I relaxed a trifle, but did not lower my club. “Who are you?”
“Judge Keith Pursuivant,” was the level response, as though I had not just finished trying to kill him. “You must be the young man they’re so anxious to hang, back in town. Is that right?”
I made no answer.
“Silence makes admission,” the stranger said. “Well, come along to my house. This grove is between it and town, and nobody will bother us for the night, at least.”
VIII “A trick that almost killed you.”
When I stepped into the open with Judge Keith Pursuivant, the snow had ceased and a full moon glared through a rip in the clouds, making diamond dust of the sugary drifts. By its light I saw my companion with some degree of plainness – a man of great height and girth, with a wide black hat and a voluminous gray ulster. His face was as round as the moon itself, at least as shiny, and much warmer to look at. A broad bulbous nose and broad bulbous eyes beamed at me, while under a drooping blond mustache a smile seemed to be lurking. Apparently he considered the situation a pleasant one.
“I’m not one of the mob,” he informed me reassuringly. “These pastimes of the town do not attract me. I left such things behind when I dropped out of politics and practice – oh, I was active in such things, ten years ago up North – and took up meditation.”
“I’ve heard that you keep to yourself,” I told him.
“You heard correctly. My black servant does the shopping and brings me the gossip. Most of the time it bores me, but not today, when I learned about you and the killing of John Gird—”
“And you came looking for me?”
“Of course. By the way, that was a wise impulse, ducking into the Devil’s Croft.”
But I shuddered, and not with the chill of the outer night. He made a motion for me to come along, and we began tramping through the soft snow toward a distant light under the shadow of a hill. Meanwhile I told him something of my recent adventures, saving for the last my struggle with the monster in the grove.
He heard me through, whistling through his teeth at various points. At the end of my narrative he muttered to himself:
“The hairy ones shall dance—”
“What was that, sir?” I broke in, without much courtesy.
“I was quoting from the prophet Isaiah. He was speaking of ruined Babylon, not a strange transplanted bit of the tropics, but otherwise it falls pat. Suggestive of a demon-festival. ‘The hairy ones shall dance there.’ ”
“Isaiah, you say? I used to be something of a Bible reader, but I’m afraid I don’t remember the passage.”
He smiled sidewise at me. “But I’m translating direct from the original, Mr Wills is the name, eh? The original Hebrew of the prophet Isaiah, whoever he was. The classic-ridden compilers of the King James Version have satyrs dancing, and the prosaic Revised Version offers nothing more startling than goats. But Isaiah and the rest of the ancient peoples knew that there were ‘hairy ones.’ Perhaps you encountered one of that interesting breed tonight.”
“I don’t want to encounter it a second time,” I confessed, and again I shuddered.
“That is something we will talk over more fully. What do you think of the Turkish bath accommodations you have just left behind?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what to think. Growing green stuff and a tropical temperature, with snow outside—”
He waved the riddle away. “Easily and disappointingly explained, Mr Wills. Hot springs.”
I stopped still, shin-deep in wet snow. “What!” I ejaculated.
“Oh, I’ve been there many times, in defiance of local custom and law – I’m not a native, you see.” Once more his warming smile. “There are at least three springs, and the thick growth of trees makes a natural enclosure, roof and walls, to hold in the damp heat. It’s not the only place of its kind in the world, Mr Wills. But the thing you met there is a trifle more difficult of explanation. Come on home – we’ll both feel better when we sit down.”
We finished the journey in half an hour. Judge Pursuivant’s house was stoutly made of heavy hewn timbers, somewhat resembling certain lodges I had seen in England. Inside was a large, low-ceilinged room with a hanging oil lamp and a welcome open fire. A fat blond cat came leisurely forward to greet us. Its broad, good-humored face, large eyes and drooping whiskers gave it somewhat of a resemblance to its master.
“Better get your things off,” advised the judge. He raised his voice. “William!”
A squat negro with a sensitive brown face appeared from a door at the back of the house.
“Bring in a bathrobe and slippers for this gentleman,” ordered Judge Pursuivant, and himself assisted me to take off my muddy jacket. Thankfully I peeled off my other garments, and when the servant appeared with the robe I slid into it with a sigh.
“I’m in your hands, Judge Pursuivant,” I said. “If you want to turn me over—”
“I might surrender you to an officer,” he interrupted, “but never to a lawless mob. You’d better sit here for a time – and talk to me.”
Near the fire was a desk, with an armchair at either side of it. We took seats, and when William returned from disposing of my wet clothes, he brought along a tray with a bottle of whisky, a siphon and some glasses. The judge prepared two drinks and handed one to me. At his insistence, I talked for some time about the séance and the events leading up to it.
“Remarkable,” mused Judge Pursuivant. Then his great shrewd eyes studied me. “Don’t go to sleep there, Mr Wills. I know you’re tired, but I want to talk lycanthropy.”
“Lycanthropy?” I repeated. “You mean the science of the werewolf?” I smiled and shook my head. “I’m afraid I’m no authority, sir. Anyway, this was no witchcraft – it was a bona fide spirit séance, with ectoplasm.”
“Hum!” snorted the judge. “Witchcraft, spiritism! Did it ever occur to you that they might be one and the same thing?”
“Inasmuch as I never believed in either of them, it never did occur to me.”
Judge Pursuivant finished his drink and wiped his mustache. “Skepticism does not become you too well, Mr Wills, if you will pardon my frankness. In any case, you saw something very werewolfish indeed, not an hour ago. Isn’t that the truth?”
“It was some kind of a trick,” I insisted stubbornly.
“A trick that almost killed you and made you run for your life?”
I shook my head. “I know I saw the thing,” I admitted. “I even felt it.” My eyes dropped to the bruised knuckles of my right hand. “Yet I was fooled – as a magician, I know all about fooling. There can be no such thing as a werewolf.”
“Have a drink,” coaxed Judge Pursuivant, exactly as if I had had none yet. With big, deft hands he poured whisky, then soda, into my glass and gave the mixture a stirring shake. “Now then,” he continued, sitting back in his chair once more, “the time has come to speak of many things.”
He paused, and I, gazing over the rim of that welcome glass, thought how much he looked like a rosy blond walrus.
“I’m going to show you,” he announced, “that a man can turn into a beast, and back again.”
IX “To a terrified victim he is doom itself.”
He leaned toward the bookshelf beside him, pawed for a moment, then laid two sizable volumes on the desk between us.
“If this were a fantasy tale, Mr Wills,” he said with a hint of one of his smiles, “I would place before you an unthinkably rare book – one that offered, in terms too brilliant and compelling for argument, the awful secrets of the universe, past, present and to come.”
He paused to polish a pair of pince-nez and to clamp them upon the bridge of his broad nose.
“However,” he resumed, “this is reality, sober if uneasy. And I give you, not some forgotten grimoire out of the mystic past, but two works by two recognized and familiar authorities.”
I eyed the books. “May I see?”
For answer he thrust one of them, some six hundred
pages in dark blue cloth, across the desk and into my hands. “Thirty Years of Psychical Research, by the late Charles Richet, French master in the spirit-investigation field,” he informed me. “Faithfully and interestingly translated by Stanley De Brath. Published here in America, in 1923.”
I took the book and opened it. “I knew Professor Richet, slightly. Years ago, when I was just beginning this sort of thing, I was entertained by him in London. He introduced me to Conan Doyle.”
“Then you’re probably familiar with his book. Yes? Well, the other,” and he took up the second volume, almost as large as the Richet and bound in light buff, “is by Montague Summers, whom I call the premier demonologist of today. He’s gathered all the lycanthropy-lore available.”
I had read Mr Summers’ Geography of Witchcraft and his two essays on the vampire, and I made bold to say so.
“This is a companion volume to them,” Judge Pursuivant told me, opening the book. “It is called The Werewolf.” He scrutinized the flyleaf. “Published in 1934 – thoroughly modern, you see. Here’s a bit of Latin, Mr Wills: Intrabunt lupi rapaces in vos, non parcentes gregi.”
I crinkled my brow in the effort to recall my high school Latin, then began slowly to translate, a word at a time: “ ’Enter hungry wolves—’ ”
“Save that scholarship,” Judge Pursuivant broke in. “It’s more early Scripture, though not so early as the bit about the hairy ones – vulgate for a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, twentieth chapter, twenty-ninth verse. ‘Ravenous wolves shall enter among you, not sparing the flock.’ Apparently that disturbing possibility exists even today.”
He leafed through the book. “Do you know,” he asked, “that Summers gives literally dozens of instances of lycanthropy, things that are positively known to have happened?”
I took another sip of whisky and water. “Those are only legends, surely.”
“They are nothing of the sort! ” The judge’s eyes protruded even more in his earnestness, and he tapped the pages with an excited forefinger. “There are four excellent cases listed in his chapter on France alone – sworn to, tried and sentenced by courts—”
“But weren’t they during the Middle Ages?” I suggested.
He shook his great head. “No, during the Sixteenth Century, the peak of the Renaissance. Oh, don’t smile at the age, Mr Wills. It produced Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Galileo, Leonardo, Martin Luther; Descartes and Spinoza were its legitimate children, and Voltaire builded upon it. Yet werewolves were known, seen, convicted—”
“Convicted on what grounds?” I interrupted quickly, for I was beginning to reflect his warmth.
For answer he turned more pages, “Here is the full account of the case of Stubbe Peter, or Peter Stumpf,” he said. “A contemporary record, telling of Stumpf’s career in and out of wolf-form, his capture in the very act of shifting shape, his confession and execution – all near Cologne in the year 1589. Listen.”
He read aloud: “ ’Witnesses that this is true. Tyse Artyne. William Brewar. Adolf Staedt. George Bores. With divers others that have seen the same.’ ” Slamming the book shut, he looked up at me, the twinkle coming back into his spectacled eyes. “Well, Mr Wills? How do those names sound to you?”
“Why, like the names of honest German citizens.”
“Exactly. Honest, respectable, solid. And their testimony is hard to pass off with a laugh, even at this distance in time, eh?”
He had almost made me see those witnesses, leather-jerkined and broad-breeched, with heavy jaws and squinting eyes, taking their turn at the quill pen with which they set their names to that bizarre document. “With divers others that have seen the same” – perhaps too frightened to hold pen or make signature . . .
“Still,” I said slowly, “Germany of the Renaissance, the Sixteenth Century; and there have been so many changes since.”
“Werewolves have gone out of fashion, you mean? Ah, you admit that they might have existed.” He fairly beamed his triumph. “So have beards gone out of fashion, but they will sprout again if we lay down our razors. Let’s go at it another way. Let’s talk about materialization – ectoplasm – for the moment.” He relaxed, and across his great girth his fingertips sought one another. “Suppose you explain, briefly and simply, what ectoplasm is considered to be.”
I was turning toward the back of Richet’s book. “It’s in here, Judge Pursuivant. To be brief and simple, as you say, certain mediums apparently exude an unclassified material called ectoplasm. This, at first light and vaporescent, becomes firm and takes shape, either upon the body of the medium or as a separate and living creature.”
“And you don’t believe in this phenomenon?” he prompted, with something of insistence.
“I have never said that I didn’t,” I replied truthfully, “even before my experience of this evening went so far toward convincing me. But, with the examples I have seen, I felt that true scientific control was lacking. With all their science, most of the investigators trust too greatly.”
Judge Pursuivant shook with gentle laughter. “They are doctors for the most part, and this honesty of theirs is a professional failing that makes them look for it in others. You – begging your pardon – are a magician, a professional deceiver, and you expect trickery in all whom you meet. Perhaps a good lawyer with trial experience, with a level head and a sense of competent material evidence for both sides, should attend these seances, eh?”
“You’re quite right,” I said heartily.
“But, returning to the subject, what else can be said about ectoplasm? That is, if it actually exists.”
I had found in Richet’s book the passage for which I had been searching. “It says here that bits of ectoplasm have been secured in rare instances, and that some of these have been examined microscopically. There were traces of fatty tissue, bacterial forms and epithelium.”
“Ah! Those were the findings of Schrenck-Notzing. A sound man and a brilliant one, hard to corrupt or fool. It makes ectoplasm sound organic, does it not?”
I nodded agreement, and my head felt heavy, as if full of sober and important matters. “As for me,” I went on, “I never have had much chance to examine the stuff. Whenever I get hold of an ectoplasmic hand, it melts like butter.”
“They generally do,” the judge commented, “or so the reports say. Yet they themselves are firm and strong when they touch or seize.”
“Right, sir.”
“It’s when attacked, or even frightened, as with a camera flashlight, that the ectoplasm vanishes or is reabsorbed?” he prompted further.
“So Richet says here,” I agreed once more, “and so I have found.”
“Very good. Now,” and his manner took on a flavor of the legal, “I shall sum up:
“Ectoplasm is put forth by certain spirit mediums, who are mysteriously adapted for it, under favorable conditions that include darkness, quiet, self-confidence. It takes form, altering the appearance of the medium or making up a separate body. It is firm and strong, but vanishes when attacked or frightened. Right so far, eh?”
“Right,” I approved.
“Now, for the word medium substitute wizard.” His grin burst out again, and he began to mix a third round of drinks. “A wizard, having darkness and quiet and being disposed to change shape, exudes a material that gives him a new shape and character. Maybe it is bestial, to match a fierce or desperate spirit within. There may be a shaggy pelt, a sharp muzzle, taloned paws and rending fangs. To a terrified victim he is doom itself. But to a brave adversary, facing and fighting him—”
He flipped his way through Summers’ book, as I had with Richet’s. “Listen: ‘. . . the shape of the werewolf will be removed if he be reproached by name as a werewolf, or if again he be thrice addressed by his Christian name, or struck three blows on the forehead with a knife, or that three drops of blood should be drawn.’ Do you see the parallels, man? Shouted at, bravely denounced, or slightly wounded, his false beast-substance fades from him.” He flung out his
hands, as though appealing to a jury. “I marvel nobody ever thought of it before.”
“But nothing so contrary to nature has a natural explanation,” I objected, and very idiotic the phrase sounded in my own ears.
He laughed, and I could not blame him. “I’ll confound you with another of your own recent experiences. What could seem more contrary to nature than the warmth and greenness of the inside of Devil’s Croft? And what is more simply natural than the hot springs that make it possible?”
“Yet, an envelope of bestiality, beast-muzzle on human face, beast-paws on human hands—”
“I can support that by more werewolf-lore. I don’t even have to open Summers, everyone has heard the story. A wolf attacks a traveler, who with his sword lops off a paw. The beast howls and flees, and the paw it leaves behind is a human hand.”
“That’s an old one, in every language.”
“Probably because it happened so often. There’s your human hand, with the beast-paw forming upon and around it, then vanishing like wounded ectoplasm. Where’s the weak point, Wills? Name it, I challenge you.”
I felt the glass shake in my hand, and a chilly wind brushed my spine. “There’s one point,” I made myself say. “You may think it a slender one, even a quibble. But ectoplasms make human forms, not animal.”
“How do you know they don’t make animal forms?” Judge Pursuivant crowed, leaning forward across the desk. “Because, of the few you’ve seen and disbelieved, only human faces and bodies showed? My reply is there in your hands. Open Richet’s book to page 545, Mr Wills. Page 545 . . . got it? Now, the passage I marked, about the medium Burgik. Read it aloud.”
He sank back into his chair once more, waiting in manifest delight. I found the place, underscored with pencil, and my voice was hoarse as I obediently read:
“ ’My trouser leg was strongly pulled and a strange, ill-defined form that seemed to have paws like those of a dog or small monkey climbed on my knee. I could feel its weight, very light, and something like the muzzle of an animal touched my cheek.’ ”
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 36