Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 01 (11 page)

 
          
“Mr.
Thunstone,” said the subdued voice of Constance Bailey. She stood diffidently
beside his table. At once he was on his feet.

 
          
“Sit
down,” he invited. “Could I bring you something? Gin and bitters suits you, I
believe.”

 
          
“Yes,
please, if you will.”

 
          
He
sought the bar and paid for the gin and bitters, and fetched the glass to the
table. Constance Bailey murmured her thanks and sipped. She looked at him with
round, troubled eyes.

 
          
“You
were kind to me, Mr. Thunstone,” she said. “Keeping the Saint-John’s-wort for
me as you did.”

 
          
“Not at all.
I just happened to think of it.”

 
          
“The
thinking of it was kindness,” she insisted. “But, Mr. Thunstone, I came hoping
to find you here, to talk to you. Warn you, I might say.”

 
          
“Warn
me?” he repeated.

 
          
At
that moment, Porrask began to sing, loudly and hoarsely:

 
          
He
came home the first night, as drunk as he could be,

           
He saw a head upon the bed where his
head ought to be.

           
“My kind wife, my loving wife, my
dear wife,” said he,

           
“Whose head is upon the bed where my
head ought to be?”

 
          
The
others in the room had stopped talking to listen. A pudgy man with short gray
hair snorted with amusement. The woman with him looked shocked.

 
          
“You
just don’t know, Mr. Thunstone,” said Constance Bailey in a hurried voice.
“Things get out and walk at night, this time of year. You can hear things, see
things, around the time they turn the Dream Rock.”

 
          
“I
did have a sense of something outside, last night,” said Thunstone. “But you
say you want to warn me. Warn me against what?”

 
          
“Danger,”
she replied. “Something’s up this turning time, something bad. And you’re going
to be in it, maybe get hurt. You oughtn’t to have come at turning time.”

 
          
“I
came on purpose because I wanted to see the turning,” he said. “How do you know
I’m in danger?”

 
          
“Don’t
ask me how I know. It’s a witch’s business to know things, see them before they
happen. And you’re a kind man, a good man, and I don’t want any bad thing to
come to you.”

 
          
She
was utterly in earnest. Her eyes were wide; she clenched her glass in her hand.

 
          
“Mr.
Gram Ensley’s up to something, with all his study of those old pagan folk who
used to live here,” she said. “He raised them from the dead, I think. And with
you here, he wants you in it somehow.”

 
          
“I
don’t understand that,” confessed Thunstone.

 
          
“I
don’t truly understand it myself. But I can see things, I tell you. I’m a white
witch—”

 
          
“One
who does her works for good,” supplied Thunstone, smiling, and from the corner
of his eye he saw that Porrask didn’t like the smile.

 
          
“I
can see things to come,” repeated Constance Bailey, again in a voice barely
audible. “When I was just a girl, somebody taught me. I say that this time of
year, when they turn the Dream Rock, the nights go strange.”

           
“Yes, you've said that. And I heard
it today from someone else. But how do the nights go strange?”

 
          
“Maybe
I’m the only ooe who can feel and see,” she said. “I don’t know anyone else who
can. Not Mrs. Fothergill. She tells me not to talk foolishness. And Mr. Gates
doesn’t believe, either. So I don’t talk to anyone about it.”

 
          
“Talk
to me,” Thunstone invited her.

 
          
“Well,”
and her hands fluttered, “after dark, at the turning time of year, this place
can be different. I can look out the window and see another kind of country, no
houses on it, not even the house I’m in myself. And bits of brush, and things
moving in them, like a bad dream everywhere, though I’m awake. And nobody
believes me.”

 
          
“I
believe you,” said Thunstone, “because that’s how it was with me last night.”

 
          
Her
eyes grew wider still. “You saw it, you felt it? You’ve got the second sight in
you?”

 
          
He
shook his head. “I’ve never thought of myself as being particularly psychic, at
least not any more than most people. I do believe that certain sensitivities
can be developed. Maybe I’ve done something like that.”

 
          
“You
saw that other empty dark land too?” she almost cried out. “Now I know you’ll
come to danger in it.”

 
          
Porrask
sang again at his table, sang with all his might,
beating
time with his mug:

 
          
“You
old fool, you damn fool, you son of a bitch,” said she,

           
“It only is a cabbage head my mother
sent to me.”

           
“I’ve traveled on
land,
I’ve traveled on sea, a thousand miles or more,

           
But I never saw a cabbage head with
whiskers on before.”

 
          
“That’ll
be quite enough of that, Mr. Porrask!” called out Hawes from beside the bar.

 
          
Everyone
in the room had fallen silent, was watching. Porrask paid no attention to
Hawes’s warning. He surged to his feet, a great rough rock of a man. He stamped
resoundingly toward the table where Constance Bailey sat with Thunstone.
Stooping, he peered into her face and licked his bearded lips.

 
          
"Why
don't you get out of here, and proper stay out of here, you little witch
girl?" he growled thickly. "I saw Mr. Ensley put you off his property
today. He doesn’t like witches, and neither do I. You ought to be driven right
out of Claines.”

 
          
"I
don’t have anything to say to you,” stammered Constance Bailey, manifestly
frightened.

 
          
"Oh,
you don’t? But I’ve got something to say to you, then, not ’alf I don’t.”

 
          
"No,
you haven’t anything to say to her,” said Thunstone. He was out of his chair,
swiftly and lightly for all his size. "She told you she doesn’t want to
talk to you. Leave her alone.”

 
          
Porrask
straightened up, hiked his big shoulders, and fixed bright, murderous eyes on
Thunstone.

 
          
"Gor
lumme, it’s the sodding Yank we’ve got ’ere in town,” he said. "So you
want to take up for little witchy-bitchy here?”

 
          
All
the other customers watched, in taut, expectant silence.

 
          
"You
want to know what I think?” mouthed Porrask.

 
          
"It
doesn’t make a bit of difference to me what you think about anything,” said
Thunstone. "Go away and stop bothering us.”

 
          
"Why,
goddamn you—”

 
          
Hawes
came hurrying to them. "Come on, Mr. Porrask, you’re making a fool of
yourself.”

 
          
"Fool,
is it?” roared Porrask. His face was flushed as red as a tomato; his eyes
rolled. He pushed Hawes away from him, so violently that Hawes staggered and
almost fell. Then he swung around to face Thunstone again.

 
          
"How
would you like to get knocked on your bum?”

 
          
"I
wouldn’t like it,” said Thunstone, "so don’t try it.”

 
          
A
concerted gasp went up from the onlookers as Porrask lumbered at Thunstone and
threw his big, hairy right fist.

 
          
Thunstone
bobbed skillfully. The fist went singing past his temple. Instantly he stepped
in close, clutching Porrask’s meaty upper arms in his broad hands. Porrask
strove to shake free, but Thunstone clamped hard, his thumbs questing along the
inner lines of the biceps and then driving in hard on the nerves there. Porrask
howled in sudden pain. Thunstone expertly kicked his feet out from under him.
Porrask floundered heavily down upon the broad planks of the floor.

 
          
“You
bloody
, sodding
Yank!”

 
          
Porrask
rolled over with hands and knees under
himself
and
struggled up again. He clawed at Thunstone with his right hand, its fingers
crooked like talons, searching for the face. Thunstone seized his wrist, hauled
him powerfully close, and clamped his own arm over Porrask’s in a tight,
punishing lock. Next moment he was dragging Porrask toward the door. Goggling,
chattering spectators made way for them. Thunstone shouldered the door open and
sprang out upon the paved yard in the cloudy light of evening, fetching Porrask
with him.

 
          
Porrask
blubbered
a curse and strove to pull his prisoned arm
free. Thunstone turned his own body and drove a shoulder up under Porrask’s
armpit. He slammed his back against Porrask’s chest,
then
stooped forward with all his strength. Porrask
came
flying through the air above him and slammed down hard on the concrete.

 
          
The
other customers had boiled out at the door of the Moonraven, all babbling at
each other. Only Constance Bailey was silent,
staring,
scared. A loud, authoritative voice suddenly dominated the confusion:

 
          
“Now
then, what’s all this?”

 
          
It
was Constable Dymock. Thunstone reflected that those words amounted almost to a
ritual with British police.

 
          
Porrask
got up slowly, unsteadily. He stood with bowed legs, and blinked at Thunstone,
at Dymock. “This ’ere man attacked me,” he blubbered.
“Struck
me.”

 
          
“That’s
a lie,” said Thunstone, the sharpest he had spoken so far to Porrask. “You
tried to hit me, but I didn’t lay a knuckle on you. If I had, you’d still be
down on the ground.”

 
          
“Let
me tell you,” said Constance Bailey quickly as she came toward them. “It was
just the other way around, it was. Albert Porrask came to where I was sitting
with Mr. Thunstone, and he spoke rude things, and when Mr. Thunstone objected,
Albert Porrask tried to hit him.”

           
‘That’s the right of it, Constable.”
It was Hawes speaking, from among the onlookers. “Mr. Porrask raised a
disturbance in my place. I tried to calm him down and he shoved me. Whatever
Mr. Thunstone did was in his own defense and in defense of Miss Bailey.”

 
          
Dymock
looked intently at Constance Bailey, but he spoke to Hawes. “Do you give him in
charge?”

 
          
“That’s
for Mr. Thunstone to say,” said Hawes. “He was the one attacked. Ask him.”

 
          
“Mr.
Thunstone?” prompted Dymock. He had moved closer to Constance Bailey. He looked
as though he would put a protecting arm around her.

 
          
“No,”
said Thunstone, “I don’t make any charge against him. He jumped on me, and I
helped him off again. That’s all.”

 
          
Someone
else came pushing through the circle of watchers. It was Ensley, his nostrils
flaring, his eyes flashing like steel.