The Avenger 29 - The Nightwitch Devil (2 page)

The road grew more and more narrow as it turned up into the hills. Trees, newly green, bent low over the roadway, shaking down rain on the trudging MacMurdie.

Mac had known Dr. John Ruyle for a good many years, though he hadn’t seen the biologist since he’d come to Massachusetts seven years ago to teach at a large college near Boston. Four months earlier, Ruyle had moved to a large old house here in Nightwitch. He was taking his sabbatical leave and planned to work on a book. The house had been in Ruyle’s family for generations and, until his return to it, had stood empty for nearly a decade. Mac, taking a very brief rest from his strenuous career as a member of the Justice, Inc., crime-fighting team, had come to spend a few days as a house-guest of his old friend.

They’d kidded him, especially grinning Cole Wilson about not being able to stand the rural quiet of Nightwitch. MacMurdie, now, had an uncomfortable feeling that he was not destined to have a quiet time of it here. The way the old station master had acted, the way the telephone woman had behaved . . . it gave Mac the feeling, not an unfamiliar one to a man who lived the kind of life he did, that something was going on wrong.

“Whoosh!” he exclaimed as he crested the hill and got his first look at the old mansion, “ ’tis bigger by far than I expected.”

The stone wall that gave the road its name circled the fifteen acres of trees and brush which surrounded the old house. The wall was high, higher than a man, made of large chunks of gray and buff stone. The house sat several thousand feet beyond the high wall—a vast house of stone, turreted, looking as though it had been transported, whole, from some English country estate.

“John always did like his privacy,” observed Mac as he headed for the gate.

The black wrought-iron gate stood half open. Thrusting his hands in his pockets, Mac crossed onto the grounds. The rain was falling heavier, spattering down on him. He felt very small with this great forest closing in on him, and the vast house looming up ahead of him.

In the center of the heavy oaken front door was set a brass knocker in the shape of an eagle. Mac used it to pound on the wood.

Nothing followed his knocking.

The lean Scot tried again, louder and longer.

Once more there was no response from within the silent house.

Ruyle, in one of his letters, had told him he had a housekeeper. Even if the doctor was out, the woman should be here.

Mac used the knocker a third time, even though he was certain there was no one within.

Then he tried the handle. The big door swung, silently, inward.

Stepping into the long, shadowy hallway, MacMurdie called out, “John, be ye home? ’Tis MacMurdie come to pay a visit.”

His words rolled along the hall, bouncing and echoing. Then the silence closed in.

The look of concern deepened on the Soot’s face. “ ’Tis not right, this.”

He began a slow and careful search of the enormous house. It took him nearly an hour. He found nothing—no sign of his friend, or of the housekeeper, and nothing to indicate where either of them might be.

When he returned to his friend’s study, the room where he’d commenced his search, Mac noticed something. Only a small thing, a splat of ink on the Oriental carpet beside the desk.

Kneeling, he poked at the black spot. It was still faintly damp. Under the desk, at the back of the kneehole, was a fountain pen. “Perhaps John was writing something and got interrupted,” thought Mac.

He searched around on the floor, in the wastebasket. No note or letter did he find.

There was a small envelope-size green blotter, a fresh one, at the edge of the desk top. Mac picked it up and turned it over. There were two lines of writing, in reverse, showing on it. In Ruyle’s handwriting, in black ink.

Mac carried the blotter to the window to make out what his missing friend had written.

“There is a Devil,” he read, “and I have—”

The night before, it had also rained. Thunder had rumbled down through the hills around Nightwitch. Lightning crackled, and wind snapped branches off trees.

But that didn’t stop the Thirteen from meeting.

Anne Barley was fairly certain they would. She had figured out, in the year she’d been in Nightwitch and working on the
Nightwitch Guardian,
a fairly accurate schedule of when they met.

It hadn’t been a year, actually, since the first month or so she hadn’t suspected anything. And, as she was an outsider, no one had told her anything openly or even hinted at it. But Anne was very good at sensing things, sensing that something unusual was going on. A conversation she’d walked in on unexpectedly, an accident no one was willing to discuss, an unexplainable run of bad luck for one of the townsmen. After a while, the girl was able to fit some pieces of the puzzle together.

Standing now beneath the beech trees across from the house she was watching, huddled in her dark raincoat, Anne knew she was right.

A few minutes before midnight, the rear door of the saltbox house eased open. A black-cloaked figure came floating out into the stormy night.

Anne moved, following the black shape.

She was also fairly certain where it would lead her. She’d narrowed the possibilities down to two or three. They were moving, through the thick woods and darkness, toward one of those three.

Lightning sizzled, illuminating the night forest.

The black figure was a hundred yards ahead of Anne, cloak fluttering.

“It’s going to be at Deacon’s Meadow,” the girl said to herself. “They’ll use the caves at the meadow edge, I’m sure.”

She was right about that, too.

The black shape floated straight across the slanting meadow, rustling the high yellow grass. Blackish rocks stood beyond the meadow, then a slaty cliffside. The cloaked figure vanished into a black spot in the cliffside.

Anne stayed crouched behind a twisted oak at the far side of Deacon’s Meadow, watching the cave mouth that had swallowed the figure she’d been following. Bringing her wrist close to her face, she saw that it was now midnight. They should all be in there.

Anne was about to leave the shelter of the tree when she heard a rustling. She pressed herself against the rough trunk.

Another cloaked figure—this one seemed to be almost flying through the night—was heading for the cave.

“Is that the last of them?” she wondered.

Five minutes went by, then ten. No one else approached the meadow.

Taking a deep breath, holding it, the girl began to make her way, ducked down low, across the meadow. The night wind threw rain at her, clutched at her clothes, tried to spin her around.

She reached the mouth of the cave finally. There was light inside, light and sound. They were chanting, some kind of strange litany.

Anne could not see any of them, for the tunneling entrance of the cave twisted and corkscrewed. Taking another long, and careful, breath, the girl crossed the rocky threshold. “I’ve come this far,” she told herself, “I might as well get a look at the festivities.”

“. . . he defied the Power,” roared a deep rumbling voice inside the cave.

“He defied the Power,” repeated other voices.

“He defied the Power and he was struck down,” roared the voice.

“He defied the Power and he was struck down.”

“Thus will perish all who stand against us.”

“Thus will perish all who stand against us.”

There was a smell filling the dark tunnel, a sweet, dead smell. Some kind of incense was being burned; a blue smoke came twisting down the rocky passageway.

Anne clapped her hand over her mouth to keep herself from coughing. She halted, pressing her slim back against the stone wall. She could see them now. It made her stop breathing for long seconds.

A black altar, streaked with darker stains, stood in the center of the oval cave floor. At each end of the altar silver bowls were smoking and sputtering, spilling the blue smoke into the air.

Kneeling around the altar were a dozen—no, thirteen—thirteen figures. They still wore their cloaks, but even so Anne recognized two others beside the one she had followed.

There was someone on the other side of the black altar. As she watched, the figure stretched up, raising his hands high over his head. The hands were twisted, hairy, and claws seemed to grow from the finger ends. But the face . . . Anne wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t.

“It’s not a face,” she told herself, repeating it. “Not a face, only a mask.”

She knew that, yet the face frightened her.

It was a dark mahogany color, and parts of it did indeed seem to be made of wood. There was hair, coarse matted grizzled hair, growing out of the face. The hair made a halo around the grimacing face, like a lion’s mane. Sprouting from the forehead were two twisted black horns. The face seemed to be smiling, eternally smiling, a horrible evil smile.

“Who is your Master?” bellowed the masked figure.

“You, you are the Master,” cried the kneeling figures.

“And who am I?”

“The Devil, the Devil himself!”

Shaking, Anne backed away. Silently she made her way out of there.

Outside she went running across the meadow, never looking back.

“Nothing,” said Gil Lunden.

“What do you mean, Gil?” asked Anne, frowning across his office at him.

Lunden was a tall, fair man of thirty-one, a native of Nightwitch, and one of its two attorneys. “I mean, darling, that you should keep quiet about what you saw. Say nothing, do nothing.”

She turned away from him and went to the window to watch the wet morning. “I didn’t imagine it. I’m not crazy,” she said finally.

“Nobody’s suggesting that.”

“Then something has to be done.”

Gil shook his head. “There are a lot of old beliefs still current in towns like Nightwitch.”

“This isn’t some quaint old folk remedy I’m talking about, Gil,” the girl said. “This is witchcraft.”

“I’m aware of that, but I don’t see any reason to get so upset.”

“Upset? When I saw thirteen of my friends and neighbors bowing down to some monstrosity who calls himself the Devil? Upset isn’t quite the word for it.”

“I’ve lived here all my life, Anne.” Gil left his desk and walked across to her. “Every once in a while you hear a story that somebody’s a witch, or that someone has had a hex put on them. It’s all pretty harmless, seems to me.” He reached out to touch her shoulder.

She shrugged free. “That face, that wasn’t harmless,” she said. “And, Gil, they were bragging about having struck someone down, struck him down because he defied the Power.”

“Look, maybe somebody stubbed his toe and these people are taking credit for it. Nothing very satanic about that, seems to me.”

Turning, she looked up into his face. “It just occurs to me,” she said, “you already knew about this cult, didn’t you? Here I’ve been poking around, keeping it all secret and playing Nancy Drew. But you . . . you knew about it.”

“I hear things,” he admitted. “I knew there was some talk about the old beliefs rising up again. You have to realize, Anne, that in wartime, well, some people get very disturbed. If wrapping up in cloaks and pretending to be witches and warlocks helps them forget their troubles, seems to me there’s nothing wrong.”

“There was nothing playful about what I saw,” Anne insisted. “That man, the one who claimed to be the Devil, he was . . . evil.”

“You’re exaggerating,” the young attorney told her. “In our world today people like Hitler are evil, Hitler and his gang. But some harmless guy in a Halloween mask, that’s not evil.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “but I don’t agree with you.”

“Don’t you understand me?” said Gil. “I love you, Anne. I don’t want you getting involved with these things.”

“I’m already involved. And, Gil, I am going to stay that way.” Ignoring his outstretched hand, she went to the door. “If you don’t want to help me, I’ll find someone who will.”

“Now, Anne, why—”

The door slammed on the rest of his words.

Angry, Anne walked down the brick office steps to the street. “Oh, I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else and didn’t see you.”

The sandy-haired man picked up the suitcase the hurrying girl had knocked from his grip. “ ’Tis nothing, lass,” he assured her.

They went, for the moment, their separate ways.

You felt snug and comfortable in the editorial offices of the
Nightwitch Guardian.
It was warm, but not too warm; the air was fresh. The editor, a tall rawboned man named Sam Hollis, sat hunched at his desk. He was writing rapidly with a pencil on a yellow legal tablet. Now and then he stopped to chew on the eraser. He finished what he was working on, tore out the page, and then smiled across the desk at Mac. “There, that’s taken care of,” he said in his slow drawling voice. “Now I can give you my undivided attention, Mr. MacMurdie. How can I help you?”

“It may be ye canna help me at all, Mr. Hollis,” said the Scot. He’d been back an hour from the house on Stonewall Road. “I’m nae yet sure I want to go to the police, so I figured as how the editor of the local paper might be the man to see.”