At the kitchen door we halted and turned about. The pack was fighting above the carcasses, raising a hell of sound. Hobbs retched horribly beside me, making spasmodic efforts to vomit. My own brain was reeling, but I was not physically sick, as Hobbs was and as I had been upon coming face to face with the naked and bloodstained Grayce.
But more work awaited me. I pushed Hobbs through the door, following him inside. It was my part to telephone the doctor and to call the police from Tiltown. I found, however, that Muriel had already done it. I was glad enough that she had taken this duty from me. I doubt that I could, at that time, have played the ghastly hoax another step.
But after we had rested a few minutes, Hobbs went in search of another gun. Then he and I again issued onto the grounds. We must be engaged in striving to kill or drive off the dogs when the help we had summoned arrived. Nevertheless, afraid of killing too many of the beasts before they had finished their work, we did little more than fire a shot or two among them, trying to frighten them into dragging their victims farther and farther away from the vicinity of the garage and house. And we did succeed in killing two more of the creatures before the police, racing madly in a large open car, swept in from the road below.
They joined us with drawn guns. The beams from their torches showed them enough of the human fragments strewing the ground to make them fighting mad. The dogs, knowing themselves overmatched, and partly satiated now with the meat they had wolfed down and the blood they had lapped, broke away, making for the hills. Only two of the original dozen escaped, however, and those two were shot and killed on the following day by hill dwellers who had bruited among themselves a story that the entire Ormesby pack was mad.
But the scheme had succeeded. By the light of the torches we found and gathered up the poor fragments of what had once been living persons. The women, with Grayce among them, and as white and terrified as the rest, had huddled together in Barbara’s room. To questions of the police, Hobbs and I stammered a tale of seeing Ormes and Agnes return from their drive. They had put their car in the garage, the dogs being then penned up. Later, I said, I had lost sight of them, but Hobbs tremblingly told of seeing them making their way toward the kennels. The next thing any of us had known was the screaming of the woman and man as the pack bore them down. Then Hobbs and I had rushed out, I with the gun I had been carrying as protection against the very dogs I was now called on to shoot, Hobbs with the axe which had been standing in the kitchen. The tale seemed plausible enough. The bodies were literally torn limb from limb. The clothing was reduced to bloody and mud-smeared rags. The hole in Ormes’s skull, noticed at once by one of the policemen, was explained by Hobbs in the manner we had plotted. Doctor Barnes, who had arrived a few minutes after the police, put in his word of “I told you so.” There was nothing visible to anyone which lent the lie to our story. Hobbs’s agitation, my own, and that of the women weeping and wailing in the room above, all these were signs of no more emotion than we must have displayed had the thing befallen as we said it had. The police bundled up the battered and torn corpses in blankets and sheets, loaded them into their car and drove away with them to the undertaker’s rooms in Tiltown. Doctor Barnes found occupation for his professional services in attending to Hobbs and myself, both of whom were scratched by claws and bleeding from the cuts of slashing fangs. Moreover, having attended to us, he had still to administer sedatives to the hysterical women.
How the news of this horrible happening had spread among the dwellers of the hills, I shall never know. The police had scarcely arrived, however, before strangers began to appear. Some came in cars, others on foot. Some were people of fashion from the neighboring country houses, others were natives of the Berkshires. I begged of the police chief that he leave one of his men with us, as protection against these intrusive strangers, who pushed and crowded into the house as if it were no longer a private dwelling but some public place. This policeman, very sympathetic in the midst of our tragedy, went outside several times and drove the people away. I heard him haranguing the crowd, trying to shame them into some kind of orderly conduct, but when they continued trying to slip past his men and enter the house, he directed the officers to use clubs against them. That scattered them quickly enough. He returned to tell us that he would leave one man with us, but that he himself and the rest must return to Tiltown, since they comprised the entire protective force of that community.
With our policeman tramping round and round the house, chasing idlers out of the grounds and threatening to shoot trespassers, we began, at last, to find some quiet. Gray had led Grayce to the latter’s room, where the two of them now were. Barnes had ordered Barbara into bed, and she, without protest, obeyed him. Muriel visited Mrs. Hobbs, going from there to the kitchen on some errand, then joined Barnes and me, where we stood talking in the front hallway. I was having difficulty in convincing the good doctor that Gray had promised to rid Ormesby of the remaining dogs on the morrow.
“Pshaw!” he cried. “They ought never to have been here. This would never have happened if she’d taken my advice in the first place. But they’ve always had a savage pack here. I shouldn’t be s’prised if she gets another.”
I replied with something, I have forgotten what it was. Muriel, as I said, came from the rear room and joined us. The front door opened and the policeman guard came in, reporting that all seemed to be quiet outside. Perhaps five minutes, not more, passed while the four of us stood there, discussing the recent happenings in low whispers.
Then Hobbs, whiter than his own shroud will be and clad only in trousers and shirt, since he had not fully resumed the clothing he had been forced to remove for the doctor’s ministrations, burst upon us from the dining-room. He halted, seeming to be about to speak. But speech failed him. He could only lift an arm and point with it back along the way he had come. It was evident from his manner and agitation that something had happened in the kitchen.
Leading the way through the dining-room, I heard the others following me. Nothing was in the latter room, and I began to think that Hobbs might have been frightened by the same spectre I had seen. But he caught up with me and, still quite unable to speak, urged me toward the kitchen, gibbering unintelligibly beside me. So I went on.
A short passage led from the dining-room to the kitchen. It was not greater than three feet in width, so that while two persons could have walked abreast along its length, they naturally would prefer to go in single file. Hobbs stumbled along behind me, clutching at my arm, and after him came the policeman, the doctor, then Muriel. And I stopped dead and stared before me, glad that I was not alone. The kitchen was a shambles.
Seated in a chair, over the back of which her head had fallen, so that her slashed throat gaped open, with a thick stream of blood still springing from the severed arteries, was Alice Hobbs. Beside her on the floor lay a long red knife. She had slashed her left wrist and the under side of both knees. Then she had cut her throat. She would be dead within a minute or so.
Doctor Barnes and the policeman, more accustomed than I to such scenes, pushed past me and went to the dying creature’s side. I stepped staggeringly aside, my hand clutching at the kitchen table.
Something drew my eyes to the door opening to the stairs which rose from the kitchen to the neighborhood of the servants’ room. Barbara Ormes stood there. In the light which shone full upon her, she stood very straight and rigid, her eyes fixed upon the woman before her. She did not glance at me. Abruptly her lips opened and the red tongue came lickingly out between them. Then I saw that there was froth on her mouth, as there had been on the crazy Grayce’s mouth last night. And the eyes with which she stared at the horrid sight were as red as are the eyes of a wolf in darkness!
I shuddered. I well-nigh cried aloud. I clutched harder at the table for support. All this had occupied but a second of time, yet in that brief interval I had looked deeper into a woman’s soul than a sane woman ever permi
ts any man to look.
Something was under my fingers. Mechanically I picked it up and glanced at it. It was a folded bit of paper. It was a note of some kind. Without thinking much of it at that moment, I thrust it unseen by any of the others into a pocket of my trousers.
But a few minutes later, while the officer again telephoned the police at Tiltown, I found an opportunity of examining the note. It had been written with a pencil.
“Harry—I kilt Mrs. Ormes. And now she won’t let me alone. She will kill me, I know it. She cheated me and hid them from me. Maybe they are in the old iron place I don’t know. I cant tell. Im glad to get out of this. Good by.
Alice.”
XV
A coroner’s jury, having reviewed the remains of Ormond Ormes and Agnes, his wife, identification of which had been made by a succession of witnesses, beginning with Gray and ending with the policemen who had carried them to Tiltown, and witnesses to the manner of their deaths having been sworn and examined, the said jury had no difficulty in arriving at a verdict of accidental death caused by dogs owned by the deceased. It was by no means a surprising verdict. How could they have found otherwise? There was no reason to suspect that reputable persons, such as were the witnesses examined, had conspired to do away with the bodies of their friends or relations in any such manner as that described. One or two questions, put to and answered by one of Ormes’s business associates, proved that the man was on the verge of bankruptcy. No suspicion, then, that he might have been killed for his money entered anyone’s head. Our story that he had taken a long drive with his wife, probably for the purpose of discussing their financial affairs, seemed perfectly plausible.
The bodies were returned to custody of the nearest of kin, and Gray at once gave instructions to have them cremated. That part of the business was over. We could, we supposed, draw quiet breath for a while.
But suppose the police had come into possession of the note I had found on the kitchen table at Ormesby? If Alice Hobbs were afraid of one of the women about her, then there was cause for a further investigation of her suicide. If certain bonds were concealed on the premises, then Ormes may have been trying to find them, and this effort on his part may well have led to his murder by someone interested in keeping the bonds from him. And if Alice Hobbs had killed Agnes Ormes, then we had all lied, and the way would have been open for a full and complete investigation. There are moments when I shudder to think of how near we came to destruction from that cause.
As to Mrs. Hobbs herself, there was never the slightest doubt as to the means of her death. Even the police were convinced that it was clearly a case of suicide, with a motive of despondency induced, perhaps, by illness, even of temporary insanity caused by horror and fright following the terrific ending of her master and mistress.
Hobbs had his wife’s body cremated along with the others, and a single funeral ceremony sufficed for the interment of the three pots of ashes.
The rest of us returned to Ormesby . . . and to horror!
There is no doubt about it, human intellect is no match for human imagination. While yet swift action drove us in that house, we had no time for thinking. But let no man suppose that his moral nature can readily become hardened to the terrible deeds his hands may have had to do. I speak, of course, of fine-grained people, of men and women somewhat above the level of the brute. We had not been an hour at Ormesby, following the funerals, when the ghosts came out of their nooks and crannies and gibbered at us from the shadows of every room and passage.
Only Grayce, of all the six of us, seemed not to suffer. She appeared to be quite sane. She moved about the house, humming to herself and doing small tasks as if she had not a care in the world. As, indeed, she had not. Yet she was fully aware of nearly all that had taken place. It was not that her memory had blanked out for her the deeds of her own madness. She probably knew, even, that she had herself attacked the poor woman whose suicide must have been induced by fear of Grayce. For all this, however, she evinced absolutely no remorse. Doctor Barnes, who had seen but little of Grayce in the past, said to Gray that her sister’s vivacity astonished him. He had caught only furtive glimpses of the crazy girl in past years, since she had never been ill, supposing, as a medical man should, that she was probably not very bright and kept out of sight from a pathological access of shyness, while the family allowed her to so hide herself because they were ashamed of her. Now, however, seeing her as full of life and spirits as a young woman could well be, and seeing that she was quite as personable as Gray herself, the good man admitted himself somewhat puzzled by Grayce’s former attitude.
Gray, meanwhile, grew pale and thin. Lying awake in my bed at night, I frequently heard her walking the floor, unable to lie down and sleep. It was not Grayce who walked. More than once I had slipped up the stairs and listened at Gray’s door, and I knew that it was she. And if Gray’s nerves were to break and hysteria come upon her, I had small doubt that the lycanthropy in her blood must come to surface and have its will with the girl. After that, by so much as she had been saner than her sister, she probably would become the more dangerous. I dared not think of all that. I must leave Ormesby before that calamity fell upon it, and Muriel must go with me. Whether she wished to go or not, and whether we were to live together, or were not, she must leave Ormesby not later than my own leaving.
So I told myself. Nevertheless, I lingered there; and the days passed and grew into weeks and then into months. It was nearly the middle of October. I had returned to the house with the Ormes women because I could scarcely leave them alone immediately after having been so closely associated with them in deeds of horror. We all told ourselves and each other—all but Barbara, who merely smiled and said nothing—that a short time would bring about such a readjustment of life there as human beings must make with each other and with their surroundings if they are to live at all.
But Hobbs was a broken man. I did not think he grieved, overmuch, for the loss of his wife. I did not believe he had deeply loved the woman. It was the terrible end she had put to herself, and at so terrible a time, which had unnerved him, that and the things he had been obliged to carry through with me. And I had not yet showed him the note Alice had left. It was addressed to him. I had, perhaps, no right to withhold it. But while he stood within danger of apprehension by the authorities, I dared not add to the burden this additional weight of horror must put upon the man. Whatever loyalty he entertained for the Ormes family, it must have been somehow strengthened by the innate contempt which the sane feel for the insane and for those with lunatic blood in their veins. Hobbs, servant as he was, could yet in a way look down upon his employers, since pity, is a form of contempt. But to reveal to him that his own wife had been also insane, that she, too, had contracted the hideous lycanthropy which made a wolf of her, lustful to tear out the throats of living victims and to drink of their blood and to gnaw at their quivering flesh, that, I feared, might well prove to be too much for poor Hobbs’s already shattered nerves. So I did not tell him of the note prior to the inquest, and after that I still hesitated to do so. For what had Alice meant by “cheated”? And what by “the old iron place”? Here was fresh mystery. Was Hobbs himself in some way involved in it?
Yet there was probably a greater danger in keeping the note to myself. I am not made of iron. The thing was fast growing to monstrous proportions; it was a symbol of all the secrets at Ormesby. I could not live with those secrets and remain the man I had been. I must assert myself and leave this house, despite Gray’s eyes and regardless of Barbara’s frankly voiced plea that I remain. There was, for one thing, Muriel to consider. And there was, for another, Gray.
Gray was in love with me. Why shouldn’t I say it? I am not ashamed of it. She did not make such overtures as Grayce had made, nor such frank invitations to join her in an intrigue as Barbara’s eyes and attitude spoke of. None the less, since a thing like that is always known to either the man
or the woman who is the object of affection, I knew that Gray loved me. No, she did not speak, nor would she speak for many a long day. Perhaps, even, if I were to remain silent, she might never speak of it. But what I knew, I knew; and I could not continue (at least, I told myself this) living with her in the same house and long refrain from yielding to her unspoken call.
As for Muriel, she had said nothing of leaving Ormesby. Neither had she said that we—or either of us—ought to remain. I was not quite sure that I any longer understood Muriel. She saw, as I was well aware, Grayce’s open preference for the only man of her own generation with whom she had ever shared a single secret. Yet I do not think that Muriel troubled herself to be jealous of Grayce. She must have seen that Barbara ignored her presence to the extent of stroking my face and throat in playful fashion whenever she happened to stand or to sit near me, a position I avoided as well as I could. Nevertheless I hardly think that Muriel could have been angry with Barbara. She, Muriel, knew well enough that I could not sleep for thinking of Gray, pacing all night back and forth in her lonely room upstairs. She knew, too, that I left my bed and stole up there to listen, for she had several times opened her door and seen me prowling. She could not have supposed that I prowled with the intention of seeking an entrance to her own chamber. Yet, knowing Gray as she did, she could not have imagined that I sought entrance there, either.
For all that, and for all that pity and concern for Gray led me by day to give her tender words and soft glances, the thought that Muriel must be taken away from Ormesby gave me no peace. I said to myself that I no longer loved the woman as I had once loved her. I swore in my heart that I loved Gray Ormes. And yet for all of that, I knew that Muriel must be shielded and safe. She herself had said that she must have safety to live happily. She had of her own volition deprived herself of such protection as I could give. And I could not, for my life, rid my brain of the notion that I must shield her now and hereafter. Explain that on any logical basis, if you can.
Fingers of Fear Page 20
