The House of Dr. Edwardes

by Francis Beeding

  “Ai saraye! ai saraye!”

  But she knew those words. She had known them somewhere before? Yes, they were written in that dreadful book which she had read in the library that night when he had found her there alone. They were the cries of the sorcerers at the Sabbath. She shuddered violently and looked round bewildered.

  She remembered everything now, remembered, not in the distant fashion of a moment before, but in a way that made everything imminent and real. This was the ceremony from which she had somehow to escape, which she had prayed to God might never come to pass. And God must have heard that prayer. He could not allow this thing to happen. For now she was able to move. In a few moments she would be strong enough to run away, to fly anywhere, anywhere from the horror that was closing in upon her.

  Again the madman shouted. He was speaking now an unknown tongue. What was it, Greek, Hebrew, Latin? Words poured from his lips. Some she could understand.

  “The demons of the heaven of Gad.—By Gibor.—Come, come, come.”

  There was a moment of silence. The figure by the stone had dropped its hands, the smoke bellied up more thickly, the air was pungent with the scent of spices. Then it raised its arms once more.

  “Come,” it shouted again, and the voice rang through the forest. “I command thee by the key of Solomon and the Great Name.”

  She was leaning now against the rough trunk of the fir tree. Still she could not fly. She was not yet strong enough to rise, and at his shout there had come a change. The moonlight was vanishing. It was growing darker. No longer could she see the tops of the fir trees against the sky. The stars were going out one by one. The face of the sky was withdrawn. It was too dark now to discern even the column of smoke. All that she could see was the crackling fire, and the dim form crouching beside it.

  The darkness was coming down. But that was only a coincidence.—Or was it something more?

  The madman made a slight gesture, and two dark shadows leapt to their feet and came towards her. She felt a hand on either arm, hot breath upon her cheek.

  “He is here,” said a voice, exultant and ringing proudly.

  She knew now that her hour had come, and she awoke at last to action. She wrenched her arms and fought madly, but she was helpless in the grip of these creatures. They seized her, lifted her aloft to the full stretch of their arms, as though she had been a child, and moved with her towards the circle and the white stone. Godstone stood there, his hands outstretched, his eyes gleaming in the light of the brazier.

  “He has come,” he shouted. “He has entered me. Your Lord, your Master, the Prince of Evil is here. I am filled with the life of hell. I am lord of the depths of the sea. I am the mighty and the strong.”

  He flung wide his arms again.

  “The moon is covered,” he said. “Her light is put out.”

  A strangled cry burst from her lips. She was carried nearer to the stone, jerked to and fro.

  “God, God,” she said, “kill me now. Do not let me live.”

  She was already close, and moving ever closer, to the stone. A skull daubed with blood grinned at her from near the brazier. And there was the head of a black cat, the lips twisted back from the white pointed teeth. She touched something hard. That was the stone, the stone of sacrifice. He was waiting beside it, and had turned towards her. His hands were outstretched. His body gleamed white between the folds of his dark robe. His face was working, and blasphemies poured from his lips. He reached towards her, and a hand gripped the top of her gown and tore it. The face was nearer now, bending over her, working. There was foam on the lips—

  No, not foam. It was a still quiet face, a face full of pity and concern, the face of an elderly man with a short gray mustache and spectacles. What was this?

  They had stopped holding her. She was free. She moved an arm. What was all that noise, those footsteps and the cries?

  Over the shoulder of the unknown man bending over her she saw dark figures running. They were dressed in some kind of uniform. The tops of the fir trees were visible again, and the moon was sailing serene in a star-sown sky. That darkness from which she had just broken clear had been only a cloud. That was all, a cloud which had blown for a moment across the moon. All was clear again.

  But no, the cloud was again creeping up the sky. It must be stopped, it must not move like that, or there would be darkness a second time.

  “She has fainted,” said Doctor Edwardes. “Carry her at once to the castle. I will come to you as soon as I can.”

  V

  He was running desperately, flying rather, borne up on the sable wings which streamed from his shoulders. And behind him were men in pursuit. Fools, to think he could be caught like any common fugitive. The Master would help him, the Master who had answered his call and who had for one glorious moment possessed himself of his body.

  Godstone paused on the edge of the belt of firs. Above him clear in the moonlight towered the rocks. Noises below him in the wood showed where his pursuers were at hand. He listened for a moment, then turned his face to the mountain and began to climb, sometimes on hand and knees, with catlike agility.

  “Mon dieu, there he goes, Etienne,” said a voice from the edge of the wood.

  Two men in dark uniforms paused and gazed upwards. They shouted, but Godstone did not even turn to look at them.

  It was not much farther now, only another hundred feet or so. There at last was the summit, clean and bare. There he would stand and the Master would come to him again. They would fly together over the world, borne on black pinions.

  His breath came in gasps, his hands were torn and bleeding. Twice he stumbled, but yard by yard he fought his way upwards. Now at last he was on the top. He stood on a ledge of rock just below the highest pinnacle. Underneath him was the forest, and at his feet a precipice that dropped sheer towards the valley.

  The watchers stopped in their scrambling pursuit and gazed. They saw a figure with arms flung wide in a sable cloak. A voice came down to them, faintly through the clear mountain air:

  “Into your arms, Master. You shall bear me up.”

  He leaped forward into the empty air, and fell like a stone, his great cloak streaming behind him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I

  “Yes, sir,” Warder Jones was saying, “jumped clean off the rock ’e did. Just like as if ’e was some big bird that was going to fly. I’ve sent the men we brought along from Annecy to recover the body. But it’ll take ’em some time to find it.”

  Doctor Edwardes was sitting at his desk—the desk from which he had ruled Château Landry for the better part of a lifetime. Warder Jones was standing at his elbow.

  “Very good, Jones,” said Doctor Edwardes wearily. “Tell them to let me know as soon as they have found it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the warder, turning on his heel.

  He paused a moment.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said. “About the doctor.”

  “The doctor?”

  “Doctor Murchison, sir.”

  “He will recover, Jones.”

  “Lucky we found ’im sir.”

  “Lucky indeed.”

  “If I ’adn’t noticed that them bushes were a bit disordered.”

  “Yes, Jones.”

  But still the warder lingered.

  “Well, Jones, what is it?”

  The warder seemed to be swallowing something hard. Then suddenly he moved clumsily towards the doctor in his chair.

  “Excuse me, Doctor, but I should like to say as ’ow I—as ’ow—well, it’s a matter o’ fifteen years as I’ve been ’ere, and I know as ’ow you’re feeling it. Doctor—and—well, that’s what I wanted to say.”

  The old man at the table put his hand on the warder’s arm.

  “Thank you, Jones,” he said.

  “Are the patients all quiet?” he added after a pause.

  “Yes, sir. All except Curtis, who ’ad another fit when we took the jacket off ’im. ‘E’s running round now
trying to murder Stimson, saying as ’ow it’s all Stimson’s fault that we broke up that party in the clearing. Miss Truelow is back again in her black, and behavin’ like a perfect lady, and Miss Collett is inquiring after a rubber ball what she lost previous to what ’appened. The Colonel is quite ’is old self—polishing ’is braces as he allus does on the thirteenth of the month, and the Reverend ’Ickett is saying ’is prayers most of the time. ’E did want to tell me of a bad dream as ’e had ’ad, but I ’adn’t time, and ’e was asking me whether I’d seen a cross what used to ’ang in ’is room and telling me as ’ow ’e’d lost ’is Bible. He seemed terribly upset about it, so I got him a Bible out of the chapel, and ’e was pacified.”

  Warder Jones now stood stolidly at attention beside the doctor’s chair.

  “Anything else, Doctor?” he added.

  “Nothing tonight, Jones.”

  “Thank you, sir. Good night, sir.”

  “Good night.”

  Doctor Edwardes was alone. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock in the morning. This, he knew, was the end. Tomorrow the patients would be removed to the asylum at Annecy. There would be official inquiries, a sensation in the press. Thank God, he had arrived in time—only just in time.

  But Château Landry was finished. Perhaps that was just as well. He was getting old. And there were all those files to study and put in order—the big book to be completed, the results of a lifetime.

  His work at Château Landry was closing in failure, but he would pass on the fruits of his experience to the new men. There was that young Murchison, for example, of whom Freud himself had spoken so highly. The work would go on. He must edit his notes and diaries, publish them for the benefit of those who would follow him in the task.

  There was a rustle beside him and he looked up. Constance was standing in front of him.

  “My dear young lady,” said Doctor Edwardes, springing to his feet. “What on earth are you doing here? You must go back to bed at once.”

  She put her hand out with a gesture of refusal. She was, he noted, fully dressed.

  “For pity’s sake, Doctor,” she said, “tell me what happened.”

  “Another time,” he said, “another time.”

  “Can’t you understand,” she burst out, “I must know at once. I shall go mad if I don’t know what happened after—after I fainted.”

  Doctor Edwardes moved towards her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Nothing happened,” he said. “Go back and try to get some rest. You had had a terrible experience, but it’s all over now, and you will be none the worse for it in a week from now. I will give you a sleeping draught.”

  She shook her head. “No more drugs. Doctor,” she said. “Godstone has drugged me once already tonight. Please tell me everything.”

  “Very well,” he said, “but you must be quiet.”

  Mechanically the doctor tore off the back leaves from the big calendar on his desk.

  He pointed to a chair. She sat down obediently.

  “My arrival is easily explained,” he said. “Warder Jones came straight to me when he was sent away. I was not very far off, you know, only at Aix-les-Bains. He told me the circumstances of his dismissal. He also told me how the man confined as Godstone had claimed to be Murchison, and of the crosses that had appeared on his feet since his arrival. As soon as I had heard his story I came straight back, and I arranged with the head of the asylum at Annecy to lend me some of his men. We came here in a car, and we scaled the fence with ladders brought from the village.

  “We were only just in time.”

  “And—and where are they all now?” said Constance.

  “The patients are in their rooms,” replied Doctor Edwardes.

  “Now that Godstone’s influence is removed they will soon be normal again, even Curtis, though at present he is having a bad attack.”

  “And Godstone?”

  “He escaped towards the mountains behind the clearing and flung himself from a high rock. They are looking for the body.”

  Constance listened. Her head ached abominably, and there had been something urgent she had wanted to say. It came back to her suddenly.

  “Doctor,” she said, “there’s something I meant to tell you.

  You must send at once to the gate and search the bushes on the side of the road. Doctor Murchison—”

  Doctor Edwardes interrupted her.

  “Doctor Murchison has been found. He was unconscious, but he will recover. It was a heavy blow, but he was only stunned.”

  It was the first good news she had heard, and she felt suddenly very weak, almost to tears.

  At that moment there came a tap at the door.

  “Come in,” said Doctor Edwardes.

  It was Mr. Deeling.

  He was wearing the clothes in which Constance had seen him first, the black suit with the striped trousers carefully creased. His hair was neat again, his manner precise and formal. He stood at the door for a moment in surprise.

  “Excuse me, Doctor,” he said. “But I saw a light in this room, and in view of the fact that it is past two a.m. I thought it well to ascertain—”

  He broke off suddenly. He was staring at the big calendar on the desk.

  “August 11th,” he said. “There must be some mistake.”

  “No, Mr. Deeling. Yesterday was the 10th.”

  Mr. Deeling passed a hand over his forehead.

  “Loss of memory,” said the doctor aside to Constance. “The days since your arrival here are a complete blank.”

  But Mr. Deeling was still staring at the calendar.

  “Dear me,” he said. “I must have forgotten how to count.”

  “Thank God,” said Constance under her breath, and fell to laughing weakly in her chair.

  II

  Pierre and Germaine were walking slowly up the road leading from the village. It was an autumn afternoon in late October. Soon the snow would fall on the mountains, but meanwhile it was warm and mild.

  They walked in silent content. Below them, as they slowly mounted the narrow road, already showing signs of neglect, stretched the green valley and the roof tops of the little village. A thin haze of smoke was hanging blue in the quiet air.

  They paused at the last bend of the road. Before them stretched a steel fence broken by a gate of the same material, propped open by a stone. Just beyond stood a little lodge, its white paint dilapidated, its door discolored.

  The road wound on through the fence, across the green upland meadow to where the castle stood half a mile away on its mound. For a moment in the rays of the setting sun the gray walls were tinted with rose and the windows were touched with fire. Then the sun sank for another day behind the barrier of rock beyond, the windows of the castle became blank, and it lay heavy upon the ground, like a great head with sightless eyes.

  The two at the gate stood silent in the fading light, looking up the road, already covered here and there with growing weeds; and, then, moved by a common impulse, they turned towards each other, and Pierre took Germaine in his arms and kissed her.

  “We shall be in the great Paris in two months from now,” he said. “There will be no more of this,” and he made a vague gesture.

  The girl looked doubtfully towards the castle.

  “Would it not still be better to take service with the rich American who is coming to live at the Château?”

  Pierre shook his head violently.

  “No,” he replied, “you will never see me there.”

  “But consider the wages.”

  “No,” he repeated. “We must leave all this. For you and me, it is the new life we shall begin. We will go to the great town where there is laughter and happiness and people in the streets.”

  Germaine drew a little apart from him. She rubbed one of the steel gateposts with her finger.

  “Look,” she said. “Already it begins to be rusty.”

  “Let it rust,” he said. “Come, sweetheart.”

  He drew her ag
ain into his arms.

  When, a little later, they turned to go down the hill, the castle behind them was a shadow among the gathering shadows of the night.

  Epilogue

  GRAND HOTEL DES LIBELLULES,

  MONTE CARLO,

  December, 1926.

  DEAREST HELEN,

  Monte is a perfect dream. I never saw such flowers. You know they actually uproot any dead or dying plants in the public gardens over night and put fresh ones in. John says that they comb the grass and dust the leaves every morning with a feather broom.

  John has had three goes at the tables, and has so far been lucky. I have had three new frocks, the evening one a perfect duck [A page of details is here omitted.], and two hats [Two irrelevant paragraphs are again omitted.], and John has still got a thousand francs over. So you see what a lovely place it is.

  A funny thing happened yesterday. We were walking on the terrace, and John was using strong language about the pigeon shooting, which is really rather horrible, my dear, when I happened to notice a man and a girl sitting on a seat. I would not have given them a second glance, though the girl was quite pretty, and had on the darlingest frock, if I had not thought I had seen the man before. And then I had quite a shock, for I realized who it was. You remember that adventure we had this summer on our honeymoon.

  Well, this was the very man I had seen lying on the road unconscious—the lunatic who had been knocked on the head with a spanner.

  Well, there was this same lunatic, talking quite happily to the pretty girl. John recognized him too, and we wondered whether we ought to do anything about it. In fact, it worried John quite a lot, and we mentioned it at lunch that day to the Baxters, and old Tommy Baxter told us the story. There’s simply nothing that man doesn’t know, and it is the most incredible tale.

  It seems that the man we saw lying by the motor car was not the lunatic at all, but the real doctor, and that the lunatic had knocked him out and pretended to be the doctor himself. What’s more, he actually took charge of the asylum. And the best of it is that John, who prides himself on his medical knowledge, was himself taken in and, as you remember, actually helped the lunatic to take his doctor to the madhouse. Of course, I laughed like anything, but old Tommy Baxter was quite grave. It was no laughing matter, he said. For the most awful things had happened. It appeared that the lunatic, who was quite sane except on one subject, was also a doctor, and that he kept the real doctor shut up for weeks, and ran the place by himself with the assistance of the pretty girl who was new to her job.