by Fritz Leiber
“That will do!” Abruptly deserting Alicia, Nils strode down upon us. There was wrath in every line of his dark face. “Jimmy, that boy is my friend! If he has ‘psychic potentialities,’ as you call it, let ’em alone. He doesn’t wish to develop into a ghost-ridden, hysterical, semi-human monstrosity, with one foot in this world and the other across the border.”
“Really,” drawled Moore, “that description runs beyond even the insolence I’ve learned to expect from you, Berquist. My wife is a psychic.”
Nils was not too easily crushed, but this time he had brought confusion on himself. “Ghost-ridden, hysterical, semi-human monstrosity” may have been an excellent description for Alicia. It is certain, however, that Nils had forgotten her when he voiced it. He flushed to the ears and stammered through an apology, to which Moore listened in grim silence.
Then Alicia spoke, with her customary dry directness.
“I am not offended. My guides do not like you, Nils, but that is because your opposition interferes with the work. Personally I like you for speaking frankly always. Take your unfortunate young friend, Mr. Barbour, and go away now.”
“Alicia!” Moore was half pleading, half indignant. “You agreed with me that Barbour had possibilities of mediumship almost as great as your own. And yet you send him away. Think of the work!”
“I tried to send him away the first time.” From beyond the lamp Alicia’s enormous eyes glinted mockingly at her husband. “You believed,” she went on, “that Mr. Barbour was naturally psychic, but undeveloped. Many times we have disagreed in similar cases. Your theory that more than half the human race might, properly trained, be sensitive to the etheric vibrations of astral and spiritual beings is true enough.”
“Then why did you—”
“Don’t argue, James. That tires me. I say that your belief is correct. But I have told you and, through me, my guides have told you that not everyone who is a natural sensitive is worthy of being developed.”
“I consulted you”—Moore’s voice trembled with suppressed irritation—“I consulted you, and you—”
“I said that a tremendous psychic possibility enveloped Mr. Barbour. That was true. Had I told you that the possibility was evil, that would have been equally true. But you would not have yielded to my judgment, and sent him away—as I tried to do.”
“Alicia,” cried her husband, “are we never to have any clear understandings?”
“Possibly not,” she said, with cool indifference. “I am—what I am. Also, I am a channel for all forces, good or evil. My guides protect me, of course. They will not let any bad spirit harm me. But I think Mr. Barbour was not glad that he stayed when I wished him to go. He has come back to me for help. I am not sure that I wish to help him. It was a long time before I was rested from my first struggle with the One he is afraid of.”
Nils made an impatient movement. “I don’t believe Clay needs any help except—pardon me, Alicia—except to keep away from this house and you.”
“Then why did he return here?”
“Because,” interpolated Moore, with a scowl for Nils, “he grew interested in his own possibilities. This attempt to frighten him is not only absurd, but the worst thing possible for him. Of course the invisible forces are of different kinds, and of course some of them are inimical. But fear is the only dangerous weapon they have. If they can’t frighten you, they can’t harm you.”
“Alicia,” cut in Nils “seems to disagree there.”
“Alicia does agree. She inclines to repel the so-called evil beings, not from fear of them, but because they are more apt to trespass than the friendlier powers. They demand too much of her strength. In consequence, I have had an insufficient opportunity to study them. If Barbour is psychic—and I should say that he very obviously is—then his strength, combined with Alicia’s, should be great enough for almost any strain. You are interfering here, Berquist. I won’t have it. I—will—not—have it.”
“And my friend is to be sacrificed so that you may study demonology?”
“Berquist, I have nothing to do with demons or daevas, devils or flibbertigibbets. You use the nomenclature of a past age.”
“Verschlingener des Lebens!” quoted Nils quickly. “You didn’t boggle over nomenclature when Alicia warned us that an ‘eater of life’ was present.”
“Oh, God give me patience!” groaned Moore. “I try to trace a reference, and you—” He broke off and wheeled to the small, shadowy figure beyond the lamplight. “Alicia, exactly what did you mean when you said that an ‘eater of lives’ had entered the room? You can put us straight there, at least.”
“I meant,” drawled Alicia, “one of those quaint, harmless beings whom you are so anxious to study at anybody’s expense. Not a demon, certainly, in the sense that Nils means. But not company I care for, either. No, I am not afraid of this one. He has the strength of an enormous greed—of a dead spirit who covets life—but he will not trap me again into lending my strength to his purpose.”
“His! Whose? Do be plain for once, Alicia.”
“I try to be,” she retorted composedly. “I could give him a name that one of you at least would recognize. But that would please him too well. There is power in a name. Every one does not know that, nor how to use it. This one does. He bears his name written across his forehead. He wills that I shall see it and speak it now. Once he surprised me into speaking it, but that was Mr. Barbour’s fault. He threw me off balance at a critical moment by turning on the lights. You have probably forgotten the name I spoke then, but I doubt if Mr. Barbour has forgotten. This one whom I refuse to name has no power over me. I have many friends among the living dead who protect me from such dead spirits as this one—”
“Just a minute, Alicia!” Moore was exaggeratedly patient. “I can believe in a dead body, and through you I’ve come to believe in live spirits, disembodied. But a dead spirit! That would be like an extinguished flame. It would have no existence.”
She shook her head. “Please don’t argue, James. You know that tires me. A spirit cannot perish. But a spirit may die, and, having died, exist in death eternal. There is life eternal and there is death eternal. There are the living spirits of the so-called dead. They are many and harmless. My guides are of their number. Also there are dead spirits. They are the ones to beware of, because they covet life. Such a one is he whom I called ‘an eater of lives,’ and who is better known to Mr. Barbour than to me. That is not my fault, however, and now I wish no more to do with any of it. I must insist, James, that you ask Mr. Barbour to leave. In fact, if he remains in the house five minutes longer I shall go out of it.”
Her strange eyes opened suddenly till a gleam of white was plainly visible all around the wide blackness of them. Her porcelain, doll-like placidity vanished in an instant.
“Make him go!” she cried. “I tell you, there is an evil in this room which is accumulating force every moment. I tell you, something bad is coming. Bad! Do you hear me? And I won’t be involved in it. I won’t! I won’t!”
Her voice rose to a querulous shriek. A spasm twitched every feature. And then she had sunk back in her chair with drooped lids.
“Bad!” she murmured softly.
CHAPTER XII.
THE SCARLET HORROR.
“You will have to go, Barbour,” said Moore heavily. “I am sorry, but there are occasions when Alicia must be humored. This seems to be one of them. Unfortunate. Very—unfortunate. Perhaps another time—”
He paused and glanced suggestively toward the door.
All the while that they had argued and quarreled over me, I had sat as apparently passive as the lay figure to which I had once compared Alicia. It was, however, the passivity not of inertia, but of high-keyed endurance. What Alicia felt I don’t know. If it was anything like the strain I suffered under, I can’t wonder that she wished to be rid of me.
“Another time,” said Moore, and looked toward the door.
I rose. Instantly Berquist was beside me. He took my arm—tried to draw me away—out of the room.
I shook him off. When I moved it was toward Alicia. Before either Moore or Nils realized my objective, I was halfway around the table. Alicia, her eyes still closed, moaned softly. She cried out, and thrust forth her hands in a resisting motion.
“Stop!”
That was Moore’s voice; but it was not for his sharp command that I halted. There was—it was as if a wall had risen between Alicia and me. Or as if her outstretched hands were against my chest, holding me back. Yet there was a space of at least two yards between us.
“What do you want, Barbour?” demanded Moore roughly. “I said you would have to go!”
“I wish,” I forced out, “to make her undo what she has done to me!”
“Then I was right!” cried Berquist indignantly.
I stood still, swept by wave upon wave of the force that willed to absorb me. The past weeks had trained me for such a struggle. Though the face of the Fifth Presence remained invisible, its identity with the intangible power I fought was clear enough to me—and I hated the face! I repulsed the enveloping consciousness of it as one strives to fling off a loathsome caress.
While I stood there, blind, silent, at war, Berquist continued: “Now I know that I was right! Jimmy, you have let this boy suffer in some way that I neither understand nor wish wholly to understand. But believe me, you’ll answer for it! Clay, lad, come away! You are courting disaster here. Alicia can’t help you. She is a poor slave and tool for any force that would use her. Why, the very atmosphere of this house is contagious! Psychic! Many people are immune. Moore is immune. But I tell you, there has been more than one time when I have resolutely shut my senses against the influence, or Alicia would have dragged me into her own field of abnormal and accursed perceptiveness. It’s because I resist that they won’t have me at a séance. Come away!”
“No!” They could not guess, of course, that I spoke from out a swimming darkness, slashed with streaks of scarlet. “No!” I muttered again. “This woman here—she can help me, she shall help me! Moore, I’ll—I’ll wring your neck if you don’t make her help me!”
Through the swimming, scarlet-slashed gloom I drove forward another step. Came a rush of motion. There was a vast, muffled sound as of beating wings. A trumpet-like voice cried out loudly: “I’ll settle with you once for all!” it shouted. And then something had thrust in between Alicia and me.
Instantly the gloom lifted.
There at my right hand was the large table, with the shaded lamp and the books and papers strewn over it. To my left the massive, empty chair in which Alicia was wont to be imprisoned during a séance. Beyond that hung the straight, black folds of the curtains which concealed the cabinet.
Though I turned my head to neither side, I saw all these things as though looking directly at them. And also, with even more unusual distinctness, I saw what was straight ahead of me.
Between me and Alicia the figure of a man had sprung into sudden existence. In no way did this figure suggest the ghostly form we might expect from what is called “materialization.” The man was real—solid.
He was of stocky, but not very powerful build. He was dressed in gray. His face—ah! Only once before had I seen this man’s face with open gaze. But many times it had haunted my closed lids!
Smooth, boyish, pleasant, with smiling lips and dear, light-blue eyes—my own eyes, save that the amused gleam in them did not express a boy’s unsophisticated humor.
Not a bodiless face this time, afloat in mid-air or lurking behind my lids. This was the man himself—the whole, solid, flesh-and-blood man!
I could not doubt that he was real. His hand caught my arm—roughly for all that amiable gentleness the face expressed. I felt the clutching fingers tight and heavy. He clutched and at the same time smiled, sweetly, amusedly. Clutched and smiled.
“Serapion!” I whispered. And: “Serapion!”
His smile grew a trifle brighter; his clutch tightened. But I was no longer afraid of him. The very strain I had been under flung me suddenly to a height of exalted courage. Instinctive loathing climaxed in rebellion.
He clasped my left arm tight. My right was free. I had no weapon, but caught up from the table a thing that served as one.
And even as I did it, that clear side-vision I have referred to beheld a singular happening. As my head grew hot with a rush of exultant blood, something came flying out through the curtains of the cabinet.
It was bright scarlet in color, and about the size of a pigeon or small hawk. I am not sure that it had the shape of a bird. The size and the peculiarly brilliant scarlet of it are all I am sure of.
This red thing flashed out of the cabinet, darted across the room, passing chest-high through the narrow space between the suddenly embodied Fifth Presence and myself—and vanished.
I heard Alicia crying: “Bad—bad! It has come!”
And then, in all the young strength of my right arm, I struck at the Fifth Presence. My aim was the face I hated. The weapon—a queer enough one, but efficient—sank deep, deep—buried half its length in one of those smiling, light-blue eyes.
He let go my arm and dashed his hand to his face. The weapon remained in the wound. From around it, even before my victim fell, blood gushed out—scarlet—scarlet. Below the edge of his clutching hand that would clutch me no more I could see his mouth, and—God help me!—the lips of it smiled still.
Then he had writhed and crumpled down in a loose gray heap at my feet.
“Barbour! For God’s sake!”
The man I struck had sunk without a sound. That hoarse, harsh shout came from Nils. Next instant his powerful arm sent me spinning half across the room. I didn’t care. He dropped to his knees. When he tried to straighten the gray heap, his hands were instantly bright with the grim color that had been the flying scarlet thing’s.
But I didn’t care!
I had killed him—it! The Fifth Presence had dared embody itself in flesh and I had slain it!
Nils had the body straight now, face uppermost. The light of the lamp beat down. Creeping tiptoe, I came to peer over Nils’s shoulder. The lips. Did they still smile? Then—
But there is an extremity of feeling with which words are inadequate to deal. Leave my emotions and let me state bare facts.
The gray suit in which I had seen the Fifth Presence clothed was the same faintly checked light suit I had wondered at Moore’s wearing in November.
And the face there in the lamplight, contorted, ashen, blood-smeared, was the face of James Barton Moore!
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS.
Though I had a few obscure after-memories of loud talking, of blue uniforms that crowded in around me, of going downstairs and out into open air, of being pushed into a clumsy vehicle of some kind, and of interminable riding through a night cold and sharply white with snow, all the real consciousness of me hovered in a timeless, spaceless agony, whereby it could neither reason nor take right account of these impressions.
Thrust in a cell at last, I must have lain down and, from pure weariness of pain, fallen asleep. Shortly after dawn, however, I awoke to a dreary, clear-headed cognizance of facts.
I knew that I had killed.
When I threatened, Moore had sprung in between me and his wife, intending, no doubt, with that hot temper of his, to put me violently from the house. His physical intervention had shocked me out of the swimming shadows, then rapidly closing in, and the Fifth Presence had chosen that opportunity for its most ghastly trick.
The face I had struck at was a wraith—a vision. My weapon—one of those paper files that are made with a heavy bronze base and an upright, murderously sharp-
pointed rod—had gone home in the real face behind. Instead of slaying an embodied ghost—a madman’s dream!—I had murdered a living man.
Last night, the killing and the atrocious manner of it had been enough. This morning, thought had a wider scope. I perceived that the isolated horror of the act itself was less than all. I must now take up the heavy burden of consequences.
The hard bed on which I lay, the narrow walls and the bars that encompassed me—these were symbols by which I fore-read my fate.
I, Clayton Barbour, was a murderer. In that gray, early clear-headedness I made no bones about the word or the fact.
True, I had been tricked, trapped into murder; but who would believe that? Alicia—perhaps. And how would Alicia’s weird testimony be received in a court of justice, even should she prove willing to give it?
I perceived that I was finished—done for.
Life as I was familiar with it had already ended, and the short, ugly course that remained to be run would end soon enough.
Then for the first time I learned what the love of life is. Life—not as consciousness, nor a state of being, nor a thought; but the warm, precious thing we are born to and carry lightly till the time of its loss is upon us.
Afterward? What were dim afterwards to me? Grant that I, of all men, had reason to know that the dying body cast forth its spirit as a persistent entity. Grant that the thin shadows of ourselves survived the flesh. That was not life!
Let me grow old in life, till its vital flood ran low, and its blood thinned, and its flesh shriveled, and weariness came to release me from desire. Then, perhaps, I should be glad of that leap into the cold world of shadows. Now—now—I was young.