The Avenger 29 - The Nightwitch Devil (3 page)

Hollis chuckled. “You make me feel like I’m one of these private eyes on the radio,” he said. “If I can do anything for you, I’d be glad to. What seems to be the trouble?”

“Do ye know Dr. John Ruyle?”

“Yes,” answered the editor. “Can’t say I know John well, but I’ve been out to his place a few times. I like him.”

“I came here to Nightwitch to spend a week as John’s houseguest,” explained Mac. “I’d written telling him the day I was arriving. He’s nae at his house, ’tis empty. I’m wondering if something’s happened.”

Hollis frowned, shaking his head. “No, nothing that I know of. I talked to John on the phone day before—”

“He does have a phone then?”

“Certainly, what gave you the—”

“ ’Twas a lass at the phone exchange, told me he had no phone.”

“Must have been Hulda Dolittle. She doesn’t take kindly to outsiders.” He pushed back from his old desk. “As far as I know, John’s had no accident and he wasn’t called away suddenly.”

“Where mot he be, then?”

The editor walked toward the potbelly stove in the center of the room, holding his palms toward it. “I really don’t know what to tell you. You say you were at his house?”

“Aye. He’s nae there, nor is—”

The door opened, Anne Barley walked in. “I took a little longer for lunch than usual, Sam. I had something I wanted to check at the library.”

“Anne, this is Mr. MacMurdie. Anne Barley, Fergus MacMurdie.”

Mac rose from his chair. “I believe we bumped into each other earlier.”

“Oh, yes. You’re the man with the suitcases.” The girl dropped her purse on the top of a desk at the side of the room and shrugged out of her raincoat.

“Anne, Mr. MacMurdie is looking for Dr. Ruyle,” said Hollis. “Do you have any idea where John might be?”

“Out at that ramshackle mansion of his working on his book.” Anne sat down in her desk chair. “John’s almost always there.”

“He’s nae there. Miss Barley, neither John nor his housekeeper.”

“Mrs. Dickerson isn’t there, either?” asked Anne.

“Does she have people in town? I’d like—”

“Yes, she has some cousins over on the south end of town,” said Anne. “What do you think’s happened?”

“I dinna know. I’m hoping someone here in Nightwitch can tell me.”

“Could it be,” suggested Hollis, “that John’s ill, and just not answering his door? We’ve had a lot of flu this past winter.”

“I took the liberty of searching his house. There’s not anyone there.”

Anne asked, “Anything to indicate where he went?”

Mac shook his head, hesitating. “There was one thing,” he said. “He seems to have been writing a note when he was interrupted. In the note he refers to someone called . . . the Devil.”

Anne made a small gasping sound.

“The Devil?” echoed Hollis.

“Does that mean anything to ye?” Mac looked especially at the girl.

“No, nothing,” she said.

Hollis rubbed his bony hands together in front of the stove. “John’s been working awfully hard on that book of his. You don’t think the strain may have . . . ?”

“Nay,” said MacMurdie. “John’s not the kind of man to have a breakdown.” He glanced from one to the other, waited a few seconds. “Well, I’ll be going. I want to talk to his housekeeper’s people, to see what they can tell me.”

Anne left her chair. “It’s a difficult house to find, when you’re a stranger. Mind if I show Mr. MacMurdie the way, Sam?”

The editor smiled. “It’s the least we can do.”

As they went out into the hall Anne said, very softly, to Mac, “I must talk to you.”

The rain churned the gray waters of the small crescent-shaped Nightwitch harbor.

Her eyes on the bay, Anne said, “I haven’t told Sam about any of this, Mr. MacMurdie. I suppose I’ve been enjoying myself playing detective, being a lone wolf.”

Mac drank some of his coffee, watching the girl across the restaurant table. “And now ye wish to tell me?”

“I recognized your name,” the girl replied, facing him. “You are with Justice, Inc, aren’t you?”

“Aye, that I am.”

“I didn’t say anything about that back at the newspaper office, because I didn’t know if you wanted Sam to know who you are.”

“You must understand, Miss Barley, that I dinna come here to investigate anything,” the Scot explained. “I, honest and true, intended to have a few days of vacation, that’s all. Now . . . I’m worried about John.”

Anne said, “I’m not sure what’s happened to him. But it’s possible he’s the one I heard them talking about.”

“Them?”

Folding her hands atop the checkered tablecloth, the girl said, “Nightwitch is an old, old town, Mr. MacMurdie. Centuries ago, when the witch craze swept through New England, a cult of witches and warlocks grew up here. Whether you believe in witchcraft and black magic or not, something was pretty certainly going on here. Strange things, things no one could explain.” She paused, watching again the gray water. “When they held the witch trials, five citizens of the town were hanged. I’ve always believed that the judges were as deluded as their poor victims, and yet . . . I’m not so certain any more.”

“Do ye mean ye think there is witchcraft being practiced here again?”

“Yes, I do,” said Anne slowly. “There is a coven of witches and warlocks, made up of thirteen citizens of the Nightwitch community. They’re led by a man calling himself the Devil.”

Mac scowled. “Do ye know if John Ruyle was also investigating the activities of this cult?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but when you mentioned the note you’d read at the mansion, well . . . that has to be what it means.”

“The Devil,” said Mac. “Do ye know who he is?”

She said, “I have no idea. I do know who three of the thirteen are. I followed one of the people I suspected of being a member, and that person led me to their coven meeting last night.” Anne proceeded to give Mac a detailed account of what she had seen and heard in the cave beyond Deacon’s Meadow.

“Aye, all the trappings of the traditional witch cult,” said Mac when she was finished.

“What they were saying, about someone having defied the Power and being taken care of . . . I don’t know, I’m afraid they might mean John Ruyle.”

MacMurdie gave a slow, determined nod of his head. “I’ll find out,” he said.

Josh Newton, with several large rolled-up maps under his arm, came walking into the Justice, Inc., offices. The black man had a thoughtful look on his face. “Probably only a coincidence,” he said.

“Huh?” said the gigantic Smitty, who was sitting in a chair near the windows. He was tinkering with the portable radio that rested on his vast lap.

“What’s a coincidence?”

The black man spread two of the maps out on the rug, weighting down the edges with an ashtray and some books. “I’ve been doing a study, at Dick’s suggestion, of the incidents of sabotage in various parts of the country. Here’s the map for part of New England.”

Cole Wilson was the only other member of Justice, Inc., in the Bleek Street headquarters at the moment. Grinning, he strolled over to look down at Josh’s map. “Looks like an outbreak of measles right there.”

“I marked each act of sabotage—to a defense plant, shipyard, military base, and so on—with a red dot,” explained Josh. “You’ll notice that the area enclosed in that circle has had a pretty high rate of trouble in the past twelve months.”

“Whereabouts is that?” asked Smitty.

“Massachusetts,” replied Josh. “Funny thing is, the town of Nightwitch is right on the edge of the circle.”

“Hey, that’s where Mac is staying,” realized Smitty.

His grin widening, Cole said, “So Mac’s landed smack dab in the middle of a nest of spies and saboteurs? As I’ve often pointed out, it’s impossible for any of us to really take a vacation.”

“Not implying there are any saboteurs based in Nightwitch,” said Josh. “What I said was, it’s a coincidence, most likely. Nightwitch just happens to be on the edge of an area where there’s been a lot of sabotage activity lately.”

“Mac’ll spot anything funny-looking,” said the giant, returning to his tinkering.

“He already has.” Richard Henry Benson had entered the room. He was a young man, in years, but there was nothing really youthful about him. He had a grim, determined look, and he radiated a kind of confidence seldom seen in younger men. There was no doubt, once you’d seen him, as to who headed up the crack crime-fighting organization known as Justice, Inc.

“You don’t mean to say,” asked Cole, “that Fergus has already uncovered a nest of spies?”

The Avenger seated himself behind his desk. “It’s something a bit stranger than that,” he told the trio. “Mac believes there’s a witch cult functioning in Nightwitch.”

“Ah, he’s got a more colorful imagination than I suspected,” remarked Cole.

“Hold on, Cole,” warned Smitty. “Mac doesn’t have hallucinations. If he says there’s witches, then there’s witches.”

Josh asked, “How’d Mac find out about them?”

“He suspects they may have had something to do with the fact that the friend he went to visit has disappeared,” said Benson.

“That Doc Ruyle guy, you mean?”

“Right, Smitty. John Ruyle has vanished.” The Avenger went on to tell them what MacMurdie had said when he’d phoned him a half-hour before.

“Not only witches,” said Cole when Benson had finished his narrative, “but the Devil, horns and all.”

“It’s no joke,” said Smitty. “It sounds like these witches maybe knocked off Mac’s buddy.”

Josh said, “Nightwitch, as you might guess from its name, figured in the witchcraft trials in the late Seventeenth century. But beliefs like that, in witchcraft and sorcery, were supposed to have died out centuries ago.”

“Could it have hung on?” asked Smitty. “In certain out-of-the-way places?”

“I’ve seen,” said Cole, “some fairly backward New England towns.”

“But Nightwitch,” put in Josh, “did pretty well as a shipping town about a century ago. It expanded for a time, got in a lot of new people. What I’m getting at is that old-time beliefs and practices are more likely to hang on in a town that’s stagnated for centuries. Nightwitch hasn’t, exactly.”

His fingers steepled beneath his chin, the Avenger said, “There are several reasons for reviving a witch cult, not all of them having to do with a belief in magic and Satanism. Cole, I’d like you and Smitty to go up to Nightwitch. Give Mac a hand digging into this business.” He paused for a few seconds. “You might take those maps of Josh’s along with you.”

It was true what they said about time. You needed outside clues to keep track of it.

Here, in the absolute blackness of the small stone room, he had no idea what the time was. No idea how long he’d been a prisoner.

“Several days,” guessed Dr. John Ruyle. “I’ve been down here several days.”

He wasn’t certain why he thought his prison was down. A feel, chiefly, that this small stone cell was underground.

He believed also he was near the water. Sometimes he could hear the sea, the tide.

“Should be able to keep track of time by the tides,” he told himself.

The trouble was, he slept sometimes. And he never knew for how long.

“And you don’t know,” he reminded himself, “how long you were unconscious after they dumped you down here.”

He’d been writing at his desk, starting to put down what he’d learned so far about the witch cult. He was aware, for seconds only, of a strange, sweet smell. He went to sleep, head falling toward the desk top.

When he awakened, he was here.

“Wherever here is.”

The room was roughly square, judging from the measurements he’d been able to pace off in the dark. Ten feet across, with the ceiling about ten feet above.

Ruyle had been able to locate a few cracks in the walls, long, thin cracks which might indicate concealed doors. He’d been unable to force anything open. And there was no trace of a real, full-fledged door or window.

Once a day, or possibly more often, a tiny grating near the floor opened. A cup of water and two dry biscuits were shoved in to him.

No light came in with the food. In fact, the first time the meal had been pushed into the stone room, Ruyle had no idea what it was. He felt around in the dark, after hearing the grating open and shut, and found the earthenware mug of water and the hard biscuits.

“They apparently want me to stay alive,” Ruyle concluded now as he roamed the blackness. “But for how long?”

He had suspected the existence of the witch cult for several months. He’d begun, very cautiously he thought, to gather facts about the group. He was fairly certain he knew the identities of four and possibly five of the thirteen members of the coven. He even had a suspicion as to the identity of the man who called himself the Devil.

Somehow, though, they’d found out, they’d learned he was suspicious and was stalking them. It was too soon, because Dr. Ruyle had intended to tell MacMurdie all he’d learned.

“Mac!” said Ruyle suddenly. “He must be here by now. Surely that much time has gone by.”

He felt more hopeful. Mac would do something, would find him down here.

“Won’t he?” Ruyle asked the darkness.