Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  “That? The woman from the post office.” Callum took a long breath as he recovered his wind after the struggle up the slope. “Bathsheba Gralloch. I’ve always tried to make Miss Aylener understand she’s mixed in with MacMorn’s black magic, but she would never credit it.”

  They went back toward the house together. Gees wound his raincoat round his arm, for it flapped in the driving wind. Callum asked: “Miss Helen?” and Gees looked at his wrist watch.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but there is still a quarter of an hour. Somewhere, I believe, in that damned house of sorceries, but I don’t know. MacMorn separated me from Kyrle and jailed me in a room.”

  “But all doors had to be opened,” Callum commented. “I knew it.”

  The mist drove away, thinned, and the squat house stood stark before them. Hours of daylight remained to reveal it — a gray, sullen light, and the wind roared hammering at the house. MacMorn’s thorn tree tossed and bent in the gusts.

  “Callum” — Gees bent close to him — “the woman from the post office. What do you know of her — do you know what she was like when she was younger?”

  “Eh, what does it matter now?” Callum asked in reply. “A dark tall slip of a thing when I was a child, and Miss Aylener petted her, made much of her. Gave her clothes — there was a green silk frock I remember. But the sister disappeared — MacMorn took her, and may Hell take him! — and after that this one never came near The Rowans. Look!”

  He pointed up at a window almost directly over the front door of the house.

  They saw Kyrle standing, gazing out to the wind-whirled tatters of thinning mist, ignoring them completely. Callum shouted at him, but he stood still, unheeding both the shout and their beckoning hands. Quite still, staring out with as little animation as if he were a corpse propped at the window.

  “He’s in hypnosis,” Gees said. “We must go up and get him out.”

  “If we can wake him, he may give us news of Miss Helen.” Callum made to enter the house as he spoke, and Gees went with him. But the black clad, black-haired serving man, whom Gees had seen before, turned from looking along the corridor to bar their way.

  “Get aside, you!” Callum said sharply. “We’re coming in.”

  “Ye’ll no’ come in!” He stood in the doorway, a heavily-built, strong figure of a man, and bared his teeth uglily. Gees drew his automatic pistol from his pocket, and leveled it at the man’s chest.

  “Stand aside!” he shouted.

  Instead, the man leaped at Callum with a snarl, and the two of them went down in the doorway. Callum was undermost, and Gees stepped forward, reversing the pistol. He waited his chance, and rapped on the man’s temple with the butt end of the weapon. He rolled aside senseless as Callum heaved out from under him and got up, with a thin stream of blood running down from teeth-marks in his chin.

  “Bit me,” he gasped out. For a few seconds he leaned against the lintel of the door, and his breath whistled through his teeth. Gees passed him and looked along the corridor for a staircase which would take them up to Kyrle, but could see none. He had already been past the door of the room in which he had been trapped by MacMorn and held inert by Gail, and knew no visible staircase existed that way. Somewhere at the other end of the house —

  “Do you feel fit to face things?” he asked.

  Callum stepped into the corridor beside him. “Quite — it was only a minute’s struggle.” He looked down at the crumpled figure, and Gees, dragging it aside out of the doorway, remembered the automatic pistol Kyrle had put down at a MacMorn’s bidding. It was no longer there.

  “We’ll go up,” he said. “This way — it must be this way.”

  He led along the corridor, and they came to the wide-flung door of the green and silver room. Gees looked in for a moment and saw two dusty old couches and what might have been a couple of roughly-made milking stools, and the very color of the upholstery on the couches had faded to brownish-gray.

  Of all the green and silver sensuousness in which he had seen Gail stand, no trace was left. Callum’s words came back into his mind: “A tall dark slip of a thing when I was a child — ” and Callum had remembered a green silk frock. MacMorn had spelled it all back and the room too as setting for her; to what she had been he had added such beauty as the fairy folk contrive for a night, to turn to rags and dust with the coming of dawn.

  Illusion — all illusion!

  For just the second of realization Gees looked into the room, and then he led the way along the corridor, round the corner and toward the back of the house. A little way along they came to an un-lighted stairway, and went up, feeling a way by the wall to come into another corridor, or running from side to side of the house, dividing the front and back rooms of the first floor.

  They hurried, for the minutes were racing away from them now, and came to the open door of the room in which Kyrle stood as they had seen him from outside, a still figure at the window, quite heedless of the noise they made in entering.

  “Kyrle!” Gees shouted at him. “Wake up, man!”

  He did not move. Gees went to him and, grasping him by the shoulder, shook him and turned him round. He moved his feet just so much as kept him balanced on them, and his wide eyes stared sightlessly past them, through them. Except that his heart beat and his flesh was warm, he was lifeless, a body in which the spirit was asleep.

  “We must get him outside,” Gees said. “Little chance of getting any news of Helen out of him. Come on, Kyrle.”

  He pulled at a limp arm, and Kyrle moved with slow, thudding steps as far as the door. But there, in a way, he came to life. MacMorn had bidden him stay in the room, and he would not leave it.

  With a hand thrust out to each side to hold him back, he resisted stubbornly, strong enough in his hypnosis to thwart them both. Until, realizing how little time remained in which to find and save Helen Aylener, Gees drew back to give himself room, and with all his weight behind the blow struck Kyrle in the solar plexus and got an arm round the limp, senseless figure.

  “He’ll thank me for that, yet, if he remembers it,” he said. “Give me a hand, Callum. I’ll carry him out, and then you can get him away somehow while I go looking for Miss Helen. Once outside this cursed circle, I believe he’d wake up.”

  He stooped, and between them they got Kyrle across his shoulder. Then they went out from the room, Callum following down the dark stairway and to the other door.

  Outside, the hurricane appeared to be lessening, though still it roared and beat at the house, and all the hurrying mist had driven eastward and left gray clarity over the valley. Gees dumped his burden on the ground and saw that the pillar scribed with Kore’s symbol had fallen.

  For centuries beyond telling it had stood, but now it was only a line along the surface of the earth. Was its fall a token that MacMorn’s power was failing?

  “And now — Miss Helen?” Callum asked.

  “I’ll look for her,” Gees answered. “If you leave him to wake up here, he’ll only go back into that room — you’ve got to get him beyond the limit of the circle, somehow, outside MacMorn’s domination. I believe you’d do it if you got him past that stone down there.”

  He stepped quickly inside the doorway as MacMorn’s man stirred and groaned, and, taking his pistol out from his pocket again, Gees dealt the man a second heavy blow.

  “That should keep you quiet,” Gees grunted. “All right, Callum — look after Mr. Kyrle and get him away. Come back and look for me if he wakes in his right sense. I’ll find Miss Helen if she’s here.”

  He turned back into the house as Callum began half-lifting, half-dragging Kyrle’s limp body down the slope toward the fallen stone.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  the black altar

  They had missed MacMorn only by minutes. He entered the room from which Gail had fled and Gees had followed her, a few seconds after they had gone; he was searching for her, since he had need of a woman’s aid. Then he sought her in the dusty room in which he had
made illusion for Gees, not knowing that she was then running away from the house.

  No sign of her, no time to find her.

  MacMorn went up the staircase and entered a room at the back where Helen Aylener, blank in hypnosis as was Kyrle, sat still on a bed. Bathsheba should have been here with the girl, should have prepared her, and now there was so little time, so terribly little time. He touched the girl’s forehead with his fingertips.

  “Waken to me, Helen,” he bade. “Waken, but only to me.”

  In a way she became alive; she was an automaton, capable of doing his bidding, and no more. He said: “Stand up,” to test her response, and she stood obediently, completely subject to him.

  He held up a leather gag that he carried. “Open your mouth,” he bade, and again she obeyed, uninterestedly.

  He fitted the gag between her teeth, not ungently, and strapped it behind her head, because in the limit of swift agony she must endure on the black altar she must not be able to cry out. He said: “Undress — take off all your clothes,” and while she obeyed that command too he took two black swathings that hung over the end of the bed.

  In one he wrapped himself, a covering that reached from his head to his feet, and when she stood naked he draped the other robe over her, a thick black woollen fabric which left exposed only her bare feet and ankles, her face and untidy, pale gold hair.

  Then he grasped her arm through the robe, and led her out and down. Had he been a minute later, Gees and Kyrle would have met him as they went up to where Kyrle stood helpless.

  He took her along the corridor which ran midway of the house at ground level, giving access from either side to the circle and the black altar stone. By one end of the stone the man Partha stood, naked, his arms folded on his hairy chest and his shaggy black head bent forward — he was acolyte to the black-robed priest of ancient evil who led the gagged sacrifice to the altar, and he neither moved nor looked up as the two advanced, while the great wind roared overhead and blue-gray masses of cloud raced across the sky.

  Between the altar and the top of the circle that walled it in a darkness slowly gathered as MacMorn had seen it gather — how many times?

  Down the shallow channel between the wall and the black stone, a line of thin fluid trickled to ooze through a wire gauze that had been set up. On the other side of the gauze, where the channel in the stone encircled the black altar rising above it, the fluid was alight with a wavering, bluish flame that gave off flecks of oily black smut. Like the covering of a Davy lamp, the wire gauze prevented the fluid from taking fire before it passed into the channel cut round the altar stone. There was a resinous smell; the fluid may have been turpentine, or some similar spiritous distillation.

  The little blue flames wavered and flickered, ringing in the black stone, and Partha stood as if he too were made of stone, his gaze directed down at the flame.

  MacMorn stripped the black robe off the girl and lifted her in his hold. He stepped over the flame and laid her on the black stone, her pale gold hair just touching its edges near where Partha stood.

  He took her hands, one after the other, and drew her arms down straight beside her, and she made no more resistance than a doll. Then MacMorn stepped back across the flame and, gazing upward, lifted his arms in silent invocation, his black robe falling back like a curtain hung behind him.

  The darkness over the altar grew denser.

  Black smut from the wavering flame was lifted up into it, and the flames grew tall and thin and steady, standing up like bluish, transparent candles, ringing in the black altar and the white, still girl laid on it. And now the darkness began to take shape — MacMorn stood rigid, his arms upraised, and Partha’s head drooped still lower on his folded arms.

  Above them grew the semblance of a giant figure with enormous, shadowy arms and hands of which the fingers were taloned like those of a vast beast, and with the face of a woman who knew all evil, and for whom all evil was not enough.

  Slowly, second by second, this semblance sucked up form and substance from the flames; slowly, second by second, it grew more tangible, and descended, a forming horror of unimaginable cruelty and lust and fear, bearing down toward the altar and the naked girl laid there, while round and round the limits of the circle shadows, cold and devoid of all emotion except that of longing for release from their dreary bondage, waited and watched this making of another shadow which presently would be one among them.

  They crowded, far off and still, while the vaster shadow accreted substance and strength from the flames, and descended —

  All this, through seconds of frozen, helpless horror, Gees saw, and knew that if he had overcome MacMorn it was only by a minute. Because he would not kill the black-robed man or devil without warning, he lifted the pistol in his hand and fired a shot at the wall, just over the place from which the fluid ran down to feed the fire about the black altar.

  With the shot MacMorn’s arms dropped as if the bullet had struck him, and the awful shape of the Unnamed whipped away like a veil and was gone, while Partha looked up, his teeth showing over his shaggy beard —

  And a spurting shaft of fluid from the wall struck MacMorn between the shoulders, a thin cascade curving out from the hole Gees’ bullet had pierced in the tank concealed high up in the circle of stone.

  MacMorn faced the source of the flow, faced about again, bewildered, and as Gees stepped out from the gloom of the corridor along which he had advanced, MacMorn almost leaped toward him, guessing his intent to take Helen off the altar.

  The man’s black eyes flamed in fury, and he made to pass the end of the altar — a little blue flame touched the edge of his spirit-sodden black robe, and he himself became a pillar of spouting flame, a tortured beast that ran hither and thither while Gees stood aghast at the sight and Partha fled into a corridor and vanished.

  Then, fighting with his hands against the fire that perhaps gave him a foretaste of his Hell, screaming in utter agony, MacMorn slipped and fell into the lake of fire that mounted upward, ever upward, fed by the stream from the bullet hole. There, drowned in fire, breathing fire, he was no more than a thing that writhed for a very little while and was still, while the shadows that had watched and waited fled, vanished. Release had come to them, and they would haunt this place of their making no more, for MacMorn, last of the men who had made them, was dead.

  One side of the black stone was still beyond the lake of flame in which MacMorn’s body shriveled and roasted. As, pocketing his pistol, Gees reached over from that side and wrapped the raincoat round Helen’s body, and then lifted her, he felt the heat of the increasing furnace scorch his eyes.

  He dragged her to the side of the stone at which he stood, lifted her in his arms, and ran into the corridor, round to the front, and out from the house.

  There he stopped to remove the gag MacMorn had placed in her mouth, and to clothe her more completely in the raincoat. Lifting her, he went off down the slope toward the loch — toward the fallen stone, over which two figures that he recognized as Kyrle and Callum stood, looking down until he was quite near them.

  Then Kyrle, looking up and seeing what he carried, would have run toward him, But Callum held the younger man back, gripping his shoulder with both hands to arrest him.

  “Nay, you don’t go inside the line of the stones!” he bade.

  Outside that line, past the end of the fallen pillar, Gees stopped, still holding Helen close to him, and looked down as Callum pointed. The skyward end of the pillar, rushing down, had struck Bathsheba Gralloch as she fled, crushing her bones, mangling her body, but leaving her face and head untouched.

  The stone was splashed with her blood; death had struck her so suddenly that her unmarked face, turned upward to the sky, revealed only surprise, and her parted lips almost smiled.

  “I tried to shut her eyes,” Callum said. “They opened again.”

  “Someone — we must get spades and dig her out,” Gees said. “The stone is too heavy for us to lift or lever it off her.�
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  “Look — look there!” Callum pointed at MacMorn’s house.

  A black shaft of smoke fled away from it, drove eastward on the last of the great gale. Where the smoke poured out from the house, its underside was streaked with yellow and blue as the fed flame roared up. For a second or less Gees glanced at it, almost indifferently.

  “MacMorn’s roasting in it,” he said. “I wish he were still alive to feel the roasting.”

  He glanced at Kyrle and saw him white and sick-looking, half dazed as yet. He looked down again at the blood-splashed stone and Bathsheba Gralloch’s dead face beside it.

  In some way death canceled out the ugly bitterness of his wakening from illusion. This crushed and shattered corpse had once been a dark, tall slip of a thing in a green silk frock — green shot with silver, perhaps — and her eyes that had hardened as her face had coarsened were once pools of tender darkness — Gail’s eyes.

  Somewhere on the pattern in the web of eternity that is called time Gail, not Bathsheba Gralloch, was fixed, in green and silver, and cold reason was extinguished in a scent that was like nothing on earth —

  MacMorn’s enchantment! MacMorn had made it all!

  Helen Aylener stirred in his hold. “My tongue is horribly sore,” she muttered. Then, struggling: “Put me down! Put me down!”

  “I can’t put you down,” Gees answered. “You’ve got nothing on but my coat, no shoes nor anything. These heather stalks would cut your feet to pieces. I’ve got to carry you back home.”

  She relaxed to limpness, and closed her eyes. Callum moved nearer and, peering at her face, reached out a forefinger and pulled down one of her lower eyelids.

  “Better get her back as soon as you can, Mr. Green,” he urged. “I don’t altogether like the look of her.”

  The wind was fast dying away, now. Behind them as they went toward The Rowans MacMorn’s house spouted fire at every window. Gees thought for a moment and little more of the man he had stunned and left just inside, but was quite indifferent as to what might happen to such a one. He had been one of MacMorn’s hellish crew, and if he were burned as was MacMorn the world would be better for the loss of him.