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Weird Tales volume 36 number 02

Page 9

by McIlwraith, Dorothy


  THE discovery of the severed telephone was the first link in a chain of astonishing revelations. As soon as the condition of the road permitted, Annette, Harris and I drove down to the village of Oak-tree. Through the drug store telephone I began to learn some of the truth about my missing uncle. Uncle Alfred had never spoken to the minister whom he had been expecting. I called the North-South Continental Company, which was Uncle Alfred's New York headquarters. They had never heard of an Alfred Fry. I called the airport and found, somewhat to my surprise, that there was a reservation in my name. In canceling it, I asked when the ticket had been bought, and whether there was more room on the plane. There was more room, and the passage had been reserved three days in advance. While I still sat in the telephone booth, Annette and Harris waiting outside, J tore open the elaborately sealed envelope Uncle Alfred had given me. It was addressed to "Carlos Diaz, Hotel Geneva, Mexico City," and it

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  contained two sheets of perfectly blank paper.

  For the moment, the problem was too much for me. I went out and told Harris to notify the local authorities of Uncle Alfred's disappearance, and then to go back to the house and stay there until he heard from us or we heard from him.

  "He looked at me owlishly. "What should I do about the hogs?"

  "Damn the hogs!" I exclaimed. "What difference does it make to me? Do anything!"

  "Even the—the new one?"

  "Of course!" If I thought anything, I suppose I thought the man was talking about feeding the brutes.

  Annette and I drove back to New York and went directly to Uncle Alfred's town house. The place was closed, shades drawn at all the windows, the front door locked.

  There we were. The mystery seemed as complete as our despair.

  But within the next few days, our fortunes took a sudden upward turn. I got a much better position than I could have hoped for, and within a short time Annette and I were married.

  SO FAR as I know, Alfred Fry was never seen again. Although it seems impossible that such a tremendously fat man could vanish like an illusion in a distorting mirror, search has been made for him throughout the world, in vain. If he does not turn up in the time specified by law, his death will be legally presumed, and his considerable estate (which does not include ownership in the North-South Continental Company) will come to me. It seems I am his sole living relative.

  I hesitate to speak of the night Annette and I spent at the farmhouse, because as a reasonable, unimaginative man I am not willing to argue the accuracy of my own impressions. We went up to the country shortly after our marriage, and within a

  month of my uncle's disappearance. The first thing I noticed was that the pens were completely empty, and I asked Harris what had happened to the hogs.

  "Oh," he said, "I sent them to market. You'll be getting the check for them."

  I said, "If my uncle ever shows up, he'll throw you in jail for it."

  Harris grinned at me. "If he ever shows up."

  After dinner, Annette, Harris and I talked once again about the mystery of Uncle Alfred. There was little doubt in my mind of what the old devil had planned and I was certain that if I had made the trip to Mexico, I should never have returned. As I said, whatever happened to him, and however it happened, it seemed to me that only the merest, eleventh hour luck had saved my life and spared Annette the most terrible fate. Harris said nothing, but sat staring into the firelight.

  The sound woke me from a deep sleep, in the middle of the night—the clatter of hooves on the hardwood floor in the hall outside our doof. I waited, listening, while the beast stopped and snuffled along the bottom of the door, as if food were just beyond his reach. Then the clatter began again as the hog started down the hall. I jumped out of bed, and was in the long, straight corridor before the trotting hooves had reached the end. There was nothing to see. As I stared into empty space, I heard Harris call, "Peeeeg!" and it seemed to me that the sound of the sharp hooves on the bare floor appeared to enter Harris' room, but the door neither opened nor closed.

  Fortunately, the commotion had not awakened Annette, and I did not wish to frighten her, now. I sat up for the rest of the night, thinking. I shall not say what I thought, nor shall I advance any theories. But when the estate of my uncle Alfred Fry is settled, Harris shall have the farm.

  ^m /iers in Wait

  By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

  Could it hare been thai Oliver Cromwell, ruthless Puritan dictator of England, used the Black Arts to win bis struggle with the Cavaliers?

  Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,

  Whose word no mjji relies on, Who never said a foolish thing. Nor ever did a wise one.

  — Proffered Epitaph on Charles 11

  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

  (1647-1680)

  Yi

  ES, Jack Wilmot wrote so concern* me, and rallied me, saying these

  lines he would cut upon my monument; and now he is dead at thirty-three, while I live at fifty, none so merry a monarch as folks deem rac. Jack's verse makes me out a coxcomb, but he knew me not in

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  my youth. He was but four, and sucking sugar-plums, when his father and I were fugitives after Worcester. Judge from this story, if he rhymes the truth of me.

  I think it was then, with the rain soaking my wretched borrowed clothes and the heavy tight plough-shoes rubbing my feet all to blisters, that I first knew consciously how misery may come to kings as to vagabonds. Egad, I was turned the second before I had well been the first. Trying to think of other things than my present sorry state among the dripping trees of Spring Coppice, I could but remember sorrier things still. Chiefly came to mind the Worcester fight, that had been rather a cutting down of my poor men like barley, and Cromwell's Ironside troopers the reapers; How could so much ill luck befall—Lauderdale's bold folly, that wasted our best men in a charge? The mazed silence of Leslie's Scots horse, the first of their blood I ever heard of before or since who refused battle? I remembered too, as a sick dream, how I charged with a few faithful at a troop of Parliamentarian horse said to be Cromwell's own guard; I had cut down a mailed rider with a pale face like the winter moon, and rode back dragging one of my own, wounded sore, across my saddle bow. He had died there, crying to me: "God save your most sacred Majesty!" And now I had need of God to save me.

  "More things than Cromwell's wit and might went into this disaster," I told myself in the rain, nor knew how true I spoke.

  After the battle, the retreat. Had it been only last night? Leslie's horsemen, who had refused to follow me toward Cromwell, had dogged me so close m fleeing him I was at pains to scatter and so avoid them. Late we had paused, my gentlemen and I, at a manor of White-Ladies. There we agreed to divide and flee in disguise. With trie help of two faithful yokels named Pen-derel I cut my long curls with a knife and crammed my big body into coarse gar-

  ments—gray cloth breeches, a leathern doublet, a green jump-coat—while that my friends smeared my face and hands with chimney-soot. Then farewells, and I gave each gentleman a keep-sake—a ribbon, a buckle, a watch, and so forward. I remembered, too, my image in a mirror, and it was most unkingly—a towering, swarthy young man, ill-clad, ill-faced. One of the staunch Penderals bade me name myself, and I chose to be called Will Jones, a wandering woodcutter.

  Will Jones! "Twas an easy name and comfortable. For the nonce I was happier with it than with Charles Stuart, England's king and son of that other Charles who had died by Cromwell's axe. I was heir to bitter sorrow and trouble and mystery, in my youth lost and hunted and friendless as any strong thief.

  The rain was steady and weary. I tried to ask myself what I did here in Spring Coppice. It had been necessary to hide the day out, and travel by night; but whose thought was it to choose this dim, sorrowful wood? Richard Penderel had said that no rain fell elsewhere. Perhaps that was well, since Ironsides might forbear to seek me in such sorry bogs; but meanwhile I shivered and sighed, and wished myself a newt. The trees, what
I could see, were broad oaks with some fir and larch, and the ground grew high with bracken reddened by September's first chill.

  Musing thus, I heard a right ill sound —horses' hoofs. I threw myself half-down-ways among some larch scrub, peering out through the clumpy leaves. My right hand clutched the axe I carried as part of my masquerade. Beyond was a lane, and along it, one by one, rode enemy—a troop of Cromwell's horse, hard fellows and ready-seeming, with breasts and caps of iron. The)' stared right and left searchingly. The bright, bitter eyes of their officer seemed to strike through my hiding like a pike-point. I clutched my axe the tighter, and

  THE LIERS IN WAIT

  5?

  swore on my soul that, if found, I would die fighting—a better death, after all, than my poor father's.

  But they rode past, and out of sight. I sat up, and wiped muck from my long nose. "I am free yet," I told myself. "One day, please our Lord, I shall sit on the throne that is mine. Then shall I seek out these Ironsides and feed fat the gallows at Tyburn, the block at the Tower."

  FOR I was young and cruel then, as now I am old and mellow. Religion perplexed and irked me. I could not understand nor like Cromwell's Praise-God men of war, whose faces were as sharp and merciless as, alas, their swords. "I'll give them texts to quote/' I vowed. "I have heard their canting war-cries. 'Smite and spare not!' They shall learn how it is to be smitten and spared not."

  For the moment I felt as if vengeance were already mine, my house restored to power, my adversaries chained and delivered into my hand. Then I turned to cooler thoughts, and chiefly that I had best seek a hiding less handy to that trail through the trees.

  The thought was like sudden memory, as if indeed I knew the Coppice and where best to go.

  For I mind me how I rose from among the larches, turned on the heel of one pinching shoe, and struck through a belt of young spruce as though I were indeed a woodcutter seeking by familiar ways the door of mine own hut. So confidently did I stride that I blundered—or did I?— into a thorny vine that hung down from a long oak limb. It fastened upon my sleeve like urging fingers. "Nay, friend," I said to it, trying to be gay, "hold me not here in the wet," and I twitched away. That was one more matter about Spring Coppice that seemed strange and not overcanny—as also the rain, the gloom, my sudden desire to travel toward its heart. Yet, as you shall

  see here, these things were strange only in their basic cause. But I forego the talc.

  "So cometh Will Jones to his proper home," cjuoth I, axe on shoulder. Speaking thus merrily, I came upon another lane, but narrower than that on which the horsemen had ridden. This ran ankle-deep in mire, and I remember how the damp, soaking into my shoes, soothed those plaguey blisters. I followed the way for some score of paces, and meseemed that the rain was heaviest here, like a curtain before some hidden thing. Then I came into a cleared space, with no trees nor bush, nor even grass upon the bald earth. In its center, wreathed with rainy mists, a house.

  I paused, just within shelter of the leaves. "What," I wondered, "has my new magic of being a woodcutter conjured up a woodcutter's shelter?"

  But this house was no honest workman's place, that much I saw with but half an eye. Conjured up it might well have been, and most foully. I gazed at it without savor, and saw that it was not large, but lean and high-looking by reason of the steep pitch of its roof. That roof's thatch was so wet and foul that it seemed all of one drooping substance, like the cap of a dark toadstool. The walls, too, were damp, being of clay daub spread upon a framework of wattles. It had one door, and that a mighty thick heavy one, of a single dark plank that hung upon heavy rusty hinges. One window it had, too, through which gleamed some sort of light; but instead of glass the window was filled with something like thin-scraped rawhide, so that light could come through, but not the shape of things within. And so I knew not what was in that house, nor at the time had I any conscious lust to find out.

  I say, no conscious lust. For it was unconsciously that I drifted idly forth from the screen of wet leaves, gained and moved along a little hard-packed path between bracken-clumps. That path led to the

  WEIRD TALES

  door, and I found myself standing before it; while through the skinned-over window, inches away, I heard noises.

  Noises I call them, for at first I could not think they were voices. Several soft hummings or puttings came to my ears, from what source I knew not. Finally, though, actual words, high and raspy:

  "We who keep the commandment love the law! Moloch, Lucifer, Bal-Tigh-Mor, Anector, Somiator, sleep ye not! Compel ye that the man approach!"

  It had the sound of a prayer, and yet I recognized but one of the names called— Lucifer. Tutors, parsons, my late unhappy allies die Scots Covenentors, had used the name oft and fearfully. Prayer within that ugly lean house went up—or down, belike—to the fallen Son of the Morning. I stood against the door, pondering. My grandsire, King James, had believed and feared such folks' pretense. My father, who was King Charles before me, was pleased to doubt and be merciful, pardoning many accused witches and sorcerers. As for me, my short life had held scant leisure to decide such a matter. While I waited in the fine misty rain on the threshold, the high voice spoke again:

  "Drive him to us! Drive him to us! Drive him to us!"

  Silence within, and you may be sure silence without. A new voice, younger and thinner, made itself heard: "Naught comes to us."

  "Respect the promises of our masters," replied the first. "What says the book?''

  And yet a new voice, this time soft and a woman's: "Let the door be opened and the wayfarer be plucked in."

  T SWEAR that I had not the least impulse -^ to retreat, even to step aside. 'Twas as if all my life depended on knowing more. As I stood, ears aprick like any cat's, the door creaked inward by three inches. An arm in a dark sleeve shot out, and fingers

  as lean and clutching as thorn-twigs fastened on the front of my jump-coat.

  "I have him safe!" rasped the high voice that had prayed. A moment later I was drawn inside, before I could ask the reason.

  There was one room to the house, and it stank of burning weeds. There were no chairs or other furniture, and no fireplace; but in the center of the tamped-clay floor burned an open fire, whose rank smoke climbed to a hole at the roof's peak. Around this fire was drawn a circle in white chalk, and around the circle a star in red. Close outside the star were the three whose voices 1 had r .-

  Mine eyes lighted first on she who held the book—young she was and dainty. She sat on the floor, her feet drawn under her full skirt of black stuff. Above a white collar of Dutch style, her face was round and at the same time fine and fair, with a short red mouth and blue eyes like the clean sea.

  Her hair, under a white cap. was as yellow as corn. She held in her slim white hands a thick book, whose cover looked to be grown over with dark hair, like the hide of a Galloway bull.

  Her eyes held mine for two trices, then I looked beyond her to another seated person. He was small enough to be a child, but the narrow bright eyes in his thin face were older than the oldest I had seen, and the hands clasped around his bony knees were rough and sinewy, with large sore-seeming joints. His hair was scanty, and eke his eyebrows. His neck showed swollen painfully.

  It is odd that my last look was for him who had drawn me in. He was tall, almost as myself, and grizzled hair fell on the shoulders of his velvet doublet. One claw still clapped hold of me and his face, ' a foot from mine, was as dark and bloodless as earth. Its lips were loose, its quivering nose broken. The eyes, cold and

  T7

  wide as a frog's, were as steady as gun-muzzles,

  He kicked the door shut, and let me go. "Name yourself," he rasped at me. "If you be not he whom we seek—"

  "I am Will Jones, a poor woodcutter," I told him.

  "Mmmm," murmured the wench with the book. "Belike the youngest of seven sons—-sent forth by a cruel step-dame to seek fortune in the world. So runs the fairy tale, and we want none such. Your true
name, sirrah."

  I told her roundly that she was insolent, but she only smiled. And I never saw a fairer than she, not in all the courts of Europe—not even sweet Nell Gwyn. After many years I can see her eyes, a little slanting and a little hungry. Even when I was so young, women feared me, but this one did not.

  "His word shall not need," spoke the thin young-old fellow by the fire. "Am I not here to make him prove himself?" He lifted his face so that the fire brightened it, and I saw hot red blotches thereon.

  'True," agreed the grizzled man. "Sirrah, whether you be Will Jones the woodman or Charles Stuart the king, have you no mercy on poor Diccon yonder? If 'twould ease his ail, would you not touch him?"

  That was a sneer, but I looked closer at the thin fellow called Diccon, and made sure that he was indeed sick and sorry. His face grew full of hope, turning up to me. I stepped closer to him.

  "Why, with all my heart, if 'twill serve," I replied.

  '"Ware the star and circle, step not within the star and circle," cautioned the wench, but I came not near those marks. Standing beside and above Diccon, I felt his brow, and felt that it was fevered. "A hot humor is in your blood, friend," I said to him, and touched the swelling on his neck.

  But had there been a swelling there? I touched it, but 'twas suddenly gone, like a furtive mouse under my finger. Diccon's neck looked lean and healthy. His face smiled, and from it had fled the red blotches. He gave a cry and sprang to his feet.

  " 'Tis past, 'tis past!" he howled. "I am whole again!"

  But the eyes of his comrades were for me.

  "Only a king could have done so," quote the older man. "Young sir, I do take you truly for Charles Stuart. At your touch Diccon was healed of the king's evil."

  I folded my arms, as if I must keej-my hands from doing more strangeness. 1 had heard, too, of that old legend of the Stuarts, without deeming myself concerned. Yet, here it had befallen. Diccon had suffered from the king's evil, which learned doctors call scrofula. My touch had driven it from his thin body. He danced and quivered with the joy of health. But his fellows looked at me as though I had betrayed myself by sin.

 

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