by Unknown
* * *
At first the presence of the skull on the window-sill did not trouble me to the extent I had feared, for after all what harm could an old broken skull do anyone? To be sure, it was not particularly pleasant; but since it was the custom, I endeavoured to conquer my nervous fears of it.
Oliver, busily at work behind a closed door, and surrounded by sheets of manuscript, was absorbed and abstracted, however, from his look of satisfaction I knew the play was shaping well. Judging from its title – 'The Death-Dealing Skull' – it promised to be all that the lovers of thrills desired.
I was almost as much startled as relieved to discover no presence of Ann Skegg (that strange personality) anywhere about; the house was left entirely to ourselves. It occurred to me that possibly she had thought better of her original intention, and had after all repaired to the village – if such it could be termed – until we should have departed, and her home once more be left to its former undisturbed quiet and solitude. I did, indeed, make a tentative inquiry from one or two of the cottagers there, but I was stared at so queerly with such startled attention that I didn't pursue the subject further. Beyond eliciting the information that Witchesbane Farm hadn't been lived in for years as far as any of them knew – that the last tenant had committed suicide – and that neither love nor money would induce any of them to put so much as their noses inside it, I returned on the whole rather more perplexed than before...
Came russet October: the bare moorlands, sprent with gold and purple, bloomed anew under the spell of air crisped with the first frosts. I walked for miles each day, delighting in the exercise and the new-born beauty around me. However, the days passed; and November brought with it chill, sobbing rain and empty hours. Now I was confined to the house, and the doors were shut to the wind's will, the open sunshiny air, and the blessed freedom of the moors; dank and miserable, they stretched before the farm in an endless, pool-sodden waste... How dark it was now in the house always; even what little sun there was had no entrance; and the owls, always the owls to haunt me with a mournful crying...
Immersed in his work, Oliver noticed nothing of this; did not notice how slowly and imperceptibly, as I passed hour upon lonely hour in the musty-smelling parlour, the sight of the skull lying there in its accustomed place began to be more than I could stand, so that I could view it only with a sense of rather absurd horror... How its eye-holes, inky and horrible, bored into my own, its mouth grim and awry ... the broken, irregular teeth, the low, criminal-looking forehead... I both feared and loathed it. Always it appeared to grin evilly and maliciously at me, as though at some obscene jest...
A night came that had set in early. I was alone as if no one were in the house, so silent was the room, the farm. Outside, the wind pressed against the windows; an old tree in the yard adjoining creaked and groaned with a straining of leafless boughs, and tapped on the black panes with phantom fingers. The old parlour, seeming dingier and even more gloomy, was a place of shadows. The only light was that cast dimly by a hurricane lamp; beyond its narrow circle, into the dark corners of the room, I dared not look lest nameless things should stir and leap upon me. I trembled at every creak; awaiting with a dreadful anticipation for the very door to open silently towards me and disclose who knew what shocking spectacle; and when the long-drawn-out hoot of an owl echoed in a tree outside I sprang to my feet, shuddering violently.
In the jumping flame of the lamp, a shaft of light danced now here, now there, over the gruesome skull, lighting up the eyeholes and heightening the effect of sinister and sardonic amusement ... I must have partially lost control of myself, or at least of my better judgment... Before I quite realized what I was doing, despite its alarming reputation for resenting either its removal or any indignity done to it, I had seized the loathsome thing quickly and thrust it out of sight in a dark cupboard.
That night Oliver and I were awakened by a sound of weird, unearthly screaming, that droned on and on, low, unceasing, and maddeningly monotonous. There was something terrible, something mysteriously awful in the sound, as if dead hopes and utter despair were being voiced, as if numberless souls in torment were circling in the black air above the farm and were wailing and crying their anguish through the keyholes. I listened quailing in my bed, not daring to confess what I had done. Oliver declared it was wind, for such a storm was raging, of wind and thunder, as set all the doors banging and the windows rattling. Sleep was made impossible. A little towards dawn, secretly, I restored the skull to its place. Ann Skegg, whom – strangely and unexpectedly – I encountered in one of the flagged passages, gave me a look from which I fled; there was such malevolent amusement in it.
And now, from this time, Ann Skegg never left the house. It was as though she mistrusted me – as if she feared for the safety of the skull and constituted herself its guardian. She appeared even more vague, more attenuated than before, and even more silent. A subtle difference in her both perplexed and intimidated me: her jaw was never still, her whole person shook from either old age or extreme cold, and up the front of her gown, of an outmoded fashion with which I was familiar and yet could not place, extended a curious green stain...
The mere sight of that twisted, contorted figure with its sideways-dripping walk, its long, lanky hands, creeping – drifting, rather – about the passages and up the stairs, sent a shuddering dread through every nerve of my body. At this time, so great was the peculiar revulsion she inspired in me, in an effort to avoid her I tramped for miles over the soaked and desolate moors. I began to entertain the most appalling notions: to question whether, like Lazarus, one who has once been dead could return alive from the grave... The touch of her fingers was cold and slimy, while I feared her smile more than anything in the world... I tried to voice my nightmare horrors to Oliver, but unfortunately, alas, he could not, or would not, understand, regarding them merely as the fancies of hysteria.
The play was almost finished... Triumphantly the last scene was completed. He announced his intention of going up to London with a view to its early production.
I heard him with a thrill of unreasoning terror. "Let me come with you," I begged. "I cannot, and will not, stay here in this dreadful house alone!"
He demurred. "I shan't be gone more than a few days: a week at the most," he said. "Now be sensible: what on earth are you so alarmed about?"
I could only stammer out something inadequate like, "A big lonely house, the moors, and the owls, and – and Ann Skegg."
"What has poor misshapen Ann Skegg done?" he scoffed. "She can't help her peculiarities; the old thing is perfectly harmless, though I must admit rather a fearsome-looking object. No, no, Frances; you stay here. I'll be back in no time, and then we'll clear off – have a holiday – Switzerland, the Riviera: how about it? I feel in my bones the play will create a sensation."
He went. In the evening a few hesitating flakes of snow hovered in the air, which before long thickened into a blizzard, continuing all night. I awoke to find the farmhouse as a beleaguered town: snowdrifts standing halfway up the doors and up to the windowledges, the rooms filled with a strange unreal light, and the house encompassed about by that unearthly hush which snow inevitably brings. Roads – even hedges – had vanished, so that there was no means of getting out, and no possibility of holding communication with the outside world. There was only Ann Skegg for company ... and the skull grinning eternally in its place on the window-sill.
The time went by. I became aware of a sense of evil in the farmhouse; an atmosphere so particularly strong in the dismal, mouldy-smelling parlour that I could not only feel it but almost see it, and against which I struggled vainly and ineffectually. Dreams haunted me day and night; I grew perceptibly haggard and wild-eyed, jumping at every sound. Each day I became more terrified of the awful thing that was Ann Skegg; an aura of unspeakable malfeasance hung about her like a black cloud. I became convinced that whatever it was that animated that old wizened troll of a creature it was some unhallowed thing. A cold sweat would break u
pon my skin and my bones turn to water whenever she turned upon me her peculiar, flaccid-looking eyes in which gleamed a terrible and implacable hate. It was as if she resented my presence, as if she wished to be left alone with the ill-omened skull for which she appeared to cherish a ghastly affection. I would see her croon and gibber to it as if it could understand, and pass her scraggy fingers over its shiny surface almost with a caressing movement. Impossible and fantastic as it may be, it was as though there existed a secret understanding between them, an affinity... It made my flesh creep to watch.
Presently a horrible fascination took possession of me. I could not tear myself away from looking; I would creep along stealthily, to hold my breath in disgust and aversion. Ann Skegg caught me thus spying upon her one night of bitter cold. She turned suddenly, the cat beside her; and saw me standing there in the doorway. The cat, its fur rising, drew back its lips and snarled hideously and noiselessly. Ann Skegg began to move and came slowly towards me with that terrible see-saw movement, her chin mim-mumbling, her head thrust forward, her baleful eyes transfixing mine – the grimmest, most ghastly thing I had ever beheld. I stood like one turned to stone, rooted there as by some strange power, incapable of moving a hand, of uttering a cry. The blood ran cold in my veins, my teeth chattered, my heart stopped beating.
Then, all at once, I shrieked. Control slipped from me. As she came slowly on, so I edged round the wall; my desperate fingers searched and found a weapon. Screaming wildly, with all my strength I flung the sinister skull full at the oncoming thing and its snarling beast. It fell at their feet with a dull thud and broke into several pieces.
Ann Skegg suddenly laughed – the vilest, loathsome sound.
Then, and then only, I realized what I had done. Fear held me in a remorseless grip, while a hundred and one superstitious terrors marshalled themselves before me. Instances of other happenings when the skull had been disturbed, or been made to suffer any indignity, shocking enough, rose to my mind; but I, with incredible folly, had reduced it to nothing but a heap of splintered bone. Since it had never been known to fail to punish anyone who mistreated it, I awaited in shuddering anticipation for what was coming.
That night I stayed awake, too frightened either to sleep or lie down; but inexplicably enough, there was no repetition of that low unnerving screaming for which I was waiting: only an ominous silence. (It was now I enacted that scene all over again: saw myself throw the window wide and with unnatural strength send the remains of the skull hurtling through the darkness, to fall into the frozen pond that lay beyond. I heard, and shall never cease to hear, the small sound of splintering cat-ice cut the still air.)
Yet another night passed; and on the third an indescribably dreadful shrieking and wailing began, as if maddened fiends were howling aloud in pain and derision, and were trying to force a way in from the cold and darkness outside. The terrifying noises, shrieks and groans dwindled, died down, then rose again with tenfold velocity: there was in them this time a malevolence not present upon the first occasions.
My heart thump-thumping, I sat up in bed clutching the clothes, anathematizing the wicked stupidity that had thus released this horror upon my head. Somewhere about midnight, thinking perhaps the rush of cold air might alleviate the fever of terror that alternately chilled and heated my body, I got out of bed to open the window.
I shut it with a slam, near to fainting. There in the blackness, not twenty yards above me, I heard a strange, unholy commotion going on. Wind was racketing round the four quarters of the house: owls screeched; thunder pealed. Trees, opaque shadows, swayed and groaned; a dog, far off, howled mournfully as if someone were dead; the whole world of night unusually awake and agitated, A waning moon (until then obscured) suddenly showed a wan face behind the clouds as they scurried panic-stricken across the sky, and upon this dark shadows met and parted again with an awful riot of nocturnal clamour; finally, sweeping downwards to the ebon surface of the pond which glimmered a faint silver where the moonglints touched it, they rose with what looked like jagged pieces of bone in their hands, which they let fall again with maleficent laughter, shrieks and groans.
Suddenly, as I watched, one of the shadows that danced round and about the pool and reeled to the battering wind and the thunder peals, detached itself and rose slowly out of the pond and, dripping, passed through the door of the farmhouse... With my hair rising upon my scalp, my face bedewed with cold sweat, I recognized it for the fearsome creature I had known as Ann Skegg.
I knew now with a hideous certitude that she was dead; had always been dead: that she was the terrible Mally Ry herself, who by some devilish power still walked the earth – drowned, but living. Beyond question I knew, too, that I was there alone, to pit my puny strength against the powers of darkness which my action of destroying the skull had released. Those powers which had been in abeyance so long as the sinister relic was neither moved nor harmed, now manifested themselves with tenfold force.
Nightly the uncanny shrieks and groans went on, making sleep impossible, Abating during the day, the din was merely a low monotone that droned ceaselessly and monotonously in my ears, rising to howl and batter round the house on the approach of the dusk hours, Nightly the unholy play with the broken pieces of the skull was enacted over the dark water of the pool, and ever again that old twisted corpse, which was animated by the vengeful spirit of Mally Ry, rose dripping out of the pond, and vanished into the shut door of the farmhouse,
Meanwhile the snows still held, coming in foot after foot of unbroken whiteness; the lines of the farm were obliterated, the roads impassable. There was no sun, and no ceasing of the biting chill. With every hour my soul became more benumbed by fear, the scarlet thread of my brain stretched to breaking point.
The climax came suddenly, following on the heels of Oliver's return (the snow having at length melted sufficiently to allow him to cross the moors, with great difficulty). Upon seeing him ploughing toilsomely towards the farm I tottered to the door, overcome with relief. He exclaimed aloud in shocked surprise upon seeing my altered looks, the shadow of myself that I had become; the next moment I crumpled up in a heap at his feet.
"For God's sake, what is it? What has been happening here while I have been away?" he demanded, as once more consciousness returned, and I sat up weak and shaking.
The tale was soon gasped out; he listened in growing consternation, his face paling in spite of himself. "Perhaps it is not too late even now," he said at length, with an uncontrollable shiver. "The pond is not deep; I will fetch a lantern–"
He went to the door and threw it open. "What – what are you going to do?" I started up, full of a nameless apprehension.
"Do? Why, fish the skull up again, of course! We must restore it, bind the pieces together, propitiate the powers of darkness, at once, now–"
His tongue clove to his mouth, his body stiffened as slowly, step by step, through the door came drifting the horror that had once been Ann Skegg. There IT stood, its face a cadaverous blue, its long fingers cold with the cold of death, its eyes grown empty hollows, the rank odour of stagnant water about its clothes – and on its thumb a long black hook like the hook of a bat...
Oliver shrieked aloud in an agony of fear. The thing smiled – the most hideous, diabolical smile, and moved soundlessly on. Upon the floor, where its feet passed, were patches of green slime...
As we retreated, so the thing followed, advancing with a fearful malignity on its skull-like face. Hard pressed, stark with terror, and the icy cold that radiated from it, I knew now the last scene was to be played to its appointed end.
Slowly, foot by foot, we fell before it. Oliver, lamp in hand, his expression one of frozen steadfastness, holding that terrible and basilisk gaze, was the last thing I saw before I sank down insensible for the second time... When I came to, the room was empty; but a rush of cold air was blowing in through the open window. I ran out into the deepening night, crying, "Oliver! Oliver!" but there was no reply. The yard was deserted and empty;
already that eldritch drone was rising and skirling round the house. Slowly I re-entered, and sat in horrible suspense awaiting his return. Several times I went to the window and gazed into the darkness; once I fancied I heard a faint cry, but attributed it to overwrought nerves... I moved restlessly about the room, too frightened either to stay in that haunted house or brave the unknown perils without.
At last, finding the suspense unendurable, and clutching at all the remnants of my courage, I went out in search of him.
Wind, like water, swept cold and black; lightning, although it was mid-winter, cut the inky darkness of the heavens; the night was full of sound. Thunder peal upon thunder peal rumbled and rolled along the tors; the air was close and unnaturally oppressive. I called repeatedly, with a sense of impending calamity, "Oliver! Oh, Oliver, answer me, answer me!" but no sound of a replying voice came to my straining ears. I went on, fearful, stumbling.
And then there came, borne on the wind, a piercing cry, as if someone were in deadly danger.
"OLIVER! OLIVER!" I cried again, and then I saw – I saw a sight that has seared itself indelibly upon my eyeballs. In the eerie light of the hurricane lamp that lay fallen on its side on the snowy brink of the pond, the great curtain of the night beyond, I saw Oliver – beaten back till he stood in its very water, still keeping at bay that thing of ghastly horror. My heart hammered against my ribs, my breath came and went in great gasps as I stood there staring – so fearful was the sight, so dire my foreboding. In the waving, fluttering light of the lamp I saw with dread the Thing, advancing and receding, but always coming nearer, draw close with deadly purpose, one gaunt arm outstretched; I saw Oliver's white face thrown back, his eyes almost starting out of his head with fear and loathing, staring into the eyeholes where hers had been; finally, with a despairing gesture, he threw up his arms, covered his eyes, shrieked out: "Drown, witch, fiend, whatever you are; in the name of the Devil, drown!"