Savage bride

by Cornell Woolrich; Internet Archive

  They rode that way, one behind the other, back along the curving gully, and out, and down the outside slope, in silence. He hadn't said a word about her riding off without waiting for him, or about her going on beyond the water hole in spite of his forbidding her the time before. Both things were in his mind, nevertheless.

  They were halfway down to the well when she stopped short suddenly. She was looking back, her horse held as rigidly motionless as her body was. Her eyes gazed past him, into the upper distance. He turned around on his saddle to look with her.

  It was rising again, the same sort of slender wavering line against the spotless sky as when they had been up there. A finger of smoke, attenuated upward into nothingness.

  But it was not the same one they had just left back there. That one had not kindled again.

  This time it was coming from behind—from the other side of the cleft—miles and miles oflF in the distance.

  As he looked, a clean break, a cessation, ran up through it. It had ended, as cleanly as if snipped off short by a pair of giant shears.

  The sky stretched stainless before them.

  Then suddenly it began again. It climbed upward and hung there, incredibly gossamer.

  Then once more it ended.

  After that it was no more.

  They didn't move, either of them. They waited, but it did not come again, it was done with.

  When at last he turned forward once more, there was something trembling on the grip of his saddle, and when he looked down, it was his own hand.

  He didn't speak of it to Mallory. He wondered why he shouldn't, but he didn't. Something held him back. He supposed, of course, that it was because he'd only imagined it, it had been merely some trick of perspective, some mirage against the clear mountain air, and it would sound silly to repeat such a thing. The other man would begin to lose his respect for him.

  But then he knew that wasn't true. He hadn't imagined it. He'd seen it with his own eyes.

  And still he didn't tell Mallory about it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It began that night.

  It had a beginning. It was strange to think later that it did have, that on such and such a precise moment, at such and such an exact instant, it had begun, and before then it hadn't been.

  It was an hour after sundown. They'd finished their evening meal and were sitting there playing bridge. Chris was his partner, and Mallory was Mitty's. It was just another evening on the plantation, and they'd had many like this. There was no strangeness to it.

  Mitty was holding a cigarette in her hand, leisurely scanning her cards. (She was modern, she was everyday, she was common place.) "You should have come back to me in spades that time, partner," she said.

  "Told you I wasn't very good at this," Mallory mumbled, crestfallen.

  Chris looked across the table at Jones and smiled a little. Not because of anything in particular, just for the sake of smiling at him. She smiled at him nearly every time he looked at her, he was beginning to notice. And when she didn't she had a sort of soulful, mooning look on her face that he liked even less. He was married, and —well, she was just a kid.

  Mitty paid out her card and the rubber ended. Mallory slumped back in his chair, swept his hand in front of his face, and said, "I'll never learn."

  Jones drew the cards toward him and began to shuffle them.

  Chris parted her lips slightly, sighed, and murmured, "I love to—"

  "I know," he finished for her dryly, "you love to watch me mix the cards." She'd said it last night and the night before. The night before that, too. Mitty was beginning to snicker about it when they were alone together in their room.

  He was dealing the cards, and at the fall of the third card, to Mitty's place, it began. Then. He stopped dead in the middle of the deal, listening.

  They all probably heard it with him, they were all listening. No one moved or said anything. He held the pack poised in his hand.

  It was faint, far-off, but yet deep-throated. You could detect a downbeat in it each time, one to each double concussion. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump?

  He was the first to speak. "What's that? A storm coming up?"

  It was too even for a storm, too rhythmic; he didn't have to be told that.

  Mallory said it for him a minute later. "That's no storm. That's too continuous." And then he added, "This is the dry season, anyway. We don't have them this time of year."

  They sat raptly listening for a moment more. Then Jones looked down at his hands and saw that he'd interrupted his card-dealing. He resumed a little jerkily, as if under mechanical compulsion.

  No one picked up the cards or looked at them as they fell. They were waiting for it to stop as unaccountably as it had begun, and it didn't. Their faces kept rotating before him, from left to right, as he turned his own in accompaniment to his card-dealing. Mallory's was turned slightly sideward, as if listening down past his own shoulder; as if that were where the sound came from. Chris was looking straight over at Jones. She wasn't smiling now. Her eyes were rounder now than they had ever been. There was a questioning sort of look in them, as if to say, "Is this bad? I'll do whatever I see you do. If you show fright, then I'll be frightened too. If you don't, then I'll know it's all right." Mitty was looking straight downward at the table. There was to her expression more of a thoughtful, introspective cast. It was more than just physical listening, it was a form of mulling-over as well. Her hand moved, absently, and a puff of smoke came from before her face.

  It reminded him for a second of the way she had looked veiled by the smoke haze of that fire she had built within the stones, when he came upon her in the gully this morning.

  He remembered that, then forgot again. There was no time for the past in the present.

  Nobody made a move to play.. A chair leg scraped shat-teringly in the stillness, and Mallory got up and went outside. The screen door ebbed back in place behind him, and his figure stood revealed through it for a moment, orange from the lamplight behind him; then it receded into the gloom outside, darkening into invisibility rather than diminishing with distance.

  The downbeat hurt a little, Jones noticed. Not the eardrums, for it was not loud, but the chest cavity, for it was deep. You felt it there each time.

  Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump . . .

  It was like an endless train going by. Each time a car passes you think it is going to be the last, but the next one comes, and the next.

  Presently Jones got up and went after Mallory.

  He could feel Chris's eyes following him, but somehow he knew equally well, without looking back, that Mitty was not even aware of his going; was not aware of any of them around her; was lost on some other plane.

  Mallory was standing by one of the uprights at the veranda rail in the dark. He didn't turn to look at him, though he heard him join him.

  "That's it," he said quietly.

  "That's what?"

  "Ghost drums. What I told you about that they claim to have heard. Tambores de los muertos. I never heard it before myself."

  "Don't say it in Spanish. It sounds even worse." Jones heeled his hand to the veranda rail. Not once, but twice, three times, repeatedly. He saw that he was keeping time with it, and quit it abruptly.

  It kept plucking at your chest, as though there were a hollow spot there, a sound box that it echoed in.

  "What do you suppose it is, some echo or freak acoustic in the mountains?"

  Mallory didn't answer.

  "It does sound like real drums, at that." He tried to laugh a little, so that the other man would join him in it. "Fools you, doesn't it?"

  Mallory didn't join him in it. "No, it doesn't fool you."

  They stood a moment longer without saying anything more. Then Mallory glanced over his shoulder toward the hghted screen door. "Let's go in. The kid's getting nervous."

  They both re-entered with that pretended cheerfulness men are apt to overdo a little when they wish to keep women from becoming a
larmed.

  "Queer sort of sound, isn't it?" Jones said lightly, drawing out his chair once more.

  "It'll quit before morning," Mallory promised.

  Thev gave one another a look.

  "But there's no one up there," Chris protested, her voice a little high. "What can be making—"

  "Who bids?" Jones said briskly.

  Mitty turned over a card limply and looked at it. He could tell she didn't know what was on it, even while she looked.

  They went ahead with their game, tried to ignore it.. Yet while they wQnt through the motions of playing, each and every one of them knew that the other three were hearing it, thinking of it, just as he was.

  It didn't come any nearer, but it didn't go any farther away. It didn't grow any louder, but it didn't grow any softer. Jones knew what there was about it that was getting them finally. They kept waiting for it to stop, all of them. And it didn't, it never did. It was that principle of the second dropped shoe overhead carried out to its ultimate point of excruciation.

  It was even, so it should have been more bearable than otherwise, but it was uneven within its evenness; it was that downbeat that did the damage. One thump high, the next low; one high, the next low again.

  He saw that Mallory was smoking too much. Far too much. And he himself, he noticed, couldn't seem to get his body adjusted right to the chair seat. He kept shifting every few minutes, crossing his legs and then recrossing them the other way around. Chris kept sweeping her hair back with one hand while she pored over her cards; hair that was not down over her brow at all, that was not out of place in the least. She'd look at him from time to time, and once or twice she'd smile; but it was a different sort of smile now, a fearful fleeting sort of thing that was more like a habit of the recent past lingering on than any warm greeting of the present. Her eyes remained large and bright.

  And Mitty—Mitty still had that attitude of disembodied listening, of secret inner conjugation. Something about it annoyed him. She seemed to be trying to decipher it, make more out of it than—than there was to be made out of it. He tactfully turned his eyes away. He didn't remember ever having been annoyed with her like this before, without any reason. Not even when they'd missed the ship at Puerto Santo on her account; at least not as intolerantly and as causelessly annoyed as now. He supposed that had something to do with the effect of the thing on his nerves.

  "Think it would do any good to close up the windows and that main door over there?" he suggested.

  Mallory said, "It would come in anyway. But try it if you want."

  Jones didn't stir. Putting the burden of timidity on himself wasn't what he'd intended; he'd been thinking of making the two women feel easier.

  Suddenly Mallory dropped his cards and stiffened to attention so unexpectedly that it drew a half-stifled little cry of alarm from Chris before she could restrain it. The clopping sound of a horse's hoofs had suddenly started up somewhere nearby outside, rapidly receding into the distance. A moment later another followed. Then a multiple stampede of five or six at one time, galloping off into the dark from the direction of the stables.

  "They've heard it down at the jacales, and that's the part I don't like!" Mallory flung back his chair and bolted from the room. Jones got up and went after him.

  An infant was wailing somewhere across the compound. Figures flitted in and out of the jacales, dimly visible by the wavering light of a number of pitch torches that hopped like crazed fireflies. Men were calling out to their women, and women were calling to whimpering children. A mass exodus was under way.

  Mallory rushed into their midst, waving his arms, even striking at some of them, trying to stem the tide. Jones took a more passive part, contenting himself with trying to head them off by getting in their way. They simply darted around him, time after time, eluded him and continued their scampering desertion. It was useless to try to do anything with them. They were in the grip of a maddened, unreasoning panic. They went scuttling off into the dark, fleeing downcountry toward the sheltering jungle, safer for once than the barefaced uplands. Their shrill, frightened voices faded into the night, babbling over and over, "Que vienen los cocas! Que vienen los muertos!" The ghosts are coming! The dead are coming!

  Silence descended on the empty shacks and barren compound in their wake, broken only by that pulsing that was a sound and yet not a sound, a tremor.

  Mallory rejoined Jones from his useless pursuit of the hindmost ones, growling imprecations.

  "They took the horses wth them too," he said. "Now we're stuck here whether we want to be or not. You can't do anything about it when that many people all get a single idea in their heads at one and the same time."

  "No," Jones agreed bleakly. "I guess you can't. You'd have to tie them all up, separately."

  "They'll be back again in a day or two, when the cursed thing stops. I've seen this happen once or twice before. But they're always a few hands short when they do come back."

  Jones pitched a thumb over his shoulder. "Is it that, each time?"

  "No, I never heard that myself, until tonight. They may have, though. Usually someone claimed to have seen a line of ghostly figures outlined against the moonlit sky, up there on the heights. Something like that would start them oflF."

  He spat disgustedly. "Well, there's no use just standing around out here listening to it. If it's going to keep up, let it keep up. I'm going to bed."

  They started back toward the main house together, Mallory plowing his feet heavily over the ground in frustration.

  Mitty came out of the lighted doorway just as they arrived in sight of it. To meet them, Jones thought at first; to join them and find out what had happened. But instead, as she came down off the veranda, she turned sharply up the opposite way, away from them, and glided off into the surrounding darkness like a sleepwalker. It was impossible that she hadn't seen them coming toward her. They were near enough by then and there was enough light filtering from the door and windows of the house to have shown them to her. It was impossible, too, that she should mistake in which direction the native huts lay and in which the open uplands; the very tilt of the ground was there to tell her.

  He called her name, and then called again, and when she didn't answer, continued to recede into the gloom like a wraith, he left Mallory's side and spurted after her.

  She didn't hurry at the sound his overtaking footsteps made behind her, but she didn't stop either, or turn to him, even after he'd bellowed out her name a third time, in mid-pursuit. She paid no heed; it was as if her faculties were utterly unaware of him.

  He only halted her finally by overtaking and pinning her against a stunted tree a considerable distance to the rear of the house. Even then, as he brought her around to him by main force, by the shoulders, her head remained stubbornly turned the other way, the way she had been going, the way in which the sound was coming from.

  "What's got into you? Have you lost your mind? Don't go wandering off like this alone, in that direction, when all the rest of them are running the opposite way!"

  He couldn't capture her attention. She kept striving to go on past him toward that distant yet ever present reverberation.

  "Mitty!" he said sharply, and'shook her by the shoulders to bring her back.

  Words were loosened from her, fell out at random, as if the shaking had dislodged them. "They're calling me," he heard her murmur, "calHng me. Let me hear what they want to say."

  He swept her up in his arms forthwith and staggered back to the house with her.

  Mallory was still waiting for him outside the doorway, where he'd left him. "What's the matter, did she turn her ankle?"

  "No, she's—I don't think she's well. She's talking kind of funny, as if she's gone out of her head. What'll I do?"

  "It's that sound doing it," Mallory said. "It's made her hysterical or something." He held the door back for him.

  Jones carried her inside and into their own room, past the startled eyes of the youngster, who was the only one of the four o
f them still remaining at the table where they'd been playing.

  He closed their room door behind him with the back of his foot and set her on her feet. "What's the matter with you?" he urged in a plaintive undertone. "What're you acting this way for?"

  He struck a match and lit the lamp.

  She had sought the edge of the bed by now, and was sitting on it. She was looking at him as calmly, as matter-of-factly, as though the incident hadn't occurred at all.

  "You'd better lie down," he suggested.

  He saw her put her fingertips lightly to each side of her forehead.

  "Do you want a cold cloth for your head? Does it bother you?"

  "I keep trying to think," she said vaguely. "Oh, if you'd only let me alone!"

  He lit a cigarette and flung the spent match impatiently aside. "You know what you said out there, don't you? What'd you mean by that? Did you know what you were saying? What'd you mean, they were calling you? Who was calling you?"

  She pushed the back of her hand absently in his direction, as if the very sound of his voice was an interruption in itself.

  Somebody knuckled the door lightly, and when he opened it narrowly, Mallory was standing outside. "Here," he said, "try these, see if that'll help her any." He handed Jones two small tufts of absorbent cotton, evidently taken from a first-aid kit; they were twined into the elongated shapes of stoppers.

  Jones thanked him with a nod and took them over to her. He stroked back the hair from the sides of her head. "Here, let me put these in your ears, see if they'll shut it out a little."

  She glanced down at them curiously, but offered no resistance whilfe he deftly inserted them.

  "Can you still hear it?"

  She didn't answer. She just looked at him as though she wondered what he was doing it for.

  He adjusted them a little tighter. "Now can you hear it?"

  "I hear it—" She didn't finish what she was saying, but her hands had started towards her chest.