XI
Battle and Retreat
I doubt if any writer, however accomplished, has ever done full justice to the emotion of terror.
To mention the icy chill at the backbone, the sudden sinewless trembling of the knees, the withering dryness of throat and tongue, is to be commonplace; and terror is not commonplace. Perhaps to remember terror is to know again the helplessness and faintness it brings.
Therefore it must suffice to say that, as I turned and saw the closing in of those pale-glowing blots of menace, I wanted to scream, and could not; to run, and could not; to take my gaze away, and could not.
If I do not describe the oncoming creatures—if creatures indeed they were—it is because they defied clear vision then and defy clear recollection now. Something quasi-human must have hung about them, something suggestive of man’s outline and manner, as in a rough image molded by children of snow; but they were not solid like snow. They shifted and swirled, like wreaths of thick mist, without dispersing in air. They gave a dim, rotten light of their own, and they moved absolutely without sound.
“It’s them,” gulped Jake Switz beside me. He, too, was frightened, but not as frightened as I. He could speak, and move, too—he had dropped Pursuivant’s head and was rising to his feet. I could hear him suck in a lungful of air, as though to brace himself for action.
His remembered presence, perhaps the mere fact of his companionship before the unreasoned awfulness of the glow-shadowy pack that advanced to hem us in, gave me back my own power of thought and motion. It gave me, too, the impulse to arm myself. I stooped to earth, groped swiftly, found and drew forth from its bed the sword-cane of Judge Pursuivant.
The non-shapes—that paradoxical idea is the best I can give of them—drifted around me, free and weightless in the night air like luminous sea-things in still, dark water. I made a thrust at the biggest and nearest of them.
I missed. Or did I? The target was, on a sudden, there no longer. Perhaps I had pierced it, and it had burst like a flimsy bladder. Thus I argued within my desperate inner mind, even as I faced about and made a stab at another. In the same instant it had gone, too—but the throng did not seem diminished. I made a sweeping slash with my point from side to side, and the things shrank back before it, as though they dared not pass the line I drew.
“Give ’em the works, Gib!” Jake was gritting out. “They can be hurt, all right!”
I laughed, like an impudent child. I felt inadequate and disappointed, as when in dreams a terrible adversary wilts before a blow I am ashamed of.
“Come on,” I challenged the undefinable enemy, in a feeble attempt at swagger. “Let me have a real poke at—”
“Hold hard,” said a new voice. Judge Pursuivant, apparently wakened by this commotion all around him, was struggling erect. “Here, Connatt, give me my sword.” He fairly wrung it from my hand, and drove back the misty horde with great fanwise sweeps. “Drop back, now. Not toward the lodge—up the driveway to the road.”
We made the retreat somehow, and were not followed. My clothing was drenched with sweat, as though I had swum in some filthy pool. Jake, whom I remember as helping me up the slope when I might have fallen, talked incessantly without finishing a single sentence. The nearest he came to rationality was, “What did … what if … can they—”
Pursuivant, however, seemed well recovered. He kicked together some bits of kindling at the roadside. Then he asked me for a match—perhaps to make me rally my sagging senses as I explored my pockets—and a moment later he had kindled a comforting fire.
“Now,” he said, “we’re probably safe from any more attention of that bunch. And our fire can’t be seen from the lodge. Sit down and talk it over.”
Jake was mopping a face as white as tallow. His spectacles mirrored the firelight in nervous shimmers.
“I guess I didn’t dream the other night, after all,” he jabbered. “Wait till I tell Mister Varduk about this.”
“Please tell him nothing,” counseled Judge Pursuivant at once.
“Eh?” I mumbled, astonished. “When the non-shapes—”
“Varduk probably knows all about these things—more than we shall ever know,” replied the judge. “I rather think he cut short his walk across the front yards so that they would attack me. At any rate, they seemed to ooze out of the timber the moment he and I separated.”
He told us, briefly, of how the non-shapes (he liked and adopted my paradox) were upon him before he knew. Like Jake two nights before, he felt an overwhelming disgust and faintness when they touched him, began to faint. His last voluntary act was to draw the blade in his cane and drive it into the ground, as an anchor against being dragged away.
“They would never touch that point,” he said confidently. “You found that out, Connatt.”
“And I’m still amazed, more about that fact than anything else. How would such things fear, even the finest steel?”
“It isn’t steel.” Squatting close to the fire, Pursuivant again cleared the bright, sharp bodkin. “Look at it, gentlemen—silver.”
It was two feet long, or more, round instead of flat, rather like a large needle. Though the metal was bright and worn with much polishing, the inscription over which Pursuivant and Varduk had pored was plainly decipherable by the firelight. Sic pereant omnes inimici tui, Domine. … I murmured it aloud, as though it were a protective charm.
“As you may know,” elaborated Judge Pursuivant, “silver is a specific against all evil creatures.”
“That’s so,” interjected Jake. “I heard my grandfather tell a yarn about the old country, how somebody killed a witch with a silver bullet.”
“And this is an extraordinary object, even among silver swords,” Pursuivant went on. “A priest gave it to me, with his blessing, when I did a certain thing to help him and his parish against an enemy not recognized by the common law of today. He assured me that the blade was fashioned by Saint Dunstan himself.”
“A saint make a silver weapon!” I ejaculated incredulously.
Pursuivant smiled, exactly as though we had not lately feared and fought for our lives and souls. His manner was that of a kindly teacher with a dull but willing pupil.
“Saint Dunstan is not as legendary or as feeble as his name sounds. As a matter of fact, he flourished heartily in the Tenth Century—not long before the very real Norman Conquest. He was the stout son of a Saxon noble, studied magic and metalworking, and was a political power in England as well as a spiritual one.”
“Didn’t he tweak Satan’s nose?” I inquired.
“So the old poem tells, and so the famous painting illustrates,” agreed Pursuivant, his smile growing broader. “Dunstan was, in short, exactly the kind of holy man who would make a sword to serve against demons. Do you blame me for being confident in his work?”
“Look here, Judge,” said Jake, “what were those things that jumped us up?”
“That takes answering.” Pursuivant had fished a handkerchief from a side pocket and was carefully wiping the silver skewer. “In the first place, they are extraterrestrial—supernatural—and in the second, they are noisomely evil. We need no more evidence on those points. As for the rest, I have a theory of a sort, based on wide studies.”
“What is it, sir?” I seconded Jake. Once again the solid assurance of the judge was comforting me tremendously.
He pursed his lips. “I’ve given the subject plenty of thought ever since you, Connatt, told me the experience of your friend here. There are several accounts and considerations of similar phenomena. Among ancient occultists was talk of elementary spirits—things supernormal and sometimes invisible, of subhuman intelligence and personality and not to be confused with spirits of the dead. A more modern word is ‘elemental,’ used by several cults. The things are supposed to exert influences of various kinds, upon various localities and people.
“Again, we have the poltergeist, a phenomenon that is coming in for lively investigation by various psychical scholars of today. I can refer you to the definitions of Carrington, Podmore and Lewis Spence—their books are in nearly every large library—but you’ll find that the definitions and possible explanations vary. The most familiar manifestation of this strange but undeniable power is in the seeming mischief that it performs in various houses—the knocking over of furniture, the smashing of mirrors, the setting of mysterious fires—”
“I know about that thing,” said Jake excitedly. “There was a house over in Brooklyn that had mysterious fires and stuff.”
“And I’ve read Charles Fort’s books—Wild Talents and the rest,” I supplemented. “He tells about such happenings. But see here, isn’t the thing generally traced to some child who was playing tricks?”
Pursuivant, still furbishing his silver blade, shook his head. “Mr. Hereward Carrington, the head of the American Psychical Institute, has made a list of more than three hundred notable cases. Only twenty or so were proven fraudulent, and another twenty doubtful. That leaves approximately seven-eighths unexplained—unless you consider supernormal agency an explanation. It is true that children are often in the vicinity of the phenomena, and some investigators explain this by saying that the poltergeist is attracted or set in motion by some spiritual current from the growing personality of the child.”
“Where’s the child around here?” demanded Jake. “He must be a mighty bad boy. Better someone should take a stick to him.”
“There is no child,” answered the judge. “The summoning power is neither immature nor unconscious, but old, wicked and deliberate. Have you ever heard of witches’ familiars?”
“I have,” I said. “Black cats and toads, with demon spirits.”
“Yes. Also grotesque or amorphous shapes—similar, perhaps, to what we encountered tonight—or disembodied voices and hands. Now we are getting down to our own case. The non-shapes—thanks again, Connatt, for the expression—are here as part of a great evil. Perhaps they came of themselves, spiritual vultures or jackals, waiting to share in the prey. Or they may be recognized servants of a vast and dreadful activity for wrong. In any case they are here, definite and dangerous.”
Again I felt my nerve deserting me. “Judge Pursuivant,” I pleaded, “we must get Miss Holgar out of here.”
“No. You and I talked that out this afternoon. The problem cannot be solved except at its climax.”
He rose to his feet. The fire was dying.
“I suggest that you go to your quarters. Apparently you’re safe indoors, and just now the moon’s out from behind the clouds. Keep your eyes open, and stay in the clear. The things won’t venture into the moonlight unless they feel sure of you. Anyway, I think they’re waiting for something else.”
“How about you?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll do splendidly.” He held up the sword of Saint Dunstan. “I’ll carry this naked in my hand as I go.”
We said good night all around, rather casually, like late sitters leaving their club. Pursuivant turned and walked along the road. Jake and I descended gingerly to the yard of the lodge, hurried across it, and gained our boathouse safely.