The Riddle of the Mysterious LightHanshew, Thomas W.
General
The Riddle of the Mysterious Light
Hanshew, Thomas W.
Cleek, Hamilton (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
As yet Cleek could get no sight of the church tower, for the
centuries-old luxuriance of a group of fir trees screened tower and
bells alike from view on this side of the church, and the upward slope
of the land from the river's edge to the graveyard wall rendered their
screen doubly effective. But presently he came abreast of that wall,
vaulted over it, zigzagged his way through a wilderness of crowded
tombstones, came out into the open, and looking upward--saw!
It was the first moment since the beginning of the sound that he had
checked his speed or halted for so much as a second. That he did so now
was only natural. For here was a thing totally unexpected. Here was
corroboration of James Overton's story. Here was, indeed, a suggestion
of the supernatural.
High up in the open space where the bells--themselves unseen--were
swinging and clashing out their jarring discords, a globe of light, its
radiance intensified by the black shadow of the tower's roof, was
careering about as if it hung in mid-air, and was dancing a ghostly
tarantella to the time of the clanging bells.
He stood stock still and looked at it, conscious of a swift, prickling
sensation travelling up his spine to his very hair; then catching a
gasping sort of sound and a low exclamation from somewhere behind him,
he knew that Mr. Narkom, too, had come within sight of the thing, and,
pulling himself together, took up the lead again and ran toward the
tower.
Racing behind in a state of mind bordering closely upon panic, Mr.
Narkom saw Cleek run to the tower's foot, whip out his electric torch,
and splash the light of it about its base--a square now spread inches
deep with fullers' earth--and then, almost immediately, he saw him throw
up both hands as if to recover an equilibrium disturbed by a violent
blow, and stagger backward.
"My God! What is it?" Mr. Narkom called in a shaking voice, as he made a
mad rush toward him. And indeed there was sufficient cause for the
horror in his voice.
For Cleek, crying out that he was burning up, had suddenly faced about,
dashed through the lich-gate, and lurched out into the road, and when,
presently, the Superintendent dodged out of the churchyard after him, it
was in time to see him stagger to the Hurdons' cottage, fall so heavily
against the door of it that it flew inward with a bang, and drop, a
crumpled heap, upon the threshold--limp and inert as a man shot dead.
Narkom, a picture of terror too real to admit of any doubt, was across
that road and kneeling beside him before you could have counted twenty,
and to the astonished eyes of Mrs. Hurdon, drawn to the window by the
uproar, and well-nigh carried off her feet by the bursting in of the
door, there appeared a man's hat rolling across her floor and a
fashionably dressed gentleman sprawling over her threshold in a fainting
condition, while another was bending over him trying to revive him as
well as terror would permit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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