Demon Lover

by Fortune , Dion

  Her mind wandered towards the strange being who, crossing her path, had deflected the whole course of her life. She thought of him and she thought of Alec, comparing the two men, and she knew beyond all doubting that never, never, could she have found contentment with that good-hearted, cheery fellow whom the world would have considered such an ideal husband. There was more satisfaction for her in being bent to the dark purposes of Lucas than in being cherished by Alec, for in so doing, she was living ; the great currents of the universe swept around her, the tremendous vitality of the man radiated out upon her, and she felt that she was growing, advancing, rising above herself, and that the Great Unseen, whence all things come and whither they all return, was drawing near to her.

  Musing thus, between sleeping and waking, her eyes gazing steadily into the heart of the glowing coals, she suddenly felt that swift swoop into outer space that had always heralded her departure upon the strange journeys of the soul on which Lucas had despatched her. This time, however, oblivion did not close upon her ; instead, she remained aware of her surroundings, although all power of movement seemed to be inhibited. For a while she lay thus, in a dreamy, somnolent state that was not unpleasant, then a new sensation made itself felt, as if something were being drawn out of her left side, at first a trickling, then a strange draining sensation, and she saw a white, mistlike pool accumulating at her feet. Slowly the pool spread out, rose up, took form in front of her in the semblance of a tenuous, sheeted ghost, and then, in a dark hollow of the draperies, a face began to form, and it was the face of Lucas !

  Veronica, drained of vitality, lay back in her chair, and saw the dead man take life before her. The bright dark eyes gazed into her clouded ones ; the lips, red with lifeblood, drew close to her palid ones ; and the arms, strong as in life, closed round her form that seemed all shrunken inside her clothes.

  This strange manifestation did not last many moments ; Lucas dared not prolong it ; and in a few seconds the devitalized girl felt life flowing back into her, and simultaneously, saw the form before her shrink, lose outline, and subside into an amorphous pool of mist at her feet. Then she awoke as from a dream, asking herself whether this strange experience had any existence outside her imagination.

  After supper it seemed even more unreal, and when she awoke from a heavy dreamless sleep in the morning, all but a vague memory had vanished. The day passed slowly by in minor tasks ; a walk in the intervals of rain, needlework, a novel, received, but did not engross her attention, until, the lamps being lit, Veronica suddenly remembered a letter to her lawyer that demanded an answer. Sitting down to the writing table, she dipped her pen in the ink, and then fell to nibbling the end of it, for she was not a fluent correspondent, and business matters had ever been beyond her, and, having written ‘Dear Sir,’ she stuck fast, pen poised above paper, when, to her surprise, she saw a line of writing slowly trace itself across the blank white page.

  “How are you, Veronica ? Justin writing.”

  The girl stared in amazement at the words that slowly formed themselves under her eyes. The pen, without volition of hers, had written ; the writing, though done by her hand, was not her usual script, yet it was curiously familiar. It was a man's hand, and Justin was a man's name. She knew no one called Justin, yet, in some odd way, it sounded familiar in her ears. Where had she heard it before ? Ah, now she remembered, it was the name of the Roman Lucas had told her about, the man who had loved and lost a girl in the days of that ancient, world-wide empire.

  “Exactly. Justinian was his name, and Justin is my name, the English version of the Latin word, just as I am the English version of the Roman soldier, only perhaps you know me better as J. Lucas.”

  Again the hand had written without her volition, and Veronica sat transfixed, gazing at the words that formed themselves upon the paper, so aptly answering her unspoken thought.

  Once again the writing commenced. “You will stand by me, won't you, Veronica ? You will see me through ? I am depending on you, you know.” Then, as if divining with that shrewd mind of his the line of appeal that would influence her : “If you do not help me, I am lost. Don't fail me, Veronica !”

  What woman could resist such an appeal ? Veronica—whose first thought had been panic-stricken flight out into the garden, the road, anywhere—remained motionless, listening, waiting for the next manifestation of this unseen presence that hovered about her.

  Again the pen began to move, and her eyes followed the writing.

  “You did very well last night ; the subtle ethers are easily detached from your dense body, and I can draw them out and build myself a form with them, but I am afraid it will be too much of a strain for you to do it often by yourself ; what we really want is a group of people to sit in a circle, then everybody contributes a little, and no one has the whole strain of it. It is one thing to take the ethers out, and quite another to put them back again, and if they don't go back, then you die too. I suppose there is no possibility of forming a circle ?”

  Veronica had no comment to make, all this was entirely beyond her. There was certainly no one whom she could ask to join her in this strange and terrible undertaking, if that was what he meant. Evidently it was, for the writing continued. “Then the only thing I can suggest is that I form a partial materialization from you, and then we get as close as we can to some other people, and I pick up the rest of the stuff I want from them. I think I can manage it if we wait till they are asleep. At any rate, we can but try.”

  Veronica flung down her pen, hastily opened the window, and went out on to the terrace. What horrible experiment was the dead man contemplating ? She was entirely ignorant of these things, even her imagination had never envisaged the strange forces, Lucas.employed nor the yet stranger aims and affairs that occupied his attention. The secret fraternity that taught these things—the unseen beings that co-operated—the invisible forces that gave rise to the effects we see upon this material plane—of all these she had never even suspected the existence until she found herself plunged into the very midst of them. Now, it seemed to her, that she saw them upon every side, as if, having once got in touch with these forces, she could never now escape from them, and whereas most people only experienced the result of their own actions, great currents of evolving and disintegrating life swept her backwards and forwards in their tides. Alone, bewildered, helpless, the concentrated will of Lucas held her bound, unable to resist ; and Lucas was no more dead than she was, he was merely without a body, and was evidently bent upon supplying the deficiency by whatever means he could bend to his purpose.

  Maddest of phantasies ! Veronica knew it could be nothing but a dream. Her mind was giving way under the strain. She had better go and see the doctor and ask him to take charge of her and put her in an asylum or wherever it was that people who dreamed such dreams as hers were safely put away. But then, irony of ironies, the doctor would have none of her ; even in death Lucas's arch-enemy served his purposes, and the dead Alec effectually barred Veronica's retreat ; she could almost hear chuckling laughter as she realized this.

  Soon the gathering darkness and bitter wind drove her within doors, and the evening passed rapidly away to bedtime as Veronica turned over and over in her mind the memories of all these uncanny transactions. The more she thought about them, the stranger they became ; any single incident could be explained away, but not this consecutive series, each of which seemed to hinge upon the others and play its part in causation. There were too many of them for casuistry to deal with, and perforce she had to accept the theory that she had got herself into the track of some little-known, but by no means non-existent form of energy.

  Veronica, stretching out her hand to her candle, paused, her hand in mid-air. The Presence was in the room, she could feel it at her elbow. Slowly she sank back into the chair from which she had risen, and as she sank back, the downward rush of the soul into space commenced. Once again the strange substance which was her life flowed from her left side and drew itself out into the sheeted form
with which tradition has made us familiar, and again Lucas's eyes looked out at her from the folds of its whiteness. But here the process was arrested, condensation went no further, only the eyes were fully materialized ; the rest of the form hung like a wreath of smoke upon the air.

  Veronica, still in full possession of her faculties though feeling strangely light and detached, returned gaze for gaze of those dark eyes. Lips and throat were not sufficiently materialized for speech, but the eyes compelled her with their hypnotic gaze, and slowly she rose from her chair and stood before him, compelled, yet eager to do his will. Following him, she moved over to a corner of the room where the old trench coat lay over a chair, the coat that to her always seemed an emanation of Lucas's personality, and with this girt about her, she seemed more than ever bound to him in some strange unity of the soul.

  The eyes shone with an uncanny light, half tenderness, half triumph, and as the grey form moved over to the window, Veronica moved after it. It seemed to her as if no weight pressed her feet to the ground and that she had only to think of a place in order to find herself there; and indeed her body responded with an extraordinary facility to every command of her mind ; swiftly, effortlessly, all impulses were acted out as fast as they were formulated, and on the heels of the drifting mist-like form she moved swiftly down the darkened terrace.

  A tenuous silver cord of vapour connected her with the gliding shadow ahead, and she knew that at all costs that cord must be kept intact. Then she noticed another and still stranger phenomenon, pitch dark though it was, she could see quite plainly in a leaden-grey twilight. To her, the landscape was illuminated with a peculiar livid light such as is seen at the time of a total eclipse of the sun, only of much less intensity, and no shadows were thrown by any object.

  They moved with swift, effortless speed down the weed-grown driveway and out into the road on the river bank, and then turned to the left, and Veronica guessed that their objective was the row of labourers’ cottages that stood a little way down the lane. Hardly daring to breathe, she followed the shadowy form that drew her by the silver cord till both she and her half-seen guide halted under the wall of the nearest cottage.

  For a moment the dark pools of the eyes were turned towards her, and then, like a wreath of smoke, the form rose into the air above her head, and she saw that it was pressing itself against the small leaded panes that hung in the crazy window-frame up under the cottage eaves. Some crack must have been found, for the drifting mist slowly disappeared till nothing but the tenuous silver trail was left that connected it with her own body.

  For an eternity she waited, no sound issuing from the cottages, and then she heard a faint creaking as the casement above her head was opened and a hand appeared upon the window sill. An amorphous mist had drifted in through the crack, but it was a distinctly physical form that came out, and from the thud with which it struck the ground, Veronica knew that it must have a certain amount of weight. Then it came towards her over the rank winter vegetation, and she saw, swathed and cowled in soft grey drapery, the .figure of Lucas as she had known him in life.

  Slipping his hand through her arm in the old familiar gesture, he led her swiftly down the lane by which they had come, and back through the garden to the terrace.

  Wood-ash still glowed redly on the hearth in the billiard room, and Veronica, seizing the poker, would have stirred it into flame, for she was perished with cold and fear, when a hand that was entirely tangible was laid upon her arm, and a familiar voice said in her ear : “Steady, child, I cannot stand much light, you know.”

  With that authoritative touch of his he led her unresisting back to her chair, and there, as she lay among the cushions, he bent over her.

  “Now I am going to give back to you what I have borrowed. It will not be safe to keep you too long in your present condition.” he said, and even as he spoke the words, Veronica felt the returning flow of the vital forces that had been partially withdrawn. This time, however, the figure before her did not entirely dematerialize when she returned to waking consciousness, there remained of the erstwhile tangible form a drifting mist marked by dark pools of blackness where there had been eyes. That which he had taken from the sleeping people in the cottages he retained, while returning to her the elements she had lent him.

  The floating form drew near as if to take farewell of her, and then, gliding over to the window, slowly drifted forth through an aperture in the rotting frame, while Veronica, dazed and exhausted, struck a light and surveyed the now empty room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE NEXT MORNING VERONICA FELT THAT SHE could but regard the whole transaction as a bad dream, and lying in bed between sleeping and waking, she was thanking her stars that it was not real, when a pair of soaked and mud-stained slippers caught her eyes. She gazed at these, but still refused to admit the possibility of reality to the memories of yesternight ; dream they must be if she were to keep her sanity, and to her sanity Veronica was determined to cling.

  After breakfast she was taking her morning walk along the lane on the river bank, when a sound of wheels behind her made her look round, and there was the doctor, Alec's father, driving along the grass-grown roadway in his dog cart. He gave her one glance, and shaking the reins, drove swiftly past without any other sign of recognition than was conveyed by that look of hate and repulsion. True, this man of the objective world had not been able to assign any other cause of death than heart failure in the case of Lucas, nor of hæmorrhage of the jugular vein from dog-bite in the case of his son, yet the intuition that slumbers in the densest of us told him that in some way Veronica was connected with these happenings—that there was something about the girl which did not fall within the laws of his three-dimensional universe. What it was, he could not define, even to himself, but he hated and dreaded her as children and dogs hate and fear, without reason assigned, yet with an unerring instinct.

  Veronica continued her walk down the over-grown lane, and presently reached the row of labourers’ cottages that had been the scene of her dream of the previous night. Even by daylight she could not cast off the horror of that memory ; its shadow still hung about her. There was the angle of the rose-covered porch where she had stood ; and there, up under the eaves, the little window by which Lucas had entered. Thank God it was but a dream, she reassured herself. Then she dropped her eyes to the muddy ground over which she was picking her way, and stopped as if turned to stone : a footprint which was not that of a heavy peasant boot was clearly outlined in the soft earth. Small feet in high-heeled slippers had passed that way. She remembered the little grey suede shoes, with their Louis heels and shining buckles, one of the first things that she had bought with the lavish salary Lucas had paid her, and that now lay soaked and ruined upon her bedroom floor. With fast-beating heart she searched the soft ground for the print of a man's lightly shod foot that should companion them if her terrible dream were reality. But such there was not. The small feet had walked alone down that pitch-dark lane through the stormy night. Hobnailed boots had passed that way, but no other human foot had left its track. But even as she drew a sigh of relief at this lack of confirmation of her fears, she saw that beside the print of the high-heeled shoes ran another and stranger trail, as if something had been dragged along over the ground, yet with here and there a footprint ; yet not a true human footprint, but rather a pad-like mark, as of extremities imperfectly finished.

  A sound attracted her attention, and she looked up to perceive what she had not noticed before, that the doctor's horse was tied to the fence, and that the doctor himself stood at the gate of the first cottage, from which he had evidently just issued, and was observing her actions intently.

  She faced him, alarmed. What was the meaning of this scrutiny which was so manifestly antagonistic ? Did he suspect that midnight expedition, and if so, what would he do to her ?

  Then he spoke. “A child died in that cottage last night, and four others are seriously ill. They were quite all right when they went to bed.�
�� They stood looking into each other's eyes, neither able to offer any comment on this brief narrative ; Veronica, because the paralysis of utter horror had descended upon her, and the doctor because he had no words that would embody the unformed intuitions within him.

  The man's eyes were directed to the ground where Veronica's had been, and he took a step forward as if he were about to inspect that which had attracted her attention. But even as he did so, the little cold wind, now so familiar, sprang up, and a great drift of autumn leaves swept across the roadway in its wake, completely obliterating the tell-tale prints. At the same moment the horse, that had been standing quietly waiting for his master, suddenly reared up with such force that the rotting wood to which he was tied gave way, and he was off down the lane with the reins streaming behind him.

  The doctor paused irresolute, uncertain for a moment whether to pursue his investigation or his vanishing steed, and finally set off at a run after the latter ; the marks on the ground, which the girl had apparently been examining, would keep, any attempt on her part to obliterate them must be detected.

  Veronica, her knees giving under her, crept away from the ill-omened spot till, unable to go any further, she sank down upon one of the many fallen trees that lay about in that neglected place. From there, she could still see the lane by the cottages, though herself hidden by undergrowth.