The Wrath of Fu Manchu

Nightmare House

"That's Low Fennel, sir."

My guide clambered out of the ditch, the withdrawing of his boots from the soupy mire involving an effort marked by successive reports like muffled pistol shots. Old Ord, my expert in the topography and lore of this uninviting stretch of Cornish lowland, reached me a gnarled paw and assisted me to the top of the small weedy hummock which gave us something more solid underfoot than the mud-porridge through which we had been wading for the last hour.

He pointed out an agglomeration of roofs, visible beyond the deep notch in the skyline made by the sides of the broad gully in which we were standing. I saw the heavy turrets of a Norman structure which seemed to constitute a left wing of a straggling house, and the more graceful corniced roof of a lower structure of later and more livable style (Jacobean, I judged): and this distant and restricted view of the House of the Drurocks was cut off here. There is a further wing of the place, modern brick enclosing plumbing and wiring of our century, but this part of the abode I came to know only later, when we got to the heart of that horror which hung in the air of those rooms, and most particularly the apartments of Margery, wife of Henry Drurock, major of the Cornish Guards, retired.

I looked and waited for John Ord's inevitable gloomy tale. The old fellow had some fearsome legend to fit every landmark, and his manner in pointing out the house in Low Fennel warned me that I was in for another number from my dour companion's repertory of the grey and grisly local lore.

"When the Drurocks die, their bodies don't die like other men's," began old Ord, and waited for me to react to the staggering and fanciful statement, which I did with the proper grimace of interest and awe.

"It's true," protested the old peasant. He lowered his voice. "Four generations of 'em were dug up when they sold the slope south of the church and those that saw them while they were above ground tell that they were as whole as when they were buried."

"And how is the phenomenon explained?" I asked, keeping levity out of my tone.

Old Ord looked at me sharply, but was either reassured by my blank expression or so well launched upon bis tale that he could not stop.

"The brimstone preserves 'em," he said, hollowly. "Their house is built over a hole that goes straight down, forever and forever, and they breathe the fumes, sleeping and waking, all their lives."

"In short," I commented, "they're just devils without tails and they have their own private stairway down to Hades."

"Don't laugh," beseeched the credulous old gossip.

I scolded him mildly.

"After all, you live off the Drurocks one way or another, every blessed soul of you around here. It isn't good form or good policy for you to be telling a stranger that your landlord is — what? A ghoul sitting on the mouth of a chimney of the inferno, I gather."

Ord shook his head. "Nevertheless, if you meet him sir, if you go into his house and eat at his table, let me tell you, don't face him when you talk to him. Stay at his side and don't let him breathe on you."

Idly, I plied the gaffer with further questions, but some flavour of irreverence about my response to his tale shut him up. He became obstinately dumb, and finally set me in my place by setting himself in his — a paid guide to a foolish scientific Londoner whose incredible hobby was the uncomfortable and unhealthy one of exploring the ditches of the region, day after day, and assembling, in accumulating jars and vials, the ill-smelling fauna and flora of these stagnant pools.

In the comatose village of Upper Fennel, the inn stood at the head of a single village street, customarily so devoid of any signs of life that it was a distinct shock to find the widow Crowley's. boy clattering toward us as we came out of the fields onto the road. My landlady's son was running toward us for all he was worth, waving a bit of paper and piping my name. I recognised the fold of a telegraph blank before it was handed to me.

"The telegram got here before the gentleman," gasped the boy.

"What gentleman?" I asked, pausing in the act of opening the message.

"Him which sent the telegram," panted the messenger. "He's in your room now."

The explanation scarcely made sense, and I was about to identify what I gathered was a visitor down from London by the simple expedient of opening the telegram when I was saved the trouble by Aubrey Wales himself.

Though I had not seen my schoolmate in five years, I recognised his voice at once as it called my name. I looked up to see him waving to me from the balcony of the inn. He had not changed much. Aubrey was still the fellow he had been at that period, the patrician among us studious clods, the Greek among us barbarians — a darling of the gods who carried his gifts so graciously that he inspired no envy. I know of nobody who begrudged him his money, his beauty, his good temper and his luck with women. We were all under his sway as undergraduates and I promptly fell under it again now, as I joined him in the low-ceilinged inn room and opened a bottle of the harsh local ale by way of making him welcome.

I still held the unopened telegram, and I thought I detected a note of constraint or embarrassment in his manner as he referred me to the message.

"You haven't looked at my telegram? Then you don't know what brings me down here," he said, with a seriousness which marked the end of the interlude of hilarious back-slapping.

"Anything grave and earnest?" I inquired. "My guess was that you were down here to set up your easel. I guessed wrong?"

He nodded. I was surprised to find him flushed and tongue-tied.

"If I had no better excuse for living than the bit of rotten painting I do from time to time, I might as well blow my brains out — if any," he said, with a bad attempt at lightness. The concealed bitterness was something so novel in him that I probably looked up sharply. He became more embarrassed than ever, a fact which he betrayed by speaking with a sign of irritation.

"Why don't you read the telegram?" he demanded, brusquely, and got up to pace the room while I obeyed the hint. I gave the reading due seriousness.

"Have you met the Drurocks?" read the extraordinary message. "What do you know about him? Is she seen about in public? Is there any gossip? Please learn what you can, but do not reply. Coming at once. — wales."

I put down the sheet and looked up at him.

"Sounds completely balmy, doesn't it?" he challenged. "Well, I'm not off my nut. Never more earnest in my life."

"In that case—" I began.

He leaped down my throat. "You have heard something!" he cried. "What? Is he mistreating her? What's this about their being locked up in that house and all the servants leaving? What do you know? If he's harmed her, Mac, I tell you I'll finish himI'll cut his throat — with pleasure."

The outburst subsided. I think I must have worn the expression of my utter amazement, for he was brought up short.

"You don't know what I'm talking about!" It was an indictment. He was incredulous. "You mean you haven't heard about it? I had all London pitying me — and grinning when I wasn't looking." He shrugged. "Oh well, I suppose a disappointed lover is a comical object. I didn't feel comical, though, I can tell you. Of course, if you don't know what I'm talking about—" He had another one of his sudden changes of mood and subject. "You know, you're an irritating sort, Mac. You never know or hear anything. Where do you keep yourself? Don't you even read the papers? The tabloids got hold of it and smeared me with ink. You know the sort of thing. My picture and hers and one of those blurbs hinting scandal: 'Engagement Mysteriously Broken.' That sort of thing! I could have wrung her neck at the time, but now, if she's in trouble—" He trailed off into silence and sent up a thick screen of cigarette smoke.

I took my opportunity to be heard. "Who's neck?" I demanded.

The answer was some more of his disconnected and excitable ramblings. But, out of his incoherence came eventually the coherent story, which I had complete before I got him off to bed far after midnight, bribed with a promise that we should look over the house at Low Fennel promptly after breakfast the following morning.

As a matter of fact, I did have some vague knowledge of his misadventure with a London girl who had gone off to marry some country squire, leaving Wales in the rather awkward predicament of being left waiting at the church. He did not gloss over his own humiliation in telling me of the circumstances. In view of his unheralded arrival in this blighted and inaccessible comer of Cornwall, all in a chivalric ferment and ready on any pretext to slaughter the Husband, he did not need to add that he had recovered badly from the love affair and was ready to pick it up again at any sign from the lady.

She had been Margery Perth, daughter of Capt. Ronald Perth, VC, DSO, etc., etc. — more medals than shillings. Even before she got to be a newspaper darling by reason o'f her engagement to a London catch and the subsequent sudden marriage to an obscure Cornishman, one saw Margery's face in the illustrateds. The press snap-shots hardly did her justice, I was soon to discover.

I offended Aubrey by failing to be properly imoressed by the origins of his love affair with the girl. It seemed to be the usual sort of thing, a house-party, an afternoon on the river, a walk back to the hall by summer moonlight and there you have it, all tied and delivered, ready for the parson. At that, I suppose a love affair is as good as its best moment, and even Romeo and Juliet must have been a common pair of moonstruck nonentities before they rose to tragedy. Aubrey and Margery had their splendid interlude, as I am ready to testify, so let us gloss over the humdrum beginnings.

They led up to an engagement in due form, with a public announcement. Then her father took her to the continent. A tour of the casinos was his regular annual custom and he saw no reason why his daughter's engagement should interfere with his habits. He was that kind of selfish pensioned Britisher, a fellow with his half-pay and a few extra pounds from somewhere and a liking for his ease.

"They left last June," Aubrey told me. "I saw Margery down to the boat-train. I'll swear she had no thought then, but to have the separation over with. It was to be an Autumn wedding. I never heard another word from her until early September, and then it was the news I read in my morning paper:

'Married: Margery Perth, daughter of Capt. Ronald Perth — and all the letters — to Maj. Henry Drurock. Maj. and Mrs Drurock will return to England within the month, and to Cornwall to open Low Fennel, where Maj. Drurock has mining interests.'"

He quoted every line of the announcement. You could tell the bit of print had burned into his memory.

"She wasn't that sort," he protested, earnestly. "There must have been something wrong." He went on in a more subdued manner, as if a bit ashamed of what he was saving. "There were lots of rumours. I don't say they were anything but rumours, mind. But people came back from Biarritz with stories of cheating in the casino. Her father was an unconscionable gambler, you know, and on his half-pay. Anyway, they talked about his being headed for a French jail and this Drurock fellow buying off the authorities. Melodrama, isn't it? I daresay untrue, every bit of it. It was just the sort of thing my fool friends might concoct to salve my wounded pride." He questioned me. "What do you think?"

"How can I think anything?" I retorted. "I only know what you're telling me. Pretty daughters do marry bounders to keep their daddies in funds. It's been done. I've heard of cases. Perhaps only in books, but it's been heard of. What then? You say you never heard from her again and here you are in her village. This is Drurock's land, you know — the village, and everything you see for miles around. Though I wouldn't give a week's pay for the whole of it. It's hopeless terrain. It has no crop but leeches and toads, no climate but a poisonous fog."

"Poisonous?" His utterance of the word was a shout; "Did you say 'poisonous fog'?"

"Merely a figure of speech," I hastened to assure him, betraying, I hoped, no sign of my startled recognition of this reiteration, by an apparently sane Londoner, of the notion which obsessed old Ord. "What's the matter, Aubrey? What about a 'poisonous fog'?"

"I don't know." He shrugged, hopelessly. "It's something hellish, but I can't say what it is." On the last of his breath, he mumbled: "Poor Margery," and then leapt to his feet. "We've got to do something, Mac. We've got to get her out of it. I didn't know what her letter meant — poor child. I thought the poison fumes were something she had imagined, some obsession of her unhappiness."

"Oh, then you have heard from the lady?" I put in. "Indirectly, yes." He brought out his bill-fold and extracted a written sheet from it. "It's a letter to her father. The old scoundrel popped off last week. They found him in his room at the club. He had been reading this. Maybe he had enough decency left in him to die of the shock of what's in the letter, but I doubt it. It was the drinking finished him off. The club people turned over his few effects to his solicitor, who happens to be mine, too. The lawyer had enough sense to be a bit alarmed about Margery's letter and he thought I might be the proper person to come to in the absence of any relative who would take the trouble to attend the funeral. In short, he turned the letter over to me and I'm asking you now. What do you think?"

I studied the pathetic scrawl, apparently dashed off in haste and under considerable emotional stress, for the taller letters all leaned like trees in a hurricane and half the lines ran off the page.

"Please, papa," the girl had written, "you must come now — at once — and take me away from him. He won't let me go alone. I know you don't believe about the poison fumes, but it's literally, awfully, devilishly true, papa, and I swear that I am not sick or anything and I haven't got hallucinations and this is not a trick to get away. If it happens once more, it will kill me. Get me out of this now, papa! Haven't I done enough? Margery."

"Well?" he demanded as I finished the reading.

"It's a perfect riddle," I ventured. "I should say, though, that the writer thinks she is in some kind of danger."

"Thinks she is!" he cried. "You don't know her. She isn't the kind that's afraid of a twig scratching against a pane. No — there's something wrong." He got up and stormed about the room."Come on, Mac. We've got to act at once."

"Do what?" I reasoned with him. "Go up to the chateau at this hour, drag this Drurock, whom we do not know, out of his bed and tell him we are taking his wife away because she doesn't like the weather? Be reasonable. Sleep on it."

"And do nothing?"

"We'll do something, but we'll do it tomorrow. My suggestion would be to have breakfast, hire a car, and go over to call like civilised people. Drurock can hardly pull up a portcullis and drop hot lead on us. The chances are we'll get a fair sort of reception and you'll get a chance to talk to the lady in private for a moment and clear up the whole thing."

He calmed sufficiently to consider the programme.

"I mustn't go as myself," he said. "If there's anything really wrong, my turning up would give the show away. Drurock must know me by name. He must have seen those London papers." He warmed to my proposal and his own somewhat melodramatic revision of it. "I'll be an artist, sketching around, loafing in the neighbourhood with you. As for you, you're quite unimpeachably explained. A frog-catcher come to where frogs are caught. That's it. Peter McAllister, RA, FRGS, sub-curator of his Majesty's pollywogs and his artist friend, dropping in for some scientific chit-chat and a cup of tea. If that's a bargain, I'll get to bed."

"It's a bargain."

Old Ord's mumblings about Drurock came to my mind as I tucked myself in and bade my room-mate goodnight. I was on the point of telling Aubrey the tale, but soon thought better of it. The excitable fellow's suspicions and dreads already were feeding on too much food. I slept. * * *

The day was steaming hot. Aubrey complained that his paints ran on the palette. However, he was obviously complaining for the sake of talking, for he was no more interested in the daub he was perpetrating than I, and that was not at all.

We were established on a little hump of ground overlooking Low Fennel and Aubrey's composition on canvas took in the old tower which I had previously seen and the modern section which I now saw for the first time. This brick wing of the venerable pile of buildings had been carefully designed not to clash with the rest, but it was plainly of recent date, and a materialistic eye, such as my own, could pick out the exterior indications of modem fittings within. A pair of telephone wires, branching off from the overland line up to the village, ended near what I took to be library windows in this modern wing. The grounds, to this side of the house, had been made as attractive as gardening skill could accomplish.

We had come on our expedition loaded like pack mules. Our equipment was principally painter's gear and included a ridiculous garden parasol which was set up on the knoll to give the artist shade.

"Certainly, it's ridiculous,** agreed Aubrey when I complained. "But it's excellent advertising. I want to be noticed. Do you think we can be seen from the windows of Low Fennel?"

The question was redundant. The extravagant parasol would be seen and talked about for miles around. I pulled on my gloves. I was interested in a brambly gully which sloped down from this highland toward the bog behind the chateau.

"I'll do a bit of self-advertising, too," I informed him. "We meet at lunch hour and beg bread at Low Fennel; is that the programme?"

He nodded and I went about my affairs." I carried net and pail, but these tools of my much ridiculed profession remained idle. An interest other than scientific urged me on. I rebelled against it, but the sum of the extravagant talk I had heard in the last twenty-four hours was beginning to have its effect on the more unreliable and romantic sections of my brain. What was at the bottom of all this fantastic nonsense about an airpoisoned castle, prison for a London girl who cried desperately for rescue from something which, if it happened once again, would kill her? Scientific dispassionateness deserted me. I confess I stumbled down the gully, prey to an excitement which had nothing to do with the peculiar professional interests of Peter McAllister, zoologist.

The sides of the gully became steeper. It was turning in fact into a ravine. I had not judged the depression on this side of Low Fennel to be so deep. I approached a turn in the gorge and found myself face to face with — the master of Low Fennel!

I knew it was he the moment I saw him. For one thing, the man was London tailored and I knew that there was no other man of wealth living in the neighbourhood. For another, a portrait photograph of the landlord of the countryside hung in the parlour of the inn up in the village and I recognised the striking features at once. For a rough picture of the man as a whole, he was a fairly average sample of the genus, country gentleman. The tweeds were the suitable costume of the heavy-set man, strong-jawed and choleric, who first looked up in surprise and then advanced cordially toward me.

"You are the Londoner, the scientist staying at the inn?" He groped for and found my name. "Mr McAllister, isn't it?" He did not wait for my affirmation, but continued. "You must forgive my not having dug you up earlier. Mrs Drurock and I planned to make you welcome, but some other matters intervened. You must forgive us — and come up for lunch. Today? Now? Certainly. Let's make it now."

"I have a guest down from London." I embarked on Aubrey's arranged lie, stammeringly. I felt at a disadvantage, exchanging for this courteous and candid hospitality my discourteous guile. "He's a painter — Alfred Hume."

He nodded sagely. I could not guess him. I never quite did. Whether he had us identified from the start, or whether he caught on to Aubrey later; this is a puzzle without solution. He never gave any sign. I could assume that my whopper had gone down with ease.

"Alfred Hume — " he echoed the name and professed to have heard it before. "Though I am not as well acquainted with our English artists as I should wish," he apologised. "Your Mr Hume — do you think he will risk provincial hospitality — or is he a growling bear, like so many artists?"

"Not in the least," I hastened to assure him. "He's back on the hill, up there, and half-starved by this time, probably."

"Shall I make the bid personally, or shall I go ahead and announce you to my wife?"

"Don't bother to come with me," I said. "I'll bring him along. He'll come like a lamb."

Aubrey did. He packed up his parasol and kit and tossed them, together with the uncompleted masterpiece, under the nearest bush.

"We have to work this thing right." He was voluble and dictatorial as we marched down the slope toward the gates of Low Fennel. "You have to get a word with Margery first and tell her not to let on. A word will do.

"So you think that fellow, Drurock, is a decent sort, do you? Well, you're wrong. You may be a great judge of fauna, my dear fellow, but you're no judge of men. Don't worry, though. I'll be on my best behaviour. I'm Afred Hume, overcome with the honour of a bid to a gentleman's home. I won't forget. I may sell him a sketch before I'm through. Tell Margery to patronise me. We'll wangle it so I do a portrait of her."

Margery was admirably quick in the emergency we presented to her. I succeeded in having my word with her alone and announced the arrival of Aubrey. She took my news calmly.

"I thought so," she murmured. "I saw him from the window and I was sure it was he." We were walking across the cobbled courtyard in front of the middle-house and Drurock was some fifty paces behind us, waiting for Aubrey, who had invented a pretext to run back for his kit on the hill.

Margery paused. To others, it might seem that she was pointing out to her guest the few scrubby flowers in the border before which we stood. She spoke without turning her face to me. Her deep, musical voice was husky with her suppressed vehemence.

"You must take him away again, Mr McAllister. Aubrey must not stay here," she commanded.

"Why?"

She hesitated for an instant. "I can't lend myself to what will surely seem to be the lowest sort of intrigue," she said, and I knew she was giving the false answer.

"Of course, it isn't anything of the kind," I insisted. "I can vouch for Aubrey. He hasn't turned up to capitalise any former relation."

I was on thin ice and deemed it best to go straight to the truth. I told her how Aubrey had become the final recipient of her letter to her father. She trembled a bit. She spoke hastily, as we heard Drurock raise his voice down at the gate and Aubrey call out a reply.

"Because he'll be in danger?" I asked.

My only answer was a fleeting nod. As I looked into the beautiful and disturbed face a conventional mask was drawn over it. The terror-stricken girl became the mistress of Low Fennel receiving her husband's guests with just the proper mixture of warmth and reserve. It was beautifully done, and I silently applauded Aubrey, too, who was bending deferentially over his hostess's hand.

A man appeared at a little door in the high wall which concealed the small formal garden before the new wing. Lunch was served. It was eaten on the brick terrace before the row of trench-windows opening out on a comfortable living-room. We had come, Aubrey and I, full of indefinable expectations of we knew not what outward signs of the trouble afflicting this house. We were completely thrown off our guard by that lunch, an innocent country repast, served in charming surroundings, washed down with a palatable light wine.

The conversation around the table, starting at a low point of constraint, actually rose to something like gaiety before we rose from coffee that was poured at the table. It was the host who had accomplished the lightening of the common mood. He had talked almost incessantly, lightly, amiably. It was impossible to oppose glowering conspiratorial masks to all of this indefatigable good humour: impossible and scarcely politic. I responded first to our host's geniality, but Aubrey had laughed aloud before the meal was over and even Margery dropped some of her defences of quiet reserve before the liqueur glasses were set down.

"And now," suggested Drurock as we rose, "I think, my dear, you might show Mr Hume the old wing." He patted Aubrey's shoulder amicably. "As a painter, Hume, I think you'll relish the old tower. One look at it and I think you'll give in and have your stuff brought over from the inn."

The proposal that we move into Low Fennel had been suggested passingly during lunch. This reiteration of it informed me that it was a genuine invitation. I consulted Aubrey with a glance and saw that he proposed to accept. I looked to Margery. She shook her head. The movement was next to imperceptible but definite. Drurock did not wait for his answer, but took my arm.

"As for the two of us, we'll go poison ourselves with brandy and tobacco, as becomes our grey hairs. I think I can amuse our scientist with some of the fearsome local legends. Come along, McAllister. I'll chill your blood with tales of ghosts and warm it with some pretty good Napoleon I've got hidden away."

Drurock's study was on the ground floor of the new wing. The outlook here was pleasant enough, with roses growing up to an open window which commanded the savage stretch of badland behind the house. Seen from this pleasant point of vantage, the evil countryside was not without its wild appeal. The heat was really oppressive, and Drurock invited me to remove my coat, setting the example himself.

We were comfortably ensconced, my host taking his lolling ease on a hardleather couch, myself deep in a saddle-back chair, our glasses to hand.

"You know," he began on a note of casual conversation, al-.though I thought I sensed some latent emotion, an undertone. "You know, I think you might be amused by some of the tales of the district. You may already have heard some of them from the country-folk?"

He darted an inquisitive look at me.

"Oh, nothing that makes sense," I replied, evasively.

He chuckled. "I can see you've heard the best one of all — that the Drurocks breathe out sulphur. Is that the way it goes?"

I coughed.

"Yes, that's the tale," he laughed aloud. "Rather, it's only part of it." He refilled his glass and tossed off the contents.

"You've heard of the slithering ghost of Low Fennel? No?" His voice settled down to a drone. "It's an amusing legend. The strange part of it is that some rather level-headed people here-about will swear to its truth — have seen it, in fact.

"I first ran into the thing last year, when we came here and opened up the chateau. That was just after the marriage, you know. We got here to find the new wing still uncompleted. I was furious. The building should have been finished well before our arrival. It was a fine mess to walk into with a new bride. We had to put up in the inn. I called for the local contractor — a fellow named Seager — whom I had left in charge of the work. The answer to the call was the information that he was dead — died on the job. You know, I could never worm the particulars of his death out of these workmen. They shuffled and lied.

"All I could learn was that the local officials had made inquiry and had brought in a finding that the man died of natural causes. Therefore I couldn't understand why there should be such an undercurrent of hard feeling about the matter. In short, I couldn't get the building finished. No one would return to the job."

"Someone did the work, though," I prompted. "Yes, John Ord. You may have run into him?" "He's been my guide around the district," I said. "And has told you some tall tales, likely! Well, old Ord rose to the bait of extra pay and came up with his wife and son, a big lout of a boy who could help his father hoist a beam. The two of them finished up the structural work and I had city workmen up for the decorating. When the work was done, I made Ord and his wife an offer — to stay on as caretakers, the year round. He took me on, and fixed the family quarters in the old tower, in that part which juts out and touches the new wing at the rear, over on the bad-lands side. They stayed on until last September — a dam' hot September it was, too. Then he rose up and gave notice." "On what grounds?"

"He told me a cock-and-bull story about his wife having seen an apparition, or some sort of fearsomely deformed creature of flesh and blood slithering along the walk outside her bedroom window. I read all the evidence — Ord's story and his wife's. She stuck to her 'apparition*. She was circumstantial about it. The thing — whatever it was — had the body of a man — a nude man who wriggled along on the ground and showed a repulsively contorted face. Well, I came to a prosaic explanation of the whole affair. The 'apparition* was simply Ord himself, coming home in the night from some drunken spree, making a disgusting spectacle of himself and preferring now to subscribe to his wife's superstitious fancies rather than confess his delinquency. I let them go.

"It's one thing to have a story like that from a local but—"

"Ah," I cut in, "you've had some sort of confirmation from a more credible source. Seen the thing yourself?"

"Thanks for not laughing at me," he replied, "though I shouldn't blame you if you concluded that I'd lapsed into the state of bigoted ignorance that rules the district.

"About our apparation and its second appearance," he resumed, with animation. "No, I did not see it myself. I just missed it. But Mrs Alson saw it as plainly as I see you. Mrs Alson is my wife's maid. She's Yorkshire. She's placid. She's literal. She's a teetotaller. Her eyes are excellent. In short I accept her account of what she saw as if I had seen it myself. It was about two months ago."

My brain made a swift calculation. The date he named would correspond to the period of the writing of Margery's letter to her father. Once again I recalled the outstanding phrase: "If it happens once again, papa, it will kill me." I listened to Drurock with sharpened attention.

"It was infernally hot that night," he was saying.

I interrupted him. "That's the second time you have mentioned the heat. I gather you trace some connection between the — phenomenon, and the thermometer."

"Excellent!" He purred applause. "Yoy are right up with me." He approved me with a warm glance of something like affection.

"Let's have Mrs Alson's tale," I said.

"She came down from her room on an upper floor about two a.m.," he obliged. "She was suffocating, she told me later, and the idea came into her head to go down into the cellar and draw herself a glass of cider. She was coming down the stairs and she reached the bend. There is a landing — or a wider step — at this point, and on this step stood the man — or thing. He was coming up. Moonlight was streaming in through the oriel and he stood fully revealed. Mrs Alson suffered grave shock, both to her nerves and to her English sense of the proprieties. The creature was stark naked. It had the body of a man, she says. The face! Well, she can only describe it as that of a demon, a contorted and devilish caricature of a human face, the eyes crossed and glaring like a mad dog's!

"Of course, she fainted on the spot. I really think she might have died there of shock if I hadn't awakened about that hour. I awoke parched and dripping out of the kind of stupor that sleep becomes in excessive heat and I also was driven downstairs in search of something to drink. I nearly fell over Mrs Alson's prostrate form. I got her into the room of one of the maids and we revived her. I sent the maid out while Mrs Alson whimpered her tale. That was a precaution. You'll understand."

I nodded. "You didn't want the story disrupting the whole household, naturally."

"And specifically," he said, "I didn't want it — don't want it to get to my wife."

"Oh," I asked, somewhat disingenuously, "then Mrs. Drurock knows nothing of all this?"

"Absolutely nothing," he affirmed. "And she must know nothing of it. My wife is rather finely strung. She is delicate. It's a matter of both breeding and health. If she should hear of our visitant, the effect on her system might be grave." He shook his head deploringly. "And if, by any chance, she were ever to encounter the thing itself, I shudder to think of the possible consequences."

"Why don't you close up the house and move away?"

He scowled. "The Drurocks belong here. A patrimony must not be renounced. If you do not understand the force which keeps me here, surely you will follow me when I say I can't go away from here with the mystery unsolved."

"Yes," I agreed, "as a scientist I can understand that."

He brightened again. "You must stay here and solve it with me. We'll compare notes."

"You have no further data?" I asked.

He hesitated. "In a way, I have. There's the miasma."

"Miasma?"

"Yes. A sort of thick vapour. Sometimes it becomes dense enough to form an opaque column, rather definite in outline. I've seen it. So have others. That's the source of another legend, of course. The house is haunted, in the approved manner, by a wraith that walks in white."

"It rises, then, within the house?"

He nodded.

"Where?"

He was evasive. I was certain of that and that he was withholding some definite knowledge he had. "Oh, here and there," he said, vaguely. "I'm not sure about the exact spot."

"Then that's all?"

Again he hesitated. "There's a document," he slowly said, and then leaped to his feet briskly. "But you've had enough for one sitting. You've got—" He counted off the elements of his account on his fingers. "You've got: the slithering visitant—"

"A naked man with a contorted face," I checked.

"— the heat—"

"Seen when the thermometer is high.", " — and the miasma," he concluded.

I waited, studying my own thoughts. When I looked over to him I caught him observing me from under lowered eyelids.

On impulse, I said, "Why.do you tell me all this?"

"Isn't it what you came here to find out?" he retorted, quietlyI digested the import of his words, which meant that he knew of our reasons for entering his home, that we were not the casual visitors in the neighbourhood that we professed to be — that he knew or guessed all this; and how much more? I traded boldness for boldness, frankness for frankness.

"Yes," I said. "I do want to get at the explanation for some curious'things I've observed."

"There speaks the scientist," he cried, with undisguised irony. "And your friend, Mr Alfred — or was it Aubrey? Hume — or is it Wales? Is his interest — zoological, too?"

I stood up. "Shall we leave?" I inquired.

"With curiosity unsatisfied?" he cried. "No, certainly not." And then he became earnest. "For some time, I've expected that outsiders would become interested in us down here. It was inevitable, with all the tales being spread around. I welcome investigation, Mr McAllister. I welcome having it conducted by one so competent as yourself, a fellow with 'RA' and 'FRGS' after his name. And—" he gave me a courteous nod — "I like its being done by a gentleman."

"And Aubrey Wales—" I began.

"— my wife's former fiance," he put in.

"Is he a welcome guest, too?"

"Why not? Why not?" he chuckled.

He gave my shoulder a friendly pat of dismissal. "Don't hurry your solution, Mr McAllister," he said, a light of mocking complacency dancing in his eyes. "Let's make it last. You can't imagine how this visit relieves the monotony which is the other disadvantage of Low Fennel."

I turned "and went up the hall. My foot was on the lower stair when I heard his low call behind me, and turned around. He had his head stuck through the study door and a smile of chummy complicity was on the large face.

"And — another thing, Mr McAllister," he whispered, loudly. "I propose a trade. Don't you tell young Mr Wales about this and I shan't bother Mrs Drurock with it. Have you ever noticed that young and beautiful people are entirely devoid of brains?"

He winked at me and closed his door.

I did not like the looks of things.

I was being left severely alone. Drurock either slept through the whole of the stifling afternoon or was gone somewhere on his own business. I saw nothing of him.

I saw something of Aubrey and our hostess, and wished I hadn't. I had no intention of so doing, but it came about that I spied on what gave every evidence of developing into a clandestine affair. Under my breath I roundly cursed Aubrey for his utter folly. So this was what his Galahadian mission had come to! Kissing another man's wife behind doors! I decided to subscribe to Drurock's proposal, and leave my fool in blissful ignorance.

Towards Margery I extended a more charitable feeling. I could begin to guess at her horrible adventure in this noxious place, where she was tied to a thing immeasurably loathsome and impure. The return of healthy young Aubrey into her existence must have been like a letting of sunshine into a foul dungeon. Her reaching out to him must have been pure instinct, irresistible, as urgent a gesture as breathing.

I came upon them when I probed my way into the ancient wing. I wished to view the quarters deserted by the family of John Ord, this being the only place which, in my host's account of the resident spectre, was precisely located with reference to the phenomena described. I found my way through a servants' yard and to a fine old kitchen suggestive of days when earlier roasting was done on a royal scale. A cook startled from sleep gave me the directions I needed, and I was soon stumbling over the rotten flooring of one level of the old tower. The dank odour of a mushroom bed below came up through the generous floorcracks.

I discovered a partition and, behind it, a little hive of rooms showing shreds of wallpaper still upon the walls. This would be the erstwhile Ord habitat. Seeking to fix the location with reference to the general plan of the rambling pile, I put my head out of a paneless window and looked around. I was instantly aware of a murmuring of low voices close at hand. I recognised Aubrey's at once. I looked down.

The precious pair of love-sick fools were directly under my eyes. She was seated on a little hummock. Her hands lay in her lap and he was bending over to kiss them. Whatever he was saying had an imploring sound. I could guess the import — "Come, fly with me." She drew away from him, but it was plain that simple instinct would have bent her the other way.

I turned to find a little frisking dog dancing at my heels. I made friends. Then I made a discovery. In one of the inner rooms of the deserted Ord abode there was a deep embrasure with a door. This wall was obviously the outer shell of the tower, immensely thick, and the opening in it was either an egress to the outdoors or a means of communication with another part of the structure. I tried the door. It resisted. While I tugged at it, the little dog began to whine at my back and presently darted over and seized my trouser leg in his teeth. He tugged with all his little strength. I desisted from my vain efforts at the door, and the dog was at once reassured and began to frisk again.

The dog continued to yap at my heels all the way back to the new wing, to which I returned by covering, roughly, the arc of a circle around both of the older sections of the chateau. I was doing a small problem in geometry as I walked and I reached the conclusion that I had all but closed a complete circle by the time I reached the library doors. Unless my rough calculations had misled me, this meant that the door in the deserted Ord apartment gave communication into the modern wing. I was about to take one of my longest steps forward toward solution of the problem of Low Fennel at this juncture and, in the next moment, I took it. As I crossed the sill into the library, the little dog which had pestered me suddenly dropped back with a low whine and lay shivering on the gravel path outside the room. Nor would he budge to rejoin me when I emitted a coaxing whistle and snapped my fingers.

I suddenly darted back and, seizing the dog by the collar, dragged him into the study with me. The result was extraordinarily encouraging to the hypothesis forming in my mind. The brute whimpered and whined piteously. At the door he struggled furiously and even tried to snap at my hand. I got him inside and imprisoned him by closing the french window. Then only did I release him. What followed was immensely suggestive, in fact conclusive. The dog began circling about the room in a frenzy, seeking a way of escape. His neck-hairs stood out like a bottle-brush. He no longer barked, he roared. Finally, ending a dizzy circuit of the room, the small animal hurled himself like a projectile at the closed window and smashed his way to the open through sash and pane.

I did not need to make further inquiry into the geographical confines of the problem. It lay here, in the modern wing!

Dinner was a disastrous affair. The various causes of disunion which lay among us all were coming too close to reckless action and utterance to permit a flow of small talk. We nibbled at tasteless viands and were all ready enough for the signal to rise from the table. Each made a pretext to be alone.

I passed an inner door to the library as I started for my room, wanting nothing but a chance to lie on my back and puff on a pipe and think this thing out. Drurock intercepted me at the library door. He was in a listless, beaten mood.

"I spoke about a document I wanted you to see," he said, but I knew that this was a pretext to draw me into the room. I saw nothing for it but to join him in a cigar. He handed me a small bound volume, which I slipped into my pocket.

"I'll read it in bed," I said.

I sat, but he paced before me. His first question took me right in my wind by its brutal unexpectedness.

"Am I utterly repulsive?" he cried.

It was not the sort of thing that required answer and I held my tongue. He made another restless crossing of the room and stopped before me again.

"A man has a right to protect his home — even if it's not such a very happy one, hasn't he?" His manner bordered on complete loss of self-control and I was on my guard against feeding his state with any badly chosen comment. I elected to make none at all.

He pounded his palm with his fist and harangued the walls.

"Even in law, he has the right, hasn't he?"

I made some inconsequential comment and rose for a leave-taking which was flight.

"Sleep soundly," he recommended with an especial emphasis. "And don't leave your room."

The heat was intolerable. I discarded everything but a shirt and stretched out on the bed. Sleep was out of the question. I left my bed lamp burning, lit a pipe, and drew out the volume Drurock had given me. It was a piece of bound handwriting. The ink was very old and pale. There was no date anywhere to be found, but the script was Elizabethan.

"In the reign of Mary accursed," began the reading, "a Du-roque of Bas-Fenelle in Cornwall came to be martyred for his faith the manner of excecution being the ministration of a lethal draught which was handed him duly in his cell in the Tower and, which drinking, he did sit down upon his pallett showing no sign, nor yet suffering any discomfort, and this for two whole days and nights, until the warden, accounting it a miracle and being afraid, did privately release the prisoner for fear of offending heaven by detaining him.

"Truly it was a miracle, even as the warden supposed, but not one of heaven but rather of hell, and this has become known, to wit:

"The Duroques of Bas-Fenelle in Cornwall are immune to all lethal matters, such as the poxes and the potions and even the bite of the serpent and this not because of a virtue of their blood but because of a foulness of it which is fouler than any poison. This is the true account of how this comes to be.

"This was in the time of the first Plantagenet and the first Duroque of England built his house then close to the mouth of the rich mine of Fennel, granted him by his King. Having built, the first Duroque turned against his King and refused tribute, wherefor Plantagenet did send forces against him, but the King's soldiers never came to attack Bas-Fenelle, having all sickened or died long ere they could come to its walls and this by reason of the waters in the country about Duroque's house, which were fatal and accounted for all who drank.

"The first Duroque died and his son. Henry, followed him and made peace with the King. The second Duroque took a wife from the Court, but the lady sickened in the house of Bas-Fenelle and complained and said to her husband that she was wasted by the poison waters and air of the countryside where the house of Bas-Fenelle stood. And being a young and delightsome lady her plaint had weight with the second Duroque, who resolved to drain his lands and make them sweet and, seeing that the mine stood beside his house, a great hole in the ground, gave orders that his serfs should divert all the pools to this catch-pit and also drive all the foul life of the waters into this place. And the serfs were loathe to obey, knowing that to go into the foul ditches and breathe the vapers there was death, but they were forced by Duroque's armed men.

"And Duroque's soldiery came behind the serfs, advancing only when the ground was dried and made sweet by their labours, but keeping the circle at all times closed, so that no man could desist from the labour. And he who paused or turned away was shot down by the arquebusiers. And the master of Bas-Fenelle sat upon his wall in a great chair and drank wine and gave this order and that and witnessed the cleansing of his land.

"At the end of many days, those of his serfs which were still alive, having survived both the pestilential waters and the arrows of the arquebusiers came close to the mouth of the mine and made sluices and the last of the poisoned waters ran down into the mine and Duroque's steward came to the master upon the wall and said: 'Messire, are you satisfied? Shall we close the pit now and send these men home?' And Duroque shook his head and said: 'No. These men are all tainted. They are no better than receptacles of the foulness which is otherwise gone. Have them slain and thrown into the pit.' Which was done, and the men were slain and thrown into the pit to the number of more than forty score and there was no male of the people left over the age of ten. The pit was sealed then by the men-at-arms and when the earth was firm Duroque came down off the wall and stamped upon it and beat the air with his arms and cried: 'For the first time a Duroque may walk on his own soil and breathe his own air and be in health!' And even as he cried out in pride, he fell prone, stricken by a curse for what he had done in the slaying of fortyscore souls, and he lay upon the ground a full night in torment and was carried then into his house and put upon his bed as one dead.

"Then there came a physician who had knowledge of many things and he saw and declared that the curse upon Duroque was that what was sweet to other men was foul to him and what was foul to other men was the breath of life to him, and, even, that the mine must be opened up again to let him breathe the vapours and revive. The mine was opened as the physician did recommend and a stench issued from the hole and everyone fled from the foul place, but Duroque, upon his bed, breathed of the foulness and was awakened from his stupor and was filled with strength, for his blood had taken on the foulness of his deed and of the fruits of it sealed in the mine, and this blood is the blood of the Duroques, generation atfer generation.

"And the Duroques must live in their ancestral home above the lake of poison which lingers underground, being the liquid of the pestilential waters and of toads and of forty-score dead men. They must live there and replenish the foul blood in their veins always from the vapours which rise out of the accursed ground. And other penalties put upon them are that they are friends of no men but only of crawling and swimming things and that no woman of warm blood will willingly mate with them and perpetuate the breed but must be constrained or bought, nor never give her consent nor show a Duroque amiability."

I finished the reading in a cold sweat. The credulous and ghastly legend cast a numbing spell over my brain. Try as I would, I could not evoke the smile of tolerant disbelief in a witch's tale which the effusion merited.

In the end I was forced to leap out of bed and switch on the lights in the room. Hurriedly dressing, I decided to take a walk in the gardens. I was shaking like a child awake from nightmare. I went to the wash-handstand and dashed cold water over my face and neck. I was ashamed to look at my reflection in the mirror and when I did, I saw a livid caricature of myself staring back at me. I saw more. I saw the contorted face, as Drurock had described it. In the glass it was reflected beside my own. The horrible apparition to whom it belonged was standing, I judged, just outside my open bedroom door, in the low-lit hall. As I stared, the creature seemed to lose its strength to stand erect, and it sank to the floor, collapsing slowly and clawing at the doorpost as it sank.

I had to straighten up to see the floor in the mirror. No power could have turned me to face the thing direct.

The landing lights were low and remote so the area beyond my door lay in comparative darkness. But there, crawling slowly into the lighted area within my room, progressing serpent-fashion, inch by inch, silently, intently, so that the head, throat and hands were actually across the threshold, came a creature out of hideous nightmare. It had the form of a man and so much of it as I could see was naked. The dreadful head was being pushed slowly across the carpet, held sideways, so that one ear all but touched the floor. Then the face came into the light. But this was not a face — not within the ordinary meaning of the word, although it had the elements of a face and was the fleshy covering of the frontal surface of the skull.

The chin and lower lip seemed to be drawn up to meet the nose, entirely covering the upper lip. The nostrils were distended to an incredible and wholly unnatural degree. The skin had a kind of purple irridescent sheen unlike anything I have ever seen. The effect was grotesque in the truest sense of the word, for the thing was clearly grinning at me, though God knows there was nothing in the situation to provoke that grin.

Nearer it came, and nearer. T could hear the heavy body being drawn across the floor. I could hear the beating of my own heart. At the moment when the awful thing seemed to coil for a spring, there suddenly intruded on the ghastly silence the sound of whispered conversation rising from the garden below.

In the same instant, the sound seemed to impinge on the monster's hearing likewise. The hideous mask became bloated with a grimace that was legibly rage. The protruding eyes twisted in the head. Even in this dreadful moment, a monitor section of my brain registered an outside impression. I identified the source of the whispered conversation in the garden and the whispers — Aubrey and Margery.

In that moment I believe I guessed the truth. The thought was but a flash, and then it was gone, dispelled by the necessity for action. By a backward slithering, movement the thing which had been in my room was gone and swallowed up in the darkness of the hall. I turned and sprang. I had my nerves fairly in hand again and a fear for those two below galvanised me.

On the landing I paused and listened intently. No sound came up from the darkened stair and when, stepping quietly forward and leaning over the rail, I peered into the hall below, nothing stirred.

Again I heard the whispers in the garden. I crept back to my window and leaned out. Over to my left and on a level with me, a shaft of light shone out from our host's bedroom. Otherwise there was no light except the ghostly faint one falling from a moon veiled by racing clouds.

Between my window and the new wing, and on a level with my eyes, was the window of Mrs Drurock's room; and in the bright moonlight I could see her leaning out, her elbows on the ledge. Her bare arms gleamed like marble in the cold light, and she looked statuesquely beautiful. Wales I could not see, for a thick, square-clipped hedge obstructed my view… but I saw something else.

Lizard fashion, a hideous unclad shape crawled past beneath me amongst the tangle of ivy and low plants. The moonlight touched it for a moment, and then it was gone into denser shadows.

A consciousness of impending disaster came to me, but, because of its very vagueness, found me unprepared. Then suddenly I saw young Wales. He sprang into view above the hedge, against which, I presume, he had been crouching; he leapt high in the air as though from some menace on the ground beneath him. I have never heard a more horrifying scream than that which he uttered.

"My God!" he cried. "Margery! Margery!" and yet again:

"Margery! Help!"

Then he was down, still screaming horribly, and calling for aid. The crawling thing made no sound, but the dreadful screams of Wales sank slowly into a sort of sobbing, and then into a significant panting which told of his agony.

I snatched up my kit, raced out of the room and down the stairs. I was held a moment at the door by the heavy and nu merous bolts, but fumbled my way to the open at last. I almost fell over Aubrey where he lay inert upon the ground. I wasted no time in futilities, but busied myself with my restoratives at once. I found the wound quickly, having an inkling of where it would be — upon the neck. I got a terrific dose of ammonia down his throat and went about the cauterising. Margery came rushing out of the house over to us.

"Be quiet!" I commanded her. She had started to sob. "What did you see?"

"I don't know," she quavered. "What was it?"

I was instantly put at rest on one subject. She had not had time to glimpse the horrible thing which had attacked her lover. "It's a snakebite," I said at random. "He'll be all right. He's coming to now," I told her and gave her no time to collapse. "You must get back to your room at once. People will come. Your husband will have heard. Do you understand?"

For answer, she turned and fled. I breathed relief. I had spoken true. Aubrey was stirring. I would have him out of this, with another stiff dose of the ammonia and a poultice. His life was safe, though he might carry a scar on his neck for the rest of his days. It was Drurock, turning up fully dressed, but dishevelled and red-eyed from sleep, who helped me carry Aubrey to his room. We deposited our six-foot burden on the bed. I faced our host across the unconscious form of my friend.

"I'll have a few more minutes with him and then he can sleep it off," I told him, levelly. "That's fortunate, for I think I could have proved a murder charge."

He blinked and said nothing.

"When I'm through here," I said with authority, "I think you and I may as well talk it out. Will you wait for me in the library?"

He nodded imperceptibly and turned to go. I thought it just as well to add:

"I shall be very much on the alert — and armed." * * *

"To be specific, Drurock, I mean to maintain that these phenomena are conjured out of the soil beneath this house."

"Conjured?" "And I think we know the conjuror," I retorted, and went on: "What stumps me is your having put so many of the clues in my hands. It's as if you wanted me to smoke you out."

"I have still to be convinced that you have 'smoked me out,' as you put it," he said, equably, and then added, on a note of self-communion: "If the secret is out — well, maybe it was time at last."

"Do I have to prove my reasoning?"

"Well," he shrugged, "isn't that the scientific method?"

"If I could stage a demonstration," I retorted, "would that be more convincing than words?"

He nodded.

"May I have an axe?"

He was taken aback for a moment. Then, a slow smile spread over his face.

"Mr McAllister," he said, "it was due me."

"Due?"

"That I should finally encounter another man with a brain as good as my own. I shall bring you the axe." * * *

Although Drurock had agreed to act exactly as I might direct, he stared in almost comic surprise when he learned the nature of the directions.

Placing two large silk handkerchiefs upon the table, I saturated them with the contents of a bottle which I had brought with me in my kit. I handed my host one of the handkerchiefs.

"Tie that over your mouth and nostrils," I said. "Whatever happens, don't remove it unless I tell you." I significantly tapped the revolver which lay in my pocket. "I'm taking you at your word. It is time for the secret to be out."

I rose, finally, perspiring from the task I set myself. The hole I had chopped down through parquetry and under-flooring was about a foot in diameter. It was really disgustingly hot. Despite the hour, which was one for dawn breezes to stir and cool the air, the wall thermometer stuck at high level. If anything, the mercury rose. Ensconced in his favourite sprawling pose on the couch against the wall Drurock made no move either to deter or assist me.

I opened windows and doors. A little ventilator near the ceiling worked by a hanging wire, caught my eye and I opened that, too.

"And now," I explained, when I had finished my prepara tions, "we have opened all the avenues. The thing can come through the door. It can enter through a window or it may — as I expect it will — ooze up through that hole in the floor-ooze up from the arsenious mass, that buried store of poison beneath our feet. So far, am I right?"

"I am audience," he purred. "I make no comment. I only applaud."

An hour passed. I had an impression that Drurock dozed off and on. I read the thermometer. The temperature had not abated a fraction of a point since sunset and, sitting immobile as I was, I found myself bathed in sweat. Despite the open doors and windows, not a breath of air stirred in the place.

Then, of a sudden, I thought I sensed a change in temperature. I shot a glance at the thermometer. It was falling with a rapidity that was visible. The conditions favourable to condensation were at work. My senses became more than ever alert. I glanced across at Henry Drurock. I believe that his eyes were keener organs of vision than the normal human pair. He had come half erect and was staring at the hole in the floor.

I followed his gaze. I was some minutes before I too perceived the very thin miasmic vapour which was rising — rising, ever rising from the aperture.

Now the column rising from the hole became thicker. A credulous observer of the ghostly phenomenon might well have expected it to progress on to some sort of materialisation into ectoplasmic form. Becoming more dense, it rose more rapidly, although it remained from start to finish a vapour not much lighter than air. It rose like a column of oily smoke until it touched the ceiling, where it mushroomed out among the rafters. I saw wisps of it sucked into the little ventilator and drawn away.

I looked to Drurock. He shrugged.

I thought I heard a door open somewhere overhead. I glanced at my companion but he, apparently, had heard nothing. He made no sign, though I thought he held his head cocked in the position of one intensely expectant of a sound or a sight. Again I thought I heard a movement, was sure some one had stirred. The sound resembled the rustling of silk and I thought it came from the stair. And then, as in a flash, I connected little bits of evidence together and knew what I had done.

"Where does that ventilator lead?" I cried, leaping to close it even as I exclaimed.

"I am under the impression it communicates With my wife's room," he said banteringly, through the handkerchief.

And now the sounds upon the stair became plainly audible. Some one was breathing stertorously out there and that some one was coming down on hands and knees or — or — I uttered an oath as I recalled the vision of the horrible thing which had slithered serpent-wise into my room a few hours back. That — and Margery? Another sound came from overhead. A second person was moving without concealment. A door slammed. I heard Aubrey's voice lifted in shrill dismay.

"Margery!" he cried. "What are you doing, Margery?" And then: "My God, Margery, don't look at me!"

I sprang to the door. Major Henry Drurock, retired, tenth of the Duroque line, was close behind me.

Almost at our feet the vile thing appeared, the head first, slipping, thrusting, crawling from dark toward light. The ghastly contorted face, one cheek brushing the floor, came into the zone of illumination, the lower lip and chin drawn up as though they were of rubber, touching the tip of the nose. The visible eye glared balefully up at me and the hair hung a dishevelled mass about the face. But the horror was to be more fully revealed. After the face came the body, and what we glimpsed of that alabaster flesh was symmetrically beautiful. If anything, this apparition was more horrible than the last. The contrast of the hideous twisted demoniacal face with the fair body was intolerable.

Suddenly, springing to its feet, the apparition stood, framed in the doorway, a slim figure, seeming like a black silhouette upon a silver background, or a wondrous statue in ebony. Elfin, dishevelled locks crowned the head; the pose of the form was as that of a startled dryad or a young Bacchante poised for a Joyous leap.

For an instant, like some exquisite dream of Phidias, the figure stood… then crumpled!

I heard Aubrey's heavy invalid step upon the stair. He came into view, carrying a flimsy garment.

"I found this in the passage," he babbled. His face was as white as the bandage around his neck. "What's wrong? I thought I saw Margery and — oh, my God!"

"Go back!" I shouted at him. "You're delirious. Go back!"

"No, come on!"

Drurock's cry rose above my own, wild and imperative, more shriek than cry. "Come on down, you damned, healthy school-boy! Come down and see her. See what you wanted to steal. Do you want her now? Come and take her! All her loveliness — all that rose-white English beauty — that perfection — they're yours. Look! Look! Look!"

I could not prevent it. Aubrey found use of his legs and was with us before I could stop him. He stooped over the white form on the floor. He had not yet seen the face a second time. He lifted the demented thing tenderly and wrapped her in her discarded robe.

And then she turned her face to him. Aubrey cried out, but he did not release her from his supporting embrace. And in that moment I decided that he loved her, well and true.

"Don't you want to kiss those lips?" screamed Drurock. "By the way, where are those lips — those sweet honeysuckle lips?"

His breath rasped in his throat; his chest rose and fell visibly with the effort of his breathing. Suddenly he tore the handkerchief from his face and stumbled toward the column of vapour which still coiled upward from the hole in the floor. I may have cried out. For, before I could move to intercept him, Henry Drurock thrust his face into that noisome emanation, and inhaled!

He drew back, and slowly turned to face us. He seemed to have grown taller, and a light of mocking triumph shone in his eyes. Then, in an instant, it was supplanted by a look of surprise and horror. His mouth fell open and his hands pawed ineffectually at his throat. I saw his face begin to change.

"Wales!" I called over my shoulder. "Get Margery out of here! Now! Out of the house!"

He did not stop to protest. Drawing upon some unsuspected source of strength, he gathered Margery Drurock's slight form in his arms and staggered from the room.

I turned again to Drurock, just in time to see him fall against a small table and topple it as he crashed to the. floor.

Back and forth he writhed, clawing at the air, his hideous face upraised toward the grey cloud which seemed to stoop above him.

I could watch no longer. I turned and fled from that room above the ghastly pit, that room where now the line of the Du-roques was coming to an end…

I was with my London friend, a medical research man. He had accepted my specimens from the ditches of Low Fennel with curt thanks, and was proving more interested in my tale of the humans of the locality than my report on its other fauna.

"Moreover," I went on, "that old Norman pillager, the first mad Drurock, was your precursor in the matter of volatilised arsenic as a preventative against the fits, by a longish bit — nine generations."

"Yes," mused my medical friend, the nerve and brain research specialist. "We do have to go back to some of that old lore of the medieval healers."

"I guess the whole history of the Drurocks, victims of the inherited taint, one after the other, all along the line, proves the case of arsenic," I said.

"Provided you can get it in that particular gaseous form, and at the proper degree of temperature, I suppose," nodded my medical friend, then shook his head regretfully. "Too bad I can't dump a thousand dying men into a vat lined with the natural ore and get the Drurock prescription duplicated. What a lot of drudgery I'm going to have to go through before I duplicate it."

"Have you accounted for the failure of the Drurock prescription in the recent years?" he asked me. "It's fairly obvious that the force of the emanations was either diminished or the source polluted. Else why the emergence of Major Drurock's convulsive symptoms toward the end?"

"Pollution is the answer," I stated, sure of my ground. "You mustn't forget that the tetanic convulsions attacked three normal persons that we know of — Seager, the contractor, Ord, the handy-man, and lastly, Margery."

"How is Mrs Wales?" asked my friend. "No recurrence of the trouble?"

"Oh," I laughed, "they're honeymooning in Sweden, and Aubrey writes me she's put on five pounds and is taking a reducing diet."

"Then," my friend went back to the discussion, "you account for the outbreak of these epileptiform attacks by something known?"

"Rather by something guessed," I countered. "We didn't linger long in Low Fennel after Drurock's death, I can tell you — not long enough for research. But I assume that those corroding waters down in the mine finally ate down to a hitherto sealed stratum, probably one of barium. That busy, underground chemical plant tried an experiment in barium compounds, and you know what some of those do to the central nervous system!"

"Crawled like reptiles!" mused my friend. "Now, I should have liked to see that. Poor old Drurock. You've got to pity the tortured soul. His old reliable remedy played out on him; worse — reversed itself. He must have suffered damnably. Quite ready for you or any one to find him out. Why don't you write up a paper on all this?"

I shook my head. "I don't pretend to have worked the whole thing out and I rather think I never shall."

"Too bad," deplored my medical friend, the research specialist. "An autopsy might be rarely instructive."

"Don't be scientifically obscene," I protested.

"Don't be unscientifically romantic," he retorted.