Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  Though it was long past midnight when I arrived there, I hammered at the door loudly enough to wake the dead.

  But I was in the house long before the door could be opened. Going around to the side, I saw a ladder placed against a bedroom window. In a flash the realization came to me that this led to David Loring’s room.

  Rushing up the ladder, I flung myself through the window—just in time to prevent a man from plunging a knife into the breast of the sleeping paralytic.

  “Sinclair!” I cried. “What the devil are you doing here?”

  I had hold of his wrist, and the knife clattered to the floor. And although he struggled like the madman he was, I was desperate myself, and ruthless. Getting clear, I swung a right to the jaw that carried every ounce in my body, and he crumpled helpless across the bed of the man he had intended to murder.

  “What’s the matter? Why—I can move! I’m better! I’m well!”

  This night of strangeness was to hold another mystery. Imagine my amazement when David Loring, a hopeless paralytic the short time I had known him, jumped out of bed and came across to me.

  I’m well! I’m cured!” he cried, tears running down his cheeks.

  The next moment Violet Loring rushed into the room.

  “Daddy!”

  She had been in his arms for several seconds before she seemed to realize that anyone else was in the room.

  Then—

  “Mr. Huish! . . . Harry!” she cried.

  As she spoke his name her lover sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  “Vi! I’ve had such a horrible dream! What am I doing here?” he said.

  It was not until Sebastian Quin and I were ensconced cosily before our sitting-room fire at the Grand Hotel that I regained my normality. The mysteries I had seen following so quickly one upon the other that night had been too much for me to grasp.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Quin, explain matters—everything!” I snapped. This was 1930, and I was tired of trying to probe things to which there appeared to be no earthly explanation. Paralysed men suddenly jumping out of bed . . . madmen becoming sane through a blow on the jaw . . . tongues of flame . . . slaughtered cocks . . .

  “I have already told you that Rathin Memory is dead,” said Quin. “Exactly how he died is too horrible to relate, but, briefly, the evil forces which he conjured up by means of the black magic you saw tonight, and which he had used to work evil upon two other men—to paralyse David Loring and to make Harry Sinclair mad—destroyed him. Once I had wrecked the five guarding lamps of the pentacle, which I did with my revolver shortly after you had left, he was no longer safe. And the spell which he had caused to be cast upon Loring and Sinclair was broken. The devils which he could control as long as those lamps served as protection seized him. I heard one short, strangled scream of dreadful horror, and I knew it was over.”

  While I stared at him in speechless amazement, Quin continued: “If you told the ordinary person that Black Magic was practised in England today, you would be thought a lunatic; but the fact is true, as you have yourself had the proof, Huish. I had my suspicions that this man Rathin Memory was an adept in the unholy art when I first heard Miss Loring’s story, but it was too early for me to give any opinion on the matter until I had myself seen him at the actual practice.”

  “But that grey shape, Quin?”

  “Was one or more spirits of evil—devils, if you care for the usual superstitious term. It is too technical a matter for me to explain now at length, but there is no doubt that the rites of Black Magic have been carefully preserved and handed down. The Egyptians unquestionably had the power to raise evil spirits and use them for purposes of personal vengeance. And have you not read how Madame de Montespan consulted a witch and took part in a Black Mass with the notorious Abbe Guibourg, so that she might win back the love of Louis the Fourteenth of France? Indeed, there is evidence enough!

  “In Tibet today spirit-raising is practised in its most elaborate and secret forms. That was what first gave me the idea that this man Memory was an adept—the news that he had recently returned from that land of weird and uncanny mystery. And now”—yawning—I’m off to bed.”

  I too went to bed—but I could not sleep.

  JAMES LIVINGSTONE IN

  MYSTERY OF INIQUITY

  L. ADAMS BECK

  The writer known as L. Adams Beck was born Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1860–1931), daughter of the naval commander John Moresby who undertook extensive surveying and exploration in the waters north of Australia and founded the town, Port Moresby in New Guinea, which bears his name. She was born in Queenstown, Ireland, where the family lived for many years but preferred to be known as English rather than Irish. She married Edward Hodgkinson, a naval commander, in 1881 and lived for a while in London and Sussex. She had one son. Her husband died in 1910 and soon after she married solicitor Ralph Adams Beck. Their wedding ceremony was in India and the two travelled extensively—they were in the Far East at the outbreak of the First World War. After the War they settled in Canada. It was only now, under the Beck name, that she started writing—the L. being kept ambiguously brief because although it was formally Louisa, she always liked to be called Lily. She also wrote as E. Barrington and Louis Moresby. She and her husband separated in 1921, and he returned to England, but she remained in Victoria, British Columbia, hosting regular salons and promoting vegetarianism and an interest in Buddhism and Eastern studies. She was on a trip to Japan in February 1931 when she died suddenly.

  She was remarkably prolific in her last ten years producing twenty-six books. Those as E. Barrington were mostly historical romances, whilst she reserved L. Moresby for nonfiction. L. Adams Beck covered her occult works and fiction, which included the novels The Treasure of Ho (1923), The Way of Stars (1925), and The House of Fulfillment (1927). There were also two story collections, The Ninth Vibration (1922) and The Openers of the Gate (1930), and it is the latter which includes her stories featuring the exploits of Dr. James Livingstone. Like Dion Fortune’s John Taverner, Livingstone is a specialist in nervous disorders and some of the stories are only borderline supernatural—indeed Livingstone only takes part in a few, and elsewhere the stories are told to him. But “Mystery of Iniquity” shows the depth of Livingstone’s knowledge and challenges him to cope with a troubled girl in Switzerland.

  THERE IS A VILLAGE IN SWITZERLAND, HIGH UPLIFTED AMONG THE mountains beside a little lake of gentian blue. Nothing could be lonelier, nothing more detached from the lower world, nothing lovelier. It is still approached by the old-fashioned diligence, toiling up mountain ways whose scanty population would not reward any higher enterprise in approach. The tourist does not know its name and from me never shall. Therefore I shall call it Geierstein after Sir Walter Scott’s famous novel, and there leave it.

  But I was free of the place. And when I took my yearly holiday, I took it always at Geierstein, partly because I loved the place for its beauty and quiet, partly because I had valued friends there—Pastor Biedermann and his wife. He was a Cambridge man like myself, though a Swiss, and our friendship grew in value to us both with the years.

  It followed that when I arrived at Geierstein, regularly every fourth of August, I boarded with them and fell immediately into their life and that of the village as to the manner born.

  Their house alone would have won the day—a chalet, long and low, with balconies up and down stairs where you could smoke and read or work or stare at the Jungfrau and her giant companions swimming in blue air or the splendors of sunset and dawn. It was a generously gabled house with running bands of decoration, which somehow expressed the simple and pious hope of the pastor’s ancestors who had built it in the year 1740. Across the front in fine old German lettering ran the verse designed to express the spirit of the house and hope of the builders:

  Wer Gott vertraut,

  Hat wohl gebaut.

  (Who trusts in God has built well.)

  They had built well. Years of sunshine, rain, snow, and storm had beat
en in vain at the high pointed windows, the generously sheltering eaves, the dove-cote chimneys. Warmth and strength were still the guardians of the house when the cold wrath of the mountains broke in fury down the valley and over the lake.

  Peace was the atmosphere of the house; sunny golden peace in summer, warm fire-lit peace in winter. It began with the garden, Biedermann’s own special charge, crammed with bushes of lovely old-fashioned roses brimming with perfume. I felt that the very dew on their petals must be attar of roses, their true spiritual essence. There was a rainbow of crowded asters. Round them crowded tawny wallflowers, lavender bushes, campanulas—God knows what. The perfume rose divinely to my balcony where I often slept in the open and woke to the dew-drenched glory of the garden with earliest dawn’s call to my plunge and swim in the lake.

  Biedermann was an unusual fellow, deeply religious in stanch Lutheran fashion, but with affections and consciousness wide enough to float his bark to heavens never conceived in the Lutheran limits. His wife was a household sweetness. Her low voice singing old ballads or hymns as she went about her work will always be a background in my thoughts to the strange events we were to share.

  It began as simply as any household happening. It was the day after my arrival and we were sitting at supper. We had reached the stage of wild strawberries and whipped cream, when Biedermann said carelessly:

  “Since you were last here, doctor, I have let the old Parson-House again.”

  He preferred living in his own house, and it was an understanding that he should keep up the Parson-House and make a little profit by letting it to eke out a tiny income.

  “And who now?” I asked.

  “An English lady and her daughter, and I’m really glad to have you near to discuss them. They’re getting on my conscience.”

  That meant on his compassion—a raft capable of supporting all the shipwrecked of the universe. Mrs. Biedermann sighed.

  “The mother’s a beautiful person but hard—hard as your toast this evening. Toni! were you dreaming when you made it?” she said laughing to the little flaxen-haired maid.

  “The daughter is beautiful too,” said Biedermann, “but in a most peculiar way that I can’t describe. I should very much like your opinion.”

  “But why are they here?”

  “I don’t know. She’s very reserved. Only said her daughter had been ill and was ordered quiet and mountain air. She took the house for a year and came in April.”

  “Then they mean to be here in the winter?”

  That was unusual. I had never seen it except for a week, but I knew what the terror and beauty of the falling snow, the raving winds would be. After October Geierstein was as cut off as a planet on the outermost orbit of the system. Everyone drew into their own concerns and family life—and what on earth would an English lady and her daughter do then? People who know the great hotels and winter sports have little notion of such a place as Geierstein when the Snow Queen sits enthroned in the valleys of the Bernese Oberland.

  “And what’s their name?”

  “Saumarez. The daughter’s name is Joyselle. They come from London and—”

  “What?” I said. “Why, I knew a Dr. Saumarez, a most extraordinary—”

  “Her husband was a doctor. He died some time ago.”

  Now it became interesting. Saumarez was a hard-bitten fellow with keen watchful eyes and set lips through which no secret would ever slip that he meant to hide. We had been medical students together and even then he was like that—ready to join in anything going but always outside it, a looker-on in spite of himself, a man no one honestly cared for. I had heard he became a clever aurist and had a house near me in London but at the other end of the street—a world away as London goes. Dead? I did not know that either, but these strangers became faintly interesting to me because of their association with Saumarez.

  Biedermann said slowly:

  “I should like you to meet them. I have an idea—Should you not say, Hilde, that there’s some hidden trouble?”

  She answered:

  “Certainly. Frau Saumarez speaks from the lips outward. What is in her heart she never tells. More strawberries, Herr Doktor?”

  As she spoke a girl passed along the road, going slowly towards the old Parson-House. She had no hat and was the slim short-skirted slip of a thing one sees in every street. What was her own was the distinction with which she carried a clipped satin-smooth head set on a long throat. It was too far for me to see her features, but the figure defined against a sunset sky had the confident beauty of a young birch tree alone in a clearing of the woods. A Dryad—a tree spirit, blown for a moment across human vision.

  “That’s the girl!” said Biedermann.

  Next day, on our way to see a case in which he wanted my advice he introduced me to Mrs. Saumarez as she stood by her garden gate, with the village milkwoman milking a cow into a pail at her feet. She bowed with the usual smile when I was presented but, directly I suggested a possible acquaintance, froze. Her face stiffened and she was on guard instantly. The very tone in which she met and dismissed the subject disclosed some wound, which I knew she would have held back with tooth and claw if possible.

  “My husband died two years ago. Have you noticed how beautiful the Caroline Testout roses are this year, Herr Biedermann?”

  That was all. We talked a few minutes and said good-by and began our tramp up the steep little mountain road. Suddenly she called after him, and I went slowly on, piecing her together.

  A locked face. Cold only (to use a contradiction) because there were volcanic elements at work under it which must be kept in check as granite hides boiling lava. Her few words were the puff of steam revealing the fire-heart within. She was handsome and had a kind of chilly dignity—a woman of whom I should have guessed that the Saumarez I knew would be the very last man she would admit to her intimacies. Well—marriage need not mean intimacy beyond what a man may have with the chance choice of a night!

  Presently Biedermann came up behind me.

  “She wanted to say a curious thing,” he said meditatively. “Now what could she mean? It was—‘Please ask Dr. Livingstone if he sees my daughter not to mention her father to her.’ I’m afraid we were right. There’s something painful behind it.”

  That was plain. We said no more on that hand but climbed on and up to the little woodland cottage set in stark and steadfast pines and staring out through low-browed windows at the giant crests of the Oberland, surging like a wave petrified in eternal defeat in some wild war on the heavens.

  I saw the case he wished me to see there—a girl of about nineteen, named Lili Schneiderling, suffering from obscure nervous trouble. I diagnosed and advised and was leading the way out of the room when she called me back, speaking hurriedly and low in German-Swiss. Biedermann turned in astonishment to hear:

  “I want to tell you—I want to say—how can I get well if—” She gasped and paused, putting up a hand to hide her eyes.

  “If what?” I asked encouragingly, bending over her.

  “If the English fräulein comes at night. Tell her not to—promise me. It should not be allowed. It should be stopped.”

  She panted as if the effort of getting the thing off her mind were greater than she could endure. I looked at the mother, a comely blonde Swiss with troubled eyes, who stood on the other side of the bed.

  “What does she mean?”

  “Indeed, sir, I can’t tell. She has said it more than once. The young English fräulein passes the window on her way up to the waterfall in the woods, but she never comes in.”

  “A lie!” said the girl harshly. “She came in the day after they went to the old Parson-House.”

  The mother smiled patiently. “Why, yes, Lili! But that was only to ask her way. She never came again.”

  “She never needed to. She had spied out what she wanted to know. Well, all I say is—if you want me to get well tell her not to come here. I don’t want her, the dear God knows!” She turned and caught my hand in a
hot painful grip: “Will you tell her? You’re English too?”

  I promised—and Biedermann and I went off together.

  “Is there any madness in the family?” I asked when we had set our faces upward once more.

  “None. The parents are as ordinary as can be, and she’s an only child now. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that Lili is jealous of the other girl’s health and strength. She goes out in all weathers, night and day. A week ago in a storm—I give you my word I thought she would be blown over the edge of the cliff road before my eyes. I saw the wind lift her. Actually, for a second! Right off the ground. She flung out her arms and laughed.

  “A great storm goes to the head like drink sometimes, but I think she must have given a hop, skip, and jump to help it! I expect Lili has had a jealous dream. Half the antipathies of the world center there, and the dreamers forget the cause when they wake.”

  We went off on dreams then, I telling him all the newest notions and guesses on that most mysterious subject, and gradually as we talked we climbed up to a ragged track on the way to the waterfall. I must describe the place for my experience turns on it.

  We were now four miles from Geierstein. The frightfully steep narrow little road had come with us as far as the shoulder of a crag and there deserted us, turning abruptly to the left on its winding way upward to another village two miles farther in the mountains and known as Donnerstein; a few chalets collected in the cup of a mountain valley, hugely uplifted as was Geierstein in the arms of a mountain only lesser than the Jungfrau and her mighty companions. Here we turned up the steep track. Half a mile of it led us to a great wood of pines, somber and sighing even in the hot sunshine of the late afternoon. The far distant murmur of water came on a waft of wind as we entered where a thick carpet of golden pine-needles dumbed the sound of our feet.

  Otherwise, what a silence! Not a bird sang, not a cricket trilled. We were in a great cathedral of Nature’s making, too high, too vast, for human worship. One could imagine the cold spirits of the mountains—no, that kind of thing has been said often enough. It means nothing except to those who have seen. Biedermann spoke low. The place enforced quiet.