25
All at once I uttered a cry of “Help me!” and sank
to my armpits. It was instantaneous. I was in water, not
on moss; and in sinking all I could do was to catch at some
particles of floating moss, slime, half-rotten weed and water weed …
I felt as if I were striving against a gigantic
octopus that was endeavouring with boneless fleshy arms
to drag me under water.
—FURTHER REMINISCENCES
“
Y
OU DON’T THINK—” I started to say. The entire day’s long and elaborate plans had all rested on the assumption that the two Americans planned to use the following evening’s artillery fire to cover their noise, that they were unlikely to wait for a natural thunderstorm. Probably, they would remain snug at home tonight. Still—
“We cannot take the chance,” he snapped. “I will bring the dog cart up; you fetch the waterproofs and put on your boots, find two torches. And, Russell? My revolver is in the drawer. Bring it.”
Without another word he dashed out of the door, leaving me to soothe the affronted Baring-Gould. I could only tell him that the case was coming into its final stages, and we would explain it all very soon; with any luck, tomorrow. As I left him, I heard him declare in a querulous voice, “He always was a headstrong boy.”
I diverted through the kitchen to ask Mrs Elliott to throw together a packet of sandwiches, as it looked to be a long night, and ran upstairs to pull every warm and watertight garment we possessed out of the drawers and wardrobes. Holmes’ revolver, with its box of bullets, was in the drawer beside the bed. I loaded it and put it in my pocket.
Downstairs I found Rosemary in the kitchen wrapping a stack of sandwiches in greased paper. Mrs Elliott, by the sound of it, was in the dining room, the object of Baring-Gould’s feeble anger, so I asked Rosemary, “Is there a shotgun in the house?”
“In the pantry, mum,” she said promptly, pointing to a door on the other side of the room. It took me a moment to see it, lying flat on a high shelf. There were six cartridges as well, standing in a neat row, which I scooped up and dropped into another pocket. I checked to be sure the gun was not loaded, asked Rosemary for a length of oiled cloth, and gathered up everything, leaving the house through the kitchen door.
Down in the stables, I helped Holmes with the last of the buckles and walked the shaggy pony out into the drive. Holmes lit a lamp and hung it off the side—highly inadequate as a headlamp, but enough to warn other vehicles we might meet on the road. I flicked the reins as soon as he was beside me and we trotted up the road, pulled by the bewildered but willing pony.
Holmes began to pull on layers of the clothing I had brought. Within a mile the first drops of rain fell, and by the time we passed through Bridestowe the rain was heavy and the going slowed. The pony was indomitable, as might be expected of a Dartmoor native, and he had no problem distinguishing the way even when we left the high road for the lesser road and, later, the lesser road for the farm track.
At the farm, Holmes splashed across the yard to the well-lit farmhouse while I began to loose the pony from its traces. Before I had finished, a pair of thick hands took over from me.
“I’ll finish that, mum,” said the man. I left him to it, taking the
shotgun from under the seat and tucking its oiled cloth securely around it, then handing Holmes his gun and the bag of provisions.
The rain pelted down, and we set off for the moor.
It was a hair-raising two miles, up the steep side of the moor wall and across the river to Black Tor Copse. I have never had very good nighttime vision, even without the downpour that made my spectacles approximately as effective as my uncorrected vision. The flashes from the slowly approaching storm provided me with the only illumination we could afford, not knowing when and from where Ketteridge and Scheiman would come (the question of if was momentarily shelved; time alone would answer that).
When we had splashed and stumbled up the bed of the stream for what seemed hours, finally the stunted trees of the copse began to rise up around us. There was no path, just hillside, and I wondered how Holmes thought we were going to fight our way across to the other bank without giving the two men enough prior warning for them to flee halfway to Mary Tavy.
“It’s clearer farther up, and there is a path of sorts,” Holmes said in answer to my question. “We need to be here to see them but there should not be a problem with crossing over when the time comes.”
I had to take his word for it, because we seemed to be at the place he had in mind. A slab of rock had fallen from above and lodged against two large standing pillars, giving us a small shelter, open at the back but keeping off the rain. I loosened three layers of buttons and shirttail to wipe my lenses.
Holmes excavated similarly for his pipe and tobacco pouch and waited for the next lightning strike to light the match, with his back turned to the gorge and his shoulders hunched. He smoked with one hand cupped over the bowl, that no giveaway glow might be seen.
We settled in to wait.
The rain poured down and the gorge was sporadically illuminated by the stark blue lightning, and I sat and sometimes squatted and every so
often stood upright, bent over double beneath the stone ceiling, in order to ease my legs. I tucked my hands under my arms and rubbed my gloves together briskly and wriggled my toes inside my damp boots, and we waited.
Time passed, the centre of the storm drew closer, and the rain fell, and still we waited. Holmes did not light a second match, sucking instead at his empty pipe, and the harsh light flashed with increasing regularity along the gushing river and the bank of rock across from us and the furiously blowing branches of the oak wood, followed at ever more brief intervals by the grumble and crack of thunder, and still the two men did not come.
“‘Those dark hours in which the powers of evil are exalted,’”I thought I heard Holmes murmur.
“An evil night,” I agreed.
“An evil place,” he said.
“Come now, Holmes,” I protested. “Surely a place cannot be inherently evil.”
“Perhaps not. But I have noticed that the great bowl of Dartmoor seems to act as a kind of focussing device, exaggerating the impulses of the men who come within its sphere, for better or for worse. Gould might well have been a petty tyrant if left in his parish in Mersea, bullying his wife and driving his bishop to distraction. Here, however, the very air allowed him to expand, to become something larger than himself. Similarly Stapleton—I’ve wondered if he mightn’t have continued as a minor crook had he not come here, where he filled out into a deft manipulator of local lore and a would-be murderer. And now these two.”
I did not answer. After a while I pulled the bag over and offered Holmes a sandwich. Rosemary had cut meat from the carcass of the goose for them, and laid them in the bread with a layer of rich herb stuffing. They were delicious, but still the storm beat at the stones around us, and still we waited, and still the men did not come.
The hands of my pocket watch crept around, and the powers of darkness moved over the face of the moor. Midnight came and midnight
passed, and neither of us had moved or spoken for some time, when I began to feel a strange sensation in the air around me. Looking back, it was probably only the psychic eeriness of the night combined with the physical sensation brought by the electric charges of the storm, building and ebbing, but it began to feel almost as if there were another person in the rock shelter with us—or if not a person, then at least a Presence. It did not seem to me, as Holmes had suggested, an evil presence, nor even a terribly powerful one, but I thought it old, very old, and patient. It felt, I decided, as if the moor itself were holding watch with us. Holmes did not seem aware of anything other than discomfort and impatience, and I did not care to mention my fancies to him. I was, however, very grateful for his warm bulk beside me.
And then, just when I was on the edge of giving up on our expedition, the two men came, with a brief bobble of a hand torch from upriver. My paranormal phantasms burst with the sight, and the spirit of Dartmoor sank back into the stones. Holmes put his empty pipe into his pocket and leant forward. I unwrapped the shotgun far enough to slide two cartridges into it, then laid it back down by my feet.
Two lights appeared, tight beams that lit the feet of the men and, as they came closer, the tool bag each carried in his left hand. They crossed by in front of us, picking their way along the edge of the stream, and stopped perhaps forty feet away. The next burst of light from the sky revealed two heavily swathed figures, one taller than the other, both looking down at a stretch of rocky hillside. The shorter of the two dropped to one knee, and the light flickered out, and a great thump of thunder rumbled down the riverbed.
We were still waiting, but at least now we had something to watch other than the rocks. Ketteridge knelt down for two or three minutes at his bag, and although I could not see what he was doing there, he had to be preparing the equipment for wiring the charge. While he was there, the taller man, who had to be Scheiman, moved around the area, stopping every few feet to bend to his bag and do something on the ground. Once I saw the gleam of a shaft of metal.
“He’s sliding the smaller pipes, which are perforated and loaded with gold-bearing sand and the charge of black powder, into the holes, and removing the larger ones from around them,” Holmes murmured.
It was quite clearly a thing Scheiman had done any number of times before. Despite the furious weather beating at his slick coat, his movements were quick and sure. He planted six of the charges, and Ketteridge was beginning to unfurl a spool of wire when Holmes touched my arm. “We’ve seen enough. Come.”
I pulled my clothes back around me, tucked the gun under my right arm, and followed Holmes, patting my way along the wall with my free hand. The rain had let up a fraction, but it was still rather like walking into sea waves breaking against a rocky cliff, without the salt. However, I kept my feet and pushed my way through the copse, and in twenty yards or so we came upon the promised path, and could stumble along at a marginally faster rate. Each time lightning struck we stopped moving, and when our eyes had readjusted to the dark, we went on.
We crossed the river around the bend from where the men were working and continued up the cliff and onto the moor above. The ground here was as usual littered with stone, but it was not entirely stone, which made it not only easier to walk, but to walk quietly. Holmes took my arm and spoke into my ear.
“They will have a vehicle somewhere, or at least horses tethered in the adit. I will immobilise it or loose them, as the case may be, and join you at the height of the tor just above where they are working. I will be ten or fifteen minutes behind you.”
Giving me no chance to argue, he disappeared into the night. I turned, put my head down against the wind and rain, and followed the path of the river back to a place opposite where we had been waiting. The tor was easy enough to see, outlined against the clouds of the night, and I suddenly realised the storm was abating somewhat, that the faint illumination of the clouds had to come from the full moon behind them.
I could hear voices now, snatches of disconnected phrases that served to warn me that noise would no longer be obscured by the storm.
“—go live in the desert after this, someplace it never rains.” Scheiman’s voice.
“—afford to—”
A long, indistinct muttering came from below while I picked my way around the tumble of loose stones on their centuries-long journey from the top of the tor to the bottom of the stream. I heard the phrase “—the Hall?” and then another fit of low speech and a laugh. When the wind stopped for an unexpected moment I heard Scheiman’s voice, so clear it startled me.
“Where the hell’s the last one of these?” he said. My foot came down wrongly on a stone, shifting sideways and making me fight to keep my balance. I nearly fell, I nearly dropped the shotgun down into the ravine, but in the end I did neither, and their voices continued uninterrupted. I took a deep breath and found myself a secure boulder to sit on. The whole hillside seemed even less stable than the other tors I had known; perhaps the stream was undermining it at a greater rate? Or could the series of blasts the hillside had been subjected to over the last three months have weakened the already brittle stone? I sat cautiously and kept my feet still.
During the next long quarter of an hour the two men discovered that either they had failed to construct twenty of the devices or else left one somewhere. After an instructive few minutes listening to the genial Ketteridge’s viciously flaying tongue, I heard them decide that nineteen would have to do, although Scheiman would not sleep until he was absolutely positive that he had not left one lying about the shed in Baskerville Hall. They went back to their task; I went back to waiting.
I was not close enough to the edge of the cliff to see them both, although their lights flickered occasionally on the oak copse on the opposite bank and from time to time one or the other would walk briefly through one of the places I could see. Ketteridge now appeared with the
spool of wire in one hand. He made a loop of it, laid the loop on the ground, and put two or three rocks on it to hold it in place. He then stood up and began walking upstream, letting the wire spool out behind him, and disappeared around the bend.