Night Creatures
Page 38
No friendly tree offered asylum; my only hope was to stand and fight. Grasping my stick, I spread my feet, bracing myself against their charge.
And as I waited their onslaught, there came from the shadow of the pines the shriller, sharper cry of the third beast. Like the crest of a flying windlashed wave, the slighter, silver-furred brute came speeding across the meadow, its ears laid back, its slender paws spurning the sod daintily. Almost it seemed as if the pale shadow of a cloud were racing toward me.
The thing dashed slantwise across the field, its flight converging on the line of the other two’s attack. Midway between me and them it paused, hairs bristling, limbs bent for a spring.
My eyes went wide with incredulity. It was standing in my defense.
All the savageness of the larger beasts’ hunting-cry was echoed in the smaller creature’s bay, and with it a defiance that needed no interpretation.
The attackers paused in their rush, halted, and looked speculatively at my ally. They took a few tentative steps in my direction, and a fierce whine, almost an articulate curse, went up from the silver-haired beast. Slowly the tawny pair circled and trotted back to the woods.
I hurried toward the sanitarium, grasping my stick firmly in readiness for another attack.
But no further cries came from the woods, and once, as I glanced back, I saw the light-haired beast trotting slowly in my wake, looking from right to left, as if to ward off danger.
Half an hour later I looked from my window toward the house in the pines. Far down the south road, its muzzle pointed to the moon, the bright-furred animal crouched and poured out a lament to the night. And its cry was like the wail of a child in pain.
Far into the night I paced my room, like a condemned convict when the vigil of the death watch is on him. Reason and memory struggled for the mastery; one urging me to give over my wild act, the other bidding me obey my promise to Mildred.
Toward morning I dropped into a chair, exhausted with my objectless marching. I must have fallen asleep, for when I started up the stars were dimming in the zenith, and bands of slate, shading to amethyst, slanted across the horizon.
A moment I paused, laughing cynically at my fool’s errand; then, seizing cap and book, I bolted down the stairs, and ran through the paling dawn to the house in the pines.
There was something ominous and terrifying in the two-toned pastel of the house that morning. Its windows stared at me with blank malevolence, like the half-closed eyes of one stricken dead in mortal sin. The little patches of hoar-frost on the lawn were like leprous spots on some unclean thing. From the trees behind the clearing an owl hooted mournfully, as if to say, ‘Beware, beware!’ and the wind soughing through the black pine boughs echoed the refrain ceaselessly.
Three mounds, sunken and weed-grown, lay in the unkempt thicket behind the corncrib. I paused beside them, throwing off my cap and adjusting my stole hastily. Thumbing the pages to the committal service, I held the book close, that I might see the print through the morning shadows, and commenced: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth. . . .’
Almost beside me, under the branches of the pines, there rose such a chorus of howls and yelps I nearly dropped my book. Like all the hounds in the kennels of hell, the sheep-killers clamored at me, rage and fear and mortal hatred in their eyes. Through the bestial cadences, too, there seemed to run a human note—the sound of voices heard before beneath these very trees. Deep and throaty and raging mad, two of the voices came to me, and, like the tremolo of a violin lightly played in an orchestra of brass, the shriller cry of a third beast sounded.
As the infernal hubbub rose at my back, I half turned to fly. Next instant I grasped my book more firmly and resumed my office; for, like a beacon in the dark, Mildred’s words flashed on my memory: ‘Look back for nothing; heed no sound behind you.’
Strangely, too, the din approached no nearer, but as though held by an invisible bar, stayed at the boundary of the clearing.
‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery . . . deliver us from all our offenses . . . O Lord, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. . . .’ and to such an accompaniment, surely, as no priest ever before chanted the office, I pressed through the brief service to the final amen.
Tiny gouts of moisture stood out on my forehead and my breath struggled in my throat as I gasped out the last word. My nerves were frayed to shreds and my strength nearly gone as I let fall my book and turned upon the beasts among the trees.
They were gone. Abruptly as it had begun, their clamor stopped, and only the rotting pine needles, lightly gilded by the morning sun, met my gaze. A light touch fell in the palm of my open hand, as if a pair of cool, sweet lips had laid a kiss there.
A vapor like swamp-fog enveloped me. The outbuildings, the old, stone-curbed well where I had drunk the night I first saw Mildred, the house itself—all seemed fading into mist and swirling away in the morning breeze.
‘Eh, eh, eh; but M’sieur will do himself an injury, sleeping on the wet earth!’ Old Geronte bent over me, his arm beneath my shoulders. Behind him, great Boris, the mastiff, stood wagging his tail, regarding me with doggish good humor.
‘Pierre,’ I muttered thickly, ‘how came you here?’
‘This morning, going to my tasks, I saw M’sieur run down the road like a thing pursued. I followed quickly, for the woods hold terrors in the dark, M’sieur.’
I looked toward the farmhouse. Only a pair of chimneys, rising stark and bare from a crumbling foundation, were there. Fence, well, barn—all were gone, and in their place was a thicket of sumac and briars, tangled and overgrown as though undisturbed for thirty years.
‘The house, Pierre! Where is the house?’ I croaked, sinking my fingers into his withered arm.
‘’Ouse?’ he echoed. ‘Oh, but of course! There is no ’ouse here, M’sieur; nor has there been for years. This is an evil place, M’sieur, it is best we quit it, and that quickly. There be evil things that run by night——’
‘No more,’ I answered, staggering toward the road, leaning heavily on him. ‘I brought them peace, Pierre.’
He looked dubiously at the English prayer book I held. A Protestant clergyman is a thing of doubtful usefulness to the orthodox French-Canadian. Something of the heart-sick misery in my face must have touched his kind old heart, for at last he relented, shaking his head pityingly and patting my shoulder gently, as one would soothe a sorrowing child.
‘Per’aps, M’sieur,’ he conceded. ‘Per’aps; who shall say no? Love and sorrow are the purchase price of peace. Yes. Did not le bon Dieu so buy the peace of the world?’
Sources
The stories in Night Creatures all saw first
publication in Weird Tales as follows:
‘The Golden Spider’: March 1940
‘The Gentle Werewolf’: July 1940
‘Mortmain’: January 1940
‘Uncanonized’: November 1939
‘The Thing in the Fog’: March 1933
‘Two Shall Be Born’: January 1941
‘Glamour’: December 1939
‘Masked Ball’: May 1947
‘Is the Devil a Gentleman?’: July 1942
‘There Are Such Things’: May 1941
‘The Phantom Farm House’: October 1923
Notes
Introduction
1 Quinn made good use of this material in many of his subsequent horror tales, as well as in a popular series of true crime articles published in Weird Tales between 1923 and 1925, all of which were recently collected as Weird Crimes & Servants of Satan, edited and introduced by Peter Ruber (Shelburne, Ontario: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1998).
2 A six-part serial, The Devil’s Bride, ran in Weird Tales from February to July 1932.
3 ‘Lynne Foster Is Dead!’, Weird Tales, November 1938.
The Gentle Werewolf
1 Lands held by the Crusaders.
Mortmain
1 Gentleman (Russian)
2 No matter (Russian)
3 Nurse
The Phantom Farm House
1 The original title for Quinn’s first piece of fiction in Weird Tales. It appeared in the October 1923 issue of the ‘Unique Magazine’.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The Golden Spider
The Gentle Werewolf
Mortmain
Uncanonized
The Thing in the Fog
Two Shall Be Born
Glamour
Masked Ball
Is the Devil a Gentleman?
There Are Such Things
The Phantom Farm House
Sources
1
2
3