As I hurried towards the Great Eastern Railway station, I felt like a horse drawn by a Gypsy whisperer to do something against his own will, and yet in the street I stopped to buy the tools.  Reaching Dullingham in the afternoon, I lunched there; and as I walked thence along the cliff, towards Raxton, I became more calm and collected.  I determined not to go near the Hall, lest my movements should be watched by the servants.  The old churchyard was full of workmen of the navvy kind, and I learned that for the safety of the public it had now become necessary to hurl down upon the sands some enormous masses of the cliff newly disintegrated by the land-springs.  I descended the gangway at Flinty Point, and concealing my implements behind a boulder in the cliff, ascended Needle Point, and went into the town.

I had previously become aware, from conversations with my mother, that Wynne had been succeeded as custodian of the old church by Shales, the humpbacked tailor, and I apprehended no difficulty in getting the keys of the church and crypt from my simple-minded acquaintance, without arousing his suspicions as to my mission.

Therefore I went at once to the tailor’s shop, but found that Shales was out, attending an annual Odd-Fellows’ carousal at Graylingham.  Consequently I was obliged to open my business to his mother, a far shrewder person, and one who might be much more difficult to deal with.  However, the fact of the navvies being at work so close to a church whose chancel belonged to my family afforded an excellent motive for my visit.  But before I could introduce the subject to Mrs. Shales, I had to listen to an exhaustive chronicle of Raxton and Graylingham doings since I had left.  Hence by the time I quitted her (with a promise to return the keys in the morning) the sun was setting.

But, as I walked along Wilderness Road towards the church, a new and unexpected difficulty presented itself to my mind.  I could not, without running the risk of an interruption, enter the church till after the Odd-Fellows had all returned from Graylingham, as Shales and his companions would have to pass along Wilderness Road, which skirts the churchyard.  Shales himself was as short-sighted as a bat; but his companions had the usual long-sight of agriculturists, and would descry the slightest movement in the church-yard, or any glimmer of light at the church windows.

I would have postponed my enterprise till the morrow; but another important appointment at the office of our solicitor with my mother, precluded the possibility of this.  So my visit to the catacomb must perforce be late at night.

Accordingly I descended the cliff and waited to hear the return of the carousers.  There I sat down upon the well-remembered boulder, lost in recollections of all that had passed on those sands, while over the sea the night spread like the widening, darkening wings of an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the waves as they came nearer and nearer.  Then I began to think of what lay before me, of the strangeness and wildness of my life.