The thing in the woods
building and a little nearer the sluice gate. But he left the trees
when we came up and flung himself savagely against the boarded
doorway.
"That was open when we left it, Herrick--do you remember?"
He took out his revolver.
"Go round to the back, Sliefer, and take the dog with you. Austin,
watch this end from outside. I'll go through; I've got the
flashlight."
"I'm coming with you," Sliefer said.
"All right. One must stay outside, in case ... Austin, it'll be you,
then. If anything--_anything_, you understand--tries to get past
you, shoot to cripple it. Fire low. Remember what I told you!"
He flung the door open; I heard the quick rush of the dog's feet.
With every nerve tense to straining-point I listened, but the seconds
slowly passed and there was no further sound. I moved a few paces
back, to get a clearer view of the building and waited.
From within I fancied once I could hear Sliefer's voice. The
flashlight moved to and fro, its gleam visible through the cracks of
the old walls. Now they were going through the upper floor.
There was a stillness in the air, that chill hush which comes just
before dawn. Already the light was changing, becoming faintly clear
and shadowless. Somehow, with this drawing-near of daylight, of the
return to common day shapes and things, the nightmare feeling of
those dark hours dropped from me; I seemed to see it as something
fantastic, monstrous, a bad dream. All the events of the last few
hours crowded in upon me--the finding of Lessing, Mary's
disappearance, our grim chase through the night woods. How far were
these things connected--what was Herrick's idea? What were we
after--a criminal, hunted and desperate, endowed with animal strength
and cunning, but yet a man like ourselves--or a figment of Herrick's
brain?
From within the building I heard an exclamation, the dog's sharp
whine. Nerves suddenly taut, I waited, my eyes fixed on the broken
doorway. And then some instinct--I don't know what--made me turn and
look up.
I was standing almost directly under the old dead chestnut, near
which the dog had been nosing when we arrived. Its bare greyish
limbs, gnarled and twisted, stretched above me, bare in the growing
light. Bare--but as I looked one of those twisted boughs seemed to
stir and change, heave slowly, detach itself in some monstrous way
from the rest and take living shape. I tried to cry out, dragged
helplessly at my revolver, but before I could get it free something
fell on me, clutching, I was borne to the ground beneath a hairy
living weight, bestial, loathesome, an unnameable horror.
For an eternity, it seemed to me, we struggled there. The thing was
stronger than I, and strive as I would I could get no clear view of
it. Coarse long fur, indescribably filthy, was against my mouth and
nose, and my clutching hands met in it helplessly. I made a supreme
effort and twisted my head to one side till my face pressed the
earth, in a blind instinct of preservation. Long curved nails caught
at my throat, and once I fancied a hand that was partly human.
Strangely, through it all, I kept my mind somehow clear; the fear of
losing consciousness was stronger in me than any other. This, I
remember thinking, was the Thing that had attacked Lessing, that had
killed the two cyclists, falling on them as it had fallen on me.
Herrick was right ... I would tell Herrick ... and I wondered what
they would say when they found me. Darkness shut down; I was lying
under a heavy mountain, and then the mountain lifted, I heard the
hoarse snarl of the dog and an oath and Herrick's voice crying
sharply: "Don't shoot!"
There was a blinding report close to me. Somehow I staggered to my
feet. Herrick was supporting me. The smoke cleared away, and
through it I could see Sliefer, the gun in his hands, and on the
ground something that writhed and twisted in beastlike shape and yet
cried out with a human voice and dragged itself, still dreadfully
crying, up the slope to the water's edge, swayed there for a
sickening instant and fell with a splash into the black depths below.
XXII
THE SILVER BULLET
Pale clear sunlight; early twittering of birds; the clean freshness
of dawn....
The lamp was still burning on the table when we reached the bungalow.
Herrick put it out. Then he laid a hand on my shoulder.
"Austin----"
There was a clatter of wheels on the road outside. Someone had
pulled up outside the house. It was a boy--Hiram Scholl's
boy--taking his load of milk-cans over to the creamery.
"I don't know as you've missed that yeller dog that belongs here," he
called out, "but if the folks were looking for him I thought I'd tell
you. He's over to the little house back on our wood-lot up the road.
I called to him, an' I dunno but he's hurt or something, for he's
just layin' there an' he wouldn't come. So if you want to go after
him I guess he's still there."
"Leo!" I exclaimed.
Herrick turned to me quickly as the boy drove off. "What house is
that?"
"Hiram Scholl's. It was empty, but someone said that Menning's
mother--Herrick, there's just a chance!"
I sprang for the motor-cycle, leaning where we had left it the night
before, by the side of the house. In a moment I had it out on the
road and Herrick swung to the seat behind me as I started the engine
up.
Five minutes brought us to the spot where the house stood, a tiny
frame shack set on a space of half-cleared woodland back from the
road. To reach it we had to climb the slope of stony pasture that
divided Scholl's land from the woods, and as we came in sight of the
house, half-hidden among the stunted spruce and juniper trees my eyes
caught a yellowish spot stretched on the doorstone.
It was the setter. He whined as I called to him, but without
turning, his gaze fixed on the closed door. His fine coat was
draggled and matted with blood about the throat; he sprang to his
feet as we came near and began to paw at the doorway.
I knocked. No one moved within. The one window was close shuttered,
but I fancied, listening, I could hear a faint crooning sound from
inside.
Together we set our shoulders to the door. It gave way, and we found
ourselves in the one tiny living-room of the house. It was dark and
close there was a disorder of household things piled here and there.
On a small broken rocker in the middle of the floor, Mrs. Menning sat
huddled, swaying to and fro, with the low crooning mutter we had
heard from outside. She had an old coloured handkerchief tied over
her head and a small silver cross was hung on a thin chain round her
wrinkled neck. Her aged face was impassive; her eyes, uncannily keen
and bright, seemed to look straight through us into distance.
"Where is Miss Lessing?" I asked.
She made no sign of having heard me, only kept up that faint
unintelligible muttering. Herrick went over and shook her gently by
the shoulder.
"Where is Miss Lessing? You got to tell us."
She twisted her shoulder from his grasp and sunk lower into the
chair, her eyes averted. My ears had caught a sound overhead. There
was no stairway in the room, but behind a pile of furniture a wooden
button betrayed a door that I had taken for an ordinary closet.
Hastily, I began to drag the things aside. The old woman saw my
purpose and slipped with sudden agility to her feet, her eyes blazing
with anger, but Herrick thrust her aside and in an instant we had the
door open and were upstairs, the dog at our heels.
"Mary!"
I caught her in my arms--unhurt, thank God--and carried her down,
through the shuttered room, past the old muttering woman--out into
the open and the clean air.
"Oh, Austin, that old woman! She met me on the road--I had gone to
call for Dick, and she said she was looking for me; that Dick had had
an accident and they'd brought him to this house and sent for me.
She told me to go upstairs, that he was there, and she shut the door
and wouldn't let me out. There was no window; no one could have
heard me from outside. And then Leo found me, I heard him barking
and she tried to drive him away, but he wouldn't go. Good old Leo!"
She put her arm round the setter, who was trying hard to reach her
face with his tongue. "I knew he'd help you to find me. Austin,
where _is_ Dick?"
I had to tell her, breaking it as gently as I could.
"Will you take me to him at once, please--now! Austin, I knew
something was going to happen--I felt it. That's why I was worried,
last night--I couldn't explain. And then shut up alone there, not
knowing what it was.... That old woman--she was dreadful, but she
wasn't unkind to me. Do you suppose she _knew_--that she just wanted
to get me somewhere safe?"
Who knew? Was there perhaps a spark of human feeling in that strange
warped soul, half unhinged by her own troubles, something that Mary's
chance kindness, that afternoon by the saw-mill, had reached and
touched? It might have been.
We walked down the hill, and I took Mary on the motor-cycle behind me
as far as Lennox's, leaving Herrick to follow on foot. Dick was
better. He had passed a feverish night, Lennox said, but the fever
had left him with dawn and he was in an exhausted but normal sleep
when we arrived.
I left Mary with him, and walked back along the road to meet Herrick.
"And now," I said, "tell me--tell me the whole thing. Jack, what was
it?"
We were near the old twisted cedar by the hollow, the tree by which
Aaron had met his death that spring. Herrick sat down on a boulder
by the roadside and began to scrape slowly at his pipe.
"I told you about Menning and his wild-man stunt--all that I found
out the other day. Menning had a criminal twist and he knew how to
turn that trick to his own ends. It is far easier to simulate the
grotesque--the superhuman, if you like--than most people suppose.
Isn't that, after all, the basis of the witch-doctors' power? Even
an ordinary man becomes horrible if you put a mask on him. And
remember that Menning had a streak of abnormality to start with, and
the thing may very easily, as I said, have become an obsession with
him. Anyway that's the best explanation one can put on it, and the
one that Lennox and our friend Sliefer, and Lessing himself, will
agree upon. After all, it pretty well covers the facts."
I remembered his words the night before.
"Then what did you mean about the dawn?"
Herrick was silent a moment.
"We're all well out of a bad business, Austin," he said then. "Don't
you think we'd better let it go at that?"
"But you had another theory. You had it that morning, after the
fire. You wouldn't tell me what it was. But I don't imagine you've
changed your mind altogether."
"No, I didn't change my mind," Herrick said. He put his hand into
his pocket. When he withdrew it there lay, on his palm, the little
battered silver button that Lennox had first shown us.
"You remember, Austin," he said, "that I recalled one or two facts to
your mind that evening. This was One of them. I want you to look at
it again."
"It is a button," I said. "A button such as you find on some
European peasants' costumes."
"Westphalian peasants, such as Menning's mother came from. Lennox
overlooked that fact, though as the button is badly defaced we can
excuse him. I'll help you out, Austin. It is of pure silver, very
soft, and it has been hammered to form a rough bullet that could be
fired from an old-fashioned muzzle-loading gun."
"I don't see how that helps you."
"I want you to think," he said, "what particular associations there
are with a silver bullet."
I stared at the little pellet in my hand, striving with some vague
recollection at the back of my mind.
"They were used against ... against ... some sort of witchcraft," I