by Jack Mann
“Another Angus, just the opposite of his father. Wild in his young days, gambled a lot in London till he had to fight a duel over cheating. He didn’t kill the other man, but nearly, and then cleared out and came back here. Managed to fascinate a Mrs. Kingsley, a lady of these parts, and either her husband knew nothing about it or else he let it go on—till he died, and this Angus married the widow. He died and left her a widow again, and on her deathbed she confessed that Angus had poisoned her first husband and she’d known he was a murderer when she married him. That was the time of what I’ll call the second appearance, which went right on, it seems, from the time Angus came back from his duel to the widow’s death. They left no children. A nephew took over.”
“How do you know all this?” Gees asked.
“The vicar of that time kept a diary,” Bird answered. “It’s not been printed, but I managed to get a look at it by asking one of his descendants and telling him I was collecting material for a history of Denlum. I still think I might write it, if I had somebody to put it into proper words for me, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“So we come to the nephew of the murderer,” Gees suggested.
“Thomas, he was,” Bird said. “Must have been an ordinary sort of man, or else a good sort, because I couldn’t find out anything much about him. That vicar’s diary mentioned him once or twice, in a casual sort of way. Coals and beef at Christmas, the sort of thing the squire of the parish used to do. His son, Captain Angus Hunter, was killed at Waterloo, and left this present Mr. Hunter’s grandfather a baby in arms for the mother to bring up. She didn’t make a very good job of it.”
“No?” Gees questioned interestedly.
“Not very,” Bird said. “You see, sir, he brings us to times I can talk about as things I’ve heard from people living then—my grandfather knew him, and lived to be a very old man—old enough for me to hear and remember a good many of the tales he told. Robert Hunter—that was the name they gave the baby—began as a thorough bad lot. When he was a young man, I suppose the squire of a parish used to look at the girls in it in a way that wouldn’t do nowadays, but he didn’t stop at that. One of his tenants nearly killed the squire over what happened with the tenant’s wife—and got turned out of his farm over it. Other cases of the sort, too. And drunken parties up at the house—every rip and bad lot for miles round welcome there, and never a decent woman would go near the place. His wife died in childbirth over her second son, but my grandfather said Robert Hunter had broken her heart before that, and she was glad to die. And I’d call that the time of the third appearance—my grandfather could tell tales of that, too—which lasted till this Robert Hunter died. I should say he was killed, because a horse threw him in Nightmare roadway and broke his neck there.”
“That is, between the big hawthorn hedges,” Gees suggested.
“It would be, but they weren’t so big, then, though I remember my father saying he’d never known ’em cut back, and they were pretty immense when I first remember ’em. May be two or three feet higher now than they were when I was a boy. Wonderful hedges, they are.”
“And this third appearance”—Gees remembered Hunter’s story of the man Henry Utter—“lasted how long? More than eighteen months?”
“Oh, a lot longer’n that,” Bird said. “More like seven or eight years, I’d think, from first to last. From time to time, that’d be. If it’d gone on all the time—well, I dunno what’d have happened, but it didn’t. The last of it was when they found the squire lying in that roadway with his neck broken, and my grandfather said that was what made the horse throw him. It might have been. I dunno.”
“Is there a man named Henry Utter in that part of the tale?”
“Utter? Oh, yes! He was son of the man who farmed Nightmare, then, and he and Squire Robert used to hunt in couples when they were lads—Robert was always about with him on some devilry or other. Then Utter got caught thieving and was sent to gaol, but even after that the squire had him up to the House and they got drunk together. Then Utter tried to rob the House one night, and fell on a knife of some sort getting out of a window. That was what was given out, and it wasn’t contradicted, but some people felt inclined to believe the squire got Utter there again, and the pair of ’em quarrelled. It was the squire who roused the house and showed ’em the body with the stuff Utter was supposed to have stolen in a sack beside him, except for what had fallen out of the sack. Utter’s bad character, and the fact that he’d served a sentence already for theft, helped to make the squire’s tale good, but—”
“An open question,” Gees remarked. “And—Utter’s death
didn’t put an end to this third series of appearances?”
“Lord, no, sir! It went on for a good year after that, till the squire was found with his neck broken in Nightmare roadway.”
“We will now have some more beer,” Gees said gravely.
Dispensing it gave him time to think, to question of himself why the present squire had distorted fact in telling his version of the appearances. For he felt sure that Bird was telling the truth, as he knew it. Resident as he was in the village, it would not pay the man to asperse the characters of the squire’s predecessors at Denlandham House, even to a stranger—and especially when that stranger had proclaimed himself here in Squire Hunter’s interests. Hunter had owned to a murderer, and a particularly nasty type of murderer at that, among his ancestors—though not in the direct line of precession from himself—but possibly, Gees reflected, he drew the line at revealing the real character of his own grandfather, and so attributed what Phil Bird called the “third appearance” to Utter’s presence in the village.
“And all these Hunters,” he remarked, “are direct descendants of that Robert who came back from the East and built Denlandham House.”
“Why, yes, sir, that is so,” Bird assented.
“Some bad, some good, some merely negligible.”
“I’d say a pretty average family for people in their station,” Bird observed thoughtfully. “One—two—three real bad ’uns, but nothing to be said against the rest of ’em, that I know.”
“There was a wife who left her husband for another man,” Gees pointed out. “Where does she come into this family history?”
“Not to any extent, she don’t,” Bird said. “Her husband was never squire here—he was a younger son and died abroad after she left him. Got drowned, trying to save a boy’s life in some foreign river.”
“Then the father of this present squire?” Gees asked.
“A right good sort,” Bird told him. “A good landlord to all his tenants, and well liked by everybody. I can just remember him with his long white whiskers and cherry-red face—he married late in life, and Squire Hunter that is now is a younger man than I am. They said his father took a terrible lot out of the estate, but he put it all back. Lived a quiet country life, and died respected.”
“Like that, eh?” Gees reflected. “Well, that’s that, and now, if you’re willing to go on talking a bit longer, I think we come to the marrow of the bone. Therefore, we will have some more beer, eh?”
“Very good beer, Nick Churchill keeps,” Bird observed gravely, as he watched the refilling of his glass.
CHAPTER 4
MAY NORRIS
“AN’ WHEN YOU SAY THE MARROW, sir, you mean the present Squire Hunter?” Phil Bird questioned, putting the big glass back on the table.
Gees shook his head. “Acting for him as I am, it wouldn’t be fair,” he said. “Also, I prefer to form my own opinion, without help. Be guided by the impression he makes on me. No. Kir Asa.”
“I see-e.” He dragged out the comment, thoughtfully. “Well, sir, I dunno if you ever was out that way. If I might ask, now, what doyou know about the tales they tell of Kir Asa—for I don’t believe anyone ever got there to get the whole truth? They are only tales.”
“And yet,” Gees said, “I believe somebody did get there, once, and put the facts of the place in the form of a no
vel. Coloured them, altered them, maybe, but left enough truth for me to remember the novel when Squire Hunter told me his story of what was happening here. And I got hold of a copy and looked it up—but there wasn’t much about the part of the story that concerns us now. So never mind what I know, but tell me all you learned to make you jump when I spoke that name.”
“It did seem a bit odd,” Bird admitted, “because it’s a long while ago since I heard that tale, and the man who told it me is dead. Also, I never heard anyone else mention the place, and he—the man I mean—only gave it at second-hand, and from a native yarn at that. Which I hadn’t any chance to verify or question about.”
“No?” Gees asked. “Tell it in your own way, Bird.”
“There’s plenty of time, sir”—he looked at the clock—“that is, unless you’re in a hurry to get to bed, which I take it you ain’t. The way I couldn’t verify it is, though I was out there for years, I never learned any more’n enough of what you might call kitchen Tamil an’ Malay to carry me along—never got really proficient in the native languages. Further to that, I don’t know whether this tale come first from a Malay, or a Dyak, or even a Kanaka, nor where Kir Asa is, beyond that it’s somewhere in the Pacific—if it’s anywhere, that is. Do you happen to know anything on that side, sir?”
Gees shook his head. “No more than you say you do,” he said.
“Most people here seem to think you could put the Pacific islands in a washing-bowl, and Macassar is next door to Singapore, but I realise that an island the size of Yorkshire would be no more than a pin-head on a fairly large map, and Kir Asa may be anywhere in a circle with a diameter of two thousand miles. That’s all I know as to where it is.”
“Same here, sir. The tale interested me, but I didn’t ask where to find the place in time. Else, I might have gone lookin’ for it, given I’d had enough money to spare the time to look. The way of it was this. I got stranded on the west coast of South America, a year or two after I’d started life as a rollin’ stone, an’ then shipped before the mast on a voyage that finished at Manilla. From there I got on a boat that took me among the islands—still before the mast, you understand, sir—and so came to ship on the Nusa Siri— I don’t know if you ever heard of her gettin’ sunk in a cyclone—driven on to a reef?”
“I did not,” Gees confessed.
“No. Things that look big on the spot, like the islands when you’re there, never so much as get heard of here. But I was one of the five that came out alive from the wreck of the Nusa Siri, an’ that was the end of my career before the mast. Because I fell in with a chap named West, an’ a very nice chap he was. His game was oil—prospectin’ for oil. Geologist, you’d call him. He’d made one big strike for some company or other, an’ then branched out on his own. Consultin’ geologist was what he called himself. His idea was to browse around in what he thought might be likely places, tryin’
to find seepages, as he called ’em, an’ then get an option an’ sell to some big company. Make more money that way, than if he was just workin’ for a company as he had been before, if he had any luck at all at it.”
“Making a gamble of his life, in fact,” Gees commented.
“I reckon it was that, takin’ a chance,” Bird agreed. “Well, he’d been in with another chap of the same kidney, but the other one died.”
“Was his name Carr?” Gees interposed.
“It sure was,” Bird answered with surprise. “But how did you know, sir? That wasn’t in the novel you read, was it?”
“It was,” Gees asserted, “and apparently there was more truth in the tale than I thought when I read it. Never mind—that’s about all it does give that’s material to your story. Carry on.”
Yet again he refilled the glasses, and Bird went on with his tale.
“Yes, Carr was the name of the one who’d died, an’ West wanted someone to take on with him to sort of fetch an’ carry while he scrabbled for signs of oil—not a man skilled at his own game, but just a handy man with a fryin’ pan an’ skillet, an’ able to shoot for the pot if we had to live on the country. That was me, an’ we got on very well together. As for the oil part of it, I learned a lot about seepages and anticlines and synclines and things I’ve mostly forgotten since, though I could still tell the difference between a Texan rig and a Galician over a boring. He spent money, did West, and made one good strike in the four years I was with him, and what I didn’t learn about leeches an’ snakes an’ jungle life generally wouldn’t be worth your notice. Four years of it, I had with him, always moving on somewhere else, always seeing new things. Suited me down to the ground, it did.”
“And then?” Gees asked. He took a drink himself and reached for the two-gallon jar: he had to tilt it some way to pour, now.
“Then he took to havin’ pains in his side,” Bird said, “an’ we headed for somewhere civilised. Got to Macassar, by which time he was much worse. It was abscess on the liver, an’ they operated. While he was seemin’ to be gettin’ better, I used to go an’ sit an’ talk to him to cheer him up an’ help him along all I could, an’ it was then he told me all he ever told of this tale of Kir Asa.”
“So now we come to the marrow,” Gees observed.
“Second-hand marrow, as I said before,” Bird pointed out, “for he’d had the tale from a native, an’ whether that native was a head-hunter or a civilised Malay, or even a Kanaka or Filipino, is more than I know. He wasn’t in the state when I could question too much, and I was more interested in the tale than where it happened, though I did think I’d ask more about it when he got better, in case I might take a chance on finding this place. But he never got better. After a time when he seemed to be on the up-grade every day, he suddenly went downhill again, and after he was dead they found there’d been two more abscesses on his liver in addition to the one they’d operated for.”
“And the tale as he told it?” Gees asked. “Did he say anything about a white man—or white men—having been to this place?”
“Not to me,” Bird answered. “No, but he told me that when he and Carr had been prospecting together, they’d run into a tribe of poison-dart people—the sort who use poison-darts, that is, but quite friendly. They made the proper presents to the head man—chief, or whatever he was called—and so got safe-conduct to browse around in his bit of country as long as they liked, and when the tribe got really pally with ’em, enough to offer ’em a temporary wife or two apiece for as long as they stayed in that part, he warned ’em against going north-east, and in the end told West why they’d better be careful about going that way. There was a tribe that lived in a big village—a stone village, this head man said—and they wouldn’t have anything to do with strangers, either white or black or brown. Killed ’em, one time, if they got to the village. But, on top of that, they never got there, because these people trained troops of big monkeys to go for ’em and wipe ’em out. I counted that part of the tale too tall altogether. You might train ourang-outang to some tricks, but I don’t see using ’em as troops.”
“Let it pass, then,” Gees said, “though that was part of what I read—one herd as part of the guard over the place.”
“Well, sir, I just shouted for the salt-cellar, over that. And the head man told West there was another sort of guard, one that no woman, especially, could pass. Only he called it a place, not a guard—the place where ghosts chase women, was what he told West it was. Enough to keep his sort of man away, too, because you won’t find any of the uncivilised or partly civilised people of that part of the world facing up to anything they can’t place as natural—anything at all spooky. There was a place, he told West, where these ghosts swarmed, on the way to Kir Asa, and if you didn’t starve or get killed before you got to that place, you had to face crowds of ’em. And no woman could face ’em and live—or else, if it should happen that one did live after coming up against these ghosts, the tribe killed her, reckoned her not fit to live. Not for immorality, but because these things, their wit
ch doctors and people believed, put evil spirits in her which couldn’t be got out again—made her a danger to the tribe if she went on living.”
“Then the tribe had been up against the things,” Gees suggested.
“West didn’t find that out—or if he did, he didn’t tell me,” Bird answered, “but they must have been at some time or other, to make that rule about killing any women who’d come up against ’em. And one thing, West said, that head man insisted on. Neither spears nor poison darts would harm these things. They were evil spirits, not men.”
