by John Burke
“ ‘If someone in Vandorf is possessed or subject to periodic fits of possession, that person must be found. In my view it will prove to be a woman. Symbolically and metaphysically this is inevitable. A woman who has become only the slave of this ancient evil, enabling it to satisfy its greed for slaughter. I am trying to find rational terms for a phenomenon which is in fact one of pure terror. Perhaps the old, original terms must stand. The Gorgons—heads crowned with living snakes—anyone who looked on them was petrified. Hence the word “Gorgonized”—literally meaning turned to stone. Incredible. But our whole history is incredible, filled with monsters and fear.’ ” Carla stopped. “I’m sorry. He came back into the house just then. That’s all I had time to memorize.”
She would have liked to add that she had found even this much of the task unpalatable. She had not enjoyed spying on that young man, whose presence in Vandorf was like an affirmation from another world—a saner, cleaner outside world.
“Hm.” Namaroff had been seated at his bureau. Now he got up and paced slowly across the room. “The Professor was an expert on the literary aspects of such myths. I am beginning to feel that he was closer to the reality than I allowed myself to believe at the time.”
Carla was chilled by this admission. Namaroff had never been one to reveal doubts and hesitations easily.
He turned at the end of a stride and caught her expression. Before she realized what was happening he had put his hands on her shoulders and tried to draw her close to him.
“Carla . . . you’ve got to trust me. I want you to stay with me—stay where I know you’re safe.”
He tried to kiss her. She twisted aside and freed herself from his grasp. His eyes gleamed with desire, and at last she summoned up the courage to say what had been in her mind for so long. “I want to leave Vandorf,” she said.
“Leave? You can’t. After all I’ve done for you . . .”
“I’m grateful to you,” she said in as level a tone as possible, “but I think I’ve been here too long. I’m not working as well as I should—”
“I’ve never made any complaints,” he said quickly. “After your illness you were afraid of being sent away. I kept you on, looked after you, gave you time to recover your self-confidence, and I thought . . . I thought . . .”
It was rare to see him at such a loss. Carla said: “I know. And it’s because of what you’ve been thinking that I know I must leave. I owe you a lot, Dr. Namaroff, and I respect you and your work. But I can’t stay in Vandorf any longer, let alone here with you.”
She had tried to make it sound regretful but firm. His face worked. When his answer came it was as savage as a blow across the face.
“You can’t leave,” he said. “That’s the truth of it. I won’t let you leave. You are not to go out of this building without letting me know.”
“Not . . . but that’s ridiculous.”
“You are in grave danger,” said Namaroff.
“Danger?”
“One thing I can tell you . . .”
Abruptly the door was flung open and Ratoff stood there, his hair unkempt and a bruise beginning to swell below his left eye.
He panted: “That devil! She’s out.”
“Martha?” gasped Carla.
“Look for her,” snapped Namaroff. “Don’t waste any time. Take who you need. And don’t come back here till you’ve found her.”
“If I do find her,” said Ratoff, “I’ll kill her.”
“You’ll bring her back alive.”
Ratoff scowled, but turned away. Namaroff slumped against the edge of his bureau. Tiredness dragged the lines of his face down.
Carla said quietly: “Perhaps we’d better talk again . . . settle things . . . tomorrow.”
Namaroff nodded. Then he seemed to bring her back into focus. He reached out again and seized her arm.
“I was about to tell you that I’m forced to agree with one of Professor Heitz’s suppositions. We must assume that the Gorgon has taken on human form.”
“Human?”
Carla glanced instinctively at the window. The curtains were drawn, but she could visualize, beyond the garden and under the black canopy of the trees, poor demented Martha ranging the forest . . . in search of what?
8
The wind had begun to rise in the middle of the evening. A few flecks of rain spattered against the windows of the old millhouse and struck a reverberating note from the section of window that had been boarded up after the assault on Professor Heitz. In the distance thunder muttered over the hills.
Paul Heitz had drunk half a bottle of wine and was staring into the wood fire that crackled fitfully in the iron basket of the grate. The weather was still mild but he found the flames cheering, and Hans had been glad to build the fire for him. It was something useful and normal.
Not that it was proving of much use to Paul. He sought inspiration and found none. The licking flames were soothing, not stimulating.
He had no idea where to begin.
Unless, of course, he explored Castle Borski. He had not dared to approach the villagers too frankly after all that he had heard of their previous behavior, but even in passing them he could not have failed to notice how they kept their eyes averted from the castle, how the houses themselves were built in such a way that their windows did not face towards the commanding turrets. He had not collated the references to Castle Borski in the various books which his father had left, but its appearance in several scribbled notes left no doubt that in the Professor’s mind it had played an important part in recent events.
Paul, determined to shake off his languor of frustration, got up and went out on to the garden steps.
The rain had coaxed a fresh, pungent smell from the grasses and the trees. It was still not heavy, and when Paul strolled down towards the fishpond he lifted his face into the cooling shower.
Thunder throbbed again, and the moon edged a turbulent mass of clouds with silver. Somewhere far away, lightning flickered.
Paul looked down into the fishpond. The rain mottled the surface only faintly, not hard enough to distort the reflection of the wall, the edge of the millhouse, and his face.
And that other face . . .
At first he saw it as curling strands of weed below the surface of the pond. Then, as the moonlight brightened, he knew that it was a reflection of something behind him, looking down from a height—from one of the lower steps.
He almost turned. But when the features swayed gently into their hideous clarity, he was transfixed. There in the water was the face that no painter, no sculptor, no creative madman could ever have conceived. It was a warped, dead thing, drowned in the pond; and yet it was alive. Its lips drew back and those drifting tendrils became serpents. The eyes held Paul’s: he tried to look away, but if he looked away he would behold the reality of which this was only the palest reflection.
The snakes appeared to twist upwards in an effort to break the surface like slimy creatures of the pond. Paul could bear it no longer. He put his arm across his eyes and turned to run. But even as he began to lurch towards the house he knew that it . . . she . . . was waiting for him.
He tottered to one side. There must be a way round this side of the building to the front. He tried to shout for help, to arouse Hans, but then stifled the sound. If Hans were to come out now he might be face to face with the creature without warning.
Paul dared to lower his arm and search for the way alongside the millhouse. It came to an end in a jagged wall. He couldn’t get over. He pushed himself away from it, and his feet caught in a tangle of tall weeds. The world was going round. A clap of thunder was like some devilish jubilation. Paul felt himself reeling sideways, keeping his balance as he went but waiting to fall, until at last he struck the wall of the fishpond and sagged over it. His head smacked into the staring reflection of abomination and broke it into a swirl of ripples . . .
Somewhere there was an uncontrollable screaming. He drowned in a nest of weed and serpents, and all th
e time he was fighting to claw his way back to the surface that screaming went on.
His eyes, strangely, were tightly shut. He tried to open them. The serpents relaxed their grip, but the water still obscured his vision. Then a face began to form in it. Paul recognized the screaming voice as his own, and screamed louder as the face took on substance. If this time he was to see the Gorgon full face, he must die; and he didn’t want to die.
Then the fear drained away and he felt the cool sheet over him, the pillow under his head. Carla Hoffmann looked down at him.
“It’s all right,” she said gently.
“She was behind me,” he babbled, “waiting for me to turn. The heads of the snakes were plunging . . .”
“It was a dream,” she said. “Only a dream.”
“No.”
A door opened. Dr. Namaroff came into the neat, aseptic little room. He stood beside Carla and stared at Paul—not, thought Paul through the blur of returning consciousness, like a doctor concerned about his patient but like a man on the defensive, daring him to speak of what he had seen.
Paul said: “What happened to me?”
“Miss Hoffmann had some sort of presentiment that something was going to happen to you. We found you lying over the wall of the pool in your garden.”
The memory of a blasphemous monster stirred below the surface, swaying as the surface swayed—and then Paul fought it back into the depths where it belonged.
“How long have I been here?” he managed to ask.
“Five days.”
Paul, incredulous, tried to sit up. Carla put a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“Lie still,” said Namaroff. Then he went on, challenging yet reluctant: “Can you remember what happened before you fell?”
“I . . . I remember seeing . . . in the pool . . .”
“What? What did you see?”
Carla’s hand moved down to Paul’s and closed on it comfortingly. He said: “A face. The most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“In the pool?”
“It must have been there behind me. But all I saw was . . . No!” It was fearful to think of, impossible to speak of. Paul turned over, burying his face in the pillow.
“You must rest,” said Namaroff in a more conventional, professional tone. “I’ll talk to you again in a day or two.”
“A day or two!”
“You’re in a very weak condition. I don’t want you to overtax your strength.”
This time Paul succeeded in struggling up to a sitting position.
“For pity’s sake, I must know more about this. I’m sorry I wasn’t up to it for a moment just then. Look, let’s talk about it. We must get to the bottom of this whole thing. I must—”
“You’re suffering from shock,” said Namaroff, “and it’s essential that you should rest.”
“I tell you I’ll be all right.”
“Miss Hoffmann, please.”
Carla gave Paul a sympathetic glance and went to the door with the Doctor. When Namaroff had gone out she stood with the door open for a moment, smiling as though offering a promise—a promise to return, to listen to him, to make things somehow all right.
Paul realized how weak he was. Just the effort of sitting up was a strain. He let himself sink back.
Before Carla closed the door he heard an excited burst of conversation in the corridor outside, dominated by Namaroff’s sharp, savage questions.
“Not quite dead when you found her—is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s right, sir,” a man’s surly voice responded.
“Did she speak? Tell you anything?”
“She’d enough strength left to spit in my face. And then she died.”
Paul groped for some meaning in this, but it didn’t fit into the hazy pattern of his own experiences. Some other patient, he supposed. Some other unfortunate trapped in a physical or mental nightmare.
He tried to stay awake. He wanted a clear head in order to sort things out logically. But he was unable to concentrate. Consciousness slipped away and he floundered once more through hideous fantasies before waking again in a sweat. Carla Hoffmann was there. Carla was there whenever he needed her during the next couple of days—or was it weeks, or only interminable minutes?—and when he implored her to stay and talk to him and help him, the touch of her hand on his grew more responsive.
Hans came timidly in to see him. In a fit of clear-cut decisiveness, Paul told him to go back to Berlin. Hans was obviously going to fall ill himself if left alone in that millhouse. Although he tried dutifully to argue, the loyal servant was only too glad to be ordered away.
Dr. Namaroff commented approvingly on this.
“And you yourself will be returning to Leipzig when you leave here?”
“No,” said Paul, wiping the approval off the Doctor’s face. “I’m staying in Vandorf.”
He found that he had spent three days here since regaining consciousness. It had seemed longer, and he was impatient to be out of the place. His impatience mounted when he heard from Carla that the inquest on his father had been held a week ago, just after he himself had been brought in to the Institution. “I sent a wreath on your behalf,” said Carla. “I hope that was right?” He thanked her, but his mind was elsewhere. It was impossible not to wonder whether his protracted coma had to some extent been induced by Namaroff so that the inquest and burial could be over and done with before he was on his feet again.
Yet this would make Namaroff a positive accomplice in some gruesome plan; and Paul was reasonably certain that such was not the case. In some way Namaroff was just as frightened as he was, but for different, inexplicable reasons.
He challenged the Doctor with this on the day of his discharge. “Doctor, I think you’d like to unravel this mystery as much as I. Why can’t we work together?”
Namaroff fussed with papers on his desk as though to show that he was a very busy man with no time to spare. But by nature he was not a fussy person, and the effect was unconvincing. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “What mystery?”
“Don’t treat me like one of your neurotic patients. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Namaroff stacked several sheets of paper meaninglessly into a pile, and then stood up with his hand out. “Goodbye, Mr. Heitz. I recommend a convalescence in your own country.”
“But, Doctor—”
“Good day.”
“You’re afraid of her,” Paul accused him, “just like the rest of them. A man of the twentieth century—as scared as any of the ignorant illiterates of Vandorf. Aren’t you?”
Namaroff stood rigidly behind his desk, waiting for Paul to go.
From the door, Paul hurled one last promise. “I intend to find this creature.”
“Indeed.”
“And destroy it,” said Paul.
He was fuming with impotent rage as he left. That a man of Namaroff’s status should be afraid seemed monstrous to him. And there was no doubt that he was afraid. But as Paul walked back to the millhouse his first brisk stride faltered. He slowed, trying to analyse the expression that had come into Namaroff’s face during those last few minutes. Certainly it had been fear, but it was not the superstitious fear that warped the minds of the villagers: there was something more complex than that in it.
The millhouse was unnaturally quiet when he reached it. Hans had left everything tidy and had packaged up Professor Heitz’s books ready for dispatch when the time came to send them away. There was a disturbing finality about this neatness: it urged Paul to pack up and go, never to return to Vandorf.
He sat in the garden during the late afternoon, regaining his strength. The steps and the fishpond were innocent enough by daylight. He was able without more than a slight tremor to assess the relative positions of himself and the monster by studying the angle of refraction, making a scientific exercise out of it in order not to succumb to fright once more.
When the sky darkened,
however, he was glad to go back indoors.
It took a great effort of will to force him out of the house again late that night and through the sleeping village to the cemetery beyond.
He had brought a spade. The earth was still soft and had not been packed down, but even so it was strenuous work digging, and he was certainly not in the best condition. Sweat was pouring off him, while at the same time his arms and legs shivered. When the lid of the coffin was uncovered he had to rest a moment before stooping to lift it off.
In that pause he was sure that he was being watched. He peered round, between the pallid monuments and tilting, neglected gravestones. Nothing moved. He mustn’t let the sombre atmosphere affect him too acutely. Once more he bent over the coffin and prised open the lid.
He reached for the lantern that he had set beside the open grave.
There was a rustle of feet between the tombs, and a woman stood above him.
He stared at her ankles, not daring to look up. A violent spasm of trembling attacked him. If he were to raise the lantern and look straight into that face which had so far appeared to him only as a dulled reflection . . .
Carla said: “Somehow I knew you’d be here.”
Paul gasped. “Another of your premonitions?” he managed to blurt out.
They looked at each other for a long moment. Then Carla knelt beside the piled earth and held the lantern for him. Paul turned back to the open coffin and pulled the shroud from his father’s face.
The noble features were unexpectedly calm. Whatever pain and horror there might have been at the end, the lines of the face had somehow settled into a stern tranquillity. Professor Heitz’s stoicism had asserted itself in his final agony, and the face was that of a dignified statue.
A statue . . . Paul touched the head, and his fingers met unyielding stone. He ran them down to the neck. There was no decay here, no dissolution; not even the softness of living flesh.
He looked up at Carla.
