The Terror: A Mystery Page 10

  CHAPTER X

  _The Child and the Moth_

  The little Roberts's ran across the road, up the path, and into thelighted room. Then they noticed that Johnnie had not followed them. Mrs.Roberts was doing something in the back kitchen, and Mr. Roberts hadgone out to the shed to bring in some sticks for the next morning'sfire. Mrs. Roberts heard the children run in and went on with her work.The children whispered to one another that Johnnie would "catch it" whentheir mother came out of the back room and found him missing; but theyexpected he would run in through the open door any minute. But six orseven, perhaps ten, minutes passed, and there was no Johnnie. Then thefather and mother came into the kitchen together, and saw that theirlittle boy was not there.

  They thought it was some small piece of mischief--that the two otherchildren had hidden the boy somewhere in the room: in the big cupboardperhaps.

  "What have you done with him then?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Come out, youlittle rascal, directly in a minute."

  There was no little rascal to come out, and Margaret Roberts, the girl,said that Johnnie had not come across the road with them: he must bestill playing all by himself by the hedge.

  "What did you let him stay like that for?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Can't Itrust you for two minutes together? Indeed to goodness, you are all ofyou more trouble than you are worth." She went to the open door:

  "Johnnie! Come you in directly, or you will be sorry for it. Johnnie!"

  The poor woman called at the door. She went out to the gate and calledthere:

  "Come you, little Johnnie. Come you, bachgen, there's a good boy. I dosee you hiding there."

  She thought he must be hiding in the shadow of the hedge, and that hewould come running and laughing--"he was always such a happy littlefellow"--to her across the road. But no little merry figure danced outof the gloom of the still, dark night; it was all silence.

  It was then, as the mother's heart began to chill, though she stillcalled cheerfully to the missing child, that the elder boy told howJohnnie had said there was something beautiful by the stile: "andperhaps he did climb over, and he is running now about the meadow, andhas lost his way."

  The father got his lantern then, and the whole family went crying andcalling about the meadow, promising cakes and sweets and a fine toy topoor Johnnie if he would come to them.

  They found the little body, under the ashgrove in the middle of thefield. He was quite still and dead, so still that a great moth hadsettled on his forehead, fluttering away when they lifted him up.

  Dr. Lewis heard this story. There was nothing to be done; little to besaid to these most unhappy people.

  "Take care of the two that you have left to you," said the doctor as hewent away. "Don't let them out of your sight if you can help it. It isdreadful times that we are living in."

  It is curious to record, that all through these dreadful times thesimple little "season" went through its accustomed course at Porth. Thewar and its consequences had somewhat thinned the numbers of the summervisitors; still a very fair contingent of them occupied the hotels andboarding-houses and lodging-houses and bathed from the old-fashionedmachines on one beach, or from the new-fashioned tents on the other, andsauntered in the sun, or lay stretched out in the shade under the treesthat grow down almost to the water's edge. Porth never toleratedEthiopians or shows of any kind on its sands, but "The Rockets" did verywell during that summer in their garden entertainment, given in thecastle grounds, and the fit-up companies that came to the Assembly Roomsare said to have paid their bills to a woman and to a man.

  Porth depends very largely on its midland and northern custom, custom ofa prosperous, well-established sort. People who think Llandudnoovercrowded and Colwyn Bay too raw and red and new, come year after yearto the placid old town in the southwest and delight in its peace; and asI say, they enjoyed themselves much as usual there in the summer of1915. Now and then they became conscious, as Mr. Merritt becameconscious, that they could not wander about quite in the old way; butthey accepted sentries and coast-watchers and people who politelypointed out the advantages of seeing the view from this point ratherthan from that as very necessary consequences of the dreadful war thatwas being waged; nay, as a Manchester man said, after having been turnedback from his favorite walk to Castell Coch, it was gratifying to thinkthat they were so well looked after.

  "So far as I can see," he added, "there's nothing to prevent a submarinefrom standing out there by Ynys Sant and landing half a dozen men in acollapsible boat in any of these little coves. And pretty fools weshould look, shouldn't we, with our throats cut on the sands; or carriedback to Germany in the submarine?" He tipped the coast-watcherhalf-a-crown.

  "That's right, lad," he said, "you give us the tip."

  Now here was a strange thing. The north-countryman had his thoughts onelusive submarines and German raiders; the watcher had simply receivedinstructions to keep people off the Castell Coch fields, without reasonassigned. And there can be no doubt that the authorities themselves,while they marked out the fields as in the "terror zone," gave theirorders in the dark and were themselves profoundly in the dark as to themanner of the slaughter that had been done there; for if they hadunderstood what had happened, they would have understood also that theirrestrictions were useless.

  The Manchester man was warned off his walk about ten days after JohnnieRoberts's death. The Watcher had been placed at his post because, thenight before, a young farmer had been found by his wife lying in thegrass close to the Castle, with no scar on him, nor any mark ofviolence, but stone dead.

  The wife of the dead man, Joseph Cradock, finding her husband lyingmotionless on the dewy turf, went white and stricken up the path to thevillage and got two men who bore the body to the farm. Lewis was sentfor, and knew, at once when he saw the dead man that he had perished inthe way that the little Roberts boy had perished--whatever that awfulway might be. Cradock had been asphyxiated; and here again there was nomark of a grip on the throat. It might have been a piece of work byBurke and Hare, the doctor reflected; a pitch plaster might have beenclapped over the man's mouth and nostrils and held there.

  Then a thought struck him; his brother-in-law had talked of a new kindof poison gas that was said to be used against the munition workers inthe Midlands: was it possible that the deaths of the man and the boywere due to some such instrument? He applied his tests but could find notrace of any gas having been employed. Carbonic acid gas? A man couldnot be killed with that in the open air; to be fatal that required aconfined space, such a position as the bottom of a huge vat or of awell.

  He did not know how Cradock had been killed; he confessed it to himself.He had been suffocated; that was all he could say.

  It seemed that the man had gone out at about half-past nine to lookafter some beasts. The field in which they were was about five minutes'walk from the house. He told his wife he would be back in a quarter ofan hour or twenty minutes. He did not return, and when he had been gonefor three-quarters of an hour Mrs. Cradock went out to look for him. Shewent into the field where the beasts were, and everything seemed allright, but there was no trace of Cradock. She called out; there was noanswer.

  Now the meadow in which the cattle were pastured is high ground; a hedgedivides it from the fields which fall gently down to the castle and thesea. Mrs. Cradock hardly seemed able to say why, having failed to findher husband among his beasts, she turned to the path which led toCastell Coch. She said at first that she had thought that one of theoxen might have broken through the hedge and strayed, and that Cradockhad perhaps gone after it. And then, correcting herself, she said:

  "There was that; and then there was something else that I could not makeout at all. It seemed to me that the hedge did look different fromusual. To be sure, things do look different at night, and there was abit of sea mist about, but somehow it did look odd to me, and I said tomyself, 'have I lost my way, then?'"

  She declared that the shape of the trees in the hedge appeared to havechanged, and besides, it had a loo
k "as if it was lighted up, somehow,"and so she went on towards the stile to see what all this could be, andwhen she came near everything was as usual. She looked over the stileand called and hoped to see her husband coming towards her or to hearhis voice; but there was no answer, and glancing down the path she saw,or thought she saw, some sort of brightness on the ground, "a dim sortof light like a bunch of glow-worms in a hedge-bank.

  "And so I climbed over the stile and went down the path, and the lightseemed to melt away; and there was my poor husband lying on his back,saying not a word to me when I spoke to him and touched him."

  * * * * *

  So for Lewis the terror blackened and became altogether intolerable, andothers, he perceived, felt as he did. He did not know, he never askedwhether the men at the club had heard of these deaths of the child andthe young farmer; but no one spoke of them. Indeed, the change wasevident; at the beginning of the terror men spoke of nothing else; nowit had become all too awful for ingenious chatter or labored andgrotesque theories. And Lewis had received a letter from hisbrother-in-law at Midlingham; it contained the sentence, "I am afraidFanny's health has not greatly benefited by her visit to Porth; thereare still several symptoms I don't at all like." And this told him, in aphraseology that the doctor and Merritt had agreed upon, that the terrorremained heavy in the Midland town.

  * * * * *

  It was soon after the death of Cradock that people began to tell strangetales of a sound that was to be heard of nights about the hills andvalleys to the northward of Porth. A man who had missed the last trainfrom Meiros and had been forced to tramp the ten miles between Meirosand Porth seems to have been the first to hear it. He said he had got tothe top of the hill by Tredonoc, somewhere between half-past ten andeleven, when he first noticed an odd noise that he could not make out atall; it was like a shout, a long, drawn-out, dismal wail coming from agreat way off, faint with distance. He stopped to listen, thinking atfirst that it might be owls hooting in the woods; but it was different,he said, from that: it was a long cry, and then there was silence andthen it began over again. He could make nothing of it, and feelingfrightened, he did not quite know of what, he walked on briskly and wasglad to see the lights of Porth station.

  He told his wife of this dismal sound that night, and she told theneighbors, and most of them thought that it was "all fancy"--or drink,or the owls after all. But the night after, two or three people, who hadbeen to some small merrymaking in a cottage just off the Meiros road,heard the sound as they were going home, soon after ten. They, too,described it as a long, wailing cry, indescribably dismal in thestillness of the autumn night; "like the ghost of a voice," said one;"as if it came up from the bottom of the earth," said another.