Gordon Grice's Blog, page 28

Tiger Fish Eat Flying Birds

Thanks to Steve V. for this one: Scientists have documented tiger fish leaping out of the water to eat birds on the wing. 


This African Fish Can Catch and Eat Flying Birds | Popular Science:

My Latest Publication: A Stiller Ground | This Land Press

This Land publishes my most personal piece of nature writing. 

A Stiller Ground | This Land Press: "You can build the coffin if you want. It might make you feel better."

The Top Ten Scary Stories of All Time: Number 6

A
haunted house, a dead nun, and a peculiar suggestion in a railway car. . .







THURNLEY ABBEY

by Perceval Landon











Three years ago I was on my way out
to the East, and as an extra day in London
was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail-train to Brindisi instead of the
usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long
forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across
the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or Osiris; but there
is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and
unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra
day and a half in London before I say goodbye to her for one of my longer
tramps. This time--it was early, I remember, in the shipping season, probably
about the beginning of September--there were few passengers, and I had a
compartment in the P. & O. Indian express to myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I
watched the blue waves dimpling the Adriatic,
and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the plain white towns, with their
flat roofs and their bold "duomos," and the grey-green gnarled olive
orchards of Apulia. The journey was just like
any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we decently could.
We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed
novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there
that I met Alastair Colvin.




Colvin was a man of middle height,
with a resolute, well-cut jaw; his hair was turning grey; his moustache was
sun-whitened, otherwise he was clean-shaven--obviously a gentleman, and
obviously also a pre-occupied man. He had no great wit. When spoken to, he made
the usual remarks in the right way, and I dare say he refrained from banalities
only because he spoke less than the rest of us; most of the time he buried
himself in the Wagon-lit Company's time-table, but seemed unable to concentrate
his attention on any one page of it. He found that I had been over the Siberian
railway, and for a quarter of an hour he discussed it with me. Then he lost
interest in it, and rose to go to his compartment. But he came back again very
soon, and seemed glad to pick up the conversation again.




Of course this did not seem to me
to be of any importance. Most travellers by train become a trifle infirm of
purpose after thirty-six hours' rattling. But Colvin's restless way I noticed
in somewhat marked contrast with the man's personal importance and dignity;
especially ill suited was it to his finely made large hand with strong, broad,
regular nails and its few lines. As I looked at his hand I noticed a long,
deep, and recent scar of ragged shape. However, it is absurd to pretend that I
thought anything was unusual. I went off at five o'clock on Sunday afternoon to sleep away the hour or
two that had still to be got through before we arrived at Brindisi.




Once there, we few passengers
transhipped our hand baggage, verified our berths--there were only a score of
us in all--and then, after an aimless ramble of half an hour in Brindisi, we returned to
dinner at the Httel International, not wholly surprised that the town had been
the death of Virgil. If I remember rightly, there is a gaily painted hall at
the International--I do not wish to advertise anything, but there is no other
place in Brindisi
at which to await the coming of the mails--and after dinner I was looking with
awe at a trellis overgrown with blue vines, when Colvin moved across the room
to my table. He picked up Il Secolo, but almost immediately gave
up the pretence of reading it. He turned squarely to me and said:




"Would you do me a
favour?"




One doesn't do favours to stray
acquaintances on Continental expresses without knowing something more of them
than I knew of Colvin. But I smiled in a noncommittal way, and asked him what
he wanted. I wasn't wrong in part of my estimate of him; he said bluntly:




"Will you let me sleep in your
cabin on the Osiris?" And he coloured a little as he said it.




Now, there is nothing more tiresome
than having to put up with a stable-companion at sea, and I asked him rather
pointedly:




"Surely there is room for all
of us?" I thought that perhaps he had been partnered off with some mangy
Levantine, and wanted to escape from him at all hazards.




Colvin, still somewhat confused,
said: "Yes; I am in a cabin by myself. But you would do me the greatest
favour if you would allow me to share yours."




This was all very well, but,
besides the fact that I always sleep better when alone, there had been some
recent thefts on board English liners, and I hesitated, frank and honest and
self-conscious as Colvin was. Just then the mail-train came in with a clatter
and a rush of escaping steam, and I asked him to see me again about it on the
boat when we started. He answered me curtly--I suppose he saw the mistrust in
my manner--"I am a member of White's. I smiled to myself as he said it,
but I remembered in a moment that the man--if he were really what he claimed to
be, and I make no doubt that he was--must have been sorely put to it before he
urged the fact as a guarantee of his respectability to a total stranger at a
Brindisi hotel.




That evening, as we cleared the red
and green harbour-lights of Brindisi,
Colvin explained. This is his story in his own words.




* 




"When I was travelling in India some
years ago, I made the acquaintance of a youngish man in the Woods and Forests.
We camped out together for a week, and I found him a pleasant companion. John
Broughton was a light-hearted soul when off duty, but a steady and capable man
in any of the small emergencies that continually arise in that department. He
was liked and trusted by the natives, and though a trifle over-pleased with
himself when he escaped to civilisation at Simla or Calcutta, Broughton's future was well assured
in Government service, when a fair-sized estate was unexpectedly left to him,
and he joyfully shook the dust of the Indian plains from his feet and returned
to England.
For five years he drifted about London.
I saw him now and then. We dined together about every eighteen months, and I
could trace pretty exactly the gradual sickening of Broughton with a merely
idle life. He then set out on a couple of long voyages, returned as restless as
before, and at last told me that he had decided to marry and settle down at his
place, Thurnley Abbey, which had long been empty. He spoke about looking after
the property and standing for his constituency in the usual way. Vivien Wilde,
his fiancée, had, I suppose, begun to take him in hand. She was a pretty
girl with a deal of fair hair and rather an exclusive manner; deeply religious
in a narrow school, she was still kindly and high-spirited, and I thought that
Broughton was in luck. He was quite happy and full of information about his
future.




"Among other things, I asked
him about Thurnley Abbey. He confessed that he hardly knew the place. The last
tenant, a man called Clarke, had lived in one wing for fifteen years and seen
no one. He had been a miser and a hermit. It was the rarest thing for a light
to be seen at the Abbey after dark. Only the barest necessities of life were
ordered, and the tenant himself received them at the side-door. His one
half-caste manservant, after a month's stay in the house, had abruptly left
without warning, and had returned to the Southern States. One thing Broughton
complained bitterly about: Clarke had wilfully spread the rumour among the
villagers that the Abbey was haunted, and had even condescended to play childish
tricks with spirit-lamps and salt in order to scare trespassers away at night.
He had been detected in the act of this tomfoolery, but the story spread, and
no one, said Broughton, would venture near the house except in broad daylight.
The hauntedness of Thurnley Abbey was now, he said with a grin, part of the
gospel of the countryside, but he and his young wife were going to change all
that. Would I propose myself any time I liked? I, of course, said I would, and
equally, of course, intended to do nothing of the sort without a definite
invitation.




"The house was put in thorough
repair, though not a stick of the old furniture and tapestry were removed.
Floors and ceilings were relaid: the roof was made watertight again, and the
dust of half a century was scoured out. He showed me some photographs of the
place. It was called an Abbey, though as a matter of fact it had been only the
infirmary of the long-vanished Abbey of Clouster some five miles away. The
larger part of the building remained as it had been in pre-Reformation days,
but a wing had been added in Jacobean times, and that part of the house had
been kept in something like repair by Mr. Clarke. He had in both the ground and
first floors set a heavy timber door, strongly barred with iron, in the passage
between the earlier and the Jacobean parts of the house, and had entirely
neglected the former. So there had been a good deal of work to be done.




"Broughton, whom I saw in London two or three times
about this period, made a deal of fun over the positive refusal of the workmen
to remain after sundown. Even after the electric light had been put into every
room, nothing would induce them to remain, though, as Broughton observed,
electric light was death on ghosts. The legend of the Abbey's ghosts had gone
far and wide, and the men would take no risks. They went home in batches of
five and six, and even during the daylight hours there was an inordinate amount
of talking between one and another, if either happened to be out of sight of
his companion. On the whole, though nothing of any sort or kind had been
conjured up even by their heated imaginations during their five months' work
upon the Abbey, the belief in the ghosts was rather strengthened than otherwise
in Thurnley because of the men's confessed nervousness, and local tradition
declared itself in favour of the ghost of an immured nun.




"'Good old nun!' said
Broughton.




"I asked him whether in
general he believed in the possibility of ghosts, and, rather to my surprise,
he said that he couldn't say he entirely disbelieved in them. A man in India had told
him one morning in camp that he believed that his mother was dead in England, as her
vision had come to his tent the night before. He had not been alarmed, but had
said nothing, and the figure vanished again. As a matter of fact, the next
possible dak-walla brought on a telegram announcing the mother's death. 'There
the thing was,' said Broughton. But at Thurnley he was practical enough. He
roundly cursed the idiotic selfishness of Clarke, whose silly antics had caused
all the inconvenience. At the same time, he couldn't refuse to sympathise to
some extent with the ignorant workmen. 'My own idea,' said he, 'is that if a
ghost ever does come in one's way, one ought to speak to it.'




"I agreed. Little as I knew of
the ghost world and its conventions, I had always remembered that a spook was
in honour bound to wait to be spoken to. It didn't seem much to do, and I felt
that the sound of one's own voice would at any rate reassure oneself as to
one's wakefulness. But there are few ghosts outside Europe--few,
that is, that a white man can see--and I had never been troubled with any.
However, as I have said, I told Broughton that I agreed.




"So the wedding took place,
and I went to it in a tall hat which I bought for the occasion, and the new
Mrs. Broughton smiled very nicely at me afterwards. As it had to happen, I took
the Orient Express that evening and was not in England again for nearly six
months. Just before I came back I got a letter from Broughton. He asked if I
could see him in London
or come to Thurnley, as he thought I should be better able to help him than
anyone else he knew. His wife sent a nice message to me at the end, so I was
reassured about at least one thing. I wrote from Budapest that I would come and see him at
Thurnley two days after my arrival in London,
and as I sauntered out of the Pannonia
into the Kerepesi Utcza to post my letters, I wondered of what earthly service
I could be to Broughton. I had been out with him after tiger on foot, and I
could imagine few men better able at a pinch to manage their own business.
However, I had nothing to do, so after dealing with some small accumulations of
business during my absence, I packed a kit-bag and departed to Euston.




"I was met by Broughton's
great limousine at Thurnley Road
station, and after a drive of nearly seven miles we echoed through the sleepy
streets of Thurnley village, into which the main gates of the park thrust
themselves, splendid with pillars and spread-eagles and tom-cats rampant atop
of them. I never was a herald, but I know that the Broughtons have the right to
supporters--Heaven knows why! From the gates a quadruple avenue of beech-trees
led inwards for a quarter of a mile. Beneath them a neat strip of fine turf
edged the road and ran back until the poison of the dead beech-leaves killed it
under the trees. There were many wheel-tracks on the road, and a comfortable
little pony trap jogged past me laden with a country parson and his wife and
daughter. Evidently there was some garden party going on at the Abbey. The road
dropped away to the right at the end of the avenue, and I could see the Abbey
across a wide pasturage and a broad lawn thickly dotted with guests.




"The end of the building was
plain. It must have been almost mercilessly austere when it was first built,
but time had crumbled the edges and toned the stone down to an orange-lichened
grey wherever it showed behind its curtain of magnolia, jasmine, and ivy.
Farther on was the three-storied Jacobean house, tall and handsome. There had
not been the slightest attempt to adapt the one to the other, but the kindly
ivy had glossed over the touching-point. There was a tall flhche in the middle
of the building, surmounting a small bell tower. Behind the house there rose
the mountainous verdure of Spanish chestnuts all the way up the hill.




"Broughton had seen me coming
from afar, and walked across from his other guests to welcome me before turning
me over to the butler's care. This man was sandy-haired and rather inclined to
be talkative. He could, however, answer hardly any questions about the house;
he had, he said, only been there three weeks. Mindful of what Broughton had
told me, I made no inquiries about ghosts, though the room into which I was
shown might have justified anything. It was a very large low room with oak
beams projecting from the white ceiling. Every inch of the walls, including the
doors, was covered with tapestry, and a remarkably fine Italian fourpost bedstead,
heavily draped, added to the darkness and dignity of the place. All the
furniture was old, well made, and dark. Underfoot there was a plain green pile
carpet, the only new thing about the room except the electric light fittings
and the jugs and basins. Even the looking-glass on the dressing-table was an
old pyramidal Venetian glass set in heavy repoussi frame of tarnished silver.




"After a few minutes' cleaning
up, I went downstairs and out upon the lawn, where I greeted my hostess. The
people gathered there were of the usual country type, all anxious to be pleased
and roundly curious as to the new master of the Abbey. Rather to my surprise,
and quite to my pleasure, I rediscovered Glenham, whom I had known well in old
days in Barotseland: he lived quite close, as,
he remarked with a grin, I ought to have known. 'But,' he added, 'I don't live
in a place like this.' He swept his hand to the long, low lines of the Abbey in
obvious admiration, and then, to my intense interest, muttered beneath his
breath, 'Thank God!' He saw that I had overheard him, and turning to me said
decidedly, 'Yes, "thank God"' I said, and I meant it. I wouldn't live
at the Abbey for all Broughton's money.'




"'But surely,' I demurred,
'you know that old Clarke was discovered in the very act of setting light on
his bug-a-boos?'




"Glenham shrugged his
shoulders. 'Yes, I know about that. But there is something wrong with the place
still. All I can say is that Broughton is a different man since he has lived
there. I don't believe that he will remain much longer. But--you're staying
here?--well, you'll hear all about it to-night. There's a big dinner, I
understand.' The conversation turned off to old reminiscences, and Glenham soon
after had to go.




"Before I went to dress that
evening I had twenty minutes' talk with Broughton in his library. There was no
doubt that the man was altered, gravely altered. He was nervous and fidgety,
and I found him looking at me only when my eye was off him. I naturally asked
him what he wanted of me. I told him I would do anything I could, but that I
couldn't conceive what he lacked that I could provide. He said with a
lustreless smile that there was, however, something, and that he would tell me
the following morning. It struck me that he was somehow ashamed of himself, and
perhaps ashamed of the part he was asking me to play. However, I dismissed the
subject from my mind and went up to dress in my palatial room. As I shut the
door a draught blew out the Queen of Sheba from the wall, and I noticed that
the tapestries were not fastened to the wall at the bottom. I have always held
very practical views about spooks, and it has often seemed to me that the slow
waving in firelight of loose tapestry upon a wall would account for ninety-nine
per cent. of the stories one hears. Certainly the dignified undulation of this
lady with her attendants and huntsmen--one of whom was untidily cutting the
throat of a fallow deer upon the very steps on which King Solomon, a grey-faced
Flemish nobleman with the order of the Golden Fleece, awaited his fair
visitor--gave colour to my hypothesis.




"Nothing much happened at
dinner. The people were very much like those of the garden party. A young woman
next me seemed anxious to know what was being read in London. As she was far more familiar than I
with the most recent magazines and literary supplements, I found salvation in
being myself instructed in the tendencies of modern fiction. All true art, she
said, was shot through and through with melancholy. How vulgar were the
attempts at wit that marked so many modern books! From the beginning of
literature it had always been tragedy that embodied the highest attainment of
every age. To call such works morbid merely begged the question. No thoughtful
man--she looked sternly at me through the steel rim of her glasses--could fail
to agree with me. Of course, as one would, I immediately and properly said that
I slept with Pett Ridge and Jacobs under my pillow at night, and that if Jorrocks
weren't quite so large and cornery, I would add him to the company. She hadn't
read any of them, so I was saved--for a time. But I remember grimly that she
said that the dearest wish of her life was to be in some awful and
soul-freezing situation of horror, and I remember that she dealt hardly with
the hero of Nat Paynter's vampire story, between nibbles at her brown-bread
ice. She was a cheerless soul, and I couldn't help thinking that if there were
many such in the neighbourhood, it was not surprising that old Glenham had been
stuffed with some nonsense or other about the Abbey. Yet nothing could well
have been less creepy than the glitter of silver and glass, and the subdued
lights and cackle of conversation all round the dinner-table.




"After the ladies had gone I
found myself talking to the rural dean. He was a thin, earnest man, who at once
turned the conversation to old Clarke's buffooneries. But, he said, Mr.
Broughton had introduced such a new and cheerful spirit, not only into the
Abbey, but, he might say, into the whole neighbourhood, that he had great hopes
that the ignorant superstitions of the past were from henceforth destined to
oblivion. Thereupon his other neighbour, a portly gentleman of independent
means and position, audibly remarked 'Amen,' which damped the rural dean, and
we talked to partridges past, partridges present, and pheasants to come. At the
other end of the table Broughton sat with a couple of his friends, red-faced
hunting men. Once I noticed that they were discussing me, but I paid no
attention to it at the time. I remembered it a few hours later.




"By eleven all the guests were
gone, and Broughton, his wife, and I were alone together under the fine plaster
ceiling of the Jacobean drawing-room. Mrs. Broughton talked about one or two of
the neighbours, and then, with a smile, said that she knew I would excuse her,
shook hands with me, and went off to bed. I am not very good at analysing
things, but I felt that she talked a little uncomfortably and with a suspicion
of effort, smiled rather conventionally, and was obviously glad to go. These
things seem trifling enough to repeat, but I had throughout the faint feeling
that everything was not quite square. Under the circumstances, this was enough
to set me wondering what on earth the service could be that I was to
render--wondering also whether the whole business were not some ill-advised
jest in order to make me come down from London for a mere shooting-party.




"Broughton said little after
she had gone. But he was evidently labouring to bring the conversation round to
the so-called haunting of the Abbey. As soon as I saw this, of course I asked
him directly about it. He then seemed at once to lose interest in the matter.
There was no doubt about it: Broughton was somehow a changed man, and to my
mind he had changed in no way for the better. Mrs. Broughton seemed no
sufficient cause. He was clearly very fond of her, and she of him. I reminded
him that he was going to tell me what I could do for him in the morning,
pleaded my journey, lighted a candle, and went upstairs with him. At the end of
the passage leading into the old house he grinned weakly and said, 'Mind, if
you see a ghost, do talk to it; you said you would.' He stood irresolutely a
moment and then turned away. At the door of his dressing-room he paused once
more: 'I'm here,' he called out, 'if you should want anything. Good night,' and
he shut the door.




"I went along the passage to
my room, undressed, switched on a lamp beside my bed, read a few pages of The
Jungle Book, and then, more than ready for sleep, turned the light off
and went fast asleep.

*




"Three hours later I woke up.
There was not a breath of wind outside. There was not even a flicker of light
from the fireplace. As I lay there, an ash tinkled slightly as it cooled, but
there was hardly a gleam of the dullest red in the grate. An owl cried among
the silent Spanish chestnuts on the slope outside. I idly reviewed the events
of the day, hoping that I should fall off to sleep again before I reached
dinner. But at the end I seemed as wakeful as ever. There was no help for it. I
must read my Jungle Book again till I felt ready to go off, so I
fumbled for the pear at the end of the cord that hung down inside the bed, and
I switched on the bedside lamp. The sudden glory dazzled me for a moment. I
felt under my pillow for my book with half-shut eyes. Then, growing used to the
light, I happened to look down to the foot of my bed.




"I can never tell you really
when happened then. Nothing I could ever confess in the most abject words could
even faintly picture to you what I felt. I know that my heart stopped dead, and
my throat shut automatically. In one instinctive movement I crouched back up
against the head-boards of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set my
heart going again, and the sweat dripped from every pore. I am not a
particularly religious man, but I had always believed that God would never
allow any supernatural appearance to present itself to man in such a guise and
in such circumstances that harm, either bodily or mental, could result to him.
I can only tell you that at the moment both my life and my reason rocked
unsteadily on their seats."

*




The other Osiris passengers
had gone to bed. Only he and I remained leaning over the starboard railing,
which rattled uneasily now and then under the fierce vibration of the
over-engined mail-boat. Far over, there were the lights of a few fishing-smacks
riding out the night, and a great rush of white combing and seething water fell
out and away from us overside.




At last Colvin went on:

*




"Leaning over the foot of my
bed, looking at me, was a figure swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling. This
shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes and the right side of the face
bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the
bed-end. The face was not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the
flesh of the face were totally gone. There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly
over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp of hair
crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. I looked at it, and it looked at
me, and my brains turned dry and hot in my head. I had still got the pear of
the electric lamp in my hand, and I played idly with it; only I dared not turn
the light out again. I shut my eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the
same second. The thing had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat
cooled me as it evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel
creaked in the wall.




"My reason failed me. For
twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, I was able to think of nothing else but this
awful figure, till there came, hurtling through the empty channels of my
senses, the remembrances that Broughton and his friends had discussed me
furtively at dinner. The dim possibility of its being a hoax stole gratefully
into my unhappy mind, and once there, one's pluck came creeping back along a
thousand tiny veins. My first sensation was one of blind unreasoning thankfulness
that my brain was going to stand the trial. I am not a timid man, but the best
of us needs some human handle to steady him in time of extremity, and in this
faint but growing hope that after all it might be only a brutal hoax, I found
the fulcrum that I needed. At last I moved.




"How I managed to do it I
cannot tell you, but with one spring towards the foot of the bed I got within
arm's-length and struck out one fearful blow with my fist at the thing. It
crumbled under it, and my hand was cut to the bone. With a sickening revulsion
after my terror, I dropped half-fainting across the end of the bed. So it was
merely a foul trick after all. No doubt the trick had been played many a time
before: no doubt Broughton and his friends had had some large bet among
themselves as to what I should do when I discovered the gruesome thing. From my
state of abject terror I found myself transported into an insensate anger. I
shouted curses upon Broughton. I dived rather than climbed over the bed-end of
the sofa. I tore at the robed skeleton--how well the whole thing had been
carried out, I thought--I broke the skull against the floor, and stamped upon
its dry bones. I flung the head away under the bed, and rent the brittle bones
of the trunk in pieces. I snapped the thin thigh-bones across my knee, and
flung them in different directions. The shin-bones I set up against a stool and
broke with my heel. I raged like a Berserker against the loathly thing, and
stripped the ribs from the backbone and slung the breastbone against the
cupboard. My fury increased as the work of destruction went on. I tore the
frail rotten veil into twenty pieces, and the dust went up over everything,
over the clean blotting-paper and the silver inkstand. At last my work was
done. There was but a raffle of broken bones and strips of parchment and
crumbling wool. Then, picking up a piece of the skull--it was the cheek and
temple bone of the right side, I remember--I opened the door and went down the
passage to Broughton's dressing-room. I remember still how my sweat-dripping
pyjamas clung to me as I walked. At the door I kicked and entered.




"Broughton was in bed. He had
already turned the light on and seemed shrunken and horrified. For a moment he
could hardly pull himself together. Then I spoke. I don't know what I said.
Only I know that from a heart full and over-full with hatred and contempt,
spurred on by shame of my own recent cowardice, I let my tongue run on. He
answered nothing. I was amazed at my own fluency. My hair still clung lankily
to my wet temples, my hand was bleeding profusely, and I must have looked a
strange sight. Broughton huddled himself up at the head of the bed just as I
had. Still he made no answer, no defence. He seemed preoccupied with something
besides my reproaches, and once or twice moistened his lips with his tongue.
But he could say nothing though he moved his hands now and then, just as a baby
who cannot speak moves its hands.




"At last the door into Mrs.
Broughton's rooms opened and she came in, white and terrified. 'What is it?
What is it? Oh, in God's name! what is it?' she cried again and again, and then
she went up to her husband and sat on the bed in her night-dress, and the two
faced me. I told her what the matter was. I spared her husband not a word for
her presence there. Yet he seemed hardly to understand. I told the pair that I
had spoiled their cowardly joke for them. Broughton looked up.




"'I have smashed the foul
thing into a hundred pieces,' I said. Broughton licked his lips again and his
mouth worked. 'By God!' I shouted, 'it would serve you right if I thrashed you
within an inch of your life. I will take care that not a decent man or woman of
my acquaintance ever speaks to you again. And there,' I added, throwing the
broken piece of the skull upon the floor beside his bed, 'there is a souvenir
for you, of your damned work to-night!'




"Broughton saw the bone, and
in a moment it was his turn to frighten me. He squealed like a hare caught in a
trap. He screamed and screamed till Mrs. Broughton, almost as bewildered as
myself, held on to him and coaxed him like a child to be quiet. But
Broughton--and as he moved I thought that ten minutes ago I perhaps looked as
terribly ill as he did--thrust her from him, and scrambled out of bed on to the
floor, and still screaming put out his hand to the bone. It had blood on it
from my hand. He paid no attention to me whatever. In truth I said nothing.
This was a new turn indeed to the horrors of the evening. He rose from the
floor with the bone in his hand and stood silent. He seemed to be listening.
'Time, time, perhaps,' he muttered, and almost at the same moment fell at full
length on the carpet, cutting his head against the fender. The bone flew from
his hand and came to rest near the door. I picked Broughton up, haggard and
broken, with blood over his face. He whispered hoarsely and quickly, 'Listen,
listen!' We listened.




"After ten seconds' utter
quiet, I seemed to hear something. I could not be sure, but at last there was
no doubt. There was a quiet sound as one moving along the passage. Little
regular steps came towards us over the hard oak flooring. Broughton moved to
where his wife sat, white and speechless, on the bed, and pressed her face into
his shoulder.




"Then, the last thing that I
could see as he turned the light out, he fell forward with his own head pressed
into the pillow of the bed. Something in their company, something in their
cowardice, helped me, and I faced the open doorway of the room, which was
outlined fairly clearly against the dimly lighted passage. I put out one hand
and touched Mrs. Broughton's shoulder in the darkness. But at the last moment I
too failed. I sank on my knees and put my face in the bed. Only we all heard.
The footsteps came to the door and there they stopped. The piece of bone was
lying a yard inside the door. There was a rustle of moving stuff, and the thing
was in the room. Mrs. Broughton was silent: I could hear Broughton's voice
praying, muffled in the pillow: I was cursing my own cowardice. Then the steps
moved out again on the oak boards of the passage, and I heard the sounds dying
away. In a flash of remorse I went to the door and looked out. At the end of
the corridor I thought I saw something that moved away. A moment later the
passage was empty. I stood with my forehead against the jamb of the door almost
physically sick.




"'You can turn the light on,'
I said, and there was an answering flare. There was no bone at my feet. Mrs.
Broughton had fainted. Broughton was almost useless, and it took me ten minutes
to bring her to. Broughton only said one thing worth remembering. For the most
part he went on muttering prayers. But I was glad afterwards to recollect that
he had said that thing. He said in a colourless voice, half as a question, half
as a reproach, 'You didn't speak to her.'




"We spent the remainder of the
night together. Mrs. Broughton actually fell off into a kind of sleep before
dawn, but she suffered so horribly in her dreams that I shook her into
consciousness again. Never was dawn so long in coming. Three or four times
Broughton spoke to himself. Mrs. Broughton would then just tighten her hold on
his arm, but she could say nothing. As for me, I can honestly say that I grew
worse as the hours passed and the light strengthened. The two violent reactions
had battered down my steadiness of view, and I felt that the foundations of my
life had been built upon the sand. I said nothing, and after binding up my hand
with a towel, I did not move. It was better so. They helped me and I helped
them, and we all three knew that our reason had gone very near to ruin that
night. At last, when the light came in pretty strongly, and the birds outside
were chattering and singing, we felt that we must do something. Yet we never
moved. You might have thought that we should particularly dislike being found
as we were by the servants: yet nothing of that kind mattered a straw, and an
overpowering listlessness bound us as we sat, until Chapman, Broughton's man,
actually knocked and opened the door. None of us moved. Broughton, speaking
hardly and stiffly, said, 'Chapman you can come back in five minutes.' Chapman,
was a discreet man, but it would have made no difference to us if he had
carried his news to the 'room' at once.




"We looked at each other and I
said I must go back. I meant to wait outside till Chapman returned. I simply
dared not re-enter my bedroom alone. Broughton roused himself and said that he
would come with me. Mrs. Broughton agreed to remain in her own room for five
minutes if the blinds were drawn up and all the doors left open.




"So Broughton and I, leaning
stiffly one against the other, went down to my room. By the morning light that
filtered past the blinds we could see our way, and I released the blinds. There
was nothing wrong with the room from end to end, except smears of my own blood
on the end of the bed, on the sofa, and on the carpet where I had torn the
thing to pieces."




* 




Colvin had finished his story.
There was nothing to say. Seven bells stuttered out from the fo'c'sle, and the
answering cry wailed through the darkness. I took him downstairs.




"Of course I am much better
now, but it is a kindness of you to let me sleep in your cabin."







The list so far:

7. Guy de Maupassant: The Apparition

8. MR James: Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

9. William Fryer Harvey: The Beast with Five Fingers

10. HG Wells: The Sea Raiders







A true corpse story by Gordon

Anacondas in the Everglades

Green Anaconda/LA Dawson/Creative Commons
Interesting article in Slate. Author Jack Landers makes several cogent observations: That the python problem in the Everglades has probably been overstated, and that Burmese pythons populations may in fact be controlled by other invasive wildlife. He even has something to say about how race affects the observations of fishermen. I doubt  the green anacondas have as strong a scute-hold in Florida as Landers suggests, but it's interesting to wonder what kind of effect they might eventually have on native alligators. As I've said in other posts, the gators have a pretty good record against pythons. But green anacondas occasionally take caimans in their home range, and they might present a more formidable challenge for the American alligator. (Thanks to Hodari Nundu for the tip.)

Green anacondas in the Everglades: The largest snake in the world has invaded the United States.: "One Burmese python at Trail Lakes, captured in the wild and kept in a large outdoor enclosure, was swarmed by fire ants that tunneled up from beneath her while she guarded her eggs. By the end of the day she and her brood had been reduced to little more than scales and bones."

The Top 10 Scary Stories of All Time: Number 7

A
pure and simple ghost story. . . or is it?







The Apparition




by Guy de Maupassant














The subject of sequestration of the
person came up in speaking of a recent lawsuit, and each of us had a story to
tell--a true story, he said. We had been spending the evening together at an
old family mansion in the Rue de Grenelle, just a party of intimate friends.
The old Marquis de la Tour-Samuel, who was eighty-two, rose, and, leaning his
elbow on the mantelpiece, said in his somewhat shaky voice:




"I also know of something
strange, so strange that it has haunted me all my life. It is now fifty-six
years since the incident occurred, and yet not a month passes that I do not see
it again in a dream, so great is the impression of fear it has left on my mind.
For ten minutes I experienced such horrible fright that ever since then a sort
of constant terror has remained with me. Sudden noises startle me violently,
and objects imperfectly distinguished at night inspire me with a mad desire to
flee from them. In short, I am afraid of the dark!




"But I would not have
acknowledged that before I reached my present age. Now I can say anything. I
have never receded before real danger, ladies. It is, therefore, permissible,
at eighty-two years of age, not to be brave in presence of imaginary danger.




"That affair so completely
upset me, caused me such deep and mysterious and terrible distress, that I
never spoke of it to any one. I will now tell it to you exactly as it happened,
without any attempt at explanation.




"In July, 1827, I was
stationed at Rouen. One day as I was walking along the quay I met a man whom I
thought I recognized without being able to recall exactly who he was.
Instinctively I made a movement to stop. The stranger perceived it and at once
extended his hand.




"He was a friend to whom I had
been deeply attached as a youth. For five years I had not seen him; he seemed
to have aged half a century. His hair was quite white and he walked bent over
as though completely exhausted. He apparently understood my surprise, and he
told me of the misfortune which had shattered his life.




"Having fallen madly in love
with a young girl, he had married her, but after a year of more than earthly
happiness she died suddenly of an affection of the heart. He left his country
home on the very day of her burial and came to his town house in Rouen, where
he lived, alone and unhappy, so sad and wretched that he thought constantly of
suicide.




"'Since I have found you again
in this manner,' he said, 'I will ask you to render me an important service. It
is to go and get me out of the desk in my bedroom--our bedroom--some papers of
which I have urgent need. I cannot send a servant or a business clerk, as
discretion and absolute silence are necessary. As for myself, nothing on earth
would induce me to reenter that house. I will give you the key of the room,
which I myself locked on leaving, and the key of my desk, also a few words for
my gardener, telling him to open the chateau for you. But come and breakfast
with me tomorrow and we will arrange all that.'




"I promised to do him the
slight favor he asked. It was, for that matter, only a ride which I could make
in an hour on horseback, his property being but a few miles distant from Rouen.




"At ten o'clock the following
day I breakfasted, tete-a-tete, with my friend, but he scarcely spoke.




"He begged me to pardon him;
the thought of the visit I was about to make to that room, the scene of his
dead happiness, overcame him, he said. He, indeed, seemed singularly agitated
and preoccupied, as though undergoing some mysterious mental struggle.




"At length he explained to me
exactly what I had to do. It was very simple. I must take two packages of
letters and a roll of papers from the first right-hand drawer of the desk, of
which I had the key. He added:




"'I need not beg you to
refrain from glancing at them.'




"I was wounded at that remark
and told him so somewhat sharply. He stammered:




"'Forgive me, I suffer so,'
and tears came to his eyes.




"At about one o'clock I took
leave of him to accomplish my mission.




"'The weather was glorious,
and I trotted across the fields, listening to the song of the larks and the
rhythmical clang of my sword against my boot. Then I entered the forest and
walked my horse. Branches of trees caressed my face as I passed, and now and
then I caught a leaf with my teeth and chewed it, from sheer gladness of heart
at being alive and vigorous on such a radiant day.




"As I approached the chateau I
took from my pocket the letter I had for the gardener, and was astonished at
finding it sealed. I was so irritated that I was about to turn back without
having fulfilled my promise, but reflected that I should thereby display undue
susceptibility. My friend in his troubled condition might easily have fastened
the envelope without noticing that he did so.




"The manor looked as if it had
been abandoned for twenty years. The open gate was falling from its hinges, the
walks were overgrown with grass and the flower beds were no longer
distinguishable.




"The noise I made by kicking
at a shutter brought out an old man from a side door. He seemed stunned with
astonishment at seeing me. On receiving my letter, he read it, reread it,
turned it over and over, looked me up and down, put the paper in his pocket and
finally said:




"'Well, what is it you wish?'




"I replied shortly:




"'You ought to know, since you
have just read your master's orders. I wish to enter the chateau.'




"He seemed overcome.




"'Then you are going in--into
her room?'




"I began to lose patience.




"'Damn it! Are you presuming
to question me?'




"He stammered in confusion:




"'No--sir--but--but it has not
been opened since--since the-death. If you will be kind enough to wait five
minutes I will go and--and see if--'




"I interrupted him angrily:




"'See here, what do you mean
by your tricks?




"'You know very well you
cannot enter the room, since here is the key!'




"He no longer objected.




"'Then, sir, I will show you
the way.'




"'Show me the staircase and
leave me. I'll find my way without you.'




"'But--sir--indeed--'




"This time I lost patience,
and pushing him aside, went into the house.




"I first went through the
kitchen, then two rooms occupied by this man and his wife. I then crossed a
large hall, mounted a staircase and recognized the door described by my friend.




"I easily opened it, and
entered the apartment. It was so dark that at first I could distinguish
nothing. I stopped short, disagreeably affected by that disagreeable, musty
odor of closed, unoccupied rooms. As my eyes slowly became accustomed to the
darkness I saw plainly enough a large and disordered bedroom, the bed without
sheets but still retaining its mattresses and pillows, on one of which was a
deep impression, as though an elbow or a head had recently rested there.




"The chairs all seemed out of
place. I noticed that a door, doubtless that of a closet, had remained half
open.




"I first went to the window,
which I opened to let in the light, but the fastenings of the shutters had
grown so rusty that I could not move them. I even tried to break them with my
sword, but without success. As I was growing irritated over my useless efforts
and could now see fairly well in the semi-darkness, I gave up the hope of
getting more light, and went over to the writing desk.




"I seated myself in an
armchair and, letting down the lid of the desk, I opened the drawer designated.
It was full to the top. I needed but three packages, which I knew how to
recognize, and began searching for them.




"I was straining my eyes in
the effort to read the superscriptions when I seemed to hear, or, rather, feel,
something rustle back of me. I paid no attention, believing that a draught from
the window was moving some drapery. But in a minute or so another movement,
almost imperceptible, sent a strangely disagreeable little shiver over my skin.
It was so stupid to be affected, even slightly, that self-respect prevented my
turning around. I had just found the second package I needed and was about to
lay my hand on the third when a long and painful sigh, uttered just at my
shoulder, made me bound like a madman from my seat and land several feet off.
As I jumped I had turned round my hand on the hilt of my sword, and, truly, if
I had not felt it at my side I should have taken to my heels like a coward.




"A tall woman dressed in
white, stood gazing at me from the back of the chair where I had been sitting
an instant before.




"Such a shudder ran through
all my limbs that I nearly fell backward. No one who has not experienced it can
understand that frightful, unreasoning terror! The mind becomes vague, the
heart ceases to beat, the entire body grows as limp as a sponge.




"I do not believe in ghosts,
nevertheless I collapsed from a hideous dread of the dead, and I suffered, oh!
I suffered in a few moments more than in all the rest of my life from the
irresistible terror of the supernatural. If she had not spoken I should have
died perhaps. But she spoke, she spoke in a sweet, sad voice that set my nerves
vibrating. I dare not say that I became master of myself and recovered my
reason. No! I was terrified and scarcely knew what I was doing. But a certain
innate pride, a remnant of soldierly instinct, made me, almost in spite of
myself, maintain a bold front. She said:




"'Oh, sir, you can render me a
great service.'




"I wanted to reply, but it was
impossible for me to pronounce a word. Only a vague sound came from my throat.
She continued:




"'Will you? You can save me,
cure me. I suffer frightfully. I suffer, oh! how I suffer!' and she slowly
seated herself in my armchair, still looking at me.




"'Will you?' she said.




"I nodded in assent, my voice
still being paralyzed.




"Then she held out to me a
tortoise-shell comb and murmured:




"'Comb my hair, oh! comb my
hair; that will cure me; it must be combed. Look at my head--how I suffer; and
my hair pulls so!'




"Her hair, unbound, very long
and very black, it seemed to me, hung over the back of the armchair and touched
the floor.




"Why did I promise? Why did I
take that comb with a shudder, and why did I hold in my hands her long black
hair that gave my skin a frightful cold sensation, as though I were handling
snakes? I cannot tell.




"That sensation has remained
in my fingers, and I still tremble in recalling it.




"I combed her hair. I handled,
I know not how, those icy locks. I twisted, knotted, and unknotted, and braided
them. She sighed, bowed her head, seemed happy. Suddenly she said, 'Thank you!'
snatched the comb from my hands and fled by the door that I had noticed ajar.




"Left alone, I experienced for
several seconds the horrible agitation of one who awakens from a nightmare. At
length I regained my senses. I ran to the window and with a mighty effort burst
open the shutters, letting a flood of light into the room. Immediately I sprang
to the door by which that being had departed. I found it closed and immovable!




"Then the mad desire to flee
overcame me like a panic the panic which soldiers know in battle. I seized the
three packets of letters on the open desk, ran from the room, dashed down the
stairs four steps at a time, found myself outside, I know not how, and,
perceiving my horse a few steps off, leaped into the saddle and galloped away.




"I stopped only when I reached
Rouen and alighted at my lodgings. Throwing the reins to my orderly, I fled to
my room and shut myself in to reflect. For an hour I anxiously asked myself if
I were not the victim of a hallucination. Undoubtedly I had had one of those
incomprehensible nervous attacks those exaltations of mind that give rise to
visions and are the stronghold of the supernatural. And I was about to believe
I had seen a vision, had a hallucination, when, as I approached the window, my
eyes fell, by chance, upon my breast. My military cape was covered with long
black hairs! One by one, with trembling fingers, I plucked them off and threw
them away.




"I then called my orderly. I
was too disturbed, too upset to go and see my friend that day, and I also
wished to reflect more fully upon what I ought to tell him. I sent him his
letters, for which he gave the soldier a receipt. He asked after me most
particularly, and, on being told I was ill--had had a sunstroke--appeared
exceedingly anxious. Next morning I went to him, determined to tell him the
truth. He had gone out the evening before and had not yet returned. I called
again during the day; my friend was still absent. After waiting a week longer
without news of him, I notified the authorities and a judicial search was
instituted. Not the slightest trace of his whereabouts or manner of
disappearance was discovered.




"A minute inspection of the
abandoned chateau revealed nothing of a suspicious character. There was no
indication that a woman had been concealed there.




"After fruitless researches all
further efforts were abandoned, and for fifty-six years I have heard nothing; I
know no more than before."





The list so far:

8. MR James: Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

9. William Fryer Harvey: The Beast with Five Fingers

10. HG Wells: The Sea Raiders





*



A ghost story by Gordon

Video: Crocodile, Warthog, Cape Hunting Dogs

A tourist video:

Video: Crocodile, Warthog, Jackals

A tourist video:

The Top 10 Scary Stories of All Time: Number 8

Golfing,
a seaside resort, and a dog whistle. This story is somehow hilarious and
terrifying at the same time.












"Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"




by MR James







"I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now
Full term is over, Professor," said a person not in the story to the
Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast
in the hospitable hall of St James's College.




The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.
"Yes," he said; "my friends have been making me take up golf
this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast - in point of fact to Burnstow -
(I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to
get off tomorrow."




"Oh, Parkins," said his neighbour on the other
side, "if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of
the Templars" preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any
good to have a dig there in the summer."




It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian
pursuits who said this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is
no need to give his entitlements.




"Certainly," said Parkins, the Professor: "if
you will describe to me whereabouts the site is, I will do my best to give you
an idea of the lie of the land when I get back; or I could write to you about
it, if you would tell me where you are likely to be."




"Don't trouble to do that, thanks. It's only that I'm
thinking of taking my family in that direction in the Long, and it occurred to
me that, as very few of the English preceptories have ever been properly
planned, I might have an opportunity of doing something useful on
offdays."




The Professor rather sniffed at the idea that planning out a
preceptory could be described as useful. His neighbour continued:




"The site - I doubt if there is anything showing above
ground - must be down quite close to the beach now. The sea has encroached
tremendously, as you know, all along that bit of coast. I should think, from
the map, that it must be about three-quarters of a mile from the Globe Inn, at
the north end of the town. Where are you going to stay?"




"Well, at the Globe Inn, as a matter of fact,"
said Parkins; "I have engaged a room there. I couldn't get in anywhere
else; most of the lodging-houses are shut up in winter, it seems; and, as it
is, they tell me that the only room of any size I can have is really a double-bedded
one, and that they haven't a corner in which to store the other bed, and so on.
But I must have a fairly large room, for I am taking some books down, and mean
to do a bit of work; and though I don't quite fancy having an empty bed - not
to speak of two - in what I may call for the time being my study, I suppose I
can manage to rough it for the short time I shall be there."




"Do you call having an extra bed in your room roughing
it. Parkins?" said a bluff person opposite. "Look here, I shall come
down and occupy it for a bit; it"ll be company for you."




The Professor quivered, but managed to laugh in a courteous
manner.




"By all means, Rogers; there's nothing I should like
better. But I'm afraid you would find it rather dull; you don't play golf, do
you?" "No, thank Heaven!" said rude Mr Rogers. "Well, you
see, when I'm not writing I shall most likely be out on the links, and that, as
I say, would be rather dull for you. I'm afraid."




"Oh, I don't know! There's certain to be somebody I
know in the place; but, of course, if you don't want me, speak the word.
Parkins; I shan't be offended. Truth, as you always tell us, is never
offensive."




Parkins was, indeed, scrupulously polite and strictly
truthful. It is to be feared that Mr Rogers sometimes practised upon his
knowledge of these characteristics. In Parkins's breast there was a conflict
now raging, which for a moment or two did not allow him to answer. That
interval being over, he said:




"Well, if you want the exact truth, Rogers, I was
considering whether the room I speak of would really be large enough to
accommodate us both comfortably; and also whether (mind, I shouldn't have said
this if you hadn't pressed me) you would not constitute something in the nature
of a hindrance to my work." Rogers laughed loudly.




"Well done. Parkins!" he said. "It's all
right. I promise not to interrupt your work; don't you disturb yourself about
that. No, I won't come if you don't want me; but I thought I should do so
nicely to keep the ghosts off." Here he might have been seen to wink and
to nudge his next neighbour. Parkins might also have been seen to become pink.
"I beg pardon. Parkins," Rogers continued; "I oughtn't to have
said that. I forgot you didn't like levity on these topics."




"Well," Parkins said, 'as you have mentioned the
matter, I freely own that I do not like careless talk about what you call
ghosts. A man in my position," he went on, raising his voice a little,
"cannot, I find, be too careful about appearing to sanction the current
beliefs on such subjects. As you know, Rogers, or as you ought to know; for I
think I have never concealed my views - "




"No, you certainly have not, old man," put in
Rogers sotto voce.




" - I hold that any semblance, any appearance of
concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a
renunciation of all that I hold most sacred. But I'm afraid I have not
succeeded in securing your attention."




"Your undivided attention, was what Dr Blimber actually
said," Rogers interrupted, with every appearance of an earnest desire for
accuracy. "But I beg your pardon. Parkins; I'm stopping you."




"No, not at all," said Parkins. "I don't
remember Blimber; perhaps he was before my time. But I needn't go on. I'm sure
you know what I mean."




"Yes, yes," said Rogers, rather hastily -
"just so. We'll go into it fully at Burnstow, or somewhere."




In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the
impression which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman -
rather hen-like, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the
sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his convictions,
and a man deserving of the greatest respect. Whether or not the reader has
gathered so much, that was the character which Parkins had.




On the following day Parkins did, as he had hoped, succeed
in getting away from his college, and in arriving at Burnstow. He was made
welcome at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room
of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange his
materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which occupied
the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by windows looking
out seaward; that is to say, the central window looked straight out to sea, and
those on the left and right commanded prospects along the shore to the north
and south respectively. On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the
north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing
it. Immediately in front was a strip - not considerable - of rough grass,
dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the
beach. Whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and
the sea, not more than sixty yards now separated them.




The rest of the population of the inn was, of course, a
golfing one, and included few elements that call for a special description. The
most conspicuous figure was, perhaps, that of an ancien militaire, secretary of
a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible strength, and of views of
a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were apt to find utterance after his
attendance upon the ministrations of the Vicar, an estimable man with
inclinations towards a picturesque ritual, which he gallantly kept down as far
as he could out of deference to East Anglian tradition.




Professor Parkins, one of whose principal characteristics
was pluck, spent the greater part of the day following his arrival at Burnstow
in what he had called improving his game, in company with this Colonel Wilson:
and during the afternoon - whether the process of improvement were to blame or
not, I am not sure - the Colonel's demeanour assumed a colouring so lurid that
even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking home with him from the links. He
determined, after a short and furtive look at that bristling moustache and
those incarnadined features, that it would be wiser to allow the influences of
tea and tobacco to do what they could with the Colonel before the dinner-hour should
render a meeting inevitable.




"I might walk home tonight along the beach," he
reflected - "yes, and take a look - there will be light enough for that -
at the ruins of which Disney was talking. I don't exactly know where they are,
by the way; but I expect I can hardly help stumbling on them." This he
accomplished, I may say, in the most literal sense, for in picking his way from
the links to the shingle beach his foot caught, partly in a gorse-root and
partly in a biggish stone, and over he went. When he got up and surveyed his
surroundings, he found himself in a patch of somewhat broken ground covered
with small depressions and mounds. These latter, when he came to examine them,
proved to be simply masses of flints embedded in mortar and grown over with
turf. He must, he quite rightly concluded, be on the site of the preceptory he
had promised to look at. It seemed not unlikely to reward the spade of the
explorer; enough of the foundations was probably left at no great depth to
throw a good deal of light on the general plan. He remembered vaguely that the
Templars, to whom this site had belonged, were in the habit of building round
churches, and he thought a particular series of the humps or mounds near him
did appear to be arranged in something of a circular form. Few people can
resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite
outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they
would have been had they only taken it up seriously. Our Professor, however, if
he felt something of this mean desire, was also truly anxious to oblige Mr
Disney. So he paced with care the circular area he had noticed, and wrote down
its rough dimensions in his pocket-book. Then he proceeded to examine an oblong
eminence which lay east of the centre of the circle, and seemed to his thinking
likely to be the base of a platform or altar. At one end of it, the northern, a
patch of the turf was gone - removed by some boy or other creature ferae
naturae. It might, he thought, be as well to probe the soil here for evidences
of masonry, and he took out his knife and began scraping away the earth. And
now followed another little discovery: a portion of soil fell inward as he
scraped, and disclosed a small cavity. He lighted one match after another to
help him to see of what nature the hole was, but the wind was too strong for
them all. By tapping and scratching the sides with his knife, however, he was
able to make out that it must be an artificial hole in masonry. It was
rectangular, and the sides, top, and bottom, if not actually plastered, were
smooth and regular. Of course it was empty. No! As he withdrew the knife he
heard a metallic clink, and when he introduced his hand it met with a
cylindrical object lying on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked
it up, and when he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see
that it, too, was of man's making - a metal tube about four inches long, and
evidently of some considerable age.




By the time Parkins had made sure that there was nothing
else in this odd receptacle, it was too late and too dark for him to think of
undertaking any further search. What he had done had proved so unexpectedly
interesting that he determined to sacrifice a little more of the daylight on the
morrow to archaeology. The object which he now had safe in his pocket was bound
to be of some slight value at least, he felt sure.




Bleak and solemn was the view on which he took a last look
before starting homeward. A faint yellow light in the west showed the links, on
which a few figures moving towards the club-house were still visible, the squat
martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the pale ribbon of sands
intersected at intervals by black wooden groynes, the dim and murmuring sea.
The wind was bitter from the north, but was at his back when he set out for the
Globe. He quickly rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand,
upon which, but for the groynes which had to be got over every few yards, the
going was both good and quiet. One last look behind, to measure the distance he
had made since leaving the ruined Templars' church, showed him a prospect of
company on his walk, in the shape of a rather indistinct personage, who seemed
to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any,
progress. I mean that there was an appearance of running about his movements,
but that the distance between him and Parkins did not seem materially to
lessen. So, at least, Parkins thought, and decided that he almost certainly did
not know him, and that it would be absurd to wait until he came up. For all
that, company, he began to think, would really be very welcome on that lonely
shore, if only you could choose your companion. In his unenlightened days he
had read of meetings in such places which even now would hardly bear thinking
of. He went on thinking of them, however, until he reached home, and
particularly of one which catches most peoples fancy at some time of their
childhood. "Now I saw in my dream that Christian had gone but a very
little way when he saw a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him."
"What should I do now," he thought, "if I looked back and caught
sight of a black figure sharply defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it
had horns and wings? I wonder whether I should stand or run for it. Luckily,
the gentleman behind is not of that kind, and he seems to be about as far off
now as when I saw him first. Well, at this rate he won't get his dinner as soon
as I shall; and, dear me! it's within a quarter of an hour of the time now. I
must run!"




Parkins had, in fact, very little time for dressing. When he
met the Colonel at dinner. Peace - or as much of her as that gentleman could
manage - reigned once more in the military bosom; nor was she put to flight in
the hours of bridge that followed dinner, for Parkins was a more than
respectable player. When, therefore, he retired towards twelve o'clock, he felt
that he had spent his evening in quite a satisfactory way, and that, even for
so long as a fortnight or three weeks, life at the Globe would be supportable
under similar conditions - 'especially," thought he, "if I go on
improving my game."




As he went along the passages he met the boots of the Globe,
who stopped and said: "Beg your pardon, sir, but as I was a-brushing your
coat just now there was somethink fell out of the pocket. I put it on your
chest of drawers, sir, in your room, sir - a piece of a pipe or somethink of
that, sir. Thank you, sir. You"ll find it on your chest of drawers, sir -
yes, sir. Good night, sir."




The speech served to remind Parkins of his little discovery
of that afternoon. It was with some considerable curiosity that he turned it
over by the light of his candles. It was of bronze, he now saw, and was shaped
very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle; in fact it was - yes,
certainly it was - actually no more nor less than a whistle. He put it to his
lips, but it was quite full of a fine, caked-up sand or earth, which would not
yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a knife. Tidy as ever in his
habits. Parkins cleared out the earth on to a piece of paper, and took the
latter to the window to empty it out. The night was clear and bright, as he saw
when he had opened the casement, and he stopped for an instant to look at the
sea and note a belated wanderer stationed on the shore in front of the inn.
Then he shut the window, a little surprised at the late hours people kept at
Burnstow, and took his whistle to the light again. Why, surely there were marks
on it, and not merely marks, but letters! A very little rubbing rendered the
deeply-cut inscription quite legible, but the Professor had to confess, after
some earnest thought, that the meaning of it was as obscure to him as the
writing on the wall to Belshazzar. There were legends both on the front and on
the back of the whistle. The one read thus:








FLA.

FUR        BIS

FLE



The other:









QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT










"I ought to be able to make it out," he thought;
"but I suppose I am a little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of
it, I don't believe I even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem
simple enough. It ought to mean, "Who is this who is coming?" Well,
the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him."




He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet
pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in
it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It
was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of
forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a
wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing and in the midst a
lonely figure - how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen
more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind
against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see
the white glint of a sea-bird's wing somewhere outside the dark panes.




The sound of the whistle had so fascinated him that he could
not help trying it once more, this time more boldly. The note was little, if at
all, louder than before, and repetition broke the illusion - no picture
followed, as he had half hoped it might. "But what is this? Goodness! what
force the wind can get up in a few minutes! What a tremendous gust! There! I
knew that window-fastening was no use! Ah! I thought so - both candles out.
It's enough to tear the room to pieces."




The first thing was to get the window shut. While you might
count twenty Parkins was struggling with the small casement, and felt almost as
if he were pushing back a sturdy burglar, so strong was the pressure. It
slackened all at once, and the window banged to and latched itself. Now to
relight the candles and see what damage, if any, had been done. No, nothing
seemed amiss; no glass even was broken in the casement. But the noise had
evidently roused at least one member of the household: the Colonel was to be
heard slumping in his stockinged feet on the floor above, and growling.




Quickly as it had risen, the wind did not fall at once. On
it went, moaning and rushing past the house, at times rising to a cry so
desolate that, as Parkins disinterestedly said, it might have made fanciful
people feel quite uncomfortable; even the unimaginative, he thought after a
quarter of an hour, might be happier without it.




Whether it was the wind, or the excitement of golf, or of
the researches in the preceptory that kept Parkins awake, he was not sure.
Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I often do
myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all manner of fatal
disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that it was
going to stop work every moment, and would entertain grave suspicions of his
lungs, brain, liver, etc. - suspicions which he was sure would be dispelled by
the return of daylight, but which until then refused to be put aside. He found
a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat.
A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was
tossing and rustling in his bed, too.




The next stage was that Parkins shut his eyes and determined
to give sleep every chance. Here again overexcitement asserted itself in
another form - that of making pictures. Experto crede, pictures do come to the
closed eyes of one trying to sleep, and are often so little to his taste that
he must open his eyes and disperse them.




Parkins's experience on this occasion was a very distressing
one. He found that the picture which presented itself to him was continuous.
When he opened his eyes, of course, it went; but when he shut them once more it
framed itself afresh, and acted itself out again, neither quicker nor slower
than before. What he saw was this: A long stretch of shore - shingle edged by
sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the
water - a scene, in fact, so like that of his afternoon's walk that, in the
absence of any landmark, it could not be distinguished therefrom. The light was
obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and
slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor was visible. Then, in
the distance, a bobbing black object appeared; a moment more, and it was a man
running, jumping, clambering over the groynes, and every few seconds looking
eagerly back. The nearer he came the more obvious it was that he was not only
anxious, but even terribly frightened, though his face was not to be
distinguished. He was, moreover, almost at the end of his strength. On he came;
each successive obstacle seemed to cause him more difficulty than the last.
"Will he get over this next one?" thought Parkins; "it seems a
little higher than the others." Yes; half-climbing, half throwing himself,
he did get over, and fell all in a heap on the other side (the side nearest to
the spectator). There, as if really unable to get up again, he remained crouching
under the groyne, looking up in an attitude of painful anxiety.




So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been
shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of
something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and
irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in
pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion
which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop,
raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to
the water-edge and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its
course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. The moment came
when the pursuer was hovering about from left to right only a few yards beyond
the groyne where the runner lay in hiding. After two or three ineffectual
castings hither and thither it came to a stop, stood upright, with arms raised
high, and then darted straight forward towards the groyne.




It was at this point that Parkins always failed in his
resolution to keep his eyes shut. With many misgivings as to incipient failure
of eyesight, over-worked brain, excessive smoking, and so on, he finally
resigned himself to light his candle, get out a book, and pass the night
waking, rather than be tormented by this persistent panorama, which he saw
clearly enough could only be a morbid reflection of his walk and his thoughts
on that very day.




The scraping of match on box and the glare of light must
have startled some creatures of the night - rats or what not - which he heard
scurry across the floor from the side of his bed with much rustling. Dear,
dear! the match is out! Fool that it is! But the second one burnt better, and a
candle and book were duly procured, over which Parkins pored till sleep of a
wholesome kind came upon him, and that in no long space. For about the first
time in his orderly and prudent life he forgot to blow out the candle, and when
he was called next morning at eight there was still a flicker in the socket and
a sad mess of guttered grease on the top of the little table.




After breakfast he was in his room, putting the finishing
touches to his golfing costume - fortune had again allotted the Colonel to him
for a partner - when one of the maids came in.




"Oh, if you please," she said, "would you
like any extra blankets on your bed, sir?"




'ah! thank you," said Parkins. "Yes, I think I
should like one. It seems likely to turn rather colder."




In a very short time the maid was back with the blanket.




"Which bed should I put it on, sir?" she asked.
"What? Why, that one - the one I slept in last night," he said,
pointing to it.




"Oh yes! I beg your pardon, sir, but you seemed to have
tried both of em; leastways, we had to make 'em both up this morning."




"Really? How very absurd!" said Parkins. "I
certainly never touched the other, except to lay some things on it. Did it
actually seem to have been slept in?"




"Oh, yes, sir!" said the maid. "Why, all the
things was crumpled and throwed about all ways, if you'll excuse me, sir -
quite as if anyone 'adn't passed but a very poor night, sir."




"Dear me," said Parkins. "Well, I may have
disordered it more than I thought when I unpacked my things. I'm very sorry to
have given you the extra trouble. I'm sure. I expect a friend of mine soon, by
the way - a gentleman from Cambridge - to come and occupy it for a night or
two. That will be all right, I suppose, won't it?"




"Oh yes, to be sure, sir. Thank you, sir. It's no
trouble. I'm sure," said the maid, and departed to giggle with her
colleagues.




Parkins set forth, with a stern determination to improve his
game.




I am glad to be able to report that he succeeded so far in
this enterprise that the Colonel, who had been rather repining at the prospect
of a second day's play in his company, became quite chatty as the morning
advanced; and his voice boomed out over the flats, as certain also of our own
minor poets have said, "like some great bourdon in a minster tower".




"Extraordinary wind, that, we had last night," he
said. "In my old home we should have said someone had been whistling for
it."




"Should you, indeed!" said Parkins, "Is there
a superstition of that kind still current in your part of the country?"




"I don't know about superstition," said the
Colonel. "They believe in it all over Denmark and Norway, as well as on
the Yorkshire coast; and my experience is, mind you, that there's generally
something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to
for generations. But it's your drive" (or whatever it might have been: the
golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper
intervals).




When conversation was resumed. Parkins said, with a slight
hesitancy:




"apropos of what you were saying just now. Colonel, I
think I ought to tell you that my own views on such subjects are very strong. I
am, in fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called the
"supernatural"."




"What!" said the Colonel, "do you mean to
tell me you don't believe in second-sight, or ghosts, or anything of that
kind?"




"In nothing whatever of that kind," returned
Parkins firmly.




"Well," said the Colonel, "but it appears to
me at that rate, sir, that you must be little better than a Sadducee."




Parkins was on the point of answering that, in his opinion,
the Sadducees were the most sensible persons he had ever read of in the Old
Testament; but, feeling some doubt as to whether much mention of them was to be
found in that work, he preferred to laugh the accusation off.




"Perhaps I am," he said; "but - Here, give me
my cleek, boy! - Excuse me one moment. Colonel." A short interval.
"Now, as to whistling for the wind, let me give you my theory about it.
The laws which govern winds are really not at all perfectly known - to
fisher-folk and such, of course, not known at all. A man or woman of eccentric
habits, perhaps, or a stranger, is seen repeatedly on the beach at some unusual
hour, and is heard whistling. Soon afterwards a violent wind rises; a man who
could read the sky perfectly or who possessed a barometer could have foretold
that it would. The simple people of a fishing-village have no barometers, and
only a few rough rules for prophesying weather. What more natural than that the
eccentric personage I postulated should be regarded as having raised the wind,
or that he or she should clutch eagerly at the reputation of being able to do
so? Now, take last night's wind: as it happens, I myself was whistling. I blew
a whistle twice, and the wind seemed to come absolutely in answer to my call.
If anyone had seen me - "




The audience had been a little restive under this harangue,
and Parkins had, I fear, fallen somewhat into the tone of a lecturer; but at
the last sentence the Colonel stopped.




"Whistling, were you?" he said. 'and what sort of
whistle did you use? Play this stroke first." Interval.




"About that whistle you were asking. Colonel. It's
rather a curious one. I have it in my - No; I see I've left in it my room. As a
matter of fact, I found it yesterday."




And then Parkins narrated the manner of his discovery of the
whistle, upon hearing which the Colonel grunted, and opined that, in Parkins's
place, he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belonged to a
set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be affirmed that you
never knew what they might not have been up to. From this topic he diverged to
the enormities of the Vicar, who had given notice on the previous Sunday that
Friday would be the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle, and that there would be
service at eleven o'clock in the church. This and other similar proceedings
constituted in the Colonel's view a strong presumption that the Vicar was a
concealed Papist, if not a Jesuit; and Parkins, who could not very readily
follow the Colonel in this region, did not disagree with him. In fact, they got
on so well together in the morning that there was no talk on either side of
their separating after lunch.




Both continued to play well during the afternoon, or, at
least, well enough to make them forget everything else until the light began to
fail them. Not until then did Parkins remember that he had meant to do some
more investigating at the preceptory; but it was of no great importance, he
reflected. One day was as good as another; he might as well go home with the
Colonel.




As they turned the corner of the house, the Colonel was
almost knocked down by a boy who rushed into him at the very top of his speed,
and then, instead of running away, remained hanging on to him and panting. The
first words of the warrior were naturally those of reproof and objurgation, but
he very quickly discerned that the boy was almost speechless with fright.
Inquiries were useless at first. When the boy got his breath he began to howl,
and still clung to the Colonel's legs. He was at last detached, but continued
to howl.




"What in the world is the matter with you? What have
you been up to? What have you seen?" said the two men.




"Ow, I seen it wive at me out of the winder,"
wailed the boy, "and I don't like it."




"What window?" said the irritated Colonel.
"Come, pull yourself together, my boy." "The front winder it
was, at the 'otel," said the boy. At this point Parkins was in favour of
sending the boy home, but the Colonel refused; he wanted to get to the bottom
of it, he said; it was most dangerous to give a boy such a fright as this one
had had, and if it turned out that people had been playing jokes, they should
suffer for it in some way. And by a series of questions he made out this story.
The boy had been playing about on the grass in front of the Globe with some
others; then they had gone home to their teas, and he was just going, when he
happened to look up at the front winder and see it a-wiving at him. It seemed
to be a figure of some sort, in white as far as he knew - couldn't see its
face; but it wived at him, and it warn't a right thing - not to say not a right
person. Was there a light in the room? No, he didn't think to look if there was
a light. Which was the window? Was it the top one or the second one? The
seckind one it was - the big winder what got two little uns at the sides.




"Very well, my boy," said the Colonel, after a few
more questions. "You run away home now. I expect it was some person trying
to give you a start. Another time, like a brave English boy, you just throw a
stone - well, no, not that exactly, but you go and speak to the waiter, or to
Mr Simpson, the landlord, and - yes - and say that I advised you to do
so."




The boy's face expressed some of the doubt he felt as to the
likelihood of Mr Simpson's lending a favourable ear to his complaint, but the
Colonel did not appear to perceive this, and went on:




"And here's a sixpence - no, I see it's a shilling -
and you be off home, and don't think any more about it."




The youth hurried off with agitated thanks, and the Colonel
and Parkins went round to the front of the Globe and reconnoitred. There was
only one window answering to the description they had been hearing.




"Well, that's curious," said Parkins; "it's
evidently my window the lad was talking about. Will you come up for a moment.
Colonel Wilson? We ought to be able to see if anyone has been taking liberties
in my room."




They were soon in the passage, and Parkins made as if to
open the door. Then he stopped and felt in his pockets.




"This is more serious than I thought," was his
next remark. "I remember now that before I started this morning I locked
the door. It is locked now, and, what is more, here is the key." And he
held it up. "Now," he went on, "if the servants are in the habit
of going into one's room during the day when one is away, I can only say that -
well, that I don't approve of it at all." Conscious of a somewhat weak
climax, he busied himself in opening the door (which was indeed locked) and in
lighting candles. "No," he said, "nothing seems disturbed."
'except your bed," put in the Colonel. 'excuse me, that isn't my
bed," said Parkins. "I don't use that one. But it does look as if
someone has been playing tricks with it."




It certainly did: the clothes were bundled up and twisted
together in a most tortuous confusion. Parkins pondered. "That must be
it," he said at last: "I disordered the clothes last night in
unpacking, and they haven't made it since. Perhaps they came in to make it, and
that boy saw them through the window; and then they were called away and locked
the door after them. Yes, I think that must be it."




"Well, ring and ask," said the Colonel, and this
appealed to Parkins as practical.




The maid appeared, and, to make a long story short, deposed
that she had made the bed in the morning when the gentleman was in the room,
and hadn't been there since. No, she hadn't no other key. Mr Simpson he kep'
the keys; he'd be able to tell the gentleman if anyone had been up.




This was a puzzle. Investigation showed that nothing of
value had been taken, and Parkins remembered the disposition of the small
objects on tables and so forth well enough to be pretty sure that no pranks had
been played with them. Mr and Mrs Simpson furthermore agreed that neither of them
had given the duplicate key of the room to any person whatever during the day.
Nor could Parkins, fair-minded man as he was, detect anything in the demeanour
of master, mistress, or maid that indicated guilt. He was much more inclined to
think that the boy had been imposing on the Colonel.




The latter was unwontedly silent and pensive at dinner and
throughout the evening. When he bade good night to Parkins, he murmured in a
gruff undertone: "You know where I am if you want me during the
night." "Why, yes, thank you. Colonel Wilson, I think I do; but there
isn't much prospect of my disturbing you, I hope. By the way," he added,
"did I show you that old whistle I spoke of? I think not. Well, here it
is."




The Colonel turned it over gingerly in the light of the
candle.




"Can you make anything of the inscription?" asked
Parkins, as he took it back. "No, not in this light. What do you mean to
do with it?"




"Oh, well, when I get back to Cambridge I shall submit
it to some of the archaeologists there, and see what they think of it; and very
likely, if they consider it worth having, I may present it to one of the
museums."




""M!" said the Colonel. "Well, you may
be right. All I know is that, if it were mine, I should chuck it straight into
the sea. It's no use talking. I'm well aware, but I expect that with you it's a
case of live and learn. I hope so. I'm sure, and I wish you a good night."





He turned away, leaving Parkins in act to speak at the
bottom of the stair, and soon each was in his own bedroom.




By some unfortunate accident, there were neither blinds nor
curtains to the windows of the Professor's room. The previous night he had
thought little of this, but tonight there seemed every prospect of a bright
moon rising to shine directly on his bed, and probably wake him later on. When
he noticed this he was a good deal annoyed, but, with an ingenuity which I can
only envy, he succeeded in rigging up, with the help of a railway-rug, some
safety-pins, and a stick and umbrella, a screen which, if it only held together,
would completely keep the moonlight off his bed. And shortly afterwards he was
comfortably in that bed. When he had read a somewhat solid work long enough to
produce a decided wish for sleep, he cast a drowsy glance round the room, blew
out the candle, and fell back upon the pillow.




He must have slept soundly for an hour or more, when a
sudden clatter shook him up in a most unwelcome manner. In a moment he realized
what had happened: his carefully-constructed screen had given way, and a very
bright frosty moon was shining directly on his face. This was highly annoying.
Could he possibly get up and reconstruct the screen? or could he manage to
sleep if he did not?




For some minutes he lay and pondered over the possibilities;
then he turned over sharply, and with all his eyes open lay breathlessly
listening. There had been a movement, he was sure, in the empty bed on the
opposite side of the room. Tomorrow he would have it moved, for there must be
rats or something playing about in it. It was quiet now. No! the commotion
began again. There was a rustling and shaking: surely more than any rat could
cause.




I can figure to myself something of the Professor's
bewilderment and horror, for I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same
thing happen; but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was
to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed.
He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash towards the window,
where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped his screen. This
was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the
personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed
and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front
of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of
getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could
not have borne - he didn't know why - to touch it; and as for its touching him,
he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It stood
for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was
like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the
spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind,
for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random
fashion. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he
had just left, and darted towards it, and bent over and felt the pillows in a
way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible.
In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then,
moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the
first time what manner of thing it was.




Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it,
did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he
chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumbled
linen. What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that
the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.




But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With
formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped
and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins's face. He could
not - though he knew how perilous a sound was - he could not keep back a cry of
disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon
the instant, and the next moment he was half-way through the window backwards,
uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was
thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second,
deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open,
and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached
the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint,
and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bedclothes.




Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in
keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed;
and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed for the rest of the
night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he would have
been a day before, and the three of them held a very long consultation in the
Professor's room. At the end of it the Colonel left the hotel door carrying a
small object between his finger and thumb, which he cast as far into the sea as
a very brawny arm could send it. Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from
the back premises of the Globe.




Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and
visitors at the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The Professor was
somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of
the reputation of a troubled house.




There is not much question as to what would have happened to
Parkins if the Colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have
fallen out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what
more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done than
frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it save the
bedclothes of which it had made itself a body. The Colonel, who remembered a
not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had
closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power
was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his
opinion of the Church of Rome.




There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may
imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they
used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice
hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field
late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.









The list so far:

10. HG Wells: The Sea Raiders

9. William Fryer Harvey: The Beast with Five Fingers



*



Another Story by This Author



(Confession: I actually like this other story, "The Ash Tree," better than "Oh Whistle." I just didn't want to run it twice. But definitely give it a try. It will ruin your sleep.)

New Film about Captive Killer Whales

I'm interested to see Blackfish, a new film about orcas in captivity. We've known for years that captivity is traumatic for whales; it's the only situation in which orcas are definitely known to attack people (though they do seem to have attacked boats in the wild). According to this article in National Geographic, the film brings that fact to vivid life. I was particularly disturbed by details of the incidents in which an orca named Tilikum killed people. For example, the trainer killed in 2010 was partly eaten. Here's more:



Opinion: SeaWorld vs. the Whale That Killed Its Trainer: "The deceased was found the next morning draped over the back of Tilikum with his genitals bitten off."



Related Post: Pilot Whale in Captivity





Thanks to Hodari Nundu for the news tip.

Ten Best Scary Stories: Number 10

Since
I gripe every time somebody else posts one of these lists and reveals his bad
taste, I thought I’d reveal mine. My ten favorite scary stories. No author
repeated. I’m beginning the week of Halloween and finishing the week of
Christmas, for Christmas was really the traditional season for scary stories up
until modern times.




Coming
in at #10, the greatest of all animal-invasion stories.







The Sea Raiders 




by HG Wells







I




Until the
extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the
strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying
body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings,
near Land’s End.




In no
department of zoological science, indeed, are we quite so much in the dark as
with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident, for instance, it was
that led to the Prince of Monaco’s discovery of nearly a dozen new forms in the
summer of 1895, a discovery in which the before-mentioned tentacle was
included. It chanced that a cachalot was killed off Terceira by some sperm
whalers, and in its last struggles charged almost to the Prince’s yacht, missed
it, rolled under, and died within twenty yards of his rudder. And in its agony
it threw up a number of large objects, which the Prince, dimly perceiving they
were strange and important, was, by a happy expedient, able to secure before
they sank. He set his screws in motion, and kept them circling in the vortices
thus created until a boat could be lowered. And these specimens were whole
cephalopods and fragments of cephalopods, some of gigantic proportions, and almost
all of them unknown to science!




It would
seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living in the middle depths
of the sea, must, to a large extent, for ever remain unknown to us, since under
water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such rare unlooked-for
accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case of Haploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still altogether ignorant
of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding- ground of the herring or
the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account
for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger
migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps, better
to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion, and to proceed at once with our
narrative.




The first
human being to set eyes upon a living Haploteuthis
— the first human being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt now
that the wave of bathing fatalities and boating accidents that travelled along
the coast of Cornwall and Devon in early May was due to this cause—was a
retired tea-dealer of the name of Fison, who was stopping at a Sidmouth
boarding-house. It was in the afternoon, and he was walking along the cliff
path between Sidmouth and Ladram Bay. The cliffs in this direction are very
high, but down the red face of them in one place a kind of ladder staircase has
been made. He was near this when his attention was attracted by what at first
he thought to be a cluster of birds struggling over a fragment of food that
caught the sunlight, and glistened pinkish-white. The tide was right out, and
this object was not only far below him, but remote across a broad waste of rock
reefs covered with dark seaweed and interspersed with silvery shining tidal
pools. And he was, moreover, dazzled by the brightness of the further water.




In a
minute, regarding this again, he perceived that his judgement was in fault, for
over this struggle circled a number of birds, jackdaws and gulls for the most
part, the latter gleaming blindingly when the sunlight smote their wings, and
they seemed minute in comparison with it. And his curiosity was, perhaps,
aroused all the more strongly because of his first insufficient explanations.




As he had
nothing better to do than amuse himself, he decided to make this object,
whatever it was, the goal of his afternoon walk, instead of Ladram Bay,
conceiving it might perhaps be a great fish of some sort, stranded by some
chance, and flapping about in its distress. And so he hurried down the long
steep ladder, stopping at intervals of thirty feet or so to take breath and
scan the mysterious movement.




At the foot
of the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than he had been; but, on the
other hand, it now came up against the incandescent sky, beneath the sun, so as
to seem dark and indistinct. Whatever was pinkish of it was now hidden by a
skerry of weedy boulders. But he perceived that it was made up of seven rounded
bodies, distinct or connected, and that the birds kept up a constant croaking
and screaming, but seemed afraid to approach it too closely.




Mr Fison,
torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn rocks, and,
finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them extremely
slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and coiled his trousers
above his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid stumbling into the
rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an
excuse to resume, even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood. At any
rate, it is to this, no doubt, that he owes his life.




He
approached his mark with all the assurance which the absolute security of this
country against all forms of animal life gives its inhabitants. The round
bodies moved to and fro, but it was only when he surmounted the skerry of
boulders I have mentioned that he realised the horrible nature of the
discovery. It came upon him with some suddenness.




The rounded
bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and displayed the
pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human being, but whether
of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the rounded bodies were new and
ghastly looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus, and with
huge and very long and flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground. The
skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The
downward bend of the tentacle- surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the
bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a
grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about
the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There
were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond
them, amid the surf of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from
the sea.




Their
bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest;
but it does not appear that Mr Fison was afraid, or that he realised that he
was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of
their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and
indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they
had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving
them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big
rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.




And then,
slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him—creeping at
first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.




In a moment
Mr Fison realised that he was in danger. He shouted again, threw both his boots
and started off, with a leap, forthwith. Twenty yards off he stopped and faced
about, judging them slow, and behold! the tentacles of their leader were
already pouring over the rocky ridge on which he had just been standing!




At that he
shouted again, but this time not threatening, but a cry of dismay, and began
jumping, striding, slipping, wading across the uneven expanse between him and
the beach. The tall red cliffs seemed suddenly at a vast distance, and he saw,
as though they were creatures in another world, two minute workmen engaged in
the repair of the ladder-way, and little suspecting the race for life that was
beginning below them. At one time he could hear the creatures splashing in the
pools not a dozen feet behind him, and once he slipped and almost fell.




They chased
him to the very foot of the cliffs, and desisted only when he had been joined
by the workmen at the foot of the ladder-way up the cliff. All three of the men
pelted them with stones for a time, and then hurried to the cliff top and along
the path towards Sidmouth, to secure assistance and a boat, and to rescue the
desecrated body from the clutches of these abominable creatures.







II




And, as if
he had not already been in sufficient peril that day, Mr Fison went with the
boat to point out the exact spot of his adventure.




As the tide
was down, it required a considerable detour to reach the spot, and when at last
they came off the ladder-way, the mangled body had disappeared. The water was
now running in, submerging first one slab of slimy rock and then another, and
the four men in the boat—the workmen, that is, the boatman, and Mr Fison—now
turned their attention from the bearings off shore to the water beneath the
keel.




At first
they could see little below them, save a dark jungle of laminaria, with an
occasional darting fish. Their minds were set on adventure, and they expressed
their disappointment freely. But presently they saw one of the monsters
swimming through the water seaward, with a curious rolling motion that
suggested to Mr Fison the spinning roll of a captive balloon. Almost
immediately after, the waving streamers of laminaria were extraordinarily
perturbed, parted for a moment, and three of these beasts became darkly
visible, struggling for what was probably some fragment of the drowned man. In
a moment the copious olive-green ribbons had poured again over this writhing
group.




At that all
four men, greatly excited, began beating the water with oars and shouting, and
immediately they saw a tumultuous movement among the weeds. They desisted to
see more clearly, and as soon as the water was smooth, they saw, as it seemed
to them, the whole sea bottom among the weeds set with eyes.




‘Ugly
swine!’ cried one of the men. ‘Why, there’s dozens!’




And
forthwith the things began to rise through the water about them. Mr Fison has
since described to the writer this startling eruption out of the waving
laminaria meadows. To him it seemed to occupy a considerable time, but it is
probable that really it was an affair of a few seconds only. For a time nothing
but eyes, and then he speaks of tentacles streaming out and parting the weed
fronds this way and that. Then these things, growing larger, until at last the
bottom was hidden by their intercoiling forms, and the tips of tentacles rose
darkly here and there into the air above the swell of the waters.




One came up
boldly to the side of the boat, and, clinging to this with three of its
sucker-set tentacles, threw four others over the gunwale, as if with an
intention either of oversetting the boat or of clambering into it. Mr Fison at
once caught up the boathook, and, jabbing furiously at the soft tentacles,
forced it to desist. He was struck in the back and almost pitched overboard by
the boatman, who was using his oar to resist a similar attack on the other side
of the boat. But the tentacles on either side at once relaxed their hold at
this, slid out of sight, and splashed into the water.




‘We’d
better get out of this,’ said Mr Fison, who was trembling violently. He went to
the tiller, while the boatman and one of the workmen seated themselves and
began rowing. The other workman stood up in the fore part of the boat, with the
boathook, ready to strike any more tentacles that might appear. Nothing else
seems to have been said. Mr Fison had expressed the common feeling beyond
amendment. In a hushed, scared mood, with faces white and drawn, they set about
escaping from the position into which they had so recklessly blundered.




But the
oars had scarcely dropped into the water before dark, tapering, serpentine
ropes had bound them, and were about the rudder; and creeping up the sides of
the boat with a looping motion came the suckers again. The men gripped their
oars and pulled, but it was like trying to move a boat in a floating raft of
weeds. ‘Help here!’ cried the boatman, and Mr Fison and the second workman
rushed to help lug at the oar.




Then the
man with the boathook—his name was Ewan, or Ewen—sprang up with a curse, and
began striking downward over the side, as far as he could reach, at the bank of
tentacles that now clustered along the boat’s bottom. And, at the same time,
the two rowers stood up to get a better purchase for the recovery of their
oars. The boatman handed his to Mr Fison, who lugged desperately, and,
meanwhile, the boatman opened a big clasp-knife, and, leaning over the side of
the boat, began hacking at the spiring arms upon the oar shaft.




Mr Fison,
staggering with the quivering rocking of the boat, his teeth set, his breath
coming short, and the veins starting on his hands as he pulled at his oar,
suddenly cast his eyes seaward. And there, not fifty yards off, across the long
rollers of the incoming tide, was a large boat standing in towards them, with
three women and a little child in it. A boatman was rowing, and a little man in
a pink-ribboned straw hat and whites stood in the stern, hailing them. For a
moment, of course, Mr Fison thought of help, and then he thought of the child.
He abandoned his oar forthwith, threw up his arms in a frantic gesture, and
screamed to the party in the boat to keep away ‘for God’s sake!’ It says much
for the modesty and courage of Mr Fison that he does not seem to be aware that
there was any quality of heroism in his action at this juncture. The oar he had
abandoned was at once drawn under, and presently reappeared floating about
twenty yards away.




At the same
moment Mr Fison felt the boat under him lurch violently, and a hoarse scream, a
prolonged cry of terror from Hill, the boatman, caused him to forget the party
of excursionists altogether. He turned, and saw Hill crouching by the forward
rowlock, his face convulsed with terror, and his right arm over the side and
drawn tightly down. He gave now a succession of short, sharp cries, ‘Oh! oh!
oh!—oh!’ Mr Fison believes that he must have been hacking at the tentacles
below the water-line, and have been grasped by them, but, of course, it is
quite impossible to say now certainly what had happened. The boat was heeling
over, so that the gunwale was within ten inches of the water, and both Ewan and
the other labourer were striking down into the water, with oar and boathook, on
either side of Hill’s arm. Mr Fison instinctively placed himself to
counterpoise them.




Then Hill,
who was a burly, powerful man, made a strenuous effort, and rose almost to a
standing position. He lifted his arm, indeed, clean out of the water. Hanging
to it was a complicated tangle of brown ropes; and the eyes of one of the
brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and resolute, showed momentarily
above the surface. The boat heeled more and more, and the green-brown water
came pouring in a cascade over the side. Then Hill slipped and fell with his
ribs across the side, and his arm and the mass of tentacles about it splashed
back into the water. He rolled over; his boot kicked Mr Fison’s knee as that
gentleman rushed forward to seize him, and in another moment fresh tentacles
had whipped about his waist and neck, and after a brief, convulsive struggle,
in which the boat was nearly capsized, Hill was lugged overboard. The boat
righted with a violent jerk that all but sent Mr Fison over the other side, and
hid the struggle in the water from his eyes.




He stood
staggering to recover his balance for a moment, and as he did so, he became
aware that the struggle and the inflowing tide had carried them close upon the
weedy rocks again. Not four yards off a table of rock still rose in rhythmic
movements above the inwash of the tide. In a moment Mr Fison seized the oar
from Ewan, gave one vigorous stroke, then, dropping it, ran to the bows and
leapt. He felt his feet slide over the rock, and, by a frantic effort, leapt
again towards a further mass. He stumbled over this, came to his knees, and
rose again.




’Look out!’
cried someone, and a large drab body struck him. He was knocked flat into a
tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went down he heard smothered,
choking cries, that he believed at the time came from Hill. Then he found
himself marvelling at the shrillness and variety of Hill’s voice. Someone
jumped over him, and a curving rush of foamy water poured over him, and passed.
He scrambled to his feet dripping, and, without looking seaward, ran as fast as
his terror would let him shoreward. Before him, over the flat space of
scattered rocks, stumbled the two workmen — one a dozen yards in front of the
other.




He looked
over his shoulder at last, and, seeing that he was not pursued, faced about. He
was astonished. From the moment of the rising of the cephalopods out of the
water, he had been acting too swiftly to fully comprehend his actions. Now it
seemed to him as if he had suddenly jumped out of an evil dream.




For there
were the sky, cloudless and blazing with the afternoon sun, the sea weltering
under its pitiless brightness, the soft creamy foam of the breaking water, and
the low, long, dark ridges of rock. The righted boat floated, rising and falling
gently on the swell about a dozen yards from shore. Hill and the monsters, all
the stress and tumult of that fierce fight for life, had vanished as though
they had never been.

Mr Fison’s
heart was beating violently; he was throbbing to the finger-tips, and his
breath came deep.




There was
something missing. For some seconds he could not think clearly enough what this
might be. Sun, sky, sea, rocks — what was it? Then he remembered the boatload
of excursionists. It had vanished. He wondered whether he had imagined it. He
turned, and saw the two workmen standing side by side under the projecting
masses of the tall pink cliffs. He hesitated whether he should make one last
attempt to save the man Hill. His physical excitement seemed to desert him
suddenly, and leave him aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward, stumbling
and wading towards his two companions.




He looked
back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the one farthest out at
sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.







III




So it was Haploteuthis ferox made its appearance
upon the Devonshire coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression.
Mr Fison’s account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing
casualties to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the
Cornish coast that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious deep-sea
monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coastline. Hunger migration has, I
know, been suggested as the force that drove them hither; but, for my own part,
I prefer to believe the alternative theory of Hemsley. Hemsley holds that a
pack or shoal of these creatures may have become enamoured of human flesh by
the accident of a foundered ship sinking among them, and have wandered in
search of it out of their accustomed zone; first way-laying and following
ships, and so coming to our shores in the wake of the Atlantic traffic. But to
discuss Hemsley’s cogent and admirably stated arguments would be out of place
here.




It would
seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the catch of eleven
people — for so far as can be ascertained, there were ten people in the second
boat, and certainly these creatures gave no further signs of their presence off
Sidmouth that day. The coast between Seaton and Budleigh Salterton was patrolled
all that evening and night by four Preventive Service boats, the men in which
were armed with harpoons and cutlasses, and as the evening advanced, a number
of more or less similarly equipped expeditions, organised by private
individuals, joined them. Mr Fison took no part in any of these expeditions.




About
midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of miles out at
sea to the south- east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen waving in a strange
manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats at once hurried towards the
alarm. The venturesome occupants of the boat, a seaman, a curate, and two
schoolboys, had actually seen the monsters passing under their boat. The
creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and
they had been floating, five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine
through the blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep,
rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the
south-east.




These
people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one boat drew
alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet of eight or nine
boats collected together, and from them a tumult, like the chatter of a
marketplace, rose into the stillness of the night. These was little or no
disposition to pursue the shoal, the people had neither weapons nor experience
for such a dubious chase, and presently—even with a certain relief, it may be —
the boats turned shoreward.




And now to
tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole astonishing raid.
We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent movements of the shoal,
although the whole south-west coast was now alert for it. But it may, perhaps,
be significant that a cachalot was stranded off Sark on June 3. Two weeks and
three days after this Sidmouth affair, a living Haploteuthis came ashore on Calais sands. It was alive, because
several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way. But it is
probable that it was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained a rifle and shot
it.




That was
the last appearance of a living Haploteuthis.
No others were seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead body,
almost complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat
from the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth, picked up
a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How the former
specimen had come by its death it is impossible to say. And on the last day of
June, Mr Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near Newlyn, threw up his arms,
shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend bathing with him made no attempt to
save him, but swam at once for the shore. This is the last fact to tell of this
extraordinary raid from the deeper sea. Whether it is really the last of these
horrible creatures it is, as yet, premature to say. But it is believed, and
certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned now, and returned for
good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so
strangely and so mysteriously arisen.







Stay tuned. . . I'll post another story every Wednesday.