Well. Like it or not, this talk made more sense. Yet I didn’t get the connection. Why would a couple who wanted to kill me because, perhaps, I was in danger of learning something about them which they wanted left hidden, play witch tricks on the simple farmer folk who were their not-very-near neighbors?
Again the yokel seemed to read my mind.
“The truth is, Sir,” he said, “that we are all from the same far country. From East Sylvania, where even today the common people believe in vampires and werewolves, in wizards and witches. This woman was our most unworthy queen, and she was driven out because it was believed she practiced sorcery with the aid of the man—who is an Arab of much strange knowledge.
“We—my wife, Matthe and I—came to this land only to share in its great richness. Learning by chance that Queen Eugenia was plotting against it, we have followed her and the Arab here. We have waited and watched, intending to act only if the time came.
“The time, Mister—Sir—is here. We were able to save you from the Arab’s attack. It was my running up which prevented him from better aiming the blow which was to kill you, Sir. Our presence has saved you; and we are ready to testify against these two. My name is Ivor Wolfert, and I, and Matthe, are at your service.”
My head was throbbing madly, and my tongue felt thick—not a good sign. It was no time to lose consciousness again. If Ivor’s story was true, the guns were in the wrong hands, and how could he say he had saved me, and how could he expect to live, to testify? “What is wrong with this picture?” I thought; and couldn’t answer myself. Things were all out of focus.
I made a violent effort to come by something resembling logic and reason.
“If they are as bad as all that, why don’t they shoot the three of us—and set fire to your house, after taking our bodies there?” I asked, feeling a little bit like the parent who told the boy not to put peas in his nose—and something like it, was a logical idea for a pair of international murderers and plotters, whether they were sorcerers or not.
That sorcery thing still stuck in my throat. I was weak, ill and dizzy, and my mind had reverted instinctively to the first principles I had learned in my business as an investigator. When anyone tells too tall a tale, that person is the most likely one to suspect.
And another thing. Find out the end of the “tall tale.” The end of the story. The objective.
The story against Bolo and Eugenia didn’t ring true, because they could have thought of what I had just suggested, and they could have done it, but they hadn’t. Now if I went along with the Wolfert family—”What do you think I ought to do?” I asked, fuzzily, when no one answered that last little question I had put.
It was the woman Matthe who answered. Heavily she leaned her awkward body toward me. An evil light glittered in the little eyes that were too small for the big-boned face.
“The gun covers my husband, Sir!” she said, “Before I move fast, it will be pointed at me, perhaps. But all three of us it cannot control. You and I must leap upon the Arab. Two of us will live to beat the man to death!”
Her bloodthirstiness settled down in my mind with that charge of witchcraft. I didn’t like her!
“It will probably be your husband who will be killed!” I reminded. “So far as you are concerned, he’s Bolo’s hostage.”
“If it must be, it must.” The woman’s voice was a low mutter; her little eyes still glared into mine venomously. “A life is not too great a price, to kill a witch. And the woman must die also!”
“No. You’d have to promise no violence! No one to be murdered, neither queen nor Arab nor witch. No one, do you hear? And if you promised, I wouldn’t believe you!”
I was shouting, and my shouting sounded just a little hysterical. I slumped down on top of the wooden-board table, propping myself on my two arms. I could feel a longish lock of hair dangle on my forehead, which happens when I am mussed up and bothered, giving me a rather juvenile look. I could feel something else slide across the skin of my brow and cheek also—I had started the blood flowing again in my head wound.
Eugenia saw this. I looked at her just then, at the ugly, out-of-proportion face with those eyes I had had to like. I saw something shine out of those eyes that I had seen in the eyes of other women, when that lock of hair fell down. A shining tenderness—
She put down her artillery and rose, holding the queer lantern with which we had walked through her beautiful “virgin forest” a short while ago. All this time its beam had been directed into the far corner of the porch, where the house wall made a dark ell with the rickety little tacked on clapboard kitchen.
She came close to me—very close, her eyes looking into mine with that look which belonged on the face of a mother looking at a hurt child. She held the lantern high, so that it shone directly on my pounding, bleeding head. It also illumined her face, in all its lumpy, fallen-in and bulged-out contours, making rutty shadows of the heavy wrinkles.
Behind me, the woman Matthe screamed in a strange, guttural croak.
“That’s how she can bewitch—you will see strange things, until your mind goes and you are quite mad!” she cried.
The pain in my head abated, and I could think.
I was remembering. The path in the forest. The lovely, illusory things I had seen, walking in the golden glow from the little lantern.
You could long for such a moment’s seeing, all through a lifetime. You could remember—as one who loves the sea remembers it living out a long life on a bleak prairie; as one who loves the changing mystery of stars and moon and sunrises and sunsets might remember, shut away for a lifetime in some prison-tomb.
With an ugly sequence of thought like the jangle of a broken harpstring in the middle of a symphony, I remembered something else, too. I remembered the horror that had suddenly followed the brighter vision, the dreadful demonic figure that froze my blood on the way back from that forest walk. If Eugenia had summoned that phantom also—whether by hypnosis, lantern slide or any formula of psychology and/or physics, then Eugenia was dreadfully, potently, unbelievably evil.
I drew back a little, staring at her.
My breath drove out of me in a forced expulsion that might have been caused by a physical blow. I stared at her face.
The lines and furrows were gone from it, in some trick of that lantern’s light, in some shift of position which showed no shadow at all. The scarified look was gone, the fullness where it didn’t belong, the hard, gaunt lines. The nose was perfect and flawless, the teeth neat and small and pearly, the slightly parted lips like red flower petals. So had Queen Eugenia looked before accident or her wish had disfigured her. So had the queen looked in the royal pictures I had seen, and so did she still look in the silver-framed photograph inside the shack. So did she look—
So did she not look. For with an unsteady hand that recognized, more plainly than the look of realization in her eyes, my sudden vision of her, she hastily lowered the lantern. It dangled from her hand, grown suddenly slack and purposeless; and in the light of the oil lamp set on a shelf built for it, the old, tired, marred face looked at me sadly.
I shook my head and shut my eyes and rubbed them. And it was then a shot rang out, and for a moment I stared wildly about me, seeing a confusion of struggling figures before I realized the change in the balance of power there on that embattled, rickety little back porch.
Wolfert had snatched the lantern from Eugenia, and dashed it to the floor, where it lay shattered. Bolo had fired the shot, but Matthe had flung herself upon him—probably just before Wolfert leaped. The gun lay on the floor at my feet, and I picked it up.
It came to me, then, that my head did not bother me at all. I don’t think I made the connection immediately. It seemed natural and right not to be weak, sick and giddy, not to have blood flowing, to be in charge of the situation. After all, it was my business to be i
n charge.
“You are all under arrest,” I said, and I said it very clearly, and with a satisfaction that was almost violent in its intensity. It was about time! A Government man is not supposed to spend hour after hour delving in the field of optical illusions, discussing shady characters with each other, trying to decide which way to cast his vote in order not to become a dead Government man while the shady characters go gaily on their various mysterious ways. At last, I had the situation in hand, and I wasn’t going to let it slip again.
“You may all line up against the wall,” I continued. “I’m going to search you for concealed weapons, and then you can walk single file into the kitchen lean-to, which has a door with a lock and only the cracks in the boards and the chimney for ventilation. There you’ll stay until I can get to a phone and back here.”
It seemed simple. Let them all tell their stories, their crazy, inconsistent stories, to the Investigation Committee. I had seen more than enough to warrant holding every one of them. For attempted murder, anyhow; and which of them was attempting the murder, and what they had been up to that made them attempt it, might presently appear. So far as I was concerned, it would be a pleasure to think of them all safe in jail for a while.
They moved back to the wall, exactly as I told them and motioned them to do. And it was not until then that I noticed I had an extra captive. There should have been four. But there were five.
He stood in the middle of a circle of dark light. I don’t know how to describe it better; Milton wrote of “not light, but rather darkness visible.” I’m not given to quoting the classics audibly or inaudibly, but my mind framed the words again.
The source of this livid green-blue-dirty purple light-cone—for it was a cone that narrowed rapidly down to a point—was not a lantern such as Eugenia had played her pretty games with, but a small, streamlined and normal appearing flashlight of the lead pencil variety. I found it by following the light back to its source. Someone had laid it down on a stool so that its light fell into that corner Eugenia had kept the direct shine from her lantern turned into. Maybe the sulphurish light, the queer, darkish light, couldn’t show so long as the other light was on it—just as white light is made up of all the various colored rays, maybe these two neutralized each other.
When I thought that, I was on the way to understanding a good many things. But consciously, my thoughts and my feelings were petrified and paralyzed, when I looked back, after tracing the source of the light, at Him.
He was the demon-looking character who had frightened me out of my wits out there in the forest. The same, with a difference.
In the forest, he had been a colossus. Something to come between you and the whole world, too big and dreadful to escape—yet somehow—I knew it now, looking back at it—he had been tenuous. Not altogether solid, even in all that clarity of vision. Something we had seemed to pass through, finally. We went right through where he had been, or seemed to be, or projected that huge image of himself, anyway.
This man I was looking at was life size, and no more; a little bigger than me—and I’m not a small man—but only a little. He was, however, very static, very solid, very much there to be reckoned with. And I had him standing there, against the wall—but not because I had ordered him there. Oh, no! He had been standing there looking coolly at me, before I saw him. I knew that.
I guess Wolfert and his wife Matthe became aware of him by the look in my eyes. You do stare at a person who is gesturing you around with a loaded gun. They lost interest in the gun and swung round to face the Newcomer, and the intensity of their adoration lent them an incredible grace as they sank to their knees, facing him.
“Master!” I heard Matthe breathe.
He faced me across their kneeling forms, with a leering suavity impossible to describe. I still found nothing better to do than to stare at him.
He wore no hat, and his black hair receded in those two peaks from his dark brows, as suggestive as ever of horns. Small, concrete horns, not sweeping up into the shadows; but incredibly wicked looking. Cruel, they looked; as though they could actually be used to butt with, as a goat or a bull butts. His mouth was cynical, and turned down at the corners. He wore unrelieved black; no white shirt front such as the gentleman Dracula affects in the movies; he was buttoned up in black to his chin. From his shoulders swept a voluminous black cape, or cloak; and you may believe this or not—I didn’t want to at the time—but bats literally clung to him, to the folds of that great flowing garment. They clung, and crawled on it, and took little flights in circles that brought them right back to him, making little squeaking noises of delight.
“Why—I wonder, have artists and other speculative souls always known of the affinity between devils and bats?”
He said the words slowly, quizzically, as though we had all the time there was; as though there was no time to be considered. As though there was no time—
I remembered that talk of madness. I checked my thoughts. For a moment, I had fancied myself living in some other plane, or dimension, or state—I believe that I had thought myself in Hell.
Strangely, it was the thought of poor Eugenia that braced me. She had known of this. She hadn’t produced an illusion in the forest, she had been terrified too, not shamming, it was a fear she knew and lived with—and fought.
The abdicated queen of a little country that believed in things like this—could fight it. A queen could fight it—a woman could fight—
A man had to fight it. I had to.
I made one last stab at authority. At least it was a gesture—it was a sane thing to do. It was an act of faith, an assumption that there was anything anyone could do.
“I wish you would tell me—what you want to accomplish here,” I said, addressing him. “I have a loaded gun in my hands, and I can use it if—if it is necessary. On the other hand, it may be that I have no quarrel with you at all. You haven’t interfered with my prisoners, although two of them-—”
I broke off. I had made my gesture, I had asked him—what he wanted. Maybe, I thought, he wanted to take his two worshipful followers away with him. Well, I thought I would let him. Maybe he wanted Eugenia and Bolo. I wouldn’t let him have them, without trying what a bullet would do. It was silly, but I wasn’t sure a bullet would do very much—against him. Still, I would try; if I had to.
Maybe he wanted something else, something that didn’t matter to me as an agent of the Government, or as a man either. I could hope—
And he could answer.
“The Queen’s lantern is broken,” he said with a strange irrelevance. “I want it. All you have to do, my friend, is to keep these two—Queen Eugenia and her consort—from interfering. The three of us will go away peacefully to the farmhouse in the adjoining field beyond the wood, taking the broken lantern with us. You may go back to town. You may take this couple with you, or leave them—it does not matter. If you are not satisfied as to Ivor and Matthe, send for them later. They will not be leaving the farmhouse.”
My relief was like feeling a mountain move off your chest, in a nightmare.
The man Ivor and the woman Matthe were not kneeling now. They leaned forward in an odd crouching posture. They were ready to snatch the lantern. Theirs was an avidity not altogether human; the man resembled a wolf crouching to spring, the woman was like nothing as much as a vulture.
They were too eager, and too ugly.
I hesitated, where I had intended to agree hastily. I returned to involved improbable conjecturings, though I was sick of them.
“I’ll hear why you want the lantern,” I said, doggedly, feeling that I was shutting the door that might have let me out of this fantastic nightmare.
“Tell me what you think it will do for you. Tell me what it is!”
“You Americans are so practical.” He sneered. “You understand a lantern, Mr. Conant. Metal and glass, and
something to make a light. A kind of—battery, an electric filament, shall we say?”
Queen Eugenia of East Sylvania came slowly, haltingly and laid her hand upon my arm. It was a graceful, slender hand, like her body which moved so fluently. Nothing had been done to disfigure her hands, I hadn’t noticed them before.
“Let Juan—let Ahmed tell you. And believe him—”
Her voice died. The man who was not a Malay, but an Arabian, not a misplaced houseboy, but a scientist, not an oriental half of a common mixed race marriage, but the banished scientist who had married his exiled queen to protect her—this man from whose face the foolish grin had vanished, whose shoulders were squared back so that the straightness of his spine added something to his stature—stood close to us, and somehow we three become undeclared allies in something dreadfully important, maybe more important than life.
“There is so little time,” he said in a falling intonation of sorrow. “Little time for any of us here, perhaps, perhaps for the whole world. You will believe, or you will not, Mr. Conant. But the source of light in that lantern—only obscured, only lacking the focus of a broken lens—is actually something like the Philosopher’s Stone. You are familiar with the old quest, the ancient alchemical theory and research of legend and fact?”
“They wanted to turn base metals into gold. It could never be done,” I said stupidly.
“It was—in part—a concealed symbol,” the Arab said quietly. “Base metals into gold, base creatures into noble, all that involve the transmutation into gold as well. By changing the atoms—not fission, the source of high explosives, potentially of power and energy. By changing things without destroying them. By transmutation!”
“This man—” Eugenia’s voice was proud, but it was not the pride of wife for husband, so much as the gracious pride of a queen bestowing a knightly honor. “This man worked in a secret laboratory—endlessly, tirelessly, heroically without despair or giving up. He—Ahmed, son of a long and ancient line of Arabian scientists. He worked with the new forces, the new knowledge. He made possible the old dream that was impossible before the new knowledge. He built the Philosopher’s Stone. Combined powers of electricity and magnetism forged it. And then—the powers of evil rose in fury, as they have always done. The kingdom was destroyed. I, who protected Ahmed, was forced to abdicate. He came with me, loyal to me, and we two have hidden our secret. But the other half of the Stone, they took.”
The Devils & Demons MEGAPACK® Page 12