The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories

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Warwick put down his drink, lighted a cigarette, looked round the club smoking-room to discover that, in our corner, at least, we were alone. Then, leaning towards me, he asked in that abrupt, disturbing manner of his:

“What happened to Mendingham?”

I was startled; the more so as at that moment the threatening storm broke with a streak of forked lightning and a clap of thunder that seemed right overhead. Then the deluge came.

I looked at Warwick with a feeling of dismay, for I knew the expression on his face, the set of his lips and jaw, and the curious rigidity that somehow seemed to stiffen even his ears. There was no gainsaying him—if he meant to learn Mendingham’s fate, nothing I could say would put him off; also, as it happened, we both had time hanging on our hands.

And yet . . .

It was on just such a night as this, stormy, wild, ‘filthy’, in sailor parlance, that I found him. The memory of that discovery would never die, but a storm always accentuated it.

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