down the hallway near your room.”
Young legs in brown slacks, soft-shoed and silent, sprang away (something to be
Another minute or two of cooperation and preparations were complete. Stacks of books held the mirror propped vertically upon the table, so that the pages of the old book, opened flat before the mirror, were reflected. And now the words of what was to be read aloud, printed in reverse, sprang to legibility in the glass. The candle burned, stuck clumsily with its own melted wax to the fine wood of the table, and leaning a trifle over the open book.
Now Clarissa pulled from the page the primitive tape, which in thirty years had deteriorated more than the old paper had in three hundred. It came free easily, and immediately gave up into her fingers the small lock of hair; mixed gray and black. More resilient than either the paper or the tape, as if it might have been trimmed off only this morning. Whose? It did not look or feel at all like Grandmother Harker’s own brown-gray curls, as Clarissa recalled them.
Side by side the candle flame and Tensor lamp stared at their own reflections in the mirror. Plenty of light, but the words would not come clear for Clarissa. She started reading aloud, stumbled, tried to make sense out of them. All higgledy-piggledy nonsense, about the falling of the sun, the rising of the night. More, just as absurd. Not evil-sounding, no, not the black and evil thing—although right now she might have risked that too—for there in the text were the names of God and Jesus set down to be sworn by with respect. She could see that much, although the words all swam together now . . .
“Grandmother . . . lean back. Rest, please. Shall I read it for you?”
“Oh yes, my dear. It’s so important. My own dear grandmother once told me . . .” Clarissa had to pause, or faint.
Judy put back the brown hair from her forehead, snapped off the Tensor, and in the candlelight leaned closer to the page and mirror. She gave a schoolroom clearing of the throat, and read through the passage twice: first in halting Latin; again in English translation that picked up speed as it went along.
“. . . walker by daylight, walker by night . . . come to my aid whose need is great . . .”
Remembering just in time, Clarissa leaned forward to do the other thing the ritual demanded. The candle flame sizzled, snapped at the dry morsels she fed it. The stink of burning hair stung at their nostrils.
And now there was nothing more for them to do. The rest was up to the unknown princely power whose aid they had besought; not God, to judge from the obscure text, but not Satan either. A saint?
Time passed, the girl standing straight now behind the old woman’s chair, waiting to see if there was anything else that she could do for Gran. To Clarissa it seemed that a great silence now bound the house. The police must have departed once again, or most of them; some had planned to keep watch on the phones. Somewhere a jet, droning in across the lake, was heading for O’Hare.
“Granny, should I turn on another light?” The candle still burned, and one small bulb in a fixture near the door.
Already the spell that Clarissa in her desperation had tried to weave around herself was dissolving, like lake mist in the morning sun. Would God that it were morning already, instead of half the night still to be endured.
As the old woman raised herself from the chair, the joints of her knees and hips felt older than Grandmother Harker’s had ever lived to be. “Judy, can you forgive me for all this nonsense? I’m a very foolish old—”
With a sharp sound the mirror, untouched by anything that either of the women could see or hear, smashed into a hundred pieces and crumpled in a heap of glass upon the table. Clarissa turned in time to see the candle, still half unburned, extinguish itself abruptly.
FIVE
Almost exactly sixteen hours, the traveler thought to himself, looking at his new wrist watch while the cab bore him, as he had directed, east and north from O’Hare Field. Here it was now four in the afternoon, and he should be just in time for tea, if one took tea in Illinois, which he was perfectly certain one did not. Sixteen hours from summons to arrival was not bad at all, considering all that he had had to do. My compliments, he thought, to BOAC. Of course he had long ago made preparations for some journey such as this—as he had for many other eventualities—and advance preparation always paid off when speed was essential.
“Turn east upon the next large road,” he ordered, loudly and clearly, wondering exactly how his English sounded to the natives here. Of course he must sound basically British after so many years in London. The driver, a thick-necked black, made a minimal motion of his head as if he was moved to turn and argue with his passenger once more that the best way to get where he was going would be to confide the exact address of his destination to such a professionally knowledgeable guide as the driver himself. But the passenger’s reaction to argument last time had not been pleasant.
Actually the passenger did not know the exact address he wanted, though he could feel the location of the place growing nearer. He momentarily tilted his dark glasses aside with a long finger, and squinted into dull sun- glow reflected from a long roadside pile of thawing snow. It was a dreary, soggy day, cloudy for the most part, not really as cold as he had expected. “And now, if you please, turn north again.”
In another mile he had the man turn east, and then in a little while, once more to the north. What must be Lake Michigan, surprisingly oceanic at first sight, hove into view upon the traveler’s right. He noted the appearance of the Shores Motel, and regretted his lack of experience in judging such establishments. A number of expensive cars were parked in front—of cars he knew a little.
Not far, now. A few minutes later the traveler was leaning forward in his seat, intently watching, thinking, feeling where he was being carried. “Slow down. Slower! Now, take that next private drive,
* * *
The man who answered the door was obviously no servant; nor did the visitor take him for a member of the family.
“Good day. I have come to see some members of the Southerland family.”
The well-dressed man in the doorway was very watchful. “Can I ask the nature of your business, sir?”
“It is personal.” But having by now recognized the other as some sort of policemen in plain clothes (this was a hopeful sign, suggesting that the difficulty for which he had been summoned was not trivial, or better yet that it had already been solved) the visitor handed over a card. “I am Dr. Emile Corday, an old friend of the family, just arrived from London.”
Then he stood there on the doorstep, under polite police inspection, holding in mind just who he was supposed to be. Dr. Corday was an old family physician, retired now or on the verge. Basically a kind and comforting man, though with a crusty facade; could be irascible at times. He added: “I attended Mrs. Clarissa Southerland’s grandmother in her last illness.” It amused the visitor to be perfectly truthful in his deceptions when he could.
He was, as usual, convincing, and the plainclothesman stepped back. “Please, come in, Doctor.”
Having already paid and dismissed the taximan, and being unencumbered by baggage, the visitor had nought to do but enter.
The examination, though, was not yet quite over. “Here, let me take your coat. You flew over from London just to see the family, did you?”
A woman of about forty-five, red-eyed and showing other signs of prolonged tension (another hopeful indication that he had not been forced to travel all this way for absolutely nothing) now appeared from deeper within the house, and exchanged glances with the policeman.
“I’m Lenore Southerland,” she then informed the visitor, turning on him a gaze in which faint new hope and old terror were mingled.
Again he introduced himself as Corday, which name obviously meant nothing at all to her. Then, just as the policeman was on the point of interrupting with more questions, there appeared from another room a face that the visitor could recognize, given his developed talent for perceiving a child’s features in the ruined mask of age.
And the recognition would perhaps be mutual. As soon as Clarissa’s eyes (he had come up with her name a moment after her face clicked into proper focus in his memory) fell on him, it seemed from a certain tremor in their puffy lids, in concert with a preparatory sagging of her body, that she might be going to faint. He locked his eyes on hers—he had taken off the dark glasses when he came inside—and presently she rallied and stood straighter.
