Saturday morning, cloudy and threatening though it was, found the pendulum once more at the other end of the arc. She found herself, if not buoyantly cheerful, at least no longer prey to the inchoate doubts and fears of the preceding evening. She couldn’t even recall their nature; they had been apart from the cool, daytime logic that preached a commonsense reliance on accepted practices. They had been, she concluded, no more than childish nightmares induced by darkness and the play of shadows.
She dressed and ate a late breakfast; her mother was already en route to the Club for her bridge-luncheon. Thereafter, she wandered into the kitchen for the company of Magda, whom she found with massive arms immersed in dish water. Pat perched on her particular stool beside the kitchen table and watched her at her work.
“Magda,” she said finally.
“I’m listening, Miss Pat.”
“Do you remember a story you told me a long time ago? Oh, years and years ago, about a man in your town who could change into something—some fierce animal. A wolf, or something like that.”
“Oh, him!” said Magda, knitting her heavy brows. “You mean the werewolf.”
“That’s it! The werewolf. I remember it now—how frightened I was after I went to bed. I wasn’t more than eight years old, was I?”
“I couldn’t remember. It was years ago, though, for sure.”
“What was the story?” queried Pat. “Do you remember that?”
“Why, it was the time the sheep were being missed,” said the woman, punctuating her words with the clatter of dishes on the drainboard. “Then there was a child gone, and another, and then tales of this great wolf about the country. I didn’t see him; us little ones stayed under roof by darkness after that.”
“That wasn’t all of it,” said Pat. “You told me more than that.”
“Well,” continued Magda, “there was my uncle, who was best hand with a rifle in the village. He and others went after the creature, and my uncle, he came back telling how he’d seen it plain against the sky, and how he’d fired at it. He couldn’t miss, he was that close, but the wolf gave him a look and ran away.”
“And then what?”
“Then the Priest came, and he said it wasn’t a natural wolf. He melted up a silver coin and cast a bullet, and he gave it to my uncle, he being the best shot in the village. And the next night he went out once more.”
“Did he get it?” asked Pat. “I don’t remember.”
“He did. He came upon it by the pasture, and he aimed his gun. The creature looked straight at him with its evil red eyes, and he shot it. When he came to it, there wasn’t a wolf at all, but this man—his name I forget—with a hole in his head. And then the Priest, he said he was a werewolf, and only a silver bullet could kill him. But my uncle, he said those evil red eyes kept staring at him for many nights.”
“Evil red eyes!” said Pat suddenly. “Magda,” she asked in a faint voice, “could he change any time he wanted to?”
“Only by night, the Priest said. By sunrise he had to be back.”
“Only by night!” mused the girl. Another idea was forming in her active little mind, another conception, disturbing, impossible to phrase. “Is that worse than being possessed by a devil, Magda?”
“Sure it’s worse! The Priest, he could cast out the devil, but I never heard no cure for being a werewolf.”
Pat said nothing further, but slid from her high perch to the floor and went soberly out of the kitchen. The fears of last night had come to life again, and now the overcast skies outside seemed a fitting symbol to her mood. She stared thoughtfully out of the living room windows, and the sudden splash of raindrops against the pane lent a final touch to the whole desolate ensemble.
“I’m just a superstitious little idiot!” she told herself. “I laugh at Mother because she always likes to play North and South, and here I’m letting myself worry over superstitions that were discarded before there was any such thing as a game called contract bridge.”
But her arguments failed to carry conviction. The memory of the terrible eyes of that other had clicked too aptly to Magda’s phrase. She couldn’t subdue the picture that haunted her, and she couldn’t cast off the apprehensiveness of her mood. She recalled gloomily that Dr. Horker was at the Club—wouldn’t be home before evening, else she’d have gladly availed herself of his solid, matter-of-fact company.
She thought of Nick’s appointment with the Doctor for that evening. Suppose his psychoanalysis brought to light some such horror as these fears of hers—that would forever destroy any possibility of happiness for her and Nick. Even though the Doctor refused to recognize it, called it by some polysyllabic scientific name, the thing would be there to sever them.
She wandered restlessly into the hall. The morning mail, unexamined, lay in its brazen receptacle, she moved over, fingering it idly. Abruptly she paused in astonishment—a letter in familiar script had flashed at her. She pulled it out; it was! It was a letter from Nicholas Devine!
She tore it open nervously, wondering whether he had reverted to his original refusal of Dr. Horker’s aid, whether he was unable to come, whether that had happened. But only a single unfolded sheet slipped from the envelope, inscribed with a few brief lines of poetry.
“The grief that is too faint for tears,
And scarcely breathes of pain,
May linger on a hundred years
Ere it creep forth again.
But I, who love you now too well
To suffer your disdain,
Must try tonight that love to quell—
And try in vain!”
XXIV
The Dark Other
It was early in the evening, not yet eight o’clock, when Pat saw the car of Nicholas Devine
