Swords From the West (87 page)

All around, the undergrowth was thick-junipers and thorn bushes pressing against the crumbling walls and lush grass growing thick on the dahlan, the front terrace.

The cellars were half-filled with foul water at their lowest level; openings in the thick stone walls were few, and sunlight penetrated only feebly into the chambers of the dead raja. Malcolm judged that it had been unoccupied for three generations at least. Perhaps because of this, a strong odor filled the place.

Yet he was certain that the terrace and the slender, square tower had been visited frequently. The soft ground had been trampled by feet whose outline he could not make out; moss had been broken from the tower top and the damp slime on its steps was scored in more than one place.

"The demon," thought Malcolm, "does not quarter himself in the castle but comes here from a nearby haunt. Very well, we will watch for him."

They saw nothing out of the ordinary, however, for several days. Thick mango groves covered the nullahs below the rise where the castle stood. Often jackals and leopards passed by, but the village cattle were kept at a distance by the herders and no human being approached them.

Malcolm, going about the routine duties of his office, was struck by this isolation of the castle. He had observed that the signs pointed to its having been occupied before he came.

This led to the conclusion that the person who had lived in or near the castle before Malcolm arrived had vacated the premises in his favor; also, that the villagers who had been in the habit of coming to the castle now made a point of avoiding it.

"It looks," he thought, "as if my neighbor demon had had friends in the village. If-as the series of murders indicates-our distinguished ghost is a servant of Kali, a goddess to whom murder is an acceptable ritual offering, his friends might well be the slayers of Rawul Singh's son. And I think the Rajput knows they are Kali worshipers, although for some reason he will not admit it to me."

When he was not in attendance on Malcolm, the Scot noticed that his follower spent hours in casting about through the jungle around the village, and that whenever Malcolm went to survey the boundary lines, Rawul Singh made a thorough search of the hillsides.

Furthermore the Rajput reported that he had tried to find in the village the servant of the potail who had lied to him about the fate of his daughter. But the man was not to be found. And the lips of the bheestie who had warned Rawul Singh were sealed by fear.

So no trace was found of Tala, although Rawul Singh was convinced that the girl could not have been conveyed from the district of Bhir without his knowing it.

Taking all this into consideration, Malcolm believed that the man who called himself or was called the ghost had Tala in his keeping, and that both were very cleverly hidden in one spot that all Malcolm's surveying and Rawul Singh's search could not locate.

This spot might well be a rendezvous of the worshipers of Kali, who, having enjoyed unlimited power in the rich district of Bhir, now sought the extermination of the English magistrates.

Before many days had passed Malcolm fell sick.

The Scot had grown pale and his eyes were heavy. He was listless at times, although he never ceased his work. His orders were to assume the duties of magistrate, and he went about the work of measuring the boundaries, taking the census, and holding a criminal court.

Malcolm's condition puzzled himself. He had no fever; the water and air were good; Rawul Singh, who feared poison, gathered their food in the village, taking pains to select his own rice and flour and to kill his meat by hunting.

One day the Rajput absented himself and returned with a lean, dirty native, naked except for a loincloth and turban. It was an old man, watery of eye, who trembled in the presence of the English officer.

"This is Cheetoo, the bheestie," explained Rawul Singh. "And he will eat of the food we share and sleep without thy door. Thus if thou hast a plague, we will know of it, because either he will catch it or he will confess what is the evil that attacks thee. If he refuses I shall cut out his liver."

Cheetoo's trembling increased and he looked around fearfully.

"0 Sun of Benevolence," he cried, "do not make me sleep within the castle."

"There is nothing here to harm thee," said Malcolm impatiently. He was irritated by his own indisposition.

Cheetoo glanced at the ruins and renewed his pleading.

"Peace!" muttered the Rajput, aside. "Twenty silver rupees wilt thou have, son of a pig, if the sahib gets well. If he dies, thy liver will be fed to the jackals as I promised. Do not think to escape, for thou knowest I will hunt thee down-"

In this manner Malcolm's party increased to three. The bheestie, torn between fear of the castle and dread of Rawul Singh-coveting the unexampled wealth of silver rupees and tormented by visions of what might happen to his own organs-Cheetoo went so far as to urge Malcolm to pitch his tent outside the walls and to shun the interior of the ruins.

The Scot took this as an attempt to get him to give up his quarters in the home of the rajas and lose dignity thereby. Rawul Singh whetted his sword and looked meaningly at the native's bare limbs.

"In the village bazaar," chattered the bheestie mournfully, "it is said that the sahib's breath is in his nostrils. He will soon be dead."

Malcolm had noticed how the natives stared at him and whispered behind his back. He had expected resistance when he collected the revenues from the landholders and the wealthier merchants; no one in this hostile province withstood him, but the eyes that looked into his were covertly mocking.

It got on his nerves-which few things did. He had expected to find an antagonist in the castle; he found no one. In the first week of his stay he had nearly been slain by a clever trick of his invisible foes. And now the sickness was gaining on him. His head throbbed and his sight was blurred. It was harder than ever to sleep.

III

One night he wakened at a slight sound near his head. Sleeping lightly as he did, he was fully conscious on the instant. Soft, regular breathing mingled with a rasping snore from the open doorway of his chamber assured him that Rawul Singh and Cheetoo were dreaming away as usual, just outside.

Malcolm reached for a pistol quietly and lay passive. The only other opening in the walls of his room was the broken aperture of a round window from which many stones had fallen away. Through this he could see clearly the panoply of stars over the blur of the jungle. On this opening he focused his attention, for the sound had come from that quarter.

Several of the stars were blotted out. Malcolm sat up silently and raised his pistol. He waited, scarcely breathing, for what seemed many moments; and then the faint light from the round window was darkened further.

Malcolm was puzzled. He had expected that the object, whatever it might be, that had come into the opening would continue its progress within his room. Instead, another object had appeared in the window.

Resolved to investigate, the Scot slipped from his bed and moved to the door in his stocking feet. At once Rawul Singh's heavy breathing ceased and the white man was aware of the Rajput standing beside him in the dark.

"Someone is outside," whispered Malcolm. "Come."

He felt that the Rajput accompanied him along the hall, to the gate of the castle-the way being familiar to both. Stepping cautiously out on the terrace, they examined the wall without result until Rawul Singh drew a quick breath and grasped the arm of the white man.

"Above, sahib," he breathed; "look at the tower."

Twenty feet overhead a figure stood on the summit of the square tower, outlined against the stars in the faint light of a new moon. Malcolm saw arms raised to the sky and the arms were knitted to the body like those of a bat. The head appeared very small compared to the grotesque body.

Malcolm shivered, believing for the moment that he was looking at a man in the form of a bat. Tales of werewolves that he had heard in his youth in Scotland flitted into his mind; he thought of the Witches' Sabbath and the night when evil spirits cast themselves into the air from a great height.

"A bat," he whispered.

Checking the momentary play of imagination, due to his weakened condition, he ordered Rawul Singh to stand watch on the terrace while he went into the tower. It was built, as was generally the case in fifteenthcentury structures in Rajputana, against the corner of the castle, and a postern door opened into it from within the front passage of the main building.

There was but the one door and through a window Malcolm could see the tall form of Rawul Singh watching from the terrace below. Up the stairs he went, pistol in hand, his heart beating heavily.

The circular stairs were narrow and Malcolm was sure no one could have passed him. Yet when he stood on the tower summit it was vacant and there was no sign of the visitor of the night.

"If it was a bat," growled Rawul Singh, "it flew away, sahib, as you climbed up. It vanished into the air."

Disturbed, the Scot did not sleep again that night, and with the first light of dawn he inspected the tower anew. He was convinced that nothing could have got by him on the steep stairs, nor was there any opening in the wall by which the apparition might have leaped to the terrace unheard-if that had been possible-by the Rajput.

One thing attracted his attention, and that was a portion of vine displaced from its hold on the stone upon the side of the tower away from where Rawul Singh had stood-the side of the tower that had been in deep shadow the night before.

The Rajput tested the strength of the vines and found that they broke under his light weight.

"It was not thus, sahib," he shook his head, "that the demon came down."

"Yet he must have come down," pointed out Malcolm irritably. "How long had he been gone from the tower top before I reached it?"

Rawul Singh considered.

"The space of time that a man might hold his breath without pain. That I know well, for I held mine until I saw thee. Nevertheless the time would not suffice for the bat" -so the old man chose to think of the visitor of the night before-"to escape out of the tower through the door within the castle before thy coming."

"So, you saw me look out of the window halfway up the stair?"

"Nay, how could I see through the shadow that was like a cloak?"

The explanation of the Rajput worked logically enough in its own bent. Since the bird-like visitor of the night had been seen at the tower top and had not been seen on the ground below, it must have vanished between tower and earth, and hence its appearance had partaken of the supernatural.

But Malcolm, frowning, reasoned that since the bat-man had not come down the stairs and had not climbed down the vines, he must have done, logically, just one thing.

He had run down the stairs, on seeing Rawul Singh appear on the terrace, as far as the window. Hearing Malcolm coming up from below, the man had climbed through the window, working down into the vines which had broken under his grasp, and had thus fallen to the terrace beside Rawul Singh.

If this were true-and Malcolm could not believe otherwise-Rawul Singh had held back information again, just as before when he had failed to admit that he knew the slayers of the highway to be servants of Kali.

Cheetoo gave it as his opinion that the ghost of the castle had been on the tower and had flown away on the back of a ghil-an invisible spirit of the air.

But Malcolm, inspecting the window that opened into his chamber, was certain that two large stones had been added to the ruins of the wall within the opening. It had been these stones, he reasoned, that he noticed against the starlight. Someone had pushed them into the window as noiselessly as possible.

Taking pen and paper, the Scot wrote to Cunningham as follows:

To the Honourable Sir A. Cunningham, Resident of Jumna: SIR:

As regards the occupant of the Castle, formerly alluded to by yourself as the Ghost, I have to report that he has visited the tower wearing his long cloak which creates a resemblance to a bat.

This personage has means of entering and leaving the aforesaid Castle unseen. He is endeavouring to wall me up in the Castle, or at least to close the openings of our quarters so far as possible without being perceived. That is a curious matter. Owing to a distemper that has attacked me, I beg that you will send at once a detail of soldiers to convey the revenues to Agra in safety, as I am bedridden.

Yr. most obed't. servant,

MALCOLM.

This message Rawul Singh sent off by a chit bearer.

"Dog and son of a dog," said Rawul Singh to Cheetoo, "soon thou wilt dig thy grave, for the illness of the sahib gains upon him."

In spite of the Rajput's care and his own fight against the poison that was entering his system, Malcolm had been forced to take to his cot.

At this Cheetoo moaned and tore at his scrawny beard. Conflicting fears reflected themselves in his emaciated face, and the fear of the Rajput's steel overmastered his dread of the Scot's enemies.

"Ai," he whispered shrilly, "the poison that is killing the farangi is in the air of the castle. Know you not, 0 blind buffalo, that a man cannot live where fire will not burn?"

Rawul Singh was perplexed by this. Air, to him, was the same everywhere, and the idea that their enemies might have poisoned it was absurd. As for fire, it was true that they did their cooking on the terrace, yet they carried their lanterns about the castle.

He went to Malcolm with the message, and the Scot pondered it. They had both noticed the dank, vitiated odor of the place but had accepted it as natural.

"Light one of the lanterns, Rawul Singh," ordered the officer. "Bear it first out upon the dahlan, then into this chamber, then down to the lowest cellars. Observe carefully whether the flame diminishes or not."

The soldier obeyed and came back more puzzled than before.

"Sahib," he reported, "this is a strange thing. On the dahlan the flame was big and strong. Here, it is not so strong. In the lowest prisons it dies down to a hair."