“Oh, oh, oh!” she sobbed; then she gathered courage and said, “Yes, I will do it, if my grandmother kills me. But you must find something to force the lock, for she always carries the key with her.”
She led me to the kitchen which was at the rear, built into the side of the cliff almost beneath the walls of the old castle ruins. While she was lighting a lamp I found a small hatchet.
“It is through there,” she said, pointing to a closet whose entrance was covered by a drawn curtain.
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.”
I had failed. His mind lacked, I think, the necessary conscious imagination. But there was one more thing to try.
I said gently: “Philippe, you care for Ma’m’selle Maguelonne, do you not?”
“I love Maguelonne,” he replied.
And then I told him brutally, briefly, almost viciously, of the thing that hung there in that cellar — and of its use.
The effect was as violent, as physical as if I had suddenly struck him in the face. “Ah! Ah! Tonnerre de Dieu! La coquine! La vilaine coquine!” he shouted, leaping from his bed like a crazy man.
The rest was simple. Philippe was too angry and concerned about Maguelonne to have much time for surprise or even gratitude at his sudden complete recovery, but he was sensible enough to realize that for the girl’s sake it was better not to make a public row. So when he went to fetch Maguelonne away he took his aunt with him, and within the hour she was transferred with her belongings to Madame Plomb’s room.
Martin Plomb would deal effectively with old Mère Tirelou. He was to make no accusation concerning the part she had played in Philippe’s misadventure — an issue difficult of legal proof — but to warn her that if she ever tried to interfere with Maguelonne or the impending marriage he would swear out a criminal warrant against her for ill treatment of a minor ward.
There remain two unsolved elements in this case which require an attempted explanation. The belief which I have always held concerning malevolent magic is that it operates by imposed autosuggestion, and that therefore no incantation can work evil unless the intended victim believes it can. In this case, which seemed to contradict that thesis, I can only suppose that while Philippe’s conscious mind reacted with complete skepticism, his unconscious mind (his family came from these same mountains) retained certain atavistic, superstitious fears which rendered him vulnerable.
The second element is, of course, the elaborate mummery of the enmeshed manikin, the doll, own cousin to the waxen images which in the Middle Ages were pierced with needles or slowly melted before a fire. The witch herself, if not a charlatan, implicitly believes that there is a literal, supernatural transference of identities.
My own belief is that the image serves simply as a focus for the concentrated, malevolent will power of the witch. I hold, in short, that sorcery is a real and dangerous force, but that its ultimate explanation lies not in any supernatural realm, but rather in the field of pathological psychology.