Part 10 (1/2)

From that moment I date the most unpleasant experience of my life. I became suddenly the prey of a black depression, shot with the red lights of terror. But it was not a numb terror, for my brain was acutely alive - I had the sense to try to make tea, but my fuel was still too damp, and the best I could do was to pour half the contents of my brandy flask into a cup and swallow the stuff. That did not properly warm my chilled body, but - since I am a very temperate man - it speeded up my thoughts instead of calming them. I felt myself on the brink of a childish panic. One thing I thought I saw clearly - the meaning of Skule Skerry. By some alchemy of Nature, which I could not guess at, it was on the track by which the North exercised its spell, a cableway for the magnetism of that cruel frozen uttermost which man might penetrate but could never subdue or understand.

Though the lat.i.tude was not far north, there are folds and tucks in s.p.a.ce as if this isle was the edge of the world. Birds knew it, and the old Northerns, who were primitive beings like the birds, knew it. That was why this inconsiderable skerry had been given the name of a conquering jarl. The old Church knew it and had planted a chapel to exorcise the demons of darkness. I wondered what sights the hermit, whose cell had been on the very spot where I was cowering, had seen in the whiter dusks.

It may have been partly the brandy, acting on an empty stomach, and partly the extreme cold, but my brain, in spite of my efforts to think rationally, began to run like a dynamo. It is difficult to explain my mood, but I seemed to be two persons - one a reasonable modern man trying to keep sane and scornfully rejecting the fancies which the other, a cast-back to something elemental, was furiously spinning. But it was the second that had the upper hand - I felt myself loosed from my moorings, a mere waif on uncharted seas. What is the German phrase? Urdummheit - primal idiocy - that is what was the matter with me. I had fallen out of civilization into the outlands and was feeling their spell - I could not think, but I could remember, and what I had read of the Norse voyagers came back to me with horrid persistence. They had known the outlaw terrors - the Sea Walls at the World's end, the Curdled Ocean with its strange beasts. These men did not sail north as we did, in steamers, with modern food and modern instruments, huddled into crews and expeditions. They had gone out almost alone, in brittle galleys, and they had known what we could never know.

And then I had a shattering revelation. I had been groping for a word and I suddenly got it. It was Adam of Bremen's proxima abysso. This island was next door to the Abyss, and the Abyss was that blanched wall of the North which was the negation of life.

That unfortunate recollection was the last straw. I remember that I forced myself to get up and try again to kindle a fire. But the wood was still too damp, and I realized with consternation that I had very few matches left, several boxes having been ruined that morning.

As I staggered about I saw the flare which John had left for me, and almost lighted it. But some dregs of manhood prevented me - I could not own defeat in that babyish way - I must wait till John Ronaldson came for me next morning. Instead, I had another mouthful of brandy and tried to eat some of my sodden biscuits. But I could scarcely swallow; this infernal cold, instead of rousing hunger, had given me only a raging thirst.

I forced myself to sit down again with my face to the land. You see, every moment I was becoming more childish. I had the notion - I cannot call it a thought - that down the avenue from the north something terrible and strange might come. My state of nerves must have been pretty bad, for though I was cold and empty and weary I was scarcely conscious of physical discomfort. My heart was fluttering like a scared boy's; and all the time the other part of me was standing aside and telling me not to be a d.a.m.ned fool.

I think that if I had heard the rustle of a flock of migrants I might have pulled myself together, but not a blessed bird had come near me all day. I had fallen into a world that killed life, a sort of Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The brume spoiled the long northern twilight, and presently it was almost dark. At first I thought that this was going to help me, and I got hold of several of my half-dry rugs and made a sleeping-place.

But I could not sleep, even if my teeth had stopped chattering, for a new and perfectly idiotic idea possessed me. It came from a recollection of John Ronaldson's parting words. What had he said about the Black Silkie - the Finn who came out of the deep and hunkered on this skerry? Raving mania! But on that lost island in the darkening night with icy tides lapping about me was any horror beyond belief?

Still the sheer idiocy of the idea compelled a reaction. I took hold of my wits with both hands and cursed myself for a fool. I could even reason about my folly. I knew what was wrong with me. I was suffering from panic - a physical affection produced by natural causes explicable, though as yet not fully explained.

Two friends of mine had once been afflicted with it, one in a lonely glen in the Jotunheim so that he ran for ten miles over stony hills till he found a saeter and human companions.h.i.+p; the other in a Bavarian forest, where both he and his guide tore for hours through the thicket till they dropped like logs beside a highroad.

This reflection enabled me to take a pull on myself and to think a little ahead. If my troubles were physical, then there would be no shame in looking for the speediest cure. Without further delay I must leave this G.o.d-forgotten place.

The flare was all right, for it had been on the highest point of the island, and John had covered it with a peat. With one of my few remaining matches I lighted the oily waste, and a great smoky flame leaped to heaven.

If the half dark had been eerie, this sudden brightness was eerier. For a moment the glare gave me confidence, but as I looked at the circle of moving water evilly lighted up, all my terrors returned. How long would it take for John to reach me? They would see it at once at Sgurravoe - they would be on the lookout for it. John would not waste time, for he had tried to dissuade me from coming. An hour, two hours at the most.

I found I could not take my eyes from the waters. They seemed to flow from the north in a strong stream, black as the heart of the elder ice, irresistible as fate, cruel as h.e.l.l. There seemed to be uncouth shapes swimming in them, which were more than the flickering shadows from the flare. Something portentous might at any moment come down that river of death - And then my knees gave under me and my heart shrank like a pea, for I saw that the something had come.

It drew itself heavily out of the sea, wallowed for a second, and then raised its head and, from a distance of five yards, looked me blindly in the face. The flare was fast dying down, but even so at that short range it cast a strong light, and the eyes of the awful thing seemed to be dazed by it.

I saw a great dark head like a bull's - an old face wrinkled as if in pain - a gleam of enormous broken teeth - a dripping beard - all formed on other lines than G.o.d has made mortal creatures. And on the right of the throat was a huge scarlet gash. The thing seemed to be moaning, and then from it came a sound - whether of anguish or wrath I cannot tell - but it seemed to me the cry of a tortured fiend.

That was enough for me. I pitched forward in a swoon, hitting my head on a stone, and in that condition three hours later John Ronaldson found me.

They put me to bed at Sgurravoe with hot bottles, and the doctor from Voss next day patched up my head and gave me a sleeping-draught. He declared that there was little the matter with me, except shock from exposure, and promised to set me on my feet in a week.

For three days I was as miserable as a man could be, and did my best to work myself into a fever. I had said not a word about my experience, and left my rescuers to believe that my only troubles were cold and hunger and that I had lighted the flare because I had lost the boat. But during these days I was in a critical state. I knew that there was nothing wrong with my body, but I was gravely concerned about my mind.

For this was my difficulty. If that awful thing was a mere figment of my brain, then I had better be certified at once as a lunatic. No sane man could get into such a state as to see such portents with the certainty with which I had seen that creature come out of the night. If, on the other hand, the thing was a real presence, then I had looked on something outside natural law, and my intellectual world was broken in pieces.

I was a scientist, and a scientist cannot admit the supernatural. If with my eyes I had beheld the monster in which Adam of Bremen believed, which holy men had exorcised, which even the shrewd Norlanders shuddered at as the Black Silkie, then I must burn my books and revise my creed. I might take to poetry or theosophy, but I would never be much good again at science.

On the third afternoon I was trying to doze, and with shut eyes fighting off the pictures which tormented my brain. John Ronaldson and the farmer of Sgurravoe were talking at the kitchen door. The latter asked some questions, and John replied, ”Aye, it was a walrus and nae mistake. It came ash.o.r.e at Gloop Ness and Sandy Fraser hae gotten the skin of it. It was deid when he found it, but no' long deid. The puir beast would drift south on some floe, and it was sair hurt, for Sandy said it had a hole in its throat ye could put your nieve in. There hasna been a walrus come to Una since my grandfather's day.”

I turned my face to the wall and composed myself to sleep. For now I knew that I was sane and need not forswear science.

H. G. WELLS.

THE RED ROOM.

”I can a.s.sure you,” said I, ”that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.” And I stood up before the fire with my gla.s.s in my hand.

”It is your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me askance.

”Eight-and-twenty years,” said I, ”I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.”

The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open. ”Aye,” she broke in, ”and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty.” She swayed her head slowly from side to side. ”A many things to see and sorrow for.”

I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty gla.s.s on the table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible st.u.r.diness, in the queer old mirror at the end of the room. ”Well,” I said, ”if I see anything tonight, I shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the business with an open mind.”

”It's your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm once more.

I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the pa.s.sage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half-averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an armchair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm gave this newcomer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.

”I said - it's your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, when the coughing had ceased for a while.

”It's my own choosing,” I answered.

The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time, and threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he began to cough and splutter again.

”Why don't you drink?” said the man with the withered arm, pus.h.i.+ng the beer toward him. The man with the shade poured out a gla.s.sful with a shaky arm that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these grotesque custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.

”If,” said I, ”you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will make myself comfortable there.”

The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under the shade; but no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one to the other.

”If,” I said a little louder, ”if you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me.”

”There's a candle on the slab outside the door,” said the man with the withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. ”But if you go to the Red Room tonight -”

(”This night of all nights!” said the old woman.) ”You go alone.”

”Very well,” I answered. ”And which way do I go?”

”You go along the pa.s.sage for a bit,” said he, ”until you come to a door, and through that is a spiral staircase, and halfway up that is a landing and another door covered with baize. Go through that and down the long corridor to the end, and the Red Room is on your left up the steps.”

”Have I got that right?” I said, and repeated his directions. He corrected me in one particular.

”And are you really going?” said the man with the shade, looking at me again for the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the face.