I spoke to him in low-pitched tones, hoping to reach whatever level of consciousness had responded to the pain.
“Tell me, sir, how were you hurt? How can I help you?”
His eyelids flickered at my second question, and he murmured something. I put my head close to his and heard the accents of a moorland dweller, rugged, not unattractive, and probably speaking weakly for the first time in his harsh struggle with a harsh world.
“I fell, love; fell. ’Twas by way of a mistake ... entirely. Saw it ... and fell.”
He must be rambling in his mind.
“Never you mind that. Let me help you. Where are you hurt?”
“... Saw the haunt.”
“Yes. Yes. Don’t think of it,” A little desperate, I looked up and around at the sea of furze and small ridges that enclosed us on every side. I knew there must be a dozen coteens of local sheepmen scattered through Heatherton Moor, but I had not passed one on my walk, nor was there a building in sight now except the Hag’s Head, which was up another rise and separated from our present location by a little dell crowded with trees and overgrown bushes. Timothy, who had behaved toward this poor man with such feline dislike, now crept toward us, hesitating, then leaping closer, then crouching again. It was perfectly obvious he knew the injured man, and even more obvious he did not like the man, though I could not guess why. It may have been the smell of liquor that offended the fastidious little cat.
As for the man himself, his square, strong face had a kind of likable roughness that made me think of the Devonshiremen who often came into Cornwall seeking work on the seacoast when times were hard on the moors of Devon.
The man came to consciousness, clenching his teeth, and I put my hand under his head, trying to pillow him in the hope that he would feel well enough to tell me where he lived and where I might go for help. He did try to be helpful, struggling to sit up, and even in his present condition he was surprisingly strong.
When I started to get up, he seized upon me as though his life depended upon his grasp. “Can ye get me back to ... the inn?”
The only inn in sight was the Hag’s Head, and it was an odd destination for a man badly hurt, but it was certainly the closest thing to a shelter.
“I’ll take you to the inn. Perhaps there’ll be something for you to lie on while I go back for help.”
“Good lass.” He tried to nod but closed his eyes and looked alarmingly white behind what appeared to be a normal olive pallor. “Give a hand?”
Since he seemed so insistent, and now and then had such curious flashes of something very like fear, I got up, and despite the pawing of Timmy, I managed to help the big man to his feet. He staggered and was dreadfully dazed. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, and it was all I could do to control his lumbering footsteps: but once we began the weary, dragging, pathetic march to the Hag’s Head, at least there was no stopping him. Whoever he was, he managed to stay on his feet and to walk without opening his eyes. His cap had long since blown off again, and within the mass of hair at the back of his skull was a smear of dried blood, where I supposed he must have fallen the first time.
“Jassy ...” he murmured, leaning heavily upon my shoulder.
I saw my chance to find his people, his coteen, or even his village; for he might well belong to Heatherton town across the moor—I could not be sure.
“Where is Jassy? Tell me, please, so I may go and fetch her.”
I heard the name “Jassy” somewhere since I came to Maidenmoor. I wondered where.
He stumbled as we climbed the rise, and I paused with him at the broken gate that swung back and forth in the morning wind. He groped for the gate and missed it, and when I tried to hold him upright, we both nearly went down in the mud among the bits of charred wood and broken stone left here twelve years ago and weathered since to mere gray slabs.
“... Not drunk, mum. No! Not...”
“I know,” I said, breathing hard but getting him to the stoop where he might sit while I went around and opened the door from the inside.
“We be at inn, lass?” he asked as he settled down against the door. Then, as his head touched the door, he let out a ferocious groan that startled me into painful sympathy and sent Timothy scuttling away with his back arched. “Will ye fetch Jassy now? There’s a good love. She’ll be in taproom.”
I was anxious to get him inside to rest so that I might consider where the nearest sheepfarm might be. From one of the upstairs windows I thought I would have a better view of the little stone buildings tucked away in the moorland, and surely, in the nearest one there would be someone who knew the injured man or his Jassy.
I said, “You must stay here while I open the door. Can you hear me?”
“Aye.”
It began to trouble me that he should imagine his Jassy was in the taproom of this abandoned building. Could he possibly mean some other inn and some other taproom? Very probably. But it was too late now. As I turned and was about to hurry around the house to the entrance Sir Nicholas had used yesterday, the man reached out and caught my coat hem. His eyes looked very odd. The pupils seemed to be of different sizes, and his expression was vague. What worried me most was that there seemed to be drops of blood in his hair beneath his ear, and this would be most serious if there was some injury within his skull, more deadly than the blow upon the back of his head.
“Tell ... Jassy ... wasn’t drunk.”
Poor man. Apparently he had often been under the influence of spirits, and now could think of nothing else but to fear Jassy’s disapproval.
“I understand, sir,” I said, trying to make him comfortably secure while I left him.
As I went around the strange old house, closely followed by Timothy, and passing the broken window where I had climbed in yesterday, I was amazed that I should have been so frightened on my first visit. Faced with the prospect of a genuinely frightening occurrence, the serious injury of this unknown man, I felt I could look upon any fancied horrors inside and laugh at them, for they would be mere figments of my imagination. The building was old, it is true, but there were many Cornish inns that were older, and under the bright open light of morning, even with the sun obscured behind puffed white clouds, the place looked like a solid, excellently constructed domicile for a young ladies’ academy. It lacked only the brisk cleaning, the dusting and refurbishing that any unused house would require before one moved in. So it appeared from the outside, at least.
I passed between the inn and what remained of the outbuildings, a series of now broken sheds through whose shattered roofs the snows of a dozen winters had sifted and lain for many months, causing the floors within to become moldy from the standing water. It always made me sad to see disused houses, even disused storage rooms, and I thought of all the wretched people crowded into the cities with which I was more or less familiar, like Cardiff in Wales, and Falmouth and Plymouth in my own country. There were many inequities in life that I had observed on my journey from Cornwall into England and up to the North Country!
At the back of the Hag’s Head, beyond the kitchen, was the scullery door through which Sir Nicholas and I had left the inn yesterday. I was surprised to find it swinging back and forth in the wind, not at all as my companion had left it; for I distinctly remembered his closing and latching the door. However, when I examined the flimsy lock, I saw that it was clearly possible that the door had swung open of its own accord, and I convinced myself that this was indeed what had happened. It was so desperately necessary to find some way of getting help to the stranger that I had to believe the old inn was deserted.
I hurried through the scullery and the kitchen, which, to my senses, still smelled of the thousands of roasts of mutton that had been spitted and turned here in the great fireplace. It smelled too of charcoal and crisp kid’s flesh. But once again, and more insistently now that I knew what had occurred here, there was the odor of burned wood and cloth, and of mold, that ever-present sign of disused and sad places.
I found myself, ri
diculously enough, lost in a passage between the pantries adjoining the kitchen, and the common room through which I had entered yesterday. I watched to see which way Timothy would go, but he darted back into the pantry to lick the stone floor where—heaven knows how long ago!—someone had spilled sugared tea. I found I must pass through a china closet to reach the front of the house. It was interesting and touching to note there were still the china and the cutlery and the old mugs and wine glasses on the shelves just as they had been when the tragedy occurred twelve years before. There was even something upon one of the plates. I assumed it must be food left at the time of the murder, and remarkably well preserved. Almost astoundingly so.
Once more, as during my first visit, I heard the creak of floors or walls upstairs, along with the familiar, yet no less unnerving, tap-tapping sound. It was comforting to recall how Sir Nicholas had dismissed such sounds as products of my overactive imagination.
But I could not stop to examine this or other mementos of the life that had existed here years before. I rushed through the little passageway of the china closet, which joined the hall at the front of the house, and found myself again in that passage which had led to the great pier glass hanging against the side of the staircase. At least, in this part of the house, I knew my way. The sight of my figure running toward its reflection was absurd today, when compared with the frightening thing it had seemed to be yesterday, before I knew what it was.
It was extraordinarily difficult to get the front door opened, and even when I succeeded, I had managed to wrench off the lock before I had it swinging wide inside. I was trying to help the stranger stumble into the main passage at the foot of the stairs to the upper floor, to greater comfort on the rush-covered floor, sheltered from the wind and weather, when I not only heard the odd sounds overhead, but saw that the sick man heard them as well. His eyes tried vainly to focus upon the ceiling, and in the bad light his sallow color seemed to have gone gray with fear.
“This ain’t Owl of York.” His fingers fastened on my skirts, and he tried to shake me but was much too ill to do more than startle me. “What’ve ye done, wicked creature! ‘Twas here I got it in the head.”
I shook myself free of his fingers, as much shocked by his sudden madness as by his words. He tried to raise himself, but I made him remain seated. There were bloodstains on the lobe of his ear and his collar, and I knew he must not move. I had seen seamen before who had got their skulls cracked open. They nearly always died.
“Please be still, sir. Do not move. I’ll bring you something to calm and warm you while I get help.”
“No! Don’t be goin’, love. I was only giving a bit of a ... tease...” I bent over him, for he seemed ready to whisper something. I thought perhaps I should gain a knowledge of his identity if I could know a little more about his work and about what he had been doing here at the Hag’s Head. “Lass,” he whispered. “Look up ’em stairs...”
I looked. Beyond being excessively dusty and dark, they held nothing more sinister than silence.
“Aye, but it was ... on that stair, I saw the—haunt...”
I realized with a thrill of horror that it was this word he had spoken out on the heath and I had not understood. But it was all his sick fancy. I could not heed him. If I did so, he would very likely die even sooner.
I rushed into the taproom a few feet away from him, but there were only half a dozen bottles, and it maddened me to discover that all the contents had either dried up in some way or drained out owing to bad corkage. And not another thing could I find to preserve the poor man’s swimming senses.
There were the cellars, of course, but I preferred not to venture into that place of dreadful memories unless it became absolutely necessary. I tried the kitchen and the stillroom, but not a bottle was left. Glancing outside, I could not find a well or spring anywhere within sight. I did locate a candlestick with a fat half-burned candle, and behind it, almost too conveniently, was a firemaker.
With the lighted candle I hurried back to the sick man, followed by the swift, darting Timothy. Nothing about the man moved except his eyes. In attending him I had to turn my back to that staircase at which he stared so fixedly above my head. The little cat waited for me also, his gray-green eyes likewise fixed upon the staircase. It made me more than a little nervous. I could not resist glancing over my shoulder. I cannot imagine what I expected to see, and I saw nothing but shadows.
“Tell—Jassy...” It was the first thing he had said in several minutes, and I realized that his condition was rapidly worsening.
I took up the candlestick, telling him I would be back immediately, and with the sturdy little candle lighting the way, I made swift work of the trip back behind the staircase that led to the upper floor. It was in this direction that Timothy had darted the day before, when he must have snagged his collar on the bit of lace from the cellar debris. Therefore, I assumed the most direct steps to the cellar must be back here. Behind the upper staircase I did indeed find the flight of stone steps pitching downward into the cold, musty darkness where, long ago, Megan Kelleher had died. I descended with great care, rather sardonically observing the caution with which Timothy stayed behind me.
The candle revealed an entire wall of bottles and barrels. Some of the latter were obviously empty, the bung holes open, and here and there among the cobwebbed bottles there were a surprising number of empty spaces. I began to suspect that it had been visited by various wine-loving moorland citizens along with the stray gypsies who often made this region a landfall in their endless journeying. Tongues of the long-ago fire had licked at the wooden structure of the wine racks, but it appeared that this fire had come through the burned door from the other cellars, for the walls between the cellars were of stone and impregnable to those flames.
I had no time for sightseeing and gazed just once into the next cellar, one of the centers of the fire, which was not as black as I had expected, because of the many cracks in the wall of the west, or entrance, side of the building at a level with the ground. Inside this burned cellar and the one beyond it, there was so much blackened debris that I assumed most of it was the contents of a cold storage stillroom, which had, of course, been destroyed in the fire and produced that haunting, acrid odor which permeated the house above.
Actually, Mrs. Sedley had been right. From what I could see of the cellars and the ground floor above, the building was still solidly constructed and very likely a bargain. I turned back after taking up a bottle that felt heavy and seemed to gurgle a little. I was just moving up the steep steps, having called Timmy away from his exploration of the burned area, when we heard a piercing shriek near the taproom above us that made Timmy arch his back, sitting, and gave me such chills that I found it even more difficult to run the rest of the way. I, at least, knew that that shriek of mortal terror came from the wounded stranger, and I could not imagine anything so awful as to produce such a sound.
At the top of the steps a sudden gust of wind from the open front door blew out my candle, but I was in too much of a hurry to reach the sick man to pay attention to that. There was light enough in the open doorway so that the stranger would not be in the fearsome darkness. I was deeply concerned to note that he had moved away from the protection of the door and was crawling, with irrational, crablike movements, toward the forsaken taproom. He had crawled only a few feet when I reached him. I did not dare cry out to him to stop this deadly motion, for fear the sharp command itself might act as a cruel prod to his movements.
As quietly as possible, I went and knelt before him, trying to ease him against my arm, but he was too heavy. I had to drop the dusty wine bottle and use all my strength to hold him partially upright. I spoke to him soothingly, as I had once seen Father speak to an Irish lobsterman who had cracked his skull when he had got off course in his small black corragh. His glazed eyes stared past me, over my arm, at the dusky shadows high on the staircase behind me. Had I not been so busy trying to make him reasonably comfortable so I could go for help, t
his attention to things at my back would have made me more than a trifle uneasy.
When I had him at least protected from falling, with the wall of the taproom behind him, I tried to uncork the dusty bottle but found it impossible. I got up, went into the taproom as far from him as possible, and broke off the bottle at the neck. My hands smelled to heaven of soured wine, but that was hardly important. Watching the bottle carefully, I carried it back to the stranger, and since I could not put the broken bottle to his lips and didn’t have time to fetch a cup, I wiped my left hand carefully on my petticoat, then poured as much wine into my palm as it would hold and held it to his lips.
He reacted like the good drinking man he must have been, moving his lips and moistening his tongue with the tart, vinegary wine. This action must have been instinctive, however, for his eyes remained fixed upon that illusive and dusky area at the top of the staircase.
It was about a minute later, just as I thought he was showing some signs of a return to conscious awareness, that the pupils of his eyes dilated, becoming even in size. He made a convulsive effort to rise, and raised his arm, pointing it straight out and upward over my shoulder. I was astonished at the sudden power he demonstrated and was almost ready to speak to him rationally, when he opened his mouth and uttered the same ear-splitting scream I had heard in the wine cellar. It was so shocking, I reeled back and nearly fell.
“The haunt—the haunt!” he cried hoarsely, and fell forward against me like a block of wood, crashing lifeless across my body.
With an enormous effort I managed to twist around without removing him and look at the staircase. It was quite true that in the brown dark, among what must be endless cobwebbed space, untouched in a dozen years, there was a peculiar aura very like a pallid mask of a face.
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