Starlit, that is, and dry and cold. There was a breeze down in the Weald of Sussex, which meant that Dannow, up on the Downs, was in the track of half a gale. It was not a noisy wind, but the kind that suggests something very big and thin fresh from the horror of Infinite Space. Swanhild could not hear it distinctly, the Manor walls are a yard thick, only she felt it sweep round the building, and there is nothing more harrowing than a deadly hush with the feel of a great noise round it.

She waited in the Holbein room, not the best place in the circumstances. Flanking the fireplace were the two dubious Holbeins; portraits of Godfrey Hammand and his wife--both killed by the Undying Monster of Dannow on a frosty night in 1556. Over the mantelpiece the little black, Streete portrait of Godfrey's father, Sir Magnus the Warlock, who committed suicide after surviving an encounter with the Monster on a frosty night of 1526. Swanhild saw all three whenever she consulted the clock, as only one lamp was lit, over the mantel, and they were enshrined in a little oasis of warmth and light in the vast spread of wainscoted room.

The rest of the apartment was all shifting shadows. Swanhild herself the only bright and vivid feature of it when the fire had gone down to a sullen smoulder. She was a big woman of twenty, slimly but largely built, with aquiline features, big grey eyes, calm and wide-set, and a wonderful crown of glowing curls, every lock a separate shade of gold, from coppery to that pale tint that suggests warmed silver. She was a typical Hammand of Dannow, evidently a descendant of the Warlock Sir Magnus, for the portrait, the face outlined palely in a black wilderness of background and Tudor cap, and the features traced like rivers on a map, might have been a coarsened likeness of her.

Soon after midnight appeared Walton, the butler, with some trifling enquiry as transparent excuse for a little talk. His manner was one of nicely suppressed alarm.

"Mr. Oliver's very late, Miss Swanhild,' he observed uneasily.

"We can trust him not to get into mischief, Walton.'

"It's mischief getting at him I dread, Miss Swanhild. Those two Ades are likely to be about their tricks on a night like this.'

Swanhild laughed. 'They're only poachers, Walton,'

"You observed yourself, Miss Swanhild, that fellows who set traps that mauled the poor beasts would be capable of anything. The Ades were always a vengeful lot, gypsy strain about them, you know, Miss Swanhild. And Charlie Ade owes Mr. Oliver one for that thrashing last month.'

"Strictly he owes me one. It was I who sent Oliver round directly I found the traps. Oliver would have been content with jailing him.'

"He swore, and so did young Bob, to do for Mr. Oliver when he was out of Lewes, Miss Swanhild.'

"Just so, hence my confidence, Walton. They wouldn't dare to do anything after saying it.

"Well, Miss Swanhild, there's no knowing.' He hesitated. 'As Mr. Oliver went to Lower Dannow it's to be hoped he won't take the short cut back by the Shaw--'

As he was voicing her own unconfessed fear Swanhild was curt. 'Don't worry about the Monster,' she advised. 'Why, it hasn't been about for forty years.'

"There's no timing it, Miss Swanhild. Once it was quiet a hundred and twenty years, and then it came up worse than ever--' He glanced involuntarily at the Warlock portrait.

The girl shuddered and abandoned her pretence of indifference. 'If one only knew beforehand when it was going to manifest itself!' she sighed.

"If you knew when to expect it, Miss Swanhild, might I venture to ask what you would do?'

"Call in--Oh, Doyle, or Professor Lodge, or Miss Bartendale.

"Miss Bartendale, Miss Swanhild? I do not seem to recognise the name. May I ask if we have ever entertained the lady?'

"No, I know her by reputation. She is the greatest hand at hunting down ghosts and anything supernatural that ever was known. She appears to combine the functions of a White Witch and detective.'

Walton shook his head. 'It was before your time, Miss Swanhild, but I remember Madame Blavatsky and Professor Crookes coming down after your grandfather's death and failing to find out anything. I doubt, with all respect to your opinion, if this lady, or anyone, could do anything with our Monster.'

Swanhild laughed again. 'I believe you would be half sorry if anyone could, Walton! It would lower the prestige of the family to lose its old-established Ghost, eh? A supernatural Bane and Luck combined that has gone on for a thousand years at least--'

She stopped suddenly. The door was afar and from the hall came the noise of the telephone bell. Both the girl and the old man were unreasonably startled. Walton hurried out, and Swanhild followed him after a moment's pause. The hall was poorly lit, at the further end of it the maid who had been sitting up pending the master's return was at the telephone.

She turned, and across the dusk of the long apartment her face shewed with the uncanny luminosity of live flesh in a dime distance. Through the hush her voice came in almost a shriek.

"Oh, Mr. Walton--Miss Hammand. They've rung up from the Lodge--the Monster's in the Shaw--Will heard it howl. And Mr. Hammand isn't home yet.'

As she ran the length of the hall Swanhild's heart seemed to miss one beat and then she was suddenly very calm. She must be calm, for Oliver's sake. 'Hullo, hullo!' came the voice of the Lodge-keeper's son as she took the receiver from the frightened maid. 'Why don't you call Miss Hammand?'

"It's Miss Hammand. Steady, Will. What's up?'

"The Monster's in the Shaw, miss. I heard on en. Killin' Mus' Hammand, most like. I heard on en a mile away. Horrible, it were, like a dog an' a devil to onct!'

"How do you know it's the Monster? It might be a trapped dog.'

"Miss, I heard en! I were comin' home from Lower Dannow, after getting' a bottle for Father from the Doctor, and on the bridge I heard en. Like a bark, an' a voice, an' a woman in 'sterics all together! Wind bein' from the Shaw, miss, an' it carryin' all the way to the bridge! It warn't no dog.'

"Very well, stand ready with a lantern to open the gates when you see a car coming.'

Three violent applications to the house telephone brought the voice of the chauffeur, scared and sleepy. ''lo! Wha's 'time o'night?' it demanded.

"It's Miss Hammand. Run the Maxwell round, Stredwick. As quick as you can.'

She ran upstairs and came down within three minutes, buckling her brother's service revolver on round her motor coat. Walton and the maid, the only servants up at the time, still stood by the telephone, as though paralysed. 'Miss Swan, surely you're not going to the Shaw?' the old man exclaimed.

The horror in his eyes brought home to Swanhild the incredible possibilities of the crisis. As a youth he had seen her own grandfather Reginald Hammand, brought home from the Shaw after such an alarm as this: living, but with his hair turned partly white in a couple of hours. She could see the picture of it was growing in his mind's eye, and to breaek the spell of horror motioned him to open the hall door.

The inrush of wind almost took her off her feet. Sudden frost had crisped the ivy round the porch to brittleness, it made an odd undertone in the wind. Before her was the courtyard, all black, the pines across the moat tossing their arms fantastically over the girding-wall, the sky overhead tenderly grey, with big, hard winter stars in it. Past the wall shewed copses and hangers like so many clumps of hearse-plumes; ground in the valley between all a soft mistiness of starlit frost-fog. Beyond the valley the last Northern wave of the Downs humping itself up to the crowning height of Thunderbarrow Beacon. The Monster Shaw, at the foot of the Beacon, plumily dusk above the mist. The summit over the Shaw only to be distinguished from the sky by token of its blocking out some stars and having the Monstrous Man of Dannow sprawled on it.

Dannow Monstrous Man is a giant figure outlined by stripping the turf from the chalk beneath, own brother to the Long Man near Eastbourne and the White Horses of many places in England. In that night of half-light and dull darkness it shone strangely distinct and menacing, looking, as shifting mist-shadows chased over it, like a Titan's ghost pegged down on the hillside and writhing in agony.

Swanhild, in the compulsory pause, up in the sounding emptiness of night, realised herself for a feeble atom bound to pit herself against what had baffled the wits and courage of thirty generations. She chafed over the car's delay, but knew it was unavoidable. And every moment was precious. What was happening to Oliver in that dark patch under the Monstrous Man that was the wood where so many Hammands had died hideously? If it was no false alarm, if he had truly fallen into the too tangible clutches of the Monster, then she was probably only going t share his fate--death in a horrible form, or madness that would end in self-destruction.

They had all committed suicide, all the Hammands who encountered the Monster and were not killed by it. Her grandfather and the Warlock Sir Magnus and Godfrey whom Holbein painted, and many others. And not one had described what he had seen. They just killed themselves, rather than live with the horror of it in their brains ... That was the very worst of it--if only one had described what it was--any horror is preferable to that of utter uncertainty.

As she strained eyes and ears for the car's coming, a soft nose was thrust into her hand. 'I had forgotten you, Alex,' she said, patting the Great Dane that ha lounged after her from the hall fire. She would not go utterly alone, after all, though no man within ten miles would have ventured into Thunderbarrow Shaw on a frosty night.

"Miss Swanhild, I can't see a lady of the family run into danger without a man to back her. I'll come.' Walton spoke with the explosiveness of desperation. His teeth chattered over the words, he clutched the doorpost as though staggered at his own temerity. He would be less use than hindrance. 'No, thanks, Walton,' she returned. 'It may be a false alarm, and you must mind the house. Just get Mrs. Walton up quietly.'

He opened his mouth to protest, but at that moment a dazzling light flowed round the house, to stop, purring, before the steps. Swanhild was down and in almost before it was stationary. The chauffeur jumped out; a ridiculous figure, his livery jacket huddled over the diverse garments he ha snatched when awakened.

"It's the Shaw, Thunderbarrow Shaw, Mr. Stredwick!'

The maid called it down--she had an understanding with him. The man's face turned to a mask of panic. 'Miss--I can't go!' he quavered to Swanhild. 'The Monster's taken a Stredwick already, besides Hammands!'

Swanhild remembered the man's grandfather had been one of the victims whose death in the Shaw had been too horrible for her grandfather to explain or survive. 'You'll open the wall gate,' she ordered, settling down in the driver's seat and calling Alex up beside her. He had it only half open when she guided the car through.

It bumped, thunderously, over the moat-bridge, and shot into the avenue.

The wind lashed Swanhild's face icily as she put the car to half speed down the clear span of avenue. It glided over the smooth gravel steadily; the splash of white glare from the lamps slipping along the ground in front; tree trunks seeming to scurry past frantically as the light rippled against them in the pitch darkness that brooded under the roof of meeting beech branches. The Lodge was marked by a pink scintillation that was Will's lantern and a flicker of twisted ironwork as the open gates were passed.

Outside, the road curved to the right, beside the park railings, ran high and bleakly parallel to the valley, and dipped to the bridge. So far the wind came to them straight from the Beacon. The girl strained her ears for any unusual sounds on it. She heard nothing, but felt the Great Dane start and stiffen beside her. The great creature suddenly drooped down on the cushions, whimpered once, and huddled against her, shuddering. Swanhild's brain crept--Alex, fearless, thoroughbred Alex, was abjectly frightened, with nothing to account for it save that wind was from the Beacon and animals can sense what human beings cannot. Then the bridge was reached, a turn to the left made, and the car sped along a glimmering ribbon of highway with the wind no longer from the Beacon. Hedges ran to either hand, fluffily black, dipping to give a glimpse of the rivulet that ran down from the uplands like a flash of dull, meandering lightning. Then came cobbles, rough-cast garden walls to the right, cottages beyond them peaking, unlit, up amongst the stars. To the other hand the misty valley and the uplands beyond sloping to the spectral enormity of the Monstrous Man on the beacon's dark bulk. The village well past, the flanks of the Beacon and another Down-hump swooped together and then opened to show the road rippling, ethereally pale, into the hazy immensity of the Weald.

Swanhild knew Oliver had gone to Mansby Place in Lower Dannow village, round the far curve of the Beacon's base. She had clung to one faint hope: that her brother had merely stayed gossiping with Goddard Covert unreasonably late. Her country-bred eyes could make out the Place, on its hillock, black but for one tiny glimmer towards the top. Oliver was not there. Goddard wsa up, pottering over his chemicals, but she thanked Heaven the Place was to windward of the Beacon that night. Oliver must have gone by the borstal; the sheep track that ran below the Shaw and through the valley almost to the Manor Lodge. All this went through her mind the moment it took to turn the car and race back through the gap. A twist to the right sent it slashing and slicing through frozen grass and dead bracken, and so down to the turf-grown Roman cutting through the valley.

It seemed an eternity while she drove principally by instinct and memory into the dull, wet sea of mist in the valley-trough. The car rushed down into it, seemed to stand hummingly still in the smother of it, bumped, and began to climb in free starlight again, the Beacon rising in front, to be drawn up on a grass slope with the fringe of the Shaw not far above it.

Alex had recovered herself; she sniffed towards the wood, but shewed no uneasiness. The sounds of a wind-tortured plantation came down, full and loud: boughs beaten together creakily, the rustle of bushes and bracken, the swish of lashed grass. A very tornado of dismal noises met Swanhild when she unshipped a lamp and stepped towards the outer fringe of trees. She was hot and cold at the same time, and calm with sheer dread. The shaw was mainly full of pines, firs, and beech, that stretched up funereally, shutting out the dimly lit sky, save where a birch tree here and there let a few stars glimmer down between bare branches. The noisy, crowded spaciousness would have been terrifying to any solitary wanderer not country-bred, to Swanhild the terror was what might manifest itself at any moment; from the treetops, behind or in front, or from the very earth.

Alex loped in front, with swaying head. Swanhild called her brother's name at intervals, steeling herself against dread that her voice might bring other hearers than Oliver. The whole Shaw was like a dark cave, a cave with endless turnings, where anything might lurk. Possibly Something that made sane men kill themselves after meeting it. Once an indistinct sound made her face round, and far away the other lamp was shining on the car.

A turn hid it, breaking the last link with the wholesome outer world, and landed her in a clearing whence several rides branched.

Someone had been there recently. The earth was too frost-bound to hold footmarks, but crushed grass and snapped fern told the tale. Alex suddenly ran up the nearest path to an oak that stood at one side of another small clearing. She nosed uneasily something on the ground. It was a splash of blood, frozen and slightly opalescent. Swanhild flashed the light round, and on the side of the tree facing the open space was a dark mark, splashed head-high and at the foot a ghastly huddle of torn flesh.

Swanhild's heart sucked, but this was not Oliver. It was the next worse thing, his dog. A gigantic mastiff, its body looked as large as a pony as it lay there. One hind leg had been torn off, the whole body had been twisted and squeezed to an almost shapeless mass before being flung against the tree. Some diabolic force must have been needed to perform such an atrocity. Alex, after snuffling mournfully at her kennel friend, led on again across the clearing to a curve in the line of trees, where the lightning-struck ruin of a beech stood overshadowed by a large pine. At the pine's foot the light lit on black curls prone on the shuffled brown needles and cones.

It was Oliver sprawled over the roots with his head in a puddle of blood.

Setting the lamp down, Swanhild turned him over and propped him against the pine. His face was covered with blood, his hair matted with it; a thick silk muffler round his neck was black and soaked and frozen into folds. All the blood was congealed, it had ceased to flow some time before, though whether from cold or because Oliver had died Swanhild could not tell. The sleeves of his thick overcoat were torn to ribbons and his hands and forearms were black and scarlet and frozen almost stiff. Swanhild could not tell if his heart showed any sign of life, with the beating of her own and the noise around almost deafening her.

She stood up and squared her shoulders. A thicket of brambles and bracken backed the trees, it was torn and broken in a way that indicated a titanic struggle. Nothing could be done there; alive or dead she must get her brother home. Suddenly a little uncertain sound came from the hollow of the burnt beech. Her scalp crept, she stepped before Oliver, listening and staring from the beech to Alex.

The dog lifted and swayed her head uncertainly, sniffing towards the beech, then resumed her watch on Oliver. Swanhild could not see into the tree, a gap to the ground existed but it was round at the other side. There were scores of different sounds on the wind as if pouted through boughs and over the hill edge; she could not decide if she had been mistaken. At last: 'Come out of that hollow tree or I'll fire!'

There was no answer, and she fired into the trunk, waist high. Nothing ensued but a shower of rotten wood. The explosion of the revolver seemed to blow aside all other noises for a moment and leave her in a little clear space of silence. No sound came from the tree. She would have been satisfied but for the dog's action. Driven by impulse, almost without conscious volition, she snatched the lamp and ran to flash it in the hollow.

She had not cried out over her brother, but at what the light showed a half-scream of: 'Kate Stringer!' seemed to ring in her ears without her knowing she had spoken. The sight was indescribable, the broken mastiff was nothing to it. And the worst was that the torn flesh she could scarcely distinguish from the torn clothing was still alive.

Nothing to be done there. With strength born of desperation, she thrust Oliver up the pine-roots until he almost stood, sagging horridly as she propped him, butted a shoulder under one of his arms, and so slung him on her back. He was an enormous man, his feet trailed on the ground and both hands were needed to hold him by the limp arms she pulled round her neck. The butt of the revolver, thrust in the breast of her coat, touched her right hand as she held him. The lamp must be left behind; she turned it with one foot so that the light carried as far as possible along the way she had come. Summoning all her strength she started off, bent nearly double beneath her overwhelming burden.

Alex kept in front of her. The mastiff's body was within he lamp's ray, seeing it she realised afresh what a mark she made, weighed down and in the dark, for whatever had done the night's work. A turn took her beyond the light and a trailing bramble caught her round one ankle like a clutching hand; she jammed Oliver between herself and a tree while she reached up the foot and found what it was. Her eyes were now adjusted to the dark, she could distinguish Alex for a lighter patch in it as the animal led her over the first clearing, and so, presently, the light of the car hove into sight in a frame of black tree silhouettes. She summoned all her strength and in a last spurt reached the blessed open, between Shaw and car, tumbled her brother on the turf, and sank down beside him, sobbing for breath.

His head rolled over in a hideously limp way when she lifted his shoulders and held him in her arms while she recovered breath, her eyes on the Shaw all the time. So far, good. The Monster never attacked anyone save under pines or firs. Oliver was safe from it for the time. Only she ought to go back for the other victim. She tried to think it over, frantically in the enforced pause to gather strength. She was almost sure Oliver was dead; but if he were taken to the Doctor at once there might be a chance for him. She knew poor Kate in the beech had been just alive--but she might be dead by now. Anyhow, a woman's first duty is to her own menfolk.

Kate was probably dead. She got up and dragged Oliver into the tonneau, tucked the rugs round him, and ran round the car to crank up. The girl who might be alive--her brother who might be dead. The Monster had not molested her, but if she went in again--She could come back after taking Oliver home.

Oh, yes, and Oliver might survive--at the expense of a girl's possible chance of living. She dropped the handle and pelted off to the Shaw again, after ordering Alex to stay with Oliver. There were things a Hammand of Dannow could not do, even to save the only brother the war had left her. She charged boldly through the darkness of the unholy wood now, no more conscious of the horror that dark might hold in leash than of the ground under her speeding feet, exalted past fear by plain duty to be done.

Only a thrill of horror had power to come when she reached the beech and was stripping off her coat to wrap and hold together the ghastly thing that was a girl she had played with years before, and talked and laughed with that past afternoon. A pair of pale blue eyes opened in the mutilated thing that had been the prettiest face in the village, and looked at her a moment before closing again. In a few minutes she was back and had stowed the close wrapped figure beside Oliver. To turn the car it had to run under the fringe of the Shaw, to a wider turf stretch, and so round to the Roman way. Then it shot down the incline and along the mist-filled trough of the valley, bumped, and climbed again.

To Swanhild it seemed a thousand years' stretch of wind that lashed the face like sleet, stars racing backwards, smothering mist, and sounding, empty space with a menacing horror ready to materialise out of the murk, before the car swooped on to cobbles in the safety of the village street.

It was best to head for the Manor. The doctor lived half an hour's run away over the worst roads in Sussex. It was ten minutes smooth scurry to the now brightly lit lodge. Will was on guard, she called to him to call the doctor at once as the car flashed through.