Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  In a swift glance that he took at the door as he waited for MacMorn’s guidance, Gees could see no fastening of any sort, nor any projection by which to pull the door open. A latch of some sort may have clicked, but, not expecting any peculiarity about the door, Gees had not heard it, or perhaps the sound had made no impression on his consciousness.

  The humming of the wind, deadened to some extent by the thickness of the wall, came to his ears in the brief interval before MacMorn spoke again. He felt that he ought to have been more observant about that door. As nearly as he could see, they could not get out of the house again until MacMorn chose to let them.

  “An early hour for a call,” MacMorn said, “but all hours are alike to me. I half expected that you would call last night.”

  “We arrived much too late,” Gees said.

  “And no doubt were tired, after so long and hard a drive,” MacMorn observed with friendly solicitude. “But before I show you my house or offer you refreshment. I wish to tell you, Mr. Kyrle, that your future wife is not in my hold, as you appear to think.”

  The exact words, Gees reflected, that he himself had used just before he bade Kyrle keep silence. “Future wife,” and “hold” — the significance of the statement was unmistakable.

  Then, as Kyrle stared at him open-mouthed, he spoke again: “And while you are my guest, I must ask you to remove the automatic pistol from your right-hand trousers pocket. Otherwise, with your entirely unfounded suspicion of me, I should not feel quite safe. As my guest, I hope you will see that the request is not unreasonable.”

  Sheepishly, Kyrle took out the pistol and held it out for MacMorn to take, while Gees wanted to shout at him to keep it but could not. In some way, material or uncanny, their talk as they neared the house had been overheard. How far, Gees asked himself, did MacMorn’s prescience extend? No visible agency for the transmission of their talk had been near them when Kyrle had said the pistol was in that pocket.

  “No,” MacMorn said, “I will not take it. I do not understand those things. If you put it down on the floor here, beside the door, you can recover it before you go. It will not be touched, I assure you.”

  Kyrle put the pistol down, and, reluctantly, Gees let it stay there.

  “You will forgive my small eccentricity, I know.” MacMorn smiled at them both, quite friendlily. “And now what shall we do? Would you care to see the house, or talk a while?”

  He sounded bafflingly cordial. Gees said, rather grimly: “We are in your hands.”

  “Ah! Then if you will come this way, please — ”

  And, turning, he led to the right along the corridor, toward the eastern end of the house, and opened a door in the inner wall by the simple expedient of pushing at its surface, on which was no more sign of a fastening than on that of his front door.

  This one swung inward soundlessly, and revealed a room panelled in black, old wood, softly carpeted, and furnished with low divans covered and cushioned in dark green, and with little, ebony three-legged stools and tables.

  There was a breast-high shelf opposite the doorway, and on it stood an array of bottles and decanters and glasses. Light, only just strong enough to reveal these things, entered through apertures in the ceiling, one at each corner, and Gees surmised an arrangement of reflecting mirrors on the roof of the house.

  “This was where you brought Helen — Miss Aylener and me, when we came to see you before,” Kyrle said with a certain eager appreciation of his surroundings.

  “I believe it is — yes,” MacMorn assented. “Do sit down.” He pointed at the divan nearest to his two guests. “You too, Mr. Green.”

  “We seem to be losing sight of our purpose in coming here,” Gees said quietly, and did not move. “It was — not a friendly purpose, as you seem to assume.

  “But before we even go so far as to sit down, I want to tell you — on our way here, we met the car which brought you and one other to this house yesterday afternoon, so your statement that Mr. Kyrle’s future wife is not in your hold does not impress me in the way you intended it should. I may tell you, too, that I saw you in London.”

  MacMorn seated himself very deliberately on one of the little ebony stools, and smiled, quite unruffled.

  “I have told you,” he said, speaking very slowly, “that Miss Aylener, Mr. Kyrle’s future wife, is not in my hold, and it appears that you do not believe me.

  “Since we are to understand each other fully before I can offer you entertainment of any kind, or before you go, answer me one question. Did the driver of the car I hired yesterday describe my companion of the journey to you?”

  As, voicing the question, he gazed at Gees directly, the little specks of fire that had appeared in his eyes when they had talked before over the incident of the black goat appeared again. The question itself revealed that his apparent omniscience was only apparent. He did not realize that Gees had not so much as spoken to the driver of the car.

  “He did not,” Gees answered, truthfully enough. “It was not necessary. You see, I know who went to Bristol.”

  For a fraction of a second, just long enough for Gees to see that the shot had gone home, MacMorn’s expression betrayed fear. Recovering his composure quickly, he gazed up from his stool at Gees, steadily.

  “I will not pretend to ignorance of things I know,” MacMorn said, as deliberately as when he had spoken before. “I do know, and how I know does not concern you, that you two men drove here from London yesterday, and since I overheard that you intended to get Mr. Kyrle’s future wife out of my hold, I conclude that you accuse me of kidnapping her.

  “I assure you that she is not here. Bring as large an army as you like, and you have my full permission to search the house and prove for yourselves that she is not. As for my companion on the journey here, if you will excuse me for a minute, I will see if she can receive you and assure you that she accompanied me yesterday.”

  He stood up as he ended his statement, and, without waiting for either of them to speak, went out by the door by which they had entered the room. It opened outward at his touch; evidently it swung both ways, but when it had closed on him and Gees tried to push it open again, it would not yield. There was some trick in its fastening.

  “Then we’re prisoners?” Kyrle said, dully.

  With his forefinger on his lips, Gees turned to him. “It doesn’t pay to say too much, or even to think too much, here,” he said.

  Kyrle went to the shelf and stood looking at its array of glassware, and Gees inspected, one after another, the four apertures in the ceiling through which light was admitted to the room, to see the sky reflected in angled mirrors.

  When his gaze ranged over objects in the room again, he realized how very little light the apertures really gave. It was no more than a twilight, for which their eyes had been prepared by the greater gloom of the corridor from which they had entered here with MacMorn.

  “Is it all a mistake of yours?” Kyrle asked abruptly.

  “We shall know better by seven o’clock tonight,” Gees answered.

  “Why — do you mean we shall be kept here till then? Must you talk in riddles all the time?”

  “Because I don’t know all the solution,” Gees answered. “If you choose to go — well, there’s nothing more to be said. And we’ve already said far too much for my liking, as it is.”

  The gloom in which they waited was heaviest in the middle of the room, farthest from the lighting apertures. There, Gees either saw or imagined, the faintest of mists was rising, an emanation that spread out as might smoke from a chimney into still air. He was not sure whether his eyes were tricking him until Kyrle spoke again:

  “Scent,” he said. “I didn’t smell any when we came in.”

  Gees too smelt it, then, and knew that what he had seen was no illusion, but some trick of MacMorn’s for which the reason would declare itself sooner or later. It was a sweet, heady scent, sensuously alluring.

  Gees tried to resist its influence on him, but Kyrle inhaled, op
en-mouthed and deeply, and laughed aloud.

  “It’s divine!” he exclaimed. “It’s like that drink he gave us.”

  He dropped back on the divan nearest to him and lay back among its cushions with closed eyes, luxuriating in the influence of the scent. With angry disgust at his weakness, Gees turned to the door and pushed at it, exerting all his strength, but in vain.

  And the strange, sweet scent was sapping his power of thought, assailing his will. Did he want so much to escape from it, in reality?

  “My companion of yesterday is tired after her long journey. I have asked her to receive you both, and in a few minutes we will go to her. Then you may hear from her own lips that she accompanied me here.”

  It was MacMorn who spoke, deliberately and quietly. Gees swung around from the immovable door and saw that all the walls of the room were solid-seeming as when he had entered, nor had there been sound or sign of a door, opening anywhere.

  Yet there stood MacMorn, a yard or so away from the corner opposite Gees and the door, and Kyrle had opened his eyes and sat up on the divan, though with no appearance of surprise. He looked like a man half-drugged, Gees realized.

  “And where in Beelzebub’s name did you spring from?” Gees exclaimed.

  MacMorn shook his head in reproof, and the little sparks gleamed momentarily in his eyes. “That is not a name to speak carelessly in this house, as you should know,” he said. “But I forget. Before I take you both to see my companion of yesterday — ”

  Without ending the sentence, he turned to the shelf at the back of the room and ranged three small glasses, and, as Gees watched him, took a bottle of clear fluid, removed its glass stopper, and from it half filled each of the glasses.

  Restoring it to its place on the shelf, he took another bottle of colorless content and from it filled each glass nearly to its brim, and the change that Helen had described took place.

  In each glass the contents foamed up pinkly, though not to the point of overflowing, and as the effervescence subsided and cleared away, the three fluids showed a deep, rich crimson.

  MacMorn took one glass and handed it to Kyrle, who took it without question, eagerly. Then, taking up the other two, MacMorn advanced to where Gees watched him, and held out one glass.

  He said: “I want us all to drink to our better understanding,” and waited while Gees hesitated.

  The heady allure of the scent was reason-destroying, a reinforcement to the friendly invitation. All Gees could think for the moment was that he had watched MacMorn pour all three drinks from the same bottles, and thus, if the stuff had a drugging effect, it would act on them all.

  He wished he had thought to ask Kyrle or Helen if all three of them had drunk together on that other occasion, but knew he could not put such a question, now. MacMorn’s fire-flecked black eyes were hypnotically compelling, and, though a sixth sense told him he ought not to touch the glass, Gees resisted the prompting and took it with his left hand.

  As he did so, the sleeve retracted from his wrist, showing the dial of his watch, with the hands at ten minutes past nine.

  “It’s early to start this sort of thing,” he said, in final, uselessly faint resistance. “And I think we already understand each other quite well.”

  MacMorn lifted his glass high, and the crimson fluid showed ruby-clear against the shaft of light in the corner behind him. “To our better understanding,” he said, and Kyrle stood up away from the divan and echoed, “Better understanding,” on which MacMorn put his glass to his lips and emptied it at a draught.

  Then Gees too drank, but without echoing the toast, and felt the drink as a limit of ecstasy as he put the glass down on an ebony table beside him. Involuntarily, facing MacMorn as he stood, he closed his eyes, and felt that he lived through limitless years of joyous strength.

  For a brief interval the warning sense that had bidden him refuse the drink insisted that he must be on his guard, held him to his distrust of MacMorn, and then it dulled to sleep.

  The man was a magician, but a splendid magician; he had said with obvious sincerity that Helen Aylener was not here, that he was not responsible for her disappearance, and had offered to show them the one who had accompanied him here. The almost invisible mist with which the scent had first become perceptible had thickened so that the room was in a haze: Kyrle half-reclined among the cushions of the divan, smiling, his eyes shut.

  The whole affair was monstrous, devilish! MacMorn had tricked them as easily as if they had been children. Gees opened his lips to damn the man for his black art, but all he said was:

  “A magic compound, your drink.”

  Thus the sense of it, but he knew he was speaking in a language he had never spoken before, never heard before. There were two of him, the sane, practical self of everyday, and this new self which spoke with tongues, felt at one with MacMorn, and felt, too, an immeasurable vitality with which his normal self was shut from expression.

  “Let us go,” MacMorn said, and Gees knew that he too spoke in the odd, musical-sounding, unknown yet known language. “I will prove to you that your suspicions were wrong,” and he went toward the door.

  “But Kyrle is to come too,” Gees found sanity enough to question.

  “When he wakens,” MacMorn dissented. “It is you whom I must convince.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  through the magic doors

  He laid his hand against the door that Gees had found immovable, and it swung outward with, apparently, no more than a touch. Gees lifted his hand to his forehead momentarily in puzzlement, and again saw the dial of his wrist watch. Half past ten!

  And not more than five minutes before, he would have sworn, he had drunk the crimson fluid! But, unless the watch was misleading him, an hour and twenty minutes had passed since he had put the glass down.

  They were in the bare corridor again, and the door closed of itself, quite silently. Again the humming of the gale outside was audible, and there, by the outer door, lay the automatic pistol Kyrle had put down. MacMorn almost paused as they passed it, as if to see whether Gees would move to pick it up, but he did nothing of the sort. His sane self remembered that he had another pistol in an armpit holster inside his shirt, one that MacMorn had not suspected.

  The bare floor of the corridor was soft and rubbery, and gave back no sound as they walked on it. So much strangeness in this place and in MacMorn called for explanation, but there was no time to ask for it. Coming to another doorway, MacMorn knocked and listened, but if a reply was given Gees did not hear it.

  Then MacMorn thrust the door inward, and stood back for Gees to enter just such a dim, sensuous-looking apartment as he had left. It was twin to the other in every way, except that its fabrics and cushions all had a silky luster of paler green, shot with silver.

  In the very middle of the room, where the light fell least, stood a girl with night-black hair and dark, soft eyes. One slender-fingered hand was laid on her breast, her other arm revealed its perfect modeling through a semi-transparent sleeve as it hung beside her, and the ankle-length, antique-looking robe she wore betrayed the lines of a perfect figure.

  With her dark eyes directed full at Gees, and a half-smile curving her lips, she waited for one or other of the two men to speak.

  “I have brought my friend to see you,” MacMorn said, still speaking in the language Gees knew and yet did not know. “Will you tell him when and how you came here?”

  “Yesterday, with you,” she answered, glancing momentarily at him, and then returning her gaze to Gees.

  He felt that, if she had not spoken in the language which made all this fantasy still more unreal, he would have recognized the voice. Yet he knew that he had never seen her before. She was one with that strange scent, one with the crimson drink — she was in the incarnation of them both, ecstasy embodied.

  “That is all,” MacMorn said. “Rest again, now.”

  “May your friend not stay awhile?” she asked, and her half-smile grew to completeness as she gazed at Ge
es. He knew he would have responded to the invitation, but MacMorn said:

  “Not now, child. Later, it may be,” and drew back from the room. Gees had no choice but to follow him.

  The door closed noiselessly. Again the gale outside sounded, a roar of driving fury, now.

  For a moment Gees remembered the hour and twenty minutes of which MacMorn had somehow robbed him, and was about to question him, when MacMorn spoke.

  “This inner wall that you see,” he said, “is that of the central tower of the castle which stood where the house stands now. It is old, so old that the wood covering was needed to preserve it.”

  “Wood to preserve stone?” Gees asked incredulously.

  “I did not say the castle was built of stone,” MacMorn answered.

  “Then — ?” He left the question incomplete, and realized that he was speaking his normal language again. Some of the spell was passing, evidently, for while MacMorn and the dark beauty had talked, he himself had thought in that other tongue, understood without need for translating.

  “We built with what came to our hands,” MacMorn said.

  “So?” Gees laughed. “You know what you have just said?”

  “Only we two know that I said it,” MacMorn retorted. “And if you repeated it, who in this age of fools would believe all that you and I know as real?”

  He took a couple of steps toward the room in which they had left Kyrle, and faced about again. The gale outside, strengthening as the day advanced, rumbled in deep-toned anger, and though there was a floor above this on which they stood, the faint hiss of hard-driven rain on the roof was audible. MacMorn looked at Gees and smiled.

  “Have I convinced you?” he asked.

  “Convinced me?” Gees echoed. “We talk in circles, arrive nowhere. You show me an impossible woman for a minute, and try to convince me Helen Aylener is not here, because that woman says she came here with you yesterday. Before that, you made some spell that took an hour and more clear out of my memory — ”