by Jack Mann
“Any description of them?” Gees asked.
Bird shook his head. “Only that. Evil spirits, not men.”
For the last time, Gees tilted the two-gallon jar over the jug. Inverted it, in fact, and put it down without replacing the cork.
“Well?” he asked, after a thoughtful silence.
“In these appearances in Denlum,” Bird said, “there’s more than one case of a woman going mad and dying mad—as my sister did, though not through any of these things. Whatever possessed and killed her didn’t come from here, as far as I know. Besides, it wasn’t the time of an appearance. But others—and now Norris’s daughter.”
“And the connection between that and the things of Kir Asa?”
Gees asked, though he knew well what the reply would be.
“Robert Hunter, the one who built the House because he
couldn’t stand Nightmare any longer—wouldn’t rebuild there,”
Bird said. “By all I’ve read, if ever a man was near on devildom, it was Robert Hunter. Not so much after he got back here, but the things he did out East, beyond law, as it was then. I believe, sir, he brought one back, maybe was possessed by it himself. And Nightmare is its home, to this day.”
The ugly black marble clock on the mantel of the room struck midnight, and then there fell a silence between the two men that lasted for what seemed a long time. The stillness of the night seemed to press on them, to become a sound in their ears.
“Then,” Gees asked, and found that his own voice sounded still and small to himself, “why only these intermittent appearances?”
“Human wickedness,” Bird said solemnly. “I think—mind, it’s only what I think—but it looks to me it takes wickedness to give this thing strength enough to show itself. Maybe it’s there all the time, just as a dormouse is in his nest in winter, and human wickedness is warmth and strength to it, food and drink, as you might say, because it’s evil.”
“That’s a pretty heavy accusation against—somebody,” Gees remarked thoughtfully, after another long pause.
“I can’t help it, sir, and since you trusted me enough to tell me why you wanted to know, and I’ve told you what I have, I’m trusting you.”
“Not without good reason, you’ll find,” Gees told him.
“And now, sir, if you ain’t in a hurry to go to bed, what do you make of it—of the ghosts that chase women, or whatever this is?”
“I agree with you,” Gees said slowly. “Robert Hunter brought it here, unwillingly, in all probability, but he did bring it, or them. There may be more than one. I don’t know much about it, yet.”
“What makes you think more than one, sir?” Bird asked, rather uneasily.
“What I have heard about the present state of this Norris girl, and Hunter’s telling me he shot at the thing, apparently after she had had her seizure, or whatever you choose to call it.”
“But how—why should that?” Bird began, and paused.
Gees poured the last of the beer into the little man’s glass, and inwardly marvelled at his tankage capacity and the fact that he was totally unaffected by the alcoholic content of what he had drunk.
“For that,” he said, “on the theory that I’m inclined to accept, you have to go back to the very beginning of things—of human life.”
“I’d like to hear that theory, sir,” Bird said, “if—if it ain’t too late for you to explain it. Get the whole thing clear, I mean.”
“That is, as far as one can on what is not much more than guesswork,” Gees pointed out, “and it’s not too late as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know if you know that the first civilisation of which we have even so much as legendary record—or series of civilisations, it may have been—was that of Atlantis?”
“It’s in Plato and Homer,” Bird assented. “I’ve got Homer—
Pope’s translation. But I never thought of it as a series of civilisations, till now.”
“But why not? It may have been that, before the final catastrophe. Just as we’ve had Assyria, Egypt, Rome, and all the rest up to our own, with our catastrophe of a different sort just showing in the making. But never mind that. You admit Atlantis?”
“From what I’ve read, I’m inclined to believe there was a continent that sunk between Africa and America—when the Andes were pushed up in place of it, maybe,” Bird said. “Homer had grounds for what he said, I reckon, and other old writers mentioned it too, they say.”
“Yes, and Atlantis was peopled by mankind as it is to-day, homosapiens, as our breed is called. Know any anthropology, Bird?”
“Precious little, sir. I’ve read there were other sorts of men that died out. The Piltdown sort, and the Chinese skull they found.”
“Exactly. Neanderthal, Mousterian, and all the rest—you can study the casts of their skulls at South Kensington any time. Man in form, without doubt, differing altogether from the ape, and the highest forms of life in their time, but differing, in a very marked degree, from homo sapiens, the man of to-day, as well.”
“As how, sir?” Bird asked. He was listening with tense interest.
“Nearer the beast,” Gees said. “Beast in all but form and brain content, in fact. More cunning than other beasts, but still beast.”
“You mean—this thing is—that, survived?” Bird asked.
Gees shook his head. “Entirely the reverse,” he answered. “You say you admit the existence of Atlantis. Now go back behind it in time, and admit the existence of the Pacific continent of Lemuria.”
“You mean, before the moon was torn off the earth?” Bird suggested.
“It may have been—the deepest part of the Pacific is supposed to be the part of the world from which the moon was pulled by centrifugal force. But try to imagine a vast continent there, sunken now—sunken before ever man appeared on Atlantis, perhaps before Atlantis rose above the waters to sink again in its time. And the world still in its shaping, then, far hotter than it is now. Jungle and marsh, steamy and incredible to us if we should see it, and the things that inhabited it incredible too, dinosaur and brontosaur, nearly all reptilian life, and among it, such a being as we know only by the Chinese skull or the Piltdown remains, man as he was then, beast in all but form.”
“That’s a weird picture, sir,” Bird said, “but as yet I don’t get how these things come into it, if you say they’re not that sort of man.”
“As nearly as I can remember,” Gees said slowly, “the words in the story of the creation are—‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’ I believe they are the words.”
“You mean—that first type was given a soul?” Bird asked.
“Some part of that first type—the best of it. Enough to survive and evolve to homo sapiens, our type. That is to say, spirit amalgamated with beast—that ‘breath of life’ stands for eternal life, the soul that survives beyond the body. Physical life the creature already had.”
“Which is why, as it’s put in Scripture, the spirit wars against the flesh,” Bird suggested. “The beast side and the spirit side—”
“Blended and become one, as nearly as possible,” Gees completed for him. “They can never become quite one, but you get lower and higher instincts in every human being. And that blending of the two began on Lemuria, countless ages ago. Man, the part of him that survives beyond his physical body, came to earth as a spirit—was sent, to form humanity of to-day. A germ of spirit, call it, such as exists in a young baby, that had to learn to use the physical frame and the physical brain just as the baby has to learn before it can even move about, let alone think connectedly. At the best, a small manifestation of the goodness of God, and at the worst—well, Robert Hunter, say.”
“I don’t get it yet, sir,” Bird said, in a slightly puzzled way.
“Probably not,” Gees agreed. “To carry on, I think those wandering spirits were attracted more to the female than to the male, tried to blend in with the female rather th
an the male, knowing that the women were the mothers of the race. That’s mere conjecture on my part, but you may link it up with that head man’s saying that those ‘things of the waste’ meant death to women, whatever they might do or not do to men. That is to say, they try to blend with women, either knowing or ignorant of the fact that a soul is already there—they try to be the souls of those already soul-possessing bodies, and so you get demon-possession where they succeed. So much so, that even that tribe of poison-dart people wouldn’t let live any woman who had encountered them, if the hellish madness of that possession didn’t kill her of itself.”
“Then this, and—good God! Norris’s daughter!” Bird exclaimed.
“One moment, Bird,” Gees said. “You know—you can see for yourself every day of your life, that there are spirits and spirits, ranging in type from, say, a Pasteur or a Father Damien, giving his life for his kind, to Robert Hunter, to take an opposite example that you know of. So in that beginning of mankind of to-day in Lemuria, there were spirits and spirits, from good to evil, and some of them so utterly, entirely evil that even the soulless being which represented man was incapable of blending with them, revolted from them as beneath itself. They survive as elementals, and move tables about at séances, play what are called poltergeist tricks, give those foolish and misleading messages you can get through mediums, and try in every way fools like to give them to get into touch with humanity. Personate the dead for bereaved people who are deluded into believing they can get into touch with their loved ones who have gone past that gulf, though man is forbidden to attempt crossing it or looking beyond it except by death. They are all round us now, these elementals, and hating me like anything for what I’m saying, because it’s damming up one avenue of approach for them.”
“If you mean me, sir, I’m no avenue,” Bird said grimly.
“A possible one, as long as you live,” Gees pointed out. “So am I, if I were fool enough to change my mind about them. And apparently a particularly dangerous form of elemental survives in some quantities near this place they call Kir Asa, with enough of solidity accreted to it—not solidity, though, but astral entity of a sort that can become visible to human eyes, given human wickedness, as you said, to strengthen it—enough of that quality to give it visibility.”
“Not in any way human—not even a soul?” Bird asked thoughtfully.
“I should say not of high enough type to become a human soul in the first place—in the very beginnings of time,” Gees said. “The dregs, if you consider human evolution as a fluid. The slag, if you consider it as ore and a perfected soul as gold. And you know, I think, that every soul is given choice, evil or good. These things have chosen evil, survived from the beginning of time and gone on making themselves more and more evil, till they are so terrible that even the people of a poison-dart tribe regard them as death itself.”
“And that, something like that, has got hold of Miss Norris,”
Bird said. “You sure have handed me a packet to think about, mister.”
Gees noted the form of expression: this man, he realised, was varying his way of talking, and even the accent that he used, from sentence to sentence. He watched while Bird drank the last of the beer and put his empty glass down on the table.
“I ain’t had an evenin’ like this, some subject that got me and held my mind all the time, since I don’t know when,” he observed.
“What are the facts about this Miss Norris, before you go?” Gees asked him. “What, exactly, did happen to the girl?”
“She’d been over to see the Coshams—Mr. Norris and Mr.
Cosham are cousins, and the Norrises are stopping with him till Michaelmas, when Norris takes over a farm on the other side of the county,” Bird said. “She’d been over there one afternoon last November, and started back home about dusk—the beginning of the dusk, it’d be, by what Mrs. Cosham said, because they wouldn’t think of keeping her to be out after dark, or so she couldn’t get home before dark”
“But isn’t that rather unusual?” Gees asked. “How far had she to go to get home from the Coshams’ place?”
“A bit over a mile,” Bird answered. “Not a mile and a half.”
“Well, surely, in a normal way, a country girl would be safe in a country parish for that distance, even if it were dark?”
Bird shook his head. “This is Denlum, sir,” he said, “and what happened in the time of this present squire’s grandfather is still talked about—or was, till this fourth appearance of Robert Hunter’s devil. No woman would go about this parish alone after dark, and not many men, alone. Especially anywhere near Nightmare. She started out all right, and didn’t arrive, so Mr. Norris and one of his men went to look for her, and found her senseless between the two hedges that shut in the Nightmare roadway. And something went away from where she was laid as they two came up and found her. Danced away and laughed, Mr. Norris said, a sort of laugh that sounded to him like a devil out of hell. Mind you, sir, if ever there was a man who’d laugh at any sort of superstition, up to then, it was Mr. Norris. When he first took Nightmare—ten year and more ago, it was—he said he’d run down and throttle any ghost there was about the place, and nothin’ was ever goin’ to scare him away as it had other tenants. But he owned the sight and sound of whatever it was that danced and laughed away turned him cold with fear. He called out, but the thing danced away and didn’t answer.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Gees reflected. “And the girl?”
“Mr. Norris picked her up and took her home while the man he’d had go with him run for the post office and telephoned for their doctor—there ain’t a doctor in the village, and if I dig four graves a year it’s the outside. It was forty-eight hours, they said, before she did more’n breathe, and the doctor—Doctor Haverstock, it was—said the condition pointed to concussion, but there was no mark nor anything to show how she’d come by it. He pooh-poohed the idea of anything supernatural or out of the common. Then she begun to come round, and that was worse, in some ways, than if she hadn’t. Doctor Haverstock changed over from concussion to what he called mental shock.”
“How was it worse?” Gees asked.
“Well, May Norris had been not only the prettiest girl for twenty parishes round, but the nicest as well. It was a pleasure to see her as well as talk to her, and they were rare proud of her, the Norrises. Everybody liked her. And she come round to screamin’ fits, and a sort of cunning look in her eyes when she was quiet that frightened her mother and Norris, too. It wasn’t her right mind, they could see nearly at once, but a bad mind, one that spoilt her for them and made ’em afraid of her. Doctor Haverstock said whatever shock it was had deranged her for the time, and through him Mr. Norris got her into some sort of nursing home or mental place where they deal with cases of that sort. She wasn’t certified or anything of that sort, you understand, sir, just sent there for cure. Doctor Haverstock said it was only for the time.”
“And now, being cured, she’s back home,” Gees suggested, remembering the conversation between Tom and Jacob in the bar.
“Don’t you think it, sir,” Bird said gravely. “There was some sort of specialist, mind specialist—I forget what he was called—”
“Alienist?” Gees interposed helpfully.
“That’s the word! Charged Mr. Norris heaven alone knows how much to treat her, and said he reckoned hypnotism could put her back to her right self. I reckon he started on it, too, because last week Mr. Norris said he’d have her back home out of there if it killed her—he wasn’t goin’ to have her mauled about by doctors any longer, since they made her worse instead of better. So she was fetched back yesterday in a closed car, but as for being cured, she’s no nearer that than she was when she went to this place. And that’ll be why Squire Hunter called you in, I guess, sir, because she ain’t cured.”