An Isle of Surrey: A Novel

by Richard Dowling

But the horrors of this place are seldom invaded at night by human foot. Often from summer dark to summer dawn no tread of man beats upon that forlorn tow-path. After nightfall the place has an evil reputation in the neighbourhood. More than a dozen times in the memory of living people cold and clammy things, once men and women, have been drawn slowly, laboriously, with dripping clothes, out of these turbid waters. No man but one sorely pressed by necessity would think of taking that path at midnight: and even when in dire haste he would have need of strong nerves to face it, to set out upon it, to plunge into it. For, unlike the streets and roadways that go by the dwellings of kindly men, once upon it there is no way from it, no crossroad or byway until the stretch of half-a-mile or a mile is accomplished. If any supreme terror or danger menaced the traveller on that path, he has only one refuge, one means of escape, one sanctuary to seek--the canal itself.

In the ditch, on the inner side of the path, you cannot know what may be crouching. Shapes and forms and monsters too hateful for sanity to endure may be lurking in that ditch, and may spring out on you, on your unprotected side, at any moment as you walk along. If this should happen would not it be better for you to seek blindness and extinction in the waters?

Or may there not lie in wait some shapes in human form more appalling than gorgon or chimera dire, some human ghouls who have committed crimes never dreamt of by the soul of affrighted man? May not these come forth and whisper at your ear as you go by, and tell you what they have done in tombs and charnel houses until the flesh falls off your bones with dread, and you take these waters of forgetfulness at your side to be not a river of Orcus, but of blissful deliverance?

And what a place is this for a woman by night!

She has crept cautiously out of Leeham and struck the canal at Leeham Bridge. At that time all Leeham is asleep in bed or at work in the great gasworks. Not a soul is abroad but two or three people moving to or from the Neptune at the end of the Pine Groves.

The woman creeps cautiously from the road down the approach leading to the canal. There is not a soul on the tow-path; the place is as still as a cave. She can hear the beating of her own heart distinctly as she walks along, keeping in the shadow.

But she will have to come out of the shadow in a moment, or rather she will have to enter the sphere of light, for on the tow-path to her left there is a gas-lamp.

She darts quickly through the patch of light and into the cavernous darkness of the bridge.

In that brief period of illumination all that could be seen was that she did not exceed the average height of woman, might be a little below it; that she was poorly clad; that she wore a bonnet and thick impenetrable veil; that she was covered from neck to heel with a long dark cloak, and that the ungloved hand which grasped the cloak in front and held it close was thin and white.

She did not seem conscious of any of the horrors of that dismal arch; while under it she was more free from the chance of observation than on the road or approach. She drew herself more upright, and slackened her pace for a moment. Then with another shudder she walked swiftly from under the arch and set off for Welford Bridge.