CHAPTER XXVII.
[THE MONSTER LET LOOSE.]
Neither man spoke. Phelan's amazement had bereft him of words. He knew the place thoroughly. He had known and feared it from his earliest years. To left and right were perpendicular cliffs. In front stretched the evil Black Rock. From where they stood descended the pathway to the table rock below. On the broken ground around them was nothing taller than dwarf bushes, which could not conceal a goat and to reach which the sure-footedness of a goat would have been needed. In his youth Phelan had been as bold as any lad in the village. But neither he nor any other lad of the village had ever dared to tempt death on those steep, friable, rotten slopes.
Beyond all doubt he had seen the figure of a man disappear over this cliff a few moments ago. Where was he--it--now? The Black Rock lay bare, naked, at their feet. A man's head could not be hidden there. Whither had that figure gone? It could not have reached the sea in the time. The monster had not yet broken loose, and the man could not have been swept into the water. No shattered corpse lay on the greasy rock beneath. A man cannot fly. What had become of this man? Or had they seen a ghost?
He turned to O'Brien and noticed that the latter looked pale and scared.
"You saw him?" he shouted above the storm. "You saw him as plain as daylight?"
"Yes."
"What do you make of it?"
"I don't know."
Once more Phelan looked carefully around him. Absolutely no trace of man was to be seen. Except for their presence, the place might have been alone since the making of the world. He again turned to O'Brien.
"Heaven be between us and all harm, but it must have been a ghost!"
"He could not have got to the Hole in the time."
"Not if he had wings."
"Did you ever see Fahey? Of course you did. You told me about him."
"Merciful Lord, it was Fahey!"
The two men looked mutely into each other's faces. Anything like a regular conversation was now impossible owing to the force and noise of the storm.
O'Brien had had a theory. The events of the last two minutes had shattered his theory to atoms. The two policemen who had seen Fahey jump into the Hole had not been mistaken. It was no ghost they saw. They had tracked their man as surely as they had ever tracked any one on whom they laid hands. He, being innocent, was suspected of a crime; or, rather, he had innocently, in ignorance, committed a criminal act, and being pursued and hard pressed, had flung himself headlong into that awful pit. Within a couple of weeks or so, O'Hanlon had seen that same figure in this place, and now he (O'Brien) had seen such a figure, and Phelan had identified it. This was monstrous. What came of all his inquiries respecting the Whalers Mouth and the accessibility of the cave? Nothing--absolutely nothing. His theory was childish. He was glad he had spoken of it to no man.
What was to be his theory now?
Phelan was stupefied, and stood staring at the cliffs and the rock as if he expected them to undergo some stupendous change, display some more incomprehensible marvel. O'Brien stood back a few paces from the brink, and kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, which had lowered and come nearer.
Suddenly Phelan stepped back to O'Brien, and, putting his mouth close to the ear of the other, shouted--
"She blows!"
O'Brien dropped his eyes to the Black Rock.
From the Hole a thin wreath of sea-smoke rose, and, bent sharply by the gale, almost touched the cliff. A booming, hollow sound, like the flapping of distant thunder among hills, weighed on the air, and then came a shrill, loud hiss, as of falling water, and again the wind was drenched in sea-smoke.
Phelan stretched out his hands towards the Hole, and shouted--
"Look!"
The word was scarcely uttered when the ground shook, and from that Hole a solid column of water sprang aloft with a shriek that drowned the raging of the storm. It rose fifty feet into the air, turned inward towards the cliff, and then toppled and fell with a mighty crash that again made the gigantic bases of the immemorial cliffs tremble to their lowest depths.
The monster had broken loose!
O'Brien started back. He had from childhood heard of the awful Puffing Hole, but had never seen it in action before. His first feeling was that this could be no display of ordinary power, but that the cliffs and rocks were riven by some Titanic force never exercised before. He felt certain that when again he looked down he should see the Black Rock shattered, disintegrated, annihilated. What could withstand such a blow?
The boatman drew him towards the edge of the cliff once more. He was scarcely in position when the huge shaft of water sprang once more into the air, this time to twice its former height. He was appalled, and again sprang back. The gale caught the capital of the column and lifted it bodily, dashing it against the cliff. O'Brien was covered from head to foot with water.
The two men shifted their position, so as to get out of the reach of the water, and then stood mutely looking at the terrible phenomenon.
When O'Brien's alarm subsided, and he knew by the conduct of his companion that there was no occasion for fear, he stood fascinated by the stupendous spectacle. He had heard this described hundreds of times, but his imagination had not had space for grandeur such as this. The Hole did not spout at every wave, but took breathing space like a living thing. Now he understood why the opening of the cave was called the Whale's Mouth. Now he understood why the people said "she spouts" when the Puffing Hole flung its hundreds of tons of water a hundred feet into the air. It was a daring fancy which saw in the strange freak of nature a colossal representation of the spouting of the whale. The Black Rock was the head, the cave the jaws, the shaft in the rock the blow-hole of a whale multiplied a thousand times.
And he, presumptuous fool that he was, had imagined a boat might enter that cave and come out uninjured--that a man might throw himself into that awful funnel and survive!
In half an hour O'Brien and Phelan left the edge of the cliff and turned their faces towards the village. Notwithstanding the oilskins, both were wet through, for the spray and fine mist from the sea penetrated at the neck, the wrists, and under the buttons in front. They kept more inland on their way back. Phelan was the first to speak of the mysterious figure they had seen. He had no difficulty in the matter. They had seen the ghost of Fahey, who had committed suicide there ten or eleven years ago. Nothing could be simpler or more natural than this explanation. It was a horribly wicked thing to commit suicide, but to throw one's self into the Puffing Hole was a double crime; for, in addition to making away with life, it was defying Providence--it was courting the most awful death that could be sought by man. The supernatural appearance that day was to be a warning to O'Brien, who had displayed an unwise curiosity as to the Puffing Hole and the Whale's Nose. From the nature of O'Brien's inquiries, it was, notwithstanding his denials, almost certain that he had formed a design of going in a boat up the cavern. The spirit of the dead man had been sent to show him the penalty of any such impious risking of life, and to remind him of the fate he would surely encounter if he dared to do anything so rash.