The nearest village was some miles away with the backs of all its
houses turned to the wood, and without one window at all facing in
that direction. They did not speak of it there, and elsewhere it is
unheard of.

Into this wood stepped Nuth and Tommy Tonker. They had no firearms.
Tonker had asked for a pistol, but Nuth replied that the sound of a
shot "would bring everything down on us," and no more was said about
it.

Into the wood they went all day, deeper and deeper. They saw the
skeleton of some early Georgian poacher nailed to a door in an oak
tree; sometimes they saw a fairy scuttle away from them; once Tonker
stepped heavily on a hard, dry stick, after which they both lay still
for twenty minutes. And the sunset flared full of omens through the
tree trunks, and night fell, and they came by fitful starlight, as
Nuth had foreseen, to that lean, high house where the gnoles so
secretly dwelt.

All was so silent by that unvalued house that the faded courage of
Tonker flickered up, but to Nuth's experienced sense it seemed too
silent; and all the while there was that look in the sky that was
worse than a spoken doom, so that Nuth, as is often the case when men
are in doubt, had leisure to fear the worst. Nevertheless he did not
abandon the business, but sent the likely lad with the instruments of
his trade by means of the ladder to the old green casement. And the
moment that Tonker touched the withered boards, the silence that,
though ominous, was earthly, became unearthly like the touch of a
ghoul. And Tonker heard his breath offending against that silence, and