FullReads

When I recovered the use of my senses a few moments later I saw that Colonel Wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained, had moved closer to me. Dr. Silence stood beside him, an expression of triumph and success in his eyes. The next minute the soldier tried to clutch me with his hand. Then he reeled, staggered, and, unable to save himself, fell with a great crash upon the brick floor.

After the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it would lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. And in the intense calm that followed I saw that the form had vanished, and the doctor was stooping over Colonel Wragge upon the floor, trying to lift him to a sitting position.

“Light,” he said quietly, “more light. Take the shades off.”

Colonel Wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his face. It was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look in the eyes and about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this short space of time to have added years to its age. At the same time, the expression of effort and anxiety had left it. It showed relief.

“Gone!” he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and struggling to his feet. “Thank God! it’s gone at last.” He stared round the laundry as though to find out where he was. “Did it control me–take possession of me? Did I talk nonsense?” he asked bluntly. “After the heat came, I remember nothing–“

“You’ll feel yourself again in a few minutes,” the doctor said. To my infinite horror I saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry dark stains from the face. “Our experiment has been a success and–“

He gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our host while I hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest cauldron.

“–and none of us the worse for it,” he finished.

“And fires?” he asked, still dazed, “there’ll be no more fires?”

“It is dissipated–partly, at any rate,” replied Dr. Silence cautiously.

“And the man behind the gun,” he went on, only half realising what he was saying, I think; “have you discovered that?”

“A form materialised,” said the doctor briefly. “I know for certain now what the directing intelligence was behind it all.”

Colonel Wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. The words conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. But his memory was returning gradually, and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a connected whole. He shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly chilly. The air was empty again, lifeless.

“You feel all right again now,” Dr. Silence said, in the tone of a man stating a fact rather than asking a question.

“Thanks to you–both, yes.” He drew a deep breath, and mopped his face, and even attempted a smile. He made me think of a man coming from the battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of his wounds. Then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question in his eyes. Memory had returned and he was himself again.

“Precisely what I expected,” the doctor said calmly; “a fire-elemental sent upon its mission in the days of Thebes, centuries before Christ, and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released from the spell that originally bound it.”

We stared at him in amazement, Colonel Wragge opening his lips for words that refused to shape themselves.

“And, if we dig,” he continued significantly, pointing to the floor where the blackness had poured up, “we shall find some underground connection–a tunnel most likely–leading to the Twelve Acre Wood. It was made by–your predecessor.”

“A tunnel made by my brother!” gasped the soldier. “Then my sister should know–she lived here with him–” He stopped suddenly.

John Silence inclined his head slowly. “I think so,” he said quietly. “Your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have been,” he continued after a pause in which Colonel Wragge seemed deeply preoccupied with his thoughts, “and tried to find peace by burying it in the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle, with the enchantments of the old formulae. So the stars the man saw blazing–“