Weird Tales, Volume 325

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “How nice to see you, Frederick,” said my aunt. “I have had the most refreshing sleep and feel so much better now.” Her voice was not weak, nor did she seem to be lying to console me. She added, nearly winsomely, “I hate to trouble cook, I know the hour is late, but perhaps Sally might boil me an egg? An egg with a little toast. And oh, a cup of tea. I’m so thirsty.”

  And then, before my astounded gaze, she was sitting herself up in the bed, and as I sprang to forestall and help her, she laughed. “You’re gallant, dear boy.”

  When accordingly I went out into the passage, I found the maid, Sally, standing there and looking at me with great eyes. Before I could speak of the wonder concerning my aunt, Sally announced, “They say the new church bell has fallen right down the spire and landed in the chancel. The roof there is all damaged and come down, too. Did you hear the horrible noise, sir? We thought the End had come.”

  Distractedly I asked, “Was anyone hurt?”

  “They say not.” (I learned later ‘they’ was the carter’s boy, who had bustled in with the news.) “But the whole town has been woke up.”

  This was, it turned out, true in more than one way, if the process of waking may be associated with revival. For my aunt was not alone in her abrupt and miraculous feat of recovery. It transpired, as over succeeding days I learned in more detail, that of all the six hundred odd persons lying sick that night, or even at the point, it was thought, of death, not one but did not rouse up an instant or so after the appalling clangour of the bell. And not one thereafter but did not take quickly a swift and easy path to full recovery. (Even, or so I was assured, a cat which that been failing grew suddenly well, and a canary, that had sunk to the floor of its cage, flew up on its perch and began to sing.)

  Shamelessly it was spoken of as a miracle, this reversal of extreme illness to good health. And there were those who spoke religiously of the falling bell, some claiming that it had cast itself down in some curious form of sacrifice, which it achieved, having cracked and buckled itself beyond use. Others averred that it had been itself unlucky or impure in some sensational but mysterious way, and therefore fell like an evil angel, at God’s will, after which the town was freed from its curse.

  These notions, of course, were ludicrous; but everywhere for a while one heard them, and small surprise. For the saving of so many of the town’s lives, both young and old, affluent and poor, and in so abrupt and unheralded a form, did smack of divine intervention. While I did not for a moment credit this, yet I thanked God with every other person there. And as the days went on, and Steepleford hoisted itself, slowly but surely from its own ashes, the streets cleared of water and debris, the baleful fires vanished, and the summer sun took pity and shone with greater brightness and less heat. The smell of furnaces and dungeons melted away.

  Ten days later, accompanying my aunt on her first walk up and down the thoroughfares, I saw fresh roses flaming in twenty gardens, and now and then, where a tree had come down or been axed, new growth rioting, shining green, from the stumps.

  They had found by then that the bell-rope had been eaten away. By rats, some said, as Steepleford moved, a rescued ship, back upon its even keel.

  “Such a nuisance,” added my aunt, flighty as a girl. “Now the rector will want another one.”

  I said that this would mean more fund-raising bacchanals, and Aunt Alice remarked that the strange Mr Polleto at least would spare them all his disappointing presence. “Lady Constance, when she called, told me he had left the town only last Monday. Generally such a thing would never have caught her attention, but it seems the cottage is now for sale, and she wishes to buy it for a young painter she has found.”

  But I had then no interest at all in Mr Polleto.

  My aunt, meanwhile, had more than become herself again. She seemed to me younger and more active than she had been for years. The doctor too assured me he now thought her good for ‘three decades.’

  And when she said to me one evening, “Do you know, dear boy, I think being ill has done me good,” I could only agree. And so it must be confessed, at liberty to do so, I began to hanker after my own life.

  Of course, I was bemused too. I wanted time to myself to think over events. One instant I felt I had been the involuntary party to a delusion. At another, the unreal seemed actual. But we seldom trust ourselves upon such matters, I mean upon matters that may contain the supernatural. There is always some other explanation that surely must be the proper one.

  I am not unduly superstitious; but now, in the glow of returning normality, I began to prefer to think myself to have been in the grasp of a wild obsession, where I had imagined some things and brooded upon others, until I could make them fit my vivid scenario.

  When finally I commenced my preparations to leave Steepleford, I was told in passing by a neighbour, that no carriage could be got now along Salter’s Lane. “Are the fallen trees still uncleared?”

  “No, no … It’s the new growth shooting out there. It’s become one great coppice, with trees bursting, they say, from the stumps. Those that have seen say they’ve never had a sight like it. But there’s a deal going on with trees and other plants, after that drought we had.” Here he gave me a long list of things, which I will not reproduce, then, as I was tiring, said this: “Perhaps you may have noticed the old beech at the station? A fine old tree, but it was twisting and due for the axe, but now spared, and they say the roots have dug down again, if such a thing is to be believed, and the trunk is straight again too. And the leaves coming out on it as if it were May not August. A strange business and no mistake. Did you ever get a peep at that house in the Lane? The Witch House some call it.”

  Sombrely I replied that I had.

  “Well, that’s all come down, like a house of cards. Not a wall of it standing, nor one stone on another. A great heap of rubble.”

  I had a dream, not while I remained in the town, but a month later, when Nash had persuaded me back to France, in the south, in a little village among the chestnut woods. I dreamed I was on the roofs of Steepleford church; and pale, glassy arrows flew by through the air, that were the looks of a woman who stood at a window in Salter’s Lane. These arrows severed the rope of the bell in the church spire. And when it fell there was no sound, only a great nothingness. But in the nothingness, I knew that woman was no more.

  “What’s up?” said Nash, finding me out in the village street, smoking, at four in the morning, the dawn just lifting its silver lids beyond the trees.

  “Do you suppose,” I said, “that something thought fully virtuous, if attacked, might rebound on the attacker, might destroy them?”

  “History and experience relate otherwise,” said Nash. And so they do.

  IV.

  That then, was my story of Steepleford, all I had of it at the time, but which I gave to my companion, Jeffers, on the terrace of the Hotel Alpius, as we waited for the Wassenhaur train.

  I was nevertheless moved to regret to him the unsatisfactory lack of explanation concerning the final outcome of events.

  “I haven’t been back now to the place for years,” I finished, “and so can add nothing. My aunt, you see, grew sprightly — she still is — and moved to London, where she has a fine town house.”

  “Hmm,” said my companion. He drew upon his cigar, and looked covertly again at the instigator of my tale, that same quaint little shop-keeper Polleto, who still sat at his adjacent table.

  Precisely then the untoward took place. Or perhaps I should say the apt, as it had happened before, and neither of us could now miss its significance.

  A party of three gentlemen and two ladies had just now been coming across the terrace, and taken their seats to my right. So it was I heard, from behind my right ear, a stifled little cry, and next the splintering crash of a water glass dropped on the paving.

  Jeffers and I both turned sharply, and in time to see that the second young lady of the party, ashen in colour, was being supported by her friends. As they fussed and produce
d a smelling-bottle, and called loudly for spirits, Polleto darted to his feet and went gliding quickly from the terrace.

  “Now I fancy,” said Jeffers, “you’ve witnessed something of this sort before. And I too, in a way, since you told me of it.”

  “You mean Daffodil King, who fainted at the church tea.”

  “Just so.”

  “You imagine that she, and the lady over there, gave way for a similar cause — that they had seen Mr Polleto?”

  “Don’t you imagine it?” asked Jeffers laconically.

  I thought, and answered honestly, “Yes. But why?”

  “I wonder,” said Jeffers, infuriatingly. Then he added, “No, I’m not being fair to you. You see, I’ve read of the case, and viewed a rather poor photograph once, in a police museum, in circumstances I shan’t bore you with. When you first pointed him out, I had a half suspicion. But in the light of both ladies swooning at the sight of the man … Recollect, Austria is only over the border here. I believe you told me the charming Daffodil had been in Austria once, and said she had seen something there so awful, it had taken her six years to recover from it?”

  “Yes, or so her sister informed me.”

  “What she saw then was that same man, Polleto, in the street probably, on the day that the people of a well known Austrian spa almost lynched him. I have no doubts the other lady to our right, saw him in a similar style. Unless she had the singular misfortune to have met him.”

  “Then he’s notorious?”

  “No. Of course, his real name isn’t Polleto. I was never told what his real name was. The documents referred to him only as The Criminal. And the crime too was hushed up in the end, and rich acquaintances got him away to avoid a most resounding scandal which would, I believe, have brought down the Austrian government of the hour.”

  “In God’s name — what had he done?”

  Jeffers shrugged. “That’s the thing, Frederick, what had he done? No one would say. Not even the file on him, which I was shown, would say anything as to the nature of his crime. Not even the policemen I spoke with. It was something so vile, so disgusting, so inhuman, that no scrap of it has ever been revealed — by anyone who knows. They won’t — can’t — speak of it. They try to push it from their minds. And if they see him, like that lady across the terrace, some part of them withers. There now, she’s looking a little better. All the better, no doubt, since what made her ill has left the vicinity.”

  I sat staring at him.

  Presently I said, “Are you then saying to me what I suppose you must be?”

  Jeffers stretched himself in his chair, and smiled at me. “Even you,” said he, “asked yourself whether or not something of great perceived virtue, like a church bell, could have halted Amber Maria, should she set her sights on it. But it wasn’t virtue she avoided, was it? She loved the earth and all the people in it. I, too, Frederick, have heard of the Lilyite sect, and of course she must have been a member of that sect. No doubt Josebaar Hawkins let her have her meetings in his house, and protected her after by lying. But maybe in the later years he feared that in her too, that she was one of the Lilyites and put the teachings of Jesus before all other things. What did she do but love others and want to help them with her precious gift of seeing, from which she herself had never tried to profit? She saw good and beauty in all men and all things, and loved them like — loved them better — than herself. And where have you heard such philosophy before, save from the lips of Christ?”

  I was shocked a little, to have missed this clue. Humbly I waited for him to go on. He did so.

  “Amber Maria looked with her eating eyes through her window, and after the blocked-up bricks and pins, she had the glass, and then, as you said, the trees, the air and the Lane. And next Steepleford she ate up with her eyes. And it would have gone on like this, like rings spreading from a pebble thrown into a pool, and God knows where it could have ended. But ended it must have done, at last. For in this world, along with all those who, despite their colossal failings, carry in them the seeds of goodness and beauty, there are a few, only a few, I trust, who have nothing like that inside them. Who are composed only of the grossest and most foul of atoms, who are, though human, like things of the Pit. In them there is not, I dare say, one hint of light. Perhaps there is no soul. And meeting one of these persons, Amber Maria, who fed on goodness and beauty and drained it to dust, fed instead upon the worst poison, that which would scald away the psychic core of any such vampire. It was Polleto, you see, Polleto, that little ghastly human demon, whose crime is so unspeakable that never is it spoken, Polleto who had come to live in the town, placating it by helping it buy a bell, Polleto that at last her devouring eyes reached. Like everything else then, she tried to eat him up. And then she must have tried to spew him out.

  “But it was too late. She had touched and tasted in a manner only vampires know. She who had once loved God and once loved others as herself, until they let her die in that atrocious manner. And after that she who hated, and would have eaten the world, save in due course she came to Polleto and ate at Polleto. Polleto! And it killed her, Frederick, in all and every way. It killed her to a death more deep than any grave, more cold than any stone.”

  LIMERICK, by George Barr

  Our evil-eyed neighbor is dotty.

  Her grasp of reality’s spotty.

  I must say, though, while

  Her one eye is vile,

  The other is just rather naughty.