The rain outside had stopped and there was only the sporadic patter of droplets draining from the tiles to disturb the silence of the room; that and the ticking of Crow's great clock. Then there came to my ears a quite audible, long drawn out, creaking sound — like straining timbers.
'You heard it?' Crow smiled.
'I heard it,' I answered. 'I've heard it half-a-dozen times while we've been talking. You've got unseasoned timber in your attic.'
'This house has very unusual rafters,' he observed. 'Teak — and seasoned well before the house was built.
And teak doesn't creak!' He grinned, obviously liking the sound of that last.
I shrugged. 'Then it's a tree straining in the wind.'
'Right, it is a tree, but it's not straining in the wind. If there was a wind up we'd hear it. No, that was a branch of "Billy's Oak", protesting at his weight.' He crossed to the window with its drawn curtains and inclined his head in the direction of the garden beyond. 'You missed our Billy when you wrote Here Be Witches!' he said. 'William "Billy" Fovargue — accused of wizardry — was hanged on that tree in 1675 by a crowd of fear-crazed peasants. He was on his way to trial at the time, but after the "lynching" the crowd testified they'd jumped the gun on Billy because he'd started a horrible incantation and weird shapes had begun to form in the sky — so they'd simply strung him up to prevent things from going any further . . .'
I got the idea. 'I see. So that sound is the branch from which he was hanged, still creaking with his weight two hundred and eighty years after the hanging?' I put as much sarcasm as possible into my reply.
Crow was quite unperturbed. 'That's right,' he answered. 'It got on the nerves of the previous owner of the house so much that he eventually sold the place to me. The owner before him nearly went crazy trying to discover the sound's source.'
I spotted Crow's mistake immediately. Something he had said did not ring quite true. 'Ah!' I pointed out. 'Now that's where your story falls down, Mr Crow. Surely he would've traced the sound to the oak?' I took his silence as acknowledgment of my cleverness and got to my feet, quickly crossing the room to where he stood by the drawn curtains. As I did so the creaking from the tree in he garden came again, louder.
'It's the wind in the oak's branches, Mr Crow,' I assured him, and nothing else.'
As the eerie sound came yet again from beyond the window I drew back the curtains and stared out into the night.
I took a quick step backwards then, telling myself that I must be seeing things. But that was just the point; I was not seeing things. My mind suddenly whirled; but, after a moment's thought, I burst into shaky laughter. The clever devil. He had actually had me going there for a moment. I turned to him in sudden anger and saw that he was still smiling.
'So it is the rafters after all?' I blurted, my voice cracking a little.
Crow kept right on smiling. 'No, it's not,' he said. 'That's what nearly drove that fellow I was telling you about crazy. You see, when they built this house seventy years ago, they cut Billy's Oak down — so that its roots wouldn't interfere with the foundations . .
DARGHUD'S DOLL
BY THE TIME I got round to writing this next one, Titus Crow had already had dealings with ghosts, Cthulhu Mythos critters, 'Roman Remains,' and the like. Now I thought I'd try him out with sympathetic magic. So you see, it wasn't really Dawson who went to see him that day but me! And this is the story he told me:
'So you're thinking of doing a book on basic magic, are you, Dawson?' Titus Crow broached the subject as soon as he had made me welcome with his customary offering of a glass of fine brandy I glanced enviously about the occultist's marvellously appointed study, a room I had fortunately been able to view on a few rare previous occasions, before answering him.
'That's right, Crow, yes. In fact, with the help of a few good source-books, I've got quite a bit of it done already; but there's this one chapter that s giving me some difficulty'
'Yes, I remember you mentioned it on the telephone imitative magic, I believe you said?'
I nodded in agreement. 'Right. I know why it's supposed to work, and even how — but I'm damned if I can find more than two or three really well-documented -cases. I mean, the theory of the thing is all well enough — but what about the facts?'
For a moment or two Crow thought about it, and the silence of the room was broken only by the occasional -creak of branches from the nighted garden beyond the -draped windows, and the oddly erratic ticking of a tall, four-handed, strangely hieroglyphed and coffin-shaped dock in one corner
'Imitative or sympathetic magic,' he mused, frowning as he cocked his head on one side in contemplation. 'Well, I'm afraid you're out of luck, Dawson. I do know of a few cases, yes, and one in particular which I suppose you could say is rather well authenticated –but you must realize that in many such cases there exists more than an element of chance. The simple truth is that unless the evidence is one hundred per cent conclusive . . . then the phenomena of imitative magic are usually purely coincidental.
'But anyway,' he quickly continued after a moment's pause, 'at a loss as I may be in that direction, I can probably supplement your list of source-books. Let me see now . . . Yes: you could try McPherson's Primitive Beliefs in N.E. Scotland, and Trachtenberg's Jewish Magic and Superstitions. Then you might find Oman's Cults, Customs, and Superstitions of India useful, or, perhaps, Dr E. Mauchamp's La Sorcellerie au Maroc. And then there's—'
'Hold on a minute there, Titus!' I cried, rudely breaking in on him. 'You changed the subject a bit fast there, didn't you? Come on, now, what about this "well-authenticated" case you mentioned? Is it something I shouldn't know about?'
'No, but . .. Well, you see, Dawson, I knew the people of the story personally, and . . .' He pursed his lips. 'If I did tell it, I'd have to alter the facts a bit, and the names of the characters. You see, Dawson? It would no longer be truly "authentic", now, would it? And after all, you're after facts; which in turn makes the telling of a disguised story rather pointless. Don't you agree?'
'Well, whether I can use it or not,' I answered in desperation, 'I've simply got to hear it now. I mean, you've got me going, Crow! You usually do get me going, and you very well know it. Now come on – how about the story?'
'As you wish,' he answered resignedly. 'But first let me fill your glass again.' He brought his chair over then, and I pulled mine a little closer to the fire; and in that strange, quiet room, with only the weird ticking of the great clock as a background to his voice, my host began the tale:
'It was all of nine years ago that Dr Maurice Jamieson went out to South Africa to visit his ailing brother, David, also a doctor, at his tiny hospital on the south shore of Lake Ngami.
'Now David Jamieson had had the so-called "missionary instinct" — a compassion, an urge to help underdeveloped peoples — ever since his boyhood. If his talents as a healer hadn't led him to medicine, then most probably he would have ended up in Africa anyway — wearing "The Cloth". As it was, in the fifteen years he'd been out there he had built himself a remarkable reputation with the natives of the region. He was looked upon by the various tribes almost as a god.
'David's trouble, his brother found when his landrover reached the hospital, from Livingstone, was simply that he had been pushing himself too hard — and he'd been doing it for fifteen years. The man was quite simply run down, and Maurice Jamieson put him straight into one of his own beds in the hospital, ordering him to stay there and be looked after while he himself tended the hospital's primitive clientele.