Bolo moved suddenly behind me, and I whirled. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, what he was doing, or going to do. I only know that Eugenia stopped him.
“He knows, my dear.”
She spoke on a weary kind of sigh. It was as though something too heavy to be borne, that had weighed her down for an interminable time, was slipping from her, yet as if its going meant some heavy sort of sorrow too.
“We knew the sands were running out. Is it not so, my love? What is, cannot go on forever. We must trust, if we are to seek help. Also we have promised ourselves that we would never lie to the Government of this land that has sheltered us, and he is its envoy to us.”
Bolo sank back into the chair he had arisen from; a chair made of crate and box parts, unpainted, roughly nailed together. The smile was gone from his face, and his whole manner was different. It was as if a clown had laid aside his motley.
Eugenia Bolo rose from her chair and stood before me, and she held out her hand to me.
“Will you accompany me?” she said. “I will speak with you alone. I will show you the virgin forest, and what lies beyond. I will take you through the Cathedral Forest.”
* * * *
I think it came to me in that moment, that I was in danger. I little knew just what kind. These two could talk without words, however, and Bolo had certainly made me feel that he could act with violence. I was sure I was right about Eugenia. She was the lost queen. But—I think I believed she might be, perhaps, a little mad. I didn’t care to go farther into the deep woods with her, and the way she spoke of them was what made me wonder about her sanity then.
That, and the things she had done to her face. I couldn’t believe a sane woman would have done them. There would have been some better way to be safe, or reasonably safe; and anyway, any woman I had ever known would have preferred death to such disfigurement. That it was voluntary, that disfigurement, I felt sure.
The sun was setting, and level, slanting golden and red rays filtered through Eugenia’s “virgin forest.” As the light failed and faded and blue dusk took over, I wondered how far we were going. It seemed a long way, and a senseless thing to do. After a while Eugenia took from a deep pocket in her dress a small sized dark lantern which cast so strong and yet so softly diffused a ray before us, that I had to comment on it.
“Yes,” she said, “You had to see it with your own eyes, to believe what I am going to tell you—Ahmed and I. He is not really a Malay, you know, but an Arab. An Arabian scientist. I had to take you on this walk—for two reasons. You will find it hard to believe what we will tell you; but after you have seen—”
Her voice trailed off, and we walked again in silence. The darkness was deep, now, and the light of her lantern beam illuminated the trees and shrubs, the tracery of branches and all about us in a most incredible way.
It wasn’t only that it was clear and bright. Overhead moonlight struggled intermittently down through the branches, and the golden ray from the lantern made you not notice it, or miss it when the heavy forest growth shut it off and you walked through a close roofed tunnel of heavy leafed branches.
No, it wasn’t that. I was seeing things—or almost. As though something about that light hypnotized me. I lost my uneasy feeling, though, because what I saw was all lovely. I didn’t put it in my official report that I watched new buds appear and break into bloom as we approached, where at first there were only green branches; that a dead and lifeless shrub which at first held up tortured, twisted boughs, swathed itself in a tender green verdure, the color of the first shoots of early spring. Or that twice I saw small winged things flying through the air which I knew were not birds or insects. They were about the size of humming birds, perhaps; but they trailed cobwebby gauze about them that looked like tiny, flowing garments studded with stardust; and I had a swift, vanishing impression of smiling eyes and mouths set in lovely, exquisite, little-faces.
Yet what I have just set down is true, even if it did not go into my report.
Suddenly Eugenia snapped off the light, and the night closed down on us, and the woods were changed.
“You have to see both sides of this,” she whispered. “Have you matches? I need a light. Not the lantern, another kind of light.”
I had my cigarette lighter, and I snapped it on. I had nothing to say, I felt let down and flat. I, Miles Conant, was no longer in fairyland. The dark—and something that closed down with it—had changed all that; but I had been through something I did not know about. I had been in fairyland, and I had been at home there, and now I was lonely and lost, and already ashamed of myself. How did the fakirs of India do it—the blooming shrubs out of bare branches, and all that? Hypnotism, that was it. I had been hypnotized, and by a madwoman, very likely, at that.
She took my lighter from me, and led me a step or two from the trail and held it so the puny flame lit up a part of the trunk of one of the tall trees.
“Look!” she said.
The word wasn’t necessary. There was an ugly carving on the tree, a double carving.
Underneath, a cross—reversed. The long part uppermost, I mean. That’s an age-old symbol of devil worship. And above that, there was in bas-relief the partly formed image of an ugly head. A long head with narrow eyes and cruel, back-drawn lips, and a forehead that sloped upward in two bulges: the little light, shining upward at this thing, elongated what were just the beginnings of horns.
It was a face I was never going to forget.
“Who—did that?” I managed, some double sense of sacrilege on me because of the crazy things I had been imagining about unearthly beauties and simple little miracles and the presence of tiny good elves.
“I could show you many,” the woman beside me said, speaking low. “And I can tell you why they are put here. It is to frighten me, to frighten me out of my wits—perhaps out of my life.”
“But who would—who, as a matter of fact, would know that you walk through these woods?” I said, trying to keep things half way sane. As I said it, a rather awful thought struck me, too. One I couldn’t say to her out loud. But there it was. Nobody on earth, it seemed, came here. There were no visitors. There were only this man and this woman. And if anyone did ugly little carvings on trees to drive the woman out of her mind, I thought it would have to be the man.
Maybe they were neither husband and wife, nor a lady and her servant. Maybe they were prisoner and jailer. Or—
Maybe—just a mad woman and her keeper. Maybe, it was that. She could still be the banished queen; no doubt the poor lady had had enough to make her lose her mind. In that case; perhaps she carved them herself.
I was forgetting the things I had been seeing myself, my own temporary insanity, if you like. Or maybe you can be hypnotized by a mad person as well as a sane one, and I rationalized it that way. I don’t remember exactly how I figured that part of it out, because in just a moment something happened that drove it out of my mind.
We turned back toward the shack, and I closed the lighter down. There was really enough direct and indirect moonlight when you got used to depending on it, and we walked quietly back Indian style, she leading the way.
Suddenly she stopped, dead in her tracks, and in a moment I knew why.
A kind of black shadow seemed pouring along the path, coming from behind us. It was exactly as if a ray of darkness were deluminating that pathway, if you know what I mean. The moonlight still fell brokenly from the sky through the branches, but it was darkened. You could make out the trees and leaves and things as well as before, but the darkness seemed rolling over them—a clear darkness that let you see things in an ugly, murky light.
And ahead of us in that murky light a tall figure standing suddenly directly in our way. A tall figure of a man with a long narrow head, a high forehead branching into two hornlike elevations. Eyes that you didn’t want—didn’t wan
t to see—
The golden light flashed out again, but it was dimmer now, neither very clear nor very strong, and it showed the trees and shrubs and once some sort of night bird flying. It showed us the way back to the shack, and it showed me that the figure of the man must have been all illusion, for there was nothing there. We walked right through the place where we had seen it.
We walked all the way to the shack, and we climbed the rickety back steps as earlier we had the shaking front ones, and Juan Bolo—or Ahmed—stood waiting for us.
The woman threw herself into his arms. It was the first time I had seen them behave exactly like equals.
She said: “Ahmed—he has come. He, himself!”
The dark man—he was not so little now; he seemed to stand taller, and his whole face looked differently because of some change in expression—patted her on the back. He didn’t know what she had told me about him, so he had one more try at the Malay, and at that horrible tittering laugh. (It was the last time I was to hear it.)
“My wife—” he said to me, “she is very superstitious. No?”
I sat down rather suddenly.
“I don’t know!” I muttered. “I don’t know what to think. I want to talk to you again—Mr. Bolo. But not here. I’d like to get back into the city. I would be glad to have you two come in with me. These woods seem to me a lonely place—maybe dangerous. Yet you leave your wife here alone through the daytime—”
Eugenia interrupted me, her head high. “Sometimes at night,” she said. “I assure you, I am not unarmed. I have—an arsenal!”
It didn’t reassure me. An arsenal in a lonely shack in a place where even I had gone a little mad was not what I wanted. I wanted city streets, traffic, people walking along the sidewalks.
“I have some business yet tonight, anyway,” I said, and it sounded pretty lame.
“You—your wife seemed to think I might be of help to you, and God knows I’m willing. But if you aren’t coming in with me, I must be going, myself. We’ll go into whatever there is—say tomorrow. I’ll call on you at your lab, Bolo.”
“You take my car,” he said quietly. “Tonight I will not leave my wife.”
It seemed fair enough. He gave me some keys—one was the key to the padlocked gate.
“You can give me that, tomorrow—if all goes well,” he said.
I saw them standing together on the little porch, the light streaming from the windows behind them. A dimmish light from the oil lamps that were all they had out there. Somehow I had a vision of beauty—briefly. Not the crazy kind I’d had in the wood, something I could understand better. Bolo’s—Ahmed’s arms were around her in a gesture of love and protection that was eloquent. I could feel their love, just as plainly as I could hear the call of an early cricket and see the glimmer of a late-summer firefly.
Then I looked ahead to my driving. It was only a little way to the gate, and only a few moments more till I had negotiated the awkward business of doing my duty by it—locking and unlocking and getting back to climb into the car again.
I didn’t make that part of it. The most beautiful display of the whole evening was the set of sky-rockets that burst before my eyes as some blunt, heavy object came down on the back of my head.
When I awoke I could feel the earth rocking with me, and I felt as though an abyss was likely to open and swallow me up. My head was splitting and it seemed the lesion must be macrocosmic—a sundering of the universe itself. My unsteady and unfocused gaze fell on the moon riding high in the sky. It was gibbous and waning, and I knew the night was far advanced. So I had been out, cold, for a good many hours.
I moved a little, and tried to raise my head. My muscles welcomed the relief of a shift in position, but my head rebelled, and my dizzy eyes closed, fast. I was lying on the hard floor boards of the back porch of the Bolo house—the side farthest from the road. But the boards felt all right compared with the pain of moving my head.
My next venture was more successful. It consisted of getting my hands up to my head. At that, it wasn’t too easy, because my wrists were tied pretty tightly together. So were my ankles. I was trussed, like a fowl for market, in fact, and being able to lay sympathetic and inquiring fingers in a gingerly fashion against my face and the side of my head did little to reassure me. For I felt a warm, sticky wetness on my hands, and then I was compelled to open my eyes—they were steadier and clearer now—and to look at my hands as I lowered them awkwardly again. And they were the color I knew they would be. They were red.
Head wounds bleed freely, and I had seen blood before. I wasn’t so worried about my physical condition. But no kind of training can steel you against the kind of terror I felt. Because of the way I was tied, like an animal—or say a man—about to be slaughtered. Yet—whoever had knocked me down and battered the side of my head could easily have finished me off at the same time. Right there on the dark road I could have been murdered, and carted away for disposal more easily dead than alive.
Therein lay the only element of hope.
This thought hit me like a shot of adrenalin, and I managed to sit up. It isn’t easy with your hands tied, and doing it made me feel fairly certain that I had no concussion.
So now I could see my companions in this rustic little pavilion where I had seemed to be a welcome, although uninvited guest.
I had expected to see Juan and his caricature of a wife, but not the others. Four people sat on handmade chairs and upended boxes, watching me. Two men, and two women. Not any of them were prepossessing.
I have described Juan and Eugenia—the newcomers were more ordinary types. You could find their prototypes on a hundred isolated farms in any state, I suppose, although both of them looked foreign also. Peasant-type, I think you’d call them. And, as sometimes happens, the man was considerably slighter than the woman.
He made up for his less uncouth frame by having a weasel-like, ill-featured narrow face lit by sharp, rodent eyes. And the unprepossessing quality of that face of his was in turn compensated by its obvious keenness, shrewdness, and intelligence. He didn’t look like a man who had been taught or schooled much in any way. It was an earthy, native shrewdness that looked out of his eyes and stamped his narrow features.
The woman’s face was stupidly brutal. A heavy ignorance lay heavy on it like a cloud. Her eyes were dark and sullen, and her movements slow. But her squat, broad body would have, I thought, the strength of an ox.
Yet it was the woman who spoke.
“You screamed once,” she said heavily. “We have the place beyond the wood. We know bad things of this couple and we started running, although I run not fast.”
The man with the weasel face took it from there.
“They had dragged you here, Mister, and tied you like that. They have prevented our doing anything for you, because they carry guns. My wife picked up a cleaver we use in butchering a few hogs which we raise, but we have no other weapons. We are ordinary plain people, and farmers, and have not wanted dealings with this man and woman.”
Naturally, I looked to Juan, and to his wife. I had not thought badly of them; as I left them I had seen in them something I thought was rare and beautiful.
I looked at them, where they sat side by side in the shadow. And they did not speak at all, and it was true that Juan held across his knees a very efficient looking rifle.
So I thought I’d make the woman talk, Eugenia—She had been the spokesman for them both; she had to say something for herself now. At least she had to explain.
“Mrs.—” I began, and I saw her lean toward me with the easy grace that was hers.
But the woman from the farm beyond the wood cried out sharply and roughly, and cut her off.
“Do not speak to her and do not listen. The woman is a witch!” was what she said.
Well! I had not been prepared for that.
I became aware of cross currents of passionate feeling in the room. Some of them were my own. I was bewildered, shocked. I had been near to “going all out” for this strange couple in their hideaway in the deep woods.
Now I was nauseated, weak and ill, and in these last few moments feeling myself grow worse rather than better. There was the necessity for a decision, and I wasn’t up to it. Some of these people were responsible for the blow that might have killed me, and probably was intended to do exactly that. Since Eugenia and Bolo were armed, and these others were accusing them, appearances indicated that Bolo and Eugenia were not a mysterious, glamorous pair of outcasts, but that they were criminals.
But that crack about Eugenia being a witch was too much for me, and it was natural for me to line up against anyone who made a crazy accusation like that.
The ferret-faced farmer may have read my thoughts in my face.
“Mister—” he began again, speaking easily and suavely, “my wife, she believes in the witchcraft. You, I can see, do not. Only those who come from the isolated, backward countries hold such a belief in these times.
“But perhaps there is another way of saying what my wife has tried to tell you. This woman whose husband has tried to kill you, sir, is of those who can create strange fancies in the mind. Even in America, that is known, is it not? Once I attended a playhouse where illusions were created on the stage. They were only meant to amuse—but I have heard of cases where such things are done for harm. There was an old mansion set in wide fields in Pennsylvania, where I once was, which was believed to be haunted. Actually, a woman who lived there all alone was driven mad.
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