The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

I will admit that it required all my courage boldly to go in, for it is hard to enter that which is the blackness of darkness to you, with the knowledge that all the while you stand the fairest of targets in the doorway. But because, as my father had told me, it is ever better to pursue than to flee, I stepped within with elbow crooked for the thrust, and dagger arm cleared of the cloak.

But it was as silent in the barn as elsewhere. I did not even hear the rats of which my little David had spoken. I began to think that I had been as needlessly and as childlessly alarmed as he. Then all at once and quite clearly I heard voices speaking together at the outer corner of the granary.

So I went near to a convenient wicket that I might listen, and my very heart and life chilled and thickened, because that the voices were those of our Marjorie and someone else who spoke low and sober—not quick and high like Gilbert Kennedy.

Then was my heart full of disgust that I should find her whom I had loved and worshipped engaging in another midnight tryst, and one that might be no better than a paltry intrigue.

So angered was I that I stole to the door, meaning to break out upon them in violent speech, caring little in mine anger what should happen. But as I came to the edge of the hard-beaten threshing-floor, Marjorie Kennedy came to the door swiftly. Turning in front of the barn, and standing with the shawl thrown back from her head, she spoke to the man she had left, whom as yet I saw not.

'Remember,' she said, 'I promise no more than the bare fact. I tell you I choose the grave before a bride-bed, the worm before such a husband!'

But the man to whom she spoke uttered no word, though he had come nearer to where in the dusk of the doorway I stood with my sword bare in my hand. I could see him plainly now—all but his face, for the tide of darkness was on the ebb. He was the tall, cloaked man whom we knew as the Grey Man.

Behind him, at the angle of the wall, crouched a black mass which yet was human—because, even as I looked, it took something from under a coat, and rose erect beside the Grey Man. As Marjorie vanished these two figures moved towards my hiding-place in the barn. I had no time to do more than glide within, pull a sheaf or two from the mow, and thrust myself, like a sword into its scabbard, within the hole I had made amid the piled grain.

Even as I looked, their dark figures filled up the square of greyness which the open barn door made against the snow. I saw them enter, feeling with their hands, as though to grasp something, yet not making any light to guide them in finding it.

Then indeed I was disquieted, and my very bones became as water within me. For if there is anything trying to the flesh of mortal man, it is to lie still and be groped for in the dark by unknown and horrible enemies. I had a nightmare sense of powerlessness to move, of impotence in the face of peril. I knew that when the blind groping inhuman horror took me by the throat, I should not be able even to cry out. It was like a dream of fever made real.