The Pale Horse Read online

  “You’ve got some very rare works here, Miss Grey. Is this an original Malleus Maleficorum? My word, you have some treasures.”

  “I have, haven’t I?”

  “That Grimoire—very rare indeed.” I took down volume after volume from the shelves. Thyrza watched me—there was an air of quiet satisfaction about her which I did not understand.

  I put back Sadducismus Triumphatus as Thyrza said:

  “It’s nice to meet someone who can appreciate one’s treasures. Most people just yawn or gape.”

  “There can’t be much about the practice of witchcraft, sorcery, and all the rest of it that you don’t know,” I said. “What gave you an interest in it in the first place?”

  “Hard to say now… It’s been so long… One looks into a thing idly—and then—one gets gripped! It’s a fascinating study. The things people believed—and the damn’ fool things they did!”

  I laughed.

  “That’s refreshing. I’m glad you don’t believe all you read.”

  “You mustn’t judge me by poor Sybil. Oh yes, I saw you looking superior! But you were wrong. She’s a silly woman in a lot of ways. She takes voodoo, and demonology, and black magic and mixes everything up into a glorious occult pie—but she has the power.”

  “The power?”

  “I don’t know what else you can call it… There are people who can become a living bridge between this world and a world of strange uncanny powers. Sybil is one of them. She is a first-class medium. She has never done it for money. But her gift is quite exceptional. When she and I and Bella—”

  “Bella?”

  “Oh yes. Bella has her own powers. We all have, in our different degrees. As a team—”

  She broke off.

  “Sorcerers Ltd?” I suggested with a smile.

  “One could put it that way.”

  I glanced down at the volume I was holding in my hand.

  “Nostradamus and all that?”

  “Nostradamus and all that.”

  I said quietly: “You do believe it, don’t you?”

  “I don’t believe. I know.”

  She spoke triumphantly— I looked at her.

  “But how? In what way? For what reason?”

  She swept her hand out towards the bookshelves—

  “All that! So much of it nonsense! Such grand ridiculous phraseology! But sweep away the superstitions and the prejudices of the times—and the core is truth! You only dress it up—it’s always been dressed up—to impress people.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “My dear man, why have people come throughout the ages to the necromancer—to the sorcerer—to the witch doctor? Only two reasons really. There are only two things that are wanted badly enough to risk damnation. The love potion or the cup of poison.”

  “Ah.”

  “So simple, isn’t it? Love—and death. The love potion—to win the man you want—the black mass—to keep your lover. A draught to be taken at the full of the moon. Recite the names of devils or of spirits. Draw patterns on the floor or on the wall. All that’s window dressing. The truth is the aphrodisiac in the draught!”

  “And death?” I asked.

  “Death?” She laughed, a queer little laugh that made me uncomfortable. “Are you so interested in death?”

  “Who isn’t?” I said lightly.

  “I wonder.” She shot me a glance, keen, searching. It took me aback.

  “Death. There’s always been a greater trade in that than there ever has been in love potions. And yet—how childish it all was in the past! The Borgias and their famous secret poisons. Do you know what they really used? Ordinary white arsenic! Just the same as any little wife poisoner in the back streets. But we’ve progressed a long way beyond that nowadays. Science has enlarged our frontiers.”

  “With untraceable poisons?” My voice was sceptical.

  “Poisons! That’s vieux jeu. Childish stuff. There are new horizons.”

  “Such as?”

  “The mind. Knowledge of what the mind is—what it can do—what it can be made to do.”

  “Please go on. This is most interesting.”

  “The principle is well known. Medicine men have used it in primitive communities for centuries. You don’t need to kill your victim. All you need do is—tell him to die.”

  “Suggestion? But it won’t work unless the victim believes in it.”

  “It doesn’t work on Europeans, you mean,” she corrected me. “It does sometimes. But that’s not the point. We’ve gone further ahead than the witch doctor has ever gone. The psychologists have shown the way. The desire for death! It’s there—in everyone. Work on that! Work on the death wish.”

  “It’s an interesting idea.” I spoke with a muted scientific interest. “Influence your subject to commit suicide? Is that it?”

  “You’re still lagging behind. You’ve heard of traumatic illnesses?”

  “Of course.”

  “People who, because of an unconscious wish to avoid returning to work, develop real ailments. Not malingering—real illnesses with symptoms, with actual pain. It’s been a puzzle to doctors for a long time.”

  “I’m beginning to get the hang of what you mean,” I said slowly.

  “To destroy your subject, power must be exerted on his secret unconscious self. The death wish that exists in all of us must be stimulated, heightened.” Her excitement was growing. “Don’t you see? A real illness will be induced, caused by that death seeking self. You wish to be ill, you wish to die—and so—you do get ill, and die.”

  She had flung her head up now, triumphantly. I felt suddenly very cold. All nonsense, of course. This woman was slightly mad… And yet—

  Thyrza Grey laughed suddenly.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “It’s a fascinating theory, Miss Grey—quite in line with modern thought, I’ll admit. But how do you propose to stimulate this death wish that we all possess?”

  “That’s my secret. The way! The means! There are communications without contact. You’ve only to think of wireless, radar, television. Experiments in extrasensory perception haven’t gone ahead as people hoped, but that’s because they haven’t grasped the first simple principle. You can accomplish it sometimes by accident—but once you know how it works, you could do it every time….”

  “Can you do it?”

  She didn’t answer at once—then she said, moving away:

  “You mustn’t ask me, Mr. Easterbrook, to give all my secrets away.”

  I followed her towards the garden door—

  “Why have you told me all this?” I asked.

  “You understand my books. One needs sometimes to—to—well—talk to someone. And besides—”

  “Yes?”

  “I had the idea— Bella has it, too—that you—may need us.”

  “Need you?”

  “Bella thinks you came here—to find us. She is seldom at fault.”

  “Why should I want to—‘find you,’ as you put it?”

  “That,” said Thyrza Grey softly, “I do not know—yet.”

  Seven

  Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative

  I

  “So there you are! We wondered where you were.” Rhoda came through the open door, the others behind her. She looked round her. “This is where you hold your séances, isn’t it?”

  “You’re well informed,” Thyrza Grey laughed breezily. “In a village everyone knows your business better than you do. We’ve a splendid sinister reputation, so I’ve heard. A hundred years ago it would have been sink or swim or the funeral pyre. My great-great-aunt—or one or two more greats—was burned as a witch, I believe, in Ireland. Those were the days!”

  “I always thought you were Scottish?”

  “On my father’s side—hence the second sight. Irish on my mother’s. Sybil is our pythoness, originally of Greek extraction. Bella represents Old English.”

  “A macabre human cocktail,” remarked Colon
el Despard.

  “As you say.”

  “Fun!” said Ginger.

  Thyrza shot her a quick glance.

  “Yes, it is in a way.” She turned to Mrs. Oliver. “You should write one of your books about a murder by black magic. I can give you a lot of dope about it.”

  Mrs. Oliver blinked and looked embarrassed.

  “I only write very plain murders,” she said apologetically.

  Her tone was of one who says “I only do plain cooking.”

  “Just about people who want other people out of the way and try to be clever about it,” she added.

  “They’re usually too clever for me,” said Colonel Despard. He glanced at his watch. “Rhoda, I think—”

  “Oh yes, we must go. It’s much later than I thought.”

  Thanks and good-byes were said. We did not go back through the house but round to a side gate.

  “You keep a lot of poultry,” remarked Colonel Despard, looking into a wired enclosure.

  “I hate hens,” said Ginger. “They cluck in such an irritating way.”

  “Mostly cockerels they be.” It was Bella who spoke. She had come out from a back door.

  “White cockerels,” I said.

  “Table birds?” asked Despard.

  Bella said, “They’m useful to us.”

  Her mouth widened in a long curving line across the pudgy shapelessness of her face. Her eyes had a sly knowing look.

  “They’re Bella’s province,” said Thyrza Grey lightly.

  We said good-bye and Sybil Stamfordis appeared from the open front door to join in speeding the parting guests.

  “I don’t like that woman,” said Mrs. Oliver, as we drove off. “I don’t like her at all.”

  “You mustn’t take old Thyrza too seriously,” said Despard indulgently. “She enjoys spouting all that stuff and seeing what effect it has on you.”

  “I didn’t mean her. She’s an unscrupulous woman, with a keen eye on the main chance. But she’s not dangerous like the other one.”

  “Bella? She is a bit uncanny, I’ll admit.”

  “I didn’t mean her either. I meant the Sybil one. She seems just silly. All those beads and draperies and all the stuff about voodoo, and all those fantastic reincarnations she was telling us about. (Why is it that anybody who was a kitchen maid or an ugly old peasant never seems to get reincarnated? It’s always Egyptian Princesses or beautiful Babylonian slaves. Very fishy.) But all the same, though she’s stupid, I have a feeling that she could really do things—make queer things happen. I always put things badly—but I mean she could be used—by something—in a way just because she is so silly. I don’t suppose anyone understands what I mean,” she finished pathetically.

  “I do,” said Ginger. “And I shouldn’t wonder if you weren’t right.”

  “We really ought to go to one of their séances,” said Rhoda wistfully. “It might be rather fun.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Despard firmly. “I’m not having you getting mixed up in anything of that sort.”

  They fell into a laughing argument. I roused myself only when I heard Mrs. Oliver asking about trains the next morning.

  “You can drive back with me,” I said.

  Mrs. Oliver looked doubtful.

  “I think I’d better go by train—”

  “Oh, come now. You’ve driven with me before. I’m a most reliable driver.”

  “It’s not that, Mark. But I’ve got to go to a funeral tomorrow. So I mustn’t be late in getting back to town.” She sighed. “I do hate going to funerals.”

  “Must you?”

  “I think I must in this case. Mary Delafontaine was a very old friend—and I think she’d want me to go. She was that sort of person.”

  “Of course,” I exclaimed. “Delafontaine—of course.”

  The others stared at me, surprised.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s only—that—well, I was wondering where I’d heard the name Delafontaine lately. It was you, wasn’t it?” I looked at Mrs. Oliver. “You said something about visiting her—in a nursing home.”

  “Did I? Quite likely.”

  “What did she die of?”

  Mrs. Oliver wrinkled her forehead.

  “Toxic polyneuritis—something like that.”

  Ginger was looking at me curiously. She had a sharp penetrating glance.

  As we got out of the car, I said abruptly:

  “I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk. Such a lot of food. That wonderful lunch and tea on top of it. It’s got to be worked off somehow.”

  I went off briskly before anyone could offer to accompany me. I wanted badly to get by myself and sort out my ideas.

  What was all this business? Let me at least get it clear to myself. It had started, had it not, with that casual but startling remark by Poppy, that if you wanted to “get rid of someone” the Pale Horse was the place to go.

  Following on that, there had been my meeting with Jim Corrigan, and his list of “names”—as connected with the death of Father Gorman. On that list had been the name of Hesketh-Dubois, and the name of Tuckerton, causing me to hark back to that evening at Luigi’s coffee bar. There had been the name of Delafontaine, too, vaguely familiar. It was Mrs. Oliver who had mentioned it, in connection with a sick friend. The sick friend was now dead.

  After that, I had, for some reason which I couldn’t quite identify, gone to beard Poppy in her floral bower. And Poppy had denied vehemently any knowledge of such an institution as the Pale Horse. More significant still, Poppy had been afraid.

  Today—there had been Thyrza Grey.

  But surely the Pale Horse and its occupants was one thing and that list of names something separate, quite unconnected. Why on earth was I coupling them together in my mind?

  Why should I imagine for one moment that there was any connection between them?

  Mrs. Delafontaine had presumably lived in London. Thomasina Tuckerton’s home had been somewhere in Surrey. No one on the list had any connection with the little village of Much Deeping. Unless—

  I was just coming abreast of the King’s Arms. The King’s Arms was a genuine pub with a superior look about it and a freshlypainted announcement of Lunches, Dinners and Teas.

  I pushed its door open and went inside. The bar, not yet open, was on my left, on my right was a minute lounge smelling of stale smoke. By the stairs was a notice: Office. The office consisted of a glass window, firmly closed and a printed card. PRESS BELL. The whole place had the deserted air of a pub at this particular time of day. On a shelf by the office window was a battered registration book for visitors. I opened it and flicked through the pages. It was not much patronised. There were five or six entries, perhaps, in a week, mostly for one night only. I flicked back the pages, noting the names.

  It was not long before I shut the book. There was still no one about. There were really no questions I wanted to ask at this stage. I went out again into the soft damp afternoon.

  Was it only coincidence that someone called Sandford and someone else called Parkinson had stayed at the King’s Arms during the last year? Both names were on Corrigan’s list. Yes, but they were not particularly uncommon names. But I had noted one other name—the name of Martin Digby. If it was the Martin Digby I knew, he was the great-nephew of the woman I had always called Aunt Min—Lady Hesketh-Dubois.

  I strode along, not seeing where I was going. I wanted very badly to talk to someone. To Jim Corrigan. Or to David Ardingly. Or to Hermia with her calm good sense. I was alone with my chaotic thoughts and I didn’t want to be alone. What I wanted, frankly, was someone who would argue me out of the things that I was thinking.

  It was after about half an hour of tramping muddy lanes that I finally turned in at the gates of the vicarage, and made my way up a singularly ill-kept drive, to pull a rusty looking bell at the side of the front door.

  II

  “It doesn’t ring,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, appearing at the door with the unexpectedness of a genie
.

  I had already suspected that fact.

  “They’ve mended it twice,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “But it never lasts. So I have to keep alert. In case it’s something important. It’s important with you, isn’t it?”

  “It—well—yes, it is important—to me, I mean.”

  “That’s what I meant, too…” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Yes, it’s quite bad, I can see— Who do you want? The vicar?”

  “I— I’m not sure—”

  It had been the vicar I came to see—but now, unexpectedly, I was doubtful. I didn’t quite know why. But immediately Mrs. Dane Calthrop told me.

  “My husband’s a very good man,” she said. “Besides being the vicar, I mean. And that makes things difficult sometimes. Good people, you see, don’t really understand evil.” She paused and then said with a kind of brisk efficiency, “I think it had better be me.”

  A faint smile came to my lips. “Is evil your department?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is. It’s important in a parish to know all about the various—well—sins that are going on.”

  “Isn’t sin your husband’s province? His official business, so to speak.”

  “The forgiveness of sins,” she corrected me. “He can give absolution. I can’t. But I,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop with the utmost cheerfulness, “can get sin arranged and classified for him. And if one knows about it one can help to prevent its harming other people. One can’t help the people themselves. I can’t, I mean. Only God can call to repentance, you know—or perhaps you don’t know. A lot of people don’t nowadays.”

  “I can’t compete with your expert knowledge,” I said, “but I would like to prevent people being—harmed.”

  She shot me a quick glance.

  “It’s like that, is it? You’d better come in and we’ll be comfortable.”

  The vicarage sitting room was big and shabby. It was much shaded by a gargantuan Victorian shrubbery that no one seemed to have had the energy to curb. But the dimness was not gloomy for some peculiar reason. It was, on the contrary, restful. All the large shabby chairs bore the impress of resting bodies in them over the years. A fat clock on the chimneypiece ticked with a heavy comfortable regularity. Here there would always be time to talk, to say what you wanted to say, to relax from the cares brought about by the bright day outside.