Her voice had been gradually rising, growing shrill, so that now he warningly hissed: “Be quiet!” And he backed her up to a stile in the fence, pressing with his knife until she was aware of it delving the soft skin of her throat. Then, very casually, he cut her thin summer dress down the front to her waist and flicked back the two halves with the point of his knife. Her free hand fluttered like a trapped bird, to match the palpitations of her heart, but she didn’t dare do anything with it. And holding that sharp blade to her left breast, he said:
“Now we’re going across this stile and behind the hedge, and then I’ll tell you all you’re to do and how best to please me. And that’s important, for if you don’t please me—well, then it will be good night, Eileen, Eileen!”
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” she whispered, as he forced her over the fence and behind the tall hedge. And:
“Here!” he said. “Here!”
And from the darkness just to one side of him, another voice, not Eileen’s, answered, “Yes, here! Here!” But it was such a voice…
“What…?” Garry Clemens gulped, his hot blood suddenly ice. “Who…?” He released Eileen’s hand and whirled, scything with his knife—scything nothing!—only the dark, which now seemed to close in on him. But:
“Here,” said that husky, hungry, lusting voice again, and now Clemens saw that indeed there was a figure in the dark. A naked female figure, voluptuous and inviting. And, “Here!” she murmured yet again, her voice a promise of pleasures undreamed, drawing him down with her to the soft grass.
Out of the corner of his eye, dimly in his confused mind, the rapist saw a figure—fleeting, tripping, and staggering upright, fleeing—which he knew was Eileen McGovern where she fled wildly across the field. But he let her go. For he’d found a new and more wonderful, more exciting girl-Friday now. “Who…who are you?” he husked as he tore at his clothes—astonished that she tore at them, too.
And: “Alaze,” she told him, simply. “Alaze…”
Eileen—running, crashing through a low thicket, flying under the moon—wanted to scream but had no wind for it. And in the end was too frightened to scream anyway. For she knew that someone ran with her, alongside her; a lithe, naked someone, who for the moment held off from whatever was his purpose.
But for how long?
The rattle of a crate deposited on the doorstep of The Old Stage woke Gavin McGovern up from unremembered dreams, but dreams which nevertheless left him red-eyed and rumbling inside like a volcano. Angry dreams! He woke to a new day, and in a way to a new world. He went to the door and it was dawn; the sun was balanced on the eastern horizon, reaching for the sky; Dave Gorman, the local milkman, was delivering.
“Wait,” Gavin told him, and ran upstairs. A moment later and he was down again. “Eileen’s not back,” he said. “She was at the dance last night, went off with some bloke, an outsider. He hasn’t brought her back. Tell them.”
Gorman looked at him, almost said: tell who? But not quite. He knew who to tell. The Athelsford tribe.
Gavin spied the postman, George Lee, coming along the road on his early morning rounds. He gave him the same message: his sister, Eileen, a girl of the tribe, had been abducted. She was out there somewhere now, stolen away, perhaps hurt. And by the time Gavin had thrown water in his face and roused his father, the message was already being spread abroad. People were coming out of their doors, moving into the countryside around, starting to search. The tribe looked after its own…
And beneath the luststone:
Alaze was back, but Hengit had not returned. It was past dawn and Chylos could feel the sun warming their mighty headstone, and he wondered what had passed in the night: was his work now done and could he rest?
“How went it?” the old wizard inquired immediately, as Alaze settled back into her bones.
“It went…well. To a point,” she eventually answered.
“A point? What point?” He was alarmed. “What went wrong? Did you not follow my instructions?”
“Yes,” she sighed, “but—”
“But?” And now it was Chylos’s turn to sigh. “Out with it.”
“I found one who was lusty. Indeed he was with a maid, which but for my intervention he would take against her will! Ah, but when he saw me he lusted after her no longer! And I heeded your instructions and put on my previous female form for him. According to those same instructions, I would teach him the true passions and furies and ecstasies of the flesh; so that afterwards and when he was with women of the tribe, he would be untiring, a satyr, and they would always bring forth from his potent seed. But because I was their inspiration, my spirit would be in all of them! This was why I put on flesh; and it was a great magic, a gigantic effort of will. Except…it had been a long, long time, Chylos. And in the heat of the moment I relaxed my will; no, he relaxed it for me, such was his passion. And…he saw me as I was, as I am…”
“Ah!” said Chylos, understanding what she told him. “And afterwards? Did you not try again? Were there no others?”
“There might have been others, aye—but as I journeyed out from this stone, the greater the distance the less obedient my will. Until I could no longer call flesh unto myself. And now, weary, I am returned.”
Chylos sagged down into the alveolate, crumbling relics of himself. “Then Hengit is my last hope,” he said.
At which moment Hengit returned—but hangdog, as Chylos at once observed. And: “Tell me the worst,” the old man groaned.
But Hengit was unrepentant. “I did as you instructed,” he commenced his story, “went forth, found a woman, put on flesh. And she was of the tribe, I’m sure. Alas, she was a child in the ways of men, a virgin, an innocent. You had said: let her be lusty, willing—but she was not. Indeed, she was afraid.”
Chylos could scarce believe it. “But—were there no others?”
“Possibly,” Hengit answered. “But this was a girl of the tribe, lost and afraid and vulnerable. I stood close by and watched over her, until the dawn…”
“Then that is the very end of it,” Chylos sighed, beaten at last. And his words were truer than even he might suspect.
But still, for the moment, the luststone exerted its immemorial influence…
Of all the people of Athelsford who were out searching in the fields and woods that morning, it was Gavin McGovern who found the rapist Clemens huddled beneath the hedgerow. He heard his sobbing, climbed the stile, and found him there. And in the long grass close by, he also found his knife still damp with dew. And looking at Clemens the way he was, Gavin fully believed that he had lost Eileen forever.
He cried hot, unashamed tears then, looked up at the blue skies she would never see again, and blamed himself. My fault—my fault! If I’d not been the way I was, she wouldn’t have needed to defy me!
But then he looked again at Clemens, and his surging blood surged more yet. And as Clemens had lusted after Eileen, so now Gavin lusted after him—after his life!
He dragged him out from hiding, bunched his white hair in a hamlike hand, and stretched his neck taut across his knee. Then—three things, occurring almost simultaneously.
One: a terrific explosion from across the fields, where John Sykes had kept his word and reduced the luststone to so much rubble. Two: the bloodlust went out of Gavin like a light switched off, so that he gasped, released his victim, and thrust him away. And three, he heard the voice of his father, echoing from the near-distance and carrying far and wide in the brightening air:
“Gavin, we’ve found her! She’s unharmed! She’s all right!”
PC Bennett, coming across the field, his uniformed legs damp from the dewy grass, saw the knife in Gavin’s hand and said, “I’ll take that, son.” And having taken it he also went to take charge of the gibbering, worthless, soul-shrivelled maniac thing that was Garry Clemens.
And so in a way old Chylos was right, for in the end nothing had come of all his works. But in several other ways he was quite wrong…
THE WHISPERER
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The first time Miles Benton saw the little fellow was on the train. Benton was commuting to his office job in the city and he sat alone in a second-class compartment. The ‘little fellow’—a very ugly little man, from what Benton could see of him out of the corner of his eye, with a lopsided hump and dark or dirty features, like a gnomish gypsy—entered the compartment and took a seat in the far corner. He was dressed in a floppy black wide-brimmed hat that fell half over his face and a black overcoat longer than himself that trailed to the floor.
Benton was immediately aware of the smell, a rank stench which quite literally would have done credit to the lowliest farmyard, and correctly deduced its source. Despite the dry acrid smell of stale tobacco from the ashtrays and the lingering odour of grimy stations, the compartment had seemed positively perfumed prior to the advent of the hunchback. The day was quite chill outside, but Benton nevertheless stood up and opened the window, pulling it down until the draft forced back the fumes from his fellow passenger. He was then obliged to put away his flapping newspaper and sit back, his collar upturned against the sudden cold blast, mentally cursing the smelly little chap for fouling ‘his’ compartment.
A further five minutes saw Benton’s mind made up to change compartments. That way he would be removed from the source of the odorous irritation, and he would no longer need to suffer this intolerable blast of icy air. But no sooner was his course of action determined than the ticket collector arrived, sliding open the door and sticking his well-known and friendly face inside the compartment.
“Mornin’, sir,” he said briskly to Benton, merely glancing at the other traveller. “Tickets, please.”
Benton got out his ticket and passed it to be examined. He noticed with satisfaction as he did so that the ticket collector wrinkled his nose and sniffed suspiciously at the air, eyeing the hunchback curiously. Benton retrieved his ticket and the collector turned to the little man in the far corner. “Yer ticket…sir…if yer don’t mind.” He looked the little chap up and down disapprovingly.
The hunchback looked up from under his black floppy hat and grinned. His eyes were jet and bright as a bird’s. He winked and indicated that the ticket collector should bend down, expressing an obvious desire to say something in confidence. He made no effort to produce a ticket.
The ticket collector frowned in annoyance, but nevertheless bent his ear to the little man’s face. He listened for a moment or two to a chuckling, throaty whisper. It actually appeared to Benton that the hunchback was chortling as he whispered his obscene secret into the other’s ear, and the traveller could almost hear him saying: “Feelthy postcards! Vairy dairty pictures!”
The look on the face of the ticket collector changed immediately; his expression went stony hard.
“Aye, aye!” Benton said to himself. “The little blighter’s got no ticket! He’s for it now.”
But no, the ticket collector said nothing to the obnoxious midget, but straightened and turned to Benton. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “but this compartment’s private. I’ll ’ave ter arsk yer ter leave.”
“But,” Benton gasped incredulously, “I’ve been travelling in this compartment for years. It’s never been a, well, a ‘private’ compartment before!”
“No, sir, p’raps not,” said the ticket collector undismayed. “But it is now. There’s a compartment next door; jus’ a couple of gents in there; I’m sure it’ll do jus’ as well.” He held the door open for Benton, daring him to argue the point further. “Sir?”
“Ah, well,” Benton thought, resignedly, “I was wanting to move.” Nevertheless, he looked down aggressively as he passed the hunchback, staring hard at the top of the floppy hat. The little man seemed to know. He looked up and grinned, cocking his head on one side and grinning.
Benton stepped quickly out into the corridor and took a deep breath. “Damn!” he swore out loud.
“Yer pardon, sir?” inquired the ticket collector, already swaying off down the corridor.
“Nothing!” Benton snapped in reply, letting himself into the smoky, crowded compartment to which he had been directed.
The very next morning Benton plucked up his courage (he had never been a very brave man), stopped the ticket collector, and asked him what it had all been about. Who had the little chap been. What privileges did he have that an entire compartment had been reserved especially for him, the grim little gargoyle?
To which the ticket collector replied: “Eh? An ’unchback? Are yer sure it was this train, sir? Why, we haint ’ad no private or reserved compartments on this ’ere train since it became a commuter special! And as fer an ’unchback—well!”
“But surely you remember asking me to leave my compartment—this compartment?” Benton insisted.
“’Ere, yer pullin’ me leg, haint yer, sir?” laughed the ticket collector good-naturedly. He slammed shut the compartment door behind him and smilingly strode away without waiting for an answer, leaving Benton alone with his jumbled and whirling thoughts.
“Well, I never!” the commuter muttered worriedly to himself. He scratched his head and then, philosophically, began to quote a mental line or two from a ditty his mother had used to say to him when he was a child:
The other day upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there…
Benton had almost forgotten about the little man with the hump and sewer-like smell by the time their paths crossed again. It happened one day some three months later, with spring just coming on, when, in acknowledgement of the bright sunshine, Benton decided to forego his usual sandwich lunch at the office for a noonday pint at the Bull & Bush.
The entire pub, except for one corner of the bar, appeared to be quite crowded, but it was not until Benton had elbowed his way to the corner in question that he saw why it was unoccupied; or rather, why it had only one occupant. The smell hit him at precisely the same time as he saw, sitting on a bar stool with his oddly humped back to the regular patrons, the little man in black with his floppy broad-brimmed hat.
That the other customers were aware of the cesspool stench was obvious—Benton watched in fascination the wrinkling all about him of at least a dozen pairs of nostrils—and yet not a man complained. And more amazing yet, no one even attempted to encroach upon the little fellow’s territory in the bar corner. No one, that is, except Benton…
Holding his breath, Benton stepped forward and rapped sharply with his knuckles on the bar just to the left of where the hunchback sat. “Beer, barman. A pint of best, please.”
The barman smiled chubbily and stepped forward, reaching out for a beer pump and slipping a glass beneath the tap. But even as he did so the hunchback made a small gesture with his head, indicating that he wanted to say something…
Benton had seen all this before, and all the many sounds of the pub—the chattering of people, the clink of coins, and the clatter of glasses—seemed to fade to silence about him as he focussed his full concentration upon the barman and the little man in the floppy hat. In slow motion, it seemed, the barman bent his head down toward the hunchback, and again Benton heard strangely chuckled whispers as the odious dwarf passed his secret instructions.
Curiously, fearfully, in something very akin to dread, Benton watched the portly barman’s face undergo its change, heard the hissss of the beer pump, saw the full glass come out from beneath the bar…to plump down in front of the hunchback! Hard-eyed, the barman stuck his hand out in front of Benton’s nose. “That’s half a dollar to you, sir.”
“But…” Benton gasped, incredulously opening and closing his mouth. He already had a coin in his hand, with which he had intended to pay for his drink, but now he pulled his hand back.
“Half a dollar, sir,” the barman repeated ominously, snatching the coin from Benton’s retreating fingers, “and would you mind moving down the bar, please? It’s a bit crowded this end.”
In utter disbelief Benton jerked his eyes from the barman’s face to his now empty hand, and from his hand to the seated hunchback;
and as he did so the little man turned his head towards him and grinned. Benton was aware only of the bright, bird-like eyes beneath the wide brim of the hat—not of the darkness surrounding them. One of those eyes closed suddenly in a wink, and then the little man turned back to his beer.
“But,” Benton again croaked his protest at the publican, “that’s my beer he’s got!” He reached out and caught the barman’s rolled-up sleeve, following him down the bar until forced by the press of patrons to let go. The barman finally turned.
“Beer, sir?” The smile was back on his chubby face. “Certainly—half a dollar to you, sir.”
Abruptly the bar sounds crashed in again upon Benton’s awareness as he turned to elbow his way frantically, almost hysterically, through the crowded room to the door. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the little man, too, had left. A crush of thirsty people had already moved into the space he had occupied in the bar corner.
Outside in the fresh air Benton glared wild-eyed up and down the busy street; and yet he was half afraid of seeing the figure his eyes sought. The little man, however, had apparently disappeared into thin air.
“God damn him!” Benton cried in sudden rage, and a passing policeman looked at him very curiously indeed.
He was annoyed to notice that the policeman followed him all the way back to the office.
At noon the next day Benton was out of the office as if at the crack of a starting pistol. He almost ran the four blocks to the Bull & Bush, pausing only to straighten his tie and tilt his bowler a trifle more aggressively in the mirror of a shop window. The place was quite crowded, as before, but he made his way determinedly to the bar, having first checked that the air was quite clean—ergo, that the little man with the hump was quite definitely not there.