coast road. The wind sweeping past the car was nearly sub-tropical and the stars were gleaming in masked beauty through a high screen of mist.
Presently the car entered Little Brook village with its solitary new signpost saying very definitely—TO MYTHORN TOWERS. Trust Henry T. to think of that! The villagers had apparently retired and the car’s headlights swept across scrupulously whitewashed walls and then upon the ivy-clad bulk of the village church. The clock was just striking midnight.
“Ten—eleven—” Nick intoned, then at the twelfth stroke he frowned a little. Instead of booming out it seemed to cut itself off short, like a gong in a radio program suddenly switched out.
“Sounded queer,” Bernice agreed, seeing his puzzled glance. “Probably the bell’s as cracked as the village inhabitants.”
“Could be,” Nick admitted.
By this time the car was on the cross-country road that connected eventually with the main London-south coast major highway. Dawlish sat immovable at the wheel, his cadaverous face lighted by stars and dashboard reflections. The dark field on either side made a perfect background for his profile.
On, and still on, the engine making hardly any sound and the speedometer registering 66 mph. On and on, until Nick began to frown a little as he saw no sign of the broad, deserted road ending. The headlamp beams pierced the misty night for a tremendous distance, but there was only the road, dusty and not very well surfaced, and the great deserted expanses of fields on either side.
“How much further?” Bernice asked at last, sitting up in some surprise. “Dawlish, are you sure you’re on the right road?”
“Certain, miss. I turned left at the signpost which brought us on the road along which we came from London.”
As if to satisfy himself that the road must end somewhere Dawlish increased speed—up to seventy, and then eighty, but the headlights continued to blaze along a white ribbon which stretched on, on, and ever on until it lost itself in the starry backdrop.
“Stop!” Nick commanded at last, his voice taut. Dawlish obeyed and as the car came to a standstill there was an appalling quiet.
“What—what’s happened?” Bernice asked at last, and she could not be blamed for sounding frightened. “Are we on the wrong road, or something?”
“Evidently we must be, Miss,” Dawlish answered. “I set the trip-milometer before we started and we’ve traveled thirty miles. Yet we’re still on this country road.”
“I imagine the explanation is fairly simple,” Harley Brand said, though he did not sound convincing. “We’ve hit one of those confounded country roads which go in a circle. If we go on far enough we’ll come back to the signpost.”
Silence. Dawlish looked at the stars. Bernice, being next to him, was attracted by his action and looked also. And her none too agile brain was puzzled by what she saw.
There was something queer about those stars. Instead of being bright points of light, they were silvery-looking streaks, broad at the top and narrow at the base, as though they had been driven into a great pool of dark and been shorn off in the doing.
Stars like shaved-off rods? Utter silence? The empty fields and nowhere a sign of life or the solitary gleam of a distant lighted window.
“Where the hell are we?” Nick demanded at last, and his enquiry brought them all into action again. They moved vaguely with no fixed idea in mind.
“Circular road, Nick,” Harley Brand insisted.
“It’s something more than that, sir,” Dawlish responded, a queer note in his voice. “Take a look at the stars. Not only do they look odd, but not one of them has any recognizable position. I’ve just been studying them.”
“I wouldn’t know a star from a planet, and even less their positions,” Nick growled. “Surprises me you know so much.”
“I’ve studied astronomy, sir, amongst other things. Usually I can find any particular star or constellation, but not this time! And when the stars fail you for direction you’re—lost!”
“Ridiculous!” Nick declared, scrambling out of the car. “There’ll be bound to be a patrol man along soon, or a passing car, or—or—something.”
Nobody answered.
“There’ll have to be!” Nick insisted.
“How much petrol have we?” Betty Danvers asked, and Dawlish glanced at the fuel gauge.
“Practically empty, Miss Danvers. I was intending to fill up at the garage just beyond Mythorn—only we haven’t passed it.”
Again the mystified quiet. Then Bernice exclaimed, “I’ve got it! Let’s look at a road map.”
Dawlish dug it out of the cubbyhole and six anxious faces bent over it in the dim glow from the dash.
“Here’s Little Brook,” Harley Brand said, pointing. “Here is the road leading through it to Mythorn Towers—yes, and here’s the spot where the new signpost has been erected where we turn the corner. Then we go straight to—”
There was no road marked where they had been traveling. They looked at each other with half-closed eyes, striving to mask a deepening apprehension.
“Maybe the map’s old?” Betty suggested.
“Recent issue,” Nick replied; then, his brows knitted, he looked around him in the quiet. Finally he took a torch from the car’s side pocket and flashed the beam at his feet. The road was not macadam-surfaced, but hard-baked soil, not unlike a trail out west which has been subjected to ceaseless sun-blistering. Dust lay thick upon it. It even looked as if rain had not descended for ages—and this, for England, was incredible, dry though the summer had been.
“I don’t get it!” Nick confessed at last, and switched off the torch.
Dawlish clambered out of the car and surveyed.
“Maybe we’re dead?” Betty Danvers suggested dryly.
“Which isn’t funny!” Bernice flared at her.
“All right, girls, keep your tempers,” Nick reproved them, sensing the thin edge of hysteria. “We’ll work out something—I hope.”
He turned and headed round the front of the car to speak to Dawlish, then he stopped halfway, completely astounded. As if things were not bad enough already there was a new mystery added. For, though he was directly intercepting the beam of the offside headlamp, he was not casting a shadow! The beam tunneled straight on into the dreary emptiness.
Nick glanced back at the car. The girls and Harley Brand were arguing amongst themselves and had not noticed this latest phenomenon—but Dawlish had. There was a rather grim smile on his lean features as Nick came to his side.
“You noticed that?” Nick asked.
“Yes, sir. Unusual—but explanatory.”
“Explanatory? How d’you mean?”
Dawlish lowered his voice.
