Night Creatures

by Seabury Quinn

  The voice stopped suddenly, as though a hand had been laid on the specter’s throat, and like an April snowflake melting in the rising sun of spring, the faintly-shining vision merged back in the darkness.

  He could not say if it had been a vivid dream or if a visitant had come to him, but presently he rose and struck a flint-spark in his tinderbox and lit a tallow dip. There on the floor beside his bed lay a medallion of dull metal, not lead nor iron, but apparently a mixture of the two, fixed to a length of slender chain of the same sheenless substance. Curiously, he noted that his hands were soiled with fresh earth and his fingernails broken, as though he had been burrowing like a woodchuck. Yet he knew he had not left his chamber since he flung himself upon the bed and fell asleep.

  Or had he? We may wonder. Might he not have been the victim of somnambulism, and risen to go scraping at the earth that covered Kundre Maltby’s body in the churchyard, then, still asleep, come back with the mysterious medal? The thought did not occur to him, but in the light of modern psychological experiments we may entertain it.

  At any rate he recognized the medallion and took it in his hand. It was quite plain on one side and engraved with characters he could not read upon the other. Its edge was rounded like that of a milled coin, and though it was no larger than a penny it weighed as much as a gold sovereign.

  What was it that the ghost had ordered him to do? ‘Hie with it to the jail house and cut away the bars that pen her in.’

  With this dull piece of soft metal? He was about to fling the medal from him in disgust when the echo of the ghostly voice seemed coming to him through the candlelight-stained darkness. ‘Hurry, hurry, lover of the falsely-accused, or it will be too late!’

  He knew what cell they’d lodged her in, the same in which her mother languished twenty years ago. It was on the ground floor of the prison, and by standing on his tiptoes he could look through the barred window.

  If they caught him skulking round the jail house—— What matter? He was resolved to die with her, why not share prison with her ere they hanged him?

  Danby jail loomed dimly, a darker darkness in the starless night, as Hosea approached it, treading noiselessly in stockinged feet. ‘Kundre,’ he whispered softly as he tapped upon the stone sill of her cell window. ‘Can’st hear me, dearest love?’

  ‘Is’t thou, my very dearest?’ the girl’s reply came to him through the formless darkness. ‘Oh, Hosea——’ He heard her sobs, the small, sad sounds of utter misery, as her voice broke.

  ‘Aye, heart o’ mine, ’tis I, and I have come to tell thee that thou shalt not go alone—come closer, love, stretch out thy hands to me——’

  ‘I cannot, dearest one; they’ve chained me to the wall as if I were a rabid cur——’

  Hosea clenched his teeth in fury and, unthinking, drove his hand against the prison bars. It was the hand in which he clasped the witch’s medal, and as it struck the bar he drew back with a startled exclamation. The heavy, hand-forged iron had melted from contact with the medal as if it had been tallow touched by flame.

  In a moment he was sawing at the window-bars with the mysterious coin, cutting them away as if they had been cheese. Silently he laid them on the turf outside the prison window, then, when he had an opening large enough to crawl through, let himself inside the cell and felt his way toward her.

  They wasted no time in reunion or premature rejoicings. With her hand on his to guide it he pressed the witch’s coin against the iron collar locked around her neck, and laid the fetter on the straw-strewn cell floor carefully, lest its clanking rouse the guard who waited in the corridor outside. Then, step by cautious step, he led her to the window.

  Hand in hand they crept along the shadowed street until they reached the stable where his mother’s horses stamped before their mangers. In a moment he had saddled the best beast and led it out, swung her to the saddle-bow before him, and set out toward the southern boundary of the town. They dared not trot or gallop lest the pounding of the horse’s hoofs arouse the neighbors, but presently they reached the churchyard, and he drove his heels into the stallion’s flanks.

  ‘Wait, wait, my dear,’ she begged him as they passed the white-spired meeting house, ‘I would say farewell to my mother ere we shake the dust of Danby from our shoon forever.’

  ‘Aye,’ he conceded, lowering her to the ground. ‘That is but fitting, sweetling. We are indebted to thy mother for thy liberty tonight.’

  Together they walked to the grave, and while the girl knelt on the moss that rimmed the stone he looked down at her pensively. He wondered why his conscience did not trouble him. Tonight he had accepted diabolic aid, made compromise with Evil. Even now he had the witch-wife’s medal in his pocket—he drew the flat metallic disc out to look at it. Should he take it with him, or return it to the grave? he wondered, then wondered more at what was happening. The coin seemed straining at his fingers, as if a thin, invisible thread were pulling it, or it had volition of its own and sought release from his grasp.

  But, strangely, the pull was all in one direction, toward the foot of Kundre Maltby’s grave.

  Wonderingly, he stepped in the direction of the tug, and noticed that it increased sharply, then seemed to bear straight down toward the earth.

  He dropped upon his knees. The coin seemed guiding his hand toward the tombstone and, still marveling, he reached in the direction that it indicated. His fingers touched the long grass growing by the stone and found an opening like a woodchuck’s burrow. Inside was something stiff and hard, yet slightly pliable, like old, oiled leather.

  He grasped the object, tugged at it, and brought it out. It was a leather sack, well smeared with tallow, stiff with age and long entombment in the earth, but wholly intact. A wax seal held the cord that bound its mouth, but this crumbled as he touched it. Inside were several smaller sacks, some of soft buckskin, some of coarse linen, and in them were bright English sovereigns, round silver Spanish dollars, and gleaming articles of jewelry. The mystery of Kundre Maltby’s lost fortune was solved. She had buried it beneath the stone that marked her husband’s empty grave, and when they went to scoop the hollow to receive her body they had used only the upper portion of the grave.

  Hosea chuckled as he realized what had happened. The diggers’ spades had been within a hand’s-width of the treasure, yet none had suspected it.

  Witchcraft? Perhaps, but very fortunate witchcraft for him and Kundre. A moment since they had had nothing but the clothes they stood in and the stolen stallion; now they were rich. Their life would not be hard—if they could get away.

  The night was tiring rapidly as they rode into the woodland. Long streaks of gray were showing in the eastern sky, small noises came to them, the chirp of crickets and the sleepy murmurs of awakening birds, but on and on they rode, secure in the knowledge that Danby jail had no bloodhounds to pursue them, and their escape could not be known till sunrise, for no one, jailor or turnkey or guard, would dare go near the witch’s cell till full daylight.

  The Newport Quakers greeted them hospitably, and when they found that they had money offered them letters to the first citizens of Philadelphia.

  In two days they took passage on a sloop bound for the Delaware, and, once on the high sea, were married by the master. So Kundre Maltby and Hosea Newton, children of seafaring Danby skippers, plighted troth upon the ocean, with the singing of the wind in the rigging for wedding march and the skirking mewl of sea gulls for a prothalamium.

  They were not the first, nor, unhappily, the last to be driven from their homes by ignorance and bigotry masquerading as religion, but in Philadelphia they found such peace and happiness as never could have been theirs in New England. Their house stood on a tall hill overlooking the wide Schuylkill and the prosperous little Quaker city, and there their family multiplied until they had four sons and three daughters.

  It was an evening in mid-April, the anniversary of her father’s death at Captain Newton’s hand, if she known it, that Kundre stood with Hosea on
the porch of their mansion and watched the lights of Philadelphia quench out against the darkness. Honora, their last-born daughter, had been christened in the afternoon, and now, all vestige of original sin washed from her, was slumbering as peacefully as any cherub in the nursery.

  ‘Look, heart of mine,’ bade Kundre, ‘all those good folk go to their rest down yonder. They are a kind and gentle people, and I know their dreams are of a better world.’

  ‘Aye, dearest,’ he slipped an arm round her, ‘a better world, in truth. Not in some dim, misty Promised Land on t’other side of Jordan, but here in this same world we live in. There’ll come a time, my sweet, when men with lofty dreams shall waken at a great tomorrow’s dawn and find their dreams still there, and nothing vanished but the night.’

  The Bishop brought his story to a close and looked from Dr Bentley to the younger clergyman with a quizzical twinkle in his eye. ‘I shan’t ask you to pass judgment,’ he said. ‘Whether Hosea Newton should have scorned the witch’s offer—or whether he received it, for that matter—are purely academic questions today. I’m pretty sure though,’ he chuckled, ‘that if he had refused it I should not be here this evening.’

  ‘How’s that, sir?’ asked young Dr Kitteringson.

  ‘Well, you see, Hosea Newton was my great-grandfather, several times removed, and his wife, the witch’s child, my ancestress. So was the witch, for that matter.’

  ‘And the witch’s coin?’ asked Dr Kitteringson. ‘Do you know what became of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Bishop Chauncey. ‘Here it is.’ He thrust two fingers in his waistcoat pocket and produced a little metal disc which might have been silver, but wasn’t, flat and plain on one side, marked with faint traces of old Nordic runes upon the other. ‘I’ve carried it as a lucky piece for years,’ he added. ‘My grandfather carried it all through the Civil War and never had a wound; my father had it with him at San Juan Hill and came off without a scratch. I lugged it through the Argonne and came out safely, but once when I left it on my dressing table in Paris I was run down by a taxicab before I had a chance to cross the street.’

  Dr Kitteringson was handling the strange coin gingerly, half curiously, half fearfully. ‘You’ve tested it for magic powers?’ he asked.

  ‘Good gracious, no, son. I don’t suppose it has any, and—good heavens, look!’

  Young Dr Kitteringson had taken up the fire shovel and drawn the coin’s blunt edge across its gleaming brass bowl. Where the medal touched the brass it cut a kerf as easily as if it had been pressed through softened tallow.

  ‘Great Scott, Bishop—Dick!’ exclaimed Dr Bentley. ‘What do you think of that?’

  The Bishop dropped the witch’s coin back in his waistcoat pocket and held his glass out toward his host. His hand was shaking slightly, but his eyes and voice were steady. ‘I think I’d like another drop of brandy; quickly, if you please,’ he answered.

  There Are Such Things

  SOME OF THIS I SAW MYSELF, some of it was told me, some of it I reconstructed, adding scrap to scrap, as a paleontologist reconstructs a brontosaur from fossil fragments salvaged from Jurassic silt.

  I was serving with the Army of Occupation, attached to the M.P., since I was one of those whose orders read ‘to Coblenz’ instead of ‘to Camp Dix’ when the A.E.F. was broken up. Jerry had taken his defeat philosophically and our principal duty at the time was to prevent fraternization between our men and our late enemies of the feminine gender. Periodically a brasshat came down from Ehrenbreitstein to lecture us on this. ‘G-I and all the folks back home are greatly concerned,’ he’d tell us with the smock-faced smugness of a staff man laying down the law to the line. ‘Think what it would mean to patriotic American mothers if their boys came home with enemy wives——’

  ‘Listen at the big lug!’ muttered Fontenoy apKern, the battalion adjutant. ‘As if all wives ain’t enemies!’ apKern should have known. He was paying alimony to two wives at home and ardent court to a blonde little English girl with buck teeth and a silly simper who drove a car for British headquarters up at Cologne.

  Accordingly, duty rested lightly on us. On our own initiative we interpreted the order against fraternizing to mean we were to keep the boys from too great intimacy with Coblenz maidens noted more for carefree spirits than attention to decorum, and let ’em go as far as they liked with legitimate love-making. Even the brigadier admitted we were wise in this, since keeping billeted soldiers from philandering is about as feasible as King Canute’s attempt to order back the rising tide.

  It was the twenty-third of June—Midsummer’s Eve—though the date meant nothing to me then, and I was off duty. With nothing to do for a blessed twenty-four hours I’d rummaged through the old part of the city, looked in at the thirteenth century basilica of Saint Castor, crossed the famous Bridge of Boats, and found myself in open country, my head pleasantly empty of intention, my throat exceedingly receptive to a draught of liebfrauenmilch, or beer, if nothing better offered.

  I must have walked four or five miles, for the slate-gray roofs of Coblenz shimmered with an almost silvery luster in the brilliant summer sunlight as I looked down on them, when I came upon the Calvary. Time-mattered and overlaid with moss until the original drab of its granite was hardly perceptible, it stood beside the highway where the remnant of a Roman road, now scarcely more than a cart-track, cut across it, a mute reminder of the old faith in the very heart of Rhenish Prussia. The sculptor, probably some pious friar, had cut life, or, more precisely, death, into the cold stone. The corpus fairly writhed upon the road; tense, straining muscles stood out on the arms and legs and torso, the corded throat seemed overfilled with groans of torment, the brow beneath the plaited crown of thorns was knotted and bedewed with the cold sweat of the death-agony. Curiously, whether because of minute particles of mica in the stone or for some other reason, the slanting sunrays struck a sort of half-dulled brightness from the upright of the cross behind the up-thrown, tortured head, giving the effect of an illusive halo.

  Across the plinth supporting the almost life-sized crucifix ran what remained of an inscription—‘ORATE PRO EJS’.

  That puzzled me. I knew the Latin of the mediaeval Schoolmen was not like that I had grappled with at Erasmus Hall High School, but . . . Understanding dawned on me at last. J and I were interchangeable in the Middle Ages, Germanic peoples favoring the J, and Latins using I. Whoever chiseled that inscription must have been a German, and chose J. That would make the last word read ‘eis’—them—so the remnant of the legend begged the passer-by to ‘pray for them’.

  This too was unusual. Such petitions usually appeared on family monuments, not on wayside Calvaries. Who, I wondered, were ‘they’? But even as I puzzled over the inscription I was vaguely conscious of another anomaly. These mediaeval roadside shrines were placed along the highway, not at crossroads, for at the junction of two roads the witches gathered to mount broomsticks and fly screaming to the sabbat, suicides were buried at such places with stakes driven through their hearts; evil spirits made crossroads their rendezvous. Yet it was certainly a crossroads, and certainly a shrine stood there.

  Beyond the hedge of hornbeam, once neatly clipped but now almost as ruinous as the old road sprawling past it, I saw the ivy-mantled relic of a gray-stone tower with what looked like a cottage roof beside it. And with the sight I realized I had walked a long way, that I’d eaten nothing since my early breakfast at the Monopole, and that I was hungry as a pike and thirsty as a sandbank. Perhaps the caretaker would sell me luncheon. Poverty was pressing hard on Fritz those days and a little American money would seem like a fortune to the average peasant.

  ‘And now, if the Herr Leutnant has completed his repast, he would like to see the ruins, nicht wahr?’

  The ‘Herr Leutnant’ had finished his repast, and very good he’d found it. Boiled fowl with dumpling, potatoes fried with just sufficient onion to make them perfect, great slabs of rich black bread with fresh sweet butter, and an apfelstrudel worthy of a king.
Apfelstrudel you must know is cake made from dough that has been stretched and beaten to a paper-thinness, then rolled around a core of spiced sliced apple, and is the only thing in the world that outranks a New England apple pie. There had been no wine—worse luck—but the bier was all that could have been desired.

  The ruins weren’t very interesting. The outer walls had fallen long ago, taking five of the six watchtowers with them, and the keep was just a square stone building with small windows and no roof. The moat was overgrown with water-hyacinth, and the terraced flower beds were choked with weeds. Still, the old fellow had seemed so anxious to show me the place—his dankerschöns were almost overwhelming when I handed him a dollar—that I thought I might as well humor him. We’d made the round, and were back where we started when, ‘What’s that little building over there?’ I asked, pointing to an unroofed structure just outside the rim of the old ruined wall.

  Something furtive came into my guide’s china-blue eyes. He licked his lips and looked away, his mouth moved once or twice, but no words came from it. Finally: ‘Na, na, it’s nothing, Herr Leutnant, just the chapel of the Hohenneitschütz. There is nothing there to interest you——’

  ‘No?’ I broke in. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’ The man, for all his affability, was after all an enemy and I was an alien soldier in conquered territory, and a military policeman in the bargain. If there was something he particularly did not want me to see—and quite obviously he did not want me to inspect the chapel—it was my duty to investigate. For the first time since I’d left Coblenz I was thankful that I’d worn my belt and gun.

  ‘Take me to that chapel and no monkey business,’ I commanded sharply, snapping back the flap of my holster. ‘Go on, get going; shake it up!’

  ‘Jawohl!’ he answered scarcely audible, shrugging his stooped shoulders as he led the way across the weed-grown flower gardens. There was no need to draw my pistol. For generations he and his kind had taken orders unquestioningly from men in uniform. ‘The Herr Leutnant need not vex himself. I will show the chapel to him, but’—I could see a shiver ripple through his fat form as he spoke—‘it holds no interest for the visitor.’