by Algernon Blackwood (1909)
It hung so conspicuously there amid the surrounding mop of fine dark hair that it piqued the curiosity of Dr Blane's friends more than any other detail of his very distinguished appearance. Grief, said a good number, had caused it; anxiety, declared others; but the majority, including servants and women plumped, of course, for love. He was successful, and he was unmarried; the evidence was unanswerable. I believe, however, that I am the only living person who holds the true secret.
“Most people who have really lived,” he used to say, “possess some singular experience or other that they do not care about telling indiscriminately. And this is mine. I'm a little ashamed of it,” he added, “for nowadays we explain everything-- or confess ourselves unscientific. Besides”--he shrugged his shoulders--"my conduct, I always feel, was not strictly professional perhaps in the best sense. And, also--it was the only time in my life when I was obliged to acknowledge a sense of unreasoning fear--and yield to it!”
And the story, it must be confessed, certainly would have claimed belief more readily in those picturesque times when “Possession,” diabolical or otherwise, was a prevalent superstition, and when the post mortem activity of a disembodied spirit was held to be often exceedingly lively.
It happened before the days when Dr Blane's skill had earned for him the honours of knighthood, together with the privilege of inspectorship of royal diseases. This, somewhat, is as he told it to me shortly before his own death:
With an intimate friend, it appears, he was revisiting a little village in the Swiss Jura, where he had been to learn French as a boy, when the friend incontinently was laid low with diphtheria, and he stayed out perforce to nurse him. Both men had their meals in the cosy little Pension de La Poste, where twenty years before they had studied grammar and irregular verbs together; but Dr Blane, who wanted quiet, had his work and bedroom in Michaud's new house at the other end of the village where the yards begin.
Now, the epidemic, it so happened, was a severe one, and two other persons- — but for whom this thing might not have come about- — were also laid low: one, the village æsculapius, Dr Ducommun; the other, Mlle. Udriet, a wealthy but avaricious old woman, whose personality was of dark and sinister odour throughout the whole countryside, and who, on account of her intense miserliness, was known generally as “la mauvaise riche.” And she was well named, for village wit has a way of hitting the nail on the head. She was an evil woman, with great force of individuality, dreaded by all; and her fear of spending money went to amazing lengths. It was even reported of her that she enticed her neighbours' cats into her big house, slew and cooked them with her own hands, and ate them to save a butcher's bill. Her long finger-nails, and certain other unappetising peculiarities, were evidence, the village held for anything and everything.
And Dr Blane, who was sent for to prescribe in the temporary absence of Dr Ducommun, admits that the moment he crossed the threshold of the ill-smelling room and saw the old miser staring fixedly at him from her bed, he was inspired by an instant and singularly powerful aversion for her. The face he always described as truly venomous, and her thin fingers lying on the coverlet were “taloned and be-clawed,” he used to declare with a shuddering laugh, “like the feet of a great bird of prey.” Here, for the first time in his life, was a patient, he hinted afterwards, whom he would rather have helped to die than to live.
Though ashamed of his revulsion he could not quite conceal it. The fact that she would never pay his fees was nothing. It was the woman herself. "She was like some great loathsome insect in that dark room,” he said; "some insect whose sting was death!”
The situation at first was merely unpleasant, but a little later it became more awkward and furnished Dr Blane with the excuse for what he terms his unprofessional attitude. For the village doctor got better--well enough to crawl out and see his pet patients--and la mauvaise riche got steadily worse. Moreover, she insisted on sending for Dr Blane because she preferred his greater skill, and Dr Blane as often as possible shelved the unpleasant responsibility upon the shoulders of the local practitioner.
Plainly put, he avoided seeing her — even refused point blank to do so, and the old woman, when she found that he no longer came, suffered paroxysms of rage that were positively terrifying in their concentrated fury.
It was one night towards the end of March when the matter came to a climax. Earlier in the evening Mlle. Udriet, apparently at her crisis, had sent him an imperious summons, and Dr Blane, not without pricks of conscience, had passed on the summons by messenger to his colleague at the other end of the village. Dr Ducommun, however, was delayed for several hours, with the unfortunate result that la mauvaise riche lay neglected to the end.
The Englishman, of course, knew nothing of this. He was in the Pension sitting by the bedside of his friend, reading. It was 10 o'clock. Shaded candles stood on the little table, and the sick man was sleeping peacefully the sleep of recovery. For twenty-four hours there had been no return of the delirium. At the end of the darkened room Mme. Favre, who owned the pension and had proved herself a devoted helper, was in the act of mixing a tumbler of the St. Germain — her invariable remedy for all complaints — when suddenly two things — two surprising things — happened simultaneously: the sick man sat bolt upright in bed with startling abruptness, stared fixedly into the dim room in front of him, and pointed; while Mme. Favre let fall her tumbler with a crash upon the floor and cried, in a voice of genuine alarm, “Who is it? Somebody pushed past me! There's someone else in the room!”
The singular way these two persons acted on the same instant impressed Dr Blane unpleasantly — curiously. He was conscious at once of a disagreeable thrill — of something that brought the water with a rush to his eyes and made the skin of his back crawl. Yet of course he never for one moment believed that anyone had really entered the room through the closed doors.
“A return of the delirium,” he said quietly, as his friend continued to glare about him and to point. And then added more sternly, “There's no need for alarm, Mme. Favre, I assure you;” for the old lady was leaning, pale and terrified, against the cupboard, and staring towards the bed as though her eyes would drop out.
But the patient, of course, absorbed his immediate attention. To the doctor there could be nothing very unusual about a scene of delirium; yet about this particular scene of delirium, he became sharply and unpleasantly aware, there was something very unusual indeed. It was convincingly and horribly real. To begin with, though the sick man had forgotten his French almost to the simplest phrases, he was now gabbling the language with a speed and fluency that were positively uncanny; and at the same time with a vehemence, a passion, a fury that had characterised none of his former attacks; moreover — most disquieting of all — with a thin, whispering voice that was beyond question not his own.
But of the whole wild torrent, all he, and for that matter all Mme. Favre, could catch before it subsided again into abrupt silence were the short phrases, uttered with eyes fixed upon the doctor and hand pointing into his very face: “You passed me by. But now I am out — and I shall not pass you by!”
The singular thing, however — and it was this that gave the good woman the "crise de nerfs" that ended in a fainting fit — the singular and horrible thing, was that as the changed voice poured out of the sick man, his face altered visibly as well, altered too into the lineaments of another visage that they both knew. How the eyes and mouth of a man could slip into the expression of a woman — an evil, vindictive woman — is beyond the power of description, yet the calm, experienced Dr Blane. as well as the frightened old lady at the end of the room, both recognised beyond possibility of discussion that voice, face, and manner belonged to the evil personality of that perverted old woman, la mauvaise riche. In the eyes, perhaps, the resemblance lay chiefly. It was unmistakable. It was weirdly impressive.
Then it all passed as quickly as it came. The sick man slept peacefully once more, Mme. Favre pulled herself together, assisted by the judicious aid of cold water, and half an hour later Dr Blane, battling already with vivid sensations of alarm such as he had never known before in his life, left the pension to go back to his own rooms.
His shortest way lay down the village street, past the house of Mlle. Udriet, and so home. Yet the doctor deliberately chose the longer route. He admits it frankly. He did not wish to pass the woman's house. “I was curiously nervous, almost frightened,” he said: “though exactly of what I could not tell. I came out of La Poste into the night all trembling. It was the most unaccountable sensation I have ever known. Rather than pass the door of that woman's house I'd have walked a mile.”
So he went home by a roundabout way of perhaps 15 minutes. The village was utterly deserted, and the night air swept about him with the scents of early spring from the surrounding forests. In his mind, however, he still saw his friend's changed face and heard the whispered words so vindictively uttered, “You passed me by. Now I'm out. I shan't pass you by!” And do what he might he could not dismiss them. The words kept time with the echo of his feet on the hard road.
A little more than halfway his path joined the main street by the fountain, and then turned to the right and ran between low stone walls to Michaud's house. Beyond the walls were vineyards with hundreds of bare sticks already planted in the earth.
And it was here, as he passed the fountain, that he first heard a noise that sent the blood tingling up about his ears. The mountain water splashes there all the year round with a steady fall, but what he heard had nothing to do with that. It was the sound of small feet pattering along under the deep shadow of the houses.
Something was following him. “It's a dog,” he said, yet at the same time he knew quite well it was not a dog. It was on two feet, not on four. Fear dropped cold and wet over his face.
The road slopes the whole way to where the Michaud house stands isolated from the rest of the village among the vineyards, and Dr Blane quickened his pace almost to a run. He found the excuse that it was cold, though he was perfectly well aware that the cold he felt was not common cold of night.
For a time he resisted the desire to look round, but before he was half-way down the hill the moon emerged from the clouds, and at last, with a sudden movement as though he expected to be attacked from behind, he stopped short, and turned.
The village street in the pale wintry moonlight was empty. Black shadows lined its sides; the church pierced the sky; far above gleamed the spectral snows on the heights of Mont Racine, and the great mountain of Boudry with its dark army of pines hung, immense and forbidding, in the air. Nothing moved. But from the spaces of open moonlit road close behind him came the sound of light pattering. The steps still followed him.
The way this creeping fear had begun to master him was beyond all things strange. He pulled himself together with a great effort of will and continued his way, this time without undue haste; for to run, he realised, was to admit that terror was in his heart. Yet, along some dark by-way, it had undoubtedly established itself already in his blood beyond all reach of argument. He walked with firm and measured steps, and as a result he at once noticed that the sounds were no longer audible. The moment he asserted his will, apparently they ceased. The whole thing was, of course, imaginary, born of the night, of the deep wintry silence, and of the unpleasant memory that vivid scene in the sickroom had marked on his brain — in a word, nerves!
Leaving the village behind him, he entered the section of road where low walls separated it from the vineyards on either side. But before he had gone a dozen yards he became aware that something was running stealthily among the serried ranks of vine sticks over the wall on his left. The soft pattering on the earth was distinctly audible. The thing was keeping pace with him still, yet always a little behind. It was holding him in view — watching; waiting.
“This,” he says, “I realised above all else — that I was being followed with some sinister purpose.”
Keeping to the middle of the road, however, Dr Blane refused now to quicken his steps. It was remarkable how dead, how deserted the mountain village seemed. No one was about; lights were out in every house. Wind, the night, and the timid moon with her fugitive gleams held possession of the world. And those swift, pattering footsteps, making their way without a single false tread between thousands of upright stakes, ran ever beside him on the other side of the low wall.
At last the outline of the house loomed welcome before him, and he entered the iron gates, slowly, still master of himself, and fumbled in the lock with his key. A space of gravel path led up to the door, and as he stooped to insert the key he was positive that he heard something leap the wall and land with a kind of hushed shuffle on the shingly path close behind him. He turned with an exclamation, half cry, half curse — again with the instinctive idea of protecting himself from attack, when suddenly a light shone through the door, and Michaud, his landlord, opened it from the inside.
The sounds ceased; Dr Blane passed hurriedly in. Never was light or human presence more welcome.
“I'll close after you,” said Michaud, a little man with a jolly, smiling fat face. “I knew your step.”
Before shutting the door he peered out into the night.
“Tiens!” he said, looking about him, “I thought I heard someone!”
“It's a dog or something that followed me down the road,” said the doctor. He was glad to be with another man — uncommonly glad.
Michaud closed the door and locked it, but as he did so Dr Blane got the curious impression that something darted in past his legs like a swift shadow into the house. At the same moment the lantern standing on the steps behind fell with a crash, as though knocked over, and the light was extinguished. Michaud laughed as he struck a match to relight it. He looked rather closely at his lodger for a moment. Dr Blane declares that to the end he could never be certain that he had not himself stumbled against the lantern and so kicked it over.
“They've been here several times to fetch you,” the man said the moment the door was fastened, “but I told them you were out.”
“Who came?" asked the other with an odd catch in his voice.
“I couldn't see. I called down from the window, but didn't recognise the voice — some woman, I think. It was too dark to see. I told them to get Dr Ducommun. She's dead, you know,” he added abruptly. “Gone to her account at last.”
“Who — who is dead?”
Michaud's voice was curiously hushed as he replied: “La mauvaise riche.” He shrugged his shoulders.
Presently they said good-night, and Dr Blane went up to his room to work or to sleep. They were alone in the house, these two, for Madame Michaud was away visiting her mother at La Chaux- de-Fonds, and there were no other occupants. He heard the little man thumping about for a space in his bedroom below. Then, presently all sounds ceased.
Dr Blane's room was on the top floor — an attic room really. There were double windows, a cupboard, a bed in one corner with a mountainous duvet, hot-air pipes, a wash-hand stand opposite, and in the centre his work-table with two lighted candles. By the bed and table two strips of carpet — the rest pine boards, not even stained. It was all very primitive.
At first he tried to work — in vain. Then, turning his thoughts inwards, he deliberately attacked the problem with a view to solving it and recovering his normal state of balance. He brought to bear upon it all the force of his acute mind, together with his great medical knowledge and experience. But analysis only confirmed things: he was suffering from a singular invasion of utterly unreasoning fear. He was afraid in the depths of his soul; cold and perspiring in turns; horribly creepy about the skin; and his hair ready at the least sound to rise upon his head. Yet, in his search, he could find nothing that seemed an adequate cause. His neglect of a patient, not even properly his, he admitted, was not wholly pardonable, but, after all — ! His mind, in spite of all efforts, came back always to the thought of that horrible changed expression in his friend's face — the expression of that evil woman's eyes, and to the whispered words that had seemed like a curse. “I'm out. You passed me by. I shall not pass you by!”
Finally, to steady his mind, and possibly to find a measure of relief in expression, he sat down to put an analysis of his mental state on paper. He worked hard. But presently he paused and looked about him. He heard the wind. It had changed; and la bise was blowing up over the Lake of Neuchatel. Now and again it rose to a wild, whistling cry that made him shiver. The clocks of Colombier struck 1 in the morning.
At length, in a calmer state of mind, Dr Blane, half wondering, half laughing, but still strangely nervous, put out the candles and got into bed.
And the moment the room was dark the noise began again.
There was no interval of guesswork; he knew at once what it was. Something was scratching at the door — outside. And the curious part of it was that the instant he heard it he realised that the door was no sort of protection. That it was locked was all a useless pretence. The thing could, and would, get in to him. And the next minute, with a nauseous rush of terror, he knew that it was in. It had somehow squeezed itself underneath the door — and was pattering across the bare boards to the side of his bed. And as he heard it, that vile pattering seemed inside him — on the very substance of his heart.
The actual distance between door and bed was small enough, but in those few seconds of tense horror it stretched into a hundred yards, and he knew all the prolonged agony of steady, merciless approach that a man fastened to the rails must know when in the distance he hears the first rumble of the coming train. For a kind of paralysis crept over him so that he could not move. His heart dropped like lead. The perspiration that drenched him froze instantly into ice.
Then the steps quickened for a running leap: there was a sound of rushing through the air; a gust of glacial wind; and something dropped heavily upon the bed by his feet — and then began to climb quickly upwards towards his face.
Dr Blane says he tried furiously to shout, but could get no sound out above a whisper.
The sensation of the footsteps treading up the whole length of his paralysed body was the most horrible thing he had ever known. But his climax of terror brought with it at least a certain power of movement, and he was just able to bury his face beneath a pile of clothes and pillows when the thing settled down with a clinging grip like wire netting upon his head, and there began the most dreadful struggle imaginable in the thick darkness.
But it was an unequal fight. His hands were so moist with the clamminess of fear that the sheets slipped through his fingers, and inch by inch the strength of his adversary succeeded in uncovering his face. First he felt it against the skin of his neck, where thin fingers that gripped like cold iron caught him behind in a suddenly exposed place. The rest went swiftly; for that touch of ice somehow seemed to paralyse all the nerve centres at a stroke and bereft him of any power he had left. In a moment the clothes were torn from off him, and he lay there helpless and motionless on his back, his face at last wholly uncovered.
And then, so close to his ear that the breath touched him as though the bise had forced a way in through the open window, he heard a thin whisper of words: “You passed me by. Now I'm out. I shall not pass you by!” and immediately after it came a smothering sensation over eyes and mouth as though a weight of snow had fallen to suffocate him, while creeping through it a stinging pain moved slowly down the sides of his face towards the throat. It was like claws of iron entering his flesh.
The freezing air of night blowing upon his face revived him after what must have been a long period of unconsciousness, for the grey light of early morning was in this room when he opened his eyes again and there was a sound of movement in the house below. With the precision of a strong mind accustomed to quick reflection and decision Dr Blane at once realised the situation. There was no groping of memory. It all came back vividly, and in that very first minute of returning consciousness he was aware clearly of two things: first, that it had all been real, and no dream; secondly, that the terror had passed completely from his soul.
Wholly master of himself, yet with a feeling that he was bruised and battered, he got out of bed and examined the room. And to his amazement he noticed for the first time that the double windows were wide open and the bise was blowing straight into the room.
Wondering greatly — for they had been closed and fastened when he went to bed — to shut them tight. Then he crossed the floor to turn on the supply of hot air in the radiator. It was on his way back that he caught the reflection of his face in the mirror that hung by the window. The morning light fell full upon it. Down both cheeks ran dull red lines that ended in marks round the neck like the marks of the rope he had known years before as prison doctor on the neck of a hanged man. There was no blood — merely a dull contusion under the skin — and almost as he looked the lines faded away and were gone.
But above them, signature of his great terror was something else that did not fade, and that remained to the day of his death. A lock of hair over the right temple had turned grey in a single night.