“Blood!” That was Eve Bartholomew’s cry.
“Oh, haven’t you noticed that either? The smell was so bad, I feared it would have some ghastly effect on Millicent. I hoped she wouldn’t notice it, in her condition. And then—we were beyond the gate-house, coming back toward the mansion, when we saw—the head.”
“Where, for God’s sake?”
“About a hundred feet away from us. I heard something stirring first, something scuttling, you might say. Then we saw it. Ugh! . . . Straight out of hell, surely. . . .”
Pendleton’s excitement was getting too much for him, and he broke through courtesy. “Why do you keep boggling it? Where was it? What did it do?”
“Crofts!” reprimanded Alberta.
Still with averted face, Paula Lebetwood tried to satisfy our fuming host. “Where? I don’t know exactly where. Near the gate-house here, I suppose. It seemed thirty or forty yards away. It was enormous, about six feet high—oh, fully that. It hung in the air—there wasn’t any body beneath. And it didn’t do anything, just remained there long enough to be seen, half a second, perhaps, and disappeared with a sort of sigh. I thought I heard a sigh. It—well, it simply went out. . . . It was hideous.”
“What did it look like, dear?” asked Alberta, more to anticipate her bluff husband than to satisfy curiosity, for her question was tremulous.
“Hideous—a great round head with red goggle eyes and a hole for a nose and broken teeth all grinning. It looked alive and staring—worse than any mask I’ve ever seen—an indecent thing. . . . Oh, don’t think that it was hallucination—poor Millicent saw it too, though it came and went like the winking of an eye. It seemed to strike to her heart—and to mine, for that matter—and she could manage to walk only a few steps more—on my arm—through the archway before she weakened and collapsed, and I saw you all there outside the french window, and called.”
She turned her head full toward us for the first time since Oxford and I had come from our private chase. Such was my position when she lifted her bent head that I, and only I, saw, on the yellow-lit ground revealed beyond, a small placard with uncouth letters thereon, large enough to be read in spite of their unshapeliness: