Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy Read Online Free PDF Page A

wind itself seems to stoop and listen, with hushed breath – and far over the seep of the mere, where that ruined cottage stands, a mere speck at the edge of the waste of shimmering water, there rises fitfully through the drifting mist a long, low, melancholy echo. Not altogether unfamiliar it sounds to the listener’s ear, and carries his mind, by some connection of ideas, straight back to lonely jungle nights in India. He throws open the window and looks out. The echo swells and dies into the distance round the furthest water’s edge where the road winds into the village. ‘It is coming!’ Then the wind shudders and leaps from among the reeds and passes on, hurrying over the grass fields in their winding sheet of mist, to the open moor, to the pine-woods, anywhere away from that ruined cottage by the mere, from the churchyard with the withered yew tree at its gate.
    Once, so the landlady had told our traveller as he alighted at the door, that yew had been a splendid tree, and used to toss its dense green branches in the wind like other trees; but years ago, they said, a curse had come upon it. It drooped and shrunk; and when the boughs were bare of leaves, a black and mouldering rope became apparent hanging, straight as though a heavy body hung from it, from the biggest branch. ‘Murder will out,’ the villagers said, and though an old man did aver that he had himself as a small boy fixed a swing up there and thought this might be the rope, his neighbours would have none of it. Old Cowp, they said, who used to ill-use his daughter and lived in the cottage, now a ruin, by the mere, could tell more about that rope and the use it was put to than most of us would like to hear. But Old Cowp and his daughter had long ago disappeared, none knew why or whither, suddenly, and no one took his cottage; and when the yew tree withered and the rope was seen, a moral certainty grew in the village that Cowp had done the deed of horror, and his cottage acquired an evil name and fell into a ruin. None visited it even by day. So with the yew tree. Children used to play merrily in its branches by day, and the wind sung in it cheerily by night; but for years, so they say, the wind has swept by and stirredneither twig nor rope, and the children in the evening pass it quickly. For the last month or more, too, the ‘Devil’s Dog’ had been heard in the village almost every night, coming from Old Cowp’s cottage and yelling as it rushed past the yew tree into the churchyard where it would try, and try, to dig a grave. So all the neighbours were agreed that Old Cowp was dead, and his wicked spirit had come back to haunt the scene of his former wickedness and try to dig a grave for his victim’s bones in the churchyard.
    All this our traveller recollects now as he hears the wailing echo coming nearer, and he stares, not altogether comfortable in mind, out into the night. A dead silence had fallen upon the water and the land, like an oppressive, suffocating cloak. The ghostly wail grows louder and nearer. The cottagers crouch in their beds and whisper: ‘The Devil’s Dog! it is coming!’ And now, distinct and suddenly near, the howl breaks out, and, just as his door is burst open and the terrified landlady rushes in with an ‘Oh? sir, it is coming!,’ our traveller recognises the unmistakable screeching of an Indian jackal. ‘It is no ghost, my good woman, it’s a fox or some sort of wild dog. If I was in India again, I should call it a common jackal.’‘Jack ’All did you say? Why, here, Tom,’ who, more frightened than his mistress, was hovering at the door, ‘what was the name they gave to that furrin kind of wolf that got out of the wild-beast show at Tarporley last August and has never been seen since?’‘Jack ’All, they called him, mum!’
    Subsequently our traveller went peacefully to bed; and next morning an investigation of