Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 11 (1949).pdf/23

 the victim of a witch’s glamour can dispel the haze that binds him. Had I sent her off with a curse, you would have remained her victim all your life, believing that the things you’d seen were really there and that she was a young and lovely woman——“

“She was—she is!” cried Harrigan. “I’ve seen her, kissed her, held her in my arms”

“You think so?” interrupted the priest. “Look there!” He pointed to an object half visible in the moonlight, half obscured by shadow.

At first he thought it was a scarecrow or a pile of old discarded clothing, but as Harrigan looked closer he saw it was a woman’s body, old, emaciated, clothed in filthy rags. The face was incredibly wrinkled, bone-pale and hideously ugly. Even in death there was no dignity about it, only a kind of reptilian malignancy. The hands, claw-like, with broken, dirt-filled nails, were like the talons of a vulture, red, cracked, swollen-jointed; between the slackly opened bloodless lips showed a few broken, yellowed teeth, long, sharp and pointed as the fangs of a carnivore. The whole appearance of the corpse was horrible, revolting, frightening. Yet—he caught his breath in sudden sickness—as he realized it—underneath the ugliness, the filth, the squalor, was a faint resemblance to the lovely creature he had caressed. Like a devilishly inspired caricature Lucinda Lafferty the witch had a resemblance to his beloved silver-blond Lucinda, as a skilled cartoonist’s drawing may suggest, though not look like, the subject which it parodies.

“Thank Heaven you were not too dazed to hear me call to you, and to obey me,” Father Clancy told him kindly. “Had you not acted when you did, and blown upon her as I ordered, we dare not think what might have happened——”

The laugh that interrupted him was dreadful, as unexpected and as shocking as a strong man’s scream of pain. It was a laugh of disillusionment, abysmal, stark, complete.

These things Edward Harrigan remembers as vividly as if they’d happened yesterday. He is a dour and silent man, efficient in his work, but utterly unsocial. He calls no man his friend, no woman interests him. His little world is bounded by his laboratory and his suite at the hotel, he shuns the parks and country, no one ever sees him strolling in the sunshine or the moonlight. Usually he works till late with his test-tubes and reagents, and there is a standing order at the hotel desk to call him every morning at five.

For, as he shuns the beauties of the woods and fields, and eschews woman’s company and man’s companionship, Edward Harrigan shuns sleep, Dreams come with sleep, and in his dreams he sees the vision of a fragile Dresden-china figure in a coral-colored gown cut in the Grecian fashion, with silver-gleaming curls piled high upon her dainty head and soft, bare arms held out in. invitation. Sometimes he speaks to her; sometimes he reaches out to grasp the slender, rose-tipped hands in his.

But she never answers, and when he stretches out his hands to hers she fades slowly from his dream-sight, like moonlight fading just before the sky begins to brighten in the east. 21