Iron Butterflies Read online

  “They did not find you. You used the passage to hide, did you not? She will be pleased at your understanding. They are gone. Such as they never see what is before them unless they are tweaked by the nose. We have much to do—”

  “Where did you come from?” Had she met with the Colonel in those hidden ways? If so—why had she not said anything concerning him? I had to keep tight rein on my tongue to hold back such questions.

  Lisolette giggled. “Oh, there are many entrances. Some I found for myself, some she showed me because it was necessary to know how to reach the place—the place.”

  She had gone to the wardrobe and now lifted out the box which she carried to the table. Taking up that same spike-pointed candlestick the Colonel had tried to use to force the lock of the box, she impaled one of the fat candles on it. Then she glanced at the half-uncurtained window.

  “See if you can draw that closer,” she ordered. “Set a chair to hold it. They are still roaming the halls and we must not provide light in an empty room. But light we must have now.”

  I sidled along the wall beside the drapes and drew the tattered one as best I could. Following her instructions I then lugged and pulled at one of the massive chairs, getting it into place so that its back, high as that was, covered most of the slits in the fabric.

  Lisolette was chanting, in a voice which was hardly more than a whisper, using a language I could not understand. She had set the candle very near the box and now she drew from beneath the folds of her dress at the collar line a chain from which swung a key, Still chanting, she set the key in the lock and opened the box.

  With the care of one engaged in an important task she began to take out objects and set them in precise order within the circled light. There was a bowl so small I could have cupped it within the palm of one of my hands, looking so old its surface was covered with greenish encrustations. Into this she sifted carefully a little powder from a leather bag which she then returned to the box. After that came a knife or dagger, its blade and hilt both black, though the latter was wound around by a scarlet cord. Last of all she had a cylinder, also of metal looking very ancient. This she twisted until it came apart, when from it she drew a piece of what looked to be much-creased and handled parchment.

  Flattening that sheet out on the table, she looked over her shoulder at me,

  “Come!” she ordered. “We must be about her business. But we do not go unprepared. She is with us, watching, making sure. Do you not feel this? You must!”

  Chapter 17

  I was uneasy, yes. How else should I feel in this place? But that there was anything hinting of superstition in my emotion I forced myself to deny fiercely. Lisolette picked up the burning candle, held its flame down into the bowl to meet the power she had shaken there. She leaned over to blow gently and was answered, a few moments later, by a thin curl of pearl-gray smoke which arose first in twists, and then straightened out into a rod of vapor soaring into the dusk of the room.

  Into this she thrust both her hands, twisting and turning the fingers in and out as one does while washing, so that the column of smoke was broken and edged out in puffs. I could smell it now—cloying—sweet—too sweet, like some flower already touched by the blight of decay. Again her hands moved, catching at the vapor as if it had substance, then drawing those hands to her head, smoothing her hair between the scented palms. It was as if she bathed in that trickle of smoke.

  While she did this her eyes were fixed, not upon the smoke itself, but straight before her. Words I could not understand fell, rose, and fell again in the cadence of a chant.

  The smoke died, the last wisp of it she caught at jealously, held to her until I thought to see that it was actually a ball she rolled so now between her palms. Then she raised her cupped closed hands to the level of her nose, leaned a little forward to inhale deeply of what she held, or seemed to hold.

  I had drawn back from the table, for there was something noisome in the thick odor of that smoke, thin and tenuous as vapor, which made me feel ill, giddy. Grasping the back of one of the chairs, I held on so, keeping my feet, fighting against a weakness which came in surges to attack both my physical strength—and my courage. I had never before, even in the days just past, in that time when I had confronted Konrad's rage and brutal usage, experienced the same kind of fear which arose and pressed in upon me now. This was not of any normal world, even of a world in which casual cruelty was a common thing.

  Lisolette turned away, but not before she had taken up the knife. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, still that stare was not turned on me. What she saw, or believed she saw, lay elsewhere, beyond the boundaries of my vision. With the concentrated absorption of a sleepwalker she went to the wardrobe and reached for the gown she wore during her night-haunting of the secret ways.

  She dressed herself in it, adjusted her veil with practiced hands, while her eyes fixed on something else. Now she no longer chanted, but still she spoke, while the manner of her speaking was so eerie and unnatural that I found myself clinging even more closely to the chair which was my support. For it was as if she were talking with another—an unseen companion, uttering those sounds, then waiting for some reply, before speaking once again. I found myself searching the dusky room for that other. So strong was the impression the girl created that I could almost believe there was a third with us in the chamber. I fought then, fought my own imagination, against that strange certainty which Lisolette raised.

  Perhaps the smoke was of some herb or substance which could cause hallucinations because, for all my battling to retain a barrier against, illusion, I could indeed accept now that there was some presence with us—a personality, if you will—growing stronger, more compelling—demanding—

  Deliberately I used the nails of one hand against the other that still grasped the back of the chair, digging them deep into my own flesh, even as a cat or some other clawed creature would defend itself. The pain was sharp, but I enforced it—as an anchorage against I know not what danger.

  The dagger Lisolette had set into the bodice of her dress, so its crirnson-wrapped hilt showed against her pale skin. She did not cover her face with the veil this time. Rather she went purposefully back to the table, silent now, as if her conversation with the other was done, that she had received some instructions. There her hand closed about the roll of ancient parchment which she had taken from the tube. With the fingers of her left, hand she picked up the candle and for the first time she looked directly at me, that glassy stare gone, clearly she was alert and knowing once again.

  “It is time to go—” She gestured me toward the hidden door in the paneling, plainly giving so an order that I open the secret way.

  The skirts of the court dress I wore dragged about me. They carried the sickly sweet scent of the smoke as I gathered as much of their fullness into one hand as I could. I felt unpleasantly exposed with this very low bodice, while the iron necklace about my throat was cold against my skin. Unfortunately I did not remember to pick up that knife which had so pleased me earlier.

  We made our way into the passage, but went very slowly, for the skirts of our dresses were hard to manage here. Twice I felt the old stuff of mine tear against some projection of the wall; though Lisolette was more deft in control of hers, the roll of parchment having joined with the knife in the forepart of her bodice.

  Down we went once more, I ever alert to some sound heralding the return of the Colonel. What we might do—or Lisolette might—if we met here, I could not guess. That I would have to leave to the fortunes of chance alone. However there was no sound, save that whisper of our own passing.

  The stairs, the Colonel's cell—then mine— Two or three paces beyond that our way took a sudden turn to the right. We must now be very close to the wall of the outer cliff. Once more we faced steps, so steep and narrow I was glad that I wore no high-heeled shoes, though the chill which struck upward through the damp woolen stockings I wore as my only foot covering numbed my feet.

  Down we went, slowly,
Lisolette taking care here and advancing a single step at a time. My fingers slid along the walls on either side, until the flesh was rasped near raw, striving to find some hold which would be a support should I slip. I have never had a good head for heights, and the passage, so little revealed by the candle ahead of me, seemed to plunge forward with a slope steep enough to make my giddiness of the upper chamber return.

  I found myself counting under my breath those steps, so very narrow—fifty of them! We must be below the foundations of the fortress, edging into the very stuff of the cliff on which it perched. Lisolette said nothing and the only sounds came from the rasping of our skirts against the walls.

  On the sixtieth step I was barely holding onto the rags of my courage. The one wane hope which supported me was the Colonel's suggestion that one of the hidden ways might provide a secret exit from Wallen-stein, fashioned to be used in a time when the fortress might fall to some foe.

  That he had come this way I had no doubts. I longed to hear some sound to suggest that he was returning. More and more I clung to the hope that he would have the strength to deal properly with Lisolette, and that on him would rest our escape from this nightmare.

  Ten more of these hellish steps—for to me this descent had become a passage into those infernal regions of which older generations had made so black a warning. Then there came an end in another passage. Here, though the candlelight picked out now and then the traces of tools which had been used to make the way more passable, there was also evidence that we were traveling through some natural cleft in the rock. There was no masonry to be seen.

  The way was cold, so cold that I shivered continuously, my bare shoulders pimpled with raised flesh. I would have gi ven anything for a shawl, even that rough garment I had left behind. Lisolette walked more briskly, I was certain that she knew exactly where she was and had a definite goal. The passage widened out and her pace became swifter, until she was nearly running and I must hasten to keep up with her and that precious candle.

  We emerged in a burst of speed, as if she were so eager to gain her desire that she could no longer wait, into a chamber cut in the rock. It might have been a cave, but there was much evidence that it had been adapted by the will of man to another purpose.

  By the thin candlelight I could only make out some standing objects here and there along the walls, and, at the far end, a raised platform. Lisolette was busy, hurrying along one wall and raising her candle high to hold its flame to a series of rusty iron baskets, each of which must have been crammed with tinder and burnable wood, for they caught fire quickly. That done she turned and sped to light a similar line on the opposite wall.

  I could see clearly now and what I saw was enough to root me in sheer astonishment, as if the stone had gripped my feet and held me completely prisoner. Those figures I had only half glimpsed were now plain. Pillars of rock stood in two rows, forming a guard. There had been no attempt to chisel any form into the rough stone below the shoulder line, but each was topped by a manifest representation of a human head, while each of those heads was that of a dead man. The mouths gaped loosely, the eyes were blank. Some had been vilely worked upon to suggest the heads of those so long dead that the bones of the skull showed through rotting flesh.

  Lisolette, having completed her circle of the wall baskets and finished their lighting, now made her way to the platform at the far end. There was a last basket there, set upon the stone at floor level, and into that the thrust her candle and left it. The figure on the platform was not one of the pillar-heads, but had been fashioned to show the whole of a squatting form. So abscene was that thing that I gasped, unable to believe hat mankind had ever worshipped such, for that this vas a temple, a very old temple, I had no doubt now.

  The thing was more than life-size and it was fe-nale—obscenely female, with vast bags of breasts lying upon a huge mound of an obviously pregnant body. While the legs were stretched well apart to expose the nost private parts of my sex. Huge as that swollen body was, the head was small in comparison, only a round ball which bore but two indentations for eyes and no other features.

  Lisolette was on her knees before that horror, reaching up her hands to it. I shuddered. Its very grossness was an insult, a degradation of my sex, and still it was plain that this child worshipped before it.

  The place was old, old and filled with something which pressed in on me. I could feel a kind of tugging to drag me forward. Lisolette—I had no feeling for her, but no one, no one must pay homage to that! It held in itself all the most bestial of the past—

  I found myself beside the girl and I caught at her shoulders, trying to drag her back and up, away from that thing squatting there. Without even looking at me, her eyes only for the image, she twisted in my hold, with astounding strength. Her hand went to the front of her bodice and she brought forth both the knife and the roll of parchment. As I tightened my hold on her she turned a little. Her expression was vicious, her lips drew back from her teeth as might those of a striking wolf, and she slashed at me with the knife.

  I flinched away, aware that in her present state she could well kill. There was a dribble of froth at the corners of her mouth.

  “She comes! You are for her!”

  Swinging around, with her back now to the image. the girl lunged at me, knife ready. There was no doubt that she meant to kill me. I flung myself out of her reach, dodged, as she moved with a wolfs speed to follow me. There was no weapon—the candle with its heavy stick! But that was several feet away—

  I dodged again, striving to get within reaching distance to seize upon that. All which was sane and humar had vanished from the girl's face.

  “She wants you,” she panted. “Then she can live again—she must live again! The Old One has promised it. You have her clothing upon you, you are of the blood she wants—she will have you!”

  She sprang at me with such a fury then that I tried once more to elude her, but my unwieldy skirts tripped me up. I fell half on my side, while that knife descended straight toward my body, and I could only fling up one arm feebly as a shield against the blow.

  The steel never reached me. Lisolette screamed. Dazed, I looked up to see that both her hands were caught in a strong grip, one determined enough to be able to hold the insane girl. The knife fell to the floor, and I threw myself on it, while the Colonel held my attacker, and her screams made a deafening, hideous din in this evil place.

  She had that strength which often comes upon those of broken minds, and he had difficulty in restraining her, slight and young as she was. I thrust the knife into my own bodice and stumbled to my feet, drawing myself up with a hold on one of those skull-headed pillars, just in time to see the Colonel raise his hand and strike Lisolette on the jaw as she clawed and bit and kicked with frenzy. Her head snapped back as she crumpled in his arms, so that he laid her down at the very foot of that obscene image and then came quickly to me.

  “You are not harmed?”

  I shook my head, trying to catch my breath. “Lisolette?” The question I made of her name came forth in a creak.

  He knelt beside the unconscious girl, touching the pulse at her throat.

  “Only unconscious. I had no other way of handling her.”

  “I know.” Some might have deemed his blow a brutal one, but I understood the necessity for it. I felt as if I had been running past my strength. There was a sharp pain in my side, hurting so that I looked down to see if the knife had really gone home into my flesh and I bad not been aware of it during those moments of deadly fear. But the red stuff was unspotted, though it was much frayed and tearing apart at the seams.

  “What do we do—?” Somehow I found breath again on spite of that pain.

  I no longer stood alone, or rather swayed weakly. There was a strong arm about my shoulder as I was drawn close to the warmth and support of a body which felt as unmovable, as impregnable as the walls of rock about us.

  “We go on. I have found the door. It is a hard way—”

  I loo
ked up into his face. There was resolution there and more than hope—a promise.

  “This place—” Once more that pain came in my side. I felt the pulling. I will swear all my life there was another presence in the light of those basket torches than just the three of us, the girl curled in a ball like a sleeping child at the feet of that horror carven centuries beyond time, the man in the tattered and blood-stained clothing—I in the slitting dress of a forgotten— and damned—court. There was an—identity hovering there. Rage—hot as the flames in the basket—a helpless rage all the more searing because it was helpless.

  Yet, when I looked at the lumpish squatting thing, I knew that the feeling did not center in it. Those who had worshipped here were long gone. Perhaps the forces they had recognized and symbolized in the image had lingered—until something else had drawn upon that residue, brought it to feed another way of power.

  Once more I looked to Pryor Fenwick, welcoming the warmth of his body close to mine, the protection of his arms about me.

  “It is not the place—alone—” I voiced what I felt. Almost I expected him to treat my strange emotions, as I would have earlier—vagaries of overwrought mind, the result of hysteria.

  Instead I saw him nod.

  “This is very old, but there were those who came later, who turned to old beliefs, twisted them. Come—” His arm still about my shoulders, he drew me to the platform, up on it, though I went reluctantly.

  “Lisolette.” I dragged against his hold for a moment and looked to the girl.

  She stirred, gave a small whimper.

  “We cannot take her. She is not badly hurt and she must know these ways well. This is not the first time she has been here.”

  “Please—!” I pulled free from him then, but he followed me and stooped to help me stretch the girl out on the stone. Her eyes opened and she looked up at me. A wide smile stretched the lips above her bruised jaw.

  “You—have come!” She clutched at my skirts. “As you promised! My lady—at last!”