The thing in the woods
stopped to notice us; with a flash of his white chest and a
wide-flung yelp of relief he was off across the road and into the
woods.
I caught Herrick's arm. "Lessing is at the saw-mill. Come on--I'll
tell you later!"
"The saw-mill?"
I saw his hand slip down to his pocket as we ran. The same thought
was in both our minds. We broke through the underbrush on the far
side of the road, stumbled by chance on the footpath and were racing
along it, shoulder to shoulder, while the setter's barking still
echoed in our ears.
For a while his voice guided us. Then, abruptly, he was silent. We
paused on the edge of the clearing to take breath. All was
still--that closed-in stillness of the woods at night, when all
daytime life hushed. Before us loomed the old mill, its broken roof
and ruined timbers black against the sky. For a moment there was no
sound but the pounding of the blood in our ears, the dry rustle of a
dead bush as Herrick leaned forward, listening.
Then suddenly, from somewhere in the recesses of the old building
itself, there broke on that tense stillness another sound--more
horrible to me than anything else--the hoarse choking breaths and
muffled worrying of a dog at grips with his enemy. It came, not from
the main floor of the mill, but from the basement where the
water-wheel hung. There was a doorway on the near side of the mill,
formerly used for carting away the sawdust, but it had been nailed
up, and remembering this I called to Herrick as I ran directly for
the steep slope on the side by the sluice. Here there was open space
to squeeze through, and with Herrick close on my heels I trampled a
way through the breast-high weeds and bushes round the corner of the
building and gained an entrance.
Within all was pitch black. The water was shut off, but a little
trickle still flowed through, dripping from the slimy motionless bulk
of the great wheel above us. The air was warm, heavy with the smell
of rotting sawdust and of something else, fetid and nauseous. The
worrying had ceased; we could hear the broken rapid breathing of two
bodies, there, unseen, somewhere within a few feet of us in the
darkness. I made a step forward, but Herrick clutched my arm, and as
he did so the fight broke out again with renewed fury, somewhere it
seemed up in the far corner, among the drifted sawdust. I could
recognize the setter's deep-throated snarls, the snap of teeth
seeking a grip, and with it was another voice, deeper and more
guttural--something wholly strange and horrible--something that
snarled and panted and coughed in choking gasps. The darkness moved;
there came the breath of a warm animal body, the straining of a heavy
weight flung against resisting wood, and then the nailed planks gave
way, the sudden square of the doorway was obscured by a tumbling,
heaving mass and the next instant we were alone--alone in the
darkness with silence round us and that fetid unforgettable smell on
the air.
It was the same smell that Mary had complained of that evening,
wafted to us as we sat on the porch--the smell, I knew now, that I
had first noticed on the day I passed the Mennings' place in the
early summer.
"Phew!" said Herrick.
He struck a match, shielding the flame with his hands. The little
flicker threw out shadows high on the piled sawdust and gray ruined
walls. We could make out the huge mass of the wheel, the shafts that
ran to the story above, the great beams supporting the broken
flooring over our heads. The match spluttered and went out, but in
that instant it had shown us what we sought, a dark motionless figure
lying huddled in the far corner, where the sawdust sloped up in a
shadowy drift under the rafters.
Herrick reached it first, his feet sinking deep at every step as he
scrambled up. I heard him draw his breath in sharply as I struck
another match, and by its gleam saw Lessing, one arm doubled under
him and the clothes nearly torn from his body, lying unconscious in a
saturated pool of blood.
Of Mary there was no sign.
XXI
THE THING IN THE WOODS
Together we managed to get Lessing back to the house and laid him on
the couch, and while Herrick held the lamp I did the best I could for
his injuries with the means at my disposal. It was an ugly job. One
arm and shoulder were badly mangled and the collar bone broken; he
had lost a great deal of blood and there was a nasty contused wound
above the temple. A flicker of consciousness came back while I was
working over him, but the loss of blood told, and he lapsed back
again almost immediately. There were stitches to be taken; nothing
much could be done except to check the bleeding with temporary
bandages and as soon as I could manage single-handed Herrick rode off
to Lennox for help.
In reality it was not long, though it seemed to me an eternity that I
kept that nightmare vigil, my ears strained for any sound from
without, bending all my will-power on my task to keep me from the one
thought that I dared not face, Mary. Where had she gone--what had
happened to her? I went over a thousand possibilities, trying to
find some reasonable explanation to which I might cling, though as
each moment went by the stillness became more and more a torture. If
she had merely missed her brother and gone down the road to call for
him we should have met her, or she would be back by now. If she had
been with him at the mill, or had followed there ... I thought of the
deep blackness of the water at the end of the dam, where we had
passed that evening, the sheer drop blow the sluice-gates, and
shuddered.
It was with infinite relief I caught the approaching noise of the
motor cycle and saw Herrick reappear, followed only a few moments
later by Lennox with the light spring-wagon. It was decided to take
Lessing straightway to the doctor's house, where he could be better
looked after than in the bungalow. We laid a mattress in the bottom
of the wagon and lifted him on to this, and Herrick and I on the
motor cycle accompanied Lennox beyond the hollow at the foot of the
hill. Before we started Herrick, his face grim and set in the
lamplight, pulled out the revolver I had lent him that morning and
handed it to me.
"Keep that, Austin. I bought another today. Lennox has his own."
"There was an extra box of cartridges," I said, "in the table-drawer."
"Lennox gave them to me."
When we had seen the wagon well along the road we turned, and rode
back to the bungalow.
"Now," said Herrick, when we stood once more in the lighted room,
"the first thing is to find Mary. And then ... there has got to be
an end to this. Are you ready to face it?"
He did not need to ask me. I looked round on the little room, gay
and friendly with its rugs and books and the great bowls of
wildflowers that Mary loved--the countless little signs of her
occupation, a sweater flung across a chair, her work-basket of Indian
grass on the table--the room in which I had spent so many happy
hours, now suddenly sinister in its desertion. And then my eye fell
on the couch where we had laid Lessing, and the hideous litter I had
left in my haste--stained wads of cotton and the torn strips from his
shirt with which we had striven to check the blood before we carried
him up from the mill.
"For God's sake," I exclaimed impulsively, "let's get that cleared
away before she gets back!"
Before Mary got back ... the words died in my throat. But I gathered
up the telltale evidence all the same--every last scrap and
fragment--and thrust them out of sight behind the kitchen woodbox,
before I turned to Herrick.
"We'll try Sliefers' first," he said. "There's just the possibility
she is there."
It was a slight chance, and as it proved, fruitless. The farmer was
still up, and opened the door to us in stockinged feet. No one there
had seen Mary since the afternoon. Sliefer heard our errand with a
grave face.
"There's no house she'd have come to but this," he said. "There's
only Scholl's and Nevill's at the Bend, and they were both asleep as
you passed? They're a-bed by ten. Besides, if there was anything
out of the way they'd either one of them have sent over here
straight. No. Unless the young lady's missed her way, or met with
some accident...."
He looked at us doubtfully. It was no time to mince matters. We
told him, as briefly as we could, what had happened that evening and
how we had found Lessing at the mill.
He heard us out, his jaw set grimly. When we had finished he rose
without a word, a tall, still stalwart figure in his stockinged feet,
and crossing the kitchen took down his gun that hung on a rack above
the door.
"I guess I'm coming with you," he said.
I glanced at Herrick. He nodded.
"Three are better than two, Austin. We may be glad of an extra hand
before the night's out." He turned to Sliefer, who had laid his gun
on the table, and was pulling on a pair of heavy boots. "Have you
got a good dog? I don't mean the collie."
"Aye. There's old Spot, back in the barn. He'd pick up a trail
anywheres. Nor he ain't none too friendly to Menning, either, that's
one reason we've kep' him tied up, most of the time. Now I guess
I'll step up an' leave word with Mother."
He opened the stairway door and tip-toed up, curiously noiseless on
his heavy feet. We heard whispering, a smothered exclamation; then
he came down, gently closing the door behind him.
"I ain't told her nothing, only that you'd missed Miss Lessing and we
was going out to hunt her up. There's no need she should know about
the rest of it. This ain't no woman's job, nor it ain't no sheriff's
job either. If they'd come to me first off I know every track in
these woods back an' forth, and it won't be easy for anyone to get
away from me, not once we pick his trail up. Menning can run these
woods like a fox, but he won't run far, not when I got a gun in my
hand. Not that I'd be scared to meet him anywheres, gun or no gun,
and I bet he knows it."
A strange expression flitted across Herrick's face as he measured the
farmer's sturdy figure with his eye. But he only said gravely:
"You're a good neighbour, Mr. Sliefer. As you say, this is no
sheriff's job now; it's up to us. And we're going to see it through."
We closed the door behind us.
"I told Mother to bolt that, once we're gone," Sliefer said. "Reckon
we don't need no lantern."
"Better not," Herrick said.
The old man crossed to the barn and came back a few minutes later
with the dog on a chain, a cross-bred hound by the look of him,
heavily built and brindled white and brown.
"That's what they used to call a bear-dog," the farmer said, "when I
was a boy. The breed's pretty well died out now. I've had old Spot
here eleven years, and I had his mother an' grandmother before him.
You don't see 'em nowadays, any more. They raise these light-built
hounds now, but they ain't the fighters these dogs were."
The farmer was a brisk walker. He picked his way through the woods,
turning here, pausing there, at what seemed to us invisible signs and
landmarks, making his way unerringly through the trees and
undergrowth, the hound close to his heels, till presently we stood
once more on the open road a little below the bungalow. I looked
eagerly towards the house, only to see the turned down light burning
just as we had left it.
"We'll try here first," Sliefer said.
He took two or three turns about the road and clearing, but the dog
took no interest. We recrossed the road to the farther side, and
here, among the underbrush near the path Herrick and I had taken, he
showed the first signs of keenness, sniffing to and fro, his nose
laid close to the ground. In a few moments he was off at a leisurely
trot along the path.