But not Use alone,
for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The
pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the
old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers
doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.
“Anoint and away! Anoint and away!” they cried in
wild chorus about him. “To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and
fearful fantasy of evil!”
Another moment and he would have yielded-and gone,
for his will turned soft and the flood of passionate memory all but
overwhelmed him, when—so can a small thing after the whole course of
an adventure—he caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the
wall, and then fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he
fell towards the houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones,
and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther
side.
And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him,
like flies upon a piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a
moment from the power of their touch, and in that brief instant of
freedom there flashed into his mind the sudden intuition that saved
him. Before he could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly
back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping
from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them
perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly
shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of
Use’s terror at the sight of fire.
Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the
dead leaves that lay under the wall.
Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the
wind carried the flame in a long line down the length of the wall,
licking upwards as it ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded
row of forms upon the top melted away into the air on the other side,
and were gone with a great rush and whirring of their bodies down into
the heart of the haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in
the middle of the deserted ground.
“Use!” he called feebly; “Use!” for his heart ached
to think that she was really gone to the great Dance without him, and
that he had lost the opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same
time his relief was so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind
with the whole thing, that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only
cried aloud in the fierce storm of his emotion… .
The fire under the wall ran its course, and the
moonlight came out again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse.
With one last shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of
horrid wonder for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still
crowded and flew, he turned his face towards the town and slowly made
his way in the direction of the hotel.
And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a
sound of howling, followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing
fainter and fainter with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between
the houses.
“It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame
ending,” said Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes
at Dr. Silence sitting there with his notebook, “but the fact
is—er—from that moment my memory seems to have failed rather. I have
no distinct recollection of how I got home or what precisely I did.
“It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I
only dimly recollect racing down a long white road in the moonlight,
past woods and villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up,
and I saw the towers of a biggish town and so came to a station.
“But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere
on the road and looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure
stood up in the moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great
monstrous cat it lay there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying
down the two main streets, and the twin and broken towers of the
cathedral marking its torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in
my mind with the utmost vividness to this day.
“Another thing remains in my mind from that
escape—namely, the sudden sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill,
and the decision I made, standing there on the dusty highroad, that the
small baggage I had left behind would more than settle for my
indebtedness.
“For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee
and bread at a cafe on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and
soon after found my way to the station and caught a train later in the
day. That same evening I reached London.”
“And how long altogether,” asked John Silence
quietly, “do you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?”
Vezin looked up sheepishly.
“I was coming to that,” he resumed, with apologetic
wrigglings of his body. “In London I found that I was a whole week out
in my reckoning of time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it
ought to have been September 15th,—instead of which it was only
September 10th!”
“So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or
two in the inn?” queried the doctor.
Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
“I must have gained time somewhere,” he said at length—”somewhere
or somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can’t explain it. I
can only give you the fact.”
“And this happened to you last year, since when you
have never been back to the place?”
“Last autumn, yes,” murmured Vezin; “and I have
never dared to go back. I think I never want to.”
“And, tell me,” asked Dr. Silence at length, when he
saw that the little man had evidently come to the end of his words and
had nothing more to say, “had you ever read up the subject of the old
witchcraft practices during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested
in the subject?”
“Never!” declared Vezin emphatically. “I had never
given a thought to such matters so far as I know–-“
“Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?”
“Never—before my adventure; but I have since,” he
replied significantly.
There was, however, something still on the man’s
mind that he wished to relieve himself of by confession, yet could only
with difficulty bring himself to mention; and it was only after the
sympathetic tactful-ness of the doctor had provided numerous openings
that he at length availed himself of one of them, and stammered that he
would like to show him the marks he still had on his neck where, he
said, the girl had touched him with her anointed hands.
He took off his collar after infinite fumbling
hesitation, and lowered his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And
there, on the surface of the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the
shoulder and extending a little way down the back towards the spine. It
certainly indicated exactly the position an arm might have taken in the
act of embracing. And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher
up, was a similar mark, though not quite so clearly defined.
“That was where she held me that night on the
ramparts,” he whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes.
It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John
Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my
notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin’s story. Since hearing it, the
doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his
secretaries had discovered that Vezin’s ancestors had actually lived
for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two
of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had
been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to
prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon
the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place.
The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches
of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there
literally by scores.
“It seems strange,” continued the doctor, “that
Vezin should have remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other
hand, it was not the kind of history that successive generations would
have been anxious to keep alive, or to repeat to their children.
1 comment