by Jack Mann
“Or what he serves is strong,” she amended. “Except that they — the thirteen sacrificed to each stones — were our people, not his.”
“It makes no difference — he can control them.”
“It makes a great difference. They are forced to submit to the control, different altogether from willing servants. Later ones, like Margaret Grallach, may be willing, devoted — I do not know if they are. But they may be.
“And what he serves — his people created it, just as Kore-worship created Kore, who became Persephone of the Greeks, wife of the Unseen One, and survives to this day through the evil of such men as Gamel MacMorn.
“Mass thought created her, just as it created Odin and Thor and Tyr and Freya, and all the gods of the Norse mythology who seemed to die when Christianity destroyed that older worship. It is part of the hidden purpose of God that He permits men to create their own devils by mass thought, mass belief in the power of evil. They make it powerful.”
“To what end?”
“The devil took Him into a high place and showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth: Fall down and worship me, and they are yours,” she said slowly. “MacMorn chose as his kingdom length of days, renewal of vitality again and again and yet again, paying a life for each renewal.”
“Or did he?” Gees asked. “All this is the wildest fantasy. What proof have you of anything you have said about him?”
“None,” she confessed. “I may be a mind-sick old woman, hating a quite normal man who lives on the other side of the loch. Do you think that of me?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he answered frankly. “I have been here just a few hours, and all I have seen has been mist driving in waves. There is a perfectly commonplace explanation for that, and I may have imagined that I saw shadows.
“Then you — your man Callum first, and then you — try to make me believe that a man lives today with not only the knowledge that was cursed before history began, but the Seventh-Hell evil and cruelty to practice what that knowledge makes possible — ”
“You have the knowledge.”
“No,” he denied. “All I know — all I believed that any man knows — is that it existed. Gilles de Rais tried to re-discover it, voodoo-worshipers and modern followers of black magic try to unearth the ritual, just as the Druids soaked altars in blood in the attempt.
“Thousands on thousands of lives have been taken, and now you say a man lives in this out-of-the-way spot who knows enough to summon Kore — or even Typhon himself, perhaps. A maker of shadows, today?”
“But not of today,” she said. “Either in himself, or by transmitted memory, old and old and old. Of the beginning of things.”
“And you want — ?”
“Your help to save my niece from Gamel MacMorn,” she answered.
“And how do you know she needs saving? She is not even here.”
“I will tell you. Her mother — my sister — was named Helen too. She came here for this Helen to be born, and died at the child’s birth. Died gladly, I think. We — I never learned who was this Helen’s father. That too you must know. It has a bearing on the girl’s danger.”
“A very definite bearing, if all the rest you have told me should happen to be true,” he agreed. “Sorry — I’m listening.”
“And convincing me that you know more of the shadow magic than you will admit,” she said with a smile. “But — Helen. I had no other interest. My sister and I had been very near each other, until she went away and — and that happened.
“All that I had I gave and still give to this daughter of the sister I loved. She does not value it, but lives in a different world from mine. We pre-war survivals do not know their world.
“Perhaps I ought to have been stricter with her, but it seems to me now that nothing would have made any difference. Just two years ago, staying with friends in Edinburgh, she met a clever young engineer, Ian Kyrle, of Kyrle and Farquhar, the bridge builders. Eighteen months ago, they became engaged, and I invited him to stay here. I have no doubt that those two love each other, but then, while he was staying here, they met Gamel MacMorn — ”
“You don’t mean she had not met MacMorn before then?” he interposed.
“Certainly not. She knew him, slightly — we have very little to do with him, as you may guess, since I know what I do know. But they — she and Ian — became almost intimate with MacMorn. For one thing, Ian was interested in the three stones that still stand, all that are left upright of the ring round MacMorn’s house.
“You know, probably, that modern man cannot tell how those stones were poised, sometimes actually on their pointed ends, but so accurately that they remained upright for thousands of years. That for one thing, and then MacMorn can be fascinating when he likes.
“He did like. Invited those two into his house — I have never stepped over the threshold, and never will. I tried to warn them both, but all you and I have talked of tonight is mere childish folly to them. She laughs at it, and Ian laughs with her.”
“Why not, if they are really in love with each other?” he asked.
“Because Gamel MacMorn has cast the thread,” she answered. “I think you know what that means, without my telling.”
“Yes, but how do you know he has?” he demanded sceptically.
“At times, I have the sight, Mr. Green,” she said gravely, “and once I saw it. A faint, thin, wavering line, going out from her breast — and MacMorn holds the other end of that thread. Because life is what it is today — because there would be inquiry, trouble for him if he were not very careful, he waits his time to draw in the thread. You may be the only man who might be able to cut that thread without injury to her reason.”
“If — if this is true, I never yet heard of more than one way of cutting that thread, and that way involves the destruction of the one who holds the thread and leaving it intact, to wither of itself. One other thing. What is MacMorn like?”
“Physically, not unlike Callum, but darker. One of those who came to this country in the ships, with very white skin and very dark hair and eyes. Like a man who lives in the dark. There is no subject on which he cannot talk with knowledge, I think, and if you met him you would find him perfectly charming. I think you will meet him.”
He shook his head, and said, “Impossible.”
“You must! You cannot refuse.”
“I cannot do otherwise,” he insisted in turn. “Think over what you have told me — what you know Callum has told me — and what is the sum of it? Two thousand, one hundred and ninety-seven shadows! Nothings.
“Lives that went to the raising of a circle of monoliths so long ago as to be almost out of time. A girl or woman who chose to run away somewhere, forty years ago. A man with a rather odd sort of name who lives not far from here, and who was rather interested in an engaged couple. That couple, rather wrapped up in each other, modern enough in their outlook to regard old legend as no more than legend.
“Then think what you have asked me, and what is the sum of that? Simply that I should kill or in some way bring about the death of a man named Gamel MacMorn. For there is no other way of doing what you ask, if I credit the fantasy you have built up for me and call it truth.
“I repeat — there is no other way, if the thread that is the beginning of shadow magic stretches between MacMorn and your niece. While they both live, it cannot be broken.”
“It is no fantasy, but truth,” she averred.
“Then, short of murder, what could I or anyone do?” he asked. “However much I might wish to kill this Gamel MacMorn, I should hang if I did it. Get your niece to marry this Ian Kyrle at once, and keep them away from here. Keep her away from here, beyond his reach — MacMorn’s.”
“You know, as I know, that he could draw her back by that thread from any place on earth,” she said, and for the first time he heard a harsh note in her voice. “Yet” — she softened again — “I see I cannot quarrel with your decision. I was foolish to hope — that there might have be
en some way — ”
“I’m desperately sorry to be so futile,” he told her.
“It is very late.” She stood up. “In spite of what you say, you must be tired, and I have kept you talking a very long time. I accept your decision, Mr. Green, and you must tell me tomorrow what I owe you for this wasted time of yours.”
“Nothing — it has been a pleasure to meet you,” he declared.
“I should like you to meet my niece too. Can you stay till tomorrow afternoon — or till the next day, if you wish?”
“Yes, thank you — till the day after tomorrow. I’ve not even seen this place yet, thanks to the mist.”
“I’ll wish you a clear day tomorrow. Goodnight, Mr. Green.”
When he switched off the light in his room and looked out from the window before turning in, he saw stars in a clear, moonless sky. No mist remained, nor, to his sight, did any shadows drive on the whispering night wind.
CHAPTER IV
within the haunted circle
A third servant waited on him when Gees breakfasted alone the next morning, a girl in her twenties whom Elizabeth called Ettie. She told him that Miss Aylener would not be down.
Miss Aylener’s staff was oddly competent for a place like this. Thirty miles from a railway station, and well off the tourist beat, Brachmornalachan was an archaism.
After breakfast, with his hostess still invisible, Gees went out to survey his surroundings. All the mist of the day before had vanished. There was sunlight, but so pale and heatless that it was more like early February than May. The air had that intense clarity that comes after rain, and hill crests in the remotest distances cut the skyline with etched distinctness.
Standing under the rowan in front of the house, Gees saw the track, by which he had come, winding away to eastward, descending gently to the level of a small lake. On its edge were seven cottages, and a stone-built post office. Three more cottages dotted the expanse near the loch, and, quite by itself, almost directly across it, a squat, solid stone house backed against the hillside. Equidistant from the house stood three monoliths, all that were left of the prehistoric circle of stones that had once stood to mark a place of assembly or of worship.
Gamel MacMorn’s house.
With the stones, and a few protuberances from the peaty soil to mark where others had stood, it was evident that it stood in the center of the ancient circle, and had been built over the altar that had once occupied its site. The house itself looked more like a prison than an ordinary house.
At its eastern end there was a tree which, viewed from this distance, looked like nothing so much as a red umbrella, and Gees knew he was looking at a scarlet-blossoming thorn tree in full flower. In its way, it was as emblematic as were the four rowans guarding this house of Margaret Aylener’s. Except for those five, there were no trees anywhere in the lower levels of this saucerlike valley.
Nowhere outside the garden of the Rowans was there any cultivation, and what the occupants of the scattered cottages did for a living was something that Gees never learned.
The door of the Rowans opened and Margaret Aylener came out to smile at Gees and to hope he had slept well. “Never better. You too, I hope.”
“No,” she said. “I had dreams. Perhaps we wakened too many things, last night. It is not good even to talk of them.”
“Incredible, in daylight,” he remarked. “Just as this is an incredible place. Do you know, Miss Aylener, I can’t see why either you or that man over there” — he pointed at the house beyond the loch — “go on living here.”
“Neither of us lives here all the time,” she said, and again smiled. “He is often away for long periods, I know, and I — you would be surprised if I told you how many places I have visited in the last ten years. But Brachmornalachan calls one back — that is, if one has been born here as I was. To me, the Rowans is like — like the thread that is the beginning of shadow magic, with someone at the far end to wind it in.”
“I think we’ll forget about that shadow magic, for today,” he suggested. “It doesn’t fit with the sunshine. I think I’ve seldom seen air so marvelously clear as this. That tree over there, like a red mushroom — it might be near enough for me to touch it.”
“You see it — like that?”
“All the distances appear lessened,” he answered evasively. “No, it isn’t the sight you mean. I’m not fey to any devil who might force that sight on me. Just that the day is almost abnormally clear, and that is a remarkably fine thorn tree.”
“It should be,” she said, with bitter emphasis. “The ground in which it is rooted has been redder than those blossoms.”
“You are harking back. I told you last night — ” He broke off, unwilling to repeat his refusal of what she had asked.
“Is that to be wondered at? With the very last of us Ayleners, threatened — But you said — what you have said. I am not trying to persuade you. Mr. Green, I want some stamps — will you walk with me as far as the post office?”
They set off, and she walked beside him as if she had been a girl of twenty, not a woman nearly twice his age.
They entered the post office and general store, and Gees ducked to avoid striking his head against a brown-paper-wrapped ham pendent from the ceiling. Bathsheba Grallach faced them across the counter. The postmistress exuded cordiality as she leaned across her counter toward them. Margaret Aylener was his passport, he divined.
“A braw day, Miss Margaret,” said she cheerfully.
“A change from yesterday,” said Margaret. “I want twenty-four three-halfpenny stamps, please, and twelve pennies.”
“And I want that ham,” Gees added.
“Twenty-five shillin’,” said the postmistress, unmovedly, “but I’ll sairve the leddy first.” She counted off the stamps.
Margaret Aylener turned to Gees. “What do you want with a ham?” she demanded, amusement dancing in her eyes. “You’re not hungry, surely?”
“I’m going to take it back,” he said, “and cook it on a gas ring in my flat. Then, when I get back late o’ nights, I’m going to carve slices off it, and eat, and say ‘Brachmornalachan’ to myself and pretend I get the real native accent on the word. The ham may help with it.”
He put down on the counter a pound note and two half-crowns. Margaret Aylener paid for her stamps, and the postmistress came out from behind her counter and took down the ham, which she handed to Gees as if it were a priceless treasure. He took it with equal reverence.
“Danish,” she said. “I’d hated to cut it, but it’s gey unlikely I’d’ve sold it whole. Unless — ” she glanced at Margaret Aylener, and went silent, and Gees felt he knew the end of that sentence.
“I suppose not many of your customers want a whole ham,” he said.
“Aye, ye’re right,” she answered. “Ye’ll find it a good ham.”
“I’m sure I shall.” He gazed full into her dark-brown, almost black eyes, and did not like her. “If there is one thing in the state of Denmark that is not rotten, it is ham.”
When they left the store, Gees fell silent, until, “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust that woman, Miss Aylener,” he said, after they had got halfway to the gate of the Rowans.
“I have known her most of my life,” she retorted stiffly. “And her sister — why should I not trust her?”
“Maybe it was impertinent of me,” he admitted. “It was that her aura and mine clash, probably. Do you keep a car?”
“I do,” she answered. “Why — what made you ask?”
“One other set of wheel marks, in addition to mine.”
“There should be another, soon,” she said. “Helen is arriving in time for lunch, and Ian is driving her.”
“Long engagement, isn’t it?” he said suddenly.
“They are being married the first week in June,” she told him. “He wanted to wait until he became a partner in his firm.”
He reflected that it was eighteen months since the girl had become friendly with MacMorn. And,
now just as she was about to marry, Margaret Aylener had yielded to her fear for the girl so far as to send for him. Why had she waited so long?
It was not his affair, though: none of it was, he told himself.
At the entrance to the house, he drew back after opening the door, “If you don’t mind, I’ll go and put my ham in the car, and then walk down to the water.”
When he entered the stable he saw a sturdy old car beside his, a twenty horsepower coupe on a short chassis which, he knew, had a high power ratio. He noted that his own car had been thoroughly cleaned and polished.
With the ham — an absurd purchase, as he realized now — safely locked away, he returned down the granite drive and turned left at the gate.
Less than ten minutes’ walk brought him to the spongy, sodden edge of the loch, and, keeping away to the left, he circled it toward the big, rambling house of Gamel MacMorn. Although he had refused to aid Margaret Aylener, he was curious about MacMorn. He wanted, too, to make certain whether MacMorn’s house stood quite in the center of the ancient circle, over whatever altar had once existed there, as the circle declared it had.
It was no affair of his, of course. Mere curiosity . . .
One of the three stones yet standing, a mighty pillar of gray, weathered rock fully twenty feet in height, was set about fifty yards from the loch, and Gees turned toward it.
A protuberance at its top showed that it had been tenoned to bind in the mortise of a crosspiece, and, since there was but the one tenon in the middle of the stone, it had probably been one side of a gate.
Turning to get the angle of the sun, Gees saw that, as nearly as he could tell, this stone was at the extreme southern limit of the circle. Facing about again, he looked at his watch and saw that by solar time it was now just eleven.
At noon, his shadow would point from this spot directly toward the doorway in the middle of MacMoran’s grounds. Therefore the house was on the line which would lie across the ancient altar.
