Harrigan laughed. ‘You think that she’s a witch, too? Perhaps the cat the Judge saw yesterday was really Miss Lucinda——’ The seriousness of the other’s face halted him.
‘The Lord forbid that I make any accusations of that kind lightly,’ Dr Clancy answered, ‘but if we admit for the sake of argument that she has the power of witchcraft she might have been the cat, or even the strange mongrel that you saw today.’
‘Lycanthropy?’ laughed Harrigan incredulously. ‘You mean you really think that there are people who can change to bestial form at will—in the twentieth century?’
Dr Clancy drew his brows down in a thoughtful frown. ‘No, I wouldn’t quite say that,’ he returned. ‘It might be due to what the mediaeval churchmen called glamour, the power to mislead the beholder. The line between witchcraft and magic, and that between magic and the prestidigitator’s mumbo-jumbo, is far from sharply drawn. Every mythology tells of fairy gifts—chests of jewels or money which the recipient gloats over at night, and finds nothing but withered leaves or worthless stones next morning. That’s silly, childish superstition, you say. Perhaps. But what about the Indian jugglers’ rope trick? Hundreds of credible witnesses testify to having seen a rope thrown up into the air and apparently hanging there on nothing, but so securely fastened that a man could climb it. Yet on one or two occasions when motion pictures have been surreptitiously taken of the trick the films showed nothing happening——’
‘I get it,’ Harrigan broke in. ‘Fakery. Mass, or at least multiple, hypnotism.’
Dr Clancy nodded assent. ‘Whichever you prefer to call it. Magic, mesmerism, hypnotism. Terminology varies with the times, but facts remain the same. These things were understood in the East long before Mesmer introduced his theory of animal magnetism. Probably much longer than we suspect in the West, too. However, that’s unimportant, really. The fact is that if it’s possible for a Hindoo fakir to make people think they see a rope suspended from infinity it’s quite as possible for someone in the West to make a person think he’s looking at a cat when none is there, or at a dog when he is really looking at a woman. You know how Sir Walter Scott puts it:
“It had much of glamour might
To make a lady seem a knight.”
‘Glamour—or hypnotism, if you prefer a modern scientific term—might quite as easily make an ugly old woman appear to be a dog or cat.’
‘But d’ye think Judge Crumpacker’s dog could have been hypnotized into thinking that he saw a witch-cat?’ Harrigan persisted.
‘Or made to die, apparently from poison, through the power of suggestion?’ added Crumpacker.
‘I don’t think anything,’ responded Dr Clancy. ‘I’m only guessing, and taking the most charitable view. I’d rather think that old Lucinda Lafferty possesses hypnotic power and uses it to gratify her malice—for she is a malicious, vindictive old woman, according to all accounts—than believe she’s entered into a pact with the Devil and signed away her soul.’
He brought the car to a stop by the clubhouse porch in a long skid and leaped out with his little satchel.
‘See you in a little while,’ he called across his shoulder. ‘Give me time to take a shower and get some breakfast.’
The western sky was burnished rose-gold and bluish-pink, smoke rose in tall straight geysers from the chimneys, and the windows of the sparsely scattered houses reflected the last rays of sunset. Blue haze hung in the valleys, softening the burning reds and golds of autumn leaves, but on the rounded backs of the mountains the trees were blatant, flaunting flame-hued oranges and garnets.
Harrigan drew a deep lungful of the limpid evening air, glanced at his wrist-watch, and set out along the highway toward the clubhouse. His afternoon had been successful. He had managed to avoid Judge Crumpacker and, on his own, had ranged the fields clear to the river, bagging four fat rabbits and half a dozen quail. Now he was pleasantly tired, wolf-hungry, and completely lost. How far he’d come he had no accurate idea, he knew only vaguely which direction to take for the club. The soft blue dusk of evening crept across the sky, the moon showed a thin crescent, and a few bright stars began to twinkle.
‘The Lafferty farm must be about here,’ he told himself as he trudged past a hedge of clipped hornbeam. ‘Too bad it’s posted. I could cut across the meadow to the Spellman place and—hullo?’ He started with an exclamation of dismay as a great raindrop struck him in the face.
He glanced up wonderingly at the sky. Five minutes earlier it had been dead calm and crystal clear, but now it was black as an inverted kettle, and the rain fell with a frantic fury, while a sudden wind whined like an animal in pain. He bent his head against the buffeting blast and stinging drops, turned up the collar of his shooting-coat, and plodded on. ‘If I can make the Spellman place before I’m soaked through,’ he began, then, in spite of his discomfort, stopped stock-still in amazement. Through the waving branches of the birch-tree hedge a light shone with a steady invitation.
‘It can’t be old Miss Lucinda’s shack,’ he reasoned. ‘That lies too low to be seen from the road. H’m; seems to me that would be just about the point the ruined mansion stands, but—pshaw! I’m confused by the storm. I’ve never been this far along the highway. Of course, there’s a house there.’
He swung along the surfaced roadway, found a gate pierced in the hedge, and started up the avenue of honey locusts, chuckling at his luck. ‘Eddie, my boy, don’t look a gift-house in the door,’ he advised. ‘If the Devil offers shelter on a night like this you’d better thank him kindly and accept it. Perhaps there isn’t really any Devil. It’s a dead sure thing pneumonia’s no myth.’
The house was larger than he’d thought, and older. Of red brick, built in Georgian style, it had tall windows, a deep, roofless porch with fluted white balustrade, and a cobweb fanlight above its wide front door. Through the transom shone a cheery glow of welcome, lamplight filtered through the curtained windows, mocking at the stormy blackness outside. This was no farmhouse, but the home of ‘quality’ he realized as he drew the silver knocker back and struck a loud alarum on the door.
Shuffling footsteps sounded as he repeated his summons; the white-enameled door swung back and an aged Negro smiled at him from amiable near-sighted eyes through the pebbles of a pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He wore a black dress coat with broad bright silver buttons, a tucked and frill-edged linen shirt, and an antique black silk stock bound round his neck.
‘Good evenin’, suh,’ he greeted. ‘We’s jes’ settin’ down ter dinnah, an’ Mis’ Lafferty’s supremely proud an’ happy to receive yuh.’
Harrigan started. This cordial greeting, as if he were expected . . . ‘Mis’ Lafferty . . .?’ A sudden gust of wind shattered the canopy of branches hanging by the porch and drove a chilling downpour on his neck. ‘Thank you,’ he answered, and stepped across the threshold.
Candles set in mirrored sconces stained the shadows of the wide hall with faint orange glows which faded out along the polished floor, but as he crossed the corridor behind the dusky major-domo Harrigan had glimpses of old waxed mahogany, carpets from Shiraz and Hamadan, blurred portraits in deep gilded frames, and the upward graceful sweep of a wide balustraded staircase.
She rose to greet him as he stepped into the dining-room, and as definitely as if he had been listening to its rhythm, he felt his heart skip a beat. Between them stretched the long polished mahogany table with its sparkling crystal and bright-gleaming silver under the soft light of candelabra, but the opulence of Georgian silver and the blurred mulberry tones of old china were forgotten as he saw her. Tall, slender, exquisite she was in a dinner dress of blue brocade lamé with silver shoulder straps, with lovely, slightly slanting, brooding eyes, and lips that slashed across the pearl-pale whiteness of her face like spilled fresh blood. Her hair was so pale that he could not tell if it were white or silver-blonde, and she wore it swept up from the temples and the neck with waves of little curls massed high upon her head. A wide bracelet of white gold or platinum s
et with emeralds and rubies circled her left arm above the elbow; a string of matched pearls hung about her throat, and the creamy skin beneath was almost the exact color of the pearls.
‘I—I’m sorry to intrude,’ he began huskily, unable to take his gaze from the vision outlined by the candle-glow, ‘but I was overtaken by the storm, and——’
‘Oh, I’m glad you came!’ she interrupted with a soft, enticing laugh. ‘It’s lonesome here, especially when it rains. You’re from the club? Harrigan, I think Elijah said your name is? I’m Lucinda Lafferty.’
He blinked at her in utter, stark amazement. ‘I beg your pardon, did I understand your name is——’
Her laugh, deep-pitched, a little husky, began in a soft chuckle that ended in a gay, infectious peal. ‘I know what you’re thinking—that poor old woman down the road. Yes, we have the same name, and she’s everlastingly receiving my mail. Only the other day she came here, almost burning up with rage, and threatened dreadful things—said she’d put a curse on me unless I either moved away or changed my name. She’s really quite harmless, poor old creature, but they say she has an evil reputation. The country people, white as well as colored, firmly believe she’s a witch. Imagine that in this century!’
Served by the velvet-footed old butler, they ate clear golden consommé spiced with a dash of lemon juice and Angostura bitters, bass fried to saddle-brown in country butter, roast wild duck gamed to perfection and served with stewed green celery tops and mint-quince jelly, and spoon bread yellow as the sweet butter which melted on it.
Lucinda barely touched her glass, but Harrigan showed due appreciation for the vintage burgundy with which the butler kept his crystal goblet filled, and as he ate and drank his admiration for his hostess grew.
After dinner they sat in the drawing-room before the fire, and while she poured coffee from a Georgian silver pot in eggshell Sèvres cups and brandy from a cobwebbed bottle into bubble-thin inhalers he looked at her as Abelard might first have looked at Héloïse or Aucassin at Nicolette.
She was a brilliant conversationalist, seeming to divine his thought before he put it into words, and following his verbal lead as a skilled dancer responds to her partner’s lightest touch. She knew and loved the things he knew and loved—the bookstalls by the Seine, the pastry cooks’ stands on the Ile de France, sunrise over the Grand Canyon, the flower market by St Paul’s in London, twilight on Fifth Avenue with lights beginning to appear in a soft veil of dusk.
But more than her quick sympathetic understanding and the wit and culture that her talk displayed, more than the beauty of her slim exquisite figure with its long and tapering arms and legs, flat back, firm, pointed breasts, and head set gracefully upon a round full throat; more, even than the beauty of her exquisite pale-ivory face with its vivid scarlet mouth and long moss-agate eyes, he found her voice compelling. It was deep-pitched, velvety, with that peculiar throaty quality one sometimes hears in southern countries, and its husky, bell-like timbre seemed to strike vibrations from the very keynote of his being. When, discussing poetry, she took down a slim vellum volume and read from a Persian songster dead for a long thousand years:
‘O my belovèd,
O thou pearl among women,
If all other women in the world
Were gathered in one corner of the East
And thou alone in the dim West,
I should surely come to thee,
Even wert thou hidden
In the deepest forest
Or on the highest mountain top,
O my belovèd.’
he felt tears of something close akin to adoration welling in his eyes.
The storm had stopped and the silver boat of the moon’s crescent rode a sky-turf tremulous with clouds when he left her. Her face was like jasmine blossom in the argent light as she bade him goodnight on the porch. ‘May I see you again soon, please?’ he besought as she laid her rosy-tipped, small hand in his. ‘Tomorrow—in the morning?’
‘Not in the morning, Edward’—they had come to first names already—she denied. ‘Tomorrow night, if there’s a moon, you may come to me, but I’m a different person in the day—I mean I like to lie abed till late,’ she added as he stared at her in bewilderment.
Acting on impulse, he raised her hand to his lips, and when she accepted the homage as if she had been used to it since infancy, he felt absurdly happy . . . grateful for her understanding acquiescence.
Rain dripped from the locust trees that hemmed the avenue which led down to the highway; great drops fell splashing from the wayside branches as he walked along the road, but before he’d gone a hundred yards he found himself treading in dust.
‘Great Scott, I’ll have to kick the door down to get in!’ he exclaimed as he looked at his wrist-watch. ‘Half-past one. It didn’t seem as if I’d been with Lucinda more than an hour.’ Suddenly he was hungry, famished. Despite the hearty dinner he had eaten he was as ravenous as though he’d tasted nothing since breakfast.
The clubhouse was ablaze with lights, and in the gunroom were gathered knots of members, talking in the hushed tones people use in church or at a funeral. ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Somebody ill?’
‘Not now,’ Dr Clancy answered soberly. ‘It’s Judge Crumpacker. He’s dead.’
‘Dead? Good heavens——’
‘I don’t believe that heaven had a part in this,’ replied Clancy. ‘He died in frightful agony, sweating blood like a hemophiliac.’
‘Sweating blood? What caused it?’
Clancy’s gaze was level and uncompromising as a pointed bayonet. ‘You remember hearing of his encounter with Lucinda Lafferty yesterday? Did he tell you that she cursed him?’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t specific, merely said——’
‘I went to him when Mr Marsten heard him groaning in his room,’ broke in the other.
‘He was sinking fast, but trying to say something. I bent over him and heard him whisper, “She said I’d die this way; my joints would stiffen and my eyes go blind, and I’d die in bloody sweat.” His knees and elbows were as stiff as if he had been frozen when I found him, and every toe and finger was as rigid as if it were cast iron. When I held a light before his eyes he couldn’t tell the difference.’
All night he dreamed of her. Sometimes she put soft hands against his cheeks; when she spoke to him the vibrant bell-tones of her voice thrilled through him till they struck responsive echoes from the smallest cell and fiber of his being. Once she leant above him and kissed him, and at the contact of her satin lips with his he felt his very spirit melt in him with longing and desire.
Troubled and unrested, he rose early and despite her refusal to see him till the evening set out for her house. This was a new experience for him. In all his thirty years he had met no woman with whom he would care to link his life; now, as he walked across the frost-jeweled fields he knew that whether for an hour or a lifetime he was hers without reserve or withholding. It was almost like an ecstasy, this strangely mingled sense of exaltation and abasement; such a love was epic, like that of Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe, or Romeo and Juliet . . . too wonderful, too marvelous to have come to any prosaic scientist like him . . . yet there it was. The vision of her pale, exquisite face seemed outlined in the bank of fleecy cirrus cloud that burned with rose reflection of the morning sun. A snatch from an old song, rescued from oblivion by radio, came unbidden to his lips:
‘I dream of you all the day long,
You run through the hours like a song, My dearie.’
He crossed the Spellman field and then vaulted the snake fence that bordered old Lucinda Lafferty’s poor land. The house of his beloved, the other, the beautiful Lucinda, must lie beyond the weed-grown orchard and the ruined mansion of the farm.
Now he was in the old crone’s apple grove, and the gnarled boughs and bent boles of her trees rose round him like menacing figures in a Doré engraving. Strangely, too, the trees, bereft of leaves, shed far more shadow than he had thought possible. Th
e sun seemed banked behind a rack of sudden storm clouds; the air was permeated with an unreal, brassy twilight, confusing, threatening. Perhaps it was the odor of the rotting windfalls on the leaf-mold round the twisted roots of the old trees, he could not say, but the very atmosphere of the place had a damp, dank chilliness. It smelled a little like the brackish water round the rotting piles of old wharves; there was something in it that made breathing difficult. A low-swinging branch knocked off his corduroy cap; as he leant to pick it up a limber twig snapped back and struck him on the cheek, not as if it were an accident, but viciously and purposefully.
He jerked his cap down low above his eyes and instantly another bough caught it and seemed to fling it off.
Something rustled in the undergrowth and flickered across his path. A squirrel? A rabbit? Possibly a cat, he could not be sure, but somehow it did not seem frightened; rather, it seemed to him, it was merely shifting position as if to get a better view of what was happening.
Night Creatures Page 24