The Winged Bull

by Dion Fortune

  ‘No, you don’t!’ said Murchison, tightening his grip upon her. She began to struggle in a half-hearted fashion, and naturally made no impression on the big and powerful man, who held her gently enough, but without the slightest intention of letting her go. She looked up into his face with a surprised expression, as if inquiring what he were about.

  ‘You’re not going,’ he said, smiling down at her.

  She shuddered, and pressed closer to him, looking apprehensively over her shoulder. Then, all of a sudden, she shrieked and jumped as if red-hot iron had touched her, and began to struggle like a mad thing. Murchison hung on to her relentlessly, crushing her into immobility against him till she could do no more than quiver. Brangwyn watched them, never stirring, and saw a curious change come over the man’s face, the change he had seen come as zero hour approached, and he got ready to take his men over the top. Murchison’s eyes grew bleak and blue and wide in the inhuman glare of the berserker, and Brangwyn’s imagination pictured a winged helmet on the shaggy fair hair. He wondered what was happening at the other end of the telepathic wire, and reckoned that something was coming over that had not been reckoned on. Murchison was in a towering rage, that was obvious; the blind, blazing eyes were seeing something pictured in the imagination, and a stream of rending, tearing hate, as destructive as dynamite, was being poured out on to it. If Fouldes and Astley were en rapport at the other end of the telepathic wire, they were getting it in the neck. Brangwyn wondered how his sister was faring in the midst of this furious strafe. Murchison, oblivious of everything save the vision before his mind’s eye, appeared to be squashing her absolutely flat.

  Then suddenly a change came over the atmosphere of the room. The strange, evil power that had been pouring in as steadily as waves beating into a bay, broke and starred like a smashed mirror, running in every direction like spilled quicksilver, and in another moment the room was empty.

  ‘Phew!’ said Brangwyn, relaxing with a gasp of relief. He saw Murchison let go of Ursula and stare at her as if he had never seen her before. Ursula was panting, evidently having had all the breath squeezed out of her. They both looked perfectly normal, and very surprised and self-conscious, and with one accord they turned and gazed at him apprehensively. He, for his part, would have liked to have embraced and blessed the pair of them. The operation was going according to plan.

  Ursula, recovering her self-possession first turned and led the way back to the fireside, Murchison following.

  ‘Well,’ said Brangwyn, breaking the embarrassing silence, ‘So that’s that.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Murchison, dropping into a chair as if exhausted. ‘That is very much that.’

  Ursula Brangwyn stared at him without speaking, a strange expression on her face, as if she had suddenly perceived all manner of unsuspected potentialities.

  Murchison had no difficulty whatever in getting to sleep when he retired to bed for the second time that night. He was as completely exhausted by his strafe as if he had done a long cross-country run. As soon as his head touched the pillow he was off, and knew nothing more till late morning.

  When he arrived down in the dining-room after a hasty toilet, he found Brangwyn and his sister lingering over the after-breakfast cigarettes.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ inquired Brangwyn.

  ‘So-so. A bit as if I’d had a night on the tiles.’

  ‘I thought you would. That is because you are not in circuit. If you had been in circuit with Ursula, you would have been all right. I must show you that trick before we have any more of these doings. I am afraid we are likely to have one or two more attempts before they give it up as a bad job,’ said Brangwyn, trying to speak casually. ‘So we may as well get the circuit in working order so as to be prepared for all eventualities. Go on, Ursula, charge him up again.’

  Ursula flushed scarlet, and flashed an angry look at her brother.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘Go on, my child. It’s the least you can do. He’s run himself out for you.’

  The girl rose reluctantly and advanced towards the embarrassed Murchison, who wondered what in the world was going to be done to him.

  ‘Put the palms of your hands against hers and enter into it imaginatively. Take what she is going to give you,’ commanded Brangwyn.

  Murchison, looking about as receptive as a shying horse, did as he was bid. He felt a pair of small, cold palms pressing against his. Nothing happened. Ursula Brangwyn looked so cross and uncomfortable that he forgot his own embarrassment in feeling sorry for her. He thought he felt a faint tingling warmth coming into the palms, but before he could be sure it was not his imagination, she withdrew them.

  ‘It’s no good, I can’t do it. My hands are cold,’ she said, and walked out of the room.

  Brangwyn made no comment on her going, but lit another cigarette. ‘You’ll be all right shortly,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Take life easily till you pick up.’

  Murchison smiled. ‘Am I a psychological car-smash?’

  ‘Good Lord, no, my dear lad. Your battery’s run down, that’s all that’s the matter with you.’

  ‘Well,’ said Murchison, rising limply from the table, ‘someone will have to charge me, for devil a spark can I get out of myself.’

  He went languidly up to his own quarters and went out on to the roof-garden and dropped on to a seat in the angle of the walls like a sick cat crawling into a patch of sunlight.

  The pale winter sun was doing its best, and there was quite appreciable warmth in the angle of the walls, open to the south and sheltered from the wind. He turned his face up to it, shutting his eyes against the bright light, and let the sunshine beat upon his skin, feeling instinctively that this was the one thing that could restore his drained vitality.

  He did not know that he was being observed through the glass door that led out on to the roof-garden, nor that Ursula Brangwyn, obeying the same instinct as himself, had come up, seeking the sunlight. Neither did he hear the door opened quietly, and the girl cross on tiptoe and stand beside him, an expression of resolution on her face, as if she had at last made up her mind to some irrevocable plunge.

  But she did not put her resolution into action at once, but stood looking down at the oblivious man on the seat, considering him. Murchison lay back in the corner of the seat looking utterly worn out, his head against the rough brickwork of the wall, the sunlight beating down on his face and revealing all the lines in it, and his frayed collar, and every crease and threadbare patch in his shabby clothes. The girl, gazing down at him critically, had a sudden revulsion of feeling for this man who looked like a tramp, and her resolution wavered.

  She could not go through with this thing. It was impossible. Her whole fastidious soul rose in revolt. She heard her brother’s voice saying, ‘Give it a fair trial, Ursula. It can’t hurt you to give it a fair trial. If it comes off on these lines it will be a much bigger thing than ever it was with Frank.’

  And she had replied, ‘I Suppose you fancy you are one of those old priest-kings of Atlantis?’

  And he had answered, ‘I was once, or so I think.’

  A strange thing, reincarnation, mused the girl, gazing down at the face of the man in front of her, who seemed to have dropped off to sleep. What had this man been in past lives? Had he ever had any connection with her? She thought not. There was no responsive stirring of memory within her at his approach. It was not like Frank, whom she had known at once. They had rushed together like twin souls. For once she doubted her brother’s wisdom. He looked a pretty hopeless proposition, this rough, trampish individual.

  She stood looking down at the man, studying his face and hesitating. Alick had said he was ten years older than herself; but he looked much older than that. She had thought before that his expression was sulky and bad-tempered, but it did not look like that now. He simply looked very weary, and melancholy almost to hopelessness.

  Ursula Brangwyn felt bitter a
nd disillusioned at that moment and very disinclined to go on with the experiment. She gazed with repugnance at the grime of the old trench-coat he was wearing. How grubby it was! She wondered how he had managed to get those curious streaks of dirt on the shoulders, and suddenly realized that those must be the marks made by the straps of a haversack. She had been old enough to remember the War days vividly, and there came back to her a scene at a railway station, with men clad just like this one lying asleep on benches, and something in her esteemed very highly these men who had stood between her and destruction.

  Murchison slid yet lower on the seat, and cricked his neck at an angle that awakened him. He looked at her in surprise for a moment, and then got clumsily to his feet, stiff from sleeping in a constrained position.

  Ursula plunged without more ado. ‘I was so sorry I couldn’t magnetize you just now,’ she said, speaking quickly and nervously, ‘it just wouldn’t work. I don’t know why. One has to feel in the mood for those things. But I’ll do you now, if you like.’

  Murchison looked down at her quizzically. ‘What is it you propose to do to me?’

  ‘Don’t you understand these things?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t. They’re all Greek to me.’

  ‘But Alick said you knew a lot about them?’

  ‘I’d never heard of ‘em when I came to the flat a couple of days ago.’

  The girl, who had been holding out her hands towards him, expecting him to press his palms against them, dropped her arms to her sides and stared at him in perplexity. ‘Then — then you haven’t had things explained to you?’

  ‘No, Miss Brangwyn, I’ve had nothing explained to me. I am not paid to ask questions. I’m paid to do as I’m told.’ The girl went scarlet to the roots of her hair, and he wondered why. His remark had seemed to him innocent enough. ‘Your brother told me that you had had a psychological car-smash over these blighters, and asked me if I’d bring the breakdown van out to you. He gave me to understand that you and he and Fouldes had been doing some sort of a psychological experiment, when Astley butted in and shunted you off the rails. He wants to repeat the experiment with me in the place of Fouldes, up to the point where it ran off the line, so that he can get you back on to the rails, as it were. That’s all I know about it.’

  Ursula Brangwyn looked at him with a strange expression on her face, which he could not fathom.

  ‘And what do you suppose will be the next move after I am back on the rails?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Brangwyn said he would help me to get another job when he no longer needed me.’

  The girl laughed a sudden, nervous laugh that had no mirth in it. ‘Do you realize that if we do this experiment, and it comes off, you will never get rid of me? That if we establish the magnetic circuit that Alick wants us to establish, it can’t be broken — that is, not easily.’

  ‘I understood that he intended to use me as a kind of scaffolding while you were rebuilding, and that when the job was done I should be taken down and carted away. That was how I worked it out.’

  ‘Then you worked it out wrong. You will be built into the structure if this goes through. Don’t you realize,’ she said, ‘that the experiment is already well under way, and it is too late to back out, even if we want to? You took what was meant for me and short-circuited it. Alick is perfectly right. Hold out your hands. No, like that, fingers up. Now press your palms against mine.’

  He did as he was bid. The girl’s feelings were evidently deeply stirred, strive as she would to hide them, and her emotion infected him. He felt her hands trembling as she pressed her palms hard against his, but they were no longer cold, but burnt with a kind of dry, electric heat that pricked and tingled against his flesh as if an electric current were coming through them.

  He felt himself take a deep breath involuntarily, and then everything faded out except the girl’s face, with its great dark eyes fixed on his.

  He was aware of nothing save the tingling in his palms and a sense of glowing warmth that was spreading slowly all over him. How long it lasted, he never knew, but at length the girl stepped back, panting, withdrawing her palms from his, and the spell was broken. He found himself standing in the roof-garden in the pale winter sunlight facing a girl whose cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright and starry, and a curious smile on her lips. Something had been done to him but whatever it was, it had restored him to normal. He no longer felt that terrible drained sensation, as if he had had a bad haemorrhage.

  At that moment the glass door opened, and Brangwyn came out on to the roof. ‘Well, Murchison?’ he said, ‘feeling better?’

  ‘Yes, much better, thanks.’

  Brangwyn looked at Ursula, and smiled. She coloured up, and her eyes dropped. ‘I’m going out,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some shopping to do,’ and she vanished through the glass door.

  ‘Is it wise for her to go alone?’ asked Murchison.

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ And Brangwyn vanished precipitately on the heels of his sister, leaving Murchison alone to his meditations.

  Left to his own devices, Murchison lit a cigarette. What in the name of heaven was it all about? Brangwyn and Hugo Astley both dabbled in strange sciences, in what was, he supposed, called the occult. Only Brangwyn denied that it was occult; or, rather, he defined the occult in a way that Murchison had never heard it defined before.

  It was too cold to stop out on the roof-garden any longer, for the little clouds were gathering over the face of the sun, and it was evident that the best of the day was over. Murchison returned to his sitting-room and lit the gas fire, took from the small bookshelf beside his chair the story-book of ancient tales, and turned over the pages till he came to the winged bull.

  The great beast stood on his plinth exactly as had done his brother in the British Museum. Bull-foot advanced as if moving at a steady walking pace, unhurried, unpausing. Behind him was a vast pylon, and above its sculptured pediment was the dark blue of the night sky sown with stars. Firelight appeared to play upon the bull, illuminating his great flanks and throwing shadows across his mighty wings, folded back into darkness. The beast was all the more impressive for being but half seen.

  Murchison stared at him as if he would penetrate his secret by sheer force of staring.

  The ringing of the telephone bell, and Brangwyn’s voice summoned him to lunch, interrupted his meditations, and he went downstairs. After lunch, when they gathered round the fire in the lounge, Brangwyn tried to draw his secretary into the conversation, but Murchison was too awkwardly nervous for social small talk and they soon let him alone.

  ‘Now listen, you two children,’ said Brangwyn at last, breaking in upon Ursula’s nervous flow of trivialities. ‘Neither of you had much sleep last night, and I particularly want you to be in good form this evening, for we have some work to do. I suggest you take an afternoon nap:’

  Murchison saw Ursula’s hands suddenly clench themselves together as they lay in her lap, but she uttered no word. She evidently knew what was before them. He gazed steadily at his employer and his eyes had a peculiar cold gleam. Brangwyn had not bought his immortal soul. There were some things that were not included in the bargain, and he wanted to make sure that the evening’s transaction was not among them. ‘What is it we are doing tonight?’ he asked in level tones.

  ‘A tentative experiment,’ said Brangwyn, picking his words carefully and watching the other, ‘to see whether you are really suitable for the job we have in mind. I think you are, and so does Ursula—’

  ‘I never said that!’ Ursula interrupted hastily and angrily, ‘I said I was willing to give him a trial.’

  ‘If you go into it in that spirit, it certainly won’t work,’ said her brother.

  ‘I can’t help the spirit in which I go into it. That’s up to him. It’s for him to make me go into it in the right spirit.’

  ‘I think you are asking too much, Ursula. Remember he is new to these things. If you start throwing cold water about at the start, nothing can possibly co
me of it.’

  Murchison suddenly rose from his chair. ‘If I am the difficulty,’ he said quietly, ‘I am quite willing to withdraw. I don’t want to be forced on Miss Brangwyn any more than she wants to have me forced on her,’ and he began to walk away.

  He suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘You mustn’t do that,’ said Brangwyn in a low voice in his ear. ‘If you back out now we shall have the most appalling mess. Ursula has got to work with you. You have got to make her work with you. For God’s sake don’t let me down, you’re my only hope. If this doesn’t come off, Ursula will spend the rest of her life behind asylum bars.’

  Murchison stared helplessly at the girl’s white, rebellious face. He thought she looked nauseated, but he was too sorry for her to feel insulted. He went and sat down on the edge of the wide brick hearth beside her knee.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ he said. ‘Won’t you tell me what the difficulty is, and see if we can’t straighten it out?’

  The girl put her hands over her face. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I can’t explain. You wouldn’t understand.’

  He turned to Brangwyn. ‘Can’t you tell me a bit more? I’m working in the dark, and it makes things very difficult. I could be a lot more useful to you if I knew a bit more.’

  ‘Difficult. You see, the test is that you spot the thing for yourself. If I told you point-blank, it would invalidate the whole business. Trust your instincts and intuitions. Go ahead and never mind convention. I’ll accept full responsibility for the consequences.’

  ‘I’m afraid of letting you down.’

  ‘Ursula, my child, run off and get your rest,’ said Brangwyn suddenly.

  The girl rose, white as a sheet, and stood hesitating, looking from one to the other of the two agitated men. Then she turned to Murchison. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a broken Voice. ‘It isn’t that I don’t like you. I just can’t help it. I’m very grateful to you, and I’d be truly thankful for your help if you can put up with me,’ and she turned and ran out of the room.