Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  Gees put the cross in his pocket, closed the blade of the knife, and returned it to security. The scent was growing stronger — did MacMorn mean to drug him?

  But why should he?

  Yes, though, there would come the time of opened doors. But that was hours away — it was now two o’clock, and new moon was not until half past six.

  Like nothing on earth, that scent. The phrase, so often used carelessly, was completely apposite now. It was like nothing on earth, but rather was a breath from and almost sight of some elysium of dreams. Scent of a golden-lighted lotus-land, peopled by such houris as the one he had seen robed in green and silver — green and silver . . .

  The language MacMorn had caused him to understand came back to his mind, and he could think in it again.

  It was like the scent, appealing and direct, simpler and less capable of fine shades of expression than his own language, but persuasive, forceful. And if MacMorn had told truth, the dark girl in green and silver would be no more than a wandering shadow, soon. MacMorn would take the rest of her, blend it to himself as another period of life in which to gain more power —

  Gees started up.

  A faint sound had reached his ears from the corner of the room opposite the door. A very faint sound, as if a mouse might have moved beside the paneling, or —

  It was at that point MacMorn must have entered the room, while Gees had been trying to open the door. Was the other door there? He had tried the wall at that point, even more thoroughly than the rest. There would be no harm in trying it again.

  He went into the corner and began there, thrusting at the wall with his hands to see if any part of it would yield. Some two yards out from the corner, at right angles to the shelf, what had been solid before gave way with little effort on his part.

  The sound he had heard had indicated the release of a catch of some sort, and now a section of the wall the size and shape of an ordinary door fell back at right angles to the rest, quite silently, revealing a passageway gloomy even at its entrance, and hidden in black, utter darkness after only a few feet of its length. If its visible beginning were any indication of its direction, it led parallel with the corridor along the front of the house.

  A trap, of course. He was intended to explore the passage — and find what ugly end in the utter darkness toward which he gazed?

  If so, though, why the scent? The catch of this hidden door might have slipped by accident. Stepping just inside the passage, he felt down the edge of the door, but could find no latch nor bolt, no inequality of the surface, even. Nor was there any sign of a fastening on the edge to which the bronze hinges were screwed, he assured himself.

  He backed into the room, out of sight of the passage, and, getting his automatic pistol out of the armpit holster next his skin, slipped it in his hip pocket with a round in the barrel chamber and the safety catch on. For he meant to explore the passage, whether it was a trap or not.

  Anything was better than sitting here, waiting MacMorn’s time to release him. And, back in the full influence of the scent, he had no scruple over telling himself that the passage might lead him to the green and silver room and the girl within it.

  In a straight line, it must take him there.

  He entered, and moved slowly and with short steps along the smooth floor. The ceiling was within his reach overhead, the walls so close to each other that he had only to extend his hands a little to touch them both. No glimmer of light showed ahead, and he went more slowly and yet more slowly, feeling his way lest some shaft should be open to take him down and out of the sight of all men for all time.

  After what seemed a long time he looked back. Yes, so far the passage was quite straight, for he could see the oblong of light framing a part of the room he had left. Again, in six-inch steps, he went on, bending each foot as he advanced it to assure himself that the toe was on firm support. The floor remained smooth, unbroken.

  Until he sensed solidity close before him. He reached out and touched it, solid wood, a smooth, unbroken surface wherever his hand moved. He thought to use his cigarette lighter, and the flame showed plain hard wood. With the light still on, he pressed lightly, and the panel gave a little. He capped the lighter and put it back in his pocket, and, looking back again to estimate the distance he had traveled, felt that he knew what was beyond this door.

  A stronger thrust, and it swung open and stayed. Facing him stood the girl in green and silver, and he knew as he looked at her that though Margaret Aylener might be and still was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, this dark girl was the loveliest. With wide eyes and parted lips she faced him, startled, but scarcely afraid, a face and figure so ethereally fine as to seem only half of earth.

  “Who are you?” he asked, with the bluntness of sudden embarrassment.

  She shook her head and smiled, as if she did not comprehend the question. Then he remembered; MacMorn and she had spoken, and he had understood, another language. It came easily to his tongue, he found, and in it he asked again —

  “Who are you?”

  “I am named Gail,” she answered, and the name as she spoke it, half separated into two syllables, was like a caress. “And you — have you found a way to freedom and come to set me free?”

  “Ah! Like that, then.” He reverted to his own language for the comment. Then, so that she could understand. “I am not sure, but we may find a way. If, as I think, the doors must be opened.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  warning in the shadows

  The girl moved close, and her soft, dark eyes questioned him, sought to know how far she might trust him. “Then you too know of the opening doors?”

  For a moment it appeared to him that the fine lines of her- face were confused with other lines, but as she drew back the illusion disappeared. He said: “Yes, and we may escape then.”

  She looked toward the passage entrance. “Until you came, no door was there,” she said. “There is light — I see light a long way off.”

  “Another room, like this,” he explained. “But — ”

  “Let us go there!” She turned toward him, interrupting him with the exclamation. “Let us go there and close this door, so that he may not know where to find me. I am afraid — let us go there.”

  He hesitated. There was nothing against the suggestion, he decided. She was already at the passage entrance, looking back at him, waiting for him to follow.

  “I shall not fear the darkness with you,” she said, and at that he hesitated no longer, but entered the passage and drew the door closed behind him, placing them both in black darkness. Before moving on, he gave a thrust at the closed door, and found it immovable. Useless to regret leaving the green and silver room, now. But not until he had found and grasped the girl’s arm did he realize that they were going back into the scent, of which her room had been free.

  With the open doorway at the far end, and his knowledge that all the length of the passage floor was smooth, he led her confidently along into his room, as he thought of it now. The scent was stronger than when he had entered the passage, or else return into it made it more perceptible. He saw it as a faint, very thin haze, a slightly greenish tinge on the air of the room.

  While he stood, staring with mixed surprise and suspicion at a tray of food that had appeared on one of the little tables in his absence, Gail reached back into the passage and pulled at the door, which swung back level with the rest of the wall. As it came to rest, Gees heard again a faint sound like a mouse in the paneling, and, moving back to try the door, found that it had latched itself and was immovable as when he had first tried the walls.

  Well, it made no difference, since the door at the other end had closed solidly. If all doors should open, as he believed, this room was as near the front entrance of the house as that other.

  He faced about to look at the girl as a sudden suspicion assailed his mind. Possibly that trick of the opening doors — for now Gees felt certain it was a trick — had been contrived so that food might be plac
ed in this room in his absence, lest he should attack whoever brought it and try to make his escape.

  But was that all, or did MacMorn intend to throw this girl and him together for some other purpose? Was she leagued with MacMorn, rendered accessible as aid to some purpose of his?

  The question lasted in his mind only until she gazed up at him, and he saw in this stronger light the full loveliness of her eyes. Utter truth was revealed in them: such a one was incapable of treachery, an embodiment of the sweetness that he breathed with the scent — and she trusted him to free her from MacMorn.

  Adam’s decisions about Eve, when she seduced him from Lilith, were probably formed on rather similar lines.

  “There is food,” Gail said simply, “and I am hungry.”

  “I too,” Gees agreed, and took off a cover to reveal sandwiches — which might be poisoned, for all he knew, but he felt he would risk it. “While we eat, you shall tell me of yourself, Gail.”

  It was the scent, a warning consciousness told him, that made him incline to belief in an easy escape at the appointed time. As he placed two stools opposite each other with the tray between them, he tried to keep in mind that he must not relax from vigilance for a moment, but the need for care and restraint was difficult to remember. More and still more difficult.

  He found himself reveling in the increased perceptiveness that was one of the attributes of this haze, and told himself that oxygen, which has a like effect, burns life itself away if increased to too great a strength. He must watch, resist, keep a clear mind —

  “Of myself,” the girl said as she seated herself before the tray. “Today, but for you, I should end, no longer be myself.”

  “I am not sure that I can save you,” he told her. “Not quite sure.”

  “When the doors are opened, you will take me away beyond his reach, beyond the limits of his circle,” she said, with complete confidence. She took up one of the sandwiches and began to eat, smiling at him.

  “If possible, I will take you away,” he assented. “You know of the doors opening. What else? Why are the doors opened?”

  “That she, the Unnamed, may enter,” she answered, with as little apprehension over it as if she had spoken of an ordinary human visitor. “All ways must be made clear for her, else the invocation brings no answer. Only when all ways are clear will she reveal herself.”

  “And then?” he asked.

  “Then, though the ways are clear, she has no need of them,” she answered. “Yet they must be clear, lest any who would win sight of her are held from her presence. There must be way for all.”

  It was accepted fact, Gees knew. In every circle raised on earth by the very old ones who believed in and gave strength to their Unnamed, the stones that guard her altars stand apart from each other, so that approach may be possible to the people on every side.

  Thus, now that MacMorn had built his house round an altar — and had been careful to leave the altar itself open to the sky — every line of approach to the altar, every door in the house which might hold back a possible visitant, must be opened before any invocation could take effect.

  He took his third sandwich and began on it. “And her way?” he asked a little later, before taking another.

  She smiled. “What is the way of the shadows?” she asked in reply. “Could you stay them when they pass, or confine them to a way?”

  For awhile they ate in silence, and Gees reflected on the many who had tried to evoke this Unnamed or some later form of her, even in historic times. The hecatombs of Carthage, the children of Retz, black victims in Haiti, white girls — especially girls! — in closed houses from Paris to the farthest East, sacrificed in attempts at reawakening the object of a worship conceived in cruelty, kept alive only by gifts of human life, and a devouring rather than beneficent power.

  MacMorn followed it to his own ultimate extinction in it, blindly, helplessly. MacMorns had been kings; one of them — this one, perhaps — had very nearly raised himself to rule over all Britain. So far, given the human lives it demanded, had their Unnamed led them upward, but with inevitably lessening fees for its consuming at their command, they had dwindled from kingship until Gamel MacMorn was an unknown man in a tiny, remote village. The moon god or goddess — for to them it was female — was cold as the moon, unresponsive to human needs as the moon.

  “You dream? Forget me?” Gail asked.

  “No man could forget you,” he answered. “I thought of ways of escape. A few hours, less than four hours, and we shall go.”

  She stood up, and he followed suit. She said: “I need drink.”

  “There is a door where the shelf is bare,” he told her. “You will find water there. Wait, I will get you water.”

  “No,” she dissented. “Another drink. When Gamel MacMorn brought me here, he came with me to this room and made a drink there.” She pointed at the shelf. “I will make it again, and you shall taste it with me. It brings great happiness.”

  She was a shining wonder as she stood, and the scent was in his brain, clouding reason. Instead of passing him on her way to the shelf, she stood before him, almost touched against him. Inevitably he held her, unresisting, as inevitably kissed her and saw her eyes close under his own, felt her yield to his hold.

  “I trust myself to you,” she said. “When the doors are opened, I will trust myself to you.”

  Then a shuddering took her, and he held her away from him with a sudden thought that the food had been poisoned. But she smiled, and stood quite clear of him, erect and slim. “I will make the drinks that bring happiness,” she said, “and you shall drink with me.”

  She leaned toward him momentarily and her lips touched lightly against his own, but when he would have held her again she slipped away and went to the shelf while he turned to watch her.

  Beside her, and behind her range of vision, he saw a shadow hovering. He could not gaze at it directly to determine its form, for as he shifted his line of vision the shadow shifted too, always escaping him. Others appeared to either side of her, but of them all he could not pin one to definiteness, could not line his sight directly on it.

  Then he saw that Gail was compounding the drinks with as sure a hand as MacMorn’s. The two glass-stoppered bottles from which he had poured stood out in front of the rest, and she half filled two glasses from one bottle, to complete the filling from the other and stand to watch while in both glasses the blended fluids foamed, gained color, and stilled to crimson clarity.

  It occurred to Gees that the change must be real rather than apparent, for MacMorn was not here now to compel a hypnotic belief in it. There was only Gail — and the shadows.

  “What need has MacMorn of shadows?”

  She turned from the shelf to face him, apparently startled by such a question. She said — “He has no need of them. They are lives yielded on the altar, for each life a shadow, because they died to give strength to the Unnamed. He can command them, but in this place he cannot escape them. They crave release from being, but while the Unnamed has power they are bound to existence. Need of them? If he could, Gamel MacMorn would drive them away, but that may not be.”

  There they were, ever moving just beyond his line of vision, but he knew that Gail did not perceive their presence. To MacMorn, who served his Unnamed, they must appear as accusers — and though he could command them he could not drive them away! There was, then, a heavy price that he must pay for his continuing human existence. He must be — was — entirely conscienceless, or he could never endure these reminders of lives he had taken, in what fashion Gees could not yet tell, to renew his own. Drifting shadows, voiceless, craving release —

  Gail turned again and took up the two glasses. She came forward from the shelf and offered one to Gees, smiling, and he took and held it.

  The shadows were nearer, more numerous, nebulous shapes on the greenish haze, though not once could he bring one directly before his gaze to ascertain what form these remnants of lives assumed. There was a warning in his bra
in that he could not reduce to definiteness, an impelling of which he did not know the source.

  Something he must or must not do or say, but it was as vague as the drifting shadows. He looked at the clear, crimson fluid in the glass, and again at Gail.

  “Where have I heard your voice?” he asked. “Somewhere — ”

  She shook her head. “There are many voices like mine,” she answered, but he detected a note of anxiety in the implied denial. “Mine is like some one of them, but you have not heard me speak until today.”

  “Yet, somewhere, I have heard you,” he insisted. “If you could speak my language — is this the only language you understand?”

  “I cannot speak your language. Drink with me.” She reached out the glass she held and with it touched his.

  (Was that — the need of placing her, remembering where he had heard her voice, the vague warning that ticked in his brain?)

  “When I drank this drink with MacMorn,” he said, “no good came of it.” (Was the warning against taking the drink?)

  “But I am not MacMorn.” She leaned toward him and smiled. “Yet I warn you — when you drink, do not close your eyes.”

  That must be it. He had closed his eyes — Kyrle remembered closing his eyes when he had first drunk this stuff, and both Kyrle and himself had lost periods of time in which MacMorn had done what he would with their minds. But still there was an uneasy sense of something he must or must not do or say, a consciousness other than his own warning him of danger from — what? Closing his eyes?

  Kyrle had said, when he told of his uneasy dreams: “It isn’t whispering, but as if they thought at the inner me, not in speech at all.” So now, something was thinking at the inner Gees, striking at the influence of the scent, trying to tell him — what?

  He ought not to have come back here: the green and silver room was free of the scent, and away from it these impulses which drove him now would have had no power. He saw Gail, not relaxing her gaze at him, lift her glass to her lips, and knew that he too wanted to drink, wanted to experience the ecstasy the crimson fluid had already given him once. If he did not close his eyes — in that lay the danger. He drank.