Night Creatures Page 8

  The troop of horsemen galloped by, a horse-tail standard at their head, the leader wrapped in furs of gray lynx, and at the sight of him she knew. Despite his Mongol armor and the way his long mustache drooped in twin braids, she knew him. Gaussin—her Gaussin! What he did so far from Acre, riding with the leather-armored horsemen of the Cham of Tartary, she knew not, nor did she care. He was here, she had his scent, she need only follow it to be near him.

  After that she stayed as close to the great camp as possible, and whenever Gaussin rode out with his followers a great gray shaggy wolf loped through the broken land that paralleled his road. When he pitched camp she stayed near. When his tents were struck she took up the march with him.

  She had followed him across the winter-blasted plains to Alamut, saw him leave his comrades in the valley while he climbed the causeway to Krak al Jebal. When the Assassins leaped treacherously upon the Mongol soldiers she growled in fury, but she dared not risk a fight with them. Gaussin might return at any moment, and she must be strong and whole to help him if he needed her.

  She saw them set upon him, and her woman-wolf’s heart rejoiced at the fierceness of the battle he gave them, but when the fourth Assassin leaped on Gaussin’s back and struck him with his dagger she knew the time for watching had gone by. With a fierce, belling bay she pounced upon the drug-crazed man and sank her great teeth in his neck.

  It was astonishing how weak human flesh could be. The man fell easily before her charge; when she worried him he made but feeble efforts to defend himself—or so it seemed to her. His arms were puny, the dagger with which he had cut Gaussin had fallen at her attack, and unarmed he was no more a match for her than the little lamb she spared had been. Exultingly, she closed her jaws upon his gullet, felt the warm blood gush, looked with fierce, fiery eyes into his terrified fast-glazing orbs, heard the strangling blood-choked cry he gave before she tore his throat away and mangled his face with her claws.

  Then she turned to Gaussin. The dagger which had wounded him . . . she had heard of those Assassin’s knives . . . ’twas said they were envenomed. Feverishly she licked the red wound that barred his brow. The blood began to flow less freely. Presently it almost ceased to trickle, but still she lapped at it, hoping madly against hope that she could draw the venom from the cut before it entered his bloodstream.

  Gaussin came slowly back to consciousness. The wound across his brow burned like a brand and he was almost blinded with the blood that drenched his eyes, but dimly he realized a great wolf stood above him, licking the hot, bleeding cut with a pink tongue. The beast whined softly, as if to reassure him, and he sank back weakly. Presently, after the immemorial wont of wounded men, he moaned, ‘I thirst.’ The wolf left off her ministrations for a moment, then took his leather helmet in her teeth and trotted off. In a little while she came back with the headgear almost filled with water from the nearby brook. He drank greedily, and afterward he slept.

  Something plucked him by the arm, softly, gently, but insistently. Presently he woke to find the she-wolf still beside him, urging him to rise. It was difficult to get upon his feet, but with his fingers laced in her thick fur he managed it, staggering drunkenly along the rough trail. His bestial guide seemed aware of his weakness, and every hundred steps or so she halted while he gathered back his strength. Also, he noted, she kept from the high-road, following the woodland paths, sometimes halting with a fierce low growl while she sniffed the air; once or twice she dragged him down, and shortly afterward a troop of Assassins rode past at a gallop.

  How long he traveled thus he had no accurate idea. He knew only she guided and sustained him, licked his festering wound until it began to heal, lay close to him and warmed him with shaggy body when he slept, and ranged the woods to bring back hares or pheasants or suckling pigs for his fare.

  At last there came a day when she appeared to think it safe to take the open road, and as they trudged along he heard a sound he had not thought to hear again, the rumble of Tartar kettle-drums. In a few minutes he saw them, a troop of leather-armored horsemen with horse-tails trailing from their helmets, lance-tips glinting in the morning sun.

  ‘Mangoli Khan!’ the leader cried. ‘Praise be to such gods as perhaps there are! We had not thought to see thee. The Old Man of the Mountain sent thy four companions’ heads to us; thee we thought he had surely slain, also.’

  The she-wolf turned under Gaussin’s hand, freeing her shoulder from his clutch. She made a sound half whine, half moan, and would have turned into the brush, but Gaussin dropped upon his knees beside her.

  ‘Nay, Lady Wolf, good, sweet, wolfkin, I will not have it so!’ he denied. ‘By all the blessed saints in Paradise, I swear I love thee, dearest beast!’ And with his arms about her furry neck he kissed her full upon the hairy mouth.

  He thought it was delusion, or return of his delirium, for instead of the rough, wiry pelt of the she-wolf he felt a mass of soft black tresses, perfumed with the spice of Araby, across his cheek; instead of the wolf’s hairy muzzle a pair of lips as soft as rose leaves pressed against his mouth. She was clinging to him. He could feel her heart beat. Her hair was fragrant on his cheek. No she-wolf, this, but a sweet, softly-molded woman. His Sylvanette!

  He said her name slowly, wonderingly. Then, as in the foothills of the Lebanons:

  ‘Sylvette ma drue! Sylvette ma mie!

  En vous ma mort, en vous ma mie!’

  Came her answer, low and tender-sweet:

  ‘Bel ami, ainsi, va de nous!

  Ne vous sans mois, ni moi sans vous!’

  The stolid Tartars of the guard showed small astonishment at seeing a woman where there had been a she-wolf. On the steppes of Muscovy where they were weaned the vrykolakas—man-wolf—was almost as common as the house-dog, and those who chose to shift their shapes did so, nor was it any concern of their neighbors. Methodically they made two litters of sheepskin coats stretched over lances and bore the fainting Mangoli Khan and his wolf-lady back to camp.

  How the armies of the Kha Khan laid siege to the fortress of the Old Man of the Mountain and plucked it apart stone by stone as children break a house of blocks; how the Grand Master of the Assassins went in chains to the blue-tiled court of the Great Khan at Karakorum and was never seen again is another story. Our concern is with Gaussin and Sylvanette.

  Not until they had been wed did they hear each other’s odysseys.

  They lay upon their couch of skins with rugs of sables and lynx fur over them, and through the tent’s thick walls of black felt came the muted thunder of the kettle-drums.

  He stroked the hair that tangled round her neck, and at his touch the small pulse in her throat quickened. For a long time they lay thus; then she raised herself to draw the heavy coils of her hair from beneath her shoulders. Her lips touched his. Touched, and clung. ‘O my beloved,’ she murmured, ‘’twas thy kiss that set me free from wolfshead.’

  ‘What say’st thou?’ he answered sleepily.

  ‘I said thou gavest me freedom from my wolfish shape with thy kiss. For this was the condition which La Crainte made when she ensorcelled me: “Take and retain the form of a she-wolf until some noble lord shall kiss thy hairy beast’s-lips and declare his love for thee.”’

  Mortmain

  RANLEIGH LOOKED UP, puzzled as the mellow radio-chime of the mortuary’s doorbell boomed its triple note of warning. One might expect a phone call half an hour after midnight, but who would ring the bell at this time? He was alone in the office, for it was Jim Atherholt’s evening off and Basset, his junior assistant, had gone to the corner for sandwiches and coffee. Burglars generally shun funeral homes, but . . . he took the pistol from his desk drawer and dropped it in the pocket of his well-cut oxford-gray jacket as he rose to answer the summons which was sounding again, insistently, irritably, as though the caller kept his finger on the bell button.

  In the coned-down light of the porch lamp he descried a figure muffled to the ears in upturned collar, caught the glint of beaver fur on the vis
itor’s overcoat, and appraised the stylish Homburg hat. His fingers relaxed on the pistol grip. The caller might be mysterious, but he was obviously no burglar.

  ‘Good evening—ah, good evening, Mr Steadman!’ he greeted as he snapped off the latch and drew the door back. ‘Come in, please.’ Then, as his visitor stepped into the lobby he stood waiting, brows raised politely in interrogation. Doctors, lawyers, and morticians are denied the layman’s right to give way to their curiosity; the cardinal rule of their callings is to maintain a poker face, whatever their impulses may be. ‘It’s very cold,’ he hazarded. There was always safety in banalities, they gave the caller time to catch his mental breath.

  Steadman ignored the remark, as Ranleigh had expected. But the rejoinder he shot back was entirely unlooked for: ‘I’d like to see some caskets. Right away.’

  For a fraction of a second Ranleigh’s carefully maintained calm faltered. Ninety patrons out of every hundred began conversation with the announcement that some relative or friend was dead. The other ten announced superfluously that they wished to make arrangements for a funeral. Albert Steadman, always poised, assured, and self-possessed, asked to look at caskets—‘some caskets’—as if he shopped for a new car or motorboat or some entirely ordinary piece of merchandize.

  Then experience triumphed over surprise. ‘Certainly, Mr Steadman,’ he answered blandly. ‘This way, if you please.’

  Ranleigh looked upon his caskets much as a dentist regards dentures and bridges, tangible and visible accessories to service, but the least important of the things he had for sale. Each casket in his display room bore a neatly-lettered card announcing it was furnished in conjunction with a complete funeral service. It was not priced separately; indeed, it was not priced at all, any more than are the buttons on a suit or ornaments upon a lady’s dress in a department store. But Steadman asked to look at caskets. Probably a layman’s inept statement of his wishes, but . . . ‘Give him time to get adjusted, let him get hold of himself,’ Ranleigh warned himself as he switched the lights of his display room on.

  In the indirect glow of the torches Steadman looked about him. Here were caskets made of metal, silver finished, or with the dull gleam of bronze or copper; cases of mahogany, beautiful as furniture designed by master-craftsmen; caskets covered with fine, rich brocades—— ‘This one,’ Steadman announced shortly, stopping by a case of pale silver-bronze satin lining. ‘How much?’

  Ranleigh glanced at the price card, not that his memory needed refreshing, but to gain time. ‘A service with that particular casket would be six hundred and fifty dollars, unless——’

  ‘I want no services; I want that casket, just as it is, and right away. How much, man?’

  ‘We don’t usually price our caskets separately, Mr Steadman,’ Ranleigh began. ‘Easy on, Gordon,’ he thought, ‘this man’s not hysterical with grief, there’s something more here; if he isn’t crazy. . . .’

  ‘Never mind your usual practise,’ Steadman jerked back. ‘It’s imperative I have this casket—immediately. How much’ll you take for it?’

  Ranleigh temporized, edging toward the door. ‘If you could give me some idea whom you want it for—that’s a lady’s casket, entirely unsuitable for a man, or even an elderly woman. . . .’

  With apparent effort Steadman brought his twitching features under control. ‘I want this casket—this particular casket,’ he replied, with slow emphasis upon each word, like one who speaks to a foreigner or a person handicapped by deafness, ‘and I want it delivered to me as soon as possible; sometime tomorrow, surely. I don’t want it for a funeral, I just want it in my house—I must have it. You’ve served my family, and you know me. I’ve come to you because I know and trust you. I can’t buy a casket direct from a wholesale house, but if you won’t sell me this one there are other undertakers who will——’ He broke off, drawing out his billfold.

  When he spoke like this he seemed sane enough, and there was certainly nothing abnormal in the sheaf of bills he handled, except their number and denominations. ‘Will you take six hundred dollars for this coffin just as it stands, without services or anything else, except delivery?’ He laid twelve fifty-dollar bills upon the casket’s gleaming top.

  Ranleigh nodded. After all, as Steadman said, there were other funeral directors . . . and six hundred dollars was six hundred dollars. ‘What inscription on the name plate?’ he asked.

  ‘None. But be sure you have this coffin at my house before sunset tomorrow. Good night, Mr Ranleigh.’

  The odd transaction preyed on Ranleigh’s mind all next day. During his direction of three funerals and arrangements for two more the memory of Albert Steadman’s distrait manner and his strange insistence that he needed a casket immediately hovered in the back of his mind. Several times he decided to send a check to Steadman with a note advising he could not make delivery of a casket in such circumstances; once he actually drew out his checkbook, but with his pen poised he paused and rationalized the sale. Steadman’s manner had seemed strange, but what right had Ranleigh to say that he was crazy? How many of us could escape incarceration if eccentric actions branded us as lunatics? Almost every day you read about the death of some unusual character who had kept a casket in his house for years—Sarah Bernhardt had been so obsessed with thoughts of death that she took a specially-selected casket on her world tours with her. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he told himself. ‘If Steadman wants that casket, sell it to him, or someone else will. He surely seemed to know what he was about.’ Still, to take advantage of a crazy man, or even one whose judgment had been warped by grief, was not the way that Gordon Ranleigh did things. He could have retired on the profits he’d passed up when he kept his patrons from incurring funeral bills beyond their means. Then back again his thoughts swung in the vicious spiral: Was Steadman crazy? . . . who was he to judge?

  A feeling of vague unease oppressed him as the highway reeled away beneath his whirling hearse wheels. Entirely devoid of superstition, especially concerning death, he still felt slightly ‘creepy’ on this errand of delivering a casket for which no corpse waited. The roadway, smooth and gray as a steel ribbon, ran between tall stands of pine trees, and it seemed to Ranleigh that there was an air of hidden menace, or at least of warning, in the long blue shadows that they threw. Far away the hills were indigo that shaded into purplish-black. The sun was going down behind them and little bits of frayed-out clouds of cotton-wool began to tinge themselves with lavender and golden-pearl, with here and there a fleeting glow of sunset-flame. Somehow, it seemed to him, the pine trees evoked from their depths primeval spirits, elementals menacing and hostile; their black boughs did not seem to whisper with the soft and friendly rustle he had always associated with evergreens, but, gaunt, lonely and aloof, they stretched their dark limbs upward, as if to share dark secrets with the darkling sky. From the dooryard of a cabin which stood in the center of a patch of brown cleared land a dog howled mournfully, and the ululating echo of its lamentation rolled back eerily from the hills, then died abruptly, snuffed out by the smothering weight of wooded shadows.

  He glanced up at the sinking sun, then at his speedometer. Steadman had been emphatic in his request that the casket be delivered before sunset. He notched his throttle forward a little. How much farther was it to Mortmain Manor?

  Funny name that, Mortmain. A lawyer friend had told him it came from the Latin, meaning a dead hand, and signified a permanently entailed estate. A Steadman in Colonial days had tried to make it impossible for his heirs to sell their homestead, and though the courts had overturned the will, the Steadmans still lived on the property, and the place was known as Mortmain. ‘Dead Hand House’, a devilish uncanny name.

  Idly, he reconstructed Albert Steadman’s history. His was the tenth generation to occupy Mortmain, and unless he remarried and had children, he would be the last. Like his father and his grandfather he had been a banker, but unlike them he had practised his profession abroad. Financial adviser to South American and small Balkan coun
tries, traveling in the Near and Far East, going anywhere and everywhere his advice could be marketed, he had lived most of his life in foreign lands, coming home for only fleeting visits till his father’s death called him to the presidency of the Sixth National Bank. And when he returned after five years’ stay in Harbin he brought a Russian bride with him, Natacha Kovalchuk, a White refugee from the revolution.

  She was a riddle-woman, enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s smile, tall, slender, fair-skinned, red-haired, with a far-off vision in her green eyes as though she had looked long upon the sufferings of the hidden places of the world. Slow grace personified, she was making every movement in the manner of a silky, lithesome cat.

  Ranleigh had been close to her only twice: once when she came with Steadman to arange for setting up a monument above his father’s grave. She had disturbed him. Her white face framed between the darkly lustrous sable of her coat and the gleaming fur of her tall Cossack hat had reminded him of something he could not recall for a moment; then he placed it with a sudden inward qualm—the face of a girl he had helped take from the river, a pale drowned face with seaweed tangled in its unbound, floating hair. And there was something secret in her long green eyes, something half sardonic, half inviting, as if to say, ‘You think you know the mystery of death, my little man? How bold—and droll—you are!’ He had felt relieved when she left with her husband.

  The second time he saw her he was called professionally. Steadman was somewhere in the interior of Mexico and could not be communicated with, but Musya, the old half-breed Tartar woman who had come with Natacha as nurse and lady’s maid, made all arrangements. ‘The gaspadin1 must understand these were milady’s wishes: She is to be dressed in this green gown, with this underwear, these stockings, and these shoes. Musya is to braid her hair; these rings shall be put on her fingers, these in her ears. Her casket must be silver-bronze with écru satin lining, and the plate upon it shall bear but the single word “Natacha”.’