Echo of a Curse

by R. R. Ryan

  Simultaneously they glanced up at the immovable figure at Govina’s window.

  “Still as a corpse,” Anne breathed.

  “Anne, be quiet! Or go in! Saying things like that!”

  Anne sulked. But Mary ostentatiously began to talk about the domestic improvements they had seen that afternoon; and even death, crime, spooky forebodings were not proof against such fascinations. They actually forgot the dark figure up in Mr. Govina’s window.

  Both were jerked back to their immediate circumstances by the town hall clock striking seven. They listened to its sonorous announcement as if it were some supernatural message.

  “Seven, Anne. You ought to look at that dinner.”

  “Oh, M’m!” the other squealed.

  “Well. In ten minutes you’ll have to.”

  The maid’s mouth assumed an ugly, obstinate air. She was about to reply—something, maybe, that later she would bitterly regret—when a figure ran violently in at the gate and along the gravel drive.

  Involuntarily Anne called out. The two women rose under a simultaneous impulse. Hearing the hail, yet unable to see from whom it came, the policeman stood puzzled, his face wearing an anxious, impatient expression. When Mary and Anne emerged from the deep shadow that had obscured them, he took two or three eager steps forward.

  “You’re Mrs. Border?” he asked sharply.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Cliffe, the lawyer, lives with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s . . .” The policeman, a youngish, sharp-featured, intelligent-looking man, broke off abruptly, turned towards the window in which Govina’s dim figure still showed, dim, but sufficiently distinct, “Who’s that?”

  “A guest staying with us.”

  “How long’s he been there?”

  “He came in just before you peeped through the gate . . .”

  “Oh, you saw me?”

  “Yes, we were sitting in the garden.”

  “Mr. Cliffe’s been attacked,” the policeman snapped.

  A pain composed of surely a million different emotions pierced Mary’s heart and, causelessly, stupidly, it seemed, the words too late sped like shooting stars into and from her mind.

  “Badly?” she asked in the officer’s curt tones.

  “Yes. Hospital job. Will you phone the Borough Hill Hospital and arrange for an ambulance? I’ve administered first aid, but he may start bleeding again and I want to stay by him till the ambulance comes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Just a little down the road.”

  “Could we bring him in here?”

  “It would be dangerous, I think, madam. I’m frightened of starting a hæmorrhage. If you phone. Hospital and doctor. There’s Doctor Kane in Oakland Road. He could come right away and be here in two minutes.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he ran off and vanished through the gate. Taking example from his speed and efficiency, Mary too turned and ran into the streaming hall.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Something silvery had awakened her . . . Mary had heard it in her very sound sleep . . . And now she slowly roused to full consciousness, to memory . . . sometimes more precious than a handful of gems, sometimes more bitter than a handful of herbs.

  Terry, dangerously wounded, in hospital . . . They were to phone her if he recovered consciousness, if she might go to him; for already they knew, as she knew, that he might die. Die—with all these years wasted; wasted by her.

  She saw him, as she had seen him when, after phoning, she had run out . . . through the gate . . . Blood—a great dark pool . . . And the rent throat . . . Then the doctor, swift, precise, efficient . . . The ambulance . . . Her phone to the hospital . . .

  “But he’s my life-long friend, since we were little children . . .”

  And the promise, if he recovered consciousness, she should know; if it was permissible, she should see him. They would phone.

  And the police . . . Mystery . . . Absolute. Their questions about Mr. Govina . . . Sheer alibi. In before policeman peeped through the gate at ten to seven. Sitting in his window. Policeman on his beat: “To the top of the road, sir, and straight back. It was striking seven when I discovered the body. Not a soul in sight.” The Superintendent’s irrefutable logic: “A man can’t be in two places at once.”

  Who had attacked him. What? How?

  The fire Anne had lighted began to flicker. A long chapter of regrets opened in her mind . . . But upon this deep thinking there superimposed itself an unfamiliar condition that was not depression, but even more subtle. As if a door to impossibility had been opened and she was suddenly aware of a horror that she could not see, but which quickened, spread, impinged. All co-ordinated thought ceased in her mind. She merely lay inert, overpowered—and icy cold with fear. It was as if she were in a new element; on a new plane; over an eternal void . . . She was going to be killed. Of that her subdued mind was dully aware. Her head of its own accord seemed to turn . . . Quite clearly in the firelight she saw a tall form clad in black, a fanged beast-jaw, rapacious, wicked; eyes glowing with liquid hate. THE INEXPLICABLE! A dull but unbearable ache began in her womb. Knowledge of some sort, black knowledge was coming, coincident with death.

  Then she saw the claws . . . Because they moved. The eyes grew, or seemed to grow, larger. Some foul effluvium, or what might not be an effluvium but a foulness of aura, began to creep about her, into her. She saw the black-clad loins tense and shake in the impulse of springing and a hand, a white hand, descend lightly onto the thing’s shoulder . . . The face changed—TO VIN.

  Now she screamed.

  White, stark light blinded her, so that she blinked furiously . . . He was here, before her. Vin. He looked very ill. Terribly worn. Yes—old.

  But he smiled . . . And strangely, it was a very beautiful smile. Protective.

  “You were dreaming and cried out.”

  “Oh, no! I’ve been awake some minutes. Some sound roused me. A silvery, tinkling sound.”

  “That was the phone. You heard it in your sleep. You thought you awakened, but actually you were having a nightmare when I came in and switched on the light. I expect your dream changed suddenly. Anxiety-dreams do, you know.”

  The phone. Vin had said the phone had rung.

  “What did they say . . . It was the hospital?”

  He followed her thoughts.

  “Yes, it was the hospital. Terry is conscious. His condition is serious and you can see him.”

  Her face drained of all colour. Terry was going to die. That was what the message meant. Her most urgent impulse was to rise and rush to Terry’s side. But an inherent courtesy held her still, that and a more profound comprehension of the “newness” of this man, who, after all, shared her rights in the children. The children. To him, did that not mean merely Faith? Strange that Don should be so aloof. The politest boy under heaven’s sun, but how impersonal. Both she and Vin had been forced into directing their love to Faith. She was a bridge that should, did indeed, span the chasm dividing mother from father—but there was a locked gate at each end. And yet, in this strange instant, he seemed positively benevolent and it was hard indeed to see in him the demented drunkard who had physically tortured her in the past and assaulted the now happily married little Ruth. Before actually rising, Mary, despite her anxiety about Terry, sought for the exact expression to nail down the elusive something she saw in Vin’s eyes. And, just as she rose in despair, the term sprang to her lips. Martyr. That’s what he put her in mind of: a man who had already suffered martyrdom, or who was about to suffer it. A man to whom earthly hates and loves were already dim memories, or so transcendent as to lift both hate and love into altitudes that gave each new significance.

  But there never could be rapprochement between him and her. Had there, she now asked, ever been anything but a fleeting physical communion between them and that by reason of a fascination almost mesmeric in its quality? He had moved out of his orbit to dazzle her, then assumed his extra-terre
strial preoccupation. Even now she felt this. In an instant remarkable for its emotional content. He did not belong to mundane interests and never had. That inch out in mental adjustment would explain the phenomenon: the lack of contact with his kind.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  If she weren’t, like Terry—Mary thought in the taxi Vin had phoned for—the most practical materialist, she’d be inclined to ascribe ill-favoured powers to Mr. Govina, since only after his arrival had all this misfortune begun. What was it that Terry and Don had discovered about him that they each should demand his banishment? Were it not that now such an act would seem disloyal to Terry, she’d have a showdown with Don and demand to know what he had against their guest. Yet, what did it matter. Was not Terry going to die? And at long last she had learned that life without him would not be life at all. Strange, she thought, how so many of us need death to show us what life has offered and which we have so strangely undervalued.

  There was a screen round Terry’s bed and this alarmed her. Was he dead? She asked the night-sister, who smiled non-committally. But, of course, they never told one the truth in these places, where there were false conventions as there were throughout all life as we live it.

  “Oh, no,” the sister said, “he’s not dead; but he’s very ill.”

  “Hopelessly?”

  “There’s always hope while there’s life—in a hospital.”

  He looked hopeless. The loss of blood had been extensive and his drained face showed it. Already the dark shadows showed in his eyes. Another precious human relationship seemed at breaking-point.

  He was not unconscious, that was one thing. But how terribly unlike the vibrant, steel-strong Terry. Yet his pained eyes smiled when he saw her . . . and filled suddenly with tears as the love Mary’s heart was so full of gushed into her eyes.

  But the absurd part of it was that these two, at last united by the disunity of death, could not speak, had no words each for the other. They could only look.

  He seemed so near to that final parting that nothing but this tragic severance filled her thoughts. And, all at once, she knew she could not bear it—and herself live.

  She said so.

  He was whispering. So she leaned near.

  “Can I have you . . . if I live?”

  “Yes. Altogether. In every way. Just how you like.”

  He smiled again . . . but differently, she thought. A faint flicker showed in his eyes, a reflex of the old Terry ready to face hopeless odds.

  The nurse touched her and she left him, looking back once to see his eyes closed.

  She felt, while the taxi sped her home, as if his frail hands, still warm with life, were round her heart. When it grew cold, her heart, he would be gone; and with him her own will to live. But they would cling now, unless forcibly dragged away by the inexorable selfishness of death. That little flicker had been his promise to her, than which, at such an instant, what could be more solemn? And if his fight were stout enough, if he came back—there was her promise to him. Her heart beat violently. And she began silently to say “Yes, yes, yes;” hardly knowing what it meant, but conscious of a vague symbolism in the words, which were, in their way, like a slow, glowing dawn.

  She wished suddenly that life were simple, that she and Terry and Faith could live in gentle peace together; just letting the days slip by.

  Never till now had she realized the little life had offered her; or, perhaps, it would be more just to say, the little she had accepted. She’d been too much a creature of domestic routine, with too little change and personal happiness. And that sort of thing did not make for fitness. Physical fitness. She was not fit. Her nervous system had been undermined. She was fretful, jumpy. Now with that murder, with Terry’s wounding, with the curious sense of “imminence” in her essentially humdrum house, with the unpleasantness of having a weird person like Mr. Govina staying under her roof, she was ready to imagine even the most commonplace things had special significance . . . These black streets, these abruptly-contrasting stretches of brilliantly-lighted shops rasped her nerves. The stretches of darkness, the sudden glittering lights, reminded her of those gleaming eyes in her dim morning-room . . . And the stale odour of this old taxi brought back that curious creeping oppression when she had expected just such a death as Terry had so narrowly escaped—if he had escaped.

  What was it that had struck him down? How odd that it should begin, this slaying, in the neighbourhood of her house—just as before.

  Presently a thought that long since had found credence deep down in her mind sprang up, asserting itself as a live and unignorable identity. Govina was connected with this return, as it seemed, of THE INEXPLICABLE. And something to do with this was why Terry and Don had demanded his expulsion. All that muffling up . . . Oh God!

  Till now she had demanded that the taxi break all regulations of speed; but now—oh let it crawl! She dreaded her return. But in less than a minute they’d slow up at her gate . . .

  And here they were.

  She almost wished that Vin would come running down the steps to fuss and pay the driver. But he did not; and, for a brief instant, she toyed with the idiotic idea of asking the taxi-man to come in with her, have a drink, anything that would delay him, would prevent her from entering alone.

  But he was a surly-looking man. Almost certainly he’d refuse . . . And there was Anne.

  In the hall she hesitated, fighting an inclination to rush to Anne, as once, when scared of bogies, she used to run to her mother, to find reassurance in her sound commonsense and true devotion.

  But she resisted the impulse stoutly. If she was going to give way to childish nerves like this, however, even with Anne’s company, was she going to sleep another night under her own roof?

  She crept on up three stairs . . . Voices . . . She listened . . . But she did not know whose they were . . . Yet she was almost sure they came from Mr. Govina’s room. A wild impulse banished all her fear and all her wisdom. She would steal up, listen . . .

  Now! . . .

  She could not hear . . .

  Carefully, very, very carefully, she opened the door . . .

  CHAPTER V

  Apart from the impossibility of his having been the perpetrator of this attack upon Terry—according to the constable’s evidence—Superintendent Mann found Mr. Govina not only willing in a very brief yet clear fashion to account for himself, but courteous, honest in his manner and that most precious witness—a perfectly lucid being. More, Mr. Govina roused the super’s sympathy by a terse account of the fire that had afflicted him and sealed this sympathy with a display of his facial injuries.

  The Superintendent left not only in a very sympathetic frame of mind but convinced that, whatever the explanation of this mystery, it had no connection with Mrs. Border’s recluse. In all probability some wild thing had escaped from captivity. Mann well-remembered THE INEXPLICABLE, but was inclined to pooh-pooh any connection.

  “Coincidence.” That was his verdict.

  Returning once more to the cherished privacy of his bedroom, Mr. Govina occupied himself in a fashion that would have surprised both the Superintendent and Mary, could either have seen him. For he was parcelling up quantities of food, all the food, in fact, that had been provided him that day. Since it was clear from this occupation that none of Mary’s food had passed his lips, it was also clear that he did not depend upon her resources for his daily sustenance.

  While putting the final touches to his task, he suddenly and to all appearances without cause stopped and, paralytically still, listened, then drew himself erect and, with his loping gait more pronounced than usual, glided to the door. He opened it abruptly and entered his sitting-room, once again to become completely still.

  Standing between Govina and the passage door was Vin, his eyes dazzlingly bright and wearing an air of curious authority that suggested some secret power. There was power not only in his unflinching gaze but also in his whole demeanour. It flowed from him like an aura.

  So, for a while
, they stood—like antagonists weighing each the other’s strength, skill, resource.

  Then, with a staccato movement, Vin turned towards, and locked the door, without knowing, however, that the bolt, since the wards were defective, could not reach its slot. But though he made this movement, his gaze did not leave Govina’s face, nor fail to observe the latter in two swift movements snatch away both his obscuring goggles and black silk fall, thus giving ominous play to his curiously-endowed eyes. The face that to Superintendent Mann had appeared merely distorted and regrettably injured, to this intruder presented the same aspect as had alarmed Don and Terry; glaring, flaming eyes, fanged beast’s mouth.

  A third swift movement revealed the savage claws. If these actions were intended to alarm and unnerve Vin, they failed. He merely smiled. To him the eyes remained in their original seeming, the mouth did not change. The hypnotic regard affected his will no more than electric currents can affect glass.

  “You see . . . my son . . .” Vin said softly, “you have not the power over me you have over others. We see each other as we are. We know each other for what we are . . . And let me remind you that though twice already you have obeyed me, you can never make me obey you. It will be always so.”

  A quiver passed through Govina’s tense form. He snarled and bunched himself as if to spring . . . Yet, he did not. On the contrary his flexed frame relaxed.

  Vin watched this surrender without interest, almost as if he failed to notice his own victory.

  “The woman Chambers told you all?” he asked tonelessly.

  He received a low, harsh affirmative.

  “Well, how have you come to this house? In hate or love?”

  “Both.”

  “Which for whom?”

  “Hate for her; love for Faith.”

  “You realize the immeasurable difference between you and Faith?”

  “Yes.”

  “And cannot let her alone?”

  “I want Faith.”

  “Faith is mine.”

  Govina’s wolflike jaws split in a hideous grin.