"To destroy your subject, power must be exerted on his secret unconscious self. The death wish that exists in all of us must be stimulated, heightened."
Her excitement was growing. "Don't you see? A real illness will be induced, caused by that death-seeking self. You wish to be ill, you wish to die - and so - you do get ill, and die."
She had flung her head up now, triumphantly. I felt suddenly very cold. All nonsense, of course. This woman was slightly mad. And yet -
Thyrza Grey laughed suddenly.
"You don't believe me, do you?"
"It's a fascinating theory, Miss Grey - quite in line with modern thought, I'll admit. But how do you propose to stimulate this death wish that we all possess?"
"That's my secret. The way! The means! There are communications without contact. You've only to think of wireless, radar, television. Experiments in extrasensory perception haven't gone ahead as people hoped, but that's because they haven't grasped the first simple principle. You can accomplish it sometimes by accident - but once you know how it works, you could do it every time..."
"Can you do it?"
She didn't answer at once - then she said, moving away: "You mustn't ask me, Mr Easterbrook, to give all my secrets away."
I followed her towards the garden door.
"Why have you told me all this?" I asked.
"You understand my books. One needs sometimes to - to - well - talk to someone. And besides -"
"Yes?"
"I had the idea - Bella has it, too - that you - may need us."
"Need you?"
"Bella thinks you came here - to find us. She is seldom at fault."
"Why should I want to 'find you,' as you put it?"
"That," said Thyrza Grey softly, "I do not know - yet."
Chapter 7
"So there you are! We wondered where you were." Rhoda came through the open door, the others behind her. She looked round her. "This is where you hold your sйances, isn't it?"
"You're well informed." Thyrza Grey laughed breezily. "In a village everyone knows your business better than you do. We've a splendid sinister reputation, so I've heard. A hundred years ago it would have been sink or swim or the funeral pyre. My great-great-aunt - or one or two more greats - was burned as a witch, I believe, in Ireland. Those were the days!"
"I always thought you were Scottish?"
"On my father's side - hence the second sight. Irish on my mother's. Sybil is our pythoness, originally of Greek extraction. Bella represents Old English."
"A macabre human cocktail," remarked Colonel Despard.
"As you say."
"Fun!" said Ginger.
Thyrza shot her a quick glance.
"Yes, it is in a way." She turned to Mrs Oliver. "You should write one of your books about a murder by black magic. I can give you a lot of dope about it."
Mrs Oliver blinked and looked embarrassed.
"I only write very plain murders," she said apologetically.
Her tone was of one who says "I only do plain cooking."
"Just about people who want other people out of the way and try to be clever about it." she added.
"They're usually too clever for me," said Colonel Despard. He glanced at his watch. "Rhoda, I think -"
"Oh, yes, we must go. It's much later than I thought. "
Thanks and good-byes were said. We did not go back through the house but round to a side gate.
"You keep a lot of poultry," remarked Colonel Despard, looking into a wired enclosure.
"I hate hens," said Ginger. "They cluck in such an irritating way."
"Mostly cockerels they be." It was Bella who spoke. She had come out from a back door.
"White cockerels," I said.
"Table birds?" asked Despard.
Bella said, "They're useful to us."
Her mouth widened in a long curving line across the pudgy shapelessness of her face. Her eyes had a sly knowing look.
"They're Bella's province," said Thyrza Grey lightly.
We said good-bye and Sybil Stamfordis appeared from the open front door to join in speeding the parting guests.
"I don't like that woman," said Mrs Oliver, as we drove off. "I don't like her at all."
"You mustn't take old Thyrza too seriously," said Despard indulgently. "She enjoys spouting all that stuff and seeing what effect it has on you."
"I didn't mean her. She's an unscrupulous woman, with a keen eye on the main chance. But she's not dangerous like the other one."
"Bella? She is a bit uncanny, I'll admit."
"I didn't mean her either. I meant the Sybil one. She seems just silly. All those beads and draperies and all the stuff about voodoo, and all those fantastic reincarnations she was telling us about. (Why is it that anybody who was a kitchenmaid or an ugly old peasant never seems to get reincarnated? It's always Egyptian princesses or beautiful Babylonian slaves. Very fishy.) But all the same, though she's stupid, I have a feeling that she could really do things - make queer things happen. I always put things badly - but I mean she could be used - by something - in a way just because she is so silly. I don't suppose anyone understands what I mean," she finished pathetically.
"I do," said Ginger. "And I shouldn't wonder if you weren't right"
"We really ought to go to one of their sйances," said Rhoda wistfully. "It might be rather fun."
"No, you don't," said Despard firmly. "I'm not having you getting mixed up in anything of that sort."
They fell into a laughing argument. I roused myself only when I heard Mrs Oliver asking about trains the next morning.
"You can drive back with me," I said.
Mrs Oliver looked doubtful.
"I think I'd better go by train."
"Oh, come now. You've driven with me before. I'm a most reliable driver."
"It's not that, Mark. But I've got to go to a funeral tomorrow. So I mustn't be late in getting back to town." She sighed. "I do hate going to funerals."
"Must you?"
"I think I must in this case. Mary Delafontaine was a very old friend, and I think she'd want me to go. She was that sort of person."
"Of course," I exclaimed. "Delafontaine - of course."
The others stared at me, surprised.
"Sorry," I said. "It's only - that - well, I was wondering where I'd heard the name Delafontaine lately. It was you, wasn't it?" I looked at Mrs Oliver. "You said something about visiting her in a nursing home."
"Did I? Quite likely."
"What did she die of?"
Mrs Oliver wrinkled her forehead.
"Toxic polyneuritis - something like that."
Ginger was looking at me curiously. She had a sharp penetrating glance.
As we got out of the car, I said abruptly:
"I think I'll go for a bit of a walk. Such a lot of food. That wonderful lunch and tea on top of it. It's got to be worked off somehow."
I went off briskly before anyone could offer to accompany me. I wanted badly to get by myself and sort out my ideas.
What was all this business? Let me at least get it clear to myself. It had started, had it not, with that casual but startling remark by Poppy, that if you wanted to "get rid of someone," the Pale Horse was the place to go.
Following on that, there had been my meeting with Jim Corrigan, and his list of "names" - as connected with the death of Father Gorman. On that list had been the name of Hesketh-Dubois, and the name of Tuckerton, causing me to hark back to that evening at Luigi's coffee bar. There had been the name of Delafontaine, too, vaguely familiar. It was Mrs Oliver who had mentioned it, in connection with a sick friend. The sick friend was now dead.
After that, I had, for some reason which I couldn't quite identify, gone to beard Poppy in her floral bower. And Poppy had denied vehemently any knowledge of such an institution as the Pale Horse. More significant still, Poppy had been afraid.
Today there had been Thyrza Grey.
But surely the Pale Horse and its occupants was one thing and that list of names something separate, quite unconnected. Why on earth was I coupling them together in my mind?
Why should I imagine for one moment that there was any connection between them?
Mrs Delafontaine had presumably lived in London. Thomasina Tuckerton's home had been somewhere in Surrey. No one on that list had any connection with the little village of Much Deeping. Unless -
I was just coming abreast of the King's Arms. The King's Arms was a genuine pub with a superior look about it and a freshly painted announcement of Lunches, Dinners, and Teas.
I pushed its door open and went inside. The bar, not yet open, was on my left, on my right was a minute lounge smelling of stale smoke. By the stairs was a notice: Office. The office consisted of a glass window, firmly closed and a printed card. Press Bell. The whole place had the deserted air of a pub at this particular time of day. On a shelf by the office window was a battered registration book for visitors. I opened it and flicked through the pages. It was not much patronized. There were five or six entries, perhaps, in a week, mostly for one night only. I flicked back the pages, noting the names.
It was not long before I shut the book. There was still no one about. There were really no questions I wanted to ask at this stage. I went out again into the soft damp afternoon.
Was it only coincidence that someone called Sandford and someone else called Parkinson had stayed at the King's Arms during the last year? Both names were on Corrigan's list. Yes, but they were not particularly uncommon names. But I had noted one other name - the name of Martin Digby. If it was the Martin Digby I knew, he was the great-nephew of the woman I had always called Aunt Min - lady Hesketh-Dubois.
I strode along, not seeing where I was going. I wanted very badly to talk to someone. To Jim Corrigan. Or to David Ardingly. Or to Hermia with her calm good sense. I was alone with my chaotic thoughts and I didn't want to be alone. What I wanted, frankly, was someone who would argue me out of the things that I was thinking.
It was after about half an hour of tramping muddy lanes that I finally turned in at the gates of the vicarage, and made my way up a singularly ill-kept drive, to pull a rusty-looking bell at the side of the front door.
II
"It doesn't ring," said Mrs Dane Calthrop, appearing at the door with the unexpectedness of a genie.
I had already suspected that fact
"They've mended it twice," said Mrs Dane Calthrop. "But it never lasts. So I have to keep alert. In case it's something important. It's important with you, isn't it?"
"It - well - yes, it is important - to me, I mean."
"That's what I meant, too." She looked at me thoughtfully. "Yes, it's quite bad, I can see - Who do you want? The vicar?"
"I - I'm not sure -"
It had been the vicar I came to see - but now, unexpectedly, I was doubtful. I didn't quite know why. But immediately Mrs Dane Calthrop told me.
"My husband's a very good man," she said. "Besides being the vicar, I mean. And that makes things difficult sometimes. Good people, you see, don't really understand evil." She paused and then said with a kind of brisk efficiency, "I think it had better be me."
A faint smile came to my lips. "Is evil your department?" I asked.
"Yes, it is. It's important in a parish to know all about the various - well - sins that are going on."
"Isn't sin your husband's province? His official business, so to speak."
"The forgiveness of sins," she corrected me. "He can give absolution. I can't. But I," said Mrs Dane Calthrop with the utmost cheerfulness, "can get sin arranged and classified for him. And if one knows about it one can help to prevent its harming other people. One can't help the people themselves. I can't, I mean. Only God can call to repentance, you know - or perhaps you don't know. A lot of people don't nowadays."
"I can't compete with your expert knowledge," I said, "but I would like to prevent people being harmed."
She shot me a quick glance.
"It's like that, is it? You'd better come in and we'll be comfortable."
The vicarage sitting room was big and shabby. It was much shaded by a gargantuan Victorian shrubbery that no one seemed to have had the energy to curb. But the dimness was not gloomy for some peculiar reason. It was, on the contrary, restful. All the large shabby chairs bore the impress of resting bodies in them over the years. A fat clock on the chimney-piece ticked with a heavy comfortable regularity. Here there would always be time to talk, to say what you wanted to say, to relax from the cares brought about by the bright day outside.
Here, I felt, round-eyed girls who had tearfully discovered themselves to be prospective mothers, had confided their troubles to Mrs Dane Calthrop and received sound, if not always orthodox, advice; here angry relatives had unburdened themselves of their resentment over their inlaws; here mothers had explained that their Bob was not a bad boy, just high-spirited, and that to send him away to an approved school was absurd. Husbands and wives had disclosed marital difficulties.
And here was I, Mark Easterbrook, scholar, author, man of the world, confronting a grey-haired weather-beaten woman with fine eyes, prepared to lay my troubles in her lap. Why? I didn't know. I only had that odd surety that she was the right person.
"We've just had tea with Thyrza Grey," I began.
Explaining things to Mrs Dane Calthrop was never difficult. She leaped to meet you.
"Oh I see. It's upset you? Those three are a bit much to take, I agree. I've wondered myself. So much boasting. As a rule, in my experience, the really wicked don't boast. They can keep quiet about their wickedness. It's if your sins aren't really bad that you want so much to talk about them. Sin's such a wretched, mean, ignoble little thing. It's terribly necessary to make it seem grand and important. Village witches are usually silly ill-natured old women who like frightening people and getting something for nothing that way. Terribly easy to do, of course. When Mrs Brown's hens die all you have to do is nod your head and say darkly: 'Ah, her Billy teased my Pussy last Tuesday week.' Bella Webb might be only a witch of that kind. But she might, she just might, be something more... something that's lasted on from a very early age and which crops up now and then in country places. It's frightening when it does, because there's real malevolence - not just a desire to impress. Sybil Stamfordis is one of the silliest women I've ever met - but she really is a medium - whatever a medium may be. Thyrza - I don't know. What did she say to you? It was something that she said that's upset you, I suppose?"
