The Terror: A Mystery Page 12

  CHAPTER XII

  _The Letter of Wrath_

  It was a still September afternoon. No wind stirred in the hanging woodsthat were dark all about the ancient house of Treff Loyne; the onlysound in the dim air was the lowing of the cattle; they had wandered, itseemed, from the fields and had come in by the gate of the farmyard andstood there melancholy, as if they mourned for their dead master. Andthe horses; four great, heavy, patient-looking beasts they were theretoo, and in the lower field the sheep were standing, as if they waitedto be fed.

  "You would think they all knew there was something wrong," one of thesoldiers muttered to another. A pale sun showed for a moment andglittered on their bayonets. They were standing about the body of poor,dead Griffith, with a certain grimness growing on their faces andhardening there. Their corporal snapped something at them again; theywere quite ready. Lewis knelt down by the dead man and looked closely atthe great gaping wound in his side.

  "He's been dead a long time," he said. "A week, two weeks, perhaps. Hewas killed by some sharp pointed weapon. How about the family? How manyare there of them? I never attended them."

  "There was Griffith, and his wife, and his son Thomas and Mary Griffith,his daughter. And I do think there was a gentleman lodging with themthis summer."

  That was from one of the farmers. They all looked at one another, thisparty of rescue, who knew nothing of the danger that had smitten thishouse of quiet people, nothing of the peril which had brought them tothis pass of a farmyard with a dead man in it, and his beasts standingpatiently about him, as if they waited for the farmer to rise up andgive them their food. Then the party turned to the house. It was an old,sixteenth century building, with the singular round, "Flemish" chimneythat is characteristic of Meirion. The walls were snowy with whitewash,the windows were deeply set and stone mullioned, and a solid,stone-tiled porch sheltered the doorway from any winds that mightpenetrate to the hollow of that hidden valley. The windows were shuttight. There was no sign of any life or movement about the place. Theparty of men looked at one another, and the churchwarden amongst thefarmers, the sergeant of police, Lewis, and the corporal drew together.

  "What is it to goodness, doctor?" said the churchwarden.

  "I can tell you nothing at all--except that that poor man there has beenpierced to the heart," said Lewis.

  "Do you think they are inside and they will shoot us?" said anotherfarmer. He had no notion of what he meant by "they," and no one of themknew better than he. They did not know what the danger was, or where itmight strike them, or whether it was from without or from within. Theystared at the murdered man, and gazed dismally at one another.

  "Come!" said Lewis, "we must do something. We must get into the houseand see what is wrong."

  "Yes, but suppose they are at us while we are getting in," said thesergeant. "Where shall we be then, Doctor Lewis?"

  The corporal put one of his men by the gate at the top of the farmyard,another at the gate by the bottom of the farmyard, and told them tochallenge and shoot. The doctor and the rest opened the little gate ofthe front garden and went up to the porch and stood listening by thedoor. It was all dead silence. Lewis took an ash stick from one of thefarmers and beat heavily three times on the old, black, oaken doorstudded with antique nails.

  He struck three thundering blows, and then they all waited. There was noanswer from within. He beat again, and still silence. He shouted to thepeople within, but there was no answer. They all turned and looked atone another, that party of quest and rescue who knew not what theysought, what enemy they were to encounter. There was an iron ring on thedoor. Lewis turned it but the door stood fast; it was evidently barredand bolted. The sergeant of police called out to open, but again therewas no answer.

  They consulted together. There was nothing for it but to blow the dooropen, and some one of them called in a loud voice to anybody that mightbe within to stand away from the door, or they would be killed. And atthis very moment the yellow sheepdog came bounding up the yard from thewoods and licked their hands and fawned on them and barked joyfully.

  "Indeed now," said one of the farmers; "he did know that there wassomething amiss. A pity it was, Thomas Williams, that we did not followhim when he implored us last Sunday."

  The corporal motioned the rest of the party back, and they stood lookingfearfully about them at the entrance to the porch. The corporaldisengaged his bayonet and shot into the keyhole, calling out once morebefore he fired. He shot and shot again; so heavy and firm was theancient door, so stout its bolts and fastenings. At last he had to fireat the massive hinges, and then they all pushed together and the doorlurched open and fell forward. The corporal raised his left hand andstepped back a few paces. He hailed his two men at the top and bottom ofthe farmyard. They were all right, they said. And so the party climbedand struggled over the fallen door into the passage, and into thekitchen of the farmhouse.

  Young Griffith was lying dead before the hearth, before a dead fire ofwhite wood ashes. They went on towards the "parlor," and in the doorwayof the room was the body of the artist, Secretan, as if he had fallen intrying to get to the kitchen. Upstairs the two women, Mrs. Griffith andher daughter, a girl of eighteen, were lying together on the bed in thebig bedroom, clasped in each others' arms.

  They went about the house, searched the pantries, the back kitchen andthe cellars; there was no life in it.

  "Look!" said Dr. Lewis, when they came back to the big kitchen, "look!It is as if they had been besieged. Do you see that piece of bacon, halfgnawed through?"

  Then they found these pieces of bacon, cut from the sides on the kitchenwall, here and there about the house. There was no bread in the place,no milk, no water.

  "And," said one of the farmers, "they had the best water here in allMeirion. The well is down there in the wood; it is most famous water.The old people did use to call it Ffynnon Teilo; it was Saint Teilo'sWell, they did say."

  "They must have died of thirst," said Lewis. "They have been dead fordays and days."

  The group of men stood in the big kitchen and stared at one another, adreadful perplexity in their eyes. The dead were all about them, withinthe house and without it; and it was in vain to ask why they had diedthus. The old man had been killed with the piercing thrust of some sharpweapon; the rest had perished, it seemed probable, of thirst; but whatpossible enemy was this that besieged the farm and shut in itsinhabitants? There was no answer.

  The sergeant of police spoke of getting a cart and taking the bodiesinto Porth, and Dr. Lewis went into the parlor that Secretan had usedas a sitting-room, intending to gather any possessions or effects of thedead artist that he might find there. Half a dozen portfolios were piledup in one corner, there were some books on a side table, a fishing-rodand basket behind the door--that seemed all. No doubt there would beclothes and such matters upstairs, and Lewis was about to rejoin therest of the party in the kitchen, when he looked down at some scatteredpapers lying with the books on the side table. On one of the sheets heread to his astonishment the words: "Dr. James Lewis, Porth." This waswritten in a staggering trembling scrawl, and examining the other leaveshe saw that they were covered with writing.

  The table stood in a dark corner of the room, and Lewis gathered up thesheets of paper and took them to the window-ledge and began to read,amazed at certain phrases that had caught his eye. But the manuscriptwas in disorder; as if the dead man who had written it had not beenequal to the task of gathering the leaves into their proper sequence; itwas some time before the doctor had each page in its place. This was thestatement that he read, with ever-growing wonder, while a couple of thefarmers were harnessing one of the horses in the yard to a cart, and theothers were bringing down the dead women.

  * * * * *

  "I do not think that I can last much longer. We shared out the lastdrops of water a long time ago. I do not know how many days ago. We fallasleep and dream and walk about the house in our dreams, and I am oftennot sure whether I am awake or
still dreaming, and so the days andnights are confused in my mind. I awoke not long ago, at least I supposeI awoke and found I was lying in the passage. I had a confused feelingthat I had had an awful dream which seemed horribly real, and I thoughtfor a moment what a relief it was to know that it wasn't true, whateverit might have been. I made up my mind to have a good long walk tofreshen myself up, and then I looked round and found that I had beenlying on the stones of the passage; and it all came back to me. Therewas no walk for me.

  "I have not seen Mrs. Griffith or her daughter for a long while. Theysaid they were going upstairs to have a rest. I heard them moving aboutthe room at first, now I can hear nothing. Young Griffith is lying inthe kitchen, before the hearth. He was talking to himself about theharvest and the weather when I last went into the kitchen. He didn'tseem to know I was there, as he went gabbling on in a low voice veryfast, and then he began to call the dog, Tiger.

  "There seems no hope for any of us. We are in the dream of death...."

  Here the manuscript became unintelligible for half a dozen lines.Secretan had written the words "dream of death" three or four timesover. He had begun a fresh word and had scratched it out and thenfollowed strange, unmeaning characters, the script, as Lewis thought, ofa terrible language. And then the writing became clear, clearer than itwas at the beginning of the manuscript, and the sentences flowed moreeasily, as if the cloud on Secretan's mind had lifted for a while. Therewas a fresh start, as it were, and the writer began again, in ordinaryletter-form:

  "DEAR LEWIS,

  "I hope you will excuse all this confusion and wandering. I intended tobegin a proper letter to you, and now I find all that stuff that youhave been reading--if this ever gets into your hands. I have not theenergy even to tear it up. If you read it you will know to what a sadpass I had come when it was written. It looks like delirium or a baddream, and even now, though my mind seems to have cleared up a gooddeal, I have to hold myself in tightly to be sure that the experiencesof the last days in this awful place are true, real things, not a longnightmare from which I shall wake up presently and find myself in myrooms at Chelsea.

  "I have said of what I am writing, 'if it ever gets into your hands,'and I am not at all sure that it ever will. If what is happening here ishappening everywhere else, then I suppose, the world is coming to anend. I cannot understand it, even now I can hardly believe it. I knowthat I dream such wild dreams and walk in such mad fancies that I haveto look out and look about me to make sure that I am not still dreaming.

  "Do you remember that talk we had about two months ago when I dined withyou? We got on, somehow or other, to space and time, and I think weagreed that as soon as one tried to reason about space and time one waslanded in a maze of contradictions. You said something to the effectthat it was very curious but this was just like a dream. 'A man willsometimes wake himself from his crazy dream,' you said, 'by realizingthat he is thinking nonsense.' And we both wondered whether thesecontradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time andspace may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, andthe moon and the stars bits of nightmare. I have often thought over thatlately. I kick at the walls as Dr. Johnson kicked at the stone, to makesure that the things about me are there. And then that other questiongets into my mind--is the world really coming to an end, the world as wehave always known it; and what on earth will this new world be like? Ican't imagine it; it's a story like Noah's Ark and the Flood. Peopleused to talk about the end of the world and fire, but no one everthought of anything like this.

  "And then there's another thing that bothers me. Now and then I wonderwhether we are not all mad together in this house. In spite of what Isee and know, or, perhaps, I should say, because what I see and know isso impossible, I wonder whether we are not all suffering from adelusion. Perhaps we are our own gaolers, and we are really free to goout and live. Perhaps what we think we see is not there at all. Ibelieve I have heard of whole families going mad together, and I mayhave come under the influence of the house, having lived in it for thelast four months. I know there have been people who have been kept aliveby their keepers forcing food down their throats, because they are quitesure that their throats are closed, so that they feel they are unable toswallow a morsel. I wonder now and then whether we are all like this inTreff Loyne; yet in my heart I feel sure that it is not so.

  "Still, I do not want to leave a madman's letter behind me, and so Iwill not tell you the full story of what I have seen, or believe I haveseen. If I am a sane man you will be able to fill in the blanks foryourself from your own knowledge. If I am mad, burn the letter and saynothing about it. Or perhaps--and indeed, I am not quite sure--I maywake up and hear Mary Griffith calling to me in her cheerful sing-songthat breakfast will be ready 'directly, in a minute,' and I shall enjoyit and walk over to Porth and tell you the queerest, most horrible dreamthat a man ever had, and ask what I had better take.

  "I think that it was on a Tuesday that we first noticed that there wassomething queer about, only at the time we didn't know that there wasanything really queer in what we noticed. I had been out since nineo'clock in the morning trying to paint the marsh, and I found it a verytough job. I came home about five or six o'clock and found the family atTreff Loyne laughing at old Tiger, the sheepdog. He was making shortruns from the farmyard to the door of the house, barking, with quick,short yelps. Mrs. Griffith and Miss Griffith were standing by theporch, and the dog would go to them, look in their faces, and then runup the farmyard to the gate, and then look back with that eager yelpingbark, as if he were waiting for the women to follow him. Then, again andagain, he ran up to them and tugged at their skirts as if he would pullthem by main force away from the house.

  "Then the men came home from the fields and he repeated thisperformance. The dog was running all up and down the farmyard, in andout of the barn and sheds yelping, barking; and always with that eagerrun to the person he addressed, and running away directly, and lookingback as, if to see whether we were following him. When the house doorwas shut and they all sat down to supper, he would give them no peace,till at last they turned him out of doors. And then he sat in the porchand scratched at the door with his claws, barking all the while. Whenthe daughter brought in my meal, she said: 'We can't think what is cometo old Tiger, and indeed, he has always been a good dog, too.'

  "The dog barked and yelped and whined and scratched at the door allthrough the evening. They let him in once, but he seemed to have becomequite frantic. He ran up to one member of the family after another; hiseyes were bloodshot and his mouth was foaming, and he tore at theirclothes till they drove him out again into the darkness. Then he brokeinto a long, lamentable howl of anguish, and we heard no more of him."