The Door of the Unreal

by Gerald Biss

  Practically simultaneously two other shots rang out from beneath the shadow of the wall, amid the old brown she-wolf dropped in her tracks, while the little one turned round with an almost human cry, yet half a yelp, and began to run back to the house, obviously terror-stricken, and limping in the near hind foot. And, as she reached the door-step, she gave another even more human cry, stumbled, and dropped.

  We all rushed forward from our cover and ran across the garden, Burgess making straight for the old iron-studded door.

  Can I describe what met my horror-stricken eyes, one of the most ghastly and gruesome sights God has ever allowed mortal vision to gaze upon, and one that time will never blot out? There lay the gaunt old she-wolf stark in death, a wolf and nothing but a wolf, with no sign of metamorphosing to her equally repulsive human shape: but the other nearer to me was a terrible and monstrous object, a man’s body naked but hairy, with the head of a wolf and the feet of a wolf, not yet dead, but writhing as though in a ghastly convulsion.

  As I approached he snarled viciously at me, baring his fangs and snapping furiously, with blood and froth on his horrid jaws: and he only just missed me. I drew my Browning and fired right at the heart of the foul hybrid creature without a touch of remorse, but rather with a great glow of triumph as I drew the trigger.

  And then he gave yet one more convulsive wriggle and struggle: and I found myself standing over and staring down upon the dead body of Professor Lycurgus Wolff, which had housed so long, to the detriment of the world and the cost of humanity, the dread elemental that had projected itself that night.

  “Thank God,” I exclaimed fervently; and God knows I never felt more like praying in my life.

  And then, as I heard steps racing round the house—it had all been the work of seconds, this climax of hours and weeks—I rushed forward to join Burgess on the steps of the house.

  I found him bending over the inanimate form of Dorothy, which he had wrapped round with his big coat with tender, concealing hands: and I felt for him in the great horror and great sacredness of the hour of his supreme ordeal.

  “Thank God, she was her own true self when I reached her,” he said in a strangled voice, “though unconscious. The wound is a mere trifle in the left foot: and I fancy she fainted from the shock. Keep the others back while I attend to it.”

  And, calling out to the rest to stand back, I gave him a light by my electric torch, while he washed the wound with antiseptic he had ready in his pocket, and bound it up with bandages from his first-aid case, which he had not forgotten: and I marvelled at the great thoughtfulness and tenderness of this big man in this prodigious test of mortal love. By the light of the torch, as I stood beside him, I noticed the unmistakable footprints of wolves’ feet on the old stone step: but I hoped that Burgess in his absorption had overlooked them.

  “We must get her away at once up to the house,” he said in his firm, concentrated way. “She must remember as little as possible of this awful night, poor child. I won’t give her any brandy till I get her right away.”

  “The C.I.D. men will be here in a moment with the van of petrol and the two-seater,” I said. “One of the youngsters will drive you up and back again, if you care to return: and you can put her in Ann’s charge—tell her it was the fire, or anything, but not to talk or ask questions. I don’t think the wound will need a doctor. At any rate, I sincerely trust not.”

  The van and the car were on the spot almost immediately; and Wellingham drove off with Burgess beside him with his precious burden in his arms, wrapped round in his coat and mine, with an extra rug which I placed tenderly round her feet.

  Then we turned to the grim work which lay in front of us—to make a pyre for the two horrible objects, grim and stark in the garden, and a holocaust of the once dear, but now tainted old house, together with all the elementals and superphysicals, such as would otherwise make it foul as their abiding-place for all time.

  XV

  In the car, Burgess told me afterwards in one of his rare moments of expansiveness, the girl had partially come to, but had easily been soothed, snuggling down happily into his arms, as though it had been the most natural thing in the world: and never again was there any doubt or question of how things stood between them.

  And it was with a more or less happy heart, after all, that he handed over her sacred body into the tender keep of our splendid little Ann, who understood intuitively, and asked no questions out of love and loyalty to her idolized big brother.

  “All explanations afterwards,” was all he had said—this Ann told me. “Ask none and give none: but look after my darling for me.”

  And he was soon on his way back to join us, young Bill Wellingham driving like a man possessed in his desire to miss nothing.

  XVI

  Blenkinsopp had issued his orders; and, as soon as the front door was clear, we all got to work piling up the dry wood in the downstairs rooms and saturating it with petrol. We also soaked the old woodwork of the building, sluicing with petrol the glorious old beams, four centuries old, the priceless panelling, and the carved staircase that was worth its weight in gold, together with the miniature minstrels’ gallery, which was such a feature of the house, sung of by architects as often as it had been sung in by musicians. The beds, the curtains, the carpets were saturated with spirit until the smell became almost overwhelming.

  The two bodies—one outwardly an old man with a world-wide reputation, the other apparently a she-wolf—were laid upon special prepared pyres half way up the staircase, and themselves saturated thoroughly in case anything should go wrong with our plans; so that it might seem that, while Dorothy escaped by her window and injured her foot in so doing, the Professor and Anna had essayed the staircase and been overcome by the consuming flames.

  Last, but not least, we raised an immense pyre in the old barn at the side, already half-full, as it stood, of inflammable matter: and there we found not only human bones, which we placed on top of the great heap, but a woman’s watch, which was afterwards privately identified as the property of Mrs. Bolsover, and a diamond brooch, which was recognized by Wellingham and Verjoyce as a present from Tony to Miss St. Chair, and was actually engraved on the back with the name “Wuffles.”

  These connecting and convincing proofs have never, I may add, been made public by Scotland Yard, but lie hid in its secret archives—not in the superficial Black Museum, a more or less polite pander to the morbid-minded public.

  Burgess arrived back just before our preparations were concluded; and it was his own hand that set fire deliberately to the waiting pile, in order that no one else could ever be blamed. It was a wonderful sacrificial act, worthy of an enthusiast, but executed with the coolness and precision of a cricketer, without the least theatrical touch.

  In the meantime I had had the whole horrid bed of lycanthropic flowers rooted up and placed upon the pyre in the barn; and I noted to instruct Hedges to see the whole hollow dug over deep, and buried in with quicklime, together with the noxious pools.

  We opened the old mullioned windows to create a draught; and each of us did our share of the arson business from one point and another—the hall itself being voluntarily selected by Burgess, while I took the barn as my portion.

  And in less time than it takes to write it there was one terrific concentrated blaze, which, within a few minutes, began to light up the skies despite the darkness and dankness of the low-lying hollow, fighting for supremacy with the ill-omened Walpurgis moon itself.

  And with that caprice of thought that persistently obtrudes at really serious crises, there kept ringing through my head the whole time the historic words of Bishop Latimer to Bishop Ridley—“This day, brother, have we lit such a fire as shall never be put out.”

  But we dared not tarry long lest we should be caught upon the spot: so, collecting everything that might betray us, we packed the men aboard the van with instructions to return to the garage, while we took cover in the woods until such time as we dared reappear upon the sc
ene and face our story out.

  ***

  I need not labour detail or dilate upon the rest of that awful night, or rather early morning. Suffice to say, with Blenkinsopp and Boodle on the spot, our story, as we had anticipated, was never questioned. The local police dared not, even if it had occurred to them to do so; and to the reporters, in due course, there was nothing to question with such a splendid three-column story to hand—literally red-hot—and the presses eager to lap it up.

  Blenkinsopp drove straight back to town soon after six in the morning, when we had seen the house and barn burnt beyond all telling, the hollow a seething cauldron of furious ashes—angry perhaps, from the elemental fury within. He left Boodle in charge; and I need hardly add that he made things all right up at the Yard.

  XVII

  The sensation and the strain of the next few days were awful, and the reaction upon all of us great: but the worst was over, we all felt, whatever might befall.

  Dorothy, with the vigour and recuperative power of youth, made wonderful progress, and her wounded foot was soon on the road to convalescence under the care of “Doctor” Burgess and “Nurse” Ann; and thereby we were saved taking an extra person, in the shape of a doctor, into our confidence upon this unpleasant and peculiarly secret subject.

  Dorothy herself remembered nothing so far as the actual metamorphosis was concerned, and I doubt little that all along she had been under the hypnotic influence of the old Professor: but she had a mighty strange story to tell of the earlier happenings of the evening.

  “We had no meals at all that day, and I was horribly hungry; but Anna said it was his orders, and would vouchsafe no further explanation. Then, as it grew dark and night approached, my father—and, oh, thank God, he was not my real father, only my stepfather, though he had forbidden me to say so to anyone, and I dared not do so before…”

  A sudden light broke over my mind. It explained so much. Why had it never occurred to me, I wondered, as it made much that had been so puzzling quite clear.

  “My real father was Colonel Cargill, of the Rifle Brigade,” she went on; “but he died when I was a baby, and my mother before I was ten. Four years before her death she married Professor Wolff—why I could never make out. I have often thought during the last year that he must have hypnotized her. She was dreadfully unhappy; and I am sure that she was glad to die, if it had not been for me. Then for years I went from one school to another on the Continent and in this country, seeing practically nothing of him or that horrible old Anna Brunnolf “—the poor girl shuddered instinctively— “till they came to this country, when the Professor took me to live with them, refusing to allow me to communicate with any of my school friends or mistresses, and ordering me to call myself ‘Dorothea Wolff’ and him ‘father,’ and never on any account to disclose to anyone our real relationship. And I felt compelled against my will to obey him, as I was afraid of him,” she concluded with pathetic simplicity.

  Burgess’s face lightened. There was one load off his mind in the fact that none of the old Professor’s tainted blood ran in her veins, and the lycanthropic taint was thus beyond all doubt or question acquired and, therefore, exorcisable.

  “Thank God,” he said, taking her beautiful hand between his: and she smiled up happily into his eyes from her couch.

  “He always had an extraordinary influence over me,” she continued, “as over my mother—a ghastly, evil, penetrating influence that seemed to fascinate like a serpent’s, and turned one’s very soul sick. His eyes were so terrible at times; he had only to look at me, and I dared not cross his slightest wish. You remember that I told you how strange he had been for a fortnight—from the new moon onwards? That was forced from me by your sympathy: and I was in mortal fear after I had spoken. Well, to cut things short, on the evening of the fire, when it became dark all save for the moon, he made me dip my hands and face in special water that he brought with his own hands—strange water that seemed to have a life of its own and was instinctively repulsive. Then he placed round my waist a girdle of dark plaited hair with a queer old gold buckle, and put flowers—those horrible yellow ones with the black pustules, of which Mr. Osgood destroyed one in the garden that afternoon, and red and white ones as well: and then in the old oak hall, empty and lit only by the light of the moon through the mullioned windows, with white chalk he drew a circle some six or seven feet in diameter, and placed me in the centre, sprinkling my forehead, my hands, and my breast with some of the same water.

  “Then”—and her face grew frightened at the horror of the recollection, and I saw Burgess’s grip upon her hand tighten reassuringly—“he began in his rough guttural voice to chant a weird incantation, moving slowly round and round me all the while.

  “I felt that he was mad—or worse: but I was fascinated and could not move. Then he went across to the wood fire burning on the open hearth, under the Clymping coat of arms and took off an iron-pot, swinging it like a censer, and sprinkling the whole centre of the circle, including myself, with it…”

  “I know,” I broke in, interrupting for the first time—“spring water with hemlock, aloes, opium, mandrake, solanum, poppy-seed, asafoetida, and parsley—some or all of the ingredients.”

  Poor Dorothy shuddered again at the recollection, as she concluded bravely: “And then it seemed that out of the half-darkness there rose a tall, pillar-like phantom: and, as it did so, I must have fainted. It is the last thing I remember until I found myself in Burgess’s arms in the car, as though in a dream—a passing recollection—and then in bed with dear Ann nursing me. I have no knowledge of anything in between.”

  “Thank God,” I said with great fervour: “and now you must lie back and rest. Try and forget those horrors; and, above all, don’t talk to Ann or anyone else about them. Thank God we were in time to save you.”

  “And there is no trace of… of…?” she asked in an awestruck whisper.

  “Of neither of them,” I struck in quietly, to save her as much as I could: and under my breath I added once more, “Thank God.”

  ***

  So Burge and I left her, and went downstairs to his sanctum.

  “I shall marry her, of course, Linc,” he said, “whatever may happen. She is not only pure in herself, but certainly untainted in blood or by any unconscious orgy: and it must be my joy and privilege in life to protect her from any ill consequences of the evil wrought by others.”

  I gripped his hand.

  “I know, old friend: and I trust by God’s grace to be able to exorcise this impregnated evil, if you will put your trust in me, and her—your most precious possession in the world—in my hands.”

  “Gladly will I leave it to you,” said Burgess most heartily; “for, had it not been for your wonderful intuition and prompt action, I shudder to think what far worse things might have befallen my darling by now—and other innocent people.”

  And never in our long friendship have I felt so near or so close to the man I regard most in the world.

  “I shall always feel,” I said quickly, speaking with restraint, “to my dying day that it was given to me by a Higher Power to save not only the soul of Dorothy, but to wipe out this great and subtle danger to this country of yours which I have learnt to love so dearly from such long and close association.”

  It was getting too much like a melodrama in real life for my liking: so I went over to the sideboard.

  “I’ll shake you a cocktail, Burge,” I said. “It won’t do either of us any harm before lunch.”

  XVIII

  And then it fell to my lot to work out the method and ritual of exorcism, and to make my preparations against the next full moon, which fell in the early hours of Wednesday, May 30. So I decided to anticipate its coming to full by a few hours, and to act on the evening of Tuesday, May 29, between 8.32 and 9.16, when things were specially favourable to the exorcism of evil spirits and elementals, as that period was dominated by Mercury, the most bitter opponent of all such evil things—that is to say, Mercury was
in 17º11 under the cusp of Seventh House, slightly to south of due west.

  And so I laid my plans, while all went well at the house, both the invalids making rapid progress till we had grown more like a happy family party, with the other loyal actors in the recent drama coming to and fro, than a house with the shadow of great horror hanging over it, as we had been whilst awaiting the coming to fullness of the last moon.

  Burgess was happier than any day could ever be long, and Dorothy was a different creature, though at times she grew restless, and a strange light would come into her eyes, as the moon approached fullness: but I made her sleep on the side of the house away from it, with blinds and curtains drawn close to keep its baleful light from her sensitive condition, both mental and physical, while each night I closed the windows of her room myself, and fastened them securely with my own bands, placing rye, garlic, and hyssop over every crevice.

  Our little Ann and her speedily recovering patient became inseparable under old Nature’s wonderful system of mutual attraction; and, as we sat on the terrace with the garden ablaze with its bright armies of tulips in regiments and platoons, with their many-coloured “busbies” on their annual full-dress parade, I was the philosopher of the party, smoking my pipe contentedly and banking my hopes on the evening of the twenty-ninth.

  ***

  I was all ready when it arrived; and Burgess and I, with Dorothy, left the house for an alleged drive in the dusk after an early dinner, at which the poor girl made but a poor pretence: and I could see marked signs of restlessness and both mental and physical stirrings within. And I don’t mind confessing that I prayed as I have seldom prayed, as I sat at that dinner-table with laughter on my lips, a glass of wine in my hand, and a load of anxiety in my heart.