Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

At the back of the closet hidden by some old clothes hung on nails was a small door, locked. It was made of heavy wood, but I had little difficulty forcing the lock, opening the door to disclose a narrow flight of steps, winding downward into the darkness.

(There was nothing mysterious in the fact that such a stairway should exist there. The whole side of the cliff beneath the castle was honeycombed with similar passages.)

The girl went first and I followed close, lighting our way with the lamp held at her shoulder. The short stairway curved sharply downward, then emerged directly into an old forgotten rectangular chamber which at one time must have been a wine cellar or storeroom of the castle. But it now housed various strange and unpleasant objects on which the shadows flickered as I set the lamp in a niche and began to look about me. I had known that actual witches, practicing almost in the direct medieval tradition, still existed in certain parts of Europe, yet I was surprised to see the definite material paraphernalia of the craft so literally surviving.

No need to describe all of it minutely — the place was evil and many of the objects were grotesquely evil; against the opposite wall an altar surmounted by a pair of horns, beneath them “I N R I” reversed with the letters distorted into obscene symbols; dangling nearby a black, shriveled Hand of Glory — and there on the floor, cunningly contrived with infinite pains, covering a considerable space, was the thing which we had come to find and which, for all my efforts to rationalize, sent a shiver through me as I examined it.

Four upright wooden pegs had been set in the floor, like miniature posts, making a square field about five feet in diameter, surrounded by cords which ran from peg to peg. Within this area and attached to the surrounding cords was stretched a crisscross, labyrinthine, spider-weblike maze of cotton thread.

Tangled in its center like an insect caught in a web was a figure some eight inches high — a common doll, it had been, with china head sewed on its stuffed sawdust body; a doll such as might be bought for three francs in any toyshop — but whatever baby dress it may have worn when it was purchased had been removed and a costume crudely suggesting a man’s knickerbocker sport garb had been substituted in its place. The eyes of this manikin were bandaged with a narrow strip of black cloth; its feet and legs tangled, fastened, enmeshed in the crisscross maze of thread.

It slumped, sagging there at an ugly angle, neither upright nor fallen, grotesquely sinister, like the body of a wounded man caught in barbed wire. All this may seem perhaps silly, childish in the telling. But it was not childish. It was vicious, wicked.

I disentangled that manikin gently and examined it carefully to see whether the body had been pierced with pins or needles. But there were none. The old woman had at least stopped short of attempted murder.

And then Maguelonne held it to her breast, sobbing, “Ah, Philippe! Philippe!”

I picked up the lamp and we prepared to come away. The place, however, contained one other object which I have not thus far mentioned and which I now examined more closely. Suspended by a heavy chain from the ceiling was a life-sized, open, cage-like contrivance of wood and blackened leather straps and iron — as perversely devilish a device as twisted human ingenuity ever invented, for I knew its name and use from old engravings in books dealing with the obscure sadistic element in medieval sorcery. It was a Witch’s Cradle. And there was something about the straps that made me wonder...

Maguelonne saw me studying it and shuddered.

“Ma’m’selle,” I said, “is it possible—?”

“Yes,” she answered, hanging her head; “since you have been here there is nothing more to conceal. But it has always been on my part unwillingly.”

“But why on earth haven’t you denounced her; why haven’t you left her?”

“Monsieur,” she said. “I have been afraid of what I knew. And where would I go? And besides, she is my grandmother.”

I was alone with Philippe in his bedroom. I had brought the manikin with me, wrapped in a bit of newspaper. If this were fiction, I should have found him magically cured from the moment the threads were disentangled. But magic in reality operates by more devious processes. He was exactly as I had left him, even more depressed. I told him what I had discovered.

He was at the same time skeptical, incredulous and interested, and when I showed him the manikin crudely dressed to represent himself and it became clear to him that Mère. Tirelou had deliberately sought to do him a wicked injury, he grew angry, raised up from his pillows and exclaimed:

“Ah, the old hag! She really meant to harm me!”

I judged that the moment had come.

I stood up. I said, “Philippe, forget all this now! Forget all of it and get up! There is only one thing necessary. Believe that you can walk, and you will walk.”

He stared at me helplessly, sank back and said, “I do not believe it.”