by Jack Mann
Maker of Shadows
MAKER OF
SHADOWS
by
Jack Mann
Ramble house
To
HARRY STEPHEN KEELER
Because he turned the craft of mystery-writing into an art
July 4th, 1938 J.M.
©1938 by Jack Mann
Published: Ramble House 2011
Cover Art: Gavin L. O’Keefe
Interior Art: Virgil Finlay
Preparation: Fender Tucker
CHAPTER I
shadows surround us
It was noon, but the twisting road that led beyond the Clyde was greasy with an almost impenetrable mist. The big gray Rolls-Bentley poked its way northward into the Highlands at a snail’s uncertain, dragging pace. Its unwonted slowness seemed to match the instinctive reluctance of its driver to proceed.
Gees — his real name was Gregory George Gordon Green — could almost feel a danger in the gloomy air that thickened as he drove, as if wishing to bar his way. He regarded the winding, bumpy road with distaste, and struggled manfully to overcome a keen desire to turn back.
He shifted his position at the wheel, and as he did, the letter in the side-pocket of his well-cut tweeds crackled almost pleadingly.
It was written in a delicate, well-bred hand; and its tone was one of courtesy and gentleness, but it spoke in accents of carefully repressed fear. It was signed, Margaret Aylener; and contained a simple request that Gees visit her at The Rowans. She had enclosed the two guineas that was Gees’ customary charge for an initial consultation, but she had neither made any inquiry as to the fees for his services nor hinted at what she wanted him to do for her.
The whole thing was tantalizingly mysterious, more for what it hinted than for the usual details it omitted; and Gees, with the clammy moistness of the fog thick on his tongue, discovered that the curiosity he had felt on first reading of the Aylener woman’s note had now returned to shove his vague uneasiness out of the driver’s seat.
May was half over. Behind him in England were blossoming chestnuts and hawthorns. But here, when the fog parted for a moment, only sullen, peaty desolation met his eye. Even the breeze was harsh and unfriendly.
The confidential agency — nobody had ever defined a limit as to what that term might cover, Gees least of all — which he had set up two or three years ago had kept him reasonably busy and moderately prosperous. The haphazard way in which it was run permitted him to pick only the cases that definitely intrigued his fancy.
Just as he was considering how entertaining his life had been since he had started on this harebrained career, the figure of a shepherd loomed up before him on the road. Gees braked sharply and stuck his long, homely face out the side-window.
“I want to get to Brachmornalachan,” he said.
“Aye,” said the shepherd.
“Could you tell me the road?”
“Aye,” said the shepherd, again.
“Well then, would you please?”
“Aye,” said the shepherd. “Tak’ the second on the left and you’ll come to a fork o’ three ways. Tak’ the middle and ye’ll come to Brachmornalachan. It’s aboot nine mile.”
Gees thanked him dazedly, and drove on. The directions were less hazy than they sounded, and Gees found the middle fork without difficulty. He paused a moment, drew a deep breath, then tramped down hard on the gas and sent the big car shooting down the road.
He found the puddled town with the unpronounceable name, got his directions for The Rowans, and soon he saw, set some fifty yards or more back from the bumpy track, an old granite house, two-storied, and a mansion by comparison with all else in the neighborhood. A low stone wall took in an acre or so of the peaty plain about this dwelling, and some twenty yards distant from the frontage, from each side, and from the back of the house, reared up a noble mountain ash, just coming into flower.
All the deeply-sunken windows that showed were lace-curtained, and, gray and old though it was, the house looked cheerful. A gate in the stone wall stood open, and beyond it a well-kept drive of fine granite chips contrasted with the badly-kept track by which Gees had approached.
He turned in, and found width enough to draw up abreast the front door, which, he saw, was composed of two wide planks of great age, bound together by a pair of great hinges of iron scrollwork. Beside it he saw as he got out from the car, a black chain confined by two eyelets hung down, terminating in an iron handle, and a pull at this set a bell clanging somewhere inside until the noise was abruptly stilled, as if somebody had grasped the tongue of the bell.
Then the door swung open slowly, heavily, silently, and a woman looked out.
She lacked only an inch or so of Gees’ own height, and he was just over six feet. She might have been forty, or sixty. High cheekboned, freckle-faced, hard-mouthed, and with deep-blue, glassy eyes, she surveyed him with as little interest as the shepherd on the road. A big-boned, long-armed, strong woman, she waited for him to speak. “Miss Aylener?”
“Aye, she’s expectin’ ye,” the woman said. “And the luggage?” She glanced past him at the car before the door.
“I’ll get it.” The woman took it from him when he had fetched it and her way of handling it suggested that the weight was nothing to her. “And is this all?” she asked.
“It is,” he answered.
“Then ye’d better come in,” she told him. “Ye can put the wee car away after ye’ve seen Miss Margaret, mayhap.”
Still carrying his case, she took his hat and raincoat and opened a door on the right of the wide hallway, and, without having asked his name, announced him.
“Mr. Green, Miss Margaret.”
He saw a big room, with two windows giving on to the front of the house, and another on the side. He saw a glowing peat fire on a wide hearth, and had an impression that the room was beautifully furnished.
Facing him as if just risen from one of the armchairs by the fire, stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
She was of middle height; slenderly, regally proportioned, with dainty hands and finely-moulded feet and ankles. Her face was perfectly-modeled, her eyes of the softest, most liquid deep blue, and the slight smile that parted her lips revealed even, perfect little teeth.
Her snow-white hair waved softly over her head and if any art went to the making of her perfect, rose-tinged white skin, it was imperceptible.
Sixty years of age, Gees would have said at that first sight of her. Later, he came to know that he had underestimated by nearly ten years, and then, knowing more of the soul of her, knew that he had underestimated her beauty fully as much as her age.
“I am glad to see you, Mr. Green.” She held out her hand. “But you will be very tired after the long drive. Elizabeth shall show you your room, and we can talk after you have rested awhile.” She pressed a bell push beside the fireplace. “Callum — my manservant — has gone to get the necessaries that a guest involves, but Elizabeth” — she broke off as the door opened — “Elizabeth, show Mr. Green where to put his car, please.”
“Aye, madam,” said Elizabeth.
At the back of the house, she opened for him the double doors of an old stable from which the stalls had been removed. Obeying her gesture, he drew the car over to right of the entrance, leaving room for another beside it. Oil and petrol cans showed that the stable was already in use as a garage.
“And now, your room,” said Elizabeth after they had re-entered the house. “I’ve taken the bag there.”
After only a momentary hesitation he followed her. The stair-carpeting, old and faded though it appeared, was of heavy, costly pile, and the stone floor of the corridor to which he ascended was equally well carpeted. Elizabeth opened a door as massive as that in the
front entrance, and revealed a large room, in which Gees saw a canopied double bed and heavy, old-fashioned furniture.
The woman pointed to a door in one corner. “Yon’s the bath,” she said, “and ye’ll know the way doun.” And, with that, she left him to himself.
As nearly as he could tell, the house faced east, and this room was at the southeast corner, with windows on opposite sides. Through either window he could see a mountain ash, though but dimly, because of the thickened reek that drove visibly from the west.
The silence was absolute, almost malignant. And the reek outside appeared to pass in waves, as if it carried shadows in its impalpable, driving mass.
Yes, that was it. Shadows, passing with the mist that made the trees appear unreal. Shadows, following each other from the west.
He went down the carpeted stairway, and back to the room in which he had left Margaret Aylener. She pointed him to an armchair beside the fire and seated herself across from him. Through the window behind her he could see another of the four rowans, but the dusk and driving mist made it little more than a ghost tree.
“You are wondering,” Margaret Aylener said with a slight smile, “what an old woman like me can want of a man like you, in a place like this.”
“Not quite,” and he too smiled. “Questioning, say, why you live in such a place as this. Its remoteness, I mean.”
“I might question why you live in London,” she countered.
“That’s true.”
She paused. “Will you tell me — you call yourself a confidential agent. What is that exactly?”
“For a time, until my father objected too much over it, I ran an advertisement in the personal columns of newspapers,” he answered. “The chief line of it was — ‘Consult Gees for anything from mumps to murder.’ You may take that literally as answer to your question, Miss Aylener.”
“That is, from medicine to crime,” she suggested. “Taking in every other form of anti-social activity by the way, I suppose?”
“Pretty much,” he assented. “Your letter interested me so much that I drove here without writing to ask what is your particular need. Now I am here I’m not sorry, though I nearly was, back on the road.”
She gave him a look of awakened interest. “Could you tell me how long ago?” she asked. “The time at which you felt that?”
“About three o’clock,” he answered. “Or just before three — a few minutes before.”
“Yes.” She brooded over it, grave-eyed and still.
“And now — what do you want of me?” he asked.
She smiled again. “I am — forgive me for not answering directly — I am trying to sense you,” she said. “To — to value you, estimate you, say. Whether, now you are here, to ask you how much I must pay you for the mere journey from London, or — you see, Mr. Green, you are altogether different from what I imagined you. And I don’t know — ”
She broke off, no longer smiling, but with trouble clouding her lovely eyes.
“What I want done is so indefinite. Outside all normal beliefs. Mr. Green, my man Callum — I want you to talk to him. He and Elizabeth have been with me here a very long time, and this — my reason for writing to you, involves a far longer time. Goes almost out of Time, I might say. Callum has great knowledge, strange knowledge. Whether you are capable of believing — ” Again she broke off, thoughtfully.
“Most things,” he ended for her. “I have learned, especially since I established my agency, not to disbelieve — most things. I wonder — I want you to tell me something, Miss Aylener.”
“And that is — ?” She gazed full at him as she put the question.
“Looking past you, through the window behind you — it’s nearly dark now, so the illusion I get is not so strong. But I got it from the window of my room. As if there were an intermittent darkening of the mist outside, not so much thickening as darkening — shadows. As if, in the mist, shadows are passing, one after another. Is it an illusion?”
Yet again she smiled.
“Your question answers mine, Mr. Green,” she said. “It completes my estimate, and I know now I was right to send for you. But I think, if I could answer your question fully, you would not be here to ask it.”
CHAPTER II
the servant of shadows
Four candle-stemmed electric bulbs on the dining table left the upper part of the room in shadow. Callum, the manservant who waited on them, was staid and middle-aged and quite noiseless, a smallish, tight-lipped man, and somehow not like a servant. “So far, Mr. Green, I have told you nothing,” Margaret Aylener said when the meal was nearing its end. “How long can you stay?”
“At the risk of being rude, I must say first that I set a value on my time,” he answered. “So far, we have ignored that side.”
“You may set what value you will, if you can do what I ask of you,” she told him. “Mr. Green, I want you to absorb, for the present — as you are absorbing. To grow into this atmosphere, as I believe more and more that you can. For tonight, say. So that you may not set too small a value on the service I shall ask of you.”
“It sounds like wisdom — from my point of view,” he said. “If I might ask about something that rather interests me — how do you get electric light in such a place as this, Miss Aylener?”
“Water power,” she answered. “My father installed it. Quite a small stream flowing down from the hills to the loch drives a wheel — I do not understand the mechanism, but Callum does.”
“There is a real loch, then?” he asked.
“Yes — didn’t you see it? But the mist — of course! You can have seen very little.”
“The four rowans,” he said. “Are they very old?”
“They were as high as the roof when I was a child,” she said. “Before them were four others, and after them, if an Aylener is left, will be four more. Always planted in a square, with the sides diagonal to the walls of the house, enclosing it in their limits.”
“And the shadows in the mist are kept outside those limits,” he said.
Margaret Aylener betrayed no surprise at the remark.
“I hope you are not merely guessing.”
“The rowan is the world ash,” he answered. “In Cumberland I have seen how it can be a guard against — perhaps against shadows even. Those four trees mark a boundary as effective as a magician’s circle, perhaps. Ygdrasil, the world ash — its powers go back through Norse mythology to the beginnings of things. But you said — if an Aylener is left.”
“There is only one, a girl, to follow me,” she explained.
“Then — forgive me if I trespass where I ought not — if she marries and carries on the succession, the name will pass,” he suggested.
“No,” she dissented. “If she marries, her husband will take her name. That is understood. You will see her tomorrow. My niece, Helen Aylener. And that is why — ”
She did not end the sentence, nor did he ask what she would have said. The four trees had told him much, and he was growing into the atmosphere of this place. Almost, now, he could define her need, though what or who had caused it was beyond his knowing. Sight of the niece, perhaps, would bring enlightenment.
And there was Callum, too. One could tell he was a Scot, but an educated one, not like a gillie or a crofter. Black-haired, dark-eyed, he appeared pure Celt, a totally different type from big-boned, Gaelic Elizabeth. Gees divined that Miss Aylener trusted him completely.
“A phrase of yours — the beginning of things,” she remarked after a silence. “I wonder — what, to you, that means.”
“Science has carried a long way back in recent years,” he said. “We know now that history is only a very small part.”
“But you do not rely only on modern science?” she asked.
He shook his head. “There are other sources — as I think you know yourself,” he answered. “No legend exists without foundation.”
“Such as — ?”
“Well, the legend of the Cro-Magnon men, for o
ne,” he said. “Their coming to western Europe was only a legend for centuries, and then their remains were discovered — enough remains to identify them as altogether different from man of today. A race that was utterly wiped off the face of the earth by the forerunners of our type of man, eighteen thousand years ago. They were — am I boring you though?”
“No — please go on.”
“I was going to say they were big men, probably a fair-haired race, and with a reasonably large brain content, but not so big and brainy as to prevent the Azilian-Tardenois race, the ancestors of the dark little Picts, from overcoming and destroying them, when this island of Britain was still joined to the continent and a river ran southward through what is now the Strait of Dover, with the Thames a mere tributary to that main stream. All that was legend, till geology and ethnology proved it.”
“The Azilian-Tardenois,” Margaret Aylener repeated thoughtfully. She looked at the posed figure of Callum. “Your ancestors, Callum,” she said.
“In part, madam,” he agreed, and relaxed from his pose to refill Gees’ glass. “Not so completely mine as Gamel Mac-Morn’s.”
“An odd sounding name, that,” Gees observed.
“It is curious that you should refer to the subject which is connected with my asking you to come here, Mr. Green.”
“Is it so very curious?”
She shook her head slightly. “Though that, the first great change, is only a very small part of the whole,” she said. “And now, before you and I talk fully about what I mean to ask of you, I wish you to talk to Callum, if you will.”
“Certainly,” he agreed. “Tonight, you mean?”
“If you take your coffee in here, and then join me in the other room. There is not much time, you see.”
They finished their meal almost in silence, and then he held the door for her and returned to his seat at the table. As he waited, the stillness gathered round him again; the granite walls of the house were thick, he knew, but this utter, oppressive silence was unnatural.
