“About thirty yards from her house there was an elbow in the drove.”
It is important to closely read and remember the paragraph here about ‘droves’ in the wilds of Norfolk, the nature of these dubious routes with high sides near unto the Fens, where the truly evil-seeming unforgettable vision in words of a depleting number of beasts, depleting but aggrandising unto one, and appearing to me as a foul sort of potential Annunciation heading, in hindsight, towards the woman in her lonely cottage at the end of a drove, a vision as strikingly triggered by “Suddenly I heard a loud snort, as of a beast, apparently at my elbow.” — as stated by a vicar to us in his last document, before his expounding on this vision. There is also much Zenoistic ‘wading’ through droves in this work, too. The ‘story’ as left by the vicar for reading after his death, concerned his visit on New Year’s Eve to a woman he ever feared, for some unknown reason, visiting. A visit today where he finds her fearfully reading the Book of Tobit about Sarah loved by the demon Asmodeus, the latter, I believe, having slaughtered all seven of her husbands before the marriages were consummated. And I think it was timely, for intense contrast and comparison, that I somehow read this Malden work by chance an hour or so after reading and reviewing (HERE) ‘Madonna of the Magnificat’ by Mary Butts!
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Other disconnected horror stories reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/