Quests of Simon Ark (9 page)

“Fine.” I quickly outlined the details of Simon Ark’s revelations. “How’s chances of borrowing a gun till tomorrow?”

“Sure,” she said, leading me to a cabinet. “Which one do you want?”

“I used a .45 in the Military Police. That’s the only one I’m sure of, so I’d better take one of those.”

She handed me the heavy automatic, together with an empty clip and a box of bullets. I shoved seven of them into the clip and then rammed it into the butt. “Thanks a lot, Rain. I’ll have it back in the morning.”

“Let me come with you,” she said then. “I’ll go crazy sitting home here, thinking about it.”

“Sorry; that’s out of the question. Ashly’s even worried with Simon and I on the scene. But I’ll call you as soon as it’s over.”

“Is that a promise?”

“That’s a promise.” I kissed her lightly on the lips and then went out into the street, the automatic hanging heavy in my topcoat pocket.

I took time out to cable the New York office that I expected to obtain the missing book that evening, and close the deal. Then I went to a middle-class bar in downtown London and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to think about nothing at all.

When I got back to the hotel I found an air mail letter from Shelly awaiting me. I tossed it on the bed without opening it.

I wondered, for just a second, if possibly I was going to the
Blue Pig
that night in some subconscious hope that death would solve my problem for me.

Because now I was convinced that I loved Rain Richards…

The basement of the
Blue Pig Pub
was a surprisingly easy place to enter, and it took Simon and me only a few moments to locate the door to the old cellar and place ourselves beneath the trap door.

I took the .45 from my pocket, and jacked a bullet into the chamber; after that we waited.

And waited…

Presently, when my wristwatch glowed 11:30, and I had just about given up hope, we heard some movement in the room above. At almost the same instant we caught the sound of people entering through the basement, as we had come.

We took shelter behind some musty packing cases, and watched several men and a few women entering the room through the trap door. Finally, when the sounds from above told us the ceremony had begun, we resumed our post beneath the door.

Simon Ark edged it up a fraction of an inch, and through the opening I saw a scene I’ll never forget. There, behind the long table, stood the white-robed figure of George Kerrigan, his arms outstretched toward the ceiling. On either end of the table burned dozens of long black candles, sending their dancing flames over the kneeling figures of some twenty men and women who nearly filled the small room.

The brightly colored wallpaper had been covered in spots by hanging pictures of basilisks and other mythical monsters, and behind Kerrigan I saw a statue of Jupiter, the ancient god. “Like the one the pagans erected on Calvary, after Christ’s death,” Simon Ark whispered. “We are in the midst of evil here.”

“What are we waiting for, then?” I asked; “let’s go!”

“Be patient. There is still more to be seen.”

The kneeling figures above were swaying back and forth now, as if under the influence of some narcotic. And a low murmuring chant was slowly building up among them.

“It’s horrible,” I said, half to myself.

Simon Ark let the trap door fall into place and he said, very quietly, “Perhaps, though, the evil up there is no greater than the evil in your own heart.”

“What?” I muttered. “What do you mean?”

“Who is to say that the sin of adultery is any less serious than the sin of devil worship?” he asked, quietly. “Certainly they are both works of Satan.”

“Are you crazy, Simon? Why pick a time like this to give me a lecture on morality?”

“It is as good a time as any, my friend. I came here searching for the devil, and perhaps I have found him in the least likely of all places—inside of you!”

The chanting from above had grown louder, and it pounded at my eardrums as I listened to Simon’s words. “No…” I mumbled. “No…”

“Leave this woman, and go home to Shelly, before it is too late.”

“I…”

Suddenly, the chanting above turned to shouting, and there was a rush of movement. I lifted the trap door again and saw a startling sight. “It’s Rain! They’ve got Rain!”

Simon Ark was at my side; and he, too, saw the struggling girl in the grip of two strong men. “She must have sneaked in, and Kerrigan recognized her. The little fool!”

And I saw that the white-robed Kerrigan had already produced his deadly bow and arrows. His right hand was drawing back on the bow string and the trembling arrow was pointing through the flickering stillness at Rain’s struggling body.

I waited no longer. While my left hand slammed up on the trap door, my right hand was already bringing the heavy .45 into firing position.

George Kerrigan half-turned toward me, and the look of utter surprise was spreading over his face when my bullet tore into his shoulder.

After that, it was chaos…

I came out of it with a bloody nose and a torn sleeve, thanks mostly to the prompt arrival of Inspector Ashly and his men. My bullet had completely shattered Kerrigan’s shoulder, and he was unconscious by the time the ambulance arrived. His followers were quickly rounded up and led away, and soon only Simon and Ashly and Rain and I remained in the room.

“That bow and arrow should be enough to convict them of Carrier’s murder,” Ashly said. “I only hope the newspapers don’t get hold of this devil worship angle, or I fear they’ll have you stripped nude and about to be sacrificed on the altar, Miss Richards. These reporters are great at building up a sensational story.”

“I’m just happy to be alive,” Rain answered. “Right now I don’t care what they say about me. When I saw that arrow pointing at my chest, all I could remember was poor Carrier pinned to the wall.”

“You owe your life to your friends here,” Ashly told her.

“I know. Now I just wish Simon would tell us where the book is hidden so we could all go home.”

“That’s right, Simon,” I agreed. “Where is this elusive copy of The
Worship of Satan
?”

He sighed, and motioned around the room, now brightly lit by several portable police spotlights. “Right where it’s always been, my friends; it should have been obvious to you from the beginning. After all, why was it necessary to kill Carrier to keep him from telling its location? Why didn’t they simply move it to a new hiding place?”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “Why didn’t they move it?”

“Because they couldn’t; because it was the one part of this room that could not easily be disposed of or transported to another place.”

We looked around at the long table, and at the pictures, and at the statue, but we saw nothing.

“Where?” Rain asked simply.

Simon Ark closed his eyes. “During the seventeenth century, when a book was banned by a government censor, it was not always burned. If the book was a large one, like a folio, the pages were damasked into wallpaper…”

“Wallpaper!”

“Certainly. The text was blotted out by overprinting with a heavy design in bright colors, and it was used for wallpaper. Here,” he motioned around the room at the multi-colored walls, “here is the last remaining copy of
The Worship of Satan,
and with it is the final secret of the Vicar of Hell…”

After that, much later, I walked with Rain Richards through the mist of a cold London morning…

“I’ll get the University Laboratory to work on that wallpaper right away,” she said, “but it’ll still be months before the original printing is readable.”

“I know,” I said, “but somehow it isn’t as important as it was a few days ago. Whether Bryan was a murderer himself, or whether he was merely the second victim of his murderous wife, is something that need not concern us, really. The punishment for the crimes has been meted out long ago by a much higher court than ours.”

“I suppose so,” she agreed reluctantly. “It’s only too bad that it had to cause so much trouble and death.”

We walked further in silence, and then I said, “You know, it’s all over between us…”

“Yes, I know…”

“Simon Ark talked to me tonight, while we waited in that basement.”

“He’s quite a man, isn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he is.”

“Remember me to your wife.”

“Yes,” I said, but we both knew that I never would.

“Goodbye…”

“Goodbye, Rain…”

I watched her as she walked away into the morning mist. I watched her until she was out of sight and then I went back to my hotel room.

The air mail letter from Shelly was still on the bed; I tore it open, and settled down in a chair to read it…

T
HE NIGHTMARE BEGAN WITH
eleven words in a telegram:
Your sister and father killed in auto accident. Come at once.

That was all.

I stared at it for a full five minutes, reading it over and over, hoping that the words would somehow magically change before my eyes.

Then finally I looked away from the telegram on my desk and gazed out the window at the snowy February canyons of Manhattan. At that moment Maple Shades, Indiana, seemed a lifetime away, and even my sister and my father were merely vague figures in my memory.

But now they were dead. I would have to return to Maple Shades, Indiana, now, and stand beside the graves as their bodies were lowered into the ground, and perhaps shed a tear for what might have been.

I picked up the telephone and dialed the Westchester number where my wife would be, just starting to prepare the evening meal. “Hello, dear,” I said into the mouthpiece. “I just received a telegram from Uncle Philip. My sister and father were both killed in an auto accident…”

“Oh, no…” Shelly gasped on the other end of the line. “How awful!”

“Look… I guess we’re going to have to fly out there for the funeral and things. Can you be ready to go tonight?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I’ll call the airline now and see about reservations. I think there’s a plane around seven…”

And so it began.

I stuffed the telegram into my pocket.

Luckily the major Spring book promotions were already under way at Neptune Books, so I had no thoughts of business to trouble me that night as our plane winged its way over Pennsylvania’s ragged mountains. And with Shelly in the seat next to me, I felt that I could face anything the people of Maple Shades had to offer.

It was an odd town, Maple Shades, lying as it did on the banks of the not-so-beautiful Ohio at a point where three states almost touched. For though it was actually located in the state of Indiana, its business and social life was influenced more by the fact that it was somewhat a suburb of Cincinnati, across the Ohio line. And its thinking more than once had reflected that of the South, as represented by Kentucky, the third state which bounded that odd bend in the Ohio River.

It was a combination of cultures which had made me flee from Maple Shades as soon as I was able, leaving behind the smug suburban aristocracy into which I had been born. I’d left nearly twenty years ago, to become a newspaper reporter out West; to go off to the wars; to meet and marry Shelly Constance; and finally to rise to the vice-presidency of a leading New York publishing house before the age of forty.

In all those years I’d never been back to Maple Shades, except for occasional Christmas visits—and once right after I’d married Shelly, when I knew my dying mother would want to see the girl I’d chosen.

But now it was time to return. My sister, whom I loved, and my father, who maybe wasn’t so bad after all, were dead—dead together in an automobile somewhere along the banks of the Ohio, or perhaps against one of the tall, stately maples that gave the town its name. They were gone, and when I thought about the people they’d left behind—Uncle Philip and his wife, my sister’s husband, and the rest—I wondered why it had to be those two who died.

“We’re coming into the Cincinnati airport,” Shelly said quietly, a voice at my side cutting sharply through the fog of my thoughts.

“So soon?”

“So soon,” she repeated. “Is it going to be that hard for you to go back, to face them after all these years?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling…”

The plane bumped to a rocky landing and slowed suddenly as the twin propellers reversed their pitch. We were there. We were in Cincinnati, and home was only a few miles away, across the state line.

We drove through the city to Bridgetown, and then out route 264 till we picked up the modern divided highway at Cleves. It was a familiar route, and the cab driver hurried along through the gently falling snow with the air of one retracing a familiar but boring journey.

Then we were across the state line, into Indiana. And soon I saw the familiar billboard standing to the right of the road:
WELCOME TO MAPLE SHADES, THE HOTTEST LITTLE TOWN IN AMERICA. POPULATION: 32,590. KIWANIS CLUB MEETS EVERY WEDNESDAY NOON.

I laughed a little to myself when I saw it, remembering a favorite high school trick of my youth. Someone was forever slipping out at night to paint over the part of the sign reading MAPLES, and drivers in the morning were often quite startled to be confronted with a sign reading:
WELCOME TO HADES, THE HOTTEST LITTLE TOWN IN AMERICA.

In spite of this, the town fathers had never changed their slogan, and I imagined the high school boys were still at it, when the spirit moved them.

But the cab had slowed now, and I was startled to find that we’d already arrived at my uncle’s rambling white house near the edge of town. Maple Shades was the county seat, and both my father and uncle served as judges, a position which called for rambling white houses in a town like this.

We paid the driver and started up the steps with our bags. I didn’t know whether Uncle Philip intended to put us up at his house during our stay; but he had plenty of room and I decided to give him the opportunity, anyway.

He opened the door at our ring, and at once he was the Uncle Philip of old, calm, dignified, sardonic. “Well,” he began in his best courtroom voice, “I’m glad to see you two could make it.” He always included Shelly in his attacks on me, as if by marrying me she had taken on the burden of my imagined guilt.