The secret in the hill

by Bernard Capes

I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with regard to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front of the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less, I do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had become acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I am sure, or she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it in her many allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part, had speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with which the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon a number of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in spite of the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting behind the local esprit de corps which hid the real truth from him. Now much was explained—provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually been permitted to discover what had been kept from us—much, that is to say, except the nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I supposed, we should never find out. But there I was mistaken, as events will show. For Destiny, having got her puppets at last into position, was even now gathering the strings into her hands for the final “Dance of Death.”

In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with a falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not long in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which followed, notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind came from the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely, cut the cliffs like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook with the roar of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into which its breath was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered like chaff on the uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of agony. God knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the day broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.

That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story which Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the fire, and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were fallen upon talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut within trees that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled. In its pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters treading the drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows looked, with a sound like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind, said Mr. Sant, a legend he had once heard about a werewolf—the German vampire. These creatures, men by day, but condemned, for their unspeakable crimes, to become wolves with the going down of the sun, are like nothing mortal. It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to sympathize with them in any way. Whosoever does, yields himself to their thrall.

One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound woods, was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the morrow over her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and looking back, there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the miserable creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted while it terrified her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or somebody; but of what or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror in it moved her in spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She took meat from her basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret sin. “But who will know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.” The creature stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the woman to escape and reach her home in safety. But all the following day her deed dwelt with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear her own sole confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely church to confess her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little sacristy bell, and summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and behind the bars heard her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned his face, she saw that snap and change in the gloom. The eyes rounded, the brows puckered and met, the jaw shot down and forth. Before her, glaring through the bars, was the werewolf of the preceding night. It barked and snapped at the grating which divided them, then dropped, and she heard it issue forth and come pattering round to the side where——

We were never to know, for at that instant, weird and unearthly in a pause of the storm, there rose a long melancholy bay outside the window. We all fell like mutes, staring at one another; then, moved by a single impulse, jumped to our feet and made for the front door. The wind battled to crush us with it, driving us back as we raised the latch, and so whipped our eyelashes and flared the lights in the hall that for a minute we could do nothing. But when at last we emerged and stood in the drive, not a living shape of any sort was to be seen—only the tossed bushes and black tree trunks.

“It must have been a wandering dog,” said Mr. Sant; “something attracted by the light. Come in again, all of you.”

But we would only re-enter to get our coats and caps for the homeward march. Some growing sense of unbounded licence in the storm awed us, I think, and drew us like cowed beasts to our lairs.

As we butted through the darkness, a form detached itself from the shadows in a deep part of the lane, and followed staggering and hooting in our wake. It was Rampick, blazing drunk, and his maniac laugh pursued my uncle and me long after we were housed and shuddering between the sheets.

CHAPTER III.
OPEN SESAME.

I had a vision sometimes of our tight little island lying on the sea like a round of bread and butter on a plate, and the Angel of the Storm amusing himself by biting patterns out of its edges. The coast in our part of the world was particularly inviting to him, because, I suppose, it was crumb, and not rocky with crust like other parts. Anyhow he never flew near without setting his teeth in it somewhere, and on this occasion to such gluttonous effect that he must have blown himself out before he had fairly settled down to his meal. His attack was as short as it was violent. For miles north and south the cliffs had been torn and gulped—only the birds, mapping them from above, could have said into what new fantastic outline. Landmarks were gone, and little bays formed where had been promontories. Here and there a fisherman’s boat had been licked out of its winter perch, that that same angel might play bounce-ball with it on the cliffs until it was broken to bits. The wreck and flotsam on the shore were indescribable; and sad and ugly was the sight of more than one drowned mariner entangled in them. I turn my memory gladly from such retrospects, to concentrate it upon those features of the havoc which most concern this history.