The Thing in the Woods 22 – Williams · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 22The Silver Bullet
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 22
The Silver Bullet
WilliamsEnglish
Pale clear sunlight; early twittering of birds; the clean freshness of dawn....
The lamp was still burning on the table when we reached the bungalow. Herrick put it out. Then he laid a hand on my shoulder.
"Austin----"
There was a clatter of wheels on the road outside. Someone had pulled up outside the house. It was a boy--Hiram Scholl's boy--taking his load of milk-cans over to the creamery.
"I don't know as you've missed that yeller dog that belongs here," he called out, "but if the folks were looking for him I thought I'd tell you. He's over to the little house back on our wood-lot up the road. I called to him, an' I dunno but he's hurt or something, for he's just layin' there an' he wouldn't come. So if you want to go after him I guess he's still there."
"Leo!" I exclaimed.
Herrick turned to me quickly as the boy drove off. "What house is that?"
"Hiram Scholl's. It was empty, but someone said that Menning's mother--Herrick, there's just a chance!"
I sprang for the motor-cycle, leaning where we had left it the night before, by the side of the house. In a moment I had it out on the road and Herrick swung to the seat behind me as I started the engine up.
Five minutes brought us to the spot where the house stood, a tiny frame shack set on a space of half-cleared woodland back from the road. To reach it we had to climb the slope of stony pasture that divided Scholl's land from the woods, and as we came in sight of the house, half-hidden among the stunted spruce and juniper trees my eyes caught a yellowish spot stretched on the doorstone.
It was the setter. He whined as I called to him, but without turning, his gaze fixed on the closed door. His fine coat was draggled and matted with blood about the throat; he sprang to his feet as we came near and began to paw at the doorway.
I knocked. No one moved within. The one window was close shuttered, but I fancied, listening, I could hear a faint crooning sound from inside.
Together we set our shoulders to the door. It gave way, and we found ourselves in the one tiny living-room of the house. It was dark and close there was a disorder of household things piled here and there. On a small broken rocker in the middle of the floor, Mrs. Menning sat huddled, swaying to and fro, with the low crooning mutter we had heard from outside. She had an old coloured handkerchief tied over her head and a small silver cross was hung on a thin chain round her wrinkled neck. Her aged face was impassive; her eyes, uncannily keen and bright, seemed to look straight through us into distance.
"Where is Miss Lessing?" I asked.
She made no sign of having heard me, only kept up that faint unintelligible muttering. Herrick went over and shook her gently by the shoulder.
"Where is Miss Lessing? You got to tell us."
She twisted her shoulder from his grasp and sunk lower into the chair, her eyes averted. My ears had caught a sound overhead. There was no stairway in the room, but behind a pile of furniture a wooden button betrayed a door that I had taken for an ordinary closet. Hastily, I began to drag the things aside. The old woman saw my purpose and slipped with sudden agility to her feet, her eyes blazing with anger, but Herrick thrust her aside and in an instant we had the door open and were upstairs, the dog at our heels.
"Mary!"
I caught her in my arms--unhurt, thank God--and carried her down, through the shuttered room, past the old muttering woman--out into the open and the clean air.
"Oh, Austin, that old woman! She met me on the road--I had gone to call for Dick, and she said she was looking for me; that Dick had had an accident and they'd brought him to this house and sent for me. She told me to go upstairs, that he was there, and she shut the door and wouldn't let me out. There was no window; no one could have heard me from outside. And then Leo found me, I heard him barking and she tried to drive him away, but he wouldn't go. Good old Leo!" She put her arm round the setter, who was trying hard to reach her face with his tongue. "I knew he'd help you to find me. Austin, where is Dick?"
I had to tell her, breaking it as gently as I could.
"Will you take me to him at once, please--now! Austin, I knew something was going to happen--I felt it. That's why I was worried, last night--I couldn't explain. And then shut up alone there, not knowing what it was.... That old woman--she was dreadful, but she wasn't unkind to me. Do you suppose she knew--that she just wanted to get me somewhere safe?"
Who knew? Was there perhaps a spark of human feeling in that strange warped soul, half unhinged by her own troubles, something that Mary's chance kindness, that afternoon by the saw-mill, had reached and touched? It might have been.
We walked down the hill, and I took Mary on the motor-cycle behind me as far as Lennox's, leaving Herrick to follow on foot. Dick was better. He had passed a feverish night, Lennox said, but the fever had left him with dawn and he was in an exhausted but normal sleep when we arrived.
I left Mary with him, and walked back along the road to meet Herrick.
"And now," I said, "tell me--tell me the whole thing. Jack, what was it?"
We were near the old twisted cedar by the hollow, the tree by which Aaron had met his death that spring. Herrick sat down on a boulder by the roadside and began to scrape slowly at his pipe.
"I told you about Menning and his wild-man stunt--all that I found out the other day. Menning had a criminal twist and he knew how to turn that trick to his own ends. It is far easier to simulate the grotesque--the superhuman, if you like--than most people suppose. Isn't that, after all, the basis of the witch-doctors' power? Even an ordinary man becomes horrible if you put a mask on him. And remember that Menning had a streak of abnormality to start with, and the thing may very easily, as I said, have become an obsession with him. Anyway that's the best explanation one can put on it, and the one that Lennox and our friend Sliefer, and Lessing himself, will agree upon. After all, it pretty well covers the facts."
I remembered his words the night before.
"Then what did you mean about the dawn?"
Herrick was silent a moment.
"We're all well out of a bad business, Austin," he said then. "Don't you think we'd better let it go at that?"
"But you had another theory. You had it that morning, after the fire. You wouldn't tell me what it was. But I don't imagine you've changed your mind altogether."
"No, I didn't change my mind," Herrick said. He put his hand into his pocket. When he withdrew it there lay, on his palm, the little battered silver button that Lennox had first shown us.
"You remember, Austin," he said, "that I recalled one or two facts to your mind that evening. This was One of them. I want you to look at it again."
"It is a button," I said. "A button such as you find on some European peasants' costumes."
"Westphalian peasants, such as Menning's mother came from. Lennox overlooked that fact, though as the button is badly defaced we can excuse him. I'll help you out, Austin. It is of pure silver, very soft, and it has been hammered to form a rough bullet that could be fired from an old-fashioned muzzle-loading gun."
"I don't see how that helps you."
"I want you to think," he said, "what particular associations there are with a silver bullet."
I stared at the little pellet in my hand, striving with some vague recollection at the back of my mind.
"They were used against ... against ... some sort of witchcraft," I said at last. "I don't see----"
"They were used against lycanthropy," said Herrick.
I stared at him. I suppose I looked stupid. I felt it. It was as though some spectre, strange, ghastly, altogether of another world, had risen up suddenly there before us in these quiet Pennsylvania woods.
"A mania--subject imagines himself some beast, resulting in actual physical transformations--exhibits depraved appetites--frequently homicidal..." I recalled haltingly the words of an old treatise.
"They did more than believe they were animals," said Herrick dryly. "They seem to have succeeded in impressing their belief pretty strongly upon their neighbours and relatives. Did you ever dig into old records of that sort, Austin? The were-wolf stories of the Middle Ages? They're rather grim reading."
I was silent.
"Remember our facts," he went on. "Menning's mother came from Westphalia, one of the parts of Europe where the belief in lycanthropy is most widely spread and where its existence is still credited among the peasants of today. Lycanthropy was believed to be a hereditary taint, as transmissible as insanity, which may lie dormant through one or more generations, so much so that at one time the relatives of an accused man or woman were all held suspect. There seems to have been more or less of a mystery about the Mennings altogether, chiefly on account of the mother's character, and most particularly in regard to Jakey. Remember also what Lennox said about the strong persistence of type in both sons, although of different paternity. We have Lennox's assertion that there was something peculiar, 'animal', about Jakey, which certainly impressed him, but which he seemed rather at a loss to describe. Then there is that unexplained incident when Jakey was with the circus. Whatever it was, it was something that gave such a shock to the proprietor--who, remember, had originally conceived the idea of the wild-man stunt himself, so wasn't likely to have been taken in by acting--that he sacrificed his best drawing card then and there sooner than have Jakey remain another night with the show. All the brother would say was that he 'guessed Jakey acted too well,' which in itself is fairly significant.
"That Aaron knew, or suspected, certain facts about his brother, there is no doubt. Why else should he so obstinately oppose any medical examination, and particularly the idea of Jakey being removed even temporarily from their control? Why did he make the very singular statement that Jakey was 'all right in the daytime,' and that at night they shut him up?"
"And the bullet?" I asked.
"Do you remember that Aaron promised if it became necessary he would take steps? What those steps were he did not say, but I believe myself that this silver bullet answers the question. Remember the horror in which lycanthropy was held, the revulsion it excited, and think whether he would not have resorted to the gravest measures sooner than have the whole concealed story come to light.
"I think that Aaron had already determined that night, unknown to their mother, to put an end to the whole thing; that he went out to seek his half-brother at the time, and under that form, when alone it would be possible to bring himself to do that which he felt had to be done. Jakey must have suspected. There was a struggle between the two, and it was Aaron who was killed, before he had time to use the silver bullet which he dropped, there, in the moment of unexpected attack. The old mother must have known the truth; through all her horror and superstition her love for her first son survived, and together they concocted the story of Aaron's absence with the wagon. That she paid bitterly, many times over, for her impulse, there is no doubt. She was now completely under Jakey's dominion--the dominion of a being little better than a monster, whom she dared not now denounce, for who would have believed her story?
"It is certain that what we saw last night is what attacked Lessing, and had attacked him previously. It reached him through the skylight, but not altogether as he thought. It climbed. You will remember that in every instance the attack was from overhead."
"But the thing that... that I touched..." I cried. "It was furry! It----"
I stopped short, taken with a sudden shudder.
"I know," said Herrick.
"I had hoped," he went on, "that you didn't retain any very definite impression. That's why----"
"You saw it."
"We all saw something. We thought we did."
"And Sliefer..." I paused. "Herrick, there was something else. I remember now. You were holding me. And you told Sliefer not to fire. I wondered..."
"They say there is a change, one way or another, at the moment of death," Herrick said. "I knew it. I tried to stop him." He paused a moment. "I was too late. That's all."
We sat there for a moment, not speaking. Then Herrick knocked his pipe out against the boulder and rose to his feet.
"Come on back to the house. Mrs. Searle will have breakfast for us, and we both look rather a wreck!" He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Take my advice, Austin, and put this whole thing out of your mind. I told you in the beginning--there's the other explanation; why not stand by it? As I say, it covers all the facts. The rest is between us three. Look at it how you will, whatever happened last night happened for the best."
I remembered the thing that had cried and twisted on the ground, and was silent. Herrick was right.
As soon as Lessing was able to travel we went down, the three of us, to the little cottage on the Sound which they had rented for the remainder of the fall. Herrick came down for an occasional long week-end, and it was during one of these, when we were lounging out on the beach before supper, that he handed me without comment a little cutting from a Pennsylvania local paper.
It was headed "Man's Body found in Millpond" and stated briefly how some boys, fishing in Sliefer's dam, had discovered the body of a man, believed to be that of a certain Aaron Menning, chicken pedlar, who had disappeared from the neighborhood mysteriously some weeks before. The body, which had lain for a considerable time in the water, showed the trace of two bullet wounds, but owing to the difficulties of medical evidence after so long a time had elapsed it was not possible to prove that either of these had been sufficient to cause death, which was brought in, on the finding of the coroner's jury, as accidental. "It will be remembered," the article concluded, "that equally mysterious circumstances attended, less than a year ago, the death of Menning's stepbrother, whose body was found at a spot not half a mile from the scene of this later tragedy. Though there was no suggestion of foul play at the time, rumor later connected Aaron's name, in no uncertain terms, with his stepbrother's death, a rumor which his disappearance served to strengthen in many persons' minds. Whatever the circumstances which led to this second tragedy, and how far the two may be connected, will remain for ever a mystery, since Aaron's death closes definitely the last chapter in the story of this singularly ill-fated family."
"What's that?" asked Lessing.
I slipped the cutting into my pocket. My compact with Herrick still held good.
"Only some more nonsense of Jack's."
Lessing grinned up at me from where he lounged, one bandaged arm stretched above his head, in the deck-chair.
"I should think, as an engaged man, you ought to be getting impervious by this time."
"I am. Don't you worry!"
Over the lawn, through the warm-scented dusk, came Mary's voice from the porch.
"Austin!" she called. "Dick! Are you three going to sit there all night?"
Herrick moved away.
"Come on," he said over his shoulder. "Supper is ready, and I won't risk being told again that I monopolize you all the day!"
