fwy' 
 
 Jrf^iirMae/i 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornefl University Library 
 PR6025.A178T3 
 
 The terror; a fantasy. 
 
 013 656 974 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013656974 
 
THE TERROR 
 
 A MYSTERY 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR MACHEN 
 
 Author of "The Bowmen" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY , 
 
 Union Square, North 
 
Copyright, 1917, by 
 EoBEBT M. McBbide & Co. 
 
 Published in 191^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Coming of the Terror . . i 
 
 II Death in the Village . . . .26 
 
 III The Doctor's Theory . . . 32 
 
 IV The Spread of the Terror . . 49 
 
 V The Incident of the Unknown 
 
 Tree . 64 
 
 VI Mr. Remnant's Z Ray ... 79 
 
 VII The Case of the Hidden Ger- 
 > mans 93 
 
 VIII What Mr. Merritt Found . . 107 • 
 
 IX The Light on the Water . .121 
 
 X The Child and the Moth . .136 
 
 XI At Treif Loyne Farm . . . 149 
 
 XII The Letter of Wrath . . * . .163 
 
 XIII The Last Words of Mr. Secretan 181 
 
 XIV The End of the Terror . . .196 
 
jCHAPTER I The Coming 
 
 of the Terror 
 
 AFTER ,two years we are tui^tiing 
 once more to the morning's news 
 with a sense of appetite and glad 
 expectation. There were thrills at the be- 
 ginning of the war ; the thrill of horror and 
 of a doom that seemed at once incredible and 
 certain; this was when Namur fell and the 
 Gerrnan host swelled like a flood over the 
 French fields, and drew very near to the 
 walls of Paris. Then we felt the thrill of 
 exultation when the good news came that 
 the awful tide had been turned back, that 
 Paris and the world were safe; for awhile 
 at all events. 
 
 Then for days we hoped for more news 
 as good as this or better. Has Von Kluck 
 been surrounded? Not to-day^ but perhaps 
 he will be surrounded to-morrow. But the 
 
 [I] 
 
The Terror 
 
 days became weeks, the weeks drew out to 
 months; the battle in the West seemed 
 frozen. Now and again things were done 
 that seemed hopeful, with promise of events 
 still better. But Neuve Chapelle and Loos 
 dwindled into disappointments as their tale 
 was told fully; the lines in the West re- 
 mained, for all practical purposes of victory, 
 immobile. Nothing seemed . to happen, 
 there was nothing to read save the record 
 of operations that were clearly trifling and 
 insignificant. People speculated as to the 
 reason of this inaction ; the hopeful said that 
 Joffre had a plan, that he was "nibbling," 
 others declared that we were short of muni- 
 tions, others again that the new levies were 
 not yet ripfe for battle. So the months went 
 by, and almost two years of war had been 
 complete^ before the motionless English line 
 began to stir and quiver as if it awoke from 
 a long sleep, and began to roll onward, over- 
 whelming the enemy. 
 
 [2] 
 
The Terrdr 
 
 The secret of the long inaction of the 
 British Armies has been well kept. On the 
 one hand it was rigorously protected by the 
 censorship, which severe, and sometimes 
 severe to the point of absurdity— "the cap- 
 tains and the . * . depart," for instance — 
 became in this particular matter ierocious. 
 As soon as the real significance of that 
 which was happening, or beginning to hap- 
 pen, was perceived by the authorities, an 
 underlined circular was issued to the news- 
 paper proprietors of Great Britain and Ire- 
 land. It warned each proprietor that he 
 might impart the contents of this circular 
 to one other person only, such person being 
 , the responsible editor^ of his paper, who was 
 to keep the communication secret under the 
 severest penalties. The circular forbade 
 any mention of certain events that had 
 taken place, that might take place; it for- 
 bade any kind of allusion to th^se events 
 or any hint of their existence, or of the pos- 
 'sibility of their existence, not only in the 
 
 [3] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Press, but in any form whatever. The sub- 
 ject was not to be alluded to in conversation, 
 it was not to be hinted at^ however obscurely, 
 in letters ; the very existence of the circular, 
 its subject apart, was to be a dead secret. 
 
 These measures were successful. A 
 wealthy newspaper proprietor of the North, 
 warmed a little at the end of the Throwsters' 
 Feast (which was held as usual, it will be 
 remembered), ventured to say to the man 
 next to him: ""How, awful it would be, 
 wouldn't it, if . . ." His words were re- 
 peated, as proof, one regrets to say, that it 
 was time for "old Arnold" to "pull himself 
 together"; and he was fined a thousand 
 pounds. Then, there was the case of an 
 obscure weekly paper published in the 
 County town of an agricultural district in 
 Wales. The Metros Observer (we will call 
 it) was issued from a stationer's back prem- 
 ises, and filled its four pages with accounts 
 of local flower shows, fancy fairs at vic- 
 arages, reports of parish councils, and rare 
 [4] 
 
The Terror 
 
 bathing -fatalities. It also issued a visitors' 
 list, which has been known to contain six 
 names. 
 
 This enlightened organ printed a para- 
 graph, which nobody noticed, which was 
 very like paragraphs that small country 
 newspapers have long been in the habit of 
 printing, which could hardly give so much 
 as a hint to any one — to any one, that is, who 
 was not fully instructed in the secret. As 
 a matter of fact, this piece of intelligence 
 got into the paper because the proprietor, 
 who was also the editor, incautiously left 
 the last processes of this particular issue to 
 the staff, who was the Lord-High-Every- 
 thing-Else of the establishment; aiid the' 
 staff put in a bit of gossip he had heard in 
 the market to' fill up two inches on the back 
 page. But the result was that the Metros 
 Observer ceased to appear, owing to "unto- 
 ward circumstances" as the proprietor said; 
 and he would say no more. No more, that 
 is, by way of explanation, but a great deal 
 [S] 
 
The Terror 
 
 more by way of execration of '"damned, 
 prying busybodies." 
 
 Now a censorship that is sufficiently 
 minute and utterly remorseless can do amaz- 
 ing things in the way of hiding . . . what 
 it wants to hide. Before the war, one would 
 have thought ' otherwise ; one would have 
 said that, censor or no censor, the fact of 
 the murder at X or the fact of the bank rob- 
 bery at Y would certainly become known; 
 if not through the Press, at all events 
 through rumor 9,nd the passage of the news 
 from mouth to mouth. And this would be 
 true— ^of England three hundred years ago, 
 and of savage tribelands of to-day. But we 
 have grown of late to such a reverence for 
 the printed word and such a reliance on it, 
 that the old faculty of disseminating- news 
 by word of mouth has become atrophied. 
 Forbid the Press to mention the fact that 
 Jones has been murdered, and it is marvel- 
 ous how few people will hear of it, and of 
 [6] 
 
/ 
 
 The Terror 
 
 those who hear how few will credit the 
 story that they have heard. You meet a 
 man in the train who remarks that he has 
 been told something about a murder in South- 
 wark; there is all the difference in the world 
 between the impression you receive from 
 such a chance communication and that given 
 by half a dozen lines of print with name, 
 and street and date and all the facts of the 
 case. People in trains repeat all sorts of 
 tales, many of them false ; newspapers do not 
 print accounts of murders that have not been 
 committed. 
 
 Then another cdnsidef ation that has made 
 for secrecy. I may have seemed to say that 
 the old office of rumor no longer exists; I 
 shall be reminded of the strange legend of 
 
 ' "the Russians" and the mythology of the 
 "Angels of Mons." But let me point out, 
 in the first place, that both these absurdities 
 
 , depended on the papers for their wide dis- 
 semination. If there had been' no news- 
 papers or magazines Russians and Angels 
 
 [7] 
 
The Terror 
 
 would have made but a brief, vague appear- 
 ance of the most shadowy kind — 3. few 
 would have heard of them, fewer still would 
 have believed in them, they would have been 
 gossiped about for a bare week or two, and 
 so they would have vanished away. 
 
 And, 'then, again, the very fact of these 
 vain rumors and fantastic tales having 
 been so widely believed for a time was fatal 
 to the credit of any stray mutterings that 
 may have got abroad. People had been 
 taken in twice; they had seen how grave 
 persons, men of credit, had preached and 
 lectured about the shining forms that had 
 saved the British Army at Mons, or had 
 testified to the trains, packed with gray- 
 coated Muscovites, rushing through the 
 land at dead of night: and now there was 
 a hint of something more amazing than 
 either of the discredited legends. But this 
 time there was no word of confirmation to 
 be found in daily paper, or weekly review, 
 or parish magazine, and so the few that 
 [8] 
 
The Terror 
 
 heard either laughed, or, being serious, went 
 home and jotted down notes for essays on 
 "War-time Psychology: Collective Delu- 
 sions." 
 
 I followed neither of these courses. For 
 before the secret circular had been issued 
 my curiosity had somehow been aroused by 
 certain paragraphs concerning a "Fatal Ac- 
 cident to Well-known Airman." The pror 
 peller of the airplane had been shattered, 
 apparently by a collision with a flight of 
 pigeons ; the blades had been broken and the 
 machine had fallen like lead to the earth. 
 And soon after I had seen this account, I 
 heard of some very odd circumstances re- 
 lating to an explosion in a great munition 
 factory in the Midlands. I thought I saw 
 the possibility of a connection between two 
 very different events. 
 
 It has been pointed out to me by friends 
 who have been good enough to read this 
 record, that certain phrases I have used may 
 [9] 
 
The Terror 
 
 give the impression that I ascribe all the 
 delays of the war on the Western front to 
 the extraordinary circumstances which oc- 
 casioned the issue of the Secret Circular. 
 Of course this is not the case, there were 
 many reasons for the irnmobility of our lines 
 from October 1914 to July 1916. These 
 causes have been evident enough and have 
 been openly discussed and deplored. But 
 behind them was something of infinitely 
 greater moment. We lacked men, but men 
 were pouring into the new army; we were 
 short of shells, but when the shortage was 
 proclaimed the nation set itself to mend 
 this matter with all its energy. We could 
 undertake to supply the defects of our army 
 both in men and munitions — if the new and 
 incredible danger could be overcome. It 
 has been overcome; rather, perhaps, it has 
 ceased to exist; and the secret may now be 
 told. 
 
 I have said my attention was attracted 
 by an account of the death of a well-known 
 [10] 
 
The Terror 
 
 airman. I have not the habit of preserving 
 cuttings, I am sorry to say, so that I caij- 
 not be precise as to the date of this event. 
 To the best of my belief it was either to- 
 wards the end of May or the beginning of 
 June 19 1 5. The newspaper paragraph an- 
 nouncing the death of Flight-Lieutenant 
 Western- Reynolds was brief enough; acci- 
 dents, and fatal accidents, to the men who 
 are storming the air for us are, unfor- 
 tunately, by no means so rare as to demand 
 an elaborated notice. But the manner in 
 which Western-Reynolds met his death 
 struck me as extraordinary, inasmuch as it 
 revealed a new danger in the element that 
 we have lately conquered. He was brought 
 down, as I said, by a flight of birds; of 
 pigeons, as appeared by what was found on 
 the bloodstained and shattered blades of the 
 propeller. An eye-witness of the accident^ 
 a fellow-officer, described how Western- 
 Reynolds set out from the aerodrome on a 
 fine afternoon, there being hardly any wind. 
 [II] 
 
The Terror 
 
 He was going to France; he had made the 
 journey to and fro half a dozen times or 
 more, and felt perfectly secure and at ease. 
 " 'Wester' rose to a great height at once, 
 and we could scarcely see the machine. I 
 was turning to go when one of the fellows 
 called out, 'I say! What's this?' He 
 pointed up, and we saw what looked like a 
 black cloud coming from the south at a tre- 
 mendous rate. I saw at once it wasn't a 
 cloud ; it came with a swirl and a rush quite 
 different from any cloud I've ever seen. 
 But for a second I couldn't make out exactly 
 what it was. It altered its shape and turned 
 into a great crescent, and wheeled and 
 veered abouj: as if it was looking for some- 
 thing. The man who had called out had 
 got his glasses, and was staring for all he 
 was worth. Then he shouted that it was a 
 tremendous flight of birds, 'thousands of 
 them.' They went on wheeling and beating 
 about high up in the air, and we were watch- 
 ing them, thinking it was interesting, but not 
 
 [12] 
 
The Terror 
 
 supposing that they would make any differ- 
 ence to 'Wester,' who was just about out of 
 sight. His machine was just a speck. 
 Then the two arms of the crescent drew in 
 as quick as lightning, and these thousands 
 of birds shot in a solid mass right up there 
 across the sky, and flew away somewhere 
 about nor'-nor'-by-west. Then Henley, the 
 man with the glasses, called out, 'He's 
 down !' and started running, and I went after 
 him. We got a car and as we were going 
 along Henley told me that he'd seen the 
 machine drop dead, as if it came out of that 
 cloud of birds. He thought then that they 
 must have mucked up the propeller somehow. 
 That turned out to be the case. We found 
 the propeller blades all broken and covered 
 with blood and pigeon feathers, and car- 
 casses of the birds had got wedged in be- 
 tween the blades, and were sticking to them." 
 This was the story that the young air- 
 man told one evening in a small company. 
 He did not speak "in confidence," so I have 
 [13] 
 
The Terror 
 
 no hesitation in reproducing what he said. 
 Naturally, I did not take a verbatim note 
 of his conversation, but I have something 
 of a knack of remembering talk that in- 
 terests me, and I think my reproduction is 
 very near to the tale that I heard. And let 
 it be noted that the flying man told his story 
 without any sense or indication of a sense 
 that the incredible, or all but the incredible, 
 had happened. So far as he knew, he said, 
 it was the first accident of the kind. Air- 
 men in France had been bothered once or 
 twice by birds — he thought they were eagles 
 — flying viciously at them, but poor old 
 "Wester" had been the first man to come 
 up against a flight of some thousands of 
 pigeons. 
 
 "And perhaps I shall be the next," he 
 added, "but why look for trouble? Any- 
 how, I'm going to see Toodle-oo to-morrow 
 afternoon." 
 
 Well, I heard the story, as one hears all 
 [14] 
 
The Terror 
 
 the varied marvels and terrors of the air ; as 
 
 one heard some years ago of "air pockets," 
 
 strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere 
 
 into which airmen fell with great peril; or 
 
 as one heard of the experience of the airman 
 
 who flew over the Cumberland mountains 
 
 in the burning summer of 191 1, and as he 
 
 swam far above the heights was suddenly 
 
 and vehemently blown upwards, the hot 
 
 air from the rocks striking his plane as if 
 
 it had been a blast from a furnace chimney. 
 
 We have just begun to navigate a strange 
 
 region ; we must expect to encounter strange 
 
 adventures, strange perils. And here a new 
 
 chapter in the chronicles of these perils and 
 
 adventures had been opened by the death of 
 
 Western-Reynolds; and no doubt invention 
 
 and contrivance would presently hit on some 
 
 way of countering the new danger. 
 
 It was, I think, about a week or ten days 
 
 after the airman's death that my business 
 
 called me to a northern town, the name of 
 
 which, perhaps, had better remain unknown. 
 
 [IS] 
 
The Terror 
 
 My mission was to inquire into certain 
 charges of extravagance which had been 
 laid against the working people, that is, the 
 munition workers of this especial town. It 
 was said that the men who used to earn 
 £2 I OS. a week were now getting from seven 
 to eight pounds, that "bits of girls" were 
 being paid two pounds instead of seven or 
 eight shillings, and that, in consequence, 
 there was an orgy of foolish extravagance. 
 The girls, I was told, were eating chocolates 
 at four, five, and six shillings a pound, the 
 women were ordering thirty-pound pianos 
 which they couldn't play, and the mfen 
 bought gold chains at ten and twenty 
 guineas apiece. 
 
 I dived into the town in question and 
 found, as usual, that tl;iere was a mixture of 
 truth and exaggeration in the stories that I 
 had heard. Gramophones, for example: 
 they cannot be called in strictness neces- 
 saries, but they were undoubtedly finding a 
 ready sale, even in the more expensive 
 [16] 
 
The Terror 
 
 brands. And I thought that there were a 
 great many very spick and span perambu- 
 lators to be seen on the pavement; smart 
 perambulators, painted in tender shades of 
 color and expensively fitted. 
 
 "And how can you be surprised if people 
 will have a bit of a fling?" a worker said to 
 me. "We're seeing money for the first time 
 in our lives, and it's bright. And we work 
 hard for it, and we risk our lives to get it. 
 You've heard of explosion yonder?" 
 
 He mentioned certain works on the out- 
 skirts of the town. Of course, neither the 
 name of the works nor of the town had been 
 printed; there had been a brief notice of 
 "Explosion at Munition Works in the 
 Northern District: Many Fatalities." The 
 working man told me about it, and added 
 some dreadful details. 
 
 "They wouldn't let their folks see bodies ; 
 screwed them up in coffins as they found 
 them in shop. The gas had done it." 
 
 "Turned their faces black, you mean?" 
 [17] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "Nay. They were all as if they had been 
 bitten to pieces." 
 
 This was a strange gas. 
 
 I asked the man in the northern town all 
 sorts of questions about the extraordinary 
 explosion of which he had spoken to me. 
 But he had very little more to say. As I 
 have noted already, secrets that may not be 
 printed are often deeply kept 5 last summer 
 there were very few people outside high 
 official circles who knew anything about the 
 "Tanks," of which we have all been talking 
 lately, though these strange instruments of 
 war were being exercised and tested in a 
 park not far from London. So the man who 
 told me of the explosion in the munition 
 factory was most likely genuine in his pro- 
 fession that he knew nothing more of the 
 disaster. I found out that he was a smelter 
 employed at a furnace on the other side of 
 the town to the ruined factory; he didn't 
 know even what they had been making there ; 
 some very dangerous high explosive, he sup- 
 [18] 
 
The Terror 
 
 posed. His information was really nothing 
 more than a bit of gruesome gossip, which 
 he had heard probably at third or fourth 
 or fifth hand. The horrible detail of faces 
 "as if they had been bitten to pieces" had 
 made its violent impression on him, that was 
 all. 
 
 I gave him up and took a tram to the dis- 
 trict of the disaster; a sort of industrial 
 suburb, five miles from the center of the 
 town. When I asked for the factory, I was 
 told that it was no good my going to it as 
 there was nobody there. But I found it; 
 a raw and hideous shed with a walled yard 
 about it, and a shut gate. I looked for signs 
 of destruction, but there was nothing. The 
 roof was quite undamaged; and again it 
 struck me that this had been a strange ac- 
 cident. There had been an explosion of suf- 
 ficient violence to kill workpeople in the 
 building, but the building itself showed no 
 wounds or scars. 
 
 A man came out of the gate and locked 
 
 [19] 
 
The Terror 
 
 it behind him. I began to ask him some 
 sort of question, or rather, I began to 
 "open" foir a question with "A terrible busi- 
 ness here, they tell me," or some such phrase 
 of convention. I got no farther. The man 
 asked me if I saw a policeman walking down 
 the street. I said I did, and I was given 
 the choice of getting about my business 
 forthwith or of being instantly given in 
 charge as a spy. " Th'ast better be gone 
 and quick about it," was, I think, his final 
 advice, and I took it. 
 
 Well, I had come literally up against a 
 brick wall. Thinking the problem over, I 
 could only suppose that the smelter or his 
 informant had tested the phrases of the 
 story. The smelter had said the dead men's 
 faces were "bitten to pieces" ; this might be 
 an unconscious perversion of "eaten away." 
 That phrase might describe well enough the 
 effect of strong acids, and, for all I knew of 
 the processes of munition-making, such acids 
 might be used and might explode with hor- 
 [20] 
 
The Terror 
 
 rible results in some perilous stage of their 
 admixture. 
 
 It was a day or two later that the accident 
 to the airman, Western-Reynolds, came into 
 my mind. For one of those instants which 
 are far shorter than any measure of time 
 there flashed out the possibility of a link 
 between the two disasters. But here was a 
 wild impossibility, and I drove it away. 
 And yet I think that the thought, mad as it 
 seemed, never left me; it was the secret 
 light that at last guided me through a somber 
 grove of enigmas. 
 
 It was about this time, so far as the date 
 can be fixed, that a whole district, one might 
 say a whole county, was visited by a series 
 ©f extraordinary and terrible calamities, 
 which were the more terrible inasmuch as 
 they continued for some time to be in- 
 scrutable mysteries. It is, indeed, doubt- 
 ful whether these awful events do not still 
 remain mysteries to many of those con- 
 
 [21] 
 
The .Terror 
 
 cerned ; for before the inhabitants of this 
 part of thq country had time to join one link 
 of evidence to another the circular was is- 
 sued, and thenceforth no one knew how to 
 distinguish undoubted fact from wild and 
 extravagant surmise. 
 
 The district in question is in the far west 
 of Wales ; I shall call it, for convenience, 
 Meirion. In it there is one, seaside town of 
 some repute with holiday-makers for five or , 
 -six weeks in the summer, and dotted about 
 the county there are three or four small old 
 towns that seem drooping in a slow decay, 
 sleepy and gray with age and forgetfulnfess. 
 They remind me of what I have read of 
 towns in the west of Ireland. Grass grows 
 between the uneven stones of the pavements, 
 the signs above the shop windows decline, 
 half the letters of these signs are missing, 
 here and there a house has been pulled down, 
 or has been allowed to slide into ruin, and 
 wild greenery springs up through the fallen 
 stones, and there is silence in all the streets. 
 
 [22] 
 
The Terror 
 
 And, it is to be noted, these are not places 
 that were once magnificent. The Celts have 
 never had the art of building, and so far as 
 I can see, such towns as Towy and Merthyr 
 Tegveth and Meiros must have been always 
 much as they are now, clusters of poorish, 
 meanly-built houses, ill-kept and down at 
 heel. 
 
 And these few towns are thinly scattered 
 over a wild country where north is divided 
 from south by a wilder mountain Tangd. 
 One of these places is sixteen miles from 
 any station; the others are doubtfully and 
 deviously connected by single-line railways 
 served by rare trains that pause and stagger 
 and hesitate on their slow journey up moun- 
 tain passes, or stop for half an hour or more 
 at lonely sheds called stations, situated in 
 the midst of desolate marshes. A few years 
 ago I traveled with an Irishman on one of 
 these queer lines, and he looked to right and 
 saw the bog with its yellow and blue grasses 
 and stagnant pools, and he looked to left and 
 
The Terror 
 
 saw a ragged hillside, set with gray stone 
 walls. "I can hardly believe," he said, 
 "that I'm not still in the wilds of Ireland." 
 
 Here, then, one sees a wild and divided 
 and scattered region a land of outland hills 
 and secret and hidden valleys. I know 
 white farms on this coast which must be 
 separate by two hours of hard, rough walk- 
 ing from any other habitation, which are 
 invisible from any other house. And in- 
 land, again, the farms are often ringed 
 about by thick groves of ash, planted by men 
 of old days to shelter their roof -trees from 
 rude winds of the mountain and stormy 
 winds of the sea; so that these places, too, 
 are hidden away, to be surmised only by the 
 wood smoke that rises from the green sur- 
 rounding leaves. A Londoner must see 
 them to believe in them; and even then he 
 can scarcely credit their utter isolation. 
 
 Such, then in the main is Meirion, and 
 on this land in the early summer of last 
 year terror descended — a terror without 
 [24] 
 
The Terror 
 
 shape, such as no man there had ever known. 
 It began with the tale of a little child 
 who wandered out into the lanes to pick 
 flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came 
 back to the cottage on the hill. 
 
 [25] 
 
CHAPTER II Death in the 
 
 Village 
 
 THE child who was lost came from a 
 lonely cottage that stands on the 
 slope of a steep hillside called the 
 Allt, or the height. The land about it is 
 wild and ragged; here the growth of gorse 
 and bracken, here a marshy hollow of reeds 
 and rushes, marking the course of the stream 
 from some hidden well, here thickets of 
 dense and tangled undergrowth, the outposts 
 of the wood. Down through this broken 
 and uneven ground a path leads to the lane 
 at the bottom of the valley; then the land 
 rises again and swells up to the cliffs over 
 the sea, about a quarter 6f a mile away. 
 The little girl, Gertrude Morgan, asked her 
 mother if she might go down to the lane and 
 pick the purple flowers — ^these were orchids 
 — that grew there, and her mother gave her 
 [26] 
 
The Terror 
 
 leave, telling her she must be sure to be back 
 by tea-time, as there was apple-tart for tea. 
 
 She never came back. It was supposed 
 that she must have crossed the road and 
 gone to the cliff's edge, possibly in order to 
 pick the sea-pinks that were then in full 
 blossom. She must have slipped, they said, 
 and fallen into the sea, two hundred feet 
 below. And, it may be said at once, that 
 there was no doubt some truth in this con- 
 jecture, though it stopped very far short 
 of the whole truth. The child's body must 
 have been carried out by the tide, for it 
 was never found. 
 
 The conjecture of a false step or of a fatal 
 slide on the slippery turf that slopes down 
 to the rocks was accepted as being the only 
 explanation possible. People thought the 
 accident a strange one because, as a rule, 
 country children living by the cliffs and the 
 sea become wary at an early age, and Ger- 
 trude Morgan was almost ten years old. 
 Still, as the neighbors said, "that's how it 
 [27] 
 
The Terror 
 
 must have happened, and it's a great pity, 
 to be sure." Bi^t this would not do when 
 in a week's time a strong young laborer 
 failed to come to his cottage after the day's 
 work. His body was found on the rocks six 
 or seven miles from the cliffs where the 
 child was supposed to have fallen; he was 
 going home by a path that he had used 
 every night of his life for eight or nine 
 years, that he used of dark nights in perfect 
 security, knowing every inch of it. The 
 police asked if he drank, but he was a tee- 
 totaler; if he were subject to fits, but he 
 wasn't. And he was not murdered for his 
 wealth, since agricultural laborers are not 
 wealthy. It was only possible again to talk 
 of slippery turf and a false step; but people 
 began to be frightened. Then a woman was 
 found with her neck broken at the bottom 
 of a disused quarry near Llanfihangel, in 
 the middle of the county. The "false step" 
 theory was eliminated here, for the quarry 
 was guarded with a natural hedge of gorse 
 [28] 
 
The Terror 
 
 bushes. One would have to struggle and 
 fight through sharp thorns to destruction in 
 such a place as this; and indeed the gorse 
 bushes were broken as i£ some one had 
 rushed furiously through them, just above 
 the place where the woman's body was 
 found. And this was strange : there was a 
 dead sheep lying beside her in the pit, as if 
 the woman and the sheep together had been 
 chased over the brim of the quarry. But 
 chased by whom, or by what? And then 
 there was a new form of terror. 
 
 This was in the region of the marshes 
 under the mountain. A man and his son, 
 a lad of fourteen or fifteen, set out early one 
 morning to work and never reached the farm 
 where they were bound. Their way skirted 
 the marsh, but it was broad, firm and well 
 metalled, and it had been raised about two 
 feet above the bog. But when search was 
 made in the evening of the same day Phil- 
 lips and his son were found dead in the 
 marsh, covered with black slime and pond- 
 [29] 
 
The Terror 
 
 weed. ' And they lay some ten yards f rorii the 
 path, which, it would seem, they must have 
 left deliberately. It was useless of course, 
 to look for tracks in the black ooze, for if 
 one threw a big stone into it a few seconds 
 removed all marks of the disturbance. The 
 men who found the two bodies beat about 
 the verges and purlieus of the marsh in hope 
 of finding some trace of the murderers ; they 
 went to and fro over the rising ground 
 where the black cattle were grazing, they 
 searched the alder thickets by the brook; 
 but they discovered nothing. 
 
 Most horrible of all these horrors, per- 
 haps, was the affair of the Highway, a lonely 
 and unfrequented by-road that wJnds for 
 many miles on high and lonely land. Here, 
 a mile from any other dwelling, stands a 
 cottage on the edge of a dark wood. It 
 was inhabited by a laborer named Williams, 
 his wife, and their three children. One hot 
 summer's evening, a man who had been do- 
 ing a day's gardening at a rectory three or 
 [30] 
 
The Terror 
 
 four miles away, passed the cottage, and 
 stopped for a few minutes to chat with Wil- 
 liams, the laborer, who was pottering about 
 his garden, while the children were playing 
 on the path by the door. The two talked 
 of their neighbors and of the potatoes till 
 Mrs. Williams appeared at the doorway and 
 said supper was ready, and Williams turned 
 to go into the house. This was about eight 
 o'clock, and in the ordinary course the fam- 
 ily would have their supper and be in bed by 
 nine, or by half -past nine at latest. At ten 
 o'clock that night the local doctor was driv- 
 ing home along the Highway. His horse 
 shied violently and then stopped dead just 
 opposite the gate to the cottage. The doc- 
 tor got down, frightened at what he saw ; 
 and there on the roadway lay Williams, his 
 wife, and the three children, stone dead, all 
 of them. Their skulls were battered in as if 
 by some heavy iron instrument; their faces 
 were beaten into a pulp. 
 
 [31] 
 
CHAPTER III The Doctor's 
 
 Theory 
 
 IT is not easy to make any picture of the 
 horror that lay dark on the hearts of 
 the people of Meirion. It was no 
 longer possible to believe or to pretend to 
 believe that these men and women and chil- 
 dren had met their deaths through strange 
 accidents. The little girl and the young la- 
 borer might have slipped and fallen over the 
 cliffs, but the woman who lay dead with the 
 dead sheep at the bottom of the quarry, the 
 two men who had been lured into the ooze 
 of the marsh, the family who were found 
 murdered on the Highway before their own 
 cottage door; in these case^ there could be 
 no room for the supposition of accident. It 
 seemed as if it were impossible to frame any 
 conjecture or outline of a conjecture that 
 [32] 
 
The Terror 
 
 would account for these hideous and, as it 
 seemed, utterly purposeless crimes. For a 
 time people said that there must be a mad- 
 man at large, a sort of country variant of 
 Jack the Ripper, some horrible pervert who 
 was possessed by the passion of death, who 
 prowled darkling about that lonely land, 
 hiding in woods and in wild places, always 
 watching and seeking for the victims of his 
 desire. 
 
 Indeed, Dr. Lewis, who found poor Wil- 
 liams, his wife and children miserably 
 slaughtered on the Highway, was convinced 
 at first that the presence of a concealed mad- 
 man in the countryside offered the only pos- 
 sible solution to the difficulty. 
 
 "I felt sure," he said to me afterwards, 
 "that the Williams's had been killed by a 
 homicidal maniac. It was the nature of the 
 poor creatures' injuries that convinced me 
 that this was the case. Some years ago — 
 thirty-seven or thirty-eight years ago as a 
 matter of fact- — I had something to do with 
 [33]' 
 
The Terror 
 
 a case which on the face of it had a strong 
 likeness to the Highway murder. At. that 
 time I had a practice at Usk, in Monmouth- 
 shire. A whole family living in a cottage 
 by the roadside were murdered one evening; 
 it was called, I think, the Llangibby murder ; 
 the cottage was near the village of that 
 name. The murderer was caught in New- 
 port ; he was a Spanish sailor, named Garcia, 
 and it appeared that he had killed father, 
 mother, and the three children for the sake 
 of the brass works of an old Dutch clock, 
 which were found on him when he was ar- 
 rested. 
 
 "Garcia had been serving a month's im- 
 prisonment in Usk Jail for some small theft, 
 and on his release he set out to walk to 
 Newport, nine or ten miles away; no doubt 
 to get another ship. He passed the cottage 
 and saw the man working in his garden. 
 Garcia stabbed him with his sailor's knife. 
 The wife rushed out ; he stabbed her. Then 
 he went into the cottage and stabbed the 
 [34] 
 
The Terror 
 
 three children, tried to set the place on fire, 
 and made off with the clockworks. That 
 looked like the deed of a madman, but Garcia 
 wasn't mad — they hanged him, I may' say 
 — he was merely a man of a very low type, 
 a degenerate who hadn't the slightest value 
 for human life. I am not sure, but I think 
 he came from one of the Spanish islands, 
 where the people are said to be degenerates, 
 very likely from too much inter-breeding. 
 
 "But my point is that Garcia stabbed to 
 kill and did kill, with one blow in each case. 
 There was no senseless hacking and slash- 
 ing. Now those poor people on the High- 
 way had their heads smashed to pieces by 
 what must have been a storm of blows. 
 Any one of them would have been fatal, but 
 the murderer must have gone on raining 
 blows, with his iron hammer on people who 
 were already stone dead. And that sort of 
 thing is the work of a madman, and nothing 
 but a madman. That's how I argued the 
 matter out to myself just after the event. 
 [35] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "I was utterly wrong, monstrously wrong. 
 But who could have suspected the truth?" 
 
 Thus Dr. Lewis, and I quote him, or the 
 substance of him, as representative of most 
 of the educated opinion of the district at 
 the beginnings of the terror. People seized 
 on this theory largely because it offered at 
 least the comfort of an explanation, an,d 
 any explanation, even the poorest, is better 
 than an intolerable and terrible mystery. 
 Besides, Dr. Lewis's theory was plausible; 
 it explained the lack of purpose that seemed 
 to characterize the murders. And yet — 
 there were difficulties even from the first. 
 It was hardly possible that a strange mad- 
 man should be able to keep hidden in a 
 countryside where any stranger is instantly 
 noted and noticed; sooner or later he would 
 be seen as he prowled along the lanes or 
 across the wild places. Indeed, a drunken, 
 cheerful, and altogether harmless tramp was 
 arrested by a farmer and his man in the fact 
 and act of sleeping off beer under a hedge; 
 [36] 
 
The Terror 
 
 but the vagrant was able to prove complete 
 and undoubted alibis, aiid was soon allowed 
 to go on his wandering way. 
 
 Then another theory, or rather a variant 
 of Dr. Lewis's theory, was started. ,This 
 was to the effect that the person responsible 
 for the outrages was, indeed, a madman; 
 but a madman only at intervals. It was 
 one of the members of the Forth Club, a 
 certain Mr. Remnant, who was supposed to 
 have originated this more subtle explana- 
 tion. Mr. Remnant was a middle-aged man, 
 who, having nothing particular to do, read 
 a great many books by way of conquering 
 the hours. He talked to the club — doctors, 
 retired colonels, parsons, lawyers — about 
 "personality," quoted various psychological 
 text-books in support of his contention that 
 personality was sometimes fluid and un- 
 stable, went back to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 Hyde" as good evidence of this proposition, 
 and laid stress on Dr. Jekyll's speculation 
 that the human soul, so far from being one 
 [37] 
 
The Terror 
 
 and indivisible, might possibly turn out to 
 be a mere polity, a state in which dwelt many 
 strange and incongruous citizens, whose 
 characters were not merely unknown but al- 
 together unsurmised by that form of con- 
 sciousness which so rashly assumed that it 
 was not only the president of the republic 
 but also its sole citizen. 
 
 "The long and the short of it is," Mr. Rem- 
 nant concluded, "that any one of us may b^ 
 the murderer, though he hasn't the faintest 
 notion of the fact. Take Llewelyn there." 
 
 Mr. Payne Llewelyn was an elderly law- 
 yer, a rural Tulkinghorn. He was the he- 
 reditary solicitor to the Morgans of Pentwyn. 
 This does not sound anything tremendous 
 to the Saxons of London; but the style is 
 far more than noble to the Celts of West 
 Wales; it is immemorial; Teilo Sant was of 
 the collaterals of the first known chief of 
 the race. And Mr. Payne Llewelyn did his 
 best to look like the legal adviser of this 
 ancient house. He was weighty, he was 
 [38] 
 
The Terror 
 
 cautious, he was sound, he was secure. I 
 have compared him to Mr. Tulkinghorn of 
 Lincoln's Inn Fields; but Mr. Llewelyn 
 would most certainly never have dreamed of 
 employing his leisure in peering into the 
 cupboards where the family skeletons were 
 hidden. Supposing such cupboards to have 
 existed, Mr. Payne Llewelyn would have 
 risked large out-of-pocket expenses to fur- 
 nish them with double, triple, impregnable 
 locks. He was a new man, an advena, cer- 
 tainly; for he was partly of the Conquest, 
 being descended on one side from Sir Payne 
 Turberville; but he meant to stand by the 
 old stock. 
 
 "Take Llewelyn now," said Mr. Remnant. 
 "Look here, Llewelyn, can you produce evi- 
 dence to show where you were on the night 
 those people were murdered on the High- 
 way? I thought not." 
 
 Mr. Llwelyn, an elderly man, as I have 
 said, hesitated before speaking. 
 
 "I thought not," Remnant went on. 
 [39] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "Now I say that it is perfectly possible that 
 Llewelyn may be dealing death throughout 
 Meirion, although in his present personality 
 he may not have the faintest suspicion that 
 there is another Llewelyn within him, a 
 Llewelyn who follows murder as a fine art." 
 
 Mr. Payne Llewelyn did not at all relish 
 Mr, Remnant's suggestion that he might 
 well be a secret murderer, ravening for 
 blood, remorseless as a wild beast. He 
 thought the phrase about his following mur- 
 der as. a fine art was both nonsensical and 
 in the worst taste, and his opinion was not 
 changed when Remnant pointed out that it 
 was used by De Quincey in the title of one 
 of his most famous essays. 
 
 "If you had allowed me to speak," he said 
 with some coldness of manner, "I would 
 have told you that on Tuesday last, the 
 night on which those unfortunate people 
 were murdered on the Highway I was stay- 
 ing at the Angel Hotel, Cardiff. I had busi- 
 [40] 
 
The Terror 
 
 ness in Cardiff, and I was detained till 
 Wednesday afternoon." 
 
 Having given this satisfactory alibi, Mr. 
 Payne Llewelyn left the club, and did not 
 go near it for the rest of the week. 
 
 Remnant explained to those who stayed 
 in the smoking room that, of course, he had 
 merely used Mr. Llewelyn as a concrete ex- 
 ample of his theory, which, he persisted, had 
 the support of a consideratjle body of evi- 
 dence. 
 
 "There are several cases of double per- 
 sonality on record," he declared. "And, I 
 say again that it is quite possible that these 
 murders may have been committed by one 
 of us in his secondary personality. Why, 
 I may be the murderer in my Remnant B. 
 state, though Remnant A. knows nothing 
 whatever about it, and is perfectly convinced 
 that he could not kill a fowl, much less a 
 whole family. Isn't it so, Lewis?" 
 
 Dr. Lewis said it was so, in theory, but 
 he thought not in fact. 
 [41] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "Most of the cases of double or multiple 
 personality that have been investigated," 
 he said, "have been in connection with the 
 very dubious experiments of hypnotism, or 
 the still more dubipus experiments of spir- 
 itualism. All that sort of thing, in my 
 opinion, is like tinkering with the works of 
 a clock — amateur tinkering, I mean. You 
 fumble about with the wheels and cogs and 
 bits of mechanism that you don't really know 
 anything about; and then you find your 
 clock going backwards or striking 246 at tea- 
 time. And I believe it's just the same thing 
 with these psychical research experiments; 
 the secondary personality is very likely the 
 result of the tinkering and fumbling with a 
 very delicate apparatus that we know noth- 
 ing about. Mind, I can't say that it's im- 
 possible for one of us to be the Highway 
 murderer in his B. state, as Remnant puts 
 it. But I think it's extremely improbable. 
 Probability is the guide of life, you know, 
 Remnant," said Dr. Lewis, smiling at that 
 [42] 
 
The Terror 
 
 gentleman, as if to say that he also had done 
 a little reading in his day. "And it follows, 
 therefore, that improbability is also the 
 guide of life. When you get a very high 
 degree of probability, that is, you are justi- 
 fied in taking it as a certainty; and on the 
 other hand, if a supposition is highly im- 
 probable, you are justified in treating it as 
 an impossible one. That is, in nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand." 
 
 "How about the thousatidth case?" said 
 Remnant. "Supposing these extraordinary 
 crimes constitute the thousandth case?" 
 
 The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoul- 
 ders, being tired of the subject. But for 
 some little time highly respectable members 
 of Forth society would look suspiciously at 
 one another wondering whether, after all, 
 there mightn't be "something in it." How- 
 ever, both Mr. Remnant's somewhat crazy 
 theory and Dr. Lewis's plausible theory be- 
 came untenable when two more victims of 
 an awful and mysterious death were offered 
 [43] 
 
The Terror 
 
 up in sacrifice, for a man was found dead 
 in the Llanfihangel quarry, where the woman 
 had been discovered. And on the same day 
 a girl of fifteen was found broken on the 
 jagged rocks under the cliffs near Forth. 
 Now, it appeared that these two deaths must 
 have occurred at about the same time, within 
 an hour of one another, certainly; and the 
 distance between the quarry and the cliffs 
 by Black Rock is certainly twenty miles. 
 
 "A motor could do it," one man said. 
 
 But it was pointed out that there was no 
 high road between the two places; indeed, 
 it might be said that there was no road at 
 all between them. There was a network 
 of deep, narrow, and tortuous lanes that 
 wandered into one another at all manner of 
 queer angles for, say, seventeen miles; this 
 in the middle, as it were, between Black 
 Rock and the quarry at Llanfihangel. But 
 to get to the high land of the cliffs one had 
 to take a path that went through two miles 
 of fields; and the quarry lay a mile away 
 [44] 
 
The Terror 
 
 from the nearest by-road in the midst of 
 gorse and bracken and broken land. And, 
 finally, there was no track of motor-car or 
 motor-bicycle in the lanes which must have 
 been followed to pass from one place to the 
 other. 
 
 "What about an airplane, then?" said the 
 man of the motor-car theory. Well, there 
 was certainly an aerodrome not far from one 
 of the two places of death; but somehow, 
 nobody believed that the Flying Corps har- 
 bored a homicidal maniac. It seemed clear, 
 therefore, that there must be more than one 
 person concerned in the terror of Meirion. 
 And Dr. Lewis himself abandoned his own 
 theory. 
 
 "As I said to Remnant at the Club," he 
 remarked, "improbability is the guide of life. 
 I can't believe that there are a pack of mad- 
 men or even two madmen at large in the 
 country. I give it up." 
 
 And now a fresh circumstance or set of 
 circumstances became manifest to confound 
 [45] 
 
The Terror 
 
 judgment and to awaken new and wild sur- 
 mises. For at about this time people real- 
 ized that none of the dreadful events that 
 were happening all about them was so much 
 as mentioned in the Press. I have already 
 spoken of the fate of the Meiros Observer. 
 This paper was suppressed by the authori- 
 ties because it had inserted a brief paragraph 
 about some person who had been "found 
 dead under mysterious circumstances"; I 
 think that paragraph referred to the first 
 death of Llanfihangel quarry. Thence- 
 forth, horror followed on horror, but no 
 word was printed in any of the local jour- 
 nals. The curious went to the newspaper 
 offices — there were two left in the county — 
 but found nothing save a firm refusal to 
 'discuss the matter. And the Cardiff pa- 
 pers were drawn and found blank; and the 
 London Press was apparently ignorant of 
 the fact that crimes that had no parallel were 
 terrorizing a whole countryside. Every- 
 body wondered what could have happened, 
 [46] 
 
The Terror 
 
 what was happening; and then it was whis- 
 pered that the coroner would allow no in- 
 quiry to be made as to these deaths of dark- 
 ness. 
 
 "In consequence of instructions received 
 from the Home Office," one coroner was un- 
 derstood to have said, "I have to tell the jury 
 that their business will be to hear the med- 
 ical evidence and to bring in a verdict im- 
 mediately in accordance with that evidence. 
 I shall disallow all questions." 
 
 One jury protested. The foreman re- 
 fused to bring in any verdict at all. 
 
 "Very good," said the coroner. "Then I 
 beg to inform you, Mr. Foreman and gentle- 
 men of the jury, that undei* the Defense of 
 the Realm Act, I have power to supersede 
 your functions, and to enter a verdict ac- 
 cording to the evidence which has been laid 
 before the Court as if it had been the verdict 
 of you all." 
 
 The foreman' and jury collapsed and ac- 
 cepted what they could not avoid. But the 
 [47] 
 
The Terror 
 
 rumors that got abroad of all this, added to 
 the known fact that the terror was ignored 
 in the Press, no doubt by oflEcial command, 
 increased the panic that was now; arising, 
 and gave it a new direction. Clearly, people 
 reasoned, these Government restrictions and 
 prohibitions could only refer to the war, to 
 some great danger in connection with the 
 war. And that being so, it followed that 
 the outrages which must be kept so secret 
 were the work of the enemy, that is of con- 
 cealed German agents. 
 
 [48] 
 
CHAPTER IV The Spread of 
 
 the Terror 
 
 IT is time, I think, for me to make one 
 point clear. I began this history with 
 certain references to an extraordinary 
 accident to an airman whose machine fell to 
 the ground after collision with a huge flock 
 of pigeons; and then to an explosion in a 
 northern munition factory, an explosion, as 
 I noted, of a very singular kind. Then I 
 deserted the neighborhood of London, and 
 the northern district, and dwelt on a myste- 
 rious and terrible series of events which 
 occurred in the summer of 191 5 in a Welsh 
 county, which I have named, for conven- 
 ience, Meirion. 
 
 Well, let it be understood at once that all 
 this detail that I have given about the oc- 
 currences in Meirion does not imply that the 
 [49] 
 
The Terror 
 
 county in the far west was alone or espe- 
 cially afflicted by the terror that was over 
 the land. They tell me that in the villages 
 about Dartmoor the stout Devonshire hearts 
 sank as men's hearts used to sink in the time 
 of plague and pestilence. There was hor- 
 ror, too, about the Norfolk Broads, and far 
 up by Perth no one would venture on the 
 path that leads by Scone to the wooded 
 heights above the Tay. And in the indus^, 
 trial districts: I met a man by chance one 
 day in an odd London corner who spoke with 
 horror of what a friend had told him. 
 
 " 'Ask no questions, Ned,' he says to me, 
 'but I tell yow a' was in Bairnigan t'other 
 day, and a' met a pal who'd seen three hun- 
 dred coffins going out of a works not far 
 from there.' " 
 
 And then the ship that hovered outside 
 the mouth of the Thames with all sails set 
 and beat to and fro in the wind, and never 
 answered any hail, and showed no light! 
 The forts shot at her and brought down one 
 [50] 
 
TJie Terror 
 
 of the masts, but she went suddenly about 
 with a change of wind under what sail still 
 stood, and then veered down Channel, and 
 drove ashore at last on the sandbanks and 
 pinewoods of Arcachon, and not a man alive 
 on her, but only rattling heaps of bones! 
 That last voyage of the Semiramis would be 
 something horribly worth telling; but I only 
 heard it at a distance as a yarn, and only 
 believed it because it squared with other 
 things that I knew for certain. 
 
 This, then, is my point ; I have written of 
 the terror as it fell on Meirion, simply be- 
 cause I have had opportunities of getting 
 close there to what really happened. Third 
 or fourth or fifth hand in the other places; 
 but round about Forth and Merthyr Teg- 
 veth I have spoken with people who have 
 seen the tracks of the terror with their own 
 eyes. 
 
 Well, I have said that the people of that 
 far western county realized, not only that 
 death was abroad in their quiet lanes and 
 [SiJ 
 
The Terror 
 
 on their peaceful hills, but that for some 
 reason it was to be kept all secret. News- 
 papers might not print any news of it, the 
 very juries summoned to investigate it were 
 allowed to investigate nothing. And so they 
 concluded that this veil of 'secrecy must 
 somehow be connected with the war; and 
 from this position it was not a long way to 
 a further inference: that the murderers of 
 innocent men and women and children were 
 either Germans or agents of Germany. It 
 would be just like the Huns, everybody 
 agreed, to think out such a devilish scheme 
 as this; and they always thought out their 
 schemes beforehand. They hoped to seize 
 Paris in a few weeks, but when they were 
 beaten on the Marne they had their trenches, 
 on the Aisne ready to fall back on: it had 
 all been prepared years before the war. 
 And so, no doubt, they had devised this ter- 
 rible plan against England in case they could 
 not beat us in open fight: there were people 
 ready, very likely, all over the country, who 
 [52] 
 
The Terror 
 
 were prepared to murder and destroy every- 
 where as soon as they got the word. In this 
 way the Germans intended to sow terror 
 throughout England and fill our hearts with 
 panic and dismay, hoping so to weaken their 
 enemy at home that he would lose all heart 
 over the war abroad. It was the Zeppelin 
 notion, in another form; they were commit- 
 ting these horrible and mysterious outrages 
 thinking that we should be frightened out 
 of our wits. 
 
 It all seemed plausible enough; Germany 
 had by this time perpetrated so many hor- 
 rors and had so excelled in devilish ingenui- 
 ties that no abomination seemed too abom- 
 inable to be probable, or too ingeniously 
 wicked to be beyond the tortuous malice of 
 the Hun. But then came the questions as 
 to who the agents of this terrible design 
 were, as to where they lived, as to how they 
 contrived to move unseen from field to field, 
 from lane to lane. All sorts of fantastic at- 
 tempts were made to answer these questions ; 
 [53] 
 
The Terror 
 
 but it was felt that they remained unan- 
 swered. Some suggested that the murder- 
 ers landed from submarines, or flew from 
 hiding places on the West Coast of Ireland, 
 coming and going by night; but there were 
 seen to be flagrant impossibilities in both 
 these suggestions. Everybody agreed that 
 the evil work was no doubt the work of Ger- 
 many ; but nobody could begin to guess how 
 it was done. Somebody at the Club asked 
 Remnant for his theory. 
 
 "My theory," said that ingenious person, 
 "is that human progress is simply a long 
 march from one inconceivable to another. 
 Look at that airship of ours that came over 
 Forth yesterday: ten years ago that would 
 have been an inconceivable sight. Take the 
 steam engine, take printing, take the theory 
 of gravitation: they were all inconceivable 
 till somebody thought of them. So it is, no 
 doubt, with this infernal dodgery that we're 
 talking about: the Huns have found it out, 
 and we haven't; and there you are. We 
 [54] 
 
The Terror 
 
 can't conceive how these poor people have 
 been murdered, because the method's incon- 
 ceivable to us." 
 
 The club listened with some awe to this 
 high argument. After Remnant had gone, 
 one member said: 
 
 "Wonderful man, that." "Yes," said Dr. 
 Lewis. "He was asked whether he knew 
 something. And his reply really amounted 
 to 'No, I don't.' But I have never heard 
 it better put." 
 
 It was, I suppose, at about this time when 
 the people were puzzling their heads as to 
 the secret methods used by the Germans or 
 their agents to accomplish their crimes that 
 a very singular circumstance became known 
 to a few of the Forth people. It related to 
 the murder of the Williams family on the 
 Highway in front of their cottage door. I 
 do not know that I have made it plain that 
 the old Roman road called the Highway fol- 
 lows the course of a long, steep hill that goes 
 [55] 
 
The Terror 
 
 steadily westward till it slants down and 
 droops towards the sea. On either side of 
 the road the ground falls away, here into 
 deep shadowy woods, here to high pastures, 
 now and again into a field of corn, but for 
 the most part into the wild and broken land 
 that is characteristic of Arfon. The fields 
 are long and narrow, stretching up the steep 
 hillside; they fall into sudden dips and hol- 
 lows, a well springs up in the midst of one 
 and a grove of ash and thorn bends over it, 
 shading it ; and beneath it the ground is thick 
 with reeds and rushes. And then may come 
 on either side of such a field territories glis- 
 tening with the deep growth of bracken, and 
 rough with gorse and rugged with thick- 
 ets of blackthorn, green lichen hanging 
 strangely from the branches; such are the 
 lands on either side of the Highway. 
 
 Now on the lower slopes of it, beneath 
 the Williams's cottage, some three or four 
 fields down the hill, there is a military camp. 
 The place has been used as a camp for many 
 
The Terror 
 
 years, and lately the site has been extended 
 and huts have been erected. But a consider- 
 able number of the men were under canvas 
 here in the summer of 191 5. 
 
 On the night of the Highway murder this 
 camp, ais it appeared afterwards, was the 
 scene of the extraordinary panic of the 
 horses. 
 
 A good many men in the camp were asleep 
 in their tents soon after 9.30, when the Last 
 Post was sounded. They woke up in panic. 
 There was a thundering sound on the steep 
 hillside above them, and down upon the tents 
 came half a dozen horses, mad with fright, 
 trampling the canvas, trampling the men, 
 bruising dozens of them and killing two. 
 
 Everything was in wild confusion, men 
 groaning and screaming in the darkness, 
 struggling with the canvas and the twisted 
 ropes, shouting out, some of them, raw lads 
 enough, that the Germans had landed, others 
 wiping the blood from their eyes, a few, 
 [57] 
 
The Terror 
 
 roused suddenly from heavy sleep, hitting 
 out at one another, officers coming up at the 
 double roaring out orders to the sergeants, 
 a party of soldiers who were just returning 
 to camp from the village seized with fright 
 at what they could scarcely see or distin- 
 guish, at the wildness of the shouting and 
 cursing and groaning that they could not 
 understand, bolting out of the camp again 
 and racing for their lives back to the vil- 
 lage: everything in the maddest confusion 
 •of wild disorder. 
 
 Some of the men had seen the horses gal- 
 loping down the hill as if terror itself was 
 driving them. They scattered off into the 
 darkness, and somehow or another found 
 their way back in the night to their pasture 
 above the camp. They were grazing there 
 peacefully in the morning, and the only sign 
 of the panic of the night before was the mud 
 they had scattered all over themselves as 
 they pelted through a patch of wet ground. 
 The farmer said they were as quiet a lot as 
 [S8] 
 
The Terror 
 
 any in Meirion ; he could make nothing of it. 
 
 "Indeed," he said, "I believe they must 
 have seen the devil himself to be in such a 
 fright as that: save the people!" 
 
 Now all this was kept as quiet as might 
 be at the time when it happened; it became 
 known to the men of the Forth Club in the 
 days when they were discussing the difficult 
 question of the German outrages, as the 
 murders were commonly called. And this 
 wild stampede of the farm horses was held 
 by some to be evidence of the extraordinary 
 and unheard-of character of the dreadful 
 agency that was at work. One of the mem- 
 bers of the club had been told by an officer 
 who was in the camp at the time of the panic 
 that the horses that came charging down 
 were in a perfect fury of fright, that he had 
 never seen horses in such a state, and so 
 there was endless speculation as to the na- 
 ture of the sight or the sound that had 
 driven half a dozen quiet beasts into raging 
 madness. 
 
 [59] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Then, in the middle of this talk, two or 
 three other incidents, quite as odd and in- 
 comprehensible, came to be known, borne on 
 chance trickles of gossip that came into the 
 towns from outland farms, or were carried 
 by cottagers tramping into Forth on mar- 
 ket-day with a fowl or two and eggs and 
 garden stuff; scraps and fragments of talk 
 gathered by servants from the country folk 
 and repeated to their mistresses. And 
 in such ways it came out that up at Plas 
 Newydd there had been a terrible business 
 over swarming the bees; they had turned 
 as wild as wasps and much more savage. 
 They had come about the people who were 
 taking the swarms like a cloud. They set- 
 tled on one man's face so that you could not 
 see the flesh for the bees crawling all over 
 it, and they had stung him so badly that the 
 doctor did not know whether he would get 
 over it, and they had chased a girl who had 
 come out to see the swarming, and settled 
 on her and stung her to death. Then they 
 [60] 
 
The Terror 
 
 had gone off to a brake below the farm and 
 got into a hollow tree there, and it was not 
 safe to go near it, for they would come out 
 at you by day or by night. 
 
 And much the same thing had happened, 
 it seemed, at three or four farms and cot- 
 tages where bees were kept. And there 
 were stories, hardly so clear or so credible, 
 of sheep dogs, mild and trusted beasts, turn- 
 ing as savage as wolves and injuring the 
 farm boys in a horrible manner — in one case 
 it was said with fatal results. It was cer- 
 tainly true that old Mrs. Owen's favorite 
 Brahma-Dorking cock had gone mad; she 
 came into Forth one Saturday morning with 
 her face and her neck all bound up and plas- 
 tered. She had gone out to her bit of a field 
 to feed the poultry the night before, and the 
 bird had flown at her and attacked her most 
 savagely, inflicting some very nasty wounds 
 before she could beat it off. 
 
 "There was a stake handy, lucky for me," 
 she said, "and I did beat him and beat him 
 [6i] 
 
The Terror 
 
 till the life was out of him. But what is 
 come to the world, whatever?" 
 
 Now Remnant, the man of theories, was 
 also a man of extreme leisure. It was un- 
 derstood that he had succeeded to ample 
 means when he was quite a young man, and 
 after tasting the savors of the law, as it 
 were, for half a dozen terms at the board 
 of the Middle Temple, he had decided that 
 it would be senseless to bother himself with 
 passing examinations for a profession which 
 he had not the faintest intention of practis- 
 ing. So he turned a deaf ear to the call 
 of "Manger" ringing through the Temple 
 Courts, and set himself out to potter ami- 
 ably through the world. He had pottered 
 all over Europe, he had looked at Africa, 
 and had even put his head in at the door 
 of the East, on a trip which included the 
 Greek isles and (Constantinople. Now, get- 
 ting into the middle fifties, he had settled 
 at Forth for the sake, as he said, of the Gulf 
 [62] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Stream and the fuchsia hedges, and pottered 
 over his books and his theories and the local 
 gossip. He was no more brutal than the 
 general public, which revels in the details of 
 mysterious crime; but it must be said that 
 the terror, black though it was, was a boon 
 to him. He peered and investigated and 
 poked about with the relish of a man to 
 whose life a new zest has been added. He 
 listened attentively to the strange tales of 
 bees and dogs and poultry that came into 
 Forth with the country baskets of butter, 
 rabbits, and green peas; and he evolved at 
 last a most extraordinary theory. 
 
 Full of this discovery, as he thought it, he 
 went one night to see Dr. Lewis and take his 
 view of the matter. 
 
 "I want to talk to you," said Remnant to 
 the doctor, "about what I have called pro- 
 visionally, the Z Ray." 
 
 [63] 
 
CHAPTER V The Incident of the 
 
 Unknown Tree 
 
 DR. LEWIS, smiling indulgently, 
 and quite prepared for some 
 monstrous piece o£ theorizing, 
 led Remnant into the room that overlooked 
 the terraced garden and the sea. 
 
 The doctor's house, though it was only a 
 ten minutes' walk from the center of the 
 town, seemed remote from all other habita- 
 tions. The drive to it from the road came 
 through a deep grove of trees and a dense 
 shrubbery, trees were about the house on 
 either side, mingling with neighboring 
 groves, and below, the garden fell down, 
 terrace by green terrace, to wild growth, a 
 twisted path amongst red rocks, and at last 
 to the yellow sand of a little cove. The 
 room to which the doctor took Remnant 
 [64] 
 
The Terror 
 
 looked over these terraces and across the 
 water to the dim boundaries of the bay. It 
 had French windows that were thrown wide 
 open, and the two men sat in the soft light 
 of the lamp — this was before the days of 
 severe lighting regulations in the Far West 
 — and enjoyed the sweet odors and the sweet 
 vision of the summer evening. Then Rem- 
 nant began : 
 
 "I suppose, Lewis, you've heard these 
 extraordinary stories of bees and dogs and 
 things that have been going about lately?" 
 
 "Certainly I have heard them. I was 
 called in at Plas Newydd, and treated 
 Thomas Trevor, who's only just out of dan- 
 ger, by the way. I certified for the poor 
 child, Mary Trevor. She was dying when 
 I got to the place. There was no doubt she 
 was stung to death by bees, and I believe 
 there were other very similar cases at 
 Llantarnam and Morwen; none fatal, I 
 think. What about them?" 
 
 "Well : then there are the stories of good- 
 [65] 
 
The Terror 
 
 tempered old sheepdogs turning wicked and 
 'savaging' children?" 
 
 "Quite so. I haven't seen any of these 
 cases professionally; but I believe the 
 stories are accurate enough." 
 
 "And the old woman assaulted by her 
 own poultry?" 
 
 "That's perfectly true. Her daughter 
 put some stuff of their own concoction on 
 her face and neck, and then she came to me. 
 The wounds seemed going all right, so I told 
 her to continue the treatment, whatever it 
 might be." 
 
 "Very good," said Mr. Remnant. He 
 spoke now with an italic impressiveness. 
 "Don't you see the link between all this and 
 the horrible things that have been happening 
 about here for the last month?" 
 
 Lewis stared at Remnant in amazement. 
 He lifted his red eyebrows and lowered them 
 in a kind of scowl. His speech showed 
 traces of his native accent. 
 
 "Great burning!" he exclaimed. "What 
 [66] 
 
The Terror 
 
 on earth are you getting at now ? It is mad- 
 ness. Do you mean to tell me that you think 
 there is some connection between a swarm or 
 two of bees that have turned nasty, a cross 
 dog, and a wicked old barn-door cock and 
 these poor people that have been pitched 
 over the cliffs and hammered to death on 
 the road? There's no sense in it, you 
 know." 
 
 "I am strongly inclined to believe that 
 there is a great deal of sense in it," replied 
 Remnant, with extreme calmness. "Look 
 here, Lewis, I saw you grinning the other 
 day at the. club when I was telling the fel- 
 lows that in my opinion all these outrages 
 had been committed, certainly by the Ger- 
 mans, but by some method of which we have 
 no conception. But what I meant to say 
 when I talked about inconceivables was just 
 this: that the Williams's and the rest of 
 them have been killed in some way that's 
 not in theory at all, not in our theory, at 
 all events, some way we've not contemplated, 
 [67] 
 
The Terror 
 
 not thought of for an instant. Do you see 
 my point?" 
 
 "Well, in a sort of way. You mean 
 there's an absolute originality in the method ? 
 I suppose that is so. But what next?" 
 
 Remnant seemed to hesitate, partly from 
 a sense of the portentous nature of what he 
 was about to say, partly from a sort of half- 
 unwillingness to part with so profound a 
 secret. 
 
 "Well," he said, "you will allow that we 
 haive two sets of phenomena of a very 
 extraordinary kind occurring at the same 
 time. Don't you think that it's only reason- 
 able to connect the two sets with one an- 
 other." 
 
 "So the philosopher of Tenterden steeple 
 and the Goodwin Sands thought, certainly," 
 said Lewis. "But what is the connection? 
 Those poor folks on the Highway weren't 
 stung by bees or worried, by a dog. And 
 horses don't throw people over cliffs or stifle 
 them in marshes." 
 
 [68] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "No; I never meant to suggest anything 
 so absurd. It is evident to me that in all 
 these cases of animals turning suddenly sav- 
 age the cause has been terror, panic, fear. 
 The horses that went charging into the camp 
 were mad with fright, we know. And I say 
 that in the other instances we have been 
 discussing the cause was the same. The 
 creatures were exposed to an infection of 
 fear, and a frightened beast or bird or in- 
 sect uses its weapons, whatever they may be. 
 If, for example, there had been anybody 
 with those horses when they took their panic 
 they would have lashed out at him with their 
 heels." 
 
 "Yes, I dare say that that is so. Well." 
 "Well; my belief is that the Germans 
 have made an extraordinary discovery. I 
 have called it the Z Ray. You know that 
 the ether is merely an hypothesis; we have 
 to suppose that it's there to account for the 
 passage of the Marconi current from one 
 place to another. Now, suppose that there 
 [69] 
 
The Terror 
 
 is a psychic ether as well as a material ether, 
 suppose that it is possible to direct irresist- 
 ible impulses across this ijiedium, suppose 
 that these impulses are towards murder or 
 suicide; then I think that you have an ex- 
 planation of the terrible series of events that 
 have been happening in Meirion for the last 
 few weeks. And it is quite clear to my mind 
 that the horses and the other creatures have 
 been exposed to this Z Ray, and that it has 
 produced on them the effect of terror, with 
 ferocity as the result of terror. Now what 
 do you say to that? Telepathy, you know, 
 is well established; so is hypnotic sugges- 
 tion. You have only to look in the 'Ency- 
 clopaedia Britannica' to see that, and sug- 
 gestion is so strong in some cases as to be 
 an irresistible imperative. Now don't you 
 feel that putting telepathy and suggestion 
 together, as it were, you have more than the 
 elements of what I call the Z Ray ? I feel 
 myself that I have more to go on in making 
 my hypothesis than the inventor of the 
 [70] 
 
The Terror 
 
 steam-engine had in making his hypothesis 
 when he saw the lid of the kettle bobbing up 
 and down. What do you say?" 
 
 Dr. Lewis made no answer. He was 
 watching the growth of a new, unknown tree 
 in his garden. 
 
 The doctor made no answer to Remnant's 
 question. For one thing, Reriinant was pro- 
 fuse in his eloquence — ^he has been rigidly 
 condensed in this history — and Lewis was 
 tired of the sound of his voice. For another 
 thing, he found the Z Ray theory almost too 
 extravagant to be bearable, wild enough to 
 tear patience to tatters. And then as the 
 tedious argument continued Lewis became 
 conscious that there was something strange 
 about the night. 
 
 It was a dark summer night. The moon 
 was old and faint, above the Dragon's Head 
 across the bay, and the air was very still. 
 It was so still that Lewis had noted that 
 not a leaf stirred on the very tip of a high 
 [71] 
 
The Terror 
 
 tree that stood out against the sky; and yet 
 he knew that he was listening to some sound 
 that he could not determine or define. It 
 was not the wind in the leaves, it was not 
 the gentle wash of the water of the sea 
 against the rocks ; that latter sound he could 
 distinguish quite easily. But there was 
 something else. It was scarcely a sound; it 
 was as if the air itself trembled and flut- 
 tered, as the air trembles in a church when 
 they open the great pedal pipes of the organ. 
 The doctor listened intently. It was not 
 an illusion, the sound was not in his own 
 head, as he had suspected for a moment ; but 
 for the life of him he could not make out 
 whence it came or what it was. He gazed 
 down into the night over the terraces of his 
 garden, now sweet with the scent of the flow- 
 ers of the night ; tried to peer over the tree- 
 tops across the sea towards the Dragon's 
 Head. It struck him suddenly that this 
 strange fluttering vibration of the air might 
 be the noise of a distant aeroplane or air- 
 [72] 
 
The Terror 
 
 ship; there was not the usual droning hum, 
 but this sound might be caused by a new type 
 of engine. A new type of engine? Possi- 
 bly it was an enemy airship; their range, it 
 had been said, was getting longer ; and Lewis 
 was just going to call Remnant's attention 
 to the sound, to its possible cause, and to the 
 possible danger that might be hovering over 
 them, when he saw something that caught 
 his breath and his heart with wild amaze- 
 ment and a touch of terror. 
 
 He had been staring upward into the sky, 
 and, about to speak to Remnant, he had let 
 his eyes drop for an instant. He looked 
 down towards the trees in the garden, and 
 saw with utter astonishment that one had 
 changed its shape in the few hours that had 
 passed sinc^ the setting of the sun. There 
 was a thick grove of ilexes bordering the 
 lowest terrace, and above them rose one tall 
 pine, spreading its head of sparse, dark 
 branches dark against the sky. 
 
 As Lewis glanced down over the terraces 
 
 [73] 
 
The Terror 
 
 he saw that the tall pine tree was no longer 
 there. In its place there rose above the 
 ilexes what might have been a greater ilex; 
 there was the blackness of a dense growth 
 of foliage rising like a broad and far-spread- 
 ing and rounded cloud over the lesser trees. 
 Here, then was a sight wholy incredible, 
 impossible. It is doubtful whether the pro- 
 cess of the human mind in such a case has 
 ever been analyzed and registered; it is 
 doubtful whether it ever can be registered. 
 It is hardly fair to bring in the mathema- 
 tician, since he deals with absolute truth (so 
 far as mortality can conceive absolute 
 truth) ; but how would a mathematician feel 
 if he were suddenly confronted with a two- 
 sided triangle? I suppose he would in- 
 stantly become a raging madman; and 
 Lewis, staring wide-eyed and wild-eyed at a 
 dark and spreading tree which his own ex- 
 perience informed him was not there, felt 
 for an instant that shock which should af- 
 front us all when we first realize the intoler- 
 [74] 
 
The Terror 
 
 able antinomy of Achilles and the Tortoise. 
 Common sense tells us that Achilles will 
 flash past the tortoise almost with the speed 
 of the lightning; the inflexible truth of 
 mathematics assures us that till the earth 
 boils and the heavens cease to endure the 
 Tortoise must still be in advance ; and there- 
 upon we should, in common decency, go mad. 
 We do not go mad, because, by special grace, 
 we are certified that, in the final court of 
 appeal, all science is a lie, even the highest 
 science of all; and so we simply grin at 
 Achilles and the Tortoise, as we grin at Dar- 
 win, deride Huxley, and laugh at Herbert 
 Spencer. 
 
 Dr. Lewis did not grin. He glared into 
 the dimness of the night, at the great 
 spreading tree that he knew could not be 
 there. And as he gazed he saw that what 
 at first appeared the dense blackness of foli- 
 age was fretted and starred with wonderful 
 appearances of lights and colors. 
 
 Afterwards he said to me: "I remember 
 [75] 
 
The Terror 
 
 thinking to myself : 'Look here, I am not de- 
 lirious ; my temperature is perfectly normal. 
 I am not drunk ; I only had a pint of Graves 
 with my dinner, over three hours ago. I 
 have not eaten any poisonous fungus ; I have 
 not taken Anhelonium Lewinii experimen- 
 tally. So, now then! What is happen- 
 ing?' " 
 
 The night had gloomed over; clouds ob- 
 scured the faint moon and the misty stars. 
 Lewis rose, with some kind of warning and 
 inhibiting gesture to Remnant, who, he was 
 conscious was gaping at him in astonish- 
 ment. He walked to the open French win- 
 dow, and took a pace forward on to the path 
 outside, and looked, very intently, at the 
 dark shape of the tree, down below the slop- 
 ing garden, above the washing of the waves. 
 He shaded the light of the lamp behind him 
 by holding his hands on each side of his 
 eyes. 
 
 The mass of the tree — ^the tree that 
 couldn't be there — stood out against the sky, 
 [76] 
 
The Terror 
 
 but not so clearly, now that the clouds had 
 rolled up. Its edges, the limits of its leaf- 
 age, were not so distinct. Lewis thought 
 that he could detect some sort of quivering 
 movement in it ; though the air was at a dead 
 calm. It was a night on which one might 
 hold up a lighted match and watch it burn 
 without any wavering or inclination of the 
 flame. 
 
 "You know," said Lewis, "how a bit of 
 burnt paper will sometimes hang over the 
 coals before it goes up the chimney, and lit- 
 tle worms of fire will shoot through it. It 
 was like that, if you should be standing some 
 distance away. Just threads and hairs of 
 yellow light I saw", and specks and sparks of 
 fire, and then a twinkling of a ruby no bigger 
 than a pin point, and a green wandering in 
 the black, as if an emerald were crawling, 
 and then little veins of deep blue. 'Woe is 
 me !' I said to myself in Welsh, 'What is all 
 this color and burning?' 
 
 "And, then, at that very moment there 
 
The Terror 
 
 came a thundering rap at the door of the 
 room inside, and there was my man telling 
 me that I was wanted directly tip at the 
 Garth, as old Mr. Trevor Williams had been 
 taken very bad. I knew his heart was not. 
 worth much, so I had to go off directly, and 
 leave Remhant to make what he could of it 
 all." 
 
 [78] 
 
CHAPTER VI Mr. Remnant's 
 
 ZRay 
 
 DR. LEWIS was kept some time at 
 the Garth. It was past twelve 
 when he got back to his house. 
 He went quickly to the room that over- 
 looked the garden and the sea and threw 
 open the French window and peered into the 
 darkness. There, dim indeed against the 
 dim sky but unmistakable, was the tall pine 
 with its sparse branches, high above the 
 dense growth of the ilex trees. The strange 
 boughs which had amazed him had van- 
 ished; there was no appearance now of col- 
 ors or of fires. 
 
 He drew his chair up to the open window 
 
 and sat there gazing and wondering far into 
 
 the night, till brightness came upon the sea 
 
 and sky, and the forms of the trees in the 
 
 [79] 
 
The Terror 
 
 garden grew clear and evident. He went up 
 to his bed at last filled with a great perplex- 
 ity, still asking questions to which there was 
 no answer. 
 
 « 
 
 The doctor did not say anything about 
 the strange tree to Remnant. When they 
 next met, Lewis said that he had thought 
 there was a man hiding amongst the bushes 
 —this in explanation of that warning ges- 
 ture he had used, and of his going out into 
 the garden and staring into the night. He 
 concealed the truth because he dreaded the 
 Remnant doctrine that would undoubtedly 
 be produced; indeed, he hoped that he had 
 heard the last of the theory of the Z Ray. 
 But Remnant firmly reopened this subject. 
 
 "We were interrupted just as I was put- 
 ting my case to you," he said. "And to sum 
 it all up, it amounts to this: that the Huns 
 have made one of the great leaps of science. 
 They are sending 'suggestions' (which 
 amount to irresistible commands) over here, 
 and the persons affected are seized with sui- 
 [80] 
 
The Terror 
 
 cidal or homicidal mania. The people who 
 were killed by falling over the cliffs or into 
 the quarry probably committed suicide; and 
 so with the man and boy who were found in 
 the bog. As to the Highway case, you re- 
 member that Thomas Evans said that he 
 stopped and talked to Williams on the night 
 of the murder. In my opinion Evans was 
 the murderer. He came under the influence 
 of the Ray, became a homicidal maniac in an 
 instant, snatched Williams's spade from his 
 hand and killed him and the others." 
 
 "The bodies were found by me on the 
 road." 
 
 "It is possible that the first impact of the 
 Ray produces violent nervous excitement, 
 which would manifest itself externally. 
 Williams might have called to his wife to 
 come and see what was , the matter with 
 Evans. The children would naturally fol- 
 low their mother. It seems to me simple. 
 And as for the animals — the horses, dogs, 
 and so forth, they as I say, were no doubt 
 [8i] 
 
The Terror 
 
 panic-stricken by the Ray, and hence driven 
 to frenzy." 
 
 "Why should Evans have murdered 
 Williams instead of Williams ' murdering 
 Evans ? Why should the impact of the Ray 
 affect one and not the other?'' 
 
 "Why does one man react violently to a 
 certain drug, while it makes no impression 
 on another man ? Why is A able to drink a 
 bottle of whisky and remain sober, while B 
 is turned into something very like a lunatic 
 after he has drunk three glasess?" 
 
 "It is a question of idiosyncrasy," said the 
 doctor. 
 
 "Is idiosyncrasy Greek for 'I don't 
 know'?" asked Remnant. 
 
 "Not at all," said Lewis, smiling blandly. 
 "I mean that in some diatheses whisky — 
 as you have mentioned whisky — appears not 
 to be pathogenic, or at all events not imme- 
 diately pathogenic. In other cases, as you 
 very justly observed, there seems to be a 
 very marked cachexia associated with the 
 [82] 
 
\^ , The Terror 
 
 exhibition of the spirit in question, even in 
 comparatively small doses." 
 
 Under this cloud of professional verbiage 
 Lewis escaped from the Club and from 
 Remnant. He did not want to hear any 
 more about that Dreadful Ray, because he 
 felt sure that the Ray was all nonsense. 
 But asking himself why he felt this certitude 
 in the matter he had to confess that he didn't 
 know. An aeroplane, he reflected, was all 
 nonsense before it was made; and he re- 
 membered talking in the early nineties to a 
 friend of his about the newly discovered X 
 Rays. The friend laughed incredulously, 
 evidently didn't believe a word of it, till 
 Lewis told him that there was an article on 
 the subject iri the current number of the 
 Saturday Review; whereupon the unbeliever 
 said, "Oh, is that so? Oh, really. I see," 
 and was converted on the X Ray faith on 
 the spot. Lewis, remembering this talk, 
 marveled at the strange processes of the 
 human mind, its illogical and yet all-com- 
 [83] 
 
The Terror 
 
 pelling ergos, and wondered whether he him- 
 self was only waiting for an article on the 
 Z Ray in the Saturday Review to become a 
 devout believer in the doctrine of Remnant. 
 But he wondered with far more fervor as 
 to the extraordinary thing he had seen in 
 his own garden with his own eyes. The tree 
 that changed all its shape for an hour or two 
 of the night, the growth of strange boughs, 
 the apparition of secret fires among them, 
 the sparkling of emerald and ruby lights: 
 how could one fail to be afraid with great 
 amazement at the thought of such a mys- 
 tery? 
 
 Dr. Lewis's thoughts were distracted 
 from the incredible adventure of the tree 
 by the visit of his sister and her husband. 
 Mr. and Mrs. Merritt lived in a well-known 
 manufacturing town of the Midlands, which 
 was now, of course, a center of munition 
 work. On the day of their arrival at Forth, 
 Mrs. Merritt, who was tired after the long, 
 [84] 
 
The Terror 
 
 hot journey, went to bed early, and Merritt 
 ian^ Lewis went into the room by the gar- 
 den for their talk and tobacco. They spoke 
 of the year that had passed since their last 
 meeting, of the weary dragging of the war, 
 of friends that had perished in it, of the 
 hopelessness of an early ending of all this 
 misery. Lewis said nothing of the terror 
 that was on the land. One does not greet a 
 tired man who is come to a quiet, sunny 
 place for relief from black smoke and work 
 and worry with a tale of horror. Indeed, 
 the doctor saw that his brother-in-law looked 
 far from well. And he seemed "jumpy"; 
 there was an occasional twitch of his mouth 
 that Lewis did not like at all. 
 
 "Well," said the doctor, after an interval 
 of silence and port wine, "I am glad to see 
 you here again. Forth always suits you. I 
 don't think you're looking quite up to your 
 usual form. But three weeks of Meirion 
 air will do wonders." 
 
 "Well, I hope it will," said the other. "I 
 [85] 
 
The Terror 
 
 am not up to the mark. Things are not go- 
 ing well at Midlingham." 
 
 "Business is all right, isn't it?" 
 "Yes. Business is all right. But there 
 are other things that are all wrong. We are 
 living under a reign of terror. It comes to 
 that." 
 
 "What on earth do you mean?" 
 "Well, I suppose I may tell you what I 
 know. It's not much. I didn't dare write 
 it. But do you know that at every one of 
 the munition works in Midlingham and all 
 about it there's a guard of soldiers with 
 drawn bayonets and loaded rifles day and 
 night? Men with bombs, too. And ma- 
 chine-guns at the big factories." 
 "German spies?" 
 
 "You don't want Lewis guns to fight spies 
 with. Nor bombs. Nor a platoon of men. 
 I woke up last night. It was the machine- 
 gun at Benington's Army Motor Works. 
 Firing like fury. And then bang! bang! 
 bang ! That was the hand bombs." 
 [86] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "But what against?" 
 
 "Nobody knows." 
 
 "Nobody knows what is happening," 
 Merritt repeated, and he went on to de- 
 scribe the bewilderment and terror that 
 hung Hke a cloud over the great industrial 
 city in the Midlands, how the feeling of 
 concealment, of some intolerable secret dan- 
 ger that must not be named, was worst of 
 all. 
 
 "A young fellow I know," he said, "was 
 on short leave the other day from the front, 
 and he spent it with his people at Belmont 
 — that's about four miles out of Midling- 
 ham, you know. 'Thank God,' he said to 
 me, 'I am going back to-morrow. It's no 
 good saying that the Wipers salient is nice, 
 because it isn't. But it's a damned sight 
 better than this. At the front you know 
 what you're up against anyhow.' At Mid- 
 lingham everybody has the feeling that we're 
 up against something awful and we don't 
 know what; it's that that makes people in- 
 [87] 
 
The Terror 
 
 clihed to whisper. There's terror in the 
 air.'' 
 
 Merritt made a sort of picture of the great 
 town cowering in its fear of an unknown 
 danger. 
 
 "People are afraid to go about alone at 
 nights in the outskirts. They make up par- 
 ties at the stations to go home together if 
 it's anything like dark, or if there are any 
 lonely bits on their way." 
 
 "But why? I don't understand. What 
 are they afraid of ?" 
 
 "Well, I told you about my being awak- 
 ened up the other night with the machine- 
 guns at the motor works rattling away, and 
 the bombs exploding and making the most 
 terrible noise. That sort of thing alarms 
 one, you know. It's only natural." 
 
 "Indeed, it must be very terrifying. You 
 mean, then, there is a general nervousness 
 about, a vague sort of apprehension that 
 makes people inclined to herd together ?" 
 
 "There's that, and there's more. People 
 [88] 
 
The Terror 
 
 have gone out that have never come back. 
 There were a couple of men in the train to 
 Holme, arguing about the quickest way to 
 get to Northend, a sort of outlying part of 
 Holme where they both lived. They ar- 
 gued all the way out of Midlingham, one 
 saying that the high road was the quickest 
 though it was the longest way. Tt's the 
 quickest going because it's the cleanest go- 
 ing/ he said. 
 
 "The other chap fancied a short cut across 
 the fields, by the canal. Tt's half the dis- 
 tance,' he kept on. 'Yes, if you don't lose 
 your way,' said the other. Well, it appears 
 they put an even half-crown on it, and each 
 was to try his own way when they got out 
 of the train. It was arranged that they 
 were to meet at the 'Wagon' in Northend. 
 'I shall be at the "Wagon" first,' said the 
 man who believed in the short cut, and with 
 that he climbed over the stile and made off 
 across the fields. It wasn't late enough to 
 be really dark, and a lot of them thought he 
 [89] 
 
The Terror 
 
 might win the stakes. But he never turned 
 up at the Wagon — or anywhere else for ,the 
 matter of that." 
 
 "What happened to him?" 
 
 "He was found lying on his back in the 
 middle of a field — some way from the path. 
 He was dead. The doctors said he'd been 
 suffocated. Nobody knows how. Then 
 there have been other cases. We whisper 
 about them at Midlingham, but we're afraid 
 to speak out." 
 
 Lewis vvas ruminating all this profoundly. 
 Terror in Meirion and terror far away in 
 the heart of England; but at Midling- 
 ham, so far as he could gather from these 
 stories of soldiers on guard, of crackling 
 machine-guns, it was a case of an organized 
 attack on the munitioning of the army. He 
 felt that he did not know enovigh to warrant 
 his deciding that the terror of Meirion and 
 of Stratf ordshire were one. 
 
 Then Merritt began again : 
 
 "There's a queer story going about, when 
 [90] 
 
The Terror 
 
 the door's shut and the curtain's drawn, 
 that is, as to a place right out in the country- 
 over the other side of MidHngham; on the 
 opposite side to Dunwich. They've built 
 one of the new factories out there, a great 
 red brick town of sheds they tell me it is, 
 with a tremendous chimney. It's not been 
 finished more than a month or six weeks. 
 They plumped it down right in the middle 
 of the fields, by the line, and they're build- 
 ing huts for the workers as fast as they can 
 but up to" the present the men are billeted 
 all about, up and down the line. 
 
 "About two hundred yards from this 
 place there's an old footpath, leading from 
 the station and the main road up to a small 
 hamlet on the hillside. Part of the way this 
 path goes by a pretty large wood, most of it 
 thick undergrowth. I should think there 
 must be twenty acres of wood, more or less. 
 As it happens, I used this path once long ago; 
 and I can tell you it's a black place of nights. 
 
 "A man had to go this way one night. 
 [91J 
 
The Terror 
 
 He got along all right till he came to the 
 wood. And then he said his heart dropped 
 out of his body. It was awful to hear the 
 noises in that wood. Thousands of men 
 were in it, he swears that. It was full of 
 rustling, and pattering of feet trying to go 
 dainty, and the crack of dead boughs lying 
 on the ground as some one trod on them, 
 and swishing of the grass, and some sort of 
 chattering speech going on, that sounded, 
 so he said, as if the dead sat in their bones 
 and talked! He ran for his life, anyhow; 
 across fields, over hedges, through brooks. 
 He must have run, by his tale, ten miles out 
 of his way before he got home to his wife, 
 and beat at the door, and broke in, and 
 bolted it behind him." 
 
 "There is something rather alarming 
 about any wood at night," said Dr. Lewis. 
 
 Merritt shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "People say that the Germans have 
 landed, and that they are hiding in under- 
 ground places all over the country." 
 [92] 
 
CHAPTER VII The Case of the 
 
 Hidden Germans 
 
 LEWIS gasped for a moment, silent 
 in contemplation of the magnifi- 
 cence of rumor. The Germans al- 
 ready landed, hiding underground, striking 
 by night, secretly, terribly, at the power of 
 England! Here was a conception which 
 made the myth of "The Russians" a paltry 
 fable; before which the Legend of Mons was 
 an ineffectual thing. 
 
 It was monstrous. And yet — 
 He looked steadily at Merritt; a square- 
 headed, black-haired, solid sort of man. He 
 had symptoms of nerves about him for the 
 moment, certainly, but one could not wonder 
 at that, whether the tales he told were true, 
 or whether he merely believed them to be 
 true. Lewis had known his brother-in-law 
 [93] 
 
The Terror 
 
 for twenty yeafs or more, and had always 
 found him a sure man in his own small 
 world. "But then," said the doctor to him- 
 self, "those men, if they once get out of the 
 ring of that little world of theirs, they are 
 lost. Those are the men that believed in 
 Madame Blavatsky." 
 
 "Well," he said, "what do you think your- 
 self? The Germans landed and hiding 
 somewhere about the country : there's some- 
 thing extravagant in the notion, isn't 
 there?" 
 
 "I don't know what to think. You can't 
 get over the facts. There are the soldiers 
 with their rifles and their g^ns at the works 
 all over Stratfordshire, and thdse guns go 
 off. I tqld you I'd heard them. Then who 
 are the soldiers shooting at? That's what 
 we ask ourselves at Midlingham." 
 
 "Quite so; I quite understand. It's an 
 extraordinary state of things." 
 
 "It's more than extraordinary; it's an 
 awful state of things. It's terror in the 
 [94] 
 
The Terror 
 
 dark, and there's nothing worse than that. 
 As that young fellow I was telling you about 
 said, 'At the front you do know what you're 
 up against.' " 
 
 "And people really believe that a number 
 of Germans have somehow got over to 
 England and have hid themselves under- 
 ground?" 
 
 "People say they've got a new kind of 
 poison-gas. Some think that they dig un- 
 derground places and make the gas there, 
 and lead it by secret pipes into the shops; 
 others say that they throw gas bombs into 
 the factories. It must be worse than any- 
 thing they've used in France, from what the 
 authorities say." 
 
 "The authorities? Do they admit that 
 there are Germans in hiding about Midling- 
 ham?" 
 
 "No. They call it 'explosions.' But we 
 
 know it isn't explosions. We know in the 
 
 Midlands what an explosion sounds like and 
 
 looks like. And we know that the people 
 
 [95] 
 
The Terror 
 
 killed in these 'explosions' are put into their 
 coffins in the works. Their own relations 
 are not allowed to see them." 
 
 "And so you believe in the German 
 theory?" 
 
 "If I do, it's because one. must believe in 
 something. Some say they've seen the gas. 
 I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw 
 it one night like a black cloud with sparks 
 of fire in it floating over the tops of the 
 trees by Dunwich Common." 
 
 The light of an ineffable amazement came 
 into Lewis's eyes. The night of Remnant's 
 visit, the trembling vibration of the air, the 
 dark tree that had grown in his garden since 
 the setting of the sun, the strange leafage 
 that was starred with burning, with emerald 
 and ruby fires, and all vanished away when 
 he returned from his visit to the Garth ; and 
 such a leafage had appeared as a burning 
 cloud far in the heart of England : what in- 
 tolerable mystery, what tremendous doom 
 was signified in this? But one thing was 
 [96] 
 
The Terror 
 
 clear and certain : that the terror of Meirion 
 was also the terror of the Midlands. 
 
 Lewis made up his mind most firmly that 
 if possible all this should be kept from his 
 brother-in-law. Merritt had come to Forth 
 as to a city of refuge from the horrors of 
 Midlingham; if it could be managed he 
 should be spared the knowledge that the 
 cloud of terror had gone before him and 
 hung black over the western land. Lewis 
 passed the port and said in an even voice : 
 
 "Very strange, indeed; a black cloud with 
 sparks of fire?" 
 
 "I can't answer for it, you know ; it's only 
 a rumor." 
 
 "Just so ; and you think or you're inclined 
 to think that this and all the rest you've told 
 me is to be put down to the hidden Ger- 
 mans ?" 
 
 "As I say; because one must think some- 
 thing. 
 
 "I quite see your point. No doubt, if 
 it's true, it's the most awful blow that has 
 [97] 
 
The Terror 
 
 ever been dealt at any nation in the whole 
 history of man. The enemy established in 
 our vitals! But is it possible, after all? 
 How could it have been worked?" 
 
 Merritt told Lewis how it had been 
 worked, or rather, how people said it had 
 been worked. The idea, he said, was that 
 this was a part, and a most important part, 
 of the great German plot to destroy England 
 and the British Empire. 
 
 The scheme had been prepared years ago, 
 some thought soon after the Franco-Prus- 
 sian War. Moltke had seen that the in- 
 vasion of England (in the ordinary sense 
 of the term invasion) presented very great 
 difficulties. The matter was constantly in 
 discussion in the inner military and high 
 political circles, and the general trend of 
 opinion in these quarters was that at the 
 best, the invasion of England would involve 
 Germany in the gravest difficulties^ and 
 leave France in the position of the tertius 
 gaudens. This was the state of affairs 
 [98] 
 
The Terror 
 
 when a very high Prussian personage was 
 approached by the Swedish professor, 
 Huvelius. 
 
 Thus Merritt, and here I would say in 
 parenthesis that this Huvelius was by all ac- 
 counts an extraordinary man. Considered 
 personally and apart from his writings he 
 would appear to have been a most amiable 
 iridividual. He was richer than the gen- 
 erality of Swedes, certainly far richer than 
 the average university professor in Sweden. 
 But his shabby, green frock-coat, and his 
 battered, furry hat were notorious in the 
 university town where he lived. No one 
 laughed, because it was well known that 
 Professor Huvelius spent every penny of 
 his private means and a large portion of 
 his official stipend on works of kindness and 
 charity. He hid his head in a garret, some 
 one said, in order that others might be able 
 to swell on the first floor. It was told of 
 him that he restricted himself to a diet of 
 dry bread and coffee for a month in order 
 [99] 
 
T-he Terror 
 
 that a poor woman of the streets, dying of 
 consumption, mig^ht enjoy Ivixuries in hos- 
 pital. 
 
 And this was the man who wrote the 
 treatise "De Facinore Humano"; to prove 
 the infinite corruption of the human race. 
 
 Oddly enough. Professor Huvelius wrote 
 the most cynical book in the world — Hobbes 
 preaches rosy sentimentalism in comparison 
 — with the very highest motives. He held 
 that a very large part of human misery, 
 misadventure, and sorrow was due to the 
 false convention that the heart of man was 
 naturally and in the main well disposed and 
 kindly, if not exactly righteous. "Murder- 
 ers, thieves, assassins, violators, and all the 
 host of the abominable," he says in one 
 passage, "are created by the false pretense 
 and foolish credence of human virtue. A 
 lion in a cage is a fierce beast, indeed; but 
 what will he be if we declare him to be a 
 lamb and open the doors of his den? Who 
 will be guilty of the deaths of the men, 
 [too] 
 
The Terror 
 
 women and children whom he will surely 
 devour, save those who unlocked the cage?" 
 And he goes on to show that kings and the 
 rulers of the peoples could decrease the sum 
 of human misery to a vast extent by acting 
 on the doctrine of human wickedness. 
 "War," he declares, "which is one of the 
 worst of evils, will always continue to exist. 
 But a wise king will desire a brief war rather 
 than a lengthy one, a short evil rather than 
 a long evil. And this not from the benign- 
 ity of his heart towards his enemies, for we 
 have seen that the human heart is naturally 
 malignant, but because he desires to con- 
 quer, and to conquer easily, without a great 
 expenditure of men or of treasure, knowing 
 that if he can accomplish this feat his peo- 
 ple will love him and his crown will be se- 
 cure. So he will wage brief victorious wars, 
 and not only spare his own nation, but the 
 nation of the enemy, since in a short war the 
 loss is less on both sides than in a long war. 
 And so from evil will come good." 
 
 [lOl] 
 
The Terror 
 
 And how, asks Huvelius, are such wars 
 to be wag^d? The wise prince, he replies, 
 will begin by assuming the enemy to be 
 infinitely corruptible and infinitely stupid, 
 since stupidity and corruption are the chief 
 characteristics of man. So the prince will 
 make himself friends in the very councils of 
 his enemy, and also amongst the pppulace, 
 bribing the wealthy by proffering to them 
 the opportunity of still greater wealth, and 
 winning the poor by swelling words. "For, 
 contrary to the common opinion, it is the 
 wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the 
 populace are to be gained by talking to them 
 about liberty, their unknown god, And so 
 much are they enchanted by the words lib- 
 erty, freedom, and such like, that the wise 
 can go to the poor, rob them of what little 
 they have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, 
 and win their hearts and their votes for 
 ever, if only they will assure them that the 
 treatment which they have received is called 
 liberty." 
 
 [I02] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Guided by these principles, says Huve- 
 lius, the wise prince will entrench himself 
 in the country that he desires to conquer; 
 "nay, with but little trouble, he may ac- 
 tually and literally throw his garrisons into 
 the heart of the enemy country before war 
 has begun." 
 
 This is a long and tiresome parenthesis; 
 but it is necessary as explaining the long 
 tale which Merritt told his brother-in-law, 
 he having received it from some magnate 
 of the Midlands, who had traveled in Ger- 
 many. It is probable that the story was 
 suggested in the first place by the passage 
 from Huvelius which I have just quoted. 
 
 Merritt knew nothing of the real Hu- 
 velius, who was all but a saint; he thought 
 of the Swedish professor as a monster of 
 iniquity, "worse," as he said, "than Neech" 
 — meaning, no doubt, Nietzsche. 
 
 So he told the story of how Huvelius had 
 sold his plan to the Germans; a plan for 
 [103] 
 
The Tenor 
 
 filling England with German soldiers. 
 Land was to be bought in certain suitable 
 and well-considered places, Englishmen 
 were to be bought as the apparent owners of 
 such land, and secret excavations were to 
 be made, till the country was literally un- 
 dermined. A subterranean Germany, in 
 fact, was to be dug under selected districts 
 of England; there were to be great caverns, 
 underground cities, well drained, well ven- 
 tilated, supplied with water, and in these 
 places vast stores both of food and of muni- 
 tions were to be accumulated, year , after 
 year, till "the Day" dawned. And then, 
 warned in time, the secret garrison would 
 leave shops, hotels, offices, villas, arid van- 
 ish underground, ready to begin their work 
 of bleeding England at the heart. 
 
 "That's what Henson told me," said Mer- 
 ritt at the end of his long story. "Henson, 
 head of the Buckley Iron and Steel Syndi- 
 cate. He has been a lot in Germany." 
 
 "Well," said Lewis, "of course, it may be 
 [104] 
 
The Terror 
 
 so. If it is so, it is terrible beyond words." 
 Indeed, he found something horribly- 
 plausible in the story. It was an extraor- 
 dinary plan, of course; an unheard of 
 scheme; but it did not seem impossible. It 
 was the Trojan Horse on a gigantic scale; 
 indeed, he reflected, the story of the horse 
 with the warriors concealed within it which 
 was dragged into the heart of Troy by the 
 deluded Trojans themselves might be taken 
 as a prophetic parable of what had happened 
 to England — if Henson's theory were well 
 founded. And this theory certainly squared 
 with what one had heard of German prepa- 
 rations in Belgium and in France: emplace- 
 ments for gtms ready for the invader, Ger- 
 man manufactories which were really Ger- 
 man forts on Belgian soil, the caverns by the 
 Aisne made ready for the cannon; indeed, 
 Lewis thought he remembered something 
 about suspicious concrete tennis-courts on 
 the heights commanding London. But a 
 German army hidden under English ground ! 
 [105] 
 
The Terror 
 
 It was a thought to chill the stoutest heart. 
 
 And it seemed from that wonder of the 
 burning tree, that the enemy mysteriously 
 and terribly present at Midlingham, was 
 present also in Meirion. Lewis, thinking 
 of the country as he knew it, of its wild 
 and desolate hillsides, its deep woods, its 
 wastes and solitary places, could not but 
 confess that no more fit region could be 
 found for the deadly enterprise of secret 
 meh. Yet, he thought again, there was 
 but little harm to be done in Meirion to the 
 armies of England or to their munitionment. 
 They were working for panic terror ? Pos- 
 sibly that might be so; but the camp under 
 the Highway? That should be their first 
 object, and no harm had been done there. 
 
 Lewis did not know that since the panic 
 of the horses men had died terribly in that 
 camp ; that it was now a fortified place, with 
 a deep, broad trench, a thick tangle of sav- 
 age barbed wire about it, and a machine-gun 
 planted at each corner. 
 [io6] 
 
CHAPTER VIII What Mr. 
 
 Merritt Found 
 
 MR. MERRITT began to pick up 
 his health and spirits a good 
 deal. For the first morning or 
 two of his stay at the doctor's he contented 
 himself with a very comfortable deck chair 
 close to the house, where he sat under the 
 shade of an old mulberry tree beside his wife 
 and watched the bright sunshine on the green 
 lawns, on the creamy crests of the waves, 
 on the headlands of that glorious coast, 
 purple even from afar with the imperial 
 glow of the heather, on the white farm- 
 houses gleaming in the sunlight, high over 
 the sea, far from any turmoil, from any 
 troubling of men. 
 
 The sun was hot, but the wind breathed 
 all the while gently, incessantly, from the 
 [107] 
 
The Terror 
 
 east, and Merritt, who had come to this quiet 
 place, not only from dismay, but from the 
 stifling and oily airs of the smoky Midland 
 town, said that that east wind, pure and 
 clear and like well water from the rock, was 
 new life to him. He ate a capital dinner 
 at the end of his first day at Forth and took 
 rosy views. As to what they had been talk- 
 ing about the night before, he said to Lewis, 
 no doubt there must be trouble of some sort, 
 and perhaps bad trouble; still, Kitchener 
 would soon put it all right. 
 
 So things went on very well. Merritt 
 began to stroll about the garden, which was 
 full of the comfortable spaces, groves, and 
 surprises that only country gardens know. 
 To the right of one of the terraces he found 
 an arbor or summer-house covered with 
 white roses, and he was as pleased as if he 
 had discovered the Pole. He spent a whole 
 day there, smoking and lounging and read- 
 ing a rubbishy sensational story, and de- 
 clared that the Devonshire roses had taken 
 [io8] 
 
The Terror 
 
 many years off his age. Then on the other 
 side of the garden there was a filbert grove 
 that he had never explored on any of his 
 former visits; and again there was a find. 
 Deep in the shadow of the filberts was a 
 bubbling well, issuing from rocks, and all 
 manner of green, dewy ferns growing about 
 it and above it, and an angelica springing 
 beside it. Merritt knelt on his knees, and 
 hollowed his hand and drank the well water. 
 He said (over his port) that night that if 
 all water were like the water of the filbert 
 well the world would turn to teetotalism. 
 It takes a townsman to relish the manifold 
 and exquisite joys of the country. 
 
 It was not till he began to venture abroad 
 that Merritt found that something was lack- 
 ing of the old rich peace that used to dwell 
 in Meirion. He had a favorite walk which 
 he never neglected, year after year. This 
 walk led along the cliffs towards Meiros, 
 and then one could turn inland and return 
 to Forth by deep winding lanes that went 
 [109] 
 
The Terror 
 
 over the AUt. So Merritt set out early one 
 morning and got as far as a sentry-box at 
 the foot of the path that led up to the cliff. 
 There was a sentry pacing up and down in 
 front of the box, and he called on Merritt 
 to produce his pass, or to turn back to the 
 main road. Merritt was a good deal put 
 out, and asked the doctor about this strict 
 guard. And the doctor was surprised. 
 
 "I didn't know they had put their bar up 
 there," he said. "I suppose it's wise. We 
 are certainly in the far West here; still, the 
 Germans might slip round and raid us and 
 do a lot of damage just because Meirion is 
 the last place we should expect them to go 
 for." 
 
 "But there are no fortifications, surely, on 
 the cliff?" 
 
 "Oh, no ; I never heard of anything of the 
 kind there." 
 
 "Well, what's the point of forbidding the 
 public to go on the cliff, then? I can quite 
 understand putting a sentry on the top to 
 [no] 
 
The Terror 
 
 keep a look-out for the enemy. What I 
 don't understand is a sentry at the bottom 
 who can't keep a look-out for anything, as 
 he can't see the sea. And why warn the 
 public off the cliffs? I couldn't facilitate a 
 German landing by standing on Pengareg, 
 even if I wanted to." 
 
 "It is curious," the doctor agreed. 
 "Some military reasons, I suppose." 
 
 He let the matter drop, perhaps because 
 the matter did not affect him. People who 
 live in the country all the year round, coun- 
 try doctors certainly, are little given to desul- 
 tory walking in search of the picturesque. 
 
 Lewis had no suspicion that sentries 
 whose object was equally obscure were being 
 dotted all over the country. There was a 
 sentry, for example, by the quarry at Llanfi- 
 hangel, where the dead woman and the dead 
 sheep had been found some weeks before. 
 The path by the quarry was used a good 
 deal, and its closing would have inconven- 
 ienced the people of the neighborhood very 
 [III] 
 
The Terror 
 
 considerably. But the sentry had his box 
 by the side of the track and had his orders 
 to keep everybody strictly to the path, as if 
 the quarry were a secret fort. 
 
 It was not known till a month or two ago 
 that one of these sentries was himself a 
 victim of the terror. The men on duty at 
 this place were given certain very strict or- 
 ders, which from the nature of the case, 
 must have seemed to them unreasonable. 
 For old soldiers, orders are orders ; but here 
 was a young bank clerk, scarcely in training 
 for a couple of months, who had not begun 
 to appreciate the necessity of hard, literal 
 obedience to an order which seemed to him 
 meaningless. He found himself on a re- 
 mote and lonely hillside, he had not the faint- 
 est notion that his every movement was 
 watched; and he disobeyed a certain instruc- 
 tion that had been given him. The post 
 was found deserted by the relief ; the sentry's 
 dead body was found at the bottom of the 
 quarry. 
 
 [112] 
 
The Terror 
 
 This by the way; but Mr. Merritt dis- 
 covered again and again that things hap- 
 pened to hamper his walks and his wander- 
 ings. Two or three miles from Forth there 
 is a great marsh made by the Afon river 
 before it falls into the sea, and here Merritt 
 had been accustomed to botanize mildly. 
 He had learned pretty accurately the cause- 
 ways of solid ground that lead through the 
 sea of swamp and ooze and soft yielding soil, 
 and he set out one hot afternoon determined 
 to make a thorough exploration of the 
 marsh, and this time to find that rare Bog 
 Bean, that he felt sure, must grow some- 
 where in its wide extent. 
 
 He got into the by-road that skirts the 
 marsh, and to the gate which he had always 
 used for entrance. 
 
 There was the scene as he had known it 
 always, the rich growth of reeds and flags 
 and rushes, the mild black cattle grazing 
 on the "islands" of firm turf, the scpnted 
 procession of the meadowsweet, the royal 
 [113] 
 
The Terror 
 
 glory of the loosestrife, flaming pennons, 
 crimson and golden, of the giant dock. 
 
 But they were bringing out a dead man's 
 body through the gate. 
 
 A laboring man was holding open the 
 gate on the marsh. Merritt, horrified, spoke 
 to him and asked who it was, and how it 
 had happened. 
 
 "They do say he was a visitor at Forth. 
 Somehow he has been drowned in the marsh, 
 whatever." 
 
 "But it's perfectly safe. I've been all 
 over it a dozen times." 
 
 "Well, indeed, we did always think so. 
 If you did slip by accident, like, and fall into 
 the water, it was not so deep; it was easy 
 enough to climb out again. And this gentle- 
 man was quite young, to look at him, poor 
 man; and he has come to Meirion for his 
 pleasure and holiday and found his death 
 in it!" 
 
 "Did he do it on purpose? Is it suicide?" 
 
 "They say he had no reasons to do that." 
 [114] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Here the sergeant of police in charge of 
 the party interposed, according to orders, 
 which he himself did not understand. 
 
 "A terrible thing, sir, to be sure, and a 
 sad pity; and I am sure this is not the sort 
 of sight you have come to see down in 
 Meirion this beautiful summer. So don't 
 you think, sir, that it would be more pleas- 
 ant like, if you would leave us to this sad 
 business of ours? I have heard many 
 gentlemen staying in Forth say that there 
 is nothing to beat the view from the hill 
 over there, not in the whole of Wales." 
 
 Every one is polite in Meirion, but some- 
 how Merritt understood that, in English, 
 this speech meant "move on." 
 
 Merritt moved back to Forth — ^he was not 
 in the humor for any idle, pleasurable 
 strolling after so dreadful a meeting with 
 death. He made some inquiries in the town 
 about the dead man, but nothing seemed 
 known of him. It was said that he had been 
 [115] 
 
The Terror 
 
 on his honeymoon, that he had been staying 
 at the Forth Castle Hotel; but the people 
 of the hotel declared that they had never 
 heard of such a person. Merritt got the 
 local paper at the end of the week; there was 
 not a word in it of any fatal accident in the 
 marsh. He met the sergeant of police in 
 the street. That officer touched his helmet 
 with the utmost politeness and a "hope you 
 are enjoying yourself, sir; indeed you do 
 look a lot better already" ; but as to the poor 
 man who was found drowned or stifled in 
 the marsh, he knew nothing. 
 
 The next day Merritt made up his mind 
 to go to the marsh to see whether he could 
 find anything to account for so strange a 
 death. What he found was a man with an 
 armlet standing by the gate. The armlet 
 had the letters "C. W." on it, which are un- 
 derstood to mean Coast Watcher. The 
 Watcher said he had strict instructions to. 
 keep everybody away from the marsh. 
 Why? He didn't know, but some said that 
 [ii6] 
 
The Terror 
 
 the river was changing its course since the 
 new railway embankment was built, and the 
 marsh had become dangerous to people who 
 didn't know it thoroughly, 
 
 "Indeed, sir," he added, "it is part of my 
 orders not to set foot on the other side of 
 that gate myself, not for one scrag-end of 
 a minute." 
 
 Merritt glanced over the gate incredu- 
 lously. The marsh looked as it had always 
 looked; there was plenty of sound, hard 
 ground to walk on; he could see the track 
 that he used to follow as firm as ever. He 
 did not believe in the story of the changing 
 course of the river, and Lewis said he had 
 never heard of anything of the kind. But 
 Merritt had put the question in the middle 
 of general conversation; he had not led up 
 to it from any discussion of the death in 
 the marsh, and so the doctor was taken un- 
 awares. If he had known of the connec- 
 tion in Merritt's mind between the alleged 
 changing of the Afon's course and the 
 [117] 
 
The Terror 
 
 tragical event in the marsh, no doubt he 
 would have confirmed the official explana- 
 tion. He was, above all things, anxious to 
 prevent his sister and her husband from 
 finding out that the invisible hand of terror 
 that ruled at Midlingham was ruling also 
 in Meirion. 
 
 Lewis himself had little doubt that the 
 man who was found dead in the marsh had 
 been struck down by the secret agency, what- 
 ever it was, that had already accomplished 
 so much of evil; but it was a chief part of 
 the terror that no one knew for certain that 
 this or that particular event was to be as- 
 cribed to it. People do occasionally fall 
 over cliffs through their own carelessness, 
 and as the case of Garcia, the Spanish sailor, 
 showed, cottagers and their wives and chil- 
 dren are now and then the victims of savage 
 and purposeless violence. Lewis had never 
 wandered about the marsh himself; but 
 Remnant had pottered round it and about it, 
 and declared that the man who met his death 
 [ii8] 
 
The Terror 
 
 there — his name was never known, in Forth 
 at all events — must either have committed 
 suicide by deliberately lying prone in the 
 ooze and stifling himself, or else must have 
 been held down in it. There were no de- 
 tails available, so it was clear that the au- 
 thorities had classified this death with the 
 others ; still, the man might have committed 
 suicide, or he might have had a sudden 
 seizure and fallen in the slimy water face- 
 downwards. And so on : it was possible to 
 believe that case A or B or C was in the 
 category of ordinary accidents or ordinary 
 crimes. But it was not possible to believe 
 that A and B and C were all in that category. 
 And thus it was to the end, and thus it is 
 now. We know that the terror reigned, 
 and how it reigned, but there were many 
 dreadful events ascribed to its rule about 
 which there must always be room for doubt. 
 For example, there was the case of the 
 Mary Ann, the rowing-boat which came to 
 grief in so strange a manner, almost under 
 [119] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Merritt's eyes. In my opinion he was quite 
 wrong in associating the sorry fate of the 
 boat and her occupants with a system of 
 signaHng by flashlights which he detected 
 or thought that he detected, on the after- 
 noon in which the Mary Ann was capsized. 
 I believe his signaling theory to be all non- 
 sense, in spite of the naturalized German 
 governess who was lodging with her em- 
 ployers in the suspected house. But, on the 
 other hand, there is no doubt in my own 
 mind that the boat was overturned and those 
 in it drowned by the work of the terror. 
 
 [I20] 
 
CHAPTER IX The Light on 
 
 the Water 
 
 LET it be noted carefully that so far 
 Merritt had not the slightest suspi- 
 cion that the terror of Midlingham 
 was quick over Meirion. Lewis had 
 watched and shepherded him carefully. He 
 had let out no suspicion of what had hap- 
 pened in Meirion, and before taking his 
 brother-in-law to the club he had passed 
 round a hint among- the members. He did 
 not tell the truth about Midlingham — and 
 here again is a point of interest, that as the 
 terror deepened the general public cooper- 
 ated voluntarily, and, one would say, almost 
 subconsciously, with the authorities in con- 
 cealing what they knew from one another — 
 but he gave out a desirable portion of the 
 truth: that his brother-in-law was "nervy," 
 
 [121] 
 
The Terror 
 
 not by any means up to the mark, and that 
 it was therefore desirable that he should be 
 spared the knowledge of the intolerable and 
 tragic mysteries which were being enacted 
 all about them. 
 
 "He knows about that poor fellow who 
 was found in the marsh," said Lewis, "and 
 he has a kind of vague suspicion that there 
 is something out of the common about the 
 case; but no more than that." 
 
 "A clear case of suggested, or rather com- 
 manded suicide," said Remnant. "I regard 
 it as a strong confirmation of my theory." 
 
 "Perhaps so," said the doctor, dreading 
 lest he might have to hear about the Z Ray 
 all over again. "But please don't let any- 
 thing out to him ; I want him to get built up 
 thoroughly before he goes back to Midling- 
 ham." 
 
 Then, on the other hand, Merritt was as 
 still as death about the doings of the Mid- 
 lands ; he hated to think of them, much more 
 to speak of them ; and thus, as I say, he and 
 
 [122] 
 
The Terror 
 
 the men at the Forth Club kept their secrets 
 from one another; and thus, from the be- 
 ginning to the end of the terror, the links 
 were not drawn together. In many cases, 
 no doubt, A and B met every day and talked 
 familiarly, it may be confidentially, on other 
 matters of all sorts, each having in his pos- 
 session half of the truth, which he concealed 
 from the other. So the two halves were 
 never put together to make a whole. 
 
 Merritt; as the doctor guessed, had a kind 
 of uneasy feeling — it scarcely amounted to 
 a suspicion — as to the business of the marsh ; 
 chiefly because he thought the official talk 
 about the railway embankment and the 
 course of the river rank nonsense. But 
 finding that nothing more happened, he let 
 the matter drop from his mind, and settled 
 himself down to enjoy his holiday. 
 
 He found to his delight that there were 
 
 no sentries or watchers to hinder him from 
 
 the approach to Larnac Bay, a delicious 
 
 cove, a place where the ashgrove and the 
 
 [123] 
 
The Terror 
 
 green meadow and the glistening bracken 
 sloped gently down to red rocks and firm 
 yellow sands. Merritt remembered a rock 
 that formed a comfortable seat, and here he 
 established himself of a golden afternoon, 
 and gazed at the blue of the sea and the 
 crimson bastions and bays of the coast as it 
 bent inward to Sarnau and swept out again 
 southward to the odd-shaped promontory 
 called the Dragon's Head. Merritt gazed 
 on, amused by the antics of the porpoises 
 who were tumbling and splashing and gam- 
 boling a little way out at sea, charmed by 
 the pure and radiant air that was so differ- 
 ent from the oily smoke that often stood for 
 heaven at Midlingham, and charmed, too, 
 by the white farmhouses dotted here and 
 there on the heights of the curving coast. 
 
 Then he noticed a little row-boat at about 
 two hundred yards from the shore. There 
 were two or three people aboard, he could 
 not quite make out how many, and they 
 seemed to be doing something with a line; 
 [124] 
 
The Terror 
 
 they were no doubt fishing, and Merritt 
 (who disHked fish) wondered how people 
 could spoil such an afternoon, such a sea, 
 such pellucid and radiant air by trying to 
 catch white, flabby, ofifensive, evil-smelling 
 creatures that would be excessively nasty 
 when cooked. He puzzled over this prob- 
 lem and turned away from it to the con- 
 templation of the crimson headlands. And 
 then he says that he noticed that signaling 
 was going on. Flashing lights of intense 
 brilliance, he declares, were coming from one 
 of those farms on the heights of the coast; 
 it was as if white fire was spouting from it. 
 Merritt was certain, as the light appeared 
 and disappeared, that some message was 
 being sent, and he regretted that he 
 knew nothing of heliography. Three short 
 flashes, a long and very brilliant flash, then 
 two short flashes, Merritt fumbled in his 
 pocket for pencil and paper so that he might 
 record these signals, and, bringing his eyes 
 down to the sea level, he became aware, with 
 [125] 
 
Th& Terror 
 
 amazement and horror, that the boat had 
 disappeared. All that he could see was 
 some vague, dark object far to westward, 
 running out with the tide. 
 
 Now it is certain, unfortunately, that the 
 Mary Ann was capsized and that two school- 
 boys and the sailor in charge were drowned. 
 The bones of the boat were found amongst 
 the rocks far along the coast, and the three 
 bodies were also washed ashore. The sailor 
 could not swim at all, the boys only a little, 
 and it needs an exceptionally fine swimmer 
 to fight against the outward suck of the tide 
 as it rushes past Pengareg Point. 
 
 But I have no belief whatever in Mer- 
 ritt's theory. He held (and still holds, for 
 all I know), that the flashes of light which 
 he saw coming from Penyrhaul, the farm- 
 house on the height, had some connection 
 with the disaster to the Mary Ann. When 
 it was ascertained that a family were spend- 
 ing their summer at the farm, and that the 
 governess was a German, though a long 
 [126] 
 
The Terror 
 
 naturalized German, Merritt could not see 
 that there was anything left to argue about, 
 though there might be many details to dis- 
 cover. But, in my opinion, all this was a 
 mere mare's nest; the flashes of brilliant 
 light were caused, no doubt, by the sun light- 
 ing up one window of the farmhouse after 
 the other. 
 
 Still, Merritt was convinced from the very 
 first, even before the damning circumstance 
 of the German governess was brought to 
 light; and on the evening of the disaster, 
 as Lewis and he sat together after dinner, 
 he was endeavoring to put what he called 
 the common sense of the matter to the 
 doctor. 
 
 "If you hear a shot," said Merritt, "and 
 you see a man fall, you know pretty well 
 what killed him." 
 
 There was a flutter of wild wings in the 
 
 room. A great moth beat to and fro and 
 
 dashed itself madly against the ceiling, the 
 
 walls, the glass bookcase. Then a sputter- 
 
 [127] 
 
The Terror 
 
 ing sound, a momentary dimming of the 
 lamp. The moth had succeeded in its myste- 
 rious quest. 
 
 "Can you tell me," said Lewis as if he 
 were answering Merritt, "why moths rush 
 into the flame?" 
 
 Lewis had put his question as to the 
 strange habits of the common moth to Mer- 
 ritt with the deliberate intent of closing the 
 debate on death by heliograph. The query 
 was suggested, of course, by the incident of 
 the moth in the lamp, and Lewis thought 
 that he had said, "Oh, shut up !" in a some- 
 what elegant manner. And, in fact Merritt 
 looked dignified, remained silent, and helped 
 himself to port. 
 
 That was the end that the doctor had de- 
 sired. He had no doubt in his own mind 
 that the affair of the Mary Ann was but one 
 more item in the long account of horrors 
 that grew larger almost with every day; 
 [128] 
 
The Terror 
 
 and he was in no humor to Hsten to wild and 
 futile theories as to the manner in which 
 the disaster had been accomplished. Here 
 was a proof that the terror that was upon 
 them was mighty not only on the land but 
 on the waters ; for Lewis could not see that 
 the boat could have been attacked by any 
 ordinary means of destruction. From Mer- 
 ritt's story, it must have been in shallow 
 water. The shore of Larnac Bay shelves 
 very gradua!lly, and the Admiralty charts 
 showed the depth of water two hundred 
 yards out to be only two fathoms ; this would 
 be too shallow for a submarine. And it 
 could not have been shelled, and it could not 
 have been torpedoed; there was no explo- 
 sion. The disaster might have been due to 
 carelessness; boys, he considered, will play 
 the fool anywhere, even in a boat; but he 
 did not think so; the sailor would have 
 stopped them. And, it may be mentioned, 
 that the two boys were as a matter of fact 
 [129] 
 
The Terror 
 
 extremely steady, sensible yoiing fellows, not 
 in the least likely to play foolish tricks of 
 any kind. 
 
 Lewis was immersed in these reflections, 
 having successfully silenced his brother-in- 
 law ; he was trying in vain to find some clue 
 to the horrible enigma. The Midlingham 
 theory of a concealed German force, hiding 
 in places under the earth, was extravagant 
 enough, and yet it seemed the only solution 
 that approached plausibility; but then again 
 even a subterranean German host would 
 hardly account for this wreckage of a boat, 
 floating on a calm sea. And then what of 
 the tree with the burning in it that had ap- 
 peared in the garden there a few weeks 
 ago, and the cloud with a burning in it that 
 had shown over the trees of the Midland 
 village? 
 
 I think I have already written something 
 of the probable emotions of the mathema- 
 tician confronted suddenly with an un- 
 doubted two-sided triangle. I said, if I re- 
 [130] 
 
The Terror 
 
 member, that he would be forced, in de- 
 cency, to go mad; and I believe that Lewis 
 was very near to this point. He felt him- 
 self confronted with an intolerable problem 
 that most instantly demanded solution, and 
 yet, with the same breath, as it were, denied 
 the possibility of there being any solution. 
 People were being killed in an inscrutable 
 manner by some inscrutable means, day 
 after day, and one asked "why" and "how" ; 
 and there seemed no answer. In the Mid- 
 lands, where every kind of munitionment 
 was manufactured, the explanation of Ger- 
 man agency was plausible; and even if the 
 subterranean notion was to be rejected as 
 savoring altogether too much of the fairy- 
 tale, or rather of the sensational romance, 
 yet it was possible that the backbone of the 
 theory was true; the Germans might have 
 planted their agents in some way or another 
 in the midst of our factories. But here in 
 Meirion, what serious effect could be pro- 
 duced by the casual and indiscriminate 
 [131] 
 
The Terror 
 
 slaughter of a couple of schoolboys in a boat, 
 of a harmless holiday-maker in a marsh? 
 The creation of an atmosphere of terror and 
 dismay? It was possible, of course, but it 
 hardly seemed tolerable, in spite of the enor- 
 mities of Louvain and of the Lusitania. 
 
 Into these meditations, and into the still 
 dignified silence of Merritt broke the rap on 
 the door of Lewis's man, and those words 
 which harass the ease of the country doc- 
 tor when he tries to take any ease : "You're 
 wanted in the surgery, if you please, sir." 
 Lewis bustled out, and appeared no more 
 that night. 
 
 The doctor had been summoned to a little 
 hamlet on the outskirts of Forth, separated 
 from it by half a mile or three-quarters of 
 road. One dignifies, indeed, this settlement 
 without a name in calling it a hamlet ; it was 
 a mere row of four cottages, built about a 
 hundred years ago for the accommodation 
 of the workers in a quarry long since dis- 
 [132] 
 
The Terror 
 
 used. In one of these cottages the doctor 
 found a father and mother weeping and cry- 
 ing out to "doctor bach, doctor bach," and 
 two frightened children, and one little body, 
 still and dead. It was the youngest of 
 the three, little Johnnie, and he was 
 dead. 
 
 The doctor found that the child had been 
 asphyxiated. He felt the clothes ; they were 
 dry; it was not a case of drowning. He 
 looked at the neck; there was no mark of 
 strangling. He asked the father how it had 
 happened, and father and mother, weeping 
 most lamentably, declared they had no 
 knowledge of how their child had been killed : 
 "unless it was the People that had done it." 
 The Celtic fairies are still malignant. 
 Lewis asked what had happened that eve- 
 ning; where had the child been? 
 
 "Was he with his brother and sister? 
 Don't they know anything about it?" 
 
 Reduced into some sort of order from its 
 [133] 
 
The Terror i 
 
 original piteous confusion, this is the story 
 that the doctor gathered. 
 
 All three children had been well and 
 happy through the day. They had walked 
 in with the mother, Mrs. Roberts, to Forth 
 on a marketing expedition in the afternoon ; 
 they had returned to the cottage, had had 
 their tea, and afterwards played about on 
 the road in front of the house. John 
 Roberts had come home somewhat late from 
 his work, and it was after dusk when the 
 family sat down to supper. Supper over, 
 the three children went out again to play 
 with other children from the cottage next 
 door, Mrs. Roberts telling them that they 
 might have half an hour before going to bed. 
 • The two mothers came to the cottage gates 
 at the same moment and called out to their 
 children to come along and be quick about 
 it. The two small families had been play- 
 ing on the strip of turf across the road, just 
 by the stile into the fields. The children 
 [134J 
 
The Terror 
 
 ran across the road; all of them except 
 Johnnie Roberts. His brother Willie said 
 that just as their mother called them he 
 heard Johnnie cry out : 
 
 "Oh, what is that beautiful shiny thing 
 over the stile?" 
 
 [135] 
 
CHAPTER X The Child 
 
 and the Moth 
 
 THE little Roberts's ran across the 
 road, up the path, and into the 
 lighted room. Then they noticed 
 that Johnnie had not followed them. Mrs. 
 Roberts was doing something in the back 
 kitchen, and Mr. Roberts had gone out to 
 the shed to bring in some sticks for the next 
 morning's fire. Mrs. Roberts heard the 
 children run in and went on with her work. 
 The children whispered to one another that 
 Johnnie would "catch it" when their mother 
 came out of the back room and found him 
 missing; but they expected he would run in 
 through the open door any minute. But six 
 or seven, perhaps ten, minutes passed, and 
 there was no Johnnie. Then the father and 
 mother came into the kitchen together, and 
 saw that their little boy was not there. 
 [136] 
 
The Terror 
 
 They thought it was some small piece of 
 mischief — that the two other children had 
 hidden the boy somewhere in the room: in 
 the big cupboard perhaps. 
 
 "What have you done with him then?" 
 said Mrs. Roberts. "Come out, you little 
 rascal, directly in a minute." 
 
 There was no little rascal to come out, 
 and Margaret Roberts, the girl, said that 
 Johnnie had not come across the road with 
 them: he must be still playing all by him- 
 self by the hedge. 
 
 "What did you let him stay like that 
 for?" said Mrs. Roberts. "Can't I trust 
 you for two minutes together? Indeed to 
 goodness, you are all of you more trouble 
 than you are worth." She went to the open 
 door: 
 
 "Johnnie! Come you in directly, or you 
 will be sorry for it. Johnnie !" 
 
 The poor woman called at the door. 
 She went out to the gate and called there: 
 
 "Come you, little Johnnie. Come you, 
 [137] 
 
The Terror 
 
 bachgen, there's a good boy. I do see you 
 hiding there." 
 
 She thought he must be hiding in the 
 shadow 01 the hedge, and that he would 
 come running and laughing — "he was al- 
 ways such a happy little fellow" — ^to her 
 across the road. But no little merry figure 
 danced out of the gloom of the still, dark 
 night; it was all silence. 
 
 It was then, as the mother's heart began 
 to chill, though she still called cheerfully to 
 the missing child, that the elder boy told 
 how Johnnie had said there was something 
 beautiful by the stile: "and perhaps he did 
 climb over, and he is running now about the 
 meadow, and has lost his way." 
 
 The father got his lantern then, and the 
 whole family went crying and calling about 
 the meadow, promising cakes and sweets 
 and a fine toy to poor Johnnie if he would 
 come to them. 
 
 They found the little body, under the ash- 
 grove in the middle of the field. He was 
 [138] 
 
The Terror 
 
 quite still and dead, so still that a great moth 
 had settled on his forehead, fluttering away 
 when they lifted him up. 
 
 Dr. Lewis heard this story. There was 
 nothing to be done; little to be said to these 
 most unhappy people. 
 
 "Take care of the two that you have left 
 to you," said the doctor as he went away. 
 "Don't let them out of your sight if you can 
 help it. It is dreadful times that we are 
 living in." 
 
 It is curious to record that all through 
 these dreadful times the simple little "sea- 
 son" went through its accustomed course at 
 Forth. The war and its consequences had 
 somewhat thinned the numbers of the sum- 
 mer visitors; still a very fair contingent of 
 them occupied the hotels and boarding- 
 houses and lodging-houses and bathed from 
 the old-fashioned machines on one beach, or 
 from the new-fashioned tents on the other, 
 and sauntered in the sun, or lay stretched 
 out in the shade under the trees that grow 
 [139] 
 
The Terror 
 
 down almost to the water's edge. Perth 
 never tolerated Ethiopians or shows of any 
 kind on its sands, but "The Rockets" did 
 very well during that summer in their gar- 
 den entertainment, given in the castle 
 grounds, and the fit-up companies that came 
 to the Assembly Rooms are said to have paid 
 their bills to a woman and to a man. 
 
 Forth depends very largely on its midland 
 and northern custom, custom of a prosper- 
 ous, well-established sort. People who 
 think Llandudno overcrowded and Colwyn 
 Bay too raw and red and new, come year 
 after year to the placid old town in the south- 
 west and delight in its peace; and as I say, 
 they 6njoyed themselves much as usual there 
 in the summer of 191 5. Now and then they 
 became conscious, as Mr. Merritt became 
 conscious, that they could not wander about 
 quite in the old way; but they accepted 
 sentries and coast-watchers and people who 
 politely pointed out the advantages of seeing 
 the view from this point rather than from 
 [1403 
 
The Terror 
 
 that as very necessary consequences of the 
 dreadful war that was being waged ; nay, as 
 a Manchester man said, after having been 
 turned back from his favorite walk to 
 Castell Coch, it was gratifying to think that 
 they were so well looked after. 
 
 "So far as I can see," he added, "there's 
 nothing to prevent a submarine from stand- 
 ing out there by Ynys Sant and landing half 
 a dozen men in a collapsible boat in any of 
 these little coves. And pretty fools we 
 should look, shouldn't we, with our throats 
 cut on the sands; or carried back to Ger- 
 many in the submarine?" He tipped the 
 coast-watcher half-a-crown. 
 
 "That's right, lad," hfe said, "you give us 
 the tip." 
 
 Now here was a strange thing. The 
 north-countryman had his thoughts on elu- 
 sive submarines and German raiders; the 
 watcher had simply received instructions to 
 keep people off the Castell Coch fields, with- 
 out reason assigned. And there can be no 
 [141] 
 
The Terror 
 
 doubt that the authorities themselves, while 
 they marked out the fields as in the "terror 
 zone," gave their orders in the dark and 
 were themselves profoundly in the dark as 
 to the manner of the slaughter that had been 
 done there ; for if they had understood what 
 had happened, they would have understood 
 also that their restrictions were useless. 
 
 The Manchester man was warned off his 
 walk about ten days after Johnnie Roberts's 
 death. The Watcher had been placed at his 
 post because, the night before, a young 
 farmer had been found by his wife lying 
 in the grass close to the Castle, with no scar 
 on him, nor any mark of violence, but stotie 
 dead. 
 
 The wife of the dead man, Joseph Cra- 
 dock, finding her husband lying motionless 
 on the dewy turf, went white and stricken 
 up the path to the village and got two men 
 who bore the body to the farm. Lewis was 
 sent for, and knevi^ at once when he saw the 
 dead man that he had perished in the way 
 [142] 
 
The Terror 
 
 that the little Roberts boy had perished — 
 whatever that awful way might be. Cra- 
 dock had been asphyxiated; and here again 
 there was no mark of a grip on the throat. 
 It might have been a piece of work by Burke 
 and Hare, the doctor reflected; a pitch plas- 
 ter might have been clapped over the man's 
 mouth and nostrils and held there. 
 
 Then a thought struck him; his brother- 
 in-law had talked of a new kind of poison 
 gas that was said to be used against the 
 munition workers in the Midlands: was it 
 possible that the deaths of the man and the 
 boy were due to some such instrument ? He 
 applied his tests but could find no trace of 
 any gas having been employed. Carbonic 
 acid gas? A man could not be killed with 
 that in the open air ; to be fatal that required 
 a confined space, such a position as the bot- 
 tom of a huge vat or of a well. 
 
 He did not know how Cradock had been 
 killed; he confessed it to himself. He had 
 been suffocated; that was all he could say. 
 [143] 
 
The Terror 
 
 It seemed that the man had gone out at 
 about half-past nine to look after some 
 beasts. The field in which they were was 
 about five minutes' walk from the house. 
 He told his wife he would be back in a quar- 
 ter of an hour or twenty minutes. He did 
 not return, and when he had been gone for 
 three-quarters of an hour Mrs. Cradock 
 went out to look for him. She went into 
 the field where the beasts were, and every- 
 thing seamed all right, but thei'e was no 
 trace of Cradock. She called out ; there was 
 no answer. 
 
 Now the meadow in which the cattle 
 were pastured is high ground; a hedge di- 
 vides it from the fields whifch fall gently 
 down to the castle and the sea. Mrs. 
 Cradock hardly seemed able to say why, hav- 
 ing failed to find her husband among his 
 beasts, she turned to the path which led to 
 Castell Coch. She said at first that she had 
 thought that one of the oxen might have 
 [144] 
 
The Terror 
 
 broken through the hedge and strayed, and 
 that Cradock had perhaps gone after it. 
 And then, correcting herself, she said: 
 
 "There was that; and then there was 
 something else that I could not make out at 
 all. It seemed to me that the hedge did look 
 different from usual. To be sure, things do 
 look different at night, and there was a bit 
 of sea mist about, but somehow it did look 
 odd to me, and I said to myself, 'have I lost 
 my way, then ?* " 
 
 She declared that the shape of the trees 
 in the hedge appeared to have changed, and 
 besides, it had a look "as if it was lighted 
 up, somehow," and so she went on towards 
 the stile to see what all this could be, and 
 when she came near everything was as 
 usual. She looked over the stile and called 
 and hoped to see her husband coming 
 towards her or to hear his voice; but there 
 was no answer, and glancing down the path 
 she saw, or thought she saw, some sort of 
 [145] 
 
The Terror 
 
 brightness on the ground, "a dim sort of 
 light like a bunch of glow-worms in a hedge- 
 bank. 
 
 "And so I climbed over the stile and went 
 down the path, and the light seemed to melt 
 away; and there was my poor husband lying 
 on his back, saying not a word to me when I 
 spoke to him and touched him." 
 
 So for Lewis the terror blackened and 
 became altogether intolerable, and others, 
 he perceived, felt as he did. He did not 
 know, he never asked whether the men at 
 the club had heard of these deaths of the 
 child and the young farmer; but no one 
 spoke of them. Indeed, the change was 
 evident; at the beginning of the terror men 
 spoke of nothing else ; now it had become 
 all too awful for ingenious chatter or labored 
 and grotesque theories. And Lewis had 
 received a letter from his brother-in-law at 
 Midlingham; it contained the sentence, "I 
 am afraid Fanny's health has not greatly 
 [146] 
 
The Terror 
 
 benefited by her visit to Forth ; there are still 
 several symptoms I don't at all like." And 
 this told him, in a phraseology that the doc- 
 tor and Merritt had agreed upon, that the 
 terror remained heavy in the Midland town. 
 
 It was soon after the death of Cradock 
 that people began to tell strange tales of a 
 sound that was to be heard of nights about 
 the hills and valleys to the northward of 
 Forth. A man who had missed the last 
 train from Meiros and had been forced to 
 tramp the ten miles between Meiros and 
 Forth seems to have been the first to hear 
 it. He said he had got to the top of the 
 hill by Tredonoc, somewhere between half- 
 past ten and eleven, when he first noticed 
 an odd noise that he could not make out at 
 all; it was like a shout, a long, drawn-out, 
 dismal wail coming from a great way off, 
 faint with distance. He stopped to listen, 
 thinking at first that it might be owls hoot- 
 ing in the woods; but it was different, he 
 [147] 
 
The Terror 
 
 said, from that : it was a long cry, and then 
 there was silence and then it began over 
 again. He could make nothing of it, and 
 feeling frightened, he did not quite know of 
 what, he walked on briskly and was glad to 
 see the lights of Forth station. 
 
 He told his wife of this dismal sound that 
 night, and she told the neighbors, and most 
 of them thought that it was "all fancy" — or 
 drink, or the owls after all. But the night 
 after, two- or three people, who had been to 
 some small merrymaking in a cottage just 
 off the Meiros road, heard the sound as they 
 were going home, soon after ten. They, too, 
 described it as a long, wailing cry, indescrib- 
 ably dismal in the stillness of the autumn 
 night; "like the ghost of a voice," said one; 
 "as if it came up from the bottom of the 
 earth," said another. 
 
 [148] 
 
CHAPTER XI At Treff Loyne 
 
 Farm 
 
 LET it be remembered, again and 
 again, that, all the while that the 
 ^ terror lasted, there was no common 
 stock of information as to the dreadful 
 things that were being done. The press had 
 not said one word upon it, there was no cri- 
 terion by which the mass of the people could 
 separate fact from mere vague rumor, no 
 test by which ordinary misadventure or 
 disaster could be distinguished from the 
 achievements of the secret and awful force 
 that was at work. 
 
 And so with every event of the passing 
 day. A harmless commerical traveler might 
 show himself in the course of his business 
 in the tumbledown main street of Meiros 
 and find himself regarded with looks of fear 
 and suspicion as a possible worker of mur- 
 [149] 
 
The Terror 
 
 der, while it is likely enough that the true 
 agents of the terror went quite unnoticed. 
 And since the real nature of all this mys- 
 tery of death was unknown, it followed 
 easily that the signs and warnings and 
 omens of it were all the more unknown. 
 Here was horror, there was horror; but 
 there was no links to join one horror with 
 another; no common basis of knowledge 
 from which the connection between this hor- 
 ror and that horror might be inferred. 
 
 So there was no one who suspected at all 
 that this dismal and hollow sound that was 
 now heard of nights in the region to the 
 north of Forth, had any relation at all to the 
 case of the little girl who went out one 
 afternoon to pick purple flowers and never 
 returned, or to the case of the man whose 
 body was taken out of the peaty slime of the 
 marsh, or to the case of Cradock, dead in his 
 fields, with a strange glimmering oL light 
 about his body, as his wife reported. And 
 it is a question as to how far the rumor of 
 [ISO] 
 
The Terror 
 
 this melancholy, nocturnal summons got 
 abroad at all. Lewis heard of it, as a coun- 
 try doctor hears of most things, driving up 
 and down the lanes, but he heard of it with- 
 out much interest, with no sense that it was 
 in any sort of relation to the terror. Rem- 
 nant had been given the story of the hollow 
 and echoing voice of the darkness in a col- 
 ored and picturesque form; he employed a 
 Tredonoc man to work in his garden once a 
 week. The gardener had not heard the 
 summons himself, but he knew a man who 
 had done so. 
 
 "Thomas Jenkins, Pentoppin, he did put 
 his head out late last night to see what the 
 weather was like, as he was cutting a field 
 of corn the next day, and he did tell me that 
 when he was with the Methodists in Cardi- 
 gan he did never hear no singing eloquence 
 in the chapels that was like to it. He did 
 declare it was like a wailing of Judgment 
 Day." 
 
 Remnant considered the matter, and was 
 [iSil 
 
The Terror 
 
 inclined to think that the sound must be 
 caused by a subterranean inlet of the sea; 
 there might be, he supposed, an imperfect 
 or half -opened or tortuous blow-hole in the 
 Tredonoc woods, and the noise of the tide, 
 surging up below, might very well produce 
 that effect of a hollow wailing, far away- 
 But neither he nor any one else paid much 
 attention to the matter; save the few who 
 heard the call at dead of night, as it echoed 
 awfully over the black hills. 
 
 The sound had been heard for three or 
 perhaps four nights, when the people com- 
 ing out of Tredonoc church after morning 
 service on Sunday noticed that there was 
 a big yellow sheepdog in the churchyard. 
 The dog, it appeared, had been waiting for 
 the congregation; for it at once attached 
 itself to them, at first to the whole body, and 
 then to a group of half a dozen who took 
 the turning to the right. Two of these 
 presently went off over the fields to their re- 
 spective houses, and four strolled on in the 
 [152] 
 
The Terror 
 
 leisurely Sunday-morning manner of the 
 country, and these the dog followed, keeping 
 to heel all the time. The men were talking 
 hay, corn and markets and paid no attention 
 to the animal, and so they strolled along the 
 autumn lane till they came to a gate in the 
 hedge, whence a roughly made farm road 
 went through the fields, and dipped down 
 into the woods and to Treff Loyne farm. 
 
 Then the dog became like a possessed crea- 
 ture. He barked furiously. He ran up to 
 one of the men and looked up at him, "as if 
 he were begging for his life," as the man 
 said, and then rushed to the gate and stood 
 by it, wagging his tail and barking at inter- 
 vals. The men stared and laughed. 
 
 "Whose dog will that be?" said one of 
 them. 
 
 "It will be Thomas Griffith's, Treflf 
 Loyne," said another. 
 
 "Well, then, why doesn't he go home? 
 Go home then !" He went through the ges- 
 ture of picking up a stone from the road and 
 [153] 
 
The Terror 
 
 throwing it at the dog. "Go home, then! 
 , Over the gate with you." 
 
 But the dog never stirred. He barked 
 and whined and ran up to the men and then 
 back to the gate. At last he came to one 
 of them, and crawled and abased himself 
 on the ground and then took hold of the 
 man's coat and tried to pull him in the direc- 
 tion of the gate. The farmer shook the dog 
 off, and the four went on their way ; and the 
 dog stood in the road and watched them and 
 then put up its head and uttered a long and 
 dismal howl that was despair. 
 
 The four farmers thought nothing of it; 
 sheepdogs in the country are dogs to look 
 after sheep, and their whims and fancies are 
 not studied. But the yellow dog— he was 
 a kind of degenerate collie — haunted the 
 Tredonoc lanes from that day. He came to 
 a cottage door one night and scratched at it, 
 and when it was opened lay down, and then, 
 barking, ran to the garden gate and waited, 
 entreating, as it seemed, the cottager to fol- 
 [154] 
 
The Terror 
 
 low him. They drove him away and again' 
 he gave that long howl of anguish. It was 
 almost as bad, they said, as the noise that 
 they had heard a few nights before. And 
 then it occurred to somebody, so far as I 
 can make out with no particular reference 
 to the odd conduct of the Treff Loyne sheep- 
 dog, that Thomas Griffith had not been seen 
 for some time past. He had missed market 
 day at Forth, he had not been at Tredonoc 
 church, where he was a pretty regular at- 
 tendant on Sunday ; and then, as heads were 
 put together, it appeared that nobody had 
 seen any of the Griffith family for days and 
 days. 
 
 Now in a town, even in a small town, this 
 process of putting heads together is a pretty 
 quick business. In the country, especially 
 in a countryside of wild lands and scattered 
 and lonely farms and cottages, the affair 
 takes time. Harvest was going on, every- 
 body was busy in his own fields, and after 
 the long day's hard work neither the farmer 
 [155] 
 
The Terror 
 
 nor his men felt inclined to stroll about in 
 search of news or gossip. A harvester at 
 the day's end is ready for supper and sleep 
 and for nothing else. 
 
 And so it was late in that week when it 
 was discovered that Thomas Griffith and all 
 his house had vanished from this world. 
 
 I have often been reproached for my curi- 
 osity over questions which are apparently of 
 slight importance, or of no importance at 
 all. I love to inquire, for instance, into the 
 question of the visibility of a lighted candle 
 at a distance. Suppose, that is, a candle 
 lighted on a still, dark night in the country ; 
 what is the greatest distance at which you 
 can see that there is a light at all? And 
 then as to the human voice ; what is its carry- 
 ing distance, under good conditions, as a 
 mere sound, apart from, any matter of mak- 
 ing out words that may be uttered? 
 
 They are trivial questions, no doubt, but 
 they have always interested me, and the lat- 
 ter point has its application to the strange 
 
The Terror 
 
 business of Treff Loyne. That melancholy 
 and hollow sound, that wailing summons 
 that appalled the hearts of those who heard 
 it was, indeed, a human voice, produced in 
 a very exceptional manner; and it seems to 
 have been heard at points varying from a 
 mile and a half to two miles from the farm. 
 I do not know whether this is anything ex- 
 traordinary ; I do not know whether the pe- 
 culiar method of production was calculated 
 to increase or to diminish the carrying power 
 of the sound. 
 
 Again and again I have laid emphasis in 
 this story of the terror on the strange isola- 
 tion of many of the farms and cottages in 
 Meirion. I have done so in the effort to con- 
 vince the townsman of something that he 
 has never known. To the Londoner a house 
 a quarter of a mile from the outlying sub- 
 urban lamp, with no other dwelling within 
 two hundred yards, is a lonely house, a place 
 to fit with ghosts and mysteries and terrors. 
 How can he understand then, the true loneli- 
 [157] 
 
The Terror 
 
 ness of the white farmhouses of Meirion, 
 dotted here and there, for the most part not 
 even on the little lanes and deep winding by- 
 ways, but set in the very heart of the fields, 
 or alone on huge bastioned headlands facing 
 the sea, and whether on the high verge of the 
 sea or on the hills or in the hollows of the 
 inner country, hidden from the sight of men, 
 far from the sound of any common call. 
 There is Penyrhaul, for example, the farm 
 from which the foolish Merritt thought he 
 saw signals of light being made: from sea- 
 ward it is of course, widely visible ; but from 
 landward, owing partly to the curving and 
 .indented configuration of the bay, I doubt 
 whether any other habitation views it from 
 a nearer distance than three miles. 
 
 And of all these hidden and remote places, 
 I doubt if any is so deeply buried as Treff 
 Loyne. I have little or no Welsh, I am 
 sorry to say, but I suppose that the name is 
 corrupted from Trellwyn, or Tref-y-Uwyn, 
 "the place in the grove," and, indeed, it lies 
 [158] 
 
The Terror 
 
 in the very heart of dark, overhanging 
 woods. A deep, narrow valley runs down 
 from the high lands of the Allt, through 
 these woods, through steep hillsides of 
 bracken and gorse, right down to the great 
 marsh, whence Merritt saw the dead man 
 being carried. The valley lies away from 
 any road, even from that by-road, little bet- 
 ter than a bridlepath, where the four farm- 
 ers, returning from church were perplexed 
 by the strange antics of the sheep-dog. One 
 cannot say that the valley is overlooked, even 
 from a distance, for so narrow is it that the 
 ashgroves that rim it on either side seem to 
 meet and shut it in. I, at all events, have 
 never found any high place from which Treff 
 Loyne is visible ; though, looking down from 
 the Allt, I have seen blue wood-smoke rising 
 from its hidden chimneys. 
 
 Such was the place, then, to which one 
 September afternoon a party went up to dis- 
 cover what had happened to Griffith and his 
 family. There were half a dozen farmers, 
 [159] 
 
The Terror 
 
 a couple of policemen, and four soldiers, 
 carrying their arms ; those last had been lent 
 by the officer commanding at the camp. 
 Lewis, too, was of the party; he had heard 
 by chance that no one knew what had become 
 of Griffith and his family; and he was anx- 
 ious about a young fellow, a painter, of his 
 acquaintance, who had been lodging at Treff 
 Loyne all the summer. 
 
 They all met by the gate of Tredonoc 
 churchyard, and trarnped solemnly along the 
 narrow lane ; all of them, I think, with some 
 vague discomfort of mind, with a certain 
 shadowy fear, as of men who do not quite 
 know what they may encounter. Lewis 
 heard the corporal and the three soldiers 
 arguing over their orders. 
 
 "The Captain says to me," muttered the 
 corporal, " 'Don't hesitate to shoot if there's 
 any trouble.' 'Shoot what, sir,' I- says. 
 'The trouble,' says he, and that's all I could 
 get out of him." 
 
 The men grumbled in reply ; Lewis thought 
 [i6o] 
 
The Terror 
 
 he heard some obscure reference to rat- 
 poison, and wondered what they were talk- 
 ing about. 
 
 They came to the gate in the hedge, where 
 the farm road led down to Treff Loyne. 
 They followed this track, roughly made, with 
 grass growing up between its loosely laid 
 stones, down by the hedge from field to wood, 
 till at last they came to the sudden walls of 
 the valley, and the sheltering groves of the 
 ash trees. Here the way curved down the 
 steep hillside, and bent southward, and fol- 
 lowed henceforward the hidden hollow of the 
 valley, under the shadow of the trees. 
 
 Here was the farm enclosure ; the outlying 
 walls of the yard and the barns and sheds 
 and outhouses. One of the farmers threw 
 open the gate and walked into the yard, and 
 forthwith began bellowing at the top of his 
 voice : 
 
 "Thomas Griffith! Thomas Griffith! 
 Where be you, Thomas Griffith ?" 
 
 The rest followed him. The corporal 
 [i6i] 
 
The Terror 
 
 snapped out an order over his shoulder, and 
 there was a rattling metallic noise as the men 
 fixed their bayonets and became in an in- 
 stant dreadful dealers out of death, in place 
 of harmless fellows with a feeling for beer. 
 
 "Thomas Griffith!" again bellowed the 
 farmer. 
 
 There was no answer to this summons. 
 But they found poor Griffith lying on his 
 face at the edge of the pond in the middle 
 of the yard. There was a ghastly wound 
 in his side, as if a sharp stake had been 
 driven into his body. 
 
 [162] 
 
CHAPTER XII The Letter 
 
 of Wrath 
 
 IT was a still September afternoon. No 
 wind stirred in the hanging woods that 
 were dark all about the ancient house 
 of Treff Loyne ; the only so'und in the dim air 
 was the lowing of the cattle ; they had wan- 
 dered, it seemed, from the fields and had 
 come in by the gate of the farmyard and 
 stood there melancholy, as if they mourned 
 for their dead master. And the horses; 
 four great, heavy, patient-looking beasts 
 they were there too, and in the lower field 
 the sheep were standing, as if they waited 
 to be fed. 
 
 "You would think they all knew there was 
 something wrong," one of the soldiers mut- 
 tered to another. A pale sun showed for a 
 moment and glittered on their bayonets. 
 [163] 
 
The Terror 
 
 They were standing about the body of poor, | 
 dead Griffith, with a certain grimness grow- 
 ing on their faces and hardening there. 
 Their corporal snapped something at them 
 again; they were quite ready. Lewis knelt 
 down by the dead man and looked closely at 
 the great gaping wound in his side. 
 
 "He's been dead a long time," he said. 
 "A week, two weeks, perhaps. He was 
 killed by some sharp pointed weapon. How 
 about the family? How many are there of 
 them ? I never attended them." 
 
 "There was Griffith, and his wife, and his 
 son Thomas and Mary Griffith, his daugh- 
 ter. And I do think there was a gentleman 
 lodging with them this summer." 
 
 That was from one of the farmers. They 
 all looked at one another, this party of res- 
 cue, who knew nothing of the danger that 
 had smitten this house of quiet people, noth- 
 ing of the peril which had brought them to 
 this pass of a farmyard with a dead man 
 in it, and his beasts standing patiently about 
 [164] 
 
The Terror 
 
 him, as if they waited for the farmer to rise 
 up and give them their food. Then the party 
 turned to the house. It was an old, six- 
 teenth century building, with the singular 
 round, "Flemish" chimney that is character- 
 istic of Meirion. The walls were snowy 
 with whitewash, the windows were deeply 
 set and stone muUioned, and a solid, stone- 
 tiled porch sheltered the doorway from any 
 winds that might penetrate to the hollow of 
 that hidden valley. The Windows were shut 
 tight. There was no sign of any life or 
 movement about the place. The party of 
 men looked at one another, and the church- 
 warden amongst the farmers, the sergeant 
 of police, Lewis, and the corporal drew to- 
 gether. 
 
 "What is it to goodness, doctor?" said the 
 churchwarden. 
 
 "I can tell you nothing at all — except that 
 that poor man there has been pierced to the 
 heart," said Lewis. 
 
 "Do you think they are inside and they 
 
The Terror 
 
 will shoot us?" said another farmer. He 
 had no notion of what he meant by "they," 
 and no one of them knew better than he. 
 They did not know what the danger was, 
 or where it might strike them, or whether 
 it was from without or from within. They 
 stared at the murdered man, and gazed dis- 
 mally at one another. 
 
 "Come!" said Lewis, "we riiust do some- 
 thing. We must get into the house and see 
 what is wrong." 
 
 "Yes, but suppose they are at us while we 
 are getting in," said the sergeant. "Where 
 shall we be then. Doctor Lewis?" 
 
 The corporal put one of his men by the 
 gate at the top of the farmyard, another at 
 the gate by the bottom of the farmyard, and 
 told them to challenge and shoot. The doc- 
 tor and the rest opened the little gate of the 
 front garden and went up to the porch and 
 stood listening by the door. It was all dead 
 silence. Lewis took an ash stick from one 
 [i66] 
 
The Terror 
 
 of the farmers and beat heavily three times 
 on the old, black, oaken door studded with 
 antique nails. 
 
 He struck three thundering blows, and 
 then they all waited. There was no answer 
 from within. He beat again, and still si- 
 lence. He shouted to the people within, but 
 there was no answer. They all turned and 
 looked at one another, that party of quest 
 and rescue who knew not what they sought, 
 what enemy they were to encounter. There 
 was an iron ring on the door. Lewis turned 
 it but the door stood fast; it was evidently 
 barred and bolted. The sergeant of police 
 called out to open, but again there was no 
 answer. 
 
 They consulted together. There was 
 nothing for it but to blow the door open, and 
 some one of them called in a loud voice to 
 anybody that might be within to stand away 
 from the dqor, or they would be killed. 
 And at this very moment the yellow sheep- 
 [167] 
 
The Terror 
 
 dog came bounding up the yard from the 
 woods and licked their hands and fawned 
 on them and barked joyfully. 
 
 "Indeed now," said one of the farmers, 
 "he did know that there was something 
 amiss. . A pity it was, Thomas Williams, 
 that we did not follow him when he implored 
 us last Sunday." 
 
 The corporal motioned the rest of the 
 party back, and they stood looking fearfully 
 about them at the entrance to the porch. 
 The corporal disengaged his bayonet and 
 shot into the keyhole, calling out once more 
 before he fired. He shot and shot again; 
 so heavy and firm was the ancient door, so 
 stout its bolts and fastenings. At last he 
 had to fire at the massive hinges, and then 
 they all pushed together and the door lurched 
 open and fell forward. The corporal raised 
 his left hand and stepped back a few paces. 
 He hailed his two men at the top and bottom 
 of the farmyard. They were all right, they 
 said. And so the party climbed and strug- 
 [i68] 
 
The Terror 
 
 gled over the fallen door into the passage, 
 and into the kitchen of the farmhouse. 
 
 Young Grififith was lying dead before the 
 hearth, before a dead fire of white wood 
 ashes. They went on towards the "parlor," 
 and in the doorway of the room was the body 
 of the artist, Secretan, as if he had fallen 
 in trying to get to the kitchen. Upstairs 
 the two women, Mrs. Griffith and her daugh- 
 ter, a girl of eighteen, were lying together 
 on the bed in the big bedroom, clasped in 
 each others' arms. 
 
 They went about the house, searched the 
 pantries, the back kitchen and the cellars; 
 there was no life in it. 
 
 "Look!" said Dr. Lewis, when they came 
 back to the big kitchen, "look! It is as if 
 they had been besieged. Do you see that 
 piece of bacon, half gnawed through?" 
 
 Then they found these pieces of bacon, 
 cut from the sides on the kitchen wall, here 
 and there about the house. There was no 
 bread in the place, no milk, no water. 
 [169] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "And," said one of the farmers, "they had 
 the best water here in all Meirion. The well 
 is down there in the wood ; it is most famous 
 water. The old people did use to call it 
 Ffynnon Teilo; it was Saint Teilo's Well, 
 they did say." 
 
 "They must have died of thirst," said 
 Lewis. "They have been dead for days and 
 days." 
 
 The group of men stood in the big kitchen 
 and stared at one another, a dreadful per- 
 plexity in their eyes. The dead were all 
 about them, within the house and without 
 it; and it was in vain to ask why they had 
 died thus. The old man had been killed with 
 the piercing thrust of some sharp weapon; 
 the rest had perished, it seemed probable, 
 of thirst; but what possible enemy was this 
 that besieged the farm and shut in its in- 
 habitants? There was no answer. 
 
 The sergeant of police spoke of getting a 
 cart and taking the bodies into Forth, and 
 Dr. Lewis went into the parlor that Secretan 
 [170] 
 
The Terror 
 
 had used as a sitting-room, intending to 
 gather any possessions or effects of the dead 
 artist that he might find there. Half a 
 dozen portfoHos were piled up in one corner, 
 there were some books on a side table,, a fish- 
 ing-rod and basket behind the door — ^that 
 seemed all. No doubt there would be clothes 
 and such matters upstairs, and Lewis was 
 about to rejoin the rest of the party in the 
 kitchen, when he looked down at some scat- 
 tered papers lying with the books on the side 
 table. On one of the sheets he read to 
 his astonishment the words: "Dr. James 
 Lewis, Forth." This was written in a stag- 
 gering trembling scrawl, and examining the 
 other leaves he saw that they were covered 
 with writing. 
 
 The table stood in a dark corner of the 
 room, and Lewis gathered up the sheets of 
 paper and took them to the window-ledge 
 and began to read, amazed at certain phrases 
 that had caught his eye. But the manu- 
 script was in disorder; as if the dead man 
 [171J 
 
The Terror 
 
 who had written it had not been equal to 
 the task of gathering the leaves into their 
 proper sequence; it was some time before 
 the doctor had each page in its place. This 
 was the statement that he read, with ever- 
 growing wonder, while a couple of the farm- 
 ers were harnessing one of the horses in the 
 yard to a cart, and the others were bringing 
 down the dead women. 
 
 "I do not think that I can last much longer. 
 We shared out the last drops of water a 
 long time ago. I do not know how many 
 days ago. We fall asleep and dream and 
 walk about the house in our dreams, and I 
 am often not sure whether I am awake or 
 still dreaming, and so the days and nights 
 are confused in my mind. I awoke not long 
 ago, at least I suppose I awoke and found 
 I was lying in the passage. I had a con- 
 fused feeling that I had had an awful dream 
 which seemed horribly real, and I thought 
 for a moment what a relief it was to know 
 [172] 
 
The Terror 
 
 that it wasn't true, whatever it might have 
 been. I made up my mind to have a good 
 long walk to freshen myself up, and then I 
 looked round and found that I had been lying 
 on the stones of the passage ; and it all came 
 back to me. There was no walk for me. 
 
 "I have not seen Mrs. Griffith or her 
 daughter for a long while. They said they 
 were going upstairs to have a rest. I heard 
 them moving about the room at first, now 
 I can hear nothing. Young Griffith is lying 
 in the kitchen, before the hearth. He was 
 talking to himself about the harvest and the 
 weather when I last went into the kitchen. 
 He didn't seem to know I was there, as he 
 went gabbling on in a low voice very fast, 
 and then he began to call the dog. Tiger. 
 
 "There seems no hope for any of us. We 
 are in the dream of death . . ." 
 
 Here the rrianuscript became unintelligible 
 for half a dozen lines. Spcretan had writ- 
 ten the words "dream of death" three or four 
 times over. He had begun a fresh word and 
 [173] 
 
The Terror 
 
 had scratched it out and then followed 
 strange, unmeaning characters, the script, as 
 Lewis thought, of a terrible language. And 
 then the writing became clear, clearer than it 
 was at the beginning of the manuscript, and 
 the sentences flowed more easily, as if the 
 cloud on Secretan's mind had lifted for a 
 while. There was a fresh start, as it were, 
 and the writer began again, in ordinary let- 
 ter-form : 
 
 "Dear Lewis, 
 
 "I hope you will excuse all this confusion 
 and wandering. I intended to begin a 
 proper letter to you, and now I find all that 
 stuff that you have been reading — if this 
 ever gets into your hands. I have not the 
 energy even to tear it up. If you read it 
 you will know to what a sad pass I had come 
 when it was written. It looks like delirium 
 or a bad dream, and even now, though my 
 mind seems to have cleared up a good deal, 
 I have to hold myself in tightly to be sure 
 [174] 
 
The Terror 
 
 that the experiences of the last days in this 
 awful place are true, real things, not a long 
 nightmare from which I shall wake up pres- 
 ently and find myself in my rooms at Chel- 
 sea. 
 
 "I have said of what I am writing, 'if it 
 ever gets into your hands,' and I am not at 
 all sure that it ever will. If what is hap- 
 pening here is happening everywhere else, 
 then I suppose, the world is coming to an 
 end. . I cannot understand it, even now I 
 can hardly believe it. I know that I dream 
 such wild dreams and walk in such mad 
 fancies that I have to look out and look about 
 me to make sure that I am not still dream- 
 ing. 
 
 "Do you remember that talk we had about 
 two months ago when I dined with you? 
 We got on, somehow or other, to space and 
 time, and I think we agreed that as soon as 
 one tried to reason about space and time one 
 was landed in a maze of contradictions. 
 You said something to the effect that it was 
 [175] 
 
The Terwr 
 
 very curious but this was just like a dream. 
 'A man will sometimes wake himself from 
 his crazy dream/ you said, 'by realizing that 
 he is thinking nonsense.' And we both won- 
 dered whether these contradictions that one 
 can't avoid if one begins to think of time 
 and space may not really be proofs that the 
 whole of life is a dream, and the moon and 
 the stars bits of nightmare. I have often 
 thought over that lately. I kick at the walls 
 as Dr. Johnson kicked at the stone, to make 
 sure that the things about me are there. 
 And then that other question gets into my 
 mind— is the world really coming to an end, 
 the world as we have always known it ; and 
 what on earth will this new world be like? 
 I can't imagine it ; it's a story like Noah's Ark 
 and the Flood. People used to talk about 
 the end of the world and fire, but no one 
 ever thought of anything like this. 
 
 "And then there's another thing that 
 bothers me. Now and then I wonder 
 whether we are not all mad together in this 
 [176] 
 
The Terror 
 
 house. In spite of what I see and know, or, 
 perhaps, I should say, because what I see 
 and know is so impossible, I wonder whether 
 we are not all suffering from a delusion. 
 Perhaps we are our own gaolers, and we are 
 really free to go out and live. Perhaps what 
 we think we see is not there at all. I be- 
 lieve I have heard of whole families going 
 mad together, and I may have come under 
 the influence of the house, having lived in it 
 for the last four months. I know there have 
 been people who have been kept alive by their 
 keepers forcing food down their throats, be- 
 cause they are quite sure that their throats 
 are closed, so that they feel they are unable 
 to swallow a morsel. I wonder now and 
 then whether we are all like this in Treff 
 Loyne ; yet in my heart I feel sure that it is 
 not so. 
 
 "Still, I do not want to leave a madman's 
 letter behind me, and so I will not tell you 
 the full story of what I have seen, or believe 
 I have seen. If I am a sane man you will be 
 
The Terror 
 
 able to fill in the blanks for yourself from 
 your own knowledge. If I am mad, burn 
 the letter and say nothing about it. Or per- 
 haps — and indeed, I am not quite sure — I 
 may wake up and hear Mary Griffith calling 
 to me in her cheerful sing-song that break- 
 fast will be ready 'directly, in a minute,' and 
 I shall enjoy it and walk over to Forth and 
 tell you the queerest, most horrible dream 
 that a man ever had, and ask what I had bet- 
 ter take. 
 
 "I think that it was on a Tuesday that we 
 first noticed that there was something queer 
 about, only at the time we didn't know that 
 there was anything really queer in what we 
 noticed. I had been out since nine o'clock 
 in the morning trying to paint the marsh, 
 and I found it a very tough job. I came 
 home about five or six o'clock and found the 
 family at Treff Loyne laughing at old Tiger, 
 the sheepdog. He was making short runs 
 from the farmyard to the door of the house, 
 barking, with quick, short yelps. Mrs. Grif- 
 [178] 
 
The Terror 
 
 fith and Miss Griffith were standing by the 
 porch, and the dog would go to them, look in 
 their faces, and then run up the farmyard 
 to the gate, and then look back with that 
 eager yelping bark, as if he were waiting for 
 the women to follow him. Then, again and 
 again, he ran up to them and tugged at their 
 skirts as if he would pull them by main force 
 away from the house. 
 
 "Then the men came home from the fields 
 and he repeated this performance. The dog 
 was running all up and down the farmyard, 
 in and out of the barn and sheds yelping, 
 barking; and always with that eager run to 
 the person he addressed, and running away 
 directly, and looking back as if to see whether 
 we were following him. When the house- 
 door was shut and they all sat down to sup- 
 per, he would give them no peace, till at last 
 they turned him out of doors. And then he 
 sat in the porch and scratched at the door 
 with his claws, barking all the while. When 
 the daughter brought in my meal, she said: 
 [179] 
 
The Terror 
 
 'We can't think what is come to old Tiger, 
 and indeed, he has always been a good dog, 
 too.' 
 
 "The dog barked and yelped and whined 
 and scratched at the door all through the 
 evening. They let him in once, but he 
 seemed to have become quite frantic. He 
 ran up to one member of the family after 
 another; his eyes were bloodshot and his 
 mouth was foaming, and he tore at their 
 clothes till they drove him out again into 
 the darkness. Then he broke into a long, 
 lamentable howl of anguish, and we heard 
 no more of him." 
 
 [i8o] 
 
CHAPTER XIII The Last Words 
 
 of Mr. Secretan 
 
 I 
 
 **"^ SLEPT ill that night. I awoke 
 again and again from uneasy 
 dreams, and I seemed in my sleep 
 to hear strange calls and noises and a sound 
 of murmurs and beatings on the door. 
 There were deep, hollow voices, too, that 
 echoed in my sleep, and when I woke I could 
 hear the autumn wind, mournful, on the hills 
 above us. I started up once with a dreadful 
 scream in my ears; but then the house was 
 all still, and I fell again into uneasy sleep. 
 "It was soon after dawn when I finally 
 roused myself. The people in the house 
 were talking to each other in high voices, 
 arguing about something that I did not un- 
 derstand. 
 
 " Tt is those damned gipsies, I tell you,' 
 said old Griffith. 
 
 [i8i] 
 
The Terror 
 
 " 'What would they do a thing like that 
 for?' asked Mrs. Griffith. If it was steal- 
 ing now — ' " 
 
 " 'It is more likely that John Jenkins has 
 done it out of spite,' said the son. 'He said 
 that he would remember you when we did 
 catch him poaching.' 
 
 "They seemed puzzled and angry, so far 
 as I could make out, but not at all fright- 
 ened. I got up and began to dress. I don't 
 think I looked out of the window. The glass 
 on my dressing-table is high and broad, and 
 the window is small ; one would have to poke 
 one's head round the glass to see anything. 
 
 "The voices were still arguing downstairs. 
 I heard the old man say, 'Well, here's for 
 a beginning anyhow,' attd then the door 
 slammed. 
 
 "A minute later the old man shouted, I 
 think, to his son. Then there was a great 
 noise which I will not describe more par- 
 ticularly, and a dreadful screaming and cry-, 
 ing inside the house and a sound of rushing 
 [182] 
 
The Terror 
 
 feet. They all cried out at once to each 
 other. I heard the daughter crying, 'it is no 
 good, mother, he is dead, indeed they have 
 killed him,' and Mrs. Griffith screaming to 
 the girl to let her go. And then one of them 
 rushed out of the kitchen and shot the great 
 bolts of oak across the door, just as some- 
 thing beat against it with a thundering crash. 
 
 "I ran downstairs. I found them all in 
 wild confusion, in an agony of grief and 
 horror and amazement. They were like peo- 
 ple who had seen something so awful that 
 they had gone mad. 
 
 "I went to the window looking out on the 
 farmyard. I won't tell you all that I saw. 
 But I saw poor old Griffith lying by the pond, 
 with the blood pouring out of his side. 
 
 "I wanted to go out to him and bring him 
 in. But they told me that he must be stone 
 dead, and such things also that it was quite 
 plain that any one who went out of the house 
 would not live more than a moment. We 
 could not believe it, even as we gazed at the 
 [183] 
 
The Terror 
 
 body of the dead man ; but it was there. I 
 used to wonder sometimes what one would 
 feel like if one saw an apple drop fr6m the 
 tree and shoot up into the air and disappear. 
 I think I know now how one would feel. 
 
 "Even then we couldn't believe that it 
 would last. We were not seriously afraid 
 for ourselves. We spoke of getting out in 
 an hour or two, before dinner anyhow. It 
 couldn't last, becatise it was impossible. In- 
 deed, at twelve o'clock young Griffith said 
 he would go down to the well by the back 
 way and draw another pail qf water. I went 
 to the door and stood by it. He had not 
 gone a dozen yards before they were on him. 
 He ran for his life, and we had all we could 
 do to bar the door in time. And then I be- 
 gan to get frightened. 
 
 "Still we could not believe in it. Some- 
 body would come along shouting in an hour 
 or two and it would all melt away and vanish. 
 There could not be any real danger. There 
 was plenty of bacon in the house, and half 
 [184] 
 
The Terror 
 
 the weekly baking of loaves and some beer 
 in the cellar and a pound or so of tea, and a 
 whole pitcher of water that had been drawn 
 from the well the night before. We could 
 do all right for the day and in the morning 
 it would have all gone away. 
 
 "But day followed day and it was still 
 there. I knew Treff Loyne was a lonely 
 place — that was why I had gone there, to 
 have a long rest from all the jangle and rat- 
 tle and turmoil of London, that makes a man 
 alive and kills him too. I went to Treff 
 Loyne because it was buried in the narrow 
 valley under the ash trees, far away from 
 any track. There was not so much as a 
 footpath that was near it; no one ever came 
 that way. Young Griffith had told me that 
 it was a mile and a half to the nearest house, 
 and the thought of the silent peace and re- 
 tirement of the farm used to be a delight 
 to me. 
 
 "And now this thought came back with- 
 out delight, with terror. Griffith thought 
 [i8s] 
 
The Terror 
 
 that a shout might be heard on a still night 
 up away on the Allt, 'if a man was listening 
 for it,' he added, doubtfully. My voice was 
 clearer and stronger than his, and on the 
 second night I said I would go up to my 
 bedroom and call for help through the open 
 window. I waited till it was all dark and 
 still, and looked out through the window be- 
 fore opening it. And then I saw over the 
 ridge of the long barn across the yard what 
 looked like a tree, though I knew there was 
 no tree there. It was a dark mass against 
 the sky, with wide-spread boughs, a tree of 
 thick, dense growth. I wondered what this 
 could be, and I threw open the window, not 
 only because I was going to call for help, 
 but because I wanted to see more clearly 
 what the dark growth over the barn really 
 was. 
 
 "I saw in. the depth of the dark of it 
 points of fire, and colors in light, all glow- 
 ing and moving, and the air trembled. I 
 stared out into the night, and the dark tree 
 [i86] 
 
The Terror 
 
 lifted over the roof of the barn and rose up 
 in the air and floated towards me. I did 
 not move till at the last moment when it was 
 close to the house; and then I saw what it 
 was and banged the window down only just 
 in time. I had to fight, and I saw the tree 
 that was like a burning cloud rise up in the 
 night and sink again and settle over the 
 barn. 
 
 "I told them downstairs of this. They 
 sat with white faces, and Mrs, Griffith said 
 that ancient devils were let loose and had 
 come out of the trees and out of the old hills 
 1 because of the wickedness that was on the 
 earth. She began to murmur something to 
 herself, something that sounded to me like 
 broken-down Latin. 
 
 "I went lip to my room again an hour 
 later, but the dark tree swelled over the barn. 
 Another day went by, and at dusk I looked 
 out, but the eyes of fire were watching me. 
 I dared not open the window. 
 
 "And then I thought of another plan. 
 [187] 
 
The Terror 
 
 There was the great old fireplace, with the 
 round Flemish chimney going high above 
 the house. I£ I stood beneath it, and shouted 
 I thought perhaps the sound might be car- 
 ried better than if I called out of the win- 
 dow ; for all I knew the round chimney might 
 act as a sort of megaphone. Night after 
 night, then, I stood in the hearth and called 
 for help from nine o'clock to eleven. I 
 thought of the lonely place, deep in the val- 
 ley of the ashtrees, of the lonely hills and 
 lands about it, I thought of the little cot- 
 tages far away and hoped that my voice 
 might reach to those within them. I 
 thought of the winding lane high on the 
 AUt, and of the few men that came there of 
 nights ; but I hoped that my cry might come 
 to one of them. 
 
 "But we had drunk up the beer, and we 
 would only let ourselves have water by little 
 drops, and on the fourth night my throat 
 was dry, and I began to feel strange and 
 weak; I knew that all the voice I had in my 
 [i88] 
 
The Terror 
 
 lungs would hardly reach the length of the 
 field by the farm. 
 
 "It was then we began to dream of wells 
 and fountains, and water coming very cold, 
 in little drops, out of rocky places in the mid- 
 dle of a cool wood. We had given up all 
 meals; now and then one would cut a lump 
 from the sides of bacon on the kitchen wall 
 and chew a bit of it, but the saltness was like 
 fire. 
 
 "There was a great shower of rain one 
 night. The girl said we might open a win- 
 dow and hold out bowls and basins and catch 
 the rain. I spoke of the cloud with burning 
 eyes. She said 'we will go to the window in 
 the dairy at the back, and one of us can get 
 some water at all events.' She stood up 
 with her basin on the stone slab in the dairy 
 and looked out and heard the plashing of the 
 rain, falling very fast. And she unfastened 
 the catch of the window and had just opened 
 it gently with one hand, for about an inch, 
 and had her basin in the other hand. 'And 
 [189] 
 
The Terror 
 
 then,' said she, 'there was something that 
 began to tremble and shudder and shake as 
 it did when we went to the Choral Festival 
 at St. Teilo's, and the organ played, and 
 there was the cloud and the burning close 
 before me.' 
 
 "And then we began to dream, as I say. 
 I woke up in my sitting-room one hot after- 
 noon when the sun was shining, and I had 
 been looking and searching in my dream all 
 through the house, and I had gone down to 
 the old cellar that wasn't used, the cellar with 
 the pillars and the vaulted room, with an 
 iron pike in my hand. Something said to 
 me that there was water there, and in my 
 dream I went to a heavy stone by the middle 
 pillar and raised it up, and there beneath was 
 a bubbling well of cold, clear water, and I 
 had just hollowed my hand to drink it when 
 I woke. I went into the kitchen and told 
 young Griffith. I said I was sure there was 
 water there. He shook his head, but he took 
 up the great kitchen poker and we went down 
 [190] 
 
The Terror 
 
 to the old cellar. I showed him the stone by 
 the pillar, and he raised it up. But there 
 was no well. 
 
 "Do you know, I reminded myself of many 
 people whom I have met in life? I would 
 not be convinced. I was sure that, after all, 
 there was a well there. They had a butch- 
 er's cleaver in the kitchen and I took it down 
 to the old cellar and hacked at the ground 
 with it. The others didn't interfere with 
 me. We were getting past that. We 
 hardly ever spoke to one another. Each one 
 would be wandering about the house, up- 
 stairs and downstairs, each one of us, I sup- 
 pose, bent on his own foolish plan and mad 
 design, but we hardly ever spoke. Years 
 ago, I was an actoi^ for a bit, and I remem- 
 ber how it was on first nights; the actors 
 treading softly up and down the wings, by 
 their entrance, their lips moving and mut- 
 tering over the words of their parts, but 
 without a word for one another. So it was 
 with us. I came upon young Griffith one 
 [191] 
 
The Terror 
 
 evening evidently trying to make a subter- 
 ranean passage under one of the walls of 
 the house. I knew he was mad, as he knew 
 I was mad when he saw me digging for a 
 well in the cellar; but neither said anything 
 to the other. 
 
 "Now we are past all this. We are too 
 weak. We dream when we are awake and 
 when we dream we think we wake. Night 
 and day come and go and we mistake one 
 for another; I hear Griffith murmuring to 
 himself about the stars when the sun is high 
 at noonday, and at midnight I have found 
 myself thinking that I walked in bright sun- 
 lit meadows beside cold, rushing streams that 
 flowed from high rocks. 
 
 "Then at the dawn figures in black robes, 
 carrying lighted tapers in their hands pass 
 slowly about and about; and I hear great 
 rolling organ music that sounds as if some 
 tremendous rite were to begin, and voices 
 crying in an ancient song shrill from the 
 depths of the earth. 
 
 [192] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "Only a little while ago I heard a voice 
 which sounded as if it were at my very ears, 
 but rang and echoed and resounded as if 
 it were rolling and reverberated from the 
 vault of some cathedral, chanting in terrible 
 modulations. I heard the words quite 
 clearly. 
 
 "Incipit liber ires Domini Dei nostri. 
 (Here beginneth The Book of the Wrath of 
 the Lord our God. 
 
 "And then the voice sang the word Aleph, 
 prolonging it, it seemed through ages, and 
 a light was extinguished as it began the 
 chapter : 
 
 "In that day, saith the Lord, there shall be 
 a cloud over the land, and in the cloud a 
 burning and a shape of fire, and out of the 
 cloud shall issue forth my messengers; they 
 shall run all together, they shall not turn 
 aside; this shall be a day of exceeding bitter- 
 ness, without salvation. And on every high 
 hill, saith the Lord of Hosts, I will set my 
 [193] 
 
The Terror 
 
 sentinels, and my armies shall encamp in the 
 place of every valley; in the house that is 
 amongst rushes I will execute judgment, and 
 in vain shall they fly for refuge to the muni- 
 tions of the rocks. In the groves of the 
 woods, in the places where the leaves are as 
 a tent above them, they shall find the sword 
 of the slayer; and they that put their trust 
 in walled cities shall be confounded. Woe 
 unto the armed man, woe unto him that 
 taketh pleasure in the strength of his artil- 
 lery, for a little thing shall smite him, and 
 by one that hath no might shall he be brought 
 down into the dust. That which is low shall 
 be set on high; I will make the lamb and the 
 young sheep to pe as the lion from the swell- 
 ings of Jordan; they shall not spare, saith 
 the Lord, and the doves shall be as eagles on 
 the hill Engedi; none shall be found that may 
 abide the onset of their battle. 
 
 "Even now I can hear the voice roUing far 
 away, as if it came from the altar of a great 
 [194] 
 
The Terror 
 
 church and I stood at the door. There are 
 lights very far away in the hollow of a vast 
 darkness, and one by one they are put out. 
 I hear a voice chanting again with that end- 
 less modulation that climbs and aspires to 
 the stars, and shines there, and rushes down 
 to the dark depths of the earth, again to 
 ascend; the word is Zain." 
 
 Here the manuscript lapsed again, and 
 finally into utter, lamentable confusion. 
 There were scrawled lines wavering across 
 the page on which Secretan seemed to have 
 been trying to note the unearthly music that 
 swelled in his dying ears. As the scrapes 
 and scratches of ink showed, he had tried 
 hard to begin a new sentence. The pen had 
 dropped at last out of his hand upon the 
 paper, leaving a blot and a smear upon it. 
 
 Lewis heard the tramp of feet along the 
 passage; they were carrying out the dead to 
 the cart. 
 
 [195] 
 
CHAPTER XIV The End of 
 
 the Terror 
 
 DR. LEWIS maintained that we 
 should never begin to understand 
 the real significance of life until 
 we began to study just those aspects of it 
 which we now dismiss and overlook as ut- 
 terly inexplicable, and therefore, unimpor- 
 tant. 
 
 We were discussing a few months ago 
 the awful shadow of the terror which at 
 length had passed away from the land. I 
 had formed my opinion, partly from ob- 
 servation, partly from certain facts which 
 had been communicated to me, and the pass- 
 words having been exchanged, I found that 
 Lewis had come by very different ways to 
 the same end. 
 
 "And yet," he said, "it is not a true end, 
 [196] 
 
The Terror 
 
 or rather, it is like all the ends of human 
 inquiry, it leads one to a great mystery. We 
 must confess that what has happened might 
 have happened at any time in the history of 
 the world. It did not happen till a year ago 
 as a matter of fact, and therefore we made 
 up our minds that it never could happen ; or, 
 one would better say, it was outside the 
 range even of imagination. But this is our 
 way. Most people are quite sure that the 
 Black Death — otherwise the Plague — will 
 never invade Europe again. They have 
 made up their complacent minds that it was 
 due to dirt and bad drainage. As a matter 
 of fact the Plague had nothing to do with 
 dirt or with drains ; and there is nothing to 
 prevent its ravaging England to-morrow. 
 But if you tell people so, they won't believe 
 you. They won't believe in anything that 
 isn't there at the particular moment when 
 you are talking to them. As with the 
 Plague, so with the Terror. We could not 
 believe that such a thing could ever happen. 
 [197] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Rfemnant said, truly enough, that whatever 
 it was, it was outside theory, outside our 
 theory. Flatland cannot beheve in the cube 
 or the sphere." 
 
 I agreed with all this. I added that some- 
 times the world was incapable of seeing, 
 much less believing, that which was before 
 its own eyes. 
 
 "Look," I said, "at any eighteenth cen- 
 tury print of a Gothic cathedral. You will 
 find that the trained artistic eye even could 
 -not behold in any true sense the building that 
 was before it. I have seen an old print of 
 Peterborough Cathedral that looks as if the 
 artist had drawn it from a clumsy model, 
 constructed of bent wire and children's 
 bricks. 
 
 "Exactly; because Gothic was outside the 
 aesthetic theory (and therefore vision) of 
 the time. You can't believe what you don't 
 see: rather, you can't see what you don't 
 believe. It was so during the time of the 
 Terror. All this bears out what Coleridge 
 [198] 
 
The Terror 
 
 said as to the necessity of having the idea 
 before the facts could be of any service to 
 one. Of course, he was right; mere facts, 
 without the correlating idea, are nothing and 
 lead to no conclusion. We had plenty of 
 facts, but we could make nothing of them. 
 I went home at the tail of that dreadful pro- 
 cession from Treff Loyne in a state of mind 
 very near to madness. I heard one of the 
 soldiers saying to the other: There's no 
 rat that'll spike a man to the heart, Bill.' I 
 don't know why, but I felt that if I heard 
 any more of such talk as that I should go 
 crazy; it seemed to me that the anchors of 
 reason were parting. I left the party and 
 took the short cut across the fields into Forth. 
 I looked up Davies in the High Street and 
 arranged with him that he should take on 
 any cases I might have that evening, and 
 then I went home and gave my man his in- 
 structions to send people on. And then I 
 shut myself up to think it all out— if I 
 could. 
 
 [199] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "You must not suppose that my experi- 
 ences of that afternoon had afforded me the 
 sHghtest illumination. Indeed, if it had not 
 been that I had seen poor old Griffith's body 
 lying pierced in his own farmyard, I think 
 I should have been inclined to accept one 
 of Secretan's hints, and to believe that the 
 whole family had fallen a victim to a col- 
 lective delusion or hallucination, .and had 
 shut themselves up and died of thirst through 
 sheer madness. I think there have been 
 such cases. It's the insanity of inhibition, 
 the belief that you can't do something which 
 you are really perfectly capable of doing. 
 But; I had seen the body of the murdered 
 man and the wound that had killed him. 
 
 "Did the manuscript left by Secretan give 
 me no hint ? Well, it seemed to me to make 
 confusion worse , confounded. You have 
 seen it ; you know that in certain places it is 
 evidently mere delirium, the wanderings of 
 a dying mind. How was I to separate the 
 facts from the phantasms — ^lacking the key 
 [200] 
 
The Terror 
 
 to the whole enigma. Delirium is often a 
 sort of clpud-castle, a sort of magnified and 
 distorted shadow of actualities, but it is a 
 very difficult thing, almost an impossible 
 thing, to reconstruct the real house from the 
 distortion of it, thrown on the clouds of the 
 patient's brain. You see, Secretan in writ- 
 ing that extraordinary document almost in- 
 sisted on the fact that he was not in his 
 proper sense ; that for days he had been part 
 asleep, part awake, part delirious. How 
 was one to judge his statement, to separate 
 delirium from fact ? In one thing he stood 
 confirmed; you remember he speaks of call- 
 ing for help up the old chimney of Treff 
 Loyne ; that did seem to fit in with the tales 
 of a hollow, moaning cry that had been heard 
 upon the AUt : so far one could take him as 
 a recorder of actual experiences. And I 
 looked in the old cellars of the farm and 
 found a frantic sort of rabbit-hole dug by 
 one of the pillars; again he was confirmed. 
 But what was one to make of that story of 
 [201] 
 
The Terror 
 
 the chanting voice, and the letters of the 
 Hebrew alphabet, and the chapter out of 
 some unknown Minor Prophet? When one 
 has the key it is easy enough to sort out the 
 facts, or the hints of facts from the delu- 
 sions; but I hadn't the key on that Septem- 
 ber evening. I was forgetting the 'tree' 
 with lights and fires in it; that, I think, im- 
 pressed me more than anything with the feel- 
 ing that Secretan's story was, in the main, 
 a true story. I had seen a like appearance 
 down there in my own garden; but what 
 was it? 
 
 "Now, I was saying that, paradoxically, 
 it is only by the inexplicable things that life 
 can be explained. We are apt to say, you 
 know, 'a very odd coincidence' and pass the 
 matter by, as if there were no more to be 
 said, or as if that were the end of it. Well, 
 I believe that the only real path lies through 
 the blind alleys." 
 
 "How do you mean?" 
 
 "Well, this is an instance of what I mean. 
 [202] 
 
The Terror 
 
 I told you about Merritt, my brother-in-law, 
 and the capsizing of that boat, the Mary 
 Ann. He had seen, he said, signal lights 
 flashing from one of the farms on the coast, 
 and he was quite certain that the two things 
 were intimately connected as cause and ef- 
 fect. I thought it all nonsense, and I was 
 wondering how I was going to shut him up 
 when a big moth flew into the room through 
 that window, fluttered about, and succeeded 
 in burning itself alive in the lamp. That 
 gave me my cue ; I asked Merritt if he knew 
 why moths made for lamps or something of 
 the kind ; I thought it would be a hint to him 
 that I was sick of his flashlights and his 
 half-baked theories. So it was — ^he looked 
 sulky and held his tongue, 
 
 "But a few minutes later I was called out 
 by a man who had found his little boy dead 
 in a field near his cottage about an hour be- 
 fore. The child was so still, they said, that 
 a great moth had settled on his forehead and 
 only fluttered away when they lifted up the 
 [203] 
 
The Terror 
 
 body. It was absolutely illogical ; but it was 
 this odd 'coincidence' of the moth in my 
 lamp and the moth on the dead boy's fore- 
 head that first set nle on the track. I can't 
 
 say that it guided me in any real sense ; it 
 
 I 
 
 was more like a great flare of red pamt on a 
 
 wall; it rang up my attention, if I may say 
 so ; it was a sort of shock like a bang on the 
 big' drum. No doubt Merritt was talking 
 great nonsense that evening so far as his 
 particular instance went ; the flashes of light 
 from the farm had nothing to do with the 
 wreck of the boat. But his general prin- 
 ciple was sound ; when you hear a gun go oil 
 and see a man fall it is idle to talk of 'a 
 mere coincidence.' I think a very interest- 
 ing book might be written on this question : 
 I would call it 'A Grammar of Coincidence.' 
 "But as you will remember, from having 
 read my notes on the matter, I was called 
 in about ten days later to see a man named 
 Cradock, who had been found in a field near 
 his farm quite dead. This also was at night. 
 [204] 
 
The Terror 
 
 His wife found him, and there were some 
 very queer things in her story. She said 
 that the hedge of the field looked as if it were 
 changed; she began to be afraid that she 
 had lost her way and got into the wrong 
 field. Then she said the hedge was lighted 
 up as if there were a lot of glow-worms in 
 it, and when she peered over the stile there 
 seemed to be some kind of glimmering upon 
 the ground, and then the glimmering melted 
 away, and she found her husband's body 
 near where this light had been. Now this 
 man Cradock had been suffocated just as the 
 little boy Roberts had been suffocated, and 
 as that man in the Midlands who took a 
 short cut one night had been suffocated. 
 Then I remembered that poor Johnnie Rob- 
 erts had called out about 'something shiny' 
 over the stile just before he played truant. 
 Then, on my part, I had to contribute the 
 very remarkable sight I witnessed here, as 
 I looked down over the garden; the appear- 
 ance as of a spreading tree where I knew 
 [205] 
 
The Terror 
 
 there was no such tree, and then the shm- 
 ing and burning of lights and moving colors. 
 Like the poor child and Mrs. Cradock, I had 
 seen something shiny, just as some man in 
 Stratfordshire had seen a dark cloud with 
 points of fire in it floating over the trees. 
 And Mrs. Cradock thought that the shape of 
 the trees in the hedge had changed. 
 
 "My mind almost uttered the word that 
 was wanted; but you see the difficulties. 
 This set of circumstances cbuld not, so far 
 as I could see, have any relation with the 
 other circumstances of the Terror. How 
 could I connect all this with the bombs and 
 machine-guns of the Midlands, with the 
 armed men who kept watch about the muni- 
 tion shops by day and night. Then there 
 was the long list of people here who had 
 fallen over the cliffs or into the quarry ; there 
 were the cases of the men stifled in the slime 
 of the marshes; there was the affair of the 
 family murdered in front of their cottage 
 on the Highw.ay; there was the capsized 
 faoe] 
 
The Terror 
 
 Mary Ann. I could not see any thread that 
 could bring all these incidents together ; they 
 seemed to me to be hopelessly disconnected. 
 I could not make out any relation between 
 the agency that beat out the brains of the 
 Williams's and the agency that overturned 
 the boat. I don't know, but I think it's very 
 likely if nothing more had happened that I 
 should have put the whole thing down as 
 an unaccountable series of crimes and acci- 
 dents which chanced to occur in Meirion in 
 the summer of 191 5. Well, of course, that 
 would have been an impossible standpoint 
 in view of certain incidents in Merritt's 
 story. Still, if one is confronted by the in- 
 soluble, one lets it go at last. If the mystery 
 is inexplicable, one pretends that there isn't 
 any mystery. That is the justification for 
 what is called free thinking. 
 
 "Then came that extraordinary business 
 
 of Treff Loyne. I couldn't put that on one 
 
 side. I couldn't pretend that nothing 
 
 strange or out of the way had happened. 
 
 [207] 
 
The Terror 
 
 There was no getting over it of getting 
 round it. I had seen with my eyes that there 
 was a mystery, and a most horrible mys- 
 tery. I have forgotten my logic, but one 
 might say that Treff Loyne demonstrated 
 the existence of a mystery in the figure of 
 Death. 
 
 "I took it all home, as I have told you, 
 and sat down for the evening before it. It 
 appalled me, not only by its horror, but here 
 again by the discrepancy between its terms. 
 Old Griffith, so far as I could judge, had been 
 killed by the thrust of a pike or perhaps of 
 a sharpened stake : how could one relate this 
 to the burning tree that had floated over 
 the ridge of the barn. It was as if I said 
 to you: 'here is a man drowned, and here i 
 is a man burned alive : show that each death 
 was caused by the same agency!' And the 
 moment that I left this particular case of 
 Treff Loyne, and tried to get some light on 
 it from other instances of the Terror, I 
 would think of the man in the midlands who 
 [208] 
 
The Terror 
 
 heard the feet of a thousand men rustling 
 in the wood, and their voices as if dead men 
 sat up in their bones and talked. And then 
 I would say to myself, 'and how about 
 that boat overturned in a calm sea ?' There 
 seemed no end to it, no hope of any solution. 
 
 "It was, I believe, a sudden leap of the 
 mind that liberated me from the tangle. It 
 was quite beyond logic. I went back to that 
 evening when Merritt was boring me with 
 his flashlights, to the moth in the candle, and 
 to the moth on the forehead of poor Johnnie 
 Roberts. There was no sense in it; but I 
 suddenly determined that the child and Jo- 
 seph Cradock the farmer, and that un- 
 named Stratfordshire man, all found at 
 night, all asphyxiated, had been choked by 
 vast swarms of moths. I don't pretend even 
 now that this is demonstrated, but I'm sure 
 it's true. 
 
 "Now suppose you encounter a swarm of 
 these creatures in the dark. Suppose the 
 smaller ones fly up your nostrils. You will 
 [209] 
 
The Terror 
 
 gasp, for breath and open your mouth. 
 Then, suppose some hundreds of them fly 
 into your mouth, into your gullet, into your 
 windpipe, what will happen to you? You 
 will be dead in a very short time, choked, 
 asphyxiated." 
 
 "But the moths would be dead too. 
 They would be found in the bodies." 
 
 "The moths ? Do you . know that it is 
 extremely difficult to kill a moth with cyanide 
 of potassium? Take a frog, kill it, open its 
 stomach. There you will find its dinner of 
 moths and small beetles, and the 'dinner' will 
 shake itself and walk off cheerily, to resume 
 an entirely active existence. No ; that is no 
 difficulty. 
 
 "Well, now I came to this. I was shut- 
 ting out all the other cases. I was confin- 
 ing myself to those that came under the 
 one formula. I got to the assumption or 
 conclusion, whichever you like, that certain 
 people had been asphyxiated by the action 
 of moths. I had accounted for that extraor- 
 [210] 
 
The Terror 
 
 dinary appearance of burning or colored 
 lights that I had witnessed myself, when I 
 saw the growth of that strange tree in my 
 garden. That was clearly the cloud with, 
 points of fire in it that the Stratfordshire 
 man took for a new and terrible kind of 
 poison gas, that was the shiny something 
 that poor little Johntiie Roberts had seen 
 over the stile, that was the ghmmering light 
 that had led Mrs. Cradock to her husband's 
 dead body, that was the assemblage of terri- 
 ble eyes that had watched over Trefif Loyne 
 by night. Once on the right track I under- 
 stood all this, for coming into this room in 
 the dark, I have been amazed by the wonder- 
 ful burning and the strange fiery colors of 
 the eyes of a single moth, as it crept up the 
 pane of glass, outside. Imagine the effect of 
 myriads of such eyes, of the movement of 
 these lights and fires in a vast swarm of 
 moths, each insect being in constant motion 
 while it kept its place in the mass : I felt that 
 all this was clear and certain. 
 
 [211] 
 
The Terror 
 
 "Then the next step. Of course, we know 
 nothing really about moths ; rather, we know 
 nothing of moth reality. For all I know 
 there may be hundreds of books which treat 
 of moth and nothing but moth. But these 
 are scientific books, and science only deals 
 with surfaces; it has nothing to do with 
 realities — it is impertinent if it attempts to 
 do with realities. To take a very minor 
 matter; we don't even know why the moth 
 desires the flame. But we do know what 
 the moth does not do ; it does not gather itself 
 into swarms with the object of destroying 
 human life. But here, by the hypothesis, 
 were cases in which the moth had done this 
 very thing; the moth race had entered, it 
 seemed, into a malignant conspiracy against 
 the human race. It was quite impossible, no 
 doubt — that is to say, it had never happened 
 before — but I could see no escape from this 
 conclusion. 
 
 "These insects, then, were definitely hos- 
 tile to man ; and then I stopped, for I could 
 
 [212] 
 
The Terror 
 
 not see the next step, obvious though it seems 
 to me now. I believe that the soldiers' scraps 
 of talk on the way to Treff Loyne and back 
 flung the next plank over the gulf. They 
 had spoken of 'rat poison,' of no rat being 
 able to spike a man through the heart; and 
 then, suddenly, I saw my way clear. If the 
 moths were infected with hatred of men, and 
 possessed the design and the power of com- 
 bining against him; why not suppose this 
 hatred, this design, this power shared by 
 other non-human creatures. 
 
 "The secret of the Terror might be con- 
 densed into a sentence: the animals had re- 
 volted against men. 
 
 "Now, the puzzle became easy enough; 
 one had only to classify. Take the cases 
 of the people who met their deaths by falling 
 over cliffs or over the edge of quarries. We 
 think of sheep as timid creatures, who al- 
 ways ran away. But suppose sheep that 
 don't run away; and, after all, in reason why 
 should they run away? Quarry or no 
 [213] 
 
The Terror 
 
 quarry, cliff or no cliff; what would happen 
 to you if a hundred sheep ran after you in- 
 stead of running from you? There would 
 be no help for it ; they would have you down 
 and beat you to death or stifle you. Then 
 suppose man, woman, or child near a cliff's 
 edge or a quarry-side, and a sudden rush of 
 sheep. Clearly there is no help; there is 
 nothing for it but to go over. There can be 
 no doubt that that is what happened in all 
 these cases. 
 
 "And again; you know the country and 
 you know how a herd of cattle will some- 
 times pursue people through the fields in a 
 solemn, stolid sort of way. They behave 
 as if they wanted to close in on you. Towns- 
 people sometimes get frightened and scream 
 and run ; you or I would take no notice, or at 
 the utmost, wave our sticks at the herd, 
 which will stop dead or lumber off. But 
 suppose they^don't lumber off. The mildest 
 old cow, remember, is stronger than any 
 man. What can one man or half a dozen 
 [214] 
 
The Terror 
 
 men do against half a hundred of these 
 beasts no longer restrained by that mysteri- 
 ous inhibition, which has made for ages the 
 strong the humble slaves of the weak? But 
 if you are botanizing in the marsh, like that 
 poor fellow who was staying at Forth, and 
 forty or fifty young cattle gradually close 
 round you, and refuse to move when you 
 shout and wave your stick, but get closer 
 and closer instead, and get you into the slime. 
 Again, where is your help ? If you haven't 
 got an automatic pistol, you must go down 
 and stay down, while the beasts lie quietly 
 on you for five minutes. It was a quicker 
 death for poor Griffith of Treff Loyne — one 
 of his own beasts gored him to death with 
 one sharp thrust of its horn into his heart. 
 And from that morning those within the 
 house were closely besieged by their own cat- 
 tle and horses and sheep; and when those 
 unhappy people within opened a window to 
 call for help or to catch a few drops of rain 
 water to relieve their burning thirst, the 
 [215] 
 
The Terror 
 
 cloud waited for them with its myriad eyes 
 of fire. Can you wonder that Secretan's 
 statement reads in places like mania? You 
 perceive the horrible position of those people 
 in Treff Loyne; not only did they see death 
 advancing on them, but advancing with in- 
 credible steps, as if one were to die not only 
 in nightmare but by nightmare. But no one 
 in his wildest, most fiery dreams had ever 
 imagined such a fate. I am not astonished , 
 that Secretan at one moment suspected the 
 evidence of his own senses, at another sur- 
 mised that the world's end had come." 
 
 "And how about the Williams's who were 
 murdered on the Highway near here?" 
 
 "The horses were the murderers; the 
 horses that afterwards stampeded the camp 
 below. By some means which is still ob- 
 scure to me they lured that family into the 
 road and beat their brains out; their shod 
 hoofs were the instruments of execution. 
 And, as for the Mary Ann, the boat that was 
 capsized, I have no doubt that it was over- 
 [216] 
 
The Terror 
 
 turned by a sudden rush of the porpoises that 
 were gamboling about in the water of Lar- 
 nac Bay. A porpoise is a heavy beast — 
 half a dozen of them could easily upset a 
 light rowing-boat. The munition works? 
 Their enemy was rats. I believe that it has 
 been calculated that in 'greater London' the 
 number of rats is about equal to the number 
 of human beings, that is, there are about 
 seven millions of them. The proportion 
 would be about the same in all the great cen- 
 ters of population; and the rat, moreover, 
 is, on occasion, migratory in its habits. You 
 can understand now that story of the Semi- 
 ramis, beating about the mouth of the 
 Thames, and at last cast away by Arcachon, 
 her only crew dry heaps of bones. The rat 
 is an expert boarder of ships. And so one 
 can understand the tale told by the fright- 
 ened man who took the path by the wood 
 that led up from the new munition works. 
 He thought he heard a thousand men tread- 
 ing softly through the wood and chattering 
 [217] 
 
The Terror 
 
 to one another in some horrible tongue; what 
 he did hear was the marshaling of an army 
 of rats — their array before the battle. 
 
 "And conceive the terror of such an at- 
 tack. Even one rat in a fury is said to be 
 an ugly customer to meet ; conceive then, the 
 irruption of these terrible, swarming myri- 
 ads, rushing upon the helpless, unprepared, 
 astonished workers in the munition shops." 
 
 There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. 
 Lewis was entirely justified in these extraor- 
 dinary conclusions. As I say, I had arrived 
 at pretty much the same end, by different 
 ways ; but this rather as to the general situa- 
 tion, while Lewis had made his own particu- 
 lar study of those circumstances of the 
 Terror that were within his immediate pur- 
 view, as a physician in large practice in the 
 southern part of Meirion. Of some of the 
 cases which he reviewed he had, no doubt, 
 no immediate or first-hand knowledge; but 
 he judged these instances by their similarity 
 [218] 
 
The Terror 
 
 to the facts which had come under his per- 
 sonal notice. He spoke of the affairs of the 
 quarry at Llanfihangel on the analogy of the 
 people who were found dead at the bottom 
 of the cliffs near Forth, and he was no doubt 
 justified in doing so. He told me that, think- 
 ing the whole matter over, he was hardly 
 more astonished by the Terror in itself than 
 by the strange way in which he had arrived 
 at his conclusions. 
 
 "You know," he said, "those certain evi- 
 dences of animal malevolence which we knew 
 of, the bees that stung the child to death, the 
 trusted sheepdog's turning savage, and so 
 forth. Well, I got no light whatever from 
 all this; it suggested nothing to me — simply 
 because I had not got that 'idea' which 
 Coleridge rightly holds necessary in all in- 
 quiry; facts qua facts, as we said, mean noth- 
 ing and, come to nothing. You do not be- 
 lieve, therefore you cannot see. 
 
 "And then, when the truth at last ap- 
 peared it was through the whimsical 'coin- 
 [219] 
 
The Terror 
 
 cidence/ as we call such signs, of the moth 
 in my lamp and the moth on the dead child's 
 forehead. This, I think, is very extraor- 
 dinary." 
 
 "And there seems to have been one beast 
 that remained faithful; the dog at Treflf 
 Loyne. That is strange." 
 
 "That remains a mystery." 
 
 It would not be wise, even now, to describe 
 too closely the terrible scenes that were to 
 be seen in the munition areas of the north 
 and the midlands during the black months 
 of the Terror. Out of the factories issued 
 at black midnight the shrouded dead in their 
 coflfins, and their very kinsfolk did not know 
 how they had come by their deaths. All the 
 towns were full of houses of mourning, were 
 full of dark and terrible rumors ; incredible, 
 as the incredible reality. There were things 
 done and suffered that perhaps never will be 
 brought to light, memories and secret tradi- 
 tions of these things will be whispered in 
 [220] 
 
The Terror 
 
 families, delivered from father to son, grow- 
 ing wilder with the passage of the years, but 
 never growing wilder than the truth. 
 
 It is enough to say that the cause of the 
 Allies was for awhile in deadly peril. The 
 men at the front called in their extremity 
 for guns and shells. No one told them what 
 was happening in the places where these 
 munitions were made. 
 
 At first the position was nothing less than 
 desperate; men in high places were almost 
 ready to cry "mercy" to the enemy. But, 
 after the first panic, measures were taken 
 such as those described by Merritt in his ac- 
 count of the matter. The workers were 
 armed with special weapons, guards were 
 mounted, machine-guns were placed in po- 
 sition, bombs and liquid flame were ready 
 against the obscene hordes of the enemy, 
 and the "burning clouds" found a fire fiercer 
 than their own. Many deaths occurred 
 amongst the airmen; but they, too, were 
 given special guns, arms that scattered shot 
 
 [221] 
 
The Terror 
 
 broadcast, and so drove away the dark flights 
 that threatened the airplanes. 
 
 And, then, in the winter of 191 5-16, the 
 Terror ended suddenly as it had begun. 
 Once hiore a sheep was a frightened beast 
 that ran instinctively from a little child ; the 
 cattle were again solemn, stupid creatures, 
 void of harm; the spirit and the convention 
 of malignant design passed out of the hearts 
 of all the animals. The chains that they 
 had cast off for awhile were thrown again 
 about them. 
 
 And, finally, there comes the inevitable 
 "why ?" Why did the beasts who had been 
 humbly and patiently subject to man, or af- 
 frighted by his presence, suddenly know 
 their strength and learn how to league to- 
 gether, and declare bitter war against their 
 ajicient master ? 
 
 It is a most difficult and obscure question. 
 I give what explanation I have to give with 
 very great diffidence, and an eminent dis- 
 [222] 
 
The Terror 
 
 position to be corrected, if a clearer light can 
 be found. 
 
 Some friends of mine, for whose judg- 
 ment I have very great respect, are inclined 
 to think that there was a certain contagion 
 of hate. They hold that the fury of the 
 whole world at war, the great passion of 
 death that seems driving all humanity to de- 
 struction, infected at last these lower crea- 
 tures, and in place of their native instinct 
 of submission, gave them rage and wrath 
 and ravening. 
 
 This may be the explanation. I cannot 
 say that it is not so, because I do not pro- 
 fess to understand the working of the uni- 
 verse. But I confess that the theory strikes 
 me as fanciful. There may be a contagion 
 of hate as there is a contagion of small- 
 pox; I do not know, but I hardly believe 
 it. 
 
 In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, 
 the source of the great revolt of the beasts 
 [223] 
 
The Terror 
 
 is to be sought in '■a much subtler region of 
 inquiry. I beHeve that the subjects revolted 
 because the king abdicated. Man has 
 dominated the beasts throughout the ages, 
 the spiritual has reigned over the rational 
 through the peculiar quality and grace of 
 spirituality that men possess, that makes a 
 man to be that which he is. And when he 
 maintained this power and grace, I think it 
 is pretty clear that between him and the ani- 
 mals there was a certain treaty and alliance. 
 There was supremacy on the one hand, and 
 submission on the other; but at the same 
 time there was between the two that cordial- 
 ity which exists between lords and subjects 
 in a well-organized state. 1 know a social- 
 ist who maintains that Chaucer's "Canter- 
 bury Tales" give a picture of true democ- 
 racy. I do not know about that, but I see 
 that knight and miller were able to get on 
 quite pleasantly together, just because the 
 knight knew that he was a knight and the 
 miller knew that he was a miller. If the 
 [224] 
 
The Terror 
 
 knight had had conscientious objections to 
 his knightly grade, while the miller saw no 
 reason why he should not be a knight, I am 
 sure that their intercourse would have been 
 difficult, unpleasant, and perhaps murder- 
 ous. 
 
 So with man. I believe in the strength 
 and truth of tradition. A learned man said 
 to me a few weeks ago: "When I have to 
 choose between the evidence of tradition and 
 the evidence of a document, I always be- 
 lieve the evidence of tradition. Documents 
 may be falsified, and often are falsified ; tra- 
 dition .is never falsified." This is true; and, 
 therefore, I think, one may put trust in the 
 vast body of folklore which asserts that' there 
 was once a worthy and friendly alliance be- 
 tween man and the beasts. Our popular 
 tale of Dick Whittington and his Cat no 
 doubt represents the adaptation of a very 
 ancient legend to a comparatively modern 
 personage, but we may go back into the ages 
 and find the popular tradition asserting that 
 [225] 
 
The Terror 
 
 not only are the animals the subjects, but 
 also the friends of man. 
 
 All that was in virtufe of that singular 
 spiritual element in man which the rational 
 animals do not possess. Spiritual does not 
 mean respectable, it does not even mean 
 moral, it does not mean "good" in the or- 
 dinary acceptation of the word. It signifies 
 the royal prerogative of man, differentiating 
 him from the beasts. 
 
 For long ages he has been putting off this 
 royal robe, he has been wiping the balm of 
 consecration from his own breast. He has 
 declared, again and again, that he is not 
 spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of 
 the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. 
 He has vowed that he is not Orpheus but 
 Caliban. 
 
 But the beasts also have within them some- 
 thing which corresponds to the spiritual 
 quality in men — we are content to call it in- 
 stinct. They perceived that the throne was 
 vacant — not even friendship was possible be- 
 [226] 
 
The Terror 
 
 tween them and the self-deposed monarch. 
 If he were not king he was a sham, an im- 
 poster, a thing to be destroyed. 
 
 Hence, I think, the Terror. They have 
 risen once — they may rise again. 
 
 THE END 
 
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