Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Kirby McCauley

  There were seven of us: Melchiora, Guido, Lady Fergusson, Whiston, Wolde Mariam, Arcane, and myself. The room’s only ornament was one of those terrible agonized Spanish Christ-figures, hung high upon a wall. There were no European chairs, but a divan and several leather stools or cushions. An oil lamp suspended from the ceiling supplied the only light. We squatted or crouched or lounged about the Minister without Portfolio and Wolde Mariam. Tom Whiston looked embarrassed. Melchiora rang a little bell, and a servant brought tea and sweet cakes.

  “Old friend,” Arcane told Wolde Mariam, “it is an English custom, Lord knows why, to tell uncanny tales at Christmas, and Grizel Fergusson must be pleased, and Mr. Whiston impressed. Tell us something of your Gondar conjurers and shape-shifters.”

  I suspect that Whiston did not like this soiree in the least, but he knew better than to offend Arcane, upon whose good humor so many barrels of oil depended. “Sure, we’d like to hear about them,” he offered, if feebly.

  By some unnoticed trick or other, Arcane caused the flame in the lamp overhead to sink down almost to vanishing point. We could see dimly the face of the tormented Christ upon the wall, but little else. As the light had diminished, Melchiora had taken Arcane’s hand in hers. We seven at once in the heart of Africa, and yet out of it—out of time, out of space. “Instruct us, old friend,” said Arcane to Wolde Mariam. “We’ll not laugh at you, and when you’ve done, I’ll reinforce you.”

  Although the Ethiopian soldier’s eyes and teeth were dramatic in the dim lamplight, he was no skilled narrator in English. Now and then he groped for an English word, could not find it, and used Amharic or Italian. He told of deacons who worked magic, and could set papers afire though they sat many feet away from them; of spells that made men’s eyes bleed continuously, until they submitted to what the conjurers demanded of them; of Falasha who could transform themselves into hyenas, and Galls women who commanded spirits. Because I collect folktales of East Africa, all this was very interesting to me. But Tom Whiston did not understand half of what Wolde Mariam said, and grew bored, not believing the other half; I had to nudge him twice to keep him from snoring. Wolde Mariam himself was diffident, no doubt fearing that he, who had been a power in Gondar, would be taken for a superstitious fool. He finished lamely: “So some people believe.”

  But Melchiora, who came from sinister Agrigento in Sicily, had listened closely, and so had the boy. Now Manfred Arcane, sitting directly under the lamp, softly ended the awkward pause.

  “Some of you have heard all this before,” Arcane commenced, “but you protest that it does not bore you. It alarms me still: so many frightening questions are raised by what occurred two years ago. The Archvicar Gerontion—how harmoniously perfect in his evil, his ‘unblemished turpitude’—was as smoothly foul a being as one might hope to meet. Yet who am I to sit in judgment? Where Gerontion slew his few victims, I slew my myriads.”

  “Oh, come, Your Excellency,” Grizel Fergusson broke in, “your killing was done in fair fight, and honorable.”

  The old adventurer bowed his handsome head to her. “Honorable—with a few exceptions—in a rude condottiere, perhaps. However that may be, our damned Archvicar may have been sent to give this old evil-doer a foretaste of the Inferno—through a devilish game of snapdragon, with raisins, brandy, and all. What a dragon Gerontion was, and what a peculiar dragon-land he fetched me into!” He sipped his tea before resuming.

  “Mr. Whiston, I doubt whether you gave full credence to the Fitaurari’s narration. Let me tell you that in my own Abyssinian years I saw with these eyes some of the phenomena he described; that these eyes of mine, indeed, have bled as he told, from a sorcerer’s curse in Kaffa. O ye of little faith! But though hideous wonders are worked in Gondar and Kaffa and other Ethiopian lands, the Indian enchanters are greater than the African. This Archvicar Gerontion—he was a curiously well-read scoundrel, and took his alias from Eliot’s poem, I do believe—combined the craft of India with the craft of Africa.”

  This story was new to me, but I had heard that name “Gerontion” somewhere, two or three years earlier. “Your Excellency, wasn’t somebody of that name a pharmacist here in Haggat?” I ventured.

  Arcane nodded. “And a marvelous chemist he was, too. He used his chemistry on me, and something more. Now look here, Yawby: if my memory serves me, Aquinas holds that a soul must have a body to inhabit, and that has been my doctrine. Yet it is an arcane doctrine” —here he smiled, knowing that we thought of his own name or alias— “and requires much interpretation. Now was I out of my body, or in it, there within the Archvicar’s peculiar demesne? I’ll be damned if I know—and if I don’t, probably. But how I run on, senile creature that I am! Let me try to put some order into this garrulity.”

  Whiston had sat up straight and was paying sharp attention. There was electricity in Arcane’s voice, as in his body.

  “You may be unaware, Mr. Whiston,” Manfred Arcane told him, “that throughout Hamnegri, in addition to my military and diplomatic responsibilities, I exercise certain judicial functions. To put it simply, I constitute in my person a court of appeal for Europeans who have been accused under Hamnegrian law. Such special tribunals once were common enough in Africa; one survives here, chiefly for diplomatic reasons. The laws of Hamnegri are somewhat harsh, perhaps, and so I am authorized by the Hereditary President and Sultan to administer a kind of jus gentium when European foreigners—and Americans, too—are brought to book. Otherwise European technicians and merchants might leave Hamnegri, and we might become involved in diplomatic controversies with certain humanitarian European and American governments.

  “So! Two years ago there was appealed to me, in this capacity of mine, the case of a certain T. M. A. Gerontion, who styled himself Archvicar in the Church of the Divine Mystery—a quasi-Christian sect with a small following in Madras and South Africa, I believe. This Archvicar Gerontion, who previously had passed under the name of Omanwallah and other aliases, was a chemist with a shop in one of the more obscure lanes of Haggat. He had been found guilty of unlicensed trafficking in narcotics and of homicides resulting from such traffic. He had been tried by the Administrative Tribunal of Post and Customs. You may perceive, Mr. Whiston, that in Hamnegri we have a juridical structure unfamiliar to you; there are reasons for that—among them the political influence of the Postmaster-General, Gabriel M’Rundu. At any rate, jurisdiction over the narcotics traffic is enjoyed by that tribunal, which may impose capital punishment—and did impose a death sentence upon Gerontion.

  “The Archvicar, a very clever man, contrived to smuggle an appeal to me, on the ground that he was a British subject, or rather a citizen of the British Commonwealth. ‘To Caesar thou must go.’ He presented a prima facie case for this claim of citizenship; whether or not it was a true claim, I never succeeded in ascertaining to my satisfaction; the man’s whole Iife had been a labyrinth of deceptions. I believe that Gerontion was the son of a Parsee father, and born in Bombay. But with his very personal identity in question—he was so old, and had lived in so many lands, under so many aliases and false papers, and with so many inconsistencies in police records—why, how might one accurately ascertain his mere nationality? Repeatedly he had changed his name, his residence, his occupation, seemingly his very shape.”

  “He was fat and squat as a toad,” Melchiora said, squeezing the minister’s hand.

  “Yes, indeed,” Arcane assented, “an ugly-looking customer—though about my own height, really, Best Beloved—and a worse-behaved customer. Nevertheless, I accepted his appeal, and took him out of the custody of the Postmaster-General before sentence could be put into execution. M’Rundu, who fears me more than he loves me, was extremely vexed at this; he had expected to extract some curious information, and a large sum of money, from the Archvicar—though he would have put him to death in the end. But I grow indiscreet; all this is entre nous, friends.

  “I accepted the Archvicar’s appeal because the complexities of his case interested me. As
some of you know, often I am bored, and this appeal came to me in one of my idle periods. Clearly the condemned man was a remarkable person, accomplished in all manner of mischief: a paragon of vice. For decades he had slipped almost scatheless through the hands of the police of a score of countries, though repeatedly indicted—and acquitted. He seemed to play a deadly criminal game for the game’s sake, and to profit substantially by it, even if he threw away most of his gains at the gaming tables. I obtained from Interpol and other sources a mass of information about this appellant.

  “Gerontion, or Omanwallah, or the person masquerading under yet other names, seemed to have come off free, though accused of capital crimes, chiefly because of the prosecutors’ difficulty in establishing that the prisoner in the dock actually was the person whose name had appeared on the warrants of arrest. I myself have been artful in disguises and pseudonyms. Yet this Gerontion, or whoever he was, far excelled me. At different periods of his career, police descriptions of the offender deviated radically from earlier descriptions; it seemed as if he must be three men in one; most surprising, certain sets of fingerprints I obtained from five or six countries in Asia and Africa, purporting to be those of the condemned chemist of Haggat, did not match one another. What an eel! I suspected him of astute bribery of record-custodians, policemen, and even judges; he could afford it.

  “He had been tried for necromancy in the Shan States, charged with having raised a little child from the grave and making the thing do his bidding; tried also for poisoning two widows in Madras; for a colossal criminal fraud in Johannesburg; for kidnapping a young woman—never found—in Ceylon; repeatedly, for manufacturing and selling dangerous narcotic preparations. The catalogue of accusations ran on and on. And yet, except for brief periods, this Archvicar Gerontion had remained at a licentious liberty all those decades.”

  Guido, an informed ten years of age, apparently had not been permitted to hear this strange narration before; he had crept close to Arcane’s knees. “Father, what had he done here in Haggat?”

  “Much, Guido. Will you find me a cigar?” This being produced from a sandalwood box, Arcane lit his Burma cheroot and puffed as he went on.

  “I’ve already stated the indictment and conviction by the Tribunal of Post and Customs. It is possible for vendors to sell hashish and certain other narcotics, lawfully, here in Hamnegri—supposing that the dealer has paid a tidy license fee and obtained a license which subjects him to regulation and inspection. Although Gerontion had ample capital, he had not secured such documents. Why not? In part, I suppose, because of his intense pleasure in running risks; for one type of criminal, evasion of the law is a joyous pursuit in its own right. But chiefly his motive must have been that he dared not invite official scrutiny of his operations. The local sale of narcotics was a small item for him; he was an exporter on a large scale, and Hamnegri has subscribed to treaties against that. More, he was not simply marketing drugs but manufacturing them from secret formulas—and experimenting with his products upon the bodies of such as he might entice to take his privy doses.

  “Three beggars, of the sort that would do anything for the sake of a few coppers, were Gerontion’s undoing. One was found dead in an alley, the other two lying in their hovels outside the Gate of the Heads. The reported hallucinations of the dying pair were of a complex and fantastic character—something I was to understand better at a later time. One beggar recovered enough reason before expiring to drop the Archvicar’s name; and so M’Rundu’s people caught Gerontion. Apparently Gerontion had kept the three beggars confined in his house, but there must have been a blunder, and somehow in their delirium the three had contrived to get into the streets. Two other wretched mendicants were found by the Post Office Police locked, comatose, into the Archvicar’s cellar. They also died later.

  “M’Rundu, while he had the chemist in charge, kept the whole business quiet; and so did I, when I had Gerontion in this house later. I take it that some rumor of the affair came to your keen ears, Yawby. Our reason for secrecy was that Gerontion appeared to have connections with some sort of international ring or clique or sect, and we hoped to snare confederates. Eventually I found that the scent led to Scotland; but that’s another story.”

  Wolde Mariam raised a hand, almost like a child at school. “Ras Arcane, you say that this poisoner was a Christian? Or was he a Parsee?”

  The Minister without Portfolio seemed gratified by his newly conferred Abyssinian title. “Would that the Negus had thought so well of me as you do, old comrade! Why, I suppose I have become a kind of ras here in Hamnegri, but I like your mountains better than this barren shore. As for Gerontion’s profession of faith, his Church of the Divine Mystery was an instrument for deception and extortion, working principally upon silly old women; yet unquestionably he did believe fervently in a supernatural realm. His creed seemed to have been a debauched Manichaeism—that perennial heresy. I don’t suppose you follow me, Wolde Mariam; you may not even know that you’re a heretic yourself, you Abyssinian Monophysite: no offense intended, old friend. Well, then, the many Manichees believe that the world is divided between the forces of light and of darkness; and Gerontion had chosen to side with the darkness. Don’t stir so impatiently, little Guido, for I don’t mean to give you a lecture on theology.”

  I feared, nevertheless, that Arcane might launch into precisely that, he being given to long and rather learned, if interesting, digressions; and like the others, I was eager for the puzzling Gerontion to stride upon the stage in all his outer and inner hideousness. So I said, “Did Your Excellency actually keep this desperate Archvicar here in this house?”

  “There was small risk in that, or so I fancied,” Arcane answered. “When he was fetched from M’Rundu’s prison, I found him in shabby condition. I never allow to police or troops under my command such methods of interrogation as M’Rundu’s people employ. One of the Archvicar’s legs had been broken; he was startlingly sunken, like a pricked balloon; he had been denied medicines—but it would be distressing to go on. For all that, M’Rundu had got precious little information out of him; I obtained more, far more, through my beguiling kindliness. He could not have crawled out of this house, and of course I have guards at the doors and elsewhere.

  “And do you know, I found that he and I were like peas in a pod—”

  “No!” Melchiora interrupted passionately. “He didn’t look in the least like you, and he was a murdering devil!”

  “To every coin there are two sides, Best Beloved,” Arcane instructed her. “‘The brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a kiss.’ Not that Gerontion was a thorough coward; in some respects he was a hero of villainy, taking ghastly risks for the satisfaction of triumphing over law and morals. I mean this: he and I both had done much evil. Yet the evil that I had committed, I had worked for some seeming good —the more fool I—or in the fell clutch of circumstance; and I repented it all. ‘I do the evil I’d eschew’—often the necessary evil committed by those who are made magistrates and commanders in the field.

  “For his part, however, Gerontion had said in his heart, from the beginning, ‘Evil, be thou my good.’ I’ve always thought that Socrates spoke rubbish when he argued that all men seek the good, falling into vice only through ignorance. Socrates had his own daimon, but he did not know the Demon. Evil is pursued for its own sake by some men—though not, praise be, by most. There exist fallen natures which rejoice in pain, death, corruption, every manner of violence and fraud and treachery. Behind all these sins and crimes lies the monstrous ego.”

  The boy was listening to Arcane intently, and got his head patted, as reward, by the Minister without Portfolio. “These evil-adoring natures fascinate me morbidly,” Arcane ran on, “for deep cries unto deep, and the evil in me peers lewdly at the evil in them. Well, Archvicar Gerontion’s was a diabolic nature, in rebellion against all order here below. His nature charmed me as a dragon is said to charm. In time, or perhaps out of it, that dragon snapped, as you shall learn.
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br />   “Yes, pure evil, defecated evil, can be charming—supposing that it doesn’t take one by the throat. Gerontion had manners—though something of a chichi accent—wit, cunning, breadth of bookish knowledge, a fund of ready allusion and quotation, penetration into human motives and types of character, immense sardonic experience of the world, even an impish malicious gaiety. Do you know anyone like that, Melchiora—your husband, perhaps?” The beauty compressed her lips.

  “So am I quite wrong to say that he and I were like peas in a pod?” Arcane spread out his hands gracefully toward Melchiora. “There existed but one barrier between the Archvicar and myself, made up of my feeble good intentions on one side and of his strong malice on the other side; or, to put this in a different fashion, I was an unworthy servant of the light, and he was a worthy servant of the darkness.” Arcane elegantly knocked the ash off his cigar.

  “How long did this crazy fellow stay here with you?” Tom Whiston asked. He was genuinely interested in the yarn.

  “Very nearly a fortnight, my Texan friend. Melchiora was away visiting people in Rome at the time; this city and this whole land were relatively free of contention and violence that month—a consummation much to be desired but rare in Hamnegri. Idle, I spent many hours in the Archvicar’s reverend company. So far as he could navigate in a wheelchair, Gerontion had almost the run of the house. He was well fed, well lodged, well attended by a physician, civilly waited upon by the servants, almost cosseted. What did I have to fear from this infirm old scoundrel? His life depended upon mine; had he injured me, back he would have gone to the torments of M’Rundu’s prison.

  “So we grew almost intimates. The longer I kept him with me, the more I might learn of the Archvicar’s international machinations and confederates. Of evenings, often we would sit together—no, not in this little cell, but in the great hall, where the Christmas party is in progress now. Perhaps from deep instinct, I did not like to be confined with him in a small space. We exchanged innumerable anecdotes of eventful lives.