Manly Wade Wellman - John Thunstone 02 (14 page)

 
          
Then
he headed for where the cemetery waited darkly under the moon. He swung his
sword cane lightly as he walked.

           
Somebody came from the theater and
paused beside Thunstone. It was the shapely, red-haired girl he had seen at the
auditorium, in the lobby of the theater, on the stage as one of Macbeth’s three
witches.

 
          
“You
don’t believe in our power,” she said accusingly. He leaned lightly on his
cane. “I think you have power.” “Come along with me now and you’ll be
convinced.” She did not wait for him to agree or decline, but walked quickly
ahead. Thunstone let her go for perhaps fifty yards,
then
followed as quietly as he could. His feet fell lightly for so big a man. Up there
ahead, in a treeless stretch where the moonlight came down like gleaming rain,
was a low stone wall like the one that bounded the campus at Main Street. The
red-haired girl walked through a gap in it. Thunstone stood and watched her go
in among the murky shadows of the cemetery trees, then followed again.

 
          
The
path that led through the gap in the wall was strewn with gravel that crunched
softly under his feet. Grass grew thickly to either side, and tombstones with
rounded tops stood there. They looked like pallid mushrooms springing up from
the turf among the trees. Here and there were larger stones, mostly square.
Thunstone moved off the noisy gravel and walked on the grass for the sake of
silence.

 
          
A
clear voice rose in a hailing call behind Thunstone. He slid away into the
sheltering dark of some low-hanging branches, just as the girl up ahead turned,
then came hurrying back along the path. Her feet made more noise than Thunstone’s.
Two more girls came to meet her, almost opposite the point where Thunstone had
gone into hiding. Moonlight filtered down upon them and he saw that they were
the other two witches of the Macbeth sequence, the blonde and the brunette.

 
          
“There’s
plenty of time yet,” one of them said. “Let’s go there together.”

 
          
They
headed deeper into the cemetery. Thunstone followed cautiously, still keeping
on the grass beside the gravel and under the shadows of the branches.

 
          
The
three girls talked, not in loud gossipy fashion but stealthily and in
undertones. Thunstone could hear their voices but could not make out the words.
The journey went on, perhaps for two hundred yards. Once the trio stopped and
turned to look back. For a worried moment, Thunstone thought they had seen him
or perhaps had divined his presence, but then they walked on again, and he
followed them.

 
          
They
turned from the gravel path into a sort of clearing where the light of the moon
was brilliant on the grass. There stood a square, flat-roofed structure the
size of a one- car garage. The moonlight was gray upon it, as upon polished
granite. A dark door showed at the front. The girls approached and one of them
took hold of some sort of catch and manipulated it for a moment, then pulled
the door open. Another turned on a flashlight. They went in, and the door closed
gratingly behind them.

 
          
Thunstone
waited behind a dark cedar tree. Slowly he counted to twenty. Then he stepped
out into the moonlit open and approached the tomb. He moved swiftly and
silently, every sense awake. Something fluttered down, almost touching his
head,
then
slid away in the air. It was a dark, winged
something, too big for any bat he had ever seen. Some sort of night bird,
probably. Or was it?

 
          
He
reached the door of the tomb. A granite slab was sunk there, like a doorstep.
Above the door were the big raised letters of a name,
emdyke.
Of course, this was the tomb of that long-ago mayor of
Buford, the mayor whose wife had ministered magically to help cure Samuel
Whitney. And the tomb was an entry to—something, somewhere.

 
          
The
door itself was a grating of upright iron bars, set close together. Each bar
was as thick as Thunstone’s sinewy wrist.

 
          
He
felt for the catch and tried to lift it, but it hung stubbornly in its place.
He exerted his considerable strength, with no success whatever. It was caught
and locked; it could be opened only by a special pressure. He tried yet again.
The catch did not move.

 
          
He
bent closer in the moonlight to study the massive framework of the door. Sure
enough, a keyhole showed beneath the catch, a slot blacker than the black iron.
He twisted the handle of his cane, freed the silver blade, and set the keen
point in the slot. Carefully he probed. He twisted this way and that. He heard
a muffled clank within the big lock, and when he took hold of the catch again,
the barred door creaked on its hinges and swung slowly outward.

 
          
At
once he was inside and pulled the door after him. He heard the grating of the
lock as it engaged. For a moment he stood against a wall of stone, waiting for
his eyes to become more used to the gloom,

 
          
Some
radiance from the moon filtered in between the close-set bars of the door. He
could see something of the chamber into which he had come. Against each of the
walls to left and right was set a chestlike structure, of stone like the tomb
itself. He went to one, felt it. There were raised letters upon it, a name or
perhaps an epitaph, but he could not read them by groping. The broad slab of
the lid above had a massive padlock. It felt rusty.

 
          
He
sought the other sarcophagus and found a rusty padlock there, too. “Probably
just as well,” he said under his breath.

           
For these two stone coffins must
hold the bodies of Mayor Emdyke, who had sponsored the witches of Buford, and
his wife, who was one of those witches.

 
          
He
resheathed the blade in his cane and slid the ferrule across the stone floor.
He found his way to the rear of the crypt, and there his cane encountered a
drop downward.

 
          
Kneeling,
he explored with his fingers. Here were stairs, leading into the earth, into a
deep blackness. He rose, felt ahead of him with his cane, and began to descend.
He moved his feet carefully from stone step to stone step, making sure of
position at each move. He counted twelve steps going down. Then he was on a
broad, roughly flagged floor, in darkness just less black than ink.

 
          
He
peered ahead of him. His right hand encountered a rough wall, and his cane,
held out straight in his left, touched a wall opposite. That meant the width of
the place was perhaps nine feet. He extended the cane above his head, to touch
some kind of ceiling.
Another nine feet, as he estimated.

 
          
He
began to move ahead. His left hand slid his cane back and forth on the stones
in front of him, questing the way like the cane of a blind man. His right hand
kept his fingertips to the stone wall beside him. He paced ahead and ahead. He
was in some sort of passage, beneath the ground of the cemetery. It would lead
him somewhere. Where? That was what he had come here to find out.

 
          
Up
there ahead, the darkness seemed to fade ever so slightly. The fingers of his
right hand on the wall told him that the passage curved, ever so gradually,
little by little. He was making a slight turn, and up ahead might even be some
sort of visibility. Step by step he accomplished. The light to the front grew
more apparent, more, until it seemed a rosy glimmer, like a sunset on a dusty
day.

 
          
Again
he was making a slight curve on the way he went, this time leftward. The passage
made a slight S as he followed it. More steps, and then he could see fairly
well. There ahead of him was the rose-tinted light, and he saw that it filtered
through some sort of a curtain there ahead, a curtain of translucent red
fabric. Against it was outlined a blotchy shadow, as though someone stood
inside it on watch.

 
          
As
Thunstone established these things, he heard a soft flutter of sound in the
corridor behind him, heard muffled voices. More people were coming in. Whatever
he did, he must do fast.

 
          
He
moved rapidly in the rose light now, and as he moved he stooped and picked up a
handful of pebbly stuff. He came close to the curtain at one side, and hurled
his pebbles with all his strength to where it came down at the far edge. It
patterned there like rain, and the shadowy form behind the curtain half said an
oath and moved quickly in the direction of the noise. A head pushed out at that
edge of the fabric, even as Thunstone slid past the edge near himself and into
something like a granite-faced vestibule. Swiftly he stole to where a carved
obelisk stood near the inward wall, and slid behind it.

 
          
He
must be in a sort of basement. Manifestly it would be Grizel Fian’s basement,
for he had been told hers was the only house at the edge of the cemetery.

 
          
Feet
scraped outside the curtain and a man’s voice cried out,
“Sapht!”

 
          
The
guard inside drew the curtain open. Peeping cautiously, Thunstone saw that that
guard was a gaunt man in a robe with the hood flung back.

 
          
“Come
in, come in,’’ he invited gruffly. “
But why all the noise?”

 
          
“Why
not all the noise?’’ returned the man who had spoken the countersign. “We’re
here, and there’ll be noise enough.”

 
          
Eight
or ten had entered. Thunstone could see that most were female. They trooped
away past the obelisk and through a roughly made arch into somewhere beyond.
Bringing up the rear was a towering, broad male figure in a cassock.
Undoubtedly he was the actor who had played Hume in the first scene of Grizel
Fian’s presentation.

 
          
Thunstone
stayed in hiding and stealthily watched until the guard turned his face back to
the red curtain. Then, swift and soundless as a night-prowling cat, Thunstone
moved to the archway and through it. As he did so, he heard a drum begin to
beat somewhere, a slow rhythm. He moved toward that sound, and wondered where
he was going.

 
          
So
often in the past, he had gone somewhere without knowing where. That was what
he did now. It was what he had chosen to do with his life. Now again, he must
follow an unknown way he had chosen. Nor could he lose his life, no matter what
Grizel Fian planned to do to him.

 
          
He
came into another passage, lighted this time with iron-bracketed oil lamps
fastened to the slaty gray walls on either side. Those were old, old lamps.
Undoubtedly they could be considered as valuable antiques.
Pom pom pom
sounded the rhythmic beat of the drum. The passage made
an abrupt turn to the right. Thunstone crowded close to the wall at the left as
he followed the turn. He saw another archway, with drapes of deep purple cloth
drawn to either side. Above the sound of the drum he heard a sound of muttering
voices, surely the people who had gone there ahead of him. He stole gingerly to
one of the hangings, slid in among its ample folds, and peeped out into what
was beyond.

 
          
That
was a great chamber, long enough and wide enough for a ballroom. It must be the
whole basement of Grizel Fian’s house. More purple fabric covered the walls,
and into the hangings, designs had been worked in black and gold. If these were
letters, they were not Greek or Arabic; they were of no alphabet Thunstone
knew. The spacious floor was paved with something as pale and smooth as wax. At
its center was painted, in blue and red and yellow, a design of a great
five-pointed star, girded round with a black circle. The spaces between the
points of the star were adorned with grotesque figures, and all around the
outside of the circle were strung more of the letters that were neither Greek
nor Arabic. Thunstone knew a pentacle when he saw one, and he knew that a
pentacle was for the focusing of dark, supernormal forces.

 
          
Oil
lamps hung from the ceiling, shedding their radiance. At the far end of the
floor stood a great thronelike chair of dark, polished wood, with a cushion as
red as fresh blood. In the gloom behind it seemed to be a flight of stairs.
Beside the throne stood a blue-robed man, pounding on a kettledrum.
A little to his rear stood two more blue-robed figures, another man and a
woman. And ranged along the walls to right and left stood others, the two lines
of them facing each other across the pale floor with its pentacle.