Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

Entering one of the paths and covering it behind them, they worked their way toward the center. It took them no more than ten minutes to find the spring.

In a small clearing beside it they found a rude pulpit built. A human skull and a short sword lay on the ground inside the pulpit. Two feet in front of the pulpit was a pile of flat stones arranged to form a sort of altar. Beside the altar was a large basket.

Other than that the cleared area was bare, but there was a rustling in the rue bushes behind the pulpit. Tied there and grazing quite peacefully was a two-month-old lamb.

Mandeville looked worried. “I don’t like this at all,” he said. “The farmers were right. Something has been going on here and it looks as if these aren’t just silly people gathering together for immoral thrills. There is organization of a sort here, someone planning and setting the scene beforehand.”

“That’s an ugly weapon,” Alain said.

“It’s an ancient short sword,” Mandeville replied, “one carried by nobles into battle during the Crusades of St. Louis. It looks sharp. I could guess which noble owns it.”

Alain didn’t wish to hear the name, yet no power on earth could have kept him from asking, “Which?”

“Count de Broux.”

Alain winced. He remembered too well Mandeville’s saying that old women and very young girls were particularly susceptible to the lure of Satanism. He tried to focus his mind on the innocent beauty of Louise de Broux, but a tough strain of honesty made him admit that there was something other than innocence in the way her smile had changed, the way her whole attitude had changed when he had blurted out, “How lucky for me.” There was no wantonness, he would swear, but there was nothing childlike in her eyes. Even in the present macabre circumstances, the memory of that brief encounter sent blood pounding in his ears.

Their first meeting had been brief but more intimate than his recent tour of the castle’s bailey. The presence of a couple of dozen of the count’s retainers had sounded a convivial but not a personal note on the latter occasion.

He looked with loathing at the short sword. It cast a pall over him.

“Not having second thoughts, are you?” Mandeville asked.

“No! This thing has got to be stopped.”

There was nothing more to be found in the clearing. The setting sun cast formless shadows and the place grew dim. The stone altar took on the appearance of a coffin. The rude pulpit seemed to change shapes in the enfolding dark. One moment it was a poorly built screen thrown up to hide the sword and the skull. The next it was a monstrous cage which might hold feral creatures steeped in forbidden craft of human and unhuman lore. And the next it would disappear altogether, a blank space merged with the surrounding blackness.

Mandeville motioned to some thick bushes at the edge of the clearing. “We can hide there,” he said. “If we crouch down, no one will see us even if there are lights; and I’m sure there will be lights.”

They beat their way into the brush, cutting down small plants which might trip them if they needed to leave their hiding place quickly. Soon they had a safe, if not altogether comfortable, blind from which to watch the clearing.

They had less than an hour to wait. They heard snappings and rustlings, then the sound of people walking over dead leaves and brittle sticks. Then they saw the flickering of small lights. The sounds and glimmers came closer.

Three naked figures entered the clearing from the side opposite the watchers. Two men and a woman approached and touched the altar. They had a single torch which they fixed in the ground at one corner. Then they lay face down in front of the altar.

A few minutes later others came by threes. When four torches had been set at the altar, there were six men and six women prostrate in the clearing. One more and the coven would be complete.

He appeared with a suddenness that surprised Alain. A man with a horned mask rose behind the pulpit and shouted in a high falsetto voice. The coven shouted reply.

All the witches wore masks, crude caps of cloth or poorly woven straw or leaves and twigs tied together covering half their faces. Mostly the effect was bizarre rather than awesome. But the leader’s mask, a leather hood with eye holes and three horns, was grotesque enough to appall. Around the face it had obscene shapes which danced and dangled when he moved.

The leader, speaking as Satan himself, led the coven in a litany of blasphemy. The crowd swayed and stamped.

The men were ill-nourished specimens past middle age. Five women were ancient crones with shriveled breasts and sagging flesh which flopped loosely on their bones. The sixth was a young girl. She it was who walked up to the altar and lay down on it. The Satan figure, carrying the human skull, left his pulpit and approached the altar. He placed the skull on the young girl’s navel and she held it in place. Then he disappeared into the darkness and reappeared with the lamb and a sword.