“I don’t know, lad. It’s like a person being murdered and crying out for help.”
“Radcliffe can’t be tanning his wife.”
“Not he, Johnny. She’d take care of that. Besides, they’ve never been cat-and-dog. Birds of a feather: that’s what they are. Oh, by Jove! there it comes again! Just listen to it! I don’t like this at all, Johnny. It must be witches, and nothing else.”
Decidedly it must be. It came from the air. The open fields lay around, white and still under the moonlight, and nothing was on their surface of any kind, human or animal. Now again! that awful cry, rising on the bit of breeze there was, and dying away in pain to a faint echo.
“Let us go to the Torr, Johnny, and ask Radcliffe if he hears it!”
We bounded forward under the cry, which rose again and again incessantly; but in nearing the house it seemed to get further off and to be higher than ever in the air. Leaping the gate into the lane, we reached the front-door, and seized the bell-handle. It brought Mrs. Radcliffe; a blue cap and red roses adoring her straggling hair. Holding the candle above her head, she peered at us with her small, sly eyes.
“Oh, is it you, young gentlemen? Do you want anything? Will you walk in?”
I was about to say No, when Tod pushed me aside and strode up the damp stone passage. They did not make fires enough in the house to keep out the damp. As he told me afterwards, he wanted to get in to listen. But there was no sound at all to be heard; the house seemed as still as death. Wherever the cries might come from, it was certainly not from inside the Torr.
“Radcliffe went over to Wire-Piddle this afternoon, and he’s not back yet,” she said; opening the parlour-door when we got to the hall. “Did you want him? You must ha’ been in a hurry by the way you pulled the bell.”
She put the candle down on the table. Her work lay there—a brown woollen stocking about half-way knitted.