Thing glided on, indifferent, and now the breathing grew fainter and now it stopped.
“Dear heaven!” muttered Bernays, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief. Luckily there was a handkerchief in the pocket of his raincoat, although he could not remember putting it there. Relief swept over him; whatever the threat, it had gone. The next moment the sky above him split into groups of leaden clouds and the merest fragment of a moon slid through.
“That’s better!”
The faint moonbeams did indeed throw some light across the country: the empty fields, the wide curve of the downs now came into view. Paul grimaced; he had been facing the wrong way; if he had continued he would have become most hopelessly lost. Thank goodness he had kept his head! He looked over toward the black outline of the rectory; and observed to his considerable annoyance a figure walking quite calmly up the path to the house. The Reverend Alaric.
“Confound the man!” Paul swore briefly. “Would he have left me, wandering about in the dark?” He ran forward, forming a protest in his mind; in pity’s name, this lacked both hospitality and common sense.
And then he saw it; some twenty yards behind Alaric Halsey.
He took it at first to be a small rain puddle, and his eyes might have ignored it altogether but for one thing. It moved. As he watched, it heaved, swelling a little, and slid across the ground—it could have been a shadow but there was nothing there to account for a shadow; nothing between the wet earth and the moon. Heaving, pulsating, it moved with ever-increasing speed along the ground. The Reverend Alaric came to the gate and passed through; behind him the object swelled, sucked itself up, wobbled briefly on the top bar and dropped over. For no particular reason Bernays associated its movement with that panting, hissing breath. It had lessened the gap, a bare ten yards lay between it and the priest; it not only gathered speed as it went, but also seemed to grow, pushing outward in wide soft bulges.
“Halsey!” cried Paul. “Halsey! Halsey!”
The man looked round. The moonlight struck full on him and an expression that might have been surprise or rage or both showed in his face. Before the emotion could be identified he saw the Thing behind him and screamed.
He broke into a run and Paul ran too, leaping across the fields, driven on by a rising panic, for distance could not dim the terror in Alaric Halsey’s voice. He fled around the corner of the rectory; the monstrous shadow gaining all the time. Paul had the advantage of youth; he cut round by the other side and caught up with him beyond the elm trees. The priest appeared to be in a state of advanced shock, his eyes stared blindly up and he shrieked:
“Deliver me! Deliver me! Deliver me from evil!”
Then he fell to the ground, senseless.
Bernays stooped over him. Fear still pulsed through the night. For the moment he had lost sight of that dark stain—it might be crouched slackly under the trees, it might have vanished altogether. He had abandoned all rational thought, all attempt to work out what in heaven’s name it could be; his immediate concern was to get Halsey to safety. They were some little distance from the house; the church stood altogether more near, and there were practical considerations too; the elder man was above average height and heavy. Paul placed his arm around the unconscious figure and, half-pulling half-lifting, contrived to drag him through the stone porch and into the little Norman church. As he did so he got once more that extraordinary sensation. The tiny chapel seemed to open out around him, to change into a vast cathedral thronged with people whispering, muttering, praying—and high above them all a sudden triumphant laugh. He blinked; between them and the altar stood a formless Thing of towering height, growing larger even as he looked.
He came to his senses in the brightly lit bedroom of West Farthing; he had been ill, they told him, for three weeks. Out of concern for his health, another week passed before the doctor thought it proper to tell him that Alaric Halsey had died, presumably of a heart attack. The doctor (being a rational country physician) had no intention of repeating local gossip; the whispered story that the body had marks on it for all the world as if it had been trampled to death by a huge crowd. The marks were there; but must surely have been caused by something else, for the entire population of West Farthing village numbered no more than twenty people. Country folk were notorious for their imaginings, and the story struck the good doctor as a palpable absurdity.
Christmas had come and gone while Paul lay in his bed; and it was not until the end of January that he nerved himself to revisit the rectory. It seemed deserted. No one answered his repeated knock; and of his Uncle Nicholas there was no sign whatsoever. He considered examining the chapel—but became conscious of a repugnance so extreme he abandoned the attempt. The Spring term beckoned, he had work to do, examinations to sit; Paul Bernays tidied his house and prepared to return to Cambridge. Sorting through various papers belonging to the estate he came across a bundle of ancient correspondence; letters apparently written by Nicholas Bernays to his father, the squire of West Farthing. The ink had faded and the words (which seemed to have been written by someone in a violent rage) proved uncommonly hard to decipher. Ill-formed characters sprawled across the page at an angle; at one point the nib of the pen had actually gone straight through the document.
“… he is my friend! My friend! I do not care if you disinherit me! I shall devote my life to him! You have been listening to vile slanders, the babble of the village idiots who have all run away. He is a great man! It is not true that he worships the…”
Here followed a word which might have been Devil; but Paul could not be certain—besides, he was pressed for time, and so he threw the letters away.
Two events only remain to be told. On putting on his raincoat preparatory to leaving West Farthing, the young man discovered a pair of black leather gloves in the pocket; a curious circumstance as he did not possess any black leather gloves. Further consideration led him to the belief that he had in fact got the wrong raincoat—by some accident in the dim light of the rectory hall, he had picked up the Reverend Halsey’s coat, and that gentleman had picked up his. The two garments were not dissimilar. (In passing it might be well if the manufacturers were to make these items of clothing more distinctive, thus avoiding possibly—
At Cambridge Paul resumed his studies, happily showing no ill effects from his disastrous adventure. But his friends did remark that from that date he evinced a marked dislike for the popular student song, “Come Follow”; and—on being present at a concert when the Glee Club performed that piece—he asked them to be good enough to desist.
THE SMELL OF CHERRIES
by Jeffrey Goddin
Since that always-popular question: “Where do you get your ideas?” has been asked of authors probably since the first caveman started scribbling on his walls, it’s always a relief when some author manages to produce a coherent answer. “The Smell of Cherries,” according to Jeffrey Goddin, “is blatantly autobiographical, if somewhat romanticized. It derives from a period some years ago when I had to do security work to make ends meet—but it was fun. To keep myself awake on eight- or twelve-hour all-night shifts I’d fantasize about just what manner of bizarre things could take place in such a setting. On some nights the phenomenal world kicked in a few ideas of its own.”
Jeffrey Goddin is a native Indianan, born in a small town there on July 7, 1950 and currently living in Bloomington. He describes himself as a “basically rural type, fond of rare books, botany, woods, rivers, target shooting and moths.” Goddin has had other stories in small press publications such as
Taylor had never been in the army. Too young for Korea, he’d pulled a high number during the Vietnamese shindig. But he liked guns, and he liked excitement of the low-key variety. This might explain why he still found
