Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

“I gave your wife an explanation which happily satisfied her,” Channing admitted. “But I should hate to have it criticized by another psychologist, all the same.”

“Oh, well,” said Arkwright, “it worked anyway. That is the only thing that matters, after all.” He had no patience with these experts, quibbling over details.

“That’s true,” replied Channing, and hoped that would he the end of it. He was angry with himself for having been led to say so much.

There was a pause for a while in the conversation, and the two men smoked and stared into the fire, listening to the wind roaring in the big chimney, as a storm swept down the valley from the moors behind the house.

But Arkwright’s mind was troubled. He detested irregularities and things incomplete, in disorder. “What was there about it you didn’t understand?” he asked suddenly.

Channing, faced with the direct question, could find no room for evasion.

“I’ll tell you,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “The fact that the dream was recurrent in type was, and is still, my chief difficulty. Most dreams are symbols of the dreamer’s state of mind, since they are his own elaboration of a meaningless picture. But recurrent dreams are in a class apart. There one is dealing with the emergence into the sleeper’s mind, not of a jumble of detached and disconnected memories, but of one whole memory, of a complete incident which has actually happened.”

“Actually happened?” broke in Arkwright. “But surely you don’t suggest that my wife’s dream ever happened?”

“That’s precisely one of the difficulties I referred to,” replied Channing quietly. “Obviously such an incident never happened. But we are dealing with a recurrent dream none the less, and it ought to have happened,” he ended obstinately. And in a few words he explained, as he had done to his patient, the significance of the battle-dreams of soldiers.

“But that is simply quibbling!” cried Arkwright when he had finished. “Just because my wife’s case is different, you say you’re not, satisfied. The whole thing seems absurd.”

He was brusque almost to the point of rudeness. It offended him that his wife’s case was different from the rest. She was a normal and proper person; and her dreams — though they might be unpleasant, of course — must be normal and proper too. Any suggestion to the contrary was objectionable and absurd.

Channing noticed his annoyance and understood also the cause of it; for the mind of his host was of a shallowness which presented few difficulties to his acutely trained perceptions. Moreover, the fact that this was his host disarmed Channing. He gave way therefore, retreating so skillfully that the other was satisfied that his ridiculous quibbles were silenced, and Arkwright finished the evening in the somewhat pompous complacency habitual to him.

They ascended the staircase at length together, chatting amiably of commonplace matters, and paused at its head to say good night. The landing on which they stood formed part of a corridor running the full length of the house. Channing’s room was down on the right, at the opposite end to the Arkwrights’; and his host waited, with typical punctiliousness, while he walked along the corridor towards it.

Suddenly Channing halted, turned round to his host and called: “Arkwright, come here a moment, will you!” His voice was low and tense.

Arkwright joined him and, obeying his gesture, looked to his left from the window in the corridor which gave a view over the valley.

“Oh, yes,” he said casually, “those are our blast-furnaces. They’re never let out, day or night, you know.” He glanced at Channing as he spoke; and what he saw startled him.

Channing was speaking, too, almost to himself. “Great jets of smoke and flame, tearing up the sky.”

“What do you mean?” Arkwright said testily. But the phrase was too familiar to escape recognition; and it was in a different tone that he said again, “Channing! What do you mean?”

But Channing had not done yet.

“Look behind you,” he said. And this time there was something in his voice which terrified Arkwright. “Look on the wall behind you,” repeated Channing; and as he spoke he turned the switch at his elbow and plunged the corridor in darkness. “Do you see?” he continued, almost in a whisper. “The shadows of these window-bars form a gigantic Cross.”

Arkwright looked and shuddered. Then he turned and, like a man in a trance, stared silently down that long corridor towards his own room — and his wife’s. But his head was out-thrust and rigid, as though he stared at something that he feared.

And Channing stared also, as in the minds of both of them the same picture took form and grew. In that picture from that distant door they saw a woman come. A woman of matchless resolution and indomitable purpose, blindly obeying, in the grip of her delirium, an urge which consciously would have filled her with abhorrence. It seemed to Channing that he saw her, wide-eyed and muttering, stumbling on bare and dragging feet to the spot where now they stood.