The chapel of the Hohenneitschütz family lay unroofed and open to its God. Grass had grown between the flagstones of the floor, the painted glass had long since disappeared from the stone mullions of the slim high Gothic windows. Carven in the walls were epitaphs in monkish Latin which I didn’t bother trying to translate, each with its wreath of coats of arms about it, for the Hohenneitschütz were related to almost every noble family in the empire.
The sun was slanting toward the horizon and shadows filled the roofless chapel as cool wine might fill a cup. The altar, white stone, much discolored by the elements, took up most of the east wall. Above it was a basalt, lustrous black crucifix, almost man’s-size, at each end were the bronze standards where in ancient days the eucharistic candles burned. I wondered as I looked at those discolored green-bronze candlesticks carved with saints and birds and stiff, unearthly-looking flowers, how long it had been since the scarlet-orange flame had bloomed above them at the tips of white, long, scented tapers, how long since the pungent tang of incense rose before the altar where the tabernacle stood and a tonsured priest had ended service with his ‘Ite, missa est.’
A quick reconnaissance almost convinced me there was no place where a mouse could find an ambush in the chapel or a cache of arms be hidden, yet the man’s apparent frightened, furtive manner and his anxiety to be rid of me struck a warning tocsin in my mind. ‘Who’s this?’ I asked as with elaborate unconcern I walked across the chapel pavement, testing each stone for a hollow ring, and paused beside the tomb that filled the space between the altar and the north wall on the Gospel side. ‘Careful, feller, watch it—keep your eye on him,’ that inward voice was warning as I circled round the tomb. The peasant’s florid round face had gone visibly paler, the fat hand winding in the watch-chain of plaited human hair cabled across his bulging waistcoat had stopped still, he drew his breath in so sharply that it seemed like a sob.
‘Na, na, Herr Leutnant,’ he responded, almost sobbing with anxiety, ‘he was no one—nothing—nobody. Come, let us go if the Herr Leutnant has seen all he wishes——’
‘Shut up!’ I cut him off. ‘I’ll tell you when I’m ready; meantime, keep your distance, or——’ The gun half-drawn from my holster put pungency in the unspoken threat, and while the little fat man fairly writhed with what seemed like acknowledgment to me, I bent closer to inspect the monument.
Unlike the Calvary which had stopped me on the highway this piece of sculpture was entirely ordinary. The figure lying supine on the stone sarcophagus was a young man dressed in light plate armor, of the middle fifteenth century I judged by the graceful flutings and ridges on the cuirass and epaulières. He was unhelmeted, and long hair curled about his ears and underneath his neck. According to the custom of the time his hands were joined above his breast as if in prayer. I glanced down at his steel-shod feet. They should have rested on a dog or lion or some heraldic animal, or possibly upon a cushion, but to my utter surprise I saw that a goose was nestled close against them, squatting complacently, feet tucked up beneath her, neck bent in a graceful curve to let her head rest on one shoulder, quite as if she’d waddled in and found the time and place propitious for depositing an egg. Had this been some young scapegrace fool? I wondered. And had the mediaeval sculptor taken this sly way of telling future generations of the young knight’s follies? ‘Who was he?’ I demanded of the caretaker.
‘Herr Leutnant, I cannot read the inscription,’ he lied shamelessly. ‘My eyes are bad, the light is poor, the Latin letters——’
I was bending forward while he spoke, deciphering the legend on the stone coffin. He might have told the truth, at that, I thought a moment later, for the letters had filled up with lichen till they were barely visible, and round them the stone had discolored till they scarcely showed against it. Still, I could descry a few dark lines of lettering, ‘—Junker Gustavus von Hohenneitschütz und—orate pro ejs—’ There it was again, that ‘Pray ye for them’. First it had appeared upon a wayside Calvary, where it had no business being, now it was on an individual tomb. Not pray for him, but pray for them.
‘Is there more than one body interred here?’ I asked the peasant.
His reaction to the question was astounding. He was a Prussian of the Prussians, round-faced, blue-eyed, fair-skinned. And doubtless a good Lutheran, too. But as I shot the harmless question at him he raised his right hand and crossed himself.
‘Nein, nein, mein Leutnant, he alone is buried there—Gott sei dank!—but he was very wicked, very foolish, very head-strong, and now he bears a dreadful penalty!’ He looked across his shoulder at the shadows which were reaching out along the chapel pavement with the coming of sunset, and I saw the sweat break out upon his forehead. ‘Come, let us go, if you will be so gracious, Herr Leutnant, for the sun is setting quickly, and it is the eve of Saint John——’
There was no mistaking the genuineness of his terror. His face was fairly quivering, his jaws hung like the dewlaps of a hound, his eyes were round and dilated, and his mouth began to twist convulsively while spittle drooled from its corners. ‘Come, for gracious heaven’s sake, Herr Leutnant,’ he besought me. ‘It is the eve of Saint John’s Day, and with the coming of the darkness they have sway upon the earth!’
So that was it. The superstitious fool was scared of ghosts and witches and wanted to be safely away from the Hohenneitschütz family mausoleum before sundown. ‘All right,’ I relented, shoving my gun back into its holster, ‘run along, but mind the curfew. If you’re caught out after eight o’ clock something worse than ghosts will get you, Fritz.’
‘Worse than ghosts, Herr Leutnant?’ he repeated blankly.
‘You said it, old scout. American M.P.s’
Half a mile down the road I paused irresolute. Saint John’s Eve was a famous gathering-time for witches, I knew, a night when all the powers of evil held high carnival and the unquiet spirits of the earthbound dead came forth to wreak their spite on anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path. A superstitious peasant might well have dreaded being found away from home at sunset, but——
I’d given young Gustav von Hohenneitschütz’s coffin a light kick, and it had sounded hollow as a kettle-drum. Six feet long and more it was, by three feet wide and three feet high. What was to prevent arms being stored there? Rifles for a full platoon could be hidden in it, or three or four dismounted machine guns. Tildenson of the Intelligence had told me of a plot the M.P.s nipped in half-bud down at Treves. They’d found guns and ammunition and about a half ton of ‘potato masher’ hand grenades hidden in a cemetery there—why not in the Hohenneitschütz family tombs up here? Perhaps it had been fear of ghosts that made that little Heinie so jumpy—and perhaps it had been fear I’d run across their arms-cache. He’d certainly tried his best to keep me from the chapel when I wanted to look at it, and it had been broad daylight then.
What to do? Go down to Coblenz, pick up a squad, and come back to make a search—and find they’d taken fright and moved the stuff while I was seeking reinforcements? No, that plan was out.
I took my gun out and looked at it. There were five shots in the cylinder. That would be enough to stop ’em unless they were too strong. If they were—— ‘What are you waiting for?’ I asked myself. ‘D’ye want to live forever? Get back there and take cover in the chapel. If it’s all right you’ll have done no harm; if Jerry’s planning something it’s up to you to put a stop to it before it starts. ’Bout face, forward march!’
Kicking my way through the hedge of hornbeam I made a circle of the castle keep, and did the last twenty yards to the chapel in approved skirmish order, wriggling quietly between the weeds that waved waist-high from the flower beds, finally dashing through the door and sprinting up the aisle to find a point of vantage in the angle of the wall beside the altar. Here I was in dense shadow and protected by the stone walls on each side. No one could sneak up on me, I could see anything bigger than a rat that crossed the threshold, and, which pleased me most of all, had an unobstructed view of the
Junker Gustav’s tomb.
The sunset light had vanished now, and blue-purple shadows slipped across the chapel floor. Looking through a trefoil window in the farther wall I saw a star come out, a mere pin-prick of golden glow against the lilac of the evening sky. Presently, I knew, the moon would be up, and the bars of light that pierced the glassless windows would make it bright enough for me to shoot with some accuracy. Till then I’d have to watch myself. Five bullets weren’t a lot, even if I could make every one count, and I’d no idea how many there would be in the party.
I didn’t feel heroic crouching there against the wall. I felt uncomfortable and foolish. If I’d only had the sense to go to Coblenz for a detail—we could have commandeered a car and gotten back in half an hour—but no, I had to be a blasted hero, taking on a whole uprising single-handed. Had I fallen from my high chair and lit upon my head in infancy? I wondered while my muscles cramped and stiffened in the evening chill and every breath of breeze set branches swaying to throw shadows in the doorway, shadows that looked suspiciously like men with rifles in their hands—and I had only a revolver with five bullets in it.
My vigil wavered from the chapel door a moment, for as one may not quite see, yet dimly perceive, an object from the corner of his eye while looking elsewhere, I was aware of something moving by the tomb of Gustav Hohenneitschütz. My eyes and gun swung simultaneously toward the sepulchre. ‘That’s it, eh?’ the thought flamed through my mind. I’d heard of secret passages with tombs for outlets, now, it seemed, I was about to see——
‘What?’ the question fairly jumped from my lips, forced out by sudden pressure of surprise. Something like a vapor, tenuous and half-seen as a puff of breath upon a frosty night, was rising from the statue’s graven lips, fanning out in a slim cone, then hanging lazily in mid-air.
I felt a sudden chill go rippling down my spine, one of those causeless fits of nervous cold which, occurring independently of outside stimuli, make us say, ‘someone’s walking on my grave’. It wasn’t easy to breathe, and there was a curiously unpleasant feeling in the region of my stomach. It was Midsummer Eve—the caretaker had warned me about ghosts—‘Steady on!’ I brought myself out of the mental nose-dive. ‘You know there aren’t such things. Jerry’s trying to pull a fast one——’
The humid summer heat seemed giving way to a chill which affected the soul as well as the body, a dull, hard, biting cold suggestive of the limitless eternities of frozen interstellar space. The little halitus white cloud swung motionless above the carved stone face, then gently, as though wafted by a breeze, it eddied slowly toward the altar, hung still a moment, then gradually spread out like a smoke-screen laid down by an airplane, a drifting, gently-billowing curtain which obscured the sanctuary from my gaze.
A horrifying thought took hold of me. Gas! In some way they had set a cylinder of phosgene in the tomb, released it through a hidden vent in the statue, and were filling the place with it. Crawling like a snake over the flagstone floor I wriggled from the corner by the altar, making for the doorless portal of the chapel. There would be air-currents there; their pressure would drive back the gas——
I looked across my shoulder as I neared the doorway. They might be coming out now; I didn’t want to take any chance of being shot at as my silhouette showed in the archway’s faint light.
The gas-cloud still hung like a curtain before the altar, but in it I could see faint points of bluish light, mere tiny specks of phosphorescence scintillating in the gently-wavering vapor. I flattened to the pavement and lay watching, gun in readiness. They had tried to gas me, and lost the first trick. Now——
Gradually, but with quickening tempo, the little points of light were multiplying till they floated like a maze of dancing midges, spinning luminantly till they seemed to merge and coalesce and form small nebulae as large as glowing cigarette ends, but burning all the while with an intense, blue eerie light. It was as if, in place of the gas-screen, the chapel had been cut in half by a curtain of solid, opaque moonlight.
The little light-points changed from spinning to a slowly weaving motion. The luminous curtain seemed breaking up, falling into a pattern of highlights and shadows.
A picture, as when the acid etches deeply in the copper of a half-tone plate, was taking form before my eyes.
Candles once more glowed in the bronze standards on the altar, their pointed, orange flames made small breeze-raveled stains against the darkness. The altar itself had been bleached from dirty, time-stained gray to spotless whiteness. I could read the legend, ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus’ cut across the chamfered slab that formed its top. In the honey-pale glow of the candles I descried a priest, a barefoot, tonsured monk in alb and stole who faced a man and woman standing at the lowest of the three steps leading to the altar.
These were no shades, no pale, anemic ghosts. Each of them was plain and clear-cut and distinct. I could see the gleam of light reflected from the gilt fringe of the priest’s stole, make out every detail of the man’s and woman’s costumes, and—which settled it—descry the shadows which they etched against the little pool of brightness spilled down by the flickering candles. Ghosts cast no shadows; I’d heard that since my infancy.
The man stood nearest me, and I could see the narrow corded edge of gold that trimmed his wine-red velvet doublet and the collar of scrolled gold about his neck. A sword with a jeweled pommel hung belted in a velvet scabbard at his left side. His hair was long and fair, curled under at the ends where it swept his shoulders. His face was turned away from me, but in the way he stood, in the way he held his head and shoulders, I seemed to see something vaguely familiar.
The woman standing at his left was partly turned toward me. She was dark and vibrant, with small, sharp, clear-cut features, her hair was very black and shone with almost blue lights in the candle-rays. She wore it plaited in two long, full braids that swept across her shoulders and hung almost to her knees in front. Upon her head was a small cap of silver netting thickly set with seed-pearls, her gown was shimmering white silk and clung as closely as a sheath to her slim figure, a belt of silver plates was clasped about her waist.
Oddly, though the priest’s lips moved, I heard no words. It was like looking at a scene through a sound-proof glass screen, or watching the swift action of a silent motion picture.
But I could fit the words to the action. It was a wedding ceremony that I watched, and from the places where the parties stood I guessed the priest was asking, as the canon required, if anyone could show just cause why he should not unite the man and woman in the bonds of matrimony. From groom and bride the celebrant inquired, ‘—I do solemnly require and charge ye both——’
Something skittered past me up the chapel aisle. It might have been a wind-blown leaf, so lightly did it scuff along the flagstones, but—it wasn’t. It was a girl, young, slender, lovely as a flower nodding on its stalk, or——
There was something odd—unnatural—about her. I could make her features out, her clear-cut, small, sweet features, the mistiness of the dark hair that rippled down each side of her face and swept across her shoulders. I could see distinctly that she wore a one-piece smock of blue linen with a hempen girdle bound about its waist and that her arms and feet were bare, but also I could see through her. She dulled but did not hide the candles’ light as she stood between them and me. Dimly, as through a fog, I saw the outlines of the white altar behind her; as she stood full in the candle-rays I saw she cast no shadows.
She stretched her empty hands appealingly to the priest. Something had hurt them, they were crushed and bloody, drops of red welled from her finger-tips and fell down with a slow dribble to the flagstones.
For a minute—or an hour, or eternity, I couldn’t say, for all time seemed suspended—they stood stone-still in a tense tableau, the priest about to say his office, the bride and bridegroom, and the visitant.
Then I saw the bride’s mouth square in a shrill scream of terror, saw her waver like a reed hit by a blast of furious wind and f
all full length upon the altar steps. The tonsured priest stepped back and raised his hands as if to ward off physical assault, then, brought to halt against the table of the altar, made the sign of the cross and spoke in hurrying, gabbling Latin. No skill in lip-reading was required to tell the words he said: ‘—te conjuro—ad locum tuum!—I conjure thee, return to thine own place!’
I saw the bridegroom’s fingers crawl up to his throat. His lips drew back, his teeth showed white and hard as they ground on each other. There was less color in his cheeks than in the face of a corpse. Distorted as his features were I recognized them as those of the stone face of the statue that stretched supine on the Junker Gustav Hohenneitschütz’s tomb with hands joined palm to palm as if in prayer. Consternation glazed his eyes, his skin seemed wrinkling as with sudden frostbite. It was not merely fright that held him paralyzed, it was terror multiplied by horror, with sheer panic added to it. ‘Du?—Thou?’ the word jerked from him. ‘Ach, mein Gott——’
The specter made no answer, but from her waist she took the double-twisted hempen rope that served her for a girdle, wrapped its loose ends about her wrist, and swung it like a scourge.
Blow after blow she reined upon the cowering man, striking his face, his shoulders, his neck. He cringed and crouched beneath the flailing lash, holding up his hands to guard his face, dropping them again as the whip bit into his neck, grovelling beneath the flogging like a beaten cur.
The maimed ghost-woman pointed with one bloody hand. The trembling, shuddering man obeyed the gesture, and slowly, as though unable to hasten, he walked down the aisle and out into the moon-filled ruin of the castle garden. Step for step she matched his tortured march, striking mercilessly as she flogged him round the angle of the chapel wall. Amazingly, there was no look of anger, hatred, or vindictiveness in her still face. It was quiet and immobile, almost void of expression as were the features of those wooden Indians with which tobacconists once advertised their wares. Almost, but not quite. From her set and staring eyes great tears ran slowly, coursing down her bloodless cheeks in one another’s tracks. She didn’t sob or cry or wail, but drop on shining drop the great, slow tears slipped down her face.
Night Creatures Page 32