The Thing in the Woods 8 – Williams · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 8I Go Fishing
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 8
I Go Fishing
WilliamsEnglish
The next morning was one of the most glorious that I remember in that whole summer. I rose early, throwing the windows wide open while I dressed to let in the full blaze of sunshine, and set myself, while the morning common-sense mood was still upon me, to go over carefully in my mind every detail of Lessing's story. Somewhere there must be a natural explanation; it was only the question of finding it. Among other things it occurred to me that someone, for reasons unknown, might be playing a series of practical jokes upon him, but it was difficult to credit a hoax of such malignant and serious intent, and even assuming for a moment that Lessing was the victim of any such plot, it did not explain those mysterious deaths which, I felt more and more convinced, were in some way connected with his own experiences.
It was at least certain that I was in for a fairly interesting vacation. I remembered with grim humour Lennox's assurance that I would find the practice a quiet one; opinions might well differ on that point. Even if Lennox came back at the time agreed upon, I had still another six weeks before me, and in six weeks a good deal might happen. It would be my own fault if I did not get some part of the mystery cleared up before then.
Everyone has his own private specific for clearing the mind. Mine was fishing. After breakfast I hunted out my tackle, asked Mrs. Searle to pack me a lunch, and set out resolutely, with the determination to remain in the open air until nightfall.
Part of the creek that lay behind the house I had already explored, and this morning I decided to work upstream, in the direction of the dam. The air was clear and fresh and the woods were alive with birds. Here and there the sumach and poison ivy were already beginning to turn colour, showing patches of tawny scarlet against the green of the undergrowth. Great painted butterflies flitted across my path, and once, as I sat quietly on a boulder in midstream, a kingfisher flashed near me in the broken sunlight.
The creek ran with a pleasant sound in its bed, now swirling between great boulders, now trickling over shallows of waving bronze-tinted weed, here and there forming deep pools, outside the stress of the current, where one might catch a glimpse of shadowy forms moving through the gold-brown sun-shot water.
I made desultory casts, taking more interest in the morning and in my surroundings than in the actual pursuit upon which I was engaged. Out here under the trees, with the music of the stream in one's ear, it was impossible to feel anything but sane and healthy.
The silence of these woods was intense. In pine woods there is always some stir of movement, however faint, but these trees, giant hickories and dense-foliaged oaks, grew so tall that sound seemed lost amid their branches. One had the impression of miles of far-reaching solitude. To break the spell I began to whistle as I moved upstream, pausing now and then to try some likely pool, picking my way over the big rocks that dotted the bed of the stream. The creek was fairly deep in places; a child, losing its footing, could be easily drowned in the strong current. It was an ideal stream for sport, but either the fish were wary this morning or I was giving but scant attention to my task, for by midday I had only one small half-pounder and a missing hook to my score. Mrs. Searle's luncheon packet bulged in my pocket, reminding me presently of hunger. I was reeling in, preparatory to settling down by some comfortable tree-trunk, when something rushed at me with a splash and a scurry. I was standing at the moment on a rounded boulder near midstream, and the impact threw me off my balance knee-deep into the water. I turned to see the Lessings' orange setter.
"Oh, you bad dog!" a voice exclaimed from the bushes.
"Whatever---- Oh, Doctor Haverill, I am so sorry!"
Mary Lessing stood on the bank, bareheaded, in a short golf-skirt and uprolled sleeves. The dog bounded back to her, and she dealt him a summary and ineffectual cuff on the ear.
"Don't do that!" I cried. "I was just thinking how cool it looked in here, anyway!"
I waded to the shore and joined her. "I can't shake hands, because I'm wet," I added. "How are you? I've been trying to fish, but the trout here are entirely too sophisticated!"
"You've frightened them for good now!" she laughed. "What a shame! Did you catch anything?"
"One wretched half-pounder. I put him back for luck."
"A poor luck!"
"I'm not so sure," I rejoined, smiling, and she stooped hastily down to address the setter, who sat regarding us with lolling tongue.
"When are you going to learn manners, you wretched animal? You haven't even the grace to apologize!"
The setter put up a muddied paw and scraped appealingly at her skirt. "You deserve to go without biscuit for a month," she continued. "Go away from me; don't shake yourself here!"
The command came too late, and we both dodged to avoid the jubilant shower of water drops. Mary Lessing shook her skirt and sat down.
"Do you often explore up this way?" she asked.
"No. It's the first time. I've no idea now how far I've come."
"You're about ten minutes from the dam," she said. "Our cottage is not very far off. I was just going back to lunch."
"And I was just going to have mine here." I clapped a sudden hand to my pocket; the paper parcel was still luckily intact. "Suppose we were to consider it a picnic? I don't know what Mrs. Searle has put up for me, but I have a recollection that she baked apple-cake yesterday. It's too entirely gorgeous a day to eat indoors."
"Oh, as for that----" she began.
"As for that, you must admit that lunch indoors doesn't tempt you in the very least."
"It doesn't," she said. "I came out here this morning because----"
She stopped rather abruptly. I was looking about me for a likely spot in the shade, and when I had found it, at the base of two towering hickories, I pulled Mrs. Searle's parcel out from my pocket. The setter watched my proceedings with a keen interest, intent on the chance of the moment.
"I'm convinced," she objected, "that you ought to go home and change your boots."
"It's impertinent," I reminded her, untying the pink grocery string from the parcel, "to give medical advice to a doctor. Do you like Uneeda biscuits? Because they seem to have occupied an important place in my housekeeper's mind this morning."
We sat down on the moss beneath the hickories, and I divided the single gigantic sandwich with my pocket-knife. Luckily Mrs. Searle had over-estimated my hunger. We ate healthily, with open-air appetites, and what was left over the setter finished at one watchful snap.
"When does Doctor Lennox come home?" Mary asked presently.
"He's due in another six weeks, unless he finds Europe too fascinating. Then I shall have to go back and grind, I suppose. It won't be an attractive prospect, after this holiday."
"You have a practice in New York?"
"Not yet. I've been interne up to now. I expect it'll end in the East Side. A friend of mine has a settlement there, and I'd like to join him if I can. There's always plenty to do."
"I know," she nodded. "I've seen something of it. Do you know a man named Herrick, there?"
"Herrick!" I sat upright. "If you mean Jack Herrick, that's the friend I was speaking of. Then you----"
"Then you," she corrected, "are the college chum he was always talking about. Why, I've known Jack Herrick ever since I used to play dolls!"
"Three and a half years..." I said pensively. "The world's a small place."
"You are rude, Doctor Haverill. It's a long enough time, anyway."
She was looking at the branches overhead, and in her upturned face I caught fleetingly a likeness that had puzzled me more than once before. I knew now. On Herrick's mantelshelf, in his shabby comfortable room at the settlement, there had stood always a photograph in a silver frame. It was the portrait of a child of perhaps thirteen, in a gingham overall, and with her hair braided in two short tails down her back. Herrick had said once: "That's an old sweetheart of mine."
Singularly enough, the recollection did not at this moment greatly please me. But I merely said:
"You wore your hair in two pig-tails."
She brought her eyes to earth swiftly. "Who told you?"
"All proper little girls do at that age," I reminded her shamelessly.
"I see. But we were talking of John Herrick."
"Go on."
"Don't you think he's splendid?" she continued, turning to me. "He's done no end of good. And he works ... I don't believe he ever takes a real holiday. Doctor Haverill, you ought to get him----"
"To come down here for a while? I will--if it would please you."
She looked at me so frankly that I was at once ashamed.
"Why, of course it would! But I don't know why I said that. I don't suppose he'd take the time."
I watched a dragon-fly that was wheeling over the stream.. She sat near me, her hands locked about her knees.
"My brother was at your house last night," she said after a moment.
"Yes."
I could feel her eyes fixed on me, and I knew what was in her mind.
"He told you something?"
"We were talking about chemistry," I said. "It's a subject your brother is very interested in."
"Chemistry!" She put out her hand with a little gesture. "Doctor Haverill, do you take me for a child? What is the matter? You can tell me; he has spoken to you. I want to know."
"What do you want to know?" I said, lamely enough.
"The whole thing--what is happening here. I know something threatens him, that he is in danger, and neither he nor you will tell me what it is."
"How can I tell you," I fenced, "what I don't even know myself?"
She was quick. "Then there is something?"
I ignored the unfinished sentence.
"Miss Lessing, why can't you get your brother to go away from here, for a time?"
"I can't. I've tried. He wouldn't leave, now. You don't know him. He's the last person in the world to give a thing up until he's proved it down to the ground, one way or another. Whatever's at the bottom of this, he won't rest till he's found it out. It's just a scientific problem to him, and nothing else."
"And you?" I said.
"I?" She moved her shoulders. "What can I think? I had hoped just now--But I only know what he has told me, what I have seen. If one began to think----"
"Listen to me," I said. "You must not think! You and I are two sane people. Look at these wood around! I ask you, is it possible to feel anything but sane and incredulous in a place like this? I want you to get into your head, right now, that there is nothing--nothing at all in this world--that a man has any reason to be afraid of. And there are very few things in the world, to my belief, that cannot be explained. Has it ever occurred to you that this whole conviction of your brother's may be nothing more than hallucination?"
"But the injuries----"
"I have known hysteric patients, before now, inflict as severe injuries upon themselves without consciousness or recollection. I don't say it is your brother's case; I'm only trying to form a possible rational explanation such as any doctor would put forward. I have had one or two such cases within my own experience. What I propose to do is this, but I shall do it only with your consent. I will write to Herrick and ask him down here for a fortnight. It will be a new brain to bear on the problem, and I shall ask your brother to let us join these investigations with him."
"You'll do that." She put out her hand to me impulsively.
"I'll do it to-night. Only ... I shall have to give Herrick a detailed account of everything that has happened, so far as we know it, and I can't do that without your brother's approval."
"Yes ... I see."
"You will excuse one question. Are they on good terms?"
It struck me that I had never heard Lessing mention his name.
"Yes." She paused doubtfully. "It's funny you should ask that. They had a disagreement, about two years ago. It was when my brother first took up this ... this kind of study. Having séances and that. Doctor Herrick wanted him to give it up."
I moved involuntarily. Here was a new light on Lessing's attitude of mind, which he himself had been at pains, it seemed to me, to touch on very lightly. I remembered stray references of his, the signed article I had noticed on my first evening at the house.
"Your brother used to attend séances often?"
"Didn't he tell you? I don't know that I would have mentioned it, but I don't see that it matters. It was before I came to live with them. He and some friends of his were very interested, and Doctor Herrick used to join them too sometimes. They met at a friend's studio. Doctor Herrick was rather against it from the first, but I know he used to be there. Of course I understand very little about it, but ... things did happen. I don't mean that they banged on tambourines or rapped out the alphabet or anything like that. It wasn't spiritualism. And then Doctor Herrick stopped. I think he knew more than any of them, but he said it was dangerous and it didn't lead to anything, and he wanted my brother to give it up altogether. Kate--that's my sister-in-law, you know--was their medium, and I think it was on her account. Doctor Herrick thought it was bad for her. And then one night something happened, I don't know just what, but Kate got some sort of a shock. She's very highly strung at any time, and I always supposed something frightened her, but anyway she was quite ill for a long time after that. She used to get queer sort of nervous spells, and she couldn't be left alone, and that was why I first came to live with them, on her account. Of course my brother gave the whole business up then. The physician who attended her said simply that she was in poor health, and had had a nervous breakdown, and he told her she must live in the country awhile till she got stronger, but I know Doctor Herrick thought at the time that the séances had been the cause of it. He told my brother so."
I listened attentively. It was news to me that Herrick, the essential level-headed, should have lent himself at any time to experiments of this order. He had never mentioned the subject to me in our many talks, and I had even gathered, as one gathers an impression without any very definite grounds, that he was a confirmed sceptic on all matters of occultism.
"You say they had a disagreement?"
"It was exactly that," she made haste to say, "They didn't quarrel, but I know Herrick was very much opposed to Dick's views, and they used to have arguments. But it didn't amount to more than that."
"Good!"
She had risen to her feet, and at her movement the setter himself lazily rose and came towards us.
"Then we're going to see this thing out?" I said.
"We'll see it out."
We shook hands, and I fancied that her fingers rested in mine a moment voluntarily before she drew them away.
"Are you coming up to see my brother today?" she asked.
"Presently ... I'd like to." I looked at my watch. "I thought of taking a stroll up to the dam, as I'm so close; I've never been there. You say it's only a few minutes?"
"Not more than ten, through the woods."
"Let's walk up together," I suggested, "if you aren't too tired."
She assented readily, and we struck off up a little footpath, barely traceable, that followed the course of the stream. It was, as she had said, a scant ten minutes before the sound of the sluice broke on our ears, and through a sudden clearing of the woods the dam lay before us, a black sinister sheet of water, covered with masses of floating weed and pond-lilies, and darkened by the trees and underbrush that grew closely down to its edge. An old scow, long past use and sunken low in the water, lay pad-locked to a slimy stump near the shore.
Following an old cart-track, we skirted the edge of the dam in the direction of the saw-mill, a dilapidated building with broken roof, that seemed to have stood for many years of disuse. To reach it we had to cross the sluice itself, and Mary Lessing, who was a few paces ahead of me, paused to look down over the single rough handrail that protected one from a misstep.
There is something forbidding about a mill-sluice at any time, especially when dissociated, as this was, from the companionable sound of human labour. The sheer depth, the knowledge of the vast imprisoned force behind one, the sound of water gushing here and there between the slimy weed-grown timbers, give always, to me at least, an indefinable sense of the sinister.
I leaned my rod against the railing, and we looked down side by side at the black oozing wall below.
"I like this place," Mary Lessing said. "There's something queer and creepy about it. I often come here. I suppose they haven't worked the sluice for years."
"I doubt if the machinery would move now," I said. "Of course this is never opened. There should be a smaller sluice for the millstream further on."
I glanced as I spoke at the clumsy wooden levers near me that controlled the sluice. They looked to be rotting in their place, but as I pushed one, idly, a sudden change in the sound of escaping water below warned me that the machinery was not in such ill repair as it would seem. I exerted my strength to pull the lever back, and my attention was momentarily distracted from the girl beside me. She was leaning out over the hand-rail, and when I turned it was with a sudden cry of warning.
"Look out!" I said. "That may not be safe!"
I caught her arm instinctively as I spoke, and on the instant the rail bent outward with a slight sound of cracking. In another moment she would have been over the edge. We looked at one another, and Mary laughed, a little nervously on the stillness. Her face had flushed.
"I thought that rail was all right," she said rather awkwardly.
"Dick walked over here with me not a week ago, and we tested it then to see."
"It isn't all right now," I returned sharply.
I put my two hands on the rail, giving it a slight wrench outward. It gave easily to my touch, and looking closer, I saw that the surface towards the water had been half cut through. Someone had tampered with it deliberately and within the last few days.
"What is it?" Mary Lessing asked.
"Merely rotten, as I thought!"
I turned away, and walked thoughtfully on towards the saw-mill. The thing puzzled me, but it had an ugly look. It was no idle mischief that had prompted the act. Whoever had done it, had done it maliciously, and the purpose was not very far to seek. Hitherto I had not attached much importance to the Lessings' occasional laughing references to their unpopularity in the village. Now it assumed suddenly a significance.
I turned to Mary Lessing, walking beside me.
"I want you to promise me something," I said, "whether it seems to you irrelevant or not. I want you not to come here again by yourself, at any time. It's a lonely place and it isn't particularly safe. If you come at all, bring your brother with you."
The smile that was on her lips at first faded abruptly, leaving her face serious.
"The rail was cut," she said quietly. "Is that what you mean? It must have been, because it was perfectly solid a few days ago."
"Someone has been up to mischief. If there are characters of that kind in the neighbourhood, it's best to run no risks, that's all."
We walked on a few paces, silently. The mill was on our right, a desolate-looking building enough, with its surrounding litter of sodden chips and piles of cut logs lying here and there In the open. A heavy smell of decaying wood was in the air, added to the stagnant odour of the dam itself.
The setter was in front of us, sniffing to and fro on the trail of the rats that infested the wood piles. Suddenly he stood still, his ears laid back, growling ominously. A short, thick-set figure slipped from the angle of the mill wall and vanished in the woods on the farther side of the cart-track.
"Aaron Menning," Miss Lessing said. She put her hand and called the dog back. I was staring up the track where the chicken-huckster had so adroitly disappeared.
"Does he live near here?"
"Not very far off. I suppose he comes here to fish. There are a good many in the dam."
"Very probable," I said.
"I dislike that man," Mary said after a moment. "I guess it's mutual, too. The other one, Jake, you know, had a quarrel with my brother one time. He was always loitering round the house, and Dick turned him away. Aaron's always very civil when we meet, but I don't believe he likes us any more than Jakey did."
We took a turning past the mill that led us, without further event, to the Lessings' bungalow. Within sight of the house I parted from her. I wanted to see Lessing again, but there were a few points that needed readjustment in my own mind first. As I walked slowly home down the familiar slope of Dutchman's Hill I was thinking that the industrious and chapel-going Aaron might very well bear a little watching.
