The Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood (10 Novels & 80+ Short Stories in One Edition). Algernon Blackwood
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too, voices began to sound somewhere in the air, but he could not tell whether they were actually in the room, or outside in the night, or only within himself—in his own head:—strange, faint voices, whispering, laughing, shouting, crying; fragments of stories, rhymes, riddles, odd names of people and places jostled one another with varying degrees of clearness, now loud, now soft, till he wondered what it all meant, and longed for the light to come.
But besides all this, something else, too, was abroad that night—something he could not name or even think about without shaking with terror down at the very roots of his being. And when he thought of this, his heart called loudly for the governess, and the people hidden in the shadows of the room seemed quite useless and unable to help.
Thus he hovered between the two worlds and the two memories, phantoms and realities shifting and changing places every few minutes.
A little light would have saved him much suffering. If only the moon were up! Moonlight would have made all the difference. Even a moon half hidden and misty would have put the shadows farther away from him.
"Dear old misty moon!" he cried half aloud to himself upon the bed, "why aren't you here to-night? My last night!"
Misty Moon, Misty Moon! The words kept ringing in his head. Misty Moon, Misty Moon! They swam round in his blood in an odd, tumultuous rhythm. Every time the current of blood passed through his brain in the course of its circulation it brought the words with it, altered a little, and singing like a voice.
Like a voice! Suddenly he made the discovery that it actually was a voice—and not his own. It was no longer the blood singing in his veins, it was some one singing outside the window. The sound began faintly and far away, up above the trees; then it came gradually nearer, only to die away again almost to a whisper.
If it was not the voice of the governess, he could only say it was a very good imitation of it.
The words forming out of the empty air rose and fell with the wind, and, taking his thoughts, flung them in a stream through the dark sky towards the hidden, misty moon:
"O misty moon,
Dear, misty moon,
The nights are long without thee;
The shadows creep
Across my sleep,
And fold their wings about me!"
And another silvery voice, that might have been the voice of a star, took it up faintly, evidently from a much greater distance:
"O misty moon,
Sweet, misty moon,
The stars are dim behind thee;
And, lo, thy beams
Spin through my dreams
And weave a veil to blind me!"
The sound of this beautiful voice so delighted Jimbo that he sprang from his bed and rushed to the window, hoping that he might be able to hear it more clearly. But, before he got half-way across the room, he stopped short, trembling with terror. Underneath his very feet, in the depths of the house, he heard the awful voice he dreaded more than anything else. It roared out the lines with a sound like the rushing of a great river:
"O misty moon,
Pale misty moon,
Thy songs are nightly driven,
Eternally,
From sky to sky,
O'er the old, grey Hills of Heaven!"
And after the verse Jimbo heard a great peal of laughter that seemed to shake the walls of the house, and rooted his feet to the floor. It rolled away with thundering echoes into the very bowels of the earth. He just managed to crawl back to his mattress and lie down, when another voice took up the song, but this time in accents so tender, that the child felt something within him melt into tears of joy, and he was on the verge of recognising, for the first time since his accident, the voice of his mother:
"O misty moon,
Shy, misty moon,
Whence comes the blush that trembles
In sweet disgrace
O'er half thy face
When Night her stars assembles?"
But his memory, of course, failed him just as he seemed about to grasp it, and he was left wondering why the sound of that one voice had brought him a moment of radiant happiness in the midst of so much horror and pain. Meanwhile the answering voices went on, each time different, and in new directions.
But the next verse somehow brought back to him all the terror he had felt in his flight over the sea, when the sound of the hissing waters had reached his ears through the carpet of fog:
"O misty moon,
Persuasive moon,
Earth's tides are ever rising;
By the awful grace
Of thy weird white face
Leap the seas to thy enticing!"
Then followed the voice that had started the horrid song. This time he was sure it was not Miss Lake's voice, but only a very clever imitation of it. Moreover, it again ended in a shriek of laughter that froze his blood:
"O misty moon,
Deceiving moon,
Thy silvery glance brings sadness;
Who flies to thee,
From land or sea,
Shall end—his—days—in—MADNESS!"
Other voices began to laugh and sing, but Jimbo stopped his ears, for he simply could not bear any more. He felt certain, too, that these strange words to the moon had all been part of a trap—a device to draw him to the window. He shuddered to think how nearly he had fallen into it, and determined to lie on the bed and wait till he heard his companion calling, and knew beyond all doubt that it was she.
But the night passed away and the dawn came, and no voice had called him forth to the last flight.
Hitherto, in all his experiences, there had been only one absolute certainty: the appearance of the governess with the morning light. But this time sunrise came and the clouds cleared away, and the sweet smells of field and air stole into the little room, yet without any sign of the governess. The hours passed, and she did not come, till finally he realised that she was not coming at all, and he would have to spend the whole day alone. Something had happened to prevent her, or else it was all part of her mysterious "plan." He did not know, and all he could do was to wait, and wonder, and hope.
All day long he lay and waited, and all day long he was alone. The trap-door never once moved; the courtyard remained empty and deserted; there was no sound on the landing or on the stairs; no wind stirred the leaves outside, and the hot sun poured down out of a cloudless sky. He stood by the open window for hours watching the motionless branches. Everything seemed dead; not even a bird crossed his field of vision. The loneliness, the awful silence, and above all, the dread of the approaching night, were sometimes more than he seemed able to bear; and he wanted to put his head out of the window and scream, or lie down on the bed and cry his heart out. But he yielded to neither impulse; he kept a brave heart, knowing that this would be his last night in prison, and that in a few hours' time he would hear his name called out of the sky, and would dash through the window to liberty and the last wild flight. This thought gave him courage, and he kept all his energy for the great effort.
Gradually, once more, the sunlight faded, and the darkness began to creep over the land. Never before had the shadows under the elms looked so fantastic, nor the bushes in the field beyond assumed such sinister shapes. The Empty House was being gradually invested; the enemy was masquerading already under cover of these very shadows.
Very soon, he felt, the attack would begin, and he must be ready to act.
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