by Craig Rice
It was in that instant that a sound came to his ears, one that he had never heard before, even in dreams, a sound so frightful and so hideous that he rushed down into the lake of vapor, hardly aware of what he did, forgetting everything, starting in the direction of the sound that seemed to come from the inlet and the landing. In the next instant he found himself hopelessly lost in the fog, unable to tell from which direction he had come, or in which he wished to go, while the ghastly sound swelled in intensity until at last, above the terrible roaring of the great dogs that were always chained by the landing he heard another sound, a high-pitched, half-choked, human scream.
It ended suddenly, torn off abruptly as though the breath had been destroyed in a throat, and the roaring of the hounds took on another note, even more menacing, a harsh, brutal, triumphant snarling.
“What was the matter with the dogs?” … “Nothing, unless they saw a ghost.”
David caught himself in his heedless rush through the fog, paused to feel carefully for what lay underfoot, trying to find his way again. Here was grass, and here was loose gravel again; he must be on a path, but which one he could not tell. Then a tiny sound reached him through the mist, scarcely heard against the snarling of the hounds, a little whisper of drops of water falling through shadowy vapor; it came from his left and the sounds from the landing seemed to be ahead of him; he was sure that he was on the path to the landing.
Here there should be a yew tree; he reached out a hand and touched it. Beyond there should be a low, glossy bush; his fingers plucked off one leaf as he went by. Now the path should pass by a small bed of cinnamon roses; their sharp, heady odor came up to his nostrils. Ahead of him the mist began to thin, and he could see the row of trees that hid Telefair from the shore.
Two shots rang out through the fog, and then there was silence.
For a moment David stood still, listening, wondering. The sudden silence seemed more perilous, more frightful than the voices of the hounds had been. In front of him the trees assumed strange and terrifying shapes in the evaporating vapor, yet beyond them it seemed that surely he could see a calm, half-misted surface that must be the inlet. Drawing in his breath, he plunged on through the trees, and came out upon the shore.
Still, he heard no more sounds.
The fog that clung in the low places of Telefair Island was only a faint, pale haze on the glassy water; it was hard to tell that it was there at all. Beyond the inlet he could just make out a long, low-lying shadow that was the mainland, and, in its darkness, one tiny light that was the house of the minister, Arthur Stone.
David turned toward the landing, a little way from him down the shore. There the fog deepened; he could see nothing at all of the landing, but at the point where his memory told him it ended, there was a flickering yellow light, like a candle carried underground, or the great sapphire on old Philip Telefair’s hand.
“I go … to light the lantern—”
David cried out suddenly, “Zenobie!” and as the breath died away in his throat, a great dark shape materialized through the mist, tall, walking unevenly over the rough stones of the shore.
Edmund was examining his revolver as he spoke.
“I was not in time,” he said very quietly.
“Zenobie!” David repeated. It was an anguished cry.
“She thought that she could slip past the dogs and reach the wharf,” Edmund whispered. “But she failed.” He paused for the barest instant, his eyes closed, before he said, in a strange, tight voice, “They had not been fed all day. I heard her scream, but by the time I came to the landing, I was—far too late.” He opened his eyes and stared at David, yet without seeming to see him. “At least, the dogs are guarding the landing no longer.”
“Her—body?” David murmured, feeling his throat contract painfully as he tried to speak.
“I gave it to the water,” Edmund said. “In another moment the current will carry it past.”
The two men turned toward the inlet as he spoke, and almost at once it seemed to David that he could see a dark shadow—but no more than that—bobbing on the surface of the inlet, obscure, half-hidden by the dim, pallid haze, now disappearing under the water, now appearing again, caught by little currents and carried this way and that, growing ever harder to see, until at last he was staring only at the water, unable to tell at what instant the shadowy thing had vanished.
“Even if she is ever found,” Edmund whispered, “carried up on some shore, she will never be recognized, now.”
David turned back from the inlet, and saw that Doctor von Berger had joined them, his round face chalk-white, his protuberant, pale blue eyes staring from behind his thick-lensed glasses.
“She murdered her lover—” Edmund said in that same low tone, and before David’s eyes rose a vision of those ugly, big-knuckled hands, the broad, dark face, the brutal, almost masculine jaw—“and it amused Philip Telefair to help her escape, just as it amused him to rescue Doctor von Berger from the prison ship, convicted of a crime he did not commit. Then afterward”—and the word sent a cold shudder through all David’s nerves; he had heard it twice before in that night—“he needed them both, and besides, they too were implicated. He could not hold me here, but after all, I had only been a boy of ten. Zenobie hated him to the last.”
“I hated him,” Doctor von Berger said, in his deep, soft, guttural voice, and David turned to him, the little German doctor, forever a stranger no matter where he might be and with what companions, whose room looked not like one where some person lived, but rather like a room where someone had come to stay for a very little while, soon to go away again. “I hated him, not for that crime, but for the other one, and now for the third.”
Suddenly David realized that both of them were staring at him, as they had stared on his first night at Telefair, with what he remembered had been a kind of pity; again he realized that he, that all of them, were here at Telefair as part of some prearranged plan, one that was not of his making, nor of theirs.
He started to speak (and never, later, was he able to remember what he had meant to say) when a new sound turned all their eyes in the direction of the interior of the Island and drove the words from his mind.
It was a strange, subdued, rustling sound, so soft that for a moment David found himself wondering if he heard or imagined it, the sound of feet moving softly and stealthily, careful to be as quiet as possible, whispering over the ground. One man, walking with that cautious, tip-toeing, measured tread, would have been noiseless, making not even the faintest shadow of a sound, but this was one tread magnified over and over, the many quiet footsteps all together became that soft, agitated whisper.
“What is it!” David breathed. He felt little Doctor von Berger’s hand clutch his arm.
Beyond the narrow strip of sand, beyond the thin line of trees, outlined against the haze, a singular, dark procession was slowly moving. David stared at it for a moment before he realized what it was, stared at the half-seen, black, immobile faces for a moment before he recognized them. Then he knew.
They were the house servants of Telefair, the deaf-mute Negroes. They were leaving Telefair now, in that curious procession, half sullen, half frightened, and it was old Jonas who was leading and guiding them.
“That was where his second loyalty always lay,” Edmund whispered, and Doctor von Berger whispered in return.
“How could it be otherwise? It was old Jonas who brought them here, searching all the South for them, finding them and bringing them here one by one, in those first years.”
The soft rustling swelled to a disquieted murmur as the deaf-mutes, in their cautious flight, passed close to where the three men stood, silent, watching them. David could see their faces, impassive and yet terrible against the white mist, passing one by one and then disappearing, stealing away through the fog to hide in some secret cave, some forgotten recess on the Island.
“Why did he want them?” he heard himself asking, in a sound that was hardly more than a breath.
“Why did he bring them here?”
“Because he could trust them,” Doctor von Berger answered. “Because they could not speak, even if they wished.”
The strange sound died away in the night, leaving not so much as an echo to let them know that it had been there at all.
Beyond the line of trees the great pale house loomed up against the sky, magnificent in isolation, empty now, David remembered.
Edmund stirred himself, returning to examining his revolver, put it away in his pocket at last.
“Those were the last two bullets,” he said quietly.
There was the little pearl-handled gun in the drawer of the carved desk in the old library, Doctor von Berger remembered; it was always loaded.
“Why should anyone need to be armed now?” Even as the last word left his lips, David wondered why he’d asked.
He could see the great empty house, like a moon-touched shell; he could see a faint flicker of opalescent light that was the little fountain; he could see the lake of mist still gathered over the gardens; and it seemed to him that he could see a deep shadow marking the path the deaf-mute Negroes had followed in their flight.
He knew that Edmund and Doctor von Berger were watching him, waiting for what he was going to say; he knew also that they had been waiting for it for a long time, nearly twenty years, and now a mad fancy seized him and he wished that he might create some dramatic phrase, some memorable sentence, yet at the same time he spoke, knowing that he had no control over the words, that they burst from his tight lips as they would.
“I have killed old Philip Telefair.”
In the same instant a sudden wind from the inlet caught the old trees, shaking them, swept over the gardens to disturb, but not dispel, the mist, and was gone as quickly as it had come. But as it passed, it seemed to David that the Island sent forth a long, moaning, dying, almost human sigh.
“It is what he intended you to do,” Edmund said for the second time that night, but this time his voice was unexpectedly dull, spiritless, almost despairing, the voice of one who tried, desperately, a hopeless venture, and lost.
20
It may be that there are hauntings in the trees, or it may be that it is we who haunt the Island. Who can tell where the one begins and the other ends? We dream, and the dreams are real. We wake, and the waking life seems real. Is it that Telefair is the illusion we have cast up in our minds?”
David stared out over the smooth water. The great dogs no longer guarded the landing. The boat was tied to the landing. He could embark in it, if he wished, and leave the Island forever. Yet he knew that he would not, as long as he lived. He was no longer imprisoned on the Island, but he was still a prisoner.
Little Doctor von Berger stood beside him, his fishlike eyes glistening in the moonlight. Edmund was gone; he had muttered something under his breath and limped up the sandy path leading to the gardens, vanishing at last into the fog.
“Believe me,” Doctor von Berger said, quoting himself inaccurately, “I was your friend.”
David turned to him, and knew it as a farewell. The little doctor was also no longer imprisoned, and he would no longer remain. He, David, could not restrain him, nor would he.
Wherever he might be, and for however long, Doctor von Berger would always be a transient guest, one who had come from some other place, and who would not long remain.
“They say,” Doctor von Berger murmured, “when one has made two voyages across water, there is always a third to come.”
David watched him silently as he walked slowly down to the landing, stepping fastidiously around the dead hounds, walked its length to where the little boat was tied, stepped in, unfastened the rope, and pushed the boat away from its mooring. Everything had been said; there was no more to add now. The boat moved out into the soft haze that clung to the surface of the inlet, expertly rowed, yet as though it went toward no certain destination.
Doctor von Berger was carrying nothing away with him, no small possessions of his own, as he left the Island that had been his home for twenty years. He had nothing to carry away; he had brought nothing with him when he came.
It came to David then that he knew no more from where Doctor von Berger had come than to where he was going. He only knew that he would never see him again.
It seemed to him that if he were to enter, now, the gray-walled room that had been Doctor von Berger’s, it would be as empty as though no one had passed its door in twenty years.
Out on the inlet, the little boat had disappeared into the shadows.
All at once David felt indescribably weary, weary and heavy with a great loneliness. Doctor von Berger had gone. Soon Edmund would go, vanishing over the water in his boat, the Dark Lady. In a little while, he would be alone on the Island.
Then across the water he saw the faintest speck of light, so tiny that at first he was sure he had imagined it, but as it persisted and grew slowly brighter and stronger, his eyes became fixed on it, watching it, wondering what it was, until at last it was near enough for him to recognize a lantern moving slowly over the water.
There were two people in the boat that was approaching the Island. At first he felt angry, outraged, that strangers should attempt to violate its shore. For a very fragment of a second he found himself wishing that Edmund had not shot the dogs. Then his watching eyes caught black hair glinting in the curious light, a pale oval face; and on the other figure a halo of silver as the moon reached down to touch the white and windblown hair; it was Laurel who came to him, in the boat rowed by her father, Arthur Stone.
It seemed to David that he had been longing for them more than he had ever longed for anyone in his young life.
He ran down to the landing and onto the tiny wharf, reaching out to catch the prow of the small boat and make it fast to the rope. But he found himself speechless, as though paralyzed, not knowing what words to use, wondering how to welcome them to the Island.
Laurel Stone reached for his hand, and he helped her up from the boat.
“I am glad you sent for me, David,” she said quietly. “We had been watching for your signal on the shore.”
She pulled her loose gray cloak a little more closely about her shoulders, and her great, beautiful, sightless eyes turned toward the Island, toward the old house.
David helped the Reverend Arthur Stone up to the wharf, he guided Laurel’s footsteps to the shore, but these seemed to be actions he watched someone else perform in a dream; he knew that the old minister called to them to go on ahead while he made certain that the boat was secure, that he would follow with the lantern, but it seemed to him a voice coming from some other world; he answered something—he never knew what it was—and it seemed to him that his own voice was something no one else could hear, only a movement of the muscles in his throat.
Laurel Stone said, “Will you take me up to the house, David?”
Her hand was light on his arm. Without a word he led her toward the path through the little woods—or was he leading her? To her it was unfamiliar ground, he knew, yet as they crossed the narrow strip of sand it seemed almost that it was she who guided him, pointing out the way.
What was he to say to her, now?
David longed, desperately, terribly, to tell her all that had happened on the Island, most of all, what had happened since he’d gone into the library after dinner, expecting to hear old Philip Telefair say, “My dear David—I had hoped—” Yet he could not.
It was not only that it was difficult, no, impossible, to choose the words, or that he did not know at what point to begin the telling. It was that he did not know what to tell.
What had Doctor von Berger said to him one night—was it only last night?—in that bare, gray room? “I shall not tell you … not only because I may not, but because, and I say it with all my heart, I do not know what was the truth of it.”
David repeated, “I do not know,” and felt his skin grow hot as he realized that he had spoken his thought.
Did he imagine it, or, for
a moment, did her slender hand grow a shade heavier on his arm?
Was it a little door that he saw before him, or was it the entrance to the path through the woods? For an instant he hesitated, and felt her footsteps pause beside him obedient to his own. Overhead was the bright sky and the white moon, behind was the glassy and glistening water of the inlet, ahead of them there was, or should be, a lake of pale, translucent mist. But the small, dark space before them seemed to be the door to strange and secret things, forever shadowed. For a moment he felt a pang of fear.
The faint tightening of her delicate fingers on his wrist recalled him from his wandering thoughts, and he went on into the narrow path, guiding her carefully beside him, conscious of only a momentary tremor as the first leaves brushed against his face, and the shadows closed around him. In the woods, under the great, interlocking trees, there was another world, a hidden and mysterious world of curious odors that were to be found nowhere else, in no open, sunlit place, where even the sound of the leaves’ whispering, and the feel of the moist earth underfoot were different from everywhere else in the world. In the old days men had feared the deep forests more than they feared death, and David remembered it now. Was it that trees and men were forever enemies of each other, deadly, irreconcilable? Telefair, the great, marvelous house, was built of murdered and mutilated trees. But these trees, bending down over his head, were still alive, possessed of the power to hate, perhaps even to destroy, at least, to damn. The still air under them had a curious coldness that existed nowhere in open spaces on the earth.
Again David was glad that he did not walk along that path alone.
He realized that he had led her toward this path through the woods, unaware of what he did, when they could have gone instead through the gardens of Telefair and across the terrace. For a moment he forgot his own uneasiness and disquietude, anxious lest she be frightened in the sudden dark. Then he remembered that the dark would never frighten Laurel; she did not know it was there.
It was she who picked the way along the little path and now he knew that he was following her, embarrassed not by her blindness, but by his own ability to see, as though it was an infirmity that he wished might be forgotten by others as well as by himself.
