Echo of a Curse

by R. R. Ryan

  However, if he noticed, Vin responded in no way.

  “How do you want her?” he asked quietly. “In human relationship, in life, in death?”

  “In death in life.”

  “And—her?”

  Govina quivered with a furious rage so ungovernable as to shake objects in his immediate vicinity.

  “Give her to me and I will abandon Faith.”

  “I give nothing.”

  “And lose Faith.”

  “We cannot bargain about Faith . . . She is mine.”

  Govina began to laugh; it was a faint sound, but very intimidating.

  “There is one person alone who can give Faith to you. The Woman Who Cursed Me . . . I will exchange Faith for her.”

  “You have not the power to impose such a bargain.”

  “Faith is my power, I have got Faith.”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Faith, dreaming her own dreams, took little notice of her traveling companion, except to wish that he had chosen a seat in the far corner rather than just opposite her, seeing he was tall and so muffled up as to require more than a fair share of room. However, she tucked her feet away and forgot him. She was able easily to forget what was unpleasant. She lived largely in a series of pictures and, since they were of her own creation, they were invariably pleasant. She was glad for this change of scene, not because she liked excessively the friends to whom she was bound, or their house much better than she liked her home, but because it offered her new medias for her mind-pictures. And, too, she loved the flowers that grew in such abundance around Mrs. Lessingham’s home.

  Lost in reveries of such a nature, it is improbable that she would have given a second thought to the still creature opposite but for the tunnel; when no longer able to watch the lovely passing scenes she let her gaze wander, to find herself looking into the gleaming eyes that held hers still until they could not look away, or even falter.

  She forgot Mrs. Lessingham, her dreams, the train, her home, her mother—everything.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  She now entered into a state of bliss to which her sweetest dreams were in no way comparable. She existed and knew she existed, but was not wholly conscious. She was aware of her companion, but not clearly. She was infinitely content. Her mind had floated away, her will its captive; but she had a mind, the mind of him by whose side she moved in slow ecstasy. Whither they were bound she neither knew nor noticed. She saw objects without registering them, and might have been in Persia for all the significance England had for her. Individuality had no part in her state. Men and women were merely negatives. Even her companion whom she obeyed, of whom, in a way, she was the complement, had no actual individuality.

  Her true self returned to her quite suddenly; and her coming to, was in fact, a shock.

  She awoke, if that is the right term to use, in a cellar as dank, as horrible, as fumy, as fungus-ridden as her mother’s cellar.

  Her eyes opened slowly; and, for a time, she believed herself still staring into the eyes of the tunnel, the gleaming, overpowering eyes. But truly she was staring into the eyes of a rat, peering curiously with its quick-looking, sharp, corrupt stare. Always she had hated, dreaded rats.

  She must, Faith knew, turn away her gaze, or she would lose control of herself and shriek in perpetual-seeming cascade—as once before she had done until silenced by exhaustion.

  And then she had the urge to glance upward, at an oblique, painful angle. She did. Into the face of what she, for a wild instant, supposed was a monster rat. Here were the eyes of a gleaming rodent, its pointed jaw . . . only immense. A wild, sick rush of fear and horror seemed to tear her mind in two . . . But it suddenly eased as the eyes into which she looked changed to an opaque whiteness, and the pointed jaw became a pointed beard.

  She sat up. Why was she here? By what extraordinary set of circumstances? Was this the cellar of Mrs. Lessingham’s house . . .? And who was this strange, ugly being?

  She saw him smile; and, though aware that the smile was hideous, she did not feel alarmed or even repulsed. Curiously she did not feel herself in danger.

  She stared round about. Just a cellar, quite bare save for a packing-case and a gingerbeer box.

  She was lying on blankets and a rug and was wearing a heavy man’s coat—necessary in an atmosphere at once chill and damp. She felt alive and strangely intense, as if she had been fed on most invigorating sustenance.

  The odd-looking man was clad entirely in black and only a livid patch of facial flesh, added to that of one ungloved hand, seemed to differentiate him from the surrounding heavy shadows, made the more uncertain because the wick of a lamp suspended from a beam, and which alone lent the cellar illumination, spluttered and yielded its meagre glow spasmodically—as if it were supplied with foul oil.

  He came forward with a curious, loping gait and sat on the upturned gingerbeer box in a manner that Faith thought lupine rather than human. He began to speak and his voice, though harsh, held a tender, syrupy note. Now that he was near, she could detect a peculiar and, at first, unrecognizable odour.

  “You are wondering who I am?” he asked.

  “Have I been in an accident, or something?”

  “Oh no!”

  “Are we at Mrs. Lessingham’s?”

  “No. Mrs. Lessingham does not expect you.”

  “But she wrote.”

  “No.”

  “But . . . she did. I read the letter. It was in her writing.”

  “Hard as it is for you to comprehend the fact, Mrs. Lessingham did not write that letter, I wrote it. I was in the train. I was the muffled up stranger. I brought you here.”

  “But . . . How?” she asked in complete bewilderment.

  “Look!”

  Suddenly once again she was looking into those flaming eyes; once again she saw that wolflike face; once again she began to feel stealing over her that delicious langour. Then the eyes, the face, the pleasant stupor were gone. The man with the injured eyes and the puckered jaw covered almost completely by its ragged, pointed beard sat before her.

  “You are not afraid of me, Faith.”

  And she was not. She, most nervous of girls, could consider this appalling abduction, these forbidding surroundings, this sinister man without a tremor.

  “I have brought you here to tell you a very long and very strange story, one that I wish your absolute ego to understand. One which it is necessary that the eternal part of you should understand.”

  “Is there an eternal part of us?”

  One half of her had always refused such beliefs; the other, Vin’s half, had been filled with those fantastic tales of undead semi-beings of which he, Vin, in frightening moments when his mind seemed totally unrelated to the minds of earth-people as she knew them, told her such vivid, true-seeming tales.

  And now this—this—this Stranger began to speak in similar language. There was, he said, in much the excited fashion of Vin’s preaching, a state of undeadness. It was scoffed at by the vast majority. But supreme knowledge was granted not to majorities but to those who ruled them. Humanity, he explained, was ruled by secrets of which the matter-of-fact scientists had not the iota of information. She must understand that among all the teeming masses on earth it was not unnatural but natural, by the rule of exception, that there were beings, apparently ordinary humans, who in reality had more alliance with the invisible, secret essence of spirit of which we have no knowledge as a human race than with the merely corporeal creatures we call men and women. To these it was granted that they could retain immortality with, to offer a crude illustration, one leg in the human world and one leg in the immaterial world.

  “My father has said all this,” Faith admitted.

  These arguments lay like lead on her soul and did not convince her reason . . . But, just now, neither her soul nor her reason was very active, though her ordinary faculties were sufficiently strong to impel her to ask:

  “And did you abduct me just to convert me to father’s theories? Or has father em
ployed you to convert me by experiments or something?”

  “I told you: I have brought you here to tell you a long and very strange story. It began at your birth—and at mine; for we two were born at one and the same time. But, indeed, it began before that; at our conception . . . And, to be more subtly exact, long before even that. It really begins with Him you call your father, who has a strain of the hyper-human in his composition—which incidentally has missed you, just as a germ in the blood will miss one twin and infect the other.

  “This story begins really with His father, who became allied to the undead by uncommon means, by means illegal in the eyes of Our law, or the law of the Unseen; of The Silent Life; of The Nameless.

  “What one might call Infra-immortality creates a link in the issue that has this strange aspect; if one corporeally related immortal destroys the immortality of another, he destroys at the same time his own immortality . . . In Him you call your father the hyper-influence was definitely subordinate to the human. He was more interested in his human relationships than in his Undead relationship; and this came to a vital point when he sowed his seed in your mother’s womb. From then on he became overwhelmingly interested in his mortal aspect, because of the issue. His father, who, in his struggle to attain Undead endowment by forcing his way through the mortal limits, had become entangled with certain of his animal mediums, feared what he would have called his own son’s treachery, that is his apostasy. He entered into an intrigue with a convert to Black Animism and they came to this town, where your grandfather was shown publicly as THE INEXPLICABLE. Inexplicable, indeed, to the uninformed human mentality.

  “So that I should be born in his image and possessing his immortality despite his son’s possible renunciation, he visited your mother, our mother, at a vital moment and used his powers to ensure that his gift of Undeadness might, despite our father’s renunciation, be perpetuated.

  “Our father shot the mortal being of his father and then destroyed his immortality, thus losing his own, from thence concentrating his interest on normal human pursuits. He was aware, however, that the child his wife expected could not be born otherwise than a monster, that the coincidental happening of his wife’s curse of her expected child and the appearance to her of a monster must have inevitable results.

  “Since he had decided to live, in appearance only, with the woman he had married, and whose early infatuation had turned to loathing, he sought consolation and companionship elsewhere, meeting a nurse employed by the doctor in attendance on his wife. They became intimate, when he discovered that she had a sister who was due to deliver an inconvenient child approximately at the same time that is was reasonable to expect his own misshapen offspring.

  “He bribed this nurse to change those babies. The plot was carried through with a success partly due to skill, partly due to luck. But fate, in its amazing way, had played a strange trick upon him. True, it had given him the monster son he anticipated, but it had, in addition, given him a normal daughter.

  “Now the sister’s child was also a boy. Hence to all seeming nothing untoward had occurred. Here, apparently, was a contented mother to whom had been vouchsafed the perfection of motherhood: a healthy boy and girl.

  “I was the real son—you were the girl. But I was condemned to my grandfather’s animal shape, my whole ‘human’ life spoilt, because of that woman’s curse. From my father, from my grandfather, I inherited the gift of immortality as achieved by Black Animism; but of what use that gift to me in my human life when it had to be lived in animal shape?”

  He stopped talking and to the already shocked girl’s further dismay began to strip. Yet soon it was clear that her susceptibilities need not be ravaged. Here was no white skin, but the rough pelt of a wolf, the torso of an ape. His clothing shed, the thing that declared itself her brother, began to run softly here and there, seeming hardly to touch the ground.

  But presently it stopped and crouched beside her.

  “My mother by adoption was the daughter of a showman, partly gipsy, partly Cornish. He refused to share in the terms our father arranged as payment for this elaborate deception. But she, besides being considerably better off already for taking charge of the monster child, saw a future source of considerable profit in my misshapen body. She would show me at fairs on the Continent and in the East. She did so and prospered. In later years she took to drink and in drink talked. Slowly I learned the truth. I learned in hate and bitterness that I need not have been the foul thing I am to look upon, that I could not only have moved among humans as their equal, but as their infinite superior because of the secret powers beginning to manifest themselves.

  “Eventually I killed her and came here; came with a desire to help and care for you and to avenge myself on her.”

  “On my mother?” Faith faltered.

  She had listened to this—as her reason termed it—farrago of folly, deeming it entirely the product of a mind as twisted as its utterer’s body was misshapen. A slow sickness of fear was welling up in her, growing in proportion to her abnormal companion’s absorption in his tale. Where was she? How had she come here? In all this talk of magic there certainly was this much evidence in its support, that she was here, in this dreadful cellar, with this thing, and could not say in the smallest degree how she came to be there. She remembered clearly all details of her train journey up to the tunnel. Then, blank. Cogitation suggested that she had been overcome by fear, because she had been suddenly faced by those two glaring eyes; in all probability she had fainted. Yet commonsense told her that even this explanation left much that seemed incredible to be explained. But here she was: fast in the possession of this beast-creature, utterly ignorant of her whereabouts and as clearly destined to stay his prisoner. How had she been fed? For she was not only without a trace of hunger, but actually stronger than she ever remembered herself being before. She felt indescribably potent.

  He looked up abruptly and for an instant it seemed to her she saw again the gleaming eyes, the fanged mouth, that so suitably completed his animal appearance. Yet, as soon as his gaze met hers, the phenomenon faded; she saw only his injured, blurred eyes and bearded, puckered mouth. And she saw a benign expression on his face, one of welcome, fondness and protection. The most powerful urge of instinct she had ever experienced bade her temporize, fall in with his exaggerations . . . But this, she told herself, was not possible in its entirety. Nothing would make her consciously agree to support his hate of Mary or to his criminal intentions towards the being she loved best on earth. And then she must, at all cost, know what his exact intentions were towards her. In addition to her reasonable, active fear, she felt a secondary fear: of something that lent countenance to his “otherness.” A fear she had sometimes experienced when Vin had lectured her upon a mysterious immortality; something that went beyond the obvious lunacy lurking in Vin and active in this being. Could it be that their claims to render her Undead . . . Oh! Here was a pit of horror which it were folly even to glance into.

  “What have you brought me here for? Just to tell me this tale?”

  “Well, now that it is told, do you not wish us to be together? You realize I am your brother—even if I look like this?”

  “Oh, yes, I understood all you said,” she replied non-committally. “But are you going to keep me here in this awful place?”

  “For a while . . .”

  “But . . .” There was such an incalculability to be said, such an immeasurability of remonstrance to be made that her tongue faltered at the start . . . “How am I to wash, change and . . . and . . . eat?”

  He ignored the first questions, but answered the last.

  “I have fed you,” he said, “as I feed myself. It is not only a sure source of vitality, but a preparation for what is to follow.”

  “What is to follow?” she asked in a whisper.

  And now he began to utter such unacceptable yet terrible folly that her stomach revolted and her understanding grew confused; but not so confused that it failed to grasp t
wo outstanding facts: both she and Mary must die; for, however, two distinctly different reasons: Faith was to die with Govina himself, so that in Undeath they would be not only eternally free but eternally united; Mary was to die so that he could condemn her to suffering incalculable.

  Without warning, Faith’s control, never very powerful, gave way; she screamed—again and again.

  Govina stared at her blankly, then miserably; and as if comprehending that here was a seriously bad subject for the rites he proposed; that Faith had not accepted his tale as true; that she believed him mad; and that to convince her he must not only supply witnesses to his statements, but also bring tangible proofs.

  His life with Holly, though civilized to some extent, had hardly prepared him for the conventional obstinacy of minds accustomed to empirical facts alone, or to facts rationalized into practicability. He failed to grasp that what to his curious inward state was as clear as daylight was, to the average man and woman, blacker than night. His was, perhaps, the human reasoning mind braked by animal simplicity. He had never comprehended law, other than the law within him, which, despite some mental agility, was mainly based on instinct—and that cannot be admitted into any system of laws, for it is essentially irresponsible.

  But he was not going to relinquish her because she was obtuse. There were other ways. He would employ them. After he had done so, she would turn to him as naturally as a child to its mother. There would be a mysterious, inviolable bond between them that would last, not for a day, a year, an age—but for always.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Again her free will was subjugated by the gleaming eyes. She sank back at peace, smiling contentedly.

  But Govina sat regarding her in metallic fixity. He was thinking now, not of Faith, but of Mary. He had acted wrongly. He should have made sure of securing not only the daughter, but also the mother . . . This latter consummation was not going to be easy. He had a difficult foe in Vin, endowed, Govina believed, with powers more than equal to his own. It might be he’d have to surrender Faith to obtain Mary. And he would forego all other considerations to wreak his hate upon her.