Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 3

The Tale of the Moor Road-2

The Colonel stole down the lane while the others beat the spinney and hedge, Flaxman Low very much chagrined as being forced to deal with an interesting problem in this rough and ready fashion. However, he saw that on this occasion at least it would be useless to oppose the Colonel’s notions. When he and Chaddam met after beating the hedge they saw a tall figure shamble away rapidly down the lane toward the Colonel’s hiding-place.

They stood still and waited for developments, but the minutes followed each other in intense stillness. Then they went to find the Colonel.

“Hullo, Colonel, anything wrong?” asked Chaddam, on nearing the field gate.

The Colonel straightened himself with the help of Chaddam’s arm.

“Did you see him?” he whispered.

“We thought so. Why did you not fire?”

“Because,” said the Colonel in a husky voice, “I had no g*n!”

“But you took it with you?”

“Yes.”

Flaxman Low opened the lantern he carried, and, as the light swept round in a wide circle, something glinted on the grass. It was the stock of the Colonel’s g*n. A little further off they came upon the Damascus barrels bent and twisted into a ball like so much fine wire. Presently the Colonel explained.

“I saw him coming and meant to meet him, but I seemed dazed – I couldn’t move! The g*n was snatched from me, and I made no resistance – I don’t know why.” He took the g*n-barrels and examined them slowly. “I give in, Low; no human hand did that.”

During dinner, Flaxman Low said abruptly; “I suppose you lately had an earthquake down here.”

“How did you know?” asked Livy. “Have you been to the quarry?”

Low said he had not.

“It was such a poor little earthquake that even the papers did not think it worth while to mention it!” went on Livy. “We didn’t feel any shock, and, in fact, knew nothing about it, until Dr. Petterped told us.”

“You had a landslip though?” went on Low.

Livy opened her pretty eyes.

“But you know all about it,” she said. “Yes, the landslip was just by the old quarry.”

“I should like to see the place to-morrow,” observed Low.

Next day, therefore, when the Colonel went off to the coverts with a couple of neighbours, whom he had invited to join him, Flaxman Low accompanied Chaddam to examine the scene of the landslip.

From the edge of the upland, looking across the hollow crowded with reedy pools, they could see in the torn, reddish flank of the opposite slope the sharp tilt of the broken slate. To the right of this lay the old quarry, and about a hundred yards to the left the lonely house and the curving road.

Low descended into the hollow and spent a long time in the spongy ground between the back of the quarry and the lower edge of the newly uncovered strata, using his little hammer freely, especially about one narrow black fissure round which he sniffed and pottered in absorbed silence. Presently he called to Chaddam.

“There has been a slight explosion of gas – a rare gas, here,” he said. “I hardly hoped to find traces of it, but it is unmistakeable.”

“Very unmistakeable,” agreed Chaddam, with a laugh. “You’d have said so had you been here when it happened.”

“Ah, very satisfactory indeed. And that was a fortnight ago, you say?”

“Rather more now. It took place a couple of days before my fall into that quarry pool.”

“Any one ill near by – at that cottage, for instance?” asked Low, as he joined Chaddam.

“Why? Was that gas poisonous? There’s a man in the Colonel’s employ named Scully in that cottage, who has had pneumonia, but he was on the mend when the landslip occurred. Since then he has grown steadily worse.”

“Is there anyone with him?”

“Yes, the Daimleys sent a woman to look after him. Scully’s a very decent man. I often go in to see him.”

“And so does the hairless man, apparently,” added Low.

“No; that’s the queer part of it. Neither he nor the woman in charge have ever seen such a person as Livy described. I don’t know what to think.”

“The first thing to be done is to get the man from here at once,” said Low decidedly. “Let’s go in and see him.”

They found Scully low and drowsy. The nurse shook her head at the two visitors in a despondent way.

“He grows weaker by the day,” she said.

“Get him away from here at once,” repeated Low, as they went out.

“We might have him up at Low Riddings, but he seems almost too weak to be moved,” replied Chaddam doubtfully.

“My dear fellow, it’s his only chance of life.”

The Daimleys made arrangements for the reception of Scully, provided Dr. Thomson of Nerbury gave his consent to the removal. In the afternoon, therefore, Chaddam bicycled into Nerbury to see the doctor on the subject.

“If I were you, Chaddam,” said Low, before he started, “I’d be back by daylight.”

Unfortunately Dr. Thomson was on his rounds, and did not return until after dark, by which time it was too late to remove Scully that evening. After leaving the doctor’s house Chaddam went to the station to enquire about a box from Mudie’s. The books having arrived, he took out a couple of volumes for Mrs. Daimley’s present consumption, and was strapping them in front of the bicycle, when it struck him that unless he went home by the Moor Road he would be late for dinner.

Accordingly he branched off into the bare track which led over the moors. The twilight had deepened into a fine, cold night, and a moon was swinging up into a pale, clear sky. The spread of heather, purple in the daytime, appeared jet black by moonlight, and across it he could see the white ribbon on road stretching ahead into the distance. The scents of the night were fresh in his nostrils, as he ran easily along the level with the breeze behind him.

He soon reached the incline past Scully’s cottage. Well away to the left lay the quarry pool like a blotch of ink under its shadowing cliff. There was no light in the cottage, and it seemed even more deserted-looking than usual.

As Chaddam flashed under the bridge, he heard a cough, and glanced back over his shoulder.

A tall, loose-jointed form he had seen once before was rearing itself up on upon the railway bridge. There was something curiously un-human about the lank outlines and the cant of the small head with its prick-eared cap showing out so clearly against the lighter sky behind.

When Chaddam looked again, he saw the thing on the bridge fling up its long arms and leap down on to the road some thirty feet below.

Then Chaddam rode. He began to think he had been a fool to come, and he counted that he was a good mile from home. At first he fancied he heard footfalls, then he fancied there were none. The hard road flew under him, all thoughts of economising his strength were lost, his single aim was to make the pace.

Suddenly his bicycle jerked violently, and he was shot over into the road. As he fell, he turned his head and was conscious of a little, bleached, bestial face, wet with fury, not ten yards behind!

He sprang to his feet, and ran up the road as he had never run before. He ran wonderfully, but he might as well have tried to race a cheetah. It was not a question of speed, the game was in the hands of this thing with the limbs of a starved Hercules, whose bony knees seemed to leap into its ghastly face at every stride. Chaddam topped the slope with a sickening sense of his own powerlessness. Already he saw Low Riddings in the distance, and a dim light came creeping along the road towards him. Another frantic spurt, and he had almost reached the light, when a hand closed like a vice on his shoulder, and seemed to fasten on the flesh. He rushed blindly on towards the house. He saw the door-handle gleam, and in another second he had pitched head foremost onto the knotted matting in the hall.

When he recovered his senses his first question was: “Where is Low?”

“Didn’t you meet him?” asked Livy. “I – that is, we were anxious about you, as you were so late, and I was just starting to meet you when Mr. Low came downstairs and insisted on going instead.”

Chaddam stood up.

“I must follow him.”

But as he spoke the front door opened, and Flaxman Low entered, and looked up at the clock.

“Eight-fifteen,” he said. “You’re late, Chaddam.”

Afterwards, in the smoking-room, he gave an account of what he had seen.

“I saw Chaddam racing up the road with a tall figure behind him. It stretched out its hand and grasped his shoulder. The next instant it shopped short as if it had been shot. It seemed to reel back and collapse, and then limped off into the hedge like a disappointed dog.”

Chaddam stood up and began to take off his coat.

“Whatever the thing is, it is something out of the common. Look here!” he said, turning up his shirt sleeve over the point of his shoulder, where three singular marks were visible, irregularly placed as the fingers of a hand might fall. They were oblong in shape, about the size of a bean, and swollen in purple lumps well above the surface of the skin.

“Looks as if someone had been using a small cupping-glass on you,” remarked the Colonel uneasily. “What do you say it is, Low?”

“I say that since Chaddam has escaped with his life, I have only to congratulate him on what, in Europe certainly, is a unique adventure.”

The Colonel threw his cigar into the fire.

“Such adventures are too dangerous for my taste,” he said. “This creature has on two occasions murderously attacked Lane Chaddam, and it would, no doubt, have attacked Livy if it had had the chance. We must leave this place at once, or we shall be murdered in our beds?”

“I don’t think, Colonel, that you will be troubled with this mysterious visitant again,” replied Flaxman Low.

“Why not? Who or what is this horrible thing?”

“I believe it to be an Elemental Earth Spirit,” returned Low. “No other solution fits the facts of the case.”

“What is an Elemental?” resumed the Colonel irritably. “Remember, Low, I expect you to prove your theories so that a plain man may understand, if I am to stay on at Low Riddings.”

“Eastern occultists describe wandering tribes of earth spirits, evil intelligences, possessing spirit as distinct from soul – all inimical to man.”

“But how do you know that the thing on the Moor Road is an Elemental?”

“Because the points of resemblance are curiously remarkable. The occultists say that when these spirits materialise, they appear in grotesque and uncouth forms; secondly, that they are invariably bloodless and hairless; thirdly, they move with extraordinary rapidity, and leave no footprints; and lastly, their agility and strength is superhuman. All these peculiarities have been observed in connection with the figure on the Moor Road.”

“I admit that no man I have ever met with,” commented Colonel Daimley, “could jump uninjured from a height of thirty feet, race a bicycle, and twist up g*n-barrels like so much soft paper. So perhaps you’re right. But can you tell me why or how it came here?”

“My conclusions,” began Low, “may seem to you far-fetched and ridiculous, but you must give them the benefit of the fact that they precisely account for the otherwise unaccountable features which mark this affair. I connect this appearance with the earthquake and the sick man.”

“What? Scully in league with the devil?” exclaimed the Colonel bluntly. “Why, the man is too weak to leave his bed; besides, he is a short, thick-set fellow, entirely unlike our haunting friend.”

“You mistake me, Colonel,” said Low, in his quiet tones. “These Elementals cannot take visible form without drawing upon the resources of the living. They absorb the vitality of any ailing person until it is exhausted, and the person dies.”

“Then they begin operations upon a fresh victim? A pleasant look-out to know we keep a well-attested vampire in the neighbourhood!”

“Vampires are a distinct race, with different methods; one being that the Elemental is a wanderer, and goes far afield to search for a new victim.”

“But why should it want to kill me?” put in Chaddam.

“As I have told you, they are animated solely by a blind malignity to the human race, and you happened to be handy.”

“But the earthquake, Low; where is the connection there?” demanded the Colonel, with the hair of a man who intends to corner his opponent.

Flaxman Low lit one cigar at the end of another before he replied.

“At this point,” he said, “my own theories and observations and those of the old occultists overlap. The occultists held that some of these spirits are imprisoned in the interior of the earth, but may be set free in consequence of those shiftings and disturbances which take place during an earthquake. This in more modern language simply means that Elementals are in some manner connected with certain of the primary strata. Now, my own researches have led me to conclude that atmospheric influences are intimately associated with spiritual phenomena. Some gases appear to be productive of such phenomena. One of these is generated when certain of the primary formations are newly exposed to the common air.”

“This is almost beyond belief – I don’t understand you,” said the Colonel.

“I am sorry that I cannot give you all the links in my own chain of reasoning,” returned Low. “Much is still obscure, but the evidence is sufficiently strong to convince me that in such a case of earthquake and landslip as has lately taken place here the phenomenon of an embodied Elemental might possibly be expected to follow, given the one necessary adjunct of a sick person in the near neighbourhood of the disturbance.”

“But when this brute got hold of me, why didn’t it finish me off?” asked Chaddam. “Or was it your coming that prevented it?”

Flaxman Low considered. “No; I don’t think I can flatter myself that my coming had anything to do with your escape. It was a near thing – how near you will understand when we hear further news of Scully in the morning.”

A servant entered the room at this moment.

“The woman has come up from the cottage, sir, to say that Scully is dead.”

“At what hour did he die?” asked Low.

“About ten minutes past eight, sir, she says.”

“Five minutes before I got in. The hour agrees exactly,” commented Low, when the man had left the room. “The figure stopped and collapsed so suddenly that I believed something of this kind must have happened.”

“But surely this is a very unprecedented coincidence?”

“It is,” said Flaxman Low. “But I can assure that that if you take the trouble to glance through the pages of the psychical periodicals you will find many statements at least as wonderful.”

“But are they true?”

Flaxman Low shrugged his shoulders.

“At any rate,” said he, “we know this is.”

The Daimleys have spent many pleasant days at Low Riddings since then, but Chaddam – who has acquired a right to control Miss Livy’s actions more or less – persists in his objection to any solitary expeditions to Nerbury along the Moor Road. For, although the figure has never been seen about Low Riddings since, some strange stories have lately appeared in the papers of a similar mysterious figure which has been met with more than once in the lonelier spots about North London. If it be true that this nameless wandering spirit, with the strength and activity of twenty men, still haunts our lonely roads, the sooner Mr. Flaxman Low exorcises it the better.

Charlotte Riddell

Charlotte Eliza Lawson Riddell (née Cowan) was born in 1832 in County Antrim, the daughter of a flax and cotton spinner. After her father died, she and her mother eked out a meagre existence before moving to London in 1855.

She tried to earn money for herself and her dying mother by writing, an experience which inspired her later novel, A Struggle for Life (1883). Her mother did not live to see her major successes, which included George Geith of Fen Court(1864), for which the publisher William Tinsley paid her an impressive £800.

In 1857 she married a patent agent by the name of Joseph Hadley Riddell. His business and health had collapsed by 1871, causing severe financial difficulties. This situation would explain Charlotte’s prodigious output during the 1860s, when she was editing St. James’s Magazine, in addition to writing fiction.

She is best known for her ghost stories, published as Weird Stories in 1882. Their success is partly due to the atmospheric setting which Riddell had drawn from her own experiences in Ireland and London. Although a popular author, she struggled to earn an adequate income. She was eventually paid a small pension by the newly-formed Society of Authors, before dying of breast cancer in 1906.