After a moment Beddows started to talk in a flat, low monotone, more as if he were talking to himself than to them. He began: ‘It can’t be news to you that I’m a self-made man. I’ve never sought to conceal it. I was born less than a dozen miles from here as the son of a farm labourer, and I started life myself as a farmer’s boy. But for all that I was born ambitious. I soon made up my mind that two-ten a week and work in all weathers wasn’t good enough. Knowing about machines seemed to me the one way out; so instead of spending my pennies on the pictures and trashy novelettes, I bought the weeklies from which I could learn about the insides of motors. That way I picked up enough to get a job in a garage.
‘Later they let me drive one of their hire-cars; then one of their customers, who was a doctor, took me on as his private chauffeur. I stayed with Doc for eighteen months, and while I was with him I attended evening classes at the Colchester Technical College. You see, by then I’d made up my mind to become an engineer. I got a lot out of those classes, but nothing like as much as I should have if I’d had more time for home study; and by the nature of things, a doctor’s chauffeur is far harder worked than most. That’s why I left him and came here. Mrs Durnsford was already over sixty and didn’t go out very much. In fact, sometimes during the winter months a whole week would pass without her using the car at all; so the job offered just the easy hours I wanted to go in for correspondence courses and study for exams.
‘For a year or so I did quite well in that way, then my thoughts were taken right off engineering. I don’t propose to go into the details of what happened, but for a long time I never even opened one of my books. As I told you just now, I formed an attachment for a certain person, and afterwards … well, afterwards I simply hadn’t the heart to start work again.
‘It was while I was still in that state that I got involved with Hettie Weston. She was the parlourmaid here. Pretty young thing, and the flighty type. She asked for trouble and she got it. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been the next feller who came along. I didn’t give a cuss for her, but she set her cap at me, and if ever a chap needed a warmblooded young woman to take him out of himself, I did. I bought it all right, and the next thing we knew was that the silly young bitch had let herself get in the family way.
‘Well, plenty of them do that in these country parts long before there’s been any talk of marriage. If the feller is willing they make a go of it and put up the banns. If he’s not, there are usually a few tears, but no harm done. The girl picks on another likely lad to go hedging and ditching with on her evenings off, and lands him with the kid. Second or third time lucky, and she usually gets some mug to the altar. That’s what would have happened in Hettie’s case if it hadn’t been for the old woman.
‘Hettie spilt the beans to the mistress and I was put on the mat. I suppose I could have told her to go take a running kick at herself. If I had, the worst that could have happened was that I’d have lost my job and had a maintenance order made against me for seven and six a week. But I didn’t. I was still in a state of not giving a damn what happened to me, and believing that I had no future worth making a struggle for. You must add to that several other factors, one of which I was certainly not aware of at the time.
‘To start with, there was the hereditary angle. Youngsters of my class had allowed themselves to be dictated to for countless generations by old women in Mrs Durnsford’s position, especially when it seemed that moral right was on their side. Next, as a person she was pretty formidable. When those beady black eyes of hers bored into you, it wasn’t easy to say “No”. Lastly, although I didn’t realise it then, she knew all about me. She knew both how ambitious I had been, and what it was that had caused my ambitions temporarily to take a line that had nothing to do with engineering. It wasn’t any high-falutin’ motive of wanting to see the right thing done by Hettie that made her row in as she did. It was the malice that was in her. From what she knew had gone before, she got a special kick out of getting me married to a parlour-maid and saddled with the sort of liabilities that make it near impossible for a young working man to rise above his station.
‘Anyhow, she bullied me into making an honest woman of Hettie and we settled down in the flat above the stables, where the Jutsons are now. It took a bit of time for me to realise what a muck I had made of my life; but in a young man ambition dies hard, and in me it started to stir again after the new experience of being married began to wear off. I somehow couldn’t find the energy to take up my correspondence courses again, but I was subconsciously seeking a way out. Then, three nights before Ellen was born, it seemed as if it had been thrust right at me.
‘I’d been out doing a bit of poaching, and returned late. The curtains of one of the drawing-room windows were not quite drawn, and through the chink I caught sight of a flicker that might have meant the place was on fire. I took a peep in, and what d’you think I saw? The flicker I’d seen was fire all right, as the room was lit only by a pile of logs blazing on the hearth. But all the furniture had been pushed back to the sides of the room, a lot of circles and figures had been drawn on the parquet, and in the middle of them stood my mistress and the Canon. Both of them were stark naked.
‘He must have been getting on for forty then, so he was already well past his youth and had a little pot. I found him comic rather than repulsive, but there was nothing the least funny about her. She was twenty years older and the scraggy kind. Her withered shanks and flabby, hanging breasts made her a horrible caricature of what a woman should be. You can imagine how weird they looked against the firelight, and how I stared. But after a minute it was not at them I was looking; it was at the thing that stood between them. I can only describe it as a sort of blacksmith’s anvil, and belly up on it they had tied a live cat.
‘The cat didn’t remain alive for long though. As I watched, the Canon produced a knife and slit its throat. Old Mother Durnsford caught the blood in the sort of chalice you see on the altar of a church. Of course, I know now that it must have been stolen from one; but at the time all this made no more sense than if I’d found myself at the Mad Hatter’s tea-party. Still, this was clearly no tea-party, as the next thing they did was to each drink some of the cat’s blood.
‘The sight turned my stomach, so for a bit I missed seeing what they got up to after that. When I looked again they both had some clothes on. She was rubbing the chalk-marks off the floor and he was pushing the furniture back into place. Knowing her reputation as a witch, I suppose I ought to have put two and two together, but somehow I didn’t. It was catching them naked that was uppermost in my mind. I thought then that he was a proper clergyman, and that the business with the cat was some sort of sexual perversion, or that drinking cat’s blood might be a way of making old people feel young again.
‘Anyhow, as far as I was concerned one thing stuck out a mile. Here was my opportunity to break out of the dead end in which I had landed myself. Setting up house with Hettie had cost me the hundred or so I had put by. Since we had been married I’d had little chance to start saving again, and I knew that once the baby arrived I’d have even less. By then I was twenty-seven. Ten years had slipped by without my getting very far—ten of the best years of my life—and I didn’t want to remain a chauffeur all my natural. Here was my chance to make a brand-new start.
‘We may as well call a spade a spade. My mind instantly turned to blackmail. I reckoned that the Canon and the old woman were good for five hundred smackers between them, and that they’d pay that to keep my mouth shut. For a pound a week I could park Hettie and the baby back on her parents. Then I’d go to London. Four hundred, eked out by taking night jobs in garages now and then, would see me through two years as a full-time student at a technical college. Before I was thirty I’d emerge as a qualified engineer, capable of earning good money. It didn’t take me long to work that out, or how to set about it.
‘They had to dispose of the body of the cat. I reckoned they wouldn’t risk the stench that would fill the house if they burnt it on the drawing-room fire; so all the odds were that the Canon would take it out to the furnace. I nipped round there and hid behind the boiler. Sure enough, a few minutes later in he comes, opens the furnace door, rakes up the coke a bit and in goes the dead cat. The moment he had gone I fished the animal out. Its fur was a little singed, which showed that an attempt had been made to burn it, and its throat was slit from ear to ear; so it provided the evidence I needed to turn the heat on him.
‘Next morning I put it in an oyster-barrel filled with brine, to preserve it, and hid the barrel in the loft. Then in the evening I cycled over to The Priory to have a little talk with the Canon. But I was told that he had gone to London and was not expected back for about a week. Two days later Hettie had her baby. As it happened I didn’t have to call on the Canon after all, as the day he got back he came to see the old woman. Having seen him go into the house, I lay in wait for him in the garden until he came out. As he turned a corner of the shrubbery we came face to face. Nice as pie, he congratulates me on becoming a father and asks me what I would like for the child as a christening present.
‘I say, “Five hundred pounds in pound notes to be delivered before the end of the week at a place and time chosen by me.”
‘At that he gave a rather twisted grin, thinking it just a cheeky sort of joke. But when I told him what I knew, and how I meant to make the neighbourhood too hot to hold him unless he paid up, his grin became even more twisted.
‘Of course he tried bluster, and said that no one would believe me. Even when I told him I had got the body of the cat, he still maintained that proved nothing, as anyone might have killed and partially burnt it. But I was ready for that one. I told him that I had taken the furnace-rake to a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the Colchester police, and asked him, just as a matter of interest, to see if he could get any fingerprints from it. The prints were there all right and we had photographed them. So if I had to tell my story about the goings on at The Grange and he sued me for defamation of character, he would have to explain how his fingerprints had got on the furnace-rake in somebody else’s back premises on the night in question.
‘I was lying about having a friend in the police; but he couldn’t know that, and it sank him. He agreed to find the money in exchange for the body of the cat, and he asked me to come to his house that night to arrange when and where the exchange was to be made. I suspected a trap, but he pointed out that as long as I had the cat and the furnace-rake, I had the whip hand of him; so I agreed to go.
‘That night he received me in his study, and after giving me a drink, asked me what I meant to do with the money when I had it. I saw no reason to conceal my plans; so I told him. When he had heard me out, he said, “You don’t mind being separated from your wife and child, then?” and I replied, “Why should I? Hettie was forced on me against my will, and the child means nothing to me.”
‘He asked me, then, into what church I intended having the child baptised. The question seemed natural enough coming from a parson, as at that time I took him to be. I had been brought up C. of E. myself, but Hettie was Chapel; and in spite of her flightiness as a single girl she thought a great deal of standing well with her own Chapel folk; so we’d been married at Chapel and I took it for granted she’d want her brat christened there. I told the Canon how matters stood and he went on to talk about religion for a bit. Then he said: “You know, Mr Beddows, the little scene that you chanced to witness last week had nothing to do with sex. It was a religious ritual—a sacrifice to a God far older than Christ, and one who was universally worshipped when the world was a much happier place than it is today. He still exists, of course, since Gods cannot die; and he is still worshipped in secret by a few of us who understand his mysteries.”
‘At that, the local gossip about old Mother Durnsford being the daughter of a witch, and a witch herself, came back to me. It all fitted in, so I said, “I suppose you are talking about the Devil?”
‘He nodded; and as I’ve a first-class memory for statements made to me, I can still recall pretty well word for word his reply, which was, “That is a name that was bestowed upon him in fear and opprobrium by the early ascetics, when they were still striving to win the nations over to the worship of the Jewish tyrant God, Jehovah; but he is more fittingly called the Lord of this World. In any case, while the God of the Christians offers nothing to His followers but the meagre possibilities of an austere heaven in a life to come, the God whom I serve rewards those who honour him with wealth and happiness here and now. There may or may not be a hereafter; but everything in this life is his to give. Even the Christian Church admits that; and it is only superstitious fear that prevents people from returning to the old faith. You should give it a trial, Mr Beddows, for at little cost to yourself you could make an offering to my Master which would ensure his behaving most generously towards you.”
‘Naturally I didn’t get what he was driving at, then; neither could I make up my mind if he was really in earnest about this old religion. His saying that the cat had been a sacrifice certainly had the ring of truth, and he didn’t sound as if he was goofy; but all that about getting riches in this life was a bit too much to swallow. More to see what replies he would make than anything else, I began to question him about it. His answers seemed logical enough, but even so I couldn’t bring myself to believe him. Then he asked me if I would like him to reveal my future.
‘Well, everyone likes having their fortune told, and I saw no harm in that. When I’d agreed, he took me through to the old part of The Priory and down into the crypt. It had evidently been used as a chapel at some time, but he had turned it into a sort of laboratory. There, he made me sit in front of a mirror. It wasn’t made of glass, but of some highly polished metal, and it was pitted round the edges as though it was very old. He gave me a big brass bowl to hold in my lap and put some cones of incense in it. When he had lit them he said to me as follows: “Within certain limits all men have free will; therefore their futures are not irrevocably fixed, but depend upon the decisions they take at certain major crossroads in their lives. I am about to give you an idea what your future will be, should you decide to rely upon my guidance and become the servant of Prince Lucifer. Keep your eyes fixed on the mirror and through the smoke you will see pictures form upon it.” Then he began to chant in a sing-song voice behind me, and I seemed to become a little drowsy.
‘You will remember what it says in the Bible about Satan taking our … our … taking J.C. up on to the mountain and showing Him the kingdoms of the Earth. Well, me being just a chauffeur saddled with an unwanted wife and kid, it wasn’t far off that. There were quite a number of pictures and afterwards they became a bit confused in my mind. The general impression was of myself, a little older, but not much, dressed in expensive clothes, wining and dining with other rich men, and having necking parties with lovely women in the luxury suites of big hotels. But a few of the scenes I saw remained clear cut. There was one of me walking through a great machine-shop where hundreds of people were working, and from the respectful way they all looked up at me as I passed it was clear that I was the boss of the whole outfit. Another confirmed that: it was the outside of my plant near Colchester pretty much as it stands today; and blazoned across its front in letters six feet high were the words “BEDDOWS AGRICULTURAL TRACTORS”. The one that really got me, though, was myself in a check suit, standing in front of a long, low grey car. That car had something that no car in the time of which I am talking had got. Its rake was completely different. It was quite unlike anything that had so far been made and obviously an advance in design. It was something slap out of the future, and I knew that whatever else Copely-Syle might have faked up to gull me he couldn’t have faked up that.
‘When the show was over I told him at once that he had made a convert, and asked what I must do to become the me in the pictures I had seen. He replied, “There is nothing very difficult about it, if you are prepared to forswear the gloomy Christian God and all His works. Prepare yourself for that by reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards every night from now on, and return here at the same hour a week from today.”
‘It wasn’t until he was showing me out of the front door, a few minutes later, that I remembered the reason I had come to see him; and with a sudden feeling that somehow he had made a monkey out of me, I said pretty sharply, “We haven’t settled anything about that five hundred pounds.”
‘“No,” he said, “and if you’ve any sense we shan’t need to. When you come here next week you’d better bring that dead cat with you as a first offering. If you don’t I will buy it off you later, as we arranged this morning. But don’t imagine that the money will do you any good. By taking it you will decree a very different future for yourself from the one I showed you. The choice is yours.”
‘During the week that followed I was torn first one way, then the other. After all, the five hundred smackers was as good as a bird in the hand, and I hated the idea of giving it up; yet I couldn’t get the image of that car of the future out of my mind, and as a sort of token payment towards it in advance I wrestled for half an hour each night with the tricky business of getting through the Lord’s Prayer said backwards. When the week ended I still hadn’t made any definite decision; but, all the same, when I called again at The Priory I took the dead cat with me.
‘That night Copely-Syle took me straight to the crypt, and the first thing he did was to shove the cat into the furnace there. Then he said to me, “Now I propose to call upon Prince Lucifer in order that you may make your bargain with him.”
‘“What bargain?” I asked, rather taken aback.
‘“Why, the usual one, of course,” he replied a little sharply. “As Lord of this World he will give you every reasonable success, pleasure and gratification in it that you may desire; but for all that he naturally asks something in return. You must sign a pact making yourself over to him body and soul.”
‘I didn’t much like the idea of doing that, and I said so.
‘He laughed then, and gave me a pat on the back. “Don’t worry. You must sign it, and in your own blood; but you need never honour it. In your case it will merely be similar to a Life Insurance Policy lodged at a bank as security. You are lucky in having just had a little daughter. All you have to do is to have her baptised into the old faith, and undertake that should she reach the age of twenty-one you will produce her here in this crypt on her twenty-first birthday. In that way you may redeem your bond and it will be handed back to you.”’
John gave a low exclamation of horror at this frightful revelation, but C.B.—who had guessed what was coming from what had gone before—grabbed his arm and squeezed it sharply, to check him from bursting into angry words that might have put an abrupt end to Beddows’ story; while Beddows, now apparently almost self-hypnotised by the recital of his confession, ignored the interruption, and went straight on: ‘Although I didn’t give a damn for the brat, it did not seem right somehow; but what was I to do? By letting him burn the cat I had burnt my own boats. I no longer had anything on him. It had become a choice of my going through with the business and a prospect of getting everything I’d ever wanted, or of walking out of the house worse off than I had ever been before; because in him I would have made a powerful and unscrupulous enemy, who could have got me the sack and used his influence to chivvy me out of the district.
‘Well, I signed the pact, and afterwards he put me through a long ritual that I could not make head nor tail of, except that in symbolical submission to Lucifer he made me kiss his arse; but by that time I felt it was a case of in for a penny, in for a pound; so I made no bones about it. Then he gave me his instructions about the baptism of the child and sent me home.
‘By that time I’d tumbled to it that the five hundred didn’t mean much to him, and it wasn’t either to save it or to get me as a convert that he had gone to quite a lot of trouble. It was the child he was after, and I was still in half a mind to ditch him about that. I think I would have, but for the fact that three days after I had signed the pact I learnt that I had won seven hundred and twenty-three pounds in a football pool.
‘It wasn’t a fortune, but it seemed to me a real earnest of Prince Lucifer’s good faith. All the same, there was something a bit frightening about getting a sum like that out of the blue so soon after I had abjured the Christian God. It scared me enough to make me decide that I had better not try to wriggle out of taking the baby to be baptised.
‘We had fixed on the following Saturday night for that, and I slipped some dope that he had given me into Hettie’s evening cup of cocoa. No sooner was she in bed than she was sleeping like a log. I wrapped the child up well and carried her to a field about a mile away from The Grange, where the Canon had told me to meet him. There were a number of other people there, women as well as men, and among them old Mother Durnsford, although I did not know that at the time, as all of them were wearing cloaks and great animal masks that hid their identities. Later, when I was made a regular member of the coven, I got to know them all; but she would never forgive me for having tried to blackmail Copely-Syle, and nothing I could offer would persuade her to sell me this house. But to get back—I saw only the beginning of that first Sabbat I attended, as the Canon was very anxious that the child should not take a chill. The actual baptism didn’t take long. It was a revolting business; but as soon as it was over he packed me off home with her.
‘As you’ve met Ellen, you will probably have noticed that she is different from other girls. She can’t go into a church without being sick, and animals won’t go near her. At night, too, she seems to assume a different personality. Naturally, she has never understood why she should be affected as she is, because she knows nothing at all of what I’ve told you; but it is having been baptised into the Satanic faith which causes these instinctive reactions, and the fact that during the hours when the Powers of Darkness are abroad she becomes readily subject to their influences.
‘For many years I had no cause to regret what I had done. Once I had taken the plunge, Copely-Syle advised me that I’d be a fool to strive for success the hard way, by going to London and spending two years studying engineering; so I used my win from the football pools to buy a share as a working partner in the business of a second-hand agricultural implement dealer in Colchester. It was only a small concern, but from the day I started there it began to flourish. I found myself imbued with enormous energy, so that I could work eighteen hours a day and enjoy it.
In ’38 I merged all my interests as Beddows Ltd, with a capital of half a million, and in the same year work was begun on the big factory. It was completed just in time for the war. By the end of it I was rolling in money and a director of half-a-dozen big firms, in addition to being chairman of my own.
‘To begin with I saw quite a lot of Copely-Syle and often assisted him in his magical rituals. That is how I learned enough to erect this pentacle myself last week: but as my own concerns began to occupy me more and more I lost interest in the higher aspects of the Great Art. Then it gradually got down to my simply paying homage to Prince Lucifer once a year, at the great Sabbat on Walpurgis Night. Apart from round about the time of those annual gatherings I never gave a thought to the real source of my money and success.
‘That may sound strange, but it isn’t really, because my principles were no better and no worse than those of most of the other big business men with whom I was constantly mixing, and it seemed to me that my achievements, like theirs, were the natural outcome of ability, shrewdness and hard work.
‘It wasn’t till after last Walpurgis Night that I began to worry a bit. Attending the great Sabbat brought it home to me with something of a shock that I had only just over ten months to go before I was due to hand over Ellen. But even then I didn’t think about it much, as a hundred and one urgent business matters drove it into the back of my mind. Then, just before Christmas, Ellen came home for good, and that gave me a real jolt.
‘I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but poor Hettie committed suicide while Ellen was still only a little girl. I’ve never married again, but I took several women to live with me for various periods, and that was one of the reasons why I sent Ellen away to boarding-school at the age of eight. The other was an instinctive feeling that, anyhow until she was grown-up, I ought to keep her away from Copely-Syle. Of course I could not prevent her from meeting him now and then, but she has never been at home for long enough at a time to fall under his influence. It was for that reason, too, that when she was too old to stay at boarding-schools any longer I sent her to a finishing place in Paris. Her two-and-a-half years there came to an end last December, and her return brought me face to face with the fact that my twenty-one years of having everything for nothing were darn near up.
‘Ellen has been at home so little in all this time that I hardly know her; so I’m not going to pretend that I suffered frightful pangs of remorse at having sold her to Lucifer when she was a baby. She has meant practically nothing in my life, and I imagined that all that would happen when she was twenty-one was that she would be initiated as a witch. I reckoned that by having kept her away from Copely-Syle and seeing to it that she was educated by decent people I was doing the best I could for her in the circumstances. Naturally, I disliked the idea of having to hand her over to the Canon, but that was all I had undertaken to do, and it seemed to me that at the age of twenty-one she would be perfectly capable of telling him to go to blazes if she felt that way. If she liked the idea of becoming a witch, that was her look-out. If not, they couldn’t make her practise witchcraft against her will. Anyhow I’d quieted my conscience with the idea that I could honour my bond, while ensuring that when she had to take her decision she should do so with an unprejudiced mind.
‘Had I been right in my belief that there was no more to it than that, I should be taking her to The Priory on the evening of her birthday; but purely by chance I found out that I had been fooling myself. Ever since I’ve been in business in a fairly big way I’ve given Copely-Syle sound financial tips from time to time, and he has quite a bit invested in my companies. A few months ago I wanted to tip him off to sell out from one of my subsidiaries. Instead of dropping him a line, as I usually did, I called in at The Priory one evening on my way home. After we had had a drink his vanity got the better of his discretion, or perhaps he thought that I know less about magical operations than I do. Anyhow, he took me to his crypt and showed me his homunculi.
‘Apparently he has been working on them for years, although I was unaware of that. He has got one there now as near perfect as any magician is ever likely to produce. To enable it to leave its jar and function like a normal human being it needs only one thing—the lifeblood of a twenty-one-year-old virgin.
‘Naturally he never hinted that to me; but it so happened that I knew it. In a flash I realised what he was planning to do with Ellen. It solved, too, a question that had vaguely puzzled me for a long time. He had never pressed me to give him an opportunity to get to know Ellen, and had most heartily endorsed my policy of keeping her at school until she was grown up. I saw then that he had done so to lessen the risk of her meeting some young man and being seduced, or getting married, before she was twenty-one.
‘Well, I knew then that I was up against it. Although I had no special love for the girl I couldn’t let that happen. After a lot of thought I decided that there was only one thing for it—both Ellen and I must go into hiding for a time and remain so till after the fateful day.
‘It may sound strange to you, but it is a fact that Prince Lucifer is quite a sportsman. He has always been willing to match cunning with cunning. There are plenty of cases in which people have enjoyed his gifts and managed to cheat him in the end. Ellen was used to doing what she was told without argument; so I decided to get her out of the way. She had a nasty sore throat just after Christmas; so as a first step I fixed it for her to have her tonsils out, and whisked her off to a nursing home at Brighton. Then I made arrangements to get her quietly out of the country and park her in the South of France, under an assumed name.
‘On my failure to produce her, my bond made me liable to act as forfeit in her place, and as Copely-Syle held my bond it would be up to him to enforce it. I could not hope to escape him by taking a plane to the United States or Australia; because with me he has occult links which would enable him to find and attack me on the Astral, wherever I was; so I made up my mind to tell my office that I had gone abroad, then dig myself in here. Only here could I hope for the absolute privacy necessary to protect myself. The trap on the landing and the ape were designed to prevent Copely-Syle getting in to me in the flesh and using the cunning that Lucifer has given him to wheedle out of me where I had hidden Ellen. The pentacle, as you evidently know, is my defence against his getting at me on the Astral.
‘He hasn’t attempted to do either yet. That may be because he is occupied with other matters. Some while ago, you said that he was after Ellen’s blood. As you know that, and why, you probably know what he has been up to this past week. I shut myself in here as soon as I returned from taking Ellen down to the Riviera; so about what has happened since you must be better informed than I am. Anyhow, I can give you no further information.’
Suddenly Beddows’ voice changed, rising to an hysterical note, as he added, ‘If I were a free agent I’d hand the two of you over to the police for having broken in here. As I am not, and you threatened to expose me to the most frightful peril, I’ve told you everything there is to tell about my awful situation. Everything, d’you understand? Everything! Now get out! And leave me unencumbered to fight my own battle.’
Silence descended on the room like a curtain of draped black velvet.
Neither C.B. nor John had dared to interrupt Beddows’ long monologue. Both of them had been acutely conscious that although he was definitely not possessed, he was, all the same, in a quite abnormal state. From the toneless voice in which he had spoken for most of the time it was clear that he was using them only as a focus at which to pour out his own story; and it was reasonable to suppose that in all the twenty-one years since he had made his pact with the Devil he had never told it to anyone before. To have cut in at any point with question, or even comment, might well have checked the flow and deprived them of hearing the all-important latter part of the revelations.
A good half minute elapsed before C.B. said, ‘We are very grateful to you for having been so frank with us; and I can only repeat that we are here as friends who want to help. We got drawn into this thing because John Fountain’s mother lives in the villa next door to that which you rented for Ellen. I had better tell you what has happened since you left her there; then we shall better be able to decide between us on a plan of campaign for overcoming our mutual enemy.’
‘I can give you no help in that.’ Beddows’ voice was sharp. ‘I’ll have my work cut out to protect myself as it is, without inviting further trouble.’
C.B. ignored the remark and proceeded to give him an account of the events centring round Ellen that had taken place in the South of France. When he had done, Beddows said thoughtfully: ‘Copely-Syle must have smelt a rat as soon as he learned that I had gone abroad so near the date. The odds are that he came to The Grange in our absence and managed to get hold of some of the girl’s personal belongings; an old hairbrush or anything she had used for her toilet would enable him to overlook her and find out where she had gone. Evidently the reason that he has so far made no move against me is because he has been too occupied with his attempts to have her kidnapped. I’m grateful to you for all you’ve done to keep her out of his clutches, and I quite understand now your reasons for breaking in here; but all the same I’d be glad if you would leave me.’
‘Oh come!’ John protested. ‘Now you know the danger she is in surely you don’t propose to ignore it?’
‘Since you had this bright idea of having her arrested, she is no longer in danger. These crooks who are acting for the Canon will be far too scared of the police to attempt to abduct her from a French prison.’
‘You are forgetting the Canon,’ C.B. put in. ‘By using his occult powers he may be able to get her out; and it is as good as certain, now, that he will fly out there tomorrow morning. We know that he’ll stick at nothing to get hold of Ellen and he still has over forty hours to work in.’
‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘Yes there is. You and he must have been mixed up in all sorts of business. It’s a sure thing that a thoroughly unscrupulous man like Copely-Syle has committed a number of criminal acts in order to carry on his sorcery and that you know of some of them. From time to time he must either have robbed churches or instigated others to do so, in order to get hold of Holy Communion wafers for desecration. We know, too, that he is having blood donors’ gifts of blood stolen from hospitals to feed his homunculi. I want you to come with us to the police and make a statement. On that we’ll get a warrant for his arrest, and even if he leaves for France in the morning I can get it executed there. That is the only way we can make absolutely certain of protecting Ellen until her maximum period of danger is past.’
Beddows gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘What the hell d’you take me for? A lunatic? Can’t you see that now you’ve queered his pitch with Ellen by having her imprisoned, the odds are that he will round on me? As long as I remain in this pentacle I’ve good hopes of cheating Lucifer yet; but the moment I move out of it I’m liable at any time to have my soul snatched, and my body will spend the rest of its days in an asylum. No thank you!’
‘You got Ellen into this!’ cried John angrily. ‘The very least you can do is to run some risk to get her out of it.’
‘She’s safe enough where she is! A darned sight safer than I am, anyway! I did my best for her by taking the risk that I’m running already, instead of handing her over in accordance with my bond; and I’ll do no more. Nothing you or anyone else can say is going to get me out of this pentacle within the next forty-eight hours.’
‘What is to prevent our smashing it up?’
‘I can’t; and if you do I’ll be in hideous danger for a while. But better that than the far worse risk of going with you now and committing myself to having to face Copely-Syle in open court as a witness against him tomorrow. If you do bust the electric current, I can use candles instead, and the moment you’ve gone I’ll make another pentacle. Besides, I’ve already paid your price for not interfering with this one by telling you what you came here to find out.’
For a further twenty minutes they argued and pleaded with Beddows, but in vain. Nothing would move him, and when C.B. found that they were repeating themselves over and over again he said at last: ‘It’s no good, John. We must do what we can on our own. Let’s get out of this and back to Colchester.’
With a curt Goodnight to Beddows, they left him and, having eased the bonds of the ape a little, made their way downstairs. On slipping out of the window by which they had come in they found that it was no longer raining, and with heartfelt relief at leaving the dank, dark house, they gratefully breathed in the cool night air.
As they turned into the drive, John muttered, ‘The callous swine! I would have liked to strangle him.’
C.B. shrugged. ‘After having had the luck to run him to earth like that it was damnably disappointing that he should refuse to help us; but he’s far from being a hundred per cent evil, otherwise he would not have tried to hide Ellen and be facing the music himself. Just think what an ordeal he undertook when he decided to coop himself up in that grim room for days on end and wait for some frightful thing to come and attempt to get him! It can hardly be wondered at that he is half crazy from fear already.’
‘All the same, he might at least have given us some pointer which would help us to lay the Canon by the heels. The very idea of a father selling his child to the Devil in the beginning is almost unbelievable, and for him to refuse to utter a word that might help to save her from being murdered now is fantastic’
‘Fantastic is the word for this whole horrible business, partner. What could be more so than the thought of Henry Beddows, a down-to-earth inventor of motor engines, who has constantly to deal with Trade Union officials, and is a power in the commercial world of Britain, sitting up there in a magic pentacle preparing to wrestle with demons for his soul; or a man who was, apparently, once a Canon of the Church of England planning to murder a girl in order to give a semblance of human life to a monster of his own creation? Nevertheless, we know these things to be actually happening.’
‘I know, I know! But what are we going to do now?’
‘Get some sleep. I can do with it.’
It was getting on for three o’clock in the morning by the time they reached their hotel. By then they were too tired even to tip the night porter to get them a drink. On reaching their rooms they pulled off their clothes, flopped into bed and within a few moments were in the deep sleep of exhaustion.
Next morning they had their breakfasts sent up to C.B.’s room and while they ate them discussed the position to date. During the previous evening and night they had found out a great deal. They now knew more about Christina’s past than she knew herself, and the reason for her peculiar behaviour. They knew why the Canon was so anxious to get hold of her, and that if he succeeded it would cost her not only her freedom, but her life. They had traced her father and learned his reason for taking her to the South of France and abandoning her there; but he had positively refused to give them the aid they had expected from him. On the other hand it had been definitely verified that the danger in which she stood would be acute for only one day; since, should the Canon fail to carry out his abominable ritual on her twenty-first birthday, there would be no point whatever in his killing her afterwards. Therefore, their immediate problem boiled down to immobilising the Canon for the next thirty-six hours.
Their prospects of doing so seemed exceedingly slender, as it was a foregone conclusion that either he was already, or would very soon be, on his way to France. The fact that Upson had arrived at The Priory the previous night made it certain he had come by air. C.B. thought it probable that during the war Upson had served in Coastal Command and had been stationed in that area. In any case, as it had been intended that he should fly Christina home, it was evident that he was familiar with the Essex coast and had already reconnoitred some of the many lonely creeks to select a good illicit landing-place. It was, therefore, long odds that when de Grasse had decided that his latest news was of too compromising a nature to convey by telephone, and sent it instead by personal messenger, Upson had travelled in his own seaplane and made a secret landing by last light somewhere along the coast, not far from Little Bentford.
If so, the Canon had a pilot and aircraft at his disposal, and could leave at any hour he chose. Obviously his only chance of getting hold of Christina now lay in flying south himself, so that he could exercise his occult powers on her jailers. However, there was one factor which might cause him to delay his departure for a few hours—namely that the Satanic writ did not run, as far as Christina’s mind was concerned, except during the hours of darkness. Only during them could he influence her voluntarily to leave prison, should the way have been opened for her to do so. Having considered this, C.B. said: ‘I had pretty well made up my mind that our best plan would be to make for Northolt right away, so as to catch the 10.30 plane for Nice, then bank on our being able to head him off from getting at Christina tonight. But an afternoon plane to Paris would still enable us to get down there by Air France or K.L.M. in time for that; so I think it would be worthwhile making a bid against Copely-Syle’s planning to leave before midday, and the sporting chance that we may then be able to prevent his leaving at all.’
‘I’m game to use force,’ John said quickly. ‘And if we manage to catch him, you have only to tell me what to do. But a charge of assault and battery would blot your official copybook really badly, so—’
‘Thanks, partner,’ C.B. cut him short with a smile, ‘but I don’t think either of us need risk being hauled up before the beak on that count. I am proposing to lay an information against him for practising cruelty to animals, and request the police to apply for a search-warrant. They have only to see those poor brutes I saw in the crypt last night to issue a summons. It is illegal to leave the country with a summons pending against one, and I have enough pull with the police to get them to keep a watch on him. If he attempts to clear out after the summons has been served he will be prevented from doing so by the coppers.’
‘By Jove! That’s a grand idea.’
‘I hope it may prove so; but it won’t do us any good if he has gone before the police get out there. And they won’t be able to secure a warrant until ten o’clock at the earliest, because the magistrates’ court does not open until that hour.’
‘Well, if he has gone, I have another idea.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
John’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. ‘The Canon can’t do his final job on the homunculus without Christina; and Christina is no good to him without the homunculus. That’s so, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Unless he can bring her back here by tomorrow night he is sunk.’
‘Even if he does, it won’t do him any good if his prize homunculus is no longer in a state to lap up Christina’s blood. If we find that he has already left for France, I mean to go down into that crypt and destroy it.’
‘Good for you, John.’ C.B. laughed for the first time in many hours. ‘I really am beginning to feel a bit more hopeful now. One way or the other I think we’ll manage to spike his guns. As soon as we are dressed we’ll go round and do our stuff with the police.’
At the station, after the usual formalities, they were shown into the office of an elderly inspector named Fuller. To him C.B. produced his card and a small trinket that he carried, after which the inspector listened to all he had to say with considerable respect. Although C.B. refrained from giving more than a general indication of what lay behind the excuse on which he desired a search-warrant to be obtained, that was quite enough to have caused most people to show incredulity; but police officers of long experience have usually come up against so many extraordinary happenings that they are prepared to consider with an open mind every conceivable aberration possible to a diseased or criminal brain. In consequence Inspector Fuller took down C.B.’s formal deposition about the maimed animals without comment, and quietly agreed to put the matter in hand at once.
However, at the magistrates’ court some delay was unavoidable, as no special priority attached to an application regarding cruelty to animals, and the lists had already been made out. So it was half-past ten before the application was granted, and after a quarter to eleven by the time the formalities of drawing the search-warrant were completed.
There was no hurrying the law, and John fumed with impatience in vain; but at last Inspector Fuller and a constable came out to join C.B. and himself in the car, and they set off.
Anxious as C.B. was to learn the results of his move, he felt that any attempt on his part to accompany the police into the house might be met by the Canon, if he was still there, with legal objections, or possibly even a false accusation of having broken in the previous night, which might have seriously complicated matters. So it was decided that he and John should wait in the car just down the lane until the inspector had carried out his search of the premises.
It was twenty-past eleven when they pulled up under the trees that fringed the road some fifty yards east of The Priory, and the two police officers got out. Both C.B. and John thought it almost certain that by this time the Canon would be on his way to France; so they had lost much of the optimism that had buoyed them up earlier that morning, and they found the wait before they would know the best or worst extremely trying. In anxious silence for the most part, they sat side by side smoking cigarette after cigarette while they watched the clock on the dashboard of the car tick away the minutes.
It was close on twelve before the inspector and the constable reappeared. Without a word C.B. and John got out of the car and walked with anxious faces to meet them.
The inspector smiled rather ruefully as he addressed C.B. ‘Canon Copely-Syle is there all right, sir, and he couldn’t have been more helpful. But there is no one in the house answering your description of the airman. There are no animals either, or human-looking fish in big glass jars like you described. We visited the crypt and it has the appearance of being used as an ordinary laboratory; no curtains embroidered with pictures of the Devil, or anything of that sort. We went over the whole house from basement to attic, and there is nothing whatever in it on which we could ask for a summons.’
John looked at C.B. in amazement and dismay. The Canon had completely outwitted them. He was still there, but free to leave at any time he chose; for he had anticipated the raid, and there was now no legal pretext on which he could be detained. Moreover, he had removed his homunculi; so it was no longer possible to go in and destroy them.