Mr Thewless looked nervously over his shoulder, and the motion bred the instant suspicion that he was being followed. This too was something against which reason’s voice spoke loudly enough. Certainly there was no occasion to suppose that anything
physical
was following him, since he had concluded that, in the first instance, nothing physical had been involved. Moreover, the light was for the moment adequate for a careful inspection, and there was demonstrably nothing in the long corridor behind him except the now foreshortened pictures, and the stern of the stuffed dog, and a number of those sheeted objects – statues, armour, or whatever – which were pervasive about the house. Mr Thewless paused for a moment to convince himself of the folly of this latest feeling; then, without again turning his head, he marched on to the head of the stairs he must descend.
But now his ears were only all too open, and Killyboffin was suddenly alive for him with whisperings, soft footfalls, muffled groans, and all the hackneyed gamut – as he desperately told himself – of conventional supernatural solicitation. He had only, he felt, to allow credulity another inch to its tether and there would at once be added to these the final banality of dismally clanking chains. He was at the stairhead; a half-turn was topographically essential to his further progress;
one
more look behind, therefore, he might venture without too gross a capitulation to his own senseless doubts. Arguing thus, he looked – and the result ought to have been wholly reassuring. The corridor was empty still; only the same objects met his scrutiny. And yet he was at once – and as he had not yet been – alarmed. There was a sense in which this new trepidation could not be called baseless, since he was convinced that it was occasioned by some specific fact. But what this was he was unable to determine; turning face forwards once more and taking his first step downstairs, he was aware only of the uncomfortable fact of water creeping in a chill trickle down his spine. And at the same time there seeped into mind an anecdote of the most extreme inconsequence. It was that of the bishop who, glancing into a field, remarked casually that it contained a hundred and eight sheep – a circumstance presently verified by the computations of his curate. The point of the story, as Mr Thewless knew, lay in the fact that the number of objects that the normal mind can instantaneously enumerate is five. But if the point was tenuous the application was more so, and by the time that he was half-way down the first flight of stairs the mental image accompanying this odd reminiscence had been replaced by a melting succession of others, dredged up from childhood, in which, behind unfortunate persons benighted in dark forests, there peeped and crept maleficent goblin bands.
Almost, he saw himself presently in panic flight through the sleeping house; and it was as a rudimentary test of self-control that he now stopped by the staircase-window as if to look at his leisure into the night. But this pause was more definitive than anything that had happened yet, so absolutely was the sense it brought him of other entities pausing too. Yes, behind him
they
had stopped because he had stopped; and when he moved on
they
would move on too.
To allow his apprehensions to crystallize in this way around a pronoun so consecrated in a popular consciousness to expressing the menace of the unknown was, he very well knew, a step towards disintegration steeper than any he now trod again to reach the lower corridor. The wind – although he had a sense that, outside, it had almost died away – continued to prowl the house, and only the more eerily because now its operations were to be apprehended only by the tip of the senses. If the pattering footfalls were softer it was because, at some sinister crisis, they were approaching with additional stealth; if the breeze no longer flapped at one’s pyjamas it was the more possible to feel it as the chill breath of some sepulchral phantom on one’s neck.
Gaining the lower corridor, he found a deeper darkness. Here the sweep of the lighthouse was without effect, and only the faintest glint of moonlight percolated through a line of windows on his right hand. His candle, now all but guttering, had become vital to him; were it to go out he could only grope. For some yards he pressed forward rapidly – but not too rapidly, lest the little flame should be extinguished by the wind of his own speed. The corridor was much like that above, with the same embrowned paintings and shrouded statuary and ranged furniture along the walls. Once more be stopped and looked back. And this time it was as if he had caught the presences in the act, for his eye had surely glimpsed some suddenly arrested movement, some swiftly frozen gesture, in the short vista behind him. Again he thought of the bishop and the sheep, and this time the association tentatively explained itself. Had he – all instantaneously, with the speed of the unconscious mind – computed the number of the objects dispersed behind him, and found that they held no tally with a similar unconscious computation made upon his previous traversing of the ground? He was moving forward again before this speculation, in the circumstances highly creditable to his intellectual vitality, had fully formed itself in his mind; when it had done so he took some steps further and this time swung round with all the speed he could contrive. The issue of this manoeuvre, which precisely reproduced the ancient playground game of Grandmother’s Steps or Fox and Geese, was at once successful and completely disastrous. It was successful because the shadowing presences did not on this occasion freeze into immobility with adequate speed – so that indeed, were the game being played according to the rules, Mr Thewless would have achieved the decisive stroke of returning them to their ‘base’. What in fact he saw was two sheeted figures, entirely ghostly after the prescriptions of Christmas pantomime, hastily assume the postures appropriate to objects of statuary shrouded after the bizarre Killyboffin fashion. This untoward spectacle, as it were inverse to those which gratified Pygmalion and liquidated Don Juan, he had no opportunity to probe, for the disaster attendant upon his whirling round was as decisive as it was inevitable. His candle went out.
Were Mr Thewless’ adventures in the hands of what is called an atmospheric writer, it might be possible to credibilize a fact which, as matters stand, can only be baldly stated. Killyboffin in the small hours had now wrought upon Humphrey Paxton’s tutor to such a degree that, while retaining considerable power of rational thought, he was lamentably confused about the probable nature of the entities behind him; about the order of being, as it may be put, to which they belonged. Had he been convinced that they were human marauders, mere breakers-in such as his host was apprehensive of, the problem presented, even if uncomfortable, would have been comparatively simple. Correspondingly, had he kept clearly in focus the concept or theory of supernatural appearances, he would have been able to regain something of the poise of the open-minded, the speculative man. But all that Mr Thewless could now predicate of the forces behind him was this: that they stood for Danger.
But the peril was whose? For Mr Thewless, standing as he was in darkness and with his enemies creeping up behind, the achieving of this question was what the thoughtful reader will already have recognized it as being: a signal triumph of the mind. Were he being pursued with intent to silence him before an alarm could be given, this could have been done long ago – and with greater advantage while he was still substantially remote from the other occupants of the mansion. If, on the other hand, the constitution of his pursuers was such that they were without the power to command physical agencies, and must work their malign will by a mere operation of terror upon the mind, they would surely do better to bar the way between Mr Thewless and the moral support which he would gain by making his way to his friends. It seemed not their object, then, either to offer him direct violence or to lead or drive him into the prescriptive hazards of precipice, flood, or bog. They were, in the strictest sense, trailing him. They were, and with all the unobtrusivenes at their command, keeping him in view until his present pilgrimage through the house was completed.
In other words, Humphrey was the quarry. Mr Thewless did not, it must be repeated, at all clearly formulate the quarry of
what
; nor did he, standing with his extinguished candle while the house muttered and whispered around him, endeavour to relate this conviction to what had hitherto been his overriding sense of the total situation in which, with the boy, he had involved himself. He simply knew that it was the boy that was threatened. And he knew that this knowledge, held securely as gospel for the time, imposed upon him a complete reversal of his present plan. For it was a clear inference from what had been revealed to him that these sinister powers were without knowledge of where Humphrey was now lodged. They had penetrated to – or was it conjured themselves into apprehensible shape in? – the haunted room from which Ivor Bolderwood had caused him to be removed; failing to find him there they had taken a cast next door and so disturbed his tutor; they had now divined the injudicious purpose by which that tutor was at present actuated, and proposed simply that he should lead them where they wanted to go. There was thus for Mr Thewless only one course consonant with the safety of his charge. He must turn round in the darkness now enveloping him; march, or grope, straight past, or upon, his adversaries; and so return to his own room.
In this formidable posture of his affairs it would be ungenerous to say that he was frightened; what chiefly confronted him was the rudimentary business of getting his limbs to obey the entirely unequivocal dictates of his will. For in this episode of nightmare (and it did occur to him, indeed, positively to wonder whether he might not, in point of ultimately comforting fact, be at this moment simply if unsoundly asleep) – in this episode of nightmare he found himself for a struggling moment circumstanced as in certain veritable nightmares of long ago. In these, which drew their material, he had been accustomed to believe, from an early and soon exhausted interest in the mechanism of the homely ‘tram’, he had been wont to find himself, at sufficiently awkward moments, rooted to the ground as if by the agency of some magnet powerfully reinforced by electrical means. And this was his situation now. Neither his right foot nor his left was prepared to accept the hazard of detaching itself from the worn carpeting to which it was clamped. Mr Thewless, in the fullest sense of the slangy phrase, was ‘in a fix’.
What came to his rescue was the decidedly chilly quality of the night to one attired exiguously for slumber. Mr Thewless sneezed. And at this the charm was miraculously broken. He found himself advancing, with what confidence was possible in a medium between the Cimmerian and the Stygian, in the direction that he wished to go. From the mere fact of this, unpromising though in some aspects it seemed, there was more than a grain of confidence to be extracted; and this less desperate mood was now reinforced by more factors than one. He had the impression that in the darkness in front of him his tergiversation was the occasion of perturbed conference; of a whispering suggesting that, whether his adversaries were creatures in or out of nature, his so decided move had, at least for the moment, ‘got them guessing’. Moreover, it occurred to him that his candlestick, being of the massive and ornamental rather than of the utilitarian or dormitory kind, was by no means rendered entirely useless to him by reason of the temporary desuetude of its primary function. By reversing it in his grasp so that its heavy base was at a farthest remove from his hand, and exalting in air the makeshift bludgeon thus achieved, he could provide himself with what, for one without the opportunity of choice, was a fortuitously accorded weapon to be thankful for.
Mr Thewless, then, retraced his steps with some firmness, although to guide him he had now only the dim outlines of the row of windows on his left, together with a slightly more substantial radiance percolating down the staircase which he must climb. Nevertheless, it was in the nature of the transposition that had taken place that of anything of occult or other significance to be seen he should now have a substantial and unintermittent view. And in a moment he did become aware, upon the evidence of certain swiftly gliding silhouettes across the line of the windows just mentioned, that the enemy was in retreat before him. It was feasible, by rising only a little to the imaginative occasion, to frame it that he was now the hunter and these the hunted. And at this he felt within himself a certain mounting exhilaration which was yet not an index, perhaps, of any very reliable emotional tone. Indeed, Mr Thewless, had he known it, was approaching very near a point of complete nervous exhaustion. There would have to be but one further turn of the screw – the revelation, say, of a Parthian strategy in the apparent debacle before him – altogether to upset such balance as, through the course of his trials, he had hitherto very creditably attained.
And of this now marginal and precarious nature of his resistance the passage of the staircase was an immediate index. He pressed up it boldly, but amid a physical distress having the effect of rendering each tread some two feet high. It was steep, it was gigantic, it was interminable; and, moreover, he acutely felt the possible advantage which, in point of any sudden assault, the retreating creatures might gain from their superior position on the incline. And again – and this assuredly was more ominous – he derived no satisfaction from the reflection that he was climbing steadily into a lesser darkness; into what was, comparatively speaking, a medium of light. It was clearly within our friend’s recollection that the upper corridor upon which his own room lay admitted through some system of skylights considerably more of whatever mild moonlight lay without; and, moreover, that the periodic illumination from the lighthouse lent fleetingly to the scene a quality of which the only description at once compendious and fair would be one free of any hint of inconvenient tenebrosity. In this simple thought there ought to have been gratification enough. The entities which, whether preternatural or merely sordidly criminal, could scarcely be regarded as other than thoroughly sinister in their nocturnal intentions, and which, having – as he somehow fleetingly and all obscurely knew – assumed the protective covering of his own impudently ravished sheets, had pursued him far into the recesses of the mansion, he was now – by a mere assertion, it might fairly be said, of his own perilously stretched but yet supervalent will – pressing triumphantly back to what, at least for him, had been the very
fons et origo
of their existence. This was surely decisive success, and by its token he ought to have been eager for whatever final
éclaircissement
might now be achieved. But this was not at all the way in which Mr Thewless’ mind found itself working. At any moment now there might indeed be something clearly to be seen. But Mr Thewless was with a definiteness unparalleled in his remotest recollection without the shadow of list to see it.