my finger bowl.
‘In a little cupboard I found a photograph of MacGregor, but it did not lead to his capture.’
‘Will you let me see it?’ I said.
The picture showed a dark man with an evil face made more forbidding by a long scar extending from near the temple diagonally downward into the black mustache.
‘By the way, Mr Elderson,’ said my affable host, ‘may I know why you asked about “Macarger’s Gulch”?’
‘I lost a mule near there once,’ I replied, ‘and the mischance has – has quite – upset me.’
‘My dear,’ said Mr Morgan, with the mechanical intonation of an interpreter translating, ‘the loss of Mr Elderson’s mule has peppered his coffee.’
The Eyes of the Panther
1
One does not always marry when insane
A man and a woman – nature had done the grouping – sat on a rustic seat, in the late afternoon. The man was middle-aged, slender, swarthy, with the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate – a man at whom one would look again. The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with something in her figure and movements suggesting the word ‘lithe.’ She was habited in a grey gown with odd brown markings in the texture. She may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied attention to all else. They were grey-green, long and narrow, with an expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes.
The man and the woman talked. ‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘I love you, God knows! But marry you, no. I cannot, will not.’
‘Irene, you have said that many times, yet always have denied me a reason. I’ve a right to know, to understan
d, to feel and prove my fortitude if I have it. Give me a reason.’
‘For loving you?’
The woman was smiling through her tears and her pallor. That did not stir any sense of humour in the man.
‘No; there is no reason for that. A reason for not marrying me. I’ve a right to know. I must know. I will know!’
He had risen and was standing before her with clenched hands, on his face a frown – it might have been called a scowl. He looked as if he might attempt to learn by strangling her. She smiled no more – merely sat looking up into his face with a fixed, set regard that was utterly without emotion or sentiment. Yet it had something in it that tamed his resentment and made him shiver.
‘You are determined to have my reason?’ she asked in a tone that was entirely mechanical – a tone that might have been her look made audible.
‘If you please – if I’m not asking too much.’
Apparently this lord of creation was yielding some part of his dominion over his co-creature.
‘Very well, you shall know: I am insane.’
The man started, then looked incredulous and was conscious that he ought to be amused. But, again, the sense of humour failed him in his need and despite his disbelief he was profoundly disturbed by that which he did not believe. Between our convictions and our feelings there is no good understanding.
‘That is what the physicians would say,’ the woman continued – ‘if they knew. I might myself prefer to call it a case of “possession”. Sit down and hear what I have to say.’
The man silently resumed his seat beside her on the rustic bench by the wayside. Over-against them on the eastern side of the valley the hills were already sunset-flushed and the stillness all about was of that peculiar quality that foretells the twilight. Something of its mysterious and significant solemnity had imparted itself to the man’s mood. In the spiritual, as in the material world, are signs and presages of night. Rarely meeting her look, and whenever he did so conscious of the indefinable dread with which, despite their feline beauty, her eyes always affected him, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story told by Irene Marlowe. In deference to the reader’s possible prejudice against the artless method of an unpractised historian the author ventures to substitute his own version for hers.
2
A room may be too narrow for three, though one is outside
In a little log house containing a single room sparely and rudely furnished, crouching on the floor against one of the walls, was a woman, clasping to her breast a child. Outside, a dense unbroken forest extended for many miles in every direction. This was at night and the room was black dark: no human eye could have discerned the woman and the child. Yet they were observed, narrowly, vigilantly, with never even a momentary slackening of attention; and that is the pivotal fact upon which this narrative turns.
Charles Marlowe was of the class, now extinct in this country, of woodmen pioneers – men who found their most acceptable surroundings in sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward, generation after generation, with rifle and axe, reclaiming from Nature and her savage children here and there an isolated acreage for the plough, no sooner reclaimed than surrendered to their less venturesome but more thrifty successors. At last they burst through the edge of the forest into the open country and vanished as if they had fallen over a cliff. The woodman pioneer is no more; the pioneer of the plains – he whose easy task it was to subdue for occupancy two-thirds of the country in a single generation – is another and inferior creation. With Charles Marlowe in the wilderness, sharing the dangers, hardships and privations of that strange, unprofitable life, were his wife and child, to whom, in the manner of his class, in which the domestic virtues were a religion, he was passionately attached. The woman was still young enough to be comely, new enough to the awful isolation of her lot to be cheerful. By withholding the large capacity for happiness which the simple satisfactions of the forest life could not have filled, Heaven had dealt honourably with her. In her light household tasks, her child, her husband and her few foolish books, she found abundant provision for her needs.
One morning in midsummer Marlowe took down his rifle from the wooden hooks on the wall and signified his intention of getting game.
‘We’ve meat enough,’ said the wife; ‘please don’t go out today. I dreamed last night, O, such a dreadful thing! I cannot recollect it, but I’m almost sure that it will come to pass if you go out.’
It is painful to confess that Marlowe received this solemn statement with less of gravity than was due to the mysterious nature of the calamity foreshadowed. In truth, he laughed.
‘Try to remember,’ he said. ‘Maybe you dreamed that Baby had lost the power of speech.’
The conjecture was obviously suggested by the fact that Baby, clinging to the fringe of his hunting-coat with all her ten pudgy thumbs, was at that moment uttering her sense of the situation in a series of exultant goo-goos inspired by sight of her father’s raccoon-skin cap.
The woman yielded: lacking the gift of humour she could not hold out against his kindly badinage. So, with a kiss for the mother and a kiss for the child, he left the house and closed the door upon his happiness forever.
At nightfall he had not returned. The woman prepared supper and waited. Then she put Baby to bed and sang softly to her until she slept. By this time the fire on the hearth, at which she had cooked supper, had burned out and the room was lighted by a single candle. This she afterward placed in the open window as a sign and welcome to the hunter if he should approach from that side. She had thoughtfully closed and barred the door against such wild animals as might prefer it to an open window – of the habits of beasts of prey in entering a house uninvited she was not advised, though with true female prevision she may have considered the possibility of their entrance by way of the chimney. As the night wore on she became not less anxious, but more drowsy, and at last rested her arms upon the bed by the child and her head upon the arms. The candle in the window burned down to the socket, sputtered and flared a moment and went out unobserved; for the woman slept and dreamed.
In her dreams she sat beside the cradle of a second child. The first one was dead. The father was dead. The home in the forest was lost and the dwelling in which she lived was unfamiliar. There were heavy oaken doors, always closed, and outside the windows, fastened into the thick stone walls, were iron bars, obviously (so she thought) a provision against Indians. All this she noted with an infinite self-pity, but without surprise – an emotion unknown in dreams. The child in the cradle was invisible under its coverlet which something impelled her to remove. She did so, disclosing the face of a wild animal! In the shock of this dreadful revelation the dreamer awoke, trembling in the darkness of her cabin in the wood.
As a sense of her actual surroundings came slowly back to her she felt for the child that was not a dream, and assured herself by its breathing that all was well with it; nor could she forbear to pass a hand lightly across its face. Then, moved by some impulse for which she probably could not have accounted, she rose and took the sleeping babe in her arms, holding it close against her breast. The head of the child’s cot was against the wall to which the woman now turned her back as she stood. Lifting her eyes she saw two bright objects starring the darkness with a reddish-green glow. She took them to be two coals on the hearth, but with her returning sense of direction came the disquieting consciousness that they were not in that quarter of the room, moreover were too high, being nearly at the level of the eyes – of her own eyes. For these were the eyes of a panther.
The beast was at the open window directly opposite and not five paces away. Nothing but those terrible eyes was visible, but in the dreadful tumult of her feelings as the situation disclosed itself to her understanding she somehow knew that the animal was standing on its hinder feet, supporting itself with its paws on the window-ledge. T
hat signified a malign interest – not the mere gratification of an indolent curiosity. The consciousness of the attitude was an added horror, accentuating the menace of those awful eyes, in whose steadfast fire her strength and courage were alike consumed. Under their silent questioning she shuddered and turned sick. Her knees failed her, and by degrees, instinctively striving to avoid a sudden movement that might bring the beast upon her, she sank to the floor, crouched against the wall and tried to shield the babe with her trembling body without withdrawing her gaze from the luminous orbs that were killing her. No thought of her husband came to her in her agony – no hope nor suggestion of rescue or escape. Her capacity for thought and feeling had narrowed to the dimensions of a single emotion – fear of the animal’s spring, of the impact of its body, the buffeting of its great arms, the feel of its teeth in her throat, the mangling of her babe. Motionless now and in absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch.
Returning to his cabin late at night with a deer on his shoulders Charles Marlowe tried the door. It did not yield. He knocked; there was no answer. He laid down his deer and went round to the window. As he turned the angle of the building he fancied he heard a sound as of stealthy footfalls and a rustling in the undergrowth of the forest, but they were too slight for certainty, even to his practised ear. Approaching the window, and to his surprise finding it open, he threw his leg over the sill and entered. All was darkness and silence. He groped his way to the fire-place, struck a match and lit a candle.
Then he looked about. Cowering on the floor against a wall was his wife, clasping his child. As he sprang toward her she rose and broke into laughter, long, loud, and mechanical, devoid of gladness and devoid of sense – the laughter that is not out of keeping with the clanking of a chain. Hardly knowing what he did he extended his arms. She laid the babe in them. It was dead – pressed to death in its mother’s embrace.
Terror by Night Page 5