Dennis Wheatley - The Devil Rides Out

‘Well, this was in seventeen something,’ Simon replied slowly. ‘The story goes that he was present at a witch burning or jilted one—I forget exactly. Anyhow she put a curse on him and it went like this:

Mackintosh, Mackintosh, Mackintosh of Moy If you ever have a son he shall never have a boy.’

Richard smiled. ‘And what happened then?’ ‘Well, whether the story’s true or not I can’t say, but its a fact that the Chieftainship of the Clan has gone all over the shop ever since. Look it up in the records of the Clans if you doubt me.’

‘My dear chap, you’ll have to produce something far more concrete than that to convince me.’

‘All right,’ Marie Lou gazed at him steadily out of her large blue eyes. ‘You know very little about such things, Richard, but in Russia people are much closer to nature and everyone there still accepts the supernatural and diabolic possession as part of ordinary life. Only about a year before you brought me to England they caught a were-wolf in a village less than fifty miles from where I lived.’

He moved over to the sofa and, taking her hand, patted it gently. ‘Surely, darling, you don’t really ask me to believe that a man can actually turn into a beast—leave his bed in the middle of the night to go out hunting—then return and go to his work in the morning as a normal man again?’

‘Certainly,’ Marie Lou nodded solemnly. ‘Wolves, as you know, nearly always hunt in packs, but that part of the country had been troubled for months by a lone wolf which seemed possessed of far more than normal cunning. It killed sheep and dogs and two young children. Then it killed an old woman. She was found with her throat bitten out, but she had been ravished too, so that’s how they knew that it must be a were-wolf. At last it attacked a woodman and he wounded it in the shoulder with his axe. Next day a wretched half-imbecile creature, a sort of village idiot, died suddenly, and when the women went to prepare his body for burial they found that he had died from loss of blood and that there was a great wound in his right shoulder just where the woodman had struck the wolf. After that there were no other cases of slaughtered sheep or people being done to death. So it was quite clear that he was the were-wolf.’

Richard looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Of course,’ he remarked, ‘the man may have done all that, without actually changing his shape at all. If anyone is bitten by a mad dog and gets hydrophobia, they bark, howl, gnash their teeth and behave just as though they were dogs and certainly believe at the time that they are. Lycanthropy, of which this poor devil seems to have been the victim, may be some rare disease of the same kind.’ Marie Lou shrugged lightly and stood up. ‘Well, if you won’t believe me—there it is. I don’t know enough to argue with you, only what I believe myself, so I shall go and order supper.’

As the door closed behind her the Duke said quietly: ‘That may be a possible explanation, Richard, but there is an enormous mass of evidence in the jurisprudence of every country to suggest that actual shape shifting does occur at times. The form varies of course. In Greece it is often of the were-boar that one hears. In Africa of the were-hyena, and were-leopard. China has the were-fox; India the were-tiger; and Egypt the were-jackal. But even as near home as Surrey I could introduce you to a friend of mine, a doctor who practises among the country people, who will vouch for it that the older cottagers are still unshakable in their belief that certain people are were-hares, and have power to change their shape at particular phases of the moon.’

‘If you really believe these fantastic stories,’ Richard smiled a little grimly, ‘perhaps you can give me some reasonable explanation as to what makes such things possible.’

‘By all means.’ De Richleau hoisted himself out of his chair and began to pace softly up and down the fine, silk Persian prayer rug before the fireplace while he expounded again the Esoteric doctrine just as he had to Rex two nights before.

Simon and Richard listened in silence until the Duke spoke of the eternal fight which, hidden from human eyes, has been waged from time immemorial between the Powers of Light and the Powers of Darkness. Then the latter, his serious interest really aroused for the first time, exclaimed:

‘Surely you are proclaiming the Manichaean heresy? The Manichees believed in the Two Principals, Light and Darkness, and the Three Moments, Past, Present and Future. They taught that in the Past Light and Darkness had been separate; then that Darkness invaded Light and became mingled with it, creating the Present and this world in which evil is mixed with good. They preached the practice of aestheticism as the means of freeing the light imprisoned in human clay so that in some distant Future Light and Darkness might be completely separated again.’

The Duke’s lean face lit with a quick smile. ‘Exactly, my friend! The Manichees had a credo to that effect.

Day by day diminishes

The number of Soul below

As they are distilled and mount above.

The basis of the belief is far, far older of course, pre-Egyptian at the least, but where before it was a jealously guarded mystery the Persian Mani proclaimed it to the world.’

‘It became a serious rival to Christianity at one time, didn’t it?’

‘Um,’ Simon took up the argument. ‘And it survived despite the most terrible persecution by the Christians. Mani was crucified in the third century after Christ and, by their own creed, his followers were not allowed to enlist converts. Yet somehow it spread in secret. The Albigenses followed it in Southern France in the twelfth century until they were stamped out. Then in the thirteenth, a thousand years after Mani’s death, it swept Bohemia. A form of it was still practised there by certain sects as late as the 1840’s and even today many thinking people scattered all over the world believe that ii holds the core of the only true religion.’

‘Yes, I can understand that,’ Richard agreed. ‘Brahminism, Budism, Taoism, all the great philosophies which have passed beyond the ordinary limited religions with a personal God are connected up with the Prana, Light, and the Universal Life Stream, but that is a very different matter to asking me to believe in were-wolves and witches.’

‘They only came into the discussion because they illustrate certain manifestations of supernatural Evil,’ De Richleau protested; ‘just as the appearance of wounds similar to those of Christ upon the Cross in the flesh of exceptionally pious people may be taken as evidence for the existence of supernatural Good. Eminent surgeons have testified again and again that stigmata are not due to trickery. It is a changing of the material body by the holy saints in their endeavour to approximate to its highest form, that of Our Lord, so, I contend, base natures, with the assistance of the Power of Darkness, may at times succeed in altering their form to that of were-beasts. Whether they change their shape entirely it is impossible to say because at death they always revert to human form, but the belief is world-wide and the evidence so abundant that it cannot lightly be put aside. In any case what you call madness is actually a very definite form of diabolic possession which seizes upon these miserable people and causes them to act with the same savagery as the animal they believe themselves for the time to be. Of its existence, no one who has read the immense literature upon it, can possibly doubt.’

‘Perhaps,’ Richard admitted grudgingly. ‘But apart from Marie Lou’s story, all the evidence is centuries old and mixed up with every sort of superstition and fairy story. In the depths of the Siberian forests or the Indian jungle the belief in such things may perhaps stimulate some poor benighted wretch to act the part now and again and so perpetuate the legend. But you cannot cite me a case in which a number of people have sworn to such happenings in a really civilised country in modern times!’