Savage bride

by Cornell Woolrich; Internet Archive

  Jones turned the wheel of the oil lamp and killed it. Mallory disappeared in the dark, as if wiped out with an ink brush. There was nothing left but that rabid ihump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, sounding on a new triumphant note now that it had the night to itself.

  The last thing Mallory said to him, as they separted in the blackness, was: "No need telling the girls about— that."

  Jones knew what he meant. The spear from nowhere. The spear from five hundred years ago, dropping to earth only now, like something aimed from one of the stars.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was the silence that woke him. He couldn't tell what it was at first. There was some lack, something missing. It was the contrast that had roused him.

  Then he got it. The drums had stopped. They were dead. The air hung tense, as breathlessly still as a swollen cloud about to erupt into a torrent. It weighed heavily on his chest.

  This was worse than the other, this stillness.

  He started up jerkily, at varying sharply arrested levels; at elbow height above the bed, then at full arm's length, then sitting erect, then turning to drop legs to floor, at last upright at full height upon his feet.

  Somthing rustled slightly, as though there were a bird trapped in his room, winging around trying to find its way out. The sound came at about mid-height between floor and ceiling, at about the heightof his own head, as he stood now at the bedside. He even turned his head in various directions, trying to orient his detection of the sound. He lost it. Then it came again, the feathered whisper.

  There was someone in the room with him. He could hear breath, all but feel it, stirring toward him in the night-clogged air.

  Maybe it was—

  "Mallory, is it my time yet?" he said softly.

  He reached for his matches, plucked one, fumbled to locate the lamp where he had left it, close beside his bed. He took the chimney off, set it down, struck the match, and put it to the wick, bending down close as he did so to turn it up. Yellow light came on, sluicing waveringly up the wall from below, at the level at which the lamp stood. It spread out sideward too, like a slow tide rolling back in the dark. It revealed Mitty's dark hair spilled upon her pillow, her half-hidden face inert in sleep against the cleft of one arm.

  He saw that much, that was the last image of normalcy he was to see, and then he turned, and reason was shattered; a series of delirium flashes took its place. Visual explosions, one crowding upon the other, vivid, immediate, but unreal for all that, undecipherable, impossible to translate into meaning.

  His eyes struck the feathered thing that had rustled first of all. They saw it immobile, suspended in air before him. Loosely flared feathers of a parakeet, yellow, green, vivid scarlet. Then under it a face, dark of color and darker of mien, nightmare-threatening. A face that could not be alive, that surely must be a mask in its baleful-ness of lineament, and yet whose black-pitted eyes were quick with light and whose nostrils dilated and contracted even as he watched with the suppressed breathing of animosity.

  And under it, giving it foundation to the floor of reality, the coppery torso of a man, the distended, graduated breast structure rising and falling with that same leashed, treacherous breath.

  He tried to assimilate what he was looking at, and couldn't. It was coming toward him, creeping frontally upon him, growing larger, nearer, even in the act of his looking.

  Along the side wall, where the backthrow of the lamp was, its grotesque shadow sidled along in company with it, crouched for the spring, a gray hallucination of a bird perched atop a human figure. Yet one was no more unreal than the other was; of the two, the shadow was more readily understandable that the substance, for at least it had the substance to give it explanation. The substance had nothing to give it explanation.

  He heard a frightened cry from Chris, over at the other side of the house. "Father! Daddy! They're in here!" The voice was that of a child. She was a little girl again in that moment; her smiles and simperings at him, her borrowed lipstick were forgotten. And perhaps for the last time she was a little girl. It was more than a cry of fright. It was death of a little girl, in a woman's body.

  And in its wake, behind him, he heard the sudden stirring of Mitty, coming awake.

  But there was no more time for these last fragments of the former mold of rationality that had encased things, flying about in disintegration now; the new nightmare flux was too close upon him now, pressing him back, overthrowing him, engulfing him. He threshed helplessly with a weight that was no dream heavy upon him, a sinewy arm hooked about his throat from behind. Other feather-sprouting figures were slinking in the doorway, one by one. His flaihng arms were caught separately, drawn together behind his back, thongs whipped around them holding them fast. He lay there loglike, immobile, face down and staring up around his shoulder at something that he couldn't understand.

  Mitty had half gained her feet. She stood there at bay, in a frozen tableau of fear. She pressed her back to the wall beside her bed, unable to retreat from them farther than that. One leg supported her on the floor; the other bent double, still rested on the bed from which she had just now risen. Even her hands had crystallized, arrested in the half-completed gesture of donning the pink silk wrapper she habitually made use of on rising, and which instinctive habit had made her seek now, even at this moment of final catastrophe. Her fingers were riveted to its edges, one at the turn of her shoulder, the other down lower at her waist, on the opposite side, so that its incompleted concealment was biased, one shoulder and the upper arm on that side left completely bare. Below, of course, peered the filmy insubstantiality of her nightdress, talcuming the exactly defined contour of her body rather than veiling it.

  Her hair was still aslant as the pillows had cast it, pressed back on one side, revealing her ear, dropping too far forward on the other side of her face. One foot had gained the sanctuary of one of her steep-arched bedside slippers. The other slipper lay untenanted on its side. The rays of the oil lamp, dull and tarnished on all the other surfaces they revealed, flashed dazzhngly back from the turquoise-studded circlet on her upper arm, which she had not removed for many days, and which had grown burnished with continual wear. It created a zone of blurred sheen that refused to come into focus to the eye.

  Her fear was less an active pang, such as had caused Chris to cry out in the other room, than a sort of hypnotic awe. Even Jones, in his distorted position on the floor, looking back and upward at the pale halo of her face, could sense in it something less than the stark unbridled terror that was to have been expected. A degree less only, perhaps, but a degree less. Though her lips were parted, it was not with effort to cry out; she made no sound. It was rather puzzlement, a sort of mesmerized regard that held them that way. Though her eyes were wide, showing more white than he ever remembered having seen them show before, they were not dilated with panic so much as with a bemused retrospection, which held them steady and almost dreamy in their fixity.

  They closed in upon her, and he saw their dark arms go out to seize her, crossbarring the pink-and-white cameo she made in his view beyond their outlines. He floundered in his bound position on the floor, seeking to rise and throw himself over there, snarhng unheeded threats in a choked voice. "Get away from her! Keep your hands off, you hear me?" A weight held him crushed to the floor, pressing upon his back until he thought his spine were shattered; it was a foot planted on him to hold him down, by one of them who had been left to guard him. It ground him flat again with brutal inexorability. A hand snaked to the back of his neck, gripped it as in a vise, and forced his upreared head down, so that it struck the ground and water was dashed from his eyes. It relented again only as he lay quiescent.

  And then suddenly something had happened, lost to him in the throes of his own struggle. The vignette had changed. They were all frozen now, she and they alike. The foremost of the predatory hands, which had already fastened on her shoulder, wrenching at it, ripping at her clothing, had fallen loosely away and she was untouched again. Th
e dislodged outer garment fell to the floor at her feet. The circlet on her bared arm flickered in coruscation. They drew slowly back, a step at a time. The grouping that had been about to enclose her widened again. The hands that had reached out graspingly remained extended, pointing. The indicating fingers were like the spokes of a wheel, and the hub of it was that prismatic light that fumed upon her arm.

  They were frightened now in turn, more than she had been. Hoarse whispers sounded from them here and there. They drew farther back, then still farther back again. A space was left between her and them, a space of superstitious awe.

  She moved. Her hands went up and drew the cotton from her ears. She was staring at them as raptly as they were at her.

  One of them spoke. Some guttural sound passed the lips of one, meant for the others.

  The answer came in a woman's voice; that same guttural gibberish, but in a woman's voice. He thought dimly that one of them must be a woman.

  None was. The only woman in the room was Mitty, his wife. Some trick of the senses, some ventriloquistic effect had made the sound seem to come from against the wall, where she was.

  Her lips were moving. Now he would hear her say, "Larry, who are they? What are they going to do to us?"

  Her lips were moving. He heard them say, "Achini go achini haya—" It began like that, and then went on, and his ears couldn't follow; it was a blurred cacophony to them.

  A great sigh went up, and all those before her, all those who had been so dangerous to the two of them only a moment ago, went down suppliantly before her, some on one knee, some on both. Some shielded their eyes with their bent arms before them, others held their heads low, eyes averted to the floor.

  She went on speaking, steadily speaking, in a hesitant way, as though trying to remember, trying to explain something that baffled her. And while she spoke, something even worse was happening than this sound of a voice he had loved receding back through the ages away from him, though both were in the same room. Her hands went to her hair, and a modern fastening she wore in it at night, a sort of pin or clip, was loosened and fell away. Then before his horrified eyes she began to pull at her single remaining modern garment that clothed her, the night robe, and ripped it bodily away from her, like someone emerging from a cocoon.

  Not a head was raised, not an eye looked up. For a single instant she was completely unclad there, in this roomful of savages bowing before her; white and beautiful as even he, her own husband, had never quite seen her before. His cry of frightened reproach stuck in his throat. He was seeing something that his senses refused to accept. His eyes rolled a little and his mouth opened and he groaned deep in his chest, lying there bound on the floor.

  But she had already reached forward and drawn away, from a pair of the submissive shoulders bent before her, a sort of military cloak or cape that one of them, higher in command than the others, had been wearing, and this she drew around her waist and fastened there into a kilt or girdle. Her upper part she left unconcealed, with the unself-consciousness typical of primitives all the world over and in all ages. Last of all she withdrew the one foot that had been encased in the high-heeled slipper, and stood upon the floor unshod.

  She had reverted to barbarism, gone into darkness there before his very eyes. She no longer saw him there, groveHng on the floor.. He didn't even exist for her, he could see that. She had eyes only for the feathered heads bowed before her, making obeisance.

  He couldn't tell what it was he was crying to her, for his mind had no part in directing his tongue, only his Jieart and the very marrow of his being. For this was fright now in its deepest form, the fright of unreason. It must be a dream—and yet it wasn't. She pointed toward him, yet without turning her face to look as she did so, and the blows that quickly fell on him to still him and punish the sacrilege of his crying out to her were real enough.

  Then two of them quickly seized him and dragged him out of her presence, backward through the doorway into what had been the central room of the house last night—a thousand years ago.

  There were others of them milling about in there. It must have been a raiding party of some two score or so. They had kindled several torches of some resinous wood to give them light, now that the capture had been effected and stealth was no longer needed. He was flung back against the wall, upright, beside Mallory and Chris, who were already bound as he was. A shrewd intelligence evidently directed these forays. The house was not looted, nor was the torch applied to it. It was as if their intention was to leave it exactly as it had been found, with only this difference, that it would be empty. They apparently wanted to give the outside world no actual proof of their existence.

  "It's my fault," Mallory said in a low voice. 'T fell asleep there over by the door. I guess I didn't really think there was anything to be on the watch for."

  Jones was incapable of answering him. What difference did it make now, anyway? To him even the fact of their capture was not the terrifying thing.

  "Why are you shaking so? What did they do in there?" Mallory asked him. It was as if he had said, We are all in the same boat. What have they done to you that is any worse than what they have done to the rest of us?

  Jones was sick in some peculiar way that he couldn't account for. Sick at his spirit, if there were such a thing.

  There was a great clammy weight upon him, all over, yet he couldn't tell where. "I don't know," he gasped. "I'm seeing things that—aren't so."

  Mallory didn't understand what he meant. Who could have understood? "They're real enough," he said dryly. "You can almost feel the heat from their bodies every time they go by."

  Jones could hear Chris whimpering, over on the other side of her father. She was cowering against him, away from all this strangeness. He felt sorry for her, but even she didn't have to contend with what he did. With her and her father, the fear was external, outside themselves; with him, it was on the inside. Even if all these strange, shadowy figures went away now and left them alone, the fear wouldn't go away. It would never go away again.

  A crude sort of palanquin was being knocked together outside the house, while they were held here awaiting its completion. It was of four crosspieces, covered over with plaited branches. Then the feathered men stood back and a lane was opened, leading from the inner room out to where it waited. Every knee was bent and every head inclined, and through their midst slowly moved the figure of reverence that Mitty had now become one of them. One set high above them, perhaps, sacred to them, dedicated to the offices of their religion, but one of them. One of their own. Impassive, idol-like. The figure of a woman who only a little while ago—

  "Mitty," he whispered hoarsely from the background.

  He could hear Mallory, beside him, draw in his breath sharply, as if some sort of cold pang had just assailed him. And even Chris. He heard her give a little frightened whimper to herself. "They've dressed her all up."

  They hadn't. She had done it herself.

  He saw her step within the litter and seat herself upon it, in proud unapproachability. Then the litter was raised upon their shoulders, high above all heads, and slowly moved forward in ceremonial procession.

  "Mitty!" he screamed out to her, in agonized terror. "Turn and look at me! I'm going mad!"

  She seemed not to hear. She stared straight forward, into the past toward which they were carrying her.

  A stinging blow drove the blood out of his lips and chin. What difference did its exact meaning make? It waseloquent enough for him to understand. One did not address a goddess, the high priestess of a cult.

  His head lolled sideways against Mallory's shoulder, then turned slowly so that his face was hidden at last. "Let me stay like this," he said in a flagging voice. "I don't want to look at it."

  He started to go limply downward. The other man couldn't support him or arrest his descent, for he himself was bound.

  He toppled inertly to the floor, into a little respite from strangeness that his mind couldn't bear.

  Chapter Sev
enteen

  In the house up in Maryland, Cotter came back from the door with an opened telegram in his hand, and its contents already on his face. "Here's the answer from the Associated Fruit Line's San Francisco oflBce. Their ship the Santa Emilia just docked there."

  Fredericks took it and read.

  CAPTAIN S.S. STA. EMILIA REPORTS LAWRENCE JONES AND WIFE ACCIDENTALLY LEFT BEHIND AT PUERTO SANTO.

  FRAVNEY, CO. AGENT

  They looked at each other. Long and forebodingly, as they had that day at the steamship office in Baltimore.

  "It could happen," Cotter tried to suggest uncertainly.

  "It's a little too much of a coincidence. Why should it be at just that one particular port of call? It wasn't Havana. It wasn't Christobal. No, it was Puerto Santo. You and I have both seen that place. There's not enough there to take up half an hour of anyone's time, much less make them overstay a shore leave. Something happened."

  "You mean—?"

  Fredericks nodded curtly. "Yes, I mean. Now the thing is, what're we going to do about it?"

  Cotter eyed him in silence, waiting for him to give the answer himself.

  "Just one more thing, to make sure. We'll communicate direct with the authorities in Puerto Santo. If they're still accounted for down there, if they're in full view waiting for the next ship, all right. If they're not, then we'll know. I'll send a radiogram right now."

  The answer came back in seventy-two hours. "It's in Spanish," Cotter said when he brought it in. "You better tackle it."

  Fredericks roughed out a running translation on a piece of scratch paper as he read it through.

  MR. AND MRS. LAWRENCE JONES UNREPORTED SINCE 12tH INST. LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS FINCA LA ESCONDIDA. DISAPPEARED, FEARED TO HAVE STRAYED INTO JUNGLE AND PERISHED.