Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  “Oh, but tell me, my dear, dear brother! Tell me — !” he cried, sweating horribly, his limbs shaking.

  Mark made a curious gesture, withdrawing at the same time a little farther into the room behind, so that he now stood upright, half in shadow by the window. The alteration in him proclaimed itself more plainly, though still without betraying its exact nature. There was something about him that was terrible. And the air that came from the open window upon Stephen was so freezing that it seemed to turn the perspiration on his face into ice.

  “I do not know; I do not remember,” he heard the tiny voice inside the room, ever withdrawing. “Besides — I may not speak with you — yet; it is so difficult — and it hurts.”

  Stephen stretched out his body, the arms scraping the wooden walls above his head, trying to climb the smooth and slippery surface.

  “For the love of God! “he cried with passion, “tell me what it all means and what you are doing here — you and — and — oh, and all three of us?” The words rang out through the silent valley.

  But the other stood there motionless again by the window, his face distraught and dazed as though the effort of speech had already been too much for him. His image had begun to fade a little. He seemed, without moving, yet to be retreating into some sort of interior distance. Presently, it seemed, he would disappear altogether.

  “I don’t know,” came the voice at length, fainter than before, half muffled. “I have been asleep, I think. I have just waked up, and come across from somewhere else — where we were all together, you and I and —— and—”

  Like his brother, he was unable to speak the name. He ended the sentence a moment later in a whisper that was only just audible. “But I cannot tell you how I came,” he said, “for I do not know the words.”

  Stephen, then, with a violent leap tried to reach the windowsill and pull himself up. The distance was too great, however, and he fell back upon the grass, only just keeping his feet.

  “I’m coming in to you,” he cried out very loud. “Wait there for me! For the love of heaven, wait till I come to you. I’ll break the doors in — !”

  Once again Mark made that singular gesture; again he seemed to recede a little farther into a kind of veiled perspective that caused his appearance to fade still more; and, from an incredible distance — a distance that somehow conveyed an idea of appalling height — his thin, tiny voice floated down upon his brother from the fading lips of shadow.

  “Old fellow, don’t you come! You are not ready — and it is too cold here. I shall wait, Stevie, I shall wait for you. Later — I mean farther from hear — we shall one day all three be together.... Only you cannot understand now. I am here for your sake, old fellow, and for hers. She loves us both, but it is... you... she loves... the best....”

  The whispering voice rose suddenly on these last words into a long high cry that the wind instantly caught away and buried far in the smothering silences of the woods. For, at the same moment, Mark had come with a swift rush back to the window, had leaned out and stretched both hands towards his brother underneath. And his face had cleared and smiled. Caught within that smile, the awful change in him had vanished.

  Stephen turned and made a mad rush round the chalet to find the door he would batter in with his hands and feet and body. He searched in vain, however, for in the shadows the supporting beams of the building were indistinguishable from the stems of the trees behind; the roof sank away, blotted out by the gloom of the branches, and the darkness now wove forest, sky and mountain into a uniform black sheet against which no item was separately visible.

  There was no châlet any longer. He was simply battering with bruised hands and feet upon the solid trunks of pines and spruces in his path; which he continued to do, calling ever aloud for Mark, until finally he grew dizzy with exhaustion and fell to the ground in a state of semiconsciousness.

  And for the best part of half-an-hour he lay there motionless upon the moss, while the vast hands of Night drew the cloak of her softest darkness over valley and mountain, covering his small body with as much care as she covered the sky, the hemisphere, and all those leagues of velvet forest.

  XIII

  It was not long before he came to himself again — shivering with cold, for the perspiration had dried upon him where he lay. He got up and ran. The night was now fairly down, and the keen air stung his cheeks. But, with a sure instinct not to be denied, he took the direction of home.

  He traveled at an extraordinary pace, considering the thickness of the trees and the darkness. How he got out of the valley he does not remember; nor how he found his way over the intervening ridges that lay between him and the country he knew. At the back of his mind crashed and tumbled the loose fragments of all he had seen and heard, forming as yet no coherent pattern. For himself, indeed, the details were of small interest. He was a man under sentence of death. His determination, in spite of everything, remained unshaken. In a few short hours he would be gone.

  Yet, with the habit of the professional mind, he tried a little to sort out things. During that state of singular exaltation, for instance, he understood vaguely that his deep longings had somehow translated themselves into act and scene. For these longings were life; his decision negatived them; hence, they dramatized themselves pictorially with what vividness his imagination allowed.

  They were dramatized inventions, singularly elaborate, of the emotions that burned so fiercely within. All were projections of his consciousness, maimed and incomplete, masquering as persons before his inner vision, it began with the singular sensations of death by drowning he had experienced. From that moment the other forces at work in the problem had taken their cue and played their part more or less convincingly, according to their strength....

  He thought and argued a great deal as he hurried homewards through the night. But all the time he knew that it was untrue. He had no real explanation at all!

  From the high ridges, cold and bleak under the stars, swept by the free wind of night, he ran almost the entire way. It was downhill. And during that violent descent of nearly an hour the details of his “going” shaped themselves. Until then he had formed no definite plans. Now he settled everything. He chose the very pool where the water coiled and bubbled as in a cauldron just where the little torrent made a turn above their house; he decided upon the very terms of the letter he would leave behind. He would put it on the kitchen table so that they should know where to find him.

  He urged his pace tremendously, for the idea that his brother would have left — that he would find him gone — haunted him. It grew, doubtless, out of that singular, detailed vision that had come upon him in his great weakness in the valley. He was terrified that he would not see his brother again — that he had already gone deliberately after her.

  “I must see Mark once more. I must get home before he leaves!” flashed the strong thought continually in his mind, making him run like a deer down the winding trail.

  It was after ten o’clock when he reached the little clearing behind the chalet, panting with exhaustion, blinded with perspiration. There was no light visible; all the windows were dark; but presently he made out a figure moving to and fro below the balcony. It was not Mark — he saw that in a flash. It moved oddly. A sound of moaning reached him at the same time. And then he saw that it was the figure of the peasant woman who cooked for them, Marie Petavel.

  And the instant he saw who it was, and heard her moaning, he knew what had happened. Mark had left a letter to explain — and gone: gone after the girl. His heart sank into death.

  The woman came forward heavily through the darkness, the dew-drenched grass swishing audibly against her skirts. And the words he heard were precisely what he had expected to hear, though patois and excitement rendered them difficult —

  “Your brother — oh your poor brother, Monsieur le Docteur — he — has gone!”

  And then he saw the piece of white paper glimmering in her hands as she stood quite close. He took it mechanic
ally from her. It was the letter Mark had left behind to explain.

  But before Stephen had time to read it, a man with a lantern came out of the barn that stood behind the house. It was her husband. He came slowly towards them.

  “We searched for you, oh, we searched,” he said in a thick voice, “my son went as far as Buttes even, and hasn’t come back yet. You’ve been long, too long away..”

  He stopped short and glanced down at his wife, telling her roughly to cease her stupid weeping. Stephen, shaking inwardly, with an icy terror in his blood, began to feel that things were not precisely as he had anticipated. Something else was the matter. The expression in the face of the peasant as the lantern’s glare fell upon it came to him suddenly with the shock of a revelation.

  “You have told monsieur — all?” the man whispered, stooping to his wife. She shook her head; and her husband led the way without another word. The interval of a few seconds seemed endless to Stephen; he was trembling all over like a man with the ague. Behind them the old woman floundered through the wet grass, moaning to herself.

  “No one would have believed it could have happened — anything of that sort,” the man mumbled. The lantern was unsteady in his hand. The next minute the barn, like some monstrous animal, rose against the stars, and the huge wooden doors gaped wide before them.

  The peasant, uncovering his head, went first, and Stephen, following with stumbling footsteps, saw the shadows of the beams and posts shift across the boarded floor. Against the wall, whither the man led, was a small littered heap of hay, and upon this, covered by a white sheet, was stretched a human body. The peasant drew back the sheet gently with his heavy brown hand, stooping close over it so that the lantern threw its light full upon the act.

  And Stephen, tumbling forward, scarcely knowing what he did, without further warning or preparation, looked down upon the face of his brother Mark. The eyes stared fixedly into — nothing; the features wore the distraught expression he had seen upon them a few hours before through the windowpane of that upper chamber.

  “We found him in that deep pool just where the stream makes the quick turn above the house,” the peasant whispered. “He left a bit of paper on the kitchen table to say where he would be. It was after dark when we got there. His watch had stopped, though, long before—” He muttered on unintelligibly.

  Stephen looked up at the man, unable to utter a word, and the man replied to the unspoken question— “At ten minutes past five the watch had stopped,” he said. “That was when the water reached it.”

  By the flicker of the lantern, then, sitting beside that still figure covered with the sheet, Stephen read the letter Mark had left for him —

  “Stevie, old fellow, one of us, you know, has got to — go; and it is better, I think, that it should not be you. I know all you have been through, for I have fought and suffered every step with you.

  I have been along the same path, loving her too much for you, and you too much for her. And I leave her to you, boy, because I am convinced she now loves you even as she first believed she loved me. But all that evening she cried incessantly for you. More I cannot explain to you now; she will do that. And she need never know more than that I have withdrawn in your favor: she need never know how. Perhaps, one day, when there is no marriage or giving in marriage, we may all three be together, and happy. I have often wondered, as you know...”

  The remainder of the sentence was scratched out and illegible.

  .. And, if it be possible, old fellow, of course I shall wait.” Then came more words blackened out.

  “... I am now going, within a few minutes of writing this last word to you of blessing and forgiveness (for I know you will want that, although there is nothing, nothing to forgive!) — going down into that Lost Valley her father told us about — the Valley hidden among these mountains we love — the Lost Valley where even the unhappy dead find peace. There I shall wait for you both. — Mark.”

  Several weeks later, before he took the train eastwards, Stephen retraced his steps to the farmhouse where he had bought milk and asked for directions. Thence for some distance he followed the path he well remembered. At a point, however, the confusion of the woods grew strangely upon him. The mountains, true to the map, were not true to his recollections. The trail stopped; high, unknown ridges intervened; and no such deep and winding valley as he had traveled that afternoon for so many hours was anywhere to be found. The map, the peasants, the very configuration of the landscape even, denied its existence.

  The Wendigo

  A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest. Dr. Cathcart, among others, came back without a trophy; but he brought instead the memory of an experience which he declares was worth all the bull moose that had ever been shot. But then Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was interested in other things besides moose — amongst them the vagaries of the human mind. This particular story, however, found no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgment of the affair as a whole....

  Besides himself and his guide, Hank Davis, there was young Simpson, his nephew, a divinity student destined for the “Wee Kirk” (then on his first visit to Canadian backwoods), and the latter’s guide, Défago. Joseph Défago was a French “Canuck,” who had strayed from his native Province of Quebec years before, and had got caught in Rat Portage when the Canadian Pacific Railway was a-building; a man who, in addition to his unparalleled knowledge of woodcraft and bush-lore, could also sing the old voyageur songs and tell a capital hunting yarn into the bargain. He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him — whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries.

  On this particular expedition he was Hank’s choice. Hank knew him and swore by him. He also swore at him, “jest as a pal might,” and since he had a vocabulary of picturesque, if utterly meaningless, oaths, the conversation between the two stalwart and hardy woodsmen was often of a rather lively description. This river of expletives, however, Hank agreed to dam a little out of respect for his old “hunting boss,” Dr. Cathcart, whom of course he addressed after the fashion of the country as “Doc,” and also because he understood that young Simpson was already a “bit of a parson.” He had, however, one objection to Défago, and one only — which was, that the French Canadian sometimes exhibited what Hank described as “the output of a cursed and dismal mind,” meaning apparently that he sometimes was true to type, Latin type, and suffered fits of a kind of silent moroseness when nothing could induce him to utter speech. Défago, that is to say, was imaginative and melancholy. And, as a rule, it was too long a spell of “civilization” that induced the attacks, for a few days of the wilderness invariably cured them.

  This, then, was the party of four that found themselves in camp the last week in October of that “shy moose year” ‘way up in the wilderness north of Rat Portage — a forsaken and desolate country. There was also Punk, an Indian, who had accompanied Dr. Cathcart and Hank on their hunting trips in previous years, and who acted as cook. His duty was merely to stay in camp, catch fish, and prepare venison steaks and coffee at a few minutes’ notice. He dressed in the worn-out clothes bequeathed to him by former patrons, and, except for his coarse black hair and dark skin, he looked in these city garments no more like a real redskin than a stage Negro looks like a real African. For all that, however, Punk had in him still the instincts of his dying race; his taciturn silence and his endurance survived; also his superstition.

  The party round the blazing fire that night were de
spondent, for a week had passed without a single sign of recent moose discovering itself. Défago had sung his song and plunged into a story, but Hank, in bad humor, reminded him so often that “he kep’ mussing-up the fac’s so, that it was ‘most all nothin’ but a petered-out lie,” that the Frenchman had finally subsided into a sulky silence which nothing seemed likely to break. Dr. Cathcart and his nephew were fairly done after an exhausting day. Punk was washing up the dishes, grunting to himself under the lean-to of branches, where he later also slept. No one troubled to stir the slowly dying fire. Overhead the stars were brilliant in a sky quite wintry, and there was so little wind that ice was already forming stealthily along the shores of the still lake behind them. The silence of the vast listening forest stole forward and enveloped them.

  Hank broke in suddenly with his nasal voice.

  “I’m in favor of breaking new ground tomorrow, Doc,” he observed with energy, looking across at his employer. “We don’t stand a dead Dago’s chance around here.”

  “Agreed,” said Cathcart, always a man of few words. “Think the idea’s “Sure pop, it’s good,” Hank resumed with confidence. “S’pose, now, you and I strike west, up Garden Lake way for a change! None of us ain’t touched that quiet bit o’ land yet—”

  “I’m with you.”

  “And you, Défago, take Mr. Simpson along in the small canoe, skip across the lake, portage over into Fifty Island Water, and take a good squint down that thar southern shore. The moose ‘yarded’ there like hell last year, and for all we know they may be doin’ it agin this year jest to spite us.”

  Défago, keeping his eyes on the fire, said nothing by way of reply. He was still offended, possibly, about his interrupted story.