Fingers of Fear

by J. U. Nicolson

  “Now you shall hear the rest of it!”

  She leered at me. Her voice was no longer deep and commanding. It had risen almost to shrieking pitch, changed not less than her appearance was changed. She was not a young woman now, but an aging Thing withered by excess and writhen by the torment of quenchless and rioting lust. She had refused to come into my arms, for that would have meant surrender; but she came closer to me. All the while she was speaking she came steadily closer to me and closer, until I felt her hot fierce breath over my face, turning me sick as if it had been the breath of a beast, and at the same time maddening me. And I awaited contact with her, utterly unable to avoid her steady and stealthy approach.

  “Now you shall hear the rest of it! Yes! He tore out her throat with his teeth. And he sucked her blood. And he gnawed the flesh of her throat. Meat! He was mad! I tell you that he was mad! But he knew well enough what he did. He knew what he wanted. He broke into Barbara’s room and flung his body upon hers. My brother heard and ran there. I followed. Ormond was twenty, then, and I was sixteen. My father turned on us and knocked my brother down with a blow of his fist. I was afraid and I stood there, cowering against the wall and unable to do anything. He threw Barbara back again onto the bed. She screamed. God, how she screamed! I saw him hurl himself on her and tear at her throat. I saw him bite into it. I saw him throw his head this way and that way, tearing it. The red meat! I saw the blood spurt from between his teeth and lips and from her neck. She fell down under him. But Ormond got up and dragged my father away. And when my father turned on him again, Ormond hit him with a chair and knocked him down. Then he pulled a revolver and shot him. Twice. I saw where the bullet hit him first, in the forehead. It was all white skin, then the red blood was coming out of it, down into his eyes, and all over his face and into his open mouth. He fell forward. I saw it. I watched him falling. I saw him catch breath, then, and then he struggled to get up. He slumped down and lay still. Just one finger moved. It was a finger of his left hand and it moved, and it kept crooking itself. I don’t know how long it moved. But it kept crooking itself. It was beckoning us—Ormond and me—to come to him . . . I saw all that. I see it . . . now!”

  During this recital her voice had once more fallen to its usual low register, and the last words came from far down, with a tearing quality about them, as if they had been ripped and wrenched alive from living tissue. For the moment her eyes had gone dull and opaque. Now her knees doubled beneath her, and she sank slowly downwards and remained kneeling on the floor. To my shame be it said that I did not at once offer her my aid. I was standing, looking upon her as I might have looked upon some hurt and unreasoning animal. And I allowed her to remain kneeling there on the ground before me. It was only after what seemed to have been a very long time that I put forth a hand to help her to her feet.

  “I’m all right,” she said, still speaking in that harsh, tearing tone. “Let me alone. You don’t know why I’ve told you this? Listen!”

  She held up one hand for silence. The storm roared over the house and beat against its walls and windows with a fury which threatened to throw them down. Yet from far away, rising above the howls of the wind and rain, came the cry of the savage dogs.

  “The dogs! Yes! They’re my dogs! We buried them—my father and my mother. We never reported the killings. We gave out that they’d sailed suddenly for England. My brother has friends there. He forged papers and bought other forgeries. It was told about that they’d both died . . . of influenza. No one questioned it. No one’s ever suspected. But the servants—they know. Barbara knows. I know. And Agnes knows that something’s here . . . something that won’t die . . . in this house. Now you can see why it’s full of ghosts.”

  Yes, I could understand that now. How should the house have failed to be full of bitter and grisly ghosts that would not die and be buried so long as these Ormses lived? But I did not so readily understand why she had told all this to me, a stranger to herself, comparatively, and certainly not an intimate even of her brother. She had this morning informed me that of late she had been afraid. Looking upon her now, recalling how she had so recently stood before me, showing forth her soul shamelessly naked in the fierce passions of madness, I could very well believe that in her saner moments she was in truth afraid of the Ormesby ghosts. Once more she read my inmost thought. She spoke again, and now I was to learn the meaning of it.

  “I’ve told you,” she said, rising swiftly to her feet and glaring again into my fascinated eyes, “because, whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, you’ve become a part of all this. You’ve seen something of the Things that won’t die and be buried, here. You’re a part of it, now. Everyone who ever has come here has become a part of it. I know that you were hired and brought here for a purpose of my brother. Perhaps I know more about that purpose than you think I do.” Her eyes flashed with a cunning leer. “Maybe, even, I know more than he himself does. What of all that? I know well enough that you’ll never write any such book.”

  She crept closer to me, and her eyes blazed at me, and her mouth leered.

  “You’re in love with me! You fool! Do you think I don’t know that? They’re all fools here, except me. But I’m not so great a fool as not to know that you’re caught. I saw you looking at me last night. I knew the moment you arrived—yes, before you got out of Ormond’s car, that you—oh, I know you, Selden Seaverns! I know you, and I’m— So you can’t leave Ormesby! The dogs out there won’t let you. The ghosts won’t let you go. And I—I won’t let you go . . . now that you’ve come to me . . . at last! You’re mine! Now I want to kiss you!”

  I said nothing. I drew back, seeking to avoid her steady approach. She came on, not swiftly, but without pause. Something behind me, a chair, perhaps, interfered with my retreat. I endeavored to move sidewise. And then she sprang upon me. It was not the spring of a human creature. She stooped, snarled, then leaped at my throat as a wolf might have leaped!

  Her open mouth sought my throat! Even now I see the red tongue darted between the bared white fangs of that slavering mouth! Her head drove swiftly forward to reach the flesh of my neck and tear it . . .

  I remember flinging her hands from my shoulders. I remember hurling her heavily off me and down onto the floor. Then I turned and ran blindly out into the passage and somehow up the stairs. I reached my own room and locked the door behind me. And while I leaned against it, panting hard and seeing the world outside as a vast sheet of rain through which leaped and twisted the fire of constant lightning, I heard a woman laughing somewhere down on that lower floor, a wild maniacal laughter that tore at my soul like fangs.

  And from very far away, as if in answer and as if in obedience to that unholy mirth, rose again the nearing cry of the pack.

  VI

  From the manner in which I have set it down, I think it likely that I shall be thought to have fled from the library and Gray’s presence there because of some physical fear that drove me. This, however, was not the case. Why should I, a man in the prime of life, without bodily weakness or disability of any kind, have been afraid of what a madwoman might do? No, it was not that. But I freely confess that the insanity within her horrified me and sent me flying to the security of my own room as from something far more terrible than danger. The woman was a wolf! There was that about the lust of her which wanted blood. I had sensed it and I had seen it in her blazing eyes. Besides, she was daughter of a man-wolf, as she had herself confessed, and she had seen her father kill in the terrible fashion of his kind.

  But over and above all this, stunning me and making it necessary that I be alone for leisure to adjust my hurt emotions, was knowledge that I had loved this girl. I had not thought, during the day, that the thing went so deep in me. One never knows such a thing until it is too late. I had loved her and, as I stood leaning against my bedroom door, panting, and striving to collect my faculties, I somehow knew that I had not lost
all feeling for her merely because I had seen that I could never indulge it. Pity came slowly to me now, driving out loathing. If she was mad, yet she was not always mad. How horrible it must be for her, since I could not believe that, in her sane intervals, she would not remember the deeds of her frenzy. Yet the wild laughter that I had heard told me that she might never again be sane.

  Getting a grip on myself, I opened the door and stepped out into the lighted hallway. She might do herself an injury, or she might rush out to her death somewhere in the storm. I listened, but heard nothing. Not a sound rose from below stairs. Surely some of the others in the house had heard that peal of laughter, yet the house, save as it creaked and groaned under assault of the elements, was as silent as the tomb. I wondered whether she had climbed the stairs to her own room, which Ormes had told me was on the third floor. A desire to know came over me. I would go up there and listen and thus learn about it. If I heard her moving within the room, then I could come back to my own room with a quieter mind.

  Carefully I passed Agnes’s door and tiptoed up the stairs, cursing every creak and certain that my presence must be detected, though under cover of the storm it is not likely that any listener could have heard me. And I gained the top of the stairs without accident. No lamp burned there, though it was the custom of the family to leave one always burning on the floor below. Facing toward the rear of the hallway, my own room and that of Ormond Ormes would be on the right. Instinctively, then, I turned toward a door opening into a room just over his, supposing that his sister occupied it. I was not mistaken. The panel stood ajar. By means of the lightning flashes, which were nearly continuous, I could see well into the room, and though it was beyond doubt a woman’s bedroom, it appeared to be quite empty of human presence. I pressed the door yet farther open, so that I could insert my head and the upper portion of my body. The bed had not been disturbed. No one was there. It was yet not later than ten-thirty, the time of my appointment with Gray. But that meeting had already become a thing of the past. I could not remain there. No one, save Gray, would have forgiven me for being there, had I been seen. Not even the excuse I had of wanting to investigate the madwoman’s laughter would have been sufficient, or so I thought.

  Slowly descending the stairs, I came again in front of Agnes’s door. Was she awake? It seemed preposterous that she had not heard the peal of furious laughter, even above the storm, and that, having heard it, she could be so indifferent to the fate of the laugher as to remain quietly in her bed beyond this door. Listening intently, I fancied that I heard sobbing. It might have been the wind. No, for I caught the sound again. There was no mistaking it this time. A woman wept in there, loudly and unrestrainedly, though not as one weeps who is in need of a stranger’s comforting. It was rather the forlorn and dismal wailing of one who bemoaned her miserable lot, of one who cried in pity of her own small woes. I felt my lips curl in contempt of the shallow creature as I left her door and took my way down the last flight of stairs.

  Everything was in darkness down there, as it had been when I quitted the library. The storm’s fury had suddenly abated, and though the lightning still played on the hills, the flashes came from a greater distance now and they were no longer so frequent. I stood in the lower hallway for some seconds, hearing nothing of consequence. Then I began to grope my way toward the library. I did not want to switch on lamps. If the madwoman were a-prowl down there, I did not want to see her until I had first become otherwise apprised of her presence. But there was no sound to indicate that anyone was near. In the library at last I could hear nothing at all. I stood by the door, fumbling for the lamp which I had been previously forbidden to light. No such coldly gentle hand closed over mine, this time. I pulled the cord.

  The room was empty. I walked softly into it, looking carefully into all the shadows and beyond the corners of the great fireplace. No one was there. Wherever Gray Ormes had gone, whether out into the storm or to some room not yet visited by me, she had probably quitted the library soon after that peal of her insane laughter had chilled my veins with terror. I retraced my steps toward the opening. Suddenly I trod on something and was down, sprawling on hands and knees. I searched for the object which had caused my ankle to turn. It was a woman’s slipper. Gray’s? No doubt it was. And then a second later I saw her crumpled silken robe, lying where she had dropped it from her shoulders. All this did not greatly surprise or astonish me. It is a common vagary of madness to strip the body naked. But this evidence, added to what I had seen and heard, left within me no doubt that Gray must be found and captured before doing herself or another some injury. I had crossed the building along the passage, entered and left the dining room, and was in the short hallway at the front, from which rose the stairs. Then I heard voices outside, and knew that someone was approaching the door. In a second I darted back through the door to the dining room, standing there concealed in the darkness, but with the door held partly open. Then the front door opened and two persons entered, shutting the door swiftly behind them.

  “You’re wet through,” said a man’s voice—Hobbs’s. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No.”

  I knew that the muffled word had proceeded from a woman’s lips, but I had not been able to recognize the voice. Yet it could only have been either Gray Ormes or Barbara Ormes. Agnes lay weeping in her room. And Hobbs’s wife would not have left him there and proceeded to mount the front stairs, as this woman was now doing. I drew back behind the door, knowing that the man must be upon me in the next second. I heard him snap the switch governing the lamp in the hallway. Then the front door opened and closed again. Had he gone again into the rain? Looking round the edge of the door, I saw that the passage was quite empty.

  In an instant I was climbing the stairs after the mounting woman. Was it Gray? That question drove me to a speed sufficient to overtake her before she had reached the top of her climb. I said nothing, but she heard my footsteps behind her and halted. In the vague light from the lamp on the landing below I could just make her out. She was covered with a long coat of some dark material, and as Hobbs had said, it was wet through, for water dripped loudly from it onto the uncarpeted portion of one of the steps.

  “Who’s there?”

  It was Gray’s voice. She had not rushed naked into the storm, then. But how had Hobbs known of her absence? And how could she have visited her room, dressed in the heavy garments she was now wearing, then left the house while I stood against the door of my own chamber, struggling to regain composure after the shock of seeing her madness in the library?

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I said, lamely.

  “What did you want? But I really haven’t time now. Tomorrow. I’m wet to the skin, I must go and change. It was the dogs. I had to pen them.”

  “I was afraid . . .” I began and paused. How could I say anything of what she had so recently been to this woman who now seemed sane enough?

  “Of what? Isn’t everything all right?”

  “Yes . . . yes, I guess so. I——”

  “Then you’d better turn in. And I really must get out of these wet things.”

  “Yes,” said I.

  She turned from me, then back again.

  “Good night,” she said, gently. “I’m really very sorry. Please forgive me. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” I said again. “Good night—Gray.”

  She was gone. I descended a few steps to the level of my own apartment and took my way along the hall toward it, my brain whirling again with the mystery of the woman’s movements. I could not understand how she could so swiftly have regained control of herself, and I was beginning to think that it might not have been madness that had made her a vile thing before me in the library. What if, after all, she was not mad, but vicious?

  So pondering, I opened my door and entered the room. Then I paused again. I remembered having left my door ajar, pur
posely, so that, in case of need, I could retreat into it swiftly and noiselessly. And I remembered having left my light burning. But the door had been fast shut and the single light had been turned off. The room, as I entered it, was in total darkness. Someone had been in there during my absence. I lighted the lamp again and stood beside it, listening and trying to decide on a course of action. I might have latched the door, or the currents of air in the rooms and passages, consequent upon the gale outside, might have sucked it shut. But I did not think so. Certainly I could not have been mistaken about the lamp, nor could that have turned out of itself. I concluded that whoever the visitor had been, it must have been the person who had been there last night and whose lips had lain against my throat.

  There seemed nothing to be gained by leaving the apartment and going again a-prowl. I would undress and lie in bed, waiting for something to happen. I wondered whether I should be able to lie still in bed without falling asleep. I thought that I really needed a night’s sound rest in order to clear my brain and allow me to see better, tomorrow, what I ought to do. For after Gray’s revelation I had no wish to continue the pretense of making a search into the origins of New England literature, whether they might be Elizabethan or any other.

  I had removed my shoes, my scarf and collar, and my shirt. Then it occurred to me that the nocturnal visitor might very well return. I did not wish to awaken in the morning with evidence of another unexplained kiss upon my throat. And if I undressed I doubted my ability to keep awake. Better to sit, fully dressed, in one of the comfortable chairs there. Then, if sleep did overcome me, at least it would not be sleep of a very sound quality. Moreover—and this had been taking shape in my brain, though not more than half consciously, during the past hour—Gray’s tale of her father’s mode of killing his wife and of his attempt against his sister Barbara had been so like the old legends of vampires, of which I had read many in my youth, that the kiss now carried a new and terrible implication. Had it been a woman, after all, who had kissed my throat? Or had it been Gray’s father . . . the male vampire . . . the werewolf . . . the Undead . . . ?