by Talbot Mundy
“I will have you punished.” She was almost over the edge of one of her hysterical fits, deliberately brought on as a last resource, or last but one, when she felt her will frustrated. Joe knew the symptoms — recognized the catch in her voice — felt half ashamed, from habit, of his own indifference — and wondered what the Yogi would do to quell her tantrum. She gulped twice. “Wait until Mr. Cummings learns you have kept me a prisoner here in the dark!”
Joe saw her then. He saw the color of a coming tantrum, just as clearly as he heard the rumble of dying thunder and the wind-borne swish of rain. She was all smoky crimson, shot with a disgusting greenish violet that he knew was self-pity, although he did not know how he knew it. But the smoky red glowed into passionate crimson when Poonch-Terai’s voice answered her:
“I gave you twenty minutes. Why waste time with that fool?”
“Your Highness—” “Shut up!” he retorted. Then, either to the Yogi or to every one: “Go ahead. Can’t you feel I’m making no resistance? I could easily ruffle the mirror. But I want to see her shown up.”
“You! You traitor!” she exploded. “Shall I tell them—” But she suddenly lapsed into silence.
“Judgment! I have demanded judgment!” said the Yogi. “If it fall on my head, let it.”
Not a sound then, except heavy breathing from Poonch-Terai’s direction. Presently something moved in mid-room vague — noiseless — fishy — gray-green — gradually taking shape. Then suddenly, as if it gathered atoms to itself and by force of will, it grew darker. It seemed to grow solid. It swayed. It was a cobra, ten times bigger than the biggest ever seen — erect — its hood raised — in a sort of pool of smoky dim-green light that cast no shadow. It struck, with the speed of lightning, toward where Rita and the Yogi sat. It struck at Joe, but seemed unable to get near him; he felt as if there were a window between it and him. It struck three times toward where Annie Weems sat, and Joe heard her saying the Lord’s Prayer, so he knew she saw it. Then, its forked tongue flicking in and out, it gradually faded as if withdrawn into infinity from whence it came.
“Like unto like!” said the Yogi. “None can summon that who loves not malice. If he can tame malice, he can tame that. If not, though it strike at others, shall it spare him?”
Poonch-Terai groaned aloud. “Make haste!” he urged. He sounded like a man in agony. It was hard to believe he was not. But he had said he was all right.
“What’s the matter with you?” Joe asked. Silence. Then strange sounds, stealthy, as of some one creeping on his hands and knees. A sudden blow — and two oaths, one in English. Bruce struck a match. Hawkes was on his knees between Rita and the Maharajah, who had been knocked down and was crawling away; he reached the darkness by the courtyard door before the match burned Bruce’s fingers and Bruce dropped it.
Rita: “Did you hurt him, Hawkesey?”
“No, Miss. Couldn’t see him, or I’d ha’ hit him proper. You black blackguard! Something told me you were sneaking up on her.”
Bruce struck two matches, but the head fell off one and the other spluttered and went out.
“Light that lamp!” commanded Mrs. Beddington. “Dammit — I say, dammit, light that lamp, you—” “Hold your horses! Very well,” said Bruce. “Be patient while I find the thing.” His fingers fumbled with the match-box and a match broke, making hardly a spark.
“Sir — beg pardon, sir,” said Hawkes, “but may I offer a suggestion?”
“Go ahead. What is it?”
“See this to a finish. See it through in the dark, sir. I mayn’t tell no secrets, but I’ve seen this kind o’ thing before. With your permission, sir, I’ll stay here. If the Maharajah moves I’ll bust him in the nose.”
Bruce did not trouble to answer him. His fingers fumbled with the match-box and a match broke.
“Damn!” he muttered. “That’s the last one.”
Rita’s voice: “I don’t believe the lamp would burn if you should try to light it.”
Joe’s mother: “I’m going to scream!”
Joe: “No she isn’t. She never screams when she says she’s going to. See this through, Bruce. I’ll go bond that these are decent people. I’ve had opportunity to get to know them. And I know my mother. She has made a lot of rotten accusations — damned lies—” “Joe! How dare you!”
“ — and as I understand it, the Yogi—” “Captain Bruce, I’m fainting!”
“No, she isn’t. She never faints when she says she’s going to. As I understand it, the Yogi proposes to show us the truth in some strange way. I vote we let him.”
Annie Weems sighed: “It is no use trying to prevent him! Captain Bruce, I dread this — I believe it’s wicked. But they don’t think it’s wicked. And I know that Rita wouldn’t lend herself to harming an insect.”
“And there’s nobody shan’t harm her — not unless he gets me previous,” said Hawkes.
“Ram-Chittra Gunga is a gentleman,” said Annie Weems, “who knows more than is right that any human being should. He knows terrible things.”
“Bah! Why talk?” Poonch-Terai’s voice held a note of horror. “Let him show what he knows!”
“Let him?” Annie Weems sounded patiently resigned. “Can you or any one prevent him? Captain Bruce, I intend to close my eyes, and I advise you to close yours.”
“Thanks, no, I’ll stay awake,” Bruce answered. “All right, carry on. Hawkes, you stay where you are; and if any one moves, speak. I warn whomever it concerns that I am holding two cocked automatics, one in each hand.”
“But I don’t think they would go off,” Rita answered. “If they make you feel less frightened it will do no harm to hold them.”
Bruce was silent, but Joe heard him moving the slide of an automatic as if he felt there were something wrong with it.
Then Mrs. Beddington did scream — hoarsely — horribly — three times. Poonch-Terai laughed, like a man on a rack whose agony is eased by the sound of some one else’s.
“What’s wrong, Mater?” Joe asked. It was temper. He knew it. He had heard her scream like that a hundred times. But he could not shed fear of her temper. It turned him cold, inside.
“Joe, don’t you dare believe this! It’s a lie! It’s trickery! It’s—” Silence. She had seen something before Joe did. So had Bruce; he was breathing in snorts through his nose. Joe stared into utter darkness. An eternity — perhaps the space of ten breaths — passed before he saw anything.
CHAPTER XXVII. “Shall not justice justify itself without your mouthings?”
Joe could hear his own heart beat and when he dug his nails into his skin it hurt him. But when he rubbed his eyes he discovered that he could see equally well with them shut or open. He had a sense of time, space, form and color; and yet, what he saw, took place so rapidly that a year passed while he was drawing two breaths. He saw himself — his own upbringing — every event in his own life until he came to India. And he knew he blushed that every one else in the room should see him so victimized and so incapable of breaking his mother’s tyranny; until it occurred to him — although he did not know how — that every individual in the room was seeing his or her own life in intimate review. Even so, he was not pleased with his own record, although he noticed an extraordinary patience, of which his mother took tireless advantage; and the strength of character beneath the patience seemed to Joe, who watched it, to develop and grow stronger the more his mother ground him down and heaped one imposition on another, until at last he was astonished at the vision of his own strength.
He was wondering how one measured strength, and how it was he recognized it, and how one told strength from weakness, when the nature of the vision changed. It ceased to concern only himself. Hitherto, it might have been his own subconscious memory reflected after the manner of dreams — whatever that is — who knows what a dream is, or how it functions? But now, events that he could not possibly remember began to stage themselves in mid-room, as if the memories of all those present were being projected in three dimen
sions on some sort of mirror to which time and space were interchangeable, or else the same thing, or perhaps did not exist.
It was the hotel verandah. Mrs. Beddington sat in a wicker chair at a tea-table and conversed with Poonch-Terai, who laughed at something which perplexed her very much indeed. There was no sound — none whatever; and yet it was perfectly clear, not only what each was saying, but what each was thinking and how each was seeking to manipulate the other. Amal came, scared almost out of her senses because she knew that Poonch-Terai knew it was she who had stabbed Joe Beddington. She told all she knew about Rita’s birth; as swiftly as in a dream her thought took form and all the details of her flight from dacoits with the new-born child recurred before Joe’s vision, until she reached the temple and Ram-Chittra Gunga took the infant in his arms.
Mrs. Beddington was disturbed. She offered Amal money — quantities of money — more than an ayah could ever have dreamed of. Amal was not even tempted, and Poonch-Terai laughed. He hinted that he was the only person who could deal with Amal in such way as to suppress her evidence. And it was absolutely clear, not only that he had murder in mind but that Mrs. Beddington suspected it and was indifferent provided she should get what she wanted and not be involved.
But Poonch-Terai, too, wanted something — several things; among them Rita, and the temple revenues; but he seemed to know how to get those. What he wanted from Mrs. Beddington was protection. Vague at first, but presently more distinct, the form of Albert Cummings seemed to hover in the neighborhood of both their minds. Darkly at first, and then in plain speech, because she was too cunning to commit herself until he came out from behind his mask of hint and innuendo, he demanded that she should use her influence with Cummings to prevent any hue and cry or official inquiry if he should kidnap Rita, and also to prevent any search for Amal. Hovering in Poonch-Terai’s thought were the shapes of Indian policemen, who would take their cue from Cummings, whether he might legally or not restrain them from sleuthing on Poonch-Terai’s trail.
Mrs. Beddington promised. She was already entirely sure of her control of Albert Cummings. He appeared in her thought in a glamour of high romance as some one vastly more important than he ever could be and possessing more authority than he could ever dream of having — but obedient to her, beholden to her, subject to her, blinded by her money and as easy to manipulate as any chairman of the board of one of her trust-bound corporations. Poonch-Terai assured her that Amal should not cause her another moment’s worry, and that he would very effectively deal with Rita. Murder and rape were in his mind — murder and rape in hers; but she had not said so, and besides, there were no witnesses. Poonch-Terai rode away on horseback, and she ordered champagne when his back was turned; she drank two glasses of it dashed with cognac.
Poonch-Terai overtook Amal trudging along a dusty lane. He drew rein and chaffed her cunningly because her knife had failed, she sullenly refusing to admit that it was her knife that had stabbed Joe. However, he told her no one else suspected her and that she need have no anxiety on his account, he would keep the secret. Then he told her to return to the temple, and watch Rita, and spy on Joe, who was convalescent and undoubtedly involved in some conspiracy to take Rita away to foreign lands.
Rita appeared in Amal’s thought as a glittering goddess, certainly not human, and at the same time as a helpless child to be protected and fought for with dogged ferocity. Foreign lands were a thirsty wilderness beyond a raging sea in which monsters swam — horribly hot deserts in which Joe owned packs of tigers and every hole in the earth held a venomous snake. Joe loomed in her imagination as a king who dragged weak women by the hair and beat them horribly unless they prayed in a frame-church, painted chocolate, that had a sheet-iron roof. So Amal turned her face toward the temple, and as she thought of Rita she exuded rays of deep-red rose. But as she thought of Joe, rose changed to hell-red.
Poonch-Terai found Chandri Lal, the man of cobras in a flat reed basket. It was not quite clear how Chandri Lal was brought into his presence; however, Poonch-Terai was seated in a garden between a fountain and a clump of bougainvillea, and Chandri Lal sat at his feet with his basket of snakes on the ground beside him. Wordlessly and indescribably, but none-the-less clearly, it was evident that Poonch-Terai was puzzled how to deal with Chandri Lal, whose mood was mildly mercenary, due to tramping on an empty stomach.
Chandri Lal himself at last supplied the missing clue. He began to beg for money, saying he had been in hiding and had earned nothing, so that even his snakes were starving. Promptly Poonch-Terai demanded to know why he had been hiding. Chandri Lal became evasive, Amal looming in his thoughts. Poonch-Terai accused him of having stabbed Joe Beddington. Chandri Lal denied it. Poonch-Terai informed him that his guilt was well known: Amal had betrayed him — had accused him of the crime and had been rewarded by Mrs. Beddington for the information.
Chandri Lal grew livid with indignation. Through his thought, in a stream of pictures, flashed the crime as he had witnessed it — he, faithful as a dog to Amal, half enamored of her, half believing her a seeress. Joe, staring into darkness, saw himself stabbed and fall at Rita’s feet — saw it through the memory of Chandri Lal, projected in the man’s own absence — saw — felt — almost tasted the fear that dried up Chandri Lal’s throat. He, Joe, saw the very splurge of agony that rushed through his own brain like liquid fire when the knife struck deep beneath his shoulder-blade. More marvelous — he saw the thought that shot through Rita’s mind as she knelt to try to stanch the bleeding. He saw that she knew Amal did it; and through Rita’s thought he saw the smiling face of Poonch-Terai. He knew then certainly, what Rita knew but Amal did not, that the Maharajah’s was the mind behind that knife; his was the will, the impulse, the obsessing malice. Amal had reacted to the trained dynamic will of Poonch-Terai more simply and with less resistance than Joe himself had sometimes acted on the impulse of his mother’s unvoiced urging.
Now he watched the Maharajah set another impulse surging in a consciousness unable to protect itself, though this time he was using words as well as metaphysical suggestion. He told Chandri Lal that his only safety lay in killing Amal, who had gone now to the temple to accuse him to the priests, who would be saved from a great deal of embarrassment at the hands of the police if they could only indicate a likely suspect. He must hurry and kill Amal, whom the temple servants would probably admit without much argument; and once inside the temple she would take her story to the high priest. Why not scale the wall at the place where the baobab formed a bridge that any active man could use? And if a cobra should bite Amal, what then? Could they prove whose cobra did it?
Chandri Lal, unfed and unrewarded because hungry men are more light-headed and amenable to impulse than are men with money and a square meal, went his way. And Poonch-Terai sat thinking, smiling, flattering his thought with pictures of the priests embarrassment when Amal should be found dead within their sacred walls. They would understand perfectly what had happened and whose the guiding mind was. But could they prove it? On the contrary, it would only make them nervous. Then a tip to the police — a temple scandal — what chance would the priests have of rescuing Rita, with themselves on the defensive and the fatuous Cummings reined in by the plutocratic hand of Joe’s determined mother?
His thought was as plain as a motion-picture. He amused himself for several minutes with the prospect of the entertainment he would wring, in the not so distant future, out of Cummings and his fabulously wealthy bride. He would make their wedding wretched. He would hint at blackmail. He would torture them so that Cummings would not dare to resign for fear lest his successor might stumble on clues that would lead to indictment. He had many a bone to pick with Cummings — pompously insufferable little Cockney; he would pick them all. And Mrs. Beddington had dared to try to patronize him him, a nineteen-gun Maharajah. She had dared to pose as a pious moralist, who scorned polygamy; as a superior Nordic intellectual whose high ideals no mere Indian could understand. She had insulted him to the marrow with
every smirking attempt at flattery, each snobbish gesture of familiarity and each unconscious breach of etiquette. He would make her pay. So help him all the gods he disbelieved in and the forces that he knew were potent, he would make her pay in nervousness until she yelled to him for mercy. And the thought of his mercy amused him still more.
He began to think of Rita. It was then that Joe’s jaws set tight and he knew, to the last hair-trigger tremor of emotion, how it feels to hunger to do bloody murder with your bare hands. He had heard of Sadists; he had even read about them, in a book suppressed by magistrates but pirated through boot-leg channels; he had sometimes thought his mother was one, in a civilized, reserved and hypocritically prudent fashion. But when the plans that Poonch-Terai let float before his mind concerning Rita met Joe’s gaze, he knew himself as ignorant of evil as a baa-lamb is of butchers. He had been in brothels. He had witnessed vivisection. He had seen bull-fights. He had even seen a baby born. Joe was not particularly squeamish. He could see such sights and almost straightway forget them. But when he witnessed the pictured thoughts of Poonch-Terai, their object Rita or any other woman, he could not keep silence.
“Mater,” he said grimly, “do you see now what your scheming might have led to?”
Sound seemed to shatter the mirror. The vision vanished. Joe’s mother gurgled and tried to speak, but her throat seemed dry and Joe imagined her with dropped jaw staring into darkness. Bruce broke silence:
“Beddington, for God’s sake don’t discuss it. We have seen into hell, if the rest of you saw what I did.”
Hawkes then: “Captain Bruce, sir if you’ll pass me one o’ them there automatics, I’ll do my duty. ‘Tain’t an officer’s job to muck up. Let me kill him. I’ll say nothing at court-martial. I’ll die proud to have sent him where he came from.”
But the Yogi’s voice boomed forth from darkness before Bruce could answer: