The Terror: A Mystery Read online

  CHAPTER VI

  _Mr. Remnant's Z Ray _

  Dr. Lewis was kept some time at the Garth. It was past twelve when hegot back to his house.

  He went quickly to the room that overlooked the garden and the sea andthrew open the French window and peered into the darkness. There, dimindeed against the dim sky but unmistakable, was the tall pine with itssparse branches, high above the dense growth of the ilex trees. Thestrange boughs which had amazed him had vanished; there was noappearance now of colors or of fires.

  He drew his chair up to the open window and sat there gazing andwondering far into the night, till brightness came upon the sea and sky,and the forms of the trees in the garden grew clear and evident. Hewent up to his bed at last filled with a great perplexity, still askingquestions to which there was no answer.

  The doctor did not say anything about the strange tree to Remnant. Whenthey next met, Lewis said that he had thought there was a man hidingamongst the bushes--this in explanation of that warning gesture he hadused, and of his going out into the garden and staring into the night.He concealed the truth because he dreaded the Remnant doctrine thatwould undoubtedly be produced; indeed, he hoped that he had heard thelast of the theory of the Z Ray. But Remnant firmly reopened thissubject.

  "We were interrupted just as I was putting my case to you," he said."And to sum it all up, it amounts to this: that the Huns have made oneof the great leaps of science. They are sending 'suggestions' (whichamount to irresistible commands) over here, and the persons affected areseized with suicidal or homicidal mania. The people who were killed byfalling over the cliffs or into the quarry probably committed suicide;and so with the man and boy who were found in the bog. As to the Highwaycase, you remember that Thomas Evans said that he stopped and talked toWilliams on the night of the murder. In my opinion Evans was themurderer. He came under the influence of the Ray, became a homicidalmaniac in an instant, snatched Williams's spade from his hand and killedhim and the others."

  "The bodies were found by me on the road."

  "It is possible that the first impact of the Ray produces violentnervous excitement, which would manifest itself externally. Williamsmight have called to his wife to come and see what was the matter withEvans. The children would naturally follow their mother. It seems to mesimple. And as for the animals--the horses, dogs, and so forth, they asI say, were no doubt panic stricken by the Ray, and hence driven tofrenzy."

  "Why should Evans have murdered Williams instead of Williams murderingEvans? Why should the impact of the Ray affect one and not the other?"

  "Why does one man react violently to a certain drug, while it makes noimpression on another man? Why is A able to drink a bottle of whisky andremain sober, while B is turned into something very like a lunatic afterhe has drunk three glasses?"

  "It is a question of idiosyncrasy," said the doctor.

  "Is idiosyncrasy Greek for 'I don't know'?" asked Remnant.

  "Not at all," said Lewis, smiling blandly. "I mean that in somediatheses whisky--as you have mentioned whisky--appears not to bepathogenic, or at all events not immediately pathogenic. In other cases,as you very justly observed, there seems to be a very marked cachexiaassociated with the exhibition of the spirit in question, even incomparatively small doses."

  Under this cloud of professional verbiage Lewis escaped from the Cluband from Remnant. He did not want to hear any more about that DreadfulRay, because he felt sure that the Ray was all nonsense. But askinghimself why he felt this certitude in the matter he had to confess thathe didn't know. An aeroplane, he reflected, was all nonsense before itwas made; and he remembered talking in the early nineties to a friend ofhis about the newly discovered X Rays. The friend laughed incredulously,evidently didn't believe a word of it, till Lewis told him that therewas an article on the subject in the current number of the _SaturdayReview_; whereupon the unbeliever said, "Oh, is that so? Oh, really. I_see_," and was converted on the X Ray faith on the spot. Lewis,remembering this talk, marveled at the strange processes of the humanmind, its illogical and yet all-compelling _ergos_, and wonderedwhether he himself was only waiting for an article on the Z Ray in the_Saturday Review_ to become a devout believer in the doctrine ofRemnant.

  But he wondered with far more fervor as to the extraordinary thing hehad seen in his own garden with his own eyes. The tree that changed allits shape for an hour or two of the night, the growth of strange boughs,the apparition of secret fires among them, the sparkling of emerald andruby lights: how could one fail to be afraid with great amazement at thethought of such a mystery?

  * * * * *

  Dr. Lewis's thoughts were distracted from the incredible adventure ofthe tree by the visit of his sister and her husband. Mr. and Mrs.Merritt lived in a well-known manufacturing town of the Midlands, whichwas now, of course, a center of munition work. On the day of theirarrival at Porth, Mrs. Merritt, who was tired after the long, hotjourney, went to bed early, and Merritt and Lewis went into the room bythe garden for their talk and tobacco. They spoke of the year that hadpassed since their last meeting, of the weary dragging of the war, offriends that had perished in it, of the hopelessness of an early endingof all this misery. Lewis said nothing of the terror that was on theland. One does not greet a tired man who is come to a quiet, sunny placefor relief from black smoke and work and worry with a tale of horror.Indeed, the doctor saw that his brother-in-law looked far from well. Andhe seemed "jumpy"; there was an occasional twitch of his mouth thatLewis did not like at all.

  "Well," said the doctor, after an interval of silence and port wine, "Iam glad to see you here again. Porth always suits you. I don't thinkyou're looking quite up to your usual form. But three weeks of Meirionair will do wonders."

  "Well, I hope it will," said the other. "I am not up to the mark.Things are not going well at Midlingham."

  "Business is all right, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Business is all right. But there are other things that are allwrong. We are living under a reign of terror. It comes to that."

  "What on earth do you mean?"

  "Well, I suppose I may tell you what I know. It's not much. I didn'tdare write it. But do you know that at every one of the munition worksin Midlingham and all about it there's a guard of soldiers with drawnbayonets and loaded rifles day and night? Men with bombs, too. Andmachine-guns at the big factories."

  "German spies?"

  "You don't want Lewis guns to fight spies with. Nor bombs. Nor a platoonof men. I woke up last night. It was the machine-gun at Benington's ArmyMotor Works. Firing like fury. And then bang! bang! bang! That was thehand bombs."

  "But what against?"

  "Nobody knows."

  "Nobody knows what is happening," Merritt repeated, and he went on todescribe the bewilderment and terror that hung like a cloud over thegreat industrial city in the Midlands, how the feeling of concealment,of some intolerable secret danger that must not be named, was worst ofall.

  "A young fellow I know," he said, "was on short leave the other day fromthe front, and he spent it with his people at Belmont--that's aboutfour miles out of Midlingham, you know. 'Thank God,' he said to me, 'Iam going back to-morrow. It's no good saying that the Wipers salient isnice, because it isn't. But it's a damned sight better than this. At thefront you know what you're up against anyhow.' At Midlingham everybodyhas the feeling that we're up against something awful and we don't knowwhat; it's that that makes people inclined to whisper. There's terrorin the air."

  Merritt made a sort of picture of the great town cowering in its fear ofan unknown danger.

  "People are afraid to go about alone at nights in the outskirts. Theymake up parties at the stations to go home together if it's anythinglike dark, or if there are any lonely bits on their way."

  "But why? I don't understand. What are they afraid of?"

  "Well, I told you about my being awakened up the other night with themachine-guns at the motor works rattling away, and the bombs explodingand making the most terri
ble noise. That sort of thing alarms one, youknow. It's only natural."

  "Indeed, it must be very terrifying. You mean, then, there is a generalnervousness about, a vague sort of apprehension that makes peopleinclined to herd together?"

  "There's that, and there's more. People have gone out that have nevercome back. There were a couple of men in the train to Holme, arguingabout the quickest way to get to Northend, a sort of outlying part ofHolme where they both lived. They argued all the way out of Midlingham,one saying that the high road was the quickest though it was the longestway. 'It's the quickest going because it's the cleanest going,' hesaid."

  "The other chap fancied a short cut across the fields, by the canal.'It's half the distance,' he kept on. 'Yes, if you don't lose your way,'said the other. Well, it appears they put an even half-crown on it, andeach was to try his own way when they got out of the train. It wasarranged that they were to meet at the 'Wagon' in Northend. 'I shall beat the "Wagon" first,' said the man who believed in the short cut, andwith that he climbed over the stile and made off across the fields. Itwasn't late enough to be really dark, and a lot of them thought hemight win the stakes. But he never turned up at the Wagon--or anywhereelse for the matter of that."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He was found lying on his back in the middle of a field--some way fromthe path. He was dead. The doctors said he'd-been suffocated. Nobodyknows how. Then there have been other cases. We whisper about them atMidlingham, but we're afraid to speak out."

  Lewis was ruminating all this profoundly. Terror in Meirion and terrorfar away in the heart of England; but at Midlingham, so far as he couldgather from these stories of soldiers on guard, of cracklingmachine-guns, it was a case of an organized attack on the munitioning ofthe army. He felt that he did not know enough to warrant his decidingthat the terror of Meirion and of Stratfordshire were one.

  Then Merritt began again:

  "There's a queer story going about, when the door's shut and thecurtain's drawn, that is, as to a place right out in the country overthe other side of Midlingham; on the opposite side to Dunwich. They'vebuilt one of the new factories out there, a great red brick town ofsheds they tell me it is, with a tremendous chimney. It's not beenfinished more than a month or six weeks. They plumped it down right inthe middle of the fields, by the line, and they're building huts for theworkers as fast as they can but up to the present the men are billetedall about, up and down the line.

  "About two hundred yards from this place there's an old footpath,leading from the station and the main road up to a small hamlet on thehillside. Part of the way this path goes by a pretty large wood, most ofit thick undergrowth. I should think there must be twenty acres of wood,more or less. As it happens, I used this path once long ago; and I cantell you it's a black place of nights.

  "A man had to go this way one night. He got along all right till hecame to the wood. And then he said his heart dropped out of his body. Itwas awful to hear the noises in that wood. Thousands of men were in it,he swears that. It was full of rustling, and pattering of feet trying togo dainty, and the crack of dead boughs lying on the ground as some onetrod on them, and swishing of the grass, and some sort of chatteringspeech going on, that sounded, so he said, as if the dead sat in theirbones and talked! He ran for his life, anyhow; across fields, overhedges, through brooks. He must have run, by his tale, ten miles out ofhis way before he got home to his wife, and beat at the door, and brokein, and bolted it behind him.".

  "There is something rather alarming about any wood at night," said Dr.Lewis.

  Merritt shrugged his shoulders.

  "People say that the Germans have landed, and that they are hiding inunderground places all over the country."