It was a nervous outburst which passed off quickly. Remaining on his knees he contemplated sadly the athletic body of as fine a seaman as ever had drawn a cutlass, laid a gun, or passed the weather earring in a gale, lying stiff and cold, his cheery, fearless spirit departed—perhaps turning to him, his boy chum, to his ship out there rolling on the grey seas off an ironbound coast, at the very moment of its flight.
He perceived that the six brass buttons of Tom’s jacket had been cut off. He shuddered at the notion of the two miserable and repulsive witches busying themselves ghoulishly about the defenceless body of his friend. Cut off. Perhaps with the same knife which.… The head of one trembled; the other was bent double, and their eyes were red and bleared, their infamous claws unsteady.… It must have been in this very room too, for Tom could not have been killed in the open and brought in here afterwards. Of that Byrne was certain. Yet those devilish crones could not have killed him themselves even by taking him unawares—and Tom would be always on his guard of course. Tom was a very wide-awake wary man when engaged on any service.… And in fact how did they murder him? Who did? In what way?
Byrne jumped up, snatched the lamp off the table, and stooped swiftly over the body. The light revealed on the clothing no stain, no trace, no spot of blood anywhere. Byrne’s hands began to shake so that he had to set the lamp on the floor and turn away his head in order to recover from this agitation.
Then he began to explore that cold, still, and rigid body for a stab, a gunshot wound, for the trace of some killing blow. He felt all over the skull anxiously. It was whole. He slipped his hand under the neck. It was unbroken. With terrified eyes he peered close under the chin and saw no marks of strangulation on the throat.
There were no signs anywhere. He was just dead.
Impulsively Byrne got away from the body as if the mystery of an incomprehensible death had changed his pity into suspicion and dread. The lamp on the floor near the set, still face of the seaman showed it staring at the ceiling as if despairingly. In the circle of light Byrne saw by the undisturbed patches of thick dust on the floor that there had been no struggle in that room. “He has died outside,” he thought. Yes, outside in that narrow corridor, where there was hardly room to turn, the mysterious death had come to his poor dear Tom. The impulse of snatching up his pistols and rushing out of the room abandoned Byrne suddenly. For Tom, too, had been armed—with just such powerless weapons as he himself possessed—pistols, a cutlass! And Tom had died a nameless death, by incomprehensible means.
A new thought came to Byrne. That stranger knocking at the door and fleeing so swiftly at his appearance had come there to remove the body. Aha! That was the guide the withered witch had promised would show the English officer the shortest way of rejoining his man. A promise, he saw it now, of dreadful import. He who had knocked would have two bodies to deal with. Man and officer would go forth from the house together. For Byrne was certain now that he would have to die before the morning—and in the same mysterious manner, leaving behind him an unmarked body.
The sight of a smashed head, of a throat cut, of a gaping gunshot wound, would have been an inexpressible relief. It would have soothed all his fears. His soul cried within him to that dead man whom he had never found wanting in danger. “Why don’t you tell me what I am to look for, Tom? Why don’t you?” But in rigid immobility, extended on his back, he seemed to preserve an austere silence, as if disdaining in the finality of his awful knowledge to hold converse with the living.
Suddenly Byrne flung himself on his knees by the side of the body, and dry-eyed, fierce, opened the shirt wide on the breast, as if to tear the secret forcibly from that cold heart which had been so loyal to him in life! Nothing! Nothing! He raised the lamp, and all the sign vouchsafed to him by that face which used to be so kindly in expression was a small bruise on the forehead—the least thing, a mere mark. The skin even was not broken. He stared at it a long time as if lost in a dreadful dream. Then he observed that Tom’s hands were clenched as though he had fallen facing somebody in a fight with fists. His knuckles, on closer view, appeared somewhat abraded. Both hands.
The discovery of these slight signs was more appalling to Byrne than the absolute absence of every mark would have been. So Tom had died striking against something which could be hit, and yet could kill one without leaving a wound—by a breath.
Terror, hot terror, began to play about Byrne’s heart like a tongue of flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes. He backed away from the body as far as he could, then came forward stealthily casting fearful glances to steal another look at the bruised forehead. There would perhaps be such a faint bruise on his own forehead—before the morning.
“I can’t bear it,” he whispered to himself. Tom was for him now an object of horror, a sight at once tempting and revolting to his fear. He couldn’t bear to look at him.
At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing horror, he stepped forward from the wall against which he had been leaning, seized the corpse under the armpits, and began to lug it over to the bed. The bare heels of the seaman trailed on the floor noiselessly. He was heavy with the dead weight of inanimate objects. With a last effort Byrne landed him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him over, snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet with which he covered it over. Then he spread the curtains at head and foot so that joining together as he shook their folds they hid the bed altogether from his sight.
He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it. The perspiration poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to carry for a while a thin stream of half-frozen blood. Complete terror had possession of him now, a nameless terror which had turned his heart to ashes.
He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning at his feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the end of the table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets round the walls, over the ceiling, over the floor, in the expectation of a mysterious and appalling vision. The thing which could deal death in a breath was outside that bolted door. But Byrne believed neither in walls nor bolts now. Unreasoning terror turning everything to account, his old-time boyish admiration of the athletic Tom, the undaunted Tom (he had seemed to him invincible), helped to paralyse his faculties, added to his despair.
He was no longer Edgar Byrne. He was a tortured soul suffering more anguish than any sinner’s body had ever suffered from rack or boot. The depth of his torment may be measured when I say that this young man, as brave at least as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol and firing into his own head. But a deadly, chilly languor was spreading over his limbs. It was as if his flesh had been wet plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs. Presently, he thought, the two witches will be coming in, with crutch and stick—horrible, grotesque, monstrous—affiliated to the devil—to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny little bruise of death. And he wouldn’t be able to do anything. Tom had struck out at something, but he was not like Tom. His limbs were dead already. He sat still, dying the death over and over again; and the only part of him which moved were his eyes, turning round and round in their sockets, running over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, again and again, till suddenly they became motionless and stony—starting out of his head fixed in the direction of the bed.
He had seen the heavy curtains stir and shake as if the dead body they concealed had turned over and sat up. Byrne, who thought the world could hold no more terrors in store, felt his hair stir at the roots. He gripped the arms of the chair, his jaw fell, and the sweat broke out on his brow while his dry tongue clove suddenly to the roof of his mouth. Again the curtains stirred, but did not open. “Don’t, Tom!” Byrne made effort to shout, but all he heard was a slight moan such as an uneasy sleeper may make. He felt that his brain was going, for, now, it seemed to him that the ceiling over the bed had moved, had slanted, and came level again—and once
more the closed curtains swayed gently as if about to part.
Byrne closed his eyes not to see the awful apparition of the seaman’s corpse coming out animated by an evil spirit. In the profound silence of the room he endured a moment of frightful agony, then opened his eyes again. And he saw at once that the curtains remained closed still, but that the ceiling over the bed had risen quite a foot. With the last gleam of reason left to him he understood that it was the enormous baldaquin over the bed which was coming down, while the curtains attached to it swayed softly, sinking gradually to the floor. His drooping jaw snapped to—and half rising in his chair he watched mutely the noiseless descent of the monstrous canopy. It came down in short smooth rushes till lowered half way or more, when it took a run and settled swiftly its turtle-back shape with the deep border piece fitting exactly the edge of the bedstead. A slight crack or two of wood were heard, and the overpowering stillness of the room resumed its sway.
Byrne stood up, gasped for breath, and let out a cry of rage and dismay, the first sound which he is perfectly certain did make its way past his lips on this night of terrors. This then was the death he had escaped! This was the devilish artifice of murder poor Tom’s soul had perhaps tried from beyond the border to warn him of. For this was how he had died. Byrne was certain he had heard the voice of the seaman, faintly distinct in his familiar phrase, “Mr. Byrne! Look out, sir!” and again uttering words he could not make out. But then the distance separating the living from the dead is so great! Poor Tom had tried. Byrne ran to the bed and attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering the body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a tombstone. The rage of vengeance made him desist; his head buzzed with chaotic thoughts of extermination, he turned round the room as if he could find neither his weapons nor the way out; and all the time he stammered awful menaces.
A violent battering at the door of the inn recalled him to his soberer senses. He flew to the window, pulled the shutters open, and looked out. In the faint dawn he saw below him a mob of men. Ha! He would go and face at once this murderous lot collected no doubt for his undoing. After his struggle with nameless terrors he yearned for an open fray with armed enemies. But he must have remained yet bereft of his reason, because forgetting his weapons he rushed downstairs with a wild cry, unbarred the door while blows were raining on it outside, and flinging it open flew with his bare hands at the throat of the first man he saw before him. They rolled over together. Byrne’s hazy intention was to break through, to fly up the mountain path, and come back presently with Gonzales’ men to exact an exemplary vengeance. He fought furiously till a tree, a house, a mountain, seemed to crash down upon his head—and he knew no more.
* * * *
Here Mr. Byrne describes in detail the skilful manner in which he found his broken head bandaged, informs us that he had lost a great deal of blood, and ascribes the preservation of his sanity to that circumstance. He sets down Gonzales’ profuse apologies in full too. For it was Gonzales who, tired of waiting for news from the English, had come down to the inn with half his band, on his way to the sea. “His excellency,” he explained, “rushed out with fierce impetuosity, and, moreover, was not known to us for a friend, and so we… etc., etc. When asked what had become of the witches, he only pointed his finger silently to the ground, then voiced calmly a moral reflection: “The passion for gold is pitiless in the very old, señor,” he said. “No doubt in former days they have put many a solitary traveller to sleep in the archbishop’s bed.”
“There was also a gipsy girl there,” said Byrne feebly from the improvised litter on which he was being carried to the coast by a squad of guerilleros.
“It was she who winched up that infernal machine, and it was she too who lowered it that night,” was the answer.
“But why? Why?” exclaimed Byrne. “Why should she wish for my death?”
“No doubt for the sake of your excellency’s coat buttons,” said politely the saturnine Gonzales. “We found those of the dead mariner concealed on her person. But your excellency may rest assured that everything that is fitting has been done on this occasion.
Byrne asked no more questions. There was still another death which was considered by Gonzales as “fitting to the occasion.” The one-eyed Bernardino stuck against the wall of his wine-shop received the charge of six escopettas into his breast. As the shots rang out the rough bier with Tom’s body on it went past carried by a bandit-like gang of Spanish patriots down the ravine to the shore, where two boats from the ship were waiting for what was left on earth of her best seaman.
Mr. Byrne, very pale and weak, stepped into the boat which carried the body of his humble friend. For it was decided that Tom Corbin should rest far out in the bay of Biscay. The officer took the tiller and, turning his head for the last look at the shore, saw on the grey hillside something moving, which he made out to be a little man in a yellow hat mounted on a mule—that mule without which the fate of Tom Corbin would have remained mysterious for ever.
[1] The gallows, supposed to be widowed of the last executed criminal and waiting for another.
THE WITCH OF FAITH LANE, by Skadi meic Beorh
The witch lived in the little white house sitting in a big yard we were always tempted to cross as a shortcut to Mr. Bedgood’s candy store where one-eyed Jack, the old yellow hunting dog, would greet us with a sad wag of his broken tail as he hopped toward us on three legs.
We were terrified of the witch. If she caught us crossing her land, she would make us peel potatoes for the rest of our lives! It was a delicious terror we held, and one always heightened by the cool air of Fall—a chill that we heritably associated with Winter, and so connected with witches, one-eyed dogs and death by potato-peeling. It was a certain comforting kind of terror that kept us alive during the pale-horse stage of early childhood.
One crisp Halloween day, a gang of eight or nine of us got money together and headed out to Bedgood’s. We needed to buy candy just in case no one gave us any that night. Always good to be on the safe side.
It was a long hike for little seven and eight-year-old legs; a good day’s adventure if we did it just right. If we stopped to pester the high-fenced Doberman pinscher Baron Von Ripper; then after that came to a stop to eye the Little Dirt Road…see who’s down it, or who might be coming out of the haunted house where the lady shot her husband five times with five different guns one hot summer afternoon. For some reason this house didn’t scare us. Maybe because it was a ranch-style. Now, if it had been an old turreted Victorian home with spooky smoky windows and a creaky old porch, that would have been a different story altogether…we would have loved it! No such luck.
We were a raggle-taggle band of ragamuffins always and forever hoofing and puffing and chattering and laughing all the way to wherever we were going…but always past the potato-witch’s house. We went to the candy store alot where we would buy, more than actual real-life candy, scary-picture stickers (nails with blood dripping off them), scratch-n-sniffs (watermelon was my favorite), day-glo green slide-whistles and sparklers that shot out a similar colored green fire. Anyway…
While Terry had us all enthralled about how he had torn a lawn mower apart and then put it back together…and about how he was going to grow his hair and never cut it again because he was an Indian…
Quincy Pugh got caught by the witch. We froze, and her sister Kincey started crying. I ran, but then realized I was running to nowhere, and Robbie and Terry called me a crybaby though I wasn’t crying, so I stopped and stiff-legged it back to our closing circle of friends. Mary Jane Ingles wondered why Quincy had thought she could out-run the witch’s Chihuahua, who had herded our friend toward the little garden and made her disappear, just like that! behind the old crumbly storage shed. We knew that behind the witch’s weedy old garden and dusty old tool shed lay the creaking back door of her little white house, and inside…well, I ha
d never allowed myself to think about what might be inside! I knew one thing for sure, though. From Olive Road to Faith Lane, Binkley Street (where most of us lived) was long, long, long…and especially at night. And even though I was seven, I had seen streetlights before; and I knew they weren’t supposed to be ghostly-green. But the one by the witch’s house was ghostly-green, and that was just plain wrong.
Like kids will do, we hatched the perfect plan that was far from perfect. Terry would stride majestically across the big lot towards the scary house, and I was volunteered to, in the mean time, walk down Faith Lane, the little road leading up to Johnson Street and around to Bedgood’s, and Jack the Dog’s sad smile. As I walked, I was to sort of whoop! like some kind of animal. Kincey said that when I hollered across the neighborhood, I always sounded like a drowning owl, and I liked that she said that, so I started walking and hooting, walking and hooting…proud of my job to help save Quincy from death by potato-peeling.
As I sauntered forward on my unique task, Terry strode forth into the witch’s domain. He was our hero-king. Brave. Stalwart. Quite a bit crazy, actually. Three weeks before, he had jumped on the back of the mail truck and rode it the entire length of Binkley Street, somehow holding onto the bumper. We watched him get smaller and smaller as the mail truck neared the witch’s house; a toy with a little stick figure sitting on the back of it. What was happening! Oh. The truck had stopped. Then it started up again with a lurch, and Terry flipped off and did a double flip forward tumble triple ice-cream twist, head over heels, slicing open the top of his crew-cut head and ripping open his shirtless bronze chest, revealing a shiny white rib in the process. He hadn’t cried one tear. We were all amazed and stunned. Man! and Cool! we hollered out, and Terry glowed. A little mercurochrome, three fish sticks, a bite of pasketti-n-meatballs and a ice cold co-cola, and he was back outside as the untiring leader of our Halloween gang—October 31st being his birthday, of course. Yes, this Halloween day Terry had turned nine.
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 40