SPINE CHILLERS EPISODE 3 "The Music on the Hill'" by Saki, told by Jonathan Pryce

Añadido: 2026-05-28

[00:00:06][music] Silia. Seltoun ate her breakfast at the morning room at Yestnne with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory.

[00:00:36]Fate had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of small struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her and usually she had just managed to come through winning.

[00:00:46]Now she felt that she had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To have married Mortimus Altun in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination to carry through. Yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from town and settling him down in this remote woodgurt manif.

[00:01:16]You will never get Mortimer to go, his mother had said carpingly. But if he once goes, he'll stay. Yes. Throws almost as much a spell over him as town does. One can understand what holds him in town. But Yes.

[00:01:31]There was a somber, almost savage wildness about Yesne that was certainly not likely to appeal to town tastes, and Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more silven than leafy Kensington.

[00:01:44]She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it over much. Distrust of town life had been a new thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she called the German street look in his eyes, as the woods and Heather of Yestnne had closed in on them yesterday night. Her willpower and strategy had prevailed.

[00:02:09]Mortima would stay.

[00:02:11]Outside the morning room windows was a triangular slope of turf, and beyond its low hedge a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous overgrown with oak and u. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed at the landscape and then it was sudden she almost shuddered.

[00:02:37]It is very wild, she said to Mortimer.

[00:02:41]One could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out. The worship of Pan never has died out, said Mortimer. Other newer gods have drawn aside his voteries from time to time, but he is the nature god to whom all must come back at last.

[00:02:59]Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did not like to hear her belief spoken of as mere aftergrowths. But it was at least something new and hopeful to hear Mortimus speak with such energy and conviction on any subject. "We don't really believe in Pan," she asked incredulously.

[00:03:19]"I've been a fool in most things," said Mortimer quietly. "But I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here. And if you're wise, you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country.

[00:03:34]>> It was not till a week later when Sylvia had exhausted the possibilities of the woodland walks around Yesnik that she ventured on an inspection of the palm buildings.

[00:03:45]A farmyard suggested in her mind a scene of cheerful bustle with churns and flails and smiling dairy mates. As she wandered among the gaunted gray buildings of Yesny Mana Farm, her first impression was one of crushing stillness and desolation, as though she had happened on some lone, deserted homestead, long given over to owls and cobwebs.

[00:04:07]Then came a sense of fertive watchful hostility.

[00:04:10]The same shadow of unseen things that seemed to lurk in the wooded and corpasses.

[00:04:15]From a distant corner, a shaggy dog watched her with intent, unfriendly eyes. As she drew near, it slipped quietly into its kennel, and slipped out again as nolessly when she had passed by. A few hens questing for food under a rick stole away under a gate at her approach.

[00:04:33]Sylvia felt that if she had come across any human beings in this wilderness of barn and buy they would have fled wraithlike from her gaze. At last turning a corner she came upon a living thing that did not fly from her. A stretch in a pool of mud was an enormous s speedily alert to resent and if necessary repel the unwanted intrusion.

[00:04:55]It was Sylvia's turn to make an unobtrusive retreat.

[00:04:58]As she threaded her way past ricky yards and cow sheds, she started suddenly at a strange sound, the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal.

[00:05:08]Jan, the only boy employed on the farm, was visibly at work halfway up the nearest hillside, and Mortimer, when questioned, knew of no other probable or possible begetter of the hidden mockery that had ambushed Sylvia's retreat. The memory of that untraceable echo was added to her other impressions of a fertive sinister something that hung around Yestnney.

[00:05:30]Of Mortimer she saw very little. Farm and woods and trout streams seemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk.

[00:05:38]Once following the direction she had seen him take in the morning, she came to an open space in a nutc which stood a stone pedestal surmounted by a bronze figure of a youthful pan.

[00:05:54]It was a beautiful piece of workmanship, but her attention was chiefly held by the fact that a newly cut bunch of grapes had been placed as an offering at his feet.

[00:06:03]Grapes were none too plentiful at the mana house, and Sylvia snatched the bunch angrily from the pedestal.

[00:06:09]Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowly homeward, and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was very near fright. Across a thick tangle of undergrowth, a boy's face was scowlling at her, brown, beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes. It was a lonely pathway, and she sped forward without waiting to give closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition.

[00:06:33]It was not until she had reached the house that she discovered that she had dropped the bunch of grapes in her flight. "I saw a youth in the wood today," she told Mortimer that evening.

[00:06:42]"Bfaced and rather handsome, but a scoundrel to look at, a gypsy lad, I suppose." "A reasonable theory," said Mortimer. "Only there aren't any gypsies in these parts at present." Then who was he? asked Sylvia. And as Mortimer appeared to have no theory of his own, she passed on to recount her finding of the votive offering.

[00:07:03]Did you meddle with it in any way? Asked Mortimer.

[00:07:08]I threw the grapes away. It seems so silly. I don't think you are wise to do that.

[00:07:15]I've heard it said that the wood gods are rather horrible to those who molest them. Horrible perhaps to those who believe in them. But you see, I don't.

[00:07:22]All the same. I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you and give a wide birth to the horned beasts on the farm.

[00:07:31]Mortimer, said Sylvia suddenly, I think we will go back to town sometime soon.

[00:07:38]Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed. It had carried her on to the ground where she was already anxious to quit.

[00:07:47]I don't think you will ever go back to town, said Mortimer.

[00:07:52]Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction that the course of her next afternoon's ramble took her instinctively clear of the woods. As to the horned cattle, Mortima's warning was scarcely needed, for she had always regarded them as of doubtful neutrality at the best. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the orchard she had a judge to be of dosile temper. Today, however, she decided to leave his dosility untested, for the usually tranquil beast was roaming with every sign of restlessness from corner to corner of his meadow. A low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute, was coming from the depth of a neighboring corpse, and there seemed to be some subtle connection between the animals restless pacing and the wild music from the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward direction and climbed the heatherclad slopes that stretched in rolling shoulders high above Yestnne.

[00:08:42]She had left the piping notes behind her, but across the wooded kums the wind brought her another kind of music. The straining bay of hounds in full chase.

[00:08:51]Sylvia could presently see a dark body breasting hill after hill, while behind him steadily swelled that relentless chorus, and she grew tense with the excited sympathy that one feels for any hunted thing in whose capture one is not directly interested.

[00:09:07]At last he broke through the outermost line of oak scrub and fern and stood panting in the open. A fat September stag carrying a wellfurnished head. His obvious cause was to drop down to the brown pools of Andum and then to the sea. To Sylvia's surprise, however, he turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering resolutely onward over the heather.

[00:09:31]It would be dreadful.

[00:09:34]The hounds were pulling down under my very eyes.

[00:09:38]But the music of the pack seemed to have died away for a moment, and in its place she heard again that wild piping which rose now on this side, now on that, as though urging the failing stag to a final effort. Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half hidden in a thick growth of water bushes, and watched him swing stiffly upward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair on his neck showing light by contrast. The pipe music shriveled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slew round and bore directly down upon her. In an instant, her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger. The thick heather roots mocked her scrambling efforts at flight, and she looked frantically downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antlerless spikes were within a few yards of her, and in a flash of numbing fear, she remembered Mortimer's warning to beware of horned beasts on the farm. And then, with a quick throb of joy, she saw that she was not alone. A human figure stood a few paces aside, kneedeep in the walle bushes. "Drive it off," she shrieked.

[00:10:46]But the figure made no answering movement.

[00:10:50]The antlers drove straight at her breast. The acurid smell of the hunted animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death.

[00:11:02]And in her ears rang the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal.

[00:11:10][laughter]