The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

The Dominie had as usual brought his pipes over his shoulder, from which, indeed, he refused to be parted even for a moment. And but for the fear of the noise reaching our enemies, I think that there and then he would have played us both reels and strathspeys—that is, if we had given him any encouragement, so pleased was he, and, indeed, all of us, to leave the dark cavern and oozy sand upon which we had first landed.

We were not long in ascending the stairs, and, as I had foretold, we found ourselves speedily in the warmer and drier air, like that of a habited house, which was so great a change from the dripping damp of the lower sea-cave that we rejoiced greatly, though quite unable to discover the cause.

Yet there was something—we knew not what—about the inner cavern which took us all by the throat. Indeed, we had not gone far when Marjorie Kennedy gasped for breath and said, 'Let us go back! I do not like the place!

But this I took to be no more than the dashing of her spirit by the adventures of the night, and the terrors through which, as she had already told us, she had come in the dreary and dangerous house of Auchendrayne.

For the passage broadened out into a wider hall with a firm floor of hard earth, as if it had been beaten or trampled. We had hardly been in this place longer than a few moments when a strangely persistent and pervading smell began to impress us with the deadliest loathing. It was sharp, pungent, and familiar. Yet could none of us tell whence it came, nor in what place we had smelled it before.

'I am faint unto death,' said Marjorie, leaning heavily on me. 'Let me go back, Launcelot, while I can.'

But this, for the sake of the dryness and comfort, I was not willing to do. So, stumbling now over one thing and now over another in the darkness, I made shift to find a further passage.

I chanced to put down my hand, when my foot struck something heavier and more massive than before, and, lo! to my horror, I touched the side of a wooden tub or vat. And scarce had I moved from the place where I was, before something cold and soft brushed my face, as if it had been suspended from the roof. My heart trembled, for we were plainly in a place of habitation of some unknown and terrible sort.

'Stand still where you are,' I cried to my companions. For I was afraid that they also might come against one of these obstructions, which were good evidence of others having been in this abode of horror and darkness as well as ourselves.

Immediately I set to the groping again, and went stumbling from one thing to another till I came to a branching passage which ascended away from the hall. And since here, in the roomy alcove high above the floor of the cave, there were (so far as I could find) none of the vats or other furniture which I had encountered about the sides of the greater cave, I decided to use it as a place of temporary shelter.