The Pale Horse

by Agatha Christie

“I shall stay on at Rhoda’s for a bit. Then perhaps go to Bournemouth. I’m not supposed to—go back to London.”

  “No use looking ahead,” Mrs. Dane Calthrop said. “Not beyond tonight.”

  “Tonight…” I got up. I said a thing that was out of character. “Pray for me—for us,” I said.

  “Naturally,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, surprised that I should need to ask.

  As I went out of the front door a sudden curiosity made me say,

  “Why the pail? What’s it for?”

  “The pail? Oh, it’s for the schoolchildren, to pick berries and leaves from the hedges—for the church. Hideous, isn’t it, but so handy.”

  I looked out over the richness of the autumn world. Such soft still beauty….

  “Angels and Ministers of grace defend us,” I said.

  “Amen,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.

  III

  My reception at the Pale Horse was conventional in the extreme. I don’t know what particular atmospheric effect I had expected—but it was not this.

  Thyrza Grey, wearing a plain dark wool dress, opened the door, said in a businesslike tone: “Ah, here you are. Good. We’ll have supper straightaway—”

  Nothing could have been more matter-of-fact, more completely ordinary….

  The table was laid for a simple meal at the end of the panelled hall. We had soup, an omelette, and cheese. Bella waited on us. She wore a black stuff dress and looked more than ever like one of the crowd in an Italian primitive. Sybil struck a more exotic note. She had on a long dress of some woven peacock-coloured fabric, shot with gold. Her beads were absent on this occasion, but she had two heavy gold bracelets clasping her wrists. She ate a minute portion of omelette but nothing else. She spoke little, treating us to a faraway wrapped-up-in-higher-things mood. It ought to have been impressive. Actually it was not. The effect was theatrical and unreal.

  Thyrza Grey provided what conversation there was—a brisk chatty commentary on local happenings. She was this evening the British country spinster to the life, pleasant, efficient, uninterested in anything beyond her immediate surroundings.

  I thought to myself, I’m mad, completely mad. What is there to fear here? Even Bella seemed tonight only a half-witted old peasant woman—like hundreds of other women of her kind—inbred, untouched by education or a broader outlook.

  My conversation with Mrs. Dane Calthrop seemed fantastic in retrospect. We had worked ourselves up to imagine goodness knows what. The idea of Ginger—Ginger with her dyed hair and assumed name—being in danger from anything these three very ordinary women could do, was positively ludicrous!

  The meal came to an end.

  “No coffee,” said Thyrza apologetically. “One doesn’t want to be overstimulated.” She rose. “Sybil?”

  “Yes,” said Sybil, her face taking on what she clearly thought was an ecstatic and otherworld expression. “I must go and PREPARE….”

  Bella began to clear the table. I wandered over to where the old inn sign hung. Thyrza followed me.

  “You can’t really see it at all by this light,” she said.

  That was quite true. The faint pale image against the dark encrusted grime of the panel could hardly be distinguished as that of a horse. The hall was lit by feeble electric bulbs shielded by thick vellum shades.

  “That red-haired girl—what’s her name?—Ginger something—who was staying down here—said she’d do a spot of cleaning and restoring on it,” said Thyrza. “Don’t suppose she’ll ever remember about it, though.” She added casually, “She works for some gallery or other in London.”

  It gave me a strange feeling to hear Ginger referred to lightly and casually.

  I said, staring at the picture:

  “It might be interesting.”

  “It’s not a good painting, of course,” said Thyrza. “Just a daub. But it goes with the place—and it’s certainly well over three hundred years old.”

  “Ready.”

  We wheeled abruptly.

  Bella, emerging out of the gloom, was beckoning.

  “Time to get on with things,” said Thyrza, still brisk and matter-of-fact.

  I followed her as she led the way out to the converted barn.

  As I have said, there was no entrance to it from the house. It was a dark overcast night, no stars. We came out of the dense outer blackness into the long lighted room.

  The barn, by night, was transformed. By day it had seemed a pleasant library. Now it had become something more. There were lamps, but these were not turned on. The lighting was indirect and flooded the room with a soft but cold light. In the centre of the floor was a kind of raised bed or divan. It was spread with a purple cloth, embroidered with various cabbalistic signs.

  On the far side of the room was what appeared to be a small brazier, and next to it a big copper basin—an old one by the look of it.

  On the other side, set back almost touching the wall, was a heavy oak-backed chair. Thyrza motioned me towards it.

  “Sit there,” she said.

  I sat obediently. Thyrza’s manner had changed. The odd thing was that I could not define exactly in what the change consisted. There was none of Sybil’s spurious occultism about it. It was more as though an everyday curtain of normal trivial life had been lifted. Behind it was the real woman, displaying something of the manner of a surgeon approaching the operating table for a difficult and dangerous operation. This impression was heightened when she went to a cupboard in the wall and took from it what appeared to be a kind of long overall. It seemed to be made, when the light caught it, of some metallic woven tissue. She drew on long gauntlets of what looked like a kind of fine mesh rather resembling a “bulletproof vest” I had once been shown.

  “One has to take precautions,” she said.

  The phrase struck me as slightly sinister.

  Then she addressed me in an emphatic deep voice.

  “I must impress upon you, Mr. Easterbrook, the necessity of remaining absolutely still where you are. On no account must you move from that chair. It might not be safe to do so. This is no child’s game. I am dealing with forces that are dangerous to those who do not know how to handle them!” She paused and then asked, “You have brought what you were instructed to bring?”

  Without a word, I drew from my pocket a brown suède glove and handed it to her.

  She took it and moved over to a metal lamp with a gooseneck shade. She switched on the lamp and held the glove under its rays which were of a peculiar sickly colour, turning the glove from its rich brown to a characterless grey.

  She switched off the lamp, nodding in approval.

  “Most suitable,” she said. “The physical emanations from its wearer are quite strong.”

  She put it down on top of what appeared to be a large radio cabinet at the end of the room. Then she raised her voice a little. “Bella. Sybil. We are ready.”

  Sybil came in first. She wore a long black cloak over her peacock dress. This she flung aside with a dramatic gesture. It slid down, looking like an inky pool on the floor. She came forward.

  “I do hope it will be all right,” she said. “One never knows. Please don’t adopt a sceptical frame of mind, Mr. Easterbrook. It does so hinder things.”

  “Mr. Easterbrook has not come here to mock,” said Thyrza.

  There was a certain grimness in her tone.

  Sybil lay down on the purple divan. Thyrza bent over her, arranging her draperies.

  “Quite comfortable?” she asked solicitously.

  “Yes, thank you, dear.”

  Thyrza switched off some lights. Then she wheeled up what was, in effect, a kind of canopy on wheels. This she placed so that it overshadowed the divan and left Sybil in a deep shadow in the middle of outlying dim twilight.

  “Too much light is harmful to a complete trance,” she said.

  “Now, I think, we are ready. Bella?”

  Bella came out of the shadows. The two women approached me. With her right hand Thyrza took my
left. Her left hand took Bella’s right. Bella’s left hand found my right hand. Thyrza’s hand was dry and hard, Bella’s was cold and boneless—it felt like a slug in mine and I shivered in revulsion.

  Thyrza must have touched a switch somewhere, for music sounded faintly from the ceiling. I recognised it as Mendelssohn’s funeral march.

  “Mise en scêne,” I said to myself rather scornfully. “Meretricious trappings!” I was cool and critical—but nevertheless aware of an undercurrent of some unwanted emotional apprehension.

  The music stopped. There was a long wait. There was only the sound of breathing. Bella’s slightly wheezy, Sybil’s deep and regular.

  And then, suddenly, Sybil spoke. Not, however, in her own voice. It was a man’s voice, as unlike her own mincing accents as could be. It had a guttural foreign accent.

  “I am here,” the voice said.

  My hands were released. Bella flitted away into the shadows. Thyrza said: “Good evening. Is that Macandal?”

  “I am Macandal.”

  Thyrza went to the divan and drew away the protecting canopy. The soft light flowed down onto Sybil’s face. She appeared to be deeply asleep. In this repose her face looked quite different.

  The lines were smoothed away. She looked years younger. One could almost say that she looked beautiful.

  Thyrza said:

  “Are you prepared, Macandal, to submit to my desire and my will?”

  The new deep voice said:

  “I am.”

  “Will you undertake to protect the body of the Dossu that lies here and which you now inhabit, from all physical injury and harm? Will you dedicate its vital force to my purpose, that that purpose may be accomplished through it?”

  “I will.”

  “Will you so dedicate this body that death may pass through it, obeying such natural laws as may be available in the body of the recipient?”

  “The dead must be sent to cause death. It shall be so.”

  Thyrza drew back a step. Bella came up and held out what I saw was a crucifix. Thyrza placed it on Sybil’s breast in a reversed position. Then Bella brought a small green phial. From this Thyrza poured out a drop or two onto Sybil’s forehead, and traced something with her finger. Again I fancied that it was the sign of the cross upside down.

  She said to me, briefly, “Holy water from the Catholic church at Garsington.”

  Her voice was quite ordinary, and this, which ought to have broken the spell, did not do so. It made the whole business, somehow, more alarming.

  Finally she brought that rather horrible rattle we had seen before. She shook it three times and then clasped Sybil’s hand round it.

  She stepped back and said:

  “All is ready—”

  Bella repeated the words:

  “All is ready—”

  Thyrza addressed me in a low tone:

  “I don’t suppose you’re much impressed, are you, by all the ritual? Some of our visitors are. To you, I daresay, it’s all so much mumbo jumbo… But don’t be too sure. Ritual—a pattern of words and phrases sanctified by time and usage, has an effect on the human spirit. What causes the mass hysteria of crowds? We don’t know exactly. But it’s a phenomenon that exists. These old-time usages, they have their part—a necessary part, I think.”

  Bella had left the room. She came back now, carrying a white cock. It was alive and struggling to be free.

  Now with white chalk she knelt down and began to draw signs on the floor round the brazier and the copper bowl. She set down the cock with its back on the white curving line round the bowl and it stayed there motionless.

  She drew more signs, chanting as she did so, in a low guttural voice. The words were incomprehensible to me, but as she knelt and swayed, she was clearly working herself up to some pitch of obscene ecstasy.

  Watching me, Thyrza said: “You don’t like it much? It’s old, you know, very old. The death spell according to old recipes handed from mother to daughter.”

  I couldn’t fathom Thyrza. She did nothing to further the effect on my senses which Bella’s rather horrible performances might well have had. She seemed deliberately to take the part of a commentator.

  Bella stretched out her hands to the brazier and a flickering flame sprang up. She sprinkled something on the flames and a thick cloying perfume filled the air.

  “We are ready,” said Thyrza.

  The surgeon, I thought, picks up his scalpel….

  She went over to what I had taken to be a radio cabinet. It opened up and I saw that it was a large electrical contrivance of some complicated kind.

  It moved like a trolley and she wheeled it slowly and carefully to a position near the divan.

  She bent over it, adjusted the controls, murmuring to herself:

  “Compass, north-northeast…degrees…that’s about right.” She took the glove and adjusted it in a particular position, switching on a small violet light beside it.

  Then she spoke to the inert figure on the divan.

  “Sybil Diana Helen, you are set free from your mortal sheath which the spirit Macandal guards safely for you. You are free to be at one with the owner of this glove. Like all human beings, her goal in life is towards death. There is no final satisfaction but death. Only death solves all problems. Only death gives true peace. All great ones have known it. Remember Macbeth. ‘After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.’ Remember the ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde. Love and death. Love and death. But the greatest of these is death….”

  The words rang out, echoing, repeating—the big box-like machine had started to emit a low hum, the bulbs in it glowed— I felt dazed, carried away. This, I felt, was no longer something at which I could mock. Thyrza, her power unleashed, was holding that prone figure on the divan completely enslaved. She was using her. Using her for a definite end. I realised vaguely why Mrs. Oliver had been frightened, not of Thyrza but of the seemingly silly Sybil. Sybil had a power, a natural gift, nothing to do with mind or intellect; it was a physical power, the power to separate herself from her body. And, so separated, her mind was not hers, but Thyrza’s. And Thyrza was using her temporary possession.

  Yes, but the box? Where did the box come in?

  And suddenly all my fear was transferred to the box! What devilish secret was being practised through its agency? Could there be physically produced rays of some kind that acted on the cells of the mind? Of a particular mind?

  Thyrza’s voice went on:

  “The weak spot…there is always a weak spot…deep in the tissues of the flesh… Through weakness comes strength—the strength and peace of death… Towards death—slowly, naturally, towards death—the true way, the natural way. The tissues of the body obey the mind… Command them—command them… Towards death… Death, the Conqueror… Death…soon…very soon… Death… Death… DEATH!”

  Her voice rose in a great swelling cry… And another horrible animal cry came from Bella. She rose up, a knife flashed…there was a horrible strangled squawk from the cockerel… Blood dripped into the copper bowl. Bella came running, the bowl held out….

  She screamed out:

  “Blood…the blood… BLOOD!”

  Thyrza whipped out the glove from the machine. Bella took it, dipped it in the blood, returned it to Thyrza who replaced it.

  Bella’s voice rose again in that high ecstatic call….

  “The blood…the blood…the blood…”

  She ran round and round the brazier, then dropped twitching to the floor. The brazier flickered and went out.

  I felt horribly sick. Unseeing, clutching the arm of my chair, my head seemed to be whirling in space….

  I heard a click, the hum of the machine ceased.

  Then Thyrza’s voice rose, clear and composed:

  “The old magic and the new. The old knowledge of belief, the new knowledge of science. Together, they will prevail….”

  Eighteen

  Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative

  “Well, what was it like?” dema
nded Rhoda eagerly at the breakfast table.

  “Oh, the usual stuff,” I said nonchalantly.

  I was uneasily conscious of Despard’s eye on me. A perceptive man.

  “Pentagrams drawn on the floor?”

  “Lots of them.”

  “Any white cocks?”

  “Naturally. That was Bella’s part of the fun and games.”

  “And trances and things?”

  “As you say, trances and things.”

  Rhoda looked disappointed.

  “You seem to have found it rather dull,” she said in an aggrieved voice.

  I said that these things were all much of a muchness. At any rate, I’d satisfied my curiosity.

  Later, when Rhoda had departed to the kitchen, Despard said to me:

  “Shook you up a bit, didn’t it?”

  “Well—”

  I was anxious to make light of the whole thing, but Despard was not an easy man to deceive.

  I said slowly, “It was—in a way—rather beastly.”

  He nodded.

  “One doesn’t really believe in it,” said Despard. “Not with one’s reasoning mind—but these things have their effect. I’ve seen a good deal of it in East Africa. The witch doctors there have a terrific hold on the people, and one has to admit that odd things happen which can’t be explained in any rational manner.”

  “Deaths?”

  “Oh yes. If a man knows he’s been marked down to die, he dies.”

  “The power of suggestion, I suppose.”

  “Presumably.”

  “But that doesn’t quite satisfy you?”

  “No—not quite. There are cases difficult of explanation by any of our glib Western scientific theories. The stuff doesn’t usually work on Europeans—(though I have known cases). But if the belief is there in your blood—you’ve had it!” He left it there.

  I said thoughtfully: “I agree with you that one can’t be too didactic. Odd things happen even in this country. I was at a hospital one day in London. A girl had come in—neurotic subject, complaining of terrible pain in bones, arm, etc. Nothing to account for it. They suspected she was a victim of hysteria. Doctor told her cure could be effected by a red-hot rod being drawn down the arm. Would she agree to try it? She did.