by John Burke
He gave Hans instructions not to send the telegram from the village. The town over the ridge was a long way off, but it was essential that the villagers here should not be provoked into fresh hostility or into curiosity about the progress of his discoveries.
Heitz felt a great deal easier in his mind when he was sure the message had gone off. He worked with renewed vigor the following day, and once more was engrossed by the time night had settled on the trees and hills.
The moon swam clear in the sky. Stepping outside for a moment’s air before resuming his convoluted trail through a dozen huge tomes, Heitz saw light glinting on what could only be one of the topmost battlements of Castle Borski. He had not realized that any part of the castle was visible from here. Some swaying of the trees or the fall of a branch must have revealed it for the first time.
It had an oddly hypnotic effect on the Professor. He wanted to go back indoors and settle down again, but that pinnacle seemed to be beckoning.
When Paul arrived, the two of them would go up there and explore. He wanted Paul to be with him then. There were things which needed to be verified, and he had no wish to be the only one to return with stories which would be mocked at by others. From here on every step must be carefully planned, every finding confirmed.
He was uneasy. The moon rode high, the trees were splintery black silhouettes against the skyline, and above them all was the one arrogant gleam of the castle.
The answer to it all was in Castle Borski.
Heitz found himself walking down the path and into the trees. He had not been near the castle before, but some force outside himself seemed to be guiding his footsteps. Dry twigs cracked under his feet, but there was no other sound.
The distance was less than he had thought. He emerged from the trees at the foot of a rocky formation on top of which the castle was piled, appearing to thrust up out of the very earth. A rubble-strewn path made a wavering ascent of the rock. Heitz looked back, hesitated, then began to climb.
The path was steeper than one would have guessed from below. Heitz was gasping by the time he reached the top and went in through the crumbling gateway. He crossed a courtyard littered with a soggy accumulation of dead leaves. Here, high above the trees, the wind was stronger. It moaned through the turrets and battlements like a mournful phantom of the valley.
A heavy door stood open ahead of him. Heitz went in and found himself in a shadowy hall. Outside, the moon escaped from the clouds and cast shafts of light through tall windows into the hall. It picked out the treads of a fine sweep of staircase, curving up to a shadowy landing above. Two huge figures blocked the Professor’s way. He stood quite still until his eyes grew accustomed to the half light, and then saw that they were statues—bad imitations of Greek sculpture, he observed with distaste.
Even in here the wind seemed to be unchecked. It was a sad breath down the staircase and through echoing passages in the depths of the castle.
Tomorrow he must come back in daylight. Or wait for Paul to arrive—if it was late tomorrow, then the next day they would come here. Tomorrow, said one part of his mind. Now, said another.
Professor Heitz began to climb the stairs.
At the top were two stone pillars. Moonlight filtered between them, serving only to emphasize the blackness of the shadows.
One of the shadows moved. Heitz stopped. It must, of course, have been an effect created by clouds touching the edge of the moon. He went on and reached the landing.
Here was a shape more truly classical than the poor imitations below. Splendidly poised, it leaned forward with a grace that was as real and immediate as when it was created. Even in the shifting light the Professor marvelled at the tilt of the head and the almost living quality of the coiled hair.
Then the moon was a great blaze upon the face before him. And it was no statue. The lips parted, and a breath stirred the cobwebs festooned between the pillars. The creature stepped forward.
Heitz let out a sob. This was what he had come in search of, and now that he had found it he could have cursed himself for being such a fool; could have cursed if there had been strength in him to produce anything other than a whimper, like a terrified creature of the night waiting to be struck down.
He stared into the blazing eyes of a creature of legend. The mythical horror of an ancient world became real. The Gorgon advanced on him, and as she did so her raven locks writhed and uncoiled, and became a rearing tangle of snakes. A forked tongue flickered, a head struck down like a whip, and Heitz felt the agonizing stab in his forehead. He put up his hands to shield himself, and pain lashed across his fingers.
Suddenly he was able to scream. The madness of it resounded through the corridors and rooms of the accursed building. The sound of his own voice hit back at him, and he turned and lurched perilously down the stairs.
The piled-up leaves in the courtyard tried to slow him down like a quagmire. Rocks spurted from under his feet as he stumbled down the path. Branches scratched his face as he went blindly on through the forest towards the millhouse. They were nothing compared to the agony that was biting deeper and deeper into his brain from that first appalling blow.
He was not sure that he would ever reach the house. When he finally collapsed against the door he could barely summon up the strength to open it. At last he was indoors, groping his way to the sitting room.
A door opened and an oil lamp was lifted high.
“Who’s that?”
“Hans . . .”
Heitz blundered gratefully towards the light. Then he heard his servant’s shuddering intake of breath.
“Your face!”
Heitz stopped. He knew that he was carrying death within him. What he didn’t know was whether it could contaminate others.
He said: “Don’t come any nearer.” He was stricken by the realization that already it was difficult for him to speak. His vocal chords were stiff and unresponsive. He forced the words out. “Listen . . . carefully. I haven’t much time.” He led the way into the sitting room, his legs a great weight so that it was an incredible effort to put one foot in front of the other. “I have to write a letter to my son, Paul. He should be here—tomorrow, perhaps. Soon. Soon. Take the letter from my table in the morning and give it to him.”
“But, sir, let me fetch—”
“Not much time,” grated the Professor. “Leave me. But make sure that Paul gets the letter—Paul and nobody else. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go, then.” Heitz lowered himself into his chair and literally had to order his arm to move so that he could pick up his pen. “There’s nothing you can do.”
When he was alone he began to write. He might have been a child reluctantly learning how to form the characters: his hand moved with intolerable slowness. He would never be finished. All he could hope was that Paul would read as much as could be put down on paper now and would compare it with the other notes he had made during his stay here.
The breath hissed in his throat. If it had not been for the pain he might have derived some ironic, academic interest from the process that was working through his blood and bone—a process of solidification like that of a lava flow settling and hardening until at last it was immutable rock.
The constriction in his chest was stonily crushing the life out of him.
And the Gorgon was in Castle Borski waiting for another victim. There would be more—many more—unless . . . unless . . .
He wrote until his arm was a rigid, dead weight across the paper.
6
Paul Heitz had begged leave of absence from Professor Meister in Leipzig and made the journey to Vandorf in a fever of impatience. It was unlike his father to send cryptic telegrams. Even through the sparse words Paul had sensed an agitation, an urgency which could only be due to some alarming aspect of Bruno’s death. Paul and his younger brother had been very close, in spite of their differences in temperament. If there was something wrong, Paul was in a hurry to be at his father’s side.
He arrived to find Hans distraught and his father dead. The body had been removed by the police. Hans could do nothing but babble of “the Professor’s face . . . his terrible face . . . the marks . . .” and hand over a three-page letter which he assured young Mr. Heitz he hadn’t mentioned to a living soul.
Paul read the letter and was convinced that his father must have been mad at the end.
He went at once to the police. They were brusque and unhelpful. His appearance was an unwelcome shock to them. He asked to see his father’s body. They refused. Paul was incredulous. He repeated that he wished to see his father—demanded to see him. The refusal was adamant.
If his father had been mad, then everybody else seemed to be mad also.
Paul went to the Vandorf Medical Institution. It looked clean and new and healthy. Dr. Namaroff looked distinguished and intelligent. Here, surely, he could rely on getting a straight answer.
“Yes,” said Namaroff, “you may see a copy of the death certificate if you wish.”
He opened a cabinet against the wall of his office and produced a document which he handed to Paul. As Paul read it, the feeling of being caught in a fine mesh of evasions intensified.
He said: “Why won’t the police let me see the body?”
“It might upset you.”
“As his son—”
“There is no need for identification of the body,” said Namaroff smoothly. “We all knew Professor Heitz. He had been here for a few weeks, as you know.”
“Yes, I know. And I know why, Dr. Namaroff. And I don’t like any of what I hear. If I insist, as my father’s heir, on seeing his body—”
“You are not in your own country, Mr. Heitz,” the Doctor reminded him. “We speak the same language here, apart from some stubborn peasants who will not discard their old tribal dialects—but we do not necessarily think the same way. Your father made himself unpopular with the authorities and with the local people, I may tell you. He did not altogether appreciate the hospitality of Vandorf. If you don’t wish to be deported without more ado, I advise you to accept the rulings of this land.”
Paul fumed. He looked down at the death certificate and then waved it at Namaroff.
“Doctor, you examined the body?”
“My signature is there to prove it.”
“And in your opinion there was no doubt as to the cause of death?”
“That, too, is there. Heart failure. A violent spasm at the end, I’m afraid. That’s why you wouldn’t want to see your father. Better to remember him as—”
“How do you account for this?” Paul interrupted. He drew the three pages of his father’s last letter from his pocket and read aloud: “ ‘I am agonized by pains in my chest. I am turning to stone.’ ”
Namaroff made an involuntary movement, putting out his right hand. “May I see that letter?”
“My father gives instructions at the beginning of it that I’m to show it to no one.”
“I see.”
“He knew he was dying when he started to write. He was able to write three pages. That doesn’t sound like heart failure. You don’t go on working through a heart attack, Doctor: you know that as well as I do.” When Namaroff did not reply he went on: “My father refers to a terrible thing stalking among the people of Vandorf. ‘It turned Sascha to stone and others before her. The conspiracy of silence must be broken before others go the way I am going. If there are cycles of possession by that which was once Medusa . . .’ And there he breaks off, and scrawls those last words about turning to stone. Medusa, Dr. Namaroff,” Paul challenged. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“A character from mythology. Not really my field, Mr. Heitz.”
“When my father wrote this letter he knew what was happening to him. He knew how he was dying, and why. And it wasn’t heart failure.”
“That is your opinion,” said Namaroff frigidly. “No doubt you’ll have an opportunity of expressing it at the inquest.”
“When will it be held?”
“It has not been decided. But I’ll see that you’re informed. Goodbye, Mr. Heitz.”
Paul had to accept this blunt dismissal. He went back to the millhouse. Hans was anxious that they should leave without delay. He was not surprised by the lack of cooperation being shown to Paul. It had been the same with his father. And look what happened to the Professor when he stubbornly lingered!
Paul took his father’s letter out of his pocket and began to re-read it for what must have been the tenth time. He strolled out of the cool house into the fitful sunshine and went down the steps to the tangle that had once been a well-kept kitchen garden. At the end of the garden was a fishpond surrounded by a low stone wall. The scene could have been idyllic but for the awareness of evil drifting like a miasma from the forest.
Paul sat on the low wall and turned the sheets of paper over yet again, wondering what terrible experience could have produced such incoherent ramblings from a man normally as precise as his father had been.
This spirit which may be an elemental force or an individual personality of great destructiveness from the past is capable of taking on human form. No other possible explanation. The human envelope itself could not have survived that long. If someone in Vandorf is possessed . . .
Impatiently he got up and went back into the house, tossing the letter on to the table. But he was restless. His father’s books were arrayed on the room’s one sagging shelf, but Paul was in no state to settle down to work on them. His father had done too much already. There were scribbled notes everywhere, and innumerable markers jutting out between the pages of the books. But the only result had been death.
Paul shivered. He had to step outside again, into the brightness of day. Again he took a few paces down the steps and looked through the trees towards the castle, demanding an answer.
Hans would be glad if they could pack up those books and go. And what else was there to do?
There was a faint rustle in the room behind him. Paul ignored it for a moment, thinking that Hans had come in. Then something prompted him to turn.
A dark girl with high cheekbones and deep eyes lost in shadow stood by the table.
She said: “Forgive me for intruding. The door was open—I couldn’t make anyone hear . . .”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Carla Hoffmann.” She came towards the door, and as she moved she gave off a faint musky scent which went well with her graceful, almost animal walk. Yet seen at close quarters she was a trim, modern young woman with an urban self-assurance. “Dr. Namaroff’s assistant at the Institution,” she added.
“Can I help you?” said Paul with no great enthusiasm. Her attractiveness was undeniable, but if she was Namaroff’s assistant he was in no mood to be attracted.
“I’d like to help you if I can,” she said.
“Does Namaroff know you’re here?”
“He’d be very angry if he did.” When Paul waited noncommittally, she burst out: “Please believe me, I only came here to see if there was anything I could do.”
“Nobody in Vandorf seems very anxious to do anything for me,” said Paul dourly.
Carla looked past him, down the steps, and out into the forest. She said: “Did Dr. Namaroff say anything to you about the local superstitions? About the thing that roams the woods?”
“He didn’t want to talk about anything of the kind. He doesn’t believe in any of it.”
“Doesn’t he?” said Carla softly. “Perhaps he believes more than he will admit. Your father tried to discuss the fear with him—and although he made a show of brushing it all aside, I know he is beginning to worry about . . . about . . .”
“Yes?”
“The creature.”
“Have you seen her?” Paul demanded. Madness, yes; but they were all afflicted by it, and he had a wild moment of debating whether or not this might be the dark curse of the place—an obsessive, contagious madness, a mass hysteria which one puff of sanity might, under the right condition
s, dispel.
“Nobody,” said Carla, “has seen her and lived.”
“Do you really think that Namaroff believes in her?”
“He believes in something that he won’t dare to admit, even to himself. But you . . . Mr. Heitz, you must believe in her.”
Paul was taken aback. “Why?”
“If you don’t, you’ll see no reason to leave here at once. And if you stay, you’ll be found like the others. Here, you’re too great a threat. You won’t be allowed to survive.”
A short time ago Paul had been sanely and sensibly planning to leave because there was nothing to be accomplished here. Now it suddenly became imperative that he should stay. In the span of a few weeks he had lost first his brother and then his father. He could not desert them now. Vandorf had defeated them, but there was still another member of the family to carry on the battle.
He said: “I’m grateful to you, but I can’t leave.”
“Please . . .”
Her concern was so genuine that he felt an impulse to put his arm round her and reassure her. Indeed, he was startled by the force of his own longing to hold her. If things had been different—if he had come to this idyllic setting and met this beautiful girl without any background of menace and hostility—they could have meant something to each other. It was as swift and sure as that.
Bitterly he thought of Bruno, who had loved and died here.
Carla said: “I must go. I’m on duty in half an hour. But please do as I say. Please, for your own sake, leave Vandorf.”
When she had gone he was drawn back despite himself to that perplexing, insane letter. He picked it up and, denying that it could mean any part of what it said, read it yet again.
7
At night the bustle of the Institution slackened to the tempo of sleep—a steady, rhythmic breathing in a twilight of shaded lamps. The petulant chatter of the larger wards was hushed. In a private room a sleepless patient tried to read herself into drowsiness. In Namaroff’s office, Carla recited from memory:
