Short Fiction · Fearful Rock (9/12)

IX

Debate and Decision

Jager’s Negro servant was quite as good a cook as promised. Lanark, eating chicken stew and biscuits, reflected that only twice before had he been so ravenous⁠—upon receiving the news of Lee’s surrender at Appomatox, and after the funeral of his mother. When he had finished, he drew forth a cheroot. His hand shook as he lighted it. Jager gave him one of the old looks of respectful disapproval, but did not comment. Instead he led Lanark to the most comfortable chair in the parlor and seated himself upon the keg. Then he said: “Tell me.”

Lanark told him, rather less coherently than here set down, the adventures of the evening. Again and again he groped in his mind for explanations, but not once found any to offer.

“It is fit for the devil,” pronounced Jager when his old commander had finished. “Did I not say that you should have stayed away from that woman? You’re well out of the business.”

“I’m well into it, you mean,” Lanark fairly snapped back. “What can you think of me, Jager, when you suggest that I might let things stand as they are?”

The frontier preacher massaged his shaggy jowl with thoughtful knuckles. “You have been a man of war and an officer of death,” he said heavily. “God taught your hands to fight. Yet your enemies are not those who perish by the sword.” He held out his hand. “You say you still have the book I lent you?”

From his torn pocket Lanark drew Hohman’s Long Lost Friend. Jager took it and stared at the cover. “The marks of fingers,” he muttered, in something like awe. He examined the smudges closely, putting on his spectacles to do so, then lifted the book to his nose. His nostrils wrinkled, as if in distaste, and he passed the thing back. “Smell it,” he directed.

Lanark did so. About the slimy-looking prints on the cover hung a sickening odor of decayed flesh.

“The demon that attacked you, that touched this book, died long ago,” went on Jager. “You know as much⁠—you killed him with your own hand. Yet he fights you this very night.”

“Maybe you have a suggestion,” Lanark flung out, impatient at the assured and almost snobbish air of mystery that colored the manner of his old comrade in arms. “If this is a piece of hell broke loose, perhaps you did the breaking. Remember that image⁠—that idol-thing with horns⁠—that you smashed in the cellar? You probably freed all the evil upon the world when you did that.”

Jager frowned, but pursued his lecture. “This very book, this Long Lost Friend, saved you from the demon’s clutch,” he said. “It is a notable talisman and shield. But with the shield one must have a sword, with which to attack in turn.”

“All right,” challenged Lanark. “Where is your sword?”

“It is a product of a mighty pen,” Jager informed him sententiously. He turned in his seat and drew from a box against the wall a book. Like the Long Lost Friend, it was bound in paper, but of a cream color. Its title stood forth in bold black letters:

The Secrets
Of
Albertus Magnus

“A translation from the German and the Latin,” explained Jager. “Printed, I think, in New York. This book is full of wisdom, although I wonder if it is evil, unlawful wisdom.”

“I don’t care if it is.” Lanark almost snatched the book. “Any weapon must be used. And I doubt if Albertus Magnus was evil. Wasn’t he a churchman, and didn’t he teach Saint Thomas Aquinas?” He leafed through the beginning of the book. “Here’s a charm, Jager, to be spoken in the name of God. That doesn’t sound unholy.”

“Satan can recite scripture to his own ends,” misquoted Jager. “I don’t remember who said that, but⁠—”

“Shakespeare said it, or something very like it,” Lanark informed him. “Look here, Jager, farther on. Here’s a spell against witchcraft and evil spirits.”

“I have counted at least thirty such in that book,” responded the other. “Are you coming to believe in them, sir?”

Lanark looked up from the page. His face was earnest and, in a way, humble.

“I’m constrained to believe in many unbelievable things. If my experience tonight truly befell me, then I must believe in charms of safety. Supernatural evil like that must have its contrary supernatural good.”

Jager pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and smiled in his beard. “I have heard it told,” he said, “that charms and spells work only when one believes in them.”

“You sound confident of that, at least,” Lanark smiled back. “Maybe you will help me, after all.”

“Maybe I will.”

The two gazed into each other’s eyes, and then their hands came out, at the same moment. Lanark’s lean fingers crushed Jager’s coarser ones.

“Let’s be gone,” urged Lanark at once, but the preacher shook his head emphatically.

“Slowly, slowly,” he temporized. “Cool your spirit, and take council. He that ruleth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city.” Once more he put out his hand for the cream-colored volume of Albertus Magnus, and began to search through it.

“Do you think to comfort me from that book?” asked Lanark.

“It has more than comfort,” Jager assured him. “It has guidance.” He found what he was looking for, pulled down his spectacles again, and read aloud:

“ ‘Two wicked eyes have overshadowed me, but three other eyes are overshadowing me⁠—the one of God the Father, the second of God the Son, the third of God the Holy Spirit; they watch my body and soul, my blood and bone; I shall be protected in the name of God.’ ”

His voice was that of a prayerful man reading Scripture, and Lanark felt moved despite himself. Jager closed the book gently and kept it in his hand.

“Albertus Magnus has many such charms and assurances,” he volunteered. “In this small book, less than two hundred pages, I find a score and more of ways for punishing and thwarting evil spirits, or those who summon evil spirits.” He shook his head, as if in sudden wrath, and turned up his spectacled eyes. “O Lord!” he muttered. “How long must devils plague us for our sins?”

Growing calmer once more, he read again from the book of Albertus Magnus. There was a recipe for invisibility, which involved the making of a thumbstall from the ear of a black cat boiled in the milk of a black cow; an invocation to “Bedgoblin and all ye evil spirits”; several strange rituals, similar to those Lanark remembered from the Long Lost Friend, to render one immune to wounds received in battle; and a rime to speak while cutting and preparing a forked stick of hazel to use in hunting for water or treasure. As a boy, Lanark had once seen water “witched,” and now he wondered if the rod-bearer had gained his knowledge from Albertus Magnus.

“ ‘Take an earthen pot, not glazed,’ ” Jager was reading on, “ ‘and yarn spun by a girl not seven years old’⁠—”

He broke off abruptly, with a little inarticulate gasp. The book slammed shut between his hands. His eyes were bright and hot, and his face pale to the roots of his beard. When he spoke, it was in a hoarse whisper:

“That was a spell to control witches, in the name of Lucifer, king of hell. Didn’t I say that this book was evil?”

“You must forget that,” Lanark counseled him soberly. “I will admit that the book might cause sorrow and wickedness, if it were in wicked hands; but I do not think that you are anything but a good man.”

“Thank you,” said Jager simply. He rose and went to his table, then returned with an iron inkpot and a stump of a pen. “Let me have your right hand.”

Lanark held out his palm, as though to a fortune-teller. Upon the skin Jager traced slowly, in heavy capital letters, a square of five words:

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

Under this, very boldly, three crosses:

X X X

“A charm,” the preacher told Lanark as he labored with the pen. “These mystic words and the crosses will defend you in your slumber, from all wicked spirits. So says Albertus Magnus, and Hohman as well.”

“What do they mean?”

“I do not know that.” Jager blew hotly upon Lanark’s palm to dry the ink. “Will you now write the same thing for me, in my right hand?”

“If you wish.” Lanark, in turn, dipped in the inkpot and began to copy the diagram. “ ‘Opera’ is a word I know,” he observed, “and ‘tenet’ is another. ‘Sator’ may be some form of the old pagan word, ‘satyr’⁠—a kind of horned human monster⁠—”

He finished the work in silence. Then he lighted another cigar. His hand was as steady as a gun-rest this time, and the match did not even flicker in his fingertips. He felt somehow stronger, better, more confident.

“You’ll give me a place to sleep for the night?” he suggested.

“Yes. I have only pallets, but you and I have slept on harder couches before this.”

Within half an hour both men were sound asleep.

X

Enid Mandifer Again

The silence was not so deadly the following noon as Lanark and Jager dismounted at the hitching-rack in front of Enid Mandifer’s; perhaps this was because there were two horses to stamp and snort, two bridles to jingle, two saddles to creak, two pairs of boots to spurn the pathway toward the door.

Enid Mandifer, with a home-sewn sunbonnet of calico upon her head, came around the side of the house just as the two men were about to step upon the porch. She called out to them, anxiously polite, and stood with one hand clutched upon her wide skirt of brown alpaca.

“Mr. Lanark,” she ventured, “I hoped that you would come again. I have something to show you.”

It was Jager who spoke in reply: “Miss Mandifer, perhaps you may remember me. I’m Parson Jager, I live south of here. Look.” He held out something⁠—the Long Lost Friend book. “Did you ever see anything of this sort?”

She took it without hesitation, gazing interestedly at the cover. Lanark saw her soft pink lips move, silently framing the odd words of the title. Then she opened it and studied the first page. After a moment she turned several leaves, and a little frown of perplexity touched her bonnet-shaded brow. “These are receipts⁠—recipes⁠—of some kind,” she said slowly. “Why do you show them to me, Mr. Jager?”

The ex-sergeant had been watching her closely, his hands upon his heavy hips, his beard thrust forward and his head tilted back. He put forth his hand and received back the Long Lost Friend.

“Excuse me, Miss Mandifer, if I have suspected you unjustly,” he said, handsomely if cryptically. Then he glanced sidewise at Lanark, as though to refresh a memory that needed no refreshing⁠—a memory of a living-dead horror that had recoiled at very touch of the little volume.

Enid Mandifer was speaking once more: “Mr. Lanark, I had a dreadful night after you left. Dreams⁠ ⁠… or maybe not dreams. I felt things come and stand by my bed. This morning, on a bit of paper that lay on the floor⁠—”

From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap. Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.

“Writing,” growled Jager. “In what language is that?”

“It’s English,” pronounced Lanark, “but set down backward⁠—from right to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote.”

The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had already seen as much.

“Have you a mirror?” Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution. He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from him. “Now it shows through,” he announced. “Will one of you try to read? I haven’t my glasses with me.”

Lanark squinted and made shift to read:

“ ‘Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?’ ”

“That is my stepfather’s handwriting,” whispered Enid, her head close to Lanark’s shoulder.

He read on: “ ‘The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish love.’ ”

He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in the old army days, before a battle.

“I think we’re being warned,” Lanark said to his old sergeant. “It’s a challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me.”

“I can’t believe,” said Enid, “that fear will vanquish love.” She blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. “That is probably beside the point,” she resumed. “What I began to say was that the sight of my stepfather’s writing⁠—why is it reversed like that?⁠—the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind.”

“What things?” Jager demanded eagerly. “Come into the house, Miss Mandifer, and tell us.”

“Oh, not into the house,” she demurred at once. “It’s dark in there⁠—damp and cold. Let’s go out here, to the seat under the tree.”

She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the day before.

“Now,” Jager prompted her, and she began:

“I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if teaching Larue, ‘Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead, fear can command.’ ”

“A devil’s doctrine!” grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.

“He said more,” went on Enid. “He spoke of ‘Those Below,’ and of how they ‘rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who rule by weak love.’ ”

“Blasphemy,” commented Jager, in his beard.

“Those statements fit what I remember of his talk,” Lanark put in. “He spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come from flouting Those Below.”

“I remember,” nodded Jager. “Go on, young woman.”

“Then there was the box.”

“The box?” repeated both men quickly.

“Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone⁠—or something. This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed when Larue could not open it.”

Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such a box.

“My stepfather then took it back,” Enid related, “and said that it held his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed.”

“I remember where that box is,” Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. “In the old oven, at⁠—”

“We could not open it, either,” interrupted the preacher.

“He spoke of that, too,” Enid told them. “It would never open, he told Larue, save in the ‘place of the Nameless One’⁠—that must be where the house burned⁠—and at midnight under a full moon.”

“A full moon!” exclaimed Lanark.

“There is a full moon tonight,” said Jager.