Maker of Shadows

by Jack Mann

  “All the lives — ?” He gazed into her eyes, questioningly.

  “Nothing. Only, if there should be a tomorrow, remember it is because of you the lives I might have taken are foregone. If there should be a tomorrow! Do you remember that I trust you to set me free, save me from Gamel MacMorn when all doors are opened?” Her arms went round him as they sat among the cushions, and she stared at the door, not yet opened, while Gees looked into her hungry eyes.

  “Trust, then. But I asked you, while we wait — tell me of yourself as you have not yet told.” The language in which he must speak to her flowed as easily as his own, and he did not know that he spoke in it, so strong was the scent that drowned his reason.

  “What shall I tell you?” Her dark eyes laughed at him, and for a moment she tightened the clasp of her arms while her lips lay on his own. About them the shadows swayed, never completely within the range of his sight, but stressing a warning that, because of the scent obscuring his reason, he would not heed.

  “We are shadows in a shadow of a dream, you and I, Gail, but tell me of your wonderful self, of the dream that is you.”

  She said: “I am a shadow of that Unnamed who is possessed of all, yet whom none may possess. Yet I am not,” — she drooped her head so that the words had a muffled sound as she clung to him — “not that one. For you know — you who hold me know!”

  “I hold you, Gail, and I know,” he told her.

  “By the Kabiri, by Tanit, by the sevenfold essences that govern the outer darkness — by the Unnamed herself, you alone know!” she whispered.

  “That too, Gail, I know,” he said,

  She had sworn by Carthaginian gods. Was there in her a recurrent memory — was she one of the dark people who had come here in ships? Still the warning ticked in his brain, but it was clouded by the influence of the scent to indistinctness. Gail’s cheek was soft against his own.

  “Could I tell you more?” she asked caressingly.

  “Your place and people,” he said. “I know — only you and your name. There is still a little time.” He glanced at his wristwatch and at the closed door. Among the shadows he had seen the utter unreality of the world beyond that door — this, with Gail beside him, was real. He tried to thrust the vague warning out of his mind, to ignore it, since he could not understand it fully.

  “My people,” she said. “The Azilian people. They came to this shore in black ships, against their will. They set out toward the west, toward the country that the sea drowned, but when they set out they did not know the waters had covered it. A wind took and drove them to this shore, helpless — it was against their will, and the black ships were broken on the rocks. Only a few came alive to land.”

  Into his mind came Miss Brandon’s voice, speaking into a receiver held at his ear: “Miss Aylener said, ‘I saw the dark men land. They should have killed them all, then.’ ”

  He asked: “The country was already peopled — the Azilians landed among another people?”

  She said: “It is a picture in my mind, because the dark men were my fathers. They were few, but they ruled that other people and took sacrifices from among them when they set up the stones. So they made many shadows, and became kings and begot strong men.

  “Gamel MacMorn is wholly of the dark people, as am I. Neither son nor daughter of my people mixed with the slaves we made, but my blood is pure. I lay my hair against your lips — test its softness! My hands that hold you — no slave blood is in them, or in me. I am of the dark people.”

  An incredibility, that through all the ages two families should not have intermingled with the race they had conquered. But it was all incredible, all a dream from which there must be an awakening. Somewhere outside, red buses ran, and express trains carried their freights — through Paleozoic swamps and the fields of asphodel!

  Gail’s soft voice carried on her story — and in the back of Gees’ brain a puzzling half-consciousness told him that he knew the voice, had heard it somewhere, and would know it if only he could hear it in his own language. There was something he must do — but the scent was too strong.

  She said: “Day by day the black altars of the Unnamed were red, and she gave my fathers power. They begot many children and grew very strong. They forgot the country of hot sun, because here were many slaves, and the Unnamed was hungry. So they ruled, and made shadows.”

  He thought aloud: “Not always.”

  “A new people brought iron,” she said. “There was a first people of all, and the race of whom my fathers made slaves drove them underground. The people who live under the hills, and still Gamel MacMorn is kin to them, because in the very first days the dark people called on them for aid and they gave it, but only when a Morn allied with a woman from under the hills. So he is kin to that very first people, a race of shadows and dreams. But we are all shadows and dreams in the mind of the Unnamed — there is no reality apart from her purpose. I who might have had many lives am glad that for a little while she has given me strength of arms that hold me and the warm sweetness of lips kissing mine — for a little while, for a very little while!”

  It was all a dream, and there must be an awakening. Green and silver held close in his arms — deep sea water under moonlight — and the velvet softness of her lips, their questing warmth . . .

  CHAPTER XXIV

  time of the new moon

  The car came over the last rise, and Callum gripped hard on the wheel, for the wind struck strongly, and howled and roared at this thing which drove against it. In the saucerlike hollow before them, Brachmornalachan huddled, crouching under the assault of such a blast as struck it only once in a hundred years.

  Margaret Aylener stiffened at sight of one of the four ash trees uptorn, a flat lying trunk and a mass of killed foliage that had broken down the wall which enclosed her home. Callum saw it too, and spoke above the roaring gale.

  “When the wind dies, I’ll plant a sapling there,” he said.

  Smitten firs lay flat on the hillsides, but for them she had no pity. The fallen mountain ash brought to her not pity, but fear. The stars in their courses fought for MacMorn, it seemed to her then.

  The wind took a layer of peat turves from a stack beside the way, lifted and flung them, and one went trundling back out of sight, like a little devil running into freedom to work mischief. A ragged bundle of straw careened up the slope, wind-driven: the skeleton rafters of an unroofed cottage rose like bare bones above its walls, in the valley ahead.

  “You say that clock is right, Callum?” Margaret Aylener asked.

  “No more than five minutes either way, madam, and likely it’s fast. A week today, it was, I set it back.”

  “Then there still is time. I want you to stop at the post office on the way home, and ask if any telegram has come. There may be some message from Miss Helen, and I want to know at once, if there is.”

  “Aye, madam. I’ll stop and inquire.” The slope was with them, but the wind fought every yard of their advance. There were waves, real waves, driving across the tiny loch, and a line of white lather on the nearer, lee shore. To the right MacMorn’s house squatted, a stony gray break on the peaty slope, low and far-spreading; while three gray stones, equidistant from the house, stabbed at the blue-gray sky.

  Thirteen lives to each stone, she thought, and thirteen to each one that lay buried under the blackish, heather-dotted earth. There, in the circle of the stones, MacMorns had ruled while Ayleners contested their kingship: now, there were left only a dark man who made shadows, and a woman near the end of her life who would have given half her substance to end his power.

  “If there is a telegram, Callum, Bathsheba can tell you its wording. And perhaps you may not have to go to MacMorn’s, after all.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  The car dipped down and down. When Callum stopped outside the post office and opened the door to get out, the gale flung it back with a force that strained the holding strap, and he used both hands and some good part of his strength to shut it
and keep out the wind that hurtled round the saloon and ruffled tendrils of Margaret Aylener’s pale-gold hair.

  The hands of the clock on the dash moved on: time fled, careless of her will to arrest its passing. Callum came out from the post office and she asked — “Was there a telegram from Miss Helen, or any message?”

  “Nothing at all, madam,” he answered, as he started the car on the last little part of its journey toward her home.

  “Bathsheba told you there was nothing?” she insisted.

  “It was not Bathsheba told me anything, madam, but that girl Jennifer she has about the place. Jennifer said Bathsheba was not there, but went out last night and had not come back to sleep in her bed, which was made as it was yesterday when Jennifer went up with tea this morning.”

  “Bathsheba is missing?” She thought again that today was the day of new moon.

  Was Bathsheba Gralloch to disappear as had her sister Margaret, whom the years had made only a memory?

  “Aye, madam, but doubtless she’ll come back,” Callum said grimly.

  “Then if there had been a telegram from Miss Helen — ” She broke off, knowing that the implication was enough for him.

  “Nay, madam,” he said, “Bathsheba’s taught Jennifer, and she knows the instrument. She told me she called up only minutes ago, to make sure lest the wires should be down in this wind, and they were not. She’s a gey clever lass, is yon Jennifer. I’ll open the gate.”

  He drove through the gateway, and as they neared the shelter of her house the gale was a thunder overhead, updriven by the walls of unyielding stone. But away to the left lay the fallen mountain ash with the stone wall shattered under its branches, a trophy of the hurricane that roared into the land from the western sea. There was a salt tang in the air, a vestige of the hurtling waters over which this fury of wind had been conceived and born.

  “Callum?” She spoke as he turned the car to draw up before the doorway. “Elizabeth and Ettie can see to the trunks and carry them in, without your help, and you can leave the car here. It will come to no harm — unless this wind throws the house down on it. I want you to go straight to MacMorn’s.”

  “Madam — ” It was not a dissent from her wish, but a question for knowledge to equip him for his errand. “You’re certain she’s there?”

  “If there were any certainty at all, Callum, she would not have gone,” she answered. “I learned in London — he met her while we were abroad, and that must have been the beginning of it. Mr. Kyrle and Mr. Green have gone there, you tell me, but they have not found her — if they had, she would have seen the car and been out to welcome me. Wait, though. I will make sure.”

  She entered the house. Callum sat at his wheel, waiting until she appeared again and, looking in on him, shook her head.

  She said: “They have not come back, Callum, and there is no news of her. I want you to go there, now.”

  He said, looking at the clock on the dash: “It is very near the time of new moon.”

  “Go now, Callum — wait for nothing. You may yet be in time. Go now, I tell you!”

  He got out of the car.

  CHAPTER XXV

  the fallen stone

  No matter how strenuously Gees might try to disregard it, there was a monition in his brain, a warning which the scent would not let him perceive fully. MacMorn had contrived the scent to block out that warning: MacMorn had designed all this enchantment . . .

  Had MacMorn made and sent — Gail? But that was a monstrous impossibility, a thing too fantastic for weaving into this pattern of a dream. Gail was a reality. The faint pressure of her breath stirred his hair. A miracle of undreamed loveliness, she leaned close to him, and her eyes were dark lakes of questing beauty.

  Beyond their range the warning shadows ever eluded his vision, free for this hour to commune with none who was not yet a shadow, but not free to tell all they knew. Else, why had they driven him back to Gail when he had questioned as to what had become of Helen Aylener?

  Helen Aylener? Who was Helen Aylener?

  Gail drew him down among the cushions of the divan, and leaned over him. She said, very softly, “Sleep. Sleep and forget all things.” And her fingers went down and down over his face, while all her will impelled him to sleep. Enough of sanity remained for him to realize that she was trying to induce a hypnotic sleep, and he closed his eyes to escape the influence, for the wristwatch had told him that the time of opening doors was very near.

  “Sleep, and forget all things. Go down so deeply into sleep that you cannot even hear my voice. Sleep, go down into sleep.”

  For a little while her fingers passed down his face, and he knew again what the shadows had tried to warn him. At the very time for which she had asked him to save her from MacMorn, she tried to render him powerless!

  The caressing fingers ceased their touch on him, and he lay with closed eyes, breathing evenly. She asked: “Can you hear my voice?”

  Lying back among the cushions, he made no reply. The scent still enveloped him, but he resisted its drugging sweetness as he had resisted her will to spell him to sleep.

  He felt her draw away from him, heard the faint rustle of movement as she rose from the divan, and her deep sigh of satisfaction. Again he heard the mouse-scratching sound in the paneling, and opened his eyes. Gail stood with her back to him, looking into the dark corridor through which she had come with him from the green and silver room, and as he lay he could hear the humming of the wind outside; and the terrified “Maa-aa-a!” of a goat, and this abruptly silenced. He could guess the reason for the silence.

  The sound had come from the middle of the house, where the black altar in its circle lay open to the sky.

  With the opening of the door air eddied into the room, and the greenish haze of the scent became swaying vapor, thinning, becoming less potent. He had an illusion — it could be only illusion, surely — that Gail’s figure dimmed, even that its outline changed. She reached into the corridor to close the door, and, knowing that she would turn to face into the room again, Gees closed his eyes.

  He heard the rustle of her approach. It came into his mind that, since she knew the secret of these doors, she and he might have gone out by way of the visible door leading to the outer corridor, out from the house and beyond MacMorn’s reach, at any time she chose.

  The shadows had said that she had been forbidden to drink of the crimson fluid, and so had failed of her purpose. Did she think to retrieve that purpose by hypotising him to sleep through the time of opened doors?

  Though he knew her now as allied with MacMorn, the sense of her nearness was still a wonder of expectation, for the dream they two had dreamed lingered in his mind. He could never forget it; he wanted now to reach up and draw her close to him again, hold all the shining, yielding, tender miracle of her.

  He had been duped so easily. She must have been filled with inward laughter at the blind readiness with which he had accepted her for what she seemed. Were her dark eyes mocking him now as she looked down, bent over him, so closely that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face?

  But then he felt her lips brush against his own, and as she drew back he could hear the hurried unevenness of her breath. Then she must have drawn back, for he was no longer conscious of her nearness. She was standing by the divan, he guessed looking down, and he dared not open his eyes. She whispered, caressingly: “Dear man! Dear man!”

  Whispered in English! Then she, too, regretted that the dream had ended.

  He heard her faint, startled exclamation, and the clang of opening doors that must be thrown wide when the Unnamed descended along the path of the shadows.

  A wind rushed through the room, sweeping away the last vestiges of the scent and bringing a fresh tang as of the sea. He started up on the divan, and at his movement, Gail shrieked aloud and, turning, fled. The silence gave place to clamor of the gale and a faint sound of voices. There was no more enchantment. Reality had destroyed the glamor in which he had been bound — and
Gail had gone!

  He thrust himself up from the divan with his hands, and ran toward the door, snatching up his raincoat as he passed the place where he had thrown it — how many ages ago? Out into the corridor, in time to catch a glimpse of green and silver as Gail fled from the house. He gained the outer, open doorway, and saw her running down the slope toward the scribed monolith, a figure already shadowy in wreathing swirls of fog that drove before the mighty wind.

  He ran, neared her fleeing figure, and shouted: “Gail, Gail!” No longer a green and silver figure, and the light slenderness he had held in his arms appeared to run heavily, almost clumsily. And now it was no illusion that other lines mixed in with those of the shape he knew: to his sight she changed as she ran.

  A man fighting his way through the hurricane loomed before her — for a few moments she paused, and Gees halted to get out his automatic pistol, in case the man should be MacMorn.

  But he heard Callum call to her over the wind: “What are you — ?” and Gail interrupting in little less than a scream: “Dinna fret yersel’. T’is my ain business!” before she ran past the man, and grew shadowy in the driving mist, a heavy, blundering figure — Gail!

  Bathsheba Gralloch’s voice! Word for word, Bathsheba Gralloch’s reply to Kyrle, when he had run after her outside the gate of the Rowans the night before! Gail of the green and silver room, of the enchantment MacMorn had made, was Bathsheba Gralloch of reality.

  A sick rage possessed Gees. If MacMorn had faced him in that moment, he would have shot him dead. If, even when the dream had been most real, she had spoken one sentence in English, he would have recognized the voice, but MacMorn had guarded against that chance. Now, clear of the house and its spells, Gees could not remember so much as a phrase of the dark man’s language; it had served MacMorn’s purpose, and was swept from his mind as if he had never spoken it.

  He faced Callum. “Who was that — the woman who passed you?” he asked.