Darconville's Cat (91 page)

  For some reason he suddenly felt the room grow cold
as ice.

  LXXXVII

  The Diabolical Pact

  These pacts with the Devil are not only vain and
useless: they are also dangerous and evil.

        —FRANCESCO
GUAZZO,
Compendium maleficarum
(1608)

  WITHOUT HESITATION, Darconville took the sheet of
paper to the mirror and held it at right angles to the glass: it
was still unreadable. He tried in vain, as well, to read it through
the back of the sheet. So he began to figure it as it had
presumably been written, reading withershins letter by letter what
turned out to be Latin. It came up slowly in the curial style and
seemed to be a formal—what? Suddenly, his face fell, a witness to
malfeasance, and went pale as paper.

              
alligiS

  
te mued et reficuL euqretsigam enimoD

  
erivres ibit roedllop te ,ocsonga
mepicnirp

  
oicnuner tE .ereviv oretop uidnauq eridebo
te

  
te soila te mutsirhC museJ te mueD
muertla

  
macilotsopA maiselccE suispi ainmo te
manamoR

  
tiussop seledif subiuq senoitagor te senoitaro
senmo

  
maicaf diuq roedllop ibit te;em orp
eredecretni

  
rep alam da erehartta te ,oretop mulam
touqtouq

  
,mumsitpab te mamsirhc oicnunerba
te;senmo

  
:murotcnas suispi te itsirhC useJ atirem ainmo
te

  
:inoitaroda te iutivres eaut oreed is
te

  
,orecef suispi iem menoitalbo non is te

  
.rnaut tucis maem mativ od ibit ,eid
euqouq

  
.ceD sumisecirt;eid te onna coh iceF

                    
.LMCM

                    
.reficurC

        
,sinrefni xe
mutcartxE

        
.munomead
ailisnoc retni

  His eyes forked in comprehension as he read it to
the end with a preying ache, moving his head as though punctuating
with self-directed nods secret decisions of
sympathy
with
it, his fingers twittering with the thrill of such evil, and then
shutting it like a clapstick, as though some faculty or prevision
in him were unexpectedly proved, he felt something suddenly pass
through him—whereupon, freeing his heart, he burst into a cruel
laughter of recognition that never seemed to end.

  LXXXVIII

  Week of the Sabbat

  There are certain crimes which the law cannot touch
and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.

        —SHERLOCK
HOLMES,

        
The
Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

  A GRIM WEEK BEGAN. There was a roar of rain on the
slate roof, blown by a wind of such power and purpose as almost to
shatter the windowpanes against which the raindrops burst like
stars. And all through the first night Darconville brooded, torn
between a decision— living for a hating or dying for a love. It
was, needless to say, no longer a question informed by any hope,
either of enchantment or exorcism, of winning back Isabel
Rawsthorne but rather one of related options touching on the
summary execution-by-evil of the spectre whose photograph he once
again set up on the mantelpiece: the crime that would make him
happy or the scaffold that would prevent him from being unhappy. He
held up his candle to the photograph as he listened to the wind
outside, the whistling, the violent rattling of a window-catch, and
his interrupted heart-pulse swam in death: he recognized nothing:
it was the face of the Queen of Spit.

  To one man in a million dreadful knowledge is
revealed. There is, it is true, a kind of psychic poikilothermism
when the mind, like the body, must assume the temperature of its
surroundings. But Crucifer’s black pact with the devil seemed only
to awaken in his own mind certain secret knowledge that had long
lain dormant, figures of every adjunct to the heavens and
characters of signs and evening stars by which the spirits are
enforced to rise. There was a harpocratic oath made that night in
the silence where, dosed with benperidol, he sat waiting to prey.
It would be a revenge Kydian, fierce, and immediate. Darconville
chose the way.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Monday
. In the morning, he was fully
resolved. It would be a matter of diligent preparation, sedulous
care, and finally celerity of execution. He would never give up,
nothing would stop him. Hunger eats through walls of stone. He
first arranged all her letters, photos, the cassette, all the
notebooks he’d kept on her. Why? He didn’t know. But it didn’t
matter. He would head her off on fronts both natural and
supernatural, for who, he wondered, was so stupid and foolish as to
think that all the things done by the body have no effect on the
spirit? She could not have found a more ruthless and persequent
enemy: he stomped into the haft of his shoe, the heel dropped home
snug and positive, and he drew a figure in the air with his finger
in front of the photograph which he then turned upsidedown.
“
Asmo-deus
,” whispered Darconville, “
I utterly forsake
thee
!” And immediately he went out and bought a new carving
knife.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Tuesday
. The weather, turning, brought cold
sunlight, but Darconville saw none of it. He pulled the shades,
intentionally put his desk out of the light, and, secretive in
whatever he did now (for, in the doing, none but himself knew why),
spent the morning for some reason compelled to write—facts only—of
everything he could remember of her; the estimate of all she wasn’t
looked fulsome in a list. A bora was blowing up in the Adriatic of
his soul, and, patience, the only virtue left there, became a
pleasant timekeeper. He baited his fishhooks.

  First, he had no trouble learning from van der
Slang’s grandmother —a boastful and polyphagous old bat who lived
near them down there—what he had feared: they were already engaged.
(Scarce manumised and already his!) She, however, knew nothing
else. And so under false pretenses he wrote to the Naval Academy
again for information as to the Dutchman’s screwship and its
nautical itinerary, hoping thus to determine by logical, if
general, conjecture in which month or months in the coming
annus deliberandi
the wedding day might be set. That
wasn’t all. He wrote to several Quinsy girls in Charlottesville,
well-disposed to him, he remembered, because ill-disposed to
Isabel, requesting them to monitor the local papers there for any
announcements of consequence.

  The concrete acts of maléfice had just begun. One
ingenuity mothered another. Darconville worked with the morbid
logic of an inquisitor not only to learn more of this witch and her
repeating frauds but also to emperor outrages to serve his pain and
so to fright all pity from the world withal where killing the
living to regenerate death alone fit the ways of the woes he felt.
To know more? To dig more deeply? It was of course folly,
reasonless—motus without motive, motive not motivirt!—and yet a
wish, the wish a desire, the desire an uncontrollable longing
perversely perpetrated upon him because he felt he should
not
, an act soliciting only the absolution of hell unless
by sulphuring himself in the sins he learned and so converting to
vapor in the heat of his throes to ascend upon her in an infamy
unseen he somehow mitigate the strategy of evil involved in the
terrible but just equivalence of pain awaiting her. Who would boast
a victory that cost no chance of loss? Who would bulletin such
success as that which, in the field of mind, took only random
memory for an assailant? No, it was too late. No sweet behavior
now, no soft minioning could ever hope to turn him from where his
appetite was fixed.

  I’ll draw you to a particular, vowed Darconville,
and have you look in a glass! He snatched up the photograph and
angrily pressed it flat upon the mirror. There, he thought,
now
bathe your finger-ends and bat your eyes and load your
bum with a farthingale! Could it move distraction in the heart of a
Minotaur it should find me quartz! What, do you beg for clemency?
Resisted, madam! Generosity? Forbearance? Come, I am in haste; be
brief. Charity? Kindness? Favor? Pity?
Pity
? He replaced
the photograph on the mantel, upsidedown. Card your wool, Eve,
thought Darconville—and fell again to writing.

  He wrote to Isabel’s real father through the
district attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, affecting, with a view
to learning of his whereabouts and perhaps more of her, to be
leaving them a huge sum of money. He wrote to Mrs. McAwaddle at the
registrar’s office for a photocopy of Isabel’s dossier in which he
hoped to descry—it didn’t matter what—some irregularity of birth, a
reference to family lunacy, any kind of extralegal ganancial
trickery in her parents’ divorce that might serve as a blocking
agent to her marriage. He wrote a handful of vituperative postcards
to everyone in Fawx’s Mt. whom he suspected of being involved in
the conspiracy, composing in a sudden
coup d’essai
, then
calling in, one special telegram to Zutphen Farm in which it was
warned that, short of an interplanetary cataclysm, he’d appear at
the forthcoming wedding in the company of Abaddon, the angel of
ice, and sixty other apparitions from the abhorred deep. And then
he wrote out an envelope to Gilbert van der Slang, stuffing it with
duplicates of those of Isabel’s letters from the previous year in a
nuptial mood—diploid, deceptive, devious—and went out at day’s end
to mail the lot of them, making an effort as he walked back through
the tin-colored dusk to ascertain the location, in back of one of
the Wigglesworth houses, of what he marked in his mind. It was a
young wild-nut tree.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Wednesday
. It was time for further action.
Darconville took from his pocket an object that had caught his eye
some few days previous, a simple gem, green as jealousy, spotted
with blood, that seemed in some kind of mnemonic resurrection both
to contain and to conceal the mystery of the whole plot. But the
luck? To traverse the world in thought where were swarming, by
moderate computation, some five billion souls indifferent to his
needs only because ignorant of them and then to remember, suddenly,
the deepest accomplice of all who by some strange and inexplicable
metonymy not laid down in books
alone
can turn captor into
captive and make of the hunter game? How provident was nature in
such matters! The chrysalis does not burst until there is a wing to
help the gauze-fly upward. He immediately telephoned Hypsipyle
Poore.

  It has been observed that it’s a desperate thief
that a thief lets in, but quickly Darconville in his brief
conversation with her found a partner whose desires ran before her
honor, whose wishes burned hotter than her faith, and when
penalties were mentioned so also was a name. Darconville smiled
darkly. The long explanation led to the only expectation: as the
venality of Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, was legend, he
asked, then why couldn’t she devise a plan to prove it? Hypsipyle
said she didn’t understand. (The complexity of language, he thought
to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted
understanding.) Why, form schemes, plans, designs! Make him tell
the tale anew, where, how, how often, how long ago, and when!
Seduce him
! Then Hypsipyle clucked through the telephone
like a wizard and jingled it with a laugh. She whispered an idea. O
banquet of foul delight, prepared by thee, dark paraclete! “I love
to say yes,” said Hypsipyle Poore, kissing him goodbye through the
receiver.

  Then Darconville put the bloodstone back into his
pocket.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Thursday
. But there was more to be done. It
required vigilance, for the speed of her moves, elucidating
duration, had to be measured in velocity—direction was involved—and
yet as Darconville continued to trace out, track, and trip toward
the unbroken trail to target, inquiries yielded full-fold. He
learned, for instance, with the help of a co-operator at the
Charlottesville telephone company—an acquaintance he remembered
from the days when Isabel herself worked there—that there had been
a spate of phone calls from New York to Isabel’s number, with
charges transferred to the van der Slang household, between July 10
and August 21. He found out that she had registered in a
Charlottesville shop for china (“Kensington” pattern by Noritake)
and silver (“Chippendale” pattern by Towle) in
early
September
! And then he managed to contact, after an elaborate
and roundabout series of calls, several ex-farmhands from Zutphen
Farm—three disgruntled, but patriotic, illiterates—who without so
much as a question proudly felt it a
duty
to help out the
F.B.I.: yes, they said, Isabel and Gilbert van der Slang were
together in Fawx’s Mt. during July, and, yes, they were
shoot
sure, officer, because it was a small town and—

  Darconville put down the receiver. He was, by now,
more surprised that he was astonished than astonished that he had
cared so much. The darkness that had sat him down despondent in his
solitary chair for days together, weaving bitter fancies, dreaming
bitter dreams, now grew light and thin, almost as if chased by the
sudden desperate longing to be free of this prostitute of figment
and fable.