by Sax Rohmer
I studied the pathetic scrawl, apparently dashed off in haste and under considerable emotional stress, for the taller letters all leaned like trees in a hurricane and half the lines ran off the page.
“Please, papa,” the girl had written, “you must come now—at once—and take me away from him. He won’t let me go alone. I know you don’t believe about the poison fumes, but it’s literally, awfully, devilishly true, papa, and I swear that I am not sick or anything and I haven’t got hallucinations and this is not a trick to get away. If it happens once more, it will kill me. Get me out of this now, papa! Haven’t I done enough? Margery.”
“Well?” he demanded as I finished the reading.
“It’s a perfect riddle,” I ventured. “I should say, though, that the writer thinks she is in some kind of danger.”
“Thinks she is!” he cried. “You don’t know her. She isn’t the kind that’s afraid of a twig scratching against a pane. No—there’s something wrong.” He got up and stormed about the room. “Come on, Mac. We’ve got to act at once.”
“Do what?” I reasoned with him. “Go up to the chateau at this hour, drag this Drurock, whom we do not know, out of his bed and tell him we are taking his wife away because she doesn’t like the weather? Be reasonable. Sleep on it.”
“And do nothing?”
“We’ll do something, but we’ll do it tomorrow. My suggestion would be to have breakfast, hire a car, and go over to call like civilised people. Drurock can hardly pull up a portcullis and drop hot lead on us. The chances are we’ll get a fair sort of reception and you’ll get a chance to talk to the lady in private for a moment and clear up the whole thing.”
He calmed sufficiently to consider the programme.
“I mustn’t go as myself,” he said. “If there’s anything really wrong, my turning up would give the show away. Drurock must know me by name. He must have seen those London papers.” He warmed to my proposal and his own somewhat melodramatic revision of it. “I’ll be an artist, sketching around, loafing in the. neighbourhood with you. As for you, you’re quite unimpeachably explained. A frog-catcher come to where frogs are caught. That’s it. Peter McAllister, RA, FRGS, subcurator of his Majesty’s pollywogs and his artist friend, dropping in for some scientific chit-chat and a cup of tea. If that’s a bargain, I’ll get to bed.”
“It’s a bargain.”
Old Ord’s mumblings about Drurock came to my mind as I tucked myself in and bade my room-mate goodnight. I was on the point of telling Aubrey the tale, but soon thought better of it. The excitable fellow’s suspicions and dreads already were feeding on too much food. I slept.
* * *
The day was steaming hot. Aubrey complained that his paints ran on the palette. However, he was obviously complaining for the sake of talking, for he was no more interested in the daub he was perpetrating than I, and that was not at all. We were established on a little hump of ground overlooking Low Fennel and Aubrey’s composition on canvas took in the old tower which I had previously seen and the modern section which I now saw for the first time. This brick wing of the venerable pile of buildings had been carefully designed not to clash with the rest but it was plainly of recent date, and a materialistic eye, such as my own, could pick out the exterior indications of modern fittings within. A pair of telephone wires, branching off from the overland line up to the village, ended near what I took to be library windows in this modern wing. The grounds, to this side of the house, had been made as attractive as gardening skill could accomplish.
We had come on our expedition loaded like pack mules. Our equipment was principally painter’s gear and included a ridiculous garden parasol which was set up on the knoll to give the artist shade.
“Certainly, it’s ridiculous,” agreed Aubrey when I complained. “But it’s excellent advertising. I want to be noticed. Do you think we can be seen from the windows of Low Fennel?”
The question was redundant. The extravagant parasol would be seen and talked about for miles around. I pulled on my gloves. I was interested in a brambly gully which sloped down from this highland toward the bog behind the chateau.
“I’ll do a bit of self-advertising, too,” I informed him. “We meet at lunch hour and beg bread at Low Fennel; is that the programme?”
He nodded and I went about my affairs. I carried net and pail, but these tools of my much ridiculed profession remained idle. An interest other than scientific urged me on. I rebelled against it, but the sum of the extravagant talk I had heard in the last twenty-four hours was beginning to have its effect on the more unreliable and romantic sections of my brain. What was at the bottom of all this fantastic nonsense about an air-poisoned castle, prison for a London girl who cried desperately for rescue from something which, if it happened once again, would kill her? Scientific dispassionateness deserted me. I confess I stumbled down the gully, prey to an excitement which had nothing to do with the peculiar professional interests of Peter McAllister, zoologist.
The sides of the gully became steeper. It was turning in fact into a ravine. I had not judged the depression on this side of Low Fennel to be so deep. I approached a turn in the gorge and found myself face to face with—the master of Low Fennel!
I knew it was he the moment I saw him. For one thing, the man was London tailored and I knew that there was no other man of wealth living in the neighbourhood. For another, a portrait photograph of the landlord of the countryside hung in the parlour of the inn up in the village and I recognised the striking features at once. For a rough picture of the man as a whole, he was a fairly average sample of the genus, country gentleman. The tweeds were the suitable costume of the heavy-set man, strong-jawed and choleric, who first looked up in surprise and then advanced cordially toward me.
“You are the Londoner, the scientist staying at the inn?” He groped for and found my name. “Mr McAllister, isn’t it?” He did not wait for my affirmation, but continued. “You must forgive my not having dug you up earlier. Mrs Drurock and I planned to make you welcome, but some other matters intervened. You must forgive us—and come up for lunch. Today? Now? Certainly. Let’s make it now.”
“I have a guest down from London.” I embarked on Aubrey’s arranged lie, stammeringly. I felt at a disadvantage, exchanging for this courteous and candid hospitality my discourteous guile. “He’s a painter—Alfred Hume.”
He nodded sagely. I could not guess him. I never quite did. Whether he had us identified from the start, or whether he caught on to Aubrey later; this is a puzzle without solution. He never gave any sign. I could assume that my whopper had gone down with ease.
“Alfred Hume—” he echoed the name and professed to have heard it before. “Though I am not as well acquainted with our English artists as I should wish,” he apologised. “Your Mr Hume—do you think he will risk provincial hospitality—or is he a growling bear, like so many artists?”
“Not in the least,” I hastened to assure him. “He’s back on the hill, up there, and half-starved by this time, probably.”
“Shall I make the bid personally, or shall I go ahead and announce you to my wife?”
“Don’t bother to come with me,” I said. “I’ll bring him along. He’ll come like a lamb.”
Aubrey did. He packed up his parasol and kit and tossed them, together with the uncompleted masterpiece, under the nearest bush.
“We have to work this thing right.” He was voluble and dictatorial as we marched down the slope toward the gates of Low Fennel. “You have to get a word with Margery first and tell her not to let on. A word will do.
“So you think that fellow, Drurock, is a decent sort, do you? Well, you’re wrong. You may be a great judge of fauna, my dear fellow, but you’re no judge of men. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be on my best behaviour. I’m Alfred Hume, overcome with the honour of a bid to a gentleman’s home. I won’t forget. I may sell him a sketch before I’m through. Tell Margery to patronise me. We’ll wangle it so I do a portrait of her.”
* * *
<
br /> Margery was admirably quick in the emergency we presented to her. I succeeded in having my word with her alone and announced the arrival of Aubrey. She took my news calmly.
“I thought so,” she murmured. “I saw him from the window and I was sure it was he.” We were walking across the cobbled courtyard in front of the middle-house and Drurock was some fifty paces behind us, waiting for Aubrey, who had invented a pretext to run back for his kit on the hill.
Margery paused. To others, it might seem that she was pointing out to her guest the few scrubby flowers in the border before which we stood. She spoke without turning her face to me. Her deep, musical voice was husky with her suppressed vehemence.
“You must take him away again, Mr McAllister. Aubrey must not stay here,” she commanded.
“Why?”
She hesitated for an instant. “I can’t lend myself to what will surely seem to be the lowest sort of intrigue,” she said, and I knew she was giving the false answer.
“Of course, it isn’t anything of the kind,” I insisted. “I can vouch for Aubrey. He hasn’t turned up to capitalise any former relation.”
I was on thin ice and deemed it best to go straight to the truth. I told her how Aubrey had become the final recipient of her letter to her father. She trembled a bit. She spoke hastily, as we heard Drurock raise his voice down at the gate and Aubrey call out a reply.
“Because he’ll be in danger?” I asked.
My only answer was a fleeting nod. As I looked into the beautiful and disturbed face a conventional mask was drawn over it. The terror-stricken girl became the mistress of Low Fennel receiving her husband’s guests with just the proper mixture of warmth and reserve. It was beautifully done, and I silently applauded Aubrey, too, who was bending deferentially over his hostess’s hand.
A man appeared at a little door in the high wall which concealed the small formal garden before the new wing. Lunch was served. It was eaten on the brick terrace before the row of french-windows opening out on a comfortable living-room. We had come, Aubrey and I, full of indefinable expectations of we knew not what outward signs of the trouble afflicting this house. We were completely thrown off our guard by that lunch, an innocent country repast, served in charming surroundings, washed down with a palatable light wine.
The conversation around the table, starting at a low point of constraint, actually rose to something like gaiety before we rose from coffee that was poured at the table. It was the host who had accomplished the lightening of the common mood. He had talked almost incessantly, lightly, amiably. It was impossible to oppose glowering conspiratorial masks to all of this indefatigable good humour: impossible and scarcely politic. I responded first to our host’s geniality, but Aubrey had laughed aloud before the meal was over and even Margery dropped some of her defences of quiet reserve before the liqueur glasses were set down.
“And now,” suggested Drurock as we rose, “I think, my dear, you might show Mr Hume the old wing.” He patted Aubrey’s shoulder amicably. “As a painter, Hume, I think you’ll relish the old tower. One look at it and I think you’ll give in and have your stuff brought over from the inn.”
The proposal that we move into Low Fennel had been suggested passingly during lunch. This reiteration of it informed me that it was a genuine invitation. I consulted Aubrey with a glance and saw that he proposed to accept. I looked to Margery. She shook her head. The movement was next to imperceptible but definite. Drurock did not wait for his answer, but took my arm.
“As for the two of us, we’ll go poison ourselves with brandy and tobacco, as becomes our grey hairs. I think I can amuse our scientist with some of the fearsome local legends. Come along, McAllister. I’ll chill your blood with tales of ghosts and warm it with some pretty good Napoleon I’ve got hidden away.”
Drurock’s study was on the ground floor of the new wing. The outlook here was pleasant enough, with roses growing up to an open window which commanded the savage stretchy of badland behind the house. Seen from this pleasant point of vantage, the evil countryside was not without its wild appeal. The heat was really oppressive, and Drurock invited me to remove my coat, setting the example himself.
We were comfortably ensconced, my host taking his lolling ease on a hard leather couch, myself deep in a saddle-back chair, our glasses to hand.
“You know,” he began on a note of casual conversation, although I thought I sensed some latent emotion, an undertone. “You know, I think you might be amused by some of the tales of the district. You may already have heard some of them from the country-folk?”
He darted an inquisitive look at me.
“Oh, nothing that makes sense,” I replied, evasively.
He chuckled. “I can see you’ve heard the best one of all—that the Drurocks breathe out sulphur. Is that the way it goes?”
I coughed.
“Yes, that’s the tale,” he laughed aloud. “Rather, it’s only part of it.” He refilled his glass and tossed off the contents.
“You’ve heard of the slithering ghost of Low Fennel? No?” His voice settled down to a drone. “It’s an amusing legend. The strange part of it is that some rather level-headed people here-about will swear to its truth—have seen it, in fact.
“I first ran into the thing last year, when we came here and opened up the chateau. That was just after the marriage, you know. We got here to find the new wing still uncompleted. I was furious. The building should have been finished well before our arrival. It was a fine mess to walk into with a new bride. We had to put up in the inn. I called for the local contractor—a fellow named Seager—whom I had left in charge of the work. The answer to the call was the information that he was dead—died on the job. You know, I could never worm the particulars of his death out of these workmen. They shuffled and lied.
“All I could learn was that the local officials had made inquiry and had brought in a finding that the man died of natural causes. Therefore I couldn’t understand why there should be such an undercurrent of hard feeling about the matter. In short, I couldn’t get the building finished. No one would return to the job.”
“Someone did the work, though,” I prompted.
“Yes, John Ord. You may have run into him?”
“He’s been my guide around the district,” I said.
“And has told you some tall tales, likely! Well, old Ord rose to the bait of extra pay and came up with his wife and son, a big lout of a boy who could help his father hoist a beam. The two of them finished up the structural work and I had city workmen up for the decorating. When the work was done, I made Ord and his wife an offer—to stay on as caretakers, the year round. He took me on, and fixed the family quarters in the old tower, in that part which juts out and touches the new wing at the Tear, over on the badlands side. They stayed on until last September—a dam’ hot September it was, too. Then he rose up and gave notice.”
“On what grounds?”
“He told me a cock-and-bull story about his wife having seen an apparition, or some sort of fearsomely deformed creature of flesh and blood slithering along the walk outside her bedroom window. I read all the evidence—Ord’s story and his wife’s. She stuck to her ‘apparition’. She was circumstantial about it. The thing—whatever it was—had the body of a man—a nude man who wriggled along on the ground and showed a repulsively contorted face. Well, I came to a prosaic explanation of the whole affair. The ‘apparition’ was simply Ord himself, coming home in the night from some drunken spree, making a disgusting spectacle of himself and preferring now to subscribe to his wife’s superstitious fancies rather than confess his delinquency. I let them go.
“It’s one thing to have a story like that from a local but—”
“Ah,” I cut in, “you’ve had some sort of confirmation from a more credible source. Seen the thing yourself?”
“Thanks for not laughing at me,” he replied, “though I shouldn’t blame you if you concluded that I’d lapsed into the state of bigoted ignorance that rules the district
.
“About our apparition and its second appearance,” he resumed, with animation. “No, I did not see it myself. I just missed it. But Mrs Alson saw it as plainly as I see you. Mrs Alson is my wife’s maid. She’s Yorkshire. She’s placid. She’s literal. She’s a teetotaller. Her eyes are excellent. In short I accept her account of what she saw as if I had seen it myself. It was about two months ago.”
My brain made a swift calculation. The date he named would correspond to the period of the writing of Margery’s letter to her father. Once again I recalled the outstanding phrase: “If it happens once again, papa, it will kill me.” I listened to Drurock with sharpened attention.
“It was infernally hot that night,” he was saying.
I interrupted him. “That’s the second time you have mentioned the heat. I gather you trace some connection between the—phenomenon, and the thermometer.”
“Excellent!” He purred applause. “You are right up with me.” He approved me with a warm glance of something like affection.
“Let’s have Mrs Alson’s tale,” I said.
“She came down from her room on an upper floor about two a.m.,” he obliged. “She was suffocating, she told me later, and the idea came into her head to go down into the cellar and draw herself a glass of cider. She was coming down the stairs and she reached the bend. There is a landing—or a wider step—at this point, and on this step stood the man—or thing. He was coming up. Moonlight was streaming in through the oriel and he stood fully revealed. Mrs Alson suffered grave shock, both to her nerves and to her English sense of the proprieties. The creature was stark naked. It had the body of a man, she says. The face! Well, she can only describe it as that of a demon, a contorted and devilish caricature of a human face, the eyes crossed and glaring like a mad dog’s!
“Of course, she fainted on the spot. I really think she might have died there of shock if I hadn’t awakened about that hour. I awoke parched and dripping out of the kind of stupor that sleep becomes in excessive heat and I also was driven downstairs in search of something to drink. I nearly fell over Mrs Alson’s prostrate form. I got her into the room of one of the maids and we revived her. I sent the maid out while Mrs Alson whimpered her tale. That was a precaution. You’ll understand.”