Wonderingly; he peered toward the grave. That mound of fresh earth should not be there. . Hadn't he and Slade themselves filled in the grave over that tiny box? And the earth was fresh. It was barely sheathed with snow.
Later he was not certain which he had seen first. . . . But when he stooped to examine the thing that his foot touched, and his hand felt it, he recoiled in cold horror.
It was Tom Summers’ voice over the telephone that broke up the vigil of Pierre, Trent and Dr. Hardt. Trent’s face was pale when he turned from the instrument.
Briefly he related the facts. Then he jammed on his coat and hat and announced: “I’m going home. Dave,” and his voice broke, “heeds me.”
Pierre moved toward Trent. He put out a detaining hand.
“He won’t be home,” Pierre said. “First he brings Sara home.”
Manning Trent angrily brushed Pierre’s hand away.
“Damn you!” he cried.
He slammed the door after him. And a dazed Pierre, standing half in the hallway and half in the library, stared at the door. When he returned to the room, his arms hung limply; Dr. Hardt detected moisture in his eyes.
Dr. Hardt said, after a moment, “He didn’t mean, that, sir. He is simply upset.”
Pierre said tonelessly, “I know. It’s only— that everything comes at once.”
He sat down, his short legs wide apart and his hands hanging lifelessly between them. He stared without seeing at the carpet. He said, at length, slowly., as if talking to himself: “It’s a time like this when you need—well, something to hold on to. Faith? I suppose that’s it. What’s a rational man to do?”
He said, wearily, “I’m going upstairs.”
He ascended slowly, with heavy tread. He knew it was not necessary to knock. She would not be there. Yet—he tapped lightly on her door. He said:
“Sara?”
“Yes, Father.”
The unexpected reply unnerved him. But he managed:
“May I come in, Sara?”
“Yes, Father.”
He pushed open the door. Sara, a revolting picture of health; sat in a negligee at her dressing table, brushing her lortg black glistening hair.
The blind anger of the farmers and villagers, reaching new intensity with each outrage, assumed panic proportions when Sexton Bogard’s story spread from cottage to house and from house to mansion.
“The valley,” wrote Painter in the Times, “is in a state of mass catalepsy. It is obsessed with fear. It is a panic of the mind. These Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, ever suspicious of strangers, now eye them with open hostility.”
Words half lost to the language from want of use returned. Where they had talked in and around forbidden matters, men now whispered of ghouls, of the hellborn, of the bewitched undead. Murder, the death and mutilation of living bodies, they understood. But the diabolical gluttony which impelled the desecration of the grave was a thing to harrow up the soul.
“The sun came out at noon,” wrote Summers. “It lay cold on the fields of snow. You would have thought the valley was at peace.
Yet every door and every window of every house was barred.”
Even the most callous reporters were affected. Lynn wrote in the News:
“I saw the corpse of Gertrude Burke, a body rutted from its last resting place. It was an appalling thing. But more appalling was the lack of explanation.”
And Doyle, returned to the scene by the Mirror, filed:
“Women were warned to walk abroad only in the company of men. And men were warned to carry arms. As for children, parents were asked to keep them at home. These are not hysterical rumors. They are the advice of the township’s commissioners, and they carry the weight of the State Motor Police.”
Colonel Winston Thorndike, commissioner of the State Police, arrived from his Olympian swivel chair in Harrisburg. He . parried reporters with airy assurance:
“Haven’t we solved every hex case that’s ever come our way?”
But that night, after hearing the reports from his lieutenants, at the sub-barracks in Melton Crossing, his face grew set and grim.
Again—but only by daylight and only in greater numbers—posses scoured the woods. They beat up and down the watercourses. They stalked their unseen prey in silence.
BY NIGHT, the white patrol cars of, the State Police prowled the back roads, the beams of their spotlights brushing each farm- , yard, wood and clearing. There was a concentration of these cars from many counties, each with its own cargo of smartly uniformed troopers in Sam Browne belts and an arsenal of machine guns and automatic pistols.
Men, bundled in overcoats and mackinaws, passed the cold nights standing guard over the graveyards. But at the Well, Klonsterman, narrowing his eyes and speaking from the side of his mouth, mumbled to Mandel:
“That is.a fool thing. They only want the blood, not the ’balming stuff. The little Gertie wasn’t ’balmed. They oughter watch jus’ the graves of kids.”
And, such was the hold of suspicion on the valley, Mandel wondered how Klonsterman knew.
Red Crane, after a week on other assignments, returned to the valley and joined Summers. Almost the first question Summers asked when they met at the Well was:
“What happened to that picture, Red?” Crane lapped at his whiskey and soda. He said vaguely:
“It wasn’t much good.”
“Nuts!” snorted Summers. “You got a perfect shot.”
Crane frowned. He shook his head. “Underexposed. I was afraid the flash didn’t, have penetration for that distance.” Summers fell silent. He was not satisfied. Photographers of Crane’s caliber seldom misjudged in a pinch.
Farson, the foreman at Trent Farms, said to Matlock, the stableman, as Matlock curried a horse:
“Can’t figger young Mr. Trent out. Seems to of lost his holt on things.”
Wallace, the butler, said to the maid, “The master seems in a perfect dither today.”
And mentally and physically Manning Trent was. He spent Monday pottering about, traveling a hesitant circuit between his study, the library, the decanter on the diningroom sideboard and the broad windows of the library’s southern exposure.
He was bewildered. He was afraid. Unlike Pierre, he possessed no reservoir of inner strength from which to draw. He blamed Pierre for his trouble; and in the same breath knew that he was wrong.
He realized the Viciousness of his departure from Fountain Head the previous night: but lie hadn’t the slightest idea of offering an apology. The more lie considered, the more he was convinced that his son was an unwilling tool—for David, unlike Pierre’s description of Sara, still made some pretense of enjoying his meals.
Yet the very realization that David was held in the closing coils of something quite beyond himself made it that much more difficult for Trent to discuss the problem with him. Had it been otherwise, had David been a volunteer to these abominations, there might have been room for open argument.
Trent got up. He walked from his study into the library, through the drawing room and through” the music room into the dining room. As he stood at the sideboard, he saw in the wide strip of mirror that girdled the walls the pantry doors open and Julia appear. He saw her stop and glance toward his back.
“I do wish,” she said primly, “that you wouldn’t be so nervous. Manning.”
And she disappeared through the other door-way.
Manning, with a deep breath that might have been a formless curse, poured himself a stiff drink of whiskey, gulped it; poured another, mixed it, carried it back to the library. He placed the drink on the smoking stand beside his chair and sat down. But he was too nervous Lo remain seated long.
He got up and moved to one of the wide high windows. Across the wide terraces of the lawn, now blanketed with snow, he could see the state highway. As he watched, a white patrol car rolled slowly past. Its glass helio- graphed dumb messages.
He watched it grow smaller and finally dis-appear over the crest of the hill. Then, along
the brick walk that led from the peach orchard, he saw David, shod in galoshes, slosh toward the house.
David walked slowly. His broad shoulders sagged. Trent recalled how tired he had appeared when.he had seen him the preceding night. The sight of him now, the renewed and hammering realization of that terrifying lack drove Trent from the window. But there was no stemming the sense of urgency to do something, anything, that pressed upon him.
He drank. He thought: Go to the police? Explain everything?
Ye-ss? He could hear their coarse jeers.
His fingers closed as he considered.
If it could be bruited about that Sara, far from being on an ocean voyage, actually was hiding in her home. . . .
If it could be rumored among these superstitious farmers and villagers that she might bear a close inspection. . . .
If it could be somehow suggested—suggested with the greatest subtlety—that there were age-old ways of dealing with instruments of evil, then:
Might there not be some release for David? “Good God!’’ he exclaimed aloud. “What devil has gotten into me?”
PIERRE missed the visits of Manning Trent. In a roundabout way, through the grocer’s garrulous boy, he learned that Trent had been seen drunk in the village.
Once he walked to the Trent house; thought, as he approached the door, he saw Manning within. But the maid told him that both Manning and Julia were out. Nor did he see David about.
Nights, in his study, he considered many things. He considered a journey to a distant priest he had met many years before. Yet—how leave Sara?
He remembered old Hans Ehlers, whom the Derhammers had visited on occasion. Yet he felt, without quite knowing why, that old Hans was an impostor.
He read deeply, and in the accounts of old French and English trials he learned of horrendous yet logical matters:
Of the common lust among warlocks tor human flesh and blood. . . .
Of their passions for the lower animals. . . .
Of how, since they were the bond slaves of Satan, they were permitted to use his hellish craft to transform themselves into beasts, the better to satisfy their craven hungers. . . .
Always, Pierre learned, these beasts retained their human eyes, for the eyes were the windows of the soul, and the soul—the forfeit to Satan—could not change.
Was that the reason, Pierre wondered, that young Mrs. Heath at Melton Crossing saw not a wolf’s eyes but eyes that were human in their agony? Was it the bartered soul writhing in anguish at the judgment that lay upon it?
And so Pierre read, seeking the spring that, once pressed, would release all in life that he held dear.
He learned the many methods which, the folklore claimed, were used in dispossessions: of the necessity of wounding a werebeast while still in its state of metamorphosis—difficult, since few saw it and fewer recognized it. But hadn’t Heinrich Derhammer seen and fired? And what had happened? Nothing. But that, Pierre learned, was because Heinrich’s bullet was neither blessed nor silver.
Hmm. If he could obtain a blessing for a bullet. . . .
But always, when he approached this question, Pierre found himself faced with the same dilemma: the necessity of submitting the problem to the clergy, of answering their incisive questions. And he kept saying. “But there must be some other way. Surely God could not have given the only key to a privileged few.”
He studied Saint Ambrose, Bodin, Sprenger, Vincent of Beauvais. He studied the sacramentals: learned of their curious power to fend off evil; found that the chalice and the font were blessed . . .
With slow labor he wove his threads of knowledge together until they made a fabric.
Wednesday. And Wednesday night.
Thursday. And Thursday night.
Pierre himself was not conscious of the evolution of his thought; of the slow and certain march of mood' and understanding carrying him to decisions he would not have considered a fortnight earlier.
In the vacuum created by the desertion of Trent, Pierre found himself saying and repeating:
“A man has to fight his own battles.”
At first the thought was born in bitterness. But as the days passed, his natural sense of justice told him that a man, too, might choose his own weapons; and, that being so, no blame ' could be attached to Manning for his withdrawal. And yet . . .
Had he known the weapon with which Trent toyed, could he have surmised the monstrous intent which the half-crazed Manning entertained upon his drunken visit to the village, doubtless the charity in Pierre’s nature would have withered.
Pierre asked, Was not the conclusion just that, since the powers of Satan existed only through the acquiescence of God for God’s own purposes, any contract with Satan could be dispelled by God’s interference?
Friday. And Friday afternoon.
There were occasions when Pierre wondered if his sanity would hold. There were other occasions when he was racked with fear at the mere thought of human interference in matters of such black moment.
Yes, despite such mental by-passes, the signal objective remained with him: he must save Sara. Nor, until today, did he consider any salvation but to make her whole, to remove the disease, to return her to her former self.
So it was that he carried this thought this afternoon when, with the early sun lowering beyond the western woods, he ascended to her room with a tray of hot tea.
He had seen the many changes that came with the weeks: he had seen her body alter; he had seen her skin dry up and her cheeks grow thin with apparent hunger; and again, he had seen her vitality restored by those nocturnal excursions.
But always, no matter what her condition, Pierre saw Sara as blood of his blood. There was that remaining in her movement, in her eyes, that revealed and proved the validity of herself. But today. . . .
As he walked into the room and set the tray upon a bedside stand, Pierre found—outstretched on the bed-only a caricature of the original. The white cheeks were tinted with sulphurous yellow; the body movements were more gross, more animal than human; and when she raised her head to see him, she had a cunning look-out of eyes no longer her own and in which the lights of perdition burned.
Pierre did not lock her door when he left. When he descended the stairs, it was with the final knowledge that he was alone.
Chapter Seven
CHRISTMAS EVE fell like a cloud upon the valley. In the churches the parties for the children were held by day instead of by evening. And they were grim events. The children were whisked from their homes by armed men, and they were guarded in the churches and they were whisked back to their homes.
At Trent Farms Manning drank the afternoon away; an afternoon which found Julia absent on one of her numberless “charities” and David keeping restlessly to his rooms. ’
Manning finally went for a walk.
He walked stiffly, trying to hold himself together until he reached the screen of the peach’ orchard. He relaxed then, and his progress was more slow and more unsteady.
The cold air refreshed him, but it did not sober him. Still, in the open, a thought retained greater cohesion. What was the thought? Pierre? But if he had the germ of an idea of visiting Pierre, it was lost when he reached the other side of the orchard. There, he could look down the slope toward a small wooded vale; and above the vale he could see the bare slope of Mt. Neshaminy, and to the left he could see a figure—Pierre, firing a rifle at a target.
When he returned home, Julia had already arrived. He knew that, any effort to take hold of himself had failed, when she confronted him.
“I don’t know why, Manning,” she said crisply, “you think you always have to get drunk for a holiday.”
There were four churches in the village: the First Methodist, the Episcopalian, the little Roman Catholic Chapel of St. Hubert, and the Friends Meeting House.
No one quite remembered how the Catholic Chapel came to be dedicated to Hubert, the patron of the huntsman. It must have been a long while back, for the small ivy-covered
stone edifice was very old.
And no one was more disturbed by the events of recent weeks than Father O’Burgh, the kindly, complacent, ineffectual shepherd of the parish.
A thin and ancient little man, his was a depth of devotion supported by small inclination to action. He felt that, above any priest in the diocese, it was his special province—since the Lord (to say nothing of his bishop) had assigned him to the Chapel of St. Hubert—to protect those who sought to track down the marauding beasts.
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