by Jack Mann
“Why, how d’you mean that?” Gees asked. “How does she affect it?”
“This way,” Bird said. “Such of us as know that thing at Nightmare is, because there’s some that don’t believe it—such of us as know, haven’t much doubt that it came here with Robert Hunter, and clings to the Hunter family. So the squire reckons that if he can get it put an end to, he may free Miss Norris from it—if it wasn’t troubling her, she’d get back her right mind and get well. Being the straight sort he is, he holds himself responsible as the head of his family, and wants to do the right thing, although Mr. Norris cursed him to his face and spat in it. An’ you—you’re a specialist in these cases, sir?”
“An open mind,” Gees hedged, “is as valuable an asset as a good car, but you may crash with either. I keep both.”
“Well, I’d already come to the conclusion you were,” Bird said, as if he had received an emphatic affirmative to his question. “And I’ve got to thank you, sir, for as interestin’ an evenin’ as I’ve spent for a very long while, as well as that remarkably good drop of beer.”
When he had gone, Gees gazed thoughtfully at the empty two-gallon jar and three-pint jug, before going up to bed. If Bird considered that quantity a drop, what would he regard as a drink?
CHAPTER 5
NIGHTMARE FARM
SINCE, ACCORDING TO NICHOLAS CHURCHILL, it was little over a mile from the inn to Knightsmere Farm (but Nicholas called it Nightmare, as had everyone else in the place whom Gees had heard mention the name, so far) Gees decided that it was not worth while turning out the car.
“Is it easy to find?” he inquired.
“Couldn’t miss it if thee tried, sir,” Nicholas squeaked—this was when he brought Gees the inevitable eggs and bacon, in spite of the ham and eggs of the preceding night—“for tha’ll see the hedges, one each side the roadway—the may is out, now—an’ there ain’t another pair of hedges like them in the county—in the whole country, I’d say.”
“Hawthorn hedges—yes,” Gees observed. “And which way is
it?”
“Soon as thee get outside the front door, turn to the right an’ keep straight,” Nicholas answered.
“If everyone did, there’d be less trouble in the world,” Gees said. The landlord gave him a puzzled look, but did not question the observation. He moved the inevitable marmalade pot off the sideboard on to the table, and left his guest to his breakfast, and, after a cigarette with a final cup of tea, Gees went out. First, he had a look at the car, and found that someone had left the stable door open, giving one of the hens a chance to get her day’s work over early by laying an egg just in front of the driving seat. A word with Nicholas, who thanked Gees for retrieving the egg and assured him that the door should be kept closed as long as the car was in the stable, and then—turn to the right and keep straight. But no—the road waggled from right to left as persistently as life itself, and keeping straight was merely metaphorical, though it was easy to tell what Nicholas had meant, in the absence of any roads diverging from this one. A fine pair of ironwork gates set against stone pillars, into each of which was chiselled a shield bearing a badly battered coat of arms, marked the entrance to the grounds surrounding Denlandham House—the residence itself was invisible because of trees, from the gateway. Gees passed it, and found the road enclosed between high, thick hedges of neatly trimmed hawthorn—too well-trimmed, in fact, for much blossom to appear. He topped a slight rise, and saw the border hills blue in the distance before him, descended again, and a little more than half a mile from the entrance to the House drive came to what was beyond doubt the roadway—as they called it—leading to Nightmare Farm.
A wooden gate had sagged down on its post so that Gees had to lift it to gain ingress, and, having passed it, he paused to look ahead. The roadway, rutted and grass-grown, with puddles here and there left by recent rains in the ruts, went arrow-straight for some half-mile—counting his paces, Gees found that he made eight hundred from end to end—between two mighty hawthorn hedges which, even in this full sunlight, made a dimness over the way. Thirty feet or more they towered, the white blossoms that decked them beginning at about ten feet from the ground and forming sheets of flower to their tops. The stems or trunks of this growth were anything up to a foot in diameter, trees rather than mere hedge stems, and so thickly set that, as Hunter had declared, both hedges were quite impenetrable by anything larger than a small terrier. They had been cut back to a width of about twelve feet for the height of a good load of hay or corn in the sheaf, but then arched in toward each other so that there was no more than three feet between their twigs where the mass of flower began. And, since the sunlight did not yet strike directly along this slit, the way between them was little more than twilit. On a moonless night it would be Stygian. The fences were unique. Except that a width of roadway between them that would serve for all the traffic of the farm had been maintained, they had been allowed to grow until, probably, they had reached the limit to which hawthorn will attain, and the length of time they had stood was beyond Gees’ ability to estimate. Phil Bird had said that they might have heightened two or three feet within his memory, which indicated that they must have been planted somewhere about a century before this present time. And, passing along the roadway between them, Gees questioned what was the life of a hawthorn tree? Probably, though, if any stem died, another sprang up to replace it, and the dead wood rotted out from its place. He saw no dead stems, nor gaps that decay might have left: nor could he see through to the land on either side of the roadway; the hedges were too wide, their growth too dense.
And the way itself was eerie, even in full, sunlit day—mid-morning, as it was then. Tufts of grass grew rank and pale; here and there a shovelful of stones had been dumped into a specially bad pothole, but the surface as a whole was unmetalled, or, if there were metalling, leaf-mould from those gigantic hedges had covered in the work. No bird twittered or rustled in flight: except for the sheets of blossom and the leafage high up, and that unhealthy-looking growth of grass in places, there was no sign of any kind of life, nothing other than vegetable life, and, having covered a hundred yards or so from the road, Gees felt as if he had moved into another world, an abnormal, uncanny substitute for known reality. Then almost with a start he saw a clump of fungi, shading from orange to scarlet, in the gloom under the right-hand hedge. Great moons of flaunting colour, smaller circles and knobs that flamed against the darkness of the hawthorn stems, they appeared outrageous, sinisterly misplaced in their setting, almost like live eyes in a corpse.
The way ascended slightly from the road, and appeared to reach a crest at its inner end, for he could see nothing but the blue of sky ahead as he went on. It came to his mind that, if Norris’s daughter, returning home in November twilight with the tales of those appearances in her mind, had abruptly sighted anything at all as she passed along this eerie way, she might well be shocked to insensibility, harmless though the being or thing that met her sight might be. For here between these gigantic hedges brooded mystery even now, boding, threatful, intangible to outward sense, but so present as to waken the inner, guarding consciousness that exists in some minds—or perhaps has its place in the soul rather than in the mind. In darkness, such darkness as normal twilight would bring here, that mystery would become terror, if the viewless influence that caused it were present then.
There—there ahead, and away to the right! Was that the chattering of a blackbird half a mile away, or was it the ghost of a laugh?
Steadily, beating down a growing desire to look behind him, Gees went on, and the monotony of bodeful gloom appeared to lengthen out as he advanced, as if this were another wonderland in which one had to keep moving to remain in the same place. Ten minutes at most, common sense told him, were taken up in traversing the distance from the sagging gate to the inner end of this roadway, but his racing thoughts made an hour of it, and then he came to light as at the end of a tunnel, saw solid earth and its contents before him, an
d breathed more easily. He had seen nothing, imagined all, from a practical view point: Hunter’s tale, and his talk with Phil Bird the night before, had their part in the effect the dark way had made on him, but he knew with utter certainty that the facts concerning things past were not all that had produced such an impression on him: there was something else, present in time and near him, even clinging round about him, in place.
Now, free of the shadowing way, he could see the house and outbuildings and the sheet of water that had given its name to Knightsmere Farm—the place itself, he decided at this first sight of it, ought to retain that name: it was the roadway leading to it that was a nightmare. The mere was a pleasant, tree-shaded sheet of water of perhaps an acre in its oval extent, in a meadow of good grass on which four big shire horses were feeding: it lay on the right as Gees stood at gaze, a little farther back from him than the house and buildings, and at this nearer end a gravelly, short slope led down to shallows at which the farm stock might drink. To left of it a rickyard declared that the farm produced good straw, whatever might have been the grain that had been threshed from it, and both meadow and clover hay. Then the outbuildings still more to the left, a very high barn of tarred weather-boarding with thatched roof most prominent among them, and round it neat, well-kept stables and sheds of red brick and tile. In front of these and still more to the left, Knightsmere farmhouse.
For centre, a mighty square chimney of age-faded red brick, rising a tall storey’s distance above the ridges of the cruciform-gabled roofs. Those roofs of old, weather-paled slate, with tufts of houseleek growing down near the eaves, and under them walls of rough-cast that may have been colour-washed at some time, but now were streaked and patched from dun to pale grey. Casement windows, deeply set, indicated that the walls were thick—
these windows appeared small, especially those of the upper storey, and as far as Gees could see there were no windows at all for the second or attic storey. There was a creeper-shaded porch, before which a woolly-coated sheep dog lay apparently asleep, and as Gees stood just free of the exit from the roadway a man, shirt-sleeved and wearing leather-belted corduroy trousers, with short leggings and muddy, heavy boots, appeared in the porch and stood with his thumbs tucked into his belt, gazing stolidly at this visitor—or intruder, he may have thought.
He did not move as Gees crossed the space intervening between them, nor speak when the caller halted before him. His face was woodenly expressionless, his eyes devoid of interest; he might have been sleeping in an upright posture with his eyes open, by the look of him.
“You are Mr. Hunter’s bailiff for this farm?” Gees asked.
“My name is Stukeley,” the man answered, slowly and uninterestedly.
“Yes. The farm is to let, I understand. I’d like to look it over. The house, that is. I can tell what the land is like from the rickyard, and what you can tell me about it, and the buildings look well kept.”
“They are,” said Stukeley, and kept his thumbs in his belt, nor moved any part of himself but his lips in response to the statement.
“What is it, heavy or light land?” Gees inquired.
“Mixed,” said Stukeley, uninterestedly as before.
By that word, though, Gees placed the man as no native of this part. The term “mixed soil,” he knew, was current and fully explanatory in the eastern counties, but was not in general use here.
“I see. And the last tenant farmed it well?”
“He did,” Stukeley owned, and left it at that.
“Is it possible to see what the house is like inside?” Gees asked, after a brief pause in which he waited vainly for some move in response to his statement that he wished to make an inspection.
“Yes,” said Stukeley, and maintained his position.
“Then”—with a gust of irritation—“why are you standing there like a wooden imitation of Nelson’s column with the top blown off, man?”
“Because”—Stukeley evinced no resentment, nor any other
form of animation—“whoever you are, mister, you’d better turn round and go right back, and forget you ever thought of hirin’ this farm.”
“And why?” Gees asked, his irritation all gone, now.
“I come outer Essex—the squire here advertised, an’ I come outer Essex to manage this place till Michaelmas,” Stukeley said in the same uninterested, almost lifeless way, “an’ I’m throwin’ it up an’ goin’ back, end o’ this month, though I don’t know what I’ll do. He won’t give me a reference, I know, after throwin’ up the job like that, but I’m goin’, all the same. You’d better turn round and go right back.”
“And I asked you why?” Gees insisted.
Stukeley shook his head. “I’m workin’ for Squire Hunter,” he said, “so it ain’t for me to say why. But I do say—that much.”
Loyalty to his employer, evidently, held him from saying more. With his thumbs still stuck in his belt, he gazed past Gees at the exit from the roadway: was it there that he looked for the reason behind his warning? Yet his face was expressionless as ever, his eyes unlighted.
“Having said that much,” Gees suggested placidly, “perhaps you will now let me see over the house, as I asked at first.” Momentarily he wondered if the man would ask for some order to view, or other document authorising him to conduct a stranger, but Stukeley did not appear to think of such a thing. He drew back a step.
“All right,” he said. “There ain’t so much to show.”
Then a smallish, worried-looking, middle-aged woman appeared beside him, and made a silent appraisal of Gees with her faded blue eyes.
“Gentleman want to see round the house, Annie,” Stukeley explained.
“Did you tell him why we—” she began, but her husband—Gees concluded that he stood in that relationship to her—put his hand over her mouth for a moment, gently, but enough to silence her.
“I told him all I got a right to tell him, an’ maybe a bit more,” he said. “Now, if you’ll make way, Annie, I’ll show him over it.”
“I’ll show him,” she dissented. “Our room ain’t tidied.”
“I’ll show him!” Stukeley insisted, with his first show of animation over anything. “Else, there’s no tellin’ where your tongue’d stop.”
There was a sternness in his tone that silenced the woman. With a slight movement of his head Stukeley invited Gees to enter, and drew back into a wide passageway that ended, nearly midway of the house, it appeared, in a blank wall, with a door at right angles to it on either side. Stukeley opened the right-hand door and turned.
“Squire Hunter hired the furniture,” he said. “Livin’ room.”
Gees entered, while his guide remained in the doorway. The furniture comprised only bare necessities for two people, and appeared lost in the room, which was full twenty feet square. To left of the doorway as Gees faced inward was an enormous open fireplace, and after the merest glance round the room he stepped into it and looked upward to see that it occupied only a part of the whole area of the chimney, since a party wall went up for nine or ten feet and above it the main wall of chimney showed farther back, soot-encrusted, rising to a square that revealed open sky, clouded by smoke which rose from some other fireplace of the house. A curing-bar with half-a-dozen or more pendent hooks for hams and the like went across the back of this fireplace, and its ends were recessed for settles. It was a good five feet from front to back, and of such height that Gees walked in and out easily.
“Yes,” he said emerging. “Now the next, please.”
Stukeley opened the door facing that of the living room. “Stair to the bedrooms, and the parlour through there,” he said.
Passing the foot of the stairs, Gees opened the parlour door and saw that, smaller than the living room only by the width of the staircase, it was totally unfurnished, while the fireplace had been bricked in and an old-fashioned, high-grated register stove fitted at some time. Stukeley, beside him, pointed to a door in the right-hand wall.
“Kitchen through there,” he said. “We ought to made this the livin’ room, if it’d been an ordinary house. But we use the other.”
“Any special reason?” Gees asked.
“I said, if it’d been an ordinary house,” Stukeley answered in his wooden way. “Because, this is next the kitchen, and the other ain’t.”