“The police were called in, of course, but they never found a shadow of evidence against anyone. But those letters had brought up more filth than all the dredgers of the Bristol Channel put together.

  “Then, just as the excitement was beginning to die down a bit, things took a more gruesome turn. Complaints started to come in that someone was torturing domestic animals. Weird caterwaulings were heard in the dead of night and several cases of horrible mutilations were reported. My cousin’s gray Persian kitten was found hanging in an old barn; a prize Sealyham of Lady Standen’s had its back legs cut off, and several similar outrages occurred. It was too revolting.

  “I was at home at the time and shall never forget the uproar it all caused. I heard of one old farmer who actually took his blue-ribbon sow to bed with him. The RSPCA? sent down a representative and several of the less reputable characters of the community were put under lock and key.

  “But the thing went on just the same in spite of the fact that every suspicious person in the place, and every tramp for miles around had a perfect alibi in the local police station. Finally word got about that the perpetrator of all these horrors was not of mortal flesh. A supernatural agency seemed the only possible explanation.

  “There was a mound outside the village where an Antichrist was supposed to have been buried in the Middle Ages. Frantic, the villagers flocked to the old vicar and begged him to come to ‘lay’ the evil spirit. He refused, steadfastly repeating that it was a case for the police and not for the priest. They then approached the young curate, who consented. The evil spirit was exorcised at midnight and a stake driven deep into the ground on the spot where its heart was supposed to lie.

  “Next night the ten year old daughter of the village postman was found brutally murdered in a corner of the churchyard. The village was in a state bordering on panic. Of course the thing got into the papers. A Scotland Yard man came down and there was no end of a rumpus.

  “Two weeks later the curate was found with his face deeply embedded in the mud of a shallow puddle three miles away. It could not have been a natural death; suicide seemed impossible and there were no traces pointing to murder. I forget what the verdict was.

  “From that day on the trouble stopped, and not a soul ever knew who was really responsible. Some say it was all done by the curate himself, others are still confident that no human being could have been capable of perpetrating such horrors. Those were the facts….”

  Michael paused and looked around him. There was a long moment of silence.

  “Gosh, what a ghastly yarn!” shuddered Comstock, who was an impressionable youth. “You know, somehow or other I can imagine that blighter Baumann being capable of a thing like that.”

  “Piffle!” I exploded. “If Baumann wanted to kill anyone or anything he’d shoot straight and he’d shoot clean—he’d probably shoot with that revolver Mrs. Bigger is always complaining about. But,” I added, “there’s nothing the matter with Baumann except that he’s homesick, poor devil.” These words, coming from an alien, carried a certain amount of weight.

  “Of course, Hilary,” said Comstock with a slight sneer, “I was forgetting that you and Baumann are friends now.”

  “We are little friends,

  Happy little friends,

  We are little friends,

  And tutor loves us so—”

  chanted Stuart. Neither he nor Michael had ever been heard to say anything against the man who stood between them and what they wanted most in the world. “Have some more whisky, everyone,” he continued. “Just a single swallow to make us spring.”

  “Put a spike in it,” I replied, mangling his metaphor and passing the glasses.

  “Speaking of village horrors,” pursued Lloyd Comstock, when we had all settled down to our drinks, “that was a pretty tragic and weird sort of business when all those women started to die in Crosby-Stourton last summer.”

  “Hey, you, no family scandal,” interrupted Stuart Somerville. “Sir Howard Crosby happens to be a cousin of my governor’s and we won’t talk about that little tea party if you don’t mind.”

  The argumentative Comstock was about to remonstrate when Stuart continued:

  “But if you do want to hear a really creepy yarn I can tell you a story about a fellow I knew at Marlborough. It was a most amazing and uncanny affair….” His voice grew low and serious. “This chap was of a nervous disposition—prone to fainting fits and nosebleeds—you know the type. I got to know him first when we were alone in the school infirmary together—the last victims of an epidemic of some sort—chickenpox, I think, or one of those kiddish complaints. I regarded it as a ripping chance to escape work and slack a bit, but he took it very hard although he wasn’t really any iller than I was.

  “I remember one night well—it was the night before his birthday and he must have been feverish or something because he begged me to stay awake with him and on no account to let him go to sleep. I can see it now—the long row of white covered beds, the black curtain, the night light flickering in a saucer of water on the mantelpiece, and his pale, frightened face imploring me to talk to him.

  “I was sleepy but I promised I’d do my best to keep awake. Then he told me the reason. Ever since he was a kid, he said, he had been subject to a particular dream which was so terrible and frightening that he couldn’t even describe it properly. It occurred quite often but he could always count on it the night before his birthday.

  “In fact, when he was a kid his parents used to sit up with him on that particular night. They had been awfully upset about it and had taken him to a specialist for treatment. Finally he had found it easiest to pretend he had outgrown his childish fears and to keep the real truth to himself.

  “In that sick-room at Marlborough he told me his dream, which, for all his pretended courage, grew more real and more terrifying each year. He dreamt he was in a large dormitory-like room such as they have in hospitals and public schools. There were eighteen beds in the room and he was always sleeping in the end one.

  “Suddenly he seemed to be awake, watching the single fluttering gas jet that lighted the room, and knowing with that awful nightmare certainty that something fearful was going to happen. Fascinated and unable to turn away his eyes, he would watch the door under the gas light. It used to open very slowly, and then something—something he could not describe—would come into the room.

  “It was not a man, it was not an ape, nor a bear nor a wolf, and yet it suggested all of these. With footsteps that were noiseless, yet somehow hideously menacing, it would creep toward one of the beds, and then—then, at that point, he always turned his eyes away, screamed and woke up in an icy sweat.

  “But the worst part of the dream was yet to come. In his earliest recollections he never saw the Thing at all distinctly. It always went to one of the cubicles at the end of the dormitory near the door. But each year he seemed to see it more and more distinctly, and this was the worst of all—every birthday he noticed that it came one bed nearer!”

  Stuart paused a moment and then continued in a more normal tone.

  “Well, I did my best to cheer him up that night. We talked far into the early hours of the morning about cricket, the masters, our families, everything on God’s earth. Finally, of course, I was so tired that I could hold out no longer. I fell asleep. I was awakened by an agonized scream. The night light had gone out, but I was aware that a figure in white pyjamas was standing by my bed and a voice gasped rather than spoke:

  “‘It came again, Somerville. I am sixteen to-day and … it was only two beds away….’

  “I remember that I jumped out of bed and called the matron. She took his temperature and sent for the doctor. He was frightfully ill next day. Sort of brain fever the matron told me. It lasted for some time and he was finally obliged to leave Marlborough altogether. But—the funny part of it is that I met the fellow two years later. It was just before I came up to the Varsity.

  “I was in Switzerland with my pater and stopping in a small inn right up in the mountains. We had just come in from a day’s climbing and were feeling frightfully bucked with ourselves. I was drinking Neuchâtel at the so-called bar when suddenly I heard someone say my name. I turned round and found him standing beside me. At first I thought it must be a ghost, he looked so perfectly ghastly!

  “‘Somerville,’ he said, and his face was so pale I could almost see through it like paper. ‘Somerville, I shall be eighteen tomorrow. I want to tell you….’”

  But Stuart never finished his story for, at this moment the room was suddenly plunged into complete darkness. A blinding flash of lightning showed us all sitting perfectly rigid in our seats like bodies excavated at Pompeii. There followed a long moment of absolute silence. Then there was a crash.

  Whether it was the uncanny tales or the whisky or the storm, I shall never know, but we all seemed to make a rush for the door at the same time. Our nerves had apparently given way in a sort of collective collapse. I fumbled for the light switch, pressed it, but without result. Someone threw open the door. The passage outside was also in total darkness.

  I am not at all clear as to what happened immediately, but the next thing I knew for certain was that I was banging against Baumann’s sported oak and calling his name.

  As I waited for a reply in the awful stillness between thunder claps, I could have sworn I heard a slight movement inside the room and the sound of a match being struck. But perhaps I was mistaken. Cambridge oaks are notoriously thick and I was far from being myself.

  “Baumann!” I called again. “The damned lights are on the blink. Can you give me a candle?” There was no answer.

  “Better go down and tell the porter,” muttered Michael’s voice behind me. “The electricity of the storm must have blown out the fuses.”

  “All right, I’ll go,” I replied, and started to feel my way down the stairs. When I passed Dr. Warren’s rooms there was no light under the door, but as I continued downwards I heard the piano starting to play. This time it was Chopin’s Marche Funèbre, but I did not stop to listen. Further on, a movement in the gyp’s pantry told me that Mrs. Bigger must have been working late. Hank was standing on the ground floor staring out at the rain. He seemed unaware of the trouble on the staircase.

  “The lights have all gone out, Hankin,” I said.

  “Is that so, Mr. Fenton?” he replied calmly. “Well, we can soon fix that up. The porter has the fuses.”

  We walked over to the porter’s lodge together.

  “Horl right, sir, horl right,” smiled the fat, jovial porter. “Them fuses is busted, I s’pose.” I nodded gravely. He turned towards Hank. “I shan’t be gone long, Tom, but you’ll have to stay here and close them gates at ten o’clock prompt if I ain’t back. It’s nine fifty-seven now and them gates closes at ten, fuses or no fuses, storm or no storm. Prompt, mind.”

  Hank nodded laconically. He was quite accustomed to pinch-hitting for the porter just before ten o’clock—the hour at which a heartless Defense of the Realm Act closes the gates of other, more popular, institutions.

  The porter trotted off to the infernal regions below his lodge, leaving Hank to play St. Peter. I returned to my own staircase. My eyes were now more accustomed to the darkness but, even so, it was hard to find one’s way and there was little or no lightning to help me out. The gyp’s pantry was still occupied and Mrs. Bigger’s “Goodnight, Mr. Fenton” answered my own. Dr. Warren’s piano was still pouring out the saccharine strains of Chopin. There was no other sound except my own footsteps.

  Just as I reached the third floor landing, however, I felt rather than heard that there was someone coming down towards me. An uncanny sensation of unreality began to creep over me. It was all like some strange waking dream. As the sounds came nearer, the rustling of a dress became more and more distinct.

  There was a woman on “A” staircase—a woman there at ten o’clock at night! It could not be Mrs. Bigger. I had passed her a few seconds before. Who on God’s earth could it be? I stood aside, waiting. As I did so, once again there came to my nostrils that faint delicate perfume which I connected so intimately with the Profile.

  There was now no mistaking that fragrance. It was so strong that it almost made my head swim. I felt as though I was in the grip of some powerful hallucination.

  And then, as I looked towards the passage window, I saw a dark shadow pass in front of it. The shadow of a woman. A sudden faint flash of lightning threw it into momentary relief and I caught a fleeting glimpse of the features whose image had been with me all day. Only a fleeting glimpse.

  But it was enough to convince me that the Profile I had just seen must be the same as that which I had seen in the morning. The perfume, too, was the same. For a moment I stood there too dazed to speak. It was all so impossible, so story book, so utterly unacademic. I could hardly believe the evidence of my own senses.

  Then a mad resolution seized me. I turned and ran down the stairs after her. I must demand an explanation. But, when I reached the court, I found it completely empty. Once again she had appeared—and disappeared—as if by magic. The pavement outside the gates was empty. No one could possibly have left the college within the last few moments. There was no sound by the chime of the college clock which was just striking the hour.

  At the tenth stroke I saw that Hank was solemnly closing the heavy wrought-iron gates.

  CHAPTER IV

  I Compound a Felony

  When I returned to my room I found the whole staircase flooded with light. Lloyd Comstock and Stuart Somerville were nowhere to be seen but Michael was lying on my sofa, smoking a cigarette.

  “Gosh, you look pale,” he said. “Have you seen a ghost?”

  “I’m not at all sure that I haven’t,” I replied as lightly as I could. “Where are the others?”

  “Dunno. When you went down after the fuses they disappeared. Own rooms, I suppose. I stayed here as I wanted to speak to you.”

  There was a note of seriousness in Michael’s voice which I was quick to catch. “Shoot,” I murmured abstractedly.

  “I had a letter today from my uncle,” he said wistfully. “The one that runs a prep school in Clifton. He’s offered me a job there next term. I’m afraid I’ll have to accept it.”

  The mania for leaving Cambridge prematurely seemed to be assuming epidemic proportions on “A” staircase.

  “But, my dear fellow,” I cried impatiently. “You can’t possibly give up your chance of getting a degree here. You must finish your third year.”

  “Can’t be done. My pater is dreadfully hard up. The Lenox Scholarship was my only hope and, of course, Baumann will carry that off, damn him.”

  “How much is the thing worth?”

  “Eighty pounds a year. It must sound absurd to you, but to me its the difference between, well—”

  I did some rapid calculations. “Why, that’s nothing,” I said. “I’m not a ruddy millionaire in spite of Somerville’s cracks, but I spend that much on ‘Gin and Its’ every term. Let me lend it to you. You can call it America’s contribution toward the depreciated pound sterling.”

  Michael sat up with a start.

  “Good Lord, no,” he answered. “I couldn’t borrow from you or anyone else. I must carve my own way out. Thanks all the same. It was ripping of you to suggest it.”

  “Darn your British pride, and darn you, Michael Grayling. Now get this straight. You’re not going to accept that pokey little job in your uncle’s pokey little prep school. You’re not going to leave Cambridge. You’re going to win the Lenox Scholarship and you’re going to get a first in the Tripos. And right now you are going to promise me that you won’t make any decision until after the exam results come out. I have a hunch that one of your chief competitors is going to be—er—eliminated.”

  “Eliminated?” Michael’s voice was pathetically eager. Inwardly I damned Baumann and his arrogant brilliance. This stupid little bit of money meant so much to Michael. It was nothing to the South African except another bauble to satisfy his vanity which was already over-inflated.

  And then, Baumann had lied to me that morning. There was no John Bowman at Cambridge at all. He had lied about the Profile. She had been in his rooms before lunch. She had, so I believed, been in his rooms again that night. He must know more about her than he was prepared to admit. He could have saved me from so much mental anguish by telling me the truth, and he could save Michael from disappointment and indecision if he would be more specific about his leaving Cambridge. Why should I not march into his rooms and demand an answer to both questions. And if he refused, then I would give him back his rotten envelope and tell him to go to an even more torrid place than Africa. I was in a fighting mood.

  I went over to my bookshelf. The package was still reposing in the second volume of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I shoved it angrily in my pocket.

  “Wait here a minute, Michael. I’m going in to speak to Baumann.” My voice must have sounded strangely purposeful because Michael sat up and stared at me in open-mouthed amazement.

  Without another word I strode out, crossed the passage and banged noisily on Baumann’s sported oak. There was no sound from his room but a crack of light showed under the door.

  “I’ll get in if it’s the last thing I do,” I muttered, still haunted by that fleeting glimpse of the Profile.

  I opened the passage window and climbed onto the still dripping roof. Once outside, I walked along the narrow parapet that separated my window from Baumann’s. So far it was easy, but as I looked through into my neighbour’s lighted room, I almost lost my balance and toppled over backwards into the court four stories below. I had to look twice before I could believe that this was not all some hideous nightmare. I grasped at the window sash to steady myself.