Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  Gail’s glass, emptied, thudded unbroken on the carpeted floor. For a moment, as he too drank, he knew again the illusion that other lines confused the contours of her face, and then the wonderful, vital life of the fluid flooded him. His glass fell unheeded from his fingers, and he reached out — Gail’s dark eyes were so near his own that he had no remembrance of the shadows, nor any reasoning sanity left . . .

  Her arms clasped round his neck, and she drew him down . . . the dark eyes looked up into his, and closed . . . she whispered — “Yes. Hold me — ” and her whispering ceased. The elysian enchantment of the scent was one with her night-dark hair and willing lips, a sweetness . . .

  CHAPTER XXII

  THE wind’s delay

  Thirty miles away, the wheel-flanges of an engine and three corridor coaches ground noisily against the lee-side rails as, resistant to the force of the gale, the train drew to a standstill at a wayside station. Callum, waiting on the platform, hurried to a doorway of the middle coach, from which Margaret Aylener descended to face him. He looked past her, but no other descended with her. “You are alone, madam.”

  “Have you seen anything of Miss Helen?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No, madam. Mr. Green and Mr. Kyrle came last night, and said she had disappeared. I thought — perhaps — ” He did not end the sentence, nor was there any need. It was the expression of the very faintest of hopes that he knew all the time as a futility.

  “They are at Brachmornalachan now?” she asked, while an aged porter, who had raked her luggage out of the van, approached for instruction as to what to do with it.

  “They went to MacMorn’s this morning,” Callum answered. “I put Mr. Green’s car in the garage for him, because he left it out last night. When I came away, madam, they had not returned.”

  “Why did he leave the car out?” She disregarded the waiting porter to ask the question.

  “He — Mr. Green — told Elizabeth there was fog,” Callum answered, “though it was quite clear when I went to bed. But — ” Again he left a remark incomplete. Again, with Margaret Aylener as his auditor, there was no need for him to state his conclusion.

  She turned to the porter — he had loaded and unloaded baggage here for her long enough to know the lady from Brachmornalachan.

  “Put it all in the car,” she bade. “In the back — we shall not wait to strap any trunks on the grid. Go and help him, Callum.”

  She gave up her ticket and followed them into the little booking office, toward the exit from the station. When Callum released the latch of the outer door for the porter to wheel his barrow through, the door swung wide with a crash, and the wind that drove it struck Margaret Aylener and forced her back a couple of steps before she could regain balance against it. She struggled through the doorway and on to the car.

  Until the car turned to face the wind, the body rocked on its springs as gusts struck at its length. Blue-gray, high-riding clouds raced from west to east, and the land was dark under them. Within a quarter-mile of the station, they passed a great gash in the earth, and at its side a wall of soil that still clung among the roots of a newly-uprooted larch.

  The driving gale roared past them, and the car shook in it. Vague in the farthest distance before them, the hills that ringed in Brachmornalachan squatted, gray under the blue-gray clouds.

  “What time was it when Mr. Green and Mr. Kyrle went to MacMorn’s this morning, Callum?” Miss Aylener asked when they had traveled a mile.

  “Very early, madam. Mr. Green asked for breakfast at six, and they left very soon after. I was out after Mr. Green’s car, and saw them go into the house. It would then be not seven o’clock, I think.”

  “And until you left, you saw nothing more of them?”

  “Nothing, madam,” he told her soberly. “It would be about two o’clock when I left, and I think they were still at MacMorn’s.”

  “And it is new moon this evening.” She stated the fact, did not ask a question. Callum inclined his head in assent.

  “By Greenwich, six-thirty-three,” he said.

  For awhile, gazing through the windscreen at bending trees, broken branches, flying wisps of straw and hay, and here and there a flung-down mass of foliage — the wrack of the great gale — she sat thoughtful. All her love for Helen, all that she had given, was futile, ran her thoughts. Within his circle of stones, MacMorn was master of old enchantments, priest of old gods and user of their powers — and the two men had not come back! He had worsted them, laid his warlock spells on them and made them helpless. And Helen —

  She must not despair: there was still time, still hope.

  They topped a rise, and the car slowed and shook in the full force of the wind. With a crash that was the sound of its death-agony a tall tree, no more than a score yards distant from the road, fell.

  “This is an awful gale, Callum,” Margaret Aylener said.

  “Aye,” he assented. “I mind no worse. But yon tree stood exposed to the worst, and t’was spaulty wood. Else it would have uprooted, not broken as it did.”

  “Is that the correct time?” She looked at the clock on the dash.

  “Fairly correct, madam. Maybe five minutes fast — it gains a wee bit.” He depressed his accelerator as he spoke, for, though they had topped the rise, the wind’s force slowed down the car.

  “And another hour will see us at home,” she suggested.

  “Not today, madam.” He shook his head. “The wind holds us back. Nearer an hour and a half, I’d say, with the last nine miles little more than a cattle track as it is. And that only if the road’s clear.”

  “Clear?” she echoed, not comprehending.

  “A tree might fall and block it at any moment, madam.”

  A slant of grayness charged toward them: drops of the rain rattled on the wind screen like small shot, and then the shower was behind them, racing to the east, while Callum set his wiper in motion for a minute to clear the spattered screen, and stopped it again.

  They rounded a bend, and he released the accelerator, disengaged gear, and pulled on the hand brake. “I feared it,” he said.

  A high-roofed truck lay on its side, the wheels toward the ditch, the strutted tarpaulin top extending so far into the road as almost to block it. Two men, the driver and his mate, stood gazing at it.

  “I’ll go and see, madam,” Callum said. “There may be just room to pass. On this curve, we are diagonal to the wind, and an inch too little might throw us into the off-side ditch. I am not sure — ”

  He got out and closed the door. Alternately she watched him and the inexorable clock on the dash, while he went to where the two men stood. The lorry driver nodded at him, cheerfully.

  “We’ve sent for the nearest towing outfit, mister,” he said. “I reckon another hour’ll see it here. She’s threatened to capsize half a dozen times when the blasted wind hit her full, and by gum she’s done it at last. But you might get past.” He measured the clear width of road with his eyes, and then looked at the stationary car. “It’s a shave, if not more’n a shave, but you might do it.”

  “We will see,” Callum said calmly.

  With his back to the tarpaulin at the point where it projected farthest into the road, he set his heel against it, and then, heel touching toe with every step, paced to the edge of the ditch.

  “What d’ye make it, mate?” the truck driver called to him.

  He came back from the edge of the ditch and shook his head. “Six inches too little,” he said. “And I must get on.”

  “You mean — real serious?” the driver asked.

  Callum looked him squarely in the eyes and said: “Life or death.”

  “Well, that’s good enough, I guess,” the man observed. “The old barrow’s wrecked, anyhow, an’ I doubt if I’ll ever drive her to Manchester again. You say life or death, so wreckin’ the cover’s no crime.”

  He detached a scout’s jack-knife from a swivel on his belt, opened it, and thrust the point through the tarpaulin cove
ring. With a downward thrust he made a long slit, parallel with the strut on which that part of the cover was braced. Then, reversing the knife and thrusting upward, he carried the slit as far as he could reach.

  “Jumbo” — he addresed his mate — “open the tool-box careful, though I guess everything’ll fall out however you open it. Fetch out the hacksaw. If we cut away a couple o’ struts about a foot down, I reckon it’ll give that six inches o’ roadway. Get a move on!”

  “I’ll go and explain to the lady in the car,” Callum said.

  She watched his return, glad to see any movement but that of the merciless clock hands before her. He explained why they must wait, and she took a pound note out of her bag and handed it to him.

  “Give them that,” she bade, “and tell them to hurry. Make them do it quickly, Callum. There is so very little time.”

  “I’ll do my best, madam,” he promised, and went back.

  By the time he reached the truck again, the driver had finished slitting the tarpaulin, and Jumbo had taken the top off the rearmost strut with the hacksaw. There was no need, Callum knew, to tell the driver and his mate to hurry. Five minutes more, and between them the two men carried aside the cut-away part of the cover. The driver eyed the resulting distance to the ditch, and again looked at the waiting car.

  “Think that’ll do it, mate?” he asked cheerfully.

  “I am quite sure,” Callum answered, and held out the pound note. “Your front end is so much farther off the road that it won’t interfere with us. Give me clearance against you as I drive past.”

  “I will that, an’ you’re a toff, mate.” The driver took the pound note. “Ten bob apiece outer the sky, as you might say. Thank the lady for us, mate, and tell her we wish her luck.”

  She needed it, Callum reflected as he went back to his seat and started again.

  Now, slowly, with a tight grip on the wheel because of the thrust of the tearing, roaring wind, Callum set the car in motion. The rear mudguard scraped against the ragged edge of tarpaulin where the driver had cut it away. They were clear! Callum pushed down the accelerator, and Margaret Aylener smiled and inclined her head to the two men as the car passed them, gaining speed momentarily.

  Clear, but with twenty-two minutes lost.

  “Callum, did you have a good lunch before you started?”

  “Why, yes, madam.” Surprise at the question sounded in his reply. She said:

  “Then, if we get back by six, I don’t wish you to stop for tea. Go straight to MacMorn’s — don’t trouble about the trunks or putting the car away, but go straight there. You understand?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “You will have no difficulty about getting in, I feel sure. My father told me how the door stood open for a new moon, at the time of Margaret Grallach’s disappearance. You will have no difficulty over that part of it.”

  “And the rest of it,” — Callum spoke as much to himself as to her — “well, I shall find that out when I get there.”

  “Helen — ” Margaret Aylener said the one word, and no more.

  Callum said: “I understand, madam,” and drove on, into the roaring wind, neutralizing its pressure with his tight grip on the steering wheel.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  maker of dreams

  A thing thought at Gees’ inner self and wakened it. It used no words, but its form was: “We tried to warn you against the crimson liquid, but you were drowned in the scent, and would drink.”

  He thought in answer: “It is too late, now.”

  “She was bidden not to drink, but to keep watch. The lure of the liquid was too strong for her, and she drank. See her now!”

  Gees saw her lying among the cushions of the divan, wonderful in sleep, with her outflung arm across his shoulder and her lips parted in a smile. Her alluring dark eyes were closed, and her breast rose and sank evenly. And in this dream he saw himself, too, from outside himself, one arm half hidden under Gail’s dark hair, his eyes closed, his body inert.

  The thing threw another thought into his self that saw these two asleep: “She did not keep watch.”

  Regret for Gail mixed in with an inexplicable triumph in that thought. Gees tried to sort out the two emotions, to understand the causes that evoked them, and the thing divined his thought. It put into his mind: “Because our master will punish her, and command us to trouble her dreams. And because we have triumphed over him, since she drank the liquid and so could not keep watch. It was willed that you alone should drink through her temptation, but the scent lured her, and she could not resist. She must pay a great price for this happiness.”

  “Then you are a shadow?” Gees thought the question at the thing he could not see nor hear, though he felt it as existing.

  “We are all shadows. We tried to warn you, but the scent was too strong. Our master is too strong, and even now he prepares to gain new strength, and in the preparing relaxes his will from us. Else, we could not have won access to you.”

  It was no more than a dream, Gees knew, though it had a continuity beyond that of most dreams, a reasonableness in spite of its impossibility. One more effort, and he would waken. He could feel the warmth of Gail’s arm, the weight of her head on his own arm. One more effort — but he could only look down and see those two bound in deepest sleep. Gail’s smile told of utter, contented happiness, but he saw his own brows draw downward in a momentary frown, and his closed eyelids quivered, and stilled.

  A shadow thought at him that he, one with them while that self on the divan slept, was out of time and out of distance. Nothing was either far or near, and presently nothing was real, for all things apart from existence itself were pictures on the great web of eternity in which time was woven as a pattern.

  And because time was no more than a pattern on eternity, he was there out of time, with the shadows, out over the world. He could see Brachmornalachan and the altar open to the sky inside an inner circle no bigger than MacMorn’s house. A red-armed man stood beside the black altar, and as others were dragged up one by one and laid on the altar his arm was splashed to a brighter red. When he looked up from his work and revealed his face, it was MacMorn’s face. Then all the shadows among whom Gees knew himself one blotted out that piece of the pattern of time and were very much afraid.

  “The master,” they thought to Gees and to each other. “The master. If he sees us, he will drive this shadow who is not yet a shadow from among us, send him back to his self that sleeps. And a shadow which is not yet a shadow is a little rest from the fields of dead flowers and desire without hope.”

  He thought a wish to see such fields, and looked on a waste of land swathed in grey gloom, dotted with tall stalks on which gray petals drooped, scentless, dead.

  He knew the gloom as an intensity of hopeless longing for escape — and through the field, half-buried in it yet in no way arrested from its rush, a modern express train hurtled on shadowy rails among a flock of shadowy sheep, while among the sheep, an aeon or so before sheep ever found these pastures, a pair of beetle-browed, skin clad lovers — Cro-Magnons, perhaps — caressed each other. For all these things, though happening at different points in the pattern which was time, had happened in that one place in eternal space, and so were fixed there, each in its moment or hour.

  Limit of fantasy! An express train rushing through the shadowy fields of asphodel! In the persisting fields shadows of men and women wandered hopelessly, calling to each other though none heeded the cries.

  Gees thought at the shadows around him: “A mad world.”

  They thought a laugh at him — even shadows could think laughter, being freed for a little hour from the driving of their master, who gave himself wholly for this time to the service of his Unnamed.

  He thought a question: “Helen Aylener?” Then there was a flurry among the shadows that had thought these scenes into his consciousness. They crowded in on him, and he saw one clearly as a bearded, fierce, dirty face. A mere bodiless face, thrust close at him, thinking that h
e had thought something they were bidden keep from him. The face drove at him. He saw Gail nestle a little closer to his sleeping self, heard her contented, rest-filled sigh, and himself moved slightly.

  His arm was numb with cramp. He moved it, trying to withdraw it from under her head without wakening her. The scent was strong in his nostrils: the things he had seen among the shadows raced, picture-clear, through and through his brain, and Gail asleep was dear, infinitely dear.

  She started up, sat erect. She said: “But you should be asleep!”

  He looked a laugh into her eyes. “I have wakened,” he answered.

  She leaned close toward him. The nearness of her was unbelievable. Yesterday, he had not know that such fire and tenderness and utter abandonment could exist outside dreams. There was something he ought to remember, something the shadows wanted him to remember: they swayed round him, never completely within range of his opened eyes. Gail’s eyes prevented them, her offered lips drove out thought of them, and the scent prevented reasoning, destroyed thought of yesterday or of tomorrow. Her arms around his neck were a garland.

  “Gail . . . loveliness . . .” He spoke aloud. “You have not told me of yourself.”

  “What can I tell you? I am a shadow in your mind, a dream you hold close and love. All men seek a dream, and you have found it.”

  “No man ever found such a dream real before.”

  She passed a slender finger over one of his eyebrows. “I ruffled it, I smooth it,” she explained, and smiled happily. “If I am a dream, you are reality. There is happiness and happiness, and you have given the greater of the two. All my life I shall remember. If I had accepted all the lives I have foregone, still I should have remembered.”