Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 02

by The School of Darkness (v1. 1)

  “I’m always sorry about those sinister priests in Henry the Sixth, ” added Father Bundren, but he smiled to say it. “One bad priest can hurt the work of twenty good ones, which is why there must be far more than twenty good priests to one bad one.”

  Yet again the houselights went down and the prolocutor paced into view behind the footlights, wrapped in his Dracula cape.

  “There’s naught but witches do inhabit here,” he proclaimed ringingly, “and therefore ’tis high time that I were hence.” And off* he strode again.

  “That’s from Comedy of Errors this time,” said Pitt, “and since we’re to have something from Macbeth it should be appropriate.”

  The curtain rose on a dreary, brush-tufted scene, with yet again blue light on it. Three female figures stood together, three strikingly shapely young women in tattered garments, exhibiting slim bare legs, rounded bare shoulders. Their hair flowed and tossed. One was a honey-hued blonde, one a brunette with thick sooty locks, one with red hair that tumbled and gleamed in the blueness. Thunder snarled; bright lights winked on and off for lightning.

  “Where shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” asked the blonde.

  The others answered, speaking of a battle to be lost and won and a fated meeting with Macbeth.

  “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” they chanted together, “hover through the fog and filthy air.”

  They continued, boasting of killing swine, of sinking a ship bound for Aleppo. A drum sounded, and Macbeth and Banquo entered. Banquo spoke of the witches, “So withered and so wild in their attire,” though the three were young and pretty enough to be cheerleaders.

  “All hail, Macbeth!” cried the blonde. “Hail to thee, thane of Glamis!”

  “All hail, Macbeth!” spoke up the brunette. “Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!”

  And the red-haired one: “All hail, Macbeth! That shall be king hereafter!”

  Macbeth and Banquo declared their mystifications, and the witches vanished.

  The stagelights blinked off briefly, and came on again. A huge pot had been fetched onstage. It stood on what seemed to be a writhing tangle of red and blue flames. Macbeth and Banquo were gone, but the three witches paced around the great pot—going counterclockwise, widdershins, Thunstone noted, the traditional direction of a witch circle. Their bare arms wove in and out as they seemed to cast things in. The blond witch chanted, “Round about the cauldron go; in the poisoned entrails throw.” Together they sang, “Double, double, toil and trouble; fire bum and cauldron bubble.”

  Pacing, the brunette witch took up the catalog of the repellant formula. Again the chorus of “Double, double,” and the red-haired one went on with the naming of highly unappetizing items. Finally, the brunette: “Cool it with a baboon’s blood, then the charm is firm and good.”

  A blinding flash of lightning, and Hecate had appeared, as though out of the floor. She was singularly fearsome, with three masks glowering to front and right and left, a headdress of snakes that stirred, a robe of wet-looking green and black, and six white arms that moved in singularly lifelike fashion.

  “O! well done! I commend your pains, and every one shall share i’ the gains.”

  That was the voice of Grizel Fian, Thunstone knew at once. The witches again moved widdershins around the cauldron, intoning a song of “black spirits.” Then, said the brunette: “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”

  It was Macbeth who came, to accost the witches. Thunder pealed again, and a head in a helmet hovered into sight above the steaming cauldron. Rowley Thome’s head, and no visible body. “Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!” Thome mouthed. “Beware Macduff, beware the Thane of Fife. Dismiss me. Enough.”

  With that, the head was gone. Stage effects were impressive here, thought Thunstone. Another apparition sprang into view above the cauldron, a child or a dwarf streaming with redness as with blood. “Be bloody and resolute,” it harangued Macbeth, and vanished in turn. In its place rose another dwarfed figure, wearing a crown and holding aloft a leafy branch of a tree. It uttered its prophecy: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until great Bimam wood to high Dunsinane hall shall come against him.” Winding up its speech, it, too vanished, and the entering procession of kings, with Banquo’s ghost escorting them, seemed fairly anticlimactic. The curtain went down, but the houselights stayed dim. Someone entered before the curtain. This time it was Grizel Fian, her hideous Hecate makeup discarded. She wore the low-cut silver gown of the Duchess of Gloucester in the first scene presented. She spoke, rhythmically:

  “. . . These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air;

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yes, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And like the insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. . . .”

  She bowed, and walked away out of sight.

  “ What did you think?” Pitt asked Thunstone.

  “Well done, especially some of the stage effects,” Thunstone replied.

  “What were they trying to prove?” Pitt prodded.

  “That will take some finding out.”

  Father Bundren and Manco met them in the aisle, and the whole group went out together,

  “Did you enjoy it?” Pitt asked Manco.

  “I recognized some elements that struck me as subtle, not to say sneaky,” said the medicine man. “I said a prayer for strength to my gods. Father Bundren crossed himself twice, which I took to mean that he was saying his own prayers.”

  “You were right, Chief,” said Father Bundren. “It seemed to me that, out of three excerpts from Shakespeare, we were watching what amounted to witch ceremonies. Some of the classicists of my faith say that to be present at such things without making a protest amounts to joining in with them. That’s why I prayed ”

  “Something of the same thought occurred to me independently,” said Thunstone. “Professor Pitt, will you be so kind as to take the Countess and my two friends back to the Inn? I’ll say goodnight to all of you right here.”

  “Where will you be going?” asked Sharon quickly.

  “Into the cemetery yonder, to begin with.”

  “Wagh, ” said Manco. “Let me come along.”

  But Thunstone shook his head vigorously. “No, let me play the lone hand. I know what I’m doing. You and Father Bundren see the Countess to her door, will you please? Make sure it’s all right for her to be in her room.”

  “We’ll be glad to,” Father Bundren assured him. Thunstone looked down into Sharon’s face. “I’ll call at your door as soon as I get back,” he promised.

  “As soon as you get back,” she repeated. “I’ll wait up.”

  “I’ll get back,” he said. “Depend on that.”

  Goodnights were said. Sharon pressed Thunstone’s hand and followed the others to where Pitt’s car was parked. Thunstone stood among departing members of the audience and watched as the car backed around and went rolling away.

  Then he headed for where the cemetery waited darkly under the moon. He swung his sword cane lightly as he walked.

  VIII

  Somebody came from the theater and paused beside Thunstone. It was the shapely, red-haired girl he had seen at the auditorium, in the lobby of the theater, on the stage as one of Macbeth’s three witches.

  “You don’t believe in our power,” she said accusingly. He leaned lightly on his cane. “I think you have power.” “Come along with me now and you’ll be convinced.” She did not wait for him to agree or decline, but walked quickly ahead. Thunstone let her go for perhaps fifty yards, then followed as quietly as he could. His feet fell lightly for so big a man. Up there ahead, in a treeless stretch where the moonlight came down like gleaming rain, was a low stone wall like the one that boun
ded the campus at Main Street. The red-haired girl walked through a gap in it. Thunstone stood and watched her go in among the murky shadows of the cemetery trees, then followed again.

  The path that led through the gap in the wall was strewn with gravel that crunched softly under his feet. Grass grew thickly to either side, and tombstones with rounded tops stood there. They looked like pallid mushrooms springing up from the turf among the trees. Here and there were larger stones, mostly square. Thunstone moved off the noisy gravel and walked on the grass for the sake of silence.

  A clear voice rose in a hailing call behind Thunstone. He slid away into the sheltering dark of some low-hanging branches, just as the girl up ahead turned, then came hurrying back along the path. Her feet made more noise than Thunstone’s. Two more girls came to meet her, almost opposite the point where Thunstone had gone into hiding. Moonlight filtered down upon them and he saw that they were the other two witches of the Macbeth sequence, the blonde and the brunette.

  “There’s plenty of time yet,” one of them said. “Let’s go there together.”

  They headed deeper into the cemetery. Thunstone followed cautiously, still keeping on the grass beside the gravel and under the shadows of the branches.

  The three girls talked, not in loud gossipy fashion but stealthily and in undertones. Thunstone could hear their voices but could not make out the words. The journey went on, perhaps for two hundred yards. Once the trio stopped and turned to look back. For a worried moment, Thunstone thought they had seen him or perhaps had divined his presence, but then they walked on again, and he followed them.

  They turned from the gravel path into a sort of clearing where the light of the moon was brilliant on the grass. There stood a square, flat-roofed structure the size of a one- car garage. The moonlight was gray upon it, as upon polished granite. A dark door showed at the front. The girls approached and one of them took hold of some sort of catch and manipulated it for a moment, then pulled the door open. Another turned on a flashlight. They went in, and the door closed gratingly behind them.

  Thunstone waited behind a dark cedar tree. Slowly he counted to twenty. Then he stepped out into the moonlit open and approached the tomb. He moved swiftly and silently, every sense awake. Something fluttered down, almost touching his head, then slid away in the air. It was a dark, winged something, too big for any bat he had ever seen. Some sort of night bird, probably. Or was it?

  He reached the door of the tomb. A granite slab was sunk there, like a doorstep. Above the door were the big raised letters of a name, emdyke. Of course, this was the tomb of that long-ago mayor of Buford, the mayor whose wife had ministered magically to help cure Samuel Whitney. And the tomb was an entry to—something, somewhere.

  The door itself was a grating of upright iron bars, set close together. Each bar was as thick as Thunstone’s sinewy wrist.

  He felt for the catch and tried to lift it, but it hung stubbornly in its place. He exerted his considerable strength, with no success whatever. It was caught and locked; it could be opened only by a special pressure. He tried yet again. The catch did not move.

  He bent closer in the moonlight to study the massive framework of the door. Sure enough, a keyhole showed beneath the catch, a slot blacker than the black iron. He twisted the handle of his cane, freed the silver blade, and set the keen point in the slot. Carefully he probed. He twisted this way and that. He heard a muffled clank within the big lock, and when he took hold of the catch again, the barred door creaked on its hinges and swung slowly outward.

  At once he was inside and pulled the door after him. He heard the grating of the lock as it engaged. For a moment he stood against a wall of stone, waiting for his eyes to become more used to the gloom,

  Some radiance from the moon filtered in between the close-set bars of the door. He could see something of the chamber into which he had come. Against each of the walls to left and right was set a chestlike structure, of stone like the tomb itself. He went to one, felt it. There were raised letters upon it, a name or perhaps an epitaph, but he could not read them by groping. The broad slab of the lid above had a massive padlock. It felt rusty.

  He sought the other sarcophagus and found a rusty padlock there, too. “Probably just as well,” he said under his breath.

  For these two stone coffins must hold the bodies of Mayor Emdyke, who had sponsored the witches of Buford, and his wife, who was one of those witches.

  He resheathed the blade in his cane and slid the ferrule across the stone floor. He found his way to the rear of the crypt, and there his cane encountered a drop downward.

  Kneeling, he explored with his fingers. Here were stairs, leading into the earth, into a deep blackness. He rose, felt ahead of him with his cane, and began to descend. He moved his feet carefully from stone step to stone step, making sure of position at each move. He counted twelve steps going down. Then he was on a broad, roughly flagged floor, in darkness just less black than ink.

  He peered ahead of him. His right hand encountered a rough wall, and his cane, held out straight in his left, touched a wall opposite. That meant the width of the place was perhaps nine feet. He extended the cane above his head, to touch some kind of ceiling. Another nine feet, as he estimated.

  He began to move ahead. His left hand slid his cane back and forth on the stones in front of him, questing the way like the cane of a blind man. His right hand kept his fingertips to the stone wall beside him. He paced ahead and ahead. He was in some sort of passage, beneath the ground of the cemetery. It would lead him somewhere. Where? That was what he had come here to find out.

  Up there ahead, the darkness seemed to fade ever so slightly. The fingers of his right hand on the wall told him that the passage curved, ever so gradually, little by little. He was making a slight turn, and up ahead might even be some sort of visibility. Step by step he accomplished. The light to the front grew more apparent, more, until it seemed a rosy glimmer, like a sunset on a dusty day.

  Again he was making a slight curve on the way he went, this time leftward. The passage made a slight S as he followed it. More steps, and then he could see fairly well. There ahead of him was the rose-tinted light, and he saw that it filtered through some sort of a curtain there ahead, a curtain of translucent red fabric. Against it was outlined a blotchy shadow, as though someone stood inside it on watch.

  As Thunstone established these things, he heard a soft flutter of sound in the corridor behind him, heard muffled voices. More people were coming in. Whatever he did, he must do fast.

  He moved rapidly in the rose light now, and as he moved he stooped and picked up a handful of pebbly stuff. He came close to the curtain at one side, and hurled his pebbles with all his strength to where it came down at the far edge. It patterned there like rain, and the shadowy form behind the curtain half said an oath and moved quickly in the direction of the noise. A head pushed out at that edge of the fabric, even as Thunstone slid past the edge near himself and into something like a granite-faced vestibule. Swiftly he stole to where a carved obelisk stood near the inward wall, and slid behind it.

  He must be in a sort of basement. Manifestly it would be Grizel Fian’s basement, for he had been told hers was the only house at the edge of the cemetery.

  Feet scraped outside the curtain and a man’s voice cried out, “Sapht!”

  The guard inside drew the curtain open. Peeping cautiously, Thunstone saw that that guard was a gaunt man in a robe with the hood flung back.

  “Come in, come in,’’ he invited gruffly. “But why all the noise?”

  “Why not all the noise?’’ returned the man who had spoken the countersign. “We’re here, and there’ll be noise enough.”

  Eight or ten had entered. Thunstone could see that most were female. They trooped away past the obelisk and through a roughly made arch into somewhere beyond. Bringing up the rear was a towering, broad male figure in a cassock. Undoubtedly he was the actor who had played Hume in the first scene of Grizel Fian’s presentation.
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br />   Thunstone stayed in hiding and stealthily watched until the guard turned his face back to the red curtain. Then, swift and soundless as a night-prowling cat, Thunstone moved to the archway and through it. As he did so, he heard a drum begin to beat somewhere, a slow rhythm. He moved toward that sound, and wondered where he was going.

  So often in the past, he had gone somewhere without knowing where. That was what he did now. It was what he had chosen to do with his life. Now again, he must follow an unknown way he had chosen. Nor could he lose his life, no matter what Grizel Fian planned to do to him.

  He came into another passage, lighted this time with iron-bracketed oil lamps fastened to the slaty gray walls on either side. Those were old, old lamps. Undoubtedly they could be considered as valuable antiques. Pom pom pom sounded the rhythmic beat of the drum. The passage made an abrupt turn to the right. Thunstone crowded close to the wall at the left as he followed the turn. He saw another archway, with drapes of deep purple cloth drawn to either side. Above the sound of the drum he heard a sound of muttering voices, surely the people who had gone there ahead of him. He stole gingerly to one of the hangings, slid in among its ample folds, and peeped out into what was beyond.

  That was a great chamber, long enough and wide enough for a ballroom. It must be the whole basement of Grizel Fian’s house. More purple fabric covered the walls, and into the hangings, designs had been worked in black and gold. If these were letters, they were not Greek or Arabic; they were of no alphabet Thunstone knew. The spacious floor was paved with something as pale and smooth as wax. At its center was painted, in blue and red and yellow, a design of a great five-pointed star, girded round with a black circle. The spaces between the points of the star were adorned with grotesque figures, and all around the outside of the circle were strung more of the letters that were neither Greek nor Arabic. Thunstone knew a pentacle when he saw one, and he knew that a pentacle was for the focusing of dark, supernormal forces.

  Oil lamps hung from the ceiling, shedding their radiance. At the far end of the floor stood a great thronelike chair of dark, polished wood, with a cushion as red as fresh blood. In the gloom behind it seemed to be a flight of stairs. Beside the throne stood a blue-robed man, pounding on a kettledrum. A little to his rear stood two more blue-robed figures, another man and a woman. And ranged along the walls to right and left stood others, the two lines of them facing each other across the pale floor with its pentacle.