There were sharp p.r.i.c.king pains in his knees and ankles. Hot sweat clotted his clothes to his body and rained down his face. But he was unaware of this. His alarming physical condition was as nothing.
He went on through the dark, hurriedly, like a man in ambush.
Now and then he stumbled at inequalities of the ground or caught his foot in furze roots. Obscene words escaped him when this happened. They burst from between the hot cracked lips, mechanical and thin. The weak complaints of some poor filthy-minded ghost!
He knew nothing of what he said.
But with knife-winds upon his face, thin needles in his joints; sodden flesh quivering with nervous tremors and wet with warm brine, he went onwards with purpose.
He was in the Amnesic Dream-phase.
Every foul and b.e.s.t.i.a.l impulse which is hidden in the nature of man was riotous and awake.
The troglodytes showed themselves at last.
All the unnameable, unthinkable things that lie deep below the soul, far below the conscience, in the lowest and sealed cellars of personality, had burst from their hidden prisons.
The Temple of the Holy Ghost was full of the squeaking, gibbering Powers of utmost, nethermost h.e.l.l.
--These are similes which endeavour to hint at the frightful Truth.
Science sums it up in a simple statement. Lothian was now in "The Amnesic dream-phase."
He came to where a gra.s.s road bounded by high hedges led down to the foresh.o.r.e.
Crouching under the sentinel hedge of the road"s end, he lit a match and looked at his watch.
It was fifteen minutes past ten o"clock.
Old Phoebe Hannett and her daughter, the servants of Morton Sims at the "Haven," would now be fast in slumber. Christopher, the doctor"s personal servant, was in Paris with his master.
The Person who walked in a Dream turned up the unused gra.s.s-grown road.
He was now at the East end of the village.
The path brought him out upon the highroad a hundred yards above the rectory, Church, and the schools. From there it was a gentle descent to the very centre of the village, where the "Haven" was.
There were no lights nor lamp-posts in the village. By now every one would be gone to bed... .
There came a sudden sharp chuckle into the night. Something was congratulating itself with glee that it had put water-boots with india-rubber soles upon its feet; noiseless soles that would make no sound upon the gravelled ways about the familiar house that had belonged to Admiral Custance.
... Lothian lifted the latch of the gate which led to the short gravel-drive of the "Haven" with delicate fingers. An expert handles a blown bird"s-egg so.
It rose. It fell. Not a crack came from the slowly-pushed gate which fell back into its place with no noise, leaving the night-comer inside.
The gables of the house rose black and stark against the sky. The attic-windows where old dame Hannett and her daughter slept were black.
They were fast in sleep now.
The night-intruder set his gun carefully against the stone pillar of the gate. Then he tripped over the pneumatic lawns before the house with almost a dance in his step.
He frisked over the lawns, avoiding the chocolate patches that meant flower-beds, with complacent skill.
Just then no clouds obscured the moon, which rode high before the advancing figure.
A fantastic shadow followed Lothian, coquetting with the flower beds, popping this way and that, but ever at his heels.
It threw itself about in swimming areas of grey vagueness and then concentrated itself into a black patch with moving outlines.
There was an ecstasy about this dancing shadow.
And now, the big building which had been a barn and which Admiral Custance had re-built and put to various uses, cut wedge-like into the lit sky.
The Shadow crept close to the Dream Figure and crouched at its heels.
It seemed to be spurring that figure on, to be whispering in its ear... .
We know all about the Dream Figure. Through the long pages of this chronicle we have learned how, and of what, It has been born.
And were it not that experts of the Middle Age--when Demonology was a properly recognised science--have stated that a devil has never a shadow, we should doubtless have been sure that it was our old friend, the Fiend Alcohol, that contracted and expanded with such fantastic measures over the moon-lit gra.s.s.
Lothian knew his way well about this domain.
Admiral Custance had been his good friend. Often in the old sailor"s house, or in Lothian"s, the two had tippled together and drank toasts to the supremacy which Queen Britannia has over the salt seas.
The lower floor of the barn had been used as a box-room for trunks and a general store-house, though the central floor-s.p.a.ce was made into a court for Badminton; when nephews and nieces, small spars of Main and Mizzen and the co-lateral Yardarms, came to play upon a retired quarter-deck.
The upper floor had ever been sacred to the Admiral and his hobbies.
From below, the upper region was reached by a private stairway of wood outside the building. Of this entrance the sailor had always kept the key. A little wooden balcony ran round the angle of the building to where, at one end, a large window had been built in the wall.
Lothian went up the outside stairs noiselessly as a cat, and round the little gallery to the long window. Here he was in deep shadow.
The two leaves of the window did not quite meet. The wood had shrunk, the whole affair was rickety and old.
As he had antic.i.p.ated, the night-comer had no difficulty in pushing the blade of his shooting knife through the crevice and raising the simple catch.
He stepped into the room, long empty and ghostly.
First, he closed the window again, and then let down the blue blind over it. A skylight in the sloped roof provided all the other light.
Through this, now, faint and fleeting moonlights fell.
By the gallery door there was a mat. Lothian stepped gingerly to it and wiped the india-rubber boots he wore.
Then he took half a wax candle from a side-pocket and lit it. It was quite impossible that the light could be seen from outside, even if spectators there were, in the remote slumbering village.
In the corners of the long room, black-velvet shadows lurked as the yellow candle flame moved.
A huge spider with a body as big as sixpence ran up one canvas-covered wall. Despite the cold, the air was lifeless and there was a very faint aroma of chemical things in it.