The Terror: A Mystery Read online

  CHAPTER II

  _Death in the Village_

  The child who was lost came from a lonely cottage that stands on theslope of a steep hillside called the Allt, or the height. The land aboutit is wild and ragged; here the growth of gorse and bracken, here amarshy hollow of reeds and rushes, marking the course of the stream fromsome hidden well, here thickets of dense and tangled undergrowth, theoutposts of the wood. Down through this broken and uneven ground a pathleads to the lane at the bottom of the valley; then the land rises againand swells up to the cliffs over the sea, about a quarter of a mileaway. The little girl, Gertrude Morgan, asked her mother if she might godown to the lane and pick the purple flowers--these were orchids--thatgrew there, and her mother gave her leave, telling her she must be sureto be back by tea-time, as there was apple-tart for tea.

  She never came back. It was supposed that she must have crossed the roadand gone to the cliff's edge, possibly in order to pick the sea-pinksthat were then in full blossom. She must have slipped, they said, andfallen into the sea, two hundred feet below. And, it may be said atonce, that there was no doubt some truth in this conjecture, though itstopped very far short of the whole truth. The child's body must havebeen carried out by the tide, for it was never found.

  The conjecture of a false step or of a fatal slide on the slippery turfthat slopes down to the rocks was accepted as being the only explanationpossible. People thought the accident a strange one because, as a rule,country children living by the cliffs and the sea become wary at anearly age, and Gertrude Morgan was almost ten years old. Still, as theneighbors said, "that's how it must have happened, and it's a greatpity, to be sure." But this would not do when in a week's time a strongyoung laborer failed to come to his cottage after the day's work. Hisbody was found on the rocks six or seven miles from the cliffs where thechild was supposed to have fallen; he was going home by a path that hehad used every night of his life for eight or nine years, that he usedof dark nights in perfect security, knowing every inch of it. The policeasked if he drank, but he was a teetotaler; if he were subject to fits,but he wasn't. And he was not murdered for his wealth, sinceagricultural laborers are not wealthy. It was only possible again totalk of slippery turf and a false step; but people began to befrightened. Then a woman was found with her neck broken at the bottom ofa disused quarry near Llanfihangel, in the middle of the county. The"false step" theory was eliminated here, for the quarry was guarded witha natural hedge of gorse bushes. One would have to struggle and fightthrough sharp thorns to destruction in such a place as this; and indeedthe gorse bushes were broken as if some one had rushed furiously throughthem, just above the place where the woman's body was found. And thiswas strange: there was a dead sheep lying beside her in the pit, as ifthe woman and the sheep together had been chased over the brim of thequarry. But chased by whom, or by what? And then there was a new form ofterror.

  This was in the region of the marshes under the mountain. A man and hisson, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, set out early one morning to work andnever reached the farm where they were bound. Their way skirted themarsh, but it was broad, firm and well metalled, and it had been raisedabout two feet above the bog. But when search was made in the evening ofthe same day Phillips and his son were found dead in the marsh, coveredwith black slime and pondweed. And they lay some ten yards from thepath, which, it would seem, they must have left deliberately. It wasuseless of course, to look for tracks in the black ooze, for if onethrew a big stone into it a few seconds removed all marks of thedisturbance. The men who found the two bodies beat about the verges andpurlieus of the marsh in hope of finding some trace of the murderers;they went to and fro over the rising ground where the black cattle weregrazing, they searched the alder thickets by the brook; but theydiscovered nothing.

  * * * * *

  Most horrible of all these horrors, perhaps, was the affair of theHighway, a lonely and unfrequented by-road that winds for many miles onhigh and lonely land. Here, a mile from any other dwelling, stands acottage on the edge of a dark wood. It was inhabited by a laborer namedWilliams, his wife, and their three children. One hot summer's evening,a man who had been doing a day's gardening at a rectory three or fourmiles away, passed the cottage, and stopped for a few minutes to chatwith Williams, the laborer, who was pottering about his garden, whilethe children were playing on the path by the door. The two talked oftheir neighbors and of the potatoes till Mrs. Williams appeared at thedoorway and said supper was ready, and Williams turned to go into thehouse. This was about eight o'clock, and in the ordinary course thefamily would have their supper and be in bed by nine, or by half-pastnine at latest. At ten o'clock that night the local doctor was drivinghome along the Highway. His horse shied violently and then stopped deadjust opposite the gate to the cottage. The doctor got down, frightenedat what he saw; and there on the roadway lay Williams, his wife, and thethree children, stone dead, all of them. Their skulls were battered inas if by some heavy iron instrument; their faces were beaten into apulp.