Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  “Buzz-z-z!” she mocked. “And here’s my little playmate all unsmirched again! Twister, you shall mix your own as a reward.”

  Kyrle said: “I was wondering whether we could go over and see MacMorn this afternoon,” he remarked.

  “I’ll tell her you feel like stretching your legs while she rests,” Helen suggested. “Otherwise — well, I could hardly go and call on a single gentleman of uncertain age after you’ve gone, could I? It will be my only chance while I’m here, and even if you don’t start back before six, you can make Edinburgh in time to get up tomorrow morning.”

  “Care to come over with us, Gees, while Helen’s Aunt Margaret has her siesta? MacMorn’s very interesting.”

  “I’d be delighted,” Gees said. He wanted to see no more of MacMorn, but if these two meant to visit the man, an uninfluenced third party with them would be all to the good.

  Gees didn’t tell them he had already met MacMorn. He had an impression that the girl’s apparent frankness and disregard of her aunt’s belief covered away something altogether different. Fear, perhaps . . .

  “This place acts on you, Helen,” Kyrle said abruptly. She grinned at him impishly. “It does,” he insisted. “As soon as we get here — I noticed it last time — you bottle up some sort of excitement inside you. You’re different, whether you realize it — ”

  “Don’t be a fool, my fool,” she said, and, blowing a kiss at Kyrle, went out. Gees put down his empty glass and looked at his watch as he followed Kyrle toward the door.

  “Miss Aylener’s told us, you know,” Kyrle observed abruptly.

  “That’s more comprehensive than enlightening, as a statement,” Gees said.

  “Do you believe any of it?” Kyrle asked — rather uneasily.

  “Do you?” Gees asked in reply. They had halted, facing each other.

  “Not till I get here,” Kyrle answered. “When I’m at the works, it feels like foolishness, all childish tales. I mean, that anyone could work magic in these days. I don’t know what sort of magic, or anything about it, but she — Miss Aylener — warned me to keep Helen away from this man MacMorn, because he’s got occult powers. I’ve never believed in occult powers. You can find a rational explanation for most things.”

  “But now — ?” Gees asked, and waited.

  “What do you mean by that?” Kyrle demanded.

  “If you had felt quite as sure of your rational explanation for anything Miss Aylener thought worth a warning, you wouldn’t have asked me whether I believed in — anything she may have told you.”

  “It’s Helen.” Kyrle let his anxiety appear in his tone. “Ever since that first time we went to see MacMorn, she’s been — different. You know, I’d already heard of you. That Kestwell case you figured in. And now I meet you I can see you’re a good scout, and don’t mind telling you Helen means everything to me. And since that day something of her has been withdrawn. As if something, somebody or — I don’t say it’s MacMorn — but as if some part of her were held away, imprisoned, almost. It won’t go into words. Unless you can sense what I mean, I can’t make it clear. Absolutely intangible — the merest shadow — ”

  “Are you sure it’s not you who’ve changed?” Gees asked.

  “I? Good Lord, no! Except — I suppose it’s thinking about her — I don’t sleep so well, and I get dreams. About her — as if something whispered to me about her. The oddest fancies. Unreal people, shadows of people, whispering at me in the night.

  “Ridiculous, of course, but you know how things exaggerate in sleep. I even saw a doctor, and he prescribed for liver. It helped for a night or two, or I thought it did, and then they came back.”

  “Who came back?” Gees persisted.

  “The whispering things. And yet it wasn’t whispering — it isn’t whispering, but as if they thought at the inner me, not in speech at all. Again I can’t explain that any better, but always it’s as if I ought to go to Helen, hold her back from — from the things that whisper at me themselves. I could disregard it at first and think it was liver, but it goes on. You must think me an ass, unless — ”

  Gees made no reply. As he had told Margaret Aylener, he could do nothing, even if he believed all that she had told him.

  “Unless you believe what she believes,” Kyrle added. “Common sense tells me there’s nothing in it, and so I wondered if you — ” Again he broke off, seeking encouragement from Gees’ face and not finding it.

  “Have you told her — Helen — any of this?” Gees asked.

  Kyrle shook his head. “I couldn’t. It won’t go into words with her. I know she ridicules anything of the sort, and even more so since we met MacMorn. This place — this damned place! Not The Rowans, but Brachmornalachan. Have you ever been at Glencoe?”

  “Driven through it, once,” Gees answered.

  “Drive through it by night, and stop there for a few minutes to feel it — then you’ll know what I mean about this place. Not what’s ordinarily known as haunting, but the influence of the evil done there surviving to color one’s thoughts. Oppressing — closing in on you — shadows of people. I felt that in the pass of Glencoe, at night. Imagination, knowledge of what had been done there, perhaps.”

  He shook his shoulders and, smiling, moved toward the drawing room.

  “We ought to go and talk to Miss Aylener, if she’s come down again yet,” he said in a lighter tone. “Otherwise, she’ll wonder what we two have been doing with you. You’re going back tomorrow, I know, and it’s no real use my telling you all this. But” — he paused, grasping the handle of the door — “I just wondered if you believed any of it, and even now you’ve not told me whether you do or no.”

  “Since I’m going back, it makes no difference,” Gees said.

  Kyrle, opening the door, stood back for Gees to enter.

  Margaret Aylener looked up at them. “So you have got to know each other,” she said. “This afternoon, Ian, I am foregoing my usual rest to discuss things with you. The last opportunity before your marriage, you know. Mr. Green, I hope you will excuse us till tea time — my niece can look after you.”

  “I shall be glad to fit in with anything you wish,” he said.

  “Take her for that walk we were talking about,” Kyrle suggested. “She can show you all the sights, and you can get back for tea.”

  By the time Gees set out with Helen, leaving Margaret and Kyrle in the dining room with a businesslike portfolio she had brought in, the sun had disappeared, and the hills that had loomed so clear and near in the morning had receded, become hazed and dim. They went the way Gees had gone in the morning, the girl silent and, it appeared to him, hurrying along by the brink of the loch. She kept a pace or so ahead of him, as if eager to reach their destination rather than to make a walk of it.

  “Good fishing in this water?” he asked, for the sake of something to say, when they had come to where he had turned aside from the loch to inspect the southern monolith that still stood.

  “Good — I’m sorry.” She slackened pace for him to come level with her. “I’m afraid I was day-dreaming. I think — yes. Pike, I believe, and small fresh water fish. Not that I’ve ever tried.” She inclined away from the water, toward the monolith. “Pike are horrible, don’t you think?”

  They reached the standing stone, and passed within the circle. Unseen by the girl who was hurrying again, Gees crossed himself. It could do no harm, even if it could do no good.

  “I’m sorry Kyrle couldn’t come with us,” he said.

  “Yes.” She sounded abstracted over it. “But he’s got to — my aunt wanted him to drive me up here so she could have this talk with him.”

  Such a reek as had developed to fog the day before chilled the air about them, and the distant hills grew less distinct. Presently the frontage of MacMorn’s house masked the horizon, and the red-flowering thorn away to their right shone like a great live coal. They faced the main entrance, and Helen lifted the heavy knocker and thudded three times.

  “He to
ld us — Mr. MacMorn told us, when we came here before — there is not a scrap of iron in the construction of the house,” she said as they waited. “All the metal is copper and bronze. Oak rots iron or steel, he said, and there is none anywhere about the place.”

  Gees remembered that the knife he had seen the man Partha lift over the goat had had a yellowish sheen.

  The door swung inward silently, and a black-attired, black-haired, respectable-looking serving man faced them.

  “Mr. MacMorn?” Helen asked.

  “Mr. MacMorn is not at home, madam.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Will you tell him we called? Miss Aylener and Mr. Green.”

  “Yes, madam.” He inclined his head toward her as he spoke.

  “Thank you. Nothing else — just that we called.”

  She turned to Gees as the door closed, and he turned to go back. Now, he observed, she walked slowly, draggingly, as if there were no object on which to concentrate, as there had been in coming here.

  “I suppose we just go back,” she said, listlessly.

  “This haze is dampening — there seems nothing else to do,” Gees concurred. “A pity. I’d have liked to see the inside of the house.”

  “And I — Oh, well!” She shrugged. “I suppose one cannot expect — ”

  “Crimson cocktails all the time,” Gees suggested.

  “Now how did you know I was thinking of that?” She turned her head to look at him with the question, seemed irritated.

  “I didn’t. But you said you remembered that drink so well.”

  “You might have known I was only fooling. I remembered the strangeness of it, two whites making a red. As red as that tree.”

  “And the flavor, apparently,” he insisted.

  “Yes, that too. Twister said he shut his eyes and opened them again after he finished his, and had an illusion that an hour or two had passed. And since then he’s been inclined to credit Gamel — Mr. MacMorn, I mean — with some of the tricks Aunt Marge blames on him. Not that Twister actually believes anything, but sometimes I think he’s a little bit credulous. Can you smell the sea in this reek?”

  “I hadn’t noticed it,” Gees answered.

  She stopped, and snuffed the air. “The coast is not more than ten or twelve miles away,” she said. “But — no, it isn’t the sea tang at all. An odd smell, like — like — what is it like?”

  “It’ll be like getting wet if we don’t hurry back,” Gees told her.

  She nodded impatiently, without quickening her step at all.

  “Yes. But I’ve smelt that smell before somewhere, but can’t place it. Coming directly from the house toward us — the wind has eddied. I don’t like it, and yet I do. Gone, now. The wind is west again.”

  They went on. Gees, too, had detected the faint odor, and recognized it. The smell of blood newly-shed.

  CHAPTER VII

  the lady bewitched

  Back to the normal, material world tomorrow. Away from all this. Gees was sitting on his bed in The Rowans’ guest room, pondering over all the incredible things he had heard and half glimpsed since he had got there. A knock at his door interrupted his thoughts, and, clad only in his dressing gown, he went and opened the door.

  “Just off,” Kyrle said. “Thought I’d come and say goodbye. Helen tells me you didn’t see MacMorn, after all.”

  “She doesn’t know I saw him this morning,” Gees answered. “But you’re late starting, with all that way to go, aren’t you?”

  “The light will hold for hours,” Kyrle explained. “I’ll make Edinburgh well before midnight. And if — ” He hesitated. “If — if anything should happen — ”

  “On the road?”

  “Lord, no! To Helen — at any time. I don’t know what could, or if anything could. But if — and I got in touch with you — ”

  “If anything did, the whole situation would be altered,” Gees said. “Get in touch with me by all means, but don’t rely too much on me.”

  “What do you mean by that exactly?” Kyrle asked.

  “Just that if anything did happen, it would be because of a bigger agency than mine,” Gees answered gravely. “Something that has been built up and built up since the very beginning of time — and I’m not initiate in it. Nor do I know anyone who is. But get in touch, by all means.”

  For a minute or so Kyrle stood silent, thoughtful. Then —

  “That’s good of you. We’ll be married in a month’s time, thank heaven! Good luck to you — goodbye.”

  In a little while, from his window Gees saw Kyrle and Helen come out to the car, and saw the tenderness of their embrace. Then Kyrle got into the car and went away, his engine running smoothly and well, while the girl stood to watch his going. He looked back and waved his hand, and she too waved and then stood as before until the car had disappeared.

  Then abruptly, amazingly, she dropped to her knees on the fine granite rubble, crouched, and with her hands lifted above her head bent forward until her forehead appeared to touch the ground. Thirteen times she prostrated herself in this fashion, after which she rose to her feet again and entered the house.

  Gees heard her close the door, and went back to his bed to resume his reflections on this case he had declined to undertake.

  Over that crimson drink of MacMoran’s Kyrle had said that he merely closed his eyes and opened them again and had had an illusion that an hour had passed. Had it been an illusion, though? Those dreams of which he had spoken indicated — what? Was it that MacMorn was not quite master of his immaterial, slavish crew?

  “Unreal people, shadows of people, whispering at me in the night,” Kyrle had said. Not here in Brachmornalachan, but away in normal surroundings . . .

  MacMorn had been frank in his implication that it might be dangerous for Gees to stay long in Brachmornalachan. The man must have utter confidence in himself to give such a warning. Then the smell of blood driven on the wind to Gees and Helen, and the way in which she had owned to being attracted as well as repelled by the scent.

  Had she too closed her eyes for an hour that had seemed no more than a moment?

  If ever a man radiated hypnotic power, MacMorn did. And inside the ancient circle, on his own ground and with the powers he could summon — if one accepted Margaret Aylener’s fear as true —

  Even here, guarded by the lines of the rowan trees and with her lover’s kiss still tingling on her lips, Helen had made the prescribed obeisance of an unholy old ritual, prostrated herself in the thirteen genuflexions with which worshipers preceded the culminating invocation in darkness to the Unseen One. And on the altar, around and over which his house was built, MacMorn had made sacrifice that day, Gees guessed.

  Yet, in this twentieth century, MacMorn dared do no more than suggest, surely? He might have influenced the girl hypnotically, but, short of kidnapping her, he could do her no real harm; and her aunt’s suspicion of him was safeguard against any interference with her.

  These fancies with which he might have infected her, such as the one which had induced her to prostrate herself, would all vanish after marriage.

  However that might be, Gees could do nothing. One had to be practical, and there was nothing definite of which MacMorn could be accused. Any man was free to kill his own goat for food, in his own house, if he felt like it. Any man was free to offer people drinks, and if they accepted the offer and suffered no visible harm, the fact that he was enough of a hypnotist to make a colorless fluid appear crimson was no more than an interesting and even amusing trick.

  As for attaching any significance to living in a Druidic or pre-Druidic circle, Avebury village was built inside one, and its inhabitants were good, sound, Wiltshire people, just like those who lived outside the circle.

  One might say that MacMorn was a strange-looking man, but there was no crime in that. And to accuse him of unholy practices, or even of undue influence on anyone at all, would merely invite doubts of the one’s own sanity.

  There was just reasonable time for a hot,
lazy bath before dinner.

  After dinner, Gees followed the two ladies to the drawing room for coffee. Helen pushed a settee forward and sat down directly in front of the fire.

  “This wind reminds me of the night I got lost in Athens, auntie,” Helen said, as she tossed her cigarette end accurately into the fire.

  “You were a bad child,” Margaret Aylener said, and smiled.

  “It was your fault, for not teaching me Greek,” the girl retorted, and smiled too. “Have you ever been to Eleusis, Gees?”

  “And felt disappointed over it,” he answered. “There is so little left. Though whether there was ever much, beyond charlatanism — ”

  “There had been much,” Margaret said, ‘but I think it was before the time of the mysteries of which so much is made. They were trying to re-create what had been. What the first people had known.”

  “The dark people who came here in ships,” he suggested.

  “Their predecessors,” she dissented. “The very old ones.”

  “Auntie knows it all,” Helen remarked. “You’d think, by the way she talks sometimes, she was chief bridesmaid when Tirzah and Ahirad were married, and the sons of the gods came down to the daughters of men till Deucalion took to boatbuilding.”

  She swung her long legs over the edge of the settee and sat up with a suddenness at which her aunt stared. “I feel too restless to sit still,” she explained. “It’s this wind, I think. Auntie, would you be too annoyed if I wanted Mr. Gees to come out for a little walk in the dark?”

  “Mr. Gees, as you call him, may not feel like going out,” Margaret said, rather coldly.

  “It might be a good idea, Miss Aylener,” he said, after a pause.

  The girl stood up. “We’ll go, then,” she said decidedly. “Half an hour or thereabouts, Aunt Marge, to make me sleepy.”

  She went out, and Gees followed to find her donning a waterproof in the entrance hall. He opened the front door and looked out on a grayish blackness into which the light behind him penetrated less than a dozen yards. He closed the door and turned to the girl, who had advanced toward him.