Night Creatures

by Seabury Quinn

  ‘What the devil——’ He took a step toward the terror-stricken group, and they shrank from him as if he were plague personified.

  There was a rustle in the oleander bushes growing at the park’s border, and Clothilde came toward him, breathing with quick, jerking gasps, the eyes behind her mask a glaze of sickened fear. ‘Horace,’ she spoke thickly through fear-stiffened lips, ‘is it truly thou?’

  ‘Of course, dear. And I’m not badly hit. That fellow couldn’t shoot fish in a barrel——’ He took a step toward her, but she shrank back, hands upraised as if to ward some terror from her.

  ‘Don’t—don’t come too near!’ she begged, and he could see that she was using all her self-control to keep from turning and flying.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded. Everyone—his late antagonist, his second, all the men, and now Clothilde, shrank from him as if he were a putrescent corpse. ‘Tell me, Clothilde——’

  ‘Did not you know—truly?’ she asked tremblingly.

  ‘Of course, I don’t——’

  ‘You know not who we are?’ She seemed to grasp her courage with both hands, holding it by main strength.

  ‘No——’

  ‘We are the dead. Once every year, upon the eve of mercredi des cendres—Ash Wednesday—it is permitted us to leave the tomb and come back to the scenes we knew in life in seeming-flesh. Upon this single night in all the year it is permitted that we laugh and love and be as gay as in the days when we were living. Those who loved in life may then renew their sweet communion; those who fought and hated may take up their quarrels if they desire. The city is the same as it was in the days of old, for time moves not for the dead.’

  He stared at her stupidly, made a move toward her, and she gave way a faltering step. ‘Forgive me, chèri, I would not hurt you, but as the living fear the dead, so we dead fear and shrink from the living. You are terrible to us. So have a little patience with poor frightened Clothilde, whose love is greater than her fear—but, hélas, not much greater.

  ‘How could I know? When I saw you outside the cemetery in your costume of the ancient days I thought that you were one of us, and though I did not know who you might be, my heart yearned toward you. Then when you passed my house I knew that you had followed me, and I was glad, so I dropped my flower down to you and you came up to me——’

  ‘But——’

  ‘The time is short, adoré; I must hasten. Do not interrupt. You will remember that I asked you when it happened as we walked down Royal Street? I meant when were you killed. Me, I was stricken with the plague the year that General Jackson held the city from the British, but you seemed of an earlier day—like one of Governor Kerlerec’s Kentucky legionnaires who held the forest pathways for New France. And when you told me that it happened when we met I thought you spoke the lover’s jest, and I was so delighted with the pretty compliment that I did not press you for an answer.

  ‘When you accepted de la Tour’s challenge I followed to meet you as you came from the champ d’honneur, for I well knew that though a sword or bullet could give you great pain, those who are already dead cannot be killed again, so though you might be sorely wounded, there would still be a few minutes in which we could share this new-found love of ours. But when I saw your blood begin to flow I knew that you were one of them—the dreadful living whom we fear so much!’

  ‘But you just said you love me,’ he broke in. ‘If that’s so, surely——’

  ‘Alas, my heart, within the grave there is no loving. ’Twixt you and me there is a gulf no love can bridge. Not even if you died could you come to me, for—I know not why it is, I know only that it is so—our company is made up of those who died many years ago. Not only life and death, but time as well is set between us like a wall!’

  The night was tiring rapidly, and in the eastern sky a faint gray streak edged with the palest rose began to show. She came a little nearer, fearfully, but with a loving courage that outfaced her fear, and it seemed to him that suddenly there blew so soft a perfume in the fading dark that he could almost see it take shape. She kept looking at him, her eyes were wide, her lips parted as she breathed faster. Suddenly she snatched the satin mask from her face and flung herself into his arms. ‘O, Horace, m’ami, je t’aime, je t’aime—je t’adore!’

  She was sobbing with heart-shattering sobs, fighting hard for breath, but her eyes were bright and steady with mingled adoration and renunciation. ‘Un dernier embrassement!—one last kiss!’ she besought in a tearful whisper, and raised her face to his.

  He held her to him a long, trembling moment. He could feel her heart beat with quick, light strokes like the ticking of a watch. She gave a little, tortured moan and became limp and yielding in his arms, then twined her hands about his neck, pulling his lips hard against hers and drawing her body against his. ‘Adieu,’ she whispered brokenly. ‘Adieu, Coeur do mon Coeur, pour le temps et pour l’éternité!’

  The world about them seemed to have stopped in its course for a long moment by some formula of potent magic, then from a belfry somewhere in the distance a gong sounded; the still air held its echoes till it seemed to quiver, and daylight came so quickly that it seemed a gust of wind had blown the dark away.

  It was morning. And suddenly his arms were empty.

  The train wheels clicked with an insistent monody as compelling as the kettle-drums in Ravel’s Bolero. Holloway sat in the club car with his glass of bourbon untasted before him as he gazed out at the flat, marshy landscape and the bare trees with their dreary streamers of gray Spanish moss—‘like funeral crapes,’ he thought. Save for the stiffness in his left shoulder where his slight wound pained no longer, he might have been convinced that he had dreamed it all—Clothilde, the masked ball, the duel in the moonlight behind the Cathedral. He was going back to New York, back to work and everyday prosaic sanity. He’d meet his friends again, make new contacts, take life up where he left off when he put on the uniform. He’d find an anodyne for broken dreams in work . . . there would be other women. . . . He laughed suddenly, so harshly that the fat man across the aisle put down his copy of the Times and stared at him.

  Other women—vibrant, living, flesh-and-blood creatures! He knew as he knew that he lived and breathed that, flesh or phantom, lovely dream or sweet reality, Clothilde Deschamps who died in 1814 and lay buried in St Louis Cemetery was the one and only love of his life, that always while he lived his heart would cleave to her memory as constantly as the tides swing to the moon.

  Is the Devil a Gentleman?

  IT HAD BEEN A DAY of strange weather, a day the calendar declared to be late April and the thermometer proclaimed to be March or November. From dawn till early dark the rain had spattered down, chill, persistent, deceptive, making it feel many degrees colder than it really was, but just at sunset it had cleared and a sort of angry yellow half-light had spilled from a sky of streaky black against a bank of blood-red clouds. Now, while the dying wind was groping with chill-stiffened fingers at the window-casings, a fire blazed on the study hearth, its comforting rose glow a gleaming island in the gathering shadows, its reflection daubing ever-changing patterns on the walls and tightly-drawn curtains.

  ‘On such a night,’ the Bishop quoted inexactly as he helped himself to brandy, ‘mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, I would not turn away from my door.’

  Dr Bentley, rector of St Chrysostom’s, dropped a second lump of sugar in his coffee and said nothing. He knew the Bishop, and had known him since their student days. When he quoted Shakespeare he was really searching through the lumber rooms of memory for a story, and there were few who had a better store of anecdotes than the Right Reverend Richard Chauncey, missionary, soldier, preacher, and ecclesiastical executive, worldly man of God and Godly man of the world. He’d looked forward to Dick’s coming down for confirmation, and had made a point of asking Kitteringson in to dinner. Kitteringson was all right, of course; good, earnest worker, a good preacher, and a good churchman, but a trifle too—how should he put it?
—too dogmatic. If you couldn’t find it in the writings of the Fathers of the Church or the Thirty-nine Articles he was against a proposition, whatever it might be. A session with the Bishop would be good for him.

  ‘Good stuff in the lad,’ thought Dr Bentley as he studied his junior covertly. A rather strong, intelligent face he had, but marked by ascetism, the face of one who might be either an unyielding martyr or a merciless inquisitor. Now he was leaning forward almost eagerly, and the firelight did things to his earnest face—made it look like one of those old mediaeval monks in the old masters’ paintings.

  ‘I’ve been wondering all day, sir,’ he told Bishop Chauncey, ‘what you meant when you told the confirmation class they should use common sense about religious prejudices. Surely, there may be no compromise with evil——’

  ‘I shouldn’t care to lay that down as a precept,’ the Bishop answered with a low chuckle. ‘We’re told the devil can quote Scripture for his purposes; why shouldn’t Christians make use of the powers of darkness in a proper case?’

  Young Dr Kitteringson was aghast. ‘Make use of Satan?’ he faltered. ‘Have dealings with the arch-fiend——’

  ‘Precisely, son. Shakespeare might have been more truthful than poetical when he declared the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.’

  ‘I can’t conceive of such a thing!’ the younger man retorted. ‘All our experiences tell us——’

  ‘All?’ cut in Bishop Chauncey softly, and the young rector fell hesitant before the level irony of his gaze. ‘How old are you, son?’

  ‘Thirty-two, sir, but I’ve read the writings of the Fathers of the Early Church, and one and all they tell us that to compromise with evil is a sin against——’ He stopped, a little abashed at the look of tolerant amusement on his senior’s face, then: ‘Can you name even one case when compromise with evil didn’t end disastrously for all concerned, sir?’ he challenged.

  ‘Yes, I think I can.’ The Bishop passed the brandy sniffer back and forth beneath his nostrils, inhaled the bouquet of the old cognac appreciatively, then took a delicate, approving sip. ‘I think I can, son. Like you, I have to call upon my reading to sustain me, but unlike you I can’t claim ecclesiastical authority for my writers. One of them, indeed, was an ancestor of mine, a great-grandfather several times removed.’

  The gloom that waited just beyond the moving edge of firelight seemed flowing forward, like a slowly rising, stagnant tide, and a blazing ember falling to the layer of sand beneath the burning logs sent a sudden shaft of light across the intervening shade, casting a quick shadow of the Bishop on the farther wall. An odd shadow it was, not like the rubicund, gray-haired churchman, but queerly elongated and distorted, so that it appeared to be the shade of a lean man with gaunt and predatory features, muffled in a cloak and leaning forward at the shoulders, like one intent—almost in the act of pouncing.

  Kundre Maltby (said the Bishop, drawing thoughtfully at his cigar so its recurrent glow etched his face in alternate red highlight and black shadow) was a confessed witch, and witches, as you know, are those who have made solemn compact with the Evil One.

  She was a Swedish girl—at least she claimed that she was Swedish—whom Captain Pelatiah Maltby had found somewhere in his travels, married, and brought back to Danby. Who she really was nobody knew.

  Captain Maltby’s ship, the Bountiful Adventure, came on her Easter Monday morning, clinging to a hatch-grating some twenty miles or so off the Madeira coast. He’d cleared from Funchal the night before, swearing that he’d never make the port again, for the Portuguese had celebrated Easter with an auto da fé at which a hundred condemned witches had been burned, and the sight of the poor wretches’ sufferings sickened him. When he asked the castaway her name she told him it was Kundre, and said her ship had been the Blenkinge of Stockholm, wrecked three days before.

  Maltby marveled at this information, for he had been in the Madeiras for a whole week, and there had been no storm, not even a light squall. But there the girl was, lashed to the floating hatch-top, virtually nude and all but dead with thirst and starvation. Moreover, she had very winning ways and more than a fair share of beauty, so Captain Maltby asked no further questions, but put in at New York and married her before he brought the Bountiful Adventure up the coast to Danby.

  Their life together seems to have been ideal, possibly idyllic. He was a raw-boned, tough-thewed son of New England, hard as flint outside and practical as the multiplication tables within. But it was from such ancestry that Whittier and Holmes and Bryant and Longfellow sprang, and probably beneath his workaday exterior Pelatiah Maltby had a poet’s soul. They had twin children, a boy and a girl. At Pelatiah’s insistence the girl was named for her mother, but Kundre chose the name of Micah for the boy, for in the whole Scripture she liked best that Prophet’s question, ‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’

  She took to transplantation like a hardy flower, and grew and flourished on New England soil. From all accounts she must have been a beauty in a heavy Nordic way, a true woman of the sea. Full six feet tall she was, and strong as any man, yet with all the gracious curves of womanhood. Her hair, they say, was golden. Not merely yellow, but that metallic shade of gold which, catching glints of outside light, seems to hold a light of its own. And her skin was white as sea-foam, and her eyes the bright blue-green of the ice of the fjords, and her lips were red as sunset on the ocean when a storm has blown itself away.

  Prosperity came with her, too. The winds were always favorable to Captain Maltby’s ship. He made the longest voyages in the shortest time. When other ships were set upon by tempests and battered till they were mere hulks he came safely through the raving storms or missed them altogether, and his enterprises always prospered. Foreign traders sold him goods at laughably low prices, or bought the cargoes that he brought at prices that astonished him.

  He brought back treasures from the far corners of the earth, silks from Cathay and Nippon, carved coral from the South Sea Isles, pearls from Java, diamonds from Africa, a comb of solid beaten gold from India—and the golden comb seemed pallid when she drew it through the golden spate of her loosed golden hair.

  The neighbors were first amazed, then wondering, finally suspicious. Experience had taught them Providence dealt even-handedly with men and balanced its smiles with its frowns. Yet Pelatiah Maltby always won. He never had to drain a cup of vinegar to compensate him for the many heady cups of the wine of success he quaffed.

  It was Captain Joel Newton who brought matters to a head. He and Captain Maltby had been rivals many years. His pew was just across the aisle from Maltby’s in the meeting house, his wife sat where she could not help but see the worldly gew-gaws Maltby lavished on Kundre, and Abigail Newton’s tongue had an edge like that of a new-filed adze, and her jealousy the bitter bite of acid. Joel Newton heard himself compared to Pelatiah Maltby, with small advantage, every Lord’s Day after service, and, driven by the lash of a shrew’s tongue, he determined to find the key to Maltby’s constant success, and set himself deliberately to trail the Bountiful Adventure from one port to another.

  Not that it helped him. The Bountiful Adventure outsailed him every trip, and when he came into a foreign berth he found that Maltby had been there before him, secured what trade there was, and sailed away.

  They came face to face at last at Tamatave in Madagascar. Maltby had traded rum and salted fish and tobacco for a holdful of rich native silver, and the local traders had no thought of laying in new stocks for months. Newton’s ship was loaded to capacity with just the wares that Maltby had disposed of so profitably, there was no market for his cargo, his food was running low, and ruin stared him in the face.

  Both had taken more of the French wines the inn purveyed than was their custom. Maltby was flushed with success, Newton bitter with the mordancy of disappointment. ‘Had I a witch-woman for wife I’d always fare well, too,’ he told his rival.

  ‘How quotha?’
Maltby asked. ‘What meanest, knave? My Kundre is the fairest, sweetest bloom——’

  ‘As ever sank its taproots deep in hell,’ his rival finished for him. ‘Oh, don’t ’ee think to fool us, Neighbor Maltby! We know what ’tis that always sends the fair winds at thy tail when others lie becalmed. We know what ’tis that makes the heathen take thy wares at such great prices, and pay thee ten times what thou’d hoped to get. Aye, and we know whence comes thy witch-mate, too—how the Papishers had burned a drove of warlocks in the Madeiras the day before ye found her floating in the ocean. She said her vessel had been wrecked three days before, but had there been a storm? Thou knowest well there had not. Did’st offer her free passage back to the islands, and did she take thy offer kindly?’

  Now this was a poser, for Pelatiah had offered to set Kundre on shore at Funchal when he rescued her, and she had refused tearfully, and begged him to hold to his course.

  ‘And why?’ asked Captain Newton as he warmed to his task of denunciation. ‘I’ll tell ’ee why, my fine bucko—because she was a cursed witch who’d slipped between the Papists’ fingers and made use of thee to ferry her to safety. Thinkest thou she loves thee? Faugh! While thou’rt away she wantons it with every man ’twixt Danby and old Salem Town——’

  ‘Thou liar!’ The scandalous words were like to have been Joel’s last, for Pelatiah drew his hanger and made for him with intent to stab the slander down his throat with cold steel, but Joel was just a thought too quick.

  Before his rival reached him he jerked a pistol from his waistband and let fly, striking Captain Maltby fairly in the chest. Afterwards he boasted that it was a silver bullet he had used, since, as everybody knew, witches, warlocks, and were-beasts were impervious to lead, but vulnerable to silver missiles.

  However that might be Captain Maltby halted in mid-stride, and his hanger fell with a clatter from his unnerved hand. He hiccoughed once and tried to draw a breath that stopped before he had it in, sagged at the knees, fell on his side, and died. But with that last unfinished breath they say he whispered, ‘Kundre dearest, they have done for me and will for thee if so be that they can. God have thee in His keeping——’