Night Creatures

by Seabury Quinn

  There came a sudden pattering. At first he thought it falling leaves, but there were few leaves on the withered boughs, and the pit-pat-patter grew into a steady rhythm, the beating of small feet, scores, hundreds of them, on the frost-dried leaves. Were they coming from the rear or in front? Or from the sides? It seemed at first as if they came from one direction, then another, finally from all around. Then something else cut straight across his path, and this time there could be no doubt. It was a rabbit running with the speed of panic, and as it passed him it seemed saying, ‘Get out of here, you fool—get out before it is too late!’

  Now there seemed a little wind . . . no, it was no wind, it was a chorus of shrill, piping laughs, soft as chirping insects’ cries, but spiteful and malicious as the cachinnation of a horde of mocking fiends. He took a running step forward, and brought up sharply with a startled grunt of pain. He had run full-tilt into a tree trunk—and he could have sworn there was no tree there. Turning, he plunged to the right. This time there was no mistake. The tree sprang into his path to stop him. It happened quicker than a wink, faster than the flicker of a bacillus beneath the eyepiece of a microscope, but he saw it! The way was open when he leaped; then it was blocked by a tree trunk, and he was lying flat upon his back, the wind knocked out of him, his hat gone one way and his gun another, and round about him, from the earth and trees and air, the high, thin, cachinnating screams of rancorous laughter sounded in his ears.

  He rose and blundered on again, saw bright sunlight showing at the end of a short vista, and made for it in stumbling haste. Now he was at the orchard’s edge; in ten yards he would be clear of it. He set his teeth and drew a deep breath, put his head down, and sprinted.

  The blow was like the hammering of a loaded bludgeon. Whether it were falling limb or shifting tree trunk he could not be sure. He knew only that something struck him on the head with devastating force, that a brilliant blue-white light flashed in his eyes, and that he tripped sprawling down into black oblivion.

  The sun had sunk almost below the hog-backed ridge that broke the western horizon, and little feathers of dusk were drifting through the autumn leaves when he awoke to find Dr Clancy standing above him. ‘Hullo,’ he greeted as he rose and felt his head with tentative, exploring fingers, ‘I must have slept here since morning——’

  The half-jocular, half-embarrassed words died still-born on his lips as he looked into the other’s face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he ended lamely.

  Dr Clancy’s steady gaze bored into his. ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ he answered in a toneless flat voice. ‘I’ve been looking for you since this morning, and only just found you.’ Then, irrelevantly: ‘Where were you last night?’

  A quick flush of resentment burned in Harrigan’s cheeks. Who the deuce did Clancy think he was, putting him on the witness stand this way? ‘Why?’ he jerked back. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘It may make much. I sat with Judge Crumpacker’s body last night, waiting for the coroner. It seemed unchristian to leave him alone, and sometime after three o’clock this morning I heard moans in your room. You’d been with him the day before; if he’d died from some strange infection—though I don’t believe he did—you might have been stricken too. So I went to you.

  ‘You were crying in your sleep, like a homesick lad, but when I bent above you I distinguished words between your sobs.’ He paused a moment; then: ‘I’m used to confidences; this won’t go any farther, but’—his blue eyes fairly seemed to blaze as they burned into Harrigan’s—‘you were begging someone named Lucinda to have pity on you, to let you touch her, kiss her, even if it were only her dress-hem or her shoes; pleading with her to accept you as her slave. Where—were—you—last—night—Edward Harrigan?’

  Sullenly at first, then defiantly, finally with the ardor of a lover talking of his mistress, Harrigan retailed his night’s adventure. When he told of the tempestuous rainstorm that drove him to seek shelter at the mansion Dr Clancy crossed himself, muttering something in quick Latin which he could not catch, but which ended with per Deum Patrem omnipotentem.

  ‘It’s odd that lovely girl should have the same name as the old wi—the old woman,’ Harrigan concluded. ‘She tells me that they’re constantly mistaken for each other by——’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Clancy broke in; then, abruptly, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any hope of dissuading you from visiting her tonight?’

  ‘Not the slightest,’ Harrigan replied. ‘I’m going to see her tonight, and tomorrow night, and every night she’ll see me. If she’ll have me, I’m going to marry her.’

  Dr Clancy’s hard gaze softened for a moment. ‘Would you care to tell me how you came here—under these trees?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Harrigan snapped.

  ‘I thought not,’ Clancy nodded understandingly. ‘Well, if you’re set on seeing her, you’re set on it, my boy. I’ve had enough experience to know that one can’t argue when a man’s in love.’

  He had no difficulty finding the house now. Clear and sharply defined against the moon-brightened sky its chimneys rose to guide him like a landmark as he hurried down the highroad. Odd that he hadn’t seen them in the morning. True, he’d approached from a different angle and his view had been obscured by the old apple trees . . . those trees! He laughed in recollection of his fight with them. Of course, he’d suffered an attack of vertigo. That was the answer. Up too late the night before, dream-troubled sleep, the shock of Judge Crumpacker’s death. . . . Never mind all that, he was going to Lucinda; he’d be with her in five minutes . . . his pulses quickened at the thought.

  She was sitting on the couch before the fireplace in the drawing-room as the butler Elijah announced him. The crackling fire put faint rose tints in her ivory skin, darkened the green in her long eyes.

  ‘Edward!’ Lightly as a tuft of breeze-blown thistledown she rose to her feet and held out soft bare arms in greeting. Once again he went completely breathless at the sight of her. Tall, graceful, altogether lovely she was, a being from another world, a sprite released from dark enchantment. Her coral-colored sleeveless gown was cut low and belted tightly at her slim waist with a corded silver girdle; her silver-shining hair was piled in clustering little curls upon her head. She wore little silver sandals on her bare feet, and the scent of gardenia mingled with an overtone of sandalwood that wafted to him from her mounted to his brain as if it were a potent drug from Araby or far Cathay.

  Was she young, mature, or ageless? It was as impossible to estimate her age as it would be to determine how old a statue is. A marble by Praxiteles or a bronze cast by Cellini is as young today—or in five hundred years—as when it left the master’s hands. His eager, ravenous gaze took in the grace of her slim throat, the lovely contours of her outstretched arms, the softly glowing green lights in her half-closed eyes. Here was enchantment old as magic, potent as immortal beauty’s self—and she was holding out her gracious hands, filled with the offer of her matchless loveliness, to him! He felt himself grow weak with longing. His heart beat with a hurrying, frenzied rhythm, like a madman on a drum, then seemed to stop entirely.

  She moved across the room so lightly, so effortlessly, and so silently it seemed that she was wafted by an unfelt breeze. She flowed toward him until he felt her breath upon his cheeks and the perfume of her silver-glowing hair in his nostrils. Then swiftly, hungrily, she kissed him. The flame of her raced in his blood like wildfire in a pine wood and crashed against his brain like an explosion. He swayed drunkenly, reaching out unsteady hands.

  But she slipped back before his questing fingers found her. ‘You love me, don’t you, Edward?’ she asked, and it seemed to him amusement flickered in her green eyes. ‘You love me very, very much?’ She drawled the question in her husky, bell-toned voice, and the magic of its timbre seemed to set his nerves aquiver, like tauted violin strings.

  His breath rasped in his throat. ‘Love you?’ he echoed hoarsely. ‘More than anything on earth——’
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br />   ‘Or in the heavens above, or waters underneath?’ she supplied, and an acid mockery seemed to underlie her words.

  ‘Or in the heavens above or waters underneath,’ he repeated like a formula.

  ‘You want me to be yours, and you’d be mine forever—to the end of time, and beyond?’

  He found no words to answer her; a gasp was all he could achieve, but with his tortured spirit looking from his eyes he nodded.

  ‘Then place your hand upon my heart while I put mine on yours, and swear’—she took his hand in hers and held it to her bosom, and he felt the rondure of her breast beneath his fingers as she laid her free hand on his chest—‘swear without reservation or withholding that as it is with me so it shall be with you; whom I serve you will serve, where I worship you will worship——’

  Dimly, like a voice heard in a dream, or from a great distance, the command came to him. ‘Breathe on her, Edward Harrigan; breathe on her in the name of God!’

  She drew away from him and raised her lovely arms as if in evocation. Her lips were redder than blood, and lights like green lightning-flashes flickered in her eyes.

  ‘No!’ she forbade, and now her voice had lost its bell-like resonance and was shrill and thin with terror. ‘No, Edward, pay no heed to him. Astarte, Magna Mater——’ Tiny wrinkles seemed to etch themselves about her eyes, her sweetly rounded throat seemed shriveling, withering, the silver-luster faded in her hair.

  Harrigan felt a shiver light as frosty air run through his body. Something terrified him—it was as if an awful unseen presence had come to the quiet firelit room, a thing of dreadful, everlasting chill and terror and wickedness.

  Again the far hail sounded, fainter this time: ‘Breathe on her, Edward Harrigan; breathe on her in the name of God for your immortal soul’s sake!’

  Scarce knowing what he did he pursed his lips and blew into her face saying, ‘In nomine Dei!’

  She turned her great eyes on him sadly, reproachfully. He’d seen a dying deer look so at the hunter.

  ‘Wretched man,’ she whispered, and now her voice had all its old-time vibrance, ‘what have you done? Hear me before the end comes, Edward Harrigan. My shadow is upon you. Never shall you free yourself from it; it shall come between you and every woman whom you look on; you shall see me in the sunshine and the moonlight, hear my voice in wind and flowing water——’

  A roaring like the thunder of Niagara filled his ears. The room was sliding past him, breaking up, as if it were a painting on a china plate smashed by a sudden blow. He fell, rose to his knees, then fell again. Then he sat up and looked about him dazedly.

  Around him was a creeper-covered ruined wall of crumbling brick. Sumac bushes grew in rank profusion from the piles of earth and rubble. To right and left he saw outlines of a broken chimney, topless, shattered, smothered in a growth of whispering-leaved ivy and pointing like a broken monument to the pale sky from which the stars had been wiped by the half-moon’s light. ‘Good heavens,’ he exclaimed, ‘have I been dreaming?’

  ‘Pray Heaven you never have another dream like it, my son!’ The voice was at his elbow, and as he started round he beheld Dr Clancy, vested in surplice and stole, an open prayer book in his hand.

  ‘Dr Clancy—Father!’ He blinked at the vested man in astonishment.

  ‘Yes, my son, I am a priest,’ replied Clancy. ‘Most of the members of the club are non-churchmen, and because it might embarrass them to know there was a priest present, I’ve used my university degree when I came up here for a few days’ shooting every autumn. Judge Crumpacker knew about me; so do half a dozen others, but to most I am just Dr Clancy. I was on my way from early mass at the village church when I met you and the judge that morning.’

  ‘But—but——’ stammered Harrigan.

  ‘I know, my son, you can’t understand how I came here,’ Father Clancy smiled. ‘I’ve suspected old Lucinda Lafferty for a long time, but one doesn’t talk of witchcraft nowadays. It does no good, and only gets one laughed at. I’ve had my eye on her, just the same, and when the judge told me about his experience it worried me. Not enough, though. I didn’t realize how malignant—or how powerful—she was until too late. Then I found you lying in her orchard, and what you told me made me fear for you. She had killed Judge Crumpacker’s body. She would kill your soul, unless I could prevent it. But what could I do? You were a victim of the glamour she cast about herself and her house by her devilish arts; it was futile to attempt to reason with you. So I followed you.

  ‘I saw you come to this old ruin, saw you greet the cursed witch, and heard you prepare to forswear your Christian birthright of salvation. I could exorcise the foul fiend that aided her, but you had to save yourself. Only the victim of a witch’s glamour can dispel the haze that binds him. Had I sent her off with a curse you would have remained her victim all your life, believing that the things you’d seen were really there and that she was a young and lovely woman——’

  ‘She was—she is!’ cried Harrigan. ‘I’ve seen her, kissed her, held her in my arms——’

  ‘You think so?’ interrupted the priest. ‘Look there!’ He pointed to an object half visible in the moonlight, half obscured by shadow.

  At first he thought it was a scarecrow or a pile of old discarded clothing, but as Harrigan looked closer he saw it was a woman’s body, old, emaciated, clothed in filthy rags. The face was incredibly wrinkled, bone-pale, and hideously ugly. Even in death there was no dignity about it, only a kind of reptilian malignancy. The hands, claw-like, with broken, dirt-filled nails, were like the talons of a vulture, red, cracked, swollen-jointed; between the slackly opened bloodless lips showed a few broken, yellowed teeth, long, sharp, and pointed as the fangs of a carnivore. The whole appearance of the corpse was horrible, revolting, frightening. Yet—he caught his breath in sudden sickness—as he realized it—underneath the ugliness, the filth, the squalor, was a faint resemblance to the lovely creature he had caressed. Like a devilishly inspired caricature Lucinda Lafferty the witch had a resemblance to his beloved silver-blonde Lucinda, as a skilled cartoonist’s drawing may suggest, though not look like, the subject which it parodies.

  ‘Thank Heaven you were not too dazed to hear me call to you, and to obey me,’ Father Clancy told him kindly. ‘Had you not acted when you did, and blown upon her as I ordered, we dare not think what might have happened——’

  The laugh that interrupted him was dreadful, as unexpected and as shocking as a strong man’s scream of pain. It was a laugh of disillusionment, abysmal, stark, complete.

  These things Edward Harrigan remembers as vividly as if they’d happened yesterday. He is a dour and silent man, efficient in his work, but utterly unsocial. He calls no man his friend, no woman interests him. His little world is bounded by his laboratory and his suite at the hotel, he shuns the parks and country, no one ever sees him strolling in the sunshine or the moonlight. Usually he works till late with his test-tubes and reagents, and there is a standing order at the hotel desk to call him every morning at five.

  For, as he shuns the beauties of the woods and fields, and eschews woman’s company and man’s companionship, Edward Harrigan shuns sleep. Dreams come with sleep, and in his dreams he sees the vision of a fragile Dresden-china figure in a coral-colored gown cut in the Grecian fashion, with silver-gleaming curls piled high upon her dainty head and soft, bare arms held out in invitation. Sometimes he speaks to her; sometimes he reaches out to grasp the slender, rose-tipped hands in his.

  But she never answers, and when he stretches out his hands to hers she fades slowly from his dream-sight, like moonlight fading just before the sky begins to brighten in the east.

  Masked Ball

  HALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK Holloway came to a halt, a grin of self-derision on his face. ‘Chump!’ he muttered. ‘If I had a little more sense I’d be a first-class halfwit.’

  He had been in New Orleans three days, crammed his time with sightseeing, and as a climax to his trip had dined at Franchetti’s, wh
ich was the indirect reason for his present predicament.

  If you know New Orleans at all you know you do not merely eat at Franchetti’s, you dine there, which is not at all the same thing. He had started with green turtle soup with clear dry sherry, followed it with oysters Rockefeller washed down with Irroy ’93; then filet of pompano with Barr Tramier and breast of guinea hen under glass with Nuits St Georges, and for dessert a bowl of frozen strawberries in half-melted vanilla ice cream with brandy and cointreau poured over them. Dinner had consumed two hours, and by the time he drained his demi-tasse of pungent chicory coffee he was more than merely comfortably fuddled and inclined to let events take their course without assistance from him.

  It was the eve of Ash Wednesday, and the tide of carnival which had been rising steadily since Twelfth Night had reached full flood. He had considered hiring a domino and mask and going down Canal Street to watch the Parade of Comus, but at the costumier’s in Conti Street he had allowed himself to be over-persuaded.

  ‘A domino, a simple masque, M’sieu’?’ the propriétaire had asked in shocked, grieved tones. ‘For you? But no. You cannot mean it. It would be unthinkable. Attend me, wait one little minute while I select the costume juste for you!’

  He was a tiny man, the costumer, all full of bows and gestures, as bustling and officious as a bluebottle-fly. His hair was thin and gray, his little pointed beard and wisp of waxed mustache might have been molded out of burnished pewter, and his small, deep-set eyes were very bright behind the lenses of a black-rimmed pince-nez from which trailed a broad black ribbon.

  While Holloway waited he rummaged through a stack of cardboard boxes almost as large as steamer trunks, humming a small tune to himself. Presently he came back smiling broadly, and with something of the air of a magician about to produce a rabbit from a high hat, dragged out his find and held it up for admiration. ‘Voilà!’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Is it not incroyable? Is it not made to order for M’sieu’—to set his special type off as a frame must complement a picture? But yes, of course!’