Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  I felt an icy air breathe upon me: I heard a cry. I felt, rather than saw, that the little doctor had hooked his arms around the phantom thing and struggled with it. I heard him gasp, choke as a strangled man. I heard his heels hammering upon the floor. And all at once I fainted.

  When I recovered consciousness it was broad daylight. The sun was streaming into the room, full upon the couch on which I lay. Beside me sat the doctor, with his usual cheery aspect. But there was something strange about his throat. I looked more closely; it was discolored by five small, livid spots, like fingerprints.

  “It’s all right, boy,” he said, cheerily. “We’ve scotched the demon and our patient’s going to get well. Miss Suydam and Mr. Fotheringham will be here in a moment and then explanations will be in order. Lie still and don’t attempt to move. You’ve had a bad shock, but you’ll be all right in a day or two.”

  Soon afterward Miss Suydam appeared upon the arm of her brother-in-law. Peace had evidently been restored between these two, judging from their behavior.

  “We found you insensible upon the floor,” the young artist explained, “and Dr. Brodsky in a hardly better condition. He looked like a man who had been putting up a stiff fight with a burglar. He must have been unconscious too, for it was early morning.”

  “He locked me in my room,” said Miss Suydam, “so that I could not go to his assistance. But tell us the explanation.”

  “We are all going to be frank,” said the doctor, “and so we will go back to the beginning. Miss Suydam, you suspected Mr. Fotheringham here of the most hideous crime that is conceivable.”

  “I wronged him greatly, and he has forgiven me,” said Miss Suydam, smiling at her brother-in-law.

  “You wronged him, but your suspicions were to a certain extent justified,” said the doctor. “Unconsciously, Mr. Fotheringham nearly murdered his wife.”

  “What?” we all exclaimed in astonishment.

  “Ah, when will you people learn that thoughts are more potent than things?” said Brodsky. “It is the easiest thing in the world to create a thought; it is almost impossible to undo it. In a sense we are all creators, and, if we only knew it, to every man is open the possibility of becoming as a god, by fashioning a universe. Mr. Fotheringham, you created this apparition.”

  “I—created it?” stammered the artist.

  “You had married the best wife in the world, but you were not content with her. You desired perfection, that perfection which is unattainable. And you began to brood. Would to heaven that one slight blemish were removed from her features! This intensity of thought, acting upon the ether, actually formed a shadow after your own imaginings. You made a spirit, and it wanted a body. Vampire-like, it preyed upon the body of your wife. Night after night it drew away her vitality.

  “At first a shadowy wraith, it became stronger and stronger. It became a substantial thing, composed of all the essential elements of flesh. It grew in wickedness, every created thing must that does not come from God, the source of all goodness. And, had it succeeded in destroying her, it would have turned upon you and destroyed you body and soul.

  “It was at the very threshold of the consummation of this achievement when I was sent for. I had my suspicions from the first, when you made your confession to me. Such cases are on record, notably in the records of Japan, in which country they usually assume the form of cats or foxes. From my cross-examinations of Miss Suydam I ascertained that this evil thing, working in the atmosphere of artificially induced slumber, fed upon the life-blood of your wife during her sleep, grew strong thereby, and went through the passage seeking you. Had it been strong enough it would have destroyed you. But, though it grew and grew like some horrible cancer, it could not conquer you so long as Mrs. Fotheringham lived. So it had to return.

  “You must have read that, in the making of Solomon’s temple, no tool of iron was allowed to come upon the stones. Iron was also banned from the Vestals’ house at Rome. The reason for these ordinances was that evil spirits can never cross it, nor good ones, either. It is the most earthly of all elements. No temple could bring down the favor of the protecting spirits were iron used in its construction.

  “Accordingly, I barred the door with a wire of fine steel, which made it impossible for the vampire to return. Wood it could pass through, but that fine barrier was more effective than a thousand tons of oak. Well, the rest you know. Leave on the wire for a few nights, though its powers are broken, and it is not likely to trouble you again. It will soon pass back into that elemental source from which you, wretched man, fashioned it.

  “So go back to your wife and be satisfied with her,” the doctor concluded. “And take a word of advice: The next time you brood over things put a wire across your door and wear a steel waistcoat.”

  XAVIER WYCHERLEY IN

  THE SORCERER OF ARJUZANX

  MAX RITTENBERG

  Dr. Xavier Wycherley is a consultant psychologist and proclaims defiantly in his stories that he is not a detective. Even so, in some stories, such as the following, he has to use his exceptional power and knowledge to investigate the nature of mental afflictions and often to combat evil. His creator, Max Rittenberg (1880–1963), was born in Australia of Jewish parents who returned to Europe, settling in England when Max was aged seven or eight. Max had a good education and a creative mind. He became fascinated by puzzles, later setting crossword puzzles for Punch. He was also a good player of bridge and chess. This creative imagination worked well both for his series featuring Dr. Wycherley and for a series featuring Magnum, the Scientific Detective. Only a few of the Wycherley stories were serialized in England while the full run appeared in the United States during 1913 to 1915. Rittenberg revised several of the stories as The Mind-Reader, published in the United States in 1913, but the full series in its original form has never been reprinted.

  SHE WAS CLIMBING PAINFULLY ON HER KNEES THE LONG FLIGHT OF stone steps that leads from the Grotto of the Vision of Bernadette up to the great double Basilique of Lourdes. With her, helping and encouraging, was her parish priest, Père Bonivet.

  “Courage, my child, and faith!” he was whispering. “Have faith, and all will be well. Only faith in Our Lady can cure you.”

  Out of the crowd of the sick and the dying that had come to Lourdes—the lame, the blind, the palsied, the epileptic, the tuberculous, the cancerous—this peasant girl had above all attracted the attention of Dr. Wycherley. He was there in pursuit of his life-study, psychological research, for at Lourdes there gather a great multitude of those who are sick in mind. Apart from his study of the cures that earnest faith brings to pass at the Shrine of Notre Dame de Lourdes, many of his previous cases had been garnered there—cases where faith had been powerless to heal the injured mind.

  This young peasant girl—scarcely more than a child—now on her knees on the long flight of stone steps, had attracted Dr. Wycherley’s attention above all the rest. There was that in her face that lifted her out of the ruck of peasants. Not the beauty of her features, nor her soft, liquid eyes, nor her raven-black hair was it that first caught the attention of the observer, but the spiritual light in her soul that shone through her face as a light shines through wax.

  She might have posed as a model for a Joan of Arc when the call first came to her at Domrémy.

  Dr. Wycherley watched the girl and the priest on their painful climb to the Basilique, as he had watched them on many days previously; he waited outside the church until they came from their long devotions. In Père Bonivet’s face was a look of deep disappointment; in the eyes of the girl was a hardened look, a glitter that had not been there before. The light on her soul no longer shone clear—it was as though a marsh mist had dimmed it with a clammy film.

  As the priest was hurrying her to their temporary home in the town, Dr. Wycherley raised his hat and addressed him.

  “Mon père,” he said, “I ask your pardon for this intrusion if it is unwelcome. But I, like yourself, do my humble best to help the weak and the sufferi
ng, and I see clearly that your pilgrimage to Lourdes has not brought the benefit you hoped for mademoiselle.”

  “We must be patient. In God’s good time He will vouchsafe His mercies,” returned the priest. “But I thank you—I see that you have the good heart.”

  “If you should need me . . .” said Dr. Wycherley, and wrote the name of his hotel on his card. Père Bonivet took the card and thanked him courteously.

  On the evening of the next day the priest called on Dr. Wycherley in anxious distress of mind.

  “I have come,” he said, “because I fear that this case is beyond my powers. It may be that I am unworthy—that my soul is too stained with the cares and pettinesses of this world to take my prayers before the Most High. Tonight I can do nothing with Jeanne. She has blasphemed against the Holy Name—she will not listen to me! It is terrible, pitiable! And”—he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper—“the mark of the beast is coming upon her!” He shuddered at his own words.

  Dr. Wycherley drew a chair forward for Père Bonivet. “Will you not sit down and tell me the trouble of mademoiselle? I have studied many cases of diseased mind, and it may be my knowledge can help. She is hystérique, is it not so?”

  “So the doctor has told us, but in the Landes, where Jeanne Dorthez lives and where I go about the work of my Master, the peasants give it another name—a very terrible name. They say that she is possessed—bewitched!

  “Myself I believe nothing of that,” added the priest hastily. “I am of the modern school, and such things belong to the superstitions of the Middle Ages. So I laid the case of Jeanne Dorthez before Monseigneur the Bishop, and he advised me to take her on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Out of his own purse our good bishop gave the money that was necessary for us, for Jeanne is but a poor peasant girl, the daughter of a woodcutter of the Landes, and myself I have little to spare.”

  “If they say she is bewitched, then they must have in mind some man or woman on whom they place suspicion of sorcery.”

  “You are right, monsieur. They say that Osper Camargo has bewitched her. They whisper many terrible things of Osper Camargo, that he is in league with the Evil One—but you and I, should we put belief in the superstitious chatter of peasants?”

  The mental healer did not answer this. “Jeanne is a good girl,” he said; “it is plain for all to read. When her attacks come upon her, she changes in mind, is it not so?”

  “She changes terribly. Tonight she blasphemed against the Holy Name. I greatly fear that she may lose her reason.”

  “What other signs?”

  “Of course, monsieur, it is nonsense what I have now to tell you. But one day the women of the village forced her to be examined, and they whisper that upon her they found places where the prick of a pin was not felt!”

  “Those places were of a definite and regular shape?”

  “How did monsieur guess? Yes. The shape of the pentacle—that is what they whisper. The doctor at Mont de Marsan could find nothing, and myself I did not believe it. But tonight I have seen the mark of the beast upon her! Red upon her breast!” Again he shuddered, and crossed himself hastily.

  Dr. Wycherley looked very thoughtful. “Let us go to see Jeanne,” he suggested, and from a travelling medicine-chest slipped a few phials into his pocket.

  The girl was lodging near at hand, and in a few minutes they had arrived at the house, a humble dwelling in a little back street of the town. When they were a few yards from the door the figure of a man slipped out quickly from the threshold and into the darkness of an alleyway.

  The priest started back. “For a moment I thought that was Osper Camargo! But the light is tricky in this narrow ruelle.”

  “He has a scrawny beard and a pair of evil-looking eyes?” asked Dr. Wycherley.

  “Camargo has that and a nose crushed by the fall of a pine-tree upon his face. It was at the time of the accident—many years ago now—that he ceased to attend Mass, and after that he gradually became feared by the villagers. But of course it could not be Camargo, for he is far from here in the salt-marshes of the Landes—there would be no reason why he should come to Lourdes.”

  The woman who opened the door to them put her finger to her lips. “S’sh, mon père, she is at last asleep! It was with difficulty that we could quiet her.”

  They moved softly upstairs to the room, and at Dr. Wycherley’s request the woman turned back the bedclothes and opened the girl’s nightgown.

  Above and between her breasts, distinct and unmistakable, was an angry reddish patch of the shape of a pentacle.

  “Last night I saw it for the first time!” whispered the woman, with horror in her voice. “Tonight it is much redder! Monsieur le Curé, Monsieur le Docteur, what can it mean?”

  Jeanne stirred in her sleep, and in her sleep murmured: “I will come. Oh, cease to torment me, for I will come!”

  Dr. Wycherley stayed the night through in the girl’s room—watching and studying her. Outside the window the Gave de Pau roared unceasingly down its torrential bed. There was menace in its voice.

  Jeanne awoke in the morning with a curious dull glaze in her eyes. She expressed a strong desire to return home to her hamlet of Aureilhac, in spite of the counsels of Père Bonivet still to have patience and faith.

  He appealed to Dr. Wycherley, but the latter drew him aside and suggested earnestly: “Let Jeanne have her way, mon père. I think it will be for the best. . . . It is upon your lips to tell me that if she will only have faith enough, she will be cured. Yes, but she has not the faith—she has lost heart. . . . Now you are about to ask me what can be hoped for if the pilgrimage to Lourdes has failed.”

  “You read my thoughts, monsieur!” said the priest in surprise.

  “And you, mon père, read mine, for you see that I wish for Jeanne only what will be for her good.”

  “Yes, yes. But if she goes back to the Landes with her faith broken, who can save her from madness? I, alas, am not worthy to do this work for my Master—that I bow my head in sorrow to acknowledge.”

  “We must work together—I will return with you.”

  “But her father, Pierre Dorthez, is only a poor woodcutter. In the Landes we are all poor. How could we pay you, monsieur? No doubt you would need many francs—perhaps many hundred francs.” To his simple mind the sum loomed vast.

  “Mon père, you and I have both learnt that the true money lies in the grateful hearts of men and women.”

  The priest raised his hand in benediction. “I know not if you are of our faith, monsieur, but may the blessing of God be upon you!”

  They travelled by slow, cross-country trains to the village of Labouheyre in the middle of the Landes district. It was a hot and sultry day, and the hundred-mile train journey seemed interminable.

  Beyond Dax they had come into the true Landes country—great silent pine-forests alternating with wide stretches of sedgy marshland. At Labouheyre their arrival was unexpected, but one of the villagers at once offered to drive them in his ox-cart to Aureilhac. It was an honour to do a service for Père Bonivet.

  But Dr. Wycherley noted that the villager took care that Jeanne should not touch him even with her garment.

  The two oxen drew them along the great silent highway that runs, level and straight, northwards to Bordeaux, stone-paved like the streets of a town to bear the weight of the lumbering timber-waggons. The oxen plodded along with the slow patience which is theirs.

  The silence of the great forest fell upon them. Even in the full light of the afternoon the sombre forest carried something of the grim and awesome. No wonder that for the simple peasants there were still spirits of evil that lurked in its shadows and on Midsummer Eve gathered together for unholy revels out in the marsh of Arjuzanx.

  From time to time they would pass a solitary goatherd lying down on his rough skin coat and dully guarding his little flock of long-haired goats. Once they caught sight of the local postman making his round on the stilts of the Landes to the outlying huts and farms, separated
by stretches of marshland impassable on foot.

  The ox-cart turned off the highway into a forest track deep-rutted from its winter traffic of heavy timber-waggons. The forest took them to its sombre heart. A grey film began to spread across the sky, shutting out the sunlight. But still it was hot and oppressive.

  Late in the afternoon they reached the hamlet of Aureilhac—a few low-roofed wooden houses in a clearing where lean hens scratched for food. Pierre Dorthez, returning from his day’s work in the forest, raised his hat to Père Bonivet and greeted them dully. He said little, either of comment or question, but ordered Jeanne to make ready a dinner for the visitors. Himself he would kill a fowl and gather vegetables for the soup.

  As the girl set about her work, Dr. Wycherley watched her keenly from his seat in the kitchen that served also as living-room. She was intent on her duties by the pot-au-feu, but there was a suppressed excitement underlying her that showed in the twitchings of her hands and the pallor of her face. It was no longer translucent in its whiteness, but of a dull and clammy pallor like the colour of a marsh mist. And in her eyes there was once more the hard glitter. Now and again she would secretly put her hand to her bosom as though to satisfy herself that something of value hidden beneath her dress was still there.

  When the simple dinner was over, Dr. Wycherley drew Père Bonivet aside.

  “Where does this Osper Camargo live?” he asked. “I wish to see him.”

  “But surely you do not believe in these superstitions of the ignorant peasants, monsieur?”

  “In my studies I have met many strange things, and I try to keep the open mind. I would see this man for myself.”