The Terror: A Mystery

by Arthur Machen

  Produced by Dave Haren and Marc D'Hooghe athttps://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously madeavailable by the Internet Archive

  THE TERROR

  _A MYSTERY_

  BY

  ARTHUR MACHEN

  AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"

  NEW YORK

  ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY

  UNION SQUARE, NORTH

  1917

  CONTENTS

  I _The Coming of the Terror_

  II _Death in the Village_

  III _The Doctor's Theory_

  IV _The Spread of the Terror_

  V _The Incident of the Unknown Tree_

  VI _Mr. Remnant's Z Ray_

  VII _The Case of the Hidden Germans_

  VIII _What Mr. Merritt Found_

  IX _The Light on the Water_

  X _The Child and the Moth_

  XI _At Treff Loyne Farm_

  XII _The Letter of Wrath_

  XIII _The Last Words of Mr. Secretan_

  XIV _The End of the Terror_

  CHAPTER I

  _The Coming of the Terror_

  After two years we are turning once more to the morning's news with asense of appetite and glad expectation. There were thrills at thebeginning of the war; the thrill of horror and of a doom that seemed atonce incredible and certain; this was when Namur fell and the Germanhost swelled like a flood over the French fields, and drew very near tothe walls of Paris. Then we felt the thrill of exultation when the goodnews came that the awful tide had been turned back, that Paris and theworld were safe; for awhile at all events.

  Then for days we hoped for more news as good as this or better. Has VonKluck been surrounded? Not to-day, but perhaps he will be surroundedto-morrow. But the days became weeks, the weeks drew out to months; thebattle in the West seemed frozen. Now and again things were done thatseemed hopeful, with promise of events still better. But Neuve Chapelleand Loos dwindled into disappointments as their tale was told fully; thelines in the West remained, for all practical purposes of victory,immobile. Nothing seemed to happen; there was nothing to read save therecord of operations that were clearly trifling and insignificant.People speculated as to the reason of this inaction; the hopeful saidthat Joffre had a plan, that he was "nibbling," others declared that wewere short of munitions, others again that the new levies were not yetripe for battle. So the months went by, and almost two years of war hadbeen completed before the motionless English line began to stir andquiver as if it awoke from a long sleep, and began to roll onward,overwhelming the enemy.

  The secret of the long inaction of the British Armies has been wellkept. On the one hand it was rigorously protected by the censorship,which severe, and sometimes severe to the point of absurdity--"thecaptains and the ... depart," for instance--became in this particularmatter ferocious. As soon as the real significance of that which washappening, or beginning to happen, was perceived by the authorities, anunderlined circular was issued to the newspaper proprietors of GreatBritain and Ireland. It warned each proprietor that he might impart thecontents of this circular to one other person only, such person beingthe responsible editor of his paper, who was to keep the communicationsecret under the severest penalties. The circular forbade any mention ofcertain events that had taken place, that might take place; it forbadeany kind of allusion to these events or any hint of their existence, orof the possibility of their existence, not only in the Press, but inany form whatever. The subject was not to be alluded to in conversation,it was not to be hinted at, however obscurely, in letters; the veryexistence of the circular, its subject apart, was to be a dead secret.

  These measures were successful. A wealthy newspaper proprietor of theNorth, warmed a little at the end of the Throwsters' Feast (which washeld as usual, it will be remembered), ventured to say to the man nextto him: "How awful it would be, wouldn't it, if...." His words wererepeated, as proof, one regrets to say, that it was time for "oldArnold" to "pull himself together"; and he was fined a thousand pounds.Then, there was the case of an obscure weekly paper published in thecounty town of an agricultural district in Wales. The _Meiros Observer_(we will call it) was issued from a stationer's back premises, andfilled its four pages with accounts of local flower shows, fancy fairsat vicarages, reports of parish councils, and rare bathing fatalities.It also issued a visitors' list, which has been known to contain sixnames.

  This enlightened organ printed a paragraph, which nobody noticed, whichwas very like paragraphs that small country newspapers have long been inthe habit of printing, which could hardly give so much as a hint to anyone--to any one, that is, who was not fully instructed in the secret. Asa matter of fact, this piece of intelligence got into the paper becausethe proprietor, who was also the editor, incautiously left the lastprocesses of this particular issue to the staff, who was theLord-High-Every-thing-Else of the establishment; and the staff put in abit of gossip he had heard in the market to fill up two inches on theback page. But the result was that the _Meiros Observer_ ceased toappear, owing to "untoward circumstances" as the proprietor said; and hewould say no more. No more, that is, by way of explanation, but a greatdeal more by way of execration of "damned, prying busybodies."

  * * * * *

  Now a censorship that is sufficiently minute and utterly remorseless cando amazing things in the way of hiding ... what it wants to hide. Beforethe war, one would have thought otherwise; one would have said that,censor or no censor, the fact of the murder at X or the fact of the bankrobbery at Y would certainly become known; if not through the Press, atall events through rumor and the passage of the news from mouth tomouth. And this would be true--of England three hundred years ago, andof savage tribelands of to-day. But we have grown of late to such areverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that the oldfaculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become atrophied.Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been murdered, andit is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of those who hearhow few will credit the story that they have heard. You meet a man inthe train who remarks that he has been told something about a murder inSouthwark; there is all the difference in the world between theimpression you receive from such a chance communication and that givenby half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and date and allthe facts of the case. People in trains repeat all sorts of tales, manyof them false; newspapers do not print accounts of murders that have notbeen committed.

  Then another consideration that has made for secrecy. I may have seemedto say that the old office of rumor no longer exists; I shall bereminded of the strange legend of "the Russians" and the mythology ofthe "Angels of Mons." But let me point out, in the first place, thatboth these absurdities depended on the papers for their widedissemination. If there had been no newspapers or magazines Russians andAngels would have made but a brief, vague appearance of the mostshadowy kind--a few would have heard of them, fewer still would havebelieved in them, they would have been gossiped about for a bare week ortwo, and so they would have vanished away.

  And, then, again, the very fact of these vain rumors and fantastic taleshaving been so widely believed for a time was fatal to the credit of anystray mutterings that may have got abroad. People had been taken intwice; they had seen how grave persons, men of credit, had preached andlectured about the shining forms that had saved the British Army atMons, or had testified to the trains, packed with gray-coatedMuscovites, rushing through the land at dead of night: and now there wasa hint of something more amazing than either of the discredited legends.But this time there was no word of confirmation to be found in dailypaper, or weekly review, or parish magazine, and so the few that heardeither laughed, or, being serious, went home and jotted down
notes foressays on "War-time Psychology: Collective Delusions."

  * * * * *

  I followed neither of these courses. For before the secret circular hadbeen issued my curiosity had somehow been aroused by certain paragraphsconcerning a "Fatal Accident to Well-known Airman." The propeller of theairplane had been shattered, apparently by a collision with a flight ofpigeons; the blades had been broken and the machine had fallen like leadto the earth. And soon after I had seen this account, I heard of somevery odd circumstances relating to an explosion in a great munitionfactory in the Midlands. I thought I saw the possibility of a connectionbetween two very different events.

  * * * * *

  It has been pointed out to me by friends who have been good enough toread this record, that certain phrases I have used may give theimpression that I ascribe all the delays of the war on the Western frontto the extraordinary circumstances which occasioned the issue of theSecret Circular. Of course this is not the case, there were many reasonsfor the immobility of our lines from October 1914 to July 1916. Thesecauses have been evident enough and have been openly discussed anddeplored. But behind them was something of infinitely greater moment. Welacked men, but men were pouring into the new army; we were short ofshells, but when the shortage was proclaimed the nation set itself tomend this matter with all its energy. We could undertake to supply thedefects of our army both in men and munitions--_if_ the new andincredible danger could be overcome. It has been overcome; rather,perhaps, it has ceased to exist; and the secret may now be told.

  I have said my attention was attracted by an account of the death of awell-known airman. I have not the habit of preserving cuttings, I amsorry to say, so that I cannot be precise as to the date of this event.To the best of my belief it was either towards the end of May or thebeginning of June 1915. The newspaper paragraph announcing the death ofFlight-Lieutenant Western-Reynolds was brief enough; accidents, andfatal accidents, to the men who are storming the air for us are,unfortunately, by no means so rare as to demand an elaborated notice.But the manner in which Western-Reynolds met his death struck me asextraordinary, inasmuch as it revealed a new danger in the element thatwe have lately conquered. He was brought down, as I said, by a flight ofbirds; of pigeons, as appeared by what was found on the bloodstained andshattered blades of the propeller. An eye-witness of the accident, afellow-officer, described how Western-Reynolds set out from theaerodrome on a fine afternoon, there being hardly any wind. He wasgoing to France; he had made the journey to and fro half a dozen timesor more, and felt perfectly secure and at ease.

  "'Wester' rose to a great height at once, and we could scarcely see themachine. I was turning to go when one of the fellows called out, 'I say!What's this?' He pointed up, and we saw what looked like a black cloudcoming from the south at a tremendous rate. I saw at once it wasn't acloud; it came with a swirl and a rush quite different from any cloudI've ever seen. But for a second I couldn't make out exactly what itwas. It altered its shape and turned into a great crescent, and wheeledand veered about as if it was looking for something. The man who hadcalled out had got his glasses, and was staring for all he was worth.Then he shouted that it was a tremendous flight of birds, 'thousands ofthem.' They went on wheeling and beating about high up in the air, andwe were watching them, thinking it was interesting, but not supposingthat they would make any difference to 'Wester,' who was just about outof sight. His machine was just a speck. Then the two arms of thecrescent drew in as quick as lightning, and these thousands of birdsshot in a solid mass right up there across the sky, and flew awaysomewhere about nor'-nor'-by-west. Then Henley, the man with theglasses, called out, 'He's down!' and started running, and I went afterhim. We got a car and as we were going along Henley told me that he'dseen the machine drop dead, as if it came out of that cloud of birds. Hethought then that they must have mucked up the propeller somehow. Thatturned out to be the case. We found the propeller blades all broken andcovered with blood and pigeon feathers, and carcasses of the birds hadgot wedged in between the blades, and were sticking to them."

  This was the story that the young airman told one evening in a smallcompany. He did not speak "in confidence," so I have no hesitation inreproducing what he said. Naturally, I did not take a verbatim note ofhis conversation, but I have something of a knack of remembering talkthat interests me, and I think my reproduction is very near to the talethat I heard. And let it be noted that the flying man told his storywithout any sense or indication of a sense that the incredible, or allbut the incredible, had happened. So far as he knew, he said, it was thefirst accident of the kind. Airmen in France had been bothered once ortwice by birds--he thought they were eagles--flying viciously at them,but poor old "Wester" had been the first man to come up against a flightof some thousands of pigeons.

  "And perhaps I shall be the next," he added, "but why look for trouble?Anyhow, I'm going to see _Toodle-oo_ to-morrow afternoon."

  * * * * *

  Well, I heard the story, as one hears all the varied marvels andterrors of the air; as one heard some years ago of "air pockets,"strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere into which airmen fell withgreat peril; or as one heard of the experience of the airman who flewover the Cumberland mountains in the burning summer of 1911, and as heswam far above the heights was suddenly and vehemently blown upwards,the hot air from the rocks striking his plane as if it had been a blastfrom a furnace chimney. We have just begun to navigate a strange region;we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils. And herea new chapter in the chronicles of these perils and adventures had beenopened by the death of Western-Reynolds; and no doubt invention andcontrivance would presently hit on some way of countering the newdanger.

  It was, I think, about a week or ten days after the airman's death thatmy business called me to a northern town, the name of which, perhaps,had better remain unknown. My mission was to inquire into certaincharges of extravagance which had been laid against the working people,that is, the munition workers of this especial town. It was said thatthe men who used to earn L2 10s. a week were now getting from seven toeight pounds, that "bits of girls" were being paid two pounds instead ofseven or eight shillings, and that, in consequence, there was an orgy offoolish extravagance. The girls, I was told, were eating chocolates atfour, five, and six shillings a pound, the women were orderingthirty-pound pianos which they couldn't play, and the men bought goldchains at ten and twenty guineas apiece.

  I dived into the town in question and found, as usual, that there was amixture of truth and exaggeration in the stories that I had heard.Gramophones, for example: they cannot be called in strictnessnecessaries, but they were undoubtedly finding a ready sale, even in themore expensive brands. And I thought that there were a great many veryspick and span perambulators to be seen on the pavement; smartperambulators, painted in tender shades of color and expensively fitted.

  "And how can you be surprised if people will have a bit of a fling?" aworker said to me. "We're seeing money for the first time in our lives,and it's bright. And we work hard for it, and we risk our lives to getit. You've heard of explosion yonder?"

  He mentioned certain works on the outskirts of the town. Of course,neither the name of the works nor of the town had been printed; therehad been a brief notice of "Explosion at Munition Works in the NorthernDistrict: Many Fatalities." The working man told me about it, and addedsome dreadful details.

  "They wouldn't let their folks see bodies; screwed them up in coffins asthey found them in shop. The gas had done it."

  "Turned their faces black, you mean?"

  "Nay. They were all as if they had been bitten to pieces."

  This was a strange gas.

  I asked the man in the northern town all sorts of questions about theextraordinary explosion of which he had spoken to me. But he had verylittle more to say. As I have noted already, secrets that may not beprinted are often deeply kept; last summer there were very few peop
leoutside high official circles who knew anything about the "Tanks," ofwhich we have all been talking lately, though these strange instrumentsof war were being exercised and tested in a park not far from London. Sothe man who told me of the explosion in the munition factory was mostlikely genuine in his profession that he knew nothing more of thedisaster. I found out that he was a smelter employed at a furnace on theother side of the town to the ruined factory; he didn't know even whatthey had been making there; some very dangerous high explosive, hesupposed. His information was really nothing more than a bit ofgruesome gossip, which he had heard probably at third or fourth or fifthhand. The horrible detail of faces "as if they had been bitten topieces" had made its violent impression on him, that was all.

  I gave him up and took a tram to the district of the disaster; a sort ofindustrial suburb, five miles from the center of the town. When I askedfor the factory, I was told that it was no good my going to it as therewas nobody there. But I found it; a raw and hideous shed with a walledyard about it, and a shut gate. I looked for signs of destruction, butthere was nothing. The roof was quite undamaged; and again it struck methat this had been a strange accident. There had been an explosion ofsufficient violence to kill workpeople in the building, but the buildingitself showed no wounds or scars.

  A man came out of the gate and locked it behind him. I began to ask himsome sort of question, or rather, I began to "open" for a question with"A terrible business here, they tell me," or some such phrase ofconvention. I got no farther. The man asked me if I saw a policemanwalking down the street. I said I did, and I was given the choice ofgetting about my business forthwith or of being instantly given incharge as a spy. "Th'ast better be gone and quick about it," was, Ithink, his final advice, and I took it.

  Well, I had come literally up against a brick wall. Thinking the problemover, I could only suppose that the smelter or his informant had twistedthe phrases of the story. The smelter had said the dead men's faces were"bitten to pieces"; this might be an unconscious perversion of "eatenaway." That phrase might describe well enough the effect of strongacids, and, for all I knew of the processes of munition-making, suchacids might be used and might explode with horrible results in someperilous stage of their admixture.

  It was a day or two later that the accident to the airman,Western-Reynolds, came into my mind. For one of those instants which arefar shorter than any measure of time there flashed out the possibilityof a link between the two disasters. But here was a wild impossibility,and I drove it away. And yet I think that the thought, mad as it seemed,never left me; it was the secret light that at last guided me through asomber grove of enigmas.

  * * * * *

  It was about this time, so far as the date can be fixed, that a wholedistrict, one might say a whole county, was visited by a series ofextraordinary and terrible calamities, which were the more terribleinasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries. Itis, indeed, doubtful whether these awful events do not still remainmysteries to many of those concerned; for before the inhabitants ofthis part of the country had time to join one link of evidence toanother the circular was issued, and thenceforth no one knew how todistinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise.

  The district in question is in the far west of Wales; I shall call it,for convenience, Meirion. In it there is one seaside town of some reputewith holiday-makers for five or six weeks in the summer, and dottedabout the county there are three or four small old towns that seemdrooping in a slow decay, sleepy and gray with age and forgetfulness.They remind me of what I have read of towns in the west of Ireland.Grass grows between the uneven stones of the pavements, the signs abovethe shop windows decline, half the letters of these signs are missing,here and there a house has been pulled down, or has been allowed toslide into ruin, and wild greenery springs up through the fallen stones,and there is silence in all the streets. And, it is to be noted, theseare not places that were once magnificent. The Celts have never had theart of building, and so far as I can see, such towns as Towy and MerthyrTegveth and Meiros must have been always much as they are now, clustersof poorish, meanly-built houses, ill-kept and down at heel.

  And these few towns are thinly scattered over a wild country where northis divided from south by a wilder mountain range. One of these places issixteen miles from any station; the others are doubtfully and deviouslyconnected by single-line railways served by rare trains that pause andstagger and hesitate on their slow journey up mountain passes, or stopfor half an hour or more at lonely sheds called stations, situated inthe midst of desolate marshes. A few years ago I traveled with anIrishman on one of these queer lines, and he looked to right and saw thebog with its yellow and blue grasses and stagnant pools, and he lookedto left and saw a ragged hillside, set with gray stone walls. "I canhardly believe," he said, "that I'm not still in the wilds of Ireland."

  Here, then, one sees a wild and divided and scattered region a land ofoutland hills and secret and hidden valleys. I know white farms on thiscoast which must be separate by two hours of hard, rough walking fromany other habitation, which are invisible from any other house. Andinland, again, the farms are often ringed about by thick groves of ash,planted by men of old days to shelter their roof-trees from rude windsof the mountain and stormy winds of the sea; so that these places, too,are hidden away, to be surmised only by the wood smoke that rises fromthe green surrounding leaves. A Londoner must see them to believe inthem; and even then he can scarcely credit their utter isolation.

  Such, then in the main is Meirion, and on this land in the early summerof last year terror descended--a terror without shape, such as no manthere had ever known.

  It began with the tale of a little child who wandered out into the lanesto pick flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came back to the cottageon the hill.