Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  He got back into the driving seat. The shadows he had seen or imagined — but not imagined, for no imagination could produce this bone-weary exhaustion — the shadows he had seen no longer patterned the mist. He was alone. How had they closed his ears, shut him away from the sound that would have guided him back here?

  He backed slowly away from the pit into which he had so nearly fallen. He had only to reverse in a straight line, and the car must come to the track from which he had diverged. The wheel tracks lengthening in front of the radiator as he backed would show him if he swerved to either side. Thick though the fog might be, it gave him eight or ten yards of sight beyond the nose of the car, enough for holding to a straight line.

  But the car left no wheel tracks! Sweat streamed down his body. Here he was with almost the most modern of material things, presumably in a material world; and the ton and a half of metal under his control appeared to press as lightly on the peaty earth as might Ariel on a blade of grass.

  Well, keep the wheel straight — and he knew that the most difficult thing in driving is that of keeping a car in reverse to a straight line — and eventually he must reach the track from which he had diverged. Thirty to forty yards, he had walked when he left the car. Now, he backed and backed, fifty or sixty yards. He stopped. The wheel must have swung in his grasp without his knowing it.

  He got out and, without losing sight of the car this time, found that he had been proceeding parallel with the track and about half a dozen yards distant from it. Had he kept on, he would eventually have backed into the wall of The Rowans, or else, circling unconsciously, backed into the pit from which he had just escaped.

  He got in again and drove on. Warned by his experience, he kept his whole attention on his driving, and presently the gray bulk of the post office showed dimly.

  Passing it, he saw the postmistress, Bathsheba Gralloch, standing on the doorstep, gazing at him. She gave no token of recognition, though he passed at so little distance that with one forward step she could have shaken hands with him. He fancied or saw a glimmer of evil amusement in her dark eyes, and, hating her unreasonably, violently, remembered the ham in the back of the car. He passed on.

  As he went up from the valley of the loch and away from Brachmornalachan, the fog thinned. When he reached the three-way crossroads and looked back, the white density from which he had emerged, ringed by its crouching hills with their intermittent clumps of ragged, wind-tortured firs and pines, lay like a sea of cotton behind him.

  Back in the normal world! No shadow shapes marched or wove figures on the haze, here, no stone reared to show a graven Name to the life of everyday. Not that any life appeared, except the tiny, grayish blobs in the far distance that he knew were grazing sheep. But — free of it!

  He felt intense relief. It was blessed to realize that, with her proposal of the night before, Margaret Aylener had put acceptance of any mission she might offer out of the question. He had bade her goodbye, finished with her and with Brachmornalachan — and with MacMorn!

  He swung on to the main road, and was about to accelerate when he saw, beside the way, a scrub-filled pit that had probably been a stone quarry, and stopped beside it, remembering Bathsheba Gralloch as she had watched him pass, and especially remembering the look in her eyes.

  He got out, went to the back of the car, and took out the ham he had bought at the post office. Swinging it, he let go, and heard it crash down in the scrub that lined the quarry. A waste of twenty-five shillings, possibly: he had no real reason to doubt that it was a perfectly good ham.

  On the other hand —

  He resumed his seat at the wheel, and presently the tires began their normal humming. Scent of peat fires, of springing vegetation, and the sun climbing up the east —

  A modern road, designed and graded and built by practical engineers for modern, practical use by sane people going about their material business.

  Steadily, swiftly, the distance between him and Brachmornalachan increased.

  CHAPTER IX

  earthly interlude

  Nearly two years before when he had established his confidential agency in Little Oakfield Street off the Haymarket, and had hesitated whether to engage a secretary, an office boy, or both, as staff, he had eventually decided that a secretary might not be all he would need, but would certainly be all he could afford.

  He had interviewed seven applicants for the post, and had inquired of each in turn whether he might kiss her. Three of them said he might, three were modestly doubtful, and the seventh negatived the suggestion flatly and decidedly, whereupon he engaged her.

  She gave her name as Eve Madeleine Brandon, and until Gees’ father, General Sir George Green, discovered that she was daughter of one old friend of his and niece of another, Gees himself was so doubtful of the name that he wanted to ask her whether she belonged to the Smith family, in reality.

  She had brains, good looks, and charm; she never let her employer forget that he might not kiss her, and they got on so well in every way that Gees frequently congratulated himself on his choice.

  On the morning after his return from Brachmornalachan, as he entered the room in which she worked or waited for something to do, she put down the novel she had been reading and greeted him coolly.

  “Book-of-the-Month, eh?”

  “I’m so bored,” she explained.

  “Any inquiries?”

  “The usual morning sheaf,” she said. “I have declined them all. Lost property, divorce evidence, psychic seekers — nothing you would care to undertake, I know. Rather an odd one this morning — I don’t know why the man should think you’d regard it as between mumps and murder. An innkeeper in the New Forest thinks his barmaid is robbing the till.”

  “Umm-m! Initial consultation, two guineas, too. But then, some while ago, a firm with a turnover of about a million a year found its accounts a penny out, and in tracing that penny the auditors uncovered frauds amounting to tens of thousands.”

  “And what has that to do with a New Forest barmaid?” she inquired.

  “I dunno,” he confessed. “Have a cigarette? So will I. But if I went and looked round that pub, the barmaid might lead me to a plot to assassinate a Cabinet Minister, or a burglary at the Mint, or a scheme for making Hitler king of Jerusalem. She might not, of course.”

  Miss Brandon frowned, and asked: “How did you get on in Scotland?”

  “In Brachmornalachan, you mean,” Gees amended. “For one thing, I met the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

  “That is not unusual, I believe,” she commented softly.

  “Her being close on twice my age makes it so, though,” he said. “Then, I was offered something over twenty thousand pounds to complete what I was asked to do, and turned the whole thing down and came back.”

  She gazed at him gravely, steadily. “I’d better finish off the morning’s inquiries, and then get on with my book,” she said.

  “And I gave twenty-five shillings for a ham, and threw it into an old stone quarry to lose it,” he added. “It looked like a good ham, too.”

  “Did you have good weather?” she asked sweetly.

  “And a very attractive girl took me out in the dark after she’d met me for an hour or so, and tried to get me to make love to her.”

  Miss Brandon frowned heavily. “I’d better dispose of these inquiries,” she said. “Unless you’d like to — ”

  “Put them aside for the present,” he bade, with a return to seriousness, “and get out your book. Even if I’ve turned down the case, we must have a record. So I’ll dictate it while the flavor of Brachmornalachan still hangs around my gills. Then I’ll discuss it with you, and after that I think I’ll go see the barmaid in the New Forest. A good solid barmaid with itchy fingers. You don’t know how thoroughly wonderful that sounds.”

  He dictated for the best part of a half-hour. At one o’clock, he went out to lunch and returned about three to find her sitting idle at her desk with the neatly finished typing la
id on her machine.

  “By the look of it, the book of the month is like that barmaid in the New Forest — doesn’t interest you any more than she did me. Have you marked and learned and mastered my story?”

  “Marked and learned,” she answered. “That is my limit.”

  “I see. This is London, of course. Yes. You’re skeptical.” He made it half a question. She looked up at him, gravely.

  “Even you turned it down,” she said. “What is it? Ghosts?”

  “I don’t like the word, Miss Brandon. To your question — no.”

  “Then — ” She left it at that, and waited for his explanation.

  “You know you can save life by transfusion of blood?” he asked.

  “You don’t mean — ?”

  “Take the word, ‘transfusion,’ and analyze it,” he suggested. “Not merely transmission, or transfer, of blood from one person to another. But fusion. That is, complete annexation of the blood to the person needing it. It becomes a part of that self; is fused in it. In that way, as I see it, MacMorn has learned to transfuse not merely blood, but life itself. To fuse another life into his own, and when that wears out another, and yet another — how many, naturally, I don’t know.”

  “But you can’t — he wouldn’t go on being MacMorn,” she objected.

  “Oh yes he would. That, don’t you see, is where the shadows come in? Not the soul — he doesn’t need that. But the principle, the vital physical force — call it what you like — that makes the human body a fit habitation for the soul all through a lifetime. That, I believe, is what he transfuses to himself. D’you know any old Egyptian beliefs?”

  “I’ve read of them, of course,” she answered.

  “Yes. Most, people have. According to them, three entities made up a man, in addition to his physical organism. There were the ka, and the bat, and the khou, distinct entities. When an adept of evil like MacMorn transfuses a life to himself, one of those three is set wandering, homeless and earthbound, and never going far from the rest of the personality of which it was a part during the mortal lifetime of the whole!”

  “And so the shadows MacMorn makes stay near him.”

  “Far more than he has made — thousands more,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “Why thousands more? There are not thousands of — adepts of evil, you called him. You say — this report — you only saw three people at his house.”

  “Possibly only two. Partha may have been the man who came to the door, for all I know. No, there is only one MacMorn, to my belief at any rate.

  “But the circle, and the altar over which MacMorn’s house is built to keep it intact as a dwelling place for what was worshiped there when all the stones were standing. I think — this is all assumption — I think that whatever was worshiped there still has power. Whatever it was, absorbed — transfused to itself — lives by the thousand in far back time, and so made the shadows.

  “While It retains power, they are bound to that place, bound to It and to obey It. Which was why they tried to destroy me, when I was leaving. I’d shown MacMorn I either knew or suspected the truth about him and was antagonistic, and he passed on the information to his — deity.”

  “In that case, how do any Ayleners survive?” she asked.

  “For one thing, they don’t. They’re fined down, now, to Margaret Aylener, who is powerless against MacMorn, and her niece Helen whom he intends to transfuse to himself for the sake of another span of mortal life. For another thing, the four rowans about the house.”

  “The trees protect from him?” She sounded derisive.

  “Throw out the old belief in the world-ash as the fountain and fore-bringer of human life, and still the tree has power,” he asserted. “Then why not as protection from what MacMorn serves? Set in a quadrangle of the rowans while they are in their own house, Ayleners need not fear MacMorn. He caught Helen and put his spell on her far from that house. At Eleusis, and could you find a more significant parallel than that?”

  “Parallel?” she asked. “I’m not — not accepting all this — it’s too fantastic. But I’d like it all clearly.”

  “If you look up the Oxford Companion off the shelf in my room some time, and turn up Eleusis,” he said, “you’ll find it says that the Eleusinian mysteries culminated in a rite in a darkened hall, where the worshipers were shown visions in flashes of light.

  “Tableaux posed in front of torches thrust up through the floor, probably — I don’t think Eleusis in historic times ever went deeper than trickery and attempted reproduction of older rites, though of course there can be no certainty about that now.

  “But MacMorn’s house is built over an altar thousands of years older than anything at Eleusis, and if sacrifice at that altar has been carried on to an extent that keeps its god there, if MacMorn is priest to that god — ”

  “Then Eleusis is only a faint parallel to his house,” she suggested.

  “I thought it all over on my way back, and talking it out with you helps to clarify the thought,” he said. “Your questions are useful — ”

  “Another question,” she interrupted. “If this girl — Helen, and by what you say of her I dislike her intensely — if she is in real danger, why did you give it up and come back?”

  “We have had two cases of the type to which this belongs, since I started this agency and engaged you. In this case, if I admit the threat to Helen Aylener, that threat emanates from an ordinary human being, a rather peculiar-looking man, I own, but to the best of my knowledge a perfectly law-abiding one whom I can’t accuse of anything, whatever I may think of him.

  “He has made the acquaintance of the girl, invited her and her fiancé to his house and given them a drink. So what? If I allege that he’s living on the life of a woman who disappeared when she was a girl, I invite questions as to my own sanity. Medically, transfusion of life in the way MacMorn may or may not accomplish it is an utter impossibility. As for the shadows, spots before the eyes make a favorite line in patent medicine advertisements. And what’s a shadow, anyhow?

  “I might sit in Brachmornalachan till the birth of Helen Aylener’s fourth baby and miss my chance at whole rows of New Forest barmaids. On top of all which, my goat was gotten nicely by the suggestion that I could have twenty thousand pounds if I’d only wipe MacMorn off the face of the earth.”

  “You think the god — whatever it is — still exists?” she asked.

  “Gods exist only by virtue of belief in them,” he answered. “That is, the gods within human conception, distortions of the real Power behind things. I feel sure the god of MacMorn’s altar still exists, because of the shadows, for one thing.

  “The multitude of human sacrifices made on that altar in old times must have built up a god of very great power, and the way in which lives were absorbed — transfused — and the resulting shadows bound near that spot would maintain life in the god.

  “Destroy worship of it, belief in it, and it will cease to exist, but while a priest of the cult remains to serve it and stand as master of the shadows, minister to the god, it will live and have power inside the circle marked by the stones as its dwelling place.”

  “In reality,” she observed thoughtfully, “you found — nothing.”

  He laughed, and offered his cigarette case. “What is reality?” he asked. “Are you and I both real as we sit here, or does one of us exist only in the imagination of the other? The whole universe may be unreal, no more than a picture in the brain of an ant belonging to some other universe. There is no ultimate, conclusive proof of the reality of anything.”

  “Well, of course, if you’re going to strike that note, I give up.”

  “More questions?” he asked.

  “What is this antipathy to iron in his house?” she asked.

  “Ah! I wondered if you’d spot that. Fellowship with the Daoine Shih — the very old ones who are only half-human. They avoid iron — it is in some way a plague to them. I don’t understa
nd it — there it is.”

  “And they are — what are they like?”

  “Mainly responsible for the legends of fairies — they let themselves be seen by humans, at times. Loathly things, far below human standards. Driven out of sight by the first savages who wandered into the lands they occupied, long before any civilization dawned.

  “You can meet them dematerialized at séances, posing as Napoleon or a departed relative for the credulous, trying to mix with full human beings in that way. Rags of mind, mainly cunning and deceit, in or out of semi-material travesties of bodies, some horrible and some merely grotesque.”

  “And how do you know all these things?” she asked caustically.

  “Soaked them up,” he answered. “Fair lady, I was not always a policeman, and things quite beyond proof always interest me. I claim to be so far proof against influence by them as to be able to study them without harm to myself, too. So I studied. MacMorn recognized that I had, and got a certain amount of panic over me in consequence.”

  “And now you wait for another case,” she observed.

  “We wait for another case,” he corrected her. “Lord, it was only yesterday morning I chucked that ham into a quarry in Scotland, and it feels about two years ago! Miss Brandon, I’ve got an idea. Let’s close down tomorrow, and I’ll turn out the buzz-wagon and take you to that New Forest pub for a bread and cheese and beer lunch. You can get off with the proprietor while his wife isn’t looking, and I’ll see what the barmaid is like. How does it appeal to you?”

  “All but the proprietor part.”

  She nodded contentedly at his back as he went out through the doorway. He had never suggested anything of this sort before — she had never ridden in that wonderful car of his. The invitation had been given in a friendly way only, but — did it mean that he was about to wake up and turn human, see her as other than his secretary?

  If so, she would know how to manage him.