She hastened onward through the thickening dusk, her muffled figure but a faint shade darker than the surrounding gloom, led me through one side street to another, gradually bending her way toward the old East End of town where ramshackle huts of squatters, abandoned factories, unofficial dumping-grounds and occasional tumbledown and long-vacated dwellings of the better sort disputed for possession of the neighborhood with weed-choked fields of yellow clay and partly inundated swamp land—the desolate backwash of the tide of urban growth which every city has as a memento of its early settlers’ bad judgment of the path of progress.
Where field and swamp and desolate tin-can-and-ash-strewn dumping-ground met in dreary confluence, there stood the ruins of a long-abandoned church. Immediately after the Civil War, when rising Irish immigration had populated an extensive shantytown down on the flats, a young priest, more ambitious than practical, had planted a Catholic parish, built a brick chapel with funds advanced by sympathetic co-religionists from the richer part of town, and attempted to minister to the spiritual needs of the newcomers. But prosperity had depopulated the mean dwellings of his flock who, offered jobs on the railway or police force, or employment in the mills then being built on the other side of town, had moved their humble household gods to new locations, leaving him a shepherd without sheep. Soon he, too, had gone and the church stood vacant for two-score years or more, time and weather and ruthless vandalism taking toll of it till now it stood amid the desolation which surrounded it like a lich amid a company of sprawling skeletons, its windows broken out, its doors unhinged, its roof decayed and fallen in, naught but its crumbling walls and topless spire remaining to bear witness that it once had been a house of prayer.
The final grains of rice were trickling through my fingers as I paused before the barren ruin, wondering what my next move was to be. Diane had entered through the doorless portal at the building’s front, and the darkness of the black interior had swallowed her completely. I had a box of matches in my pocket, but they, I knew, would scarcely give me light enough to find my way about the ruined building. The floors were broken in a dozen places, I was sure, and where they were not actually displaced they were certain to be so weakened with decay that to step on them would be courting swift disaster. I had no wish to break a leg and spend the night, and perhaps the next day and the next, in an abandoned ruin where the chances were that anyone responding to my cries for help would only come to knock me on the head and rob me.
But there was no way out but forward. I had promised Jules de Grandin that I’d keep Diane in sight, and so, with a sigh which was half a prayer to the God of Foolish Men, I grasped my stick more firmly and stepped across the threshold of the old, abandoned church.
Stygian darkness closed about me as waters close above the head of one who dives, and like foul, greasy water, so it seemed to me, the darkness pressed upon me, clogging eyes and nose and throat, leaving only the sense of hearing—and of apprehension—unimpaired. The wind soughed dolefully through the broken arches of the nave and whistled with a sort of mocking ululation among the rotted cross-beams of the transept. Drops of moisture accumulated on the studdings of the broken roof fell dismally from time to time. The choir and sanctuary were invisible, but I realized they must be at the farther end of the building, and set a cautious foot forward, but drew it quickly back, for only empty air responded to the pressure of my probing boot. “Where was the girl? Had she fallen through an opening in the floor, to be precipitated on the rubble in the basement?” I asked myself.
“Diane? Oh, Diane?” I called softly.
No answer.
I struck a match and held the little torch aloft, its feeble light barely staining the surrounding blackness with the faintest touch of orange, then gasped involuntarily.
Just for a second, as the match-head kindled into flame, I saw a vision. Vision, perhaps, is not the word for it; rather, it was like one of those phosphenes or subjective sensations of light which we experience when we press our fingers on our lowered eyelids, not quite perceived, vague, dancing and elusive, yet, somehow, definitely felt. The molding beams and uprights of the church, long denuded of their pristine coat of paint and plaster, seemed to put on new habiliments, or to have been mysteriously metamorphosed; the bare brick walls were sheathed in stone, and I was gazing down a long and narrow colonnaded corridor, agleam with glowing torches, which terminated in a broad, low flight of steps leading to a marble platform. A giant statue dominated all, a figure hewn from stone and representing a tall and bearded being with high, virgin female breasts, clothed below the waist in woman’s robes, a scepter tipped with an acornlike ornament in the right hand, a new-born infant cradled in the crook of the left elbow. Music, not heard, but rather felt, filled the air until the senses swooned beneath its overpowering pressure, and a line of girls, birth-nude, save for the veilings of their long and flowing hair, entered from the right and left, formed twos and stepped with measured, mincing tread in the direction of the statue. With them walked shaven-headed priests in female garb, their weak and beardless faces smirking evilly.
Brow-down upon the tessellated pavement dropped the maiden priestesses, their hands, palms forward, clasped above their heads while they beat their foreheads softly on the floor and the eunuch priests stood by impatiently.
And now the groveling women rose and formed a circle where they stood, hands crossed above their breasts, eyes cast demurely down, and four shaven-pated priests, came marching in, a gilded litter on their shoulders. On it, garlanded in flowers, but otherwise unclothed, lay a young girl, eyes closed, hands clasped as if in prayer, slim ankles crossed. They put the litter on the floor before the statue of the monstrous hermaphroditic god-thing; the circling maidens clustered round; a priest picked up a golden knife and touched the supine girl upon the insteps. There was neither fear nor apprehension on the face of her upon the litter, but rather an expression of ecstatic longing and anticipation as she uncrossed her feet. The flaccid-faced, emasculated priest leaned over her, gloating …
As quickly as it came the vision vanished. A drop of gelid moisture fell from a rafter overhead, extinguishing the quivering flame of my match, and once more I stood in the abandoned church, my head whirling, my senses all but gone, as I realized that through some awful power of suggestion I had seen a tableau of the worship of the great All-Mother, the initiation of a virgin priestess to the ranks of those love-slaves who served the worshippers of the goddess of fertility, Diana, Milidath, Astarte, Cobar or by whatever name men knew her in differing times and places.
But there was naught of vision in the flickering lights which now showed in the ruined sanctuary-place. Those spots of luminance were torches in the hands of living, mortal men, men who moved soft-footedly across the broken floor and set up certain things—a tripod with a brazen bowl upon its top, a row of tiny brazen lamps which flickered weakly in the darkness, as though they had been votive lamps before a Christian altar. And by their faint illumination I saw an odd-appearing thing stretched east and west upon the spot where the tabernacle had been housed, a gray-white, leprous-looking thing which might have been a sheeted corpse or lichened tombstone, and before it the torch-bearers made low obeisance, genuflecting deeply, and the murmur of their chant rose above the whispering reproaches of the wind.
It was an obscene invocation. Although I could not understand the words, or even classify the language which was used, I felt that there was something wrong about it. It was something like a phonographic record played in reverse. Syllables which I knew instinctively should be sonorously noble were oddly turned and twisted in pronunciation … “diuq sirairolg.” With a start I found the key. It was Latin—spoke backward. They were intoning the fifty-second Psalm: “Quid gloriaris … why boastest thou thyself … whereas the goodness of God endureth yet daily?”
A stench, as of burning offal, stole through the building as the incense pot upon the tripod began to belch black smoke into the air.
And now another voice was cha
nting. A woman’s rich contralto. “Oitanimulli sunimod …” I strained my ears and bent my brows in concentration, and at last I had the key. It was the twenty-seventh Psalm recited in reverse Latin: “The Lord is my light and my salvation …”
From the shadows Diane Wickwire came, straight and supple as a willow wand, unclothed as for the bath, but smeared from soles to hair-line with some luminous concoction, so that her slim, nude form stood out against the blackness like a spirit out of Purgatory visiting the earth with the incandescence of the purging fires still clinging to it.
Silently, on soft-soled naked feet, she stepped across the long-deserted sanctuary and passed before the object lying there. And as her voice mingled with the chanting of the men I seemed to see a monstrous form take shape against the darkness. A towering, obscene, freakish form, bearded like a hero of the Odyssey, its pectoral region thick-hung with multiple mammae, its nether limbs encased in a man’s chiton, a lingam-headed scepter and a child held in its hands.
I shuddered. A chill not of the storm-swept night, but colder than any physical cold, seemed creeping through the air, as the ghostly, half-defined form seemed taking solidarity from the empty atmosphere. Diane Wickwire paused a moment, then stepped forward, a silver hammer gleaming in the lambent light rays of the little brazen lamps.
But suddenly, like a draft of clear, fresh mountain breeze cutting through the thick, mephitic vapors of swamp, there came another sound. Out of the darkness it came, yet not long was it in darkness, for, his face picked out by candlelight, a priest arrayed in full canonicals stepped from the shadows, while beside him, clothed in cassock and surplice, a lighted taper in his hand, walked Jules de Grandin.
They were intoning the office of exorcism. “Remember not, Lord, our offenses nor the offenses of our forefathers, neither take Thou vengeance of our sins….”
As though struck dumb by the singing of the holy chant, the evocators ceased their sacrilegious intonation and stared amazed as de Grandin and the cleric approacbed. Abreast of them, the priest raised the aspergillum which be bore and sprinkled holy water on the men, the woman and the object of their veneration.
The result was cataclysmic. Out went the light of every brazen lamp, vanished was the hovering horror from the air above the stone, the luminance on Diane’s body faded as though wiped away, and from the sky’s dark vault there came the rushing of a mighty wind.
It shook the ancient ruined church, broke joists and timbers from their places, toppled tattered edges of brick walls into the darkened body of the rotting pile. I felt the floor swaying underneath my feet, heard a woman’s wild, despairing scream, and the choking, suffocated roar of something in death-agony, as though a monster strangled in its blood; then:
“Trowbridge, mon brave; Trowbridge, mon cher, do you survive? Are you still breathing?” I heard de Grandin’s hail, as though from a great distance.
I sat up gingerly, his arm behind my shoulders. “Yes, I think so,” I answered doubtfully. “What was it, an earthquake?”
“Something very like it,” he responded with a laugh.
“It might have been coincidence—though I do not think it was—but a great wind came from nowhere and completed the destruction which time began. That ruined church will never more give sanctuary to wanderers of the night. It is only debris, now.”
“Diane—” I began, and:
“She is yonder,” he responded, nodding toward an indistinct figure lying on the ground a little distance off. “She is still unconscious, and I think her arm is broken, but otherwise she is quite well. Can you stand?”
With his assistance I rose and took a few tottering steps, then, my strength returning, helped him lift the swooning girl and bear her to a decrepit Ford which was parked in the muddy apology for a road beside the marshy field. “Mon Père,” de Grandin introduced, “this is the good physician, Doctor Trowbridge, of whom I told you, he who led us to this place. Friend Trowbridge, this is Father Ribet of the French Mission, without whom we should—eh bien, who can say what we should have done?”
The priest, who, like most members of his calling, drove well but furiously, took us home, but declined to stay for refreshment, saying he had much to do the next day.
We put Diane to bed, her fractured arm carefully set and bandaged. De Grandin sponged her with a Turkish cloth, drying her as deftly as any trained hospital nurse could have done; then, when we’d put her night-clothes on her and tucked her in between the sheets, he bore the basin of bath-water to the sink, poured it out and followed it with a liberal libation of carbolic antiseptic. “See can you withstand that, vile essence of the old one?” he demanded as the strong scent of phenol filled the room.
“Well, I’m listening,” I informed him as we lighted our cigars. “What’s the explanation, if any?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Who can say?” he answered. “You know from what I told you that Mademoiselle Diane prepared to go to them; from what you did observe yourself, you know she went.
“To meet their magic with a stronger counter-agent, I had recourse to the good Père Ribet. He is a Frenchman, therefore he was sympathetic when I laid the case before him, and readily agreed to go with me and perform an exorcism of the evil spirit which possessed our dear Diane and was ruled by those vile miscreants. It was his number which I bade you call, and fast we followed on your message, tracing you by the trail of rice you left and making ready to perform our office when all was ready. We waited till the last safe minute; then, while they were chanting their so blasphemous inverted Psalms, we broke in on them and—”
“What was that awful, monstrous thing I saw forming in the air just before you and Father Ribet came in?” I interrupted.
“Tiens, who can say?” he answered with another shrug. “Some have called it one thing, some another. Me, I think it was the visible embodiment of the evil thing which man worshipped in the olden days and called the Mother Principle. These things, you know, my friend, were really demons, but their strength was great, for they drew form and substance from the throngs which worshipped them. But demons they were and are, and so are subject to the rite of exorcism, and accordingly, when good Père Ribet did sprinkle—”
“D’ye mean you actually believe a few phrases of ecclesiastical Latin and a few drops of holy water could dissipate that dreadful thing?” I asked incredulously.
He puffed slowly at his cigar; then: “Have it this way, if you prefer,” he answered. “The power of evil which this thing we call the Magna Mater for want of a better name possesses comes from her—or its—worshippers. Generation after superstitious generation of men worshipped it, pouring out daily praise and prayer to it, believing in it. Thereby they built up a very great psychological power, a very exceedingly great power, indeed; make no doubt about that.
“But the olden gods died when Christianity came. Their worshippers fell off; they were weakened for very lack of psychic nourishment. Christianity, the new virile faith, upon the other hand, grew strong apace. The office of exorcism was developed by the time-honored method of trial and error, and finally it was perfected. Certain words—certain sounds, if you prefer—pronounced in certain ways, produced certain ascertainable effects, precisely as a note played upon a violin produces a responsive note from a piano. You have the physical explanation of that? Good; this is a spiritual analogy. Besides, generations of faithful Christians have believed, firmly believed, that exorcism is effective. Voilà; it is, therefore, effective. A psychological force of invincible potency has been built up for it.
“And so, when Père Ribet exorcised the demon goddess in that old and ruined church tonight—tiens, you saw what happened.”
“What became of those men?” I asked.
“One wonders,” he responded. “Their bodies I can vouch for. They are broken and buried under tons of fallen masonry. Tomorrow the police emergency squad will dig them out, and speculation as to who they were, and how they met their fate, will be a nine days’ wonder in the newspapers.”
>
“And the stone?”
“Crushed, my friend. Utterly crushed and broken. Père Ribet and I beheld it, smashed into a dozen fragments. It was all clay, not clay surrounding a meteorite, as the poor, deluded Wickwire believed. Also—”
“But look here, man,” I broke in. “This is all the most fantastic lot of balderdash I’ve ever heard. D’ye think I’m satisfied with any such explanation as this? I’m willing to concede part of it, of course, but when it comes to all that stuff about the Magna Mater and—”
“Ah hah,” he cut me off, “as for those explanations, they satisfy me no more than they do you. There is no explanation for these happenings which will meet a scientific or even logical analysis, my friend. Let us not be too greatly concerned with whys and wherefores. The hour grows late and I grow very thirsty. Come, let us take a drink and go to bed.”
The Mansion of Unholy Magic
“CAR, SIR? TAKE YOU anywhere you want to go.”
It was a quaint-looking figure which stood before us on the railway station platform, a figure difficult to classify as to age, status, or even sex. A man’s gray felt hat which had seen better days, though not recently, was perched upon a head of close-cropped, tightly, curling blond hair, surmounting a face liberally strewn with freckles. A pull-over sweater of gray cardigan sheathed boyishly broad shoulders and boyishly narrow hips and waist, while the straight, slim legs were encased in a pair of laundry-faded jodhpurs of cotton corduroy. A pair of bright pink coral ear-drops completed the ensemble.
Jules de Grandin eased the strap by which his triple-barreled Knaak combination gun swung from his left shoulder and favored the solicitor with a look denoting compound interest. “A car?” he echoed. “But no, I do not think we need one. The motor stage—”
“The bus isn’t running,” the other interrupted. “They had an accident this afternoon and the driver broke his arm; so I ran over to see if I could pick up any passengers. I’ve got my car here, and I’ll be glad to take you where you want to go—if you’ll hurry.”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 50