The Devil Rides Out (31 page)

‘No,' Richard confessed. ‘Quite frankly, I find it very difficult to believe that we haven't all gone bug-house with this talk of witches and wizards and magic and what-not at the present day.'

‘Yet you saw Mocata yourself this afternoon.'

‘I saw an unpleasant pasty-faced intruder I agree, but to credit him with all the powers that you suggest is rather more than I can stomach at the moment.'

‘Oh, Richard!' Marie Lou broke in. ‘Greyeyes is right. That man is horrible. And to say that people do not believe in witches at the present day is absurd. Everybody knows that there are witches just as there have always been.'

‘Eh!' Richard looked at his lovely wife in quick surprise. ‘Have you caught this nonsense from the others already? I've never heard you air this belief before.'

‘Of course not,' she said a little sharply. ‘It is unlucky to talk of such things, but one knows about them all the same. Of witches in Siberia I could tell you much–things that I have seen with my own eyes.'

‘Tell us, Marie Lou,' urged the Duke. He felt that in their present situation scepticism might prove highly dangerous. If Richard did not believe in the powers that threatened them, he might relax in following out the instructions for their protection and commit some casual carelessness, bringing, possibly, a terrible danger upon them all.

‘There was a witch in Romanovsk,' Marie Lou proceeded. ‘An old woman who lived alone in a house just outside the village. No one, not even the Red
Guards, with all their bluster about having liquidated God and the Devil, would pass her cottage alone at night. In Russia there are many such and one in nearly every village. You would call her a wise woman as well perhaps, for she could cure people of many sicknesses and I have seen her stop the flow of blood from a bad wound almost instantly. The village girls used to go to her to have their fortunes told and, when they could afford it, to buy charms of philtres to make the young men they liked fall in love with them. Often, too, they would go back again afterwards when they became pregnant and buy the drugs which would secure their release from that unhappy situation. But she was greatly feared, for everyone knew that she could also put a blight on crops and send a murrain on the cattle of those who displeased her. It was even whispered that she could cause men and women to sicken and die if any enemy paid her a high enough price to make it worth her while.'

‘If that is so I wonder they didn't lynch her,' said Richard quietly.

‘They did in the end. They would not have dared to do that themselves. But a farmer whom she had inflicted with a plague of lice appealed to the local commissar and he went with twenty men to her house one day. All the villagers and I among them went with them in a frightened crowd hanging well behind. They brought the old woman out and examined her, and having proved she was a witch, the commissar had her shot against the cottage wall.'

‘How did they prove it?' Richard asked sceptically.

‘Why–because she had the marks of course.'

‘What marks?'

‘When they stripped her they found that she had a teat under her left arm, and that is a certain sign.'

De Richleau nodded. ‘To feed her familiar with, of course. Was it a cat?'

Marie Lou shook her head. ‘No. In this case, it was a great big fat toad that she used to keep in a little cage.'

‘Oh, come!' Richard protested. ‘This is fantastic. They slaughtered the poor old woman because she had some malformation and kept an unusual pet.'

‘No, no,' Marie Lou assured him. ‘They found the Devil's mark on her thigh and they swam her in the village pond. It was very horrible, but it was all quite conclusive.'

‘The Devil's mark!' interjected Simon suddenly. ‘I've never heard of that,' and the Duke answered promptly:

‘It is believed that the Devil or his representative touches these people at their baptism during some Satanic orgy and that spot is for ever afterwards free from pain. In the old witch trials, they used to hunt for it by sticking pins into the suspected person because the place does not differ in appearance from any other portion of the body.'

Marie Lou nodded her curly head. ‘That's right. They bandaged this old woman's eyes so that she could not see what part of her they were sticking the pin into and then they began to prick her gently in first one place and then another. Of course she cried out each time the pin went in, but after about twenty cries, the head man of the village pushed the pin into her left thigh and she didn't make a sound. He took it out then and stuck it in again, but still she did not cry out at all so he pushed it in right up to the head, and she didn't know he'd even touched her. So you see, everyone was quite satisfied then that she was a witch.'

‘Well,
you
may have been,' Richard said slowly. ‘It seems a horribly barbarous affair in any case. I dare say the old woman deserved all she got, but it's pretty strange evidence to shoot anyone on.'

‘Er … Richard …' Simon leaned forward suddenly. ‘Do you believe in curses?'

‘What–the old bell and book business! Not much. Why?'

‘Because the actual working of a curse is evidence of the supernatural.'

‘They're mostly old wives' tales of coincidences I think. You'll have to produce something far more concrete than that to convince me.'

‘All right,' Marie Lou gazed at him steadily out of her large blue eyes. ‘You know very little about such things, Richard, but in Russia people are much closer to nature and everyone there still accepts the supernatural and diabolic possession as part of ordinary life. Only about a year before you brought me to England they caught a were-wolf in a village less than fifty miles from where I lived.'

He moved over to the sofa and, taking her hand, patted it gently. ‘Surely, darling, you don't really ask me to believe that a man can actually turn into a beast–leave his bed in the middle of the night to go out hunting–then return and go to his work in the morning as a normal man again?'

‘Certainly,' Marie Lou nodded solemnly. ‘Wolves, as you know, nearly always hunt in packs, but that part of the country had been troubled for months by a lone wolf which seemed possessed of far more than normal cunning. It killed sheep and dogs and two young children. Then it killed an old woman. She was found with her throat bitten out, but she had been ravished too, so that's how they knew that it must be a were-wolf. At last it attacked a woodman and he wounded it in the shoulder with his axe. Next day a wretched half-imbecile creature, a sort of village idiot, died suddenly, and when the women went to prepare his body for burial they found that he had died from loss of blood and that there was a great wound in his right shoulder just where the woodman had struck the wolf. After that there were no other cases of slaughtered sheep or people being done to death. So it was quite clear that he was the were-wolf.'

Richard looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Of course,' he remarked, ‘the man may have done all that without actually changing his shape at all. If anyone is bitten by a mad dog and gets hydrophobia, they bark, howl, gnash their teeth and behave just as though they were dogs and certainly believe at
the time that they are. Lycanthropy, of which this poor devil seems to have been the victim, may be some rare disease of the same kind.'

Marie Lou shrugged lightly and stood up. ‘Well, if you won't believe me–there it is. I don't know enough to argue with you, only what I believe myself, so I shall go and order supper.'

As the door closed behind her the Duke said quietly: ‘That may be a possible explanation, Richard, but there is an enormous mass of evidence in the jurisprudence of every country to suggest that actual shape shifting does occur at times. The form varies of course. In Greece it is often of the were-boar that one hears. In Africa of the were-hyena and were-leopard. China has the were-fox; India the were-tiger; and Egypt the were-jackal. But even as near home as Surrey I could introduce you to a friend of mine, a doctor who practices among the country people, who will vouch for it that the older cottagers are still unshakeable in their beliefs that certain people are were-hares, and have power to change their shape at particular phases of the moon.'

‘If you really believe these fantastic stories,' Richard smiled a little grimly, ‘perhaps you can give me some reasonable explanation as to what makes such things possible.
Brahminism, Budism, Taoism, all the great philosophers which have passed beyond the ordinary limited religions with a personal God are connected up with the Prana, Light, and the Universal Life Stream, but that is a very different matter to asking me to believe in were-wolves and witches.'

‘They only came into the discussion because they illustrate certain manifestations of supernatural
Evil,
' De Richleau protested; ‘just as the appearance of wounds similar to those of Christ upon the Cross in the flesh of exceptionally pious people may be taken as evidence for the existence of supernatural
Good.
Eminent surgeons have testified again and again that stigmata are not due to trickery. It is a changing of the material body by the holy saints in their endeavour to approximate to its highest form, that of Our Lord, so, I contend, base natures, with the assistance of the Power of Darkness, may at times succeed in altering their form to that of were-beasts. Whether they change their shape entirely it is impossible to say because at death they always revert to human form, but the belief is world-wide and the evidence so abundant that it cannot lightly be put aside. In any case what you call madness is actually a very definite form of diabolic possession which seizes upon these people and causes them to act with the same savagery as the animal they believe themselves for the time to be. Of its existence, no one who has read the immense literature upon it, can possibly doubt.'

‘Perhaps,' Richard admitted grudgingly. ‘But apart from Marie Lou's story, all the evidence is centuries old and mixed up with every sort of superstition and fairy story. In the depths of the Siberian forests or the Indian jungle the belief in such things may perhaps stimulate some poor benighted wretch to act the part now and again and so perpetuate the legend. But you cannot cite me a case in which a number of people have sworn to such happenings in a really civilised country in modern times!'

‘Can't I?' De Richleau laughed grimly. ‘What about the affair at Uttenheim near Strasbourg. The farms in the neighbourhood had been troubled by a lone wolf for weeks. The Garde-Champetre was sent out to get it. He tracked it down. It attacked him and he fired–killing it dead. Then he found himself bending over the body of a local youth. That unfortunate rural policeman was tried for murder, but he swore by all that was holy that it was a wolf at which he had shot, and the entire population of the village came forward to give evidence on his behalf–that the dead man had boasted time and again of his power to change his shape.'

‘Is that a fifteenth or sixteenth century story?' murmured Richard.

‘Neither. It occurred in November, 1925.'

For a while longer De Richleau strode up and down, patiently answering Richard's questions and ramming home his arguments for a belief in the power of the supernatural to affect mankind until, when Marie Lou rejoined them, Richard's brown eyes no longer held the half-mocking humour which had twinkled in them an hour before.

The Duke's explanation had been so clear and lucid, his earnestness so compelling that the younger man was at least forced to suspend judgment, and even found himself toying with the idea that Simon might really be threatened by some very dangerous and potent force which it would need all their courage to resist during the dark hours that lay ahead.

It was eight o'clock now. Twilight had fallen and the trees at the bottom of the garden were already merged in shadow. Yet with the coming of darkness they were not filled with any fresh access of fear. It seemed that their long talk had elucidated the position and even strengthened the bond between them. Like men who are about to go into physical battle, they were alert and expectant but a little subdued, and realised that their strongest hope lay in putting their absolute trust in each other.

At Marie Lou's suggestion they went into the dining-room and sat down to a cold supper which had already been laid out. Having eaten so lightly during the day, their natural inclination was to make a heavy meal but, without any further caution from De Richleau, they all appreciated now that the situation was sufficiently serious to make restraint imperative. Even Richleau denied himself a second helping of his favourite Morecambe Bay shrimps which had arrived that morning.

When they had finished the Duke leant over him. ‘I think the library would be the best place to conduct my experiments, and I shall require the largest jug you have full of fresh water, some glasses, and it would be best to leave the fruit.'

‘By all means,' Richard agreed, glancing towards his butler. ‘See to that please, Malin–will you.' He then went on to give clear and definite instructions that they were not to be disturbed on any pretext until the morning, and concluded with an order that the table should be cleared right away.

With a bland, unruffled countenance the man signified his understanding and motioned to his footman to begin clearing the table. So bland, in fact, was the expression that it would have been difficult for them to visualise him half an hour later in the privacy of the housekeeper's room declaring with a knowing wink:

‘In my opinion it's spooks they're after–the old chap's got no television set. And behaving like a lot of heathens with not a drop of drink to their dinner. Think of that with young Simon there who's so mighty particular about his hock. But spiritualists always is that way. I only hope it doesn't get
‘em bad or what's going to happen to the wine bill I'd like to know?'