The thing in the woods
"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" I asked.
"What could I do? If I went telling that around anyone would have a
right to say I was crazy and that I'd imagined the whole thing. You
might say--and I've tried to think myself--that what I heard was just
something running in the bushes and what I saw was an old hen
fluttering in at the window. And maybe it was. And I've known men
who've been just as startled, and have told circumstantial tales,
over nothing more."
"You could have told it at its face value."
"No," said Lennox, "I couldn't. My mind doesn't work that way. I've
got to weigh things. And I've got to exhaust every possible
reasonable explanation, including my own physical state at the time,
before I'll admit that a thing is so when I know it can't be so. If
I've kept this to myself it's because I wanted to find some sort of
explanation in my own mind first."
He faced me, stolid and obstinate. Even in that moment I admired his
self-possession, his dogged, common sense determination not to be
drawn into admission of the existence of any thing that, as Lessing
said, he couldn't stick a pin into and label. And I knew, too, that
it had cost him something to tell me that story.
"Well," I said, "that's only one more to the list of things we don't
seem able to clear up. There's one point; that whatever the
explanation may be, it all seems to centre, in the end, round Menning
himself."
Lennox rose and went to his desk. "It's what I've always said," he
threw back over his shoulder. "Get Menning, and you get the root of
all this mystery."
I sat pondering his story. It was not long before my ears caught the
sound of a motor cycle along the road, and a few minutes after
Herrick appeared. He looked as if he had ridden far and fast; his
clothes were covered with dust and there were grimy circles round his
eyes.
"No, I don't want to eat," he said. "I got a sandwich coming along.
Just let me get this dirt off, that's all."
He went through to the kitchen, and we could hear him splashing at
the sink. When he came back, still vigorously towelling his face,
Lennox had already mixed him a drink at the sideboard.
"Well," Herrick said, settling himself in the chair Lennox had
vacated, "let's begin at the beginning. When I left this morning,
Austin, I couldn't tell you where I was going, because I didn't know
myself. I had to pick up my information on the way. I was on the
track of something which, it seems to me, none of us has so far taken
into account, and that is, Jakey Menning's early life."
"He was born right in this county," said Lennox.
"He was not. That's where you make your mistake. He was between
eight and nine years old when he first came here. His mother, when
we first hear of her, was employed with a travelling show, owned by a
German Jew called Goldstein, a sort of fourth rate circus that used
to do one-night stands in the small towns and villages. She cooked
for the men and looked after the wardrobe. While she was working
with them Jakey was born. No one seems to have known just who his
father was. The mother passed as a kind of half-wit. She was
cunning under an appearance of heavy stupidity, spoke a poor English,
was easily teased and enraged, and seems to have been treated as the
butt of the company. They wintered usually in Pottsville, where the
proprietor's brother kept a saloon. The proprietor's wife took
rather a fancy to Jakey, and later on, when Jakey's mother, during
the slack season, took a job as cook in a cheap eating-joint there,
she simply abandoned the baby to the circus people. While she was
employed there she met Menning, married him, and doesn't seem to have
troubled about Jakey for several years. Probably she never told
Menning of his existence.
"They settled in the country, where Aaron was born, and a few years
after, for reasons unknown, Menning deserted her. Then, for the
first time, she seems to have remembered Jakey, now growing to an age
when he might begin to make himself useful about the farm. She set
about claiming him. The circus people, from what I could hear, made
some opposition. Jakey was being trained as an acrobat and showed
some promise, though he was a difficult child to manage. Moreover,
they had kept him all this time and expected some return. Times,
however, were slack, they probably foresaw trouble with the school
inspectors also, and in the end they let the boy go.
"He worked about the farm, off and on, for some eight or ten years,
and got himself thoroughly disliked, as you know, by all the
Mennings' neighbours. The criminal streak in him was already
apparent, though in those days it only took the form of spitefulness
and mental deficiency. He was idle and vagrant and finally, at about
seventeen years old, took himself off one fine day and went back to
the travelling show, which he managed to trace up through the
Pottsville saloon-keeper. They took him back as an extra hand, to
help with the wagons. He was not good enough for a performer, his
training being interrupted, but the proprietor about that time had
the idea of running one or two freak side-shows, and they tried Jakey
out as the hoary old fake of 'wild man.'"
Herrick paused a moment to light a fresh cigarette, and in that
instant I saw Lennox's eye turn to me with something very like relief.
"It seems," Herrick went on, "that he was quite a successful
attraction and I can certainly believe it. There was naturally
something apish and uncouth about him, and very little make-up would
have turned the trick most naturalistically. He stayed with the show
nearly two years, doing odd jobs by day and playing his wild-man
stunt at the performances. And then some sort of queer thing must
have happened.
"I couldn't get the whole truth of it from the Pottsville brother,
who told me most of the story. Either he didn't know or he was
unwilling to tell, but the gist of it is that there was some row and
Jakey got suddenly fired. From what the Pottsville brother
'guessed,' Jakey played his rôle too realistically, and the
proprietor refused then and there to keep him another day. He had a
little money in his pockets, he turned up in Pottsville, where he
hung about for two or three days, and then made his way back to the
farm.
"I would give a great deal to have ten minutes with Goldstein
himself, and know exactly what did happen and why Jakey was fired. I
gathered that it was something pretty unpleasant. But Goldstein is
somewhere out in Ohio, and try as I would, I could get nothing more
from the brother than what I have told you. I think myself there was
something hushed up at the time, and that he is afraid even now of
its coming out. But I got enough I think to throw some interesting
light on what has happened since."
"Did you get any idea," Lennox asked, "of Jakey's make-up when he was
with these people?"
"No. Why?"
"Tell him your story, Lennox," I said.
He repeated briefly what he had already told me. Herrick listened,
his face intent.
"So that was----" He pulled himself up short. "Well, it isn't
difficult to put two and two together. The obvious explanation is
that Jakey has fallen back on his old circus stunt as a means of
terrorizing the neighbourhood. It wouldn't be difficult. No one
here, from what I can make out--possibly not even his own
family--knew how he spent those two years while he was away. There
is a form of mania which takes just that expression, and it is
possible that in Jakey's case it began out of sheer maliciousness,
and developed later into something a great deal worse--a fixed mania
which, with the rousing of the homicidal instinct, turned him
actually, at moments, into the wild beast he pretended to be."
"You think it was Menning--it was--well, what I saw--that attacked
Lessing?"
"I am certain of it. Go over the thing carefully, Lennox. There was
no stunt outside the possibility of a man with unusual physical
strength and ability, who had had acrobatic training in boyhood. And
remember that a maniac can perform feats that in his sane moments
might be outside his powers. We are not dealing with a normal
person. That's the one thing in this whole business we've got to
remember." He rose. "Austin, will you come over to the bungalow
with me? I'd like to see Lessing tonight."
I looked at my watch. "Ten o'clock. I told them I'd be over. We'll
take the cycle. It'll carry two of us."
He had left the motor cycle outside the porch. As we wheeled it out
to the roadway I said: "You think that is the explanation of the
whole thing?"
Herrick gave me a quick look.
"I said it was the obvious explanation. It is. But there's more
mixed up with it than that. And it's the other side of it that we
shall never get to the truth of until we get hold of Menning himself."
I thought of Lennox's description of what he had seen, in that
fleeting glimpse, and in spite of myself a shudder went over me.
"Do you mean that mania can actually transform a human being to that
degree?"
"Haven't you see enough, Austin, in your own experience, to answer
that question?"
I was silent. Every doctor, I imagine, has had experiences which he
is glad enough to put out of his mind, and though my own were limited
so far, I had heard enough tales of abnormality, at second hand, to
know that there was truth in Herrick's words.
I took my seat on the back of the motor cycle, and in a few minutes
we had reached the rise of hill. Turning the corner, we could see
the bungalow through the trees. There was still a light burning. As
we approached, the deep melancholy howl of the dog broke on our ears.
Evidently Lessing had not yet let him out.
We left the cycle against a tree and went up to the porch. The door
stood wide open, the light streaming through it from the lamp on the
table inside. Of Lessing or his sister there was no sign. Except
for the steady howling of the dog in the shed, the place was
absolutely silent.
We went through the empty rooms, came out again on the porch. A
chair was drawn up near the doorway, with a book dropped in it
face-downward, as though someone had risen in haste. That, and the
lamp left flaring on the table, gave me for the first time a definite
thrill of uneasiness.
Herrick went back and lowered the flame. "They can't have gone far,"
he said. "They wouldn't have left the light that way. Let's try the
studio."
We crossed the little space of ground beside the house. The studio
was dark; the door was locked and the key on the outside. As we
passed the tool-shed there was a tumult within. The dog, hearing our
footsteps, flung himself against the door in a frenzy of eagerness,
whining, scratching, tearing at the wood with his nails. There was
something in the deep, agonized, almost human anxiety in his voice,
raised, not in yelps, but in steady entreaty, that sent a queer
thrill down by spine. Herrick felt it too. He stopped short.
"What's _got_ that dog?"
"Lessing shut him in this evening. It was after----"
I paused. All at once there came back to my mind the dog's behaviour
that afternoon, when Lessing dragged him back from the saw-mill,
bristling and rebellious--Lessing's own face when he joked about the
rat. It was near the identical spot where we had missed the dog
before, when he broke away from us on our way down, just before we
saw Menning's mother. Menning's mother ... and Menning himself had
been seen in the neighbourhood the night before. In a flash I saw
the whole thing clearly--Freeman's action, the ghost that haunted the
milldam, Rebecca's rifled cream-pans and the old woman with her
basket of chips. What a fool I had been!
In a moment I had drawn the bolt and the setter was free. He barely