Snow-blind
being out-of-doors, but feeling your way in a strange--” and hesitated
for the word--“cavern. Everything is so--shut-in.”
Kitchener had nothing to say. He was forcing his way doggedly through
the low, jungle-like thickets, when suddenly, unreasoningly, his breath
was quenched in his lungs and his heart stood still.
Something soft and silent and somehow horrible, seemed to move through
the air just by his head.
He was not aware of any sound, nor of actual motion. Yet without seeing
or hearing he knew that something alive had passed through the darkness
and stared at him.
And Diane knew, and the dogs knew. The girl’s hand was clutching the
muscles of his forearm, trembling. The dog team scrambled forward to
slink at Kitchener’s heels. Like the girl, the beasts also had
discovered a sudden need for human companionship.
Kit had pulled up short, listening, his eyes striving vainly to
penetrate the stifling gloom.
There was nothing, only the sighing of the spruces and the cracking of
frost-brittle branches along the hidden creek. His common sense tried to
tell him that he was deluding himself with overwrought imaginings, but
his high-keyed instincts knew better.
As he waited, tense and breathless, with the girl clinging to him and
the dogs cowering at his feet, it came again. For an instant he fancied,
or rather, felt, that a ghostly shape, blacker than the blackness of the
night, had soundlessly crossed his line of vision. Similarly, he was
conscious of a wavering in the darkness behind him.
Kit felt a cold tingling creep up his backbone to the base of the neck,
that queer, atavistic sensation that modern men probably have inherited
from furry forebears, who bristled in moments of danger and dread. The
girl was standing close, her slim young body as taut as though she had
suddenly passed under a mesmeric spell. Without thinking what he did,
Kit’s arm slid around her waist, and she did not try to move.
Again he was aware of a shady stirring, as though a grotesque and
impalpable substance had stooped his direction and brushed him by. For
just that moment the dead air was disturbed and he had the impression
that a soft, monstrous form had swept past his face. And all at once the
awful silence was disrupted by a harsh, snicking sound--like a pair of
steel scissors’ blades that had sharply clashed.
Kit caught his breath, and then his drawn muscles relaxed and he laughed
feebly with the letting down of over-strained senses. “Oh, gosh!” he
moaned. “What a pair of idiots we are! Scared--”
“Of what?” the girl gasped. “Oh, what?”
“Do you know the name of this place?” Kit’s voice sounded more as though
it belonged to him. “Of course! I never thought!”
“This place--?” she echoed.
“Great Owl Run. There must have been a reason for the name.” He released
the girl and looked shamefacedly into the darkness. “Owls!”
Something glided past them so close that they felt the fanned wake in
the atmosphere.
“It’s an owl pit in here,” explained Kit, who had become his own man
again. “There must be dozens of ’em. They’re just swooping to look at
us--”
The girl shuddered and threw up one arm to defend her face. “How
terrible!” she faltered.
“A puppy or a wolf cub would never get out of here alive,” he told her.
“But a man and woman and grown dogs are perfectly safe.”
The girl strained forward as his eyes tried desperately to fathom the
obscurity. “I can feel them about us,” she whispered. “They must be
enormous.”
“Great Northern Owls!” he said. “I saw one once that had wandered south.
He was six feet across the wings. Bloody night pirates! Fiends! This
must be a fearful pocket of the woods. Where the owls live nothing else
ever lives.” He touched her hand. “Let’s get on.”
Miss Durand was somewhat reassured, but the dogs did not like this place
at all. Thenceforward Kit had no worries about the jaded animals keeping
up with him. They were nosing his heels at every step.
As he crunched over a carpet of spruce needles, which in places was bare
of snow, vague, feathery flutterings wove invisible orbits about his
head. Once something croaked above him, and later one of the fearsome
nightbirds sent out his hunting call, a voiceless, disembodied sound,
like a despairing groan floating out of an insatiable emptiness. He knew
it was only an owl, and yet his blood was chilled by the unearthliness
of the cry.
He had no idea how far he followed the windings of that ill-omened
creek. For hours, it seemed to him, he groped his way among shaggy tree
trunks, around rotted windfalls, through tangling, flesh-tearing
thickets. And then, without warning, he found nothing in front of his
outreaching hand. He stopped and peered blindly, and knew only that the
dense forest had abruptly come to an end and that there was open space
before him.
Gingerly he moved forward again, and barked his knee on the sharp edge
of a stump. There were other snags and stumps sticking up from the
ground. He brushed the snow from one of the old stubs, and found the
scars of ancient ax-work. Here, apparently, was a man-made clearing.
Diane Durand had pressed up behind him with one unquiet hand touching
him as she tried to see past his shoulder. The dogs squatted on their
haunches and sat in an uneasy line, their noses and sharp ears cocked to
the fore. And then, before anybody could stop him, one of the beasts
flung up his head and let forth a long, lugubrious howl.
The sudden eruption of sound in that hushed closure of the wilderness
was indecent, uncanny, frightening. Kitchener caught the animal’s throat
and choked off the last echoing quaver. “Shut up!” he commanded under
his breath.
The girl had ventured a few paces forward, and he straightened and stole
up beside her.
“I think there’s something there,” she said close to his ear. “I can
just make it out--square and black.”
Kit lifted one eyebrow and stood at straining attention. Gradually a
dim, dark outline took shape in the gloom. “It looks like a house,” he
mused.
A mutual curiosity drew them on, and after several cautious halts, they
arrived before a low-roofed, dismal-looking structure of hewn logs, that
stood, apparently, in the middle of an abandoned clearing. There was no
sound within, no glimmer of light; the place smelled of emptiness,
desolation and decay.
Kit moved under the dank front wall, and waited with his mouth half open
and his head alertly tilted. The open doorway yawned at him and the
puncheon door hung on one rusted hinge that creaked faintly with the
pressure of the wind. At the right and left loomed the dark squares of
two broken-shuttered windows. In the faint odor of must that emanated
from the interior murk he caught no scent of smoke nor savor of recent
cooking. The one-time occupants of the cabin must have been a long while
absent.
Kitchener’s sense told him that he might enter the place openly, and
that there would be no one to deny him the right. But something more
than mere instinct of caution urged him to hesitate. His hand went down
to unbutton the flap of his pistol holster, and that simple, unthinking
act made him bold. He shouldered aside the swaying door and stepped into
the cabin.
Something squeaked and scuttled away overhead, and became silent. The
old roof evidently sheltered squirrels, or rats. There was something
else. It was a low, measured sound, lifting and falling, like a man
breathing in the dark.
The dead air within seemed many degrees colder than the zero weather
outside. Kit found himself shivering as he stared into the frigid
obscurity, striving with every nerve aquiver to locate the source of
that strange, breathy heaving.
Diane Durand had come into the cabin and remained a stilled shadow at
his side. The dogs were cowering in their tangled traces at the doorway,
snuffing audibly at whatever it was the darkness hid. It might have
seemed that they were afraid to stay alone outside, and fearful of
coming in.
Kitchener had his flashlight in hand, his thumb irresolute on the
button. He drew a quick breath and suddenly pressed the contact. A spot
of light danced on the farther wall, and he swung it in a circuit of the
room.
His swift reconnoitering disclosed nothing immediately alarming. The
brilliant bull’s-eye flicked from wall to wall, illuminating bare,
peeled logs, warped and moldy and showing wide cracks at places where
the chinking had crumbled. The first hurried survey revealed a clay
fireplace choked with stale kitchen litter, a greasy iron pot hanging on
a crane, a broken-legged table covered with tattered oilcloth, a slab
bench, a trash heap of empty tins and battered cooking utensils, a
sheet-iron stove and stove-pipe flaked red with rust, a disused ax
driven to the hilt into one of the sill-logs, and a double-decked bunk
made of poles and stuffed with withered balsam branches and
frowsy-looking bed clothing.
The single, four-square room held no visible habitant, and yet,
deliberate and rhythmic as tick-tocks, the breathing sounds continued.
Kitchener felt his eyes growing bigger as he switched his light back to
the bunk. There was something in the lower section, a shapeless bulge
hidden by a red blanket.
For lengthening seconds he watched and listened so particularly to the
other breathing that he himself forgot to breathe. At first he thought
the blanket had shifted slightly, but as he eyed it closely he changed
his mind and decided that nothing had moved. But still the strange,
bellows-like pulsations filled and expired, lifted and died again.
Slowly his glance turned upward, and then he shot his light towards the
ceiling beams. There was a gaping hole in the roof, where a patch of
shakes had rotted through; and one of the rafters had loosened at the
eaves. A current of air sucked through the door and drew out through the
vent overhead, causing the sagging roof to billow at intervals like a
tent-top in a wind. It was the cabin that was breathing.
Kitchener should have been relieved when he traced the source of
disturbing sound. But he wasn’t. There was something wrong about this
place. He felt it. He knew it. He felt it in the air, in the chilling
darkness, in his blood and nerves and in the marrow of his bones. The
light flickered back to the bunk. He looked, took a couple of steps
forward, and looked harder.
The red blanket was an old Hudson’s Bay Company four pointer. He saw the
marking stripes at the corner that hung off the edge of the bunk, and
also he saw a charred spot in the fabric, down near the border. A spark
had hopped out of the camp fire his first night in the woods and
scorched that hole in the wool. It was Grandfather Tearl’s old red
blanket. There was no mistaking it. He had given it to Jerry when they
traded clothes and equipment, two days ago. Jerry was here, or had been
here.
With misgivings that he could never have explained, Kit moved to the
bunk and pulled at the edge of the blanket. He tugged tentatively, and
then jerked it to the floor. In the middle of the bunk was a crumpled
garment--a gray stag shirt--and nothing else.
Kitchener stood like a torpid man, staring senselessly at his own bare
hand. His fingers were wet and sticky. He turned the light towards
himself and felt weak and sick. The blanket had left a gory smear across
his palm.
As though he had suddenly aroused himself from a stupor he snatched up
the shirt from the mattress of browse. He looked at the label under the
neck band. It was the shirt he himself had purchased not long ago at a
New York store of outfitters. His brother had it when they last saw each
other.
In an access of horror Kit spread wide the garment and brought his lamp
to bear. And then his eyes shut as though with an anguish that was