by James Doig
“Three more to pass, and we’re all right,” grunted Mayence.
“Look out! Shove off!” A barge drifting beam-on lay in our path. Vidal howled, thrust out a leg pushing with all his might. We bumped once, and went clear without receiving boarders. I needn’t describe what we glimpsed in passing, nor what we presently saw as we circled in the swirl of the Cannon Street railway bridge; suffice it to say that many had sought refuge upon its floating fenders—in vain.
Below was a red flare of flaming warehouses belching showers of sparks, yet none reached us, and we whirled blindly on in the black, smothering smoke blanket, passed beneath London Bridge without seeing it, and narrowly missed running full tilt into an anchored boat, perilously laden with folks, who yelled in chorus as we rasped across their cable; two men with oars out tugged dementedly, another fool struck wildly with a boathook, smote his iron deep into one of our planks and nearly capsized the lot.
“Let go, you idiot!” roared Mayence, whilst the water licked their gunwale, and, fortunately for them, he obeyed, and we parted company, losing sight of them instantly.
Vidal levered the hook clear and crouched ready to fend off from what might come next. With ebb and current together the stream was a race, and we should have fared badly had we encountered anything moored; but our amazing good fortune held, and though we caught sight of many craft, and heard voices all about us, we kept clear of everything ’til, about the neighbourhood of Deptford, the smoke thinned and we could see our fellow-men once more.
Either margin of the river was lined with people standing in the water, knee-deep, waist-deep, up to the neck; beyond these a floating fringe, then boats and rafts, all loaded nearly to sinking; and the voice of their misery was a continuous giant groan, a deep, plaintive note of despair, such as I hope never to hear again. Of the people in boats around, none heeded us, except to curse when we fouled them; but after I had picked up the blade of a broken oar, we kept a better course, and had no more collisions.
“We must get as far down as we can before the tide turns,” Mayence explained; and we paddled our best ’til in the broad reach a little below Greenwich, we met a flotilla of torpedo boats. Half dead with fatigue, blistered all over by the oil which had saved our lives at the expense of our skins, we were hauled aboard the first, and stowed in the narrow quarters below, already crowded with refugees, whilst the boats steamed into the smoky pall to rescue all they might, and when they were loaded, dropped down river and decanted us into the cruisers, battleships, and liners anchored about Tilbury.
All night the work went on, and all night and for many days thereafter London blazed unchecked. Of a forlorn hope of bluejackets who went ashore with the intention of blowing up buildings to stop its progress, only two returned, and by the end of a week a great part of the Empire city lay in ruins.
On the night of our rescue, our cruiser set out in company with a fleet of all kinds of vessels, and in the early morning we were landed at Yarmouth, which for the moment was out of the danger zone, and thence we went by train to Glasgow, where I had some friends. The journey took over two days, so you may guess the congestion and confusion that reigned everywhere. I believe that the Norfolk Broads, the Fen country, and many sheltered bays and estuaries grew populous, thousands of people returning to the primitive style of lake dwellings, and building themselves huts upon piles or rafts.
But the most part believed only in flight, and the roads were black with fugitive multitudes who could find no place on the overburdened railroads; if the ants had followed up their first onslaught with the speed of which they were capable, I think it probable that the whole island would have been depopulated.
Perhaps the burning of London disconcerted them, or they had the strategical sense to reduce the country in their rear before going further; at all events, they made no move northward for over a week, but during that time overran the country to the south of a line between the Thames and the Severn estuary, methodically slaughtering flocks, herds, and those unfortunates who had not escaped over the Channel or fortified themselves in some such fashion as we had done.
Then they flooded northward, but by that the country had been cleared before them, and at the Avon-Welland line they were brought to a full stop for a while. Every bridge was defended, and along the banks and in the gap about Naseby, where once a very different battle had been fought, hundreds of fire-engines pumping blazing petroleum went into action, and thousands of men fought right gallantly with hand-pumps and squirts. Surely it was the strangest battle that the world had seen, bloodless but deadly, so potent being the poison, that to be stung meant death before cautery or antidote could be used. For days it continued, the ants tunnelling beneath the rivers’ beds at many points, emerging oftentimes amongst thickets or coverts far in the rear of the firing line, and there, ringed about by the reserves, to be driven to earth again.
Across the country from sea to sea was stretched a broad band of fire-scoured earth, miles wide, and by this frontier the invasion is for the moment stayed, at the price of constant, unremitting vigilance, though none knows what the future has in store. Even the most optimistic of our experts, Professor Guy Durham, is gloomy.
“Our real knowledge of the earth’s crust is small,” he remarks in his report “and a poor mile the limit of our shafts. What fissures, crevices, caverns, lie beneath us we know not at all, but it may very well be that, in the four thousand miles from surface to centre, many such occur. London, it is surmised, lies in part above a great subterranean lake, and it requires but a small effort to imagine such regions inhabited.”
He goes on to details of our enemy’s anatomy: F. Horribilis, as it has been dubbed, is in many respects entirely different from and vastly superior to its sun-loving brother, having a marvellously complex brain, excellent smelling apparatus, and, a somewhat unusual endowment for a subterranean creature, well developed eyes. In fact, the thing is altogether a super-ant, and he comes to a conclusion not hard to credit under the circumstances.
“I have no hesitation in announcing my conviction that Horribilis is an intellectual, a rational creature, able to plan, to reason, and, as we have so terribly experienced, to act in combination. I am of opinion that their aggression is a deliberate attack upon human supremacy, intolerable though such a suggestion may be to our self-satisfaction; but, taking into consideration their means of offence, their proved skill as miners, and the immense fecundity of such allied species as we know, I am forced to the forlorn conclusion that mankind may, at no very distant date, be compelled to struggle hard for very existence. And, lest we grow over-confident in our present defences, I am bound to point out that, if analogy holds good, our feeble barriers of fire and water may presently be passed, if not underground, then by the path of the air. Both the male and female of the ant, at one period of their lives, are winged!”
THE STORY OF THE STAIN, by Sophie Osmond
Phil May’s Annual, Winter 1901
Sophie Osmond was a writer, journalist, and critic who published several popular novels set in Australia and New Zealand. She wrote three stories for Phil May’s Annual between 1901-1904, all of which have supernatural elements.
We always thought there was something strange about the old kitchen attached to the homestead father bought at Carrap, even from the very first week we lived there.
It was mother who originally put the idea in our heads.
As we were settling and sorting things the morning after our arrival, mother suddenly left her work to examine a large stain in the earthen floor.
“I wonder what that can be!” she said.
“Something must have been spilt there,” suggested Sis, who was two years younger than I.
“I’ll try and scour it off,” said mother, and presently she was scrubbing away at it. But all her work went for nothing, the stain seemed to stand out all the more.
“I hate
the sight of it,” she said.
“Well, don’t worry, anyhow,” put in father, because as soon as you get the house straight, I’m going to pull down this old shanty, and rebuild it.”
I should say here that father, John Crosland, had added to, and rebuilt the old, tumble-down dwelling which was on the property when he purchased it, and now it was a six-roomed house, with a wide verandah all round.
We were some little distance off the road, so as to be near a never-failing creek—“Carrap” being the native equivalent for “plenty of water.” The place had been lived on, and the land cultivated for many years, in a fitful kind of way, but it had latterly fallen into such neglect that father got it for next to nothing.
So soon as he and Uncle Ned had fixed up the house, mother and I and Sis joined them, taking with us all our belongings from the old home thirty miles away, and travelling in a bullock team, driven by our staunch friend and neighbour, James Bon, for that was the way folk did good turns to one another in those lonely parts.
True to his word, father and Uncle Ned commenced to pull down the old kitchen, that is, they made a start by trying to take out the window and door, but father sprained his ankle, and was laid up for several days.
When he was well enough he had another try, but again he met with a check, as Uncle Ned found the footbridge over the creek had been washed away in a flood, and they had to see to that before anything else.
About a week later they made their third attempt on the life of the old kitchen, when to their annoyance, and not a little to our astonishment, father was called away to attend an inquest at the township.
“That’s three times we’ve been stopped,” observed Uncle Ned. “Give it best, I say; it seems queer, the whole thing.”
But there was much more “queerness” to come.
Father relinquished his idea of rebuilding, and decided to put down a new floor. But while he and Uncle Ned were working, they heard the noise of guns and shooting, as from a long distance, in the air, and yet next to them.
And when the floor was down, quite white and new, they saw a dark place show in the wood, and just over the spot of the other stain. We all saw it, and wondered.
Next day it had grown larger and darker, and the next, and the next, until it had become the size and shape of the stain on the old earthen floor! And for all the scrubbing mother and I and Sis gave it, nothing would move it.
We were very curious to learn why, but father did not like us talking about the matter to strangers, so no one knew outside our home.
As we never heard the sound of shooting again, Uncle fancied it must have been due to some electric or other atmospheric influence in the locality, but father held to his own view of its being a peculiar echo of the hammering.
As for the stain, they put it down to the effect of damp, as the ground sloped towards the place where the kitchen stood.
Sis and I confidently expected a fresh development, but as none came, we felt in a measure disappointed.
“Never mind,” said Sis, “you mark my words, when there’s that, there’s more.”
But nothing “more” manifested itself, and we lived such a busy life that we grew accustomed to the dark stain, and seldom spoke about it.
When the general elections came round, James Bon asked father to put up a party of men working for their candidate. “Carrap” was the most central farm in the district; it was accessible to five adjacent roads.
An electioneering campaign was no light matter in that part of New South Wales, where the holdings were many miles apart.
Father was anxious to do what he could for his party, and, as James Bon had done, placed his house at the committee’s disposal.
This meant much extra work for us women folk, for we would not be thought lacking in hospitality for the world; and yet we had to keep fresh and neat, having a certain pride of birth that father and Uncle Ned never allowed us to forget.
The visit of the election party upset the whole house. Every room was turned into a bedroom, and we Croslands had to cram ourselves wherever we found space.
Uncle Ned swung himself into a hammock in the verandah. Sis and I scraped together whatever we could in the way of spare rugs and cushions, and made beds for ourselves in the old kitchen. As I have already said, we had become so accustomed to the mark on the floor, that we never heeded it.
But that night it looked darker than usual, and Sis suggested it was an omen to the political party. So we drifted into joking about it, and Sis declared
“You’re not game to sleep on that stain, Bess!”
“I am, though,” I said.
And she dared me.
The end of it was, I spread my share of the rugs and cushions on the floor (the electioneers had all the available mattresses), and went to bed with my head directly over the mark, for further bravado.
And thus we fell asleep. At least I fancied I went off into a doze, but was awakened by the most dreadful noises, screaming, yelling, banging; yet I had no power to call out.
Something seemed to be pressing me down, down, down, until I sank out of sight; but all the time the awful clamour increased.
The window was full of ugly black faces glaring in; cruel hands were tearing down the woodwork, and brandishing spears. I could almost hear their teeth gnashing, and wherever I looked, there were more fiendish faces, more dark bodies, and those savage, ruthless hands.
I tried to cry out, in my terror, but no sound would pass my lips. My body did not seem to belong to me.
Then I became aware I was not alone in the hut. Three strange men, roughly dressed, were in the centre of the floor. Seizing their guns, they fired wildly at the attackers.
Two women rushed from somewhere at the back, carrying axes. At that moment the window gave with a crash, the blacks leapt in, one after another, ’til the room was full of fiends.
The women slashed at them with their axes, and the men fired, each shot taking effect.
Then it seemed that they could not have had time to re-load—so closely did their assailants press them—and they could only swing about the butt-ends of their guns, doing murderous work though the odds were against them.
One of the women fell, and was trampled underneath the feet of the blacks. Her heartrending screams rose above the din, and goaded the men on to redoubled efforts, and in their fury they laid about them with the strength of giants.
But still the blacks kept pouring in by door and window, and one of the white men fell dead.
And, oh! horrible that it was! the other woman seized a kerosene lamp that was fastened to a beam in the wall, and flung it on the fire, and the whole wall on that side burst into a blaze.
The two white men resolutely forced the blacks into the fire, and slowly victory was coming to their side. The noise was like the yelling of demons, but the two Englishmen never spoke, never opened their stern, set lips.
Such of the enemy as were away from the burning wall turned and fled, their shrieks of terror seeming to tear the very air.
The room was full of blacks, dying and wounded, and now the other two walls and the roof had caught, and were blazing.
The stronger of the Englishmen pulled out his friend who was wounded and the woman, and left the place to burn with all the bodies in it.
I made a last effort to scream, and to rouse myself, yet I only heard my own voice as the feeblest sob.
As I did so, I saw that the “dead” Englishman was not dead, but raising himself on one arm, crawled over to where I was lying, and scraped and clutched where my head lay.
“Find it! Find it!” he moaned. “For God’s sake! Send it to her! She has wailed all these years!”
Then he fell back dead, and from his mouth there gushed blood, which ran into a pool underneath my head.
I awoke to see Sis bending over me, and crying with fright.
I suppose we awakened father and mother, for they rushed in to see what had happened. I told them of my vision, but they could not understand it, as less than half an hour had elapsed since Sis and I had bade them “Goodnight.”
Sis had heard strange noises and shooting, but in a dim, far-off way, that might have come from the distant paddock.
Mother pacified us, and took us into her room, while father lay where I had been, lying with his head there, just as my head was. Yet he saw nothing, and heard nothing but a confusion of sounds.
Then Uncle Ned tried, but heard or saw nothing at all. By this time it was dawn, and everybody was up and astir.
Father said I must have had the nightmare, but that awful voice went on moaning in my ear—
“Find it! Find it! For God’s sake! Send it to her! She has waited all these years.”
It was with me all the day, and I begged mother to tear up the floor to see if there was anything under.
One or two of our visitors asked if anything had happened during the night, but father replied that one of his girls had had the nightmare, and had called out in her sleep.
The party of electioneering men dispersed on their different roads during the morning, and the household was quiet again.
Mother begged father to have the floor of the old kitchen taken up, and the earthen floor underneath broken into, to see if there were anything hidden. After thinking it over, father and Uncle Ned commenced work, more to set mother’s mind at rest than for any other reason, for they grumbled at the waste of labour.
This time they heard no sound, either of guns or shooting, but when Uncle Ned drove his pick into the old clay floor, after the boards had been taken up, he suddenly started, and glanced at father.
