“The Child,” I asked.  “Can you explain that part at all?  Why you didn’t see the Woman, and why they didn’t see the Child.  Was it merely the same Force, appearing differently to different people?”

“No,” said Carnacki, “I can’t explain that.  But I am quite sure that the Woman and the Child were not only two complete and different entities; but even they were each not in quite the same planes of existence.

“To give you a root idea, however, it is held in the Sigsand MS. that a child ‘stillborn’ is ‘Snatyched back bye thee Haggs.’  This is crude; but may yet contain an elemental truth.  Yet, before I make this clearer, let me tell you a thought that has often been made.  It may be that physical birth is but a secondary process; and that prior to the possibility, the Mother Spirit searches for, until it finds, the small Element—­the primal Ego or child’s soul.  It may be that a certain waywardness would cause such to strive to evade capture by the Mother Spirit.  It may have been such a thing as this, that I saw.  I have always tried to think so; but it is impossible to ignore the sense of repulsion that I felt when the unseen Woman went past me.  This repulsion carries forward the idea suggested in the Sigsand MS., that a stillborn child is thus, because its ego or spirit has been snatched back by the ‘Hags.’  In other words, by certain of the Monstrosities of the Outer Circle.  The thought is inconceivably terrible, and probably the more so because it is so fragmentary.  It leaves us with the conception of a child’s soul adrift half-way between two lives, and running through Eternity from Something incredible and inconceivable (because not understood) to our senses.

“The thing is beyond further discussion; for it is futile to attempt to discuss a thing, to any purpose, of which one has a knowledge so fragmentary as this.  There is one thought, which is often mine.  Perhaps there is a Mother Spirit—­”

“And the well?” said Arkwright.  “How did the captain get in from the other side?”

“As I said before,” answered Carnacki.  “The side walls of the well did not reach to the bottom; so that you had only to dip down into the water, and come up again on the other side of the wall, under the cellar floor, and so climb into the passage.  Of course, the water was the same height on both sides of the walls.  Don’t ask me who made the well entrance or the little stairway; for I don’t know.  The house was very old, as I have told you; and that sort of thing was useful in the old days.”

“And the Child,” I said, coming back to the thing which chiefly interested me.  “You would say that the birth must have occurred in that house; and in this way, one might suppose that the house to have become en rapport, if I can use the word in that way, with the Forces that produced the tragedy?”

“Yes,” replied Carnacki.  “This is, supposing we take the suggestion of the Sigsand MS., to account for the phenomenon.”