After half an hour I said what I had been pondering ever since we started.
“Billy, this is a crazy business. I’m willing to call the bet off if you are.”
But he answered gravely.
“I’m sorry, my friend, but I’m not going to lose the opportunity of making a fiver.”
Then there was silence again until Anderson looked back from the wheel and said:
“Look here, Billy, let’s stop at this pub and then go home. I can lend you a fiver or more if you want it. You needn’t pay me until you want to.”
But Billy was resolute:
“No, Dick, I owe enough already. I should like to earn an honest meal for once.”
So Anderson drove on and soon we came into sight of the grim place which Craine had chosen for our experiment. I saw that Billy was beginning to lose his nerve for he was shivering in his big overcoat and his feet were very still, pressed down with all his might.
“Billy,” I said, “I don’t think we need go any further; we should only be wasting time. You’ve obviously won the bet.”
And I think he would have yielded—for he was rather a child—when Craine’s voice answered for him.
“What damned nonsense. The thing isn’t begun yet. Donne’s bet that he has the nerve to go through the whole werewolf ceremony. Just getting to the place is nothing. He doesn’t yet know what he has to do. I’ve got as far as this twice before—once in Nigeria with a man of forty, but he hadn’t the nerve to go through with it, and once in Wales with the bravest thing in the world, a devoted woman; but she couldn’t do it. Donne may, because he’s young and hasn’t seen enough to make him easily frightened.”
But Billy was frightened, badly, and so were Anderson and I and for this reason we let ourselves be overborne by Craine because he knew that we were; and he smiled triumphant as a stage Satan in the moonlight.
It was strange being beaten like this by Craine who in College was always regarded as a rather unsavoury joke. But then this whole expedition was strange and Craine was an old man—thirty-three—an age incalculable to the inexperience of twenty-one; and Billy was only just nineteen.
We had started off merrily enough down St. Aldate’s; Billy had said:
“I wonder what human flesh tastes like; what d’you suppose one should drink with it?” and when I had answered with utter futility, “Spirits, of course,” they had all laughed; which shows that we were in high good humour.
But once in Anderson’s car and under that vast moon, a deep unquiet had settled upon us and when Craine said in his sinister way:
“By the way, Donne, you ought to know in case you lose us; if you want to regain your manhood all you have to do is to draw some of your own blood and take off the girdle.”
Anderson and I shuddered. He said it with a slight sneer on “manhood” and we resented it that he should speak to Billy in this way, but more than this we were shocked at the way in which the joke was suddenly plunged into reality. This was the first time that evening on which I had felt fear and all through the drive it had grown more and more insistent, until on the heath, bleak and brilliantly moonlit, I was sickeningly afraid and said:
“Billy, for God’s sake let’s get back.”
But Craine said quietly:
“Are you ready, Donne? The first thing you have to do is to take off your clothes; yes, all of them.”
And Billy without looking at us, began with slightly trembling hands to undress. When he stood, white beside his heap of clothes under the moon, he shivered and said: “I hope I get a wolf skin soon; it’s damned cold.” But the pathetic little joke faltered and failed and left us all shivering; all except Craine who was pouring something out into the cup of his flask.
“You have to drink this�............