The keepers gave notice
one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the
foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a
place to be avoided, day or night. “There came a point,” the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, “when
I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could
not kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the
stories at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the
map, comes rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost
touches the end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its
dense growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from
the east winds that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my
brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one
of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate.”

“And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?” asked Dr. Silence. “In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know--except that I
understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head
keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up
travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this
wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall
round it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins
tomorrow in the daylight.”

“And the result of your investigations--these stories, I mean?” the
doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues. “Yes, I’m coming to that,” he said slowly, “but the wood first, for
this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way
peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer
part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large
boulders--old Druid stones, I’m told. At another place there’s a small
pond. There’s nothing distinctive about it that I could mention--just
an ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood--only the trees are a
bit twisted in the trunks, some of ’em, and very dense. Nothing more. “And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor
brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all
odd--such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make
out how these people got such notions into their heads.”

He paused a moment to relight his cigar. “There’s no regular path through it,” he resumed, puffing vigorously,
“but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners
whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in
it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of
the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound--most
of ’em said that, in fact--and another man saw shapes flitting in and
out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all
faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms--always
queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the
whole wood was lit up, and one fellow--he’s still here and you shall
see him--has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars
lying on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals----”

“What kind of stars?” put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that
made me start. “Oh, I don’t know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very
large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was
too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them
since.”

He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze--welcome for its
blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already
a strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its
effect and far from comforting. “Of course,” he went on, straightening up again on the mat, “this was
all commonplace enough--this seeing lights and figures at night. Most
of these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may
account for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight. One of the woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to
his midday meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood
by something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree,
always keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway
and the twigs snap on the ground. And it made a noise, he declared--but
really”--the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh--“it’s too
absurd----”

“_Please!_” insisted the doctor; “for it is these small details that
give me the best clues always.”

“----it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were his
very words: like the crackling of a bonfire,” finished the soldier,
with a repetition of his short laugh. “Most interesting,” Dr. Silence observed gravely. “Please omit nothing.”

“Yes” he went on, “and it was soon after that the fires began--the
fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the patches of
coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. No
one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number,
have seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and
circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head
keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house
chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them,
I must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable. They are most singular, I consider, most singular, these mysterious
fires, and I am glad to say that they come only at rather long
intervals and never seem to spread. “But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that
are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the
plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in
the trees, or flew into their shade. He set countless traps, but never
caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more
than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no
obvious signs of how they had met their death. “Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever
chasing some invisible creature across the field one day when he was
out with his gun. The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at
his feet, and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed
its imaginary quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in--a
thing he had never known it to do before. The moment it crossed the
edge--it is darkish in there even in daylight--it began fighting
in the most frenzied and terrific fashion. It made him afraid to
interfere, he said. And at last, when the dog came out, hanging its
tail down and panting, he found something like white hair stuck to its
jaws, and brought it to show me. I tell you these details because----”

“They are important, believe me,” the doctor stopped him.