Абрахам Меррит - Creep, Shadow!

I started to undress, whistling, Helen's face still clear cut before me. I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the silver bracelet with the black stone. The face of Helen faded abruptly. In its place, as clearly cut, even more alive, was the face of the Demoiselle with her great eyes tender, her lips smiling –

I threw the bracelet from me, as though it had been a snake.

But when I went to sleep it was still the face of the Demoiselle and not the face of Helen that was back of my eyes.

I woke up next morning with a headache. Also, out of a dream which began with dolls holding foot-long needles in one hand dancing with pink shadows around circles of enormous standing stones, and with Helen and the Demoiselle alternately and rapidly embracing and kissing me. I mean that Helen would embrace and kiss me, and then she would fade into the Demoiselle; and then the Demoiselle would do the same and as quickly fade into Helen, and so on and so on.

I remember thinking in that dream that this was quite like what occurred at a very unusual place of entertainment in Algiers named the "House of the Heart's Desire." It's run by a Frenchman, a hashish eater and also a truly astonishing philosopher. He and I were great friends. I won his regard, I think, by unfolding to him that same scheme for "Heaven and Hell, Inc." which had so interested the Demoiselle and de Keradel. He had quoted Omar:

Then he had said my idea wasn't so original; it was really a combination of that quatrain and what made his place so profitable. He had a couple of renegade Senussi in his house. The Senussi are truly astonishing magicians, masters of illusion. He had a dozen girls, physically the most beautiful I've ever seen, and they were white and yellow and black and brown and intermediate shades. When one wanted to embrace "the Heart's Desire," and that was a most expensive undertaking, these twelve girls would stand in a circle, naked; a big, wide circle in a big room, hands clasped in each other's with their arms out at full length. The Senussi squatted in the center of the circle with their drums, while the aspirant for the "Heart's Desire" stood beside them. The Senussi drummed and chanted and did this and that. The girls danced, intertwining. Ever faster and faster. Until at last white, brown, black and yellow and intermediate seemed to coalesce into one supernal damsel – the girl of his dreams, as the old sentimental songs so quaintly put it, with trimmings of Aphrodite, Cleopatra, Phryne, and what not – at any rate, the girl he had always wanted whether he had realized it or not. So he took her.

"Was she what he thought her? How do I know?" shrugged this Frenchman. "To me – looking on – there were always eleven girls left. But if he thought so – then, yes."

Helen and the Demoiselle melting so rapidly into each other made me wish that they would coalesce. Then I'd have no bother. The Demoiselle seemed to stay a moment or two longer. She kept her lips on mine… and suddenly I felt as though I had both water and fire in my brain, and the fire was a stake upon which a man was bound, and the flames rushed up and covered him like a garment before I could see his face.

And the water was a surging sea… and out upon it, pale gold hair adrift, wave-washed, was Dahut… eyes staring up to a sky less blue than they… and dead.

It was then I woke up.

After a cold shower I felt a lot better. While I ate breakfast, I marshaled the events of the night before into coherent order. First, Lowell's experience with the doll-maker. I knew much about the magic of the animate doll, which is far ahead of the simple idea of the effigy into which one sticks pins, or roasts at a fire or what not. Nor was I so sure that the hypothesis of hypnotism could account for a belief of such ancient and wide-spread popularity. But more ancient still, and much more sinister, was the shadow magic that had slain Dick. The Germans might give it the more or less humorous twist of Peter Schlemihl who sold his shadow to the Devil, and Barrie give it his own labored whimsicality of Peter Pan whose shadow was caught in a drawer and got torn – yet the fact remained that of all beliefs this of the sharing of his shadow with a man's life, personality, soul – whatever one may term it – was, perhaps, the most ancient of all. And the sacrifices and rites connected with propitiation or safety from shadows could parallel any for downright devilishness. I determined to go up to the library and look up shadow lore. I went to my room and called up Helen.

I said: "Darling, do you know that I love you desperately?"

She said: "I know that if you don't you're going to."

I said: "I'm going to be tied up this afternoon – but there is tonight."

Helen said: "I'll be waiting for you, darling. But you're not going to see that white devil today are you?"

I answered: "I am not. I've even forgotten what she looks like."

Helen laughed. My foot touched something and I looked down. It was the bracelet I had thrown away. Helen said: "Tonight then."

I picked up the bracelet and dropped it in my pocket. I answered, mechanically: "Tonight."

Instead of looking up shadow lore, I spent the afternoon at two unusual private libraries to which I have access, delving into old books and manuscripts upon ancient Brittany – or Armorica as it was called before the coming of the Romans and for five centuries thereafter. What I was looking for were references to Ys, and what I hoped for was to find some mention of the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer in the Cairn. Obviously, I must have read or heard those names somewhere, sometime. The only other reasonable explanation was that the Demoiselle had suggested them to me, and recalling the vividness of that vision of Carnac under the touch of her hand, I was not inclined to reject that. On the other hand she had denied it and I was as strongly disinclined to reject her denial. It had sounded like truth to me. Of the Alkar-Az I found no mention whatsoever. In a palimpsest of the 7th Century, one torn leaf, there were a few sentences that might or might not refer to the Gatherer. It read, translating freely the monkish Latin:

"… is said that it was not because this people of Armorica took part in the Gaulish insurrection that the Romans treated them with such severity but because of certain cruel and wicked rites unparalleled in their evil by any tribe or people with whom the Romans had come in contact. There was one [several words illegible] the place of the standing stones called [two whole lines illegible] beating in their breasts first slowly [another lapse] until breast and even the heart were crushed and then when within the crypt of the center temple the Blackness began – "

Here the fragment ended. Could this "place of the standing stones" have been Carnac, and the "Blackness" that began "within the crypt of the center temple" have been the Gatherer within the Cairn? It well might be. I knew, of course, that the Romans had practically exterminated the primitive population of Armorica after that insurrection of 52 A.D., and that the survivors had fled from their wrath, leaving the country unpopulated until the 5th Century, when numbers of Celtic inhabitants of Britain, driven out by the Angles and Saxons, emigrated to Armorica and repopulated a great part of the peninsula. The Romans, taken all in all, were a broad-minded lot with the widest tolerance for the gods of those they conquered. Nor was it their custom to deal thus savagely with the conquered. What could have been these "cruel and wicked rites unparalleled in their evil" which had so shocked them that they had so ruthlessly stamped out those who practiced them?