Authors: Franklin Gregory
“Hard it will make. Thirty-one years we stop here have. The old mister since.”
Pierre nodded uneasily.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. But there was a new note of desperation in his words. “I just have to do it this way. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you sooner. But I didn’t know.”
In the ensuing silence, he heard Sara’s movements in the room above.
“She’s packing now,” he lied. “She only decided to take the boat last night. It leaves tomorrow.”
“Help she needs maybe?” Freda asked eagerly.
“She said she’d call if she wanted any. But I imagine you’ll be pretty busy yourselves. I can loan you a couple of trunks and suitcases and you can take the light truck.” He hurried on, “Let’s see. It’s fifty miles up there. Better get started by mid-afternoon. You can keep the truck as long as you need it. I’ll have a shipper take the livestock up tomorrow.”
He knew he was fumbling. He knew his reasons were shot with holes. He heard Heinrich’s and Freda’s unspoken questions:
But if staying here you are, who up the place keeps?
We make out it is better us to stay. Alone in this house a man? Himmel. It makes bad.
“Fact is,” Pierre said, as if answering his own conscience, “I’m thinking of selling Fountain Head.” He added: “I was up there a few weeks ago. The last tenant left things in good shape. It’s completely furnished. There’s plenty of fuel and you can take what food you’ll need until tomorrow. Later—I’ll give you the deed.”
He said this with an air of finality and he arose. Freda heaved heavily to her feet. Heinrich stood up, fingering his cap. Pierre hoped the suddenness of his announcement would leave them too dazed to form suspicions until they had gone—and then he didn’t give a damn.
Freda stood perplexed in the doorway. Finally, “Is sick the Fraulein?”
For the first time in the interview, Pierre told the truth.
“Yes.”
Freda said, after another moment of con-centration, “I hope, well gets the Fraulein.” “The sea air will do wonders,” Pierre assured her. He waited patiently for the Der- hammers to leave, but still Freda stood uncertainly. At last she asked:
“But for supper tonight too yet?”
Pierre, realizing how much more complicated everything was than he had even dreamed, was brought up short. And when he hesitated, Freda said, wagging her head: “Up the cold supper I fix before.”
Pierre could have kissed her for that.
He sighed, but he breathed no easier when finally they left. He couldn't—he simply couldn’t—stand their presence in this house another night.
Heinrich and Freda stood alone in the kitchen. Heinrich looked at the floor, diffidently, like a little boy who had been punished. Freda looked at him. Heinrich said finally:
“It makes queer, the mister.”
He was thinking of the three milch cows, the two work horses, the riding horses, the chickens, the ducks, the pigs; not in his relationship as newly established owner, but of the more practical side. He was making out he would have to feed them hours early; that perhaps it would not be good in the morning to truck them without feeding first. He was thinking of Jason's milch cows at Buttercup.
“It makes queer,” he repeated, without lifting his head.
Freda, in the role of good hausfrau suddenly discovering her kitchen world collapsing in disorder about her, shook her head slowly. Her eyes were moist.
“I feel it evil,” she whispered. “Evil it goes near this creek by.” Her voice shook with fear. “It makes good maybe we go.” And, as Heinrich lifted his head, she made the fearsome sign of the horned finger.
For a long moment husband and wife looked into each other’s eyes. Then, as if by mutual silent consent, each went about his tasks.
A WEEK passed, dismal and drear. The sky was overcast and light snow fell, insensibly, in the village and in the valley, tension relaxed. But Pierre would not know that. For not once had he left Fountain Head.
He was not a good housekeeper. He had never cooked. Once, in passing, he considered bringing out a cook from town. But the idea, he felt, was too dangerous.
So he kept house.
He muddled along, using twice as many pots and pans as were necessary for his cooking. Faithfully he prepared three meals a day. Religiously he appeared at Sara’s door with a tray and left it there. She hardly touched a thing he served.
He stood that for the first three days. On the fourth he began to worry. The fifth day he spent an hour in her room. She sat in a chair by her window and stared out at the falling snow. She stared with a longing in her eyes.
The hollows of her eyes had deepened. The skin had tightened over the bones of her face. Pierre said:
“But, Sara, you must eat something.”
Sara only shook her head.
On the sixth day, when Pierre visited her, she was noticeably weaker. She lay on her bed, eyes wide, face stony. On the night of the seventh day, Sunday, Dr. Hardt drove up.
Pierre’s welcome was genuine. It was not that he was lonely, for each night Manning Trent—as much to get away from Julia and his own troubles as anything—had called. He would bring books: books on the occult, books on lycanthropy, books on magic, on witchcraft, on anthropology. He bought them in the city daily; he borrowed them from libraries. And each, Pierre and Trent—and, as it developed, Dr. Hardt—carried on his own research in what, lacking sound theological instruction, could be at best a blind and stumbling fashion.
Hardt himself brought the bulky Roman Ritual. Pierre thumbed the tenth section, devoted to mechanics of exorcism.
“What's frightening,” he said, “is that we lose our technique from want of practice. The ancients made bronze we can’t dream of duplicating. The Egyptians preserved bodies in a way to make us shake our heads. Now we’ve gotten away from Satan as well as away from God, and we know no more how to repel the former than to summon the Latter.”
They sat around a log fire in the library.' Gloomily, and with as gloomy an explanation, Trent passed the negative and- positive of Red Crane's nocturnal work to the psychiatrist.
“You look at the negative first,” he said. Hardt studied them.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he demanded, with rising irritation. How do I know this print was taken from this wolf negative? Your man lied.”
Trent shook his head slowly.
“He didn’t lie. I made another print from it with my own hands. And if you want to try it. . . .”
Hardt fingered the ribbon of his glasses and glared at Trent. All that he saw was complete sincerity. . He clucked his tongue. He glanced -back at negative and positive. He roared:
“Bah!”
But there was no assurance in his “bah.” It was simply an automatic “bah” which permitted him time to digest the fact and save his face. Finally:
“Can’t figure it, sir. Doesn’t make sense.” He tapped his fingers nervously on the arm of the chair. “Unless . . . .”
He did not complete his thought. Pierre and Trent waited a moment. At length Pierre said:
“Doctor. I want you to look at Sara. She won’t eat.”
Hardt moved his large frame in a gesture of protest.
“You simply have to, Doctor,” Pierre persisted. “I can’t call in anyone else. You understand that. And I can’t let her go on like this. She’s simply fading away.”
Hardt frowned. He lumbered to his feet. “Where is she?” he snapped.
“In her room.” Pierre nodded toward the ceiling.
“
Locked
in her room,” amended Trent. “Locked?” Dr. Hardt’s black brows clouded stormily. “That’s inhuman.”
“You refused to commit her,” Pierre reminded.
Hardt chewed perplexedly at his cigar.
“I’ll see her,” he said. Trent picked up a book, settled into his chair: Pierre led the psychiatrist into the hallway. They climbed the stairs in silence. A faint light burned in the upper passage. A brighter bar of light lay beneath the door to Sara’s room, Pierre produced a key, inserted it in the lock,-turned, and opened the door.
Sara was not in her room. She was not in her bathroom. She was not in her dressing room. Pierre stood in the center of the bedroom, stupefied.
Hardt stomped about the room, his annoyance rising.
“What’s this?” he kept asking sharply. “What’s this?”
Pierre said dully, “She isn’t here.”
Hardt asked, “She had a key of her own?” “Do you think I’m an utter ass?”
“Well, where do these windows lead? Porch roof?”
“No. It’s a straight drop to the flag walk.”
Hardt strode to the windows. One, and only one, was open; and it was open but the breadth of his hand. He tugged at it.
“You can’t open it farther,” Pierre warned. “I installed stops.”
Nevertheless, the doctor tried. When he gave up, he resumed stomping about the room.
“Nonsense,” he muttered: “Nonsense, sir.” He poked into this closet and that; even looked under the bed. His eyes fell on Sara’s dressing table. A crimson salve jar, half filled with a black unguent, caught his attention. He picked it up, sniffed at it.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
Pierre' shook his head wonderingly.
The doctor took a match from his pocket and daubed the stick with a minute quantity of the grease. Gingerly he touched it to his tongue.
“What the devil,” he demanded, “is she doing with aconite?”
Dr. Hardt pretended, when they descended, that he didn’t know what it was all about; he swore he wished he hadn’t come out. It was still snowing. He washed his hands of the whole affair. He reiterated that he washed his hands.
But when Pierre told Trent, “Sara isn’t there.” Trent stared at him.
“Not there?”
“No.”
Trent laid down his book. He repeated: “Sara isn’t there?” He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. “Why. . . .” Then, “My God!”
He reached for the telephone. Something in that movement recalled a similar occasion. . . . How long ago? It seemed centuries. His hand shook. His voice trembled.
“You, Julia? Julia! Where’s David?”
Julia’s voice, brittle and distant, answered, “He went out a few minutes ago. I think he thought he heard something. He said he might go for a walk.”
Three men, each with his own foreboding thoughts, sat down to wait.
It was, perhaps his wider knowledge of such hellish matters that made Dr. Hardt, as he waited, even more “restless than the others. Because of those earlier studies, he could trace certain symptoms to their black origin. And he felt, though he felt it rebelliously because he could not rationalize it, that he knew what had happened to Sara.
She had, simply and logically, refused to starve to death.
Long since, he believed, she had moved beyond the desire for mortal food; she had reached that unholy ground where from others she must appropriate their life forces or
die.
Now, to appease this fiendish appetite, she had called upon a loathsome force outside herself to free her from the bondage of her room.
A train of unhappy legends returned to Hardt:
The Herzegovinian
voukndlaks
, quaffing the hot blood of young girls. . . .
The Wallachian
priccolitsch
. leeching nightly upon the bodies of domestic stock, appearing by day as a man in perpetual health and vigor. . . .
The vampiric
vrykolaka
. . . .
The dead
liougat
of the Albanians, striding abroad in his winding sheet to devour whatever fell in his path. . . .
The psychiatrist arose from his chair, from which he had been moodily staring at the dancing flames in the fireplace, and moved tremendously about the room. Why, he wondered, could he not have stayed away? It was no business of his. Ruinous as it might be to his professional standing, once it were known, it might prove more perilous still to his very existence. And yet, he knew that, man of strong will as he was, some triumphant compulsion had drawn him on this visit.
“Curiosity,” he mumbled belligerently.
Pierre and Trent cast him sidelong looks.
A handsome clock stood on a far table, turning up the days as well as the hours and minutes. Hardt's glance at its face wheeled his thoughts into other channels. It was Sunday, December 18th. He said:
“Christmas is only a week away.”
Pierre and Trent were silent. Hardt exploded.
“No, sir, it makes the least impression on you. But the Twelve Nights between Christmas and Epiphany. . . .”
Again he broke a sentence in mid-voice.
Pierre knew what he meant. For as much as there are hallowed grounds in certain areas of earth, where spiritual peaks rise to touch planes of existence beyond most human comprehension, so are there periods of the year which stir to unnatural life.
“We must do something!” he exclaimed. “We must!”
The others sat silent.
He slumped even farther into the depths of his chair. He implored:
“We can’t just sit. We can’t simply talk. There must be some way out! Why, if there is a merciful God in heaven, can such things be?”