In the front parlor green windowshades were drawn and the room was dark with a darkness that was deeper than the dusk.
Foster Adams heaved his bulky body from a leather chair standing in one corner and came across the room to shake my hand. His handclasp was cold and flabby, indifferent if not bored.
“Not many find their way here,” he said. “I am glad you came.”
But I am sure he wasn’t. I am sure he wished I hadn’t bothered him by coming.
We sat there in the dusk behind the drawn shades and we talked in hushed voices, for the very room whispered not to speak aloud. Foster Adams, if no more could be said for him, had perfect manners. Prim, precise, even a little fussy—and disquieting.
It was queer, I thought, to hear the thin, high, cold and hostile whining of the wind at August noon against the sides and around the corners of the house. For there was no friendliness in hill or house. Whatever warmth they may have held had been leached away with the ruin of the acres and the callous abandonment of the buildings to wind and rain and sun.
Yes, Adams said, he could tell me the things I wished to know. And he told them to me without recourse to note or book, speaking as if he were drawing upon personal observation, as if he were talking of a time that was contemporaneous, as if he himself had lived in fifteenth-century England.
“Such things,” he said, “have always interested me. What kind of petticoats a woman wore or the kind of herbs that went into the pot. And even more—” he lowered his voice a trifle—“even more, the way that men have died.”
He sat motionless in his chair and it was as if he might be listening for something that he knew was there—rats in the cellar, perhaps, or crickets in the drapes.
“Men,” he stated, “have died in many ways.” He made it sound as if he were the first man who had ever thought or said it.
In the silence I heard the clumping tread of the old manservant walking about in the dining-room just outside the door. Faintly from the orchard came the muted metallic thumping of the wind-tossed windmill vane.
Foster Adams rose abruptly from his chair. “It was nice seeing you,” he said. “I hope you come again.”
And that is exactly how it was. I was literally thrown out, told to go like a gawping schoolboy who has overstayed his welcome.
But I couldn’t get the man out of my mind. There was a fascination about him that kept tugging at me to go back to the old grey farmhouse atop the bleak unfriendly ridge. Like a man who keeps going back to a certain cage in a zoo, to stand and stare and shiver at the sight of the beast it houses.
I finished my book, using Adams’ information to good advantage, and sent it off to the publisher.
Then, one day, scarcely knowing what I was doing, never for a moment admitting to myself that I was doing it, I found myself once more among the tangled hills of the lower Wisconsin.
The old farmhouse looked just the same as it had before.
I had told myself that probably Adams had just moved in shortly before my visit and that, given time, he would fix up the place. A coat of paint most certainly would have helped. A fireplace would have done wonders to bring some cheer into the house. Flowers and rock gardens and some terracing would have given its gaunt lines a softer setting, while a poplar or two at the corners would have broken the stark dreariness that reared against the sky.
But Adams had done nothing. The house was just the way I remembered it.
He said that he was glad to see me but his handshake was still a flabby gesture and he was as prim and straight as ever.
He sat in his deep leather chair and talked and I knew that if he were glad to see me it was only because it gave him a chance to hear his own voice. For he didn’t talk to me, he didn’t even look at me. it was as if he were talking to himself and there were times when I caught a querulousness in his voice as though he were arguing with himself.
“There is a streak of cruelty,” he said, “that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills.
“A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog’s tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive.”
There was a feeling of mustiness in the house—a feeling, not a smell. A sense of dusty time that had long since run through the glass.
“The Aztecs,” said Foster Adams, “cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.”
The talk sickened me—not the things he told me but the way he talked of them, the smooth professional talk of a man who knows his subject and views it objectively as something to be probed and studied and catalogued as neatly as a merchant would invoice his stock.
For to him, I realize now, the flayed men and the men in the serpent pits and the men who hung on crosses along the Roman roads were not flesh and blood but certain facts that someday might fall into a pattern under the persistent probing of his mind.
Not that he was callous. His interest was real and alive and personal—that his interest became acutely personal in his last few hours of sanity and life there can be small doubt.
He must have seen that his monologue disturbed me for he suddenly changed the subject and we talked of other things, of the country and the view from the hill, of the pleasant weather, for it was late October, and of the irritating curiosity of the natives concerning his reason for living at the farm and what he might be doing. I could see that he was disturbed by their actions.
More than a year elapsed before I saw Foster Adams again and then only by accidental circumstance.
Driving home from a brief visit to Chicago, a violent autumn storm caught me on the road just as night was lowering. Rain turned into ice, ice to snow. As the storm grew worse and the car was reduced to a mere crawl I realized that I could not continue much further and must soon seek shelter. And with this realization came another, that I was at that moment no more than two miles or so from the old Smith farm.
I found the side road that turned off the main highway and half an hour later came to the foot of the hill that ran to the ridge above. Knowing the car had no chance to make the slope I got out and walked, floundering in the wet and heavy snow, guided by a feeble beam of light from one of the farmhouse windows.
By daylight the wind on the hill had been merely vicious, a thin-flanked wind with a snarl between its teeth. Now it was filled with a terrible anger as it howled across the ridge and went booming down into the hollow.
Pausing to get my breath, I listened to it and heard the howling of a pack of hellish hounds, the screams of hunted harried victims, the slow wet whimpering gurgle of a cornered creature that foundered in a deep ravine.
I hurried on, ridden by senseless terror, and it was not until I was almost at the house that I realized I was running, driven by the throng of imagined horrors that pressed up the slope behind me.
I reached the porch and hung onto a canted post to regain my breath and beat back the illogical fear that had gathered in the dark. I was almost myself again when I knocked upon the door—and had to knock a second and a third time because the howling of the storm drowned out the sound of knuckles.
The old manservant let me in and it seemed to me that he moved more slowly on feet that dragged a little more than I had remembered, that he talked more thickly, as if a hand were at his throat.