‘Did you notice that?’ asked Paul; and then again, ‘I say, sir, did you notice that?’
Rain drummed steadily on the grass. He strained his eyes, for surely the man must be there; he had been there only a second before.
‘Hullo!’ He peered again—and yes, there he was, away on the left—No. That looked more like a tree; it was in fact a tree. Well, to the right, then, there had not been time for him to travel any great distance. ‘Mr Halsey!’
He got no answer, and now concern swept over him: had his guide slipped and fallen, was he lying on the ground?
‘Where are you, sir?’
The rain grew slower, spat, and stopped.
If there had been an accident he would have heard a cry, a shout for help. If his companion had gone on without him—unlikely in these difficult conditions—he should by now be aware of Paul’s absence.
‘I’m here!’ cried Paul. The call was swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. ‘I’m here, where are you . . . ?’
No reply; and still blackness defeated his eyes and still he could not find a trace. He hurried forward, which was unwise and led to a stumbling fall; he spent several minutes in agitated search before deciding that he would have to return to the house and get help. It seemed that some calamity had overtaken the Reverend Alaric Halsey. He straightened; then realised that with the disappearance of the lights, he had lost his bearings; he did not know in which direction to walk—quite simply, he did not know where he was. Paul Bernays possessed slow reactions yet a fair degree of common sense; he pulled himself up and stood completely still. To advance blindly might easily lead to his wandering miles out into the open countryside; the best hope lay in waiting, in hoping that his eyes would finally grow accustomed to the gloom and enable him to identify a landmark.
As he stood there a noise caught his attention: close at hand, close behind him, the sound of heavy breathing. Now there is no good reason why this should have alarmed him so extravagantly; it could have been a farm animal, a stray dog, a badger, a fox . . .
He knew it to be none of these.
The noise grew louder, a kind of panting followed by a hiss. It took all Paul’s courage to remain where he stood, for an overwhelming presentiment of evil gripped him, a profound conviction that horror walked the night. Two things alone kept him in his place: the first, a very real fear that if he turned and ran he might all too easily lose his footing and crash to the ground; the second, a curious yet mounting impression that this invisible creature was not looking at him. He froze. Perhaps the darkness cloaked him? Yet surely an animal could smell; no animal would be hampered by . . . Something soft and faintly slimy bumped against his leg. Paul let out a yell; and still the Thing glided on, indifferent, and now the breathing grew fainter and now it stopped.
‘Dear heavens!’ muttered Bernays, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief. Luckily there was a handkerchief in the pocket of his raincoat, although he could not remember putting it there. Relief swept over him; whatever the threat, it had gone. The next moment the sky above him split into groups of leaden clouds and the merest fragment of a moon slid through.
‘That’s better!’
The faint moonbeams did indeed throw some light across the country: the empty fields, the wide curve of the downs now came into view. Paul grimaced; he had been facing the wrong way; if he had continued he would have become most hopelessly lost. Thank goodness he had kept his head! He looked over towards the black outline of the rectory; and observed to his considerable annoyance a figure walking quite calmly up the path to the house. The Reverend Alaric.
‘Confound the man!’ Paul swore briefly. ‘Would he have left me, wandering about in the dark?’ He ran forward, forming a protest in his mind; in pity’s name this lacked both hospitality and common sense.
And then he saw it; some twenty yards behind Alaric Halsey.
He took it at first to be a small rain puddle, and his eye might have ignored it altogether but for one thing. It moved. As he watched, it heaved, swelling a little, and slid across the ground—it could have been a shadow, but there was nothing there to account for a shadow; nothing between the wet earth and the moon. Heaving, pulsating, it moved with ever-increasing speed along the ground. The Reverend Alaric came to the gate and passed through; behind him the object swelled, sucked itself up, wobbled briefly on the top bar and dropped over. For no particular reason Bernays associated its movement with that panting, hissing breath. It had lessened the gap, a bare ten yards lay between it and the priest; it not only gathered speed as it went, but also seemed to grow, pushing outwards in wide soft bulges.
‘Halsey!’ cried Paul. ‘Halsey! Halsey!’
The man looked round. The moonlight struck full on him and an expression that might have been surprise or rage or both showed in his face. Before the emotion could be identified he saw the Thing behind him and screamed.
He broke into a run and Paul ran too, leaping across the fields, driven on by a rising panic, for distance could not dim the terror in Alaric Halsey’s voice. He fled around the corner of the rectory, the monstrous shadow gaining all the time. Paul had the advantage of youth; he cut round by the other side and caught up with him beyond the elm trees. The priest appeared to be in a state of advanced shock, his eyes stared blindly up and he shrieked:
‘Deliver me! Deliver me! Deliver me from evil!’
Then he fell to the ground, senseless.
Bernays stooped over him. Fear still pulsed through the night. For the moment he had lost sight of that dark stain—it might be crouched slackly under the trees, it might have vanished altogether. He had abandoned all rational thought, all attempt to work out what in heaven’s name it could be; his immediate concern was to get Halsey to safety. They were some little distance from the house; the church stood altogether more near, and there were practical considerations too: the elder man was above average height and heavy. Paul placed his arm around the unconscious figure and, half-pulling half-lifting, contrived to drag him through the stone porch and into the little Norman church. As he did so he got once more that extraordinary sensation. The tiny chapel seemed to open out around him, to change into a vast cathedral thronged with people whispering, muttering, praying—and high above them a sudden triumphant laugh. He blinked; between them and the altar stood a formless Thing of towering height, growing larger even as he looked.
‘Oh God’, thought Paul confusedly, ‘It lives here.’ And fainted.
He came to his senses in the brightly-lit bedroom of West Farthing; he had been ill, they told him, for three weeks. Out of concern for his health, another week passed before the doctor thought it proper to tell him that Alaric Halsey had died, presumably of a heart attack. The doctor (being a rational country physician) had no intention of repeating local gossip: the whispered story that the body had marks on it for all the world as if it had been trampled to death by a huge crowd. The marks were there; but must surely have been caused by something else, for the entire population of West Farthing village numbered no more than twenty people. Country folk were notorious for their imaginings, and the story struck the good doctor as a palpable absurdity.