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.