Echo of a Curse

by R. R. Ryan

  But there was subtlety; there was guile. By some exercise of these qualities he might yet possess them both.

  He rose and began to don his cast-off clothes. Presently, masked and goggled and muffled in his outdoor wear, he was ready to sally forth.

  CHAPTER VI

  “I have Faith,” Govina repeated.

  The contrast between father and son at this instant was startling indeed. Whereas Border faced Govina in an attitude of insousiant grace, with an air almost of nobility, Govina faced Border as if he had just risen from the mythological regions of Pluto. A veritable reproduction of THE INEXPLICABLE sustained by a greater virility.

  It was thus that Mary, tottering in, saw him, her son, before she fell with a crash across the threshold.

  For an instant she lay there with the eyes of both men upon her helpless form: Vin looking with oddly changing expression; Govina with his already hideous features diabolically distorted.

  A cold smile dawned on Vin’s once ruddy lips. He nodded at Mary’s prone figure.

  “Well, my son, she is there, helpless, at your feet . . . Burn her with your eyes . . . Tear her with your fangs . . . Or rip her with those nice long claws.”

  A low, rumbling growl answered him from the wolflike jaws; it was clear that the impulse to leap almost rent Govina’s lean frame.

  But he remained shivering where he stood, as if rooted.

  Vin eyed him with a suggestion of idle, inimical amusement.

  “So you see, my son, if you have Faith, my daughter, I have Mary, my wife.”

  A shocking transformation took place. Govina, dropping to all fours, howled in the blood-curdling and baleful fashion of his kind.

  Vin examined his nails.

  “If the faithful Anne hears that,” he drawled, “her knees will be beating the devil’s tattoo.”

  Govina, his jowl dripping, strained violently but uselessly towards Mary’s unconscious form, then turning vanished through the bedroom door, which crashed. Vin, raising the prone woman with difficulty, staggered out on to the landing, where he came face to face with Anne, her cheeks chalk-white and the hand that held a candlestick shaking violently.

  She tried to speak, in vain.

  “Your mistress has fainted. Help me to get her upstairs.”

  But the maid still stood shivering, as if she had not heard.

  “What was that howl?” she whispered.

  “A dog in the garden next door.”

  “It sounded in the house.”

  “Noises travel curiously at night,” Vin said. “Please pull yourself together and help me.”

  But at that instant Mary opened her eyes and started to scream, staring at Anne as if the flickering candle were the glaring eyes she feared and her plateless mouth the gaping jaws of Govina.

  But Mary was no screamer, either by impulse or habit. Rather she was one well-equipped for crisis, her own or others.

  The meaning of that grim scene into which, fortunately or unfortunately, she had blundered was all too clear. Disaster had overwhelmed her life just when it seemed the clouds were breaking. Terry, happiness, love—these, with their gentle forecasts, were as far behind her as the years of youth. What remained was the necessity to keep her will firm, her mind clear and her courage great.

  “I can walk,” she said harshly and with a force foreign to her usual considerate manner. “Anne, you go back to bed.”

  “But . . .”

  “Do as you’re told, please . . . I will come quite soon.”

  After some hesitation the elder woman, her candle dripping grease, which, ordinarily, would have filled her with horror, remounted the stairs.

  “Will you come into my room?” Vin asked Mary in his quiet way, which contrasted so oddly with the impish manner and voice of those far off days.

  It was significant of her new attitude to him that she consented without hesitation. In his room she had a surprise. It was bare to the degree of a cell. Everything that had stood for comfort had disappeared. She had her choice of a wooden chair or the floor. From a point of principle Mary had left the superintendence of Vin’s two rooms to Anne, as silent as she was grim; and, though the latter had from time to time reported that Vin had asked for this, for that, to be removed, and had stripped his rooms, Mary had viewed this statement as exaggerated. But now she saw that, so far from being exaggerated, it fell short of the truth.

  His door into the bedroom was open. Through it she could see a little black altar of which Anne had told her.

  “There’s always a dish with some rank-smelling stuff on it. Filthy stuff . . . But it’s always there.” So Anne had reported and now through the open door she could see the small black dish.

  Vin closed the passage door. They were alone together for the first time in years and years. She sat on one wooden chair and Vin took another, facing her. Then he waited in silence for interrogation, as if he knew that now revelation was inevitable. Which it was.

  A premonition of the truth was in her mind. Moreover, it was only too easy to interpret what she had seen and heard. Well, she was here; she had to begin; but it seemed to Mary that her soul was shaking. War, with its atrocities, its human degradation, had so far seemed to her the most sordid depth to which Man, with his boasted Immortal Soul, could sink; but now she knew she was wrong. There were things fouler; things that, maybe, accounted for the more obvious vileness to which men can and do sink.

  She cleared her dry throat and for an instant closed her burning eyes.

  “Who is this man, Govina?”

  His face and eyes less eloquent than stone, Vin replied:

  “Our son.”

  “Then . . . that time when the thing came to the window . . . and I cursed the son you expected . . . It . . . it . . . photographed that image on . . .?”

  “Yes.”

  Unconsciously swaying in her horror, her gaze fixed upon Vin, Mary looked back.

  “Then who is Don?”

  “A baby I and the nurse substituted.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I acted under some compulsion,” Vin replied slowly.

  He himself did not know, had never known, why he had so deliberately schemed to spare Mary the result of a curse to which he had driven her. It was not, he had always reminded himself, as if he had foreseen Faith, or that he wanted another man’s son. But a shot and its grim complement had profoundly changed his outlook towards his human relationships. In that, or for infinitely more sinister reasons beyond even his occult knowledge, lay the explanation. On the face of it Mary was justified in assuming his action done to save her anguish.

  “I am grateful for your compassion,” she muttered.

  But Vin made no reply.

  “Is . . .” She stopped and nodded towards where Mr. Govina’s rooms lay . . . “Is he abnormal in mind as well as body?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Mad?”

  “You would call it so.”

  “What is its real appearance?”

  “As you’ve just seen it.”

  “Those eyes—that mouth?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why does it assume another appearance . . . The bearded mouth and injured eyes?”

  “It has hypnotic powers greatly developed. All the stupefying endowment of the preying world added to human will.”

  “Then it did kill that white-haired old man?”

  “Don’s true grandfather? Yes.”

  “And injure Terry?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we did not truly see him sitting in his window?”

  “No.”

  “The cat’s eyes . . .?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Faith?”

  “You heard. He has Faith.”

  “What does he want with Faith?”

  “You must understand, Mary, he knows from the woman who brought him up as a freak on the Continent—and whom he has killed—that you are his mother, why he is a monster and that Faith is his twin. I kn
ow it will be quite useless to explain that he is abnormal to a non-human degree, but perhaps you can grasp this—that he believes he is immortal, in less exaggerated degree, as the fictional vampires are immortal. He has a natal adoration for his twin. He wants her to share his immortality. Perhaps that is only mania. If so, it is full of menace to Faith; for he believes that to attain life she must pass through death.”

  “You do not know where he has taken Faith?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe he has her? That letter from Mrs. Lessingham.”

  “She did not write it. She never invited Faith. If you got on the phone to her now, you would find she does not know anything about Faith’s journey to stay with her.”

  “What about the police?”

  “That would be fatal. You have seen him baffle the police. To call them in would be to condemn Faith to immediate death.”

  “Have you no . . . no influence with him?”

  “Not influence with him. Some power over him. But I cannot say ‘Bring Faith to me’ with any hope of obedience. I can stop him, while at hand, from killing you.”

  “He means to kill me?”

  “Apart from Faith, it is the foremost wish and the absolute intention of his mind.”

  “He said he would relinquish Faith for me.”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence. All this dark fantasy so little related to prosaic life required collating and assimilating. Never had Mary so longed for Terry’s cool judgment and strong nature. Were he present, she could just turn over the whole complex problem to him. As it was, she had to deal with it alone.

  “I must think, Vin,” she said wearily. “I’ll go to bed, though sleep seems improbable.”

  She moved to implement her purpose; but he stopped her.

  “Mary.” She turned towards him. “Make me up some sort of bed on your divan. I must sleep there until—this affair is settled.”

  “Why?”

  “He cannot pass through to your bedroom while I am present.”

  She was about to utter trivial refusals; but suddenly refrained. She just nodded. For one thing—any excuse to get away, to consider this absurd yet awful problem, arrive at some decision.

  Anne was awake and lifted her arrogant old head when Mary entered.

  “Anne, I’ve asked my husband to sleep on the divan in the sitting-room.”

  “Good lor! Are you coming all over married?”

  Mary ignored the familiar flippancy. Anne, old and well-loved, had many privileges.

  “I told him I was nervous.”

  “Nervous!” The old woman looked round anxiously as if expecting evil faces to flower vilely among the floral extravagances of the wallpaper. “I never thought this house’d turn creepy; but it has. You get undressed; I’ll make up his bed.”

  For Mary was rummaging in the huge bottom drawer where she usually kept some spare sheets and blankets.

  “No, it’s quite . . .”

  “Do as you’re told, M’m.”

  Mary, as often obedient to Anne as Anne to Mary, began to undress.

  “What made you faint, M’m?”

  “Oh, the strain of everything. Mr. Terry and . . .”

  The old servant shot her mistress a shrewd glance.

  “If I believed in the devil . . .” she began; but left her remark unended. “Didn’t hear that howl, of course?”

  “What howl?”

  “Oh well, never mind!”

  To prevent further questions Anne started to make Vin’s bed. Suddenly she re-appeared.

  “Listen, M’m, let him sleep there if you like—though it seems like asking the devil to keep his imps out of mischief—but I don’t sleep with him in there unless our door’s locked.”

  “We’ll lock it, Anne,” Mary agreed without humour.

  Already her racked mind was wrestling with her problem. She was quickly in bed and was terse with Anne when she tried to express her growing alarm and feminine sense of outrage; she pretended great sleepiness, but actually had never felt so wide awake in her life before. Her head seemed full of white-hot wires and her mind so dense with confusion that it was a very long time before she could co-ordinate her thoughts to any degree at all.

  It was amazing to think that the terrible nightmare which she had supposed past, but which, nevertheless, was too often present in her waking thoughts and in her dreams, was not present in concrete fact. In all the books she had read, in all the films she had witnessed, Mary had seen nothing so appalling as the raw truth obtaining in this house . . .

  Now let me think, she kept saying . . .

  Don is not my boy. My own son I did curse . . . And curses come home to roost . . . This has . . . A mad monster in this house, teeming with the urge to rip me up, to debauch Faith’s true nature . . . And how is he to be prevented? His hypnotic power’s not marvelous, but easily understood; yet it’s marvelous in its effective protection of him. More effective than a smoke screen in times of war. He must succeed. A voice in her mind soon began to assert itself: You can’t just lie here and do nothing! Don’t you understand that Faith is in this creature’s power? You do not know to what vileness she may be subjected. She thought of Faith’s dreamy beauty, of her lovable helplessness. An experience such as this was sufficient to wreck a stronger mind than Faith’s. How could she continue to lie still without knowing where her daughter was?

  Desperation surged over her. Inaction became abruptly impossible. She would speak to Vin, demand that something should be done . . . And, if Vin could not or would not do anything, then she’d tackle the thing that was her son. She must. If he would consent to return Faith to safe-keeping in exchange for her own life, the bargain should be made. Clearly, in regard to that, she had no choice. Faith was an utterly innocent party; she herself was aware of guilt. Plainly, calm reason declared, to curse a child in the early days of its conception is a grievous sin. Had she cursed Vin, she would have been justified, but the child . . .

  She would do something, confront it; and if she could achieve nothing that way, she’d rouse the countryside.

  Mary listened carefully to Anne’s breathing. There were two stages of the old woman’s sleep, when she had gone off but was rousable by even light noises, and when she had sunk into a deeper slumber and was hard indeed to rouse. From the depth and stertorous rhythm that proceeded from the other bed, Anne had reached her second stage and it would be safe for Mary to venture.

  She and Anne slept with their curtains drawn. The moonlight streamed in. It was a hard night. All cloud had withdrawn from the sky, which was fully dominated, like the earth below, by aloof silver. A night without a sympathetic note.

  With soft movements she donned her dressing-gown—more beautiful in this tempered radiance than the girl she called lovely—and stole to the door. Here she listened, but heard no sound from Vin’s made-up bed; no breathing. No restless movements. She ventured the door, opening it slowly and with infinite caution.

  Vin lay upon his back. She eyed him, making little tentative movements of entry . . . He was impressively still—still as a corpse; eyes as glassy. Mary had seen the dead and did not think that he was in truth a corpse . . . rather he gave her the impression of suspension. He looked not asleep but void, as if his spirit were not with his body. She moved more boldly. He did not stir.

  Even when Mary had with a little unavoidable squeaking opened the passage door, a backward glance showed her Vin still as remote as an effigy at some waxworks.

  The passage, too, was palely alight, as if her way were being lit by ghostly purpose. And each step downward was like dipping her feet into an immaterial stream.

  At Govina’s door courage failed her. For the first time terror welled up. But she welcomed the fear—as now she knew she welcomed the full frightfulness of this ordeal and its possible consequences. Thus she could purge her soul of a guilty feeling. What sin, she asked herself, can equal sin against the unborn, prejudicing lives not yet shaped? For this reason, though i
n turning the knob her hand trembled, it did not falter. She went in. The sitting-room was empty. With feet weighted and slow she crossed to the second door and tapped. But no answer came. She tapped again—many times . . .

  She had an overmastering impulse to peep in; but a terror of doing so equally as strong. What might she not see? More death, more and more terrible death? Those deadly eyes? That ghastly mouth? Things blasphemous against the common beliefs of life?

  In obedience to her less considered urge she did open the door to find an empty room . . .

  How she was being baulked! Ten thousand times harder is the pursuing of a sacrifice when the impulse seeking its consummation has to endure by artificial means.

  She would, however, see Govina.

  She did.

  He stood behind her muffled up as was his habit on his journeys to and from the house.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  “Where has he come from? What has he come from doing?”

  These were her first thoughts. Killing? Has he been killing? As he killed that old man. As he would have killed Terry . . . As his dreadful prototype killed . . . to all seeming purposely . . . Unless there were some terrible explanation for these crimes that would show them far from objectless.

  Well, soon he would kill her. She trembled in this muffled presence—kin of hers yet as alien as spirit to matter. The dread of immediate and violent death tied her tongue, dried her mouth. She stood merely trembling, ignorant of what might be happening behind those goggles and that black silk fall. She could not, somehow, identify this woman, trembling in strange circumstances to Miltonian aspects, with the Mary she had known from infancy.

  She began to falter words, staring at the material of his wrappings.

  “Your father has explained about you . . . I find it exceedingly hard to put into words what I feel . . . Contrition for the great wrong that I feel my curse has done you is what I most want to express . . . Any mother in such circumstances would wish to say . . .” Her voice faded. She was aware Govina shook. Was he laughing? Did he shake through rage? “Amends . . . if in any way I can make amends . . . There is nothing”—her voice deepened under the stress of her feelings—“nothing I would not do . . .”