Gerry Fenn’s nighttime encounter with Alice Pagett begins as a roadside near miss and ends with an apparent impossibility: a girl who, Fenn is later told, cannot hear or speak has addressed the beauty of an oak before collapsing. The episode turns an ordinary reporting shift into a pursuit through a churchyard and across a wall, while leaving Fenn—and the reader—with a contradiction that the scene itself does not resolve.

Background and First Sighting

Gerry Fenn is driving a newspaper van at night while on duty. Earlier calls to the police, hospitals, undertakers, fire stations, and clergy have produced nothing worth reporting, and the newspaper’s diary has offered little to enliven the shift. Banfield is on his route. The drive is routine until something small and white darts across the road ahead. Fenn swerves; the van skids and stops with its front on the grass verge. He has narrowly missed the figure, which disappears from view before he can identify it.

The uncertainty is immediate and practical as well as unsettling. Fenn cannot tell whether the figure is a child, but it seems too large to be an animal. He sees movement again and calls out. When a low gate stands open on one side, he follows the figure along a tree-lined path toward a building, calling for it to stop and talk. His decision to leave the van shifts the episode from an unexplained sighting into a pursuit: he does not yet know who is running or why, but the possibility that a child is outside alone draws him onward.

Through the Churchyard

As the building grows clearer, Fenn recognizes that he has entered church grounds. The figure does not go to the church entrance; it turns aside at the large doors and disappears around the building. Fenn follows along a muddy, narrowing path and arrives at the rear of the church, where he finds a graveyard. The small moving shape crosses among the graves, the only movement in the scene. Fenn is frightened and considers retreating, but his curiosity as a reporter outweighs that impulse.

He continues through the churchyard, past gravestones and tombs, until he reaches a wall at the back. Beyond it lies a field, and near its middle stands a contorted oak. From this distance, the tree appears as a dark, isolated shape against the otherwise flat landscape. Fenn sees the figure moving toward it. The girl stops, continues, and then appears to sink down. He corrects his first impression: she is on her knees. For a time, neither she nor the tree moves. Fenn waits, then climbs over the wall and approaches, turning observation into direct contact.

The Encounter at the Oak

Close to the figure, Fenn sees that it is not the small adult or supernatural presence he had feared but a little girl. She is looking at the oak and smiling. When Fenn touches her shoulder, she says that the tree is beautiful. Her attention remains fixed on what is before her; she does not appear to be answering a question or responding to a conversation with him. The distinction matters to the encounter: Fenn has followed her in order to discover what she is doing, but her words seem directed toward the tree rather than toward the reporter who has caught up with her.

The moment does not develop into an exchange. Immediately after speaking, the girl’s eyes roll upward and she topples forward, becoming motionless. The sequence is stark: she is smiling at the oak, speaks when Fenn touches her, and then collapses. Fenn has found the person he was pursuing, but the scene gives him no explanation for her attention, her words, or her sudden stillness. It ends not with an answer but with his attempt to establish who she is.

The Revelation and Its Effect

Fenn later recounts the encounter to a priest. In his telling, he describes the girl as possibly sleepwalking or, more precisely, sleep-running, and explains that he touched her gently so as not to frighten her. He repeats what she said about the tree. The priest responds not by asking about the oak, but by focusing on the fact that the girl spoke. Fenn clarifies that she seemed to be speaking to herself rather than to him, yet the priest insists on the significance of the speech and identifies her as Alice, a deaf-mute who cannot speak or hear.

That disclosure recasts the encounter without resolving it. The words Fenn heard are now in direct tension with the priest’s account of Alice’s condition. The narrative does not establish whether Fenn misunderstood what happened, whether the priest’s information is incomplete, or whether the event resists ordinary explanation. Instead, it preserves the contradiction as the scene’s decisive consequence: a nighttime pursuit has brought Fenn to Alice, but the fact that should clarify the meeting makes it more mysterious. The oak, first seen from beyond a wall as an uncanny shape in the field, remains the focus of Alice’s attention and the setting for the brief speech that unsettles Fenn’s assumptions.