‘We found Joe Beecher in Dyke Wood,’ he went on, ‘at the bottom of the old quarry as there is there. We covered up his face quick with a coat. I didn’t fear God nor man in them days, but it were too much for me, and it didn’t seem right that a mortal face should take that shape.
‘Meanwhile, of course, my mate was took pretty bad. He’d just lie on his bed come day go day and not a word to anyone, but in the night he’d start shaking all over and crying out something terrible, same as he’d done the first time in the engine-house. He nearly drove his old woman crazy, too, but after a time he quieted down until one day he was man enough to tell us what it was he saw.
‘Then he said that when the cage came up there was something crouched a-top of it, holding on to the cables. He couldn’t see it very plain, he said, not half as clear as he could see Joe even in the half-light, but it had a human shape, he thought, even if it did seem terrible tall and thin, and it seemed to be a kind of dirty white all over, like summat that’s grown up in the dark and never had no light. When the cage stopped it come down and made after Joe as quick and quiet as a cat after a sparrow. He could hear Joe’s running plain enough across the yard, he said, but this thing made never a sound, though it went fast enough and was catching up on him, so that when he got to the edge of the wood it looked as if it was reaching out for him with its arms.
‘Well, I can’t tell you no more. No one never went down that mine again, and we cut the cage ropes and the guides and covered over the mouth of the shaft with girt great old timbers all bolted fast. A bit foolish, maybe you’ll think, but when we heard my mate’s tale we fancied, like, that something might come a-crawling up. Any road, that’s how it come to be named Hell’s Mouth instead of Long Barrow. For myself I reckon hell be too good a name for it. Bible says hell be fire and brimstone, but at any rate fire is something I can understand and I could abide it better than the dark and the quiet down there.’
The Cat Returns
IT WAS CERTAINLY NOT a very cheerful start for a honeymoon, Steven reflected as they groped their way hand in hand up the dark lane. It was fortunate that both he and Myrtle possessed a strong sense of humour and so could appreciate the humorous side of their predicament. It was just like the conventional opening of a mystery film; a newly wed couple, a pitch-dark night of rain and wind, the car breaking down miles from anywhere, and now this tramp through the storm in search of shelter. How many times had he not sat in the warmth of a cinema and watched on the screen precisely this same sequence of events?
But whereas the benighted couple of the film story invariably arrived at some sinister, moated grange, candle-lit and cobwebbed, the light towards which Steven and Myrtle groped their way came from a far less romantic source. It shone from beneath the portico of a house which would have been described by a house agent as ‘ultra-modern’, and which presented to the narrow lane an angular façade of smooth stucco and gaping steel-framed windows. In response to Steven’s ring there appeared on the doorstep no frightening or sinister figure, but an insignificant little man who, in fact, was undoubtedly scared by them. Obviously the manservant, Steven decided, as he explained their plight. The other seemed to be reassured by his explanation, for he opened the door wider and ushered them in, saying as he did so, in a nervous, jerky manner, ‘Come in, come in, do, only too pleased to help you. It’s a dreadful night to be stranded, and you must stay here, of course.’
He insisted on helping them out of their sodden coats, which done he showed them into the lighted room from which he had obviously emerged. It was expensively but tastelessly furnished in a style in keeping with the rest of the house, and a cheerful wood fire burned in the grate.
Their host had evidently been settled in an easy chair by the fireside, for the cushions were disturbed, a decanter, siphon and glass stood on a small table beside it, and a newspaper, hurriedly thrown aside, lay crumpled on the carpet. He motioned them to be seated.
‘Have you dined?’ he enquired, and without waiting for an answer, continued in the same nervous monotone, ‘Let me get you sandwiches, I am afraid it is the best I can offer you at this hour.’ He silenced their protestations with a quick gesture, ‘No, no. I insist, it’s no trouble, I assure you. I will get fresh glasses, too, and you must join me in a drink. You must both be chilled after being out on such a night, and the whisky will do you good.’ He walked to the door.
When their host had left the room Steven glanced enquiringly at Myrtle.
‘What do you make of him?’ he whispered.
She smiled. ‘I think the cat’s away,’ she replied, ‘and the mouse is playing. Sitting in master’s chair and drinking master’s whisky. No wonder we scared him. I’m surprised he didn’t turn us away, but he’s evidently decided to try to bluff it out. Obviously he’s alone in the house, for if there was someone in the kitchen to cut the sandwiches he’d have been back by now. Most likely he’s making up a bed for us, too.’ She paused and clutched his arm. ‘What’s that?’
Steven chuckled and pointed to the telephone.
‘It’s all right, my sweet, you’re not in the haunted grange, remember; everything’s terribly dull and civilised, it was only the ‘phone tinkling’ the sort of funny little noise it makes when the exchange connects up by mistake and finds that it’s a wrong number just in time. There it goes again. Perhaps there’s something wrong with the bell, and it really is someone trying to ring through. The mouse doesn’t seem to be coming back, so perhaps I’d better answer it.’
He picked up the receiver, but could only hear a confused whirring and crackling, like wireless atmospherics. Thinking that after all it must be a false alarm, caused no doubt by the wind in the wires, Steven was about to hang up when the noises suddenly ceased and a male voice asked abruptly, ‘Is Hawkins there?’
The tone was hoarse and querulous, obviously that of an old man. Steven thought rapidly. He felt sure that Hawkins must be their nervous host, and he had a shrewd suspicion that the caller was none other than his absent master.
‘Yes,’ he replied, without appreciable hesitation. ‘If you wouldn’t mind holding on a moment, I’ll go and find him.’
‘Don’t trouble,’ said the voice. ‘Just tell him I shall return in the morning. He’ll understand.’
‘Who is it speaking?’ asked Steven, but there was no reply. He listened for a moment more, then set the receiver down and turned to Myrtle.
‘You were quite right, darling; our good host, whose name is Hawkins incidentally, is certainly the mouse in this establishment. The cat has just phoned up to say he’ll be back in the morning. Sounded a peppery old devil, too. No wonder poor Hawkins is a bundle of nerves. He wouldn’t wait for me to fetch him to the phone; gave no name either, and I must say I was expecting him to ask who the devil I was and what I was doing in his house.’
‘Hush,’ whispered Myrtle, laying a hand on his arm. ‘He’s coming back.’
Steven turned towards the door as their host reappeared bearing a plate of sandwiches and two more glasses upon a tray, which he set down beside the decanter.
‘Please help yourselves,’ he invited, as he moved the table towards them and filled the three glasses generously.
Steven raised his glass.
‘Good health,’ he toasted, ‘and many thanks. You’ve saved our lives; but for you we should most likely be spending a wretched night in the back of the car.’
The other smiled wanly in acknowledgment, but made no reply. Steven sat down. There was an awkward pause, broken only by the sound of the rain lashing at the windows and the ticking of the clock on the mantelshelf, which asserted itself for the first time.
This is tricky, Steven was thinking. I’ve got to tell him about the phone message somehow so that he won’t suspect I’ve tumbled to his little game. I wonder how he’ll take it; bluff it out, I expect, and make some excuse for not being able to put us up after all, or perhaps he’ll make a clean breast of it and let us stay on condition we make a get-away before the ol
d boy gets back!
He covertly studied the other; the pallid face so lacking in expression, the ever-restless hands, and the dark nondescript clothes. Every feature was self-effacing except the eyes. They were pale blue and slightly protuberant, and like the hands they were never still. For a moment Steven intercepted their roving gaze, and somehow behind their superficial nervousness it seemed to him that there lurked a sort of furtive malevolence like that of a cowed but dangerous animal.
At length he cleared his throat and took the plunge.
‘Are you Mr Hawkins, by any chance?’ he asked diffidently. He had expected the other to make some little show of surprise, but if he had suddenly whipped out a revolver the effect could not have been more startling. The man shrank back in his chair, and the hand that held his glass shook so violently that the whisky slopped over on to his knees. Poor devil, thought Steven; the old boy must be a tartar: for the other seemed to be quite panic-stricken by this innocent question and to fighting hard to control himself.
‘How did you know?’ he managed to blurt out at last.
Steven smiled reassuringly.
‘Quite simple,’ he explained. ‘While you were outside the phone went, and someone asked for a Mr Hawkins. I thought it must be you, and offered to go and find you, but whoever it was wouldn’t wait, but just told me to say that he would be coming in the morning. I asked for the name, but he’d evidently hung up on me by then. He sounded to me like an oldish man.’
While he had been speaking the other had gulped down his whisky, which seemed to pull him together somewhat for he replied with some show of composure.
‘Of course—stupid of me—I was expecting the call, but for a moment I was startled because I couldn’t think how you had found out my name.’
You’re lying, and clumsily, too, thought Steven, you never expected that call, and now you’re trying to bluff it out. But why get in such a panic: the old boy can’t be as bad as all that; still, I’d better give you a good chance to get out of it, so he said tactfully, ‘I’m so sorry if I startled you; perhaps, too, this phone message upsets your plans. If it makes it inconvenient now for you to let us stay, please don’t hesitate to say so, and we’ll be on our way. After all, we must be somewhere near a village, and if I might use your phone maybe I could ring the local pub.’
‘No, no,’ the other insisted, to their surprise. ‘I won’t hear of your turning out again on such a night, and besides,’ he added, with a glance at Myrtle, ‘it’s a good two miles to the nearest inn, and it’s a poor place at that.’
‘Don’t worry about me, please,’ Myrtle insisted. ‘I’m perfectly prepared to do what my husband says. Besides,’ she added with a smile, ‘after your excellent whisky a two-mile walk has no terrors for me.’
Their polite protestations only made it obvious, however, that their strange host, despite his nervousness, was almost pathetically eager for them to stay, so they were not loath to agree.
There followed another strained interval, during which Myrtle and Steven both made valiant attempts to draw their host into conversation by discovering some topic in which he took an interest. He seemed quite distrait, however, and expressed no opinion of his own till at length, ‘I am afraid I am a poor host tonight. Business worries, you know, get on one’s mind. No doubt you are both tired after your journey and your room is ready, so if you wish I’ll show you to it.’
They accepted readily, being in truth dog-tired, so with renewed thanks for his hospitality, they followed their host up the stairs. He led them to a large, bright room as featureless as the rest of the house and bid them good night.
‘Well, darling, what do you make of your mouse now?’ asked Steven, as they undressed.
‘Probably he knows that the old boy won’t be back till late tomorrow morning,’ she conjectured, ‘so he’s decided to stick to his guns and get us out of the house early tomorrow. But why he should seem so scared and yet be so anxious for us to stay I can’t imagine.’
‘Anyway,’ Steven concluded as he jumped into bed, ‘we’ve got a roof over our heads and a comfortable bed, that’s the main thing, so let’s forget about poor Mr Hawkins and his worries till the morning.’
A wan dawnlight was filtering through chinks in the window curtains when Steven suddenly awoke, and he glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. It was four-thirty. The wind had fallen and the house was utterly quiet. He was usually a very sound sleeper, and now he had an uneasy feeling that some strange instinct, whether prompted by dream or reality he knew not, must have caused him to awaken thus suddenly and at such an unearthly hour. Yet there was no sound, and at his side Myrtle slept peacefully enough.
As he lay on his back, wide-eyed in the darkness, he suddenly recalled a Christmas house-party he had once attended. He remembered how, one night, they had sat round the fire and held a competition to decide who could describe the most terrifying apparition.
They had conjured up a grim company of headless knights and malevolent cowled monks, but the winner had described a most insignificant little ghost in modern dress, which had on a sudden revealed a face, if face it could be called, that was innocent of any feature, a blank cranium of flesh more terrible in its inhumanity than any human face, however grotesque, could ever have been.
It seemed to Steven that this house and its solitary occupant, so prosaic the previous evening, had now taken upon themselves some of the horror of that featureless face, so empty did they seem of any human warmth or character.
He felt that the silence of the house had become charged with a sort of ominous expectancy. It was like the hush that falls before a storm breaks, when even the birds are silent.
The tension became so unbearable that he felt he must cry out, and might have done so had he not been forestalled by someone close at hand.
Once as a boy he had shot a hare, and this sound recalled vividly the horror he had felt then as he heard the thin terrible scram of terror and pain which the helpless thing had given before it died.
There followed a few moments’ stillness before he thought he heard a just audible click as though the sneck of a door, closed with infinite stealth, had sprung home. Then there came, undoubtedly from the next room, a confused choking and bubbling noise, very terrible to hear.
This was too much for Steven. He clambered stealthily out of bed, bent over Myrtle for a moment to assure himself that she still slept, and then groped his way to the door.
The sight that met his eyes when he switched on the light in the next room was one destined to remain with him in all its horrid detail for the rest of his life. It was a scene of Grand Guignol. The man Hawkins lay on his back in the bed, his blue eyes no longer restless, but staring fixedly upward. His throat was cut and he was obviously dead, for his choking had ceased. A broad crimson stain had welled up over the coverlet, and on the floor, just out of reach of the limp fingers of his dangling right hand, lay an open razor. The handle was of ivory and upon it were engraved the initials ‘A.M.’
The morning was well advanced when Steven and Myrtle returned to the house with the local constable, a stolid and imperturbable countryman, whose company they found oddly reassuring. To their relief he seemed to have accepted without question the explanation of their presence in the house. He left them to wait below while he stumped ponderously up the stairs to investigate.
‘Well, he’s done for himself right enough, as you say,’ he announced, when he eventually rejoined them. ‘Just the very same as his master done a year ago.’ He shook his head. ‘A queer business—but, then, they was a queer couple, we could never make head nor tail of them.’
Steven threw Myrtle a significant glance.
‘Do you really mean to say that his master did this, too?’
‘That’s right,’ nodded the other. ‘Professor Arthur Morgan, that was his name. Funny old gent. Lived abroad most of his life, so they said, and came here to retire. Had this house built, he did, right away from the village, because he reckoned he didn’t
want no company. Lived here alone with this feller Hawkins for the best part of four years and then, as I said before, one fine morning a year ago, there he was dead in his bed.’ He drew his forefinger across his throat in a significant gesture. ‘Left everything to Hawkins he did, house and all, and here Hawkins have lived all by hisself till now.’
‘Must have got on their nerves, I suppose, living so much alone,’ was all the comment Steven could think of. Then as the thought occurred to him he added, ‘I suppose we shall have to attend the inquest, which is going to be an infernal nuisance.’
The policeman’s eyes twinkled benevolently as he glanced at Myrtle. ‘Well,’ he said judicially, ‘I reckon we can manage without you, if you and I don’t go a-talking too much about it. After all, you won’t have no more honeymoons together, so you’d best make the most of this one. You’ve had trouble enough already getting mixed up in this business.’ He jerked his head aloft.
Steven grinned broadly and took Myrtle’s hand in his.
‘That’s damned decent of you, Constable, I must say,’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, and by the way, that reminds me, our car is still stranded by the roadside where we left it last night. I must get a garage to send out and collect it.’ He walked towards the phone. ‘It would be all right for me to ring them from here, wouldn’t it?’
The constable smiled and shook his head.
‘I’m afraid you won’t do no good there, sir,’ he answered. ‘I know because my daughter works on the exchange; Mr Hawkins gave orders for it to be cut off six months or more ago.’
Bosworth Summit Pound
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the lock-keepers in their lonely cottages by the Cold Bosworth and Canonshanger locks, and of the infrequent boatmen who navigate its narrow, tortuous course, very few people are familiar with the little-used North Midland section of the Great Central Canal. Many have crossed over it and perhaps caught a brief glimpse of its still, reed-fringed waters as they hurried northward by those great main road and rail routes which stride so arrogantly across the Midland Shires. Yet they are seldom sufficiently interested to enquire whither this forgotten water road leads. Again, antiquaries and those who make it their hobby to ‘collect’ village churches will be familiar with the splendid broach spire of St Peter’s, Cold Bosworth, which, standing four-square to the winds of the wolds, is such a prominent local landmark. But when they stand in the nave to admire the remarkable fourteenth-century rood-screen or the delicate tracery of the clerestory windows, they do not realise that the waters of the Great Central Canal lie directly beneath their feet. In fact, the church of St Peter stands upon that great belt of limestone which extends from the Dorset coast to the Yorkshire border, and which here forms the central watershed of England. As a glance at a contoured map will show, the erosion of the small streams which may carry the rain-water from the church roof to the Humber, the Wash or the Bristol Channel has considerably narrowed the ridge at this point. Consequently it was here that the canal engineers decided to cut the watershed by a tunnel over a mile long. Just above the lock called Bosworth Top, and within a few hundred yards of the churchyard wall, the canal disappears underground, but as both lock and tunnel portal are hidden in the thick undergrowth of Bosworth wood, a stranger standing in the churchyard would be unaware of their existence.
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