Great mischief (12 page)

Timothy listened with the old enthrallment. His experiences of the last two days acquired depth and texture from these tales and others like them which he had heard with faith and a shivering delight at Maum Rachel's knee. His years in the shop seemed short and brittle, the advances of scientific learning looked pretentious and naive against the ancient, instinctive wisdom that welled in this little pocket in the underbrush, shielded from a civilization that corrupts the instincts.

It would take her a while, Maum Rachel said when they reached her cabin, to fix things up. Mas Timity had better go for a little walk.

"I have to catch the evening train—" Timothy looked at his watch.

If he would come back by dusk-dark, Maum Rachel thought she would have everything ready.

Timothy walked over to the creek toward which the big house had faced. At the end of what had been an allee he stopped to admire the view, the placid dark blue water edged with cresslike plants. His stomach suddenly gave him a stab of reproach, and he took his lunch from his pocket. A white gleam in the growth at his feet caught his eye; he pulled away the vines and found a statue, broken into sections, from the old garden. In spite of the defacement of time he easily recognized the goddess Diana. She looked very chaste indeed after the visions he had been seeing—her limbs and narrow flanks youthful and untried. "You couldn't do me any good in the fix I'm in," he said explanatorily; "you're not in my mythology." And sitting down on her flat little huntress's belly, he ate his bread and cheese.

A magical calm descended on the water with the descending sun. Pearly colors glossed over the surface of the creek. A flock of coots flew in and circled low over his still head with a wooden creaking of wings. They struck the calm water in a wild urgence, slicing deep into the darkness underneath, and vanished, full of anxious nighttime talk, into the sedge. Timothy felt his heart bared in some physical sense to their anxiety, to all the impounded fear and loss that underlay the world.

Diana began to prove as hard of muscle as rumor reported, and he got up and went down to the creek-side and drank deeply. When he returned to Maum Rachel's cabin he found her ready for him. A mule and a farm wagon stood by the door; her husband had come home and would take Timothy to the train. Maum Rachel drew Timothy aside and slipped two balls, each sewed up in cloth, into his hand. He must hide them in the chimneys; she had made them extra strong to keep all evil spirits away from his rooftree.

Timothy gave her some money, which was not a payment but a pledge of their relationship, a distinction they both understood. "Gawd bless you, Mas' Timity; I gwine ter pray for you."

"Thank you, Maum Rachel—thank you," he said with a gratitude and affection untroubled by any sense of incongruity. Devoutly he grasped the familiar old hands and pressed them. Then he mounted to the wagon seat and drove down the dark road. The ambling motion of the loose-wheeled wagon made the cunjer balls in his pocket bump gently against his hip. He knew he should be ashamed of his descent to such moonshine, but his meeting with Maum Rachel had given him a peace he had not felt for two long days and nights. The country noises as they plodded through the gray evening still carried an inimical sound; the sudden wild shrilling of peepers from the ditch, and their equally sudden cessation, still seemed the voices of alarm in the earth, the evil under its wrinkled skin. But now, he thought, perhaps some of them would be on his side.

It was late when he got back to his house. He went straight to the kitchen, took a pepper-cruet from the shelf, and climbed to the third floor. He fortified both chimneys with the charms and a liberal sprinkling of red pepper, moving the washstand from his hearth to do a thorough job in his own room. He doubted if a mere washstand would have afforded him protection in any case. Nevertheless, he pushed it back against the opening just for luck.

When he had eaten some supper he returned to his room, locked the door, and sat down in his armchair. He considered going to bed, but his faith was not quite strong enough to allow him to risk being caught in his nightshirt— He started up with a wild notion that if he was in his nightshirt a lady might hesitate to come in, and he half-unbuttoned his coat; but immediately he realized the folly of hoping for any such reticence on her part, and sank back in his chair again. This time he kept on his stout walking shoes.

The country air had made him drowsy and he dozed in spite of himself. The sudden clank of metal on wood roused him. He sat up and grasped the arms of his chair; then he saw that the key on the inside of his bedroom door had fallen to the floor. As he stared rigid with denial, a little spurt of rosy dust came through the key-hole. Like smoke above a flame it spun, became a feather, a column, a cloud; but slowly, irrefutably it solidified before his eyes into the shape of the hag.

He looked at her dumfounded. "How—did you get in?" he stammered, though he had just watched her entrance. The hag took something from her mouth and, gliding to the fireplace, she put it on the end of the mantel.

With a deep shudder Timothy gave up his foolish hopes and did not move away at her approach. He was too defeated even to stand in the presence of a lady; he merely glared at her along the marble top of the wash-stand. The hag's bright lips parted in one of her scoffing smiles. "Did you really think you could keep me out by that mish-mash of Maum Rachel's?" She nodded toward the chimney.

"Mish-mash?" Timothy looked at her stupefied. "But I thought of course—I thought you believed in magic!"

"You are a feeler, my dear man, not a thinker. And all your reading did you little good if you don't know that the world you are touching is hieratical. My art is well above Maum Rachel's simple skill. My means of operation are too varied for her."

"Who are you?" Timothy asked, emboldened by hopelessness.

"Whoever you like." She shrugged, and the shadow deepened in the little hollow of her throat. "I use all sorts of names—you can take your choice. I can also assume a great many shapes, though not as many as the higher orders of witches. Among other things I can hold a cat bone in my mouth"—she touched the object she had laid on the mantel—" and go through a very small crevice, a keyhole, for instance."

Timothy looked at the keyhole and back at his visitor. "Who are you?" he said again. "You must be somebody—you must have a real name."

"My 'real' name? Nonsense! If I had a real name, I wouldn't tell it. Call me anything you like. Let's see— you may call me Sinkinda. That's a witch name that will suit your romantic fancy, I imagine." And her dark-ringed eyes sparkled with malice.

"These orders of Evil, I find them very confusing," said Timothy, aggrieved. "It's disquieting not to know where you stand. In pharmacy you have a formula, you can weigh your ingredients to the smallest grain, but in matters of superstition—"

"Superstition? Evil is a religion where I come from. You are taken in by yokel's words."

Timothy could not help showing that he was scandalized. "Evil certainly isn't a real religion; I know better. Why, it has no churches, no saints, and no hymnbooks. I am a religious man—or was," he added ruefully.

"So you imagine. But do you really think you can separate superstition from religion? What you need is a good stiff course in comparative theology instead of those dreary sermon books you read. Or did," she mocked him. "The truth is you aren't real either; everything about you is a little pseudo—you're a character out of the Gothic revival."

This gibe galled Timothy immoderately. "Me—Gothic? How ridiculous! I'm a middling honest pharmacist, a Christian gentleman, and fond of reading. That's all."

"You're a dabbler in medievalism, a part-time monk, and stuffed with religiosity. There's no real construction behind that perpendicular facade."

Timothy scarcely knew how to defend himself against these charges. Could he properly use a Christian's weapons in his state of disgrace? He fell back on an old prop in times of doubt. "If Sister were here she'd be a match for your sophistries. Her faith was sturdier than mine; I'd like to hear you tell her that magic isn't evil and the Christian faith not the only good."

Sinkinda seated herself on the arm of a rocking chair, riding it like a sidesaddle. Her skirt of hunter's green fell in appropriate loops, and indeed it was cut like a riding habit, he saw, though the stuff was supple and airy. "Good . . . Evil . . . what do you know about them? Humans are stupid not to believe in the old gods—or devils, if you prefer. There is Evil in the world, I assure you, not dreamed of in Sister's second-rate decalogue, though she knew more than she let on. You have to have wit, and especially the right kind of faith, to understand it. Of course there are plenty of people who do. More of your friends believe in magic than you suspect."

Timothy was forced to assent to this; yet a sense of decency drove him to defend Penelope.

"Whatever you may say of me, leave my sister out, if you please. She had her faults, no doubt, but she is dead now. Besides, we can't deny that she loved people and sacrificed herself for them—look how she took care of Mr. Dombie—and that should be accounted to her for righteousness."

Sinkinda laughed again, and her laughter was musical but unpleasant. It frightened Timothy a good deal. "Keep a lady's name out of lewd conversation, eh? You and your fatuous chivalry! But tell me, my troubadour, what about Mr. Dombie—that poor man who should have been left to die? She brought him back from the grave, of course, she fought death for possession of him in a hand-to-hand encounter—and why? Because she needed a creature—her claque, her creation, if you like, a being she could command. You are too naive to live."

These blasphemies shocked Timothy into silence. He stared at the hag, whose skin seemed to grow redder with excitement. She went on, "Why else would a woman want to bring back a man whose body was useless? Because such people make good victims; they have gone over to death, they have lost the will to live, and pride like your sister's can easily enter in and possess them. She called it devotion, of course, and it was love in a way—by stretching a point you might even call it passion—"

"Do you mean to imply—" began Timothy, as scarlet as the hag.

"Of course not! She remained technically chaste and he was—well, scarcely reanimated to that point, shall we say, to preserve your pseudo-Gothic front. Nothing so carnal as a love affair. But she used you both, nevertheless; she was the mother and the mistress—now don't keep on denying it"—she held up her hand with authority as Timothy started to speak; "innocence is really very tiresome. Besides, you aren't being loyal to her; you are just defending your own bad judgment, your blindness, during all those years you lived under the same roof."

Timothy tried not to remember a sound that reverberated from some deep place to which he had consigned it. It was the secret thud of Penelope's footsteps as she would sometimes prowl about the house at night. He would wake to the shuffling of bedroom slippers, he would hear a faint tap-tap-tap on a door . . . "Did you call, Mr. Dombie?" she would say. "Do you want anything?" "Have you enough blankets . . ." Then she would fall back into the long silence; and after a while he would, if he stayed awake, hear her going tiptoe upstairs again.

He did indeed feel compelled to defend his judgment, less against Sinkinda than against the suspicions that unstrung him. "But Mr. Dombie did need the care she gave him; she had to prepare all his food herself— he had arteriosclerosis, you know, and couldn't touch salt."

"Arteriosclerosis, my foot! Rigor mortis, that's what ailed him. Of course she cooked his food herself; if they eat salt, those renovated ruins, they know they're dead. They break their bondage and go back to the freedom and peace of the churchyard." She gave an affected little titter.

Stung beyond enduring, Timothy jumped up. He scarcely knew what he intended to do, it was only that the recklessness of anger and pity and wounded pride lifted him in spite of himself. But at his start Sinkinda sprang onto the rocker, balancing with her extraordinary air of being at ease in any element.

"Oho! Impatient to be out and riding, dear troubadour? Well, so am I"—and she made a sort of graceful dive toward him, touching the lamp as she passed so that it went out. Timothy dodged involuntarily; he felt foolish and furious—but what can you do but run—what use is valor with such a female? He ran. Once again his door opened into blind streets, anonymous as when he had walked them in the fog; but he was thankful enough that they were empty; he would have hated to be seen bolting, for bolting with him was the incredible being who had gained this dominance over his soul and whose ruthless doting he was unlikely ever to escape.

When Timothy woke next day it was noon. He was drunk with fatigue, but at least he wasn't dead, he thought—one good thing about hags, they didn't kill you, or not for a while. Groaning, he stretched his stiff limbs. The shadow of his horror still hung heavy about him and dissipated only by degrees as the motions of dressing, eating, and reading the paper restored him to his own shape. Fragments of his conversation with Sinkinda kept swimming into his mind in broken sequences; her accusations against Penelope gave him a queer stab of mingled horror and raw satisfaction. To be free from the bondage of that overshadowing goodness! But the issue was involved and sensational; he decided to forget it and did. Besides, Sinkinda, he thought (with a certain pleasure) was all woman; no doubt female rivalry entered into this fantastic interpretation of Penelope's character. The sharp hostility in her eyes when she talked about Penelope . . . the enormous black pupils . . . What was frightening about these eyes, they never returned your look, no recognition of another presence filled their emptiness. Come to think of it, they gleamed only with external light, when the quick turn of her head, the arching of her neck, brought her face to face with the fire or the lamp. Timothy gave a long startled sigh.

Toward dusk he sat on his front steps and watched the moon rise over the housetops while he assembled his arguments in case she should return that evening. He knew that, set against hers, his will would buckle like a stick of marsh sedge; still he wanted to state the case for Christian morality, for one didn't get over Christianity all at once, and he had by no means given up his inherited dogmas, definitive and comforting as they were.