He nodded without answering, and, as we turned to go in, I heard quite
plainly and distinctly a low, strange laugh, a laugh full of a honeyed
sweetness that yet thrilled me with great fear. "What's that?" I said, stopping short. "What?" Radcliffe asked. "Someone laughed," I said, and I stared all round and then upwards. "I
thought it came from up there," I said in a bewildered way, pointing
upwards. He gave me an odd look and, without answering, went into the cottage. He
had said nothing of having planned any flight for the next morning; but
in the early morning, the chill and grey dawn, I was roused by the
drumming of his engine. At once I jumped up out of bed and ran to the
window. The machine was raising itself lightly and easily from the ground. I
watched him wing his god-like way up through the still, soft air till he
was lost to view. Then, after a time, I saw him emerge again from those
immensities of space. He came down in one long majestic sweep, and
alighted in a field a little way away from the house, leaving the
aeroplane for his mechanics to fetch up presently. "Hullo!" I greeted him. "Why didn't you tell me you were going up?" As I spoke I heard plainly and distinctly, as plainly as ever I heard
anything in my life, that low, strange laugh, that I had heard before,
so silvery sweet and yet somehow so horrible. "What's that?" I said, stopping short and staring blankly upwards, for,
absurd though it seems, that weird sound seemed to come floating down
from an infinite height above us. "Not high enough," he muttered like a man in an ecstasy. "Not high
enough yet." He walked away from me then without another word. When I entered the
cottage he was seated at the table sketching a woman's face--the same
face I had seen in that other sketch of his, spectral, unreal, and
lovely. "What on earth----?" I began. "Nothing on earth," he answered in a strange voice. Then he laughed and
jumped up, and tore his sketch across. He seemed quite his old self again, chatty and pleasant, and with his
old passion for talking "shop." He launched into a long explanation of
some scheme he had in mind for securing automatic balancing. I never told anyone about that strange, mocking laugh, in fact, I had
almost forgotten the incident altogether when something brought every
detail back to my memory. I had a letter from a person who signed
himself "George Barnes." Barnes, it seemed, was the operator who had taken the pictures of that
last ascent, and as he understood I had been Mr. Thorpe's greatest
friend, he wanted to see me. Certain expressions in the letter aroused
my curiosity. I replied. He asked for an appointment at a time that was
not very convenient, and finally I arranged to call at his house one
evening. It was one of those smart little six-room villas of which so many have
been put up in the London suburbs of late. Barnes was buying it on the
instalment system, and I quite won his heart by complimenting him on it. But for that, I doubt if anything would have come of my visit, for he
was plainly nervous and ill at ease and very repentant of ever having
said anything. But after my compliment to the house we got on better. "It's on my mind," he said; "I shan't be easy till someone else knows." We were in the front room where a good fire was burning--in my honour, I
guessed, for the apartment had not the air of being much used. On the
table were some photographs. Barnes showed them me. They were
enlargements from those he had taken of poor Radcliffe's last ascent. "They've been shown all over the world," he said. "Millions of people
have seen them." "Well?" I said. "But there's one no one has seen--no one except me." He produced another print and gave it to me. I glanced at it. It seemed
much like the others, having been apparently one of the last of the
series, taken when the aeroplane was at a great height. The only thing
in which it differed from the others was that it seemed a trifle
blurred. "A poor one," I said; "it's misty." "Look at the mist," he said. I did so. Slowly, very slowly, I began to see that that misty appearance
had a shape, a form. Even as I looked I saw the features of a human
countenance--and yet not human either, so spectral was it, so unreal and
strange. I felt the blood run cold in my veins and the hair bristle on
the scalp of my head, for I recognised beyond all doubt that this face
on the photograph was the same as that Radcliffe had sketched. The
resemblance was absolute, no one who had seen the one could mistake the
other. "You see it?" Barnes muttered, and his face was almost as pale as mine. "There's a woman," I stammered, "a woman floating in the air by his
side. Her arms are held out to him." "Yes," Barnes said. "Who was she?" The print slipped from my hands and fluttered to the ground. Barnes
picked it up and put it in the fire. Was it fancy or, as it flared up,
and burnt and was consumed, did I really hear a faint laugh floating
downwards from the upper air? "I destroyed the negative," Barnes said, "and I told my boss something
had gone wrong with it. No one has seen that photograph but you and me,
and now no one ever will." VIII

THE TERROR BY NIGHT


Maynard disincumbered himself from his fishing-creel, stabbed the butt
of his rod into the turf, and settled down in the heather to fill a
pipe. All round him stretched the undulating moor, purple in the late
summer sunlight. To the southward, low down, a faint haze told where the
sea lay. The stream at his feet sang its queer, crooning moor-song as it
rambled onward, chuckling to meet a bed of pebbles somewhere out of
sight, whispering mysteriously to the rushes that fringed its banks of
peat, deepening to a sudden contralto as it poured over granite boulders
into a scum-flecked pool below. For a long time the man sat smoking. Occasionally he turned his head to
watch with keen eyes the fretful movements of a fly hovering above the
water. Then a sudden dimple in the smooth surface of the stream arrested
his attention. A few concentric ripples widened, travelled towards him,
and were absorbed in the current. His lips curved into a little smile
and he reached for his rod. In the clear water he could see the origin
of the ripples; a small trout, unconscious of his presence, was waiting
in its hover for the next tit-bit to float downstream. Presently it rose
again. "The odds are ten to one in your favour," said the man. "Let's see!" He dropped on one knee and the cast leapt out in feathery coils. Once,
twice it swished; the third time it alighted like thistledown on the
surface. There was a tiny splash, a laugh, and the little greenheart
rod flicked a trout high over his head. It was the merest
baby--half-an-ounce, perhaps--and it fell from the hook into the herbage
some yards from the stream. "Little ass!" said Maynard. "That was meant for your big brother." He recovered his cast and began to look for his victim.