WEREWOLVES
DON'T
WHISTLE

Father Bredder heard the noise again and raised his flashlight.

Suddenly, staring down from the top of the wall was the head and shoulders of a man… his face pale, mummy-like yellow… his hair disheveled and matted with earth … and in the center of his chest, a large darkening blotch…

"Exciting … dramatic … Father Bredder's fascinating maneuvers result in an engrossing tale."

—VIRGINIA KIRKUS BULLETIN

"Absorbing suspense"

—WILMINGTON NEWS JOURNAL

DELIVER
US
FROM
WOLVES

LEONARD HOLTON

A DELL MYSTERY

Published by
DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
750 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

Copyright © 1963 by Leonard Holton
Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved
Reprinted by arrangement with
Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, N.Y.

The characters, places, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place or actual happening.

First Dell Printing—January, 1966

Printed in U.S.A.

Front Cover

Flyleaf

Title Page

Copyright

Secret Of The Doubting Saint

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

The Dell Great Mystery Library

By Agatha Christie

Bestsellers From Dell

Back Cover

CHAPTER

1

The fierce April sun splashed down in blinding light over the mountains through which the road struggled upward toward the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, so that Father Bredder, seated in the back of the little Mercedes taxi could scarcely look out of the window without squinting. The mountains around were rocky. Boulders as big as houses stood on their sides, some of them so large that their tops protruded over the pine trees that grew between them, thickly in some places and sparsely in others. The sky, contrasted with the white light reflected from these boulders, was almost a navy blue—a dark and passionate sky invaded by a white and equally passionate sun. The pines seemed to droop in the heat and the shadows below them were a blackish purple, which Father Bredder decided was much blacker than black.

The priest was still surprised to find himself in Portugal and on his way to the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima. It was difficult to adjust to the knowledge that he was not in Los Angeles, California, where he served as chaplain at the Convent of the Holy Innocents. The unreality was heightened by the fact that he had not planned to come to Portugal at all, and a month before would never have dreamed such a thing was possible for him. And then Mrs. Crawley had called him and said that she could arrange a free trip to Fatima for him. Mrs. Crawley ran a travel agency in Los Angeles, and her daughter, Angela Crawley, was one of the students at the Convent of the Holy Innocents.

Mrs. Crawley said that she had an offer of passage to Portugal outward bound by plane and homeward bound by ship and she could not go herself. She could transfer the offer of the round-trip passage to anyone she wished, and would Father Bredder like to make the journey? And Father Bredder, without giving the matter a moment's thought, had said yes, he would like to go. He had immediately been horrified that he had said such a thing because there was a terrible amount of work to be attended to at the Convent, and it was by no means fair to his assistant, Father Armstrong, to take off on a pleasure jaunt, leaving the work to him.

Having accepted the offer, Father Bredder hoped secretly that something would turn up which would provide a legitimate excuse for backing out. He hoped that the Bishop would say that there were far too many matters to be attended to for him to leave his post at that time. But the Bishop had said nothing of the sort. All he had said was, "You must certainly go. But be sure to visit the monastery of Jeronimos just outside Lisbon. It will delight you. It is there that Vasco da Gama is buried, and the interior columns are carved to appear like palm trees so that the impression is of being in a tropical forest."

"You have been there, Your Grace?" asked Father Bredder.

"No," said the Bishop. "But I've read about it. When you come back I will expect a full report on Fatima and the monastery. And call on the Bishop of Leiria. I will write him immediately that you are coming. "

Everybody assumed that Father Bredder would be visiting the shrine at Fatima where the Virgin had appeared to three Portuguese children. It was a natural assumption, for no priest visiting Portugal could resist such an opportunity.

Disappointed that the Bishop did not forbid the trip, but rather encouraged it, Father Bredder consulted with Reverend Mother Theresa, the prim, strict English-born leader of the nuns at the Convent. "Perhaps I ought not to be away at this time," Father Bredder said after telling her of the offer.

"Father," said Reverend Mother, "I think you're fishing for an excuse to back out, and I am not going to provide you with one. You've been working very hard, you're tired and should get away. We will get along very nicely with Father Armstrong." Father Bredder marveled at Reverend Mother's insight. It was quite impossible to hide anything, however innocent, from her. As far as hidden motives and feelings were concerned, Reverend Mother had X-ray vision.

Turned down by the Bishop and Reverend Mother,

Father Bredder spoke to Barbara Minardi, daughter of his friend Lieutenant Minardi of the Los Angeles Police Department.

"I really shouldn't be going at this time, Barbara," Father Bredder said. "There are aphids coming on the roses. They have to be sprayed regularly. And if the sweet peas aren't picked every single day, they'll go to seed and that will be the end of them."

Barbara and Father Bredder had a joint gardening project at the Convent. One year they had raised tulips together, a tremendous achievement in the hot, dry Los Angeles climate. This year they had got some bareroot roses in January and put in twenty-four of them in a little rose garden. And they had also bought some sweet pea seeds, and the vines were flourishing outside of Father Bredder's study. He loved sweet peas because they reminded him of Ohio where he had grown up in a small town not far from Toledo.

"I promise I'll keep the sweet peas picked," said Barbara. "I'll pick them every morning right after breakfast before ancient misery."

"Ancient misery?" asked Father Bredder.

"Ancient history," said Barbara. "About all the fighting and cheating and lying that went on in Ancient Greece. When we know all about that, we start on Ancient Rome. I expect they were every bit as bad."

"They weren't really like that," said Father Bredder, shocked that history should have produced such an impression on Barbara. "The greater number of them were just like you and me."

"What are inner meats?" asked Barbara. It was characteristic of her that she did not react to information given her but went ruthlessly on to the next question, which might or might not have something to do with the subject in hand.

"Inner meats?" asked the priest. "Oh. You mean in the sacrifices the Greeks made to their gods?"

"Yes. They always offered the inner meats to them. What were they?"

"Heart, kidneys, and so on," said the priest.

"That's about the only sensible thing I've heard about the Greeks," said Barbara. "I hate heart and kidneys too. If I were a Greek, I'd have sacrificed everything except the steaks to the gods. None of those Greeks went to Heaven anyway because they were pagans."

That hurt Father Bredder because he could not believe that all born before the advent of Christ were excluded from Heaven, so he said, "God would not deny Himself to those who earnestly sought Him," and then he felt awkward because, although he was a priest, he did not like to seem to be preaching or trying to create an impression of superior holiness. But Barbara understood and smiled and said, "I'll spray the aphids when you are away. In the evenings."

"Thank you," said Father Bredder. "Once a week will do."

All these things went through Father Bredder's mind as the taxi climbed up the Serra d'Aire from the village of Leiria which he had reached by train from Lisbon the night before. The road was precipitous, full of curves and bends, and the taxi driver had tremendous faith in the power of his horn, for at the numerous hairpin bends all he did was blow on his horn and plunge around, sometimes meeting a descending car or taxi whose driver was also blowing on his horn, sometimes skimming the sides of huge oxen pulling carts along the road.

There were three others in the taxi, besides the driver—two women and a man. The little car with five adults aboard was overcrowded, and the women had bundles on their knees, taking up room.

They were all very shy and after saying "Bom dia, Pater" to him, left him to his thoughts, though Father Bredder suspected that they would like to open a conversation with him.

He himself, however, was a shy man. Although a master of Latin, he spoke also Portuguese and Spanish, having studied these languages as an exercise, but he was not much of a conversationalist. The taxi driver spoke English, but with such an intonation, emphasizing all the wrong syllables, that it was difficult to follow him. They made the journey largely in silence, though now and again the taxi driver, to practice his English, would attempt to explain some point of interest to the priest.

"There are not many houses around," said Father Bredder to the taxi driver when he felt that there was too much silence to be politely endured.

"This is one of the wildest parts of my country," said the taxi driver.

"I suppose there are a few people living here, however, " said the priest.

"Yes," said the driver. "Peasants. They keep goats and sheep. They make a cheese from goat's milk which is called cheese of the mountains. It is very good. You like cheese?"

"Yes," said Father Bredder. And then there was silence again, for he could think of nothing more to say. Once or twice on the road they passed what Father Bredder took to be soldiers. They were always in pairs, one on one side of the highway and the other on the other. They wore helmets like those of the German army. The taxi driver explained that they customs police—or at least that was what Father Bredder understood him to say. It seemed odd to have customs police so far from the frontier and so heavily armed.

They continued the journey in the blinding sunlight through the wild country, which seemed to Father Bredder, for he was sensitive to such things, to have changed little since the dawn of time. Because the season of pilgrimage to the Shrine of Fatima had not yet started—it started in May—there were no great crowds about when Father Bredder arrived. He was amazed by the size of the arena before the church—an area so huge it seemed several acres.

The taxi stopped by the roadside and he had to walk across this huge arena to the little Chapel of the Visitation at the far end, with next to it a large church.

Walking across the paved arena where the pilgrimage crowds would gather for outdoor services, Father Bredder felt very small. Those who had come in the taxi with him had made immediately for an area to the right of the plaza where souvenirs of the shrine were for sale. Important as it was for them to visit the shrine, it seemed to be more important to bring back some souvenir of it as proof to their fellows of the visit. They visited the shrine for prestige rather than devotion. Immediately this thought occurred to him, Father Bredder was ashamed of himself for being so uncharitable. He had no right to judge the motives of his fellows, and he winced at his lack of charity and upbraided himself for being so quick to form a judgment of others.

He was delighted with the chapel. It was small and completely without pretensions—a modest little building devoid of pews and with a tiny altar at the end. Outside the wall grew a rosebush already in leaf, some of the buds beginning to open, promising small dark blooms like heart's blood. Perhaps, Father Bredder thought, they were the roses of the Virgin of Fatima. He loved them immediately. The floor inside the chapel was wood and there were some murals on the walls, but he did not pay much attention to them.

The building was like a prayer—not the elaborate prayers of the great saints, but the simple prayers of the poor, devoid of rhetoric and posture or intellectual brilliancy; humble and trusting. The priest went down on his knees and prayed himself. Sometimes it took him a long time to pray. Words came but not the feeling that the words were intended to convey. But in the tiny chapel, erected because three children had insisted, in the face of the hostility of both the civil authorities and the church, that the Virgin had appeared to them on this spot on six occasions, prayer came readily to Father Bredder. He did not even need words but felt that all he wanted to say was communicated immediately to his Creator. He did not know how long he spent on his knees, and when at last he left the chapel, he felt that he was leaving behind him some part of himself that would remain there through all time. And he was glad of it.

He went, because of a promise made to Barbara Minardi, to the souvenir area to pick up some little thing for her.

There were more than a dozen stores, and the storekeepers were avaricious for his custom. They all spoke English of a sort and besought him to buy from them. He was annoyed by this and upset by the things they had to sell—electric light bulbs made in the form of of the Virgin; paperweights in the form of a statue of the Virgin; Our Lady of Fatima fountain pens and Our Lady of Fatima alarm clocks with a statue of the Virgin, garishly painted, perched on top.

"These are very popular," said one storekeeper whom the priest found impossible to evade. "You wake up in the morning and the first sight before you is the Virgin. One hundred escudos. But for you, Father, a special price—eighty."

"In America," said Father Bredder, thinking of the statue, "people often throw things at alarm clocks."

"They do not last long in Portugal, either," said the man. "Father is a Dominican?"

"No. A Franciscan."

The man looked disappointed, and Father Bredder smiled. Franciscans were notoriously poor.

"Well, look around, Father," said the storekeeper. "Stay as long as you wish. I will make you a price on anything. Pay no attention to the price tags."

"I want a present for a girl of thirteen," he said. "And I can spend ten escudos."

"I have it," said the storekeeper. "Here. A skipping rope. See, on the handles are …"

"… the Virgin of Fatima," said Father Bredder.

"That is not all," said the storekeeper. "If you hold the handle up to the light and look through this hole, you will see a little picture of the three children precisely as they were when the Virgin appeared to them."

"No, thank you," said the priest.

"Rosary?"

"No."

"Fountain pen?"

"No."

"A missal then. In the front there is …"

"… a picture of the Virgin of Fatima…"

"Yes. But when you turn it in a different way, it becomes the three children who saw the Virgin," said the storekeeper.

"No, thank you," said Father Bredder.

"I see you are one of the wise ones," said the storekeeper. "It is a pleasure to come up against a man of taste. I have something here which I have saved for just such a person as you. It is not for the ordinary sort."

He went to a little glass booth at the end of the store which served him as an office. There was a small round safe in it and this he opened and, after peering into it, inserted his arm and came out with a small wooden box about the size of the box in which jewelers put rings. He brought this to Father Bredder.

"I show you this only because you are a man of some discrimination," he said. "You will know how to take it. I would prefer to sell it to an American rather than to one of our own people. They are too superstitious altogether." He now opened the box to reveal inside what looked like a piece of bluish gray stone variegated with dark stripes and very crudely carved in the shape of an animal's head. The work was so badly done that Father Bredder could not decide whether the head of a bear or a dog had been intended. He was disappointed and did not know what to say to reject this bargain he was being offered. He picked the stone up and examined it carefully, rehearsing in his mind some method of refusing it, for he judged it worthless.

"You know what it is?" asked the shopkeeper.

"No." said Father Bredder.

"There is some writing on the other side," said the shopkeeper. "It is in Latin so perhaps you can translate it." Father Bredder turned the carving over. The reverse side had a flat panel in the center and on this was carved the words "libera nos a lupis."

"Libera nos a lupis?" said the priest. "Save us from —wolves?"

"Yes," said the shopkeeper. "It is, as you can see, a very old piece—five hundred years or more, I would say. From medieval times. It is a—a charm; designed to protect the owner from wolves. There were wolf packs all through these parts in those days—and indeed all over Europe. In fact, the wolf is not extinct even now in the wilder parts of Portugal.

"One of the workmen found this while they were doing the excavation for the arena outside and brought it to me. I gave him two escudos for it, and he was quite happy. You may have it for four. To be sure, it is not what one could call a souvenir of the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima. But on the other hand, one cannot deny that it is unique."

"If it is as old as you think," said Father Bredder, "it should be in a museum."

"The whole of Portugal, my dear Father, should be in a museum," said the shopkeeper. "Curios of all kinds and many of them much older than that piece of carved stone abound in this country. You have perhaps not been into Tras os Montes yet? There you will find big carved statues older than the Romans. Nobody knows who carved them. They are of pigs—or perhaps bears or wolves—one cannot tell. Some are of men, but the men look like animals. They are carvings of men who, like animals, have no souls. That is the best way to put it.

"No. Don't talk about putting that little charm piece into a museum. It should be out in the live world, handled by people; not dead behind the glass of a museum case."

"Libera nos a lupis," said the priest. There were many references in Scripture to wolves and the shepherd who guarded his flock from them. Among a pastoral people the ferocious, questing, blood-hungry wolf, waiting for his prey, was a better symbol of Satan than a creature with horns upon its head and hoofs for feet. So perhaps the wolf, prowling in the darkness for his prey, had at one time been a stormy and striking figure of Satan.

He looked the stone over carefully and felt an attraction for it. It certainly wasn't a proper present for Barbara, but perhaps he would find something else for her. It would be better to wait a while rather than rush into buying a souvenir when he had just arrived in the country.

"I would like to buy it," he said. "How much did you say you wanted?"

"To you—four escudos," said the shopkeeper. "You understand that I make no guarantee concerning the age. But what I have told you about it being found here is true."

"Did they find other things during the excavations ?" asked the priest.

"Oh, yes," said the shopkeeper. "Dig anywhere in Portugal and you will find something—pieces of tile, pottery, remains of bronze tools; sometimes stone tools. They are about everywhere. Portugal is an ancient country, unvisited and uninvestigated. You have heard of Tarshish in ancient history?"

"The port of the ancient Phoenicians?" asked Father Bredder who had a sort of pack rat's knowledge of all kinds of things as a result of his habit of buying books on a great variety of subjects from secondhand bookstores.

"Yes," said the shopkeeper. "The lost port of the Phoenicians on the Atlantic. The Spanish believe that it was located on their coastline. But Tarshish was at Nazaré in Portugal. Go there and you will believe this immediately. The people are Semites—Phoenicians. They dress differently from everyone else in Portugal. They look different. You will only have to be there a few minutes when you will agree with me that Nazaré was Tarshish, and the colorful clothing of the people is the cloak of many colors to which the Bible refers."

Father Bredder was delighted with all this information, and would have liked to have talked longer with the shopkeeper, but it was now midday and in half an hour's time he had an appointment to see the Bishop of Leiria. His own bishop in Los Angeles had, as promised, written the Bishop of Leiria as soon as it was known that Father Bredder was to come to Portugal. And the priest had hardly arrived in Lisbon before there was a message from the Bishop inviting him to lunch. The arrangement was that a car would be sent for him to the Chapel of the Visitation. All he knew of the residence of the Bishop of Leiria was that it lay somewhere up in the mountains, and he would spend the night there.

"I must leave you now," the priest said to the shopkeeper. "I have very much enjoyed talking to you and hope we will see each other again. My name is Bredder, Father Joseph Bredder."

"And I am Vargas y Lucito—Emil Vargas y Lucito. "

They shook hands and Father Bredder went across the big open arena again to wait for the Bishop's car, very happy with Portugal, so colorful in its people and its history. He was sure he was going to thoroughly enjoy his stay.

CHAPTER

2

The residence of the Bishop of Leiria was in the ancient town of Ourem over the top of the ridge down whose slope lay Fatima. On the crest of this ridge were three windmills whose sails, Father Bredder was surprised to note, were made of canvas. They were triangular like the jibsail of a sloop, and the priest was much taken with the little windmills which, in their sails, linked land and sea—a reminder that the seamen of Portugal in the great days of discovery were farmers when not on a voyage.

Ourem, he found, lay on the peak of a mountain beyond the ridge, the top of the peak being dominated by the ruins of a castle. The Bishop's residence was in a small cobbled square in the center of the town whose streets were so narrow that two cars could scarcely pass each other without scraping against the walls of the houses.

All that was to be seen from the street, of the Bishop 's house, was a high stone wall capped by red tiles. There was a narrow iron gateway through the wall outside of which the car stopped and the chauffeur indicated that Father Bredder was to get out.

He did so, went to the gate and it was immediately opened for him by a pleasant middle-aged woman, clad entirely in black and with her hair pulled to the back of her head in a severe bun.

Once through the gate Father Bredder found himself in a spacious garden, laid out with beds of roses which were already in bloom. There were two peacocks on the lawn between the rose beds and one of these screamed in its devilish way as the priest went by, and then turning its back, displayed the beautiful fan of its tail.

Before the house, which was a mansion of three stories, was a large terrace fringed by pillars from which beams extended to the roof of the house, the beams being covered with flowering vines.

The floor of the terrace was beautifully paved with colored tiles. The design of the tiles seemed somewhat Eastern and as Father Bredder learned later, the Portuguese learned the art of making such tiles from their Moorish conquerors, giving them an Eastern quality.

The Bishop himself came down a flight of steps before the house to welcome him. He was a portly man, quite bald, brown-faced and all smiles. He was in such a hurry to get to Father Bredder that he seemed like a rubber ball bouncing down the steps, his pectoral cross bobbing on his ample chest.

"My good father," he said. "You have no idea how much I have looked forward to this visit. You have come at the best possible time. Isn't that so?"

He turned for confirmation to a slender, pale-faced priest who had followed the Bishop down the steps. He agreed with a wan smile that this was so. He was introduced as Father Painter.

"Father Painter is from England. You are from America. And I am the only Portuguese," the Bishop said. "The universal church in all truth. But come. You are no doubt hungry, and we mustn't keep our soup waiting. A cook, once annoyed, can destroy a whole week."

There was nothing in the slightest degree modern about the mansion into which they entered. The floors were of polished red tiles, covered with throw-rugs which looked worn and were of the style that Father Bredder vaguely identified as Turkish. All the furniture was of heavy wood, elaborately carved. It had the weight of oak but was dark, and the upholstery was covered in plush—red and green for the most part. Outside the light had been bright and fierce, but inside all was dimmed. Windows were heavily curtained and tapestries were hung against the white plastered walls, both for display and also to cut down glare and muffle sound. With the dimming of the light went a dimming of sound also, the effect being that Father Bredder discovered he was talking in a whisper, as if in a church.

At the end of the huge entrance hall, with its gleaming polished red tiles, its heavy formal chairs and its hangings of tapestry, was a large flight of stairs wide enough to accommodate three or four people abreast. The risers were small, the steps broad and generous and carpeted in a glorious red, making an effective crimson swirl upward to the second floor. To the right of the entrance hall was a huge drawing room and to the left a dining room which was a delight. The walls were wainscoted in beautifully carved wood. The windows, giving out on to a terrace, were leaded, the panes being of stained glass. One design was of a caravel; another of a man in armor kneeling to be blessed by a cleric, and in the center of these two the episcopal coat of arms at feet of the Virgin.

The dining room, compared with the huge entrance hall and the withdrawing room into which they had peeked, was small and cozy, making for good food and good conversation.

"Large dining rooms are a device of the devil's," said the Bishop when Father Bredder commented on the coziness of the room. "Seated at a table for twenty, a man would be better off dining alone. He cannot converse with the whole table, and whatever conversation he may strike up with a neighbor to his right or left is at the mercy of whoever is to their right or left.

"I have suffered at large banqueting tables for many years and count every hour spent at them toward whatever suffering may lie ahead of me in purgatory. It is certainly quite impossible to deal with any particular topic when dining with twenty other people."

The Bishop was plainly a man who enjoyed his food. He enjoyed not merely the taste of it but the cooking of it and the story of it, for he had some little anecdote to produce about every course that was laid before them. Father Bredder was by nature neither a gourmet nor a trencherman. He ate because there was a physical necessity for eating, and although he was a big man, he had no great appetite nor interest in eating. But, listening to the Bishop, he suspected that His Grace got an extra nourishment from his food as a result of the delight he took in it, and that, he reflected, perhaps accounted for the Bishop's cheerfulness and bubbling vitality.

The first course was a kind of potato soup with a green vegetable sliced very fine cooked with it. "Caldo verde," pronounced the Bishop. "And excellent, I might add. It is the common soup of Portugal and I believe that it is possible to exist on this and bread alone—though of course there must be a little wine as well. You will like our fish. Today we are to have linguada—sole. Not the Dover sole of England, but Portuguese sole, full-flavored and yet delicate. Our fish is good in Portugal—but our meat … well, Father Painter tells me that we do not know how to butcher meat properly but hack it to pieces, destroying the best cuts."

So the talk went on until the final course of cheese and crackers, the Bishop doing most of the talking, Father Painter shy and quiet, and Father Bredder being supplied with more lore about Portuguese food and wine in one day than he could absorb in a week. His Grace, during his discourse on food, had inquired about various foods in America, but asked little about Father Bredder's life there. He now turned to him and said with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes, "I understand, Father, that you are something of a detective and have helped the police in solving several cases in the United States."

"I have had a hand in one or two cases," said Father Bredder, rather surprised at this sudden change of the topic of conversation.

"You put it too mildly," said the Bishop. "I have been in touch with your superior in Los Angeles and he gives you far more credit, saying that you have solved several murders and the police have on many occasions thanked you for your assistance. I mention this because we have a little mystery of our own which baffles us and in which the police are not much concerned. I don't suppose, however, that it is anything that would interest a man of your talents and fame." He picked up a knife and neatly and with a remarkable air of innocence cut himself a cube of soft cheese which he transferred from the cheese dish to his plate and trimmed carefully before eating.

"And yet," he said, "our little mystery is not without its fascination. It concerns a phenomenon (if that is the right word) not much met with these days."

It was plain to Father Bredder that at this point he was expected to inquire what this phenomenon was. But he suspected that a trap was being baited for him and so he kept quiet, for he was not fond of detective work and did not like to be thought of as a detective. The Bishop eyed him shrewdly.

"Yes, indeed," said the Bishop. "Our little mystery concerns something unique in the twentieth century. Something you are not likely to be called upon to investigate in the United States. It concerns werewolves. " And with that he let his knife fall to his plate with a little clatter which heightened the impact of the statement.

"Werewolves?" said Father Bredder, snapping at the bait without a scruple of control.

"Exactly," said the Bishop with a little smile. "Werewolves. Or a werewolf. There is one in Father Painter's parish."

"You're not serious," said Father Bredder.

"Oh, yes," said the Bishop. "Yes, we are indeed. But let Father Painter tell you all about it. He's the man on the spot."

"I think His Grace puts the matter too strongly," said Father Painter. "I would not say that there is a werewolf in my parish, but only that things are happening there that in the past were attributed to werewolves. And unfortunately my parishioners believe that there is a werewolf among them. And that can be dangerous."

"What has happened?" asked Father Bredder.

"Basically it is nothing more than a matter of a few lambs being killed," said Father Painter. "In itself there is nothing extraordinary about that. My parish is in the village of San Joaquim da Serra—up in the wilder mountains to the north. It is a place very remote from the rest of Portugal and a place where old beliefs and superstitions still linger on strongly.

"The people farm tiny plots of land on the sides of the mountains wherever there is enough of a ledge to prevent the soil being swept away by the rains. They also raise sheep. There are a great number of dogs in the village, and quite a few stray dogs in the mountains. There are also a few wolves, for Portugal is, I think, the last country in Europe that still has a population of wild wolves.

"Naturally, then, there is nothing extraordinary in finding a lamb or two killed by a dog or a wolf. That happens all the time. Sometimes a lamb is merely worried to death by a dog. Sometimes a particularly savage dog will not only kill a lamb but eat part of it. There are periodical hunts to kill these wild dogs off. But as I say, there is nothing extraordinary about all this.

"However, two months ago, something extraordinary did happen. Some men, passing by the cemetery, which lies beyond the village, on their way to work, found a lamb killed outside the cemetery wall. There were bloody pawprints leading from the carcass, which had been partially eaten. The men followed them, and then, to their horror, they found the prints changing from those of a dog or a wolf to the footprints of a man. In short, they saw on the ground evidence of a wolf which had changed itself into a man—a werewolf.

"Of course they came to me about it. I saw the prints myself and can confirm that after a certain distance the pawprints became human footprints. But I assured the men and the rest of the villagers that somebody was playing a joke on them all—that someone had come along, seen the bloody pawprints on the ground and had then decided to play a joke by making human footprints at the point where the pawprints petered out. Or perhaps making footprints over the pawprints.

"I was believed. The villagers agreed with me that it was a joke, and after a while little was said about it. Then, a week later, the same thing happened again. And in the same place. Once more a dead lamb was found. Once more there were a set of bloody pawprints and these changed after a while to footprints. Again I explained it was some kind of hoax and this time, in my Sunday sermon, knowing these people and their superstitions, I warned the jokester, whoever he might be, against continuing in his prank. My explanation may have been believed the second time. But when there was a third appearance of the footprints in the same place, then my explanation was no longer acceptable. The villagers believed—and do believe now—that there is a werewolf among them."

"That belief," continued Father Painter, "has added conviction in my parish since there was a werewolf there two hundred and fifty years ago.

"At that time an unfortunate man who seems to have been half an imbecile was accused of being a werewolf. He was found guilty, strangled and his body buried with a pike through it. His name was Pedro da Malveira. Soon the story got around that this Pedro da Malveira had returned from his grave; that at nighttime he is able to assume the form of a wolf, killing lambs to satisfy his thirst for blood, but that shortly before dawn, he is compelled to return to his grave before the sun rises."

"You say this story is believed by the people of your parish?"

"Yes," said Father Painter. "They are convinced that it is so. It is a very lonely parish—isolated and with towering mountains all around. There is nothing modern about it at all. It lives, as it were, in the Middle Ages, all the old fears of the supernatural being augmented by the very isolation of the place. Spirits attend every birth, and any baby born with a cowlick is reckoned especially fortunate. Warts are still charmed off people's hands by old women, and on some windmills you will see designs painted on the walls to ward off evil spirits who would otherwise cause the flour to go moldy."

"About this werewolf," said Father Bredder, "have you any suspicion who started all this?"

"No. I have none. I must add in all honesty that I am not especially popular in the village. I am a foreigner. They respect me as a priest, but they do not confide in me as they would with one of their own. The fact that I am foreign perhaps prevents me from having an insight into the people that someone born in Portugal would have." He glanced almost guiltily at the Bishop.

"Nonsense," said His Grace. "You are no more foreign to the people of your parish than a priest born here in Lisbon would be. They are country people and they have their own ways, and only those born among them can understand them."

"Well, is it possible that since you are not Portuguese, that this werewolf business might be in some way directed against yourself?" asked Father Bredder.

"I don't know," said Father Painter. "I don't think I'm that unpopular. I had thought that it might be better to replace me … that a native priest might have more influence over the parish…"

"Not another word about that," said the Bishop. "You are doing excellently, and I have no intention whatever of moving you."

"It's a curious kind of a hoax," said Father Bredder. "I don't know much about werewolves except what I learned as a boy from horror movies."

"I sent to friends in England for some information on them," said Father Painter. "The library of the British Museum has quite a collection of books on lycanthropy—that's the technical name for it. I asked some friends in London to look it up for me and I've become quite an expert. Werewolves are known in every country in the world and in every age of history…"

"Are known?" asked Father Bredder.

"Yes," said Father Painter. "Are known. There is no doubt about their existence. Even in countries where there are no wolves there are reports of men taking on the nature of other predatory animals—jaguars in South America, for instance, and leopards or tigers in Africa and Asia. I don't say that they become these animals physically. But they become them mentally and in their instincts. They are not men in animal form but animals in the form of men."

"These are actual cases?" Father Bredder persisted. "They are not just rumors?"

"No. Actual cases," said the other. "There are many of them well documented and there are a variety of explanations. The medical view is that this is a form of insanity whose cause is suspected to be a glandular imbalance resulting in a depraved appetite for raw meat, often for human flesh.

"Another view is that there are certain people who by autosuggestion can produce in themselves the hallucination of being an animal. This hallucination is so strong that they take on a complete animal behavior, even growling like an animal instead of speaking. To help induce this hallucination, they wear something associated with the animal which they are to become. In the case of men becoming wolves it is common to wear a girdle made of a wolf's skin.

"The older explanations involved possession of the body by the spirit of an animal which drives out or subjugates the human soul. We would speak of possession by a devil."

"Are there supposed to be any particular signs by which someone who is a werewolf can be identified?" asked Father Bredder.

"Yes," said Father Painter. "Bushy eyebrows that connect across the top of the nose; lobeless ears with a pointed appearance at the top, eyes set close together in the head, hair on the palms of the hands, and an enlarged great toe. Of course there are medical reasons for these physical peculiarities. But any one of them is taken to be the sign of a werewolf. "

"About the enlarged great toe," said Father Bredder. "Was that a feature of the footprints you saw?"

"Yes," said the other. "It was. It was a feature which made my own explanation sound false to the people of the village. The great toe on both feet was very large compared with the other toes."

"Since this man—what did you say his name was?"

"Pedro da Malveira—it means Peter of the Woods."

"Since Pedro da Malveira was put to death as a werewolf two hundred and fifty years ago, have there been other reports of werewolves in the district?" asked Father Bredder.

"No," said Father Painter. "None at all. I should add perhaps that although the body of Pedro da Malveira was not buried in consecrated ground, a cross was put up over his grave. During a storm last winter it fell down."

"For the first time in two and a half centuries?" asked Father Bredder.

"Yes," said the other. "For the first time in two and a half centuries."

"Well, surely this thing will be exposed as a hoax as time goes by," said Father Bredder. "Whoever is responsible cannot remain secret indefinitely."

"I suppose so," said Father Painter. "But in the meantime the situation is dangerous."

"Why dangerous?" asked Father Bredder.

"Because of the temper of the people. They are beginning to talk about hunting the werewolf and killing it. They have made silver bullets for this purpose and asked me to bless them."

"Silver bullets?" interrupted Father Bredder.

"Yes. By melting coins. A werewolf can be killed only by a silver bullet. It is impervious to any other kind. It is better, of course, if the bullet is blessed. I have naturally refused to bless them, since to do so would be catering to a superstition and therefore sacrilegious."

"Quite right," said the Bishop.

"But what about the police—there is surely a policeman in the village?"

"There is," said Father Painter with a sigh. "But he was a villager before he was a policeman. In short, he believes in the werewolf like everyone else, and has his own supply of silver bullets."

"It occurs to me," said the Bishop smoothly, "that you might like to go to Father Painter's parish and look into the matter. It is naturally all a hoax; but a hoax that has been carried to dangerous lengths. I have no doubt you will be able to get to the bottom of the matter in a day or two and you will certainly not be bored. You will be in a part of Portugal rarely if ever visited by tourists, and I rather think you would enjoy it."

He was examining the cheese as he spoke as if to cut himself another neat cube, but decided against this and put his knife down with a sigh. Father Bredder was about to reject this suggestion when he caught in the eyes of his fellow priest a pleading look, as if he was desperately in need of help. Then he recalled the stone which he had bought from the shopkeeper in Fatima; the stone which had written on it in Latin the strange supplication: "Deliver us from wolves."

"Yes," he said, "I think I would like to go."

The look Father Painter gave him was one of pure gratitude.

CHAPTER

3

It took the better part of four hours the following morning to get to Father Painter's parish in the village of Joaquim da Serra. They drove there in Father Painter's little Volkswagen—a present to him from his family in England. He was a young priest and had not the almost aggressive assurance of being right, which Father Bredder had come to think of as being the hallmark of an Englishman (though he had gained this impression from literature, having met very few). Instead Father Painter was shy, blushed readily and could only with difficulty be brought to engage in a conversation.

Father Bredder felt for him for he was a shy man himself, though topping six feet and with a muscular bulk to match; people did not know this, shyness being commonly associated with a frail physique. To ease the strain, Father Bredder during their journey spoke about his life in Los Angeles at the Convent of the Holy Innocents, and his boyhood in Ohio and found an excellent listener in Father Painter, who slowly thawed and told him some details of his own life.

They added up to the story of an only son born to a titled north-of-England family who, against his parents' wishes, had entered the priesthood and had been assigned to this remote little parish in Portugal, there being a shortage of native priests.

"I'm afraid I'm not much of a success," he said in a burst of confidence. "I'm not able to cope with the problems. I seem to be losing ground in my parish all the time. I think it would be better if I were replaced. "

"Don't you have anyone in the parish to help you?" asked Father Bredder.

"Not really," said the other. "The church is very small and the attendance is poor. Mostly the women come to church. Hardly any men come at all. They regard church attendance as not being—manly. The trouble is that since I've been there I've been able to do nothing at all to make a name for myself. And this miserable werewolf business has made matters even worse. In the eyes of the parishioners I've failed, and since I've failed, the whole church has failed. It would really be better if I were replaced by someone who was—more competent."

"When you went to see the Bishop, was it to ask him to replace you?" asked Father Bredder.

"Yes. I felt and still feel that I am doing no good and I ought to turn the parish over to someone more competent."

Father Bredder said nothing for a while. He was thinking over the remarkable luncheon of the day before at the Bishop's residence and the Bishop's request that he should help to solve the werewolf problem—which on the face of it looked like little more than a case of sheep-killing by a wild dog. He began that the Bishop's motives ran deeper than that—that he hoped Father Bredder would help to save this young priest who was in danger of being defeated in his mission. The Bishop had perhaps argued that a priest from America would be able to pump some confidence back into Father Painter in his isolated parish in the mountains.

"You know," said Father Bredder, "you shouldn't underestimate yourself. You talk about handing over the parish to someone more competent. But it is equally possible that whoever you handed it over to might be less competent than you. Some of your parishioners are coming to church. That is something. If none of them came to church at all, that would be the time to start worrying. Do you have any particular family in the parish with influence?"

Father Painter smiled. "We have the lady of the manor," he said. "The Countess Alicia de Castelbranco. She is wealthy, widowed, childless and lives most of the time in Lisbon. She is the mistress of a castle which, like all the castles in Portugal, is on a nearby peak, and I have seen her only once in two years, when I first arrived. She invited me to dinner at the castle, rather as if I were some retainer of hers, dismissed me shortly after dinner, and returned to Lisbon the next day."

"Alicia de Castelbranco," said Father Bredder. "I don't know why, but the name seems familiar to me. Should it be?"

"I think so," said Father Painter. "She is a figure in international society, one of the wealthiest women in Europe, and also famous as a racing driver. She's the only woman who ever made the Mercedes team at Le Mans. Her husband was killed in a road race in Italy three years ago."

"Is she in residence at the castle now?" asked Father Bredder.

"Yes," replied the other. "But I have not been invited to call at the castle since that first visit, she has never come to see me, never attends Mass and has indicated that she is not anxious for me to visit her. So she lives on the mountain and I live in the village and we have no contact. I have heard that she calls me 'the little English choirboy,' " and he blushed deeply.

"She is the landlord of the area?" asked Father Bredder.

"Oh, yes," said the other. "Her estate covers my whole parish. The history is interesting. During the Middle Ages big grants of land were given to what one can only call warrior families. These lands were always on the frontiers of the kingdom. There was no fee or payment involved other than some trivial service such as the bringing of a particular dish to the coronation banquet of the sovereign or perhaps sending some small but specified gift once a year which was an acknowledgment of the authority of the sovereign. The arrangement was a wise one, for the sovereign got rid of the more warlike of his people who might have caused dissension in the court by putting them on the frontiers of his kingdom.

"There they were kept very busy protecting the lands granted to them by the king from seizure by others. In so doing, of course, they protected the kingdom, erecting castles, always on mountain peaks, for this purpose. You can trace the expanding or contracting frontiers of Portugal at any particular period by drawing a line through these castles. You will find that the castles closest to Lisbon are really military toys—delightful structures, with the battlements elaborately decorated like enormous wedding cakes. But the castles on the frontiers are different. There is little or no decoration.

"They are grim and efficient, the outer walls well preserved, the inner walls of the mainkeep soaring upward a hundred feet and more to the battlements, with hardly a ledge or a window at which an attacker could gain a purchase to effect entrance. When you look at them, they chill you however warm or gay the day. They are the very embodiment of defiance and of menace, and at times you can almost hear the clanging of arms, the shouts of leaders and the scream of trumpets and smell, too, the boiling pitch prepared in great caldrons on the battlements to be poured down on the besiegers below." He stopped and blushed. "I'm afraid I'm getting carried away," he said.

"Not at all," said Father Bredder. "Castles interest me. Your parish, I gather, is close to the Spanish border."

"Yes. The castle is only a few hundred yards from the border."

"Tell me some more about it," said Father Bredder, fascinated.

"The outer walls of these castles all have gateways, of course," said Father Painter. "But the gateways were really portcullises—that is, they were raised and lowered by draw works. There were always two—one on the outside and one on the inside. It was a favorite trick to raise them both during an attack, and as soon as the besiegers had rushed in, the two gateways were lowered, trapping them in the wall. They were then immolated by boiling pitch being poured on them. It was the custom that the lord of the castle had the honor of pouring the first caldron of pitch on the wretches trapped between the gates, and I do not know that many of the lords refused it.

"I cannot look on these gateways through the outer walls of castles or fortified towns without thinking of such scenes. Castles are not romantic for me, I am afraid. They fill me with fear. I feel better out of them. I am glad that such days belong to history. "

They don't belong to history at all, Father Bredder thought. They are part of the present, and he himself, in the United States Marines, had seen Japanese burned to death with flame throwers, the latter-day equivalent of boiling pitch. But he did not mention this to Father Painter. He concluded that part of the young priest's trouble was that he was unable to face up to evil and the cruelty inherent in all men. He cringed from it and turned himself away. But a priest, of all people, had to face the evil in men as well as the good in them. He must see and experience fully the dual nature of man, be aware of the struggle between Hell and Heaven that raged in them all, and boldly enter that struggle on the side of God. Piety was not enough. A priest was a soldier who could not turn aside because of the horrors he encountered in battle. He must face them without flinching but never become indifferent to them or put on the armor of the cynic to shield his own hurt and announce that men were by their nature animals and nothing could be done to change them.

The road had been winding round in a series of hairpin bends, climbing higher and higher into the mountains. In many parts there was not room for two cars to pass should they meet, and often a drop of several hundred feet from one side of the road down the mountain. The view down these precipices, passed within a few feet of their edge, was breathtaking.

Here and there far below were little patches of field, like pieces of light jade, set in the grim brown of the mountainside. Some were little vineyards, others were planted in corn or potatoes. It seemed that any piece of ground at all that had any prospect for cultivation had been put under the plow or the hoe.

Several times on the road the two priests passed heavy carts, drawn by slow plodding oxen. Some of the carts had solid wheels which would have been familiar to the Romans at the dawn of the Christian era. Others, belonging to more prosperous peasants, were fitted with automobile wheels and drawn by oxen. The wheels looked utterly out of place.

The peasants wore coats which Father Painter explained were of sheepskin and had long stocking hats on their heads, the ends sometimes with a tassel dangling down over one shoulder. They guided the oxen not with reins but with a large pole, like a fishing pole, with which they touched the beasts on one or the other of their horns to get them to turn. Father Bredder estimated the distance between the horns at five or six feet on some of the animals, and when the little Volkswagen sped past a pair of oxen, he expected the horns to rip the top of the car, for the oxen would hardly move aside for it.

They passed no isolated houses at all. From village to village there was nothing but the road and the terrible mountains, with here and there a tiny field or two. And the villages were but a cluster of half a dozen cottages, all with red-tiled roofs, but with very low walls, so that it would seem that anyone entering would have to remain stooped until he was sitting down. On some of the little cottages pumpkins were placed on the roof to ripen in the sun, and many of the houses had not one but several roofs, all with different ridgepoles and at different levels.

"The rooms are added one by one over the centuries, " said Father Painter. "There is never any such thing as a plan for a cottage, and so you get this variety of roof levels. Do they look familiar to you?"

Father Bredder shook his head and his companion seemed disappointed.

"They all seemed familiar to me when I arrived," he said. "I kept getting a strong feeling that I had seen them before—even lived in them and knew the people. It was curious, this sense of familiarity with a place that was completely strange to me. And then I realized that I had indeed seen it all before and in a sense lived in these places. For they are precisely the same as the places painted by Brueghel in the sixteenth century—red-tiled multi-roofed cottages with pigeons circling around them and pumpkins ripening on the roof and stables nearby with donkeys and oxen. The scene was common to all the painters of that time. You may find examples in every art gallery in the world. And in these parts of Portugal little has changed since then."

"We have nothing like it in America," said Father Bredder.

"I think that is one reason I would like America," said the other. "The past oppresses me. It seems to stifle me—almost to threaten me."

They were leaving the village now, and Father Painter took a fork of the road bearing to the left, which would bring them past the cemetery. He stopped the car and pointed to a rough cross at the side of the road. It was made of two pieces of stick tied together with the longer limb thrust into the ground.

"This is where they found the dead lamb and the bloody footprints," he said. "All three were found in about the same place."

The crucifix," said Father Bredder. "You didn't put it there?"

"No. Of course not. The villagers put it up. I decided not to interfere. It does no harm, I suppose."

Father Bredder looked curiously at the other priest, then got out of the car, went over to the crucifix, took it from the ground and broke it into pieces. When he got back to the car, he saw three men on the road behind him. They were standing there watching what he had done.

CHAPTER

4

Father Bredder was hardly in the village an hour before he was aware of the fear which lay on all the inhabitants. There was a brooding atmosphere about the place—an absence of laughter and bright talk and friendliness. There was a sense indeed of impending doom. What conversation took place was subdued and the people looked fearfully at the wild mountains that surrounded them, as if it was there that the menace lay, waiting to strike. There was not a house among the fifteen or twenty of which the village was comprised that had not a bunch of pine branches hung at all the doors and windows.

"To protect them from the werewolf," said Father Painter, with a touch of bitterness. "The pine is an evergreen and an old pagan symbol of everlasting life. All through the Latin countries you will find evergreens, mostly cypress or pines, planted in cemeteries, symbolizing another life. The same is true in England where the yew, which remains green through the winter, is common to all graveyards. Holly, ivy, yew, pine, cypress—they are all remnants of paganism, though symbolizing a life beyond the grave. The werewolf does not like evergreens and howls when he sees a branch of pine affixed to a door and goes away, leaving the people safe."

"Why is the werewolf repelled by an evergreen?" asked Father Bredder.

Father Painter shrugged a little hopelessly. "How is one to explain a belief?" he asked. "A belief is there and it is not reason but something that transcends reason. We try to bring reason to bear on a belief and we disprove the whole belief as false—and yet it persists. The evergreen has for so many thousands of years been regarded as the symbol of eternal life it has become confused with eternal life itself—from being a symbol it becomes the essence and so acquires power of its own. So the pine branch has the power to protect from death. What the villagers are doing now is not much removed from the worship of trees."

"If the evergreen, as a symbol of life, has the power to ward away the werewolf," said Father Bredder, "then the werewolf must be the spirit of death. Life repels and is the enemy of death."

"Yes," said Father Painter. "And not merely physical death but also, and far more terrible, spiritual death. For whoever is killed by a werewolf is eternally destroyed. The soul leaves the world of human souls and joins the world of animal souls, and from that world there is no release. Whoever is killed by the werewolf becomes himself a werewolf. In their mythology there is no salvation from that fate."

"In that case," said Father Bredder, thinking of the stone he had in his pocket, "the werewolf is Satan—the spirit of indescribable evil—as God is the spirit of indescribable good."

"Yes," said the Englishman. "That is so."

"And these pine branches before the doors are an effort to exorcise Satan?"

"Yes," said Father Painter. "A resort to paganism in the face of a pagan belief."

"The existence of Satan is not a pagan belief," said Father Bredder gently. "Have you ever heard of a prayer of supplication in this village—'Libera nos a lupis'?"

"Yes," said Father Painter. "It was contained in an old litany which was used in the church many, many years ago. I believe it was recited in the times when wolves were much more plentiful in these parts, and a menace to those who worked alone in the distant fields. But it was suppressed, or fell out of use, when the danger from wolves abated."

"You do not know how it originated?" asked Father Bredder.

"No. Except as a protection against wolves, as I have said. Why?"

Father Bredder showed him the wolfstone and explained how he had come by it.

"I have never heard of such a stone," said the Englishman. "This is the first one I have seen."

"Why was the supplication suppressed?"

"As I have said, it lost its significance as the wolves were killed off. There used to be packs of them. Now there are only a few visiting the neighborhood of the village in the winter. Why do you ask?"

"It seems to me that the prayer might have been for protection against something more than ordinary wolves," said Father Bredder thoughtfully. "It may have been a prayer for protection against the devil—who may appear in the form of a man but has the nature of an animal—a ferocious, devouring animal which has no pity, and whose effect it is to turn man who resembles God into a beast resembling the very opposite of God."

"In any case," said Father Painter, "the Church could not allow the continuance of such a prayer, which would encourage a superstitious belief in werewolves. "

"I do not regard it as a superstitious belief," said Father Bredder gravely.

"You can't mean that," exclaimed Father Painter. "You can't mean that you believe in werewolves."

"I believe that men, tempted by Satan, can take on the nature and the appetite of animals," said Father Bredder. "I believe that they can utterly surrender themselves to the animal in their natures, excluding the God in their natures. And in that sense, which I regard as the truest of all possible senses, I believe in werewolves, and I think the prayer 'Deliver us from wolves' is a proper prayer and one to which God would listen."

To this Father Painter said nothing.

The village lay in a little valley over which the mountains towered on all sides, reaching up so high that their tops were frequently hidden in the clouds. The swirling of the clouds over them, here and there revealing a crag or peak, only to obliterate them in a matter of moments, made the mountains appear as if they had a life of their own; an actual soul which was remote, strong and menacing. There were two roads, one struggled up the mountain to Castelbranco and ended there. The other, first passing the cemetery, half a mile away, went north and west to another village, Todos Santos, ten miles distant.

Where the two roads met was a store in which all the necessities of the village were sold—boots, kerosene, flour, olive oil, wine, dried salted cod called Bacalhao, nails, pencils, sugar candy—all these and many more items were the stock-in-trade of the store run by Enrique Pereira, a tall but very thin, blackhaired man with an astonishing black mustache which drooped down the sides of his mouth like the tusks of a walrus.

Across from the store was a school of one room—a stone building, scrupulously clean, plastered and white-washed. There was a playground so actively used that not a blade of grass would grow on it.

The day after his arrival, Father Bredder walked to the village alone and passed by the school during the mid-morning break. The playground was full of brown children, many barefoot and screaming the delights of play. But when he was seen, the word spread quickly and all the noise died away and the children just stood and looked at him. He was upset that his appearance should stop the play of the children so dramatically. They seemed awed and even afraid of him, and in an effort to put them at their ease he waved his hand and said "Hi."

They did not smile but only looked at him out of dark wondering eyes. The sudden cessation of noise in the schoolyard brought Pereira and his customers out of his store and several people out of their cottages. And all looked at the priest in silence and it seemed to him in distrust.

He wanted to do something immediately to break this distrust down. So he went into Pereira's store, thinking that he would buy a ball of some kind and throw it to the children in the schoolyard as a gesture of friendliness.

Inside the store he made his request. Pereira looked at his wife who was standing at the end of the counter, which consisted of several planks supported on barrels.

She was a fat woman of medium height and she was leaning on the planks, the weight of her torso making a roll of fat stand out on each forearm where it lay on the wood. She raised herself, an operation requiring considerable effort, shuffled around to where some ancient cardboard boxes lay on shelves along the wall behind the counter. Out of one of these she took a painted rubber ball which she gave to her husband, who gave it to Father Bredder.

"How much?" he asked.

"Cem cinquante centavos," said Pereira.

Father Bredder reached in his pocket and took out a handful of change. Among the change was the stone he had got at the souvenir shop at Fatima— the stone with the strange prayer "libera nos a lupis" on it. Pereira saw it, glanced up at the priest, but said nothing. Father Bredder counted out the hundred and fifty centavos.

"Obrigado," he said and started to leave with the ball.

"One moment please," said Pereira, and spoke rapidly to his heavy wife. She looked at the priest and shuffled off slowly into a back room. She was so heavy that she rolled as she walked, and Father Bredder felt a pang of sympathy for her, knowing that she must suffer with so much weight; suffer not only from the physical necessity of dragging it around, but suffer from the contempt and revulsion of all who saw her. He knew that there was little charity shown to fat people, who are assumed to have a dullness of spirit making them impervious to hurt.

She waddled back with a cardboard box which she gave to her husband. He took off the top and inside were a dozen rounds of ammunition of perhaps 30 caliber. The bullets themselves, as distinct from the cartridge case, were either of silver or coated with silver.

"You will be good enough to bless these?" asked Pereira. The priest picked up one of the bullets and examined it carefully. There were no marks made by a vise on the brass cartridge cases. The bullets had not been withdrawn and replaced by others of solid silver. They had merely had a coating of silver put over them.

"No," said Father Bredder. "These will not do what you made them for."

Pereira shrugged. "They are silver," he said. "They should kill the lobishomem." It was the first time Father Bredder had heard the word in Portuguese.

"If I bless these," said Father Bredder, "will you charge a higher price?"

Mrs. Pereira started to laugh. She made no sound, but the rolls of fat on her shook and, still laughing, she waddled away to the back room, shaking her head in appreciation of the joke. Pereira pulled one tusk of his walrus mustache and grinned. "Certainly, " he said. "They won't work without the blessing."

"Come to Mass on Sunday," said Father Bredder. "You will find your best ammunition there. And it's free," he added with a smile.

Pereira said nothing to this, and Father Bredder left with the ball, skirting two dogs that lay on the floor and which growled uneasily as he passed them.

But when he got outside, the school children were already back in the school and he stood in the street with the brightly painted ball, feeling rather foolish. A dog barked and then two more, and soon there was a whole chorus of them. Someone shouted at the dogs and after a little while they quieted down. There were three in the street—big dogs of mongrel blood, but the rest were in the yards of the various cottages.

Father Bredder went to the door of the school and pushed it open cautiously, thinking that perhaps there was a hallway beyond. But there wasn't. The door opened immediately on the classroom, and he was embarrassed to discover that he was peering through the crack of the door at the children in the classroom, who were staring back at him. He pushed the door open and stood there with the ball in his big hand, completely at a loss what to do or say.

The teacher came to his rescue. She was a woman in her middle thirties, clad in a no-nonsense tweed skirt which gave more than a passing salute to Britain. A blouse was tucked severely into the top, and her hair was done in a bun which seemed to be the only hair style permitted in the village. She had a bony face with a good nose and chin which would have been handsome on a man but was disaster for a woman. But there was a twinkle in her dark eyes when she saw Father Bredder standing there with the ball, and she said to him in English, "You brought a present for the children, Father?"

"Yes," he said. "I saw them playing and then they stopped … as if they were afraid of me."

As soon as the priest entered the room, the children all stood up. The teacher told them now to sit down and introduced herself as the Senhora Helena Silva.

"You are the only teacher here?" Father Bredder asked.

"Yes. But a few years ago there was not even a school, so this is real progress. We teach them what you call the three R's. A few of them may be able to go further. But at least they will be literate."

"Can many in the village read and write?" asked the priest.

Then Senhora Helena shook her head. "No," she said. "Perhaps half a dozen—Pereira at the store and his wife, the police officer, the forest guard. But whether they can write or not, they can add and subtract. Even the youngest child who comes here knows how many centavos there are in an escudo. Simple arithmetic is far more important than reading and writing."

Father Bredder looked around the whitewashed walls of the classroom. There was a picture of Salazar, the prime minister, and one of another man whom the priest did not recognize. Otherwise the walls were blank.

"No crucifix," said the teacher, sensing what the priest was looking for.

'Well, at least no pine branches," said Father Bredder.

The Senhora Helena said nothing to that but, looking around the class, beckoned with her finger to a little girl who was sitting in the back. She had long dark hair which to Father Bredder's relief was not done up in a bun, but tied with a ribbon over the crown of her head and allowed to fall loosely down her back. She had on a dark blue dress and an old-fashioned pinafore. She came forward hesitantly, to the whispered encouragements of the others in the room. She stood before the priest very shyly and now and again looked at him and then lowered her eyes quickly as if to be found looking at him was the height of rudeness.

"Maria will accept the ball on behalf of the children, " said the teacher.

Father Bredder went down on his haunches to give the ball to the girl. She still would not look at him, but held her head down as he put the ball into her small hands. Then she said "Obrigado" and was plainly very anxious to get back to her seat and end the ordeal. But because she was so tiny, he wanted to give her something entirely for herself and thought over the contents of his pockets, realizing with dismay that he had nothing for a child. That was always the case. He loved children and liked to give them little presents, but he never had anything to give them. In his pockets were only some change and the piece of stone he had got at Fatima.

"God bless you, little one," he said, and he would have picked her up and given her a hug but he was shy himself and thought that she might cry. He touched her gently on the head and she went back to her place.

The Senhora Helena went to the door of the class with him and closed it behind them, so that they were standing on the steps of the school outside together.

"It was kind of you to bring the ball for the children, " she said. "But I do not like the blessing of children by priests in my school."

"Why?" asked Father Bredder, astonished.

"All this religious rigamarole is a superstition from which these people have suffered for hundreds of years," said the schoolteacher. "The sooner they are rid of it, the better off they will be. It is too late to do anything with the old people—they are steeped in these superstitions. God-superstitions and devil-superstitions. But something may be done with children, and in my schoolroom I will allow no mention of God."

"I see," said Father Bredder sadly. "You do not believe in God. And because you do not believe in God, you think it is your duty to prevent little children from believing in Him." He spoke quietly, without any anger.

"We can only do what we believe," said the schoolteacher. "To do otherwise is to be a hypocrite. Furthermore, I do not believe in the werewolf."

"Well, at least we can be friends," said Father Bredder, and he held out his hand. She took it, staring at him in disbelief. He left her standing on the steps watching him; and across the street, Pereira was also standing at his door watching the big American priest as he walked up the street toward the church.

CHAPTER

5

Father Bredder, during his first couple of days in Sao Joaquim da Serra, noted that Father Painter never went into the village; visited no one there, and had no visitors call on him. He celebrated Mass each day, performed the other devotions required of him as a priest, but remained either in the rectory or in the church as if he were afraid of visiting the village, or at least strongly disliked doing so. Father Bredder thought about this and concluded that the situation was proving too much for the young English priest; that it was getting on his nerves beyond bearing and he was in desperate need of a vacation.

He was like a soldier who was suffering from shell shock and flinched from further action. The priest in him was firm, but the man in him badly needed a rest. And so Father Bredder suggested that Father Painter go to Lisbon or some bustling busy town for a week or ten days and he, Father Bredder, would take over his duties.

"Don't concern yourself about me or anything that is going on here," said Father Bredder. "I will be glad of the experience."

Father Painter did not fall in immediately with the suggestion. But Father Bredder said that it would help him in his investigations if the people believed that he had come to the village as a relief, so that he, Father Painter, could take a short holiday. He sent a letter to the Bishop proposing the arrangement and when a reply came that the Bishop had no objection, Father Painter went off gratefully. He took the once-a-week bus out of the village, insisting on leaving his Volkswagen with Father Bredder.

"You will find you will need it to get around," he said. "The place won't get on your nerves so much. You won't feel—so stuck."

But when Father Painter had gone, Father Bredder did begin to feel a sense of isolation—a sense of having been taken from his own time and place and thrust into another century and another country, both of them alien and menacing. He wished that he had with him his friend Lieutenant Minardi of the Los Angeles Police Department. To be sure Minardi would laugh at his suspicions that something wrong was going on in Sao Joaquim da Serra; would say that the werewolf story was only the result of ignorance and point out that in remote areas of the United States, as, for instance, the Appalachian Mountains, there were similar superstitions. Nonetheless, Father Bredder wrote a note to the lieutenant outlining the situation in the village and asking him whether he could suggest any line of investigation.

When he had written this letter, Father Bredder read it through and he thought it would seem so preposterous to Minardi, reading it in police headquarters in Los Angeles, with six lanes of traffic streaming along the street outside, that he was about to decide not to mail it. But he mailed it anyway because it was written and because it comforted him to have someone else know of his problems.

He then called upon Pereira, the storekeeper, who had seemed to be a man of more character than the rest of the villagers and who might tell him something of value. He did not know what. He would have liked to call on the schoolteacher, who he discovered was always referred to as the Senhora Professora. But in view of her attitude he decided that he would have to wait until a favorable opportunity presented itself; or until she came to him.

Father Bredder, having first of all made inquiries of the woman who took care of the rectory, visited Pereira at his home over his shop in the evening. Pereira, it seemed, was expecting him for he showed no surprise when the priest knocked, but led him into a small living room with a floor of old polished wood—so old, in fact, that the knots in the planks stood up in rounded knobs above the general surface.

There were a few mats of straw on the floor. The furniture was sparse and of painted wood, the chairs having seats of woven straw. There was no fireplace, but a small brazier in one corner served that purpose on winter nights. The room was spotless, and when Father Bredder had lowered himself into an upholstered wooden chair which he prayed would support his weight, a little girl peeked at him around the door and was gone in a flash. It was the same little girl who had accepted the ball from him on behalf of her classmates.

"Your daughter?" he asked of Mrs. Pereira, who had brought him a tiny cup of coffee.

"Yes," she said. "The mountain and the mouse." And then she laughed and called the child, but without effect for she would not come.

Pereira, with a nod of his head, dismissed his wife and pulled up a chair to face Father Bredder. "It is an honor to have you in my house, Father," he said.

"It is good of you to receive me," said Father Bredder.

"About Mass," said Pereira. "I will not be in church on Sunday. I do not believe in these things."

"That is a matter for your own conscience," said Father Bredder quietly. The reply surprised Pereira. He thought that the priest was coming to lecture him about attending church, and he got no lecture, but the matter was put squarely in his own hands. It was upsetting, to say the least. He felt a need to defend himself.

"Well, I am no longer a boy," said Pereira. "I am a man. For children it is another thing. But a man makes his own decisions."

"The important thing," said Father Bredder quietly, "is that he should make the correct ones. But I wanted to talk to you about the village. Something is going on here that I do not understand. Something wrong. I know no one, and I thought you might help me."

"You mean the lobishomem," said Pereira. "Well, it is something to puzzle about all right."

"You believe in it?" asked the priest.

"I will say only this: you would not get me near that cemetery at nighttime."

"Each time the bloody footprints have appeared it has been outside the cemetery," said Father Bredder. "I wonder why the cemetery."

"You have been there?" asked Pereira.

"I drove by it," said Father Bredder.

"You noticed the high wall?"

"Yes. What is the reason for it—why is it so high?"

"The walls around cemeteries are always high in these parts," said Pereira. "You build a high wall either to keep something in or to keep something out."

"And in this case…"

"To keep something out," said Pereira.

"What?" asked the priest.

"The lobishomem—Pedro da Malveira."

The priest thought about this for a while. "Let us suppose," he said, "that Pedro da Malveira, the werewolf, was able to come back from his grave, why would he want to go into a cemetery?"

"To get a body," said Pereira.

"To get a body?" repeated Father Bredder incredulously.

"Yes. His own had rotted long ago. He can only come back in his other nature—as a wolf. But if he can get a body, he can enter it and give it life and be a man. Otherwise he must kill someone to get a body."

"Tell me," said Father Bredder, "is there someone recently buried in the cemetery?"

"Two months ago," said Pereira. "A young man. He was shot."

"Shot?" echoed Father Bredder.

"Yes. It was an accident. Either it was an accident or suicide. His body was found outside the cemetery with his gun lying beside him. He had been shot through the chest."

When was he found?" asked the priest.

"In the morning—by one of the villagers. He was on his way to Todos Santos on his bicycle and he found the body."

"So this man was killed during the night?"

"I suppose so," said Pereira. "After dark anyway."

"What would he have been doing in the neighborhood of the cemetery at nighttime with a gun?" asked the priest.

"Father," said Pereira, "you would be a terrible one to go to to make a confession. You would ask so many questions that a man would discover sins he was quite happy to forget about. Nobody knows what he was doing by the cemetery at nighttime with his gun. But it is probable that he had been hunting in the mountains and the dark overtook him and it was dark when he reached the cemetery on his way back to the village."

"Did he do much hunting?" asked the priest.

"Yes. He was fond of hunting. He was a strange one—like his sister. Always doing things he told nobody about."

"His sister?" asked the priest.

"Certainly. The Senhora Professora. You have met her, I know." Pereira grinned at the thought of the exchange that must have taken place between the priest and the atheist schoolteacher.

"Yes," said Father Bredder, "I have met her. But I did not know she had a brother and he had been shot."

"Well. One does not tell these things to strangers," said Pereira. "Anyway, this Thomas, the brother of the Senhora Professora, was a great one for books. He was always studying something. And I can tell that he knew all the history of this village and the castle. I do not believe that there was a single thing that happened in this village or at Castelbranco in the past thousand years that he did not know about."

"He seems to have been a remarkable man indeed," said Father Bredder. "Had he a good schooling?"

"When he was a boy there was no school in this village," said Pereira. "His father taught him—taught him and his sister. He had a little land around here. He was a very religious man, the father, and a great reader. He could read in Latin and in Greek and was always helping with the church. But you see how things turn out. The father had too much religion and the son and daughter none. Moderation. That is the only safe road."

'Did this werewolf business start before or after this man Thomas was shot?" asked Father Bredder.

"After," said Pereira.

"There was nothing before?"

"Nothing," said Pereira. He looked uneasily at the priest.

"That's strange," said Father Bredder. "For two hundred and fifty years there is no trouble. Then one man is shot and the story of Pedro da Malveira returning from his grave immediately spreads and the people are terrified."

"Well, there is more to it than that," said Pereira. You see this Thomas, he was especially interested in Pedro da Malveira. He read all the details of his trial. He used to visit the grave. As a matter of fact, there is a story that he dug the grave up one night. Somebody did, for it was found with the earth thrown back in on it. So it is not so surprising after all that people should think that since he was so interested in Pedro da Malveira during his life, that Pedro da Malveira would be interested in him after Thomas died. There was a link between these two, you see."

"It is supposed then that Pedro da Malveira is trying to get the body of Thomas?"

"You have not understood me," said Pereira. "It is more than that."

"More than that?" echoed the priest, puzzled.

"You are forgetting about the human footprints," said Pereira.

"What about them?" asked Father Bredder.

"There are pawprints first and then footprints," said Pereira. "When Pedro da Malveira leaves his grave he is in the form of a wolf. Then he changes to a man. He gets a body. The body of Thomas. He occupies it and gives it life and is able to go about as a man. But at dawn the body is returned to its grave, and the werewolf goes back to his. He has been seen."

"By who?"

Pereira looked anxiously at the door to satisfy himself that nobody was listening.

"By me," he said. "A month ago. I was coming back from Todos Santos on my bicycle. I had some business there. I started back late. The road is very rough and I had a puncture. There was nothing for it but to walk, pushing the bicycle. When I got to the cemetery it was dark. I heard a noise on the inside of the cemetery, behind the wall, and I was frightened, I can tell you. I hid and I saw Thomas climb over the wall out of the cemetery. There was a bright moon, and I saw him plainly when he got to the top of the wall. The whole of the front of his shirt was covered with blood—just as he was found the morning that he was shot."

"You are sure it was him?" asked the priest.

"Father, I am as sure as I am sitting here before you. He had an old scar on the side of his cheek, and I saw it in the moonlight. The same scar. It was Thomas, all right.

"Well, that is what happens to one who abuses the church. The devil takes him. When he was alive, he was even worse on the subject of religion than his sister. When we of the village pass the church, we cross ourselves. Well, even if we do not go to Mass on Sunday, there is no harm in a little respect.

"But he would spit instead. He said once that if there was a God, then there must be a devil, and of the two he would sooner have the devil on his side."

"Do you know why he was so bitter against the church?" asked Father Bredder.

"Because of his father, of course," said Pereira. "He was in church as often as the priest. Mass every morning. Meditation for an hour every day. Then a visit to say the Rosary. And he never missed Benediction or the Stations of the Cross. And always the children had to be with him. And when they were not in church they were studying. I tell you it would drive a grown man out of his mind, let alone children. And when the father died, there was nothing for the children but the piece of land that was soon sold. They were brought up by the charity of their neighbors, for the money got from the land the father had willed to the church."

"I see," said Father Bredder. He understood the Senhora Professora better now, and felt sorry for her—not because of the distorted childhood she had endured but because this childhood had driven her from God into the loneliness and bleakness of atheism. Her rebellion was not against God but against her father's attitude toward God, which she had confused with God Himself.

"If Thomas was so evidently an atheist," said Father Bredder, "why was he buried in the cemetery, in consecrated ground?"

"The cemetery is no longer consecrated," said Pereira. "You know there was a revolt against the church in this country many years ago and at that time it was decided that the cemetery belonged to the people, and anybody in the village could be buried in it. But there was no service for Thomas. He was put in the ground like a dog. I do not agree with that kind of thing. A man, after all, is not a dog. There should have been at least a prayer. And no cross was put over the grave. We asked the Senhora Professora to permit a cross, but she would not do anything of the sort. Well, if there had been a cross, the body would be safe now."

"Why?" asked Father Bredder.

"These things that need bodies cannot approach a grave that has a cross on it," said Pereira. He was quite serious. "That is the reason for the cross on a grave, isn't it? Furthermore, if the cross on the grave of Pedro da Malveira had not fallen down, he would not be able to get out of it. People expected trouble when that cross fell down and they were right.

"That English priest has failed in his duty to the village. He should have allowed a new cross to be made and have blessed it and put it over the werewolf's grave. He was asked to do this, but he would not do it. He is a priest and he would not protect the villagers from this thing. Then he wonders why people will not come to him with their troubles or attend Mass on Sunday."

"The reason a cross is put over a grave," said Father Bredder quietly, "is to testify that whoever is buried beneath lived and died in the Christian faith."

"It is also to protect the body that is buried there," said Pereira. "You will not admit it, but that is the main reason."

Father Bredder decided to let the point pass.

"Was there an inquiry into the death of Thomas?" he asked.

"A report was sent to police headquarters at Fatima, " Pereira said uneasily. "It was an accident. There was no need for a big investigation. These things do no good. He was dead anyway. It never does to raise a scandal."

"A scandal?" asked Father Bredder. "What kind of scandal would be likely to come out of an investigation?"

"Father," said Pereira, "I am not a man who disrespects the Church. It is true that I do not attend the services, leaving that to my wife, for it is beyond dispute that women are better at praying than men.

"When the policeman Sylvester asked me whether I thought there should be an investigation, I said no. It was an accident. The body should be buried and he should report to his superiors that it was an accident. I may not be a good Catholic, but I am always ready to defend the Church."

"What has defending the Church got to do with an investigation into the death of Thomas?" asked Father Bredder.

"If it was not an accident," said Pereira, "there was only one person in the village who had any enmity against Thomas."

"Who?" asked Father Bredder.

"Father Painter," said Pereira.

CHAPTER

6

From the village below, and three quarters of a mile distant, not much of the castle of Castelbranco was to be seen but the outer wall and over the top of it a small portion of the main keep.

The outer walls made a rough triangle, and at each corner was a turret for the defenders. Two other turrets, connected by a building between them, were situated on either side of the main gate, the connecting building being over the gate. Outside of the walls ran a ditch which six hundred years before might have been fifteen feet deep, but now was a scant five. The road to the castle up which Father Bredder was toiling stopped at this ditch, which was spanned by a permanent bridge replacing the old drawbridge of the castle.

From the village, then, the castle looked small. But as Father Bredder neared it, it loomed mightily upward; the wall, which had seemed like a necklace of stone thrown carelessly around the top of the hill, now towered upward so that the priest was surprised when he stood below it to find that it was as much as twenty feet high in places.

The portcullis, giving admission through the wall, a weighted iron grill which could be raised or lowered, was raised. There were two of them, one on the exterior and one on the interior of the wall—the distance between them was fifteen feet.

Stepping out of the hot sun into the deep shadow of this gateway, it was suddenly cool. Indeed it was not only cool, but the air seemed damp and moldy. The priest stopped to examine the drawworks which raised the portcullis. They were well greased and in working condition, as if the mistress of the castle expected that iron gates might yet have to be lowered against an invader.

Once inside the walls, the priest discovered himself in the outer court of a castle so well preserved that he reflected that it might be the only complete example of a castle in all Europe. The various buildings constructed against the walls which had once provided quarters for armorers, bakers, masons and all the other servants of the castle were still standing, their tiled roofs intact.

Father Bredder was a great reader. He bought an average of a book a week, but only from secondhand stores, for he could afford to spend no more than twenty-five or fifty cents on any volume. He had no particular taste in books, reading anything that came to hand at the price he could afford, and so had a working knowledge of a wide variety of subjects. He had read a volume by a German author of the 1880's on the construction of castles, and with pleasure now recognized the parts of the castle to which the author had referred. Barbican gate at the entrance of the walls, bailey, tiltyard, stables—they were all dominated by the huge donjon keep which towered a hundred feet into the air.

He followed along the road which led up to the donjon keep and passed through an inner wall to find himself in a pleasant court of paving stones. At the far end of this court was a massive door of wood studded with iron bolts. In the hope that this was the entrance to the castle living quarters, he went to it and pulled on a rope which hung to one side, operating a bell above. The bell clanged much louder than he had anticipated, the noise reverberating off the stones around. Then a little grill in the doorway was opened, and someone looked out. Because it was very dark behind the door, Father Bredder could not see whoever was looking at him.

A voice spoke to him from the darkness behind the grill, asking his identity and business. "I am Father Joseph Bredder," he replied. "I would like to see the senhora."

The voice said something, the grill was shut, and he waited. A profound and disturbing silence settled over the whole castle. There was no noise either from without or within. Then, without any sound of approaching footsteps, the door was slowly opened for him by a swarthy woman with gray hair. She was dressed in black, and a number of keys hung from a belt around her waist.

"Please follow me," she said in English, and led him through a hall big enough to muster a regiment, past several suits of fifteenth-century armor and stands of arms secured to the walls. He would like to have stopped to examine these. There were several spears in what seemed excellent shape and a number of great swords with blades fully five feet in length. One was so big that a smaller sword was clamped to it at the crosspiece. But the housekeeper went briskly down the hall, and he had no time to do more than catch a glimpse of these fascinating items. When they were almost to the end of the hall, she stopped before a huge tapestry, signaled him to wait, and disappeared behind it. She was back again in a few seconds and, holding the tapestry aside, beckoned him to pass through. He did so and entered what in a normal house would be a large room, but in this castle would pass for a small one. A blonde woman, very beautiful, dressed in slacks and a cashmere sweater, came toward him holding out her hand.

"Always so glad to meet an American," she said. "Do sit down and have a cup of tea—or perhaps you would prefer wine? It is good in this part of Portugal, but not much can be said for it elsewhere."

"Thank you," said Father Bredder. "Tea would be fine. I hope I am not disturbing you. But I felt I ought to see you."

"I only heard yesterday that you were in the village," said the Countess. "Really, it is ridiculous to live so close to the place and know so little of what is going on there. I suppose that you will go back to America and tell them that we in Portugal are not very friendly."

"Oh no," said Father Bredder.

"Actually, we're not very friendly," the Countess continued, passing him his teacup. "We have developed over the centuries an elaborate form of politeness which consists of ignoring people. We don't mean to be cold. We're really warm-natured. We are just—well, overreserved."

Father Bredder began to feel uncomfortable. He had no small talk. It was up to him to say something just to keep the conversation going, but he could think of nothing. In desperation he took a sip of his tea. It was exceedingly hot, so hot that it had the surprising effect of making him sneeze. The cup rattled on the saucer, spilling the tea and slopping it onto his lap. He put the cup down and mopped himself desperately with his handkerchief, not wanting to soil the little piece of Madeira lace that had been given him as a napkin.

A new cup was brought and the Countess poured him some more tea. He put it on the low table before him, for he dared not drink it for a while. The Countess, he was aware, was smiling at him with a touch of mockery, and he could think of nothing to say to escape from his embarrassment.

It was she who came to his rescue, with small talk about America, which she had visited several times. But she spoke with an attitude of superiority, as if the Americans were curious people whose customs and government were a source of amusement rather than interest and understanding. She plainly thought of all Americans as being brash and unpolished and Father Bredder was mortified at the thought that his clumsiness with the teacup had probably served to reinforce that belief. He had served his country as a soldier but he had let his country down by his ungainliness with a cup of tea in the presence of the Countess. The thought amused him.

"I am very impressed by the condition of the castle, " he said at length. "Of course, this is the first castle I have ever been in. But I am very lucky, because it is in such wonderful shape."

"Would you like me to show you around?" she asked.

"Yes," he said enthusiastically, "I really would. But I don't want to take too much of your time"

"It will be a pleasure for me," she said, suddenly very gracious. "And afterwards perhaps you can stay for dinner."

"Thank you," said Father Bredder. "That would be a real treat."

"I hear that Father Painter has left us?" said the Countess, rather casually.

"He has gone on a little vacation," said the priest. "He needed a rest."

"He should never have been sent to this parish in the first instance," said the Countess. "He's such a frightened little man. Really, he's quite a boy. I spoke to the Bishop about him and said he ought to be replaced. It's ridiculous to have a man like him in this wild part of the world—utterly strange to him. In two years he knows no more of the people than when he arrived. And he's made quite a number of enemies among them, as you know." She looked at Father Bredder, seeking confirmation that he did know this to be the case, but he said nothing.

"Really," she said. "I feel quite sorry for him and I'm ashamed to say that I have neglected him horribly. I should have invited him to visit me more often, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it."

"Why?" asked Father Bredder gently.

"I can't stand people I feel sorry for," said the Countess. "Pathetic people bring out the worst in me. A post in a convent would be the best place for Father Painter. What we need here is someone like you." She eyed Father Bredder's big frame with undisguised appreciation.

"Where do you serve in America?" she asked.

"In a convent," said Father Bredder, and was ashamed at the sense of triumph that followed the statement.

CHAPTER

7

Before the tour of the castle was halfway over, Father Bredder deeply regretted agreeing to it. The Countess proved to be a woman endowed with the energy of an Olympic athlete. She sped down corridors, up spiral staircases and along battlements with a tirelessness that Father Bredder, though a charitable man, began to hate.

Father Bredder, who weighed close to two hundred pounds, had trouble with his feet and a bunion on his right toe. They were hardly well started on the tour before the bunion began to ache, first in a dull and sluggish way, but finally growing into a pain so intense it affected his whole foot and indeed the muscles of his big right leg. He walked first with a slight limp, then with a pronounced limp, and finally like a man deeply lamed.

But the Countess hardly seemed to notice. She inquired once whether he had hurt his foot, and he said it was nothing, and, as he reflected later, the Lord punished him terribly for this deceit.

It was a pity that he was badly afflicted, for he missed much of the castle. He tried to concentrate on what the Countess was showing and telling him, but without much success. He recalled a story concerning an assault by the Moors on the castle; an assault which turned into a siege which lasted for seven months. During it those who died had beseeched the survivors to eat their remains so that they could hold out the longer.

He recalled another story of a man who had been hung in a cage from the top of the main keep for three years, baked in the summer's sun and frozen in the winter's storms. He had survived this barbarous punishment, but, having been crouched so long, had never been able to stand upright again.

But most of the time Father Bredder was conscious only of his inflamed foot, which hurt more when he lifted it off the ground than when he had his weight on it.

At last the tour was concluded and to his enormous relief, the Countess had him shown to an apartment where he could attend to his toilet before dinner. This apartment contained a bedroom, sitting room and bathroom. The bed was set in the wall and so high off the floor that a ladder was needed to get into it. As soon as the maid had shut the door, Father Bredder limped into the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water, and lowered himself gratefully into it. After a little while his foot went numb and the pain ceased, and although he was beginning to get cold, he still lay in the water gazing at the sculptured ceiling and grateful for the enormous relief.

The bathroom was octagonal in shape, and the ceiling was in the form of a dome with ribs of stone coming out from the corner of the octangle to a central boss from which hung a stone pendant, carved in the form of a tassel. He examined the ribbing and the ceiling in between and the tassel and decided that all was contrived to give the appearance of being inside a tent rather than a stone chamber. Seven of the ribs in the ceiling were decorated with twining vines, fernlike leaves, and here and there roses, all of stone. The eighth rib was bare of such decorations, and this aroused his curiosity. Then he noticed that there were some letters sculptured along the rib. They were all together, and he thought for a moment that they gave the name of the chamber, for he knew that the rooms of castles were often given names.

He tried to spell the name out, and when he had spelled out the first few letters, he sat bolt upright in the bath, all thoughts of his bunion gone. For what was carved in the rib over his head, all the letters running into one word, was the supplication liberanosalupis—Deliver us from wolves. He got out of the bath, deep in thought, and was still preoccupied when he joined the Countess in the dining room for dinner.

The priest's preoccupation did not escape the Countess, and she decided that he was annoyed because of the marathon tour of the castle. She also decided to tease him about it.

"I'm afraid I put too much strain on you, Father," she said. "You must forgive me. I had forgotten that Americans have no vigor once they are through with college football. Thereafter they take no exercise at all."

"I'm not really tired," said Father Bredder, "though I may ache a little tomorrow. But I have something on my mind that I want to talk to you about. Something rather serious, I'm afraid."

"Serious," she echoed with a slight smile.

"Yes," said Father Bredder. "Serious and perhaps dangerous."

"I love danger," said the Countess. "It is the only thing that really excites me. Tell me everything." She was still teasing him.

"It is about the situation in the village," said Father Bredder.

"Oh, that," said the Countess contemptuously. "The werewolf business and Pedro da Malveira. It is nothing but ignorance and superstition. Really, Father, you mustn't take this kind of hysteria seriously or you will be needing a vacation like Father Painter." There was a touch of malice in the words, which was not lost on the priest. "It will all blow over in a little while," she added.

"I suppose so," said Father Bredder. "But in the meantime it is dangerous. It is so dangerous that anyone walking through the village or out of his home at nighttime is likely to be shot. And there is another danger, too, with which I am more concerned than you."

"What danger is that?" asked the Countess.

"The danger to men's souls when they start believing in witchcraft."

"Oh, come now, Father," said the Countess. "Really. Isn't that taking your office rather too seriously?"

"No," said Father Bredder. "Mine is a serious office. "

She gave him a look half smiling, half puzzled, but said nothing. It was plain to Father Bredder that the Countess looked upon priests who took a job because it gave them a position in society and some kind of a living. There was no involvement on their part.

"I am beginning to suspect that there is something more behind this werewolf business than people are aware of," said Father Bredder. "And I think it is connected with the death of Thomas Silva—the brother of the schoolteacher."

"That was an accident," she said, "and I am sure had nothing to do with it."

"It is a curious place and time for a man to be shot to death by accident," said Father Bredder. "Outside a cemetery and at night."

"Are accidents supposed to occur at particular places and times?" asked the Countess mockingly, and Father Bredder blushed.

"I didn't put that very well," he said. "What I meant was that it is strange for a man to be outside a cemetery with a gun at nighttime."

"He was coming back from hunting and had to pass the cemetery on his way to the village," said the Countess. "It seems reasonable enough to me. He stumbled in the dark and his gun was cocked and killed him. The only other explanation offered would, I know, be quite unacceptable to you."

"That Father Painter killed him?" asked the priest quietly.

"Oh? You've heard about that."

"Do you think Father Painter shot him?"

"Certainly not," said the Countess. "It was plainly an accident and I opposed any investigation. The policeman asked my opinion and I told him the facts pointed to an accident and he should report it as such."

"Pereira told him the same," said Father Bredder. "He intimated that Father Painter might not come out too well in an investigation."

"The fact is that Father Painter was out that evening in his car and had a gun with him," said the Countess. "He was over in Todos Santos and returned after dark. The road from Todos Santos splits at the cemetery, one branch going to the right and the other to the left and thus entering the village from different ends. Father Painter took the righthand branch of the road, and Thomas was found dead on the left-hand branch. If Father Painter had passed on the left-hand branch, he would have found the body. He didn't."

"How do you know all this?" asked the priest.

"From Sylvester the policeman, of course," said the Countess. "He reports whatever is happening in the village to me as a matter of duty. In my position I am what you would call a magistrate, I suppose."

"I wonder why Father Painter had a gun with him?" said the priest.

"Almost everybody gets into the habit of carrying a gun in these parts," said the Countess. "For hunting. It is our one diversion. And remember, Father Painter is an Englishman. They are curious people, the English. They hunt every animal in the world and at the same time are the foremost in the prevention of cruelty to animals."

"Tell me," said Father Bredder, "why does one of the stone ribs in the ceiling of the bathroom I used this evening have carved in it the words 'libera nos a lupis'?"

"So you really are a detective," she said, to his surprise. "And you have been sent to the village by the Bishop to look into the werewolf mystery—and the death of the man Thomas which is attributed by gossip to Father Painter."

"I am a priest," said Father Bredder. "Not a detective."

"You are a priest who is a detective," said the Countess. "Well, let me give you a little advice. Let sleeping dogs and werewolves lie."

"Why?" asked the priest.

"I have told you already that this werewolf business will blow over. And what is to be gained by an investigation into the death of Thomas? It was an accident. He is dead. That is all there is to it."

It struck Father Bredder that her attitude was precisely that of Pereira—a determination to turn her back on the whole thing.

"The werewolf is not sleeping," said Father Bredder, "and will not sleep until the whole truth is out. Then Pedro da Malveira will sleep forever."

"Well," said the Countess, "I have warned you to leave it alone. If you continue with your investigations, you must take the consequences. But I would have thought that the duty of one priest was to protect another."

"You mean that you do not entirely believe that Father Painter is innocent?"

"I mean only that it would be better to leave matters as they are."

"About the wording on the ceiling of the bathroom, " said the priest. "Why is it there—in that particular room? What is the story behind it?"

"Deliver us from wolves," said the Countess. "Well, wolves were a serious menace around here in the old days, and as a matter of fact, in the very apartment you were in one of my ancestors was attacked at night and killed by a wolf many years ago. He was in bed. The bed used to be in the octagonal chamber now occupied by the bathroom. He was found rather horribly dead in the morning and so that pious inscription was carved in the ceiling. It worked magnificently," she added, "for there have been no wolf attacks since then … at least not in the castle."

"At that time," said Father Bredder, "was it generally agreed that death was caused by a wolf?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I was looking at the outer walls around the castle before I came in," said the priest. "They are about twenty feet high. That is a big jump, even for a ravening wolf."

"I see that there is no sense whatever in trying to keep our little scandals from you," said the Countess. "No. People did not say it was a wolf, an ordinary wolf. They said it was a werewolf—that someone in the castle was a werewolf and had killed this unfortunate man while he slept."

"Pedro da Malveira?" asked Father Bredder.

"Yes. Pedro da Malveira. He was a retainer at the castle—a serf. He was seemingly not mentally competent, an imbecile. Anyway, he was tried, found guilty, executed, and that was the end of the whole affair."

"What was done with his body?" asked Father Bredder.

"The usual thing," said the Countess with a grimace. "It was buried with a stake through it—to keep it down. As an extra precaution, the shaft of the stake, which thrust upward out of the grave, was made into a cross by the addition of horizontal arm." At this Father Bredder closed his eyes, as if in pain, and the Countess was genuinely surprised and said, "That disturbs you?"

"Yes," said the priest. After a few moments he said, "Such happenings as these usually give rise to legends. Are there any connected with the execution or burial of this man Pedro da Malveira as a werewolf?"

"Certainly," said the Countess. "Namely, that as soon as the cross, formed out of the shaft of the stake, fell down or was destroyed in any way, then Pedro da Malveira would return to the village."

"With a wooden structure, that would not take long," said Father Bredder.

"Naturally," said the Countess. "So the wooden cross was replaced by a cross of stone erected about a year later. The villagers petitioned the then Lord of the Castle for such a cross, and he had it erected. It was enthusiastically blessed by the priest at the time," she added mischievously. "Really, Father, this blessing of pieces of stone by the clergy is playing right into the hands of the heretics. I am surprised that the Church still persists in this kind of mummery."

Father Bredder was tempted to reply that God had control not only over the animate but also the inanimate—that all the universe was His creation, and to limit His power to human beings alone would be to limit God, making Him not God at all. He said nothing to her jibe, however, but questioned her further about the cross itself.

"I am told that the cross fell down recently," he said.

"Yes. About two months ago, during a storm, it crumbled into several pieces. It seems to have been struck by lightning—despite the blessing. As soon as the fact was discovered, the villagers remembered the legend. A few lambs slaughtered by wolves or dogs was all that was needed to convince them that Pedro da Malveira had returned. And so they shiver all night in their cottages and put pine branches at their doors and only venture out in the day in groups, and then armed."

"And that is all?" asked Father Bredder.

"Not quite all," said the Countess. "Father Painter didn't endear himself to them, although in this instance I admire him. I didn't suspect he had any courage, but the English are curious that way—the shyest of them have, on occasion, the courage of mastiffs."

"What happened?" asked the priest.

"The villagers, quite naturally, I suppose, approached Father Painter and asked that another cross be immediately erected on the grave—to keep the werewolf down. And he refused to countenance such a thing. There was a big deputation about it, but he held his ground. He said that the erection and blessing of such a cross would be nothing but catering to a superstition. He got very angry and sent them all packing. They didn't like him much before, but they liked him less afterwards. They even came to me and asked me to provide a stone cross. I was quite willing, of course, since I have a responsibility to them. But since they couldn't get Father Painter to bless it, it wouldn't be much good."

"Who led this deputation?" asked Father Bredder.

"Pereira. Pereira and Sylvester the policeman. I was rather surprised at Sylvester. But then after all he is a villager, too, and brought up in these—superstitions." The way she said the word left Father Bredder in doubt as to whether she was referring to the werewolf or the blessing of a crucifix.

"Can you remember whether the cross fell down before or after Thomas was shot?" he asked.

She thought for a moment. "I think it was after," she said. And then she said emphatically, "No, it wasn't. It was before."

"You are sure?" asked the priest.

"Quite sure. I remember the storm. It was particularly violent. But is it important?"

"I don't know," said Father Bredder. "Actually I'm just trying to get things tidied up in my head—in some kind of sequence. That sometimes helps. Are there any records available on the trial of this man Pedro da Malveira?"

"Certainly," she said. "It was held in the castle, but there are copies of the records at the church. They are in the vaults there. I'm surprised Father Painter didn't tell you about them."

"You have records here, too?"

"Oh, yes. The originals are here in the castle, and those in the church vaults are copies."

"Thomas was interested in the case, wasn't he?" said Father Bredder. "You let him see your copy of the records?"

"Yes. In view of the relationship between the two of them, he could hardly get them from Father Painter. He asked me to let him look at them, and I liked to encourage him. He was a very violent and moody man. But educated. I felt sorry for him and, as I say, I liked to encourage him in his studies."

"Where is the grave of Pedro da Malveira?" asked the priest.

"On the road beside the cemetery," said the Countess. "Close to where the bloody footprints were seen."

Father Bredder left shortly after that. But he had decided not to return home immediately. He would go instead to the cemetery.

CHAPTER

8

There was no moon that night, and the stars, which always shone so much brighter in the mountain country, were partially obscured by clouds sailing darkly in across the Atlantic. Father Bredder, plodding down the road from the castle, watched them for a while. When he was a boy, he had loved to watch the clouds constantly changing shape in the great silence of the sky. The shapes they made now were fearful rather than beautiful. One large finger of cloud, exuding from a dark mass, stretched over the village from mountain to mountain like some doom which had come from the outer darkness and was about to descend on the village. The village could hardly be seen at the foot of the road leading up to the castle. There was here and there a suggestion of a white wall and a dark roof. But the houses seemed huddled and crouched to the ground, trying to hide from whatever it was above that menaced them.

When he was a few hundred yards on his way, a bell boomed from the castle behind him, nearly frightening the priest out of his skin.

Father Bredder had decided not to go through the village to get to the cemetery, which lay on the third corner of a triangle which it formed with the castle and the village. The village was full of dogs. They would set up a frightful barking as he approached, and even at this distance they seemed to sense his presence, for one or two of them howled, affrighting the night with the noise and making his skin crawl.

By cutting across the flank of the mountain through the furze and cactus, he could get to the cemetery without entering the village and he toiled along, looking now at the village, now at the sky, and now at the grim castle which, as he got more distant from it, seemed to turn into a huge rock, capping the peak on which it stood.

He got to the cemetery sooner than he expected. He topped a rise and suddenly its high wall was before him, so unexpectedly that it gave him a start. He first circled the exterior of the wall, examining the ground about carefully. He had brought a small flashlight for this purpose, and spent half an hour making the circuit, but found nothing of interest. When he came to the place where the carcasses of the lambs had been found, he got down on his hands and knees to look the ground over very closely and also the portion of the cemetery wall adjacent. It was about eight feet high at this point, rather lower than elsewhere, because the ground rose in a small hill.

Nearby between the road and the cemetery wall was the grave of Pedro da Malveira. He found it by stumbling over the pieces of the stone cross which lay on it. There was a clump of furze and cactus and in the center of this, the grave. The pieces of the cross were lying among the furze and cactus, the grave itself being clear of them, though over the earth there was a slight scattering of furze needles. The priest examined the scene thoughtfully.

Plainly, when the crucifix had been shattered during the storm, pieces of it would have fallen directly on top of the grave. And there should be several inches of the furze needles on it. So somebody had indeed dug the grave up. Pereira had said that Thomas was suspected of doing this and it might be true. But why? Why would he dig up the grave? To find something that he believed to be buried in it, something other than what was left of Pedro da Malveira. There was no doubt in Father Bredder's mind that Thomas was the one who had disturbed the grave. Only Thomas the atheist would dare to do such a thing. The others would be too frightened. Thomas—or his sister.

His examination of the grave completed, Father Bredder went next to the cemetery gates. They were of ironwork and locked. A number of pine branches were spread before them. He examined the gates with his flashlight and then climbed up and down to the other side. It seemed darker inside the cemetery than out in the open. Here and there he could make out the shape of a tombstone or a cross, leaning out of the perpendicular. But the farther end was all darkness, and he could not see into it and did not want to use his flashlight at this point.

There were a few trees, slim Italian cypress planted in clumps here, but in this dry wild country no grass grew on the graves. A weedy path led down through the center toward the far end, and he groped his way down this pathway, past collapsing tombstones and tottering crosses which loomed softly into view and as softly and mutely withdrew, until he came to the place where another path bisected the one he was following. He stood there, uncertain for a moment, looking around.

Then, from the portion of the wall to his right, he heard a sound of heavy panting and scratching, as if something were trying to scale the wall. For a moment, he could not move.

The panting and scratching continued, becoming more vigorous, and it seemed moving upward from the base to the top of the wall. The priest's heart was pounding heavily and he was so frightened he could do nothing. He finally forced himself to turn in the direction of the sound, trying to switch on his flashlight. It worked with a button that had to be pressed down and moved forward, and in his fright he, fumbled the attempt.

When he felt that his courage was gone and he could only run, the flashlight switched on to reveal, staring down at him from the top of the wall, the head and shoulders of a man whose face, in the flashlight, was a pale yellow like a mummy. His mouth was open and showed as a blackness in this face. The hair was disheveled and it seemed to Father Bredder that there was earth clinging to it. The circle of the flashlight caught only the upper part of the body. The creature had on a light shirt, and in the center of it, over the chest, was a large dark blotch, like a blotch of blood.

"In God's name, who are you?" cried Father Bredder.

The creature made no reply, only staring at the priest and blinking in the flashlight, and then dropped to the ground outside the wall and out of sight

Father Bredder remained standing where he was, horrified, for a few moments. Then, recovering his wits, he ran to the wall and tried to get over it. He had to climb on top of a big tombstone to pull himself up on the wall. And as he jumped up he felt his foot touch something soft. When he got astride of the wall, he turned on the flashlight, pointing it down on the road below. There was nothing to be seen—nothing at all. Among the furze and cactus of the wild area around he heard a rustling as if someone or something was plunging up the mountain in the direction of the castle. He turned his flashlight in the direction of these sounds, but the beam was absorbed in the darkness a hundred feet away, revealing nothing.

He sat for a while astride the wall, steadying his nerves and considering what to do next. It was useless to plunge off up the mountain searching for whoever it was had gone scurrying off into the darkness. He got down on top of the tomb, which was actually a vault such as is used for families, its flat roof of stone being large enough to cover a small house. He turned the flashlight on and examined the roof. Many generations of lichens had flourished and died on it, mottling the stone with little gray and yellow circlings. There was a slight dew on the cold stone, but it was enough to show naked footprints along the top of the vault leading to the wall. Against the wall was something dark and shapeless. He picked it up and found that it was a black beret of the kind worn by almost all the men of the village. "Well," said the priest to himself, "it is comforting to find that Thomas, arisen from the dead, wears a beret to protect his head from the night air." He was ashamed of the fear which had seized him before and put the beret in his pocket. He got down from the vault and inspected it with his flashlight. Oblong in shape, one end of it was square against the cemetery wall. The other end had before it a flight of steps leading down to the entrance. The debris of many autumns lay over the steps and those at the bottom were completely covered with withered brush and shrubs. On the lintel over the slab that formed the doorway to the vault was carved the word "Castelbranco."

Father Bredder continued his inspection of the vault, speculating over an area on one side where there was little of the lichen growing. This area was on the north side close to the wall, where there would be constant shadow. His inspection completed, he climbed back on the top of the vault again, extinguished his flashlight, climbed to the top of the wall and dropped down on the other side.

Then he went home without as much as a backward glance at the cemetery.

The next day he called for the first time on Sylvester, the police constable in the village. He lived in a cottage at the rear of the school, the front room of the cottage serving as his office.

"I found this," Father Bredder said, producing the beret. "Whoever owns it might want it back."

The policeman stared at the beret and then at the priest. He passed his tongue over his lips and asked, "Where did you find it?"

"In the cemetery," said Father Bredder. "At nighttime. It was lying on top of the vault of the family of Castelbranco. By the way, there are some initials in the beret which should help you to find the owner. E. S. Your first name does not start with an E, does it?"

"It was taken from me," blurted Sylvester. "I have missed it two days. One of the children in the school must have thrown it over the wall of the cemetery."

"Then I am glad to be able to return it to you," said Father Bredder mildly.

"What were you doing in the cemetery and at night?" demanded the policeman.

"Looking for the werewolf," said Father Bredder gently. "Having this, I had no need to be afraid of him." With that, he produced the wolfstone from his pocket and showed it to the policeman, who stared at it in disbelief.

"It is a souvenir, a protection against werewolves," said Father Bredder, smiling, and walked out, leaving the policeman staring after him.

An airmail letter was waiting for him when he got back to the rectory. The sight of it cheered him, for it was from his friend Lieutenant Minardi of the Los Angeles Police Department. He opened it hurriedly and with great anticipation and read the letter through. It dealt mostly with personal news and it was not until the end that the lieutenant turned to the problem of the werewolf about which the priest had written him.

"I don't suppose I am ever going to be able to cure you of your habit of mixing up the supernatural and the natural as if they were all part of the same structure and, worse, both equally credible," wrote the lieutenant. "It surprises me that a man of your education should have such a hard time distinguishing between fact and fancy—between what has substance and significance and what has no substance and no significance at all. You write as if there really were a werewolf in your village. Even though you recognize the fact that someone is playing some kind of a hoax, you can't rid yourself of the fancy that there are such things as werewolves.

"Now put your fancies aside for once. Don't go looking around for the powers of darkness, as you call them. It is all just a piece of rustic spite. And in so remote a place I can't imagine any big crime being involved for which the werewolf business is just a blind. That, I am afraid, is just another of your fancies. The only crime we know of here connected with Portugal is petty larceny. It seems that there have been a number of complaints (mostly, I might add, from priests or from nuns) that souvenirs they have brought back after a visit to Fatima have been swiped when they got to this country.

"That's travel as a status symbol for you, Father. People are so anxious to pretend that they have been abroad that they even swipe the souvenirs brought back by other tourists. Is the sin of pride involved somewhere here? Is pride related to the status symbol, and is the tourist, displaying on his mantelpiece some memento of his travels, actually indulging in one of the seven deadly sins? It is something worth examining, for as you have told me before, evil never changes its nature though it constantly changes its name to make it socially acceptable.

"I'm sorry I can't be of any real help to you. Barbara says she picks the sweet peas each day and they are still growing. She is fighting a winning battle against the aphids, and her half hour off from homework each day to spray your roses is making her the envy of your class. She was home last weekend and I showed her your letter, and she is on your side. She says there really is a werewolf, and there's a big criminal organization operating in the village, but she says she isn't worried because you are bound to find out all about it.

"On that note of pure faith (and love), I will close—contenting myself with repeating the warning to watch your souvenirs.

Affectionately,
Louis Minardi."

The priest read the letter through twice. It was about what he had expected he would receive. Still, he was glad he had written about his troubles to Minardi. It was good to get a letter from America, to hear that his sweet peas and roses were prospering. But he was disturbed at the theft of souvenirs from clerics and nuns returning from Fatima. Knowing the smallness of their allowances, there was something particularly contemptible in these thefts.

CHAPTER

9

That evening Father Bredder went to the vault of the church and, having first of all made inquiries of the housekeeper, had no difficulty locating, in a heavy wooden chest, the bound volumes containing the records of the case of Pedro da Malveira.

The date of the case he had learned from the Countess was April 18, 1724. This date was a great help to him because there were fourteen leatherbound volumes for the year 1724, and it would have been a formidable task to have searched through them all. The records were written in a neat italic hand. The volumes were not dusty. Plainly someone, very probably Father Painter, had examined them recently.

Father Bredder opened one at random to find the date October 22, 1724, in the center of the first page, with below it a statement that the volume contained the records of all legal proceedings at the castle of Castelbranco for that month. Each word of the title was spelled with a capital initial, written with a great deal of flourish.

Father Bredder put the October volume aside as not pertinent and found the one for April. It fell open at the page on which the record of the trial of Pedro da Malveira for witchcraft began—a further confirmation that it had been recently read. The preamble to the case against Pedro da Malveira charged that "using powers conferred upon him by the devil, he did turn himself into a wolf, killing Dom Joao da Castelbranco, brother of Dom Diego da Castelbranco, while he slept in the castle."

There were fifteen pages of court proceedings, and reading through them, the case against Pedro da Malveira was plainly lopsided. Twelve witnesses were called against him, but none appeared on his behalf. When Dom Diego, who had presided over the trial, asked for witnesses for the defendant, he was told that there were none; the explanation being that "no man nor woman would wish to testify on behalf of one in league with the devil." The public had found Pedro da Malveira guilty ahead of the court.

Several of the witnesses testified that they had on occasion noticed that the defendant had small short hairs growing on the palms of his hands. These hairs, they said, were not always present, but appeared from time to time. They had noted that shortly after the appearance of these hairs, there were wolf attacks on the flocks around the village.

All said that the accused had a great familiarity with animals and seemed to prefer their company to that of his fellowmen. He was often seen talking with and petting a large, fierce mastiff, and the mastiff gave every evidence of enjoying the affection bestowed on him by the defendant. No one else had ever been able to pet the dog, which was kept chained to the castle wall as a watchdog. It was noted for its ferocity.

The keeper of the barbican gate said that on the night of the slaying, the dog had been particularly restive, howling and snapping at all that passed by. It had been fed nothing for two days "to curb its spirit" and also whipped by Dom Joao, it having lunged at him as he passed by. Dom Joao had later returned to tantalize it with a piece of meat, which the dog, lunging, had snatched from his hand. Dom Joao had said the dog was too fierce and he proposed to kill it the next day.

The more he read of the case, the more it seemed to Father Bredder that the big mastiff, made savage by its sufferings, had in some manner become free during the night and killed its chief tormentor, Dom Joao.

Several of the witnesses said that they had heard savage growlings in the courtyard of the castle on the night in question, but they had been afraid to leave their quarters to investigate. The dog was not to be found the morning after the killings, but the defendant was discovered in very bloody clothes, sleeping in his bed and thoroughly exhausted.

Pedro da Malveira, "having been put to torture since he would not otherwise admit his terrible sin," confessed that he was indeed a werewolf and often attended witches' Sabbaths held a hundred leagues away across the Spanish border. Despite the grimness of the record, Father Bredder smiled here. The witches held their Sabbaths not in Portugal but in Spain, which the Portuguese hated. He, Pedro da Malveira, had been enabled to go and return that distance in one night because he could take on the form of a wolf and could cover a hundred yards with one bound. The mastiff chained in the courtyard was his familiar. Those who attended these witches' Sabbaths were all in the form of animals—some pigs, some dogs and some cocks. The devil always presided in the form of a black goat as big as a cow. They danced and drank and indulged in all manner of obscenities.

The devil had told Pedro da Malveira that he was not satisfied with his performance as a werewolf for he limited himself to killing sheep. He must kill a man, and so he had killed Dom Joao for tormenting his familiar, the mastiff. The mastiff had helped him in the crime. He concluded by begging the court to kill him and put him out of his misery.

Sentence of death by strangling was then passed. As soon as the sentence was uttered, however, the defendant threw himself onto the floor, shrieking and cursing and then whimpering and calling out to be saved. He had to be dragged to the place of execution.

Before the strangler had put the garrote around his neck, he had cried out that he was innocent and insisted that Dom Joao had been killed by the mastiff, which he had set free himself, intending no harm.

When he continued to assert his imnocence, he was gagged "and the just sentence of the court was carried out." The body was buried transfixed by a stake.

The grim record, apart from names, told Father Bredder little that he did not already know. He was disappointed. He had hoped to find some connection between the death of Pedro da Malveira and the present situation in the village; some detail, he did not know what it would be, that would open a line of investigation. But he had drawn a complete blank. He closed the volume and looked at the stack of others before him. Was it worthwhile going through them all to see if there was something—what would it be, anyway?—something concrete linking the terrible past to the equally terrible present? He turned to the volume again and read through the proceedings once more. This time his eye lit on the detail that the victim, Dom Joao, was recently returned from a voyage to the Indies.

"A voyage to the Indies," repeated Father Bredder. Almost the whole of the once-fabulous wealth of Portugal had come out of what was once called the Indies. Spain had made her fortune out of the gold and silver mines of the New World. But Portugal's equally fabulous wealth had come from the Indies—a loose term extending from India to China. Dom Joao might well have returned from a prosperous voyage only to be torn to bits while asleep in his brother's castle.

The priest read through the proceedings again, looking for the part containing a description of how the body had been found. The evidence, given by Dom Diego, the brother, and substantiated by the seneschal of the castle, said that the body had been found "slashed and torn in the most foul manner imaginable, one of the eyes gouged out, the throat ripped to the bone, and the whole upper part of the body slashed by fangs. His weapons were in the small closet of the room called the Katherine closet except his sword, which still hung from the head of the bed by the pommel, it being out of its scabbard."

So Dom Joao had slept with a naked sword beside him in his brother's castle. But he had not time to get the sword when the attack on him launched, so swift had it been. A large mastiff could attack like that, seizing its victim in one leap. But there was something wrong with the death scene—in fact, several things wrong with it. First of all, why should a man sleep in his brother's castle with a naked sword within reach? Plainly because he had been expecting to be attacked. By a savage dog chained to a wall? Hardly. But by another man, that was plain. If confirmation was needed, it lay in the fact that he had been found in his bed. In a death fight with a big dog, he would surely have rolled to the floor. Then there was the fact that Dom Joao had not even had time to get his sword, which lay within easy reach. He had been incapacitated immediately—perhaps killed immediately—"slashed and torn in the most foul manner imaginable." There was something to think about here.

Because he had them before him and because he could not resist old books, Father Bredder began to leaf through the other volumes covering the remainder of the year 1724. He discovered that they were not merely court records, but records, for instance, of the collection of rents from peasants, and records also of repairs made to the castle.

They were all in the same hand, and although kept in the impartial style of all such proceedings, now and then there was a note suggesting that the writer was a confidant of the Lord of the Castle at the time. One entry, for instance, said, "Dom Diego hath this day finished the rebuilding of the chamber in which Dom Joao was foully slain by the lobishomem. Yet I do not think he hath achieved his purpose." What purpose? The rebuilding of the chamber to simulate the appearance of a tent viewed from the inside? Perhaps. But it seemed to Father Bredder some other purpose was referred to here, though he had no clue as to what it might be.

No item escaped the busy chronicler. He even recorded that one day after the execution of Pedro da Malveira, the fierce mastiff had also been killed and the body buried "south of the barbican close to the fosse."

Another entry recorded a reminiscence about the slain Dom Joao. "Before he was killed by the werewolf," recorded the chronicler, "he said to his brother that the grave would take all he had and swallow forever all he most prized.

"Whereupon," the chronicler continued, "his brother rebuked him for thinking upon his death, saying he had many more years to live, and would soon recover from the ravages of his Indian voyage." It was the only reference Father Bredder found to indicate that before he died, Dom Joao had been in poor health.

He remained reading until it was well past midnight, but when he went to bed, had an uneasy feeling that he had missed something—something that connected the past and the present, and provided a key to the situation in Sao Joaquim da Serra.

He could not, however, think what it was.

CHAPTER

10

The next day the Senhora Professora, after a bitter struggle with her principles, called on Father Bredder. She got very quickly down to business.

"I have come to ask you to erect a cross on the grave of my brother Thomas and also on that of Pedro da Malveira, and bless them both in a public ceremony," she said.

Father Bredder was so astonished that he could only stare at her. Such a sudden change in her attitude was more than he could credit.

"Do not misunderstand me," she said sharply. "No miracle has taken place. I have not been suddenly converted. It is for the children."

"The children?"

"Yes,"

"I don't understand," said the priest.

"You understand perfectly, but you intend to embarrass me by making me give the details," she said. "Very well. You are perfectly aware that the children of the village are living in a very unhealthy state at the moment. They are terrorized by the approach of darkness. Some of them have actually become sick. It is all this superstition concerning Pedro da Malveira and my brother Thomas. Reason will not prevail against this. One superstition must be fought with another. Therefore, for the sake of the children, I ask that you erect and bless crosses over both the graves—that of my brother and that of Pedro da Malveira."

"You would really have a crucifix put over your brother's grave in view of his attitude toward the Church?" said Father Bredder.

"Yes," she said, her face pale but determined.

"You would not feel that you were betraying the principles he stood for all his life?"

"I would certainly be betraying them," she said. "But it would be for the children—to free them from fear."

"You love them so much?" said Father Bredder softly.

"Yes."

The priest was too moved to say anything immediately. "I am sorry," he said after a while, "but I cannot do what you ask."

She was shocked and then immediately very angry. "What could I expect from your kind?" she stormed. "You humiliate me, you make me state my reasons, you make me confess to you that I would betray my brother for the sake of the children, and then you refuse me. And now you will boast all over the village that I made this request to you and you refused me. You are a cheat and a hypocrite as all priests are cheats and hypocrites." Her voice was rising higher and higher and she stormed on until she could say nothing further but slumped into a chair and covered her bony face with her hands.

"I will not say anything to anybody," said Father Bredder, when she could go on no more. "I promise you that not a word about your request will leave this room. I hope you will believe me, for I mean that promise most sincerely. I admire you for making the request. I will not expose you to scorn."

He put his big hand on her shoulder and patted her as if she were a child, attempting by this gesture to assure and comfort her. She calmed down and said, "Why can't you do what I ask? It is such an easy thing for you to do. You know how hard it is for me to ask such a thing."

"You touched the reason yourself," he said, "when you talked about combating one superstition with another. God is not a superstition and a crucifix is not a lucky charm." He searched desperately for the apt phrase, the glittering definition which would illuminate for this woman, who did not believe in God, the difference between religion and superstition. It was very clear to him. Religion was the knowledge and worship of God. Superstition was the subtle distortion of religion until it dishonored and even denied God. Superstition, then, was the religion of Satan, his weapon in the battle for men's souls. But he could not explain this to the schoolteacher, and so he just stood mute before her, distressed by his own inability to say these things which had humbled him all his life.

"I cannot put a crucifix over the graves as a lucky charm," he said. "Whatever you may think of me and my Church, I could not do that." That was the only explanation he could give her and it was inadequate, he knew.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him about medals and holy water and shrines, but his sincerity was so patent that she swallowed her anger and didn't.

"I am fond of children too," said Father Bredder. "I am as anxious as you are to banish their fear and the fear that lies over the whole village. Perhaps we can work together, since we have a common purpose and I do not doubt your sincerity. I hope you will not doubt mine."

She said nothing to that.

"Do you mind if I talk to you about the death of your brother?" he asked. "I think there is something there that is hidden and may be at the bottom of all this business."

"He is dead," she said. "I faced that fact. I cannot be hurt by talking about his death."

"There is a suggestion that he was shot by Father Painter," said the priest. "People seem to be covering up, insisting it was an accident as if to protect Father Painter. If he was shot by Father Painter—murdered—that must not be hidden. It must be brought out and he must be charged."

"You would help to bring such a thing out?" she asked.

"Certainly," said Father Bredder. "That is without any question at all. Do you believe that Father Painter shot your brother?"

"I have never believed that my brother shot himself by accident," she said slowly.

"Then you believe that your brother was shot deliberately—murdered?"

"Yes."

"Can you think of any motive for Father Painter killing him?" asked the priest. "Please be frank. Don't hold anything back, I beg you."

"Father Painter regarded my brother as an enemy—a man who worked against him all the time in the village," she said. "Thomas once told me that he knew some things about Father Painter and he could expose him as a fraud, but he needed a little more evidence. He said that the hostility between Father Painter and the Countess was only on the surface and actually they were in league together. Shortly after that he was shot."

"Shortly after he spoke of exposing Father Painter?"

"Yes."

"Your brother didn't give you any indication of what it was he had discovered concerning Father Painter?"

"No. Only that it was something between him and the Countess."

"Would it have been something connected with Pedro da Malveira?" asked the priest.

"Why?" she demanded.

"Because your brother was interested in his case and Father Painter was interested in his case. The whole thing seems to go back to Pedro da Malveira. Did your brother dig up Pedro da Malveira's grave?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"He wouldn't tell me. He told me he had dug up the grave and would tell me why later. But he was shot first."

"Do you suppose that he excavated the grave in his determination to expose Father Painter? Do you think it had something to do with his suspicions concerning Father Painter?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Can you remember whether the crucifix over Pedro da Malveira's grave fell down before or after your brother was killed?" Father Bredder asked.

"After," she said.

"You are quite sure?"

"I'm absolutely certain. There was a violent storm the night after my brother was killed. The crucifix fell down. And immediately this werewolf business started. I was asked to put a cross over my brother's grave to stop the werewolf getting his body. I refused. I was wrong," she added bitterly. "I should have had one put up."

"No," said the priest. "You were right. I am told that Pereira and Sylvester were prominent among those who asked you to put up the cross."

"Yes," she said. "That Sylvester is a fool. He was appointed policeman on the recommendation of the Countess because he could write. But he is an ignorant fool and utterly incompetent."

"He did nothing to investigate the shooting of your brother?"

"No. He is too weak. I think he wanted to hold an investigation but he was talked out of it—by Pereira and the Countess."

"How about yourself? Didn't you insist on an investigation? You tell me you had strong suspicions that the death was not an accident."

"I questioned Sylvester. He showed me my brother's gun. It was a German military rifle converted for hunting. The cartridge was still in it. It had been fired then, but the bolt ejecting the cartridge had not been worked. He said that proved that it had gone off by accident."

"The cartridge was still in the gun?" said, surprised.'

"Yes."

"Did a doctor examine the body?"

She shook her head. "There is no doctor in the village," she said. "Everyone insisted it was an accident. There wasn't anything I could do."

"He was your only relative?"

"Yes. I couldn't believe he was dead for a long time. That night I dreamed that he was still alive. The following morning I had to face the fact of his death again. I had to face it morning after morning until at last I stopped dreaming that he was alive and could accept the fact that he was dead—that he had ceased to exist—forever."

The statement, flatly made, wrenched Father Bredder. He wanted to tell her that death was only a change of existence and no one once born was ever obliterated. But he knew she would reject that belief, and to offer it to her would seem to mock her grief with false hopes. He felt wretched for her in her appalling loneliness, and admired her courage that she could continue living a good life while believing that beyond that life was nothing but obliteration.

"Can you tell me something of the Countess?" asked the priest after a while. "Has she much money?"

"She is supposed to have millions, but I sometimes doubt it," said the schoolteacher. "I don't pretend to know much of her affairs. But I have heard rumors that she is actually very heavily in debt and that there is a mortgage on the whole castle which she cannot pay off. I know that she has sold all her expensive racing cars. I have heard gossip from her servants about calls to her bank in Lisbon. A few months ago there was a very wealthy Englishman here who made a tour of the castle. There was a rumor that he was interested in buying it. It is, as you know, extremely well kept. And it has cost a fortune to keep it in that condition, rebuilding all the time."

"There has been a great deal of rebuilding?" asked the priest.

"It is a kind of passion with those people," said the schoolteacher. "Her father was always having work done on the castle, and her grandfather. They are always pulling part of it down and then putting it back up again. Sometimes they make a few changes. But generally they put it back exactly as it was before. Of course, that means that the castle is as good now as it was the day it was completed. They have that to show for it. There has been talk of selling it to the government as a national asset."

"That is strange," said Father Bredder.

"It is and it isn't," said the schoolteacher. "There is no accounting for the amusements of people. Furthermore, if your ancestors have very carefully preserved a place like a castle, it is difficult not to follow their example."

Father Bredder nodded. Yet he sensed that there was some element in this rebuilding of the castle that held the key to the situation in the village. What that element was, was just beyond his grasp. Every time he reached for it mentally, it withdrew. The room in which Dom Joao had been killed had been rebuilt. Why? To banish the horror of his death? To hide something? To find something that was hidden? He did not know. But reflecting on Don Joao, and looking for a clue to that element that was evading him, he told the schoolteacher that while reading through the record he had come to the conclusion that it was highly likely that Dom Joao was murdered by his brother Dom Diego.

He told her how Dom Joao had slept with a naked sword at the head of his bed in his brother's castle. "The tearing of his throat could be attributed to a dog—or a werewolf," he said. "But a dog wouldn't slash the upper part of his body. That sounds more to me like someone using a dagger to inflict wounds to resemble those he thought would be made by a dog."

"How do you know that a dog wouldn't tear his torso in that manner?" she asked.

"We used dogs in the Marines—on patrol," said the priest. "They go instinctively for the throat. It is extremely hard for a dog to bite at the torso. A dog can grab limbs or a throat, but a big area like the chest he just can't bite. I think Dom Joao was stabbed to death by his brother and then the body mutilated to make it appear that death was due to an attack by the mastiff—or a werewolf. I suspect—and it is only a suspicion—that his brother had been trying to poison him for a long time, but wearying of the length of time this took, decided to use violence to end his life. There is a mention in the records that Dom Joao was ill after his return from the Indies, and he seemed to despair of living. He may have been ill, of course. But in the circumstances, I suspect poison."

He was about to tell her about finding the policeman's beret in the cemetery. The policeman's story of the beret having been stolen by the school children and flung over the cemetery wall to land on the vault of the Castelbranco family was obviously a lie. It was evident that it was the policeman he had seen there that night, roughly disguised so that he would be taken by anyone who saw him, in their fright, for Thomas.

There was another possibility—a very slim one; namely, that whoever was impersonating Thomas had stolen the policeman's beret. This might have been done to incriminate the policeman. It was the thinnest of possibilities, and yet it existed.

Father Bredder decided not to say anything about all this to the schoolteacher. He would tell no one, but wait for something to happen as a result of having returned the beret to Sylvester and told him where he had found it. If the person he saw was Sylvester, then the policeman would do something. He, Father. Bredder, had only to wait.

There was nothing to be lost by waiting. At present all was confusion—everything was jumbled up. There was the slaying of Thomas and the old murder (for so he believed it to be) of Dom Joao; there was the judicial murder of the half-wit, Pedro da Malveira, and the curious continuing rebuilding of the castle. There was the enmity between Thomas and Father Painter, and the conspiracy to dismiss the killing of Thomas as an accident, with the strong suggestion that this was to protect Father Painter, who had actually murdered him. And somewhere in the background there was the werewolf and perhaps the wolfstone which he had obtained before this started from the souvenir dealer at Fatima—the wolfstone which contained on it the same words as were carved on the ceiling of the room in the castle where Dom Joao had been killed.

"Libera nos a lupis," said Father Bredder to himself. "Deliver us from wolves." Wolves. Werewolves. He began to reflect on the significance of the wolf in medieval times and to wonder as he had when he first received the stone, whether the wolf was not at one time a synonym for Satan. And then, out of his haphazard reading, a few verses of Dante's "Inferno " came to his mind. He had long ago bought and treasured the translation by Dorothy Sayers, published as a paperback by the Penguin company. He recalled how, before Virgil had appeared to him, Dante had been utterly lost in a dark wood, and first a leopard, then a lion, and then a wolf had barred his path.

"And next a Wolf, gaunt with the famished craving
Lodged ever in her horrible lean flank,
The ancient cause of many men's enslaving—

"She was the worst—at that dread sight a blank
Despair and whelming terror pinned me fast
Until all hope to scale the mountain sank."

The priest thought the two verses over, concentrating on the line that described the Wolf as "The ancient cause of many men's enslaving." What was it the Wolf had stood for in the allegory? Greed, avarice, deceit. But pre-eminent among them all, fraud.

Fraud. There was fraud in the werewolf and fraud in the death of Thomas and fraud in the death of Dom Joao and fraud in the execution of Pedro da Malveira. And there was another fraud, too, that he was overlooking. And what fraud was it? It was connected with Fatima, with the selling of the gaudy souvenirs at Fatima, selling them to priests and nuns, from whom they were subsequently stolen.

Suddenly Father Bredder understood, and the nature of the werewolf was made completely clear to him. But he said nothing to the schoolteacher. He knew now, with certainty, that all he had to do was wait.

CHAPTER

11

Later that afternoon, Father Bredder saw the policeman going up the road toward the castle, walking very fast. He remained there a little over an hour and then came back but instead of going straight down to the village, came to the priest's house.

"The Countess would like to see you," he said. He looked very uneasy.

"Immediately?" asked the priest.

"If it is convenient," said the policeman. "You had better go right away," he added. "It is important."

Father Bredder nodded and went. This time the Countess was waiting for him by the barbican gate. "It is good of you to come so soon," she said. "We have found something at the castle that I am sure will interest you. You know that we are constantly repairing and rebuilding here. This is really exciting. Remembering your interest in the castle, I just couldn't wait to show you." She led him to the archway which gave access to one of the four spiral staircases, one at each corner, by which the various floors of the main keep could be reached.

"This one goes down through a storeroom and then into the dungeons," she said. "It's down there that we made the find. Be careful. The steps are slippery ard the bottom. Here. You'd better take this." She handed him a flashlight and he started down ahead of her. The light faded quickly as they left the ground-floor level. The storeroom was underground and so also was the dungeon below it, with no ventilating shaft leading down to them other than the staircase. Father Bredder went down very carefully, feeling for each step. It took a long time to get to the storeroom, and he flashed his light around it through the entry port into the spiral staircase. The beam showed only a vast area, the floor sloping to a grating in the center.

"For drainage," said the Countess. "It drained into the dungeon below. There was no drainage there at all. Poor wretches. They were left utterly in the dark and often in water that was two or three feet high until it managed to seep away. We found a watermark of three and a half feet on the wall of the dungeon. What a horrible way to die."

"Was there ever a moat around this castle?" asked Father Bredder.

"Really, Father," she said in her teasing voice. "How could you ask such a question? A moat around a castle on the top of a mountain? Wherever would they have got the water to fill it?"

"It is surprising that water would build up to a level of three feet in the dungeon unless there were a moat and the dungeon was below the water level of he moat," the priest replied.

"Well, there's a well," she said. "Perhaps in heavy rains the well overflowed and the flood came into the dungeon."

Father Bredder nodded.

"Where is this discovery of yours?" he asked.

"In the dungeon," she said. "Forty more steps down."

They continued down the spiral staircase, now in absolute darkness. The stone walls around the staircase were cold and slightly damp. The steps themselves became increasingly slippery under Father Bredder's feet. They reached the level of the dungeon floor and once again the priest flashed his torchlight over it. Here the floor did not slope to the center to provide a drain. Rather it seemed to slope toward the spiral staircase in which he was standing, indicating that the dungeon drained down the stairs. The light of the torch revealed a great pile of masonry stacked up just outside the entrance to the staircase. Father Bredder picked a lump of stone as big as a baseball off the pile.

"A souvenir," he said.

"This is where the find started," said the Countess. "We assumed that the staircase ended here. But on a hunch I had the workmen pull up the paving and dig below it. And we discovered that the staircase goes on down to the third level. There's another room down there, nowhere near as big as the dungeon above. It is stocked with all kinds of things. I haven't touched them. I want you to see them just as they are. But be careful. Better count the steps. There are twenty of them and they are very slippery."

"And when was this discovered?" asked the priest.

"Only this morning," said the Countess. "Come on. I'm in quite a hurry to see it again myself." The steps were quite as slippery as the Countess had said. Father Bredder could feel the slime on them under his feet.

Nor were they worn like the steps above. The edges were square, indicating that these particular steps had been little used since they were installed. Whatever chamber lay below them had been rarely visited and could indeed be the strongroom of the castle.

Father Bredder descended, counting each step, and as he went down, he began to feel uneasy. There was something he was overlooking, and to overlook it was dangerous. What could it be? Except for the flashlight, he was in utter darkness. He felt the stone he had picked up as a souvenir and then he knew what it was that he had forgotten.

He went on down, counting carefully until he had reached the eighteenth step. Then he stopped. The Countess was right behind him and she gave him a nudge. "Go on," she said. "We're almost there." But instead Father Bredder threw the stone a little ahead of him. He heard it strike against the curved wall of the staircase and thought for a moment that he had been wrong.

And then from far below came a distant "plop" of the stone hitting water, and this was followed by a sound like the afternoise of a bell chiming.

He whirled around and felt the Countess's foot on his chest. Between turning and being pushed, he lost his footing on the slippery stairs. His legs went from under him and he started to slide down to whatever lay below. His legs from the knees down were over the last step, hanging in the void over whatever lay below. The Countess was kicking at him, trying to push him off. He got one arm around the stone central post of the spiral staircase. It was almost as slick as the stairs themselves, but the material of his jacket gave him some grip on it.

"Damn you," cried the Countess. "Damn you. Let go"—and she kicked and kicked again at the arm by which he was holding on. In the struggle his flashlight had gone, so he could not see her. She had her flashlight on him and was kicking at his shoulder, trying to pry him loose from his hold on the pillar. Father Bredder was trying to clutch the slippery step above him with his free hand. He could hold on a little, but if he tried to support too much weight, his hand slipped off. He was, in any case, inching over the void and he knew that in a matter of seconds he would be gone.

Then the Countess made a mistake. She had been standing two steps above him, out of his reach. But seeing him slipping lower and lower, she came down to the step to which Father Bredder was trying desperately to hold with his right hand. In a second he had seized her ankle. She screamed.

"Hold still," shouted the priest. "Hold still, for Heaven's sake." But either in anger or terror, she struggled to get her ankle free. Suddenly she lost her footing, and with a scream slid past the priest between him and the wall. He grabbed for her, clutched her woolen cardigan, and lost his grip on it because of the slime on his hand from the staircase. Her scream continued on until it was drowned out by a heavy splash far below him. Then he heard a floundering and washing of the water and one half-stifled cry, and then nothing more but the noise of disturbance subsiding.

Sick with horror, the priest concentrated on saving himself. Both flashlights had gone rolling down the stairs into the well below.

His struggle to grab the Countess left him with only the palm of his left hand around the slippery central pillar, and he was still moving slowly downward. The muscles of his arms ached from bearing his huge weight in such a position.

With infinite care he got one knee up on the edge of the last step. As soon as he got it there, he could feel it sliding away. He got his right hand under his chest and, straining, lifted himself upward. Then he pressed quickly forward with his right hand and knee. They both went from under him, but he had projected himself perhaps three inches up the slippery staircase. He repeated the process several times until he finally got both knees on the lowest step and started to crawl upward.

He had to feel for each step in the darkness, and slipped several times, but at last he had climbed four stairs and was not slipping any more.

Then he rested and was suddenly overtaken by a fit of trembling. Every muscle in his body twitched, and he had no control over them. The fit passed at last, and he went slowly upward, still on hands and knees, for he did not trust himself to stand upright. When he got to the dungeon level, where the paving had been broken away to uncover the stairs below, he rested for a while.

Then he continued upward, walking now but steadying himself with his hands against the staircase wall. Gradually, as he approached ground level, a grayish light appeared, filtering down the staircase. It was the thinnest kind of light, a mere shading of the darkness, but to the priest it was like the light of Heaven.

He stumbled up as fast as he could toward it.

CHAPTER

12

It was essential now for Father Bredder to get immediately to Fatima. It was critical that he should do so—before the news of the death of the Countess went any further.

"There is a telephone here?" he demanded of the housekeeper, who with all the castle servants was standing in the entrance hall—a mob of people so frightened that they just stood staring at him, not even whispering to each other, so great was the shock of the Countess's death.

"Yes," said the housekeeper. Her face was drawn and she seemed very old. She kept shaking her head from side to side as if to deny the fact of the Countess 's death.

"Please take me to it," said the priest. "I must call the police."

She led him to a small room off the side of the entrance hall. It was furnished as a study. Glass-fronted bookcases lined the walls and there was a large table at one end containing a number of racing trophies. In the center of the room was a desk, and on it a hand telephone, with a crank beside it. The housekeeper explained that to call the operator he must turn the crank several times, then pick up the receiver and the operator would answer. Then she left him, but before she went, Father Bredder inquired whether there were other telephones in the castle.

"No, this is the only one," she said. "It is very inconvenient, but instruments are hard to get." She went out, closing the door behind her, and Father Bredder, after a quick glance at the telephone, took out a penknife, unscrewed the top of the box containing the cranking mechanism, disconnected two wires, and put the top back on the box. Then he pushed a wad of paper under the receiver so that the circuit remained open.

He opened the door and beckoned to the housekeeper. "The telephone is not working," he said. "I must drive to Fatima myself and tell the police. Has Sylvester been sent for?"

"Yes," said the housekeeper. "One of the gardeners went for him."

"Good," said the priest. "Has he a telephone at his house?"

"Yes. But it is on the same line as this one. If this is not working, his will be out of order also."

Sylvester arrived a few minutes later and with him was Pereira and, it seemed to the priest, about half the village. The schoolteacher was among the crowd of new arrivals also. Sylvester was very much shaken. His face was gray and his eyes were bright either with excitement or anxiety.

Father Bredder took Sylvester and Pereira aside into the little study where the telephone was.

"The telephone is not working," he said. "I must leave immediately for Fatima to tell the police of this terrible happening. It is essential that nobody the body until proper safety precautions are taken. It is very dangerous. You had better attend to that while I am away, Sylvester."

"You cannot leave here," said Sylvester quickly. "You have to stay. You are the one responsible."

"What do you mean I am the one responsible?" asked Father Bredder.

"You were there when this happened," said the policeman. "I cannot let you leave the village."

"It would be better if you stayed," said Pereira soothingly. "There is already some feeling in the village about this. There has been talk, you know, about what happened to Thomas. Now the Countess is dead. People are already beginning to think wild things. The best thing you can do is to stay here until the police come from Fatima."

"And who will go for the police?" asked Father Bredder.

"I will," said Sylvester. "It is my duty."

"Then I will come too," said Father Bredder. "After all, you have no transportation, and I have the Volkswagen. You cannot drive. But I think it would be better if you stayed here to take care of things in the village. If you want someone to accompany me, then perhaps Pereira can come with me."

"You will not leave the village," said Sylvester.

Father Bredder got up. The door of the study had been shut during this little conference. He went to it and opened it and, turning to Sylvester, he said, loud enough for those who were outside to hear, "If you wish to arrest me, you may do so. Otherwise you have no authority over my movements."

"He must not be allowed to leave here," said the policeman, not to the priest but to the mob in the hallway outside. "He is trying to get away. He must be stopped." There was a muttering from the crowd and they gathered around the study door blocking Father Bredder's path. Someone toward the back of the crowd said, "The English priest got away. This one must be made to face the music." This was followed by a mutter of approval. The faces of the men were angry and the priest knew that at this point they were not to be reasoned with. It was the schoolteacher who came to his rescue.

"What is the matter with you all?" she said. "Why are you all so stupid? Do you think that a priest would come all the way from America to murder the Countess? Cannot you think for yourselves? You bring a shame on the village with your ignorance and your superstition. Move aside, every one of you, and let the priest pass." She started to push them aside and, bewildered that she should be the one to defend the priest, they moved, clearing a way for him.

"Do you wish to come with me or do you wish to stay here?" asked Father Bredder of Sylvester. The policeman made no answer, for he plainly did not know what to say.

"You had better stay here," said the priest. "I will take Pereira with me. Everybody knows him and trusts him."

There was a murmur of agreement at that.

Father Bredder turned to, the schoolteacher. "Thank you," he said. "This is what I was waiting for—the thing that had to happen, though I didn't know what it was."

With that, followed by Pereira, he left to go down to the rectory and drive in the Volkswagen to Fatima.

The two of them said nothing to each other during long drive through the mountains to Fatima. Father Bredder drove fast, speculating on whether Sylvester would suspect that the telephone had been tampered with and would be able to re-establish the connection. He was gambling that he would be the first to bring the news of the Countess's death to Fatima. Everything depended on that.

When he got to Fatima, he found that the road to the police station led through the area near the shrine where the souvenirs were sold. Although it was late in the evening, the souvenir stores were still open and the traffic on the road, mostly foot traffic, was heavy, so that he had to drive slowly. He noted that the store of the man who had sold him the wolfstone was open and saw a priest coming out with a parcel under his arm.

"Where exactly is the police station?" asked Father Bredder, still watching in the rearview mirror the priest with the parcel.

"Right there," said Pereira, pointing to a sign half a block away. To Pereira's surprise, Father Bredder ran the Volkswagen into the curb, jumped out and grabbed the parcel out of the hands of the priest he had been watching. Then he ran with it, dodging through the crowds, to the police station and plunged through the door to the astonishment of a gray-uniformed policeman sitting at a desk near the counter.

The policeman's astonishment was even greater when another priest came in a moment after shouting something in English that the policeman couldn't understand.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded the new arrival. "Give me back my parcel." He turned to the policeman and said, "This man is a thief. He is not a priest at all."

"He says that I am a thief," translated Father Bredder. "And he is quite right. I stole this from him. I would like to see the officer in charge. It is very important."

There was no need to send for the officer in charge. He was in the adjacent office and, seeing through the glass door two priests struggling for the possession of a parcel and shouting at each other, came out, scarcely able to conceal his smiles.

"Ah," said Father Bredder, spotting him. "I must see you alone, Captain. With my colleague here," and he indicated the other priest. He turned to Pereira, who was dumbfounded by Father Bredder's behavior. "You had better come too," he said.

"Now," said Father Bredder when they were all in the office. "I have two things to report. The first is that the Countess of Castelbranco is dead. I will give you the details of that later. The second is that the good father here is a smuggler."

"You are out of your mind," said the other priest.

"No, I'm not," said Father Bredder. "You don't know it, but you are a smuggler. If you will break open the souvenir you have here, you will find something illegal inside it. I don't know what it is, but I guess it is heroin."

The captain, with a puzzled look at Father Bredder, took the parcel and undid the wrappings to reveal an alarm clock with, on the top of it, a statue of the Virgin of Fatima.

"Oh, dear," said Father Bredder. "Really. I didn't think you would have bought that."

"It's for a little girl who has trouble getting up in the morning," said the priest defensively. "I got it cheap."

"How much?" asked Father Bredder.

"Ten escudos. The price is normally twenty-five."

"That's what I thought," said Father Bredder. He turned to the police captain. "Try the clock first. It may not be necessary to break the statue."

The police captain took out a clasp knife and undid the three screws that held the back of the clock in place. Then he had to unscrew also the handle on the winder for the alarm and the timepiece itself. The back came off. He peered into the works and took out a little roll of yellowish paper, tied up very neatly with strong cotton.

"That might be it," said Father Bredder. The captain reached in his drawer and took out, to the priest's delight, a pair of manicure scissors. He cut the cotton binding and opened the paper. Inside was a small quantity of powder, off-white in color.

"Heroin, I think," said Father Bredder. "Several hundred dollars' worth when sold to users in the United States. If you will go to the store of Emil Vargas y Lucito you will find more. He has been using priests and nuns returning from visits to Fatima, to smuggle it into the United States."

"That is an outrageous suggestion," said the other priest.

"Oh, no," said Father Bredder. "They didn't know about it. They just thought they were bringing back souvenirs for friends. Only the souvenirs were always stolen from them—after they got through customs."

CHAPTER

13

"The mystery is only partially solved," said Father Bredder, "and a mystery which is only partially solved is more tantalizing and frustrating than one for which no solution at all has been found."

He was seated at the dinner table in the rectory at San Joaquim da Serra with Father Painter, returned from his vacation, the Senhora Professora and Pereira. He had asked Pereira to be present because he was the leading man of the village, and because he had contributed to that part of the mystery for which a solution had been found. But he had a few questions to ask Pereira and he wanted to ask them in the presence of Father Painter, although he, Father Bredder, already guessed the answers to them.

The Senhora Professora had consented to come out of a consuming curiosity as to how Father Bredder had uncovered the scheme for smuggling narcotics from Spain into Portugal. But Father Bredder hoped that there was also in her presence a promise of a softening in her attitude toward the Church. He did not hope for anything more than a little opening of her mind toward that to which she had bitterly and determinedly closed her mind before. With that much he would be happy, and he believed that perhaps that much had or could be achieved. Father Bredder was, by experience, an optimist. Life had made him such.

"I must say," said Father Painter, "that I am as much confused as ever—if not more so. The death of the Countess horrifies me, and I still find it difficult to believe that a person in her position could or would engage in dope smuggling. I don't understand that at all," he said.

The schoolteacher gave Father Painter a cold look, and Father Bredder remembered that her brother had said that there was more between the Countess and Father Painter than people knew of; that Father Painter was in fact a fraud and he proposed to expose him. To get to the bottom of that story was another of the reasons the priest had brought these three together for dinner.

Father Bredder turned to the Senhora Professora. "It was you who first made me suspicious of the Countess," he said. "Or perhaps I should say that it was you who crystallized some suspicions that were forming in my mind. I was uneasy about her after my first interview—uneasy because she took the werewolf story so lightly; refused to see any serious possibilities in it; and she was so quick, when I suggested that the werewolf and the death of Thomas might be connected, to assert that the death of Thomas was an accident. Immediately afterward, however, she intimated strongly that Father Painter here might be connected with the shooting of Thomas. And then she told me to leave matters alone—to let sleeping werewolves lie.

"From this I gathered—though only dimly—that she did not want any investigation of the werewolf, or of the death of Thomas. And the deduction to be made from that was that the story of the werewolf served her purpose. And the death of Thomas also."

"Might she not really have wanted to protect Father Painter?" asked the schoolteacher.

"I considered that carefully," said Father Bredder. "And I concluded that that was not her reason. I reached that conclusion because her attitude to the Church was one of contempt. I do not blame people who have a genuine distrust of the Church and of priests if they are prepared to inquire into the basis for their distrust. But hers was a fashionable contempt—a contempt based on what is often accepted as sophistication, or a superior wisdom. That being so, she was not likely to shield Father Painter if he were guilty of murder. She could not be contemptuous on the one hand and protective on the other. There was a contradiction there which would not be resolved. I suspected then that the werewolf served her purpose. But I did not know what the purpose was. And it was you who gave me the first clue."

"In what way?" asked the schoolteacher.

"When you told me that you had heard that she had had to mortgage the castle and had sold her fleet of racing cars. She was short of money. The interest on the mortgage payments would be high, let alone the principal. She would have to raise money—a large sum of money. And the answer was narcotics smuggling."

Father Painter looked almost angry. "I still don't see…" he said.

"You don't see how a person in her position would become engaged in such a crime," said Father Bredder. "You don't see how even if she were tempted to do so, if she had a desperate need of money, how she would go about it. You don't see how someone like the Countess who previously had no connection at all with the underworld would contact members of the underworld and suggest that she was ready to do some business with them.

"Well. It didn't happen that way. It happened the other way, as it usually does. She did not contact the heroin sellers. They contacted her. For these people to operate, they need agents. And they are constantly in search of agents—agents who must themselves fulfill three prime requirements. First, they must not themselves be known members of the underworld, for then they would be known to the police and watched. Second, they must be trustworthy—that is, they must be people who are not agents for the police. The law itself makes many people trustworthy in the eyes of the underworld in this respect by the stiff penalty it imposes for handling narcotics illegally. Once someone has agreed to handle narcotics for the illegal market, he or she is not likely to run to the police for fear of imprisonment. In the Countess's case she was especially trustworthy from the underworld viewpoint. A person who stood so high in Portuguese society would hardly be an agent the Portuguese or international police, would indeed be above suspicion as far as the police are concerned, and would be extremely careful not to be discovered because of the scandal the exposure would cause.

"The third requirement is that the agent selected should be in a desperate need of money—because only a desperate need of money, when all other sources have been exhausted, will persuade a law-abiding citizen to turn to crime.

"The Countess filled all these three requirements to perfection. She would never be suspected by the police. She was not likely to be a police agent or to turn police informer. And she was desperately in need of money."

"How would these mysterious underworld figures know that she was in need of money?" asked Father Painter.

"They make it their job to know people who are in need of money," said Father Bredder. "They are aware of people, highly placed, who are living beyond their means. They would read when so famous a racing figure as the Countess started selling her cars. All readers of the press and magazines are not law-abiding and in search only of current entertainment. They would hear rumors that she had applied for and received a mortgage on the castle. And they well know that a mortgage on ancestral property is the last resource of the nobility. Over and above that she may well have mentioned to her friends her need for money. And so the word would travel. Until one day someone—perhaps the gentleman from England who was thought to be interested in buying the castle—would contact the Countess and suggest that if she were prepared to receive a small package and turn it over to someone else, and ask no questions, she would be paid a generous fee for the courtesy.

"For the Countess, the proposition had one further especial appeal."

"What was that?" asked the schoolteacher.

"It was dangerous," said the priest. "And she liked danger. At the start, without a doubt, she handled the transactions herself; receiving the packages brought to her across the border and delivering them to Vargas y Lucito, the souvenir seller in Fatima.

"But then there came a new development which demanded a new technique. It was an inevitable development and one she could have foreseen if she had thought ahead a little.

"The new development was this. She was asked to receive a very large quantity of heroin—a final shipment out of which she could make a fortune and then get out of the business entirely."

"Why?" asked Father Painter.

"Because once a safe method of smuggling anything across an international border has been found, the wise policy is to make as infrequent use of it as possible. It is only the petty smuggler who gets caught because he keeps using the same itinerary. The big smuggler discovers a route, tests it with one or two shipments, and then sends a really big shipment through and does not use that method again.

"So the Countess was asked to take a big shipment and handle it herself. The money offered—we have all this from Vargas y Lucito—was easily sufficient to pay off the mortgage on the castle. The temptation was too much, it all seemed very easy, and the Countess agreed."

"What would constitute a big shipment?" asked Pereira.

"Sufficient in packages to fill two suitcases," said Father Bredder. "With that amount on her hands, the Countess felt the need first of all of a hiding place and second of an accomplice."

"A hiding place?" said Father Painter. "With a whole castle at her disposal."

"A castle isn't a very good hiding place," said Father Bredder. "It seems so. But it isn't. It's too big. You see, a hiding place is somewhere that you can put something and keep your eye on it and see that nobody else finds it. It is impossible to keep an eye on the whereabouts of everybody in a castle—to know into what rooms they are likely to stray or what closets or drawers they are likely to open. A good hiding place is a place that nobody goes to because they have no business there. Or what business they have there so absorbs their attention that they do not go poking around into things that are not their business. In short, a very good hiding place is a graveyard."

"A graveyard?" echoed Pereira.

"Yes," said Father Bredder. "To be specific, a grave or a vault in a graveyard. The vault of her family—the Castelbranco vault in the graveyard of the village."

"And the werewolf…" said Father Painter.

"Yes," said Father Bredder. "The werewolf was a device to permit somebody to enter the vault at nighttime, certain that no one else would venture near it, get a quantity of the heroin and take it to Fatima to Vargas y Lucito. And that somebody was the policeman Sylvester. It was simple to kill a few lambs and leave about the pawprints of a dog and a human foot in the blood."

"A human foot with an enlarged great toe," said Father Painter.

Father Bredder smiled. "The enlarged great toe," he said, "was in the minds of the people who saw the footprints. In the circumstances in which the footprints were found, they expected to see an enlarged great toe. And they saw one. Certainly Sylvester's great toe is no larger in proportion than anyone else's."

"It astounds me that she should have used the policeman anyway," said Father Painter when he had thought a little about this.

"She hadn't any choice and it wasn't a bad choice," said Father Bredder. "First of all, the policeman would be the one least likely to be suspected by the authorities should they get any wind of smuggling in the village. Secondly the policeman was the only man in the village who had to make regular trips to Fatima—to report twice a month to his superiors there. And thirdly, she had a kind of call on his loyalty. She had got him his job in the first place. She could have him removed. And a woman of her education and traditional position could dominate a man like Sylvester. He had a strange sort of loyalty to her that is hard for me to understand."

"She was his lady," said Pereira. "She was the one in the village to whom we all owed loyalty. Her family had been here over us for many, many centuries. "

"Yes." said Father Bredder. "I see that."

"But you cannot understand it," said the schoolteacher. "Even I cannot explain it to you. But at the first battle against the Moors, her ancestor led the people of the village. It is very old, this connection. They say blood is thicker than water, but time is stronger than blood. You are too young in America to understand that."

She sounded proud—proud of a tradition of loyalty to the family of Castelbranco, and that was strange for the Senhora Professora, and Father Bredder, because of it, began to see that he had been wrong in writing her off as a creature of pure cold reason and unbending dogma.

"In a little time," said Pereira, "the Countess will be a heroine in this village. When my grandchildren are grown up, she will be a heroine." He looked defiantly at Father Bredder. "It has to be so," he said. "You cannot build for children on black deeds—you cannot take a great family and end it with a criminal. "

"I'm sorry," said Father Bredder. He had been feeling a little proud of his work in solving the case. Now he felt wretched about it.

"It was not your fault," said Pereira softly.

"You knew about it?" Father Bredder asked. Pereira looked at him out of expressionless eyes, but said nothing, and Father Bredder reflected that Pereira had been the man who made the silver bullets and had asked him to bless them. To give credence to the werewolf story? Or because he believed in it? The priest put the line of thought aside. Whatever the answer, it didn't matter now.

"There was one trouble about using Sylvester as an accomplice," he continued. "She could trust him, but Vargas y Lucito was likely to be very disturbed when a policeman came to his shop, presented him with a package of heroin and wanted money from him. That would look like a naked trap. No doubt she told Vargas in advance that she proposed to use Sylvester as her go-between and pointed out that people were likely to comment if she herself was often seen going in his shop, which contained merchandise of such poor taste that she would not be interested in it. And Vargas said that was all very well, but how was he to know that the policeman who came to him was in her employ? He could not tell one policeman from another, and he distrusted them all.

"The Countess supplied the answer by resort to a device widely used in the Middle Ages."

"The wolfstone?" asked Father Painter.

"Yes. The wolfstone."

The schoolteacher looked surprised, but not Pereira. He merely looked uncomfortable.

"In olden times," said Father Bredder, "when it was necessary to send a stranger on some important message, and before passports and identity cards had been invented, he was given a token that would establish him as a bona fide messenger. That token was more often than not a ring with the coat of arms of the sender on it—a signet ring. But the Countess would not give her signet ring to Sylvester. Whatever token she gave him had to be secret—and unique. It had to be something that would be known to come from her but could not be traced by others back to her.

"She gave him the wolfstone. She told Vargas that her policeman messenger would have this particular stone. And that stone was unique. There are no others like it. I suspect, though I do not know, that it was carved for Dom Diego after he had had his brother murdered. It would go nicely with the prayer he had carved on the ceiling of the room where the murder took place. It would suggest that his brother having been killed by a werewolf, he feared a similar fate and kept the stone with him. He would want people to believe he had such a fear. It was he, I suspect, who started the use of the prayer in the church."

"Then why did Vargas give it or rather sell it to you?" asked Father Painter. "I would have presumed that once in his possession, he would have either returned it to the Countess or made sure that nobody else got hold of it. It seems sheer folly on his part to have sold it to a strange American priest."

"Ah," said Father Bredder. "But I wasn't a strange American priest to him."

"You surely didn't know him before?" asked Father Painter.

"No. But he knew me. You see, I do not like to think of myself as a detective, but unfortunately in Los Angeles I have a reputation as such. Now just in the same way that the police try to keep tabs on the whereabouts of known criminals, known criminals try to keep tabs on the whereabouts of detectives."

"You mean that Vargas had been warned that you were coming to Portugal?" asked Father Painter.

"Yes. I was coming here quite innocently and the papers in Los Angeles mentioned my visit—on the society pages. That report, with my picture, was sent ahead to Vargas by his agents in Los Angeles. What would be more natural than that he would assume that I was coming to investigate his use of priests and nuns, returning to the United States, as innocent smugglers of heroin? It fitted nicely. Certainly if a detective were being sent to investigate such hoodwinking of the clergy, a detective who was a priest would be the most suitable man to send. And then, innocently, I confirmed his suspicions about my visit by refusing all the souvenirs he offered me at Fatima. I was looking for something special. It might have struck him that my insistence on some extraordinary kind of souvenir (meaning to him something containing heroin) was a clumsy piece of detective work. But if it did, he did not pay that much attention. He is a clever man, and not without a sense of humor.

"He decided that he would put a mark on me that would immediately identify me as a detective to the Countess or Sylvester, should I meet them. And so he gave me—or rather sold me—the Countess's wolfstone. When I produced it, she would know that I had got it from him, and since I was not in her confidence, she would know that I was someone of whom to be wary. 'Deliver us from wolves.' And I was the wolf. Vargas had a sense of humor."

"How would he be sure that you would produce it?" asked the schoolteacher. "You might have kept it in your pocket and said nothing about it to anybody. "

"That would be contrary to human nature," said Father Bredder. "And Vargas knows a lot about human nature. He knew that nobody—particularly an American—could fail to show so curious a piece as that to others. He gave me a trumped-up but very interesting story of how it had been found and how old it was. He knew that Americans are—well, suckers—for finds, particularly any kind of a find that claims antiquity and has a little story attached to it. No. He could be quite sure that I would show it to a lot of people. And if my investigations took me to this village, as they did, I would be even more sure to show it to people because I would tie in the prayer Libera nos a lupis with the werewolf.

"In short, in giving me the stone, Vargas marked me as a detective to those who needed to know that fact. It was clever and it worked. But it worked for me rather than for him. It was too clever. It frightened Sylvester and the Countess into actions they might not have otherwise taken. It frightened them because they were involved in a crime far more serious than illegal traffic in drugs.

"That crime was the shooting of Thomas."

CHAPTER

14

The Senhora Professora's bony face became pale and drawn at the mention of her brother and she bent her head down to avoid the look of the three men at the table. With her head still lowered, she said, "Tell me about my brother's death. I want to know everything. Only tell me quickly, please."

"I will," said Father Bredder. "He was killed by Sylvester, who has already confessed to it. The Policeman shot him in a panic and then to cover himself, decided to make it look as if Thomas had accidentally shot himself. He had to think fast and he was not very good at thinking. Thomas was shot inside the cemetery. Sylvester had to get his body outside, and when he had done this, he saw the headlights of a car coming down the road from Todos Santos. That was your car, Father Painter. He was paralyzed with fear, thinking you would take the left fork down the road past the cemetery and find him there by the roadside with Thomas's body. But you didn't. You took the right fork. Why did you do that? It is the longer way round."

"I was almost out of petrol," said Father Painter. "I hoped to be able to get to Pereira's store, wake him up and get some. But I ran out and had to leave the car and walk home anyway. Pereira brought the car to me in the morning."

"Where did you leave it?" asked Father Bredder.

Father Painter smiled. "It was rather odd," he said. "My petrol lasted me until I got to the gate of the cemetery. There it ran out. That is about a quarter of a mile from Pereira's place. I decided not to disturb him then and walked home."

"Leaving your gun in your car?"

"No. I thought I ought to take that with me. The housekeeper was rather surprised to see me turn up without the car, rather the worse for wear—it's about two miles from here to the cemetery gates—and carrying my gun."

"Well, to continue," said Father Bredder. "To get Thomas's body out of the cemetery, Pereira had to take it through the gate. I've examined the wall and it is much too high for a man alone to hoist a body over—even if he stood on top of the Castelbranco vault. He dragged it through the gates and then to the place opposite the Castelbranco vault, by the grave of Pedro da Malveira, which is the loneliest part of the road. When he got it there, he saw the headlights of your car approaching. But you took the right fork of the road. He waited a long time for you to round the cemetery and go on up to the rectory. But your car never passed up the rectory road. He had to leave the body, but first he discharged Thomas's gun to simulate an accident. Then he left and, at the cemetery gates, on his way home, found your car. It was a stroke of luck for him. He guessed you had run out of petrol, and he knew you always carried a gun in your car, but there was no gun there. You would then be walking home in the middle of the night with a gun and in the morning the man you disliked so much would be found shot outside the cemetery. There were some elements here that suggested a defense for himself by throwing suspicion on you.

"When the body was found the next morning and the fact reported to him, he went immediately to the Countess. He told her the whole story and everything he had done. And it was she who told him that he must talk about holding an investigation. He could rely on her dissuading him and Pereira here, too. It was important, however, that it look as though he actually wanted an investigation, because no man guilty of an offense wants the offense investigated. And it was important that she should dissuade him with the hint that because of Father Painter's car being found and Father Painter turning up with his gun in the middle of the night, that things would come out about Father Painter that were best covered up.

"The guilty often try to escape by pretending they are covering up for someone who is actually quite innocent. That is why slander and detraction are listed prominently among the deadly sins—against an implied but never-spoken accusation no man has any defense."

Father Bredder looked directly at the schoolteacher when he said these words. But she avoided his eyes and looked instead at Father Painter, and it seemed that some of the coldness had gone out of her look.

Pereira cleared his throat and, pulling on one side of his long black mustache, said, "I was at fault there. I found Father Painter's car and hearing that Thomas had been shot, and that Father Painter had come home with his gun, I concluded that he was responsible.

"You see, Thomas's gun was not very near his body. It was several feet away. It was so far away as to make it improbable, though not impossible, that Thomas had shot himself. Whether Sylvester had put the gun in the position on purpose or because he was frightened and wanted to get away quickly, I do not know. But it was suspicious and caused some talk in the village. And there was one further thing that has not been brought out yet that added to the talk." He looked directly at Father Painter.

"What was that?" asked the latter.

"Before going to bed, although it was one o'clock in the morning, you cleaned your gun thoroughly, according to the housekeeper."

"Certainly," said Father Painter.

"Why?" demanded Pereira.

"It is the only way to look after a gun," said Father Painter impatiently, as if this was something everyone should know. "It never does to leave a gun dirty. It will start a small pitting of the bore. I was trained from boyhood to clean a gun as soon as possible after firing and have always done so."

"Even at one o'clock in the morning?" asked Pereira.

"Yes," said Father Painter firmly. "Taking care of a gun, like taking care of anything, requires discipline. If it is not cleaned immediately, a certain sloppiness develops about the job. It will be left a day or two, and finally, it will be left long enough for damage to be done to the bore. The only way to care for a gun is to clean it at the very first opportunity after firing. Then it is always safe."

"I often leave my gun two or three days without cleaning," said Pereira.

"Mine belonged to my father, who had it thirty years," said Father Painter rather primly. "It is still as good as new."

"What had you shot at?" asked Pereira.

"A hare," said Father Painter. "I missed," he added, unhappily and Pereira seemed pleased at the news.

"You have not told me why Sylvester shot my brother," said the schoolteacher.

"That goes back to Pedro da Malveira and the murder of Dom Joao," said Father Bredder. "Your brother was a man of more than ordinary intelligence and very interested in the case of Pedro da Malveira. He was often at the castle looking over the records, and he came to the conclusion that Dom Joao had been murdered by his brother. He also noted that there was a constant rebuilding at the castle. He wondered what would be the reason for Dom Diego to murder his brother, and he found a clue in an obscure sentence or two in the records. In one place, after the room in which the murder took place was rebuilt, the chronicler records that he doubted that Dom Diego had achieved his purpose. And in another place the chronicler wrote that shortly before he died, Dom Joao said that all he prized he would take to the grave with him.

"Your brother concluded that Dom Joao had something extremely valuable that Dom Diego wanted to get from him, and he was prepared to murder him to obtain it. That something must have been small to be readily hidden, and extremely valuable to warrant murder, and that would suggest some very precious jewel.

"I suspect that this was so. I suspect that this was the reason for the constant tearing down and rebuilding of portions of the castle through the centuries. And I suspect that was why the Countess, seeking to solve her financial difficulties, did not part with the castle by an outright sale. She would be selling something so valuable that her ancestors had sought for it for over two hundred years.

"Thomas, examining the records, was impressed by the statement that Dom Joao had said he would take whatever he prized to the grave with him. The place to look, then, was in the tomb of Dom Joao—in the casket itself, along with whatever remnants were left of the body.

"If he had reflected on the matter, he must have concluded that this had already been done centuries before by the Countess's ancestors. Maybe he realized this but concluded that their search had not been thorough. Anyway, he decided he would search the tomb himself, and so he did, gaining access by the panel on the north side of the vault where there are no lichens growing. I thought that was because of the lack of sunlight. But it was because the panel had been removed many times. And while he was in the tomb Sylvester found him, and thinking, in his panic, that Thomas had discovered the big cache of heroin, shot him."

"Why did my brother first of all dig up the grave of Pedro da Malveira?" asked the schoolteacher.

"I think I can answer that," said Father Painter. "He came to me one day and asked to be allowed to examine all the church records concerning the cemetery. I asked him why he wanted to see them, and he said he wanted to know whether the present boundaries were what they had been many years ago, I asked how far he wished to go back in the records, and he said, 'To the time of Pedro da Malveira.'

"I refused him, doubting his motives."

"Why did you doubt them?" asked the schoolteacher.

"I had myself many times read over the case of Pedro da Malveira. I had also concluded that Dom Joao was murdered to get hold of something he possessed which was of particular value. I also concluded that whatever that was, it was buried with him.

"It seemed strange then that it had never been discovered, and thinking of this, I went over the cemetery records and particularly the old maps. It seems that the cemetery was much bigger two centuries ago, for the Castelbranco vault, on the old maps, is shown as being almost in its center. Now it is flush against the cemetery wall. What is thought to be the grave of Pedro da Malveira is actually part of the burial ground of the family of Castelbranco—part of the area covered by the vault. It could be the burial place of Dom Joao, for Pedro's resting place is somewhere up in the mountains. It must surely have struck you that the vault was small for so ancient a family."

The question was addressed to Father Bredder, who had to admit that this had not occurred to him at all. "When were the boundaries of the cemetery changed?" he asked.

"About the time of the Napoleonic Wars," said Father Painter. "Terrible destruction was done through this countryside, the castle alone being spared. The graveyard was laid open, the stones used for making roads for the French cannon and baggage to travel upon, and a good half of the Castelbranco vault was taken off for this purpose. Thomas believed that he could dig down a little way and find himself in the Castelbranco vault without having to work inside the cemetery itself. But he found that when the walls and roof of the vault had been carried off, the hole had been filled in solid with earth. There was no subroof, as he had hoped. His only entrance to the vault, then, lay through the remainder of the structure in the cemetery."

"He said he dug up the grave of Pedro da Malveira to expose Father Painter as a fraud—to expose some kind of conspiracy between him and the Countess," said the schoolteacher.

"Yes," said Father Bredder. "For he came to the conclusion that Father Painter himself was seeking whatever he also was seeking. When Father Painter refused him the old cemetery records, he became even more suspicious that this was so. One suspicion breeds four others. He was well aware of the reasons for the enmity between himself and Father Painter. He did not understand why the Countess was so cold to him. He concluded that this was merely a front and actually the two were in a conspiracy together."

"A conspiracy for what purpose?" asked the schoolteacher.

Father Painter looked blank. "That I really don't know," he said. "I did not even know that I was suspected of such a conspiracy."

"I think that's obvious, knowing Thomas's state of mind," said Father Bredder. "A conspiracy to get the jewel before he got it—the two of them against him. But he was misled all the time. Everybody was looking in the wrong place for Dom Joao's treasure. It is neither in the castle nor in the graveyard."

"You know where it is?" asked the schoolteacher.

"Yes," said Father Bredder. He turned to Pereira. "If you can have a few of the villagers up at the barbican gate of the castle tomorrow morning with picks and shovels," he said, "I think we can find it."

The next day the greater part of the men in the village assembled outside the barbican gate of the castle with picks and shovels, highly excited at the story that they were to dig for treasure.

The Senhora Professora was there also and Pereira. Pereira had with him his huge wife and his tiny daughter to whom Father Bredder had given the ball. She had the ball with her, clutched in her chubby little hands, but when the priest looked at her, she kept hiding herself in her mother's ample skirts.

Father Bredder took a compass and, standing with his back to the barbican gate, walked southward from it until he came to the edge of the fosse, or ditch, that surrounded the castle.

"Now," he said to Pereira, "we must dig a trench along here, about three feet deep. It would speed matters up if the men would separate and each start digging in a different place to make a connected trench. But as soon as any bones are found, the digging is to stop immediately."

"Bones?" echoed Pereira. "Human bones?"

"No," said Father Bredder. "The bones of a dog. A large mastiff. Probably only the skull and a few ribs will remain."

They started digging immediately and Father Bredder turned his attention to Maria, the little girl who was attending the village school under the Senhora Professora and whose education would be complete when she had learned to read and write. It seemed a pity that such a bright little thing and all the other children in the village should be left in this sort of darkness for the rest of their lives. He had wanted to give her something really worthwhile and all he had been able to give her was a ball. He wished he could give her a great deal more than that.

Suddenly one of the men shouted. "Bones," he said. "Here are the bones." Everybody immediately crowded around him, and Father Bredder had some difficulty getting through the crowd to the hole the man had dug. At the bottom of it was a bleached canine skull, with part of the brain pan missing. It had been killed either with a bullet or a tremendous blow.

He got down into the hole and started sifting through the dirt with his hands, removing the skull and several ribs and then the bones of a leg. And then he stood up, holding in his hand what looked like a dirt-covered stone about the size of a small egg.

"I think this is it," he said. He rubbed it briskly on his jacket, leaving a smear of dirt there, and the stone changed into something that looked first of all like a piece of dark marble and then, with more rubbing, a piece of red glass.

"Yes," he said. "This is it."

"What is it?" asked Pereira, crowding around with the others."

"A ruby," said Father Bredder. "A very large ruby, cut as a pendent jewel. I would say, judging by its size, that it is worth a fortune." It was passed around from hand to hand, each one rubbing more of the dirt off it until it was returned to the priest by the Senhora Professora, who was the last to handle it.

"How did you know it was here?" she asked.

"Dom Joao had said that he would take all he prized to the grave," said the priest. "But he had not specified what grave. He suspected that he was being poisoned and he knew that one way or another he would be killed. The day before he died, he was tantalizing the dog with a big piece of meat. The dog snatched it from his hand and swallowed it. The ruby was in the meat, and Dom Joao announced that he would have the dog killed the next day. He took a terrible revenge on his brother and all his descendants, for he had them searching for two and a half centuries for something he had ensured would be buried in the grave of a dog. And now that we have it at last, what are we to do with it?"

"I don't know," said the Senhora Professora. "The Countess had no relatives."

"I found it," said Father Bredder firmly.

"Yes."

"I therefore have a claim on it."

"Yes," said the schoolteacher. "That is hardly to be disputed." Her voice was cold and hostile.

"Good," said Father Bredder. "Well, I have always been somehow without anything appropriate to give to children. I buy them a ball or give them an orange, but these are not lasting things."

He put the ruby in the hands of the schoolteacher. "If I have any claim on it," he said, "spend it on the children. Use it to get a bigger school for them with more teachers. Then for the first time in my life I will feel that I have really given children something worthwhile."

CHAPTER

15

Father Bredder was enormously glad to be back in Los Angeles. Reverend Mother had a dozen problems for him that Father Armstrong, his assistant, had somehow not been able to deal with, and this cheered him immensely because he knew he had been missed. Barbara had done a magnificent job on the sweet peas, keeping them picked every day so that they were still in generous bloom. And she had kept the aphids on the roses at bay, though there was a kind of mildew on them, and she was glad Father Bredder was back because he would know what to do about that. Furthermore, the Los Angeles Dodgers, after a six-game losing streak, had recovered so magnificently that they were now only two and a half games behind the league-leading San Francisco Giants, with eighty games still to be played and therefore a good prospect of winning the pennant.

Even the very thought of baseball cheered the priest immensely after the sojourn in the grim village of San Joaquim da Serra, which, however, was not now so grim. The second night of his return, his friend Lieutenant Minardi had invited him to dinner at his apartment, with Barbara present with Reveren Mother's permission. And he had gone over the whole story of the werewolves and pointed out that Minardi's mention of the stealing of souvenirs from priests and nuns had been a key clue in the solution of the mystery.

"I was especially pleased about Father Painter," he told them. "At first I thought he was concerned about the credulity given to the werewolf story in his parish, feeling he had lost all his hold on his parishioners and so was imcompetent as a priest. And so he was. That was part of his concern. But he knew that that would in time abate. What would not abate, what he would have to live with for the rest of his life, was the unvoiced suspicion that he was responsible for the death of the man Thomas. Since the charge was not made publicly, he could not defend himself against it.

"But all his life, the suspicion would attach to him—that he, a priest, had killed a man who was an atheist. He wanted his Bishop to move him to another parish. But that was not the answer. The Bishop knew that the only answer was to clear him. And that was why the Bishop wanted me to go to the village.

"In a sense there was a werewolf in San Joaquim da Serra. And the werewolf was calumny, which kills and devours the character of men."

"I'm surprised that neither he nor the Bishop mentioned this to you," said Minardi.

"They knew I would find it myself," said Father Bredder. "They argued that I would then investigate more thoroughly, because I might be inclined to believe the possibility of such a thing since they had hidden it from me."

"Ummmmmm," said Minardi. "That's a curious way of going about it."

"No," said Father Bredder. "Not in the circumstances. It is really the same procedure the Church adopts in the canonization of saints. The most important investigator argues against the canonization—tries to find out everything that is bad or dubious about the candidate. He is called the Devil's advocate. He must doubt from the start. And if, in spite of all his doubting and all he can uncover, the candidate's character remains that of a very holy person, then the proof is all the more conclusive."

"And by the way," he continued to his friend the detective, "knowing that you are fond of souvenirs connected with what I call the forces of evil but you call crime, I have brought one back for you."

He reached in his right-hand trouser pocket and fumbled there; then in his left-hand trouser pocket, and then in the pockets of his jacket.

"That's funny," he said. "I can't find it."

"Find what?" asked Minardi with a slight smile on his sallow face.

"The wolfstone," said the priest. "I had it when I arrived back yesterday."

"You'd better come down to headquarters with me tomorrow morning," said Minardi. "Narcotics will want to talk to you about smuggling heroin."

"You mean …" gasped Father Bredder.

"Yes," said Minardi. "The wolfstone was taken from you by one of our men—after customs, when you were juggling to collect your bags at the airport. And a hole had been drilled through the length of it and was plugged with pure heroin. About five thousand dollars' worth, they say. You didn't notice the hole drilled through the middle lengthwise plugged with wax because the markings on the stone camouflaged the drilling.

"Your friend Vargas y Lucito wasn't one to miss a bet. He used the stone to mark you as a detective. And he figured it would be an excellent joke if he made you an agent for getting heroin into the United States on top of it. Not only the United States and California by the way. He'd been shipping the stuff in the same way to Canada and South America as well—a real network."

"But how did you suspect all this?" asked the priest. "Father," said Minardi. "We may be only policemen, but we are not dumb. When this souvenir snitching was going on, Narcotics heard of it and had noted that there was a lot of illegal heroin coming into Los Angeles. This was curious because we had had excellent co-operation from Mexico and had been able to cut narcotics smuggling down to almost nothing for a while. So we thought about the souvenir snitching and we thought about how Portugal, the last land in Europe, is the jumping-off place for the United States and the whole of this hemisphere in these days of air travel, and we put two and two together and came up with four."

"You mean that the police would have found out about the Countess themselves?" asked Father Bredder, abashed.

"In time," said Minardi. "But don't be too downcast. You did it first and all alone. And when you go down to headquarters tomorrow, I'll put in a good word for you and I think they'll let you off easy and give you back the wolfstone."

Barbara had been listening politely to all this conversation which she did not entirely understand, particularly the part about calumny being a werewolf. She would ask Father Bredder about that privately later. Meanwhile she felt that politeness had been thoroughly served and she could put a tactful question to the priest.

"I suppose," she said, "that being as busy as all that you weren't able to bring back any other kinds of souvenirs."

"Barbara!" exclaimed her father.

"I certainly did," said Father Bredder. "A special souvenir for you. And I think we can think of it as a gift for you from Our Lady of Fatima—a little mark of her perpetual love for all children."

"What is it?" asked Barbara. "Tell me quickly!"

"A living rose," said Father Bredder. "Outside the chapel where she appeared to the Portuguese children, there is a beautiful rosebush growing. I was told that it bloomed on the spot where Our Lady stood. It is a little dark red rose, the most beautiful thing you' have ever seen. This isn't dogma—it's just a legend; a story. But the story is that the rosebush is the Virgin's special gift to children. And the Bishop of Leiria got me a cutting from it which is already rooted and you can plant it in the garden."

"Gee," said Barbara, and Father Bredder smiled because he knew that "Gee" was the most fervent expression of thanks of which Barbara was capable. And he knew that Our Lady of Fatima understood that, too.

Two months later, when the rose cutting had been cleared through the inspection station of the California Department of Agriculture and was thriving in the garden, Father Bredder got a letter from Father Painter.

"The courts are still busy with the ownership of the ruby," he wrote. "They probably will be for years. But at least they have decided that thirty per cent of its value belongs to you as finder. It looks as though you will get the whole amount, but you are certain of this thirty per cent, which amounts to roughly thirty thousand dollars. What I mean, of course, is that the Senhora Professora is to get that money. The ruby has been purchased by the government of Portugal as a national heritage, the purchase money to be given to those whom the courts designate.

"This is rather a long and involved way of telling you that the Senhora Professora has thirty thousand dollars with which to build a much bigger school and hire teachers. I won't go into all the ramification of the financing except to tell you one thing. At the entrance hall to the school there is to be a crucifix, and the Senhora Professora has asked me to bless it.

"Now don't think that miracles are occurring here. She was very specific in saying that she is still an unbeliever, but that curious honesty of hers demands that credit be given where credit is due. In short, the school being the result of your work and gift to the children, she wants them to be reminded of this, and so desires the crucifix. That is as far as it goes, and do not look for it to go any further or you will be disappointed. I enclose a note which she asked me to forward to you."

The note was in its own sealed envelope. All it said was, "I am searching for my own treasure, and I will not accept the stories of others that it lies here or there. I search alone."

But that was all that Father Bredder needed to read. For his Master had said, "Seek, and you shall find." And he knew that one day the Senhora Professora would find the Great Truth toward which she fumbled, painfully and alone, but with tremendous courage.

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