The Thing in the Woods 20 – Williams · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 20What We Found in the Saw-Mill
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 20
What We Found in the Saw-Mill
WilliamsEnglish
Herrick had not yet returned when I reached the house. Lennox was just sitting down to supper, in which I joined him. While we were lingering over our coffee I remembered what Mary had said that morning, and asked him point-blank about it.
He gave me a curious look before replying:
"So Mary Lessing told you that, did she? Well, I give her credit for observation. I remember that morning perfectly. She was quite right; something had happened."
He paused to light a cigar over the lamp-chimney before saying: "Shall we go into the surgery, Haverill?"
I followed him in, leaving the dining-room to Mrs. Searle, and closed the door between us, while Lennox threw himself back into the armchair and smoked for a few moments in silence.
"I've told you, Haverill, that between one thing and another my nerves were in a pretty unreliable state early this summer. I mention that now, because I still think it had a certain bearing on what happened. When Mary Lessing stopped me that morning in the road it was just a case of one shock on top of another."
"Then----"
"Wait a minute," Lennox said. "If I tell this thing I've got to tell it my own way. I'll tell you just what happened and I haven't got any explanation of it at all. You can take it or leave it. And you'll understand that I don't even claim to be telling you facts. The whole thing might have been just an impression in my own mind. That's what I want to make clear, regardless of any effect it may have had on me at the time.
"I had been out on an all-night case. I was physically tired, and through a particular anxiety in this instance, just about all in. I had a seven-mile drive home, and I could almost have fallen asleep there in the buggy. I had left my patient out of danger, and coming back I remembered that Mrs. Searle wanted a couple of chickens from Aaron and that I'd told her the day before I would stop in some time and get them. It was very little after daybreak, but I chanced the Mennings being early risers and turned out of my way to go by the Bend. There was smoke coming from the chimney, so I got out and knocked at the door, and the old woman opened it. I guess she was just dressing; she looked half asleep, and she told me Aaron wasn't up yet, but that the chickens were ready, and she'd get them for me if I didn't mind waiting a minute.
"I stood about outside. It was a chilly morning, and a bit foggy. I guess I had my mind more on a cup of hot coffee than anything else, and I wondered if the old woman would give me some if I asked for it when she came back, though I'd be needing coffee pretty badly before I'd drink it in that house. You knew the Menning place, before it was burned?"
I nodded.
"There are a lot of tumble-down outbuildings there where they used to keep the chickens he bought, and one in particular--I don't know if you noticed it--a sort of lean-to near the open wagon shed, painted green. I don't know what it was built for, but it had a door and a square window-hole, high up, about the height of a man's head. I don't suppose the whole floor space inside would be more than about eight foot square, about the size of a calf-pen, and I shouldn't wonder if that was what it was. I'd walked over to it because I wanted to get my pipe started, out of the breeze. The door was shut, and I'm certain there wasn't anything moving in there, or I'd have heard it.
"I'd struck a match, and was just bending over to draw on my pipe when something shot past me. It seemed to come out of the uncleared patch of woods back of the sheds. I didn't get more than a half glimpse of it, and I can't even tell you what it looked like, except that it was biggish, and it seemed to shamble on all fours, and it panted, the way an animal does that's been running, and it smelt like an animal too--I seemed to get a whiff of it as it went past. It came by me so close I could almost have touched it, and flung itself straight at that window-hole and slithered through, and I could hear the thud of its body on the inside.
"I'm a short man. That window-hole was well above the level of my head. My first thought was to pull myself up and look through, and then--well, you can put it down to what you like, but the thing had given me such a queer turn when it shot past, like cold water down my spine, and I believe if I could have touched that window I wouldn't have had the physical strength to pull myself up and look through. Instead I backed away and just stood there, staring. The door was tight shut. It had all happened in such a flash that I began to wonder, then, if I'd imagined the whole thing. I might have stood there for a couple of minutes, though it seemed to me longer, and then suddenly the door was flung wide open and Aaron himself--or as I know now, Jakey--walked out.
"The door opened outward, and I could see straight past into the shed. There was a heap of broken harness and some rags lying in one corner, and except for that the place was as bare as my hand.
"I daresay I must have looked queer--I know I felt it--for Menning gave me a pretty surly look. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him I'd stopped for the chickens. He said they weren't ready, that he'd bring them over, but just at that minute his mother came out from the house with them in her hand, and I tell you I was glad enough to grab those chickens and drive off. I didn't want to ask questions or to stop near the place."
"This thing--what did you think it looked like?"
"I can't even tell you. It--it didn't look like anything."
"But it ran?"
"Yes, it ran. It's no good trying to tell you what my impression was, any more than I have done."
"Do you suppose Menning kept something shut up there?"
"If he did, where was it when he opened the door? I tell you the shed was empty."
"There was no trapdoor?"
"I went back to see. I didn't just give it up, either. I went back a few days later, one time when Menning had passed our house and I knew he'd be away on his rounds some time. I saw the old woman. She was surly in a way, but friendly to me. You see, I'd tended her before when Menning had been beating her up--oh, yes, he'd done that more than once to my knowledge. The Nevills knew it, but there was no good interfering; she'd deny it, and no one dared tackle Menning. But she had to come to me, once, and though she put up some story, I could tell what had happened. Well, I chatted with her there, and just to see what she'd say I asked her if they didn't keep some sort of a dog on the place. She said no, that they'd had a dog and her son shot it because it howled at night. After a while I left her settled there in the kitchen and before I left I took my chance to go over every hole and corner out of doors. Except for the cow and a couple of pigs there wasn't the sign of any animal round the place bigger than a cat. And there was no opening in that shed except the window and the door Menning came out by.
"So now you know the whole thing--all Mary Lessing claimed I was keeping back from you--and I imagine you're about as wise as I am, and that isn't much."
"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" I asked.
"What could I do? If I went telling that around anyone would have a right to say I was crazy and that I'd imagined the whole thing. You might say--and I've tried to think myself--that what I heard was just something running in the bushes and what I saw was an old hen fluttering in at the window. And maybe it was. And I've known men who've been just as startled, and have told circumstantial tales, over nothing more."
"You could have told it at its face value."
"No," said Lennox, "I couldn't. My mind doesn't work that way. I've got to weigh things. And I've got to exhaust every possible reasonable explanation, including my own physical state at the time, before I'll admit that a thing is so when I know it can't be so. If I've kept this to myself it's because I wanted to find some sort of explanation in my own mind first."
He faced me, stolid and obstinate. Even in that moment I admired his self-possession, his dogged, common sense determination not to be drawn into admission of the existence of any thing that, as Lessing said, he couldn't stick a pin into and label. And I knew, too, that it had cost him something to tell me that story.
"Well," I said, "that's only one more to the list of things we don't seem able to clear up. There's one point; that whatever the explanation may be, it all seems to centre, in the end, round Menning himself."
Lennox rose and went to his desk. "It's what I've always said," he threw back over his shoulder. "Get Menning, and you get the root of all this mystery."
I sat pondering his story. It was not long before my ears caught the sound of a motor cycle along the road, and a few minutes after Herrick appeared. He looked as if he had ridden far and fast; his clothes were covered with dust and there were grimy circles round his eyes.
"No, I don't want to eat," he said. "I got a sandwich coming along. Just let me get this dirt off, that's all."
He went through to the kitchen, and we could hear him splashing at the sink. When he came back, still vigorously towelling his face, Lennox had already mixed him a drink at the sideboard.
"Well," Herrick said, settling himself in the chair Lennox had vacated, "let's begin at the beginning. When I left this morning, Austin, I couldn't tell you where I was going, because I didn't know myself. I had to pick up my information on the way. I was on the track of something which, it seems to me, none of us has so far taken into account, and that is, Jakey Menning's early life."
"He was born right in this county," said Lennox.
"He was not. That's where you make your mistake. He was between eight and nine years old when he first came here. His mother, when we first hear of her, was employed with a travelling show, owned by a German Jew called Goldstein, a sort of fourth rate circus that used to do one-night stands in the small towns and villages. She cooked for the men and looked after the wardrobe. While she was working with them Jakey was born. No one seems to have known just who his father was. The mother passed as a kind of half-wit. She was cunning under an appearance of heavy stupidity, spoke a poor English, was easily teased and enraged, and seems to have been treated as the butt of the company. They wintered usually in Pottsville, where the proprietor's brother kept a saloon. The proprietor's wife took rather a fancy to Jakey, and later on, when Jakey's mother, during the slack season, took a job as cook in a cheap eating-joint there, she simply abandoned the baby to the circus people. While she was employed there she met Menning, married him, and doesn't seem to have troubled about Jakey for several years. Probably she never told Menning of his existence.
"They settled in the country, where Aaron was born, and a few years after, for reasons unknown, Menning deserted her. Then, for the first time, she seems to have remembered Jakey, now growing to an age when he might begin to make himself useful about the farm. She set about claiming him. The circus people, from what I could hear, made some opposition. Jakey was being trained as an acrobat and showed some promise, though he was a difficult child to manage. Moreover, they had kept him all this time and expected some return. Times, however, were slack, they probably foresaw trouble with the school inspectors also, and in the end they let the boy go.
"He worked about the farm, off and on, for some eight or ten years, and got himself thoroughly disliked, as you know, by all the Mennings' neighbours. The criminal streak in him was already apparent, though in those days it only took the form of spitefulness and mental deficiency. He was idle and vagrant and finally, at about seventeen years old, took himself off one fine day and went back to the travelling show, which he managed to trace up through the Pottsville saloon-keeper. They took him back as an extra hand, to help with the wagons. He was not good enough for a performer, his training being interrupted, but the proprietor about that time had the idea of running one or two freak side-shows, and they tried Jakey out as the hoary old fake of 'wild man.'"
Herrick paused a moment to light a fresh cigarette, and in that instant I saw Lennox's eye turn to me with something very like relief.
"It seems," Herrick went on, "that he was quite a successful attraction and I can certainly believe it. There was naturally something apish and uncouth about him, and very little make-up would have turned the trick most naturalistically. He stayed with the show nearly two years, doing odd jobs by day and playing his wild-man stunt at the performances. And then some sort of queer thing must have happened.
"I couldn't get the whole truth of it from the Pottsville brother, who told me most of the story. Either he didn't know or he was unwilling to tell, but the gist of it is that there was some row and Jakey got suddenly fired. From what the Pottsville brother 'guessed,' Jakey played his rôle too realistically, and the proprietor refused then and there to keep him another day. He had a little money in his pockets, he turned up in Pottsville, where he hung about for two or three days, and then made his way back to the farm.
"I would give a great deal to have ten minutes with Goldstein himself, and know exactly what did happen and why Jakey was fired. I gathered that it was something pretty unpleasant. But Goldstein is somewhere out in Ohio, and try as I would, I could get nothing more from the brother than what I have told you. I think myself there was something hushed up at the time, and that he is afraid even now of its coming out. But I got enough I think to throw some interesting light on what has happened since."
"Did you get any idea," Lennox asked, "of Jakey's make-up when he was with these people?"
"No. Why?"
"Tell him your story, Lennox," I said.
He repeated briefly what he had already told me. Herrick listened, his face intent.
"So that was----" He pulled himself up short. "Well, it isn't difficult to put two and two together. The obvious explanation is that Jakey has fallen back on his old circus stunt as a means of terrorizing the neighbourhood. It wouldn't be difficult. No one here, from what I can make out--possibly not even his own family--knew how he spent those two years while he was away. There is a form of mania which takes just that expression, and it is possible that in Jakey's case it began out of sheer maliciousness, and developed later into something a great deal worse--a fixed mania which, with the rousing of the homicidal instinct, turned him actually, at moments, into the wild beast he pretended to be."
"You think it was Menning--it was--well, what I saw--that attacked Lessing?"
"I am certain of it. Go over the thing carefully, Lennox. There was no stunt outside the possibility of a man with unusual physical strength and ability, who had had acrobatic training in boyhood. And remember that a maniac can perform feats that in his sane moments might be outside his powers. We are not dealing with a normal person. That's the one thing in this whole business we've got to remember." He rose. "Austin, will you come over to the bungalow with me? I'd like to see Lessing tonight."
I looked at my watch. "Ten o'clock. I told them I'd be over. We'll take the cycle. It'll carry two of us."
He had left the motor cycle outside the porch. As we wheeled it out to the roadway I said: "You think that is the explanation of the whole thing?"
Herrick gave me a quick look.
"I said it was the obvious explanation. It is. But there's more mixed up with it than that. And it's the other side of it that we shall never get to the truth of until we get hold of Menning himself."
I thought of Lennox's description of what he had seen, in that fleeting glimpse, and in spite of myself a shudder went over me.
"Do you mean that mania can actually transform a human being to that degree?"
"Haven't you see enough, Austin, in your own experience, to answer that question?"
I was silent. Every doctor, I imagine, has had experiences which he is glad enough to put out of his mind, and though my own were limited so far, I had heard enough tales of abnormality, at second hand, to know that there was truth in Herrick's words.
I took my seat on the back of the motor cycle, and in a few minutes we had reached the rise of hill. Turning the corner, we could see the bungalow through the trees. There was still a light burning. As we approached, the deep melancholy howl of the dog broke on our ears. Evidently Lessing had not yet let him out.
We left the cycle against a tree and went up to the porch. The door stood wide open, the light streaming through it from the lamp on the table inside. Of Lessing or his sister there was no sign. Except for the steady howling of the dog in the shed, the place was absolutely silent.
We went through the empty rooms, came out again on the porch. A chair was drawn up near the doorway, with a book dropped in it face-downward, as though someone had risen in haste. That, and the lamp left flaring on the table, gave me for the first time a definite thrill of uneasiness.
Herrick went back and lowered the flame. "They can't have gone far," he said. "They wouldn't have left the light that way. Let's try the studio."
We crossed the little space of ground beside the house. The studio was dark; the door was locked and the key on the outside. As we passed the tool-shed there was a tumult within. The dog, hearing our footsteps, flung himself against the door in a frenzy of eagerness, whining, scratching, tearing at the wood with his nails. There was something in the deep, agonized, almost human anxiety in his voice, raised, not in yelps, but in steady entreaty, that sent a queer thrill down by spine. Herrick felt it too. He stopped short.
"What's got that dog?"
"Lessing shut him in this evening. It was after----"
I paused. All at once there came back to my mind the dog's behaviour that afternoon, when Lessing dragged him back from the saw-mill, bristling and rebellious--Lessing's own face when he joked about the rat. It was near the identical spot where we had missed the dog before, when he broke away from us on our way down, just before we saw Menning's mother. Menning's mother ... and Menning himself had been seen in the neighbourhood the night before. In a flash I saw the whole thing clearly--Freeman's action, the ghost that haunted the milldam, Rebecca's rifled cream-pans and the old woman with her basket of chips. What a fool I had been!
In a moment I had drawn the bolt and the setter was free. He barely stopped to notice us; with a flash of his white chest and a wide-flung yelp of relief he was off across the road and into the woods.
I caught Herrick's arm. "Lessing is at the saw-mill. Come on--I'll tell you later!"
"The saw-mill?"
I saw his hand slip down to his pocket as we ran. The same thought was in both our minds. We broke through the underbrush on the far side of the road, stumbled by chance on the footpath and were racing along it, shoulder to shoulder, while the setter's barking still echoed in our ears.
For a while his voice guided us. Then, abruptly, he was silent. We paused on the edge of the clearing to take breath. All was still--that closed-in stillness of the woods at night, when all daytime life hushed. Before us loomed the old mill, its broken roof and ruined timbers black against the sky. For a moment there was no sound but the pounding of the blood in our ears, the dry rustle of a dead bush as Herrick leaned forward, listening.
Then suddenly, from somewhere in the recesses of the old building itself, there broke on that tense stillness another sound--more horrible to me than anything else--the hoarse choking breaths and muffled worrying of a dog at grips with his enemy. It came, not from the main floor of the mill, but from the basement where the water-wheel hung. There was a doorway on the near side of the mill, formerly used for carting away the sawdust, but it had been nailed up, and remembering this I called to Herrick as I ran directly for the steep slope on the side by the sluice. Here there was open space to squeeze through, and with Herrick close on my heels I trampled a way through the breast-high weeds and bushes round the corner of the building and gained an entrance.
Within all was pitch black. The water was shut off, but a little trickle still flowed through, dripping from the slimy motionless bulk of the great wheel above us. The air was warm, heavy with the smell of rotting sawdust and of something else, fetid and nauseous. The worrying had ceased; we could hear the broken rapid breathing of two bodies, there, unseen, somewhere within a few feet of us in the darkness. I made a step forward, but Herrick clutched my arm, and as he did so the fight broke out again with renewed fury, somewhere it seemed up in the far corner, among the drifted sawdust. I could recognize the setter's deep-throated snarls, the snap of teeth seeking a grip, and with it was another voice, deeper and more guttural--something wholly strange and horrible--something that snarled and panted and coughed in choking gasps. The darkness moved; there came the breath of a warm animal body, the straining of a heavy weight flung against resisting wood, and then the nailed planks gave way, the sudden square of the doorway was obscured by a tumbling, heaving mass and the next instant we were alone--alone in the darkness with silence round us and that fetid unforgettable smell on the air.
It was the same smell that Mary had complained of that evening, wafted to us as we sat on the porch--the smell, I knew now, that I had first noticed on the day I passed the Mennings' place in the early summer.
"Phew!" said Herrick.
He struck a match, shielding the flame with his hands. The little flicker threw out shadows high on the piled sawdust and gray ruined walls. We could make out the huge mass of the wheel, the shafts that ran to the story above, the great beams supporting the broken flooring over our heads. The match spluttered and went out, but in that instant it had shown us what we sought, a dark motionless figure lying huddled in the far corner, where the sawdust sloped up in a shadowy drift under the rafters.
Herrick reached it first, his feet sinking deep at every step as he scrambled up. I heard him draw his breath in sharply as I struck another match, and by its gleam saw Lessing, one arm doubled under him and the clothes nearly torn from his body, lying unconscious in a saturated pool of blood.
