Then he realized that he was wrong. It was not imagination. The windmill was alive. He could see its aliveness more clearly than imagination could have shown it. The structure was festooned and enwrapped by wriggling, climbing shapes, none of which he could see in their entirety, for they were so entangled in their climbing that no one of them could be seen in their entirety. There was about them a drippiness, a loathesomeness, a scaliness that left him gulping in abject terror. And there were, as well, he saw, others of them on the ground surrounding the well, great dark, humped figures that lurched along until they crossed the track.
Instinctively, without any thought at all, he pushed the accelerator to the floorboards and the camper leaped beneath him, heading for the massed bodies. He would crash into them, he thought, and it had been a silly thing to do. He should have tried to go around them. But now it was too late; panic had taken over and there was nothing he could do.
The engine spit and coughed, then slobbered to a halt. The camper rolled forward, came to a staggering stop. Thomas twisted the starter key. The motor turned and coughed. But it would not start. All the dark humps bumped themselves around to look at him. He could see no eyes, but he could feel them looking. Frantically, he cranked the engine. Now it didn’t even cough. The damn thing’s flooded, said one corner of his mind, the one corner of his mind not flooded by his fear.
He took his hand off the key and sat back. A terrible coldness came upon him—a coldness and a hardness. The fear was gone, the panic gone; all that remained was the coldness and the hardness. He unlatched the door and pushed it open. Deliberately, he stepped down to the ground and moved away from the camper. The windmill, freighted with its monsters, loomed directly overhead. The massed humped shapes blocked the track. Heads, if they were heads, moved back and forth. There was the sense of twitching tails, although he could see no tails. The whistling filled the universe, shrill, insistent, unending. The windmill blades, unhampered by the climbing shapes, clattered in the wind.
Thomas moved forward. “I’m coming through,” he said, aloud. “Make way for me. I am coming through.” And it seemed to him that as he walked slowly forward, he was walking to a certain beat, to a drum that only he could hear. Startled, he realized that the beat he was walking to was the creaking of that rocking chair in the old New England house.
Illogic said to him, It’s all that you can do. It’s the only thing to do. You cannot run, to be pulled down squealing. It’s the one thing a man can do.
He walked slowly, but deliberately, marching to the slow, deliberate creaking of the rocking chair. “Make way,” he said. “I am the thing that came after you.”
And they seemed to say to him, through the shrill whistling of the well, the clatter of the windmill blades, the creaking of the chair, Pass, strange one. For you carry with you the talisman we gave our people. You have with you the token of your faith.
Not my faith, he thought. Not my talisman. That’s not the reason you do not dare to touch me. I swallowed no gizzard stone.
But you are brother, they told him, to the one who did.
They parted, pulled aside to clear the track for him, to make way for him. He glanced to neither left nor right, pretending they were not there at all, although he knew they were. He could smell the rancid, swamp-smell of them. He could feel the presence of them. He could feel the reaching out, as if they meant to stroke him, to pet him as one might a dog or cat, but staying the touch before it came upon him.
He walked the track and left them behind, grouped in their humpiness all about the well. He left them deep in time. He left them in another world and headed for his own, striding, still slowly, slow enough so they would not think that he was running from them, but a bit faster than he had before, down the track that bisected Parker’s Ridge.
He put his hand into the pocket of the jacket, his fingers gripping the greasy smoothness of the gizzard stone. The creaking of the chair still was in his mind and he still marched to it, although it was growing fainter now.
Brother, he thought, they said brother to me. And indeed I am. All life on earth is brother and each of us can carry, if we wish, the token of our faith.
He said aloud, to that ancient dinosaur that had died so long ago among the tumbled boulders, “Brother, I am glad to know you. I am glad I found you. Glad to carry the token of your faith.”
The Peculiar Demesne
Russell Kirk
“The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
—Gen. VIII: 21
Two black torch-bearers preceding us and two following, Mr. Thomas Whiston and I walked through twilight alleys of Haggat toward Manfred Arcane’s huge house, on Christmas Eve. Big flashlights would have done as well as torches, and there were some few streetlamps even in the lanes of the ancient dyers’ quarter, where Arcane, disdaining modernity, chose to live; but Arcane, with his baroque conceits and crotchets, had insisted upon sending his linkmen for us.
The gesture pleased burly Tom Whiston, executive vice-president for African imports of Cosmopolitan-Anarch Oil Corporation. Whiston had not been in Haggat before, or anywhere in Hamnegri. Considerably to his vexation, he had not been granted an audience with Achmet ben Ali, Hereditary President of Hamnegri and Sultan in Kalidu. With a sellers’ market in petroleum, sultans may be so haughty as they please, and Achmet the Pious disliked men of commerce.
Yet His Excellency Manfred Arcane, Minister without Portfolio in the Sultan’s cabinet, had sent to Whiston and to me holograph invitations to his Christmas Eve party—an event of a sort infrequent in the Moslem city of Haggat, ever since most of the French had departed during the civil wars. I had assured Whiston that Arcane was urbane and amusing, and that under the Sultan Achmet, no one was more powerful than Manfred Arcane. So this invitation consoled Tom Whiston considerably.
“If this Arcane is more or less European,” Whiston asked me, “how can he be a kind of grand vizier in a country like this? Is the contract really up to him, Mr. Yawby?”
“Why,” I said, “Arcane can be what he likes: when he wants to be taken for a native of Haggat, he can look it. The Hereditary President and Sultan couldn’t manage without him. Arcane commands the mercenaries, and for all practical purposes he directs foreign relations—including the oil contracts. In Hamnegri, he’s what Glubb Pasha was in Jordan once, and more. I was consul here at Haggat for six years, and was made consul general three years ago, so I know Arcane as well as any foreigner knows him. Age does not stale, nor custom wither, this Manfred Arcane.”
Now we stood at the massive carved wooden doors of Arcane’s house, which had been built in the seventeenth century by some purse-proud Kalidu slave trader. Two black porters with curved swords at their belts bowed to us and swung the doors wide. Whiston hesitated just a moment before entering, not to my surprise; there was a kind of magnificent grimness about the place which might give one a grue.
From somewhere inside that vast hulking old house, a soprano voice, sweet and strong, drifted to us. “There’ll be women at this party?” Whiston wanted to know.
“That must he Melchiora singing—Madame Arcane. She’s Sicilian, and looks like a femme fatale.” I lowered my voice. “For that matter, she is a femme fatale. During the insurrection four years ago, she shot a half dozen rebels with her own rifle. Yes, there will be a few ladies: not a harem. Arcane’s a Christian of sorts. I expect our party will be pretty much en famille—which is to say, more or less British, Arcane having been educated in England long ago. This house is managed by a kind of chatelaine, a very old Englishwoman, Lady Grizel Fergusson. You’ll meet some officers of the IPV—the Interracial Peace Volunteers, the mercenaries who keep your oil flowing—and three or four French couples, and perhaps Mohammed ben Ibrahim, who’s the Internal-Security Minister nowadays, and quite civilized. I believe there’s an Ethiopian noble, an exile, staying with Arcane. And of course there’s Arcane’s usual menage, a lively household. There should be English-style games and stories. The M
inister without Portfolio is a raconteur.”
“From what I hear about him,” Tom Whiston remarked sotto voce, “he should have plenty of stories to tell. They say he knows where the bodies are buried, and gets a two percent royalty on every barrel of oil.”
I put my finger on my lips. “Phrases more or less figurative in America,” I suggested, “are taken literally in Hamnegri, Mr. Whiston—because things are done literally here. You’ll find that Mr. Arcane’s manners are perfect: somewhat English, somewhat Austrian, somewhat African grandee, but perfect. His Excellency has been a soldier and a diplomat, and he is subtle. The common people in this town call him ‘the Father of Shadows.’ So to speak of bodies…”
We had been led by a manservant in a scarlet robe up broad stairs and along a corridor hung with carpets—some of them splendid old Persians, others from the cruder looms of the Sultanate of Kalidu. Now a rotund black man with a golden chain about his neck, a kind of major-domo, bowed us into an immense room with a fountain playing in the middle of it. In tolerable English, the majordomo called out, after I had whispered to him, “Mr. Thomas Whiston, from Texas, America; and Mr. Harry Yawby, Consul General of the United States!”
There swept toward us Melchiora, Arcane’s young wife, or rather consort: the splendid Melchiora, sibylline and haughty, her mass of black hair piled high upon her head, her black eyes gleaming in the lamplight. She extended her slim hand for Tom Whiston to kiss; he was uncertain how to do that.
“Do come over to the divan by the fountain,” she said in flawless English, “and I’ll bring my husband to you.” A fair number of people were talking and sipping punch in that high-ceilinged vaulted hall—once the harem of the palace—but they seemed few and lonely in its shadowy vastness. A string quartet, apparently French, were playing; black servingmen in ankle-length green gowns were carrying about brass trays of refreshments. Madame Arcane presented Whiston to some of the guests I knew already: “Colonel Fuentes… Major MacIlwraith, the Volunteers’ executive officer… Monsieur and Madame Courtemanche…” We progressed slowly toward the divan. “His Excellency Mohammed ben Ibrahim, Minister for Internal Security… And a new friend, the Fitaurari Wolde Mariam, from Gondar.”
The Fitaurari was a grizzle-headed veteran with aquiline features who had been great in the Abyssinian struggle against Italy, but now was lucky to have fled out of his country, through Gallabat, before the military junta could snare him. He seemed uncomfortable in so eccentrically cosmopolitan a gathering; his wide oval eyes, like those in an Ethiopian fresco, looked anxiously about for someone to rescue him from the voluble attentions of a middle-aged French lady; so Melchiora swept him along with us toward the divan.
Ancient, ancient Lady Grizel Fergusson, who had spent most of her many decades in India and Africa, and whose husband had been tortured to death in Kenya, was serving punch from a barbaric, capacious silver bowl beside the divan. “Ah, Mr. Whiston? You’ve come for our petrol, I understand. Isn’t it shockingly dear? But I’m obstructing your way. Now where has His Excellency got to? Oh, the Spanish consul has his ear; we’ll extricate him in a moment. Did you hear Madame Arcane singing as you came in? Don’t you love her voice?”
“Yes, but I didn’t understand the words,” Tom Whiston said. “Does she know ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’?”
“Actually, I rather doubt— Ah, there she has dragged His Excellency away from the Spaniard, clever girl. Your Excellency, may I present Mr. Whiston—from Texas, I believe?”
Manfred Arcane, who among other accomplishments had won the civil war for the Sultan through his astounding victory at the Fords of Krokul, came cordially toward us, his erect figure brisk and elegant. Two little wolfish black men, more barbaric foster sons than servants, made way for him among the guests, bowing, smiling with their long teeth, begging pardon in their incomprehensible dialect. These two had saved Arcane’s life at the Fords, where he had taken a traitor’s bullet in the back; but Arcane seemed wholly recovered from that injury now.
Manfred Arcane nodded familiarly to me and took Whiston’s hand. “It’s kind of you to join our pathetic little assembly here; and good of you to bring him, Yawby. I see you’ve been given some punch; it’s my own formula. I’m told that you and I, Mr. Whiston, are to have, tête-à-tête and candidly, a base commercial conversation on Tuesday. Tonight we play, Mr. Whiston. Do you fancy snapdragon, that fiery old Christmas sport? Don’t know it? It’s virtually forgotten in England now, I understand, but once upon a time before the deluge, when I was at Wellington School, I became the nimblest boy for it. They insist that I preside over the revels tonight. Do you mind having your fingers well burnt?”
His was public-school English, and Arcane was fluent in a dozen other languages. Tom Whiston, accustomed enough to Arab sheikhs and African pomposities, looked startled at this bouncing handsome white-haired old man. Energy seemed to start from Arcane’s fingertips; his swarthy face—inherited, report said, from a Montenegrin gypsy mother—was mobile, nearly unlined, at once jolly and faintly sinister. Arcane’s underlying antique grandeur was veiled by ease and openness of manners. I knew how deceptive those manners could be. But for him, the “emergent” Commonwealth of Hamnegri would have fallen to bits.
Motioning Whiston and me to French chairs, Arcane clapped his hands. Two of the servingmen hurried up with a vast brass tray, elaborately worked, and set it upon a low stand; one of them scattered handfuls of raisins upon the tray, and over these the other poured a flagon of warmed brandy.
The guests, with their spectrum of complexions, gathered in a circle round the tray. An olive-skinned European boy—“the son,” I murmured to Whiston—solemnly came forward with a long lighted match, which he presented to Arcane. Servants turned out the lamps, so that the old harem was pitch-black except for Arcane’s tiny flame.
“Now we join reverently in the ancient and honorable pastime of snapdragon,” Arcane’s voice came, with mock portentousness. In the match-flame, one could make out only his short white beard. “Whosoever snatches and devours the most flaming raisins shall be awarded the handsome tray on which they are scattered, the creation of the finest worker in brass in Haggat. Friends, I offer you a foretaste of Hell! Hey presto!”
He set his long match to the brandy, at three points, and blue flames sprang up. In a moment they were ranging over the whole surface of the tray. “At them, brave companions!” Few present knowing the game, most held back. Arcane himself thrust a hand into the flames, plucked out a handful of raisins, and flung them burning into his mouth, shrieking in simulated agony. “Ah! Ahhh! I burn, I burn! What torment!”
Lady Fergusson tottered forward to emulate His Excellency; and I snatched my raisins, too, knowing that it is well to share in the play of those who sit in the seats of the mighty. Melchiora joined us, and the boy, and the Spanish consul, and the voluble French lady, and others. When the flames lagged, Arcane shifted the big tray slightly, to keep up the blaze.
“Mr. Whiston, are you craven?” he called. “Some of you ladies, drag our American guest to the torment!” Poor Whiston was thrust forward, grabbed awkwardly at the raisins—and upset the tray. It rang upon the tiled floor, the flames went out, and the women’s screams echoed in total darkness.
“So!” Arcane declared, laughing. The servants lit the lamps. “Rodriguez,” he told the Spanish consul, “you’ve proved the greatest glutton tonight, and the tray is yours, after it has been washed. Why, Mr. Texas Whiston, I took you for a Machiavelli of oil contracts, but the booby prize is yours. Here, I bestow it upon you.” There appeared magically in his hand a tiny gold candlesnuffer, and he presented it to Whiston.
Seeing Whiston red-faced and rather angry, Arcane smoothed his plumage, an art at which he was accomplished. With a few minutes’ flattering talk, he had his Texas guest jovial. The quartet had struck up a waltz; many of the guests were dancing on the tiles; it was a successful party.
“Your Excellency,” Grizel Fergusson was saying in her shrill old vo
ice, “are we to have our Christmas ghost story?” Melchiora and the boy, Guido, joined in her entreaty.
“That depends on whether our American guest has a relish for such yarn-spinning,” Arcane told them. “What’s dreamt of in your philosophy, Mr. Whiston?”
In the shadows about the fountain, I nudged Whiston discreetly: Arcane liked an appreciative audience, and he was a tale-teller worth hearing.
“Well, I never saw any ghosts myself,” Whiston ventured, reluctantly, “but maybe it’s different in Africa. I’ve heard about conjure men and voodoo and witch doctors…”
Arcane gave him a curious smile. “Wolde Mariam here—he and I were much together in the years when I served the Negus Negusti, rest his soul—could tell you more than a little of that. Those Gondar people are eldritch folk, and I suspect that Wolde Mariam himself could sow dragon’s teeth.”
The Abyssinian probably could not catch the classical allusion, but he smiled ominously in his lean way with his sharp teeth. “Let us hear him, then,” Melchiora demanded. “It needn’t be precisely a ghost story.”
“And Manfred—Your Excellency—do tell us again about Archvicar Gerontion,” Lady Fergusson put in. “Really, you tell that adventure best of all.”
Arcane’s subtle smile vanished for a moment, and Melchiora raised a hand as if to dissuade him; but he sighed slightly, smiled again, and motioned toward a doorway in line with the fountain. “I’d prefer being toasted as a snapdragon raisin to enduring that experience afresh,” he said, “but so long as Wolde Mariam doesn’t resurrect the Archvicar, I’ll try to please you. Our dancing friends seem happy; why affright them? Here, come into Whitebeard’s Closet, and Wolde Mariam and I will chill you.” He led the way toward that door in the thick wall, and down a little corridor into a small whitewashed room deep within the old house.
Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 31
