“I’d like to visit that grove,” I said.
“I pray you!” he cried, waving in protest. “Do not make us unwelcome.”
We arrived shortly before noon. The little town rests in a circular hollow among high wooded hills, and there is not a really good road into it, for two or three miles around. After listening to Zoberg, I had expected something grotesque or forbidding, but I was disappointed. The houses were sturdy and modest, in some cases poor. The greater part of them made a close-huddled mass, like a herd of cattle threatened by wolves, with here and there an isolated dwelling like an adventuresome young fighting-bull. The streets were narrow, crooked and unpaved, and for once in this age I saw buggies and wagons out-numbering automobiles. The central square, with a two-story town hall of red brick and a hideous cast-iron war memorial, still boasted numerous hitching-rails, brown with age and smooth with use. There were few real signs of modern progress. For instance, the drug store was a shabby clapboard affair with “Pharmacy” painted upon its windows, and it sold only drugs, soda and tobacco; while the one hotel was low and rambling and bore the title “Luther Inn.” I heard that the population was three hundred and fifty, but I am inclined to think it was closer to three hundred.
We drew up in front of the Luther Inn, and a group of roughly dressed men gazed at us with the somewhat hostile interrogation that often marks a rural American community at the approach of strangers. These men wore mail-order coasts of corduroy or suede – the air was growing nippier by the minute – and plow shoes or high laced boots under dungaree pants. All of them were of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon type.
“Hello!” cried Zoberg jovially. “I see you there, my friend Mr. Gird. How is your charming daughter?”
The man addressed took a step forward from the group on the porch. He was a raw-boned, grizzled native with pale, pouched eyes, and was a trifle better dressed than the others, in a rather ministerial coat of dark cloth and a wide black hat. He cleared his throat before replying.
“Hello, Doctor. Susan’s well, thanks. What do you want of us?”
It was a definite challenge, that would repel or anger most men, but Zoberg was not to be denied. He scrambled out of the car and cordially shook the hand of the man he had called Mr. Gird. Meanwhile he spoke in friendly fashion to one or two of the others.
“And here,” he wound up, “is a very good friend of mine, Mr. Talbot Wills.”
All eyes – and very unfriendly eyes they were, as a whole – turned upon me. I got out slowly, and at Zoberg’s insistence shook hands with Gird. Finally the grizzled man came with us to the car.
“I promised you once,” he said glumly to Zoberg, “that I would let you and Susan dig as deeply as you wanted to into this matter of spirits. I’ve often wished since that I hadn’t, but my word was never broken yet. Come along with me; Susan is cooking dinner, and there’ll be enough for all of us.”
He got into the car with us, and as we drove out of the square and toward his house he conversed quietly with Zoberg and me.
“Yes,” he answered one of my questions, “the houses are old, as you can see. Some of them have stood since the Revolutionary War with England, and our town’s ordinances have stood longer than that. You aren’t the first to be impressed, Mr. Wills. Ten years ago a certain millionaire came and said he wanted to endow us, so that we would stay as we are. He had a lot to say about native color and historical value. We told him that we would stay as we are without having to take money from him, or from anybody else for that matter.”
Gird’s home was large but low, all one storey, and of darkly painted clapboards over heavy timbers. The front door was hung on the most massive handwrought hinges. Gird knocked at it, and a slender, smallish girl opened to us.
She wore a woolen dress, as dark as her father’s coat, with white at the neck and wrists. Her face, under masses of thunder-black hair, looked Oriental at first glance, what with high cheekbones and eyes set aslant; then I saw that her eyes were a bright gray like worn silver, and her skin rosy, with a firm chin and a generous mouth. The features were representatively Celtic, after all, and I wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time in my life if there was some sort of blood link between Scot and Mongol. Her hand, on the brass knob of the door, showed as slender and white as some evening flower.
“Susan,” said Gird, “here’s Doctor Zoberg. And this is his friend, Mr. Wills.”
She smiled at Zoberg, then nodded to me, respectfully and rather shyly.
“My daughter,” Gird finished the introduction. “Well, dinner must be ready.”
She led us inside. The parlor was rather plainer than in most old-fashioned provincial houses, but it was comfortable enough. Much of its furniture would have delighted antique dealers, and one or two pieces would have impressed museum directors. The dining room beyond had plate-racks on the walls and a long table of dark wood, with high-backed chairs. We had some fried ham, biscuits, coffee and stewed fruit that must have been home-canned. Doctor Zoberg and Gird ate heartily, talking of local trifles, but Susan Gird hardly touched her food. I, watching her with stealthy admiration, forgot to take more than a few mouthfuls.
After the repast she carried out the dishes and we men returned to the parlor. Gird faced us.
“You’re here for some more hocus-pocus?” he hazarded gruffly.
“For another séance,” amended Zoberg, suave as ever.
“Doctor,” said Gird, “I think this had better be the last time.”
Zoberg held out a hand in pleading protest, but Gird thrust his own hands behind him and looked sternly stubborn. “It’s not good for the girl,” he announced definitely.
“But she is a great medium – greater than Eusapia Paladino, or Daniel Home,” Zoberg argued earnestly. “She is an important figure in the psychic world, lost and wasted here in this backwater—”
“Please don’t miscall our town,” interrupted Gird. “Well, Doctor, I agree to a final séance, as you call it. But I’m going to be present.”
Zoberg made a gesture as of refusal, but I sided with Gird.
“If this is to be my test, I want another witness,” I told Zoberg.
“Ach! If it is a success, you will say that he helped to deceive.”
“Not I. I’ll arrange things so there will be no deception.”
Both Zoberg and Gird stared at me. I wondered which of them was the more disdainful of my confidence.
Then Susan Gird joined us, and for once I wanted to speak of other subjects than the occult.
III “That thing isn’t my daughter—”
It was Zoberg who suggested that I take Susan Gird for a relaxing drive in my car. I acclaimed the idea as a brilliant one, and she, thanking me quietly, put on an archaic-seeming cloak, black and heavy. We left her father and Zoberg talking idly and drove slowly through the town.
She pointed out to me the Devil’s Croft of which I had heard from the doctor, and I saw it to be a grove of trees, closely and almost rankly set. It stood apart from the sparser timber on the hills, and around it stretched bare fields. Their emptiness suggested that all the capacity for life had been drained away and poured into that central clump. No road led near to it, and I was obliged to content myself by idling the car at a distance while we gazed and she talked.
“It’s evergreen, of course,” I said. “Cedar and a little juniper.”
“Only in the hedge around it,” Susan Gird informed me. “It was planted by the town council about ten years ago.”
I stared. “But surely there’s greenness in the center, too,” I argued.
“Perhaps. They say that the leaves never fall, even in January.”
I gazed at what appeared to be a little fluff of white mist above it, the whiter by contrast with the black clouds that lowered around the hill-tops. To my questions about the town council, Susan Gird told me some rather curious things about the government of the community. There were five councilmen, elected every year, and no mayor. Each of the five presided at a meeting in tur
n. Among the ordinances enforced by the council was one providing for support of the single church.
“I should think that such an ordinance could be set aside as illegal,” I observed.
“I think it could,” she agreed, “but nobody has ever wished to try.”
The minister of the church, she continued, was invariably a member of the council. No such provision appeared on the town records, nor was it even urged as a “written law,” but it had always been deferred to. The single peace officer of the town, she continued, was the duly elected constable. He was always commissioned as deputy sheriff by officials at the county seat, and his duties included census taking, tax collecting and similar matters. The only other officer with a state commission was the justice; and her father, John Gird, had held that post for the last six years.
“He’s an attorney, then?” I suggested, but Susan Gird shook her head.
“The only attorney in this place is a retired judge, Keith Pursuivant,” she informed me. “He came from some other part of the world, and he appears in town about once a month – lives out yonder past the Croft. As a matter of fact, an ordinary experience of law isn’t enough for our peculiar little government.”
She spoke of her fellow-townsmen as quiet, simple folk who were content for the most part to keep to themselves, and then, yielding to my earnest pleas, she told me something of herself.
The Gird family counted its descent from an original settler – though she was not exactly sure of when or how the settlement was made – and had borne a leading part in community affairs through more than two centuries. Her mother, who had died when Susan Gird was seven, had been a stranger; an “outlander” was the local term for such, and I think it is used in Devonshire, which may throw light on the original founders of the community. Apparently this woman had shown some tendencies toward psychic power, for she had several times prophesied coming events or told neighbors where to find lost things. She was well loved for her labors in caring for the sick, and indeed she had died from a fever contracted when tending the victims of an epidemic.
“Doctor Zoberg had known her,” Susan Gird related. “He came here several years after her death, and seemed badly shaken when he heard what had happened. He and Father became good friends, and he has been kind to me, too. I remember his saying, the first time we met, that I looked like Mother and that it was apparent that I had inherited her spirit.”
She had grown up and spent three years at a teachers’ college, but left before graduation, refusing a position at a school so that she could keep house for her lonely father. Still idiotically mannerless, I mentioned the possibility of her marrying some young man of the town. She laughed musically.
“Why, I stopped thinking of marriage when I was fourteen!” she cried. Then, “Look, it’s snowing.”
So it was, and I thought it time to start for her home. We finished the drive on the best of terms, and when we reached her home in midafternoon, we were using first names.
Gird, I found, had capitulated to Doctor Zoberg’s genial insistence. From disliking the thought of a séance, he had come to savor the prospect of witnessing it – Zoberg had always excluded him before. Gird had even picked up a metaphysical term or two from listening to the doctor, and with these he spiced his normally plain speech.
“This ectoplasm stuff sounds reasonable,” he admitted. “If there is any such thing, there could be ghosts, couldn’t there?”
Zoberg twinkled, and tilted his beard-spike forward. “You will find that Mr. Wills does not believe in ectoplasm.”
“Nor do I believe that the production of ectoplasm would prove existence of a ghost,” I added. “What do you say, Miss Susan?”
She smiled and shook her dark head. “To tell you the truth, I’m aware only dimly of what goes on during a séance.”
“Most mediums say that,” nodded Zoberg sagely.
As the sun set and the darkness came down, we prepared for the experiment.
The dining room was chosen, as the barest and quietest room in the house. First I made a thorough examination, poking into corners, tapping walls and handling furniture, to the accompaniment of jovial taunts from Zoberg. Then, to his further amusement, I produced from my grip a big lump of sealing-wax, and with this I sealed both the kitchen and parlor doors, stamping the wax with my signet ring. I also closed, latched and sealed the windows, on the sills of which little heaps of snow had begun to collect.
“You’re kind of making sure, Mr. Wills,” said Gird, lighting a patent carbide lamp.
“That’s because I take this business seriously,” I replied, and Zoberg clapped his hands in approval.
“Now,” I went on, “off with your coats and vests, gentlemen.”
Gird and Zoberg complied, and stood up in their shirt-sleeves. I searched and felt them both all over. Gird was a trifle bleak in manner, Zoberg gay and bright-faced. Neither had any concealed apparatus, I made sure. My next move was to set a chair against the parlor door, seal its legs to the floor, and instruct Gird to sit in it. He did so, and I produced a pair of handcuffs from my bag and shackled his left wrist to the arm of the chair.
“Capital!” cried Zoberg. “Do not be so sour, Mr. Gird. I would not trust handcuffs on Mr. Wills – he was once a magician and knows all the escape tricks.”
“Your turn’s coming, Doctor,” I assured him.
Against the opposite wall and facing Gird’s chair I set three more chairs, melting wax around their legs and stamping it. Then I dragged all other furniture far away, arranging it against the kitchen door. Finally I asked Susan to take the central chair of the three, seated Zoberg at her left hand and myself at her right. Beside me, on the floor, I set the carbide lamp.
“With your permission,” I said, and produced more manacles. First I fastened Susan’s left ankle to Zoberg’s right, then her left wrist to his right. Zoberg’s left wrist I chained to his chair, leaving him entirely helpless.
“What thick wrists you have!” I commented. “I never knew they were so sinewy.”
“You never chained them before,” he grinned.
With two more pairs of handcuffs I shackled my own left wrist and ankle to Susan on the right.
“Now we are ready,” I pronounced.
“You’ve treated us like bank robbers,” muttered Gird.
“No, no, do not blame Mr Wills,” Zoberg defended me again. He looked anxiously at Susan. “Are you quite prepared, my dear?”
Her eyes met his for a long moment; then she closed them and nodded. I, bound to her, felt a relaxation of her entire body. After a moment she bowed her chin upon her breast.
“Let nobody talk,” warned Zoberg softly. “I think that this will be a successful venture. Wills, the light.”
With my free hand I turned it out.
All was intensely dark for a moment. Then, as my eyes adjusted themselves, the room seemed to lighten. I could see the deep gray rectangles of the windows, the snow at their bottoms, the blurred outline of the man in his chair across the floor from me, the form of Susan at my left hand. My ears, likewise sharpening, detected the girl’s gentle breathing, as if she slept. Once or twice her right hand twitched, shaking my own arm in its manacle. It was as though she sought to attract my attention.
Before and a little beyond her, something pale and cloudy was making itself visible. Even as I fixed my gaze upon it, I heard something that sounded like a gusty panting. It might have been a tired dog or other beast. The pallid mist was changing shape and substance, too, and growing darker. It shifted against the dim light from the windows, and I had a momentary impression of something erect but misshapen – misshapen in an animal way. Was that a head? And were those pointed ears, or part of a headdress? I told myself determinedly that this was a clever illusion, successful despite my precautions.
It moved, and I heard a rattle upon the planks. Claws, or perhaps hobnails. Did not Gird wear heavy boots? Yet he was surely sitting in his chair; I saw something shift position at that point. The gro
tesque form had come before me, crouching or creeping.
Despite my self-assurance that this was a trick, I could not govern the chill that swept over me. The thing had come to a halt close to me, was lifting itself as a hound that paws its master’s knees. I was aware of an odor, strange and disagreeable, like the wind from a great beast’s cage. Then the paws were upon my lap – indeed, they were not paws. I felt them grip my legs, with fingers and opposable thumbs. A sniffing muzzle thrust almost into my face, and upon its black snout a dim, wet gleam was manifest.
Then Gird, from his seat across the room, screamed hoarsely.
“That thing isn’t my daughter—”
In the time it took him to rip out those five words, the huddled monster at my knees whirled back and away from me, reared for a trice like a deformed giant, and leaped across the intervening space upon him. I saw that Gird had tried to rise, his chained wrist hampering him. Then his voice broke in the midst of what he was trying to say; he made a choking sound and the thing emitted a barking growl.
Tearing loose from its wax fastenings, the chair fell upon its side. There was a struggle and a clatter, and Gird squealed like a rabbit in a trap. The attacker fell away from him toward us.
It was all over before one might ask what it was about.
IV “I don’t know what killed him.”
Just when I got up I do not remember, but I was on my feet as the grapplers separated. Without thinking of danger – and surely danger was there in the room – I might have rushed forward; but Susan Gird, lying limp in her chair, hampered me in our mutual shackles. Standing where I was, then, I pawed in my pocket for something I had not mentioned to her or to Zoberg; an electric torch.
It fitted itself into my hand, a compact little cylinder, and I whipped it out with my finger on the switch. A cone of white light spurted across the room, making a pool about and upon the motionless form of Gird. He lay crumpled on one side, his back toward us, and a smudge of black wetness was widening about his slack head and shoulders.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 33
