“It’s gone.”
“I checked the one in the back yard,” Ben said.
Drake looked at him. Ben nodded.
“What the hell!” Drake exploded.
“What can it be?” murmured Ben Harrian. “Jack, you don’t believe in superstition, of course, but I’ve made a study of such things. Frankly, this business worries me.”
“Your friend Ellers is what’s worrying me!” Drake barked at him. “We’d better look for him.”
Drake went inside for a flashlight. It took an hour, casting about in widening circles, to find the little dowser on the thickety slope. A three-quarter moon rising in the east cast oblique light into a small clearing about two hundred yards from the house. They found Tom Ellers there…quite dead.
“Poor little devil!” Drake mourned as they picked their way back to the house. “I feel guilty as hell, having you bring him over here…”
Ben’s voice was a mumble in the darkness. “Forget it, Jack.”
“We couldn’t know he had a bad heart, could we, Ben?”
“Forget it, Jack!”
Drake nearly wept with remorse. “Ben, I…”
Ben’s firm, slim hand came out of the darkness, shook Drake forcibly.
“Forget it!”
Drake’s teeth rattled. Momentary rage swarmed through him. But the shaking cleared his head. He felt his guts settle slowly back into place.
“Sorry, Ben…here, take it easy…here’s the yard.”
They rounded the garage and went into the house. Drake did not see the shadow lurking there, out of the moonglow. As the kitchen door closed, the shadow detached itself from the garage, drifted down the drive and into the night.
“Guess we better call the sheriff, Ben?”
“That is the usual procedure,” Ben said gruffly.
Drake moved toward the phone. Ben put a hand on his arm. He made a motion signifying a drink in Beverly’s direction. Beverly understood, sped worriedly into the kitchen where they kept a fifth under the sink.
“Better let me phone,” Ben said.
He made the call quickly, curtly, and turned to Drake.
“Bev is bringing you a drink, Jack. Pull yourself together. The sheriff and his men will be here in a few minutes. Don’t mention the puddles to them.”
“The puddles?” Drake had forgotten the puddles. “Why?”
Ben grinned tightly. He tapped his forehead with a stiffened finger.
“That’s why. They’ll think you’re crazy enough, having a dowser over. Let me do the talking. You just answer what questions are asked of you.”
“But, Ben, how about those puddles…?”
“Forget the puddles, Jack!”
Drake felt anger flare in him again. Ben Harrian was master of this situation. He, Drake, in his own house, was a nincompoop. He blamed Ben for accentuating his distress. Beverly appeared suddenly and jammed something cold and firm into his grasp. He tilted the glass, drank. His feelings subsided.
It was a long night. They had to go back to the body, of course, with the sheriff and two of his deputies. Flashlights bobbed in the thicket, pale swords of luminance in the stark glare of the moon. When they came upon the body, Sheriff Hamilton sent a deputy back to the house to await the county coroner, who was an unnecessarily long time in coming.
The remaining deputy occupied the interval taking several flash photographs with an enormous camera.
The sheriff questioned both Ben and Drake, listened to the story Ben told of the water hunt, the graphic description of the speed with which the old man had darted into the brush in search of the “big spring.”
“Don’t take much stock in water witchin’, myself,” the sheriff grunted, “though I guess there’s a lot of it bein’ done. It’s plain the old fellow had a bad heart. Too much exertion for a man his age.”
The coroner finally came, fussed over the corpse. He wasn’t a doctor—the coroner’s post in Burton County was a political appointment—but even he could see that Ellers was dead, and he said so, with what seemed to Drake to be a great deal of unnecessary satisfaction.
“Think his heart gave out, Abe?” rumbled the sheriff.
“Ed, you know I’m not a doctor!” protested the coroner. “We’ll have to send the body to the city for a post mortem. All I can say for sure is that he’s dead.”
The group crashed back through the brush. The two deputies carried the body. At the edge of the thicket, a pair of ambulance men with a stretcher met them. The body was put on the stretcher, carried out to the ambulance in the street. Sheriff Hamilton offered a few last words, legged into his car with his deputies, and the cortege ground away.
Drake was surprised to find Zuelda in the house when they re-entered.
“Bev called me,” Zuelda explained. “I had neighbors bring me over.”
Ben frowned. “You should not have come, Zuelda…”
Zuelda sparkled dangerously. “Leave Bev all alone, with you men out there crashing around in the brush?” She softened suddenly. “Poor old Tom…!”
Ben shrugged, turned to Drake.
“I guess we better be going, Jack. It’s late.” A cloud settled on his thin, handsome face. “There’s…something frightening going on around here, Jack.” He appealed to Beverly. “Aren’t you afraid to stay here?”
Beverly shook her head, wondering.
Drake said, “If you’re referring to those puddles, Ben, it’s your turn to forget it. There’s a natural explanation for everything, if you look far enough. As for being afraid of poor old Ellers’ ghost… I think not!”
Zuelda spoke slowly, looking doubtfully at her husband, as if seeking support from him.
“Ben is…is psychic. Jack. You can call it that. We wouldn’t blame you if you moved out right away after these things have happened.”
Drake laughed harshly.
“Too big an investment to leave,” he chuckled grimly. “It’s over with now, so what is there to worry about? Ben…you’re too sensitive. I’ve thought that about you all along. If I told you there were pixies in the thicket, I’m sure you would believe me!”
Ben stared at him oddly while Zuelda anxiously regarded her husband.
“Do you…do you know there is something in the thicket…?”
Drake exploded with strained mirth.
“There…what did I tell you? I didn’t even say there were pixies and you…” He exploded in another uproar.
“You listen to Ben, Jack!” Zuelda shrilled at him, shocking him out of his semi-hysteria. “Ben knows things you don’t know he knows…don’t dream…!”
Ben Harrian’s hand came down forcibly on her arm.
“Zuelda! My dear…” He turned to Drake, smiling. “Sorry, old man. I take it, then, that you plan to stay right here?”
Now it was Drake’s turn to stare. Could there really be any other thought in the tall man’s mind? Move out? Why? Ben seemed satisfied with Drake’s reaction. He took his wife solicitously by the shoulder.
“Come, dear. Jack’s had a bad evening.”
“Sorry I’m not scared out of seven years’ growth,” Drake put in with a sour grin. “Like some people…”
Ben turned, flashing white teeth in a friendly smile.
“Good night, Jack…Beverley.”
They heard the Harrian’s car churning the furlongs to the highway.
Beverly said, “You’ve insulted them, John, our best friends!” She said it simply, without accusation, as if puzzled, and she awaited an explanation.
Drake passed a hand across his face. His fingers shook.
“I’m sorry, Bev. Shock, I guess. Mostly, I can’t stand that guy, anyway. I’ll look him up at the office tomorrow and apologize.”
He wondered later about Ben�
��s concern over their leaving this place, he and Bev. Drake laughed grimly at the thought. It wasn’t in Drake’s make-up to scare easily. He wasn’t scared at all, he told himself. His reaction was shock…sympathy…pity for poor old Tom Ellers…tough way to end!
The apology he had contemplated making Ben for Beverly’s benefit dried up like the puddles in the yard. Drake didn’t apologize, and though he saw Ben frequently at the office, there was a strained atmosphere between them. And it didn’t matter, Drake told himself, though Bev was worried about losing Zuelda’s friendship.
* * * *
Friday evening, Sheriff Hamilton stopped by. Drake gave Bev that look which both of them tacitly understood to mean vanish. Bev vanished into the kitchen and rattled crockery.
Hamilton opened the skirmish with a few questions about Tom Ellers—pointless questions. Drake shrugged.
“You’d better ask Ben Harrian about that, Sheriff. I’d never seen the man before in my life.”
The sheriff grunted. “I’ll get around to Harrian later. Now, about this dowsing. Tell me about that again.”
Drake told him. He wanted to mention the puddles, just to spite Ben Harrian, but somehow he could make no mention of them pass his lips.
“Now, tell me again just how you found the body,” the sheriff went on.
Drake said, “Aren’t you making a lot of unnecessary trouble, Sheriff, over a man’s dying of a heart attack?”
Sheriff Hamilton stared levelly into Drake’s eyes.
“I didn’t say Ellers died of a heart attack—leastwise, not tonight.”
Drake felt a kind of sick alarm flood him.
“You mean…an accident? He could have tripped and fallen…”
“He didn’t trip.”
Drake felt sicker. The thought of an attacker lurking in the thicket…probably there while Bev was home alone…
“I didn’t see any marks to show he might have been clubbed or stabbed, Sheriff. And we didn’t hear a shot.”
“Ellers wasn’t knifed, clubbed or shot.”
Drake wondered why the sheriff deliberately prolonged the agony of his disclosure. Did he think he and Ben Harrian had killed Ellers?
“How did he die—if it’s any of my business?”
“It might be your business. It depends on whether Ellers went off into the brush under his own power, as you say, or whether he was carried in there and planted after he was drowned.
“Drowned?”
“The autopsy showed his lungs full of water. Ellers died by strangulation in an aqueous medium…if you prefer the language of the autopsy report.”
There was a moment of leaden, swimming silence, then the sheriff’s rough voice resumed the interrogation. “Now, you’re sure, are you, that Ellers went off alone into the brush…”
He does suspect us, Drake thought. A countering thought flashed through his mind. It was Hamilton’s job to suspect everybody. He could have no evidence to point suspicion toward Ben or Drake.
Drake said, “I guess I’ve said enough, Sheriff. If I am under arrest, I’ll go peacefully…”
The sheriff sighed and got to his feet.
“Sit down. You’re not under arrest. I believe your story, and that’s the tough part of it. It would be easier if I didn’t. If you find out how a man can drown himself in the middle of a thicket without getting his clothes wet, and without a drop of water anywhere around, let me know huh?”
* * * *
John Drake awoke in the middle of the night with a feeling of palpitant urgency. His ears strained against the unusual quiet of the night, as if seeking again the source of some sound that might have awakened him. Silver moonlight gushed through the bedroom windows from a nearly full moon riding high in the star-powdered sky.
The night was breathlessly still and hot. There was no murmur of insects, no raucous screams of the cicada, a blasting trumpet of sound synonymous with hot weather. He heard only the light breathing of Beverly as she slept quietly beside him, bathed in the light of the moon.
Then, faintly, he heard the sound again, the sound that had brought him awake—a low, throbbing ululation of musical quality that rose and fell on the moon-drenched night, crescendoed to a wail, and fell again to a haunting murmur that was like the whisper of dark waters caressing the smooth stones of an ancient stream bed. With the sound, there came an intensification of the urgent feeling that gripped him. He had to get up and go—someplace, he knew not where. Drake sat up in bed, head cocked for better listening, restraining the mad impulse to jump and run.
It was the sound of a voice—or of many voices, so beautifully blended as to seem one. It was a voice such as Drake had never heard before, its unhuman quality poignant with desire and the promise of sweetness ineffable. As the voice crescendoed, his ear detected the separation of syllables, but the song remained lost to his understanding, the words blurred and indistinct, yet pregnant with a lure that was more than he could resist.
Suddenly the singing was quite loud, as if swelled by an unimaginable chorus, until the room throbbed with its rhythm. Surely, Drake thought, the swelling harmonies must awaken Beverly. But she slept gently on. Drake covered his ears with his hands, but the wild song diminished not a decibel in volume.
It came to him then that the voices he heard lifted in song were not in the air at all, but in his own mind, ringing sweet and clear from some mystic, hidden well-spring of his own being. The pathos of it, the lure of it, the liquid, murmuring richness of its rhythmic fabric consumed him, dulled his senses, his power of thought, made of his mind a bright chamber where Nothingness floated in Void and he was robbed of his will.
Like a man in a dream, Drake dressed, stole to the door and out. Moments later, he picked his way through the thicket world of scrubby elms and willows, blundering through an endless, chaotic world of molten-bright moon silver and ebon shadow.
The voices still rang in his mind, neither closer nor farther away, with quickened tempo, with breathless beat, urging him frantically onward, calling, luring, promising, lulling. Drake came out in a clearing in the heart of the thicket. He might have recognized it as the place where they had found Tom Ellers’ body, but his external senses were dulled to his surroundings, only the inner ones were afire with the rhythm of that delectable melody.
In the clearing he saw them…that angelic chorus…that heavenly minstrelsy…and the moon bathed with its glare their glowing bodies, effulgent silver against the shadowed backdrop of the thicket. With intricate step and flowing motion they danced…naked in the moonlight they danced…the grassblades scarcely bending under the flitting lightness of their dainty feet. Scores of female figures dancing, each perfect as cast in the mold of perfection, and from the throat of each seemed to pour that unearthly melody which held him spellbound.
The night became a blur in Drake’s mind. By and by, he was vaguely aware that time had passed, that the moon had lowered itself and now poured a colder light athwart the thickety ridge. He stumbled, leaving the thicket behind him to re-cross his own back yard. He did not perceive the shape that huddled in the shadow of the garage and looked after him with, complete satisfaction as he groped his way to the kitchen door and into the house. He was not truly conscious of anything until he suddenly awoke to full command of his own senses in his own bed.
Beverly slept quietly yet. She might not have stirred a muscle the whole night through. Drake’s mind was a kaleidoscope of moonlight shards and shadows, and twisting, writhing, leaping shapes that glistened silver…of soft breasts and yielding torsos, clinging arms and flashing thighs.
The whole vision seemed to contract in his mind-shriveling into a core of hard brilliance, an unremembered spectacle of grandeur and passion. Drake whimpered, his face in his hands, as the last shred of delightful memory drifted beyond his ken, became a throbbing ache that answered no
thing of the questioning pain in his being…and demanded much. He slept.
Drake could not explain, even to himself, the feeling that gripped him next day. What mystified him was something beyond his unexplainable feeling of physical exhaustion. He spent the morning out of doors, hovering at the fringe of the thicketed slope. Once he cut a forked stick as he had seen Tom Ellers do. He held it in his hands in as nearly the same peculiar manner as he could remember. But it was only a stick—a scrawny, bifurcated wooden thing, dead as a stick of wood in his grasp…a stick of wood…it was nothing more.
He drove by the Harrian’s, but the shades were drawn at all the windows, and nobody answered his knock on the door.
Drake drove into the city, parked by the public library and went in. It was late afternoon when he came out, and he was ravenously hungry. He found a small restaurant, ate, and drove home. It was after sunset when Beverly met him at the door. She looked worried, wifely intuition sensing the disquiet that gnawed at him.
She said, “Your supper is waiting, dear.”
Drake roused from his abstraction sufficiently to kiss her lightly.
“Thanks. I ate downtown.” At her look of disappointment, he added quickly, “I’ll have a cup of coffee with you while you eat.”
The table was set in the kitchen. While Drake gloomed over his coffee, Beverly pecked disinterestedly at her food. “Have you seen the Harrians today?” he asked.
She raised her brows. “No. Should I have?”
“No. I just thought—” he paused. “I stopped by their place this morning. Nobody was home, and I thought maybe they might have come here. I didn’t go directly there… I drove around a bit first.”
“They weren’t here.” She paused, wanting to ask the question. She blurted, “Where did you go today, dear?”
“No place.” At her continued questioning look, he amplified, “In town to the library.”
Beverly seemed suddenly more cheerful. She relaxed, smiled. “Get any good books?”
“Huh? Get any…? No… I didn’t take any out. Just looked through a couple.”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 17