He went on singing his little song. Now he put the words to it again, or he heard them in his mind, he didn’t know which:
I can hear the dark
If I listen hard
Hiding in the garden
Climbing up the stairs . . .
He got ready. He would open his eyes. Soon.
Then, with a curious, almost expectant smile on his lips, he reached out and felt the cold doorknob. And made it turn in his hand, turn and begin to open.
EVER THE FAITH ENDURES by Manly Wade Wellman
Manly Wade Wellman has written just about everything and been appreciated for it, too: he’s been nominated for a Pulitzer for one of his historicals, won first prize in the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story contest (nudging out William Faulkner in the process), has a Mystery Writers of America Award for his fact-crime book Dead and Gone, and received the 1975 World Fantasy Award for his collection Worse Things Waiting. He’s been steadily writing creepy stories, too, since the 1930s—fine, flavorsome ones, too—despite the fact he could obviously be writing with success in almost any field. In fact, if anyone today deserves the title Dean of Fantasy Writers, it has to be Wellman, and this story (which has never been published before now) clearly reveals why. And after the story, we’ll be back with some short remarks Wellman made recently.
He’d somehow expected it to be like this. What else had he come looking for?
Though he’d never been here, had only wanted to be here. Had saved money for this journey overseas, then had puzzled and striven over railway timetables and guidebooks to get here. Here to the home his ancestors had left to go to America.
The place was swaddled in trees, there a couple of miles from the village where he’d left the train that noon, all among a landscape of tawny hills and softly grassed valleys, gatherings of sheep grazed here and there in the open, under the serene authority of black and white dogs. And no trees out there, only here, heavily marshaled beyond the quickset hedge with its June blossoms. There were yews, rowans, Scotch firs, two or three enormous oaks, with shrubs matted here and there underneath. It was like a solid chunk of forest taken from somewhere else and set here among the meadows and slopes and distant heights.
Wofford Belson stood opposite a driveway gap in the hedge. He was fifty-five, big but not soft, wearing the tweed suit he had bought in London. Gray stitched his heavy black hair. His face was square-jawed, vigorously seamed. He reminded himself that Belsons had been American for three hundred years. Before that, British for how many thousands?
Movement among the trees, and a woman stepped into view. She was tall, slim, in dark blue slacks and a white blouse and a gray jacket. Her hair was a fine toss of syrupy brown. She wore broad spectacles. In one long hand she held a trowel. She came toward him.
“Yes?” she said.
Belson wished he had a hat to take off.
“I wondered—” he began, stopped, and started again. "Does this house happen to be called Belstone?”
“Yes,” she said again, clipping the syllables. “It happens to be called Belstone.”
“Let me explain.” He wondered if he could. “My name’s Wofford Belson, but it used to be Belstone.” Once more he stopped.
“Used to be?” she prompted. Behind the spectacles her watchful eyes were as blue as deep, clean water, and as calm. She was, he thought, perhaps forty-two or forty-three. And quite pretty.
“I’m American,” he said unnecessarily. “The name got changed over there. Back in 1643, in Virginia.” He smiled, white-toothed. “That’s long ago in America, if it’s not long ago here.”
“And I daresay you’re curious about your British origins, Mr. Belson,” she said gently. “I am Anne Belstone, and we must be cousins, at a number of removes.” She smiled, ever so slightly, and she had a dimple. “Forgive me if I seemed careful. I live here alone, you know, and I don’t get many callers.” Her blue eyes appraised him. “But come into the yard if you like.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I ought to say, I’m from North Carolina, a town called Chapel Hill. That’s where the State university is.”
“You are of the university?” she asked as he walked into the driveway and toward her. “You teach?”
“No, ma’am, but I graduated from there, and I have a book store in town. Now that I’m alone in the world—divorced, my children grown up—I wanted to come here. I always wanted to. Hoped to make it during the war, but they sent me to the Pacific theater.” He felt that he was jabbering nervously, and wondered why. “I do know something, not much, about my family before the name got changed.”
“Do you know why the name is Belstone?” she asked. “Do come and sit on the porch, I was going to have tea there. Would you care for a cup?”
“I thank you, ma’am, that’s right good of you.”
“Not at all.”
They walked along the pebbled driveway. Overhead, the trees crossed stirring green branches. The driveway curved in around a gaunt, jagged rock, mottled gray in color and almost as tall as Belson. He thought that Anne Belstone drew away from it as she walked, and would have looked at it closely, but there was the house.
He stopped in his tracks to look. It was what he had wanted, without knowing it.
The house was squarely and massively built, with lean windows in its two stories and dormers in the high slate roof. The stone of the walls was gray with a hint of rose. Up the two gable sides sprouted wide chimneys of the same rose-gray stone, built into the walls themselves and each crowned with a row of hatlike pots. Across the front sprawled a paved porch with sturdy posts of cut stones in dark mortar. Inside the windows behind the porch clung tawny curtains. Along the porch’s edge stood flower pots with tufts of bloom.
“Is something wrong?” asked Ann Belstone at his shoulder.
“I was admiring the house.”
“I suppose it’s different from houses in the states.”
"The chimneys,” he tried to explain his feelings. “They’re part of the house, of the walls. Not put on after the house was built, not tacked on as an afterthought.”
She chuckled. It was a musical chuckle.
“Well, sir, generations of your forebears lived here. This house, or most of it, goes back to Elizabethan times. I think of it as utilitarian, old-fashioned. You make me wonder if it isn’t more than that. But come up and sit on the porch.”
They mounted the blocky steps. “Here,” she said, and laid a hand on the back of a chair of weathered, solid wood. “Sit here and I’ll fetch us out a tray.”
Then she was gone. Belson sat in the chair. Next to it was a blocky table. He looked out into the trees of the yard.
Someone stood beside the driveway. No, it was the jagged rock. It was like an ill-proportioned human figure in the shadows. It seemed to have sloping shoulders and a knobby head. Eyes? But they were only scraps of shadow. The mouth-like crack was just a crack. Belson told himself that. For a moment he almost got out of the chair to step from the porch and walk down to examine the rough pillar. Then he lectured himself to wait and ask Anne Belstone about it first.
Behind him he fancied he heard a rustle. He turned in his chair, expecting to see his hostess. There was only a window behind him, and a stir in the stealthy curtains.
Then she came through the door, bringing a broad tray set with heaped dishes. He rose, took the tray from her and set it on the table.
“I hope you don’t mind tea,” she said, sitting in another chair. “I believe that most Americans prefer coffee.”
“Tea suits me fine, ma’am,” he said. “Don’t fret about Americans not appreciating it. Some of them dumped a whole shipload of it into Boston harbor one time.”
She laughed her musical laugh and poured him a cup. He declined cream and sugar and thanked her when she put a roll and a pat of butter on a plate for him. They ate and drank.
“That’s a right interesting chunk of rock in your yard,” he felt it was time to remark. “For a moment, s
itting here, I thought it looked like somebody coming in.”
She set down her cup, her eyes moody behind the spectacles. “I’d better tell you about that. That stone is named Belstone, too.”
“It is?” he said, smiling, for he had begun to like her company. “Who named it that?”
“Nobody knows. It’s been here, probably, since prehistoric times. And the name means a god. Baal.”
She sipped tea. Belson gazed at the stone, disliking the fancy that it gazed back at him.
“Baal,” he repeated. “That’s out of the Bible.”
“Out of many places,” said Anne Belstone. “Baal was worshipped by Old Testament people, by European pagans, worshipped here in the British Isles. His name’s on the land. Balquiddir and Balgonie in Scotland, Baltimore in Ireland—they hark back to Baal, worshipped by the Celts before the Romans.”
“And we have the name too, Cousin Anne.”
She smiled again when he called her that. “Yes, let’s be cousinly. I’ll call you cousin—Wofford, you said?”
“That’s my mother’s family name. I’ve lots of Wofford kinfolk.”
“Kinfolk,” she said after him. “Not me. I was an only child, so was my father, and his father before him. Any cousins I have are almost as distant as you, Cousin Wofford. I don’t keep in touch with them, and I have no friends you could call friends, not here. People don’t come here.”
“Not the milkman, the postman?”
“I get milk and letters and supplies yonder in the village. I’ve a little car out behind, to do my errands. I don’t even try to keep up this house, so forgive me for not taking you inside. I live in just a bedroom and a kitchen.”
He had a sense of movement at the window, but did not look. “We were talking about the name Belstone,” he reminded her.
“And I said the stone was always there where you see it. The Romans invaded and wanted to take it away, but some sort of disaster happened to anyone who tried, so they left it. When Saxon missionaries came along, they learned to let it alone, too.”
“Was it that bad?” asked Belson, gazing at the rock.
“Bad enough that someone was told off, about a thousand years ago, to live here and guard it; and he took the name Belstone on account of his job.”
“Baal’s stone,” said Belson, buttering a bit of roll. “Why Baal’s stone? Was it an altar?”
Ann Belstone’s shoulders drew up, in not quite a shudder. “You can say that. The old pagans had human sacrifices—that’s why the Romans were so bitter about them. And where sacrifice has been, a spirit stays. It can’t be exorcised.”
“The missionaries tried, I reckon.”
‘Yes, and they failed. This must sound silly to you.”
“It sounds fascinating, Cousin Anne.”
She dimpled at the name. “Well, the stone’s stayed where you see it, all those centuries. And the Belstones have lived here beside it, and sometimes got into trouble and then got out.”
“One got to America,” said Belson. “My ancestor Thomas."
“What do you know of him?”
“Almighty little,” admitted Belson. “His name’s in a book about persons of quality coming to America. He arrived at Jamestown in 1643, aboard a ship named Bristol Venture, and there’s a note saying he had to take a special oath of allegiance to Charles the First. I’ve wondered about that.”
“I can tell you,” said Anne Belstone. “He was a younger son—the older son, Alan, was my ancestor. The records say that Thomas Belstone claimed magical powers. One day Matthew Hopkins arrived in this area. Do you know who he was?”
“A witch-hunter, wasn’t he?”
“England’s Witch-finder General. Thomas Belstone was one of twenty-three accused witches here, and the only one not hanged. He seems to have had money and friends to help him get more or less exiled instead.”
“I’m glad he got to America,” said Belson, smiling into her spectacled eyes. “He married a girl with Indian blood, and I’m glad for that, too. A drop of the Indian—that’s really American.”
She pondered that for a moment. Then:
“My ancestor Alan joined Cromwell—the winning side.” Her soft voice had music in it. “He profited by that and he enlarged this house. We’ve lived here ever since, and I hope this much family history will content you, because I don’t know much more.”
“It’s pleasant on this porch.” He changed the subject.
“Sometimes, when I sit out here at night, I hear a nightingale sing in the trees.”
“Nightingale,” he said after her. “We don’t have those in America. I’ve often wondered how they sounded.”
But she did not invite him to stay and find out. He set down his teacup.
“You said you won’t show me the house, but I’d like to walk out and look at that rock I’m named for.”
“Well . . . That was no permission, but no refusal, either.
He rose and walked into the yard. The graveled way was bordered with shaggy moss, in which grew tiny red toadstools. He reached the rock. It stood as tall as himself. It was like the outline of a human shape, but if it had been hewn like that, the marks of hewing had long weathered away. Belstone studied the shadowed dints that looked like eyes, the crack that ran across like a mouth. That crack seemed to twist wryly.
“You’re not pretty,” he addressed it. “No wonder the old Romans wanted to put you away. What if I just shoved you over?”
He lifted a hand, but he did not touch the rock. At that moment, it seemed to blur, as in a mist. He had a sensation of cold. And he heard the murmur of a voice.
That made him jump backward and turn around.
Anne Belstone had come silently out with him. Her hands clasped themselves in front of her. She whispered something. A prayer? But he did not know the words:
“Sobrosto, ekkshilhai—pion fhanfhantishm—”
She sidled away.
“What did you say?” he asked her.
“Old words I was taught when I was a girl.”
“Some kind of spell?”
She did not answer that. “Come,” she said, and turned to lead him back to the porch. He sat down and lifted his teacup, and silently cursed his hand for trembling.
“You had your wish, saw it at close quarters,” she said. “Why did you make fun of it?”
He looked out at the silent rock. “You said, human sacrifices.”
“Only in those days before the Romans. Later on, blood sacrifices of animals.” Her smooth cheek looked tense. “When a god’s overthrown, it becomes a devil.”
“And a devil must be bought off,” he tried to fall in with her unhappy humor.
“Yes, he must be bought off.”
“Let’s talk about something else, Cousin Anne. Thanks, I’d like more tea.”
She asked about his children. He talked proudly of his lawyer son who had two sons himself, and of his daughter who was finishing her studies for a doctorate in psychology. He told about his book store and how happily he kept it. He said he approved of old shoes and the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, and of vacations in the mountains and at the seaside.
She talked more briefly about herself. She had always lived at Belstone, except when she had gone to school as a girl. When her parents died, she had stayed there, quietly alone.
“Haven’t men come visiting?” he teased her, smiling. “I’d think that any man who was a man would want to.”
“I know very few men.”
“You ought to come and visit in North Carolina.”
“You make it sound perfect there,” she said.
“Nothing’s perfect, but most time things are good. Beautiful spring and summer and fall, and mild winters. And I have friends, some of them professors, scholars. You’d like them.” He looked at her earnestly. “They’d like you, too.”
At last her own smile came back. “Why do you think that?”
“They’d have to, because I like you so much myself.”
“I wish I
could come.” She sounded as if she meant it. She rose and began to gather up the tea things.
“I hate to bring this to an end, Cousin Wofford.”
“Why bring it to an end?” he protested.
Her eyes were blue, blue, behind the spectacles. “You have quite a walk to the village. You’ll want to be there by sundown.”
“It won’t he sundown for quite a while. Look, come with me. We can have dinner at the inn.”
She stacked dishes on the tray. “I mustn’t, really. But it’s been good having you here. You’re—well, so healthy, so cheerful.”
“You don’t look unhealthy, and you could be cheerful if you half tried,” he said. “I want to help you to try.”
“I might be cheerful if—”
She left it unfinished. He studied the sweet curve of her cheek as she bent over the tray.
“Look here, why didn’t you ever marry?” He demanded suddenly, strong in the sense it was none of his business. “You ought to have a family, children.”
“No,” she said gently, “not for me. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll take these back to the kitchen.”
She carried the tray to the door and turned the knob with her free hand. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. He heard the click of the catch. Had she locked it from inside? Why?
Rising, he walked to the door and turned the big brass knob. It wasn’t locked. He pushed it inward and stepped into the house.
Dim in there, a sort of sandy-brown light That was from the curtains at the window. He took half a dozen steps along a hall and looked through an open arch into a broad, dim room.
It was walled with darkly aged wooden panels and set with upright timbers, like the ribs of a ship’s hold. Furniture stood here and there, draped with dusty sheets. At the far end, a fireplace, and, though it was warm June outside, a nest of coals burned redly on the hearth. Belson felt its heat.
On the hob of the fireplace was built up a little cube of stones. Upon it, as upon an altar, lay what looked like shreds of raw meat.
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