THE WHITE WOLF (18 page)

Manning, with a deep breath that might have been a formless curse, poured himself a stiff drink of whiskey, gulped it; poured another, mixed it, carried it back to the library. He placed the drink on the smoking stand beside his chair and sat down. But he was too nervous Lo remain seated long.

He got up and moved to one of the wide high windows. Across the wide terraces of the lawn, now blanketed with snow, he could see the state highway. As he watched, a white patrol car rolled slowly past. Its glass helio- graphed dumb messages.

He watched it grow smaller and finally dis-appear over the crest of the hill. Then, along the brick walk that led from the peach orchard, he saw David, shod in galoshes, slosh toward the house.

David walked slowly. His broad shoulders sagged. Trent recalled how tired he had appeared when.he had seen him the preceding night. The sight of him now, the renewed and hammering realization of that terrifying lack drove Trent from the window. But there was no stemming the sense of urgency to do something, anything, that pressed upon him.

He drank. He thought: Go to the police? Explain everything?

Ye-ss? He could hear their coarse jeers.

His fingers closed as he considered.

If it could be bruited about that Sara, far from being on an ocean voyage, actually was hiding in her home. . . .

If it could be rumored among these superstitious farmers and villagers that she might bear a close inspection. . . .

If it could be somehow suggested—suggested with the greatest subtlety—that there were age-old ways of dealing with instruments of evil, then:

Might there not be some release for David? “Good God!’’ he exclaimed aloud. “What devil has gotten into me?”

PIERRE missed the visits of Manning Trent. In a roundabout way, through the grocer’s garrulous boy, he learned that Trent had been seen drunk in the village.

Once he walked to the Trent house; thought, as he approached the door, he saw Manning within. But the maid told him that both Manning and Julia were out. Nor did he see David about.

Nights, in his study, he considered many things. He considered a journey to a distant priest he had met many years before. Yet—how leave Sara?

He remembered old Hans Ehlers, whom the Derhammers had visited on occasion. Yet he felt, without quite knowing why, that old Hans was an impostor.

He read deeply, and in the accounts of old French and English trials he learned of horrendous yet logical matters:

Of the common lust among warlocks tor human flesh and blood. . . .

Of their passions for the lower animals. . . .

Of how, since they were the bond slaves of Satan, they were permitted to use his hellish craft to transform themselves into beasts, the better to satisfy their craven hungers. . . .

Always, Pierre learned, these beasts retained their human eyes, for the eyes were the windows of the soul, and the soul—the forfeit to Satan—could not change.

Was that the reason, Pierre wondered, that young Mrs. Heath at Melton Crossing saw not a wolf’s eyes but eyes that were human in their agony? Was it the bartered soul writhing in anguish at the judgment that lay upon it?

And so Pierre read, seeking the spring that, once pressed, would release all in life that he held dear.

He learned the many methods which, the folklore claimed, were used in dispossessions: of the necessity of wounding a werebeast while still in its state of metamorphosis—difficult, since few saw it and fewer recognized it. But hadn’t Heinrich Derhammer seen and fired? And what had happened? Nothing. But that, Pierre learned, was because Heinrich’s bullet was neither blessed nor silver.

Hmm. If he could obtain a blessing for a bullet. . . .

But always, when he approached this question, Pierre found himself faced with the same dilemma: the necessity of submitting the problem to the clergy, of answering their incisive questions. And he kept saying. “But there must be some other way. Surely God could not have given the only key to a privileged few.”

He studied Saint Ambrose, Bodin, Sprenger, Vincent of Beauvais. He studied the sacramentals: learned of their curious power to fend off evil; found that the chalice and the font were blessed . . .

With slow labor he wove his threads of knowledge together until they made a fabric.

Wednesday. And Wednesday night.

Thursday. And Thursday night.

Pierre himself was not conscious of the evolution of his thought; of the slow and certain march of mood' and understanding carrying him to decisions he would not have considered a fortnight earlier.

In the vacuum created by the desertion of Trent, Pierre found himself saying and repeating:

“A man has to fight his own battles.”

At first the thought was born in bitterness. But as the days passed, his natural sense of justice told him that a man, too, might choose his own weapons; and, that being so, no blame ' could be attached to Manning for his withdrawal. And yet . . .

Had he known the weapon with which Trent toyed, could he have surmised the monstrous intent which the half-crazed Manning entertained upon his drunken visit to the village, doubtless the charity in Pierre’s nature would have withered.

Pierre asked, Was not the conclusion just that, since the powers of Satan existed only through the acquiescence of God for God’s own purposes, any contract with Satan could be dispelled by God’s interference?

Friday. And Friday afternoon.

There were occasions when Pierre wondered if his sanity would hold. There were other occasions when he was racked with fear at the mere thought of human interference in matters of such black moment.

Yes, despite such mental by-passes, the signal objective remained with him: he must save Sara. Nor, until today, did he consider any salvation but to make her whole, to remove the disease, to return her to her former self.

So it was that he carried this thought this afternoon when, with the early sun lowering beyond the western woods, he ascended to her room with a tray of hot tea.

He had seen the many changes that came with the weeks: he had seen her body alter; he had seen her skin dry up and her cheeks grow thin with apparent hunger; and again, he had seen her vitality restored by those nocturnal excursions.

But always, no matter what her condition, Pierre saw Sara as blood of his blood. There was that remaining in her movement, in her eyes, that revealed and proved the validity of herself. But today. . . .

As he walked into the room and set the tray upon a bedside stand, Pierre found—outstretched on the bed-only a caricature of the original. The white cheeks were tinted with sulphurous yellow; the body movements were more gross, more animal than human; and when she raised her head to see him, she had a cunning look-out of eyes no longer her own and in which the lights of perdition burned.

Pierre did not lock her door when he left. When he descended the stairs, it was with the final knowledge that he was alone.

CHRISTMAS EVE fell like a cloud upon the valley. In the churches the parties for the children were held by day instead of by evening. And they were grim events. The children were whisked from their homes by armed men, and they were guarded in the churches and they were whisked back to their homes.

At Trent Farms Manning drank the afternoon away; an afternoon which found Julia absent on one of her numberless “charities” and David keeping restlessly to his rooms. ’

Manning finally went for a walk.

He walked stiffly, trying to hold himself together until he reached the screen of the peach’ orchard. He relaxed then, and his progress was more slow and more unsteady.

The cold air refreshed him, but it did not sober him. Still, in the open, a thought retained greater cohesion. What was the thought? Pierre? But if he had the germ of an idea of visiting Pierre, it was lost when he reached the other side of the orchard. There, he could look down the slope toward a small wooded vale; and above the vale he could see the bare slope of Mt. Neshaminy, and to the left he could see a figure—Pierre, firing a rifle at a target.

When he returned home, Julia had already arrived. He knew that, any effort to take hold of himself had failed, when she confronted him.

“I don’t know why, Manning,” she said crisply, “you think you always have to get drunk for a holiday.”

There were four churches in the village: the First Methodist, the Episcopalian, the little Roman Catholic Chapel of St. Hubert, and the Friends Meeting House.

No one quite remembered how the Catholic Chapel came to be dedicated to Hubert, the patron of the huntsman. It must have been a long while back, for the small ivy-covered stone edifice was very old.

And no one was more disturbed by the events of recent weeks than Father O’Burgh, the kindly, complacent, ineffectual shepherd of the parish.

A thin and ancient little man, his was a depth of devotion supported by small inclination to action. He felt that, above any priest in the diocese, it was his special province—since the Lord (to say nothing of his bishop) had assigned him to the Chapel of St. Hubert—to protect those who sought to track down the marauding beasts.

Yet, what could a poor man do? He prayed —and he fended his ears' from the irrational tales which came to him from the more superstitious of his flock. No one, not even a priest, expected the Devil to make a personal appearance in enlightened Pennsylvania in this twentieth century of Our Lord.

No, he was more concerned with form. And he was, therefore, no little disturbed when, preparing on Christmas Eve for the midnight mass, he entered-the sacristy through the door which led from the altar—to discover the sacrificial chalice missing.

There was no doubt of theft. The other door, which opened into the night, stood ajar, Through it blew the cold wind. And by the light that spilled out of the church, Father O’Burgh saw on the snow a line of footprints leading to the church and another leading away.

“God ha’ mercy,” he breathed, and he would have been the most surprised person in the world had he had any idea at all that those three brief words would be answered. Trite as they were, they yet mysteriously compelled (or, at least, so one might read into the consequences) a restraint upon that automatic , loss of consecration of the sacred vessel which, the legislators of Church solemnly averred, would occur if it fell into profane hands.

The priest telephoned to the sub-barracks at Melton Crossing.

“About five inches high, I should say,” he said. “Oh, yes; silver. Gilded within by gold. . . . .”

The lieutenant in charge was polite. He said he would “see what can be done, Father.”

Yes, polite was the word. But he was not, Father O’Burgh considered afterwards, sufficiently impressed.

Father O’Burgh could not know that the chief concern at that moment at the subbarracks was the failure, after two hours, of the white patrol car carrying Corporal Moberly and Private Aalborg to respond to radioed instructions.

FOR twenty-three years Private Aalborg’s hair had been auburn. It was white when, at two o’clock Christmas morning, searchers found him stumbling out of Lacey’s Lane into Fishing Mill Road near the Galehouse Caldwell place.

His uniform was tattered, blood-soaked; his lace was bruised and cut; his sleeveless right arm was grooved with long parallel clawlike tears, and his twisted left arm hung disjointed from its shoulder socket. He stared with the vacancy of the idiotic; and he gabbled incoherencies.

They found the car in a clearing off Lacey’s Lane, not far from the mill where Nellie Sage had first seen the “white thing.” Along a snow-covered path a little way down Bowling Creek, they found the body of Corporal Moberly—his uniform shredded to threads and great ugly rips in his frozen thighs.

The searchers, lamps in hand, stood in shocked silence. '

The snow was pocked with bootprints. There were deep animal tracks.

“Must’ve seen something,” Private Black said moodily.

“Must’ve,” said Private Reid. He flicked his flashlight over the terrain.

“Saw something?” asked another.

“Maybe. Or maybe they parked to wait.”

“And saw it and got out to shoot,” suggested Black. And Reid said:

“Here’s where they got out. Both on the right side. And walked up that way—ahead of the car.”

“Easy, there! Don’t blur those tracks.” “Look! Looks like just one set of tracks It was there, in front of the car, and they were walking toward it. But. . . .”

The men were puzzled. It made no sense. Two men and one beast. Why couldn’t they kill it? Two men with guns.

Quickly enough they learned the truth. For behind and to the left of the car they found an impression in the snow where a second larger animal had crouched; crouched, and leaped upon the unsuspecting troopers as they advanced to attack the first.

Slowly they digested the significance of this awful cunning. And Klonsterman, stopping some hours later at Mandel’s house, said darkly:

“If’n the police can’t protect us—”

In the parish house Father O’Burgh wonderingly unwrapped the brown paper from a weighty package. The paper was stamped, “Special Delivery.” Within the wrapping was a cardboard box.

Within the box was cotton packing. And when Father O’Burgh removed the packing, he stared, mouth open, at a golden chalice. There was no explanation; only the firm name of Bond & Starr, Jewels, Chestnut Street east of Broad Street, Philadelphia.

At Trent Farms, Manning Trent began to tremble when David entered the library. He trembled so violently that the whiskey and soda spilled from the glass he held.

Julia. appeared. Her eyes were cold and her lips compressed when she glanced at Manning and saw the glass. And then, turning to her son, Julia said:

“Why, David. You aren’t looking very well for Christmas.”

Manning got up and left the room. Thought was blurred. But there lay, within the blur, a. focused space that made him wonder at the miracle of Julia’s blindness'.

Stay out of Julia’s way, he warned himself. He finished his drink. He poured and drank another in the dining room, He rang for Wallace, who helped him into his overcoat and overshoes. He put on his hat and left the house.

It was late. It was on toward dusk. Down on the highway a car passed, two spotlights arcing from the road. At least. . . . At least. . . . They’d gotten men last night, not children. . . . What was that about the priest? Father O’Burgh? Did they do that, too?

He walked away from the house. He walked aimlessly. It was dusk, and he made no effort to control himself when his legs faltered.

The valley was of ghastly beauty in the dusk. The snow took on a faint blueness. The black trees stood sharply against the lowering gray of the sky. Lights flickered from the houses in the valley. And in some of the far-off windows the faint red and green lights of the yuletide shone timidly.

HE FOLLOWED his own winding drive through the trees to the State Highway. At his gates he stood uncertainly.

Why not? he asked. If he could save David. She was damned, any way you looked at it. He, publisher of a lurid newspaper, well knew the insidious quality of innuendo.

He leaned against the tall gatepost. Well—but there were two beasts. If they dragged Sara from her home and found the lack, wouldn’t their observations quicken? Wouldn’t they seek the same lack in' another? In those close to Sara? In Pierre? And then—in David?

And so he did not turn toward the village.

He walked, instead, south along the highway, not quite knowing what impelled him in that direction. The darkness gathered about him. And the stars appeared.

Here it is, the junction with the Old Post Road, leading to Fountain Head. Of course. Stop and call on Pierre. Christmas night. See old friends. He turned into the road. And he walked under the oaks.

Fountain Head, on the old Post Road, appeared suddenly beyond a wooden bend. Its suddenness dismayed Trent.

But he approached the house, and glanced through a library window. There was a blaze in the fireplace, but he did not see Pierre.

He hesitated again at the porch. Fondness for Pierre and bitterness renewed their battle. And bitterness won. He kept on, hugging the south wall of the house, until he reached the first of the study windows.

He thought, in a moment of sanity. Good God! This is a crazy thing. . . .

Then, cautiously, he peered through the window.

Pierre was seated at a table. On the table was spread a newspaper. On the newspaper were the parts of a rifle—the 30.30, Trent thought. Pierre was cleaning the parts.