When it stopped, both her hands were clutching the sides of her face, nails digging into the flesh. Her clothes lay forgotten at her feet. The dark shape was crouched again in its rapid gliding search, moving steadily closer to the house. From a great distance she heard a gurgling sound, and realized dimly that it was coming from her: the insane, overwhelming need to scream, barely held in check by the remaining thread of rationality that warned silence.
She ran to the doors, yanked the handles. They would not budge. She pounded, pulled, threw herself against them, and at last put back her head and screamed. The sound was answered inside her mind, echoed and amplified a thousand times. The doors gave way suddenly, with a rush of wind that jeered and gibbered in nightmare tongues, clutched at her hair and skin. She stumbled through, fell against the wall, raced down the hall to the stairway. Gripping the newel post, she swung herself around.
The lights went out.
In the blackness she clung to the balustrade, straining to hear over her ragged breath, her hammering pulse. Something was rustling the bushes outside. There came a heavy thump against glass.
A dark shape was moving outside the sliding door.
Hope glimmered—she had locked it—but as if reading her thoughts, the shape disappeared in the direction of the front of the house.
Her knees gave out.
The thought, I must run, repeated itself again and again in her mind with childlike simplicity. Kneeling, swaying, holding the balustrade tightly with both hands, she tried to make her legs move. They refused. From a distant part of the house, she heard another thump. Hinges creaked. Wind blew across the darkened living room below, scattering papers.
She began to slide backward: a push, a pause to draw her legs up, a push. There was another sound under the wind now, a sort of slithering. Mouth working silently, she slid and paused, slid and paused, until her back was against the wall. The sound changed tone as it shifted from tiles to the carpeted stairs. A thick, dark shadow was creeping up, coming slowly into view.
The last sound she heard before losing consciousness was the sort of noise a snake might make if it could whimper with anticipation.
** ** **
The house was dark, the front door wide open. “What the hell,” Skip said, gripping the car seat to lean forward. McTell cut the engine and strode across the drive. The uneasiness that had been mounting in him rose to fill his throat. Eyes wide with the strain of piercing the darkness, he groped for the light switch. He flicked it back and forth. Nothing. A lighter flared in the center of the living room. Bertie’s face looked ghostly and disembodied, tense with fear.
“John!” Linden called sharply. The sound made him whirl. She stood in the hall doorway; hands on hips, face stern. Skip was looking over her shoulder. “What on earth is going on here?” she demanded. “What’s wrong with the lights?” And then, the question that had been hovering just below the surface of McTell’s consciousness, that he had not dared to let rise: “Where’s Mona?”
He walked to the stairway. “Mona?” he called, hearing the strain in his own voice. “Are you up there?”
Not a sound issued from the inky darkness upstairs. Like a man climbing to the guillotine, choked with dread, he started up, Bertie following with the lighter.
He was first to see her shape: back against the wall, slumped and spread-legged like an abandoned doll.
He closed his eyes, certain that she was dead.
** ** **
The doctor was named Devarre, a wiry, clean-shaven man of about fifty, with veined forearms beneath rolled-up sleeves. Moving quickly without seeming to hurry, he examined Mona’s pupils, listened to her heart, took her blood pressure. She was not outwardly harmed, but nothing they had been able to do could make her regain consciousness. Skip had picked her up and taken her to bed; Bertie had ventured with a flashlight into the pantry and discovered the blown fuse. While they waited for Devarre, Skip continually wet her lips with brandy. Bertie paced—sternfaced, silent—going frequently to look out the window. Linden stalked from the phone to the room and back, chainsmoking. Twice, McTell caught Bertie looking at him with narrowed eyes.
It was Bertie who had discovered her clothes, scattered by the wind across the balcony.
Devarre unhooked his stethoscope from his ears, reached into his bag, and popped an ampul under her nose. She sputtered and shook her head feebly. For the first time, her eyes blinked. Hope leaped in McTell’s heart. He leaned forward intently, gripping the foot of the bedstead.
“How do you call yourself, madame?” Devarre said in quiet, clear French.
The world hung still for McTell. When the word “Mona?” broke wonderingly from her lips, he could have wept with relief
Devarre asked her several more simple questions, receiving one-word answers in the same dazed tone. Then he motioned them out into the hallway. His English was heavily accented but fluent.
“It appears this lady has sustained a great shock,” he said, looking from one to the other. His professional manner did not quite conceal the curiosity in his eyes. “It is rare to see such a thing with no sign of physical injury. Have you no idea what could have caused it?”
“We were gone,” McTell said. “We found her like this. But the front door was open, and the lights had gone out—a blown fuse. Maybe an intruder”—he met Bertie’s eyes and finished lamely—“of some sort.”
“Such a thing is also rare around here,” Devarre murmured. “There were other signs of a breaking in?”
McTell hesitated, then said, “No.”
“She recently lost a pet, a dog, that she was very attached to,” Linden offered. She rummaged nervously in her purse for a cigarette.
"Eh bien,” Devarre said, closing his bag with a snap. “A lady so—how do you say? Strung highly?—who can suffer such a blow over the loss of a pet or a failure of electricity—a night of two of rest and observation would do her no harm. I will call for you the hospital in Grasse. You can take her yourself? Or shall I ask for an ambulance.”
“We’ll take her,” Skip said.
Devarre nodded. “You will forgive me one more question. Is it possible that she had taken drugs? Barbiturates, perhaps, mixed with alcohol?” No one answered. With the doctor on the way, Linden had hurried to hide the cocaine.
Devarre shrugged. “They will give her tests at the hospital. She is in no immediate danger.” He glanced around at them, eyes keen. “You must understand that I do not ask merely out of curiosity, and that such information would not go outside my profession. It is just that I could perhaps speed things.” Again, a slightly shamefaced silence greeted his pause.
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” McTell finally said.
To his relief, Skip agreed. “I’m not saying we’ve never done a little recreating,” he said, not quite meeting Devarre’s eyes. “But certainly not nearly enough to bring on something like this.”
Devarre nodded. “You will show me the telephone, madame?” He shook hands quickly with the men, a Gallic, fingers-only clasp. As he followed Linden down the hall, he paused once more.
“Mademoiselle Alysse is in your employ, is she not, monsieur?”
“Yes,” McTell said warily.
“A lovely girl. It is a sad thing about her aunt’s illness. We can only hope she will recover soon.” He bowed slightly. “Bonsoir, messieurs,” he said, and continued down the stairs, leaving McTell certain that the doctor had meant more than he had said.
He turned back to the bedroom. To his amazement, Bertie moved swiftly to block him, swinging the door shut behind. He stood before McTell, with an ugly, dangerous-looking mixture of fear and fury on his big bony face. Uncertainly, McTell stopped.
“I thought I’d help pack,” he said.
“Don’t come another step.” Bertie’s voice was low and tense. His fear communicated itself like a hot wave crawling over McTell’s skin.
“I don’t know what the hell went on here,” Bertie said between his teeth, “and I don
’t know what you have to do with it, but something is very wrong about this place, and I think you know what it is.”
Eyes locked, they stood, and McTell felt something come unveiled in his face.
“I think you do,” Bertie whispered. He backed into the room and closed the door hard.
Suddenly so weary he sagged, McTell walked downstairs. Linden came from the hall into the living room, and seemed startled at his appearance. “Buck up,” she said. “We have to drive her to the hospital.”
“Bertie’s gone over the edge too,” McTell said. He held out his hand to stop the question forming on her lips. His own voice sounded blurred and far away. “Go ahead if you want, take our car. I’ve had enough of them.”
He climbed heavily back up the stairs, closed the door of his study, and dropped into his chair. Long after Mona had been helped downstairs, after Linden had said an uncertain good-night and promised to call in the morning, after the car tires had crunched on the gravel of the drive; when at last the blessed relief of silence—of peace—had descended, he sat gazing out the window at the moonlit ruin.
CHAPTER 11
“A word with you, monsieur, if you please.”
Startled, McTell turned to find Riboux, the gardener, standing in the driveway, twisting his greasy beret in his hands. His tiny mustache and button face gave him an almost comic appearance. But there was nothing comic about the look in his eyes; it made McTell suddenly queasy.
He had not passed a good night.
“There is something I must show you,” Riboux said. He spoke slowly, with exaggerated enunciation, as if to an idiot. McTell glanced around. It was early; Linden had not yet called.
He turned back to Riboux. “After you,” he said.
The gardener led him through the grounds and down the familiar path toward Montsevrain. Clouds had moved in during the predawn hours; the day promised to be the coolest yet. The foliage was alive with the hum of insects, as if they sensed the onset of autumn. Perhaps fifty yards from the house, Riboux pushed aside a sort of hedge that concealed the entrance to a smaller path, one McTell had never noticed. His uneasiness rose. They walked another thirty yards.
Then, without speaking, Riboux stepped aside. McTell found himself looking into a lovely small glade.
Lovely except for the thing that hung at eye level on a tree at the far side: a bundle of white fur, pathetically small and still. A smell like a packing house thickened the air. He stepped closer, then quickly spun away.
The dog had not been hung, as he had first thought. It had been impaled through the abdomen, on a branch snapped off to a point.
And then practically turned inside out. Blackening entrails crawling with insects spilled to the ground.
Riboux was gazing at him steadily. “I had been in the habit of coming here to take my meals,” he said.
McTell pointed weakly. “The dog escaped two days ago. We looked—”
“I do not think this is a joke, monsieur.”
McTell stared at the man, not sure he had heard correctly. “A joke? God knows it’s not a joke. What could have done such a thing? A bear?”
“I do not think this is a joke,” Riboux repeated. His gaze was stoic now, revealing nothing. “I will bury this dog.” A spade was already leaning against a tree. With a jolt, McTell recognized it as the one he had used to drive the dog from the shed.
“And then, monsieur, as I had been meaning to tell you for some time”—Riboux paused, in the delicate complicity of two men sharing a face-saving lie—“I fear I must leave your employ to attend to my own affairs, which I have let suffer too long.”
McTell nodded dumbly. At the edge of the glade, he paused and took a bill from his wallet. Riboux was digging grimly, a man who wanted an unpleasant job done.
“Perhaps it would be as well,” McTell said, “for Madame Mona to believe that her pet was picked up on the highway and taken to a good home.” Riboux said nothing. McTell tucked the folded bill into the bark of a tree.
He resolutely held the matter from his mind as he walked back to the house. There he sat on the patio steps. The pool gleamed dull blue-gray under the gathering clouds; the trees were turning the cheerful colors of early autumn; scurrying ants and shiny black beetles moved purposefully along the ground.
Now he knew what the shrieking had been. Woodenly, he stood and climbed the stairs to his study.
He stood holding the grimoire in his hands, remembering his initial repulsion to the feel of it. Now its weight was solid, familiar, even comforting. It was, after all, his—or at least more his than it had been anyone else’s for most of a thousand years.
There could be no more doubt about the identity of the pilgrim.
And though he had spent the night in feeble attempts to rationalize, the sight of Pepin had removed that doubt too. For an instant, he pictured Mona as the dog had been. His stomach threatened to heave.
However it had all come about, whatever force was at work, he could no longer trust the book—or was it himself he could not trust? He glanced uneasily at his palm—and despite the fact that it had somehow connected him with the most extraordinary experiences of his life, despite his overwhelming sense of being involved in a drama that demanded to play itself out, he would have to be satisfied with trying to piece together the puzzle from a safe time and distance.
But what to do with the grimoire? His scholar’s mind refused to allow the thought of destroying it. He could send it to the Sorbonne or his own university; but if he attached an explanation of what had happened to him, he would be considered mad, and if he did not, there was no telling what new evils the book might give rise to in unwary hands. For minutes, McTeH’s tired mind sought the least unacceptable choice.
At last he thought of Boudrie. Whether the priest in truth represented a power that could contain whatever was working through the grimoire, whether there was anything to the whole business, McTell did not know. But he was certain Boudrie would be a sympathetic, even if skeptical, listener; and most important, he was close by. McTell replaced the grimoire in its cask and wrapped the cask in newspaper, while his mind edited a version of the story to tell. He would not mention his part in releasing Pepin—or his decision to abandon Mona. He was not yet sure about the mark on his hand. Uneasiness grew, and he moved more quickly.
Holding the parcel, he paused for a final glance at the ruin. In spite of everything, the book was hard to part with. It was, impossibly but undeniably, connected with magic; it had offered him an undreamed-of power; in some sense, it represented what he had craved all his life. And he shrank from the inner voice that sneered at him for abandoning it, for fleeing back to his timid, risk-free existence, his ivy-covered world and bone-dry books and secondhand longing for the miraculous.
He turned from the window and hurried to the stairs.
A small purse rested on the dining room table. He recognized it as Alysse’s; no one had thought to try and contact her, tell her she would not be needed today. He stopped, listening for her in the kitchen, but the house was silent. His steps took him to a window.
She was in the garden, stooped, knees together, a wing of hair concealing the side of her face. For half a minute he watched her move slowly down the row, remembering the smirking look far back in Skip’s eyes, Mona’s mocking laughter.
“You’ll never know,” he said softly, “but I did it for you.”
He was nearly to the door when the phone began its harsh antiquated buzzing. He hesitated, but Alysse probably would not hear it. He walked back down the hall.
“They’re checking out of the hospital now,” Linden said. “They’re going to Cannes, to a hotel.”
“She’s better, then,” McTell said with relief.
“Yes.” Linden sounded dubious. “I’m going with them, just in case, and I’ll probably spend the night. Skip’s nearly useless, and Bertie left for Paris.”
“A shame,” McTell murmured.
Neither spoke for a moment. Then she said, “John, s
he told us a little about what happened. She’s still not very coherent, and she doesn’t want to think about it. They’ve got her on some pretty heavy tranquilizers. But it sounded just dreadful. Some sort of creature stalking her.”
“Creature,” McTell said sharply. “Not a man?”
Another pause. “She says not. She says it wasn’t an animal either.”
“That doesn’t leave much,” McTell said.
“John, she said it was some kind of—of demon, or something. I know how that sounds, but she was absolutely insistent.”
Abruptly an image appeared in McTell’s mind: the figure carved on the wall in the village church. It faded into Bertie’s pale bony face, frightened and enraged. I think you know what it is. I think you do.
He swallowed, then said, “Now, wait a minute. Let’s not forget that she’d ingested a substantial amount of alcohol, cocaine, and who knows what else. Skip’s a regular walking pharmacy.”
“I know, I know all that. But what was it, then? Bertie took me aside as he was leaving. He said, ‘If I were you I should never set foot in that house again, and I would see to it that Professor McTell joined you elsewhere, immediately.’ That was the only thing he said to anybody all night. I got the feeling he didn’t even want to be in the same part of the country.”
“I’m beginning to think,” McTell said slowly, “that what we had were several incipient nervous breakdowns, and they all picked last night to happen.”
“That’s reaching a long way for coincidences.”
“Darling, neurotics are acutely sensitive. When one starts to go, the others pick it up and work off it. None of those people is exactly a model of stability. Good God, they don’t do anything but hang around and claw at each other.”
“Now you wait a minute.” Her voice was heated. “Mona is my half-sister, I’ve known her all my life, and she may be a little high-strung, but she’s never shown the slightest sign of mental instability. Skip’s just plain too lazy to have a breakdown, it would be too much work. And Bertie’s, well, a lord.”
Next, After Lucifer Page 17
