The Amazing Dr. Darwin

THE TREASURE OF ODIREX

“The fever will break at dawn. If she wakes before that, no food. Boiled water only, if she asks for drink. I will infuse a febrifuge now, that you can give in three hours time if she is awake and the fever has not abated.”

Darwin rose heavily from the bedside and moved to the fireplace, where oil lamps illuminated the medical chest standing on the oak escritoire. It was past midnight, and he moved as though he was weary to the bone.

Jacob Pole had been standing motionless by the fire, his eyes fixed on the restless form of the young woman lying on the bed. Now he bit his lip and shook his head unhappily.

“I just wish that you could stay the night, Erasmus. It’s late already. Are you sure that the fever will lessen?”

“As sure as a man can be, Jacob, when we deal with disease. I wish that I could stay, but there is a bad case of puerperal fever in Rugeley that I must see tonight. Already the ways are becoming foul, but you know as well as I do that sickness will not wait on convenience.”

He looked ruefully down at his leather leggings, spattered with drying mud from the late November rain. “If anything changes for the worse, send Prindle after me. He knows the route well. And before I go I will leave you materials for tisanes, and instructions to prepare them. Do you have somebody reliable to help you with them?”

“I do. But these will be done with my own hands. I will trust you with her, but no one else.”

“Aye, I should have known that. I’m sorry, Jacob. Weariness has a hold on me. I’ll wake when I have a few breaths of the night air.”

He began to select from the medical chest, while his companion walked to the bedside and gazed unhappily at his wife as she tossed in fevered sleep. His weariness showed only in his reddened eyes, and the more pronounced trembling of his thin hands.

Erasmus Darwin looked at him sympathetically as he sorted the drugs he needed, then took paper and quill and prepared careful written instructions for their use.

“Attend now, Jacob,” he said, as he handed him the written sheets. “There is one preparation here that I would normally insist on administering myself. These are dried tubers of aconite, cut fine. You must make an infusion for three hundred pulse beats, then let it cool before you use it. It serves as a febrifuge, to reduce fever, and also as a sudorific, to induce sweating. That is good for these cases. If the fever should continue past dawn, here is dried willow bark, for an infusion to lower body temperature.”

“After dawn. Yes. And these two?” Jacob Pole held up the other packets.

“Use them only in emergency. If there should be convulsions, send for me at once, but give this as a tisane until I arrive. It is dried celandine, together with dried flowers of silverweed. And if there is persistent coughing, make a decoction of these, dried flowers of speedwell.”

He looked closely at the other man and nodded slightly to himself as he saw the faint hand tremor and yellowish eyes. He rummaged again in the medical chest.

“And here is one for you, Jacob.” He raised his hand, stifling the other’s protest. “Don’t deny it. I saw the signs again when I first walked in here tonight. Malaria and Jacob Pole are old friends, are they not? Here is cinchona, Jesuit-bark, for your use. Be thankful that I have it with me—there’s little enough call for it on my usual rounds. Rheumatism and breech babies, that’s my fate.”

During his description of the drugs and their use, his voice had been clear and unhesitating. Now, at the hint of humor, his usual stammer was creeping back in.

Jacob Pole was glad to hear it. It meant that the physician was confident enough to permit his usual optimistic outlook to reemerge.

“Come on, then, Erasmus,” he said. “Your carriage should still be ready and waiting. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done for us. First Emily, and now Elizabeth. One life can never repay for two, but you know I’m ready should you ever need help yourself.”

The two men took a last look at the sleeping patient, then Jacob Pole picked up the medical chest and they left the room. As they did so, the housekeeper came in to maintain the vigil on Elizabeth Pole. They walked quietly past her, down the stairs and on to the front of the silent house. Outside, the night sky was clear, with a gibbous moon nearing the full. A hovering ground mist hid the fields, and the distant lights of Lichfield seemed diffuse and deceptively close. The sulky was waiting, the old horse standing patiently between the shafts and munching quietly at her nosebag.

“That’s strange.” Jacob Pole paused in his work of filling the mare’s nosebag. He looked down the road to the south. “Do you hear it, Erasmus? Unless my ears are going, there’s a horseman coming this way, along the low road.”

“Coming here?”

“Must be. There’s no other house between here and Kings Bromley. But I don’t expect visitors at this hour. Did you promise to make any calls out that way?”

“Not tonight.”

They stood in silence as the faint jingling of harness grew steadily louder. The rider who at last came into view seemed to be mounted on a legless horse, smoothly breasting the swirling ground mist. The Derbyshire clay, still slick and moist from the afternoon rain, muffled the sound of the hooves. The rider approached like a phantom. As he grew closer they could see him swaying a little in the saddle, as though half asleep. He cantered up to them and pulled aside the black face-cloth that covered his nose and mouth.

“I’m seeking Dr. Darwin. Dr. Erasmus Darwin.” The voice was soft and weary, with the flat vowels of a northcountryman.

“Then you need seek no further.” Jacob Pole stepped forward. “This is Dr. Darwin, and I am Colonel Pole. What brings you here so late?”

The other man stiffly dismounted, stretching his shoulders and bowing at the waist to relieve the cramped muscles of a long ride. He grunted in relief, then turned to Darwin.

“Your housekeeper finally agreed to tell me where you were, Doctor. My name is Thaxton, Richard Thaxton. I must talk to you.”

“An urgent medical problem?”

Thaxton hesitated, looking warily at Jacob Pole. “Perhaps. Or worse.” He rubbed at the black stubble on his long chin. “ ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?’ ”

“Better perhaps than Macbeth could.” Erasmus Darwin stood for a moment, head hunched forward on his heavy shoulders. “Who suggested that you come to me?”

“Dr. Warren.”

“Warren of London?” Darwin’s voice quickened with interest. “I doubt that I can do anything for you that he cannot. Why did he not treat your problem himself?”

Again the other man hesitated. “If Dr. Warren is an old friend, I fear that I bring you bad news. He can no longer sustain his practice. His health is failing, and he confided in me his belief that he is consumptive.”

“Then that is bad news indeed.” Darwin shook his head sadly. “To my mind, Warren is the finest diagnostician in Europe. If he has diagnosed consumption in himself, the prospect is bleak indeed.”

“He holds you to be his master, especially in diseases of the mind. Dr. Darwin, I have ridden nonstop from London, and I must get back to Durham as soon as possible. But I must talk with you. Dr. Warren offers you as my only hope.”

Thaxton’s hands were trembling with weariness as they held the bridle. Darwin scrutinized him closely, measuring the fatigue and the despair.

“We will talk, Mr. Thaxton, never fear. But I cannot stay to do it. There is an urgent case of childbed fever six miles west of here. It cannot wait.” He gestured at the carriage. “However, if you would be willing to squeeze into the sulky with me, we could talk as we travel. And there is a hamper of food, that you look to be sorely in need of.”

“What about my horse?”

“Leave that to me.” Jacob Pole stepped forward. “I’ll see he gets a rubdown and feed. Erasmus, I suggest that you come back here when you are done, and take some rest yourself. I can send one of the servants over to Lichfield, to tell your household that they can reach you here.”

“Aye. It bids fair to be a long night. Say that I will be home before sunset tomorrow. This is a bad time of year for fevers and agues.”

“No need to tell me that, Erasmus.” Jacob Pole smiled ruefully and looked at his own shaking hand, as the other two men climbed into the carriage. As they moved off into the mist, he stirred himself with an effort and led the horse slowly to the stables at the rear of the house.

“It is a long and confusing story, Dr. Darwin. Bear with me if it seems at first as though I am meandering.”

Food and brandy had restored Thaxton considerably. Both men had made good use of the hamper of food and drink balanced between them on their knees. Darwin wiped his greasy hands absentmindedly on his woollen shawl, and turned his head to face Richard Thaxton.

“Take your time. Detail is at the heart of diagnosis, and in the absence of the patient—since it is clear that you are not he—the more that you can tell me, the better.”

“Not ‘he,’ Doctor. She. Three years ago my wife, Anna, went to see Dr. Warren. At that time we were living in the heart of London, hard by Saint Mary-le-Bow. She had been feeling lacking in strength, and was troubled by a racking cough.”

“With bleeding?”

“Thank God, no. But Dr. Warren was worried that she might become phthisic. He recommended that we move away from the London style of life, to one with more of country ways and fresh air.”

Darwin nodded approvingly. “Warren and I have seldom disagreed on diagnosis, and less still on treatment. You took his advice?”

“Of course. We moved back to my family home, Heartsease, near Milburn in Cumbria.”

“I know the area. Up in the high fell country. Clean air, and clear sun. A good choice. But did it fail?”

“Not for my wife’s general health, no. She became stronger and more robust. I could see the improvement, month by month. Then—about one year ago—there came another problem. She began to see visions.”

Erasmus Darwin was silent for a long moment, while the carriage rolled steadily along the graveled roads. “I see,” he said at last. “Invisible to others, I take it?”

“Invisible to all, save Anna. Our house stands north of Milburn, facing out across Cross Fell. Late at night, in our bedroom, when the Helm stands on the fell and the wind is strong from the north, she sees phantom lights moving on the fell slopes, and hears crying in the wind.”

“You have looked for them yourself?”

“I, and others. I have brought our servants upstairs to look also. We see nothing, but Anna is persistent.”

“I see.” Darwin paused again, reflective, then shrugged. “Even so, it does not sound like a matter for serious concern. She believes that she can see what you cannot. What harm is there in a will-o’-the-wisp? It does not interfere with your life.”

“It did not.” Thaxton turned directly to Darwin, intense and troubled. “Until three months ago. Then Anna found a book in Durham telling of the early history of our part of the country. Cross Fell had another name, long ago. It was known as Fiends’ Fell. According to legend, it was renamed Cross Fell when St. Augustine came with a cross to the fell and drove out the fiends. But Anna says that she has seen the fiends herself, on two occasions. By full moonlight, and only when the Helm is on the fell.”

“Twice now you have mentioned the Helm. What is it?”

“Dense cloud, like a thunderhead. It sits as a bank, crouching over the top of Cross Fell. It does not move away, even when the wind sweeping from the top of the fell is strong enough in Milburn to overturn carts and uproot trees. Anna says that it is the source of the fiends.”

Darwin nodded slowly. The two men rode on in silence for a while, both deep in thought.

“Nothing you have said so far suggests the usual mental diseases,” Darwin said at last. “But the human mind is more complicated than we can guess. Tell me, has your wife any other fears or fancies? Any other fuel for her beliefs?”

“Only more legends.” Thaxton shrugged apologetically. “There are other legends of the fell. According to the writings of Thomas of Appleby, in Roman times a great king, Odirex, or Odiris, lived in the high country of the fells. He acquired a great treasure. Somehow, he used it to banish the Romans from that part of the country, completely, so that they never returned.”

“What was his treasure?”

“The legend does not tell. But according to Thomas of Appleby, Odirex hid his treasure on Cross Fell. Local folk say that it is there to this day, guarded by the fiends of the fell. Anna says that she has seen the guardians; that they are not of human form; and that they live on Cross Fell yet, and will sometime come down again.”

Darwin had listened to this very closely, and was now sitting upright on the hard seat of the carriage. “A strange tale, indeed, and one that I have not heard before in all my reading of English myth and legend. Odirex, eh? A name to start trains of thought, if we will but remember our Latin. Odii Rex—the King of Hate. What else does Thomas of Appleby have to say about the King of Hate’s Treasure?”

“Only that it was irresistible. But surely, Dr. Darwin, you are not taking these tales seriously? They are but the instruments that are turning my wife’s mind away from sanity.”

“Perhaps.” Darwin relaxed and hunched low in his seat. “Perhaps. In any case, I would have to see your wife to make any real decision as to her condition.”

“I can bring her here to see you, if you wish. But I must do it under some subterfuge, since she does not know that I am seeking assistance for her condition. As for money, I will pay any fee that you ask.”

“No. Money is not an issue. Also, I want to see her at your home in Milburn.” Darwin appeared to have made up his mind about something. “Look, I now have the responsibilities of my practice here, and as you can see they are considerable. However, I have reason to make a visit to York in a little more than two weeks’ time. I will have another doctor, my locum tenens, working here in my absence. If you will meet me in York, at a time and place that we must arrange, we can go on together to Milburn. Then perhaps I can take a look at your Anna, and give you my best opinion on her—and on other matters, too.”

Darwin held up his hand, to stem Thaxton’s words. “Now, no thanks. We are almost arrived. You can show your appreciation in a more practical way. Have you ever assisted in country medicine, two hours after midnight? Here is your chance to try it.”

“The roof of England, Jacob. Look there, to the east. We can see all the way to the sea.”

Darwin was leaning out of the coach window, holding his wig on with one hand and drinking in the scenery, as they climbed slowly up the valley of the Tees, up from the eastern plain that they had followed north from the Vale of York. Jacob Pole shivered in the brisk east wind that blew through the inside of the coach, and huddled deeper into the leather greatcoat that hid everything up to his eyes.

“It’s the roof, all right, blast it. Close that damn window. No man in his right mind wants to be out on the roof in the middle of December. I don’t know what the devil I’m doing up here, when I could be home and warm in bed.”

“Jacob, you insisted on coming, as you well know.”

“Maybe. You can be the best doctor in Europe, Erasmus, and the leading inventor in the Lunar Society, but you still need a practical man to keep your feet on the ground.”

Darwin grinned, intoxicated by the clear air of the fells. “Of course. The mention of treasure had nothing to do with it, did it? You came only to look after me.”

“Hmph. Well, I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that. Damn it all, Erasmus, you know me. I’ve dived for pearls off the eastern Spice Islands; I’ve hunted over half the Americas for El Dorado; I’ve scrabbled after rubies in Persia and Baluchistan; and I’ve dug for diamonds all the way from Ceylon to Samarkand. And what have I got out of it? A permanent sunburn, a bum that’s been bitten by all the fleas in Asia, and a steady dose of malaria three times a year. But I could no more resist coming here, when I heard Thaxton talk about Odirex’s treasure, than you could stop… philosophizing.”

Darwin laughed aloud. “Ah, you’re missing the point, Jacob. Look out there.” He waved a brawny arm at the Tees valley, ascending with the river before them. “There’s a whole treasure right here, for the taking. If I knew how to use them, there are plants for a whole new medical pharmacopeia, waiting for our use. I’m a botanist, and I can’t even name half of them. Hey, Mr. Thaxton.” He leaned farther out of the coach, looking up to the driver’s seat above and in front of him.

Richard Thaxton leaned perilously over the edge of the coach. “Yes, Dr. Darwin?”

“I’m seeing a hundred plants here that don’t grow in the lowlands. If I describe them to you, can you arrange to get me samples of each?”

“Easily. But I should warn you, there are many others that you will not even see from the coach. Look.” He stopped the carriage, swung easily down, and went off to a mossy patch a few yards to one side. When he came back, bareheaded, dark hair blowing in the breeze, he carried a small plant with broad leaves and a number of pale green tendrils with blunt, sticky ends. “There’s one for your collection. Did you ever see or hear of anything like this?”

Darwin looked at it closely, smelled it, broke off a small piece of a leaf and chewed it thoughtfully. “Aye. I’ve not seen it for years, but I think I know what it is. Butterwort, isn’t it? It rings a change on the usual order of things—animals eat plants, but this plant eats animals, or at least insects.”

“That’s right.” Thaxton smiled. “Good thing it’s only a few inches high. Imagine it ten feet tall, and you’d really have a ‘Treasure of Odirex’ that could have scared away the Romans.”

“Good God.” Jacob Pole was aghast. “You don’t really think that there could be such a thing, do you—up on Cross Fell?”

“Of course not. It would have been found long ago—there are shepherds up there every day, you know. They’d have found it.”

“Unless it found them,” said Pole gloomily. He retreated even farther into his greatcoat, Thaxton climbed back into the driver’s seat and they went on their way. The great expanse of the winter fells was spreading about them, a rolling sea of copper, sooty black and silver-grey. The land lay bleak, already in the grip of winter. At last, after three more hours of steady climbing, they came to Milburn. Thaxton leaned far over again, to shout into the interior of the coach. “Two more miles, and we’ll be home.”

The village of Milburn was small and windswept, a cluster of stone houses around the church and central common. Thaxton’s coach seemed too big, out of scale with the mean buildings of the community. At the cross-roads that led away to the neighboring village of Newbiggin, Thaxton halted the carriage and pointed to the great mass of Cross Fell, lying to the northeast. Darwin looked at it with interest, and even Jacob Pole, drawn by the sight of his potential treasure-ground, ventured out of his huddle of coats and shawls.

After a couple of minutes of silent inspection of the bleak prospect, rising crest upon crest to the distant, hidden summit, Thaxton shook the reins to drive on.

“Wait—don’t go yet!” Darwin’s sudden cry halted Thaxton just as he was about to start the coach forward.

“What is it, Dr. Darwin? Is something the matter?”

Darwin did not reply. Instead, he opened the carriage door, and despite his bulk swung easily to the ground. He walked rapidly across the common, to where a boy about ten years old was sitting by a stone milestone. The lad was deformed of feature, with a broad, flattened skull and deep-set eyes. He was lightly dressed in the cast-off rags of an adult, and he did not seem to feel the cold despite the biting breeze.

The child started up at Darwin’s approach, but did not run away. He was less than four feet tall, heavy chested and bowlegged. Darwin stood before him and looked at him with a professional eye.

“What is it, Erasmus?” Jacob Pole had dismounted also and come hurrying after. “What’s his disease?”

Darwin had placed a gentle hand on the boy’s head and was slowly turning it from side to side. The child, puzzled but reassured by Darwin’s calm manner and soft touch, permitted the examination without speaking.

“It is not disease, Jacob.” Darwin shook his head thoughtfully. “At first I thought it must be, but the lad is quite healthy. Never in my medical experience have I seen such a peculiar physiognomy. Look at the strange bone structure of the skull, and the curious regression of the jaw. And see that odd curve, in the relation of the thoracic and cervical vertebrae.” Darwin puffed out his full lips, and ran a gentle finger over the child’s lumpy forehead. “Tell me, my boy, how old are you?”

The child did not reply. He looked at Darwin with soft, intelligent eyes, and made a strange, strangled noise high in his throat.

“You’ll get no reply from Jimmy,” said Thaxton, who had followed behind the other two men. “He’s mute—bright enough, and he’ll follow any instructions. But he can’t speak.”

Darwin nodded, and ran his hand lightly over the boy’s throat and larynx. “Yes, there’s something odd about the structure here, too. The hyoid bone is malformed, and the thyroid prominence is absent. Tell me, Mr. Thaxton, are the boy’s parents from these parts of Cumbria?” Darwin smiled encouragingly at the lad, though his own lack of front teeth made that more frightening than reassuring. A piece of silver, pressed into the small hand, was more successful. The boy smiled back tentatively, and pointed upwards toward the fell.

“See, he understands you very well,” said Thaxton. “His mother is up on Dufton Fell, he says.” He turned away, drawing the other two men after him, before he continued in a low voice. “Jimmy’s a sad case. His mother’s a shepherdess, daft Molly Metcalf. She’s a poor lass who doesn’t have much in the way of wits. Just bright enough to tend the sheep, up on Dufton Fell and Cross Fell.”

“And the father?” asked Darwin.

“God only knows. Some vagrant. Anyway, Jimmy’s not much to look at, but his brain is all right. He’ll never be much more than a dwarf, I fear, but there will always be work for him here in the village. He’s trustworthy and obedient, and we’ve all grown used to the way he looks.”

“He’s certainly no beauty though,” said Jacob Pole. “That’s a strange deformity. You know what he reminds me of? When I was in the Spice Islands, there was a creature that the Dutch called the Orange-Lord, or Orang-Laut, or some such name. It lived in the deep forest, and it was very shy; but I once saw a body that the natives brought in. The skull and bone structure reminded me of your Jimmy.”

“It’s a long way from the Spice Islands to Cross Fell, Colonel,” said Thaxton. “And you can guess what Anna has been saying—that daft Molly was impregnated by a fiend of the fell, some diabolical incubus, and Jimmy is the devilish result. What do you think of that, Dr. Darwin?”

Erasmus Darwin had been listening absentmindedly, from time to time turning back for another look at the boy. “I don’t know what to think yet, Mr. Thaxton,” he finally replied. “But I can assure you of one thing. The only way that a human woman bears children is from impregnation by a human male. Your wife’s chatter about an incubus is unscientific piffle.”

“Impregnation is not always necessary, Doctor. Are you not forgetting the virgin birth of Our Lord, Jesus Christ?”

“Don’t get him started on that,” said Jacob Pole hastily, “or we’ll be here all day. You may not know it, Mr. Thaxton, but this is Erasmus Darwin, the doctor, the inventor, the philosopher, the poet, the everything—except the Christian.”

Thaxton smiled. “I had heard as much, to tell the truth, from Dr. Warren. ‘If you are wise,’ he said, ‘you will not dispute religion with Dr. Darwin. If you are wiser yet, you will not dispute anything with him.’ ”

The men climbed back into the coach and drove slowly on through Milburn, to Thaxton’s house north of the village. Before they went inside the big stone-built structure, they again took a long look at Cross Fell, rising vast to the northeast.

“It’s clear today,” said Thaxton. “That means that the Helm won’t be on the fell, and Anna won’t be seeing or hearing anything tonight. Dr. Darwin, I don’t know what your diagnosis will be, but I swear to God that the next twenty-four hours will be the hardest for me of any that I can remember. Come in, now, and welcome to Heartsease.”

Darwin did not speak, but he patted the other man sympathetically on the shoulder with a firm hand. They walked together to the front door of the house.

“They are taking an awfully long time.” Richard Thaxton rose from his seat by the fire and began to pace the study, looking now and again at the ceiling.

“As they should be,” said Jacob Pole reassuringly. “Richard, sit down and relax. I know Erasmus, and I’ve seen him work many times in the past. He has the greatest power of observation and invention of any man I ever met. He sees disease where others can see nothing—in the way a man walks, or talks, or stands, or even lies. And he is supremely thorough, and in the event of dire need, supremely innovative. I owe to him the lives of my wife, Elizabeth, and my daughter Emily. He will come down when he is satisfied, not before.”

Thaxton did not reply. He stood at the window, looking out at the inscrutable bulk of Cross Fell. A strong northeast wind, harsh and gusting, bent the leafless boughs of the fruit trees in the kitchen garden outside the study window, and swirled around the isolated house.

“See up there,” he said at last. “The Helm is growing. In another two hours the top of the fell will be invisible.”

Pole rose also and joined him by the window. At the top of the fell, a solid bank of rolling cloud was forming, unmoved by the strengthening wind. As they watched, it grew and thickened, shrouding the higher slopes and slowly moving lower.

“Will it be there tonight?” asked Pole.

“Until dawn. Guarding the treasure. God, I’m beginning to talk like Anna. It’s catching me, too.”

“Has there ever been any real treasure on the fell? Gold, or silver?”

“I don’t know. Lead, there surely is. It has been mined since Roman times, and there are mine workings all over this area. As for gold, I have heard much talk of it, but talk is easy. I have never seen nuggets, or even dust.”

Jacob Pole rubbed his hands together. “That’s meat and drink to me, Richard. Fiends or no fiends, there’s nothing I’d like better than to spend a few days prospecting around Cross Fell. I’ve travelled a lot farther than this, to places a good deal more inhospitable, on much less evidence. Yes, and I’ve fought off a fair number of fiends, too—human ones.”

“And you have found gold?”

Pole grimaced. “Pox on it, you would ask me that. Never, not a pinch big enough to cover a whore’s modesty. But luck can change any time. This may be it.”

Richard Thaxton pushed his fingers through his black, bushy hair, and smiled at Jacob Pole indulgently. “I’ve often wondered what would take a man to the top of Cross Fell in midwinter. I think I’ve found out. One thing I’ll wager, you’ll not get Dr. Darwin to go with you. He’s carrying a bit too much weight for that sort of enterprise.”

As he spoke, they heard the clump of footsteps on the stairs above them. Thaxton at once fell silent and his manner became tense and somber. When Erasmus Darwin entered, Thaxton raised his eyebrows questioningly but did not speak.

“Sane as I am,” said Darwin at once, smiling. “And a good deal saner than Jacob.”

“—or than you, Richard,” added Anna Thaxton, coming in lightly behind Darwin. She was a thin, dark-haired woman, with high cheekbones and sparkling grey eyes. She crossed the room and put her arms around her husband. “As soon as Dr. Darwin had convinced himself that I was sane, he confessed to me that he was not really here to test me for a consumptive condition, but to determine my mental state. Now”—she smiled smugly—“he wants to do some tests on you, my love.”

Richard Thaxton pressed his wife to him as though he meant to crack her ribs. Then her final words penetrated, and he looked at her in astonishment.

“Me! You’re joking. I’ve seen no fiends.”

“Exactly,” said Darwin. He moved over to the table by the study window, where an array of food dishes had been laid out. “You saw nothing. For the past hour, I have been testing your wife’s sight and hearing. Both are phenomenally acute, especially at low levels. Now I want to know about yours.”

“But others were present when Anna saw her fiends. Surely we are not all blind and deaf.”

“Certainly, all are not. But Anna tells me that when she saw and heard her mysteries on Cross Fell, it was night and you alone were with her upstairs. You saw and heard nothing. Then when you brought others, they also saw and heard nothing. But they came from lighted rooms downstairs. It takes many minutes for human eyes to acquire their full night vision—and it is hard for a room full of people, no matter how they try, to remain fully silent. So, I say again, how good are your eyes and ears?”

“I tell you, they are excellent!” exclaimed Thaxton.

“And I tell you, they are indifferently good!” replied Anna Thaxton. “Who cannot tell a rook from a blackbird at thirty paces, or count the sheep on Cross Fell?”

They still held each other close, arguing across each other’s shoulder. Darwin looked on with amusement, quietly but systematically helping himself to fruit, clotted cream, Stilton cheese and West Indian sweetmeats from the side table. “Come, Mr. Thaxton,” he said at last. “Surely you are not more prepared to believe that your wife is mad, than believe yourself a little myopic? Shortsightedness is no crime.”

Thaxton shrugged. “All right. All right.” He held his wife at arms’ length, his hands on her shoulders. “Anna, I’ve never won an argument with you yet, and if Dr. Darwin is on your side I may as well surrender early. Do your tests. But if you are right, what does that mean?”

Darwin munched on a candied quince, and rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. “Why, then we no longer have a medical problem, but something much more intriguing and pleasant. You see, it means that Anna is really seeing something up on Cross Fell, when the Helm sits on the upland. And that is most interesting to me—be it fiends, fairies, hobgoblins, or simple human skullduggery. Come, my equipment for the tests is upstairs. It will take about an hour, and we should be finished well before dinner.”

As they left, Jacob Pole went again to the window. The Helm had grown. It stood now like a great, grey animal, crouching at the top of Cross Fell and menacing the nearer lowlands. Pole sighed.

“Human skullduggery?” he said to Anna Thaxton. “I hope not. I’ll take fiends, goblins and all—if the Treasure of Odirex is up there with them. Better ghouls and gold together, than neither one.”

“Tonight? You must be joking!”

“And why not tonight, Mr. Thaxton? The Helm sits on the fell, the night is clear, and the moon is rising. What better time for Anna’s nocturnal visitants?”

Richard Thaxton looked with concern at Darwin’s bulk, uncertain how to phrase his thought. “Do you think it wise, for a man your age—”

“—forty-six,” said Darwin.

“—your age, to undergo exertion on the fell, at night? You are not so young, and the effort will be great. You are not—lissom; and it—”

“I’m fat,” said Darwin. “I regard that as healthy. Good food wards off disease. This world has a simple rule: eat or be eaten. I am not thin, and less agile than a younger man, but I have a sound constitution, and no ailment but a persistent gout. Jacob and I will have no problem.”

“Colonel Pole also?”

“Try and stop him. Right, Jacob? He’s been lusting to get up on that fell, ever since he heard the magic word ‘treasure,’ back in Lichfield. Like a youth, ready to mount his first—er—horse.”

“I’ve noticed that,” said Anna Thaxton. She smiled at Darwin. “And thank you, Doctor, for tempering your simile for a lady’s ears. Now, if your mind is set on Cross Fell tonight, you will need provisions. What should they be?”

Darwin bowed his head, and smiled his ruined smile. “I have always observed, Mrs. Thaxton, that in practical decision-making, men cannot compare with women. We will need food, shielded lamps, warm blankets, and tinder and flint.”

“No weapons, or crucifix?” asked Richard Thaxton.

“Weapons, on Cross Fell at night, would offer more danger to us than to anyone else. As for the crucifix, it has been my experience that it has great influence—on those who are already convinced of its powers. Now, where on the fell should we take up our position?”

“If you are going,” said Thaxton suddenly, “then I will go with you. I could not let you wander the fell, alone.”

“No. You must stay here. I do not think that we will need help, but if I am wrong we rely on you to summon and lead it. Remain here with Anna. We will signal you—three lantern flashes from us will be a call for help, four a sign that all is well. Now, where should we position ourselves? Out of sight, but close to the lights you saw.”

“Come to the window,” said Anna Thaxton. “See where the spur juts out, like the beak of an eagle? That is your best waiting point. The lights show close there, when the fiends of the fell appear. They return there, before dawn. You will not be able to see the actual point of their appearance from the spur. Keep a watch on our bedroom. I will show a light there if the fiends appear. When that happens, skirt the spur, following westward. After a quarter of a mile or so the lights on the fell should be visible to you.”

As she was speaking, the sound of the dinner gong rang through the house.

“I hope,” she continued, “that you will be able to eat something, although I know you must be conscious of the labors and excitement of the coming night.”

Erasmus Darwin regarded her with astonishment. “Something? Mrs. Thaxton, I have awaited the dinner bell for the past hour, with the liveliest anticipation. I am famished. Pray, lead the way. We can discuss our preparations further while we dine.”

“We should have brought a timepiece with us, Erasmus. I wonder what the time is. We must have been here three or four hours already.”

“A little after midnight, if the moon is keeping to her usual schedule. Are you warm enough?”

“Not too bad. Thank God for these blankets. It’s colder than a witch’s tit up here. How much longer? Suppose they don’t put in an appearance at all? Or the weather changes! It’s already beginning to cloud up a little.”

“Then we’ll have struggled up here and been half frozen for nothing. We could never track them with no moon. We’d kill ourselves, walking the fell blind.”

The two men were squatted on the hillside, facing southwest toward Heartsease.

They were swaddled in heavy woollen blankets, and their exhaled breath rose white before them. In the moonlight they could clearly see the village of Milburn, far below, etched in black and silver. The Thaxton house stood apart from the rest, lamps showing in the lower rooms but completely dark above. Between Darwin and Pole sat two shielded oil lanterns. Unless the side shutters were unhooked and opened, the lanterns were visible only from directly above.

“It’s a good thing we can see the house without needing any sort of spyglass,” said Pole, slipping his brass brandy flask back into his coat after a substantial swig. “Holding it steady for a long time when it’s as cold as this would be no joke. If there are fiends living up here, they’ll need a fair stock of Hell-fire with them, just to keep from freezing. Damn those clouds.”

He looked up again at the moon, showing now through broken streaks of cover. As he did so, he felt Darwin’s touch on his arm.

“There it is, Jacob!” he breathed. “In the bedroom. Now, watch for the signal.”

They waited, tense and alert, as the light in the window dimmed, returned, and dimmed again. After a longer absence, it came back once more, then remained bright.

“In the usual place, where Anna hoped they might be,” said Darwin. “Show our lantern, to let Thaxton know we’ve understood their signal. Then let’s be off, while the moon lights the way.”

The path skirting the tor was narrow and rocky, picked out precariously between steep screes and jagged outcroppings. Moving cautiously and quietly, they tried to watch both their footing and the fell ahead of them. Jacob Pole, leading the way, suddenly stopped.

“There they are,” he said softly.

Three hundred yards ahead, where the rolling cloud bank of the Helm dipped lower to meet the broken slope of the scarp face, four yellow torches flickered and bobbed. Close to each one, bigger and more diffuse, moved a blue-green phosphorescent glow.

The two men edged closer. The blue-green glow gradually resolved itself to squat, misshapen forms, humanoid but strangely incomplete. “Erasmus,” whispered Jacob. “They are headless!”

“I think not,” came the soft answer. “Watch closely, when the torches are close to their bodies. You can see that the torch light reflects from their heads—but there is no blue light shining there. Their bodies alone are outlined by it.” As he spoke, a despairing animal scream echoed over the fell. Jacob Pole gripped Darwin’s arm fiercely.

“Sheep,” said Darwin tersely. “Throat cut. That bubbling cry is blood in the windpipe. Keep moving toward them, Jacob. I want to get a good look at them.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Pole again began to move slowly forward. But now the lights were retreating steadily uphill, back toward the shrouding cloud bank of the Helm.

“Faster, Jacob. We’ve got to keep them in sight and be close to them before they go into the cloud. The light from their torches won’t carry more than a few yards in that.”

Darwin’s weight was beginning to take its toll. He fell behind, puffing and grunting, as Pole’s lanky figure loped rapidly ahead, around the tor and up the steep slope. He paused once and looked about him, then was off uphill again, into the moving fog at the edge of the Helm. Darwin, arriving at last at the same spot, could see no sign of him. Chest heaving, he stopped to catch his breath.

“It’s no good.” Pole’s voice came like a disembodied spirit, over from the left of the hillside. A second later he suddenly emerged from the cloud bank. “They vanished into thin air, right about here. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I can’t understand how they could have gone so fast. The cloud isn’t so thick here. Maybe they can turn to air.”

Darwin sat down heavily on a flat-topped rock. “More likely they snuffed their torches.”

“But then I’d still have seen the body-glow.”

“So let’s risk the use of the lanterns, and have a good look around here. There should be some trace of them. It’s a long way back to Heartsease, and I don’t fancy this climb again tomorrow night.”

They opened the shutters of the lanterns and moved cautiously about the hillside. Darwin knew that the Thaxtons would be watching from Heartsease, and puzzling over what they had seen. He interrupted his search long enough to send a signal: four lantern flashes—all goes well.

“Here’s the answer.” Jacob Pole had halted fifty feet away, in the very fringe of the Helm. “I ought to have guessed it, after the talk that Thaxton and I had earlier. He told me yesterday that there are old workings all over this area. Lead, this one, or maybe tin.”

The mine shaft was set almost horizontally into the hillside, a rough-walled tunnel just tall enough for a crouching man. Darwin stooped to look at the rock fragments inside the entrance.

“It’s lead,” he said, holding the lantern low. “See, this is galena, and this is blue fluorspar—the same Blue John that we find back in Derbyshire. And here is a lump of what I take to be barytes—heavy spar. Feel the weight of it. There have been lead mines up here on the fells for two thousand years, since before the Romans came to Britain, but I thought they were all in disuse now. Most of them are miles north and east of this.”

“I doubt that this one is being used for lead mining,” replied Jacob Pole. “And I doubt if the creatures that we saw are lead miners. Maybe it’s my malaria, playing up again because it’s so cold here.” He shivered all over. “But I’ve got a feeling of evil when I look in that shaft. You know the old saying: iron bars are forged on Earth, gold bars are forged in Hell. That’s the way to the treasure, in there. I know it.”

“Jacob, you’re too romantic. You see four poachers killing a sheep, and you have visions of a treasure trove. What makes you think that the Treasure of Odirex is gold?”

“It’s the natural assumption. What else would it be?”

“I could speculate. But I will wager it is not gold. That wouldn’t have served to get rid of the Romans, or any invader. Remember the Danegeld—that didn’t work, did it?”

As he spoke, he was craning forward into the tunnel, the lantern held out ahead of him.

“No sign of them in here.” He sniffed. “But this is the way they went. Smell the resin? That’s from their torches. Well, I suppose that is all for tonight. Come on, we’d best begin the descent back to the house. It is a pity we cannot go farther now.”

“Descent to the house? Of course we can follow them, Erasmus. That’s what we came for, isn’t it?”

“Surely. But on the surface of the fell, not through pit tunnels. We lack ropes and markers. But now that we know exactly where to begin, our task is easy. We can return here tomorrow with men and equipment, by daylight—perhaps we can even bring a tracking hound. All we need to do now is to leave a marker here, that can be seen easily when we come here again.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Pole shrugged, and turned disconsolately for another look at the tunnel entrance. “Damn it, Erasmus, I’d like to go in there, evil or no evil. I hate to get this far and then turn tail.”

“If the Treasure of Odirex is in there, it has waited for you for fifteen hundred years. It can wait another day. Let us begin the descent.”

They retraced their steps, Jacob very reluctantly, to the downward path. In a few dozen paces they were clear of the fringes of the Helm. And there they stopped. While they had examined the entrance to the mine, the cloud cover had increased rapidly. Instead of seeing a moon shining strongly through light, broken clumps, they were limited to occasional fleeting glimpses through an almost continuous mass of clouds.

Jacob Pole shrugged, and looked slyly at Darwin. “This is bad, Erasmus. We can’t go down in this light. It would be suicide. How long is it until dawn?”

“Nearly four hours, at a guess. It’s bad luck, but we are only a week from winter solstice. There’s nothing else for it, we must settle down here and make the best of it, until dawn comes and we have enough light to make a safe descent.”

“Aye, you’re right.” Jacob Pole turned and looked thoughtfully back up the hill. “Since we’re stuck here for hours, Erasmus, wouldn’t it make sense to use the time, and take a quick look inside the entrance of the mine? After all, we do have the lanterns—and it may well be warmer inside.”

“—or drier, or any other of fifty reasons you could find for me, eh?” Darwin held his lantern up to Pole’s face, studying the eyes and the set of the mouth. He sighed. “I don’t know if you’re shivering with excitement or malaria, but you need warmth and rest. I wonder now about the wisdom of this excursion. All right. Let us go back up to the mine, on two conditions: we descend again to Heartsease at first light, and we take no risks of becoming lost in the mine.”

“I’ve been in a hundred mines, all over the world, and I have yet to get lost in one. Let me go first. I know how to spot weak places in the supports.”

“Aye. And if there’s treasure to be found—which I doubt—I’d not be the one to deprive you of the first look.”

Jacob Pole smiled. He placed one lantern on the ground, unshuttered. “Let this stay here, so Richard and Anna can see it. Remember, we promised to signal them every three hours that all is well. Now, let’s go to it—fiends or no fiends.” He turned to begin the climb back to the abandoned mine. As he did so, Darwin caught the expression on his face. He was nervous and pale, but in his eyes was the look of a small child approaching the door of a toy shop.

On a second inspection, made this time with the knowledge that they would be entering and exploring it, the mine tunnel looked much narrower and the walls less secure. Jacob, lantern partially shuttered to send a narrow beam forward, led the way. They went cautiously into the interior of the shaft. After a slight initial upward slant, the tunnel began to curve down, into the heart of the hill. The walls and roof were damp to the touch, and every few yards small rivulets of water ran steadily down the walls, glistening like a layer of ice in the light of the lantern.

Thirty paces on, they came to a branch in the tunnel. Jacob Pole bent low and studied the uneven floor.

“Left, I think,” he whispered. “What will we do if we meet the things that live here?”

“You should have asked that question before we set out,” replied Darwin softly. “As for me, that is exactly what I am here for. I am less interested in any treasure.”

Jacob Pole stopped, and turned in the narrow tunnel. “Erasmus, you never cease to amaze me. I know what drives me on, what makes me willing to come into a place like this at the devil’s dancing-hour. And I know that I’m in a cold sweat of fear and anticipation. But why aren’t you terrified? Don’t you think a meeting with the fiends would carry great danger for us?”

“Less danger than you fear. I assume that these creatures, like ourselves, are of natural origin. If I am wrong on that, my whole view of the world is wrong. Now, these fiends hide on the fell, and they come out only at night. There are no tales that say they kill people, or capture them. So I believe that they fear us—far more than we fear them.”

“Speak for yourself,” muttered Pole.

“Remember,” Darwin swept on, “when there is a struggle for living space, the stronger and fiercer animals drive out the weaker and more gentle—who then must perforce inhabit a less desirable habitat if they are to survive. For example, look at the history of the tribes that conquered Britain. In each case—”

“Sweet Christ!” Jacob Pole looked round him nervously. “Not a lecture, Erasmus. This isn’t the time or the place for it. And not so loud! I’ll take the history lesson some other time.”

He turned his back and led the way into the left branch of the tunnel. Darwin sniffed, then followed. He was almost fat enough to block the tunnel completely, and had to walk very carefully. After a few steps he stopped again and looked closely at a part of the tunnel wall that had been shored up with rough timbers.

“Jacob, bring the light back for a moment, would you? This working has been used recently—new wood in some of the braces. And look at this.”

“Sheep wool, caught on the splintered wood here. It’s still dry. We’re on the correct path all right. Keep going.”

“Aye. But what now?”

Pole pointed the beam from the lantern ahead, to where the tunnel broadened into a domed chamber with a smooth floor. They walked forward together. At the other side of the chamber was a deep crevasse. Across it, leading to a dark opening on the other side, ran a bridge of rope guides and wooden planks, secured by heavy timbers buttressed between floor and ceiling. Pole shone his lantern across the gap, into the tunnel on the other side, but there was nothing to be seen there. They walked together to the edge.

“It looks sturdy enough. What do you think, Erasmus?”

“I think we have gone far enough. It would be foolhardy to risk a crossing. What lies below?”

Pole swung the lantern to throw the beam downward. The pit was steep sided. About eight feet below the brink lay black, silent water, its surface smooth and unrippled. To right and left, the drowned chasm continued as far as the lantern beam would carry. Pole swung the light back to the bridge, inspecting the timbers and supporting ropes.

“Seems solid to me. Why don’t I take a quick look at the other side, while you hold the lantern.”

Darwin did not reply at once. He was staring down into the crevasse, a puzzled frown on his heavy face.

“Jacob, cover the lantern for a moment. I think I can see something down there, like a faint shining.”

“Like gold?” The voice was hopeful. Pole shuttered the lantern and they stared in silence into the darkness. After a few moments, it became more visible to them. An eerie, blue-green glow lit the pit below, beginning about three feet below the lip and continuing to the water beneath. As their eyes adjusted, they began to see a faint pattern to the light.

“Jacob, it’s growing there. It must be a moss, or a fungus. Or am I going blind?”

“It’s a growth. But how can a living thing glow like that?”

“Some fungi shine in the dark, and so do some animals—glowworms, and fireflies. But I never heard of anything like this growth. It’s in regular lines—as though it had been set out purposely, to provide light at the bridge. Jacob, I must have a sample of that!”

In the excited tone of voice, Pole recognized echoes of his own feelings when he thought about hunting for treasure. Darwin knelt on the rocky floor, then laboriously lowered himself at full length by the side of the chasm.

“Here, let me do that, Erasmus. You’re not built for it.”

“No. I can get it. You know, this is the same glow that we saw on the creatures on Cross Fell.”

He reached over the edge. His groping fingers were ten inches short of the highest growth. Grunting with the effort, Darwin took hold of the loose end of a trailing rope from the bridge, and levered himself farther over the edge.

“Erasmus, don’t be a fool. Wait until we can come back here tomorrow, with the others.”

Darwin grunted again, this time in triumph. “Got it!”

The victory was short-lived. As he spoke the hemp of the rope, rotted by many years of damp, disintegrated in his grasp. His body, off balance, tilted over the edge. With a startled oath and a titanic splash, Darwin plunged headfirst into the dark water beneath.

“Erasmus!” Jacob Pole swung around and groped futilely in the darkness for several seconds. He at last located the shuttered lantern, opened it and swung its beam onto the surface of the pool. There was no sign of Darwin. Pole ripped off his greatcoat and shoes. He stepped to the edge, hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and jumped feet-first into the unknown depths of the black, silent pool.

“More than three hours now. They should have signalled.”

“Perhaps they did.” Richard Thaxton squinted out of the window at the dark hillside.

“No. The lantern has been steady. I’m worried, Richard. See, they set it exactly where the lights of the fiends disappeared into the Helm.” Anna shook her head unhappily. “It must be freezing up on Cross Fell tonight. I just can’t believe that they would sit there for three hours without moving or signalling, unless they were in trouble.”

“Nor can I.” Thaxton opened the window and stuck his head out. He stared at the bleak hillside. “It’s no good, Anna. Even when the moon was up I couldn’t see a thing up there except for the lantern—and I can only just see that when you tell me where to look. Let’s give it another half hour. If they don’t signal, I’ll go up after them.”

“Richard, be reasonable. Wait until dawn. You’ll have an accident yourself if you go up there in the dark—you know your eyes aren’t good enough to let you be surefooted, even by full moonlight.”

The freezing wind gusted in through the open window. Thaxton pulled it closed. “At dawn. I suppose you’re right. I’d best check the supplies now. I’ll take medicine and splints, but I hope to God we won’t be needing them.” He stood up. “I’ll tell two of the gardeners that we may have to make a rescue trip on the fell at first light. Now, love, you try and get some sleep. You’ve been glued to that window most of the night.”

“I will.” Anna Thaxton smiled at her husband as he left the room. But she did not move from her vigil by the window, nor did her eyes move from the single point of light high on the bleak slopes of Cross Fell.

The first shock was the cold of the water, enfolding and piercing his body like an iron maiden. Jacob Pole gasped as the air was driven from his lungs, and flinched at the thought of total immersion. Then he realized that he was still standing, head clear of the surface. The pool was less than five feet deep.

He moved around in the water, feeling with his stockinged feet until he touched a soft object on the bottom. Bracing himself, he filled his lungs and submerged to grope beneath the surface. The cold was frightful. It numbed his hands instantly, but he grasped awkwardly at Darwin’s arm and shoulder, and hoisted the body to the level of his own chest. Blinking water from his eyes, he turned the still form so that its head was clear of the surface. Then he stood there shuddering, filled with the awful conviction that he was supporting a corpse.

After a few seconds, Darwin began to cough and retch. Pole muttered a prayer of relief and hung on grimly until the spasms lessened.

“What happened?” Darwin’s voice was weak and uncertain.

“You fell in headfirst. You must have banged your head on the bottom.” Pole’s reply came through chattering teeth. His arms and hands had lost all feeling.

“I’m sorry, Jacob.” Darwin was racked by another spell of coughing. “I behaved like an absolute fool.” He roused himself. “Look, I can stand now. We’d better get out of here before we freeze.”

“Easier said than done. Look at the height of the edge. And I see no purchase on either side.”

“We’ll have to try it anyway. Climb on my shoulders and see if you can reach.”

Scrabbling with frozen hands on the smooth rock face, Pole clambered laboriously to Darwin’s shoulders, leaned against the side of the pit, and reached upwards. His straining fingertips were a foot short of the lip. He felt in vain for some hold on the rock. Finally he swore and slid back into the icy water.

“No good. Can’t reach. We’re stuck.”

“We can’t afford to be. An hour in here will kill us. This water must be snow-melt from the fell. It’s close to freezing.”

“I don’t give a damn where it came from—and I’m well aware of its temperature. What now, Erasmus? The feeling is going out of my legs.”

“If we can’t go up, we must go along. Let’s follow the pool to the left here.”

“We’ll be moving away from the lantern light up there.”

“We can live without light, but not without heat. Come on, Jacob.”

They set off, water up to their necks. After a few yards it was clear that the depth was increasing. They reversed their steps and moved in the other direction along the silent pool. The water level began to drop gradually as they went, to their chests, then to their waists. By the time it was down to their knees they had left the light of the lantern far behind and were wading on through total darkness. At last, Jacob Pole bent forward and touched his fingers to the ground.

“Erasmus, we’re out of the water completely. It’s quite dry underfoot. Can you see anything?”

“Not a glimmer. Stay close. We don’t want to get separated here.”

Pole shivered violently. “I thought that was the end. What a way to die—stand until our strength was gone, then drown, like trapped rats in a sewer pipe.”

“Aye. I didn’t care for the thought. ‘O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown, what dreadful noise of waters in my ears, what sights of ugly death within my eyes.’ At least poor Clarence smothered in a livelier liquid than black fell water. Jacob, do you have your brandy flask? Your hand is ice.”

“Left it in my greatcoat, along with the tinder and flint. Erasmus, I can’t go much farther. That water drained all my strength away.”

“Pity there’s not more flesh on your bones.” Darwin halted and placed his hand on Pole’s shoulder, feeling the shuddering tremors that were shaking the other’s skinny frame. “Jacob, we have to keep moving. To halt now is to die, until our clothes become dry. Come, I will support you.”

The two men stumbled blindly on, feeling their way along the walls. All sense of direction was quickly lost in the labyrinth of narrow, branching tunnels. As they walked, Darwin felt warmth and new life slowly begin to diffuse through his chilled body. But Pole’s shivering continued, and soon he would have fallen without Darwin’s arm to offer support.

After half an hour more of wandering through the interminable tunnels, Darwin stopped again and put his hand to Pole’s forehead. It burned beneath his touch.

“I know, ’Rasmus, you don’t need to tell me.” Pole’s voice was faint. “I’ve felt this fever before—but then I was safe in bed. I’m done for. No Peruvian-bark for me here on Cross Fell.”

“Jacob, we must keep going. Bear up. I’ve got cinchona in my medical chest, back at the house. We’ll find a way out of here before too long. Just hang on, and let’s keep moving.”

“Can’t do it.” Pole laughed. “Wish I could. I’m all ready for a full military funeral, by the sound of it. I can hear the fife and drum now, ready to play me out. They’re whispering away there, inside my head. Let me lie down, and have some peace. I never warranted a military band for my exit, even if it’s only a ghostly one.”

“Hush, Jacob. Save your strength. Here, rest all your weight on me.” Darwin bent to take Pole’s arm across his shoulder, supported him about the waist, and began to move forward again. His mood was somber. Pole needed medical attention—promptly—or death would soon succeed delirium.

Twenty seconds later, Darwin stopped dead, mouth gaping and eyes staring into the darkness. He was beginning to hear it, too—a faint, fluting tone, thin and ethereal, punctuated by the harsh deeper tone of drums. He turned his head, seeking some direction for the sound, but it was too echoing and diffuse.

“Jacob—can you tell me where it seems to be coming from?”

The reply was muttered and unintelligible. Pole, his body fevered and shaken with ague, was not fully conscious. Darwin had no choice but to go forward again, feeling his way along the damp, slick walls with their occasional timber support beams. Little by little, the sound was growing. It was a primitive, energetic music, shrill panpipes backed by a taut, rhythmic drumbeat. At last Darwin also became aware of a faint reddish light, flickering far along the tunnel. He laid Pole’s semiconscious body gently on the rocky floor. Then, light-footed for a man of his bulk, he walked silently toward the source of the light.

The man-made tunnel he was in emerged suddenly into a natural chimney in the rock, twenty yards across and of indefinite height. It narrowed as it went up and up, as far as the eye could follow. Twenty feet above, on the opposite side from Darwin, a broad, flat ledge projected from the chimney wall.

Darwin stepped clear of the tunnel and looked up. Two fires, fuelled with wood and peat, burned on the ledge and lit the chimney with an orange-red glow. Spreading columns of smoke, rising in a slight updraft, showed that the cleft in the rock served as a chimney in the other sense. Behind the fires, a group of dark figures moved on the ledge to the wild music that echoed from the sheer walls of rock.

Darwin watched in fascination the misshapen forms that provided a grotesque backdrop to the smoky, flickering fires. There was a curious sense of regularity, of hypnotic ritual, in their ordered movements. A man less firmly rooted in rational convictions would have seen the fiends of Hell, capering with diabolic intent, but Darwin looked on with an analytical eye. He longed for a closer view of an anatomy so oddly distorted from the familiar human form.

The dancers, squat and shaggy, averaged no more than four feet in height. They were long-bodied and long-armed, and naked except for skirts and headdresses. But their movements, seen through the curtain of smoke and firelight, were graceful and well coordinated. The musicians, set back beyond the range of the firelight, played on and the silent dance continued.

Darwin watched, until the urgency of the situation again bore in on him. Jacob had to have warmth and proper care. The dancers might be ferocious aggressors, even cannibals; but whatever they were, they had fire. Almost certainly, they would also have warm food and drink, and a place to rest. There was no choice—and, deep inside, there was also the old, overwhelming curiosity.

Darwin walked forward until he was about twenty feet from the base of the ledge. He planted his feet solidly, legs apart, tilted his head back and shouted up to the dancers.

“It’s no good, Anna. Not a sign of them.” Richard Thaxton slumped on the stone bench in the front yard, haggard and weary. “They must have gone up, into the Helm. There’s not a thing we can do for them until it lifts.”

Anna Thaxton looked at her husband with a worried frown. His face was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Love, you did all you could. If they got lost on the fell, they’d be sensible enough to stay in one place until the Helm moves off the highlands. Where did you find the lantern—in the same place as I saw it last night?”

“The same place exactly. There.” Thaxton pointed a long arm at the slope of Cross Fell. “The trouble is, that’s right where the Helm begins. We couldn’t see much of anything. I think it’s thicker now than it was last night.”

He stood up wearily and began to walk toward the house. His steps were heavy and dragging on the cobbled yard. “I’m all in. Let me get a hot bath and a few hours sleep, and if the fell clears by evening we’ll go up again. Damn this weather.” He rubbed his hand over his shoulder. “It leaches a man’s bones to chalk.”

Anna watched her husband go inside, then she stooped and began collecting the packages of food and medicine that Richard in his weariness had dropped carelessly to the floor. As she rose, arms full, she found a small figure by her side.

“What is it, Jimmy?” The deformed lad had been leaning by the wall of the house, silent as always, listening to their conversation.

He tugged at her sleeve, then pointed to the fell. As usual he was lightly dressed, but he seemed quite unaware of the cold and the light drizzle. His eyes were full of urgent meaning.

“You heard what Mr. Thaxton said to me?” asked Anna. Jimmy nodded. Again he tugged at her arm, pulling her toward the fell. Then he puffed out his cheeks and hunched his misshapen head down on his shoulders. Anna laughed. Despite Jimmy’s grotesque appearance, he had somehow managed a credible impersonation of Erasmus Darwin.

“And you think you know where Dr. Darwin is?” said Anna.

The lad nodded once more, and tapped his chest. Again, he pointed to Cross Fell. Anna hesitated, looking back at the house. After the long climb and a frantic four-hour search, Richard was already exhausted. It would serve no purpose to interrupt his rest.

“Let me go inside and write a note for Mr. Thaxton,” she said. “Here, you take the food and medicine. We may need them.” She handed the packages to Jimmy. “And I’ll go and get warm clothing for both of us from the house. How about Colonel Pole?”

Jimmy smiled. He drew himself up to his full height of three feet nine inches. Anna laughed aloud. The size and build were wrong, but the angular set of the head and the slightly trembling hands were without question Jacob Pole.

“Give me five minutes,” she said. “Then you can lead the way. I hope you are right— and I hope we are in time.”

At Darwin’s hail, the dancers froze. In a few seconds, pipe and drum fell silent. There was a moment of suspense, while the tableau on the ledge held a frieze of demons against the dark background of the cave wall. Then the scene melted to wild confusion. The dancers milled about, most hurrying back beyond the range of the firelight, a few others creeping forward to the edge to gaze on the unkempt figure below.

“Do you understand me?” called Darwin.

There was no reply. He cursed softly. How to ask for help, when a common language was lacking? After a few moments he turned, went rapidly back into the tunnel, and felt his way to where Jacob Pole lay. Lifting him gently, he went back to the fire-lit chamber and stood there silently, the body of his unconscious friend cradled in his arms.

There was a long pause. At last, one of the fiends came to the very edge of the ledge and stared intently at the two men. After a second of inspection he turned and clucked gently to his companions. Three of them hurried away into the darkness. When they returned, they bore a long coil of rope which they cast over the edge of the ledge. The first fiend clucked again. He swung himself over the edge and climbed nimbly down, prehensile toes gripping the rope.

At the base he halted. Darwin stood motionless. At last, the other cautiously approached. His face was a devil-mask, streaked with red ocher from mouth to ears—but the eyes were soft and dark, deep-socketed beneath the heavy brow.

Darwin held forward Pole’s fevered body. “My friend is sick,” he said. The other started back at his voice, then again came slowly closer.

“See, red-man,” said Darwin. “He burns with fever.” Again, he nodded at Pole’s silent form.

The fiend came closer yet. He looked at Pole’s face, then put a hesitant hand out to feel the forehead. He nodded, and muttered to himself. He felt for the pulse in Pole’s scrawny neck and grunted unhappily.

Darwin looked at him with an approving eye. “Aye, doctor,” he said quietly. “See the problem? If we don’t get him back home, to where I can give him medicine and venesection, he’ll be dead in a few hours. What can you do for us, red-man?”

The fiend showed no sign of understanding Darwin’s speech, but he looked at the other with soft, intelligent eyes. Darwin, no Adonis at the best of times, was something to look at. His clothes, wrinkled and smeared, hung like damp rags on his corpulent body. He had lost hat and wig in his descent into the pool, and his face was grimed and filthy from their travels through the tunnels of the mine. On his left hand, a deep cut had left streaks of dried blood along wrist and sleeve.

Darwin stood there steadily, heedless of his appearance. The fiend finally completed his inspection. He took Darwin by the arm and led him to the foot of the ledge. After slipping the rope around Jacob Pole’s body and making it fast, he called a liquid phrase to the group above. The fiends on the ledge hoisted Pole to the top and then—with considerably greater effort—did the same for Darwin. The red-smeared fiend shinned up lightly after them. The others, taking the rope with them, quietly hurried away into the dark tunnel that led from the cave.

Together, Darwin and the fiend lifted Jacob Pole and laid him gently on a heap of sheepskins and rabbit furs. The red-man then also hurried away into the darkness. For the first time, Darwin was alone and could take a good look around him on the ledge.

The area was a communal meeting-place and eating-place. Two sheep carcasses, butchered and dressed, hung from a wooden tripod near one of the fires. Pole lay on his pile of furs about ten feet from the other fire, near enough for a comforting warmth to be cast on the sick man. Darwin walked over to the large black pot that nestled in the coals there. He bent over and sniffed it. Hot water. Useful, but not the source of the tantalizing smell that had filled his nostrils. He walked to the other fire, where an identical pot had been placed. He sniffed again. His stomach rumbled sympathetically. It was mutton broth. Darwin helped himself with the clay ladle and sipped appreciatively while he completed his inspection of the ledge.

Clay pots were stacked neatly along the nearer wall. Above them a series of murals had been painted in red and yellow ocher. The figures were stylized, with little attempt at realism in the portrayal of the fiends. Darwin was intrigued to see that many of them were set in forest backgrounds, showing boars and deer mingled with the distorted human figures. The animals, unlike the humanoids, were portrayed with full realism.

The other wall also bore markings, but they were more mysterious—a complex, intertwined network of lines and curves, drawn out in yellow ocher. At the foot of that wall lay a heap of jackets and leggings, made from crudely stitched rabbit skins. Darwin’s eye would have passed by them, but he caught a faint bluish gleam from the ones farthest from the fire. He walked over to them and picked one up. It shone faintly, with the blue-green glow that they had seen moving on Cross Fell, and again near the rope bridge.

Darwin took a tuft of fur between finger and thumb, pulled it loose and slipped it into his damp coat pocket. As he did so, the red-man appeared from the tunnel, closely followed by a female fiend. She had a red-streaked face with similar markings, and was carrying a rough wooden box. Giving Darwin a wide berth, she set the box beside Jacob Pole. The red-man brought a clay pot from the heap by the wall, filled it with scalding water from the cauldron by the fire, and opened the wooden box. He seemed absorbed in his actions, completely oblivious to Darwin’s presence.

“I see,” said Darwin reflectively. “A medicine chest, no less. And what, I wonder, are the prescriptive resources available to the medical practitioner on Cross Fell?” He stooped to watch the red-man at his work.

“That one looks familiar enough. Dried bilberries—though I doubt their efficacy. And this is—what?—bog rosemary? And here is dried tormentil, and blue gentian. Sound enough.” He picked up a petal and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Aye, and flowers of violet, and dried holly leaves. You have the right ideas, red-man—I’ve used those myself in emergency. But what the devil are these others?” He sniffed at the dried leaves. “This could be bog asphodel, and I think these may be tansy and spleenwort. But this?” He shook his head. “A fungus, surely—but surely not fly agaric!”

While he mused, the fiend was equally absorbed. He selected pinches of various dried materials from the chest and dropped them into the scalding water in the clay pot. He muttered quietly to himself as he did so, a soft stream of liquid syllables.

At last he seemed satisfied. Darwin leaned over and sniffed the infusion. He shook his head again.

“It worries me. I doubt that this is any better than prancing around Jacob to ward off evil spirits. But my judgment is worthless with those drugs. Do your best, red-man.”

The other looked up at Darwin, peering from under his heavy brows. He smiled, and closed the box. The female fiend picked up the clay pot, while the red-man went to Jacob Pole and lifted him gently to a sitting position. Darwin came forward to help. Between them, they managed to get most of the hot liquid down Pole’s throat.

Darwin had thought that the female was naked except for her short skirt. At close quarters, he was intrigued to see that she also wore an elaborately carved necklace. He bent forward for a closer look at it. Then his medical interests also asserted themselves, and he ran a gentle hand along her collarbone, noting the unfamiliar curvature as it bent toward her shoulder. The woman whimpered softly and shied away from his touch.

At this, the red-man looked up from his inspection of Jacob Pole and grunted his disapproval. He gently laid Pole back on the heap of skins. Then he patted the female reassuringly on the arm, removed her necklace, and handed it to Darwin. He pointed to the red streaks on her face. She turned and went back into the tunnel, and the red-man patted his own cheek and then followed her. Darwin, mystified, was alone again with Pole. The other fiends had shown no inclination to return.

Darwin looked thoughtfully at the remains of the infusion, and listened to Pole’s deep, labored breathing. At last, he settled down on a second pile of skins, a few yards from the fire, and looked closely at the necklace he had been given. He finally put it into a pocket of his coat, and sat there, deep in speculation. One theory seemed to have been weakened by recent events.

When the red-streaked fiend returned, he had with him another female, slightly taller and heavier than the first. He grunted in greeting to Darwin and pointed to the single line of yellow ocher on her cheek. Before Darwin could rise, he had turned and slipped swiftly away again into the recesses of the dark tunnel.

The female went over to Pole, felt his brow, and tucked sheepskins around him. She listened to his breathing, then, apparently satisfied, she came and squatted down on the pile of skins, opposite Darwin. Like the other, she wore a brief skirt of sewn rabbit skins and a similar necklace, less heavy and with simpler carving. For the first time, Darwin had the chance for a leisured assessment of fiend anatomy, with adequate illumination. He leaned forward and looked at the curious variations on the familiar human theme.

“You have about the same cranial capacity, I’d judge,” he said to her quietly. She seemed reassured by his gentle voice. “But look at these supra-orbital arches—they’re heavier than human. And you have less cartilage in your nose. Hm.” He leaned forward, and ran his hand softly behind and under her ear. She shivered, but did not flinch. They sat, cross-legged, opposite each other on the piled skins.

“I don’t feel any mastoid process behind the ear,” Darwin continued. “And this jaw and cheek is odd—see the maxilla. Aye, and I know where I’ve seen that jawline recently. Splendid teeth. If only I had my Commonplace Book with me, I’d like sketches. Well, memory must suffice.”

He looked at the shoulder and rib cage and moved his index finger along them, tracing their lines. Suddenly he leaned forward and plucked something tiny from the female’s left breast. He peered at it closely with every evidence of satisfaction.

“Pulex irritans, if I’m any judge. Pity I don’t have a magnifying glass with me. Anyway, that seems to complete the proof. You know what it shows, my dear?” He looked up at the female. She stared back impassively with soft, glowing eyes. Darwin leaned forward again.

“Now, with your leave I’d like a better look at this abdominal structure. Very heavy musculature here—see how well-developed the rectus abdominis is. Ah, thank you, that makes inspection a good deal easier.” Darwin nodded absently as the female reached to her side and removed her brief skirt of rabbit skins. He traced the line of ribbed muscle tissue to the front of the pelvis. “Aye, and an odd pelvic structure, too. See this, the pubic ramus seems flattened, just at this point.” He palpated it gently.

“Here! What the devil are you doing!” Darwin suddenly sat bolt upright. The female fiend sitting before him, naked except for her ornate necklace, had reached forward to him and signalled her intentions in unmistakable terms.

“No, my dear. You mustn’t do that.”

Darwin stood up. The female stood up also. He backed away from her hurriedly. She smiled playfully and pursued him, despite his protests, round and round the fire.

“There you go, Erasmus. I turn my back on you for one second, and you’re playing ring-a-ring-a-rosy with a succubus.” Pole’s voice came from behind Darwin. It sounded cracked and rusty, like an unoiled hinge, but it was rational and humorous.

The female squeaked in surprise at the unexpected sound. She ran to the heap of furs, snatched up her skirt, and fled back into the dark opening in the wall of the ledge. Darwin, no less surprised, went over to the bed of furs where Pole lay.

“Jacob, I can’t believe it. Only an hour ago, you were running a high fever and beginning to babble of green fields.” He felt Pole’s forehead. “Back down to normal, I judge. How do you feel?”

“Not bad. Damn sight better than I did when we got out of that water. And I’m hungry. I could dine on a dead Turk.”

“We can do better than that. Just lie there.” Darwin went across to the other fire, filled a bowl with mutton stew from the big pot, and carried it back. “Get this inside you.”

Pole sniffed it suspiciously. He grunted with pleasure and began to sip at it. “Good. Needs salt, though. You seem to be on surprisingly good terms with the fiends, Erasmus. Taking their food like this, without so much as a by-your-leave. And if I hadn’t been awakened by your cavorting, you’d be playing the two-backed beast this very second with that young female.”

“Nonsense.” Darwin looked pained. “Jacob, she simply misunderstood what I was doing. And I fear the red-man mistook the nature of my interest in the other female, also. It should have been clear to you that I was examining her anatomy.”

“And she yours.” Pole smiled smugly. “A natural preliminary to swiving. Well, Erasmus, that will be a rare tale for the members of the Lunar Society if we ever get back to Lichfield.”

“Jacob—” Darwin cut off his protest when he saw the gleeful expression on Pole’s face. “Drink your broth and then rest. We have to get you strong enough to walk, if we’re ever to get out of this place. Not that we can do much on that front. I’ve no idea how to find our way back—we’ll need the assistance of the fiends, if they will agree to give it to us.”

Pole lay back and closed his eyes. “Now this really feels like a treasure hunt, Erasmus. It wouldn’t be right without the hardships. For thirty years I’ve been fly-bitten, sun-baked, wind-scoured and snow-blind. I’ve eaten food that the jackals turned their noses up at. I’ve drunk water that smelled like old bat’s-piss. And all for treasure. I tell you, we’re getting close. At least there are no crocodiles here. I almost lost my arse to one, chasing emeralds on the Ganges.”

He roused himself briefly, and looked around him again. “Erasmus, where are the fiends? They’re the key to the treasure. They guard it.”

“Maybe they do,” said Darwin soothingly. “You rest now. They’ll be back. It must be as big a shock to them as it was to us—more, because they had no warning that we’d be here.”

Darwin paused and shook his head. There was an annoying ringing in his ears, as though they were still filled with fell water from the underground pool.

“I’ll keep watch for them, Jacob,” he went on. “And if I can, I’ll ask them about the treasure.”

“Wake me before you do that,” said Pole. He settled back and closed his eyes. Then he cracked one open again and peered at Darwin from under the lowered lid. “Remember, Erasmus—keep your hands off the fillies.” He lay back with a contented smile.

Darwin bristled, then also smiled. Jacob was on the mend. He sat down again by the fire, ears still buzzing and singing, and began to look in more detail at the contents of the medical chest.

When the fiend returned he gave Darwin a look that was half smile and half reproach. It was easy to guess what the females must have said to him. Darwin felt embarrassed, and he was relieved when the fiend went at once to Pole and felt his pulse. He looked pleased with himself at the result, and lifted Pole’s eyelid to look at the white. The empty bowl of stew sitting by Pole’s side also seemed to meet with his approval. He pointed at the pot that had contained the infusion of medicaments, and smiled triumphantly at Darwin.

“I know,” said Darwin. “And I’m mightily impressed, red-man. I want to know a lot more about that treatment, if we can manage to communicate with each other. I’ll be happy to trade my knowledge of medicinal botany for yours, lowland for highland. No,” he added, as he saw the other’s actions. “That isn’t necessary for me.”

The fiend had filled another pot with hot water while Darwin had been talking, and dropped into it a handful of dried fungus. He was holding it forward to Darwin. When the latter refused it, he became more insistent. He placed the bowl on the ground and tapped his chest. While Darwin watched closely, he drew back his lips from his teeth, shivered violently all over, and held cupped hands to groin and armpit to indicate swellings there.

Darwin rubbed his aching eyes, and frowned. The fiend’s mimicry was suggestive— but of something that seemed flatly impossible. Unless there was a danger, here on Cross Fell, of…

The insight was sudden, but clear. The legends, the King of Hate, the Treasure, the departure of the Romans from Cross Fell—at once all this made a coherent picture, and an alarming one. He blinked. The air around him suddenly seemed to swirl and teem with a hidden peril. He reached forward quickly and took the bowl.

“Perhaps I am wrong in my interpretation, red-man,” he said. “I hope so, for my own sake. But now I must take a chance on your good intentions.”

He lifted the bowl and drank, then puckered his lips with distaste. The contents were dark and bitter, strongly astringent and full of tannin. The red fiend smiled at him in satisfaction when he lowered the empty bowl.

“Now, red-man, to business,” said Darwin. He picked up the medicine chest and walked with it over to the fire. He hunkered down where the light was best and gestured to the red fiend to join him. The other seemed to understand exactly what was on Darwin’s mind. He opened the lid of the box, pulled out a packet wrapped in sheep-gut, and held it up for Darwin’s inspection.

How should one convey the use of a drug—assuming that a use were known— without words? Darwin prepared for a difficult problem in communication. Both the symptoms and the treatment for specific diseases would have to be shown using mimicry and primitive verbal exchange. He shook off his fatigue and leaned forward eagerly to meet the challenge.

Three hours later, he looked away from the red fiend and rubbed his eyes. Progress was excellent—but something was very wrong. His head was aching, the blood pounding in his temples. The buzzing and singing in his ears had worsened, and was accompanied by a blurring of vision and a feeling of nausea. The complex pattern of lines on the cave wall seemed to be moving, to have become a writhing tangle of shifting yellow tendrils.

He looked back at the fiend. The other was smiling—but what had previously seemed to be a look of friendship could equally well be read as a grin of savage triumph. Had he badly misunderstood the meaning of the infusion he had drunk earlier?

Darwin put his hands to the floor and attempted to steady himself. He struggled to rise to his feet, but it was too late. The cave was spiralling around him, the murals dipping and weaving. His chest was constricted, his stomach churning.

The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the red-streaked mask of the fiend, bending toward him as he slipped senseless to the floor of the cave.

Seen through the soft but relentless drizzle, Cross Fell was a dismal place. Silver was muted to dreary grey, and sable and copper gleams were washed out in the pale afternoon light. Anna Thaxton followed Jimmy up the steep slopes, already doubting her wisdom in setting out. The Helm stood steady and forbidding, three hundred feet above them, and although she had looked closely in all directions as they climbed, she had seen no sign of Pole and Darwin. She halted.

“Jimmy, how much farther? I’m tired, and we’ll soon be into the Helm.”

The boy turned and smiled. He pointed to a rock a couple of hundred yards away, then turned and pointed upwards. Anna frowned, then nodded.

“All right, Jimmy. I can walk that far. But are you sure you know where to find them?”

The lad nodded, then shrugged.

“Not sure, but you think so, eh? All right. Let’s keep going.”

Anna followed him upwards. Two minutes later, she stopped and peered at a scorched patch of heather.

“There’s been a lantern set down here, Jimmy—and recently. We must be on the right track.”

They were at the very brink of the Helm. Jimmy paused for a moment, as though taking accurate bearings, then moved up again into the heavy mist. Anna followed close behind him. Inside the Helm, visibility dropped to a few yards.

Jimmy stopped again and motioned Anna to his side. He pointed to a dark opening in the side of the hill.

“In here, Jimmy? You think they may have gone in, following the fiends?”

The boy nodded and led the way confidently forward into the tunnel. After a moment of hesitation, Anna followed him. The darkness inside quickly became impenetrable. She was forced to catch hold of the shawl that she had given Jimmy to wear, and dog his heels closely. He made his way steadily through the narrow tunnels, with no sign of uncertainty or confusion. At last he paused and drew Anna alongside him. They had reached a rough wooden bridge across a deep chasm, lit faintly from below by a ghostly gleaming on the walls. Far below, the light reflected from the surface of a dark and silent pool.

Jimmy pointed to a group of objects near the edge: a lantern, shoes and a greatcoat. Anna went to them and picked up the coat.

“Colonel Pole’s.” She looked down at the unruffled water below. “Jimmy, do you know what happened to them?”

The boy looked uncomfortable. He went to examine the frayed end of the trailing rope that hung from the bridge, then shook his head. He set out across the bridge, and Anna again took hold of the shawl. Soon they were again in total darkness. This time they seemed to grope their way along for an eternity. The path twisted and branched, moving upward and downward in the depths of the fell.

At last they made a final turn and emerged without warning into a broad clear area, full of people and lit by flickering firelight. Anna, dazzled after long minutes in total darkness, looked about her in confusion. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized with horror that the figures in front of her were not men and women—they were fiends, powerfully built and misshapen. She looked at the fires, and shivered at what she saw. Stretched out on piles of rough skins lay Erasmus Darwin and Jacob Pole, unconscious or dead. Two fiends, their faces red-daubed and hideous, crouched over Darwin’s body.

Anna did not cry out. She turned, twisted herself loose of Jimmy’s attempt to restrain her, and ran blindly back along the tunnel. She went at top speed, though she had no idea where her steps might lead her, or how she might escape from the fiends. When it came, the collision of her head with the timber roof brace was so quick and unexpected that she had no awareness of the contact before she fell unconscious to the rocky floor. She was spared the sound of the footsteps that pursued her steadily along the dark tunnel.

Richard Thaxton surfaced from an uneasy sleep. The taste of exhaustion was still in his mouth. He sat up on the bed, looked out at the sky, and tried to orient himself. He frowned. He had asked Anna to waken him at three o’clock for another search of Cross Fell, but outside the window the twilight was already far advanced. It must be well past four, on the grey December afternoon. Could it be that Darwin and Pole had returned, and Anna had simply decided to let him sleep to a natural waking, before she told him the news?

He stood up, went to the dresser, and splashed cold water on his face from the jug there. Rubbing his eyes, he went to the window. Outside the weather had changed again. The light drizzle of the forenoon had been replaced by a thick fog. He could scarcely see the tops of the trees in the kitchen garden, a faint tangle of dark lines bedewed with water droplets.

The first floor of the house was cold and silent. He thought of going down to the servants’ quarters, then changed his mind and went through to the study. The log fire there had been banked high by one of the maids. He picked up Anna’s note from the table, and went to read it by the fireside. At the first words, his concern for Darwin and Pole was overwhelmed by fear for Anna’s safety. In winter, in a dense Cumbrian fog, Cross Fell could be a death trap unless a man knew every inch of its sudden slopes and treacherous, shifting screes.

Thaxton put on his warmest clothing and hurried out into the gathering darkness. In this weather, the safest way up to the fell would be from the north, where the paths were wider—but the southern approach, although steeper and more treacherous, was a good deal more direct. He hesitated, then began to climb the southern slope, moving at top speed on the rough path that had been worn over the years by men and animals. On all sides, the world ended five yards from him in a wall of mist. The wind had dropped completely, and he felt like a man climbing forever in a small, silent bowl of grey fog. After ten minutes, he was forced to stop and catch his breath. He looked around. The folly of his actions was suddenly clear to him. He should now be on his way to Milburn, to organize a full-scale search party, rather than scrambling over Cross Fell, alone and unprepared. Should he turn now, and go back down? That would surely be the wiser course.

His thoughts were interrupted by a low, fluting whistle, sounding through the fog. It seemed to come from his left, and a good distance below him. The mist made distance and direction difficult to judge. He held his breath and stood motionless, listening intently. After a few seconds it came again, a breathy call that the fog swallowed up without an echo.

Leaving the path, he moved down and to the left, stumbling over the sodden tussocks of grass and clumps of heather, and peering ahead into the darkness. Twice, he almost fell, and finally he stopped again. It was no good, he could not negotiate the side of Cross Fell in the darkness and mist. Exploration would have to wait until conditions were better, despite his desperate anxiety. The only thing to do now was to return to the house. He would rest there as best he could, and be fit for another ascent, with assistance, when weather and light permitted it. Whatever had happened to Anna, it would not help her if he were to suffer injury now, up on the fell. He began a cautious descent.

At last he saw the light in the upper bedroom of the house shining faintly through the mist below him. Down at ground level, on the left side of the house, he fancied that he could see a group of dim lights, moving in the kitchen garden. That was surprising. He halted, and peered again through the darkness. While he watched, another low whistle behind him was answered, close to the house. The lights grew dimmer.

He was gripped by a sudden, unreasoning fear. Heedless of possible falls, he began to plunge full-tilt down the hillside.

The house and garden seemed quiet and normal, the grounds empty. He made his way into the kitchen garden, where he had seen the moving lights. It too seemed deserted, but along the wall of the house he could dimly see three oblong mounds. He walked over to them, and was suddenly close enough to see them clearly. He gasped. Side by side, bound firmly to rough stretchers of wood and leather, lay the bodies of Darwin, Pole and Anna, all well wrapped in sheepskins. Anna’s cold forehead was heavily bandaged, with a strip torn from her linen blouse. Thaxton dropped to his knee and put his ear to her chest, full of foreboding.

Before he could hear the heartbeat, he heard Darwin’s voice behind him.

“We’re here, are we?” it said. “About time, too. I must have dropped off to sleep again. Now, Richard, give me a hand to undo myself, will you. I’m better off than Anna and Jacob, but we’re all as sick as dogs. Myself, I don’t seem to have the strength of a gnat.”

“What a sight. Reminds me of the field hospital after a Pathan skirmish.” Jacob Pole looked round him with gloomy satisfaction. The study at Heartsease had been converted into a temporary sickroom, and Darwin, Anna Thaxton and Pole himself were all sitting in armchairs by the fire, swaddled in blankets.

Richard Thaxton stood facing them, leaning on the mantelpiece. “So what happened to Jimmy?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Darwin. He had broken one of his own rules, and was drinking a mug of hot mulled wine. “He started out with us, leading the way down while the rest of them carried the stretchers. Then I fell asleep, and I don’t know what happened to him. I suspect you’ll find him over in Milburn, wherever he usually lives there. He did his job, getting us back here, so he’s earned a rest.”

“He’s earned more than a rest,” said Thaxton. “I don’t know how he did it. I was up on the fell myself in that fog, and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.”

“He knows the fell from top to bottom, Jimmy does,” said Anna. “He was almost raised there.” She was looking pale, with a livid bruise and a long gash marring her smooth forehead. She shivered. “Richard, you’ve no idea what it was like, following him through the dark in that tunnel, then suddenly coming across the fiends. It was like a scene out of hell—the smoke, and the shapes. I felt sure they had killed the Colonel and Dr. Darwin.”

“They hardly needed to,” said Pole wryly. “We came damned close to doing that for ourselves. Erasmus nearly drowned, and I caught the worst fever that I’ve had since the time that I was in Madagascar, looking for star sapphires. Never found one. I had to settle for a handful of garnets and a dose of dysentery. Story of my life, that. Good thing that Erasmus could give me the medicine, up on the fell.”

“And that was no thanks to me,” said Darwin. “The fiends saved you, not me. They seem to have their own substitute for cinchona. I’ll have to try that when we get back home.”

“Aye,” said Pole. “And we’ll have to stop calling them fiends. Though they aren’t human, and look a bit on the fiendish side—if appearances bother you. Anyway, they did right by me.”

Richard Thaxton dropped another log on the fire, and pushed a second tray of meat pasties and mince pies closer to Darwin. “But at least there are fiends on Cross Fell,” he remarked. “Anna was right and I was wrong. It was a hard way to prove it, though, with the three of you all sick. What I find hardest to believe is that they’ve been there in the mines for fifteen hundred years or more, and we’ve not known it. Think, our history means nothing to them. The Norman Conquest, the Spanish Armada—they mean no more to them than last year’s rebellion in the American Colonies. It all passed them by.”

Darwin swallowed a mouthful of pie and shook his head. “You’re both wrong.”

“Wrong? About what?” asked Thaxton.

“Jacob is wrong when he says they are not human, and you are wrong when you say they’ve been up in the mines for fifteen hundred years.”

There was an immediate outcry from the other three. “Of course they’re not human,” said Pole.

Darwin sighed, and regretfully put down the rest of his pie, back on the dish. “All right, if you want evidence, I suppose I’ll have to give it to you. First, and in my opinion the weakest proof, consider their anatomy. It’s different from ours, but only in detail—in small ways. There are many fewer differences between us and the fiends than there are between us and, say, a monkey or a great ape. More like the difference between us and a Moor, or a Chinee.

“That’s the first point. The second one is more subtle. The flea.”

“You’d better have some proof more substantial than that, Erasmus,” said Pole. “You can’t build a very big case around a flea.”

“You can, if you are a doctor. I found a flea on one of the young females—you saw her yourself, Jacob.”

“If she’s the one you were hoping to roger, Erasmus, I certainly did. But I didn’t see any flea. Of course, I didn’t have the privilege of getting as close as you apparently did.”

“All the same, although you didn’t see it, I found a flea on her—our old friend, Pulex irritans, if I’m a reliable judge. Now, you scholars of diabolism and the world of demons. When did you ever hear of any demon that had fleas—and the same sort of fleas that plague us?”

The other three looked at each other, while Darwin took advantage of the brief silence to poke around one of his back teeth for a piece of gristle that had lodged there.

“All right,” said Anna at last. “A fiend had a flea. It’s still poor evidence that fiends are human. Dogs have fleas, too. Are you suggesting they should be called human? There’s more to humanity than fleas.”

“There is,” agreed Darwin. “In fact, there’s one final test for humanity, the only one I know that never fails.”

The room was silent for a moment. “You mean, possession of an immortal soul?” asked Richard Thaxton at last, in a hushed voice.

Jacob Pole winced, and looked at Darwin in alarm.

“I won’t get off on the issue of religious beliefs,” said Darwin calmly. “The proof that I have in mind is much more tangible, and much more easily tested. It is this: a being is human if and only if it can mate with a known human, and produce offspring. Now, having seen the fiends, isn’t it obvious to you, Jacob, and to you, Anna, that Jimmy was sired by one of them? One of them impregnated daft Molly Metcalf, up on the fell.”

Anna Thaxton and Jacob Pole looked at each other. Jacob nodded, and Anna bit her lip. “He’s quite right, Richard,” she said. “Now I think about it, Jimmy looks just like a cross of a human with a fiend. Not only that, he knows his way perfectly through all the tunnels, and seems quite comfortable there.”

“So, my first point is made,” said Darwin. “The fiends are basically human, though they are a variation on our usual human form—more different, perhaps, than a Chinaman, but not much more so.”

“But how could they exist?” asked Thaxton. “Unless they were created as one of the original races of man?”

“I don’t know if there really were any ‘original races of man.’ To my mind, all animal forms develop and change, as their needs change. There is a continuous succession of small changes, produced I know not how—perhaps by the changes to their surroundings. The beasts we finally see are the result of this long succession—and that includes Man.”

Darwin sat back and picked up his pie for a second attack. Pole, who had heard much the same thing several times before, seemed unmoved, but Anna and Richard were clearly uncomfortable with Darwin’s statements.

“You realize,” said Thaxton cautiously, “that your statements are at variance with all the teachings of the Church—and with the words of the Bible?”

“I do,” said Darwin indistinctly, through a mouth crammed full of pie. He held out his mug for a refill of the spiced wine.

“But what of your other assertion, Erasmus?” said Pole. “If the fiends were not on Cross Fell for the past fifteen hundred years, then where the devil were they? And what were they doing?”

Darwin sighed. He was torn between his love of food and his fondness for exposition. “You didn’t listen to me properly, Jacob. I never said they weren’t about Cross Fell. I said they weren’t living in the mine tunnels for fifteen hundred years.”

“Then where were they?” asked Anna.

“Why, living on the surface—mainly, I suspect, in the woods. Their murals showed many forest scenes. Perhaps they were in Milburn Forest, southeast of Cross Fell. Think, now, there have been legends of wood-folk in England as long as history has records. Puck, Robin Goodfellow, the dryads—the stories have many forms, and they are very widespread.”

“But if they lived in the woods,” said Anna, “why would they move to the mine tunnels? And when did they do it?”

“When? I don’t know exactly,” said Darwin. “But I would imagine that it was when we began to clear the forests of England, just a few hundred years ago. We began to destroy their homes.”

“Wouldn’t they have resisted, if that were true?” asked Pole.

“If they were really fiends, they might—or if they were like us. But I believe that they are a very peaceful people. You saw how gentle they were with us, how they cared for us when we were sick—even though we must have frightened them at least as much as they disturbed us. We were the aggressors. We drove them to live in the disused mines.”

“Surely they do not propose to live there forever?” asked Anna. “Should they not be helped, and brought forth to live normally?”

Darwin shook his head. “Beware the missionary spirit, my dear. They want to be allowed to live their own lives. In any case, I do not believe they would survive if they tried to mingle with us. They are already a losing race, dwindling in numbers.”

“How do you know?” asked Pole.

Darwin shrugged. “Partly guesswork, I must admit. But if they could not compete with us before, they will inevitably lose again in the battle for living space. I told you on the fell, Jacob, in all of Nature the weaker dwindle in number, and the strong flourish. There is some kind of selection of the strongest, that goes on all the time.”

“But that cannot be so,” said Thaxton. “There has not been enough time since the world began, for the process you describe to significantly alter the balance of the natural proportions of animals. According to Bishop Ussher, this world began only four thousand and four years before the birth of Our Lord.”

Darwin sighed. “Aye, I’m familiar with the bishop’s theory. But if he’d ever lifted his head for a moment, and looked at Nature, he’d have realized that he was talking through his episcopal hat. Why, man, you have only to go and look at the waterfall at High Force, not thirty miles from here, and you will realize that it must have taken tens of thousands of years, at the very least, to carve its course through the rock. The earth we live on is old—despite the good bishop’s pronouncement.”

Anna struggled to her feet and went over to look out of the window. It was still foggy and bleak, and the fell was barely visible through the mist. “So they are humans, out there,” she said. “I hope, then, that they have some happiness in life, living in the cold and the dark.”

“I think they do,” said Darwin. “They were dancing when first we saw them, and they did not appear unhappy. And they do come out, at night, when the fell is shrouded in mist—to steal a few sheep of yours, I’m afraid. They always return before first light. They fear the aggressive instincts of the rest of us, in the world outside.”

“What should we do about them?” asked Anna.

“Leave them alone, to live their own lives,” replied Darwin. “I already made that promise to the red fiend, when we began to exchange medical information. He wanted an assurance from us that we would not trouble them, and I gave it. In return, he gave me a treasure-house of botanical facts about the plants that grow on the high fells—if I can but remember it here, until I have opportunity to write it down.” He tapped his head.

Anna returned from the window. She sat down again and sighed. “They deserve their peace,” she said. “From now on, if there are lights and cries on the fell at night, I will have the sense to ignore them. If they want peace, they will have it.”

“So, Erasmus, I’ve been away again chasing another false scent. Damn it, I wish that Thomas of Appleby were alive and here, so I could choke him. All that nonsense about the Treasure of Odirex—and we found nothing.”

Pole and Darwin were sitting in the coach, warmly wrapped against the cold. Outside, a light snow was falling as they wound their way slowly down the Tees valley, heading east for the coastal plains that would take them south again to Lichfield. It was three days before Christmas, and Anna Thaxton had packed them an enormous hamper of food and drink to sustain them on their journey. Darwin had opened it, and was happily exploring the contents.

“I could have told you from the beginning,” he said, “that the treasure would have to be something special to please Odirex. Ask yourself, what sort of treasure would please the King of Hate? Why was he called the King of Hate?”

“Damned if I know. All I care about is that there was nothing there. If there ever was a treasure, it must have been rifled years ago.”

Darwin paused, a chicken in one hand and a Christmas pudding in the other. He looked from one to the other, unable to make up his mind.

“You’re wrong, Jacob,” he said. “The treasure was there. You saw it for yourself, and I had even closer contact with it. Don’t you see, the fiends themselves are the Treasure of Odirex. Or rather, it is what they bear with them that is the Treasure.”

“Bear with them? Sheepskins?”

“Not something you could see, Jacob. Disease. The fiends are carriers of plague. That’s what Odirex discovered, when he discovered them. Don’t ask me how he escaped the effects himself. That’s what he used to drive away the Romans. If you look back in history, you’ll find there was a big outbreak of plague in Europe, back about the year four hundred and thirty—soon after the Romans left Britain. People have assumed that it was bubonic plague, just like in the Black Death in the fourteenth century, or the Great Plague here a hundred years ago. Now, I am sure that it was not the same.”

“Wait a minute, Erasmus. If the fiends carry plague, why aren’t all the folk near Cross Fell dead?”

“Because we have been building up immunity, by exposure, for many hundreds of years. It is the process of selection again. People who can resist the plague can survive, the others die. I was struck down myself, but thanks to our improved natural resistance, and thanks also to the potion that the red fiend made me drink, all I had was a very bad day. If I’d been exposed for the first time, as the Romans were, I’d be dead by now.”

“And why do you assert that it was not bubonic plague? Would you not be immune to that?”

“I don’t know. But I became sick only a few hours after first exposure to the fiends— that is much too quick for bubonic plague.”

“Aye,” said Pole. “It is, and I knew that for myself if I thought about it. So Odirex used his ‘treasure’ against the Romans. Can you imagine the effect on them?”

“You didn’t see me,” said Darwin, “and I only had the merest touch of the disease. Odirex could appear with the fiends, contaminate the Roman equipment—touching it might be enough, unless personal contact were necessary. That wouldn’t be too difficult to arrange, either. Then, within twelve hours, the agony and deaths would begin. Do you wonder that they called him Odii Rex, the King of Hate? Or that they so feared his treasure that they fled this part of the country completely? But by then it was too late. They took the disease with them, back into Europe.”

Pole looked out at the snow, now beginning to settle on the side of the road. He shivered. “So the fiends really are fiends, after all. They may not intend to do it, but they have killed, just as much as if they were straight from Hell.”

“They have indeed,” said Darwin. “More surely than sword or musket, more secretly than noose or poison. And all by accident, as far as they are concerned. They must have developed their own immunity many thousands of years ago, perhaps soon after they branched off from our kind of humanity.”

Jacob Pole reached into the hamper and pulled out a bottle of claret. “I’d better start work on the food and drink, too, Erasmus,” he said morosely. “Otherwise you’ll demolish the lot. Don’t bother to pass me food. The wine will do nicely. I’ve had another disappointment, and I want to wash it down. Damn it, I wish that once in my lifetime— just once—I could find a treasure that didn’t turn to vapor under my shovel.”

He opened the bottle, settled back into the corner of the coach seat, and closed his eyes. Darwin looked at him unhappily. Jacob had saved his life in the mine, without a doubt. In return, all that Pole had received was a bitter letdown.

Darwin hunched down in his seat and thought of all that he had omitted to say, to Jacob and to the Thaxtons. In his pocket, the necklace from the female fiend seemed to burn, red-hot, like the bright red gold from which it was made. Somewhere in their explorations of the tunnels under Cross Fell, the fiends had discovered the gold mine that had so long eluded the other searchers. And it was plentiful enough, so that any fiend was free to wear as much of the heavy gold as he chose.

Darwin looked across at his friend. Jacob Pole was a sick man, and they both knew it. He had perhaps two or three more years, before the accumulated ailments from a lifetime of exploration came to take him. Now it was in Darwin’s power to satisfy a life’s ambition, and reveal to Jacob a true treasure trove, up there on Cross Fell. But Darwin also remembered the look in the red fiend’s eyes, when he had asked for peace for his people as the price for his medical secrets. More disturbance would break that promise.

Outside the coach, the snow was falling heavier on the Tees valley. Without doubt, it would be a white Christmas. Darwin looked out at the tranquil scene, but his mind was elsewhere and he felt no peace. Jacob Pole, or the red fiend? Very soon, he knew that he would have to make a difficult decision.