The thing in the woods
with fireflies, gleaming and vanishing alternately in the soft dusk.
There should be a moon, but within the past hour premonitory
rainclouds had gathered, blotting it out. Lessing glanced at the sky.
"How long will it take you to get back?"
"Ten minutes, more or less. It won't rain till I get there."
I scratched a match, stooping toward my bicycle lantern.
"Is it necessary to light that?" he asked.
"Why not? There's a bad bit of road at the bottom there."
"I find the glare of a lamp like that always makes it worse. What is
it, acetylene?"
He bent over the lantern to examine it, and in the pause the match
burned down and went out. I felt for the box again in my pocket, and
as I did so Lessing let go his hold on the bicycle. The machine
slipped by its weight, and reaching quickly to catch it I heard the
unmistakable sound of escaping air.
"Now you've done it!" cried Lessing boyishly.
"Damn!" I groped for the rear tire. It was flat. "Here's a
cheerful business. How the dickens----"
Lessing laughed. "We'll have to walk it now! Never mind. I know
the road."
"I'm not going to bring you all that way," I said. "I shall be all
right."
"Nonsense! I like a walk before I turn in."
He took hold of the bicycle on one side, I on the other, and together
we set off to walk down the hill. There is an exhilaration in
walking through woods at night, even tempered by the necessity of
pushing a heavy motor-cycle before you, and my brief annoyance at the
accident rapidly vanished. Lessing was boyishly high-spirited;
between us we made a fairly rowdy trip of it. We had just finished
the ascent of the other side of the hollow when he laid a sudden hand
on my arm.
"Did you hear anything?"
"No. Why?"
I thought he was still joking, but his cloak of nonsense had dropped
from him abruptly. He pulled me to the side of the road.
"Listen!"
There seemed nothing to listen for. I waited, rather impatiently.
Lessing threw back his head, scanning the line of the trees that shut
us in. "There!"
It was still in my mind that he was trying to play some game on me.
"It's nothing but a bird," I said.
"Bird? You heard nothing else?"
"No."
"Come on," Lessing said. He seemed abruptly sobered, and I fancied
he was at pains to quicken our pace over the remaining stretch of
road. When we sighted the glimmer of the orchard palings I pulled up.
"Come on into the house and have a drink," I said.
"No, thanks. I must get back. By the way, do you carry a revolver?"
"What on earth for?"
"I only wondered. I should advise you to, around here." His hand
slipped down to his pocket, and I heard a soft click.
"What are you going to do?"
"Have a pot at the birds, going back." He smiled. "Good night.
Look in sometime during the week."
And he went off without further delay, whistling softly.
VII
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LABORATORY
Instead, it was Lessing who came a day or two later to see me. He
lounged in one evening when I was sitting smoking on the porch, after
supper, and my first advice of his presence was the clatter of a zinc
pail which Pete let fall promptly in the side yard. When Lessing
rounded the corner of the porch he was grinning.
"Your nigger must have a bad conscience," he said. "I never saw
anyone so afraid of the devil in all my life!"
I made a sound of annoyance. Evidently I had not finished with Pete
yet. "He's a born idiot!" I said.
"I'm not so sure," Lessing returned. "He has a very practical regard
for his own skin. I appreciate that."
"You ought to."
He gave me one of those habitual quick looks, his head on one side.
"Thanks! Do you find the mosquitoes bad around here? I got all
bitten up coming past Dutchman's Hollow."
I took the hint.
"We'll sit indoors," I said. "It's pretty cool in the surgery."
He followed me into the room, glancing curiously about him.
"So this is where old Lennox hung out ... the place has a look of
him. What's that, butterflies? He always had a weakness for things
he could stick a pin into and label nicely!"
"Have you never been here before?"
"Never. He used to come to my place. I have an idea you know, that
Lennox still thinks I'm not right in the head."
I lit the student lamp on the table and set out whisky and a couple
of glasses. Lessing settled himself in the shabby armchair opposite
me, and for a little while we smoked in silence. In the half-shadow
beyond the ring of lamplight I could see his face, fine and clear cut
against the shabby morocco of the chair back, the dark hair tumbled
over his forehead. He was staring up at the smoke wreaths in a
curious intensity of abstraction.
"I suppose," he began at last, "that I owe you some sort of an
explanation, as things go."
I made a little gesture of indifference. I was beginning to know my
man. If it pleased him to work upon my curiosity I was prepared to
give him the least possible satisfaction.
"You offered me one," I corrected him. "I believe we decided to let
it go at that."
He turned his gaze upon me, with a rather charming impertinence.
"That was when I took you for a fool. As I admit the error you ought
to forgive my expression of it. The truth is..." He paused so long
that I reached for a fresh cigarette to break the interval. "I'll be
damned if I know what the truth is myself!" He finished almost
violently. "I can give you facts--all you want. When it comes to
putting things together.... Do you know how maddening it is to have
your hand on a thing--actually on it--and feel it all the while
slipping through your fingers?"
He threw his cigarette away. "Let's drop all this nonsense, anyway.
I came over here tonight to have a talk with you. I tell you
frankly, because you're about the only sane man I'm likely to cross
down here. I tried Lennox once, and Lennox thought I was batty, and
there the matter ended. But I've got to a point now where it's
absolutely necessary, for the sake of my own mental balance, that I
should have someone else's opinion about things. I'm going to put
certain facts before you, and you'll say what you think about them."
I nodded.
"About eighteen months ago," Lessing began, "my wife was in rather
bad health. It was some sort of nervous trouble, which I need not
enter into here, but the doctor said she needed complete change, and
that she must positively live in the country for some time, a year or
two at least. We came down here. I bought the piece of ground up
the hill there and built the little bungalow we are living in, with
the idea of using it later on, when her health is restored, simply as
a summer cottage. I have a fondness for dabbling in chemistry, as I
think I told you, and shortly after we moved down here I built that
sort of outdoor study you have seen, so that I could have a place,
perfectly quiet, that I could work in without being disturbed, and
without messing the house up with my things. I am not a good
sleeper. I sit up pretty late at night as a rule, and it worries me
to know I'm disturbing other people in the house or that the women
are liable to drop in in their dressing-gowns at half-past one or so,
to ask whether I'm going to bed or not.
"My laboratory has a top light for day use, and I have rigged up an
acetylene lamp just over my table, with a pretty strong light. One
night last fall I happened to be working rather late. As a rule I
have no difficulty whatever about keeping awake--it's the other way
about, in fact--but along about one o'clock I began to get rather
drowsy. It might have been the fumes of the chemicals I was using,
but I'm used to that, and anyway I don't think they could have
affected me. My interest in what I was doing was still awake, but
the other side of my mind seemed to get drowsy at the same time. I
fought against it a long while, and then gradually I seemed to get
the consciousness of something--some presence--in or near the room.
I don't know if you have ever attended a séance, Haverill?"
"Never--of any account."
My cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I threw it away. I
was beginning to get keenly interested in his story.
"Well, if you had, you would know that one sometimes gets the sense
of a materialization some minutes before it actually takes place. I
suppose the subconscious part of one's mind acts more quickly than
the senses in receiving an impression. Anyway that was what seemed
to happen with me. I waited. I was awake; I want you to understand
that clearly. I was as awake as I am now. I saw everything about
me, but I seemed to see it in a quite impersonal sort of way.
"The top light is arranged to open in sections, the top as well as
the four sides. The side glasses were my idea for bad weather, so
that I could always have ventilation on one side or the other without
rain driving in, as it will with an ordinary skylight. I had the
middle section raised, and one side open as well. Presently I was
conscious that something was trying to enter at the glass. There
were no sound on the roof itself, which is galvanized, but I could
hear plainly a sort of scraping at the window. The inside light was
so strong that I could see nothing, but something was gradually
obscuring the opening. I had a conviction that the thing, whatever
it was, was attracted by my light, and I made an effort, with the
strange drowsiness gaining on me, to reach the lamp and turn it out.
"I was on my feet, reaching across the table, with the glare of the
lamp full in my eyes, when something--I don't know what--struck me
and threw me to the ground. My hand was already on the lamp, and I
must have managed to turn it out actually in the moment of falling.
I have a recollection of struggling for a moment there in the
darkness, of trying, with some sort of hazy instinct, to drag myself
under cover of the table, and then I suppose I became unconscious.
"When I came to it was broad daylight. I was lying on the floor,
near the table. There was broken glass near me, and I seemed to
remember the crash of it before I lost consciousness. My clothes
were torn, my arms and chest were badly scratched--I must have
somehow defended my face without knowing it--and I was stiff all over
when I moved. When I got into the open I was seized with an intense
nausea, which lasted for several minutes. My wife and sister are
used to my being up till all hours, so that my absence had caused no
uneasiness. I went into the house, washed myself as well as I could,
and went to sleep. It was then five o'clock, so that I must have
been nearly four hours unconscious."
"Did you notice any other symptoms besides the nausea?" I interrupted.
"Yes; an intense fatigue. It was not sleepiness. I was tired out,
as if I had been through some great exertion."
"Well?" I said, for I knew he had not finished.
"That was last October, the twenty-fourth, to be exact. Since then
the thing has happened twice again. On each occasion I have had the
same premonitory drowsiness. I have struggled against it, and it has
mastered me at just the critical moment. The second time when I came
to I was more badly hurt than before. My sister happened to be up
early that morning, and there was no disguising my condition from
her. She went off for Lennox. When he came he fixed me up and gave
me a sleeping draught--which I didn't need--and I slept nearly the
whole day. He held the opinion, which I wrested from him later, that
I had had some sort of seizure, the result of overwork, and that I
had inflicted the injuries on myself during unconsciousness. The
rest he put down to hallucination. He was a fool, and I told him so.
Whatever the thing was, it was no hallucination."
"How wide was the skylight open?"