The Thing in the Woods 3 – Williams · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 3A Mysterious Call
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 3
A Mysterious Call
WilliamsEnglish
I had prepared a stern lecture for Pete while I was shaving next morning, but I was destined not to give it. While I was yet in my room Mrs. Searle called me from below stairs.
"You're wanted over to the Bend, doctor, for Mr. Lessing."
I finished my dressing quickly and went downstairs. Coffee was on the table. Mrs. Searle sniffed as she set a cup before me.
"You'd best take something to eat before you start, doctor. It's a two'n-a-half-mile drive.
"Who is this Mr. Lessing? Did they say what it was for?"
I fancied she looked at me rather curiously.
"He has the new bungalow in the woods there. It's just before the turnin' to Sliefer's dam."
She spoke as though with a reluctance to name either the house or its owner, and there flashed across my mind instantly a remembrance of the first day Peter had driven me to the Bend, a few clustered cottages, hardly enough to be called a village, situated some few miles up the road. We had passed near the house then, just visible through the trees, and I had asked him who lived there. He had answered with the same reluctance I traced in Mrs. Searle's reply. Evidently this Mr. Lessing had for some reason managed to make himself unpopular in the district.
Peter had the buggy ready, and I started off. The mare was fresher than usual this morning, and covered the two and a half miles at a brisk pace.
The road ran level for some distance, then dipped to the little hollow known as Dutchman's Hollow, where it crossed a shallow stream, nearly dry in the summer. At the top of the hill, when you had crossed the stream, was the turning to the new bungalow.
The woods were emerald with early sunlight, and the dew hung heavily on brambles and undergrowth. Birds were everywhere, and I saw a Baltimore oriole, a rare flash of black and orange, fly across my path as we neared the stream. Above the marshy space at the foot of the hollow many dragon-flies were glancing, jewelled and wonderful, and a small spotted turtle flopped from his stone in midstream at the near crunch of wheels.
I let the mare take her own pace climbing the hill. The morning was too fine for hurry, even on an unknown errand. When we reached the top a glint of unpainted timber through the trees led me to the left, and a few yards up the cross-road I came out on a little clearing in which the house stood.
It was an ordinary one-story cottage, newly built, and as yet with no attempt at garden or enclosure. What struck my eye immediately was a curious sort of annex, standing near it. It was a rather high, square building, windowless, but with one big skylight like an artist's studio. Yet it had not the look of a studio, and the skylight was so raised on four glass sides as to suggest a rude attempt at an observatory.
I tied the mare to a sapling in the shade, and went up to the house. The front door stood open, and the interior showed the usual living-room of a summer cottage. It was furnished scantily but artistically. There were a few good rugs on the floor, a divan heaped with cushions, a piano, and a set of low bookshelves supporting a great bronze jar filled with wild-flowers. There were few ornaments about, but those few were chiefly of Eastern origin and good of their kind. It looked a room belonging to people of taste rather than wealth.
The divan was so placed in one corner, near a window screened by drawn curtains, that it was a full moment before I realized that it was occupied. A man lay there face downward among the tumbled cushions, in what seemed the apathy of complete exhaustion. He was clothed only in a suit of thin woolen pyjamas, that showed the meagreness of his frame. He was so thin and slight that he seemed to fill scarcely any space on the wide couch. He was evidently not asleep, but he had not turned his head at my entrance--I could see only a patch of rumpled dark hair against the pillows--and I crossed the room and paused beside him.
"Mr. Lessing...."
He moved, looking at me with petulant, questioning eyes from a face that showed every sign of physical and nervous exhaustion.
"Who are you? I sent for Doctor Lennox."
"My name is Haverill. I am taking Doctor Lennox's place for a few months."
"The devil you are!" He lifted his head, regarding me again intently with those queer dark eyes, the eyes of a boy set in a prematurely worn face. "Then Lennox has bolted!"
"He has gone to Europe for the summer," I said, looking him full in the face. "He told me he needed a change, and I gathered from his looks he was pretty overworked. So I'm afraid you'll have to put up with me for a while."
"That's like old Lennox! I thought he'd do it some day." He slipped back again among the cushions. "Where are you from?"
I told him. He repeated the name of the hospital after me mechanically. "I didn't know Lennox had gone when I sent over."
The tone was ungracious, but it was more the ungraciousness of a child than a rational being. I could see that the man's nerves were fairly on the raw. Judging roughly, I should say that he had not slept for several nights. I ignored the hint.
"As I'm here," I said pleasantly, "I might as well look you over, don't you think? What's the trouble?"
For a full minute he did not answer. I fancied he was turning me over very closely in his mind.
"The usual thing," he said then. "Overwork--like Lennox's!" A grim smile flashed momentarily on me. "I've been scratched up. That's what I want you to see to."
"An accident?"
"You may call it a dog!"
He turned, with a visible effort. Until now he had been lying almost upon his face. The light came obscured from the window, but as I bent forward I realized with a thrill of what extraordinary physical endurance that slight body was capable. The right sleeve of his pyjamas had been torn down--it seemed at one single rip--and the edges of the flannel were caked and sodden with blood. As he threw open the jacket with the other hand I saw two long parallel scratches of the same depth running transversely across his chest.
My first act was to draw the curtain aside. He lay there blinking at me in the full light, watchful to see what change my face betrayed.
"What you think, eh?"
"I think," I said quietly, "that the sooner that dog is shot the better."
I made a movement to draw the jacket down, but at the touch of my hand on his shoulder he winced for the first time.
"I must have warm water," I said. "I suppose you are not alone here?"
Almost as I spoke a woman came into the room by a second door; evidently his wife. She was young, and her face would have been noticeably beautiful but for its expressionlessness. She had deep eyes, well-moulded features, and a very clear pallid complexion, but her whole appearance suggested a slatternliness, evinced in the tumbled silk wrapper, the carelessly combed-back hair. I think I have never seen a woman, least of all in any crisis, look so utterly stupid and bewildered. Her eyes were pink about the edges, where powder had been hastily dabbed to hide recent tear-marks. I imagined that her first impulse in any emergency would be to weep.
"Have you warm water in the house?"
"I'll get it."
She disappeared toward the kitchen, and I followed her in. I wanted for the moment to be out of range of the man on the couch, and I thought it would give her a chance to say something to me herself of what had happened.
She took up a bowl haphazard from the dresser, put it down again and took another, always with the scurrying half-frightened movement with which she had entered the room; went finally through a doorway into what appeared to be an outer kitchen to fetch the water. There I heard another woman's voice, clear-cut, decisive, with what seemed an undertone of forced cheerfulness to it. Scraps of a conversation reached me while I waited.
"They won't send it up. I'll have to go down later. And Scholl will let us have bread if I fetch it. I thought I'd better bring three now."
"Mary, it's awful!"
"Did that new man get here?"
Mrs. Lessing's voice was discreetly dropped, drowned by the accompanying splash of water from a kettle. But I heard the other say: "Is he any good?"
"Mary, sh-h!"
She fluttered back, and I took the bowl of water from her hands. Lessing was stretched on the divan just as I had left him, waiting my return. There was no chair near, and I looked about me impatiently for something on which to set the bowl, while the woman stood by in a sort of helpless indecision. Just as I was about to put it on the floor someone pushed Mrs. Lessing gently but promptly aside and came forward. It was the girl whose voice I had heard in the kitchen, and I saw in the second's glance I gave her that it was she whom I had seen on the road the first morning I came down.
"Give me the bowl," she said. "You can manage better if I hold it."
I stripped Lessing's jacket off as gently as I could, sponging the sleeve where it adhered to the torn flesh. He must have been lying untended there for some considerable time before my arrival. When I had laid bare his chest and shoulder to the light I set my lips to an involuntary whistle. The man looked as if he had been fighting with some wild animal. No dog had made those wounds. They were not bites; they were long raking cuts, as if the flesh had been torn by heavy blunt-pointed claws. A bear might have done it, but there was no sign of bruising or tooth-prints. The scratch on the shoulder was a good half-inch deep in one place--it nearly laid bare the bone.
He had bled freely; the jacket sleeve was soaked and stiff. I set to work to cleanse the blood from his chest, and as I did so I saw other wounds of the same order, some old cicatrices, others newly healed scars of perhaps a month old, but none so deep as the present ones. I glanced sharply at the man's hands. They were well kept, the fingers stained a little with acids as though in photography, the nails smooth and closely trimmed.
The scratches were ugly. I had slipped an emergency case of tabloids into my pocket on starting, and asking for fresh water, I dissolved two in it. The girl watched me steadily, holding the bowl of solution while I cleansed the cuts carefully, bit by bit, and I fancied that in her presence Lessing was at particular pains not to flinch. The man's endurance was extraordinary. I had noticed something else on his arm, but of that I did not immediately speak.
"You want iodoform?" said the girl. "There is some in the house."
She fetched it, with diachylon and a roll of sterilized gauze such as is used in hospitals, from the drawer of a Japanese cabinet. I dressed the cuts--it took some little time--and helped him into the clean shirt she brought me. When I straightened my back at last we were alone.
"Do you mind," said Lessing, "going to the cabinet there and getting me a bottle that's in the top left-hand cupboard? There's a glass with it."
I found both. I drew the glass stopper from the bottle and smelled it. It contained a familiar cardiac stimulant.
"It's all right. It's the stuff Lennox gave me."
I poured him a dose and he drank it. Then he dropped back on the cushions again, watching me. I drew a chair up, but on second thought remained standing.
"Well, Mr. Lessing," I said, "I don't know that I'm able to do anything more for you under the present circumstances. If you feel like wanting me you know where to send."
"What are you in a hurry for?"
"I am in no hurry."
"Then sit down."
"If you think there is anything to be gained."
I sat down. I had dealt with his type before, and I waited.
"Well?" he said.
"You must know, my good fellow, that there's no use calling a medical man in to tell this kind of nonsense! I'm not a fool."
"Then there," he answered, "you differ most charmingly from old Lennox!"
I could no more be angry with him than with a sick child.
"No dog made these scratches!"
"I said you might call it a dog," he reminded me.
"I might call it an ourang-outang and be nearer the mark! Am I to conclude that you keep a menagerie in your house, Mr. Lessing?"
"Suppose I told you I did it myself?"
"I should call you a liar," I said. "I have seen your hands."
"Old Lennox swore I did. I told you he was a fool."
"We'll drop the scratches," I said, walking to the window. "I don't know that it really matters if you choose to tell me they were done by a tame mud-turtle in the back yard. But one or two things you'll have to stop if I'm looking after you."
"Such as?"
"You want sleep, man! You look as if you hadn't seen bed for a week."
"I sleep in the daytime. I have to work at night."
"What--photography?"
"Chemistry ... of sorts."
"Chemistry doesn't have to be done at night, of necessity," I answered. "You're overworked and you're using yourself up. You know you've hardly a whole nerve left in your body at this moment."
"I've plenty in my shoulder," he returned drily, and I smiled involuntarily as our eyes met. There was a fascination in the man, despite his eccentricity, his absurd persistence in what seemed to be a tissue of childish and reasonless lies, to which I held no clue.
"That won't hurt you long. I'll look in again tomorrow." I wheeled on him abruptly, of purpose. "How long have you been taking morphia?"
I expected denial. Instead his eyes merely narrowed, appreciatively.
"A year, more or less. I take it when I can't sleep."
"Lately?"
"Not for several weeks."
"Yes, you have," I thought. Aloud I said: "I'll make you up something else, for a change. Can you sleep now?"
"I'll have a try."
"Better get to bed."
"I sleep better here," he said, and without more ado turned over with his face to the wall. I waited a moment, but he took no further notice of my presence, and I went out.
The girl who had helped me with the dressing was outside, feeding sugar to the mare. The two seemed old friends. I saw, as I drew near, that she bore a strong resemblance to Lessing himself, sufficient to proclaim her his sister. She had the same deep hazel eyes, but her hair was lighter; it showed a bronze glint as she stood bare-headed in the sunshine. It would have been an attractive face but for a look of cynicism, almost a hardness, in the lines of her mouth. I was glad that it was she I encountered instead of Mrs. Lessing. Here was at least one practical person in this puzzling household.
She turned as I came near, but without moving.
"Your brother will do all right," I said without preamble. "Keep him quiet today, and if possible make him sleep. He wants rest badly."
She nodded, brushing the crumbs of sugar from her hands.
"How long has this been going on?"
"The not sleeping?" She looked at me sharply. "About four or five nights."
"I thought so. Can't you make him?"
She looked at me almost contemptuously, as though wondering that my interview with Lessing had taught me so little. "Does he look as if I could?"
"You can do it if anyone can," I said. "I shall be back tomorrow. If by any chance I am wanted..."
"I'll come and fetch you," she said.
"Good." I turned to unfasten the mare, then paused. "You have a dog here, I think. May I see it?"
For a moment she seemed about to hesitate. "If you like," she said then.
I followed her round to the side of the house. A small sort of tool-shed stood not far from the odd building I had noticed, and which I saw now was not an annex, but separate from the house. The door of the shed was closed, and from within a whining and scratching greeted our approach. Without a word she turned the key and threw open the door.
A magnificent orange setter rushed out nearly knocking her down. There was nothing savage in his demeanor; he licked her hands and face and even tried to include me in the demonstration, but what caught my attention was his inexplicable behavior the next moment. He bounded straight toward the big outbuilding, but within a few paces of it he stopped, whining and sniffing, his ears laid back, his body trailed near to the ground, as though in some abject fear. Whining still, he dragged himself back to our feet and crouched there, trembling. Miss Lessing's voice broke the silence.
"Do you advise," she said, "that he should be destroyed as dangerous?"
"I think," I replied, "that is hardly necessary, at present. What's the matter with him?"
Her lip curled a little as she looked at me. She shrugged her shoulders.
"He is frightened. Do you believe in the instinct of dogs, Doctor Haverill?"
"What is that building used for?" I asked curtly.
"It is my brother's laboratory."
"Then what in heaven's name----?" I checked the exclamation on my lips. She was looking at me as her brother had done, but she seemed, at all events, to make up her mind more quickly. "Come with me," she said quietly.
We walked to the building. There was a door at the side fitted with a Yale lock, but it stood slightly ajar. She pushed it open. The interior consisted of one single room, that seemed from its fittings half laboratory, half workshop. There were shelves around, containing bottles, chemical apparatus, a few books stacked together. A long table, littered with tubes and glasses, stood almost directly under the skylight. One corner of the room, to the right of the table, was screened off to form a dark-room, with the ordinary square of red glazed fabric let into the door.
I looked around the place with curiosity. There was nothing here to account for the dog's behavior. The contents of the table at one end were confused and overthrown, and a strip of cocoa matting, which had evidently lain under or near the table, had been rolled and flung in one corner. The boards were noticeably cleaner where it had been lying, and near the edge of this clean space there was a stain, smudged as though purposely by someone's foot, but to my eyes an obvious blood-stain.
Directly under the skylight, which was some four feet square, was the apparatus that for the moment puzzled me. It was mounted on a high stand that brought it near to the glass, and it looked like an acetylene lamp with very powerful concave reflectors; the kind of reflector, on a smaller scale, that is used in some lighthouses. The size of the lamp was quite outside the requirements of the room for ordinary lighting purposes, and the reflector seemed planned to throw the light outside the building, and in any desired direction. As I looked at it there flashed across my mind the recollection of the curious sort of searchlight I had seen the night before from my porch. Here was the solution of it, but I was puzzled to imagine what Lessing could be doing with an apparatus of this kind in such a place.
I turned to Miss Lessing.
"Was it here that your brother spent last evening?"
"Yes. He came out here about nine o'clock, after dinner. He often works late, and we never sit up for him. My sister-in-law went to bed soon after; she had one of her bad headaches that she has been subject to for the last eighteen months. I sleep in the room next to hers, and I went to bed about eleven. I am an early riser, as a rule, and when I came out of my room this morning I met my brother just coming into the house." She paused, and I could see that she was struggling with the recollection. "He wouldn't let me touch him, and he only said something about wanting to sleep, and that I should send Doctor Lennox up to him. I left him in the sitting-room and went straight off."
"Cycled?"
"No, walked. I have no cycle here. My brother doesn't like me using one. If I had, it would have saved time. I came through the woods."
"You were quick, anyway," I said approvingly. "Now listen, Miss Lessing. Your brother has had a severe shock; of what sort I know no more than you. He will probably tell us in his own time. For the present, I don't want him worried in any way. I shall come again tomorrow. If I may advise you, I would lock this place and keep the key until he asks you for it. Have you touched anything in the room since this morning?"
"No. It is as he left it."
Then Lessing himself had removed the tell-tale carpet. I thought a moment.
"Was your brother wearing pyjamas when he went out last evening?"
"He changed into them after dinner, I remember. It is hot in here of an evening, and he nearly always wears them to work in."
"Did you hear any noise last night?"
"No." She hesitated a moment. "My sister-in-law was very restless last night, and she was talking in her sleep. She seemed to be in pain, so I went in to her, but she was sound asleep and I went back to bed. I heard nothing outside."
"Where was the dog?"
"Shut up. We used to have him loose, but he's sometimes noisy at night, and lately my brother has taken a fancy to have him shut up."
"It doesn't seem likely that he would trouble him here," I said.
She bit her lip.
"Doctor Haverill, what is it?"
"My dear young lady," I said, "I can know nothing until your brother is able to give us some account." I had almost said "chooses," but I changed the word on a look at her face. "After all," I said lightly, "you must remember I am here only as a doctor, and a stranger at that!"
I turned back to where the mare was waiting, and she followed me, locking the door behind her.
"I shall be at the house all day, if I'm wanted, but I don't think I shall be. Meantime, you'll remember what I've told you. Your brother will have to make up sleep before he can tell us anything at all."
She seemed to take it quite as a matter of course that I should be giving my directions to her instead of Mrs. Lessing. It was as if she took the responsible place instinctively in the household. I climbed into the buggy, turning the mare around, and she nodded a good-bye to me. My last glimpse, as I left the house, was of her slim bare-headed figure, wistful in its very air of self-reliance, standing there in the sunshine with the setter by her side.
