The Devil Rides Out

‘You mean the Sabbat eh? And you’ll give me the name of the place where it’s being held?’

‘Oh no.’ The sunlight gleamed golden on her hair as she shook her head. ‘But I’ll let you take me to it, if you agree to let me go free once we are there.’

‘Nothing doing,’ he said bluntly.

‘I see,’ she smiled, ‘you are afraid of Mocata after all. Well, that doesn’t surprise me because he has ample means of protecting himself against anything you could attempt against him. That is why, of course, I feel that, providing the place is not given away beforehand, he would prefer me to let you know it than detain me here—I’m quite honest you see, but evidently you are not so confident of yourself or interested in your friend as I thought.’

Rex was thinking quickly. Nothing but an actual order from the Duke, based on his assurance that Mocata might punish Tanith in some terrible manner if she failed to appear, would have induced him to let her go to the Sabbat, but on the other hand this was a real chance to reach Simon, in fact, the only one that offered. ‘Do you require that I should actually hand you over to Mocata when we get there?’ he asked at length.

‘No. If you take me to the place that will be sufficient, but there must be no question of gagging me or tying me up.’

In an agony of indecision he pondered the problem again. Dare he risk taking Tanith within the actual sphere of Mocata’s influence? Yet he would have the Duke with him, so surely between them they would be able to restrain her from taking any part in the ceremony, and it was impossible to throw away such a chance of saving Simon.

‘I’m not giving any promise to let you join the party,’ Rex said firmly.

‘Well, I intend to do so.’

‘That remains to be seen—but I’ll accept your offer on those conditions.’

She nodded, confident now that once they reached their destination Mocata would exercise his powers to relieve her of restraint.

‘The place must be about seventy miles from here,’ she told him, ‘and I should like to be there by sundown, so we ought to leave here by six.’

‘Wouldn’t it be possible to start later?’ A worried frown clouded Rex’s face. ‘The truth is, that message Max gave us before lunch was phoney—just a part of my plan for keeping you here. I never did count on De Richleau arriving much before the time you say we ought to start—and I’d just hate to leave without him.’

Tanith smiled to herself. This was an unexpected piece of luck. She had only met the Duke for a moment the night before, but his lean, cultured face and shrewd, grey eyes had impressed her. She felt that he would prove a far more difficult opponent than this nice, bronzed young giant, and if she could get away without having to face him after all, it would be a real relief, so she made a wry face and proceeded to elaborate her story.

‘I’m sorry, but there are certain preparations which have to be made before the gathering. They begin at sunset, so I must be at—well, the place to which we are going by a quarter past eight. If I arrive later I shall not be eligible to participate—so I will not go at all.’

‘In that case I guess I’m in your hands. Anyhow, now we’ve settled things, let’s get back to the house.’ Rex untied the canoe and, setting the motor in motion, steered back to the landing stage.

His first thought was to inform De Richleau of the bargain that he had made, but after pleading once more with the officials at the British Museum to have the Duke sought for, he learned that he was no longer there, and when he got through to the Curzon Street flat the servants could tell him nothing of De Richleau’s whereabouts, so it was impossible to expedite his arrival.

For a time Rex strolled up and down the lawn with Tanith, then round the lovely garden, while he talked again of the places that they had both visited abroad and tried to recapture something of the gaiety which had marked their drive down from London in the morning.

Max brought them tea out on to the terrace, and afterwards they played the electric gramophone, but even that failed to relieve Rex of a steadily deepening anxiety that the Duke might not arrive in time.

The shadows of the lilacs and laburnums began to lengthen on the grass. Tanith went upstairs to tidy herself, and when she came down asked if he could find her a road map. He produced a set and for a time she studied two of them in silence, then she refolded them and said quietly : ‘I know so little of the English country but I am certain now that I can find it. We must be leaving soon.’

It was already six o’clock, and he had put off shaking a cocktail until the last moment in order to delay their departure as long as possible. Now, he rang for ice as he said casually: ‘Don’t fuss, I’ll get you there by a quarter after eight.’

‘I’ll give you five minutes—no more.’

‘Well, listen now. Say De Richleau fails to make it. Won’t you give me a break? Let me know the name of the place so as I can leave word for him to follow?’

She considered for a moment. ‘I will give you the name of a village five miles from it where he can meet you on one condition.’

‘Let’s hear it’

‘That neither of you seek to restrain me in any way once we reach our destination.’

‘No, I’ll not agree to that.’

‘Then I certainly will not give you any information which will enable your friend to appear on the scene and help you.’

‘I’ll get him there some way—don’t you worry.’

‘That leaves me a free hand to prevent you if I can—doesn’t it?’

As he swallowed his cocktail she glanced at the clock. ‘It’s ten past now, so unless you prefer not to go we must start at once.’

Consoling himself with the thought that De Richleau could have got no more out of her even if he had questioned her himself, Rex led her out and settled her in the Rolls then, before starting up the engine, he listened intently for a moment, hoping that even yet he might catch the low, steady purr of the big Hispano which would herald the Duke’s eleventh hour arrival, but the evening silence brooded unbroken over the trees and lane. Reluctantly he set the car in motion and as they ran down the gravel sweep, Tanith said quietly, ‘Please drive to Newbury.’

‘But that’s no more than twenty miles from here!’

‘Oh, I will give you further directions when we reach it,’ she smiled, and for a little time they drove in silence through the quiet byways until they entered the main Bath Road at Theale.

At Newbury, she gave fresh instructions. ‘To Hungerford now,’ and the fast, low, touring Rolls sped out of the town eating up another ten miles of the highway to the west.

‘Where next?’ he asked, scanning the houses of the market town, for its most prosperous-looking Inn and mentally registering The Bear. It was just seven o’clock—another few miles and they would be about halfway to the secret rendezvous. He did not dare to stop in the town in case she gave him the slip and hired another car or went on by train, but when they were well out in the country again he meant to telephone the Duke, who must have arrived at Pangbourne by this time, and urge him to follow as far as Hungerford at once—then sit tight at The Bear until he received further information.

Tanith was studying the map. ‘There are two ways from here,’ she said, ‘but think it would be best to keep to the main road as far as Marlborough.’

A few miles out of Hungerford the country became less populous with only a solitary farmhouse here and there, peaceful and placid in the evening light. Then these, too, were left behind and they entered a long stretch of darkening woodlands, the northern fringe of Savernake Forest.

Both were silent, thinking of the night to come which was now so close upon them and the struggle of wills that must soon take place. Rex brought the car down to a gentle cruising speed and watched the road-sides intently. At a deserted hairpin bend, where a byway doubled back to the south-east, he found just what he wanted, a telephone call-box.

Turning the car off the main road he pulled up, and noted with quick appreciation that they had entered one of the most beautiful avenues he had ever seen. As far as the eye could see it cut clean through the forest, the great branches meeting overhead in the sombre gloom of the falling night, it looked like the nave of some titanic cathedral deserted by mankind; but he had no leisure to admire it to the full, and stepping out, called to Tanith over his shoulder: ‘Won’t be a minute—just want to put through a call.’

She smiled, but the queer look that he had seen earlier in the day came into her eyes again. ‘So you mean to trick me and let De Richleau know the direction we have taken?’

‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ he protested. ‘In order to get in touch with Simon I bargained to take you to this place you’re so keen to get to, but I reserve the right to stop you taking any part yourself, and I need the Duke to help me.’

‘And I agreed, because it was the only way in which I could get away from Pangbourne, but I reserved the right to do all in my power to attend the meeting. However,’ she shrugged lightly, ‘do as you will.’

‘Thanks.’ Rex entered the box, spoke to the operator, and having inserted the necessary coins, secured his number. Next minute he was speaking to De Richleau. ‘Hello ! Rex here. I’ve got the girl and she’s agreed…. Oh, Hell!’

He dropped the receiver and leapt out of the box. While his back was turned Tanith had moved into the driver’s seat. The engine purred, the Rolls slid forward. He clutched frantically at the rear mudguard but his fingers slipped and he fell sprawling in the road. When he scrambled to his feet the long blue car was almost hidden by a trail of dust as it roared down the avenue, and while he was still cursing his stupidity, it disappeared into the shadows of the forest.

CHAPTER XIV

THE DUKE DE RICHLEAU TAKES THE FIELD

At 7.20. Rex was through again to the Duke, gabbling out the idiotic way in which he had allowed Tanith to fool him and leave him stranded in Savernake Forest.

At 7.22. De Richleau had heard all he had to tell and was ordering him to return to Hungerford as best he could, there to await instructions at The Bear.

At 7.25. Tanith was out of the Forest and on a good road again, some five miles south-east of Marlborough, slowing down to consult her map.

At 7.26. The Duke was through to Scotland Yard.

At 7.28. Rex was loping along at a steady trot through the gathering darkness, praying that a car would appear from which he could ask a lift.

At 7.30. De Richleau was speaking to the Assistant Commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, a personal friend of his. ‘It’s not the car that matters,’ he said, ‘but the documents which are in it. Their immediate recovery is of vital importance to me and I should consider it a great personal favour if any reports which come in may be sent at once to the Police Station at Newbury.’

At 7.32. Tanith was speeding south towards Tidworth, having decided that to go round Salisbury Plain via Amesbury would save her time on account of the better roads.

At 7.38. Scotland Yard was issuing the following communique by wireless : ‘All stations. Stolen. A blue touring Rolls, 1934 model. Number OA 1217. Owner, Duke de Richleau. Last seen in Savernake Forest going south-east at 19 hours 15, but reported making for Marlborough. Driven by woman. Age twenty-three —attractive appearance—tall, slim, fair hair, pale face, large hazel eyes, wearing light green summer costume and small hat. Particulars required by Special Department. Urgent. Reports to Newbury.’

At 7.42. De Richleau received a telephone call at Pangbourne. ‘Speakin’ fer Mister Clutterbuck,’ said the voice, ‘bin tryin’ ter get yer this lars’ ‘arf hour, sir. The green Daimler passed through Camberley goin’ south just arter seven o’clock.’

At 7.44. Tanith was running past the military camp at Tidworth still going south.

At 7.45. Rex was buying a second-hand bicycle for cash at three times its value from a belated farm-labourer.

At 7.48. The Duke received another call. ‘I have a special from Mr. Clutterbuck,’ said a new voice. ‘The Yellow Sports Sunbeam passed Devizes going south at 7.42.’

At 7.49. Tanith reached the Andover-Amesbury road and turned west along it.

At 7.54. De Richleau climbed into his Hispano. ‘My night glasses—thank you,’ he said as he took a heavy pair of binoculars from Max. ‘Any messages which come in for me up to 8.25 are to be relayed to the police at Newbury, after that to Mr. Van Ryn at The Bear Inn, Hungerford, up till 8.40, and from then on to the police at Newbury again.’

At 7.55. Tanith was approaching a small cross-roads on the outskirts of Amesbury. A Police-Sergeant who had left the station ten minutes earlier spotted the number of her car, and stepping out into the road called to her to halt. She swerved violently, missing him by inches, but managed to swing the car into the by-road leading north.

At 7.56. Rex was pedalling furiously along the road to Hungerford with all the strength of his muscular legs.

At 7.58. Tanith, livid with rage that Rex should have put the police on to her as though she were a common car thief, had spotted another policeman near the bridge in Bulford village. Not daring to risk his holding her up in the narrow street, she switched up another side-road leading north east.

At 7.59. The Amesbury Police-Sergeant dropped off a lorry beside the constable on duty at the main cross-roads of the town and warned him to watch out for a Blue Rolls, number OA1217, recklessly driven by a young woman who was wanted by the Yard.

At 8.1. Tanith had slowed down and was wondering desperately if she dared risk another attempt to pass through Amesbury. Deciding against it she ran on, winding in and out through the narrow lanes, to the north-eastward.

At 8.2. Rex had abandoned his bicycle outside the old Alms-houses at Froxfield and was begging a lift from the owner of a rickety Ford who was starting into Hungerford.

At 8.3. The Amesbury Police-Sergeant was reporting to Newbury the appearance of the ‘wanted’ Rolls.

At 8.4. Tanith pulled up, hopelessly lost in a tangle of twisting lanes.

At 8.6. De Richleau swung the Hispano on to the main Bath Road. His cigar tip glowed red in the twilight as he sank his chin into the collar of his coat and settled down to draw every ounce out of the great powerful car.

At 8.8. Tanith had discovered her whereabouts on the map and found that she had been heading back towards the Andover Road.

At 8.9. The Amesbury Police-Sergeant was warning the authorities at Andover to keep a look-out for the stolen car in case it headed back in that direction.

At 8.10. Tanith had turned up a rough track leading north through some woods in the hope that it would enable her to get past the Military Camp at Tidworth without going through it.

At 8.12 Rex was hurrying into The Bear Inn at Hungerford.

At 8.14. Tanith was stuck again, the track having come to an abrupt end at a group of farm buildings.

At 8.17. The Duke was hurtling along the straight, about five miles east of Newbury.

At 8.19. Tanith was back at the entrance of the track and turning into a lane that led due east.

At 8.20. The Amesbury Police-Sergeant left the station again. He had completed his work of warning Salisbury, Devizes, Warminster and Winchester to watch for the stolen Rolls.

At 8.21. Tanith came out on the main Salisbury-Marlborough road and, realising that there was nothing for it but to chance being held up at Tidworth, turned north.

At 8.22. Rex had sunk his second tankard of good Berkshire ale and took up his position in the doorway of The Bear to watch for the Duke.

At 8.23. Tanith, possessed now, it seemed, by some inhuman glee, chortled with laughter as a Military Policeman leapt from the road to let her flash past the entrance of Tidworth Camp.

At 8.24. De Richleau entered Newbury Police Station and learned that the Blue Rolls had been sighted in Amesbury half an hour earlier.

At 8.25. Tanith had pulled up, a mile north of Tidworth, and was studying her map again. She decided that her only hope of reaching the secret rendezvous now lay in taking the by-roads across the northern end of Salisbury Plain.

At 8.26. The Duke was reading two messages which had been handed to him by the Newbury Police. One said : Green Daimler passed through Basingstoke going west at 7.25. Max per Clutterbuck, and the other, Green Daimler passed through Andover going west at 8.0. Max per Clutterbuck. He nodded, quickly summing up the position to himself. ‘Green is heading west through Amesbury by now, and Blue was seen making in the same direction, while Yellow took the other route and is coming south from Devizes—most satisfactory so far.’ He then turned to the Station Sergeant: ‘I should be most grateful if you would have any further messages which may come for me relayed to Amesbury. Thank you—Good night.’

At 8.27. Tanith had reached a cross-road two miles north of Tidworth and turning west took a dreary windswept road which crosses one of the most desolate parts of the Plain. Dusk had come and with it an overwhelming feeling that whatever happened she must be present at the meeting. The fact that she was about seventeen miles farther from her destination than she had been at Amesbury did not depress her, for she had misled Rex as to the vital necessity of her being there by sunset, and the actual Sabbat did not begin until midnight.

At 8.32. Rex was taking a message over the telephone of The Bear at Hungerford.

At 8.35. Tanith was passing the Aerodrome at Upavon, and forced to slow down owing to the curving nature of the road ahead.

At 8.37. De Richleau’s Hispano roared into Hungerford, and Rex, who had resumed his position in the doorway of The Bear ran out to meet it. ‘Any messages?’ the Duke asked as he scrambled in.

‘Yep—Max called me. A bird named Clutterbuck says a Yellow Sunbeam passed through Westbury heading south at five minutes past eight.’

‘Good,’ nodded the Duke, who already had the car in motion again.

At 8.38. Tanith was free of the twisting patch of road by Upavon and out on the straight across the naked Plain once more. If only she could keep clear of the police, she felt that she would be able to reach the meeting-place in another forty-five minutes. A wild, unnatural exaltation drove her on as the Blue Rolls ate up the miles towards the west.

At 8.39. Rex was asking : ‘What is all this about a Yellow Sunbeam anyway? It was a Blue Rolls I got stung for.’ And the Duke replied, with his grey eyes twinkling : ‘Don’t worry about the Rolls. The police saw your young friend with it in Amesbury a little after eight. They will catch her for us you may be certain.’

At 8.40. The police at Newbury were relaying a message from Max for the Duke to their colleagues at Amesbury.

At 8.41. De Richleau was saying : ‘Don’t be a fool, Rex. I only said that I could not call in the police unless these people committed some definite breach of the law. Car stealing is a crime, so I have been able to utilise them in this one instance— that’s all.’

At 8.44. Two traffic policemen on a motor-cycle combination, which had set out from Devizes a quarter of an hour before, spotted the back number-plate of Blue Rolls number OA 1217 as it switched to the left fork road where they were stationed, but Tanith had caught sight of them, and her headlights streaked away, cutting a lane through the darkness to the south-westward.

At 8.45. The Hispano was rocking from side to side as it flew round the bends of the twisting road south-west of Hungerford. The Duke had heard Rex’s account of the way Tanith had tricked him but refused to enlighten him about the Yellow Sunbeam.

‘No, no,’ he said impatiently. ‘I want to hear every single thing you learned from this girl—I’ll tell you my end later.’

At 8.46. The traffic policemen had their machine going all out and were in full cry after the recklessly driven Rolls.

At 8.47. The Police at Newbury were relaying a second message from Max for the Duke to their colleagues at Amesbury.

At 8.48. Tanith saw the lights of Easterton village looming up in the distance across the treeless grassland as she hurtled south-westward in the Rolls.

At 8.49. The traffic policeman in the side-car said : ‘Steady, Bill—we’ll get her in a minute.’

At 8.50. The Hispano had passed the cross-roads nine miles south-west of Hungerford and come out on to the straight. De Richleau had now heard everything of importance which Rex had to tell and replied abruptly to his renewed questioning : ‘For God’s sake don’t pester me now. It’s no easy matter to keep this thing on the road when we’re doing eighty most of the time.’

At 8.51. Tanith clutched desperately at the wheel of the Rolls as with screaming tyres it shot round the corner of the village street. The police siren in her ears shrilled insistently for her to halt. She took another bend practically on two wheels, glimpsed the darkness of the open country again for a second then, with a rendering, splintering crash, the off-side mudguards tore down a length of wooden palings. The car swerved violently, dashed up a steep bank then down again, rocking and plunging, until it came to rest, with a sickening thud, against the back of a big barn.

At 9.8. The Duke, with Rex beside him, entered Amesbury Police Station and the two messages which had been phoned through from Newbury were handed to him. The first read : Green Daimler passed through Amesbury going west at 8.15, and the second, Yellow Sunbeam halted Chilbury 8.22. Both were signed : Max per Clutterbuck.

As De Richleau slipped them into his pocket an Inspector came out of an inner room. ‘We’ve got your car, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Heard the news only this minute. Two officers spotted the young woman at the fork roads south of Devizes and gave chase. She made a mucker of that bad bend in Easterton village. Ran it through a garden and up a steep bank.’

‘Is she hurt?’ asked Rex anxiously.

‘No, sir—can’t be. Not enough to prevent her hopping out and running for it. I reckon it was that bank that saved her and the car too—for I gather it’s not damaged anything to speak of.’

‘Has she been caught?’ inquired the Duke.

‘Not yet, sir, but I expect she will be before morning.’

As De Richleau nodded his thanks, and spread out a map to find the village of Chilbury, the desk telephone shrilled. The constable who answered it scribbled rapidly on a pad and then passed the paper over to him. ‘Here’s another message for you sir.’

Rex glanced over the Duke’s shoulder and read, Green Daimler halted Chilbury 8.30. Other cars parked in vicinity and more arriving. Will await you cross-roads half a mile south of village. Clutterbuck.

De Richleau looked up and gave a low chuckle. ‘Got them!’ he exclaimed. ‘Now we can talk.’

At 9.14. They were back in the car.

CHAPTER XV

THE ROAD TO THE SABBAT

The big Hispano left the last houses of Amesbury behind and took the long, curving road across the Plain to the west. De Richleau, driving now at a moderate pace, was at last able to satisfy Rex’s curiosity.

‘It is quite simple, my dear fellow. Immediately I learned from you that Madame D’Urfe was leaving Claridges for the Sabbat at four o’clock, I realised that in her we had a second line of inquiry. Having promised to meet you at Pangbourne, I couldn’t very well follow her myself, so I got in touch with an ex-superintendent of Scotland Yard named Clutterbuck, who runs a Private Inquiry Agency.’

‘But I thought you said we must handle this business on our own,’ Rex protested.

‘That is so, and Clutterbuck has no idea of the devilry that we are up against. I only called him for the purpose of tracing cars and watching people, which is his normal business. After I had explained what I wanted to him he arranged for half a dozen of his assistants to be in readiness with motor-cycles. Then I took him round to Claridges in order to point the old woman out to him. As luck would have it, I spotted the Albino that we saw at the party last night come out at half past three and drive off in the Yellow Sports Sunbeam, so that gave us a third line, and Clutterbuck sent one of his men after him. The Countess left in the Green Daimler a good bit after four, and that’s why I was delayed in getting down to Pangbourne. Clutterbuck trailed her in his own car, and directly we knew that she was making for the west, sent the rest of his squad ahead in order to pick her up again if by any chance he lost her. That is how the reports of the movements of the two cars came through to me.’

‘How about Mocata? He was at Claridges when Tanith phoned the old woman, round about half past one!’

‘Unfortunately, he must have left by the time I came on the scene, but it doesn’t matter, because he is certain to be with the rest.’

Rex grinned. ‘It was a pretty neat piece of staff work.’

The few miles across the Plain were soon eaten up, and the Duke had scarcely finished giving Rex particulars of his campaign when they reached the lonely windswept cross-roads half a mile south of Chilbury. A car was drawn up at the side of the road and near it a group of half a dozen men with motor cycles stood talking in low voices. As the Hispano was brought to a standstill, a tall, thin man left the group and came over to De Richleau.

‘The persons you are wanting are in the big house on the far side of the village, sir,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it because the place is surrounded by trees, and they are the only ones hereabouts.’

‘Thank you,’ De Richleau nodded. ‘Have you any idea how many people have arrived for this party?’

‘I should think a hundred or so at a rough guess. There are quite fifty cars parked in the grounds at the back of the house, and some of them had two or three occupants. Will you require my assistance any further?’

‘Not now. I am very pleased with the way you have handled this little affair, and should I need your help later on, I will get in touch with you again.’

Rex nudged the Duke just as he was about to dismiss Clutterbuck. ‘If there’s a hundred of them, we won’t stand an earthly on our own. Why not keep these people? Eight or nine of us might be able to put up a pretty good show!’

‘Impossible,’ De Richleau replied briefly, while the detective eyed the two of them with guarded interest, wondering what business they were engaged upon but satisfied in his own mind that, since Rex had suggested retaining him, he had not lent himself to anything illegal. ‘If there’s nothing else I can do then, sir,’ he said, touching his hat, ‘I and my men will be getting back to London.’

‘Thank you,’ De Richleau acknowledged the salute. ‘Good night.’ As the detective turned away, he let out the clutch of the Hispano.

With the engine just ticking over, they slipped through the silent village. Most of the cottages were already in darkness. The only bright light came from the tap-room of the tiny village inn, while the dull glow from curtained windows in one or two of the upper rooms of the houses showed that those inhabitants of the little hamlet who were not already in bed would very shortly be there.

To the south of the road, on the far side of the village, they came upon a thick belt of ancient trees extending for nearly a quarter of a mile and, although no house was visible behind the high stone wall that shut them in, they knew from Clutterbuck’s description that this must be the secret rendezvous.

A chalky lane followed the curve of the wall where it left the main road and, having driven a hundred yards along it, they turned the car so that it might be in immediate readiness to take the road again, and parked it on a grassy slope that edged the lane.

‘As the Duke alighted, he pulled out a small suitcase. ‘These are the results of my morning’s research at the British Museum,’ he said, opening it up.

Rex leaned forward curiously to survey the strange assortment of things the case contained : a bunch of white flowers, a bundle of long grass, two large ivory crucifixes, several small phials, a bottle—apparently of water—and a number of other items; but he stepped quickly back as a strong, pungent, unpleasant odour struck his nostrils.

De Richleau gave a grim chuckle. ‘You don’t like the smell of the Asafoetida grass and the Garlic flowers, eh? But they are highly potent against evil my friend, and if we can only secure Simon they will prove a fine protection for him. Here, take this crucifix.’

‘What’ll I do with it?’ Rex asked, admiring for a moment the beautiful carving on the sacred symbol.

‘Hold it in your hand from the moment we go over this wall, and before your face if we come upon any of these devilish people.’

While De Richleau was speaking, he had taken a little plush box from the suitcase, and out of it a rosary from which dangled a small, gold cross. Reaching up, he hung it about Rex’s neck, explaining as he did so: ‘Should you drop the big one, or if it is knocked from your hand by some accident, this will serve as a reserve defence. In addition, I want you to set another above a horseshoe in your aura.’

‘How d’you mean?’ Rex frowned, obviously puzzled.

‘Just imagine if you can that you are actually wearing a horseshoe surmounted by a crucifix on your forehead. Think of it as glowing there in the darkness an inch or so above your eyes. That is an even better protection than any ordinary material symbol, but it is difficult to concentrate sufficiently to keep it there without long practice, so we must wear the sign as well.’ The Duke placed a similar rosary round his own neck and took two small phials from the open case. ‘Mercury and Salt,’ he added. ‘Place one in each of your breast pockets!’ Rex did as he was bid. ‘But why are we wearing crucifixes when you put a swastika on Simon before?’ he asked.

‘I was wrong. That is the symbol of Light in the East, where I learned what little I know of the Esoteric Doctrine. There, it would have proved an adequate barrier, but here, where Christian thoughts have been centred on the Cross for many centuries, the crucifix has far more potent vibrations.’

He took up the bottle and went on: ‘This is holy water from Lourdes, and with it I shall seal the nine openings of your body that no evil may enter it at any one of them. Then you must do the same for me.’

With swift gestures, the Duke made the sign of the cross in holy water upon Rex’s eyes, nostril’s, lips, etc., and then Rex performed a similar service for him.

De Richleau picked up the other crucifix and shut the case. ‘Now we can start,’ he said. ‘I only wish that we had a fragment of the Host apiece. That is the most powerful defence of all, and with it we might walk unafraid into hell itself. But it can only be obtained by a layman after a special dispensation, and I had no time to plead my case for that today.’

The night was fine and clear, but only a faint starlight lit the surrounding country, and they felt rather than saw the rolling slopes of the Plain which hemmed in the village and the house, where they were set in a sheltered dip. The whole length of the high stone wall was fringed, as far as they could see, by the belt of trees, and through their thick, early-summer foliage no glimpse of light penetrated to show the exact position of the house.

Since no sound broke the stillness—although a hundred people were reported to be gathered there—they judged the place to be somewhere in the depths of the wood at a good distance from the wall; yet despite that, as they walked quickly side by side down the chalky lane, they spoke only in whispers, lest they disturb the strange stillness that brooded over that night-darkened valley.

At length they found the thing that they were seeking, a place where the old wall had crumbled and broken at the top. A pile of masonry had fallen into the lane, making a natural step a couple of feet in height, and from it they found no difficulty in hoisting themselves up into the small breach from which it had tumbled.

As they slipped down the other side, they paused for a moment, peering through the great tree-trunks, but here on the inside of the wall beneath the widespreading branches of century-old oaks and chestnuts they were in pitch darkness, and could see nothing ahead other than the vague outline of the trees.

‘In manus tuas, domine,’ murmured the Duke, crossing himself; then holding their crucifixes before them they moved forward stealthily, their feet crackling the dry twigs with a faint snapping as they advanced.

After a few moments the darkness lightened and they came out on the edge of a wide lawn. To their left, two hundred yards away, they saw the dim, shadowy bulk of a rambling old house, and through a shrubbery which separated them from it, faint chinks of light coming from the ground floor windows. Now, too, they could hear an indistinct murmur, which betrayed the presence of many people.

Keeping well within the shadow of the trees, they moved cautiously along until they had passed the shrubbery and could get a clear view of the low, old-fashioned mansion. Only the ground-floor windows showed lights and these were practically obscured by heavy curtains. The upper stories were dark and lifeless.

Still in silence, and instinctively agreeing upon their movements, the two friends advanced again and began to make a circle of the house. On the far side, they found the cars parked just as Clutterbuck had described, upon a gravel sweep, and counted up to fifty-seven of them.

‘By Jove,’ Rex breathed. ‘This lot would rejoice an automobile salesman’s heart.’

The Duke nodded. Not more than half a dozen out of the whole collection were ordinary, moderately-priced machines. The rest bore out De Richleau’s statement that the practitioners of the Black Art in modern times were almost exclusively people of great wealth. A big silver Rolls stood nearest to them; beyond it a golden Bugatti. Then a supercharged Mercedes, another Rolls, an Isotta Fraschini whose bonnet alone looked as big as an Austin Seven, and so the line continued with Alfa Romeos, Daimlers, Hispanos and Bentleys, nearly every one distinctive of its kind. At a low estimate there must have been Ł100,000 worth of motor-cars parked in that small area.

As they paused there for a moment a mutter of voices and a sudden burst of laughter came from a ground-floor window. Rex tiptoed softly forward across the gravel. De Richleau followed and, crouching down with their heads on a level with the low sill, they were able to see through a chink in the curtains into the room.

It was a long, low billiards-room with two tables, and the usual settees ranged along the walls. Both tables were covered with white cloths upon which were piles of plates, glasses, and an abundant supply of cold food. About the room, laughing, smoking and talking, were some thirty chauffeurs who, having delivered their employers at the rendezvous, were being provided with an excellent spread to keep them busy and out of the way.

The Duke touched Rex on the shoulder, and they tiptoed quietly back to the shelter of the bushes. Then, making a circle of the drive, they passed round the other side of the house, which was dark and deserted, until they came again to the lighted windows at the back which they had first seen.

The curtains of these had been more carefully drawn than those of the billiards-room where the chauffeurs were supping, and it was only after some difficulty that they found a place at one where they were able to observe a small portion of the room. From what little they could see, the place seemed to be a large reception-room, with parquet floor, painted walls and Italian furniture.

The head of a man, who was seated with his back to the window, added to their difficulty in seeing into the room, but the glimpse they could get was sufficient to show that all the occupants of it were masked and their clothes hidden under black dominoes, giving them all a strangely funereal appearance.

As the man by the window turned his head De Richleau, who was occupying their vantage point at the time, observed that his hair was grey and curly and that he had lost the top portion of his left ear, which ended in a jagged piece of flesh. The Duke felt that there was something strangely familiar in that mutilated ear, but he could not for the life of him recall exactly where he had seen it. Not at Simon’s party, he was certain but, although he watched the man intently, no memory came to aid his recognition.

The others appeared to be about equal numbers of both sexes as far as the Duke could judge from the glimpses he got of them as they passed and repassed the narrow orbit of his line of vision. The masks and dominoes made it particularly difficult for him to pick out any of the Satanists whom he had seen at the previous party, but after a little, he noticed a man with a dark-skinned, fleshy neck and thin, black hair whom he felt certain was the Babu, and a little later a tall, lank, fair-haired figure who was undoubtedly the Albino.

After a time Rex took his place at their observation post. A short, fat man was standing now in the narrow line of sight. A black mask separated his pink, bald head from the powerful fleshy chin—it could only be Mocata. As he watched, another domino came up, the beaky nose, the bird-like head, the narrow, stooping shoulders of which must surely belong to Simon Aron.

‘He’s here,’ whispered Rex.

‘Who—Simon?’

‘Yes. But how we’re going to get at him in this crush is more than I can figure out’

‘That has been worrying me a lot,’ De Richleau whispered back. ‘You see, I have had no time to plan any attempts at rescue. My whole day has been taken up with working at the Museum and then organising the discovery of this rendezvous. I had to leave the rest to chance, trusting that an opportunity might arise where we could find Simon on his own if they had locked him up, or at least with only a few people, when there would be some hope of our getting him away. All we can do for the moment is to bide our time. Are there any signs of them starting their infernal ritual?’

‘None that I can see. It’s only a “conversation piece” in progress at the moment.’

De Richleau glanced at his watch. ‘Just on eleven,’ he murmured, ‘and they won’t get going until midnight, so we have ample time before we need try anything desperate. Something may happen to give us a better chance before that.’

For another ten minutes they watched the strange assembly. There was no laughter but, even from outside the window, the watchers could sense a tenseness in the atmosphere and a strange suppressed excitement. De Richleau managed to identify the Eurasian, the Chinaman and old Madame D’Urfe with her parrot beak. Then it seemed to him that the room was gradually emptying. The man with the mutilated ear, whose head had obscured their view, stood up and moved away and the low purr of a motor-car engine came to them from the far side of the house.

‘It looks as if they’re leaving,’ muttered the Duke; ‘perhaps the Sabbat is not to be held here after all. In any case, this may be the chance we’re looking for. Come on!’

Stepping as lightly as possible to avoid the crunching of the gravel, they stole back to the shrubbery and round the house to the place where the cars were parked. As they arrived a big car full of people was already running down the drive. Another was in the process of being loaded up with a number of hampers and folding tables. Then that also set off with two men on the front seat.

Rex and De Richleau, crouching in the bushes, spent the best part of an hour watching the departure of the assembly.

Every moment they hoped to see Simon. If they could only identify him among those dark shapes that moved between the cars they meant to dash in and attempt to carry him off. It would be a desperate business but there was no time left in which to make elaborate plans; under cover of darkness and the ensuing confusion there was just a chance that they might get away with it.

No chauffeurs were taken and a little less than half the number of cars utilised. Where the guests had presumably arrived in ones, twos, and threes, they now departed crowded five and six apiece in the largest of the cars.

When only a dozen or so of the Satanists were left the Duke jogged Rex’s arm. ‘We’ve missed him I’m afraid. We had better make for our own car now or we may lose track of them,’ and, filled with growing concern at the difficulties which stood between them and Simon’s rescue, they turned and set off at a quick pace through the trees to the broken place in the wall.

Scrambling over, they ran at a trot down the lane. Once in the car, De Richleau drove it back on to the main road and then pulled up as far as possible in the shadow of the overhanging trees. A big Delage came out of the park gates a hundred yards farther along the road and turning east sped away through the village.

‘Wonder if that’s the last,’ Rex said softly.

‘I hope not,’ De Richleau replied. ‘They have been going off at about two-minute intervals, so as not to crowd the road and make too much of a procession of it. If it is the last, they would be certain to see our lights and become suspicious. With any luck the people in the Delage will take us for the following car if we can slip in now, and the next to follow will believe our rear light to be that of the Delage.’ He released his brake, and the Hispano slid forward.

On the far side of the village they picked up the rear light of the Delage moving at an easy pace and followed to the cross-roads where they had met Clutterbuck an hour and a half earlier. Here the car turned north along a by-road, and they followed for a few miles upward on to the higher level of the desolate rolling grasslands, unbroken by house or farmstead, and treeless except for, here and there, a coppice set upon a gently sloping hillside.

Rex was watching out of the back window and had assured himself that another car was following in their rear, for upon that open road motor headlights were easily visible for miles.

They passed through the village of Chitterne St. Mary, then round the steep curve to the entrance of its twin parish, Chitterne All Saints. At the latter the car which they were following switched into a track running steeply uphill to the north-east, then swiftly down again into a long valley bottom and up the other side on a higher crest. They came to a cross-roads where four tracks met in another valley and turned east to run on for another mile, bumping and skidding on the little-used, path like way. After winding a little, the car ahead suddenly left the track altogether and ran on to the smooth, short turf.

After following the Delage for a mile or more across the grass, De Richleau saw it pull up on the slope of the downs where the score or so of cars which had brought the Satanists to this new rendezvous were parked in a ragged line. He swiftly dimmed his lights, and ran slowly forward, giving the occupants of the Delage time to leave their car before he pulled up the Hispano as far from it as he dared without arousing suspicion in the others. The car following, which seemed to be the last in the procession, passed quite close to them and halted ten yards ahead, also disgorging is passengers. Rex and the Duke waited for a moment, still seated in the darkness of the Hispano, then after a muttered conference, Rex got out to go forward and investigate.

He returned after about ten minutes to say that the Satanists had gone over the crest of the hill into the dip beyond, carrying their hampers and their gear with them.

‘We had better drive on then,’ said the Duke, ‘and park our car with theirs. It’s less likely to be noticed if the moon gets up.’

‘There isn’t a moon,’ Rex told him. ‘We’re in the dark quarter. But it would be best to have it handy all the same.’

They drove on until they reached the other cars, all of whose lights had been put out, then, getting out, set off at a stealthy trot in the direction the Satanists had taken.

Within a few moments they arrived at the brow of the hill and saw that spread below them lay a natural amphitheatre. At the bottom, glistening faintly, lay a small tarn or lake, and De Richleau nodded understanding.

‘This is the place where the devilry will actually be done without a doubt. No Sabbat can be held except in a place which is near open water.’ Then the two friends lay down in the grass to watch for Simon among the dark group of figures who were moving about the water’s edge.

Some were busy unpacking the hampers, and erecting the small folding-tables which they had brought. The light was just sufficient for Rex to see that they were spreading upon them a lavish supper. As he watched, he saw a group of about a dozen move over to the left towards a pile of ancient stones which, in the uncertain light, seemed to form a rugged, natural throne.

De Richleau’s eyes were also riveted upon the spot and, to his straining gaze, it seemed that there was a sudden stirring of movement in the shadows there. The whole body of masked black-clad figures left the lake and joined those near the stones, who seemed to be their leaders. After a moment the watchers could discern a tall, dark form materialising on the throne and, as they gazed with tense expectancy, a faint shimmer of pale violet light began to radiate from it.

Even at that distance, this solitary illumination of the dark hollow was sufficient for the two friends to realise that the thing which had appeared out of the darkness, seated upon those age-old rocks, was the same evil entity that De Richleau had once taken for Mocata’s black servant, and which had manifested itself to Rex with such ghastly clarity in Simon’s silent house. The Sabbat was about to commence.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SABBAT

Straining their eyes and ears for every sound and movement from the assembly in the dark shadows below, Rex and the Duke lay side by side on the rim of the saucer-shaped depression in the downland.

As far as they could judge, they were somewhere about halfway between the two hamlets of Imber and Tilshead, with Chitterne All Saints in their rear and the village of Easterton, where Tanith had crashed, about five miles to the north. The country round about was desolate and remote. Once in a while some belated Wiltshire yokel might cross the plain by night upon a special errand created by emergency; but even if such a one had chanced to pass that way on this Walpurgis-Nacht, the hidden meeting-place—guarded by its surrounding hills—was far from the nearest track, and at that midnight hour no living soul seemed to be stirring within miles of the spot which the Satanists had chosen for the worship of their Infernal Master.

In the faint starlight they could see that the tables were now heaped with an abundance of food and wine, and that the whole crowd had moved over towards the throne round which they formed a wide circle, so that the nearest came some little way up the slope and were no more than fifty yards from where the Duke and Rex lay crouched in the grass.

‘How long does it last?’ Rex asked, beneath his breath, a little nervously.

‘Until cock-crow, which I suppose would be at about four o’clock at this time of the year. It is a very ancient belief that the crowing of a cock has power to break spells, so these ceremonies, in which the power to cast spells is given, never last longer. Keep a sharp look out for Simon.’

‘I am, but what will they be doing all that time?’

‘First, they will make their homage to the Devil. Then they will gorge themselves on the food that they have brought and get drunk on the wine; the idea being that everything must be done contrary to the Christian ritual. They will feast to excess as opposed to the fasting which religious people undergo before their services. Look! There are the leaders before the altar now.’

Rex followed the Duke’s glance, and saw that half a dozen black figures were placing tall candles—eleven of them in a circle and the twelfth inside it — at the foot of the throne.

As they were lighted the twelve candles burned steadily in the windless night with a strong blue flame, illuminating a circle of fifty feet radius including the tables where the feast was spread. Outside this ring the valley seemed darker than before, filled with pitch-black shadows so that the figures in the area stood out clearly as though upon a bright circular stage.

‘Those things they have lighted are the special black candles made of pitch and sulphur,’ muttered the Duke. ‘You will be able to smell them in a minute. But look at the priests: didn’t I tell you that there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo? We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!’

While the crowd had been busy at the tables, their leaders had donned fantastic costumes. One had a huge cat mask over his head and with a furry cloak, the tail of which dangled behind him on the ground; another wore the head-dress of a repellent toad; the face of a third, still masked, gleamed bluish for a moment in the candle-light from between the distended jaws of a wolf, and Mocata, whom they could still recognise by his squat obesity, now had webbed wings sprouting from his shoulders which gave him the appearance of a giant bat.

Rex shivered. ‘It’s that infernal cold again rising up the hill,’ he said half-apologetically. ‘Say—look at the thing on the throne. It’s changing shape.’

Until the candles had been lit, the pale violet halo which emanated from the figure had been enough to show that it was human and the face absolutely black. But, as they watched, it changed to a greyish colour, and something was happening to the formation of the head.

‘It is the Goat of Mendes, Rex!’ whispered the Duke. ‘My God! this is horrible!’ And even as he spoke, the manifestation took on a clearer shape; the hands, held forward almost in an attitude of prayer but turned downward, became transformed into two great cloven hoofs. Above rose the monstrous bearded head of a gigantic goat, appearing to be at least three times the size of any other which they had ever seen. The two slit-eyes, slanting inwards and down, gave out a red baleful light. Long pointed ears cocked upwards from the sides of the shaggy head, and from the bald, horrible unnatural bony skull, which was caught by the light of the candles, four enormous curved horns spread out—sideways and up.

Before the apparition the priests, grotesque and terrifying beneath their beast-head masks and furry mantles, were now swinging lighted censers, and after a little a breath of the noisome incense was wafted up the slope.

Rex choked into his hand as the fumes caught his throat, then whispered : ‘What is that filth they’re burning?’

‘Thorn, apple leaves, rue, henbane, dried nightshade, myrtle and other herbs,’ De Richleau answered. ‘Some are harmless apart from their stench, but others drug the brain and excite the senses to an animal fury of lust and eroticism as you will see soon enough. If only we could catch sight of Simon,’ he added desperately.

‘Look, there he is!’ Rex exclaimed. ‘Just to the left of the toad-headed brute.’

The goat rose, towering above the puny figures of its unhallowed priests, and turned its back on them; upon which one stooped slightly to give the osculam-infame as his mark of homage. The others followed suit, then the whole circle of Satanists drew in towards the throne and, in solemn silence, followed their example, each bending to salute his master in an obscene parody of the holy kiss which is given to the Bishop’s ring.

Simon was among the last, and as he approached the throne, Rex grabbed De Richleau’s arm. ‘It’s now or never,’ he grunted. ‘We’ve got to make some effort. We can’t let this thing go through.’

‘Hush,’ De Richleau whispered back. ‘This is not the baptism. That will not be until after they have feasted—just before the orgy. Our chance must come.’

As the two lay there in the rough grass, each knew that the time was close at hand when they must act if they meant to attempt Simon’s rescue. Yet, despite the fact that neither of them lacked courage, both realised with crushing despondency how slender their chances of success would be if they ran down the slope and charged that multitude immersed in their ghoulish rites. There were at least a hundred people in that black-robed crowd and it seemed an utter impossibility to overcome such odds.

Rex leaned over towards the Duke and voiced his thoughts aloud. ‘We’re right up against it this time unless you can produce a brainwave. We’d be captured in ten seconds if we tried getting Simon away from this bunch of maniacs.’

‘I know,’ De Richleau agreed miserably. ‘I did not bargain for them all being shut up together in one room in that house or coming on to this place in a solid crowd. If only they would split up a little we might isolate Simon with just two or three of them, down the rest, and get him away before the main party knew what was happening; but as things are I am worried out of my wits. If we charge in, and they catch us, I have not a single doubt but that we should never be allowed to come up out of this hollow alive. We know too much, and they would kill us for a certainty. In fact, they would probably welcome the chance on a night like this to perform a little human sacrifice in front of that ghastly thing on the stones there.’

‘Surely they wouldn’t go in for murder even if they do practise the filthy parody of religion?’ whispered Rex incredulously.

De Richleau shook his head. ‘The Bloody Sacrifice is the oldest magical rite in the world. The slaying of Osiris and Adonis, the mutilation of Attis and the cults of Mexico and Peru, were all connected with it. Even in the Old Testament you read that the sacrifice which was most acceptable to God the Father was one of blood, and St. Paul tells us that “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission”.’

‘That was just ancient heathen cruelty.’

‘Not altogether. The blood is the Life. When it is shed, energy —animal or human as the case may be—is released into the atmosphere. If it is shed within a specially prepared circle, that energy can be caught and stored or redirected in precisely the same way as electric energy is caught and utilised by our modern scientists.’

‘But they wouldn’t dare to sacrifice a human being?’

‘It all depends upon the form of evil they wish to bring upon the world. If it is war they will seek to propitiate Mars with a virgin ram; if they desire the spread of unbridled lust—a goat, and so on. But the human sacrifice is more potent for all purposes than any other, and these wretched people are hardly human at the moment. Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and warlocks of the Dark Ages.’

‘Oh, Hell!’ Rex groaned, ‘we’ve simply got to get Simon out of this some way.’

The Goat turned round again after receiving the last kiss, holding between its hoofs a wooden cross about four feet in length. With a sudden violent motion it dashed the crucifix against the stone, breaking it into two pieces. Then the cat-headed man, who seemed to be acting the part of Chief Priest, picked them up. He threw the broken end of the shaft towards a waiting group, who pounced upon it and smashed it into matchwood with silent ferocity, while he planted the crucifix end upside down in the ground before the Goat. This apparently concluded the first portion of the ceremony.

The Satanists now hurried over to the tables where the banquet was spread out. No knives, forks, spoons or glasses were in evidence. But this strange party, governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality, grabbed handfuls of food out of the silver dishes and, seizing the bottles, tilted them to drink from the necks, gurgling and spitting as they did so and spilling the wine down their dominoes. Not one of them spoke a word, and the whole macabre scene was carried out in a terrible unnatural silence, as though it were a picture by Goya come to life.

‘Let’s creep down nearer,’ whispered the Duke. ‘While they are gorging themselves an opportunity may come for us to get hold of Simon. If he moves a few paces away from them for a moment, don’t try to argue with him, but knock him out.’

At a stealthy crawl, the two friends moved down the hillside to within twenty yards of the little lake, at the side of which the tables were set. The throne still occupied by the monstrous goat was only a further fifteen yards away from them, and by the light of the twelve black candles burning with an unnaturally steady flame even in that protected hollow among the hills, they could see the clustered figures sufficiently well to recognise those whom they knew among them despite their masks and dominoes.

Simon, like the rest, was gnawing at a chunk of food as though he had suddenly turned into an animal, and, as they watched, he snatched a bottle of wine from a masked woman standing nearby, spilling a good portion of its contents over her and himself; then he gulped down the rest.

For a few moments Rex felt again that he must be suffering from a nightmare. It seemed utterly beyond understanding that any cultured man like Simon, or other civilised people such as these must normally be, could behave with such appalling bestiality. But it was no nightmare. In that strange, horrid silence, the Satanists continued for more than half an hour to fight and tumble like a pack of wolfish dogs until the tables had been overthrown and the ground about the lakeside was filthy with the remaining scraps of food, gnawed bones and empty bottles.

At last Simon, apparently three parts drunk, lurched away from the crush and flung himself down on the grass a little apart from the rest, burying his head between his hands.

‘Now!’ whispered the Duke. ‘We’ve got to get him.’

With Rex beside him, he half rose to his feet, but a tall figure had broken from the mass and reached Simon before they could move. It was the man with the mutilated ear, and in another second a group of two women and three more men had followed him. De Richleau gritted his teeth to suppress an oath and placed a restraining hand on Rex’s shoulder.

‘It’s no good,’ he muttered savagely. ‘We must wait a bit. Another chance may come.’ And they sank down again into the shadows.

The group about the tables was now reeling drunk, and the whole party in a body surged back towards the Goat upon its throne. Rex and De Richleau had been watching Simon so intently they had failed to notice until then that Mocata and the half a dozen other masters of the Left Hand Path had erected a special table before the Goat, and were feeding from it. Yet they appeared strangely sober compared with the majority of the crowd who had fed beside the lake.

‘So the Devil feeds, too,’ Rex murmured.

‘Yes,’ agreed the Duke, ‘or at least the heads of his priesthood, and a gruesome meal it is if I know anything about it. A little cannibalism, my friend. It may be a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered, but I would stake anything that it is human flesh they are eating.’

As he spoke, a big cauldron was brought forward and placed before the throne. Then Mocata and the others with him each took a portion of the food which they had been eating from the table and cast it into the great iron pot. One of them threw in a round ball which met the iron with a dull thud.

Rex shuddered as he realised that the Duke was right. The round object was a human skull.

‘They’re going to boil up the remains with various other things,’ murmured the Duke, ‘and then each of them will be given a little flask of that awful brew at the conclusion of the ceremony, together with a pile of ashes from the wood fire they are lighting under the cauldron now. They will be able to use them for their infamous purposes throughout the year until the next Great Sabbat takes place.’

‘Oh, Hell!’ Rex protested. ‘I can’t believe that they can work any harm with that human mess, however horrid it may be. It’s just not reasonable.’

‘Yet you believe that the Blessed Sacrament has power for good,’ De Richleau whispered. ‘This is the antithesis of the Body of Our Lord, and I assure you, Rex, that, while countless wonderful miracles have been performed by the aid of the Host, terrible things can be accomplished by this blasphemous decoction.’

Rex had no deep religious feelings, but he was shocked and horrified to the depths of his being by this frightful parody of the things he had been taught to hold sacred in his childhood.

‘Dear God,’ muttered the Duke, ‘they are about to commit the most appalling sacrilege. Don’t look, Rex—don’t look.’ He buried his face in his hands and began to pray, but Rex continued to watch despite himself, his gaze held by some terrible fascination.

A great silver chalice was being passed from hand to hand, and very soon he realised the purpose to which it was being put, but could not guess the intention until it was handed back to the cat-headed man. One of the other officiating priests at the infamy produced some round white discs which Rex recognised at once as Communion Wafers—evidently stolen from some church.

In numbed horror he watched the Devil’s acolytes break these into pieces and throw them into the brimming chalice, then stir the mixture with the broken crucifix and hand the resulting compound to the Goat, who, clasping it between its great cloven hoofs, suddenly tipped it up so that the whole contents was spilled upon the ground.

Suddenly, at last, the horrid silence was rent, for the whole mob surged forward shouting and screaming as though they had gone insane, to dance and stamp the fragments of the Holy Wafers into the sodden earth.

‘Phew!’ Rex choked out, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. ‘This is a ghastly business. I can’t stand much more of it. They’re mad, stark staring crazy, every mother’s son of them.’

‘Yes, temporarily,’ the Duke looked up again. ‘Some of them are probably epileptics, and nearly all must be abnormal. This revolting spectacle represents a release of all their pent-up emotions and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustices, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success and good fortune. That is the only explanation for this terrible exhibition of human depravity which we are witnessing.’

‘Thank God, Tanith’s not here. She couldn’t have stood it. She’d have gone mad, I know, or tried to run away. And then they’d probably have murdered her. But what are we going to do about Simon?’

De Richleau groaned. ‘God only knows. If I thought there were the least hope, we’d charge into this rabble and try to drag him out of it, but the second they saw us they would tear us limb from limb.’

The fire under the cauldron was burning brightly, and as the crowd moved apart Rex saw that a dozen women had now stripped themselves of their dominoes and stood stark naked in the candle-light. They formed a circle round the cauldron, and holding hands, with their backs turned to the inside of the ring, began a wild dance around it anti-clockwise towards the Devil’s left.

In a few moments the whole company had stripped off their dominoes and joined in the dance, tumbling and clawing at one another before the throne, with the exception of half a dozen who sat a little on one side, each with a musical instrument, forming a small band. But the music which they made was like no other that Rex had ever heard before, and he prayed that he might never hear the like again. Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge.

To this agonising cacophony of sound the dancers, still masked, quite naked and utterly silent but for the swift movement of their feet, continued their wild, untimed gyrations, so that rather than the changing pattern of an ordered ballet the scene was one of a trampling mass of bestial animal figures.

Drunk with an inverted spiritual exaltation and excess of alcohol—wild-eyed and apparently hardly conscious of each other —the hair of the women streaming disordered as they pranced, and the panting breath of the men coming in laboured gasps— they rolled and lurched, spun and gyrated, toppled, fell, picked themselves up again, and leaped with renewed frenzy in one revolting carnival of mad disorder. Then, with a final wailing screech from the violin, the band ceased and the whole party flung themselves panting and exhausted upon the ground while the huge Goat rattled and clacked its monstrous cloven hoofs together and gave a weird laughing neigh in a mockery of applause.

De Richleau sat up quickly. ‘God help us, Rex, but we’ve got to do something now. When these swine have recovered their wind the next act of this horror will be the baptism of the Neophytes and after that the foulest orgy, with every perversion which the human mind is capable of conceiving. We daren’t wait any longer. Once Simon is baptised, we shall have lost our last chance of saving him from permanent and literal Hell in this life and the next.’

‘I suppose it’s just possible we’ll pull it off now they’ve worked themselves into this state?’ Rex hazarded doubtfully.

‘Yes, they’re looking pretty done at the moment,’ the Duke agreed, striving to bolster up his waning courage for the desperate attempt.

‘Shall we—shall we chance it?’ Rex hesitated. He too was filled with a horrible fear as to the fate which might overtake them once they left the friendly shadows to dash into that ring of evil blue light. In an effort to steady his frayed nerves, he gave a travesty of a laugh, and added: ‘The odds aren’t quite so heavy against us now they’ve lost their trousers. No one fights his best like that.’

‘It’s not the pack that I’m so frightened of, but that ghastly thing sitting on the rocks.’ De Richleau’s voice was hoarse and desperate. ‘The protections I have utilised may not prove strong enough to save us from the evil which is radiating from it.’

‘If we have faith,’ gasped Rex, ‘won’t that be enough?’

De Richleau shivered. The numbing cold which lapped up out of the hollow in icy waves seemed to sap all his strength and courage.

‘It would,’ he muttered. ‘It would if we were both in a state of grace.’

At that pronouncement Rex’s heart sank. He had no terrible secret crime with which to charge himself, but although circumstances had appeared to justify it at the time, both he and the Duke had taken human life, and who, faced with the actual doorway of the other world, can say that they are utterly without sin?

Desperately now he fought to regain his normal courage. In the dell the Satanists had recovered their wind and were forming in the great semi-circle again about the throne. The chance to rescue Simon was passing with the fleeting seconds, while his friends stood crouched and tongue-tied, their minds bemused by the reek of the noxious incense which floated up from the hollow, their bodies chained by an awful, overwhelming fear.

Three figures now moved out into the open space before the Goat. Upon the left the beastlike, cat-headed high priest of Evil; upon the right Mocata, his gruesome bat’s wings fluttering a little from his hunched-up shoulders; between them, naked, trembling, almost in a state of collapse, they supported Simon.

‘It’s now or never!’ Rex choked out.

‘No—I can’t do it,’ moaned the Duke, burying his face in his hands and sinking to the-ground. ‘I’m afraid, Rex. God forgive me, I’m afraid.’

CHAPTER XVII

EVIL TRIUMPHANT

As the blue Rolls, number OA 1217, came to rest with a sickening thud against the back of the big barn outside Easterton Village, Tanith was flung forward against the windscreen. Fortunately the Duke’s cars were equipped with splinter-proof glass and so the windows remained intact, but for the moment she was half-stunned by the blow on her head and painfully ‘winded’ by the wheel, which caught her in the stomach.

For a few sickening seconds she remained dazed and gasping for breath. Then she realised that she had escaped serious injury, and that the police would be on her at any moment. Her head whirling, her breath stabbing painfully, she threw open the door of the Rolls and staggered out on to the grass.

In a last desperate effort to evade capture, she lurched at an unsteady run across the coarse tussocks and just as the torches of the police appeared over the same hillock, which had slowed down the wild career of the car, she flung herself down in a ditch, sheltered by a low hedge, some thirty yards from the scene of the accident.

She paused there only long enough to regain her breath, and then began to crawl away along the runnel until it ended on the open plain. Taking a stealthy look over the hedge, she saw her pursuers were still busy examining the car, so she took a chance and ran for it, trusting in the darkness of the night to hide her from them.

After she had covered a mile she flopped exhausted to the ground, drawing short gulping breaths into her straining lungs— her heart thudding like a hammer. When she had recovered a little, she looked back to find that the village and the searching officers were now hidden from her by a sloping crest of downland. It seemed that she had escaped—at least for the time being —and she began to wonder what she had better do.

From what she remembered of the map, the house at Chilbury where the Satanists were gathering, preparatory to holding the Great Sabbat, was at least a dozen miles away. It would be impossible for her to cover that distance on foot even if she were certain of the direction in which it lay, and the fact that she was wanted by the police debarred her from trying to seek a lift in a passing car if she were able to find the main road again. In spite of her desperate attempt to reach the rendezvous in the stolen Rolls, and the frantic excitement of her escape from the police, she found to her surprise that a sudden reaction had set in, and she no longer felt that terrible driving urge to be present at the Sabbat.

Her anger against Rex had subsided. She had tricked him over the car, and he had retaliated by putting the police on her track. She realised now that he could only have done it on account of his overwhelming anxiety to prevent her from joining Mocata, and smiled to herself in the darkness as she thought again of his anxious, worried face as he had tried so hard that afternoon on the river to dissuade her from what she had only considered, till then, to be a logical step in her progress towards gaining supernatural powers.

She began to wonder seriously for the first time if he was not right, and that during these last months which she had spent with Madame D’Urfe her brain had become clouded almost to the point of mania by this obsession to the exclusion of all natural and reasonable thoughts. She recalled those queer companions who were travelling the same path as herself, most of them far further advanced upon it, of whom she had seen so much in recent times. The man with the hare-lip, the one-armed Eurasian, the Albino and the Babu. They were not normal any one of them and, while living outwardly the ordinary life of monkeyed people, dwelt secretly in a strange sinister world of their own, flattering themselves and each other upon their superiority to normal men and women on account of the strange powers that they possessed, yet egotistical and hard-hearted to the last degree.

This day spent with the buoyant, virile Rex among the fresh green of the countryside and the shimmering sunlight of the river’s bank, had altered Tanith’s view of them entirely; and now, in a great revulsion of feeling, she could only wonder that her longing for power and forgetfulness of her fore-ordained death had blinded her to their cruel way of life for so long.

She stood up and smoothing down her crumpled green linen frock, did her best to tidy herself. But she had lost her bag in the car smash, so not only was she moneyless but had no comb with which to do her hair. However, feeling that now Rex had succeeded in preventing her reaching the meeting-place he would be certain to call off the police, she set out at a brisk pace away from Easterton towards where she believed the main Salisbury-Devizes road to lie; hoping to find a temporary shelter for the night and then make her way back to London in the morning.

Before she had gone two hundred yards, her way was blocked by a tall, barbed-wire fence shutting in some military enclosure, so she turned along it. Two hundred yards farther on the fence ended, but she was again brought up by another fence and above it the steep embankment of a railway line. She hesitated then, not wishing to turn back in the direction of Easterton, and was wondering what it would be best to do, when a dark, hunched figure seemed to form out of the shadows beside her. She started back, but recovered herself at once on realising that it was only a bent old woman.

‘You’ve lost your way, dearie?’ croaked the old crone. ‘Yes,’ Tanith admitted. ‘Can you show me how I get on to the Devizes road?’

‘Come with me, my pretty. I am going that way myself,’ said the old woman in a husky voice, which seemed to Tanith in some strange way vaguely familiar.

‘Thank you.’ She turned and walked along the bridle-path that followed the embankment to the west, searching her mind as to where she could have heard that husky voice before.

‘Give me your hand, dearie. The way is rough for my old feet,’ croaked the ancient crone; and Tanith willingly offered her arm. Then, as the old woman rested a claw upon it, a sudden memory of long ago flooded her mind.

It was of the days when, as a little girl living in the foothills of the Carpathians, she had made a friend of an old gipsy-woman who used to come to the village for the fair and local Saints’ Days, with her band of Ziganes. It was from her that Tanith had first learned her strange powers of clairvoyance and second sight. Many a time she had scrambled down from the rocky mount upon which her home was set to the gipsy encampment outside the village to gaze with marvelling eyes at old Mizka who knew so many wonderful things, and could tell of the past and of the future by gazing into a glass of water or consulting her grimy pack of Tarot cards.

Tanith could still see those greasy pasteboards which had such fascinating pictures upon them. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana, said by some to be copies of the original Book of Thoth, which contained all wisdom and was given to mankind by the ancient ibis-headed Egyptian god. For thousands of years such packs had been treasured and reproduced from one end of the world to the other and were treasured still, from the boudoirs of modern Paris to the tea-houses of Shanghai, wherever people came secretly in the quiet hours to learn, from those who could read them, the secrets of the future.

As she walked on, half unconscious of her strange companion, Tanith recalled them in their right and faithful order. The Juggler with his table—meaning mental rectitude; the High Priestess like a female Pope—wisdom; the Empress—night and darkness; the Emperor—support and protection; the Pope—reunion and society; the Lovers—marriage; the Chariot—triumph and despotism; Justice, a winged figure with sword and scales—the law; the Hermit with his lantern—a pointer towards good; the Wheel of Fortune carrying a cat and a demon round with it—success and wealth; Strength, a woman wrenching open the jaws of a lion—power and sovereignty; the Hanged Man lashed by his right ankle to a beam and dangling upside down while holding two money bags—warning to be prudent; Death with his scythe —ruin and destruction; Temperance, a woman pouring liquid from one vase to another—moderation; the Devil, bat-winged, goat-faced, with a human head protruding from his belly—force and blindness; the Lightning-struck Tower with people falling from it—want, poverty and imprisonment; the Star—disinterestedness; the Moon—speech and lunacy; the Sun—light and science; the Judgment—typifying will; the World, a naked woman with goat and ram below—travel and possessions; then last but not least the card that has no number, the Fool, foretelling dementia, rapture and extravagance.

Old Mizka had been a willing teacher, and Tanith, the child, an eager pupil, for she had spent a lonely girlhood in that castle on the hill separated by miles of jagged valleys difficult to traverse from other children of her own position, and debarred by custom from adopting the children of the villagers as her playmates. Long before her time she had learned all the secrets of life from the old gipsy, who talked for hours in her husky voice of lovers and marriages and lovers again, and potions to bring sleep to suspicious husbands and philtres which could warm the heart of the coldest man towards a woman who desired his caresses.

‘Mizka,’ Tanith whispered suddenly. ‘It is you—isn’t it?’

‘Yes, dearie. Yes—old Mizka has come a long way tonight to set her pretty one upon the road.’

‘But how did you ever come to England?’

‘No matter, dearie. Don’t trouble your golden head about that. Old Mizka started you upon the road, and she has been sent to guide your feet tonight.’

Tanith hung back for a second in sudden alarm, but the claw upon her arm urged her forward again with gentle strength as she protested.

‘But I don’t want to go! Not… not to the….’

The old crone chuckled. ‘What foolishness is this? It is the road that you have taken all your life, ever since Mizka told you of it as a little girl. Tonight is the night that old Mizka has seen for so many years in her dreams—the night when you shall know all things, and be granted powers which come to few. How fortunate you are to have this opportunity when you are yet so young.’

At the old woman’s silken words, a new feeling crept into Tanith’s heart. She had been dwelling upon Rex’s face as she crossed the plain, and all the health-giving freshness of his gay, clean modernity, but now she was drawn back into another world; the one of which she had thought so long, in which a very few chosen people could perform the seemingly impossible—bend others to their will—cause them to fall or rise—place unaccountable obstacles in their path at every turn, or smooth their way to a glorious success. That was more than riches, more than fame; the supreme pinnacle to which any man or woman could rise, and all her longing to reach those heights before she died came back to her. Rex was a pleasant, stupid child; De Richleau a meddlesome fool, who did not understand the danger of the things with which he was trying to interfere. Mocata was a Prince in power and knowledge. She should be unutterably grateful that he had considered her worthy of the honour which she was about to receive.

‘It is not far, dearie. Not so far as you have thought. The great Festival does not take place in the house at Chilbury. That was only a meeting place, and the Sabbat is to be held upon these downs only a few miles from here. Come with me, and you shall receive the knowledge and the power that you seek.’

A curtain of forgetfulness seemed to be falling over Tanith’s mind—a feeling of intoxication—mental and physical, flooded through her. She felt her eyes closing… closing… as she muttered : ‘Yes. Knowledge and Power. Hurry, Mizka! Hurry, or we shall be too late.’

All her previous hesitations had now been blotted out, and although they were walking over coarse grass, it seemed to her that they trod a smooth and even way. Her mind was obsessed again with the sole thought of reaching the Sabbat in time.

‘That is my own beautiful one talking now,’ crooned the old beldame, in a honeyed voice. ‘But have no fear, the night is young, and we shall reach the meeting-place of the Covens before the hour when our Master will appear.’

Tanith was holding herself stiffly as she walked. Her golden head thrown back, her eyes dilated to an enormous size—the muscles at the sides of her mouth twitched incessantly as the old woman’s smooth babble flowed on.

They crossed the road, although Tanith was hardly conscious of it as, with Mizka beside her, she stepped out, a new strength surging through her despite her long and tiring day. Then as she mounted an earthy bank a dark and furry presence brushed against her legs, and looking down she saw the golden eyes of a great black cat.

For a moment she was startled, but the old woman chuckled in the darkness. ‘It is only Nebiros,’ she muttered. ‘You have played with him often as a child, dearie, and he is so pleased to see you now.’

The cat mewed with pleasure as Tanith stooped for a moment to stroke its furry back. Then they hastened on again.

For hours it seemed they tramped over the grassy tussocks, up gently-sloping hills and down again into lonesome valleys unbroken by trees or cottages or farmsteads, ever on to the secret place where the Satanists would be gathering now, until old Mizka, walking at Tanith’s left, suddenly pulled up—clutching at her arm with her bony hand.

‘Shut your eyes, dearie,’ she hissed in a sharp whisper. ‘Shut your eyes. There is something here that it is not good for you to see. I will guide you.’

Tanith did as she was bid mechanically, and although she could no longer see the rough ground over which they were passing, she did not stumble but continued to step forward evenly at a good pace. Yet she had a feeling that she was no longer alone with the old woman, but that a third person was now walking with them at her right hand. Then, a low voice, bell-like and clear, sounded in her ears.

‘Tanith, my darling. Look at me, I implore you.’

At the shock of hearing that well-loved voice, the curtain lifted for a moment and Tanith opened her eyes again. To her right, she saw the figure of her mother dressed in white as she had last seen her before she had set out to some great party where she had died of a sudden heart attack. Round her neck hung a rope of pearls, and her head was adorned with a half-hoop of diamond stars. The figure shone by some strange unnatural light in the surrounding darkness, seeming as pure and translucent as carved crystal.

‘My dear one,’ the voice went on, ‘my folly of encouraging your gift of second sight has led you into terrible peril. I beg you by all that is good and holy to draw back while there is yet time.’

Despite the urging hand which clawed upon her arm, Tanith stumbled for the first time in the long grass and, wrenching her arm away, stood still. In a flash of insight which seared through her drugged brain, she knew then that old Mizka was not a living being, but a Dark Angel sent to lead her to the Sabbat, and that her mother had come at this last moment from the world beyond as an Angel of Light to draw her back again into the safety and protection of holy things.

Mizka was babbling and crowing upon her left, urging her onward with a terrible force and intensity. The words ‘power’— ‘crowning your life’—‘mastery of all’ came again and again in her rapid speech, and Tanith moved a few steps forward. But her mother’s voice, imploring again, came clearly in her ears.

‘Tanith, my darling, I am only allowed to appear to you because of your great danger, and for the briefest space. I am called back already, but I beg you in the name of love that we had for each other, not to go. There is a better influence in your life. Trust in it while there is still time, otherwise you will be dragged down into the pit and we shall never meet again.’ Suddenly the voice changed, becoming cold and commanding, ‘Back, Mizka —back whence you came. I order you by the names of Isis, mother of, Horus, Kwan-Yin, mother of Hau-Ki, and Mary, mother of Our Lord.’

The voice ceased on a thin wail as though, all unwillingly, the spirit had been drawn back while its abjuration to the demon was only half completed. With a wild cry and arms outstretched, Tanith dashed forward to the place where that nebulous moon-white being had floated, but where the apparition of her mother had been a second before, only a little breeze ruffled the long grasses. A feeling of immense fatigue bowed her shoulders as she turned towards old Mizka and the cat. But they too had vanished.

She sank upon her knees and began to pray, feverishly at first and then less strongly, until her tongue tripped upon the words and at last she fell silent. Almost unconsciously she rose to her feet and found herself, the night wind playing gently in her hair, standing upon a hill-top gazing down into a shallow valley.

A new and terrible fear gripped at her heart, for she saw below her, by the strange unearthly light of a ring of blue candles, the Satanists gathering for their unholy ceremony, and knew that evil powers had led her feet by devious paths to the place of the Great Sabbat that she might participate after all.

She stood for a moment, the blood draining from her face, quick tremors of horror and apprehension running down her body. She wanted to turn and flee into the dark, protective shadows of the night, but she could not tear her eyes away from that terrible figure seated upon the rocky throne, before which the Satanists were making their obscene obeisance. Some terrible uncanny power kept her feet rooted to the spot, and although her mother’s warning still rang in her ears, she could not drag her gaze away from that blasphemous mockery of God proceeding in a horrid silence a hundred yards down the slope from where she stood.

Time ceased to exist for Tanith then. An unearthly chill seemed to creep up out of the valley, swirling and eddying about her legs as a cold current suddenly strikes a bather in a warm patch of sea. The chill crept upwards to the level of her breasts, numbing her limbs and dulling her faculties until she could have cried out with the pain. She watched the gruesome banquet with loathing and repulsion, but as she saw those ghoul-like figures tilting the bottles to their mouths she was suddenly beset by an appalling desire to drink.

Although her limbs were cold, her mouth seemed parched; her throat swollen and burning. She was seized with an unutterable longing to rush forward, down the slope, and grab one of those bottles with which to slake her all-consuming thirst. Yet she remained rooted, held back by her higher consciousness; the vision of her mother no longer before her physical eyes, but clear in her mentality just as she had seen it, tall, slender and white-clad, with a sparkling hoop of star-like diamonds glistening above the hair drawn back from the high, broad forehead.

At the defamation of the Host, she was seized by a shuddering rigor in all her limbs. She tried to shut her eyes but they remained fixed and staring while silent tears welled from them and gushed down her cheeks. She endeavoured to cross herself, but her hand, numb with that awful cold, refused to do the bidding of her brain and remained hanging limp and frozen at her side. She endeavoured to pray, but her swollen tongue refused its office, and her mind seemed to have gone utterly blank so that she could not recall even the opening words of the Paternoster or Ave Maria. She knew with a sudden appalling clarity that having even been the witness of this blasphemous sacrilege was enough to damn her for all eternity, and that her own wish to attend this devilish saturnalia had been engendered only by a stark madness caught like some terrible contagious disease from her association with these other unnatural beings who were victims of a ghastly lunacy.

In vain she attempted to cast herself upon her knees, to struggle back from this horror, but she seemed to be caught in an invisible vice and could not lift her glance for one single second from that small lighted circle which stood out so clearly in the surrounding darkness of the mysterious valley.

She saw the Satanists strip off their dominoes and shuddered afresh—almost retching—as she watched them tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfe, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god.

‘They are mad, mad, mad,’ she found herself saying over and over again, as she rocked to and fro where she stood, weeping bitterly, beating her hands together and her teeth chattering in the icy wind.

The dance ceased on a high wail of those discordant instruments and then the whole of that ghastly ghoul-like crew sank down together in a tangled heap before the Satanic throne. Tanith wondered for a second what was about to happen next, even as she made a fresh effort to drag herself away. Then Simon was led out from among the rest and she knew all too soon that the time of baptism was at hand. As she realised it, a new menace came upon her. Without her own volition, her feet began to move.

In a panic of fear she found herself setting one before the other and advancing slowly down the hill. She tried to scream, but her voice would not come. She tried to throw herself backward, but her body was held rigid, and an irresistible suction dragged at each of her feet in turn, lifting it a few inches from the ground and pulling it forward, so that, despite her uttermost effort of will to resist the evil force, she was being drawn slowly but surely to receive her own baptism.

The weird unearthly music had ceased. An utter silence filled the valley. She was no more than ten yards from the nearest of those debased creatures who hovered gibbering about the throne. Suddenly she whimpered with fright for, although she was still hidden by the darkness, the great horned head of the Goat turned and its fiery eyes became fixed upon her.

She knew then that there was no escape. The warnings from Rex and her mother had come too late. Those powers which she had sought to suborne now held her in their grip and she must submit to this loathsome ritual despite the shrinking of her body and her soul, with all the added horror of full knowledge that it meant final and utter condemnation to the bottomless pit.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE POWER OF LIGHT

At the sight of De Richleau’s breakdown Rex almost gave in too. The cold sweat of terror had broken out on his own forehead, yet he was still fighting down his fear and, after a moment, the collapse of that indomitable leader to whom he had looked so often and with such certain faith in the worst emergencies brought him a new feeling of responsibility. His generous nature was great enough to realise that the Duke’s courage had only proved less than his own on this occasion because of his greater understanding of the peril they were called upon to face. Now, it was as though the elder man had been wounded and put out of action, so Rex felt that it was up to him to take command.

‘We can’t let this thing be,’ he said with sudden firmness, stooping to place an arm round De Richleau’s shaking shoulders. ‘You stay here. I’m going down to face the music’

‘No—no, Rex.’ The Duke grabbed at his coat. ‘They’ll murder you without a second thought.’

‘Will they? We’ll see!’ Rex gave a grating laugh. ‘Well, if they do you’ll have something you can fix on them that the police will understand. It’ll be some consolation to think you’ll see to it that these devils swing for my murder if they do me in.’

‘Wait! I won’t let you go alone,’ the Duke stumbled to his feet. ‘Don’t you realise that death is the least thing I fear? One look from the eyes of that Goat could send you mad—then where is the case to put before the police ? Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but the others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demoniac possession brought about by looking upon terrible things that they were never meant to see.’

‘I’ll risk it.’ Rex was desperate now. He held up the crucifix. ‘This is going to protect me, because I’ve got faith that it will.’

‘All right then—but even madness isn’t the worst that can happen to us. This life is nothing—I’m thinking of the next. Oh, God, if only dawn would come or we had some form of Light that we could bring to bear on these worshippers of Darkness.’

Rex took a pace forward. ‘If we’d known what we were going to be up against we’d have brought a searchlight on a truck. That would have given this bunch something to think about if light has the power you say. But it’s no good worrying about that now. We’ve got to hurry.’

‘No—wait!’ the Duke exclaimed with sudden excitement. ‘I’ve got it. This way — quick!’ He turned and set off up the hill at a swift crouching run.

Rex followed, and when they reached the brow easily overtook him. ‘What’s the idea,’ he cried, using his normal voice for the first time for hours.

‘The car!’ De Richleau panted, as he pelted over the rough grass to the place where they had left the Hispano. ‘To attack them is a ghastly risk in any case, but this will give us a sporting chance.’

Rex reached it first and flung open the door. The Duke tumbled in and got the engine going. It purred on a low note as they bumped forward in the darkness to the brow of the hill.

‘Out on the running-board, Rex,’ snapped De Richleau as he thrust out the clutch. He seemed in those few moments to have recovered all his old steel-like indomitable purpose. ‘It’s a madman’s chance because it’s ten to one we’ll get stuck going up the hill on the other side, but we must risk that. When I use the engine again, snap on the lights. As we go past, throw your crucifix straight at the thing on the throne. Then try and grab Simon by the neck.’

‘Fine!’ Rex laughed suddenly, all his tension gone now that he was at last going into action. ‘Go to it!’

The car slid forward, silently gathering momentum as it rushed down the steep slope. Next second they were almost upon the nearest of the Satanists. The Duke let in the clutch and Rex switched on the powerful headlights of the Hispano.

With the suddenness of a thunderclap a shattering roar burst upon the silence of the valley—as though some monster plane was driving full upon that loathsome company from the cloudy sky. At the same instant, the whole scene was lit in all its ghastliness by a blinding glare which swept towards them at terrifying speed. The great car bounded forward, the dazzling beams threw into sharp relief the naked forms gathered in the hollow. De Richleau jammed his foot down on the accelerator and, calling with all his will upon the higher powers for their protection, charged straight for the Goat of Mendes upon his Satanic throne.

At the first flash of those blinding lights which struck full upon them, the Satanists rushed screaming for cover. It was as though two giant eyes of some nightmare monster leapt at them from the surrounding darkness and the effect was as that of a fire-hose turned suddenly upon an angry threatening mob.

Their maniacal exaltation died away. The false exhilaration of the alcohol, the pungent herbal incense and the drug-laden ointments which they had smeared upon their bodies, drained from them. They woke as from an intoxicated nightmare to the realisation of their nakedness and helplessness.

For a moment some of them thought that the end had come and that the Power of Darkness had cashed in their bond, claiming them for its own upon this last Walpurgis-Nacht. Others, less deeply imbued with the mysteries of the Evil cult, forgot the terrible entity whose powers they had come to beg in return for their homage and, reverting to their normal thoughts, saw themselves caught and ruined in some ghastly scandal, believing those blinding shafts of light from the great Hispano to herald the coming of the police.

As the grotesque nude figures scattered with shrieks of terror the car bounded from ridge to ridge heading straight for the monstrous Goat. When the lights fell upon it Rex feared for an instant that the, malefic rays which streamed from its baleful eyes would overcome the headlights of the car. The lamps flickered and dimmed, but as the Duke clung to the wheel he was concentrating with all the power of his mind upon visualising the horseshoe surmounted by a cross in silver light just above the centre of his forehead, setting the symbol in his aura and, at the same time, repeating the lines of the Ninety-first Psalm which is immensely powerful against all evil manifestations.

‘Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the most High: shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in Him will I trust.

For He shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence.’

From the time Rex switched on the headlights, it was only a matter of seconds before the big car hurtled forward like a living thing right on to the ground where the Sabbat was being held.

Rex, clinging to the coachwork, and also visualising that symbol which De Richleau had impressed so strongly upon him, leaned from the step of the car and, with all his force, threw the ivory crucifix straight in the terrible face of the monstrous beast.

The Duke swerved the car to avoid the throne and Simon who, alone of all the Satanists, remained standing but apparently utterly unconscious of what was happening.

The blue flames of the black candles set upon the hellish altar went out as though quenched by some invisible hand. The lights of the car regained their full brilliance, and once again they heard the terrible screaming neigh which seemed to echo over the desolate plain for miles around as the crucifix, shining white in the glow of the headlights, passed through the face of the Goat.

A horrible stench of burning flesh, mingled with the choking odour from the sulphur candles, filled the air like some poisonous gas, but there was no time to think or analyse sensations. After that piercing screech, the brute upon the rocks disappeared. At the same instant Rex grabbed Simon by the neck and hauled him bodily on to the step of the car as it charged the farther slope of the hollow.

Jolting and bouncing it breasted the rise, hesitated for the fraction of a second upon the brink as though some awful power was striving to draw it backwards. But the Duke threw the gear lever into low, and they lurched forward again on to level ground.

Rex, meanwhile, had flung open the door at the back and dragged Simon inside where he collapsed on the floor in a senseless heap. Instinctively, although De Richleau had warned him not to do so, he glanced out of the back window down into the valley where they had witnessed such terrible things, but it lay dark, silent, and seemingly deserted.

The car was travelling now at a better pace, although De Richleau did not dare to use the full power of his engine for fear that they should strike a sudden dip or turn over in some hidden gully.

For a mile they raced north-eastward while, without ceasing, the Duke muttered to himself those protective lines:

‘He shall defend thee under His wings, and thou shalt be safe under His feathers: His faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day; For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.’

Then to his joy, they struck a track at right-angles, and he turned along it to the north-westward, slipping into top gear. The car bounded forward and seemed to fly as though in truth all the devils of Hell were unleashed behind it in pursuit. Swerving, jolting, and bounding across the grassy ruts, they covered live miles in twice as many minutes until they came upon the Lavington-Westbury road.

Even then De Richleau would not slow down but, turning in the direction of London, roared on, swerving from bend to bend with utter disregard for danger in his fear of the greater danger that lay behind.

They flashed through Earlstoke, Market Lavington and then Easterton, where, unseen by them, the Blue Rolls lay just off the road in a ditch where Tanith had crashed it a few hours before; then Bushall, Upavon, Ludgershall and so to Andover, having practically completed a circuit of the Plain. Here at last, at the entrance of the town, the Duke brought the car to a halt and turned in his seat to look at Rex.

‘How is he?’ he asked.

‘About all-in I reckon. He is as cold as blazes, and he hasn’t fluttered an eyelid since I hauled him into the car. My God! what a ghastly business.’

‘Grim, wasn’t it!’ De Richleau for once was looking more than his age. His grey face was lined and heavy pouches seemed to have developed beneath his piercing eyes. His shoulders were hunched as he leaned for a moment apparently exhausted over the wheel. Then he pulled himself together with a jerk and thrusting his hand in his pocket, took out a flask which he passed to Rex.

‘Give him some of this—as much as you can get him to swallow. It may help to pull him round.’

Rex turned to where Simon lay hunched up beneath the car rugs on the back seat beside him and forcing open his mouth poured a good portion of the old brandy into it.

Simon choked suddenly, gasped, and jerked up his head. His eyes flickered open and he stared at Rex, but there was no recognition in them. Then his lids closed again and his head fell backwards on the seat.

‘Well, he’s alive, thank God,’ murmured Rex. ‘While you’ve been driving like a maniac I’ve been scared that we had lost poor Simon for good and all. But now we’d better get him back to London or to the nearest doctor just as soon as we can.’

‘I daren’t,’ De Richleau’s eyes were full of a desperate anxiety. ‘That devilish mob will have recovered themselves and are probably back at the house near Chilbury by now. They will be plotting something against us you may be certain.’

‘You mean that as Mocata knows your flat he will concentrate on it to get Simon back—just as he did before?’

‘Worse. I doubt if they’d ever let us reach it.’

‘Oh, shucks!’ Rex frowned impatiently. ‘How’re they going to stop us?’

‘They can control all the meaner things—bats, snakes, rats, foxes, owls—as well as cats and certain breeds of dog like the Wolfhound and Alsatian. If one of those dashed beneath the wheels of the car when we were going at any speed it might turn over. Besides, within certain limits they can control the elements, so they could ensure a dense local fog surrounding us the whole way, and every mile of it we’d be facing the risk of another car that hadn’t seen our lights smashing into us head on at full speed. If they combine the whole of their strength for ill it’s a certainty they’ll be able to bring about some terrible accident before we can cover the seventy miles to London. Remember too, this is still Walpurgis-Nacht and every force of evil that is abroad will be leagued against us. For every moment until dawn we three remain in the direst peril.’

CHAPTER XIX

THE ANCIENT SANCTUARY

Well we can’t stay here,’ Rex protested.

‘I know, and we’ve got to find some sanctuary where we can keep Simon safe until morning.’ ‘How about a church?’

‘Yes, if we could find one that is open. But they will all be locked up at this hour.’

‘Couldn’t we get some local parson out of bed?’ ‘If I knew one anywhere near here I’d chance it, but how can we possibly expect a stranger to believe the story that we should have to tell? He would think us madmen, or probably that it was a plot to rob his church. But wait a moment! By Jove, I’ve got it! We’ll take him to the oldest cathedral in Britain and one that is open to the skies.’ With a sudden chuckle of relief, De Richleau set the car in motion again and began to reverse it. ‘Surely you’re not going back?’ Rex asked anxiously. ‘Only three miles to the fork-roads at Weyhill, then down to Amesbury.’

‘Well, don’t you call that going back?’

‘Perhaps, but I mean to take him to Stonehenge. If we can reach it, we shall be in safety, even though it is no more than a dozen miles from Chilbury.’

Once more the car rocked along the road across those grassy, barren slopes, cleaving the silent darkness of the night with its great arced headlights.

Twenty minutes later they passed again through the twisting streets of Amesbury, now silent and shuttered while its inhabitants slept, not even dreaming of the terrible battle which was being fought out that night between the Power of Light and the Power of Darkness, so near to them in actuality and yet so remote to the teeming life of everyday modern England.

A mile outside the town, they ran up the slope to the wire fence which rings in the Neolithic monument, Stonehenge. The Duke drove the car into the deserted car park beside the road and there they left it. Rex carried Simon, wrapped in De Richleau’s great-coat and the car rug, while the Duke followed him through the wire with the suitcase containing his protective impedimenta.

As they staggered over the grass, the vast monoliths of the ancient place of worship stood out against the skyline—the timeless symbols of a forgotten cult that ruled Britain, before the Romans came to bring more decorative and more human gods.

They passed the outer circle of great stone uprights upon some of which the lintels forming them into a ring of arches still remain. Then De Richleau led the way between the mighty chunks of fallen masonry to where, beside the two great trilithons, the sandstone altar lies half buried beneath the remnants of the central arch.

At a gesture from the Duke, Rex laid Simon, still unconscious, upon it. Then he looked up doubtfully. ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing, but I’ve always heard that the Druids, who built this place, were a pretty grim lot. Didn’t they sacrifice virgins on this stone and practise all sorts of pagan rites? I should have thought this place would be more sacred to the Power of Evil than the Power of Good.’

‘Don’t worry, Rex,’ De Richleau smiled in the darkness. ‘It is true that the Druids performed sacrifices, but they were sun-worshippers. At the summer solstice, the sun rises over the hill-top there, shedding its first beam of light directly through the arch on to this altar stone. This place is one of the most hallowed spots in all Europe because countless thousands of long-dead men and women have worshipped here—calling upon the Power of Light to protect them from the evil things that go in darkness —and the vibrations of their souls are about us now making a sure buttress and protection until the coming of the dawn.’

With gentle hands, they set about a more careful examination of Simon. His body was still terribly cold but they found that, except for where Rex had clawed at his neck, he had suffered no physical injury.

‘What do you figure to do now?’ Rex asked as the Duke opened his suitcase.

‘Exorcise him in due form, in order to try and drive out any evil spirit by which he may be possessed.’

‘Like the Roman Catholic priests used to do in the Middle Ages.’

‘As they still do,’ De Richleau answered soberly.

‘What—in these days?’

‘Yes. Don’t you remember the case of Helene Poirier who died only in 1914. She suffered from such terrible demoniacal possession that many of the most learned priests in France, including Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, and Monsieur Mallet, Superior of the Grand Seminary, had to be called in before, with God’s grace, she could be freed from the evil spirit which controlled her.’

‘I didn’t think the Church admitted the existence of such things as witchcraft and black magic’

‘Then you are very ignorant, my friend. I do not know the official views of others, but the Roman Church, whose authority comes unbroken over nineteen centuries from the time when Our Lord made St. Peter his vice-regent on earth, has ever admitted the existence of the evil power. Why else should they have issued so many ordinances against it, or at the present time so unhesitatingly condemn all spiritualistic practices which they regard as the modern counterparts of necromancy, by which Hell’s emissaries seek to lure weak, foolish and trusting people into their net.’

‘I can’t agree to that,’ Rex demurred. ‘I know a number of Spiritualists, men and women of the utmost rectitude.’

‘Perhaps.’ De Richleau was arranging Simon’s limp body. ‘They are entitled to their opinion and he who thinks rightly lives rightly. No doubt their high principles act as a protective barrier between them and the more dangerous entities of the spirit world. However, for the weak-minded and mentally frail such practices hold the gravest peril. Look at the Bavarian family of eleven people, all of who went out of their minds after a Spiritualistic seance in 1921. The case was fully reported by the Press at the time and I could give you a dozen similar examples, all attributable to Diabolic possession, of course. In fact, according to the Roman Church, there is no phenomenon of modern Spiritism which cannot be paralleled in the records of old witch trials.’

‘According to them, maybe, but Simon’s not a Catholic’

‘No matter, there is nothing to prevent a member of the Roman Church asking Divine aid for any man whatever his race or creed. Fortunately I was baptised a Catholic and, although I may not be a good one, I believe that with the grace of God, power will be granted to me this night to help our poor friend.

‘Kneel down now and pray silently, for all prayers are good if the heart is earnest and perhaps those of the Church of England more efficacious than others since we are now in the English countryside. It is for that reason I recite certain psalms from the book of Common Prayer. But be ready to hold him if he leaps up for, if he is possessed, the Demon within him will fight like a maniac.’

De Richleau took up the holy water and sprinkled a few drops on Simon’s forehead. They remained there a moment and then trickled slowly down his drawn, furrowed face. But he remained corpse-like and still.

‘May the Lord be praised,’ murmured the Duke.

‘What is it?’ breathed Rex.

‘He is not actually possessed. If he were the holy water would have scalded him like boiling oil, and at its touch the Demon would have screamed like a hell cat.’

‘What now then?’

‘He still reeks of evil so I must employ the banishing ritual to purge the atmosphere about him and do all things possible to protect him from Mocata’s influence. Then we will see if this coma shows any signs of lifting.’

The Duke produced a crutch of Rowan wood then proceeded to certain curious and complicated rites; consisting largely in stroking Simon’s limbs with a brushing motion towards the feet; the repetition of many Latin formulas with long intervals in which, led by the Duke, the two men knelt to pray beside their friend.

Simon was annointed with holy water and with holy oil. The gesture of Horus was made to the north, to the south, to the east and to the west. The palms of his hands were sprinkled and the soles of his feet. Asafoetida grass was tied round his wrists and his ankles. An orb with the cross upon it was placed in his right hand, and a phial of quicksilver between his lips. A chain of garlic flowers was hung about his neck, and the sacred oil placed in a cross upon his forehead. Each action upon him was preceded by prayer, concentration of thought, and invocation to the archangels, the high beings of Light, and to his own higher consciousness.

At last, after an hour, all had been accomplished in accordance with the ancient lore and De Richleau examined Simon again. He was warmer now and the ugly lines of distress and terror had faded from his face. He seemed to have passed out of his dead faint into a natural sleep and was breathing regularly.

‘I think that with God’s help we have saved him,’ declared the Duke. ‘He looks almost normal now, but we had best wait until he wakes of his own accord; I can do no more, so we will rest for a little.’

Rex passed his hand wearily across his eyes as De Richleau sank down beside him. ‘I’ll say I need it. Would it be … er … sacrilegious or anything if I had a smoke?’

‘Of course not.’ De Richleau drew out his cigars. ‘Have a Hoyo. It is thoughts, not formalities, which make the atmosphere of good or evil.’

For a little while the two friends sat silent, the points of their cigars glowing faintly in the darkness until a pale greyness in the eastern sky made clearer the ghostly outlines of the great oblong stones towering at varying angles to twenty feet above their heads.

‘What a strange place this is,’ Rex murmured. ‘How old do you suppose it to be?’

‘About four thousand years.’

‘As old as that, eh?’

‘Yes, but that is young compared with the Pyramids and, beside them, for architecture and scientific alignment, this thing is a primitive toy.’

‘Those ancient Britons must have been a whole heap cleverer than we give them credit for all the same, to get these great blocks of stone set up. It would tax all the resources of our modern engineers, I reckon. Some of them must weigh a hundred tons apiece.’

De Richleau nodded. ‘Only the piety of many thousand willing hands, hauling on skin ropes, and manipulating vast levers could have accomplished it, but what is even more remarkable is that the foreign stones were transported from a quarry nearly two hundred miles from here.’

‘What do you mean by “foreign stones”?’

‘The stones which form the inner ring and the inner horseshoe are called so because they were brought from a great distance — a place in Pembrokeshire, I think.’

‘Horseshoe,’ Rex repeated with a puzzled look. ‘I thought all the stones were placed in rings.’

‘It is hardly discernible in the ruins now but originally this great temple consisted of an outer ring formed of big arches, then a concentric circle of smaller uprights. Inside that, five great separate trilithons or arches, two of which you can see still standing, set in the form of a horseshoe and then another horseshoe of the smaller stones.’

‘The Druids used the horseshoe, too, then?’

‘Certainly. As I have told you, it is a most potent symbol indissolubly connected with the Power of Light. Hence my use of it in connection with the swastika and the cross.’

They fell silent again for some time, then Simon stirred beside them and they both stood up. He slowly turned over and looked about him with dull eyes until he recognised his friends, and asked in a stifled voice where he was.

Without answering, De Richleau drew him down between Rex and himself on to his knees, and proceeded to give thanks for his restoration. ‘Repeat after me,’ he said, ‘the words of the Fifty-first Psalm.’

‘Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness: according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences.

Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness: and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my faults and my sin is ever before me.’

To the end of the beautiful penitent appeal the Duke read in a solemn voice from the Prayer Book by the aid of a little torch while the others repeated verse by verse after him. Then all three stood up and began at last to talk in their normal voices.

De Richleau explained what had taken place, and Simon sat upon the altar-stone weeping like a child as now, with a clear brain, he began at last to understand the terrible peril from which his friends had rescued him.

He remembered the party which had been given at his house and that the Duke had hypnotised him in Curzon Street. After that—nothing, until he found himself present in the Sabbat which had been held that night, and even then he could only see vague pictures of it, as though he had not participated in it himself, but watched the whole of the ghastly proceedings from a distance; horrified to the last degree to see a figure that seemed to be himself taking part in those abominable ceremonies, yet mentally chained and powerless to intervene or stop that body, so curiously like his own, participating in that godless scene of debauchery.

Dawn was now breaking in the eastern sky, as De Richleau placed his arm affectionately round Simon’s shoulders. ‘Don’t take it to heart so, my friend,’ he said kindly. ‘For the moment at least you have been spared, and praise be to God you are ‘still sane, which is more than I dared to hope for when we got you here.’

Simon nodded. ‘I know—I’ve been lucky,’ he said soberly.

‘But am I really free—for good ? I’m afraid Mocata will try and get me back somehow.’

‘Now we’re together again you needn’t worry,’ Rex grinned. ‘If the three of us can’t fight this horror and win out we’re not the men I always thought we were.’

‘Yes,’ Simon agreed, a little doubtfully. ‘But the trouble is that I was born at a time when certain stars were in conjunction, so in a way I’m the key to a ritual which Mocata’s set his heart on performing.’

The invocation to Saturn coupled with Mars,’ the Duke put in.

‘That’s it, and he can’t accomplish it without me. That’s why I’m scared he’ll exercise every incantation in the book to drag me back to him despite myself.’

‘Isn’t that danger over? Surely it should have been done two nights ago, but we managed to prevent it then.’

‘Ner,’ Simon used his favourite negative with a little wriggle of his bird-like head. ‘That would have been the most suitable time of all, but the ritual can be performed with a reasonable prospect of success any night while the two planets remain in the same house of the Zodiac’

‘Then the longer we can keep you out of Mocata’s clutches, the less chance he stands of pulling it off as the two planets get farther apart,’ Rex commented.

De Richleau sighed. His face looked grey and haggard in the early morning light. ‘In that case,’ he said slowly, ‘Mocata will exert his whole strength when twilight comes again, and we shall have to fight with our backs to the wall throughout thus coming night.’

CHAPTER XX

THE FOUR HORSEMEN

Now that the sun was up Rex’s resilient spirit reasserted itself. ‘Time enough to worry about tonight when we are through today,’ he declared cheerfully. ‘What we need most just now is a good hot breakfast.’

The Duke smiled. ‘I thoroughly agree, and in any case we can’t stay here much longer. While we feed we’ll discuss the safest place to which we can take Simon.’

‘We can’t take him anywhere at the moment,’ Rex grinned. ‘Not as he is—with only the car rug and your great-coat to cover his birthday suit.’

Simon tittered into his hand. It was the gesture which both his friends knew so well, and which it delighted them to see again. ‘I must look pretty comic as I am,’ he chuckled. ‘And it’s chilly too. One of you had better try and raise me a suit of clothes.’

‘You take the car, Rex,’ said the Duke, ‘and drive into Amesbury. Knock up the first clothes dealer you can find and buy him an outfit. Have you enough money?’

‘Plenty. I was going down to Derby yesterday for the first Spring Race Meeting if this business hadn’t cropped up overnight. So I’d drawn fifty the day before.’

‘Good,’ the Duke nodded. ‘We shan’t move from here until you return.’ Then, as Rex strode away across the grass to the Hispano, which was now visible where they had left it in the car-park, he turned to Simon:

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘while Rex is gone. How did you ever get drawn into this terrible business?’

Simon smiled. ‘Well,’ he said hesitantly, ‘it may seem a queer thing to say, but you are partly responsible yourself.’

‘I!’ exclaimed the Duke. ‘What the deuce do you mean?’

‘I’m not blaming you, of course, in the least, but do you remember that long chat we had when we were both down at Cardinals Folly for Christmas? It started by your telling us about the old Alchemists and how they used to make gold out of base metals.’

De Richleau nodded. ‘Yes, and you threw doubt upon my statement that the feat had actually been performed. I cited the case of the scientist Helvetius, I remember, who was bitterly opposed to the pretentions of the Alchemists, but who, when he was visited by one at the Hague in December 1666, managed to secrete a little of the reddish powder which the man showed him under his finger-nail, and afterwards succeeded in transmuting a small amount of lead into gold with it. But you would not believe me, although I assured you, that no less a person than Spinoza verified the experiment at the time.’

‘That’s right,’ said Simon. ‘Well, I was sceptical but interested, so I took the trouble to check up as far as possible on all you’d said. It was Spinoza’s testimony that impressed me because he was so very sane and unbiased.’

‘So was Helvetius himself for that matter.’

‘I know. Anyhow, I dug up the fact that Povelius, the chief tester of the Dutch Mint, assayed the metal seven times with all the leading goldsmiths at the Hague and they unanimously pronounced it to be pure gold. Of course there was a possibility that Helvetius deceived them by submitting a piece of gold obtained through the ordinary channels, but it hardly seemed likely that he practised deliberate fraud, because he had no motive. He had always declared his disbelief in alchemy and he couldn’t make any more because he hadn’t got the powder—so there was no question of his trying to float a bogus company on the experiment. He couldn’t even claim any scientific kudos from it either because he frankly admitted that he had stolen the powder from the stranger who showed it to him. After that I went into the experiments of Berigord de Pisa and Van Helmont.’

‘And what did you think of those?’ asked the Duke, his lined face showing quick interest in the early morning light.

‘They shook my unbelief a lot. Van Helmont was the greatest chemist of his time, and like Helvetius, he’d always said the idea of transmuting base metals into gold was sheer nonsense until a stranger gave him a little of that mysterious powder with which he, too, performed the experiment successfully; and he again had no personal axe to grind.’

‘There are plenty of other cases as well,’ remarked the Duke. ‘Raymond Lully made gold for King Edward III of England, and George Ripley gave Ł100,000 of alchemical gold to the Knights of Rhodes. The Emperor Augustus of Saxony left 17,000,000 Rix dollars and Pope John XXII of Avignon 25,000,000 florins, sums which were positively gigantic for those days. Both were poor men with slender revenues which could not have accounted in a hundred years for such fortunes. But both were alchemists, and transmutation is the only possible explanation of the almost fabulous treasure which was actually found in their coffers after their deaths.’

Simon nodded. ‘I know. And if one rejects the sworn evidence of men like Spinoza and Van Helmont, why should one believe the people who say they can measure the distance to the stars, or the scientists of the last century who produced electrical phenomena?’

‘The difference is that the mass mind will not accept scientific truths unless they can be demonstrated freely and harnessed to the public good. Everyone accepts the miracle that sulphur can be converted into fire because they see it happen twenty times a day and we all carry a box of matches in our pockets, but if it had been kept as a jealously guarded secret by a small number of initiates, the public would still regard it as impossible. And that, you see, is precisely the position of the alchemist.

‘He stands apart from the world and is indifferent to it. To succeed in the Great Work he must be absolutely pure, and to such men gold is dross. In most cases he makes only sufficient to supply his modest needs and refuses to pass on his secret to the profane; but that does not necessarily mean that he is a fraud and a liar. The theory that all matter is composed of atoms, molecules and electrons in varying states is generally accepted now. Milk can be made as hard as concrete by the new scientific process, glass into women’s dresses, wood and human flesh decay into a very similar dust, iron turns to rust, and crystals are known to grow although they are a type of stone. Even diamonds can be made synthetically.’

‘Of course,’ Simon agreed, with his old eagerness, so absorbed now in the discussion as to be apparently oblivious of his surroundings. ‘And as far as metals are concerned, they are all composed of sulphur and mercury and can be condensed or materialised by means of a salt. Only the varying proportions of those three Principals account for the difference between them. Metals are the fruits of mineral nature, and the baser ones are still unripe because the sulphur and mercury had no time to combine in the right proportions before they solidified. This powder, or the Philosophers’ Stone as they call it, is a ferment that forces on the original process of Nature and ripens the base metals into gold.’

‘That is so. But do you mean to tell me that you have been experimenting yourself?’

‘Ner,’ Simon shook his narrow head. ‘I soon found out that to do so would mean a lifetime of aestheticism and then perhaps failure after all. It is hardly in my line to become a “Puffer”. Besides it’s obvious that transmutation in its higher sense is the supreme mystery of turning Matter into Light. Metals are like men, the baser corresponding to the once born, and both gradually become purified—metals by geological upheavals—men by successive reincarnations, and the part played by the secret agent which hurries lead to gold is the counterpart of esoteric initiation which lifts the spirit towards light.’

‘Was that your aim then?’

‘To some extent. You know how one thing leads to another. I discovered that the whole business is bound up with the Quabalah so, being a Jew, I began to study the esoteric doctrine of my own people.’

De Richleau nodded. ‘And very interesting you found it, I don’t doubt.’

‘Yes, it took a bit of getting into, but after I’d tackled a certain amount of the profane literature to get a grounding, I read the Sepher Ha Zoher, the Sepher Jetyjrah and some of the Midra-schim. Then I began to see a little daylight.’

‘In fact you began to believe, like most people who have really read considerably and had a wide experience of life, that our western scientists have only been advancing in one direction and that we have even lost the knowledge of many things with which the wise men of ancient times were well acquainted.’

‘That’s so,’ Simon smiled again. ‘I’ve always been a complete sceptic. But once I began to burrow beneath the surface I found such a mass of evidence that I could no longer doubt the existence of strange hidden forces which can be chained and utilised if one only knows the way.’

‘Yes. And plenty of people still interest themselves in these questions and use the Quabalah to promote their own well-being and the general good. But where does Mocata come into all this?’

Simon shuddered slightly at the name and drew the car rug more closely about his shoulders. ‘I met him in Paris,’ he said, ‘at the house of a French banker with whom I’ve sometimes done business.’

‘Castelnau!’ exclaimed the Duke. ‘The man with the jagged ear. I knew last night that I had seen that ear somewhere before, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall where.’

Simon nodded quickly. ‘That’s right—Castelnau. Well, I met Mocata at his place, and I don’t quite know how it started, but the conversation drifted round to the Quabalah and, as I had been soaking myself in it at the time, I was naturally interested. He said he had a lot of books upon it and suggested that I might like to visit the house where he was staying and have a look through them. Of course I did. Then he told me that he was conducting an experiment in Magic the following night, and asked if I would care to be present.’

‘I see. That’s how the trouble started.’

‘Yes. The experiment was quite a harmless affair. He made certain ritual conjurations with the four elements, Fire, Air, Water and Earth, then told me to look into a mirror with him. It was an old Venetian piece, a bit spotted at the back but otherwise quite ordinary you know. As I watched, it clouded over with a sort of mist, then when it cleared again I could no longer see my reflection in it, but a sheet of newspaper instead. It was the financial page of Le Temps giving all the quotations of the Paris Bourse, which sounds pretty prosaic I suppose, but the queer part is that this issue was dated three days ahead.’

De Richleau stroked his lean face with his slender fingers. ‘I saw a similar demonstration in Cairo once,’ he commented gravely. ‘But on that occasion it was the name of the new Commander-in-Chief, who had only been appointed by the War Office in London that afternoon, which appeared in the mirror. You took a note of some of the Bourse quotations I suppose?’

‘Um. The list wasn’t visible for more than ten seconds then the mirror clouded over again and went back to its normal state, but that was quite long enough for me to memorise the stocks I was interested in, and when I checked up afterwards they were right to a fraction.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Mocata offered to instruct me in the attainment of the knowledge and conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel as the first step on the road to obtaining similar powers myself.’

‘My poor Simon!’ The Duke made an unhappy grimace. ‘You are not the first to be trapped by a Brother of the Left Hand Path who is recruiting for the Devil by such a promise. If you had known more of Magic you would have realised that it is proper to pass through the six stages of Probationer, Neophyte, Zelator, Practicus, Philosophus and Dominus Liminis before, as an Adept Inferior after many years of study and experience, you would be qualified to take the risk of attempting to pass the Abyss.

Besides, there are no precise rules for attaining the knowledge and conversation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel. It is a thing which each man must work out for himself and no other can help one to it. Mocata invoked your Evil Angel, of course, to act a blasphemous impersonation while your Holy Guardian wept impotent tears to see the terrible danger into which you were being drawn.’

‘I suppose so, although, of course, I couldn’t know that at the time. Anyhow, I had to go back to London a few days later, and I was so impressed by that time that I asked Mocata to let me know directly he arrived, because he spoke of coming over. He turned up a fortnight later and rang me up at once to urge me to unload a lot of stock that he knew I was carrying. I had faith in it myself but in view of what I’d seen in his mirror I took his tip and saved myself quite a packet, because the market broke almost immediately after.’

‘Was that when you asked him to go and live with you?’ inquired the Duke.

‘Yes. I suggested that he should stay with me while he was in London because he had no suitable place in which to practise his evocations at his hotel. He moved over to St. John’s Wood then and after that we used to sit up together in the observatory pretty well every night. That’s why I saw so little of you during that time. But the results were extraordinary—utterly amazing.’

‘He gave you more information which governed your financial transactions, I suppose.’

‘Yes, but more than that. He foretold the whole of the Stravinsky scandal. I’m not a poor man as you know, but if I hadn’t been forewarned about that, it would have darn nearly broken me. As it was, I cleared every single share in the dud companies before the storm broke and got out with an immense profit.’

‘By that time you had begun to dabble in Black Magic I imagine?’

Simon’s dark eyes flickered away from the Duke’s for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Just a bit. He asked me to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards one night, and I was a bit unhappy about it but… well, I did. He said that since I wasn’t a Christian anyhow, no harm could come to me from it.’

‘It is horribly potent all the same,’ the Duke commented.

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Simon miserably. ‘But Mocata is so devilish glib and according to him there is no such thing as Black Magic anyhow. The harnessing of supernatural powers to one’s will is just Magic—neither black nor white, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Tell me about this man.’

‘Oh, he’s about fifty, I suppose, bald-headed, with curious light blue eyes and a paunch that would rival Dom Gorenflot’s.’

‘I know,’ agreed the Duke impatiently. ‘I’ve seen him. But I mean his personality, not his appearance.’

‘Of course, I forgot,’ Simon apologised. ‘You know for weeks now I hardly know what I’ve been doing. It’s almost as though I had been dreaming the whole time. But about Mocata: he possesses extraordinary force of character, and he can be the most charming person when he likes. He’s clever of course— amazingly so, and seems to have read pretty well every book that one can think of. It’s extraordinary, too, what a fascination he can exercise over women. I know half a dozen who are simply “bats” about him.’

‘What can you tell me of his history?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid. His Christian name is Damien and he is a Frenchman by nationality, but his mother was Irish. He was educated for the Church. In fact, he actually took Orders, but finding the life of a priest did not suit him, he chucked it up.’

De Richleau nodded. ‘I thought as much. Only an ordained priest can practise the Black Mass, and since he is so powerful an adept of the Left Hand Path, it was pretty certain that he was a renegade priest of the Roman Church. But what more can you tell me? Every scrap of information which you have may help us in our fight, because you must remember, Simon, that you have only achieved a very temporary security. The battle will begin again when he exercises his dominance over you to call you back.’

Simon shifted his position on the stones and then replied thoughtfully. ‘He does the most lovely needlework, petit point and that sort of thing you know, and he’s terribly fastidious about keeping his plump little hands scrupulously clean. As a companion he is delightful to be with except that he will smother himself in expensive perfumes and is as greedy as a schoolboy about sweets. He had huge boxes of fondants, crystallised fruits and marzipan sent over from Paris twice a week when he was at St. John’s Wood.

‘Ordinarily he was perfectly normal and his manners were charming, but now and again he used to get irritable fits. They came on about once a month and after he had been boiling up for twenty-four hours, he used to clear out for a couple of days and nights. I don’t know where he used to go to at those times, but I ran into him one morning early, when he had just returned from one of these bouts, and he was in a shocking state : filthy dirty, a two days’ growth of beard on his chin, his clothes all torn and absolutely stinking of drink. It looked to me as if he hadn’t been to bed at all the whole time but had been wallowing in every sort of debauchery down in the slums of the East End.

‘He is quite an exceptional hypnotist, of course, and keeps himself in touch with what is going on in Paris, Berlin, New York and a dozen other places by throwing various women, who used to come and visit him regularly, into a trance. One of them wasp a girl called Tanith, a perfectly lovely creature. You may have seen her at the party, and he says she is by far the best medium he’s ever had. He can use her almost like a telephone and plug in right away to whatever he wants to know about. Whereas with the others there are very often hitches and delays.’

‘You let him hypnotise you, too, of course?’

‘Yes, in order to get these financial results.’

‘I thought as much,’ De Richleau nodded. ‘And after you had allowed him to do it willingly for some little time he was able to block out your own mentality entirely and govern your every thought. That’s why you’ve failed to realise what’s been going on. It is just as though he’d been keeping you drugged the whole time.’

‘Um,’ Simon agreed miserably. ‘It makes me positively sick to think of it, but I suppose he has been gradually preparing me for this Ritual to Saturn which he meant to perform two nights ago and… .’ He broke off suddenly as Rex appeared between two of the great monoliths.

Grinning from ear to ear, Rex displayed his purchases for their inspection. A pair of grey flannel shorts, a khaki shirt, black and white check worsted stockings, a gaudy tie of a revolting magenta hue, a pair of waders, a cricket cap quartered in alternate triangular sections of orange and mauve, and a short, dark blue bicyclist’s cape.

‘Only things I could get,’ he volunteered cheerfully. ‘The people who run the local Co-op don’t live on the premises, so I had to knock up a sports outfitter.’

De Richleau sat back and roared with laughter while Simon fingered the queer assortment of garments doubtfully. ‘You’re joking Rex,’ he protested with a sheepish grin. ‘I can’t return to London in this get-up.’

‘We’re not going to London,’ the Duke announced. ‘But to Cardinals Folly.’

‘What—to Marie Lou’s?’ Rex looked at him sharply. ‘How did you come to get that idea–’

‘Something that Simon said just after you left us.’

Simon shook his head jerkily. ‘I don’t like it — not a little bit. I’d never forgive myself if I brought danger into their home.’

‘You will do as you’re told my friend,’ De Richleau’s voice brooked no further argument. ‘Richard and Marie Lou are the most mentally healthy couple I know. The atmosphere of their sane and happy household will be the very best protection we could find for you, and all of us are certain of a warm welcome. No harm will come to them if we exercise reasonable precautions, and the help of their right-thinking minds will give us the extra strength we need. Besides, they are about the only people to whom we can explain the whole situation without being taken for madmen. Now hurry up and array yourself like the champion of next year’s Olympic Games.’

With a shrug of his narrow shoulders Simon disappeared behind the stones while Rex added : ‘That’s right. I ordered ham and eggs to be got ready at the local inn and I’m mighty anxious to start in on them.’

‘Eggs and fruit,’ cut in the Duke, ‘but no ham for any of us. It is essential that we should avoid meat for the moment. If we are to retain our astral strength our physical bodies must undergo a semi-fast at least.’

Rex groaned. ‘Why, oh, why dear Simon, did you ever go hunting Talismen and let your friends in for this? When I went to Russia after the Shulimoff jewels and you came to get me out of trouble, at least it didn’t prevent your feeding decently when you had the chance.’

‘That reminds me,’ De Richleau threw over his shoulder in the direction where Simon was struggling into his queer garments. ‘What is this Talisman? Rex mentioned it last night.’

‘It’s the reason why Mocata is certain to make every effort to get possession of me again,’ Simon’s voice came back. ‘It is buried somewhere, and adepts of the Left Hand Path have been seeking it for centuries. It conveys almost limitless powers upon its possessor and Mocata has discovered that its whereabouts will be revealed if he can practise the ritual to Saturn in conjunction with Mars with someone who was born in a certain year at the hour of that conjunction. There can’t be many such, but for my sins I happen to be one, and even if he can find others they might not be suitable for various reasons.’

‘Yes, I realise that. But what is the Talisman?’

‘I don’t really know. Except for conducting my business on the lines suggested by Mocata, I don’t think my brain has been functioning at all in the last two months. But it’s called the Talisman of Set.’

‘What!’ The Duke sprang to his feet as Simon appeared grotesquely attired in his incongruous new clothes, his long knees protruding beneath the shorts, the absurd cricket cap set at a rakish angle on his head, and the cycling cloak flapping about his shoulders.

Rex dissolved into tears of laughter, but the Duke’s grim face quickly sobered his mirth.

‘The Talisman of Set,’ De Richleau repeated almost in a whisper.

‘Yes, it has something to do with four horsemen I think— but what on earth’s the matter?’ Simon’s big mouth fell open in dismay at the sight of the Duke’s horror-stricken eyes.

‘It has indeed! The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ De Richleau grated out. ‘War, Plague, Famine and Death. We all know what happened the last time those four terrible entities were unleashed to cloud the brains of statesmen and rulers.’

‘You’re referring to the Great War I take it,’ Rex said soberly.

‘Of course, and every adept knows that it started because one of the most terrible Satanists who ever lived found one of the secret gateways through which to release the four horsemen.’

‘I thought the Germans got a bit above themselves,’ Rex hazarded, ‘although it seems that lots of other folks were pretty well as much to blame !’

‘You fool!’ De Richleau suddenly swung upon him. ‘Germany did not make the war. It came out of Russia. It was Russia who instigated the murder at Sarajevo, Russia who backed Serbia to resist Austria’s demands, Russia who mobilised first and Russia who invaded Germany. The monk Rasputin was the Evil genius behind it all. He was the greatest Black Magician that the world has known for centuries. It was he who found one of the gateways through which to let forth the four horsemen that they might wallow in blood and destruction—and I know the Talisman of Set to be another. Europe is ripe now for any trouble and if they are loosed again, it will be final Armageddon. This is no longer a personal matter of protecting Simon. We’ve got to kill Mocata before he can secure the Talisman and prevent him plunging the world into another war.’

CHAPTER XXI

CARDINALS FOLLY

RICHARD Eaton read the telegram a second time.

Eat no lunch this vitally important Simon ill Rex and I bringing him down to you this afternoon Marie Lou must stop eating too kiss Fleur love all. De Richleau.

He passed one hand over the smooth brown hair which grew from his broad forehead in an attractive widow’s peak, and handed the wire to his wife with a puzzled smile.

‘This is from the Duke. Do you think he has gone crazy—or what?’

‘What, darling,’ said Marie Lou promptly. ‘Definitely what. If he stood on his handsome head in Piccadilly and the whole world told me he was crazy I should still maintain that dear old Greyeyes was quite sane.’

‘But really,’ Richard protested. ‘No lunch—and you told me that the shrimps from Morecambe Bay came in this morning. I was looking forward …’

‘My sweet!’ Marie Lou gave a delicious gurgle of laughter as she flung one arm round his neck and drew him down on the sofa beside her. ‘What a glutton you are. You simply live for your tummy.’

He nuzzled his head against her thick chestnut curls. ‘I don’t. I eat only in order to maintain sufficient strength to deal with you.’

‘Liar,’ she pushed him away suddenly. ‘There must be some reason for this extraordinary wire, and poor Simon ill too! What can it mean?’

‘God knows! Anyhow it seems that virtuous and upright wife orders preparation of rooms for guests while miserable worm husband goes down into dark, dirty cellar to select liquid sustenance for same.’ Richard paused for a moment. A wicked little smile hovered round his lips as he looked at Marie Lou curled up on the sofa with her slim legs tucked under her like a very lovely Persian kitten, then he added thoughtfully: ‘I think tonight perhaps we might give them a little of the Chateau Lafite ‘99.’

‘Don’t you dare,’ she cried, springing to her feet. ‘You know that it’s my favourite.’

‘Got you—got you,’ chanted Richard merrily. ‘Who’s a glutton now?’

‘You beast,’ she pouted deliciously, and for the thousandth time since he had brought her out of Russia her husband felt himself go a little giddy as his eyes rested on the perfection of her heart-shaped face, the delicately flushed cheeks and the heavy-lidded blue eyes. With a sudden movement, he jerked her to him and swinging her off her feet, picked her up in his arms.

‘Richard—put me down—stop.’ Her slightly husky voice rose to a higher note in a breathless gasp of protest.

‘Not until you kiss me.’

‘All right.’

He let her slide down to her feet, and although he was not a tall man, she was so diminutive that she had to stand on tiptoe to reach her arms round his neck.

‘There,’ she declared, a trifle breathlessly, after he had crushed her soft lips under his. ‘Now go and play with your bottles, but spare the Lafite, beloved. That’s our own special wine, and you mustn’t even give it to our dearest friends—unless it’s for Simon and he’s really ill.’

‘I won’t,’ he promised. ‘But whatever I give them, we shall all be tight if we’re not to be allowed to eat anything. I wish to goodness I knew what De Richleau is driving at.’

‘Something it is worth our while to take notice of, you may be certain. Greyeyes never does anything without a purpose. He’s a wily old fox if ever there was one in this world.’

‘Yes—wily’s the word,’ Richard agreed. ‘But it’s nearly lunch-time now, and I’m hungry. Surely we’re not going to take serious notice of this absurd telegram?’

‘Richard!’ Marie Lou had curled herself on the sofa again. But now she sat forward suddenly, almost closing her big eyes with their long curved lashes. ‘I do think we ought to do as he says, but I was looking round the strawberry house this morning.’

‘Oh, were you!’ He suppressed a smile. ‘And picking a few just to see how they were getting on, I don’t mind betting.’

‘Three,’ she answered gravely. ‘And they are ripening beautifully. Now if we took a little cream and a little sugar, it wouldn’t be cheating really to go and have another look at them instead of having lunch—would it?’

‘No,’ said Richard with equal gravity. ‘But we have an ancient custom in England when a girl takes a man to pick the first strawberries.’

‘But, darling, you have so many ancient customs and they nearly always end in kissing.’

‘Do you dislike them on that account?’

‘No.’ She smiled, extending a small, strong hand by which he pulled her to her feet. ‘I think that is one of the reasons why I enjoy so much having become an Englishwoman.’

They left Marie Lou’s comfortable little sitting-room and, pausing for a moment for her to pull on a pair of gum-boots which came almost up to her knees while Richard gave orders cancelling their luncheon, went out into the garden through the great octagonal library.

The house was a rambling old mansion, parts of which dated back to the thirteenth century, and the library, being one of the oldest portions of it, was sunk low into the ground so that they had to go up half a dozen steps from its french windows on to the long terrace which ran the whole length of the southern side of the house.

A grey stone balustrade patched with moss and lichens separated the terrace from the garden, and from the former two sets of steps led down to a broad, velvety lawn. An ancient cedar graced the green sward towards the east end of the mansion where the kitchen quarters lay, hiding the roofs of the glass-houses and the walled garden with its espaliered peach and nectarine trees.

At the bottom of the lawn tall yew hedges shut in the outer circle of the maze, beyond which lay the rose garden and the swimming-pool. To the right, just visible from the library windows, a gravel walk separated the lawn from a gently sloping bank, called the Botticelli Garden. It was so named because in spring it had all the beauty of the Italian master’s paintings. Dwarf trees of apple, plum and cherry, standing no more than six feet high and separated by ten yards or more from each other, stood covered with white and pink blossom while, rising from the grass up the shelving bank, clumps of polyanthus, pheasant’s-eye narcissus, forget-me-nots and daffodils were planted one to the square yard.

This spring garden was in full bloom now and the effect of the bright colours against the delicate green of the young grass was almost incredibly lovely. To walk up and down that two hundred yard stretch of green starred by its many-hued clumps of flowers with Richard beside her was, Marie Lou thought— sometimes with a little feeling of anxiety that her present happiness was too great to last—as near to Heaven as she would ever get. Yet she spent even more time in the long walk that lay beyond it, for that was her own, in which the head gardener was never allowed to interfere. It consisted of two glorious herbaceous borders rising to steep hedges on either side, and ending at an old sundial beyond which lay the pond garden, modelled from that at Hampton Court, sinking in rectangular stages to a pool where, later in the year, blue lotus flower sand white water-lilies floated serenely in the sunshine.

As they came out on to the terrace, there were shrieks of ‘Mummy—Mummy’, and a diminutive copy of Marie Lou dressed in a Russian peasant costume with wide puffed sleeves of lawn and a slashed vest of colourful embroidery threaded with gold, came hurtling across the grass. Her mother and father went down the steps of the terrace to meet her, and as she arrived like a small whirlwind Richard swung her up shoulder high in his arms.

‘What is it Fleur d’amour?’ he asked, with simulated concern, calling her by the nick-name that he had invented for her. ‘Have you crashed the scooter again or is it that Nanny’s been a wicked girl today?’

‘No—no,’ the child cried, her blue eyes, seeming enormous in that tiny face opened wide with concern. ‘Jim’s hurted hisself.’

‘Has he?’ Richard put her down. ‘Poor Jim. We must see about this.’

‘He’s hurted bad,’ Fleur went on, tugging impulsively at her mother’s skirt. ‘He’s cutted hisself on his magic sword.’

‘Dear me,’ Marie Lou ran her fingers through Fleur’s dark curls. She knew that by ‘magic sword’ Fleur meant the gardener’s scythe, for Richard always insisted that the lawn of Cardinals Folly was too old and too fine to be ruined by a mowing machine, and maintained the ancient practice of having it scythe-cut. ‘Where is he now, my sweet?’

‘Nanny binded him up and I helped a lot. Then he went wound to the kitchen.’

‘And you weren’t frightened of the blood?’ Richard asked with interest.

Fleur shook her curly head. ‘No. Fleur’s not to be frightened of anyfink, Mummy says. Why would I be frightened of the blug?’

‘Silly people are sometimes,’ her father replied. ‘But not people who know things like Mummy and you and I.’

At that moment Fleur’s nurse joined them. She had heard the last part of the conversation. ‘It’s nothing serious, Madam,’ she assured Marie Lou. ‘Jim was sharpening, his scythe and the hone slipped, but he only cut his finger.’

‘But fink if he can’t work,’ Fleur interjected in a high treble.

‘Why?’ asked her father gravely.

‘He’s poor,’ announced the child after a solemn interval for deep thought. ‘He-has-to-work-to-keep-his-children. So if he can’t work, he’ll be in a muddle—won’t he?’

Richard and Marie Lou exchanged a smiling glance as Simon’s expression for any sort of trouble came so glibly to the child’s lips.

‘Yes, that’s a serious matter,’ her father agreed gravely. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

‘We mus’ all give somefink,’ Fleur announced breathlessly.

‘Well, say I give him half a crown,’ Richard suggested. ‘How much do you think you can afford?’

‘I’ll give half a cwown too.’ Fleur was nothing if not generous.

‘But have you got it, Batuskha?’ inquired her mother.

Fleur thought for a bit, and then said doubtfully: ‘P’r’aps I haven’t. So I’ll give him a ha’penny instead.’

‘That’s splendid, darling, and I’ll contribute a shilling,’ Marie Lou declared. ‘That makes three shillings and sixpence halfpenny altogether, doesn’t it?’

‘But Nanny must give somefink,’ declared Fleur suddenly turning on her nurse who, smiling, said she thought she could manage fourpence.

‘There,’ laughed Richard. ‘Three and tenpence halfpenny! He’ll be a rich man for life, won’t he? Now you had better toddle in to lunch.’

This domestic crisis having been satisfactorily settled, Richard and Marie Lou strolled along beneath the balustraded terrace, past the low branches of the old cedar, and so to the hot-houses. Their butler, Malin, had just arrived with sugar and fresh cream, and for half an hour they made a merry meal of the early strawberries.

They had hardly finished when, to their surprise, since it was barely two o’clock, Malin returned to announce the arrival of their guests. So they hurried back to the house.

‘There they are,’ cried Marie Lou as the three friends came out from the tall windows of the drawing-room on to the terrace. ‘But, darling, look at Simon—they have gone mad,’

Well might the Eatons think so from Simon’s grotesque appearance in shorts, cycling cape and the absurd mauve and orange cricketing cap. Hurried greetings were soon exchanged and the whole party went back into the drawing-room.

‘Greyeyes, darling,’ Marie Lou exclaimed as she stood on tiptoe again to kiss De Richleau’s lean cheek. ‘We had your telegram and we are dying to know what it’s all about. Have our servants conspired to poison us or what?’

‘What,’ smiled De Richleau. ‘Definitely what, Princess. We have a very strange story to tell you, and I was most anxious you should avoid eating any meat for today at all events.’

Richard moved towards the bell. ‘Well, we’re not debarred from a glass of your favourite sherry, I trust.’

The Duke held up a restraining hand. ‘I’m afraid we are. None of us must touch alcohol under any circumstances at present.’

‘Good God!’ Richard exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean that—you can’t. You have gone crazy !’

‘I do,’ the Duke assured him with a smile. ‘Quite seriously.’

‘We’re in a muddle—a really nasty muddle,’ Simon added with a twisted grin.

‘So it appears,’ Richard laughed, a trifle uneasily. He was quite staggered by the strange appearance of his friends, the tense electric atmosphere which they had brought into the house with them, and the unnatural way in which they stood about—speaking only in short, jerky sentences.

He glanced at Rex, usually so full of gaiety, standing huge, gloomy and silent near the door, then he turned suddenly back to the Duke and demanded : ‘What is Simon doing in that absurd get-up? If it was the right season for it I should imagine that he was competing for the fool’s prize at the Three Arts’ Ball.’

‘I can quite understand your amazement,’ the Duke replied quietly, ‘but the truth is that Simon has been very seriously bewitched.’

‘It is obvious that something’s happened to him,’ agreed Richard curtly. ‘But don’t you think it would be better to stop fooling and tell us just what all this nonsense is about?’

‘I mean it,’ the Duke insisted. ‘He was sufficiently ill-advised to start dabbling in Black Magic a few months ago, and it’s only by the mercy of Providence that Rex and I were enabled to step in at a critical juncture with some hope of arresting the evil effects.’

Richard’s brown eyes held the Duke’s grey ones steadily. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I am far too fond of you ever to be rude intentionally, but hasn’t this joke gone far enough? To talk about magic in the twentieth century is absurd.’

‘All right. Call it natural science then.’ De Richleau leaned a little wearily against the mantelpiece. ‘Magic is only a name for the science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.’

‘Or, by setting natural laws in action quite inadvertently,’ added Marie Lou, to everyone’s surprise.

‘Certainly,’ the Duke agreed after a moment, ‘and Richard has practised that type of magic himself.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Richard exclaimed.

De Richleau shrugged. ‘Didn’t you tell me that you got a Diviner down from London when you were so terribly short of water here last summer, and that when you took his hazel twig from him you found out quite by accident that you could locate an underground spring in the garden without his help?’

‘Yes,’ Richard hesitated. ‘That’s true, and as a matter of fact, I’ve been successful in finding places where people could sink wells on several estates in the neighbourhood since. But surely that has something to do with electricity? It’s not magic’

‘If you were to say vibrations, you would be nearer the mark,’ De Richleau replied seriously. ‘It is an attunement of certain little-understood vibrations between the water under the ground and something in yourself which makes the forked hazel twig suddenly begin to jump and revolve in your hands when you walk over a hidden spring. That is undoubtedly a demonstration of the lesser kind of magic’

‘The miracle of Moses striking the rock in the desert from which the waters gushed forth is only another example of the same thing,’ Simon cut in.

Marie Lou was watching the Duke’s face with grave interest. ‘Everyone knows there is such a thing as magic,’ she declared, ‘and witchcraft. During those years that I lived in a little village on the borders of the Siberian Forest I saw many strange things, and the peasants went in fear and trembling of one old woman who lived in a cottage all alone outside the village. But what do you mean by lesser magic?’

‘There are two kinds,’ De Richleau informed her. ‘The lesser is performing certain operations which you believe will bring about a certain result without knowing why it should be so. If you chalk a line on the floor and take an ordinary hen, hold its beak down for a little time on to the line and then release it, the hen will remain there motionless with its head bent down to the floor. The assumption is that, being such a stupid creature, it believes that it has been tied down to the line and it is therefore useless to endeavour to escape. But nobody knows that for certain. All we do know is that it happens. That is a fair example of an operation in minor magic. The great majority of the lesser witches and wizards in the past had no conception as to why their spells worked, but had learned from their predecessors that if they performed a given operation a certain result was almost sure to follow it.’

Rex looked up suddenly and spoke for the first time. ‘I’d say they were pretty expert at playing on the belief of the credulous by peddling a sort of inverted Christian Science, faith healing, Coueism and all that as well.’

‘Of course,’ De Richleau smiled faintly. ‘But they were far too clever to tell a customer straight out that if he concentrated sufficiently on his objective he would probably achieve it—-even if they realised that themselves. Instead, they followed the old formulas which compelled him to develop his will power. If a man is in love with a girl and is told that he will get her if he rises from his bed at seven minutes past two every night for a month, gathers half a dozen flowers from a new-made grave in the local churchyard and places them in a spot where the girl will walk over them the following day, he does not get much chance to slacken in his desire and we all know that persistence can often work wonders.’

‘Perhaps,’ Richard agreed with mild cynicism. ‘But would you have us believe that Simon is seeking the favour of a lady by wandering about in this lunatic get-up?’

‘No, there is also the greater magic which is only practised by learned students of the Art who go through long courses of preparation and initiation, after which they understand not only that certain apparently inexplicable results are brought about by a given series of actions, but the actual reason why this should be so. Such people are powerful and dangerous in the extreme, and it is into the hands of one of these that our poor friend has fallen.’

Richard nodded, realising at last that the Duke was perfectly serious in his statement. ‘This seems a most extraordinary affair,’ he commented. ‘I think you’d better start from the beginning and give us the whole story.’

‘All right. Let’s sit down. If you doubt any of the statements that I am about to make, Rex will guarantee the facts and vouch for my sanity.’

‘I certainly will,’ Rex agreed with a sombre smile.

De Richleau then told the Eatons all that had taken place in the last forty-eight hours, and asked quite solemnly if they were prepared to receive Simon, Rex and himself under their roof in spite of the fact that it might involve some risk to themselves.

‘Of course,’ Marie Lou said at once. ‘We would not dream of your going away. You must stay with us as long as you like and until you are quite certain that Simon is absolutely out of danger.’

Richard, sceptical still, but devoted to his friends whatever their apparent folly, nodded his agreement as he slipped an arm through his wife’s. ‘Certainly you must stay. And,’ he added generously without the shadow of a smile, ‘tell us exactly how we can help you best.’

‘It’s awfully decent of you,’ Simon hazarded with a ghostly flicker of his old wide-mouthed grin. ‘But I’ll never forgive myself if any harm comes to you from it.’

‘Don’t let’s have that all over again,’ Rex begged. ‘We argued it long enough in the car on the way here, and De Richleau’s assured you time and again that no harm will come to Richard and Marie Lou provided we take reasonable precautions.’

‘That is so,’ the Duke nodded. ‘And your help will be in valuable. You see, Simon’s resistance is practically nil owing to his having been under Mocata’s influence for so long, and Rex and I are at a pretty low ebb after last night. We need every atom of vitality which we can get to protect him, and your coming fresh into the battle should turn the scale in our favour. What we should have done if you had thrown us out I can’t think, because I know of no one else who wouldn’t have considered us all to be raving lunatics.’

Richard laughed. ‘My dear fellow, how can you even suggest such a thing? You should still be welcome here if you’d committed murder.’

‘I may have to before long,’ De Richleau commented soberly. ‘The risk to myself is a bagatelle compared to the horrors which may overwhelm the world if Mocata succeeds in getting possession of the Talisman—but I won’t involve you in that of course.’

‘This Sabbat you saw …’ Richard hazarded after a moment. ‘Don’t think I’m doubting your account of it, but isn’t it just possible that your eyes deceived you in the darkness? I mean about the Satanic part. Everyone knows that Sabbats took place all over England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it is generally accepted now that they were only an excuse for a bit of a blind and a sexual orgy. Country people had no motor bikes and buses to take them in to local cinemas then, and the Church frowned on all but the mildest forms of amusement, so the bad hats of the community used to sneak off to some quiet spot every now and again to give their repressed complexes an airing. Are you sure that it was not a revival of that sort of thing staged by a group of wealthy decadents?’

‘Not on your life,’ Rex declared with a sudden shiver. ‘I’ve never been scared all that bad before and, believe you me, it was the real business.’

‘What do you wish us to do, Greyeyes dear?’ Marie Lou asked the Duke.

He hoisted himself slowly out of the chair into which he had sunk. ‘I must drive over to Oxford. An old Catholic priest whom I know lives there and I am going to try and persuade him to entrust me with a portion of the Blessed Host. If he will, that is the most perfect of all protections which we could have to keep with us through the night. In the meantime, I want the rest of you to look after Simon.’ He smiled affectionately in Simon’s direction, ‘You must forgive me treating you like a child for the moment, my dear boy, but I don’t want the others to let you out of their sight until I return.’

‘That’s all right,’ Simon agreed cheerfully. ‘But are you certain that I’m not—er—carrying harmful things about with me still?’

‘Absolutely. The purification ceremonies which I practised on you last night have banished all traces of the evil. Our business now is to keep you free of it and get on Mocata’s trail as quickly as we can.’

‘Then I think I’ll rest for a bit.’ Simon glanced at Richard as he followed the Duke towards the door. ‘The nap we had at the hotel in Amesbury after breakfast wasn’t long enough to put me right—and afterwards perhaps you could lend me a decent suit of clothes?’

‘Of course,’ Richard smiled. ‘Let’s see Greyeyes off, then I’ll make you comfortable upstairs.’

The whole party filed into the hall and, crowding about the low nail-studded oaken door watched De Richleau, who promised to be back before dark, drive off. Then Richard, taking Simon by the arm, led him up the broad Jacobean stairway, while Marie Lou turned to Rex.

‘What do you really think of all this?’ she asked gravely, the usual merriment of her deep blue eyes clouded by a foreboding of coming trouble.

He stared down at her upturned heart-shaped face from his great height and answered soberly. ‘We’ve struck a gateway of Hell all right, my dear, and I’m just worried out of my wits. De Richleau didn’t give you the whole story. There’s a girl in this that I’m—well—that I’m clean crazy about.’

‘Rex!’ Marie Lou laid her small strong hand on his arm. ‘How awful for you. Come into my room and tell me everything.’

He followed her to her sitting-room and for half an hour poured into her sympathetic ears the strange tale of his three glimpses of Tanith at different times abroad, and then his unexpected meeting with her at Simon’s party. Afterwards he related with more detail than the Duke had done their terrible experiences on Salisbury Plain and was just beginning his anxious speculation as to what could have happened to Tanith when Malin, the butler, softly opened the door.

‘Someone is asking for you on the telephone, Mr. Van Ryn, sir.’

‘For me!’ Rex stood up and, excusing himself to Marie Lou, hurried out, wondering who in the world it could be since no one knew his whereabouts. He was soon enlightened. A lilting voice, which had a strong resemblance to that of Marlene Dietrich, came over the wire as he placed the receiver to his ear.

‘Is that you, Rex? Oh, I am so glad I have found you. I must see you at once—quickly—without a moment’s delay.’

‘Tanith!’ he exclaimed. ‘How did you tumble to it that I was here?’

‘Oh, never mind that! I will tell you when I see you. But hurry, please.’

‘Where are you then?’

‘At the village inn, no more than a mile from you. Do come at once. It is very urgent.’

For a second Rex hesitated, but only for a second. Simon would be safe enough in the care of Richard and Marie Lou, and Tanith’s voice had all the urgency and agitation of extreme fear. Anxiety for her had been gnawing at his heart ever since he had heard of her crash the previous evening. He knew that he loved her now—loved her desperately.

‘All right,’ he answered, his voice shaking a little. ‘I’ll be right over.’

Running back across the hall, he explained breathlessly to Marie Lou what had happened.

‘You must go of course,’ she said evenly. ‘But you’ll be back before nightfall won’t you, Rex?’

‘Sure,’ All his animation seemed suddenly to have returned to him as, with a quick grin, he hurried out, snatched up his hat and, leaving the house, set off at a long easy loping trot by the short cut across the meadows to the village.

Unnoticed by him, a short figure entered the drive just as he disappeared beyond the boundary of the garden. A few moments later the newcomer was in conversation with Malin. The butler knew that his master was upstairs sitting with his friend Mr. Aron while the latter rested, and had given orders that he was not to be disturbed, so leaving the visitor in the hall he crossed to Marie Lou’s sitting-room.

‘There is a gentleman to see you, madam,’ he announced quietly. ‘A Mr. Mocata.’

CHAPTER XXII

THE SATANIST

For a moment Marie Lou hesitated, her eyes round with surprise, staring at the butler. In the last hour she had heard so much about this strange and terrifying visitor, but it had not occurred to her for one instant that she might be called upon to face him in the flesh so soon.

Her first impulse was to send upstairs for Richard, but like many people who possess extremely small bodies, her brain was exceptionally quick. Rex and the Duke were both absent and, if she sent for Richard, Simon would be left alone—the one thing that De Richleau had been so insistent should not be allowed to happen. True, she and Richard would have been the principal enemy under observation themselves, but he had allies. It flashed upon her that this girl Tanith was one perhaps and had purposely decoyed Rex away to the inn. Mocata might have others already waiting to lure Simon out of the house while they were busy talking to him. Almost instantly her mind was made up. Richard must not leave Simon, so she would have to interview Mocata on her own.

‘Show him in,’ she told the butler evenly. ‘But if I ring you are to come at once—immediately, you understand?’

‘Certainly, madam.’ Malin softly withdrew, while Marie Lou seated herself in an armchair with her back to the light and within easy reach of the bell-push.

Mocata was shown in, and she studied him curiously. He was dressed in a suit of grey tweeds and wore a black stock tie. His head, large, bald and shiny, reminded her of an enormous egg, and the several folds of his heavy chin protruded above his stiff-winged collar.

‘I do hope you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Eaton,’ he began in a voice that was musical and charming, ‘for calling on you without any invitation. But you may perhaps have heard my name.’

She nodded slightly, carefully ignoring the hand which he half extended as she motioned him to the armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace. Marie Lou knew nothing of Esoteric Doctrines, but quite enough from the peasants’ superstitions which had been rife in the little village where she had lived, an outcast of the Russian Revolution, to be aware that she must not touch this man, nor offer him any form of refreshment while he was in her house.

The afternoon sunshine played full upon Mocata’s pink, fleshy countenance as he went on. ‘I thought perhaps that would be the case. Whether the facts have been rightly represented to you, I don’t know, but Simon Aron is a very dear friend of mine, and during his recent illness I have been taking care of him.’

‘I see,’ she answered guardedly. ‘Well, it was hardly put to me in that way, but what is the purpose of your visit?’

‘I understand that Simon is with you now?’

‘Yes,’ she replied briefly, feeling that it was senseless to deny it, ‘and his visit to us will continue for some little time.’

He smiled then, and with a little shock Marie Lou suddenly caught herself thinking that he was really quite an attractive person. His strange light-coloured eyes showed a strong intelligence and, to her surprise, a glint of the most friendly humour, which almost suggested that he was about to conspire with her in some amusing undertaking. His lisping voice, too, was strangely pleasant and restful to listen to as he spoke again in perfect English periods, only a curious intonation of the vowel sounds indicating his French extraction.

‘The country air would no doubt be excellent for him, and I am certain that nothing could be more charming for him than your hospitality. Unfortunately there are certain matters, of which you naturally know nothing, but which make it quite imperative that I should take him back to London tonight.’

‘I am afraid that is quite impossible.’

‘I see,’ Mocata looked thoughtfully for a moment at his large elastic-sided boots. ‘I feared that you might take this attitude to begin with, because I imagine your friend De Richleau has been filling the heads of your husband and yourself with the most preposterous nonsense. I don’t propose to go into that now or his reason for it, but I do ask you to believe me, Mrs. Eaton, when I say that Simon will be in very considerable danger if you do not allow me to take him back into my care.’

‘No danger will come to him as long as he is in my house,’ said Marie Lou firmly.

‘Ah, my dear young lady,’ he sighed a little wistfully. ‘I can hardly expect anyone like yourself to understand precisely what will happen to our poor Simon if he remains here, but his mental state has been unsatisfactory for some little time, and I alone can cure him of his lamentable condition. Chocolates!’ he added suddenly and irrelevantly as his eyes rested upon a large box on a nearby table. ‘You’ll think me terribly rude, but may I? I simply adore chocolates.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Marie Lou replied without the flicker of an eyelash, ‘but that box is empty. Do go on with what you were saying about Simon.’

Mocata withdrew his hand, feeling himself unable to challenge her statement by opening the box to see, and Marie Lou found it difficult to repress a smile as he made a comically rueful face like some greedy schoolboy who has been disappointed of a slice of cake.

‘Really!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a pity. May I put it in the waste-paper basket for you then? To leave it about is such a terrible temptation for people like myself.’ Before she could stop him he had reached out again and picked up the box, realising immediately by its weight that she had lied to him.

‘No, please,’ she put out her hand and almost snatched the box from his pudgy fingers. ‘I gave it to my little girl to put her marbles in—we mustn’t throw it away.’ The box gave a faint rustle as she laid it down beside her, so she added swiftly: ‘She puts each one in the little paper cups that the chocolates are packed in and arranges them in rows. She would be terribly distressed if they were upset.’

Mocata was not deceived by that ingenious fiction. He guessed at once her true reason for denying him the chocolates and was quick to realise that in this lovely young woman, who stood no taller than a well-grown child, he was up a far cleverer antagonist than he had at first supposed. However, he was amply satisfied with the progress he had made so far, sensing that her first antagonism had already given way to a guarded interest. For a moment they stared at each other in silence. Then he opened his attack in a new direction.

‘Mrs. Eaton, it is quite obvious to me that you distrust me and, after what your friends have told you, I am not surprised. But your intelligence emboldens me to think that I am likely to serve my purpose better by putting my cards on the table than by beating about the bush.’

‘It will make no difference what you do,’ said Marie Lou quietly.

He ignored the remark and went on in his low, slightly lisping voice. ‘I do not propose to discuss with you the rights or wrongs of practising the Magic Art. I will confine myself to saying that I am a practitioner of some experience and Simon, who has interested himself in these things for the past few months, shows great promise of one day achieving considerable powers. Monsieur De Richleau had probably led you to suppose that I am a most evil person. But in fairness to myself I must protest that such a view of me is quite untrue. In magic, there is neither good nor evil. It is only the science of causing change to occur by means of will. The rather sinister reputation attaching to it is easily accounted for by the fact that it had to be practised in secret for many centuries owing to the ban placed upon it by the Church. Anything which is done in secret naturally begets a reputation for mystery and, since it dare not face the light of day, the reverse of good. Few people understand anything of these mysteries, and I can hardly assume that you have more than vague impressions gathered from casual reading; but at least I imagine you will have heard that genuine adepts in the secret Art have the power to call certain entities, which are not understood or admitted by the profane, into actual being.

‘Now these are perfectly harmless as long as they are under the control of the practitioner, just as a qualified electrician stands no risk in adjusting a powerful electric battery from which a child, who played foolishly with it, might receive a serious shock or even death. This analogy applies to the work Simon and I are engaged upon. We have called a certain entity into being just as workers in another sphere might have constructed an electrical machine. It needs both of us to operate this thing with skill and safety, but if I am to be left to handle it alone, the forces which we have engendered will undoubtedly escape and do the very gravest harm both to Simon and myself. Have I made the position clear?’

‘Yes,’ murmured Marie Lou. During the long explanatory speech he had been regarding her with a steady stare, and as she listened to his quiet, cultured voice expressing what seemed such obvious truths, she felt her whole reaction to his personality changing. It suddenly seemed to her absurd that this nice, charming gentleman in the neat grey suit could be dangerous to anyone. His face seemed to have lost its puffy appearance even while he was speaking, and now her eyes beheld it as only hairless, pink and clean like that of some elderly divine.

‘I am so glad,’ he went on in his even, silky tone. ‘I felt quite sure that if you allowed me a few moments I could clear up this misunderstanding which has only arisen through the over-eagerness of your old friend the Duke, and that charming young American, to protect Simon from some purely imaginary danger. If I had only had the opportunity to explain to them personally I am quite convinced that I should have been able to save them a great deal of worry, but I only met them for a few moments one evening at Simon’s house. It is a charming little place that, and he very kindly permits me to share it with him while I am in England. If you are in London during the next few weeks, I do hope that you will come and see us there. We both know without asking that Simon would be delighted, and it would give me the very greatest pleasure to show you my collection of perfumes, which I always take with me when I travel.

‘As a matter of fact, I am rather an expert in the art of blending perfumes, and quite a number of my women friends have allowed me to make a special scent for them. It is a delicate art, and interesting, because each woman should have her own perfume made to conform to her aura and personality. You have an outstanding individuality, Mrs. Eaton, and it would be a very great pleasure if you would allow me some time to see if I could not compound something really distinctive in that way for you.’

‘It sounds most interesting.’ Marie Lou’s voice was low and Mocata’s eyes still held hers. Really, she felt, despite his bulk, he was a most attractive person, and she had been quite stupid to be a little frightened of him when he first entered the room. The May sunshine came in gently-moving shafts through the foliage of a tree outside the window, so that the dappled light played upon his face, and it was that, she thought, which gave her the illusion that his unblinking eyes were larger than when she had first looked into them.

‘When will the Duke be back?’ he asked softly. ‘Unfortunately, my visit today must be a brief one, but I should so much have liked to talk this matter over quietly with him before I go?’

‘I don’t know,’ Marie Lou found herself answering. ‘But I’m afraid he won’t be back before six.’

‘And our American friend—the young giant,’ he prompted her.

‘I’ve no idea. He has gone down to the village.’

‘I see. What a pity, but of course your husband is here entertaining Simon, is he not?’

‘Yes, they are upstairs together.’

‘Well, presently I should like to explain to your husband just as I have to you, how very important it is that I should take Simon back with me tonight, but I wonder first if I might beg a glass of water. Walking from the village has given me quite a thirst.’

‘Of course,’ Marie Lou rose to her feet automatically and pressed the bell. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer a cup of tea or a glass of wine and some biscuits?’ she added, completely now under the strange influence that radiated from him.

‘You are most kind, but just a glass of water and a biscuit if I may.’

Malin already stood in the doorway and Maire Lou gave orders for these slender refreshments. Then she sat down again, and Mocata’s talk flowed on easily and glibly, while her ears became more and more attuned to that faint musical lisping intonation.

The butler appeared with water and biscuits on a tray and set them down beside Mocata, but for the moment he took no notice of it. Instead he looked again at Marie Lou, and said: ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me asking, but have you recently been ill? You are looking as though you were terribly run down and very, very tired.’

‘No,’ said Marie Lou slowly. ‘I haven’t been ill.’ But at that moment her limbs seemed to relax where she was sitting and her heavy eyelids weighed upon her eyes. For some unaccountable reason, she felt an intense longing to shut them altogether and fall asleep.

Mocata watched her with a faint smile curving his full mouth. He had her under his dominance now and knew it. Another moment and she would be asleep. It would be easy to carry her into the next room and leave her there, ring for the servant, ask him to find his master, and when Richard arrived, say that she had gone out into the garden to find him. Then another of those quiet little talks which he knew so well how to handle, even when people were openly antagonistic to him to begin with, and the master of the house would also pass into a quiet, untroubled sleep. Then he would simply call Simon by his will and they would leave the house together.

Marie Lou’s eyes flickered and shut. With a shake of her head she jerked them open again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said sleepily. ‘But I am tired, most awfully tired. What was it that you were talking about?’

Mocata’s eyes seemed enormous to her now, as they held her own with a solemn, dreamy look. ‘We shall not talk any more,’ he said. ‘You will sleep, and at four o’clock on the afternoon of 7th May, you will call on me at Simon’s house in St. John’s Wood.’

Marie Lou’s heavy lashes fell on her rounded cheeks again, but next second her eyes were wide open, for the door was flung back and Fleur came scampering into the room.

‘Darling, what is it?’ Marie Lou struggled wide awake and Mocata snapped his plump fingers with a little angry, disappointed gesture. The sudden entrance of the child had broken the current of delicate vibrations.

‘Mummy—mummy,’ Fleur panted. ‘Daddy-sent-me-to-find-you. We’se playing hosses in the garden, an’ Uncle Simon says he’s a dwagon, an’ not a hoss at all. Daddy says you’re to come and tell him diffwent.’

‘So this is your little daughter? What a lovely child,’ Mocata said amiably, stretching out a hand to Fleur. ‘Come here, my.…’

But Marie Lou cut short his sentence as full realisation of the danger to which she had exposed herself flooded her mind. ‘Don’t you touch her!’ she cried, snatching up the child with blazing eyes. ‘Don’t you dare!’

‘Really, Mrs. Eaton,’ he raised his eyebrows in mild protest. ‘Surely you cannot think that I meant to hurt the child ? I thought, too, that we were beginning to understand each other so well.’

‘You beast,’ Marie Lou cried angrily as she jabbed her finger on the bell. ‘You tried to hypnotise me.’

‘What nonsense,’ he smiled good-humouredly. ‘You were a little tired, but I fear I bored you rather with a long dissertation upon things which can hardly interest a woman so young and charming as yourself. It was most stupid of me, and I hardly wonder that you nearly fell asleep.’

As Malin arrived on the scene she thrust Fleur into the astonished butler’s arms and gasped: ‘Fetch Mr. Eaton—he’s in the garden—quickly—at once.’

The butler hurried off with Fleur and Mocata turned on her. His eyes had gone cold and steely. ‘It is vital that I should at least see Simon before I leave this house.’

‘You shan’t,’ she stormed. ‘You had better go before my husband comes. D’you hear?’ Then she found herself looking at him again, and quickly jerked her head away so that she should not see his eyes, yet she caught his gesture as he stooped to pick up the glass of water from the table.

Furious now at the way she had been tricked into ordering it for him, and determined that he should not drink, she sprang forward and, before he could stop her, dashed the little table to the ground. The plate caught the carafe as it fell and smashed it into a dozen pieces, the biscuits scattered and the water spread round with an angry snarl. This small, sensuous, cat-like creature had cheated him at the last, and the placid, kindly expression of his face changed to one of hideous demoniacal fury. His eyes, muddied now with all the foulness of his true nature, stripped and flayed her, threatening a thousand unspeakable abominations in their unwinking stare as she faced him across the fallen table.

Suddenly, with a fresh access of terror, Marie Lou cowered back, bringing up her hands to shield her face from those revolting eyeballs. Then a quick voice in the doorway exclaimed : ‘Hello! What is all this?’

‘Richard,’ she gasped. ‘Richard, it’s Mocata! I saw him because I thought you’d better stay with Simon, but he tried to hypnotise me. Have him thrown out. Oh, have him thrown out.’

The muscles in Richard’s lean face tightened as he caught the look of terror in his wife’s eyes and thrusting her aside he took a quick step towards Mocata. ‘If you weren’t twice my age and in my house, I’d smash your face in,’ he said savagely. ‘And that won’t stop me either unless you get out thundering quick.’

With almost incredible swiftness Mocata had his anger under control. His face was benign and smiling once more, as he shrugged, showing no trace of panic. ‘I’m afraid your wife is a little upset,’ he said mildly. ‘It is this spring weather, and while we were talking together, she nearly fell asleep. Having heard all sorts of extraordinary things about me from your friends, she scared herself into thinking that I tried to hypnotise her. I apologise profoundly for having caused her one moment’s distress.’

‘I don’t believe one word of that,’ replied Richard. ‘Now kindly leave the house.’

Mocata shrugged again. ‘You are being very unreasonable, Mr. Eaton. I called this afternoon in order to take Simon Aron back to London.’

‘Well, you’re not going to.’

‘Please,’ Mocata held up a protesting hand. ‘Hear me for one moment. The whole situation has been most gravely misrepresented to you, as I explained to your wife, and if she hadn’t suddenly started to imagine things we should be discussing it quite amicably now. In fact, I even asked her to send for you, as she will tell you herself.’

‘It was a trick,’ cried Marie Lou angrily. ‘Don’t look at his eyes, Richard, and for God’s sake turn him out!’

‘You hear,’ Richard’s voice held a threatening note and his face was white. ‘You had better go—before I lose my temper.’

‘It’s a pity that you are so pig-headed, my young friend,’ Mocata snapped icily. ‘By retaining Simon here, you are bringing extreme peril both on him and on yourself. But since you refuse to be reasonable and let me take him with me, let me at least have five minutes’ conversation with him alone.’

‘Not five seconds,’ Richard stood aside from the door and motioned through it for Mocata to pass into the hall.

‘All right! If that is your final word!’ Mocata drew himself up. He seemed to grow in size and strength even as he stood there. A terrible force and energy suddenly began to shake his obese body. They felt it radiating from him as his words came low and clear like the whispering splash of death-cold drops falling from icicles upon a frozen lake.

‘Then I will send the Messenger to your house tonight and he shall take Simon from you alive—or dead!’

‘Get out,’ gritted Richard between his teeth. ‘Damn you— get out!’

Without another word Mocata left them. Marie Lou crossed herself, and with Richard’s arm about her shoulder they followed him to the open door.

He did not turn or once look back, but plodded heavily, a very ordinary figure now, down the long, sunlit drive.

Richard suddenly felt Marie Lou’s small body tremble against him, and with a little cry of fright she buried her head on his shoulder. ‘Oh, darling,’ she wailed. ‘I’m frightened of that man —frightened. Did you see?’