The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

Then suddenly a frightful cry rent and shattered the stillness, and from outside a screaming, strangled voice called:

“Oh, my God!” it yelled. “Oh, Christ!”

For one moment Philip lay in the grip and paralysis of mortal fear, but the next he broke through it, and sprang out of bed, and, not pausing to light a candle, stumbled to the door. At the same moment his servant’s door flew open, and he came out with a white, scared face. He carried a lighted candle.

“It was from the garden, sir,” he said. “It was Mr. Merivale’s voice.”

Philip did not answer, but went quickly downstairs, followed by the man. The door into the verandah stood open, as usual, and he hurried out. There on the table were the cloth and the remains of dessert; his chair stood where he had sat all evening; Merivale’s was pushed sideways. The moon was somewhere risen behind the clouds, for thick as they were, the darkness was not near pitch, and followed by the servant, the light of whose candle tossed weird, misshapen shadows about, Philip set his teeth and went down towards where the hammock was slung in which Merivale usually slept.

That strange, pungent smell, which he had noticed more than once before, was heavy in the air, and infinitely stronger and more biting than it had been. And for one moment his flesh crept so that he stopped, waiting for the man to come up with the light. He could not face what might be there alone.

A few yards further on they came in sight of the hammock. Something white, a flannelled figure, glimmered there, but, like some strange, irregular blot, something black concealed most of the occupant. Then that black thing, whatever it was, suddenly skipped into the air and ran with dreadful frolicsome leaps and bounds and tappings on the brick path of the pergola, down to the far end of the garden, where they lost sight of it. Then they came to the hammock.

Merivale was sitting up in it, bunched up together with his head drawn back, as if avoiding some deadly contact. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, so that the gums showed, his eyes were wide-open, and terror incarnate sat there, and the pupils were contracted to a pin-point as if focussed on something but an inch or two from him. He was not dead, for his chest heaved with dreadful spasms of breathing, and Philip took him up and carried him away from that haunted place into the house, laying him on a rug in the passage.

But before they had got him there the breathing had ceased, the mouth and the eyes had closed, and what they looked on was just the figure of a boy whose mouth smiled, and who was sunk in happy, dreamless sleep.

There was nothing to be done. Philip knew that, but he sent his servant off at once to fetch a doctor from Brockenhurst, while he waited and watched by Merivale or what had been he. All terror and shrinking had utterly passed from that face, and Philip himself, in spite of the frightful, inexplicable thing that had happened, was not frightened either, but sat by him, feeling curiously calm and serene, hardly conscious even of sorrow or regret. Nor did he fear any incomer from the garden. For the curtain had been drawn, and the dead man had felt so sure that whatever form the revelation was to take, it would be God, that the assurance of his belief filled and quieted the man who watched by him.