Here’s a Story of Creeping Horror
That Rises, Gradually, To a Powerful Climax
It’s a Story Not Easily Forgotten
The Phantom Farm House
By SEABURY QUINN
I HAD been at the new Braircliff Sanitarium nearly three weeks before I actually saw the house.
Every morning, as I lay abed after the nurse had taken my temperature, I wondered what was beyond the copse of fir and spruce at the turn of the road. The picture seemed incomplete without chimneys rising among the evergreens. I thought about it so much I finally convinced myself there really was a house in the wood. A house where people lived and worked and were happy.
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All during the long, trying days when I was learning to navigate a wheel-chair, I used to picture the house and the people who lived in it. There would be a father, I was sure; a stout, good-natured father, somewhat bald, who sat on the porch and smoked a cob pipe in the evening. And there was a mother, too; a waistless, plaid-skirted mother with hair smoothly parted over her forehead, who sat beside the father as he rocked and smoked, and who had a brown work-basket in her lap. She spread the stocking feet over her outstretched fingers and her vigilant needle spied out and closed every hole with a cunning no mechanical loom could rival.
Then there was a daughter. I was a little hazy in my conception of her; but I knew she was tall and slender as a hazel wand, and that her eyes were blue and wide and sympathetic.
Picturing the house and its people became a favorite pastime with me during the time I was acquiring the art of walking all over again. By the time I was able to trust my legs on the road I felt I knew my way to my vision-friends’ home as well as I knew the by-ways of my own parish; though I had as yet not set foot outside the sanitarium.
Oddly enough, I chose the evening for my first long stroll. It was unusually warm for September in Maine, and some of the sturdier of the convalescents had been playing tennis during the afternoon. After dinner they sat on the veranda, comparing notes on their respective cases of influenza, or matching experiences in appendicitis operations.
After building the house bit by bit from my imagination, as a child pieces together a picture puzzle, I should have been bitterly disappointed if the woods had proved empty; yet when I reached the turn of the road and found my dream house a reality, I was almost afraid. Bit for bit and part for part, it was as I had visualized it.
A long, rambling, comfortable-looking farmhouse it was, with a wide porch screened by vines, and a white-washed picket fence about the little clearing before it. There was a tumbledown gate in the fence, one of the kind that is held shut with a weighted chain. Looking closely, I saw the weight was a disused ploughshare. Leading from gate to porch was a path of flat stones, laid unevenly in the short grass, and bordered with a double row of clam shells. A lamp burned in the front room, sending out cheerful golden rays to meet the silver moonlight.
A strange, eerie sensation came over me as I stood there. Somehow, I felt I had seen that house before; many, many times before; yet I had never been in that part of Maine till I came to Briarcliff, nor had anyone ever described the place to me. Indeed, except for my idle dreams, I had had no intimation that there was a house in those pines at all.
"WHO lives in the house at the turn of the road?" I asked the fat man who roomed next to me.
He looked at me as blankly as if I had addressed him in Choctaw, then countered, "What road?"
"Why, the South road," I explained. "I mean the house in the pines—just beyond the curve, you know."
If such a thing had not been obviously absurd, I should have thought he looked frightened at my answer. Certainly his already prominent eyes started a bit further from his face.
"Nobody lives there," he assured me. "Nobody’s lived there for years. There isn't any house there."
I became angry. What right had this fellow to make my civil question the occasion for an ill-timed jest? "As you please," I replied. "Perhaps there isn't any house there for you; but I saw one there last night."
"My God!" he ejaculated, and hurried away as if I'd just told him I was infected with smallpox.
Later in the day I overheard a snatch of conversation between him and one of his acquaintances in the lounge.
"I tell you it's so," he was saying with great earnestness. "I thought it was all a lot of poppycock, myself; but that clergyman saw it last night. I'm going to pack my traps and get back to the city, and not waste any time about it, either."
"Rats!" his companion scoffed. "He must have been stringing you."
Turning to light a cigar, he caught sight of me. "Say, Mr. Weatherby," he called, "you didn't mean to tell my friend here that you really saw a house down by those pines last night, did you?"
"I certainly did," I answered, "and I tell you, too. There's nothing unusual about it, is there?"
"Is there?" he repeated. "Is there? Say, what'd it look like?"
I described it to him as well as I could, and his eyes grew as wide as those of a child hearing the story of Bluebeard.
"Well, I'll be a Chinaman's uncle!" he declared as I finished. "I sure will!"
"See here," I demanded. "What's all the mystery about that farmhouse? Why shouldn't I see it? It's there to be seen, isn't it?"
He gulped once or twice, as if there were something hot in his mouth, before he answered:
"Look here, Mr. Weatherby, I'm telling you this for your own good. You'd better stay in o' nights; and you'd better stay away from those pines in particular."
Nonplussed at this unsolicited advice, I was about to ask an explanation, when I detected the after-tang of whisky on his breath. I understood, then. I was being made the butt of a drunken joke by a pair of race course followers.
"I'm very much obliged, I'm sure;" I replied with dignity, "but if you don't mind, I'll choose my own comings and goings."
"Oh, go as far as you like—" he waved his arms wide in token of my complete free-agency—"go as far as you like. I'm going to New York."
And he did. The pair of them left the sanitarium that afternoon.
A SLIGHT recurrence of my illness held me housebound for several days after my conversation with the two sportively inclined gentlemen, and the next time I ventured out at night the moon had waxed to the full, pouring a flood of light upon the earth that rivaled mid-day. The minutest objects were as readily distinguished as they would have been before sunset; in fact, I remember comparing the evening to a silver-plated noon.
As I trudged along the road to the pine copse I was busy formulating plans for intruding into the family circle at the farmhouse; devising all manner of pious frauds by which to scrape acquaintance.
"Shall I feign having lost my way, and inquire direction to the sanitarium; or shall I ask if some mythical acquaintance, a John Squires, for instance, lives there?" I asked myself as I neared the turn of the road.
Fortunately for my conscience, all these subterfuges were unnecessary, for as I neared the whitewashed fence, a girl left the porch and walked quickly to the gate, where she stood gazing pensively along the moonlit road. It was almost as if she were coming to meet me, I thought, as I slackened my pace and assumed an air of deliberate casualness.
Almost abreast of her, I lowered my cadence still more, and looked directly at her. Then I knew why my conception of the girl who lived in that house had been misty and indistinct. For the same reason the venerable John had faltered in his description of the New Jerusalem until his vision in the Isle of Patmos.
From the smoothly parted hair above her wide, forget-me-not eyes, to the hem of her white cotton frock, she was as slender and lovely as a Rossetti saint; as wonderful to the eye as a Mediaeval poet's vision of his lost love in paradise. Her forehead, evenly framed in the beaten bronze of her hair, was wide and high, and startlingly white, and her brows were delicately penciled as if laid on by an artist with a camel's hair brush. The eyes themselves were sweet and clear as forest pools mirroring the September sky, and lifted a little at the corners, like an Oriental's, giving her face a quaint, exotic look in the midst of these Maine woods.
So slender was her figure that the swell of her bosom was barely perceptible under the light stuff of her dress, and, as she stood immobile in the nimbus of moon rays, the undulation of the line from her shoulders to ankles was what painters call a "curve of motion."
One hand rested lightly on the gate, finely cut as a bit of Italian sculpture, and scarcely less white than the limed wood supporting it. I noticed idly that the forefinger was somewhat longer than its fellows, and that the nails were almond shaped and very pink—almost red—as if they had been rouged and brightly polished.
No man can take stock of a woman thus, even in a cursory, fleeting glimpse, without her being aware of the inspection, and in the minute my eyes drank up her beauty, our glances crossed and held.
The look she gave back was as calm and unperturbed as though I had been non-existent; one might have thought I was an invisible wraith of the night; yet the faint suspicion of a flush quickening in her throat and cheeks told me she was neither unaware nor unappreciative of my scrutiny.
Mechanically, I raised my cap, and, wholly without conscious volition, I heard my own voice asking:
"May I trouble you for a drink from your well? I’m from the sanitarium—only a few days out of bed, in fact—and I fear I’ve overdone myself in my walk."
A smile flitted across her rather wide lips, quick and sympathetic as a mother’s response to her child’s request, as she swung the gate open for me.
"Surely—" she answered, and her voice had all the sweetness of the south wind soughing through her native pines—"surely you may drink at our well, and rest yourself, too—if you wish."
She preceded me up the path, quickening her pace as she neared the house, and running nimbly up the steps to the porch. From where I stood beside the old-fashioned well, fitted with windlass and bucket, I could hear the sound of whispering voices in earnest conversation. Hers I recognized, lowered though it was, by the flutelike purling of its tones; the other two were deeper, and, it seemed to me, hoarse and throaty. Somehow, odd as it seemed, there was a queer, canine note in them, dimly reminding me of the muttering of not too friendly dogs—such fractious growls I had heard while doing missionary duty in Alaska, when the savage, half-wolf malamutes were not fed promptly at the relay stations.
Her voice rose a thought higher, as if in argument, and I fancied I heard her whisper, "This one is mine, I tell you; mine. I’ll brook no interference. Go to your own hunting."
An instant more there was a reluctant assenting growl from the shadow of the vines curtaining the porch, and a light laugh from the girl as she descended the steps, swinging a bright tin cup in her hand. For a second she looked at me, as she sent the bucket plunging into the stone-curbed well; then she announced, in explanation:
"We’re great hunters here, you know. The season is just in, and Dad and I have the worst quarrels about whose game is whose."
She laughed in recollection of their argument, and I laughed with her. I had been quite a Nimrod as a boy, myself, and well I remembered the heated controversies as to whose charge of shot was responsible for some luckless bunny’s demise.
The well was very deep, and my breath was coming fast by the time I had helped her wind the bucket-rope upon the windlass; but the water was cold as only spring-fed well water can be. As she poured it from the bucket it shone almost like foam in the moonlight, and seemed to whisper with a half-human voice, instead of gurgling as other water does when poured.
I had drunk water in nearly every quarter of the globe; but never such water as that. Cold as the breath from a glacier: limpid as visualized air, it was yet so light and tasteless in substance that only the chill in my throat and the sight of the liquid in the cup told me that I was doing more than going through the motions of drinking.
"And now, will you rest?" she invited, as I finished my third draught. "We've an extra chair on the porch for you."
Behind the screen of vines I found her father and mother seated in the rays of the big kitchen lamp. They were just as I had expected to find them; plain, homely, sincere country folk, courteous in their reception and anxious to make a sick stranger welcome. Both were stout, with the comfortable stoutness of middle age and good health; but both had surprisingly slender hands. I noticed, too, that the same characteristic of an over-long forefinger was apparent in their hands as in their daughter’s, and that both their nails were trimmed to points and stained almost a brilliant red.
"My father, Mr. Squires;" the girl introduced, "and my mother, Mrs. Squires."
I could not repress a start. These people bore the very name I had casually thought to use when inquiring for some imaginary person. My lucky stars had surely guided me away from that attempt to scrape an acquaintance. What a figure I should have cut if I had actually asked for Mr. Squires!
Though I was not aware of it, my curious glance must have stayed longer on their reddened nails than I had intended, for Mrs. Squires looked deprecatingly at her hands. "We’ve all been turning in, putting up fox grapes"—she included her husband and daughter with a comprehensive gesture. "And the stain just won’t wash out; has to wear off, you know."
I spent, perhaps, two hours with my new-found friends, talking of everything from the best methods of potato culture to the surest way of landing a nine-pound bass. All three joined in the conversation and took a lively interest in the topics under discussion. After the vapid talk of the guests at the sanitarium, I found the simple, interested discourse of these country people as stimulating as wine, and when I left them it was with a hearty promise to renew my call at an early date.
"Better wait until after dark," Mr. Squires warned, "We’d be glad to see you any time; but we’re so busy these fall days, we haven’t much time for company."
I took the broad hint in the same friendly spirit it was given.
It must have grown chillier than I realized while I sat there, for my new friends’ hands were clay-cold when I took them in mine at parting.
Homeward bound, a whimsical thought struck me so suddenly I laughed aloud. There was something suggestive of the dog tribe about the Squires family, though I could not for the life of me say what it was. Even Mildred, the daughter, beautiful as she was, with her light eyes, her rather prominent nose and her somewhat wide mouth, reminded me in some vague way of a lovely silver collie I had owned as a boy.
I struck a tassel of dried leaves from a cluster of weeds with my walking stick as I smiled at the fanciful conceit. The legend of the werewolf—those horrible monsters, formed as men, but capable of assuming bestial shape at will, and killing and eating their fellows, was as old as mankind’s fear of the dark, but no mythology I had ever read contained a reference to dog-people.
Strange fancies strike us in the moonlight, sometimes.
SEPTEMBER ripened to October, and the moon, which had been as round and bright as an exchange-worn coin when I first visited the Squires house, waned as thin as a shaving from a silver-smith’s lathe.
I became a regular caller at the house in the pines. Indeed, I grew to look forward to my nightly visits with those homely folk as a welcome relief from the tediously gay companionship of the over-sophisticated people at the sanitarium.
My habit of slipping away shortly after dinner was the cause of considerable comment and no little speculation on the part of my fellow convalescents, some of whom set it down to the eccentricity which, to their minds, was the inevitable concomitant of a minister’s vocation, while others were frankly curious. Snatches of conversation I overheard now and then led me to believe that the objective of my strolls was the subject of wagering, and the guarded questions put to me in an effort to solve the mystery became more and more annoying.
I had no intention of taking any of them to the farmhouse with me. The Squires were my friends. Their cheerful talk and unassuming manners were as delightful a contrast to the atmosphere of the sanitarium as a breath of mountain balsam after the fetid air of a hothouse; but to the city-centered crowd at Briarcliff they would have been only the objects of less than half scornful patronage, the source of pitying amusement.
It was Miss Leahy who pushed the impudent curiosity further than any of the rest, however. One evening, as I was setting out, she met me at the gate and announced her intention of going with me.
"You must have found something dreadfully attractive to take you off every evening this way, Mr. Weatherby," she hazarded as she pursed her rather pretty, rouged lips at me and caught step with my walk. "We girls really can't let some little country lass take you away from us, you know. We simply can't."
I made no reply. It was scarcely possible to tell a pretty girl, even such a vain little flirt as Sara Leahy, to go home and mind her business. Yet that was just what I wanted to do. But I would not take her with me: to that I made up my mind. I would stop at the turn of the road, just out of sight of the farmhouse, and cut across the fields. If she wanted to accompany me on a cross-country hike in high-heeled slippers, she was welcome to do so.
Besides, she would tell the others that my wanderings were nothing more mysterious than nocturnal explorations of the nearby woods; which bit of misinformation would satisfy the busybodies at Briarcliff and relieve me of the espionage to which I was subjected, as well.
I smiled grimly to myself as I pictured her climbing over fences and ditches in her flimsy party frock and beaded pumps, and lengthened my stride toward the woods at the road's turn.
We marched to the limits of the field bordering the Squires' grove in silence, I thinking of the mild revenge I should soon wreak upon the pretty little busy-body at my side, Miss Leahy too intent on holding the pace I set to waste breath in conversation.
As we neared the woods she halted, an expression of worry, almost fear, coming over her face.
"I don't believe I'll go any farther," she announced.
"No?" I replied, a trifle sarcastically. "And is your curiosity so easily satisfied?"
"It's not that;" she turned half round, as if to retrace her steps, "I'm afraid of those woods."
"Indeed?" I queried. "And what is there to be afraid of? Bears, Indians, or wildcats? I've been through them several times without seeing anything terrifying." Now she had come this far, I was anxious to take her through the fields and underbrush.
"No-o," Miss Leahy answered, a nervous quaver in her voice, "I'm not afraid of anything like that; but—oh, I don't know what you call it. Pierre told me all about it the other day. Some kind of dreadful thing—loop—loop—something or other. It's a French word, and I can't remember it."
I was puzzled. Pierre Geronte was the ancient French-Canadian gardener at the sanitarium, and, like all doddering old men, would talk for hours to anyone who would listen. Also, like all habitants, he was full of the wild folklore his ancestors brought overseas with them generations ago.
"What did Pierre tell you?" I asked.
"Why, he said that years ago some terrible people lived in these woods. They had the only house for miles 'round; and travelers stopped there for the night, sometimes. But no stranger was ever seen to leave that place, once he went in. One night the farmers gathered about the house and burned it, with the family that lived there. When the embers had cooled down they made a search, and found nearly a dozen bodies buried in the cellar. That was why no one ever came away from that dreadful place.
"They took the murdered men to the cemetery and buried them; but they dumped the charred bodies of the murderers into graves in the barnyard, without even saying a prayer over them. And Pierre says—Oh, Look! Look!"
She broke off her recital of the old fellow's story, and pointed a trembling hand across the field to the edge of the woods. A second more and she shrank against me, clutching at my coat with fear-stiffened fingers and crying with excitement and terror.
I looked in the direction she indicated, myself a little startled by the abject fear that had taken such sudden hold on her.
Something white and ungainly was running diagonally across the field from us, skirting the margin of the woods and making for the meadow that adjoined the sanitarium pasture. A second glance told me it was a sheep: probably one of the flock kept to supply our table with fresh meat.
I was laughing at the strength of the superstition that could make the girl see a figure of horror in an innocent mutton that had strayed away from its fellows and was scared out of its silly wits, when something else attracted my attention.
Loping along in the trail of the fleeing sheep, somewhat to the rear and a little to each side, were two other animals. At first glance they appeared to be a pair of large collies; but as I looked more intently, I saw that these animals were like nothing I had ever seen before. They were much larger than any collie—nearly as high as St. Bernards—yet shaped in a general way like Alaskan sledge-dogs—huskies.
The farther one was considerably the larger of the two, and ran with a slight limp, as if one of its hind paws had been injured. As nearly as I could tell in the indifferent light, they were a rusty brown color, very thick-haired and unkempt in appearance. But the strangest thing about them was the fact that both were tailless, which gave them a terrifyingly grotesque look.
As they ran, a third form, similar to the other two in shape, but, smaller, slender as a grayhound, with much lighter hued fur, broke from the thicket of short brush edging the wood and took up the chase, emitting a series of short, sharp yelps.
"Sheep-killers," I murmured, half to myself. "Odd. I've never seen dogs like that before."
"They're not dogs," wailed Miss Leahy against my coat. "They're not dogs. Oh, Mr. Weatherby, let's go away. Please, please take me home."
She was rapidly becoming hysterical, and I had a difficult time with her on the trip back. She clung whimpering to me, and I had almost to carry her most of the way. By the time we reached the sanitarium, she was crying bitterly, shivering, as if with a chill, and went in without stopping to thank me for my assistance.
I turned and made for the Squires farm with all possible speed, hoping to get there before the family had gone to bed. But when I arrived the house was in darkness, and my knock at the door received no answer.
As I retraced my steps to the sanitarium I heard faintly, from the fields beyond the woods, the shrill, eerie cry of the sheep-killing dogs.
A TORRENT of rain held us marooned the next day. Miss Leahy was confined to her room, with a nurse in constant attendance and the house doctor making hourly calls. She was on the verge of a nervous collapse, he told me, crying with a persistence that bordered on hysteria. and responding to treatment very slowly.
An impromptu dance was organized in the great hall and half a dozen bridge tables set up in the library; but as I was skilled in neither of these rainy day diversions, I put on a waterproof and patrolled the veranda for exercise.
On my third or fourth trip around the house I ran into old Geronte shuffling across the porch, wagging his head and muttering portentiously to himself.
"See here, Pierre," I accosted him, "what sort of nonsense have you been telling Miss Leahy about those pine woods down the South road?"
The old fellow regarded me unwinkingly with his beady eyes, wrinkling his age-yellowed forehead for all the world like an elderly baboon inspecting a new sort of edible. "M’sieur goes out alone much at nights, n’est-ce-pas?" he asked, at length.
"Yes, Monsieur goes out alone much at night," I echoed, "but what Monsieur particularly desires to know is what sort of tales you have been telling Mademoiselle Leahy. Comprenez vous?"
The network of wrinkles about his lips multiplied as he smiled enigmatically, regarding me askance from the corners of his eyes.
"M’sieur is Anglaise," he replied. "He would not understand—or believe."
"Never mind what I’d believe," I retorted. "What is this story about murder and robbery being committed in those woods? Who were the murderers, and where did they live? Hein?"
For a few seconds he looked fixedly at me, chewing the cud of senility between his toothless gums, then, glancing carefully about, as if he feared being overheard, he tip-toed up to me and whispered:
"M’sieur mus’ stay indoors these nights. W’en the moon, she shine, yes; w’en she not show her face, no. There are evil things abroad at the dark of the moon, M’sieur. Even las’ night they keel t’ree of my bes’ sheep. Remembair, M’sieur, the loup-garou, he is out when the moon hide her light."
And with that he turned and left me; nor could I get another word from him save his cryptic warning, "Remembair, M’sieur; the loup-garou. Remembair."
In spite of my annoyance, I could not get rid of the unpleasant sensation the old man’s words left with me. "The loup-garou — werewolf — he had said, and to prove his goblin-wolf’s presence, he had cited the death of his three sheep.
As I paced the rain-washed porch I thought of the scene I had witnessed the night before, when the sheep-killers were at their work.
"Well," I reflected, "I’ve seen the loup-garou on his native heath at last. From causes as slight as this, no doubt, the horrible legend of the werewolf had sprung. Time was when all France quaked at the sound of the loup-garou’s hunting call and the bravest knights in Christendom trembled in their castles and crossed themselves fearfully because some renegade shepherd dog quested his prey in the night. On such a foundation are the legends of a people built.
Whistling a snatch from Pinafore and looking skyward in search of a patch of blue in the clouds, I felt a tug at my raincoat sleeve, such as a neglected terrier might give. It was Geronte again.
"M’sieur," he began in the same mysterious whisper, "the loup-garou is a verity, certainly. I, myself, have nevair seen him—" he paused to bless himself—"but my cousin, Baptiste, was once pursued by him. Yes.
"It was near the shrine of the good Sainte Anne that Baptiste lived. One night he was sent to fetch the curé for a dying woman. They rode fast through the trees, the curé and my cousin Baptiste, for it was at the dark of the moon, and the evil forest folk were abroad. And as they galloped, there came a loup-garou from the woods, with eyes as bright as hell-fire. It followed hard, this tailless hound from the devil’s kennel; but they reached the house before it, and the curé put his book, with the Holy Cross on its cover, at the doorstep. The loup-garou wailed under the windows like a child in pain until the sun rose; then it slunk back to the forest.
"When my cousin Baptiste and the curé came out, they found its hand marks in the soft earth around the door. Very like your hand, or mine, they were, M’sieur, save that the first finger was longer than the others."
"And did they find the loup-garou?" I asked, something of the old man’s earnestness communicated to me.
"Yes, M’sieur; but of course," he replied gravely.
"T'ree weeks before a stranger, drowned in the river, had been buried without the office of the Church. W’en they opened his grave they found his finger nails as red as blood, and sharp. Then they knew. The good curé read the burial office over him, and the poor soul that had been snatched away in sin slept peacefully at last."
He looked quizzically at me, as if speculating whether to tell me more; then, apparently fearing I would laugh at his outburst of confidence, started away toward the kitchen.
"Well, what else, Pierre?" I asked, feeling he had more to say.
"Non, non, non," he replied. "There is nothing more, M’sieur. I did but want M’sieur should know my own cousin, Baptiste Geronte, had seen the loup-garou with his very eyes."
"Hearsay evidence," I commented, as I went in to dinner.
During the rainy week that followed I chafed at my confinement like a privileged convict suddenly deprived of his liberties, and looked as wistfully down the South road as any prisoned gipsy ever gazed upon the open trail.
The quiet home circle at the farmhouse, the unforced conversation of the old folks, Mildred’s sweet companionship, all beckoned me with an almost irresistible force. For in this period of enforced separation I discovered what I had dimly suspected for some time. I loved Mildred Squires. And, loving her, I longed to tell her of it.
No lad intent on visiting his first sweetheart ever urged his feet more eagerly than I when, the curtains of rain at last drawn up, I hastened toward the house at the turn of the road.
As I hoped, yet hardly dared expect, Mildred was standing at the gate to meet me as I rounded the curve, and I yearned toward her like a humming bird seeking its nest.
She must have read my heart in my eyes, for her greeting smile was as tender as a mother’s as she bends above her babe.
"At last you have come, my friend," she said, putting out both hands in welcome. "I am very glad."
We walked silently up the path, her fingers still resting in mine, her face averted. At the steps she paused, a little embarrassment in her voice as she explained, "Father and mother are out: they have gone to a—meeting. But you will stay?"
"Surely,’’ I acquiesced. And to myself I admitted my gratitude for this chance of Mildred’s unalloyed company.
We talked but little that night. Mildred was strangely distrait, and, much as I longed to, I could not force a confession of my love from my lips. Once, in the midst of a long pause between our words, the cry of the sheep-killers came faintly to us, echoed across the fields and woods, and as the weird, shrill sound fell on our ears; she threw back her head, with something of the gesture of a hunting dog scenting its quarry.
Toward midnight she turned to me, a panic of fear having apparently laid hold of her.
"You must go," she exclaimed, rising and laying her hand on my shoulder.
"But your father and mother have not returned" I objected. "Won’t you let me stay until they get back?"
"Oh, no, no;" she answered, her agitation increasing. "You must go at once—please." She increased her pressure on my shoulder, almost as if to shove me from the porch.
Taken aback by her sudden desire to be rid of me, I was picking up my hat, when she uttered a stifled little scream and ran quickly to the edge of the porch, interposing herself between me and the yard. At the same moment I heard a muffled sound from the direction of the front gate, a sound like a growling and snarling of savage dogs.
I leaped forward, my first thought being that the sheep-killers I had seen the other night had strayed to the Squires place. Crazed with blood, I knew, they would be almost as dangerous to men as to sheep, and every nerve in my sickness-weakened body cried out to protect Mildred.
To my blank amazement, as I looked from the porch I beheld Mr. and Mrs. Squires walking sedately up the path, talking composedly together. There was no sign of the dogs or any other animals about.
As the elderly couple neared the porch I noticed that Mr. Squires walked with a pronounced limp, and that both their eyes shone very brightly in the moonlight, as though they were suffused with tears.
They greeted me pleasantly enough; but Mildred's anxiety seemed increased, rather than diminished, by their presence, and I took my leave after a brief exchange of civilities.
On my way back I looked intently in the woods bordering the road for some sign of the house of which Pierre had told Miss Leahy; but everywhere the pines grew as thickly as thought neither axe nor fire had ever disturbed them.
"Geronte is in his second childhood," I reflected, "and like an elder child, he loves to terrify his juniors with fearsome witch-tales."
Yet an uncomfortable feeling was with me till I saw the gleam of the sanitarium's lights across the fields; and as I walked toward them it seemed to me that more than once I heard the baying of the sheep-killers in the woods behind me.
A buzz of conversation, like the sibilant arguments of a cloud of swarming bees, greeted me as I descended the stairs to breakfast next morning.
It appeared that Ned, one of the pair of great mastiffs attached to the sanitarium, had been found dead before his kennel, his throat and brisket torn open and several gaping wounds in his flanks. Boris, his fellow, had been discovered whimpering and trembling in the extreme corner of the dog house, the embodiment of canine terror.
Speculation as to the animal responsible for the outrage was rife, and, as usual, it ran the gamut of possible and impossible surmises. Every sort of beast from a grizzly bear to a lion escaped from the circus was in turn indicted for the crime, only to have a complete alibi straightway established.
The only one having no suggestion to offer was old Geronte, who stood Sphinx-like in the outskirts of the crowd, smiling sardonically to himself and wagging his head sagely. As he caught sight of me he nodded sapiently, as if to include me in the joint tenancy to some weighty secret.
Presently he worked his way through the chattering group and whispered, "M'seiur, he was here last night—and with him was the other tailless one. Come and see."
Plucking me by the sleeve, he led me to the rear of the kennels, and, stooping, pointed to something in the moist earth. "You see?" he asked, as if a printed volume lay for my reading in the mud.
"I see that someone has been on his hands and knees here," I answered, inspecting the hand prints he indicated.
"Something," he corrected, as if reasoning with an obstinate child. "Does not M'sieur behol' that the first finger is the longest?"
"Which proves nothing," I defended. "There are many hands like that."
"Oh—yes?" he replied with that queer upward accent of his. "And where has M'sieur seen hands like that before?"
"Oh, many times," I assured him somewhat vaguely, for there was a catch at the back of my throat as I spoke. Try as I would, I could recall only three pairs of hands with that peculiarity.
His little black eyes rested steadily on me in an unwinking stare, and the corners of his mouth curved upward in a malicious grin. It seemed, almost, as if he found a grim pleasure in thus driving me into a corner.
"See here, Pierre," I began testily, equally annoyed at myself and him, "you know as well as I that the loup-garou is an old woman's tale. Someone was looking here for tracks, and left his own while doing it. If we look among the patients here we shall undoubtedly find a pair of hands to match these prints."
"God forbid!" he exclaimed, crossing himself, "That would be an evil day for us, M'sieur.
"Here, Bor-ees," he snapped his fingers to the surviving mastiff, "come and eat."
The huge beast came wallowing over to him with the ungainly gait of all heavily-muscled animals, stopping on his way to make a nasal investigation of my knees. Scarcely had his nose come into contact with my trousers when he leaped back, every hair in his mane and along his spine stiffly erect, every tooth in his great mouth bared in a savage snarl. But instead of the mastiff's fighting growl, he emitted only a low, frightened whine, as though he were facing some animal of greater power than himself, and knew his own weakness.
"Good heavens!" I cried, thoroughly terrified at the friendly brute's sudden hostility.
"Yes, M'sieur," Geronte cut in quickly, putting his hand on the dog's collar and leading him a few paces away. "It is well you should call upon the heavenly ones; for surely you have the odor of hell upon your clothes."
"What do you mean?" I demanded angrily. "How dare you—?"
He raised a thin hand deprecatingly. "M'sieur knows that he knows;" he replied evenly, "and what I, also know."
And leading Boris by the collar, he shuffled to the house.
Mildred was waiting for me at the gate that evening, and again her father and mother were absent at one of their meetings.
We walked silently up the path and seated ourselves on the porch steps, where the waning moon cast oblique rays through the pine branches.
I think Mildred felt the tension I was drawn to, for she talked trivialities with an almost feverish earnestness, stringing her sentences together, and changing her subjects as a Navajo rug weaver twists and breaks her threads.
At last I found an opening in the abattis of her small talk.
"Mildred," I said, very simply, for great emotions tear the ornaments from our speech, "I love you, and I want you for my wife. Will you marry me, Mildred?" I laid my hand on hers. It was cold as lifeless flesh, and seemed to shrink beneath my touch.
"Surely, dear, you must have read the love in my eyes," I urged, as she averted her face in silence. "Almost from the night I first saw you, I've loved you, dear. I—"
"O-o-h, don't" her interruption was a strangled moan, as if wrung from her by my words.
I leaned nearer her. "Don't you love me, Mildred?" I asked. As yet she had not denied it.
For a moment she trembled, as if a sudden chill had come on her, then, leaning to me, she clasped my shoulders in her arms, hiding her face against my jacket.
"John, John, you don’t know what you say," she whispered disjointedly, as though a sob had torn the words before they left her lips. Her breath was on my cheek, moist and cold as air from a vault.
I could feel the litheness of her through the thin stuff of her gown, and her body was as devoid of warmth as a dead thing.
"You’re cold," I told her, putting my arms shieldingly about her. "The night has chilled you."
A convulsive sob was her only answer.
"Mildred," I began again, putting my hand beneath her chin and lifting her face to mine, "tell me, dear, what is the matter?" I lowered my lips to hers.
With a cry that was half scream, half weeping, she thrust me suddenly from her, pressing her hands against my breast and lowering her head until her face was hidden between her outstretched arms. I, too, started back, for in the instant our lips were about to meet, hers had writhed back from her teeth, like a dog’s when he is about to spring, and a low, harsh noise, almost a growl, had risen in her throat.
"For God’s sake," she whispered hoarsely, agony in every note of her shaking voice, "never do that again! Oh, my dear, dear love, you don’t know how near to a horror worse than death you were."
"A — horror — worse — than — death?" I echoed dully, pressing her cold little hands in mine. "What do you mean, Mildred?"
"Loose my hands," she commanded with a quaint reversion to the speech of our ancestors, "and hear me.
"I do love you. I love you better than life. Better than death. I love you so I have overcome something stronger than the walls of the grave for your sake; but John, my very love, this is our last night together. We can never meet again. You must go, now, and not come back until tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning?" I repeated blankly. What wild talk was this?
Heedless of my interruption, she hurried on. "Tomorrow morning, just before the sun rises over those trees, you must be here, and have your prayer book with you."
I listened speechless, wondering which of us was mad.
"By that corncrib there," she waved a directing hand, "you will find three mounds. Stand beside them and read the office for the burial of the dead. Come quickly, and pause for nothing on the way. Look back for nothing; heed no sound from behind you. And for your own safety, come no sooner than to allow yourself the barest time to read your office."
Bewildered, I attempted to reason with the mad woman; begged her to explain this folly; but she refused all answer to my fervid queries, nor would she suffer me to touch her.
Finally, I rose to go. "You will do what I ask?" she implored.
"Certainly not," I answered firmly.
"John, John, have pity!" she cried, flinging herself to the earth before me and clasping my knees. "You say you love me. I only ask this one favor of you; only this. Please, for my sake, for the peace of the dead and the safety of the living, promise you will do this thing for me."
Shaken by her abject supplication, I promised, though I felt myself a figure in some grotesque nightmare as I did it.
"Oh, my love, my precious love," she wept, rising and taking both my hands. "At last I shall have peace, and you shall bring it to me.
"No," she forbade as I made to take her in my arms at parting. "The most I can give you, dear, is this," she held her icy hands against my lips. "It seems so little, dear; but oh! it is so much."
Like a drunkard in his cups I staggered along the South road, my thoughts gone wild with the strangeness of the play I had just acted.
Across the clearing came the howls of the sheep-killers, a sound I had grown used to of late. But tonight there was a deeper, fiercer timbre in their bay; a note that boded ill for man as well as beast. Louder and louder it swelled; it was rising from the field itself, now, drawing nearer and nearer the road.
I turned and looked. The great beasts I had seen pursuing the luckless sheep the other night were galloping toward me. A cold finger seemed traced down my spine; the scalp crept and tingled beneath my cap. There was no other object of their quest in sight. I was their elected prey.
My first thought was to turn and run; but a second’s reasoning told me this was worse than useless. Weakened with long illness, with an uphill road to the nearest. shelter, I should soon be run down.
No friendly tree offered asylum; my only hope was to stand and fight. Grasping my stick. I spread my feet, bracing myself against their charge.
And as I waited their onslaught, there came from the shadow of the pines the shriller, sharper cry of the third beast. Like the crest of a flying, windlashed wave, the slighter, silver-furred brute came speeding across the meadow, its ears laid back, its slender paws spurning the sod daintily. Almost, it seemed, as if the pale shadow of a cloud were racing toward me.
The thing dashed slantwise across the field, its flight converging on the line of the other two’s attack. Midway between me and them it paused; hairs bristling, limbs bent for a spring.
My eyes went wide with incredulity. It was standing in my defense.
All the savageness of the larger beasts’ hunting cry was echoed in the smaller creature’s bay, and with it a defiance that needed no interpretation.
The attackers paused in their rush; halted, and looked speculatively at my ally. They took a few tentative steps in my direction; and a fierce whine, almost an articulate curse, went up from the silver-haired beast. Slowly the tawny pair circled and trotted back to the woods.
I hurried toward the sanitarium, grasping my stick firmly in readiness for another attack. But no further cries came from the woods, and once, as I glanced back, I saw the light-haired beast trotting slowly in my wake, looking from right to left, as if to ward off danger.
Half an hour later I looked from my window toward the house in the pines. Far down the south road, its muzzle pointed to the moon, the bright-furred animal crouched and poured out a lament to the night. And its cry was like the wail of a child in pain.
FAR into the night I paced my room, like a condemned convict when the vigil of the death watch is on him. Reason and memory struggled for the mastery; one urging me to give over my wild act, the other bidding me obey my promise to Mildred.
Toward morning I dropped into a chair, exhausted with my objectless marching. I must have fallen asleep, for when I started up the stars were dimming in the zenith, and bands of slate, shading to amethyst slanted across the horizon.
A moment I paused, laughing cynically at my fool’s errand, then, seizing cap and book, I bolted down the stairs, and ran through the paling dawn to the house in the pines.
There was something ominous and terrifying in the two-toned pastel of the house that morning. Its windows stared at me with blank malevolence, like the half-closed eyes of one stricken dead in mortal sin. The little patches of hoar-frost on the lawn were like leprous spots on some unclean thing. From the trees behind the clearing an owl hooted mournfully, as if to say, "Beware, beware!" and the wind soughing through the black pine boughs echoed the refrain ceaselessly.
Three mounds, sunken and weedgrown, lay in the unkempt thicket behind the corncrib. I paused beside them, throwing off my cap and adjusting my stole hastily. Thumbing the pages to the committal service, I held the book close, that I might see the print through the morning shadows, and commenced: "I know that my redeemer liveth. . ."
Almost beside me, under the branches of the pines, there rose such a chorus of howls and yelps I nearly dropped my book. Like all the hounds in the kennels of hell, the sheep-killers clamored at me, rage and fear and mortal hatred in their cries. Through the bestial cadences, too, there seemed to run a human note; the sound of voices heard before beneath these very trees. Deep and throaty, and raging mad, two of the voices came to me, and, like the tremolo of a violin lightly played in an orchestra of brass, the shriller cry of a third beast sounded.
As the infernal hubbub rose at my back, I half turned to fly. Next instant I grasped my book more firmly and resumed my office, for like a beacon in the dark, Mildred’s words flashed on my memory : "Look back for nothing; heed no sound behind you."
Strangely, too, the din approached no nearer; but as though held by an invisible bar, stayed at the boundary of the clearing.
"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. . . deliver us from all our offenses. . . O, Lord, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. . ." and to such an accompaniment, surely, as no priest ever before chanted the office, I pressed through the brief service to the final Amen.
Tiny grouts of moisture stood out on my forehead, my breath struggled in my throat as I gasped out the last word. My nerves were frayed to shreds and my strength nearly gone as I let fall my book, and turned upon the beasts among the trees.
They were gone. Abruptly as it had begun, their clamor stopped, and only the rotting pine needles, lightly gilded by the morning sun, met my gaze. A light touch fell in the palm of my open hand, as if a pair of cool, sweet lips had laid a kiss there.
A vapor like swamp-fog enveloped me. The outbuildings, the old, stone-curbed well where I had drunk the night I first saw Mildred, the house itself—all seemed fading into mist and swirling away in the morning breeze.
"EH, EH, EH; but M’sieur will do himself an injury, sleeping on the wet earth!" Old Geronte bent over me, his arm beneath my shoulders. Behind him, great Boris, the mastiff, stood wagging his tail, regarding me with doggish good humor.
"Pierre," I muttered thickly, "how came you here?"
"This morning, going to my tasks, I saw M’sieur run down the road like a thing pursued. I followed quickly, for the woods hold terrors in the dark, M’sieur."
I looked toward the farmhouse. Only a pair of chimneys, rising stark and bare from a crumbling foundation were there. Fence, well, barn—all were gone, and in their place a thicket of sumac and briars, tangled and overgrown as though undisturbed for thirty years.
"The house, Pierre! Where is the house?" I croaked, sinking my fingers into his withered arm.
"'ouse?" he echoed. "Oh, but of course. There is no ’ouse here, M’sieur; nor has there been for years. This is an evil place, M’sieur; it is best we quit it, and that quickly. There be evil things that run by night—"
"No more," I answered, staggering toward the road, leaning heavily on him. "I brought them peace, Pierre."
He looked dubiously at the English prayer book I held. A Protestant clergyman is a thing of doubtful usefulness to the orthodox French-Canadian. Something of the heartsick misery in my face must have touched his kind old heart, for at last he relented, shaking his head pityingly and patting my shoulder gently, as one would soothe a sorrowing child.
"Per’aps, M’sieur," he conceded. "Per’aps; who shall say no? Love and sorrow are the purchase price of peace. Yes. Did not le bon Dieu so buy the peace of the world?"