by Jack Mann
“I think not,” he said. “We’d get lost.”
“Oh, no!” she retorted. “The feel of the path will guide us as far as the front gate, and I couldn’t get lost in this place. Come along.”
She opened the door again, and he followed. Twenty steps or so took them into a wet, driving fog such as the Scottish highlands and the west of Ireland experience, a blanketing density that hid the lighted windows of the house. Helen took his arm, and their footsteps crunched on the granite chips.
“If you’d not been here, I’d have slipped out alone,” she said.
“Being the madder of the two,” he suggested.
“Quite possibly. And Eleusis means nothing to you?”
“Next to nothing. Those mysteries — fake, I think. Nothing is known for certain, but probably they were impositions on the credulous.”
“I remember it, because I saw Gamel MacMorn there,” she said. “Aunt Marge doesn’t know he was there. Where — you know they still show the place where the oracle used to speak. She was tired, and I went alone. He was there, and we got talking — you know how one gets talking to anyone, even an acquaintance, you meet abroad. I’d never talked to him before, though of course we knew him, living so near each other.”
“You talked about what?” Gees asked, keeping pace with her.
“I wish I could remember, but I can’t. That’s always seemed odd to me. Things he said about the mysteries. I know he seemed to believe in them as real mysteries, only he didn’t talk about Demeter and Persephone in connection with them, but spoke of Kronos and — and — ”
“Rhea?” he suggested, and paused as the gate appeared before them.
“Yes, it was Rhea,” she agreed, “and the rest of what he told me I can never remember, though I can feel it, sometimes.”
“That’s a rather incomprehensible statement,” he observed.
“Yes, isn’t it?” She struck down the latch of the gate and thrust at it with her foot, swinging it outward. “I mean I feel myself a part of those mysteries. The crazy abandonment of them.”
“Oh! So you know that part of it, then?”
“Know it?” She laughed, oddly. “Come outside, Gees. I can’t tell you inside our wall.” She led on, and he followed her into the dense wet fog until the gate was invisible, and then stopped.
“Not another step,” he said determinedly. “We’ve got to find that gate again as it is, and I don’t intend to lose myself and you out here for the rest of the night. It’s too damp, and too cold.”
“Anything else?” There was an odd note in her voice, and she held his arms tightly.
“What was it you wanted to say outside your boundary?” he asked.
“Just that — you see, the cult of Kronos and Rhea was more primitive, nearer to elemental things. I don’t know how I know that, whether Gamel MacMorn told me or I read it somewhere. And — it’s got me. I’ve never told Aunt Marge, and I daren’t say anything of the sort to Ian, but it has. Intermittently, not all the time. Ian’s sane — you don’t know how I try to submerge that side of me by clinging to him. I trust you enough to tell you about it, Gees, in case you might be able to help me. To — to kill that other side, altogether.”
“The other side being — Eleusinian?” he suggested.
“I think it must be that. An almost uncontrollable — desire to be what they were. Quite mad. Do you know the Venusberg music?”
“Quite well. You mean — that defines what you feel?”
“Expresses it. My love for Ian — his for me — quite apart from it. I feel like one in a Sabbath of whirling, dancing devils — yes, devils! Capable of any ecstasy, any abandonment of myself. Not human, but all animal. At the point to which they must have worked up — ”
Abruptly she swung herself to face him, put both her hands on his shoulders and peered into his eyes, so closely that her own eyes were quite plain to his sight, and her breath warm on his mouth.
“So,” she whispered. “At this moment, I wish you felt it too.”
He grasped both her arms above the elbows, and held her back. “My child,” he said, “your aunt is right, terribly right. It isn’t Eleusis that’s bewitched you, but this Gamel MacMorn.”
He felt her go limp in his hold, as if the momentary madness had passed. “But he — Oh, that’s impossible — absurd!” she exclaimed.
“Impossible, absurd, and true,” he insisted. “Listen here. You don’t remember clearly what he told you at Eleusis?”
“No, I don’t. But nothing — nothing like I’ve just told you. He didn’t — didn’t try to make love to me, of course.”
“As you tried, just now with me,” he said grimly, and kept hold on her arms. “Naturally he didn’t. But the man is a master hypnotist, and he managed to plant in your mind this suggestion of evil — it is evil, Helen, and most deadly evil at that.
“I’d say that there, in that first real contact you had with him, he got you. Got your will, imposed his own on it, and planted the suggestion that you should go to see him here in his own place. Which you did, you and Kyrle. He doesn’t want Kyrle, so with the help of that strange drink he got you all to himself, put Kyrle into a state in which he would remember nothing, know nothing — ”
“But he didn’t,” she interrupted. “We bade him goodbye over the drink, and left only a minute or two after we’d had it, I remember.”
“I believe, after you’d had it, MacMorn wiped an hour or more clean out of your consciousness, and Kyrle’s consciousness too,” he insisted. “The natural, conscious side of you knows nothing about it, of course, but he — MacMorn — took that opportunity of stimulating what he had already wakened in you, which is no more nor less than the devil that sleeps in every one of us, the instinct to unrestrained evil surviving in us from the very beginnings of humanity on earth.”
“But I don’t feel it as evil,” she protested. “If — just now — if you’d felt as I did, given way as I nearly asked in words, I know I’d have been utterly happy — and so would you. Don’t you see?”
“My dear girl, the instinct that was driving you then is father and mother of lust and hate and murder, every evil there is, but it wouldn’t drive or hold anyone on earth if it didn’t give them a sense of just the glamour that makes its power over you. The devils men make and worship as gods promise unutterable joys — and give torment in the end.”
“He — I — what must I do? Oh, what must I do?” she moaned.
Gees released his hold on her, and faced about beside her. “I’ll tell you all I can as we go back.”
For, abruptly, he had become conscious that they were not alone in the thick, clogging darkness. Cold, inhuman presences crowded on them on every side, incorporeal shadows that thickened the mist and moved in it with a life that was not life, but rather death-given sentience.
The girl felt them too, and clung to him, quivering with sudden terror. “Yes — Oh, which way? I’m lost, Gees! And look! The living dead are all around us in the fog! We’re lost — quite lost!”
“Just keep your wits, Helen,” he bade, trying to keep his voice steady, since he too knew some of the terror she felt. “We are not lost at all, and have only a few yards to go before we’re back at the gate.”
Realizing how easy it is to lose sense of direction in a night fog, he had noted every step they had taken, every turn or part of turn that either of them had made.
Now, disengaging himself from her fearful hold on him, he took her arm and impelled her to where, he felt sure, they would again encounter the gate.
Every step was a vast effort, for though the intangible things that she had called the living dead were of no more substance than the fog itself, they sucked at his strength so that he felt as if he walked in deep water, in part controlled by it.
He had to drag the girl along, for she was incapable of independent movement, and her audible breaths came and went catchily, uncertainly, almost in sobs. After a vast age of struggle he found that he had miscalculated th
eir direction after all, for they came to the wall surrounding The Rowans, but found no sign of the gate nor could Gees tell if it was to right or left of the point they had reached.
Now, as they both touched the wall, the sense of clogging presences about them increased, and Gees knew that these living dead were making a final effort to hold them back, drive them away from the wall and the house beyond it.
He took a few seconds for breath, and then put one arm around Helen’s waist and the other behind her knees and swung her over the wall, setting her on her feet on the inside. Somehow he scrambled over after her — it was no more than waist-high.
He stood beside her, recovering breath and steadiness. Here, they were unmolested, but beyond the wall shadows swayed and swirled, darknesses on the thick darkness of the night. Helen turned and pointed away to the right, her arm a white line on the darkness.
“I think the gate is there,” she said.
“And I think it’s the other way,” Gees dissented. “Before we begin looking for it, though — you understand a little more clearly, now?”
“I’m so tired,” she half-sighed. “So terribly tired, Gees.”
“So am I, after that,” he said grimly. “But if I tell you what you’ve got to do to save yourself, will you do it?”
“I’m so tired, I tell you,” she insisted tremulously.
“If I say what to do, will you do it?”
“What? What do you want me to do?” she asked, sluggishly.
“See here!” He grasped her arm and shook her, roughly. “Do you want to become no more than a shadow on the night, like that?” He pointed beyond the wall with his free hand.
“No.” But the reply was listless, uninterested, as if she did not really care.
“Does Kyrle’s love mean nothing to you?” he demanded harshly.
“Yes. What is it you want me to do?”
“First, never go out here alone, either day or night.”
“Yes, I understand,” she assented, still in that flat, lifeless way.
“Say it,” he insisted. “What is it that you must not do?”
“I must never go out here alone, either by day or night,” she said.
“Repeat that, please. Get it engraved on your mind.”
She repeated the words. Then — “I’m so terribly tired,” she said.
“I know.” He refrained from attempting to impress more on her. In her present state, he knew, the one prohibition would sink in so as to have power over her, but to perplex her with other biddings or forbiddings might spoil the effect. He took her arm and led her to the left.
“We’ll find the path to the house,” he said.
A dozen paces brought them to the granite chips, and Helen turned toward the gate and tried to break from his hold. “Not that way,” he said. “The house is behind you.”
“Calling,” she almost whispered. And again — “Calling.”
“You forget.” He would not ask what she meant by the word. “Tell me again — what is it that you must not do on any account.”
“I must never go out here alone, either by day or night,” she said, and with the words turned toward the house. “I’m so very tired, too.”
She leaned heavily on him all the way to the door, and, entering after he had opened it, turned and faced him.
“Will you tell Aunt Marge I’ve gone straight to bed, please?” she asked. “And” — a faint smile grew about her lips — “you were right — the glamour, I mean, and the reality. I know, now. Goodnight, Gees.”
He watched her ascend the stairs, saw that she turned at the bend and lifted her hand to him in a little gesture of farewell.
The pale yellow of her hair showed white against the paneling, and her slender figure drooped wearily. When she had gone, he entered the drawing room.
Margaret Aylener, standing by the mantel, turned from gazing into the ashy fire. “Was it a good idea?” she asked, with a tinge of irony.
“And bad,” he answered. “Both. Miss Aylener, get her away from here. Take her away — anything. Don’t let her stay here, that’s all.”
“Do you still say you can do nothing?”
“No more than I have done,” he answered. “We went outside the gate, and they came round us. Suffocatingly. Whether he was there too, I don’t know, but she half-yielded to some hypnosis — she was not under control, but open to suggestion. I suggested all I dared, took advantage of her condition to insist that she should not go out here alone, and I think the suggestion is fixed, but I’m not sure. Even if it is fixed, it won’t endure so get her away, soon.”
“I have been thinking,” she said, quite calmly. “I suppose, if I realized everything I have, I should not rank as a poor woman, Mr. Green. The total amount would be between forty and fifty thousand pounds.”
“Not exactly poor,” he commented.
“I will give you half that sum if you bring about Gamel MacMorn’s death,’ she said, as quietly and evenly as before.
“I see.” He too spoke very quietly. “There is a thick, wet fog outside tonight, too dense for me to travel by my headlights. If you don’t mind, I’ll start back very early in the morning.”
She gazed at him steadily, and, as when he had first seen her, he knew she was very lovely. Her age was an incredibility he felt.
“Why, yes,” she said. “It is a long day’s journey to London, by road. And since I rise late, I will say goodbye now. Mr. Green. I am so sorry you have had the long drive here to so little purpose.”
CHAPTER VIII
farewell to shadows
The reluctant day was not an hour old when Gees nosed the Rolls-Bentley out into still, white mist. Gees could only see a dozen yards beyond the radiator cap. Miss Aylener’s servant, the strange Callum, guided him to the drive in front. The rowans were giant ghosts looming high, guarding clouds on the mist.
With Callum walking beside him, Gees drove to the gate that he and Helen had failed to find on their return last night. Passing by the open gate, Gees reached out his hand, and Callum took his tip with respectful thanks.
Then the car was rocking and swaying along the track toward the post office and cottages, and The Rowans was no more than an incredible memory behind.
Little less angry than he had been when he bade Margaret Aylener goodbye the night before, Gees drove with about one-tenth of his brains, and hotly resented Miss Aylener’s calm suggestion of murder with the rest. Hire him like a paid Florentine assassin, eh? The woman was crazy.
Of course she had cause to hate and fear MacMorn, for the adventure with Helen in the fog had proved that the girl was in real danger, but — to avert it by buying a man to murder — He cursed under his breath, and jerked sharply to attention.
The car was half off the road. Either because the surface was bumpy or because he’d not been paying attention, the wheel had pulled against his hands and swerved to the right. Just ahead loomed blankness where solid ground should be.
He got out to go look over the edge of a pit which, if he had not caught himself up in time, would surely have wrecked him. Leaving his engine running, he went back along his tire marks, and saw that he had swerved off the main track some thirty or forty yards back — had made almost a right-angled turn, in fact. He could not remember swinging the wheel, but he must have, somehow.
Then, looking for the tire track to guide him through the fog back to the car, he saw them in process of being wiped out — by nothing. The spongy sidetrack appeared to even itself out with the rest of the ground. As if someone were busy with a rake or broom or hoe, the earth lifted from underneath and leveled.
And he could see it being done!
His hair crisped at the sight: it might have been the elasticity of the peaty soil, but the swiftness with which the tracks vanished pointed to some sentient agency.
The car was drowned in the still whiteness that prisoned him from normal things. Fortunately, he had left the engine running, and could guide himself back by the sound. He faced tow
ard it, took a step in that direction, and the sound ceased!
Now, unless someone had switched off the ignition, this was an impossibility. His gasoline gauge had showed six gallons that morning and a Rolls-Bentley engine does not cease running of its own accord. A new rage possessed him. Somebody — MacMorn? — had waited for him to get beyond sight of the car, and then had shut off the motor so that he should lose himself, perhaps fall into such a pit as lay just ahead of his car. Yet, why? He was leaving the place. He had given up — as abruptly as when Helen had been with him the night before, he realized that he was not alone.
Shadows thronged in the whiteness, darkened it as they wove figures about him, patterning the air with strange, half-human shapes, never quite in his sight. When he tried to look directly at any one of them, it was not there, but just aside from the line along which he gazed. By an effort he shut his mind to them, managed to concentrate on the fact that he was faced toward the point at which he had heard the purring exhaust of the engine. He must go in a straight line ahead to find the car. Only a few yards, and he would be in sight of it again.
They were trying to turn him, luring him to look aside and so lead from the line he must follow. He dare not let them. And suddenly Gees knew fear.
He advanced, looking straight before him. The shadows in the fog closed in on him, grew more numerous, and he felt the loss of strength they had imposed on him before. They took his human vitality and used it to supplement their sub-human intangibility, sucked at his physical strength and grew as tangible as wreaths of the fog itself, pressing on him, striving to divert him from his way — and then fading to nothingness as with a gasp of relief he saw the car.
He had won! Both attempts at leading him astray — killing him, perhaps — had failed. And, as the car came to sight again, he heard the purring exhaust as when he had left it. The engine had not stopped at all! Had it, though? Yet, if it had been stopped and started again, he would surely have heard the self-starter.
