“It’s all so utterly out of my line of things,” he began, puffing out clouds of cigar smoke between his words, “and there’s so little to tell with any real evidence behind it, that it’s almost impossible to make a consecutive story for you. It’s the total cumulative effect that is so—so disquieting.” He chose his words with care, as though determined not to travel one hair’s breadth beyond the truth.
“I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died,” he continued, “but could not afford to live here then. My sister, whom you met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all these years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the place—for we never got a satisfactory tenant—and saw that it was not allowed to go to ruin. I myself took possession, however, only a year ago.
“My brother,” he went on, after a perceptible pause, “spent much of his time away, too. He was a great traveller, and filled the house with stuff he brought home from all over the world. The laundry—a small detached building beyond the servants’ quarters—he turned into a regular little museum. The curios and things I have cleared away—they collected dust and were always getting broken—but the laundry-house you shall see tomorrow.”
Colonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that this beginning took him a long time. But at this point he came to a full stop altogether. Evidently there was something he wished to say that cost him considerable effort. At length he looked up steadily into my companion’s face.
“May I ask you—that is, if you won’t think it strange,” he said, and a sort of hush came over his voice and manner, “whether you have noticed anything at all unusual—anything queer, since you came into the house?”
Dr. Silence answered without a moment’s hesitation.
“I have,” he said. “There is a curious sensation of heat in the place.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the other, with a slight start. “You have noticed it. This unaccountable heat—”
“But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself—but outside,” I was astonished to hear the doctor add.
Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map that hung upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was made with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face.
“Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,” he said after a moment, turning round with the map in his hands. “Though, of course, I can have no idea how you should guess—”
John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. “Merely my impression,” he said. “If you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.”
Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.
“On coming into possession,” he said, looking us alternately in the face, “I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and impossible kind I had ever heard—stories which at first I treated with amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my brother’s death—and, in a way, I think so still.”
He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.
“It’s an old plan of the estate,” he explained, “but accurate enough for our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one,” indicating the spot with his finger, “is called the Twelve Acre Plantation. It was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother and the head keeper met their deaths.”
He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would have preferred to leave untouched—things he personally would rather have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any moment I might be summoned to play a part.
“It was twenty years ago,” continued the Colonel, “but there was much talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them seem to have been frequent.”
“I do not recall the affair,” said the doctor. “May I ask what was the cause of death?” Something in his voice made me prick up my ears for the reply.
“The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when found.”
“And your brother?” asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and listening intently.
“Equally mysterious,” said our host, speaking in a low voice with effort. “But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to mention. For those who saw the face—I did not see it myself—and though Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged—” He stammered and hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between his words. He stuck.
“Yes,” said the chief listener sympathetically.
“My brother’s face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. It had been swept, as it were, by something that burned—blasted. It was, I am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from its edge.”
Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map attentively.
“I did not see the face myself,” repeated the other, his manner somehow expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, “but my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame—blasted.”
John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece.
“They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants, but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a place to be avoided, day or night.
“There came a point,” the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, “when I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map, comes rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate.”
“And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?” asked Dr. Silence.
“In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know—except that I understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in t
his wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins tomorrow in the daylight.”
“And the result of your investigations—these stories, I mean?” the doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.
“Yes, I’m coming to that,” he said slowly, “but the wood first, for this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large boulders—old Druid stones, I’m told. At another place there’s a small pond. There’s nothing distinctive about it that I could mention—just an ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood—only the trees are a bit twisted in the trunks, some of ‘em, and very dense. Nothing more.
“And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all odd—such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make out how these people got such notions into their heads.”
He paused a moment to relight his cigar.
“There’s no regular path through it,” he resumed, puffing vigorously, “but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound—most of ‘em said that, in fact—and another man saw shapes flitting in and out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms—always queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the whole wood was lit up, and one fellow—he’s still here and you shall see him—has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals—”
“What kind of stars?” put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that made me start.
“Oh, I don’t know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them since.”
He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze—welcome for its blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already a strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect and far from comforting.
“Of course,” he went on, straightening up again on the mat, “this was all commonplace enough—this seeing lights and figures at night. Most of these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may account for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight. One of the woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to his midday meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood by something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree, always keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway and the twigs snap on the ground. And it made a noise, he declared—but really"—the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh—"it’s too absurd—”
“Please!” insisted the doctor; “for it is these small details that give me the best clues always.”
“—it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were his very words: like the crackling of a bonfire,” finished the soldier, with a repetition of his short laugh.
“Most interesting,” Dr. Silence observed gravely. “Please omit nothing.”
“Yes,” he went on, “and it was soon after that the fires began—the fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the patches of coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. No one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number, have seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them, I must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable. They are most singular, I consider, most singular, these mysterious fires, and I am glad to say that they come only at rather long intervals and never seem to spread.
“But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in the trees, or flew into their shade. He set countless traps, but never caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no obvious signs of how they had met their death.
“Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever chasing some invisible creature across the field one day when he was out with his gun. The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at his feet, and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed its imaginary quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in—a thing he had never known it to do before. The moment it crossed the edge—it is darkish in there even in daylight—it began fighting in the most frenzied and terrific fashion. It made him afraid to interfere, he said. And at last, when the dog came out, hanging its tail down and panting, he found something like white hair stuck to its jaws, and brought it to show me. I tell you these details because—”
“They are important, believe me,” the doctor stopped him. “And you have it still, this hair?” he asked.
“It disappeared in the oddest way,” the Colonel explained. “It was curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and I sent it to be analysed by the local chemist. But either the man got wind of its origin, or else he didn’t like the look of it for some reason, because he returned it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, so far as he could make out, and he didn’t wish to have anything to do with it. I put it away in paper, but a week later, on opening the package—it was gone! Oh, the stories are simply endless. I could tell you hundreds all on the same lines.”
“And personal experiences of your own, Colonel Wragge?” asked John Silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest and sympathy.
The soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“Nothing, I think,” he said slowly, “nothing—er—I should like to rely on. I mean nothing I have the right to speak of, perhaps—yet.”
His mouth closed with a snap. Dr. Silence, after waiting a little to see if he would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the point.
“Well,” he resumed presently, and as though he would speak contemptuously, yet dared not, “this sort of thing has gone on at intervals ever since. It spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious chatter of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate, coming to see the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance. Notices of man-traps and spring-guns only seemed to increase their persistence; and—think of it,” he snorted, “some local Research Society actually wrote and asked permission for one of their members to spend a night in the wood! Bolder fools, who didn’t write for leave, came and took away bits of bark from the trees and gave them to clairvoyants, who invented in their turn a further batch of tales. There was simply no end to it all.”
“Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe,” interposed the doctor.
“Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun, and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in something else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can tell you exactly, for I’ve kept a diary more or less of what happened.”
“Ah!”
“But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all revived again with a rush—with a kind of furious attack, so to speak. It has really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the general state of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving has occurred to me.”
“Incendiarism?” suggested Dr. Silence, half
under his breath, but not so low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.
“By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!” exclaimed the astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation of my friend’s divining powers were to be found that way.
“It’s only that you are thinking very vividly,” the doctor said quietly, “and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter them. It’s merely a little elementary thought-reading.”
His intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later.
“Good Lord! I had no idea—” He did not finish the sentence, and dived again abruptly into his narrative.
“I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out—in the direction of this house. There,” he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump, pointing with a thick finger to the map, “where the westerly fringe of the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the house—where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel shrubberies, running right up to the back premises—that’s where these lights were seen. They passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in this way reached the house itself. Like silent rockets, one man described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright.”
“And this evidence you spoke of?”
“They actually reached the sides of the house. They’ve left a mark of scorching on the walls—the walls of the laundry building at the other end. You shall see ‘em tomorrow.” He pointed to the map to indicate the spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though he had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction.
“Scorched—just as the faces were,” the doctor murmured, looking significantly at me.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 322