Scary Stories
Negotium Perambulans - E F Benson
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- Duration:
- 45m
- Broadcast on:
- 08 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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V-G-W Group, forward, where prohibited by law, 18-plus Terms and Conditions apply. Negotium Parambulance by E. F. Benson. The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and Land's End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger, the faded inscription, "Polon, two miles", but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse those two miles in order to see a place to which their guidebooks award so cursory a notice. It is described there in a couple of unattractive lines as a small fishing village with a church of no particular interest except for certain carved and painted wood panels originally belonging to an earlier edifice which form an altar rail. But the church at St. Creed, the tourist is reminded, has a similar decoration far superior in point of preservation and interest, and thus even the ecclesiastically disposed are not lured to Poland. So Miega Abait is scarce worth swallowing, and a glance at the very steep lane which in dry weather presents a carpet of sharp-pointed stones, and after rain, a muddy water course, where almost certainly decide him not to expose his motor or his bicycle to risks like these and so sparsely populated a district. Hardly a house has met his eyes since he left Penzance, and the possible trundling of a punctured bicycle for half a dozen weary miles seems a high price to pay for the sight of a few painted panels. "Polon, therefore, even in the high noon of the tourist season, is little liable to invasion, and for the rest of the year I do not suppose that a couple of folk a day traverse those two miles, long ones at that, of steep and stony gradient. "I am not forgetting the postman in this exicue assessment, for the days are few when, leaving his pony and cart at the top of the hill, he goes as far as the village, since but a few hundred yards down the lane there stands a large white box, like a sea trunk, by the side of the road, with a slip for letters and a locked door. Should he have in his wallet a registered letter, or be the bearer of a parcel too large for insertion in the square lips of the sea trunk, he must needs trudge down the hill, and deliver the troublesome missive, leaving it in person on the owner, and receiving some small reward of coin or refreshment for his kindness." But such occasions are rare, and his general routine is to take out of the box such letters as may have been deposited there, and insert in their place such letters as he has brought. These will be called for, perhaps that day, or perhaps the next, by an emissary from the Poland Post Office. As for the fishermen of the place, who, in their export trade, constitute the chief link of movement between Poland and the outside world, they would not dream of taking their catch up the steep lane and so, with six miles farther of travel, to the market at Pennzance. The sea route is shorter and easier, and they deliver their wares to the pier head. Thus, though the sole industry of Poland is sea fishing, you will get no fish there unless you have bespoke in your requirements to one of the fishermen. Back come the trawlers as empty as a haunted house, while their spoils are in the fish train that is speeding to London. Such isolation of a little community continued, as it has been for centuries, produces isolation in the individual as well, and nowhere will you find greater independence of character than among the people of Poland. But they are linked together, so it has always seemed to me, by some mysterious comprehension. It is as if they had all been initiated into some ancient rite, inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible. The winter storms that batter the coast, the vernal spell of the spring, the hot, still summers, the season of rains and autumnal decay, have made a spell which, line by line, has been communicated to them, concerning the powers, evil and good, that rule the world, and manifest themselves in ways penignant or terrible. I came to Poland first at the age of ten, a small boy weak and sickly, and threatened with pulmonary trouble. My father's business kept him in London, while for me abundance of fresh air and a mild climate were considered essential conditions if I was to grow to manhood. His sister had married the vicar of Poland, Richard Bolitho, himself native to the place, and so it came about that I spent three years as a paying guest with my relations. Richard Bolitho owned a fine house in the place, which he inhabited in preference to the vicarage, which he led to a young artist John Evans, on whom the spell of Poland had fallen, for from years beginning to years end he never left it. There was a solid roofed shelter, open on one side to the air, built for me in the garden, and here I lived and slept, passing scarcely one hour out of twenty-four behind walls and windows. I was out on the bay with a fisher-folk, or wandering along the gorse-clad cliffs that climbed steeply to the right and left of the deep comb where the village lay, or pottering about on the pier-head, or birds nesting in the bushes with the boys of the village, slept on Sunday, and for the few daily hours of my lessons I might do what I pleased, so long as I remained in the open air. About the lessons there was nothing formidable. My uncle conducted me through flowering bipaths among the thickets of arithmetic, and made pleasant excursions into the elements of Latin grammar, and above all he made me daily give him an account in clear and grammatical sentences of what had been occupying my mind or my movements. Should I select to tell him about a walk along the cliffs, my speech must be orderly, not vague, slip-shod notes of what I had observed. In this way too he trained my observation, for he would bid me tell him what flowers were in bloom, and what birds hovered fishing over the sea or were building in the bushes. For that I owe him a perennial gratitude, for to observe and to express my thoughts in the clear spoken word became my life's profession. But far more formidable than my weekday tasks was the prescribed routine for Sunday. Some dark embers compounded of Calvinism and mysticism smolded in my uncle's soul, and made it a day of terror. His sermon in the morning scorched us with a foretaste of the eternal fires reserved for unrepentant sinners, and he was hardly less terrifying at the children's service in the afternoon. Well do I remember his exposition of the doctrine of guardian angels. "A child," he said, "might think himself secure in such angelic care, but let him be aware of committing any of those numerous offences which would cause his guardian to turn his face from him, for as sure as there were angels to protect us, there were all so evil and awful presences which were ready to pounce; and on them he dwelt with peculiar gusto. "Well, too do I remember in the morning sermon his commentary on the carved panels of the altar rails to which I have already alluded. There was the angel of the enunciation there, and the angel of the resurrection, but not less was there the Witch of Endor, and, on the fourth panel, a scene that concerned me most of all. This fourth panel, he came down from his pulpit to trace its time-worn features, represented the litch-gate of the churchyard pole on itself, and indeed the resemblance when thus pointed out was remarkable. In the entry stood the figure of a robed priest holding up a cross with which he faced a terrible creature like a gigantic slug that reared itself up in front of him. That so ran my uncle's interpretation was some evil agency such as he had spoken about to us children of almost infinite malignity and power, which could alone be combated by firm faith and a pure heart. No ran the legend, negotium parambulance in tenebris, from the ninety-first psalm. We should find it translated there the pestilence that walketh in darkness, which but feebly rendered the letting. It was more deadly to the soul than any pestilence that can only kill the body. It was the thing, the creature, the business that trafficked in the outer darkness, a minister of God's wrath on the unrighteous. I could see, as he spoke, the looks which the congregation exchanged with each other, and knew that his words were evoking a surmise, a remembrance. Nods and whispers passed between them. They understood to what he eluded, and with the inquisitiveness of boyhood, I could not rest till I had wormed the story out of my friends among the fisher-boys, as, next morning, we sat basking and naked in the sun after our bathe. One knew one bit of it, one another, but it pieced together into a truly alarming legend. In bald outline it was as follows, a church far more ancient than that in which my uncle terrified us every Sunday had once stood not three hundred yards away, on the shelf of level ground below the quarry from which its stones were hewn. The owner of the land had pulled this down, and erected for himself a house on the same site out of these materials, keeping in a very ecstasy of wickedness, the altar, and on this he dined and played dice afterwards. But as he grew old, some black melancholy seized him, and he would have lights burning there all night, for he had deadly fear of the darkness. On one winter evening there sprang up such a gail as was never known before, which broke in the windows of the room where he had sucked and extinguished the lamps. Yelles of terror brought in his servants, who found him lying on the floor with the blood streaming from his throat. As they entered, some huge black shadow seemed to move away from him, crawled across the floor and up the wall and out of the broken window. "There, he lay adoying," said the lost of my informants, "and him that had been a great birdie man, was withered to a bag of skin, for the critter had drained all the blood from him. His last breath was a scream, and he hollowed out the same words as passing red off the screen. Some perambulance internebrous, I suggested eagerly. Thereabouts, Latin anyhow. And after that I asked. Nobody would go near the place, and the old house rotted and fell in ruins till three years ago, when a long comes Mr. Doolist from Penzance, and built the off of it up again. But he don't care much about such critters, nor about Latin neither. He takes his bottle of whiskey a day and gets drunk solor in the evening. Eh, I'm Gwynell, Nomoy a dinner. Whatever the authenticity of the legend, I had certainly heard the truth about Mr. Doolist from Penzance, who from that day became an object of keen curiosity on my part, the more so because the quarry-house adjoined my uncle's garden. The thing that walked in the dark failed to stir my imagination, and already I was so used to sleeping alone in my shelter that the night had no terrors for me. But it would be intensely exciting to wake at some timeless hour and hear Mr. Doolist yelling, and conjecture that the thing had got him. But by degrees the whole story faded from my mind, overscored by the more vivid interests of the day, and for the last two years of my outdoor life in the Vicridge Garden I seldom thought about Mr. Doolist and the possible fate that might await him for his temerity in living in the place where that thing of darkness had done business. Occasionally, I saw him over the Garden Fence, a great yellow lump of a man, with slow and staggering gait, but never did I set eyes on him outside his gait, either in the village street or down on the beach. He interfered with none, and no one interfered with him. If he wanted to run the risk of being the prey of the legendary nocturnal monster or quietly drink himself to death, it was his affair. My uncle, so I gathered, had made several attempts to see him when first he came to live at Poland, but Mr. Doolist appeared to have no use for Parsons, but said he was not at home and never returned the call. After three years of sun, wind, and rain, I had completely outgrown my early symptoms and had become a tough, strapping youngster of thirteen. I was sent to Eden and Cambridge, and in due course ate my dinners and became a barrister. In twenty years from that time I was earning a yearly income of five figures, and had already laid by in sound securities a sum that brought me dividends which would, for one of my simple tastes and frugal habits, supply me with all the material comforts I needed on this side of the grave. The great prizes of my profession were already within my reach, but I had no ambition beckoning me on, nor did I want a wife and children, being, I must suppose, a natural celibate. In fact, there was only one ambition which through these busy years had held the lure of blue and far off hills to me, and that was to get back to Poland, and live once more isolated from the world, with the sea and the gorse-clad hills for playfellows and the secrets that lurked there for exploration. The spell of it had been woven about my heart, and I can truly say that there had hardly passed a day in all those years in which the thought of it and the desire for it had been wholly absent from my mind. Though I had been in frequent communication with my uncle there during his lifetime, and after his death with his widow who still lived there, I had never been back to it since I embarked on my profession, for I knew that if I went there it would be a wrench beyond my power to tear myself away again. But I had made up my mind that when once I had provided my own independence I would go back there not to leave it again. And yet I did leave it again, and now nothing in the world would induce me to turn down the lane from the road that leased from Penn's ants to the land's end, and see the sides of the comb rise steep above the roofs of the village, and hear the gulls chiding as they fish in the bay. One of the things invisible, of the dark powers, leaped into light, and I saw it with my eyes. The house where I had spent those three years of boyhood had been left for life to my aunt, and when I made known to her my intention of coming back to Poland, she suggested that till I found a suitable house, or found her proposal unsuitable, I should come to live with her. The house is too big for a lone old woman, she wrote, and I have often thought of quitting, and taking a little cottage sufficient for me and my requirements, but come and share it my dear, and if you find me troublesome, you or I can go. You may want solitude, most people in Poland do, and will leave me, or else I will leave you. One of the main reasons of my stopping here all these years was a feeling that I must not let the old house starve. The house is starved, you know, if they are not lived in, they die a lingering death. The spirit in them grows weaker and weaker, and at last fades out of them. Isn't this nonsense to your London notions? Naturally, I accepted with warmth this tentative arrangement, and on an evening in June found myself at the head of the lane leading down to Poland, and once more I descended into the steep valley between the hills. Time had stood still apparently for the comb. The dilapidated signpost, or its successor, pointed a rickety finger down the lane, and a few hundred yards farther on was the white box for the exchange of letters. Point after a remembered point met my eye, and what I saw was not shrunk, as is often the case with the revisited scenes of childhood into a smaller scale. There stood the post office, and there the church, and close beside at the vicarage, and beyond, the tall shrubberies which separated the house for which I was bound from the road, and beyond that again the grey roofs of the quarryhouse, damp and shining with the moist evening wind from the sea. All was exactly as I remembered it, and, above all, that sense of seclusion and isolation. Somewhere above the treetops climbed the lane which joined the main road to Penzance, but all that had become immeasurably distant. The years that had passed since last I turned in at the well-known gate faded like a frosty breath, and vanished in this warm, soft air. There were law courts somewhere in memory's dull book which, if I cared to turn the pages, would tell me that I had made a name and a great income there. But the dull book was closed now, for I was back in Poland, and the spell was woven around me again. And if Poland was unchanged, so too was Aunt Hester, who met me at the door. Dainty and China white she had always been, and the years had not aged, but only refined her. As we sat and talked after dinner, she spoke of all that had happened in Poland in that score of years, and yet somehow the changes of which she spoke seemed about to confirm the immutability of it all. As the recollection of names came back to me, I asked her about the quarryhouse, and Mr. Dulis, and her face gloomed a little, as with the shadow of a cloud on a spring day. "Yes, Mr. Dulis," she said, "poor Mr. Dulis. How well I remember him, though it must be ten years and more since he died. I never wrote you about it, for it was all very dreadful, my dear, and I did not want to darken your memories of Poland." Your uncle always thought that something of the sort might happen if he went on in his wicked, drunken ways, and worse than that, and though nobody knew exactly what took place, it was the sort of thing which might have been anticipated. "But what more or less happened, Aunt Hester?" I asked. "Hey there, it is Ryan Seacrest with you. You want to make this summer unforgettable? Join me at Chumbak Casino, it's the summer's hottest online destination. They're rolling out the red carpet with an amazing welcome offer, just for you. So don't wait, dive in now and play hundreds of social casino games for free. Your chance to redeem real prizes is just a spin away. "Do you want to be sponsored by Chumbak Casino, no purchase necessary, VGW Group, voidware prohibited by law, 18+ terms and conditions apply." Well, of course, I can't tell you everything, no one knew it. You remember a sermon of your uncles when he got out of the pulpit and explained that panel at the altar rails, the one I mean with a horrible creature rearing itself up outside the litch gate? "Yes, I remember perfectly," said I. "Ah, it made an impression on you, I suppose, and so it did on all who heard him, and that impression got stamped and branded on us all when the catastrophe occurred. Somehow, Mr. Doolis got to hear about your uncle's sermon, and in some drunken fit he broke into the church and smashed the panel to atoms. He seemed to have thought that there was some magic in it, and that if he destroyed that, he would get rid of the terrible fate that was threatening him. I must tell you that before he committed that dreadful sacrilege he had been a haunted man. He hated and feared darkness, for he thought that the creature on the panel was on his track, but that as long as he kept lights burning it could not touch him. But the panel, to his disordered mind, was the root of his terror, and so, as I said, he broke into the church and attempted, you will see why I said "attempted" to destroy it. It certainly was found in splinters next morning when your uncle went into church for mattins, and, knowing Mr. Doolis' fear of the panel, he went across to the quarry house afterwards and taxed him with its destruction. The man never denied it. He boasted of what he had done. There he sat, though it was early morning, drinking his whiskey. "Oi settled your thing for you," he said, "and your sermon too. A fig for such superstitions." Your uncle left him without answering his blasphemy, meaning to go straight into penzance and give information to the police about this outrage to the church, but on his way back from the quarry house, he went into the church again, in order to be able to give details about the damage, and there in the screen was the panel untouched and uninjured. And yet he had himself seen it smashed, and Mr. Doolis had confessed that the destruction of it was his work. But there it was, and whether the power of God had mended it, or some other power, who knows? This was Polon indeed, and it was the spirit of Polon that made me accept all Aunt Hester was telling me as a tested fact. It had happened like that. She went on in her quiet voice. Your uncle recognized that somehow beyond police was at work, and he did not go to penzance, or give information about the outrage, for the evidence of it had vanished. A sudden spate of skepticism swept over me. "There must have been some mistake," I said. It hadn't been broken. She smiled. "Yes, my dear, but you have been in London so long," she said. "Let me, anyhow, tell you the rest of my story." That night, for some reason, I could not sleep. It was very hot and airless. I dare say you will think that the sultry conditions accounted for my wakefulness. Once and again, as I went to the window to see if I could not admit more air, I could see it from the quarry house, and I noticed the first time that I left my bed that it was blazing with lights. At the second time, I saw that it was all in darkness, and as I wondered at that I heard a terrible scream, and the moment afterwards the steps of someone coming at full speed down the road outside the gate. He yelled as he ran. "Light, light!" he called out. "Give me light, or it will catch me!" It was very terrible to hear that, and I went to rouse my husband, who was sleeping in the dressing room across the passage. He wasted no time, but by now the whole village was aroused by the screams, and when he got down to the pier he found that all was over. The tide was low, and on the rocks at his foot was lying, the body of Mr. Doulis. He must have cut some artery when he fell on those sharp edges of stone, for he had bled to death, they thought, and though he was a big burly man, his corpse was but skin and bones. Yet there was no pool of blood round him, such as you would have expected, just skin and bones, as if every drop of blood in his body had been sucked out of him. She leaned forward. "You and I, my dear, know what happened," she said, "or at least, yes." God has his instruments of vengeance on those who bring wickedness into places that have been holy. Dark and mysterious are his ways. Now, what I should have thought of such a story if it had been told to me in London, I can easily imagine. There was such an obvious explanation. The man in question had been a drunkard. What wonder if the demons of Delirium pursued him? But here in Poland, it was different. "And who is in the quarry house now?" I asked. Years ago, the Fisher-Boys told me the story of the man who first built it, and of his horrible end, and now again it has happened. Surely no one has ventured to inhabit it once more. I saw in her face, even before I asked that question, that somebody had done so. "Yes, it is lived in again," said she, "for there is no end to the blindness." I don't know if you remember him. He was a tenant of the Vicarage many years ago. "John Evans," said I, "yes, such a nice fellow he was too. Your uncle was pleased to get so good a tenant, and now…" She rose. "Aunt Hester, you shouldn't leave your sentences unfinished," I said. She shook her head. "My dear, that sentence will finish itself," she said. "But what a time of night! I must go to bed, and you too, or they will think we have to keep lights burning here through the dark hours." Before getting into bed, I drew my curtains wide, and opened all the windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking out into the garden, I could see in the moonlight the roof of the shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That, as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one, like globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe of mysterious lights and reflections. Then, raising my eyes a little, I saw against the black hillside the windows of the quarryhouse still a light. Morning, as is so often the case, brought no shattering of my illusion. As I began to regain consciousness, I fancied that I was a boy again, waking up in the shelter in the garden. And though, as I grew more widely awake, I smiled at the impression that, on which it was based, I found to be indeed true. It was sufficient now, as then, to be here, to wander again on the cliffs, and hear the popping of the ripen seed pods on the gorse bushes, to stray along the shore to the bathing cove, to float and drift and swim in the warm tide, and bask on the sand, and watch the gulls fishing, to lounge on the peerhead with the fisherfolk, to see in their eyes and hear in their quiet speech the evidence of secret things, not so much known to them as part of their instincts and their very being. There were powers and presences about me. The white poplars that stood by the stream that battled down the valley knew of them, and showed a glimpse of their knowledge sometimes. Like the gleam of their white underleaves, the very cobbles that paved the street were soaked in it. All that I wanted was to lie there and grow soaked in it, too. Unconsciously, as a boy, I had done that, but now the process must be conscious. I must know what stir of forces fruitful and mysterious, see along the hillside at noon, and sparkle at night on the sea. They could be known, they could even be controlled by those who were masters of the spell, but never could they be spoken of, for they were dwellers in the innermost, grafted into the eternal life of the world. There were dark secrets as well as these clear, kindly powers, and to these no doubt belonged the negotium parambulance intenebrous, which, though of deadly malignity, might be regarded not only as evil, but as the avenger of sacrilegious and impious deeds. All this was part of the spell of Polon, of which the seed had long-lane dormant in me. But now they were sprouting, and who knew what strange flower would unfold on their stems? It was not long before I came across John Evans. One morning, as I lay on the beach, there came shambling across the sand, a man stout and middle-aged, with the face of Silenas. He paused as he drew near, and regarded me from narrow eyes. "Why, you're the little chap that used to live in the Parsons Garden," he said. "Don't you recognize me?" I saw who it was when he spoke. His voice, I think, instructed me, and, recognizing it, I could see the features of the strong, alert young man in this gross caricature. "Yes, you're John Evans," I said. "You used to be very kind to me. You used to draw pictures for me." "So I did, and I'll draw you some more. Been bathing? That's a risky performance. You never know what lives in the sea, nor what lives on the land for that matter. Not that I heed them. I stick to work and whiskey. God, I've learned to paint since I saw you. And drink, too, for that matter. I live in the quarryhouse, you know, and it's a powerful, thirsty place. Come and have a look at my things, if you're passing. Staying with your aunt, are you? I could do a wonderful portrait of her. Interesting face. She knows a lot. Not who live at Poland get to know a lot, though I don't take much stock in that sort of knowledge myself. I do not know when I have been at once so repelled and interested. Behind the mere grossness of his face, there looked something which, while it appalled, yet fascinated me. His thick, lisping speech had the same quality, and his paintings, what would they be like? "I was just going home," I said. "I'll gladly come in, if you'll allow me." He took me through the untended and overgrown garden into the house which I had never yet entered. A great, great cat was sunning itself in the window, and an old woman was laying lunch in a corner of the call hall into which the door opened. It was built of stone, and the carved mouldings let into the walls the fragments of gargoyled and sculptured images bore testimony to the truth of its having been built out of the demolished church. In one corner was an oblong and carved wooden table littered with a painter's apparatus and stacks of canvases leaned against the walls. He jerked his thumb towards the head of an angel that was built into the mantelpiece and giggled. "Quite a sanctified air," he said. "So we tone it down for the purposes of ordinary life by a different sort of art. Have a drink?" "No." "Well, turn over some of my pictures while I put myself to rights." He was justified in his own estimate of his skill. He could paint, and apparently he could paint anything, but never have I seen pictures so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite studies of trees, and you knew that something lurked in the flickering shadows. There was a drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window, even as I had just now seen it. And yet it was no cat but some beast of awful malignity. There was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not human, but some evil thing which had come out of the sea. Above all there were pictures of his garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you knew that in the bushes were presences ready to spring out on you. "Well, do you like my style?" he said as he came up glass in hand. The tumbler of spirits that he held had not been diluted. I tried to paint the essence of what I see, not the mere husk and skin of it, but its nature, where it comes from and what gave it birth. There's much in common between a cat and a fuchsia bush if you look at them closely enough. Everything came out of the slime of the pit, and it's all going back there. I should like to do a picture of you someday. I'd hold the mirror up to nature, as that old lunar tick said. After this first meeting I saw him occasionally throughout the months of that wonderful summer. Often he kept to his house and his painting for days together, and then perhaps some evening I would find him lounging on the pier, always alone, and every time we met thus the repulsion and interest grew; for every time he seemed to have gone farther along a path of secret knowledge towards some evil shrine where complete initiation awaited him. And then suddenly the end came. I had met him thus one evening on the cliffs, while the October sunset still burned in the sky, but over it with amazing rapidity there spread from the west a great blackness of clouds such as I have never seen for denseness. The light was sucked from the sky, the dusk fell in ever thicker layers. He suddenly became conscious of this. "I must get back as quick as I can," he said. "It will be dark in a few minutes, and my servant is out. The lamps will not be lit." He stepped out with extraordinary briskness for one who shambled and could scarcely lift his feet and soon broke out into a stumbling run. In the gathering darkness I could see that his face was moist with the dew of some unspoken terror. "You must come with me," he panted, "for so we can get the lights burning the sooner. I cannot do without light." I had to exert myself to the full to keep up with him, for terror winged him, and even so I fell behind so that when I came to the garden gate he was already half way up the path to the house. I saw him enter, leaving the door wide, and found him fumbling with matches. But his hand so trembled that he could not transfer the light of the wick to the lamp. "What's the hurry about?" I asked. Suddenly his eyes focused themselves on the open door behind me, and he jumped from his seat beside the table which had once been the altar of God, with a gasp and a scream. "No, no!" he cried, "Keep it off!" I turned and saw what he had seen. The thing had entered, and now was swiftly sliding across the floor towards him like some gigantic caterpillar. A stale, phosphorescent light came from it, for though the dust had grown to blackness outside I could see it quite distinctly in the awful light of its own presence. From it, too, there came an odour of corruption and decay as from slime that has long lain below water. It seemed to have no head, but on the front of it was an orifice of puckered skin which opened and shut and slathered at the edges. It was hairless and slug-like in shape and texture. As it advanced its four-part reared itself from the ground like a snake about to strike, and it fastened on him. At that sight, and with the yells of his agony in my ears, the panic which had struck me relaxed into a hopeless courage, and with palsy, impotent hands I tried to lay hold of the thing, but I could not. Though something material was there, it was impossible to grasp it, my hand sunk in it as in thick mud. It was like wrestling with a nightmare. I think that but a few seconds elapsed before all was over. The screams of the wretched man sank to moans and mutterings as the thing fell on him. He panted once or twice, and was still. For a moment longer there came gurglings and sucking noises, and then it slid out even as it had entered. I lit the lamp which he had fumbled with, and there on the floor he lay, no more than a rind of skin in loose folds over projecting bones. And of Nicosium Parambulance. This is Ryan here and I have a question for you, what do you do when you win? Like are you a fist-pumper, a woohoo, a hand-clap or a high-fiver? If you want to hone in on those winning moves, check out Chumba Casino. Choose from hundreds of social casino-style games for your chance to redeem serious cash prizes. The new game releases weekly plus free daily bonuses so don't wait, start having the most fun ever at Chumba Casino.com.