by Jack Mann
Callum entered with coffee, his dark, still face utterly expressionless.
“We are to talk,” Gees said, after a long pause.
“Why, yes,” Callum said. “Since it is her wish.”
“Not exactly a servant, are you, Callum?” Gees suggested abruptly.
“You see more than most people,” Callum retorted.
“Enough to want to see more.” Gees took a cigarette from his case and lighted it. “I suggest you sit down and talk as Miss Aylener wishes you to talk. What, exactly, are you?” Gees asked bluntly.
“My family have served Ayleners for a very long time,” Callum answered. “Served and guarded them. My father intended me for the medical profession, but the year I passed my finals in Edinburgh my brother died, and so I came to my place here. Happier in it than there.”
His sincerity was obvious.
“A fully qualified medical man, eh?” Gees reflected.
“It has its use,” Callum pointed out. “But that is not what we were to talk about, I think. Miss Aylener wants you to understand — fully.”
“Does Gamel MacMorn come into it?” Gees asked.
“He is it,” Callum answered. “Spawn of the devil — he is it!”
Momentarily, he let fierce hatred gleam through his impassivity. Gees finished his coffee, and put the cup down.
“Suppose you explain?” he asked calmly.
“I — it goes so far back,” Callum said. “Not quite so far as the time out of time you mentioned at dinner. When the first Aryans to overrun Europe drove the Azilian-Tardenois to out-of-the-way corners of the continent such as this, I think Britain was already an island. There were MacMorns then. They go back to the very dawn of things.”
“Unpleasantly, I gather,” Gees suggested.
“My feelings toward them are beside the point,” Callum said. “They were chiefs — priests and kings — from the very first. And they preserved the old wisdom, know and practice it up to today.”
“Ah!”
“You know, probably,” Callum went on, “that this corner of the earth is still peopled by a branch of the Turanian race, to some extent. There is Gaelic admixture, but you can see Turanian in me, and it is stronger in Gamel MacMorn. Almost pure breed, there, no Gael blood showing. Ayleners are Brythonic — British, that is. They were a strong family, once, and now only two remain.”
“And they have been here how long?” Gees asked.
“Since Agricola’s wall was built,” Callum answered. “There is Gaelic blood in the family, of course — Goidels and Brythons were one race, at first, and Brythons held as far north as the site of Agricola’s wall before that wall was built. Ayleners were established here then, and how long before I do not know, and they held on here after the wall was built — held on after the Picts reoccupied Bernicia, and Hadrian’s wall was built as the limit of Roman power.”
“Where do your MacMorns come in?”
“MacMorns came near to establishing a Pictish kingdom,” Callum answered. “If they had had better material to their hands, they might have put an end to Roman rule, even, but the very thing that gave them their power, the practice of the old wisdom, spoiled the cohesion of the Picts.
“It was too bloodthirsty — you cannot rule altogether by fear. And so the power of the MacMorns was not enough — Hadrian’s wall held the Picts in spite of MacMorns, and the invasions of the Ulster Ivernians put an end to MacMorn supremacy.
“They dwindled, and Gamel MacMorn today is no more than a small laird here in Brachmornalachan — to the outside world, that is. One thing, Mr. Green. In talking of Picts, I mean true Picts by blood, though the Romans included all the unconquered British races under that name. I do not. The Gaels are not Picts.”
Callum became silent.
“And now,” Gees suggested, “suppose we ascend from the general to the particular. What have I to do with Gamel MacMorn?”
“I told you,” Callum said slowly, “that I am a fully qualified medical man, and for that, as you will understand, one has to be sane, materialistic. Very few illusions can survive seven years of medical training, as you can realize.
“But now, coming to the particular, I want to talk of things that would make the average man smile at my credulity, or worse than credulity. Impossible things, in my Edinburgh or your London, because they go back out of time. It was you who credited the Cro-Magnon legend, apparently saw them as a race. And they had a wisdom.”
“They had a wisdom,” Gees echoed. “The wisdom of Hell.”
“MacMorn has it to this day,” Callum said.
“Your warrant for that statement?” Gees asked sharply.
“I would say — Miss Helen Aylener,” Callum answered.
“Ah! Caught in a web of MacMorn’s spinning.”
“Now I wonder” — Callum stared hard at him — “was that a chance simile, or did you mean it exactly as you said it?”
“So.” Gees spoke again after a long pause. “As I thought when I looked out from the windows. The shadow magic, old as time itself.”
“Then you know?” Callum asked. “This is not impossible, to you?”
“I did not know it survived anywhere today,” Gees answered. “Nor, as far as that goes, that anyone survived with either the knowledge or the hardihood to practice it. You go so far — do you? — as to allege that MacMorn traffics with shadows?”
“I said, as far as the outside world goes, he is only a small laird here,” Callum reminded him. “But among the Daoine Shih he is still a king. And — as you expressed it — he spins webs.”
“Orders the spinning,” Gees amended. Remembering how the shadows had driven across from west to east in the hazy reek.
“You know, then,” Callum said thoughtfully.
“Very little,” Gees confessed. “There is a clay tablet from the site of Nineveh, which was one of the most evil cities on earth in its time. A papyrus from the Thebaid, and that is no more than a monkish palimpsest which scores out and overlays most of what had been written about the shadow magic- — it is no more than a fragment of knowledge.
“A possible picturization on one of the stones near Concarneau, but without the palimpsest and the clay tablet one would attach no importance to it. A few other scraps like these, and taking them all together the average student would call it no more than pretence at a cult, not enough to justify belief in the cult as a thing of any power.”
“But you believe — at least you think it may have power?”
“How much do you know?” Gees asked abruptly.
“Less than you, I think,” Callum answered frankly. “But I believe.”
“He — this MacMorn — he would never dare,” Gees said.
“His shadows that you saw — most of them — they are not of today nor of yesterday,” Callum declared. “Only, I think, two. He lives nearly halfway round the loch from here, in a bigger house than this. One not so old. But it is built in one of the circles, a very large circle, like the one at Avebury, and three of the stones are standing to this day.
“The others are sunk in the peat, but they are there, and you know how they were erected, with living men buried round them to keep them from falling. And each stone lowered on a living man’s chest.”
“Thirteen lives to each stone,” Gees added.
“And MacMorns built that circle, before there was a Druid ritual,” Callum added yet again. “This one, Gamel MacMorn, he dares.”
“They call it murder these days.”
“Yes,” he assented, “but only when they have proof.”
“How old is this MacMorn?”
“He was about forty, when I was born.”
“Yes, but how old is he now?” Gees persisted.
“About forty, as you see him.”
“Which is manifestly impossible,” Gees pointed out.
“He went away for a time, and came back as his own son,” Callum said. “That, I believe, was the second of the two shadows he added to the old ones. The fir
st was in my father’s time. They were both — disappearances, and in both cases he wove a web. There was no proof, nothing to connect him with the disappearances. And each time he went away, and came back as his own son. Which is a monstrous impossibility, as you said. It is all impossible, of course.”
“Only those two?” Gees asked thoughtfully.
“I do not know. Nobody knows. Nobody here will speak of it, and away from here it would be no more than a madman’s dream. Forty — eighty years ago, for the first of them.
“If there were one before that, it would be about a hundred and twenty years ago, and since they will not talk, who would know? Fear of him would have been stronger then, and their silence about it more complete.
“For all I know, or anyone else knows, this Gamel MacMorn may be the one who took back Bernicia when the Romans built Hadrian’s wall. May be the one who raised the standing stones, thirteen lives to a stone, round the site of the house where he lives today. A life for a lifetime, on and on.”
“Still a king among the Men of Peace, you said,” Gees observed.
“When I think of Them — the general view of Them as pretty little things running about the glens with gauzy wings and all the fairy trickery, I could laugh,” Callum said. “That is, if it were not for the nightmare of the reality. Yes, MacMorn is still king among Them.”
“By what right — what kinship with Them has he?”
“There was a woman — she may have been of the Azilian-Tardenois people, or later, and all Turanian-Ivernian, even,” Callum said slowly. “She was caught and taken among the Men of Peace, and by some one of them bore a daughter who was half of earth and half of middle earth — only half human.
“When Bron or Brun MacMorn — he would be a Brian in these days — when he wanted aid in some one of his attempts at power, that daughter gave it, but only on condition that a son of theirs should succeed him in his place.
“And that son was born and came to Bron’s place, and through his mother he kept an ascendancy among the Daoine Shih. Whether he is Gamel, or an ancestor of Gamel’s, nobody knows.”
“This tale is very old,” Gees said thoughtfully.
“Miss Aylener will tell you the rest of it,” Callum observed.
“One other thing I want you to tell me,” Gees said. “Gamel MacMorn, I gather, is weaving a web to add another life to his, and add one more shadow to those already driven out. Is that the case?”
“Miss Helen Aylener’s life,” Callum said somberly, “and Miss Helen Aylener’s shadow. That is why, as a last chance, Miss Margaret sent for you.”
With that he stood up, as if to indicate that he had no more to say. While Gees stared at him, unbelievingly, he spoke again, and the words declared him once more the perfect serving man.
“What time do you wish to be called in the morning, sir?”
CHAPTER III
can man refuse?
Elizabeth finished making up the peat fire in the drawing room, and went out. As, for a second, she glanced at Gees before passing him on her way to the door, he saw or imagined a relaxation of her features from the grim immobility of his earlier encounter with her, almost as if she had made up her mind to approve of him. The door closed on her, and his hostess, facing him from the other side of the fireplace, spoke.
“Callum has told you, Mr. Green?”
“Enough,” he answered. “I wonder — ‘Mac’ means ‘son of.’ I wonder — who and when was Morn, the father of all the MacMorns?”
“That is beyond telling, now,” she said. “Unless — but no. This must be a son. Even if Callum is right about those renewals of youth.”
“What do you think of that, Miss Aylener?” he asked.
“I think — it is all so impossible. Mr. Green” — she spoke with tense earnestness — “I have read and studied — as you see, I am not young, and I have had time to study. The germ plasm in man, that tiny part transmitted from generation to generation to establish heredity. As, I think, you know it does.”
“You mean, assuring that the children of man shall be men,” he suggested. “Though at one stage the embryo even has gills like a fish, it develops to man before birth, inherits the likeness of its parents.”
“More,” she said. “In some cases — a few cases — inherits the memories of its parents, until so-called love destroys them. You remember that story of Kipling’s — ‘The Greatest Story Ever Written,’ I think he called it. And the story was never written, never told, because the man who might have told it fell in love, and that sorry little love destroyed all his memories of earlier lives, lest greater loves should spoil the little passion that filled his shrunken soul. Love kills memory.”
“There is no evidence that the germ plasm carries memory,” he said.
She smiled. “Call me evidence,” she invited.
“I don’t get that, Miss Aylener,” he answered. “Unless — ”
“What do you think of this place — The Rowans?”
“I think” — he chose his words with care — “it is a garden enclosed, containing one of the loveliest flowers that ever grew in any garden.”
She laughed, softly, musically. “An old woman thanks you, Mr. Green. I have wealth, but I sit here, nearing the allotted span of life. Why, do you think? I might have chosen any man I liked, almost.”
“Might have chosen one, and lost him.”
“No. I am one of those in whom the germ plasm carries memory. I would not spoil that memory, would not lose it, and so I barred out the little loves that might have been for this span of life. What I had was better — is better. Immaterial, yes, but nothing came to displace it.”
“Therefore, the end of the line of Ayleners.”
“No!” It was a vehement protest. “Even if it had meant that — but no. All I am telling you is that memory is transmitted, in some cases, and Gamel MacMorn may be one of them. Or it may be that — forty years, and forty years, and forty years, endlessly.”
“As I told Callum, they call that murder these days.”
“Yes? Mr. Green, you cannot look back forty years — you are not old enough to look back much more than twenty. But I can. Just think, now. Forty years ago, all that it means. What Brachmornalachan was, then.”
“Well?” he asked.
“Forty years ago,” she said. “I can remember. I was old enough, then, for clear judgment. Ancestral memories, things that had happened to Ayleners long dead — long, long dead — were recreated in me.
“But of that time, forty years ago. As far as Brachmornalachan was concerned, the motor road on which you traveled had not been made, and you would have had to use tracks like the one outside my gate for eighty miles and more before you got here. The nearest railway station was thirty miles away, as it is today. We were a village out of the world. And if a girl — such a girl as my niece Helen — suddenly disappeared, and it was put about that she had a lover somewhere farther south, and had gone to him? Well?”
“I don’t know,” he said, impressed by her earnestness.
“She was not like my niece Helen,” she went on. “She was the sister of the woman who is postmistress here now — her name was Margaret, like mine. Margaret Grallach. The elder sister of Bathsheba Grallach, who keeps the post office here in Brachmornalachan now.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I see. Now, Miss Aylener, if I am to get all this clear — what are your memories? What have you of yesterday to tell me?”
“Yesterday first?” She appeared reluctant over it, he thought.
“Decidedly,” he assured her. “If I am going into this — if I am to accept the impossible as possible, I must have everything bearing on it.”
“There is a doubt in that ‘if’ of yours,” she objected.
“Naturally. In all the other cases I have undertaken, there has been something tangible, something on which I could take hold. Here, it appears, I have to deal with shadows, and no more.”
“Shadows,” she echoed thoughtfully.
�
�Forgive me for reminding you — I asked a question,” he said.
“Of my yesterdays.” She sat silent for a long time. “Of my — yes, my other lives. I feel that I lived them. It may be no more than the germ plasm in me, carrying memory, as it might in you, in anyone, if they had the sight to see. The Scots’ second sight, going back instead of forward, and heritage of us Goidelic people who kept to the old ways instead of becoming clothed. Did you know that Briton, or Brython, merely means clothed?”
He nodded with a smile. “If you want to employ me, you must tell me all you know. In fact, all you are. I am doubtful, on what I have so far heard, of helping you at all. And so I want you to tell me — your yesterdays.”
She shook her head. “If you know anything at all of these things,” she said, “you must know that memories of that sort are too fluid, too uncertain, for me to recite them to you as a part of my life. Something of me — something transmitted from generation to generation — was, when the circle was raised where Gamel MacMorn’s house is now, but I cannot tell you whether Mom himself or a MacMorn raised it. I know that even then I felt the horror of what was done — even in that primal, undeveloped state. Because that ritual was alien from our people — ” She broke off.
The Margaret Aylener of today was withdrawn, and it seemed that some other soul looked out through her beautiful eyes and dreaded the picture they registered in her brain.
Gees asked, “What people?” and with the question broke the spell. She looked at him normally, herself again.
“How can I tell? Except — they came in ships. A dark people, not like us. They brought evil, and fear.”
“Masters of the shadow ritual,” he suggested.
“Yes. Makers of shadows. A hundred and sixty-nine stones, and thirteen shadows to each stone. Earth-bound, while the stones endure.”
“Thirteen times thirteen times thirteen,” he reflected. “That number as only a beginning. Then Gamuel MacMorn must be very strong.”
