Manly Wade Wellman - Judge Pursuivant 01 (11 page)

 
          
 
"Susan, you mustn't!"

 
          
 
She shrank back, her face turning slowly up to
mine. Her back was to the fire, yet light rose in her eyes, or perhaps behind
them; a green light, such as reflects in still forest pools from the moon. Her
hands lifted suddenly, as though to repel me. They were half closed and the
crooked fingers drawn stiff, like talons.

 
          
 
"Susan!" I coaxed her, yet again,
and she made no answer but tried to slip sidewise around me. I moved and headed
her off, and she growled - actually growled, like a savage dog.

 
          
 
With my free hand I clutched her shoulder.
Under my fingers, her flesh was as taut as wire fabric. Then, suddenly, it
relaxed into human tissue again, and she was standing straight. Her eyes had
lost their weird
light,
they showed only dark and
frightened.

 
          
 
"Talbot," she stammered. "VVh -
what have I been doing?"

 
          
 
"Nothing, my dear," I comforted her.
"It was nothing that we weren't able to fight back."

 
          
 
From the woods behind me came a throttling
yelp, as of some hungry thing robbed of prey within its very grasp. Susan
swayed, seemed about to drop, and I caught her quickly in my arms. Holding her
thus, I turned my head and laughed over my shoulder.

 
          
 
"Another score against
you!"
I jeered at my enemy. "You didn't get her, not with all
your filthy enchantments!"

 
          
 
Susan was beginning to cry, and I half led,
half carried her back to the fireside. At my gesture she sat on her cloak
again, as tractable as a child who repents of rebellion and tries to be
obedient.

 
          
 
There were no more sounds from the timber. I
could feel
an emptiness
there, as if the monster had
slunk away, baffled.

           
 
“Light's our best
weapon."

 
          
 
Neither of us said anything for a while after
that. I stoked up the fire, to be doing something, and it made us so
uncomfortably warm that we had to crowd away from it. Sitting close against the
tree-trunk, I began to imagine something creeping up the black lane of shadow
it cast behind us to the edge of the clearing; and yet again I thought I heard
noises. Club in hand, I went to investigate, and I was not disappointed in the
least when I found nothing.

 
          
 
Finally Susan spoke. "This," she
said, "is a new light on the thing."

 
          
 
"It's nothing to be upset about," I
tried to comfort her.

 
          
 
"Not be upset!" She sat straight up,
and in the light of the fire I could see a single pained line between her
brows, deep and sharp as a chisel-gash. "Not when I almost turned into a
beast!"

 
          
 
"How much of that do you remember?"
I asked her.

 
          
 
"I was foggy in my mind, Talbot, almost
as at the seance, but I remember being drawn - drawn to what was waiting out
there." Her eyes sought the thickets on the far side of our blaze.
"And it didn't seem horrible, but pleasant and welcome and - well, as if
it were my kind. You," and she glanced quickly at me, then ashamedly away,
"you were suddenly strange and to be avoided."

 
          
 
"Is that all?"

 
          
 
"It spoke to me," she went on in
husky horror, "and I spoke to it."

 
          
 
I forbore to remind her that the only sound
she had uttered was a wordless howl. Perhaps she did not know that - I hoped
not. We said no more for another awkward time.

 
          
 
Finally she mumbled, "Tm not the kind of
woman who cries easily; but I'd like to now."

 
          
 
"Go ahead," I said at once, and she
did, and I let her. Whether I took her into my arms, or whether she came into
them of her own accord, I do not remember exactly; but it was against my
shoulder that she finished her weeping, and when she had finished she did feel
better.

 
          
 
"That somehow washed the fog and the fear
out of me," she confessed, almost brightly.

 
          
 
It must have been a full hour later that
rustlings rose yet again in the timber. So frequently had my imagination
tricked me that I did not
so
much as glance up. Then
Susan gave a little startled cry, and I sprang to my feet. Beyond the fire a
tall, gray shape had become visible, with a pale glare of light around it.

 
          
 
"Don't be alarmed," called a voice I
knew. "It is I - Otto Zoberg."

 
          
 
"Doctor!"
I
cried, and hurried to meet him. For the first time in my life, I felt that he
was a friend. Our differences of opinion, once making companionship strained,
had so dwindled to nothing in comparison to the danger I faced, and his avowed
trust in me as innocent of murder.

 
          
 
"How are you?" I said, wringing his
hand. "They say you were hurt by the mob."

 
          
 
"Ahh, it was nothing serious," he
reassured me.
"Only this."
He touched with
his forefinger an eye, and I could see that it was bruised and swollen
half-shut. "A citizen with too ready a fist and too slow a mind has that
to answer for."

 
          
 
"I'm partly responsible," I said.
"You were trying to help me, I understand, when it happened."

 
          
 
More noise behind
him,
and two more shapes pushed into the clearing. I recognized Judge Pursuivant,
nodding to me with his eyes bright under his wide hat-brim. The other man,
angular, falcon-faced, one arm in a sling, I had also seen before. It was
Constable O'Bryant. I spoke to him, but he gazed past me, apparently not
hearing.

 
          
 
Doctor Zoberg saw my perplexed frown, and he
turned back toward the constable. Snapping long fingers in front of the great
hooked nose, he whistled shrilly. O'Bryant started, grunted,
then
glared around as though he had been suddenly and rudely awakened.

 
          
 
"What's up?" he growled menacingly,
and his sound hand moved swiftly to a holster at his side. Then his eyes found
me, and with an oath he drew his revolver.

 
          
 
"Easy, Constable!
Easy does it," soothed Judge Pursuivant, his own great hand clutching
O'Bryant's wrist. "You've forgotten that I showed how Mr Wills must be
innocent."

 
          
 
"I've forgotten what we're here for at
all," snapped O'Bryant, gazing around the clearing. "Hey, have I been
drunk or something? I said that I'd never
- "

 
          
 
"I'll explain," offered Zoberg.
"The judge met me in town, and we came together to see you. Remember? You
said you would like to avenge your brother's death, and came with us. Then,
when you balked at the very edge of this Devil's Croft, I took the liberty of
hypnotizing you."

 
          
 
"Huh? How did you do that?" growled
the officer.

 
          
 
"With a look, a word, a motion of the
hand," said Zoberg, his eyes twinkling. "Then you ceased all
objections and came in with us."

 
          
 
Pursuivant clapped O'Bryant on the unwounded
shoulder. "Sit down," he invited, motioning toward the roots of the
tree.

 
          
 
The five of us gathered around the fire, like
picnickers instead of allies against a supernormal monster. There, at Susan's
insistence, I told of what had happened since Judge Pursuivant had left us. All
listened with rapt attention, the constable grunting occasionally, the judge
clicking his tongue, and Doctor Zoberg in absolute silence.

 
          
 
It was Zoberg who made the first comment after
I had finished. "This explains many things," he said.

 
          
 
"It
don't
explain a doggone thing," grumbled O'Bryant.

 
          
 
Zoberg smiled at him,
then
turned to Judge Pursuivant. "Your ectoplasmic theory of lycanthropy - such
as you have explained it to me - is most interesting and, I think, valid. May I
advance it a trifle?"

 
          
 
"In what way?" asked the
judge.

 
          
 
"Ectoplasm, as you see it, forms the
werewolf by building upon the medium's body. But is not ectoplasm more apt,
according to the observations of many people, to draw completely away and form
a separate and complete thing of
itself
? The thing may
be beastly, as you suggest. Algernon Blackwood, the English writer of psychic
stories, almost hits upon it in one of his John Silence' tales. He described an
astral personality taking form and threatening harm while its physical body
slept."

 
          
 
"I know the story you mean," agreed
Judge Pursuivant. ''The Camp of the Dog, I think it's called."

 
          
 
"Very well, then. Perhaps, while Miss
Susan's body lay in a trance, securely handcuffed between Wills and myself
- "

 
          
 
"Oh!" wailed Susan. "Then it
was I, after all."

 
          
 
"It couldn't have been you," I told
her at once.

 
          
 
"But it was! And, while I was at the
judge's home with you, part of me met the constable's brother in this
wood." She stared wildly around her.

 
          
 
"It might as well have been part of
m^," I argued, and O'Bryant glared at me as if in sudden support of that
likelihood. But Susan shook her head.

 
          
 
"No, for which of us
responded to the call of that thing out there?"

 
          
 
For the hundredth time she gazed fearfully
through the fire at the bushes behind which the commanding
whine
had risen.

 
          
 
"I have within me," she said dully,
"a nature that will break out, look and act like a beast-demon, will kill
even my beloved father
- "

 
          
 
"Please," interjected Judge
Pursuivant earnestly, "you must not take responsibility upon yourself for
what happened. If the ectoplasm engendered by you made up the form of the
killer, the spirit may have come from without."

 
          
 
"How could it?" she asked
wretchedly.

 
          
 
"How could Mar the Beraud exude ectoplasm
that formed a bearded, masculine body?" Pursuivant looked across to
Zoberg. "Doctor, you surely know the famous 'Bien Boa' seance, and how the
materialized entity spoke Arabic when the medium, a Frenchwoman, knew little or
nothing of that language?"

 
          
 
Zoberg sat with bearded chin on lean hand. His
joined brows
bristled
the more as he corrugated his
forehead in thought. "We are each a thousand personalities," he said,
sententiously if not comfortingly. "How can we rule them all, or rule even
one of them?"

 
          
 
O'Bryant said sourly that all this talk was
too high-flown for him to understand or to enjoy. He dared hope, however, that
the case could never be tied up to Miss Susan Gird, whom he had known and liked
since her babyhood.

 
          
 
"It can never do that," Zoberg said
definitely. "No court or jury would convict her on the evidence we are
offering against her."

 
          
 
I ventured an opinion: "While you are
attempting to show that Susan is a werewolf, you are forgetting that something
else was prowling around our fire, just out of sight."

 
          
 
"Ahh, just out of sight!" echoed
Zoberg. "That means you aren't sure what it was."

 
          
 
"Or even that there was anything,"
added Susan, so suddenly and strongly that I, at least, jumped.

 
          
 
"There was something, all right," I
insisted. "I heard it."

 
          
 
"You thought you heard a sound behind the
tree," Susan reminded me. "You looked, and there was nothing."

 
          
 
Everyone gazed at me, rather like staid adults
at a naughty child. I said, ungraciously, that my imagination was no better
than theirs, and that I was no easier to frighten. Judge Pursuivant suggested
that we make a search of the surrounding woods, for f
)ossible
clues.

 
          
 
"A good idea," approved Constable
O'Bryant. "The ground's damp. We might find some sort of footprints."

 
          
 
"Then you stay here with Miss
Susan," the judge said to him. "We others will circle around."