Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (7 page)

I thought I would go mad in London, when my injured fingers began to heal with a
new
growth. A monstrous growth – that where my brothers who were engulfed in my flesh at the time of my birth and did not begin to develop until now! Had they been developed and born at the proper time, we would have been triplets. But the
mode
of that development now!
 

Human flesh is subject to horrible perversions. Can my thoughts and activities as a puppeteer have had a determining influence? Have I influenced their minds until those minds are really those of Punch and Jack Ketch?
 

And what I read in that old pamphlet. Hands hacked off ... Could my ancestor's pact with the devil have given him his fiendish skill? Given him the monstrous growth which led to his ruin? Could this physical characteristic have been inherited, lying dormant until such time as another Lathrop, another puppeteer, summoned it forth by his ambitious desires?
 

I don't know. What I do know is that as long as I live I am the world's greatest puppeteer – but at what cost! I hate
them
and
they
hate me. I can hardly control them. Last night one of them clawed Delia while I slept. Even now, when my mind wandered for a moment, the
one
turned the pen and tried to drive it into my wrist...

I did not scoff at the questions that Jock Lathrop had asked himself. I might have at one time. But I had seen
them
, and I had seen the tiny sword driven into Lathrop's eye. No, I'm not going to spend any more time trying to figure out the black mystery behind the amazing skill of Jock Lathrop. I'm going to spend it trying to make Delia forget.

 

 

 

CRY WITCH!

 

THE GIRL was very beautiful and she came into the café on the arm of a young writer whose fearless idealism has made him one of the most talked of figures of today. Still, it seemed odd to me that old Nemecek should ignore my question in order to eye her. Old Nemecek loves to argue better than to eat or drink, or, I had thought, to love, and in any case he is very old.

Indeed, old Nemecek is almost incredibly old. He came to New York when the homeland of the Czechs was still called Bohemia, and he was old then. Now his face is like a richly tooled brown leather mask and his hands are those of a dapperly gloved skeleton and his voice, though mellow, is whispery. His figure is crooked and small and limping, and I sometimes feel that he came from a land of ancient myth. Yet there are times when a certain fiery youthfulness flashes from his eyes.

The girl looked our way and her glance stopped at Nemecek. For a moment I thought they had recognized each other. A cryptic look passed between them, a guardedly smiling, coolly curious, rapid, reminiscent look as if they had been lovers long ago, incredible as that might be. Then the girl and her escort went on to the bar and old Nemecek turned back to me.

"Idealism?" he queried, showing that he had not forgotten my question. "It is strange you should ask that now. Yes, I certainly am an idealist and have always been one, though I have been deserted and betrayed by my ideals often enough, and seen them exploited in the market place and turned to swords and instruments of torture in the hands of my enemies."

The tone of his voice, at once bitter and tender, was the same as a man might use in talking of a woman he had known and lost long ago and still loved deeply.

"Ideals," he said softly and fingered the glass of brandy before him and looked at me through the eyeholes of his Spanish leather mask. "I will tell you a story about them. It happened to a very close friend of mine in old Bohemia. It is a very old story, and like all the best old stories, a love story."

 

SHE WAS NOT like the other village girls, this girl my friend fell in love with (said Nemecek). With the other village girls he was awkward, shy, and too inclined to nurse impossible desires. He walked past their houses late at night, hoping they would be looking out of a darkened window, warm white ghosts in their cotton gowns. Or wandering along the forest path he imagined that they would be waiting alone for him just around the next turn, the sunlight dappling their gay skirts and their smiles. But they never were.

With her it worked out more happily. Sometimes it seemed that my friend had always known her, back even to that time when a jolly Old Man in Black had made noises at him in his crib and tickled his ribs; and always their meetings had the same magical conformity to his moods. He would be trudging up the lane, where the trees bend close and the ivy clings to the cool gray wall, thinking of nothing, when suddenly he would feel a hand at his elbow and turn and see her grave, mysterious, sweet face, a little ruffled from having run to overtake him.

When there was dancing in the square and the fiddlers squealed and the boards thundered and the bonfires splashed ruddy gilt, she would slip out of the weaving crowd and they would whirl and stamp together. And at night he would hear her scratching softly at his bedroom window like a cat almost before he realized what it was he had been listening for.

My friend did not know her name or where she lived. He did not ask her. With regard to that he was conscious of an unspoken agreement between them. But she always turned up when he wanted her and she was very artful in her choice of the moment to slip away.

More and more he came to live for the hours they spent together. He became contemptuous of the village and its ways. He recognized, with the clarity of anger, the village's shams and meannesses and half-masked brutalities. His parents noticed this and upbraided him. He no longer went to church, they complained. He sneered at the schoolmaster. He was disrespectful to the mayor. He played outrageous tricks on the shopkeepers. He was not interested in work or in getting ahead. He had become a good-for-nothing.

When this happened he always expected them to accuse him of wasting his time on a strange girl, and to put the blame on her. Their failure to do this puzzled him. His curiosity as to her identity was reawakened.

She was not a village girl, she was not a gypsy, and she certainly was not the daughter of the nobleman whose castle stood at the head of the valley. She seemed to exist for him alone. Yet, if experience had taught him anything, it had taught him that nothing existed for him alone. Everything in the village had its use, even the beggar who was pitied and the dog who was kicked. He racked his brains as to what hers might be. He tried to get her to tell him without asking a direct question, but she refused to be drawn. Several times he planned to follow her home. When that happened she merely stayed with him until he had forgotten his plan, and by the time he remembered it she was gone.

But he was growing more and more dissatisfied with the conditions of their relationship. No matter how delightful, this meet-at-the-corner, kiss-in-the-dark business could not go on forever. They really ought to get married.

My friend began to wonder if she could be concealing something shameful about her background. Now when he walked arm-in-arm around the square with her, he fancied that people were smirking at him and whispering behind his back. And when he happened on a group of the other young men of the village, the talk would break off suddenly and there would be knowing winks. He decided that, whatever the cost, he must know.

 

IT WAS near May Eve. They had met in the orchard opposite the old stone wall, and she was leaning against a bough crusted with white blossoms. Now that the moment had come, he was trembling. He knew that she would tell the truth and it frightened him.

She smiled a little ruefully, but answered without hesitation.

"What do I do in the village? Why, I sleep with all of them – the farmers, the preacher, the schoolmaster, the mayor..."

There was a stinging pain in the palm of his hand. He had slapped her face and turned his back on her, and he was striding up the lane, toward the hills. And beside him was striding an Old Man in Black, not nearly so jolly as he had remembered him, cadaverous in fact and with high forehead deeply furrowed and eyes frosty as the stars.

For a long way they went in silence, as old comrades might. Over the stone bridge, where once he and she had dropped a silver coin into the stream, past the roadside shrine with its withered flowers and faded saint, through the thin forest, where a lock of his hair and hers were clipped together in a split tree, and across the upland pasture. Finally he found words for his anger.

"If only she hadn't said it with that hangdog air, and yet as if expecting to be praised! And if it had happened only with some of the young fellows! But those old hypocrites!"

He paused, but the Old Man in Black said nothing, only a certain cold merriment was apparent in his eyes.

"How can she do it and still stay so lovely?" my friend continued. "And how can they know her and not be changed by it? I tell you I gave up a great deal for her! But they can enjoy her and still stick like leeches to the same old lies. It's unfair. If they don't believe in her, why do they want her?"

The Old Man laughed shortly and spoke, and the laugh and the words were like a wind high above the earth.

"She is a harlot, yet whosoever possesses her becomes highly respectable thereby. That is a riddle."

"
I
have not become respectable."

The Old Man showed his teeth in a wintry smile. "You really love her. Like old King David,
they
desire only to be warm."

"And she really sleeps with them all? Just as she said?"

The Old Man shook his head. "Not all. There are a few who turn her away. The philosopher who stays in the little cottage down the road and scowls at the religious processions and tells the children there is no god. The nobleman whose castle stands at the head of the valley. The bandit who lives in the cave on the hill. But even they cannot always endure life without her, and then they get up in the chilly night and go to the window and open it, and the bandit goes to the frost-rimmed mouth of his cave, and they call brokenly in the moonlight, hating themselves for it, and she comes, or her ghost."

The Old Man turned his head and his sunken eyes were very bright.

"They are weak," he said, "but you may be stronger. It's a gay life in the crags."

"Old Man," my friend answered, "you've shown me two paths and I'll take neither. I won't leave her and freeze to death in the crags, no matter how gaily. And I won't share her with those fat hypocrites. I have a plan."

And he turned and went whistling down the hill, his hands in his pockets.

 

When he had almost come to the village, he saw a tall hay-wagon coming up the lane. There were two rich farmers on the seat, with still collars and thick vests and fat gold watchchains, and she was sitting between them and their arms were around her shoulders. The schoolmaster had begged a ride and was lying on the hay behind the seat, and he had slyly managed to slide his arm around her waist.

Watching them from the middle of the road as the wagon slowly creaked nearer, my friend chuckled and shook his head, wondering how he could ever have been so blind as not to realize that she was the town harlot. Why, he had seen her a hundred times, drunken, clinging to some man's arm, hitching at her skirt, singing some maudlin song. Once she had beckoned to him. And it had never occurred to him that they were the same woman.

He laughed again, out loud this time, and stepped forward boldly and stopped the horses.

The farmer who was driving got up unsteadily, jerking at the reins, and roared in a thick, tavern voice, "Loafer! Good-for-nothing! Get out of our way!" And the whip came whistling down.

But my friend ducked and the lead horse reared. Then he grabbed the whip and pulled himself up onto the wagon with it, and the tipsy farmer down. The other farmer had found the bottle from which they had been swigging and was fetching it up for a blow, when he snatched it away from him and broke it over his head, so that the brandy drenched his pomaded hair and ran into his eyes. Then he tumbled him off into the road and laid the whip onto the horses until they broke into an awkward gallop which made up in jouncing what it otherwise lacked in speed.

When the fight started, the schoolmaster had tried to slip off the back of the wagon. Now he tried to hang on. But hay is not easy stuff to cling to. First his books went, then his tall hat, then he. There was a great brown splash. The last they saw of him, he was sitting in the puddle, his long legs spread.

By the time they reached the bridge, the horses were winded. My friend jumped nimbly out and swung her down. She seemed to be amused and perhaps even delighted at what was happening. Without any explanation, he took her firmly by the wrist and headed for the hills.

Every now and then he stole a glance at her. He began to marvel that he had ever thought her perfect. The dearest thing in the world, of course, but perfect? – why, she was much too cream-and-sugary, too sit-by-the-fire, too cozy and stodgy-respectable, almost plump. Well, he'd see to that, all right.

And he did. All through the long summer and into the tingling fall their life went like what he had always imagined must come after the happy endings of the fairy tales his grandmother had told him. He repaired the little old cabin in the hills beyond the upland pasture, and stuffed the old mattress with fresh green grass, and carved wooden dishes and goblets and spoons, and made her a pail out of bark to fetch water. Sometimes he managed to filch from the outlying farms a loaf of new-made bread, sometimes some flour, sometimes only the grain, which she ground between stones and baked unleavened on another stone over the fire. He hunted rabbits and squirrels with his revolver, but occasionally he stole chickens and once he killed a sheep.

She went with him on his hunting expeditions, and once or twice they climbed into the crags, which seemed not at all cold and forbidding, as on that afternoon when he had walked with the Old Man. He made slim flutes out of willow wands, and they piped together in the evenings or out in the sunny forest. Sometimes, as a solemn jest, they wove twigs and flowers into wreaths as an offering to fancied forest gods. They played games with each other and with their pets – a squirrel who had escaped the pot and a brave young cat who had come adventuring from the village.