Witching Hill

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Hornung Ernest William. Witching Hill

CHAPTER I. Unhallowed Ground

CHAPTER II. The House with Red Blinds

CHAPTER III. A Vicious Circle

CHAPTER IV. The Local Colour

CHAPTER V. The Angel of Life

CHAPTER VI. Under Arms

CHAPTER VII. The Locked Room

CHAPTER VIII. The Temple of Bacchus

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Uvo Delavoye had developed a theory to match his name for the Estate. The baleful spirit of the notorious Lord Mulcaster still brooded over Witching Hill, and the innocent occupiers of the Queen Anne houses were one and all liable to the malign influence. Such was the modest proposition, put as fairly as can be expected of one who resisted it from the first; for both by temperament and training I was perhaps unusually proof against this kind of thing. But then I always held that Delavoye himself did not begin by believing in his own idea, that he never thought of it before our subterranean adventure, and would have forgotten all about it but for the house with red blinds.

That vermilion house with the brave blinds of quite another red! I can still see them bleaching in the glare of those few August days.

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"I'm not so sure," said I gloomily. "I'm only sure of one thing – that the dead can't lead the living astray – and you'll never convince me that they can."

It was no use arguing, for we were oil and vinegar on this matter, and were beginning to recognise the fact. But I was grateful to Uvo Delavoye for his attitude on another point. I tried to explain why I had never told him about my last meeting with Abercromby Royle. It was not necessary; there he understood me in a moment; and so it was in almost everything except this one perverse obsession, due in my opinion to a morbid imagination, which in its turn I attributed to the wretched muddle that the Egyptian climate had made of poor Uvo's inner man. While not actually an invalid, there was little hope of his being fit for work of any sort for a year or more; and I remember feeling glad when he told me he had obtained a reader's ticket for the British Museum, but very sorry when I found that his principal object was to pursue his Witching Hill will-o'-the-wisp to an extent impossible in the local library. Indeed, it was no weather for close confinement on even the healthiest intellectual quest. Yet it was on his way home from the museum that Uvo had picked up Coysh outside my office, and that was where he was when Coysh came down again before the week was out.

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