Horror Hunters
Author: Roger Elwood; Vic Ghidalia; Algernon Blackwood; William Hope Hodgson; H. P. Lovecraft; Robert E. Howard; August Derleth; Fritz Leiber; Theodore Sturgeon; Robert Bloch
Date: 1971-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Anthologies
Description: Macabre
Publisher: Manor Books

Piercing Malignant Red Eyes

… showed that the creature had life, yet that life sustained itself in a shrunken, half-mummified body which resembled a disinterred corpse. A red smear of some sort covered the wizened slit which served it as a mouth.

“She was a beauty once,” my guide told me. “Fearing death, she bartered her soul to the devil for eternal life. She feeds on the bodies of her descendants.”

My guide lowered his torch so I could see the floor. Strewn about were the scattered bones and skull of an adult male, red with fresh blood. Now I knew what caused the smear on the creature’s repulsive mouth….

Stories, by:

Algernon Blackwood

Robert Bloch

August Derleth

William Hope Hodgson

Robert E. Howard

Fritz Leiber, Jr.

H. P. Lovecraft

Theodore Sturgeon

Edited by

Roger Elwood and Vic
Ghidalia

MB

A
Macfadden-Bartell Book

For

AUGUST DERLETH

Those who know him will know why

THIS BOOK IS A MACFADDEN ORIGINAL

THIS COLLECTION HAS NOT APPEARED IN BOOK FORM

A MACFADDEN BOOK . • . , 1971

Macfadden-Bartell Corporation A subsidiary of Bartell Media Corporation 205 East 42nd Street, New York, New York, 10017

Ancient Sorceries, by Algernon Blackwood, from “John Silence” by Richards Press.

The Gateway of the Monster, by William Hope Hodgson, copyright, 1947, by August Derleth.

The Unnamable, by H. P. Lovecraft, copyright, 19)9, 194), by August Derleth and Donald Wanderi; copyright, 1965, by August Derleth.

The Thing On the Roof, by Robert E. Howard, copyright, 1932 by Weird Tales. Used by permission of Weird Tales and Leo Margules.

Mr. Ames’ Devil, by August Derleth, copyright, 1942, by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, copyright, 1945, by August Derleth.

In the X-Ray, by Fritz Leiber, Jr., copyright, 1942 by Weird Tales. Used by permission of Weird Tales and Leo Margules.

One Foot and the Grave, by Theodore Sturgeon, copyright, 1942 by Weird Tales. Used by permission of Weird Tales and Leo Margules.

I Kiss Your Shadow—, by Robert Bloch, copyright, 195 6 by Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Used by permission.

Horror Hunters, copyright, ©, 1971, by Macfadden-Bartell Corporation* All rights reserved* Printed in the U.S.A.

Contents

Ancient Sorceries - Algernon Blackwood

The Gateway of the Monster - William Hope Hodgson

The Unnamable - H. P. Lovecraft

The Thing on the Roof - Robert E. Howard

Mr. Ames’ Devil - August Derleth

In the X-Ray - Fritz Leiber, Jr.
One Foot and the Grave - Theodore Sturgeon
I Kiss Your Shadow — - Robert Bloch

Ancient Sorceries

Algernon Blackwood

I.

There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath—and looks the other way! And it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the widespread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and appealing to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.

Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul of things—and to release a suffering human soul in the process—was with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed, often passing strange.

The world, of course, asks for some plausible explanations to which it can attract credence—something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.

“Such a thing happen to that man!” it cries—“a commonplace person like that! It is too absurd. There must be something wrong!”

Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr. Silence. Outwardly, or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.”

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit.

John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.

He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn’t want and that were really valueless, such as comer seats, windows up or down, and so forth.

So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.

And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. Even his flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting “en voiture” and the corridor of his compartment was already packed when the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and rushed to snatch his bag.

Finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for he had a comer seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched French that he intended to break the journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend only the last few words: “a cause du sommeil et à cause des chats.”

In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though without being able to explain why. They had sat facing one another during the four hours of the journey, and though no conversation had passed between them—Vezin was timid about his stuttering French—he confessed that his eyes were being continually drawn to his face, almost he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to be kind. The men liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or would not have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. The Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective influence over the insignificant little Englishman, and without words or gestures betrayed that he wished him well and would gladly have been of service to him.

“And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?” asked John Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted the prejudices of his patient, “were you unable to follow it exactly?”

“It was so quick and low and vehement,” explained Vezin, in his small voice, “that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught the few words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine.”

‘ “A cause du sommeil et à cause des chats’?” repeated Dr. Silence, as though half speaking to himself.

“That’s it exactly,” said Vezin; “which, I take it, means something like ‘because of sleep and because of the cats,’ doesn’t it?”

“Certainly, that’s how I should translate it,” the doctor observed shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.

“And the rest of the sentence—all the first part I couldn’t understand, I mean—was a warning not to do something—not to stop in the town, or at some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was the impression it made on me.”

Then, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the platform alone and rather forlorn.

The little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked uninteresting and modem, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of modem life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the crowded train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent hilltown, remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he recognised this spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on tiptoe down the winding narrow streets where the gables all but met over his head, and he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a deprecating and modest demeanour that was in itself an apology for intruding upon the place and disturbing its dream.

At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.

“Like a cat, you said?” interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him up.

“Yes. At the very start I felt that.” He laughed apologetically. “I felt as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me purr. It seemed to be the general mood of the whole place—then.”

The inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt he was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it seemed the natural pathway to’ a real Chamber of Sleep—a little dim cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the streets could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute rest that surrounded him.

On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. But she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred to him.

She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.

“But when she looked at me, you know,” said Vezin, with that little apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, “the odd notion came to me that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and that with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of that stone yard and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse.”

He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe.

“Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then added that dinner was at seven o’clock, and that they were very early people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey that late hours were not encouraged.”

Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression that here he would be “managed,” that everything would be arranged and planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove and obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked for from him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly out into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was in a milieu that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so much easier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that all the town purred with him.

About the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways, fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very potently here, he felt.

The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him or turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even able to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unself-conscious. It was like becoming part of a softly-coloured dream which he did not even realise to be a dream.

On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of ancient fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught glimpses of their quiet movements far below.

He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.

And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly-breathing wind were part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.

There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible ships; or—and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion—a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard the wailing, halfhuman cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music to one another and the moon in chorus.

It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes, again, and all in such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of these half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress his musical soul like fiddles out of tune.

He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.

“There was nothing to alarm?” put in Dr. Silence briefly.

“Absolutely nothing,” said Vezin; “but you know it was all so fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed. Perhaps, too,” he continued, gently explanatory, “it was this stirring of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back, the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could not account for in the least, even then.”

“Incidents, you mean?”

“Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was just after sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an opalescent sky of gold and red. The dusk was running down the twisted streets. All round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its level rising with the darkness. The spell of this kind of scene, you know, can be very moving, and it was so that night. Yet I felt that what came to me had nothing directly to do with the mystery and wonder of the scene.”

“Not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with beauty,” put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation.

“Exactly,” Vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful of our smiles at his expense. “The impressions came from somewhere else. For instance, down the busy main street where men and women were bustling home from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping in groups, and all the rest of it, I saw that I aroused no interest and that no one turned to stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. I was utterly ignored, and my presence among them excited no special interest or attention.

“And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all the time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned. Everybody as a matter of fact was watching me closely. Every movement I-made was known and observed. Ignoring me was all a pretence—an elaborate pretence.”

He paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then continued, reassured—

“It is useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot explain it But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I got back to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my mind and forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may as well say at once, was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only give you the fact, as fact it was to

ID&t The little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. His diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the magic of the old adventure. His eyes shone a little already as he talked.

“Well,” he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his excitement, “I was in a shop when it came to me first—though the idea must have been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so complete a form all at once. I was buying socks, I think,” he laughed, “and struggling with my dreadful French, when it struck me that the woman in the shop did not care two . pins whether I bought anything or not. She was indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only pretending to sell.

“This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.

“For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places. In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their own. But the main current of their energies ran elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. The town was doing this very thing to me.

“This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked home to. the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of its hidden life.

“And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence of the whole place. Positively, the town was muffled. Although the streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like cats. Nothing made noise. All was hushed, subdued, muted. The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring. Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hilltown into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn—an outward repose screening intense inner activity and purpose.

“Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it. The people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness lay over them all like a spell.”

Vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory had become very vivid. His voice had run off into a whisper so that we heard the last part with difficulty. He was telling a true thing obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.

“I went back to the inn,” he continued presently in a louder voice, “and dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of reality receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and incomprehensible. I regretted having left die train so impulsively. An adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature. Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling of alarm mingled itself with my wonder—alarm for the stability of what I had for forty years recognised as my ‘personality.’

“I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses.”

II

Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not decide to leave. Decisions were always very difficult for him and he sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of leaving the train. It seemed as though someone else must have arranged it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy Frenchman who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood that long sentence ending so strangely with “d cause du sommeil et d cause des chats.” He wondered what it all meant.

Meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay, and what it was all about. But his limited French and his constitutional hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole anybody and ask questions. He was content to observe, and watch, and remain negative.

The weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He wandered about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to him every day that he was never free himself from observation. The town watched him as a cat watches a mouse. And he got no nearer to finding out what they were all so busy with or where the main stream of their activities lay. This remained hidden. The people were as soft and mysterious as cats.

But that he was continually under observation became more evident from day to day.

For instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a little green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon one of the empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone—at first. Not another seat was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths deserted. Yet, within ten minutes of his coming, there must have been fully twenty persons scattered about him, strolling aimlessly along the gravel walks, staring at the flowers, and others seated on the wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself. None of them appeared to take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well they had all come there to watch. They kept him under close observation. In the street they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet these were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll and laze in the sun, their duties unremembered. Five minutes after he left, the garden was again deserted, the seats vacant. But in the crowded street it was the same thing again; he was never alone. He was ever in their thoughts.

By degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched, yet without the appearance of it. The people did nothing directly. They behaved obliquely. He laughed in his mind as the thought thus clothed itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. They looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their sight in another direction altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so far as these concerned himself. The straight, direct thing was not their way evidently. They did nothing obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the woman walked instantly away and busied herself with something at the farther end of the counter, though answering at once when he spoke, showing that she knew he was there and that this was only her way of attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she followed. Even in the diningroom of the inn, the be-whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come straight to his table for an order or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly, vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether, and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.

Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to realise these things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took their dejeuner and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they entered the room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the doorway, peering about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he wondered which table they were making for, and at the last minute making almost a little quick run to their particular seats. And again he thought of the ways and methods of cats.

Other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer, soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him exceedingly. It may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. Once he followed two elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from across the street—quite near the inn this was—and saw them turn the corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet when he sharply followed on their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only opening through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards away, which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.

And in just such sudden fashion people appeared when he never expected them. Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when his head appeared over the wall. And even then none of them turned to look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their voices, he thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of fighting animals, almost of cats.

The whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more—it began rather to frighten him.

Out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him. Yet the vital matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him.

Once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each individual going his or her own way. It was always the same: he never could learn what their main interest was. The cathedral was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted. They shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to. The booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little cafés desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the bustle.

“Can it be,” he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that he should have dared to think anything so odd, “can it be that these people are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? That during the day they make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true life begins? Have they the souls of night-things and is* the whole blessed town in the hands of the cats?”

The fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. Something utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into certain of his minor actions. Something exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance.

And, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their shop doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at the comers of the streets, yet always vanishing silently like shadows at his near approach. And as the inn invariably closed its doors at ten o’clock he had never yet found the opportunity he rather half-heartedly sought to see for himself what account the town could give of itself at night.

“-A cause du sommeil et à cause des chats”—the words now rang in his ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite meaning.

Moreover, something made him sleep like the dead.

III

It was, I think, on the fifth day—though in this detail his story sometimes varied—that he made a definite discovery which increased his alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. Before that he had already noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle transformations being brought about in his character which modified several of his minor habits. And he had affected to ignore them. Here, however, was something he could no longer ignore; and it startled him.

At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision. The discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to nothing. He found it impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth day, he realised that he had stayed long enough in the town and that for reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser and safer that he should leave.

And he found that he could not leave!

This is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and the expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of impotence he had reached. All this spying and watching, he said, had as it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of decision. The mere thought of vigorous action—action towards escape—began to terrify him. All the currents of his life had turned inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to force his recognition of something he had long forgotten—forgotten years upon years, centuries almost ago. It seemed as though a window deep within his being would presently open and reveal an entirely new world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that, again, he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would see still farther into this region and at last understand something of the secret life of these extraordinary people.

“Is this why they wait and watch?” he asked himself with rather a shaking heart, “for the time when I shall join them—or refuse to join them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?”

And it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt, and something in his heart turned coward.

Why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily, silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind him? Why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself? And why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable? Why, indeed?

And, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.

“It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept a sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive,” was all he could say. “I got the impression that the whole town was after, me—wanted me for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least the Self I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am not a psychologist, you know,” he added meekly, “and I cannot define it better than that.”

It was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening meal that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to his quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over alone. In the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the possibility that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some door, with her pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. This had happened several times and he could not endure the sight of her. He still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and land with one single crushing leap upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.

He went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not yet been lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the corridor—doors that he had never once seen opened—rooms that seemed never occupied. He moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on tiptoe.

Half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was not wall—something that moved. It was soft and warm in texture, indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute he knew it was something quite different.

Instead of investigating, however,—his nerves must have been too overwrought for that, he said,—he shrank back as closely as possible against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped past him with a sound of rustling, and retreating with light footsteps down the passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air was wafted to his nostrils.

Vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half leaning against the wall—and then almost ran down the remaining distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement, pleasurable excitement. His nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow made itself felt all over his body. In a flash it came to him that this was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was in love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran all over him and mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was suddenly become tender, melting, loving.

The room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window, wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to argue with himself about leaving. The encounter in the passage-way had changed all that. The strange perfume of it still hung about him, bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew that it was a girl who had passed him, a girl’s face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness, and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.

Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as useless to deny as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered his veins, and now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the inner turmoil and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere, the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness, had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart, and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of tearing and tumultuous excitement.

After a time, however, the number of Vezin’s years began to assert their cumulative power; he grew calmer; and when a knock came at length upon his door and he heard the waiter’s voice suggesting that dinner was nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his way downstairs into the diningroom.

Everyone looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took his customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation was still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the current stage of the table d’hôte, when a slight commotion in the room drew his attention.

His chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the long salle d manger were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage had now come into the room. He felt the presence long before he heard or saw any one. Then he became aware that the old men, the only other guests, were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging greetings with some one who passed among them from table to table. And when at length he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain for himself, he saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving down the centre of the room and making straight for his own table in the corner. She moved wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young panther, and her approach filled him with such delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable to tell at first what her face was like, or discover what it was about the whole presentment of die creature that filled him anew with trepidation and delight.

“Aha, Ma’mselle est de retour!” he heard the old waiter murmur at his side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth, and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before his eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what he did. He was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow; that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils, and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one hand on the table at his side. She was quite close to him—that was the chief thing he knew—explaining that she had been asking after the comfort of her mother’s guests, and was now introducing herself to the latest arrival—himself.

“M’sieur has already been here a few days,” he heard the waiter say; and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied—

“Ah, but M’sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My mother is too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now I am here I will remedy all that.” She laughed deliciously. “M’sieur shall be well looked after.”

Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting upon the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat down again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife.

Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.

IV

This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing, it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in the least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. He knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite sex, for he was encased in shyness and realised his overwhelming defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to him deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by the magic of her invisible presence.

“You felt she was altogether wholesome and good?” queried the doctor. “You had no reaction of any sort—for instance, of alarm?”

Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes sought the floor again before he answered.

“I don’t think I can quite say that,” he explained presently. “I acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A conviction grew upon me that there was something about her—how shall I express it?—well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense, physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same time repelled me, more than—than-”

He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.

“Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since,” he concluded, with lame confusion. “I suppose it was, as you suggested just now, something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make me feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years if only I could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand.”

“Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?” John Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.

“I am surprised that you should ask me such a question,” answered Vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. “I think no man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight.

“But there’s one thing I can tell you,” he went on earnestly, his eyes aglow, “namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town and its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther, going smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her own—purposes that I was sure had me for their objective. She kept me, to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if I may say so”—he made a deprecating gesture—“or less prepared by what had gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always still, always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare and laughter of her great eyes, in the comers of the rooms, in the passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest parts of the public streets.”

Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter which had so violently disturbed the little man’s equilibrium. He was naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as her mother’s representative she naturally had to do with the guests in the hotel. It was not out of tire way that a spirit of camaraderie should spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty, she was French, and—she obviously liked him.

At the same time, there was something indescribable—a certain indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times—that made him try hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.

And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely different being.

And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra dishes on his private table in the diningroom. Conversations, too, with “Mademoiselle Ilsé” became more and more frequent and pleasant, and although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them to an end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that he never properly understood, yet felt to be significant.

And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy. They all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in the town indefinitely.

“And has M’sieur not even yet come to a decision?” she said softly in his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before déjeuner, the acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. “Because, if it’s so difficult, we must all try together to help him!”

The question. startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused his small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and her manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind, frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.

At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.

“It is true I find it difficult to leave,” he stammered, losing his way deliciously in the depths of her eyes, “and especially now that Mademoiselle Ilsé has come.”

He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have bitten his tongue off for having said it.

“Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to stay on,” she said, ignoring the compliment.

“I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you,” he cried, feeling that his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him, and made to go.

“It is soupe à l’oignon day!” she cried, laughing back at him through the sunlight, “and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you know, M’sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will leave us!”

He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in her corner seat just inside the hall-way.

But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were? Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that made her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of some tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a girl, graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air of sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and the darkness of night beneath her feet?

Vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again, and the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to her mother about the soupe à l’oignon, and saw her glancing back at him over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a dew-kissed rose bending slightly before summer airs.

And, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day, because he saw another cover laid at his small table and, with fluttering heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that “Ma’msell Ilsé would honour M’sieur to-day at déjeuner, as her custom sometimes is with her mother’s guests.”

So actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking quietly to him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after, mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. And, later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came again to his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a moment, full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke—

“My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little town, and I think so too! Would M’sieur like me to be his guide, perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for many generations.”

She had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the street, yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should do so, and without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty. Her face glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of seventeen that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town, and alive beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.

So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her mother’s family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score. She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world’s history. Her voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep, allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its elaborate pretence of modem active life, the upper layers of his being became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it might lift altogether… .

He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town was reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment New thoughts, with new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful and seductive.

And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child’s face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and called her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though taken by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire apparently frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away too.

Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and they had both forgotten the incident.

They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival. It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl leaned across the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer something—he hardly knew what—of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his face, “so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must also like what I do, and what I belong to.”

Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.

“You will take part in our real life, I mean,” she added softly, with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking. “You will come back to us.”

Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.

“You will, I know,” she repeated, holding him with her eyes.

They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth. An irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self.

The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall close beside him, gating out across the darkening plain, her elbows on the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage in both hands.

“Tell me, Ilsé,” he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, “what is the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what it all means? And, tell me,” he added more quickly with passion in his voice, “what you really are—yourself?”

She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying itself by die faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face.

“It seems to me,”—he faltered oddly under her gaze—“that I have some right to know-”

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. “You love me, then?” she asked softly.

“I swear,” he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide, “I never felt before—I have never known any other girl who-”

“Then you have the right to know,” she calmly interrupted his confused confession; “for love shares all secrets.”

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking again.

“The real life I speak of,” she whispered,“is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong.”

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. His present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the thought of death.

“You came here,” she went on, “with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide, whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether-”

Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change, growing larger and darker with an expression of age.

“It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back again among them.”

Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl’s eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.

“Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,” she resumed. “The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through all these years. But I”—she paused a moment and looked at him with complete confidence in her splendid eyes—“I possess the spell to conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And I do choose to use it. I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim past”—she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his eyes, and her voice positively sang—“I mean to have you, for you love me and are utterly at my mercy.”

Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand. He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind her sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and licked at his soul.

And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul could hold.

“Yet I came here wholly by chance-” he heard himself saying.

“No,” she cried with passion, “you came here because I called to you. I have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you.”

She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence in the face—the insolence of power.

The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of the girl’s dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed forth the truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being. As he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing. Others were about her too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading die dance in some tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he knew to be her mother.

The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened… . And then the scene faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl’s eyes gazing steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again.

“And you,” he whispered tremblingly—“you child of visions and enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even before I saw?”

She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.

“The call of the Past,” she said; “and besides,” she added proudly, “in the real life I am a princess-”

“A princess!” he cried.

“-and my mother is a queen!”

At this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance beyond all hope of control. He took her in his arms and covered her unresisting face with kisses.

But even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained his very soul… . And when, presently, she had freed herself and vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the wall in a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of her yielding body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already dimly realised must prove his undoing.

And from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry, which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat.

V

For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his surging thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had done the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this ancient Past. For in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie of olden days, and had revived it. And the memory of that soft impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him with a shudder. The girl had first mastered him, and then led him to the one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid, after the lapse of centuries—caught, and conquered.

Dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But, for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted to his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than the one he had ever been accustomed to.

The moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain, when at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches.

The cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly, keeping to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very silent; the doors were closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was astir. The hush of night lay over everything; it was like a town of the dead, a churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones.

Wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached the courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the wall. He sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men did when they entered the salle d manger. He was horrified to find himself doing this instinctively. A strange impulse came to him, catching him somehow in the centre of his body—an impulse to drop upon all fours and run swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible transformation of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.

The moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of the street where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and reached the porch with the glass doors.

But here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about. Hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he opened the door carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was not empty. A large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. At first he thought it must be household articles. Then it moved, and he thought it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of light and shadow. Then it rose straight up before him and he saw that it was the proprietress.

What she had been doing in this position he could only venture a dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the girl’s strange saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. The impulse was fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He glanced quickly about him. There was no one there. Then he deliberately inclined his head towards her. He bowed.

“Enfin! M’sieur s’est donc décidé. C’est bien alors. J’en suis contente.”

Her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.

Then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and caught him.

“On pourrait faire un p’tit tour ensemble, n’est-ce pas? Nous y allons cette nuit et il faut s’exercer un peu d’avance pour cela. Ilsé, Ilsé, viens done ici. Viens vite!”

And she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that seemed oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones, this strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And presently, when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare as of flame shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined them and that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held by the daughter. Ilse had come in answer to the call, and he saw her with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly, odiously, loathsomely seductive.

“To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!” they cried. “On to the Witches’ Sabbath!”

Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.

Suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did not pause to see. He only realised that he was free, and he blundered through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to his room as though all hell was at his heels.

He flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned. Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to happen. At least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. The door was locked. He crossed over and sofdy opened the window which gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall through the glass doors.

As he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears from the streets beyond—the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was clear and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver disc being still behind the house. It came to him irresistibly that the inhabitants of the town, who a little while before had all been invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some secret and unholy errand. He listened intently.

At first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came to him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings sent the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he knew not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass, and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently, shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost sight of them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps. Sometimes their shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he could not make out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of cats. They seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The transformation looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings, yet changed swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like animals.

The yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements of dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass doors. They kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in the window-panes opposite. They were coming from all parts of the town, reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and springing from level to level till they came to the yard.

Then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and changed in the swiftest possible second into—cats—huge, silent cats. They ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond.

So, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied.

Moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he remembered it all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just so, hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known the wild madness of it all. The outline of the old building changed, the yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from a much greater height through smoky vapours. And, as he looked, half remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of the Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Use whirling by his side.

Suddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. “Come,” it seemed to say, “come with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself swiftly and come!” Only too well he understood the creature’s soundless call.

It was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. And again he felt the dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and then drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great flying leap into the air. Oh, how the passion of it rose within him like a flood, twisting his very entrails, sending his heart’s desire flaming forth into the night for the old, old Dance of the Sorcerers at the Witches* Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him; once more he met the magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing from precipice and forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys, tore him away. … He heard the cries of the dancers and their wild laughter, and with this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously about the dim Throne where sate the Figure with the sceptre of majesty… .

Then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a little in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and deserted. They had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he was left behind—alone.

Vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of the stairs he paused and listened. Below him, the hall where they had gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on the far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving farther and farther into the distance.

He made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing to meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one; across the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things, and out through the opened front doors into the street. He could not believe that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had been purposely permitted to escape. It perplexed him.

Nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.

The whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors and windows of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred; moonlight and silence lay over all. The night lay about him like a cloak. The air, soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a great furry paw. He gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though still keeping to the shadowed side. Nowhere could he discover the faintest sign of the great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place. The moon sailed high over all in a sky, cloudless and serene.

Hardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place and so came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the high road and along which he could make good his escape to one of the other little towns that lay to the northward, and so to the railway.

But first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and unreality. No air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of the day against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted away into haze and shimmering mistiness.

But the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. The whole lower slopes of the hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow, and through the glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and fast between the openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves driven by the wind, he discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one moment against the sky and then settled down with cries and weird singing through the branches into the region that was aflame.

Spellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure. And then, moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control the whole adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad coping, and balanced a moment where the valley gaped at his feet. But in that very instant, as he stood hovering, a sudden movement among the shadows of the houses caught his eye, and he turned to see the outline of a large animal dart swiftly across the open space behind him., and land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a little lower down. It ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him upon the ramparts. A shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight trembled for a second. His heart pulsed fearfully. Ilse stood beside him, peering into his face.

Some dark substance, he saw, stained the girl’s face and skin, shining in the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was dressed in wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue and vervain twined about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy light. He only just controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms and leap with her from their giddy perch into the valley below.

“See!” she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered in the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. “See where they await us! The woods are alive! Already the Great ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!”

Though a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in the crests of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill, and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the inn rose about him in the air.

“Transform, transform!” she cried again, her voice rising like a song. “Rub well your skin before you fly.

Come! Come with me to the Sabbath, to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint and come!”

She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him with the binning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the power before which fades all that is good.

A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her wicked joy.

“Satan is there!” she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw him with her to the edge of the wall. “Satan has come! The Sacraments call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!”

Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it was heard below. It was answered.

The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top of the stone wall; and Ilse clung to him with her long shining arms, smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Use alone, for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.

“Anoint and away! Anoint and away!” they cried in wild chorus about him. “To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and fearful fantasy of evil!”

Another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him, when—so can a small thing alter the whole course of an adventure—he caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he fell towards the houses, in the open space of dust and cobble stones, and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side.

And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the power of their touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there flashed into his mind the sudden intuition that saved him. Before he could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of Use’s terror at the sight of fire.

Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay under the wall.

Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the flame in a long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the top melted away into the air on the other side, and were gone with a great rush and whirring of their bodies down into the heart of the haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in the middle of the deserted ground.

“Ilse!” he called feebly; “Ilse!” for his heart ached to think that she was really gone to the great Dance without him, and that he had lost the opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same time his relief was so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole thing, that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in the fierce storm of his emotion… .

The fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse. With one last shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew, he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the direction of the hotel.

And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling, followed him, from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses.

VI

“It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending,” said Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence sitting there with his notebook, “but the fact is—er—from that moment my memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection of how I got home or what precisely I did.

“It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the towers of a biggish town and so came to a station.

“But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and looking back to where the hilltown of my adventure stood up in the moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the utmost vividness to this day.

“Another thing remains in my mind from that escape—namely, the sudden sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made, standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.

“For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a cafe on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I reached London.”

“And how long altogether,” asked John Silence quietly, “do you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?” Vezin looked up sheepishly.

“I was coming to that,” he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his body. “‘In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been September 15th,—instead of which it was only September 10th!”

“So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?” queried the doctor.

Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.

“I must have gained time somewhere,” he said at length—“somewhere or somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can’t explain it I can only give you the fact.”

“And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back to the place?”

“Last autumn, yes,” murmured Vezin; “and I have never dared to go back. I think I never want to.”

“And, tell me,” asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to say, “had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the subject?” “Never!” declared Vezin emphatically. “I had never given a thought to such matters so far as I know-”

“Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?”

“Never—before my adventure; but I have since,” he replied significantly.

There was, however, something still on the man’s mind that he wished to relieve himself of by confession, yet could with difficulty bring himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him the marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched him with her anointed hands.

He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing. And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar mark, though not quite so clearly defined.

“That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,” he whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes.

It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin’s story. Since hearing it, the doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his secretaries had discovered that Vezin’s ancestors had actually lived for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by scores.

“It seems strange,” continued the doctor, “that Vezin should have remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to think he still knows nothing about it.

“The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by a most singular chance too, with the very souls who had taken part with him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period dominated the imaginations of the whole country.

“One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal credence. The witchcraft trials abound in evidences of such universal beliefs.”

Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject, and showed how every detail of Vezin’s adventure had a basis in the practices of those dark days.

“But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man’s own consciousness, I have no doubt,” he went on, in reply to my questions; “for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered his signature in the visitors’ book, and proved by it that he had arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone.

“I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more than once that he saw her through smoke and flame.”

“And that mark on his skin, for instance?” I inquired. “Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding,” he replied, “like the stigmata of the religieuses, and the bruises which appear on the bodies of the hypnotised subject who have been told to expect them. This is very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these marks should have remained so long in Vezin’s case. Usually they disappear quickly.”

“Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it all over again,” I ventured.

“Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to alleviate.”

Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice. “And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?” I asked further—“the man who warned him against the place, à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats? Surely a very singular incident?”

“A very singular incident indeed,” he made answer slowly, “and one I can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence-”

“Namely?”

“That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him. But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen to him, and thus to warn him as he did.

“Yes,” he presently continued, half talking to himself, “I suspect in this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves, they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in memory, to a former and lower state of development.

“Ah yes!” he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, “subliminal up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt it, I doubt it”

His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power.

The Gateway of the Monster

William Hope Hodgson

In response to Camacki’s usual card of invitation to have dinner and listen to a story, I arrived promptly at Cheyne Walk, to find the three others who were always invited to these happy little times there before me. Five minutes later Camacki, Arkright, Jessop, Taylor and I were all engaged in the “pleasant occupation” of dining.

“You’ve not been long away this time,” I remarked as I finished my soup, forgetting momentarily, Carnacki’s dislike of being asked even to skirt the borders of his story until such time as he was ready. Then he would not stint words.

“No,” he replied with brevity, and I changed the subject, remarking that I had been buying a new gun to which piece of news he gave an intelligent nod and a smile, which I think showed a genuinely good-humoured appreciation of my intentional changing of the conversation.

Later, when dinner was finished, Camacki snugged himself comfortably down in his big chair, along with his pipe, and began his story, with very little circumlocution:

“As Dodgson was remarking just now, I’ve only been away a short time, and for a very good reason too—I’ve only been away a short distance. The exact locality I am afraid I must not tell you; but it is less than twenty miles from here; though, except for changing a name, that won’t spoil the story. And it is a story too! One of the most extraordinary things I have ever run against.

“I received a letter a fortnight ago from a man I will call Anderson, asking for an appointment. I arranged a time and when he turned up I found that he wished me to look into, and see whether I could not clear up, a longstanding and well authenticated case of what he termed ‘haunting.’ He gave me very full particulars and, finally, as the thing seemed to present something unique, I decided to take it up.

“Two days later I drove up to the house late in the afternoon and discovered it a very old place, standing quite alone in its own grounds.

“Anderson had left a letter with the butler, I found, pleading excuses for his absence, and leaving the whole house at my disposal for my investigations.

“The butler evidently knew the object of my visit and I questioned him pretty thoroughly during dinner, which I had in rather lonely state. He is an elderly and privileged servant, and had the history of the Grey Room exact in detail. From him I learned more particulars regarding two things that Anderson had mentioned in but a casual manner. The first was that the door of the Grey Room would be heard in the dead of night to open, and slam heavily, and this when even the butler knew it was locked and the key on the bunch in his pantry. The second was that the bedclothes would always be found torn off the bed and hurled in a heap into a corner.

“But it was the door slamming that chiefly bothered the old butler. Many and many a time, he told me, had he lain awake and just shivered with fright, listening; for at times the door would be slammed time after time thud! thud! thud! so that sleep was impossible.

“From Anderson, I knew already that the room had a history extending back over a hundred and fifty years. Three people had been strangled in it—an ancestor of his and his wife and child. This is authentic, as I had taken very great pains to make sure, so that you can imagine it was with a feeling that I had a striking case to investigate, that I went upstairs after dinner to have a look at the Grey Room.

“Peters, the butler, was in rather a state about my going, and assured me with much solemnity that in all the twenty years of his service, no one had ever entered that room after nightfall. He begged me in quite a fatherly way to wait till the morning when there could be no danger and then he could accompany me himself.

“Of course, I told him not to bother. I explained that I should do no more than look around a bit and perhaps fix a few seals. He need not fear, I was used to that sort of thing. But he shook his head when I said that.

“ ‘There isn’t many ghosts like ours, sir,’ he assured me with mournful pride. And by Jove! he was right, as you will see.

“I took a couple of candles and Peters followed with his bunch of keys. He unlocked the door, but would not come inside with me. He was evidently in quite a fright and renewed his request that I would put off my examination until daylight. Of course J laughed at him, and told him he could stand sentry at the door and catch anything that came out.

“ ‘It never comes outside, sir,’ he said, in his funny, old solemn manner. Somehow he managed to make me feel as if I were going to have the creeps right away. Anyway, it was one to him, you know.

“I left him there and examined the room. It is a big apartment and well furnished in the grand style, with a huge four-poster which stands with its head to the end wall. There were two candles on the mantelpiece and two on each of the three tables that were in the room. I lit the lot and after that the room felt a little less inhumanly dreary, though, mind you, it was quite fresh and well kept in every way.

“After I had taken a good look round I sealed lengths of bebe ribbon across the windows, along the walls, over the pictures, and over the fireplace and the wall-closets. All the time, as I worked, the butler stood just without the door and I could not persuade him to enter, though I jested with him a little as I stretched the ribbons and went here and there about my work. Every now and again he would say:—‘You’ll excuse me, I’m sure, sir; but I do wish you would come out, sir. I’m fair in a quake for you.’

“I told him he need not wait, but he was loyal enough in his way to what he considered his duty. He said he could not go away and leave me all alone there. He apologised, but made it very clear that I did not realise the danger of the room; and I could see, generally, that he was getting into a really frightened state. All the same I had to make the room so that I should know if anything material entered it, so I asked him not to bother me unless he really heard something. He was beginning to fret my nerves and the ‘feel’ of the room was bad enough already, without making things any nastier.

“For a time further, I worked, stretching ribbons across a little above the floor and sealing them so that the merest touch would break the seals, were anyone to venture into the room in the dark with the intention of playing the fool.

“All this had taken me far longer than I had anticipated and, suddenly, I heard a clock strike eleven. I had taken off my coat soon after commencing work; now however, as 1 had practically made an end of all that I intended to do, I walked across to the settee and picked it up. I was in the act of getting into it when the old butler’s voice (he had not said a word for the last hour) came sharp and frightened:—‘Come out, sir, quick! There’s something going to happen!’ Jove! but I jumped, and then in the same moment, one of the candles on the table to the left of the bed went out. Now whether it was the wind, or what, I do not know; but just for a moment I was enough startled to make a run for the door; though I am glad to say that I pulled up before I reached it. I simply could not bunk out with the butler standing there after having, as it were, read him a sort of lesson on ‘bein’ brave, y’know.’ So I just turned right round, picked up the two candles off the mantelpiece, and walked across to the table near the bed. Well, I saw nothing. I blew out the candle that was still alight; then I went to those on the two other tables and blew them out. Then, outside of the door, the old man called again:—‘Oh! sir, do be told! Do be told!’

“ ‘All right, Peters,’ I said, and by Jove, my voice was not as steady as I should have liked! I made for the door and had a bit of work not to start running. I took some thundering long strides, though, as you can imagine. Near the entrance I had a sudden feeling that there was a cold wind in the room. It was almost as if the window had been suddenly opened a little. I got to the door and the old butler gave back a step, in a sort of instinctive way.

“ ‘Collar the candles, Peters!’ I said, pretty sharply, and shoved them into his hands. I turned and caught the handle and slammed the door shut with a crash. Somehow, do you know, as I did so I thought I felt something pull back on it, but it must have been only fancy. I turned the key in the lock, and then again, double-locking the door.

“I felt easier then and set-to and sealed the door. In addition I put my card over the keyhole and sealed it there, after which 1 pocketed the key and went downstairs—with Peters who was nervous and silent, leading the way. Poor old beggar! It had not struck me until that moment that he had been enduring a considerable strain during the last two or three hours.

“About midnight I went to bed. My room lay at the end of the corridor upon which opens the door of the Grey Room. I counted the doors between it and mine and found that five rooms lay between. And I am sure you can understand that I was not sorry.

“Just as I was beginning to undress an idea came to me and I took my candle and sealing-wax and sealed the doors of all the five rooms. If any door slammed in the night, I should know just which one.

“I returned to my room, locked myself in and went to bed. I was waked suddenly from a deep sleep by a loud crash somewhere out in the passage. I sat up in bed and listened, but heard nothing. Then I lit my candle. I was in the very act of lighting it when there came the bang of a door being violently slammed along the corridor.

“I jumped out of bed and got my revolver. I unlocked the door and went out into the passage, holding my candle high and keeping the pistol ready. Then a queer thing happened. I could not go a step towards the Grey Room. You all know I am not really a cowardly chap. I’ve gone into too many cases connected with ghostly things, to be accused of that; but I tell you I funked it, simply funked it, just like any blessed kid. There was something precious unholy in the air that night. I backed into my bedroom and shut and locked the door. Then I sat on the bed all night and listened to the dismal thudding of a door up the corridor. The sound seemed to echo through all the house.

“Daylight came at last and I washed and dressed. The door had not slammed for about an hour, and I was getting back my nerve again. I felt ashamed of myself, though in some ways it was silly, for when you’re meddling with that sort of thing your nerve is bound to go, sometimes. And you just have to sit quiet and call yourself a coward until the safety of the day comes. Sometimes it is more than just cowardice, I fancy. I believe at times it is Something warning you and fighting for you. But all the same, I always feel mean and miserable after a time like that.

“When the day came properly I opened my door and keeping my revolver handy, went quietly along the passage. I had to pass the head of the stairs on the way, and who should I see coming up but the old butler, carrying a cup of coffee. He had merely tucked his nightshirt into his trousers and he’d an old pair of carpet slippers on.

“ ‘Hullo, Peters!’ I said, feeling suddenly cheerful, for I was as glad as any lost child to have a live human being close to me. ‘Where are you off to with the refreshments?’

“The old man gave a start and slopped some of the coffee. He stared up at me and I could see that he looked white and done-up. He came on up the stairs and held out the little tray to me.

“ ‘I’m very thankful indeed, sir, to see you safe and well,’ he said. ‘I feared one time you might risk going into the Grey Room, sir. I’ve lain awake all night, with the sound of the Door. And when it came light I thought I’d make you a cup of coffee. I knew you would want to look at the seals, and somehow it seems safer if there’s two, sir.’

“ ‘Peters,’ I said, ‘you’re a brick. This is very thoughtful of you.’ And I drank the coffee. ‘Come along,’ I told him, and handed him back the tray. ‘I’m going to have a look at what the Brutes have been up to. I simply hadn’t the pluck to in the night.’

“ ‘I’m very grateful, sir,’ he replied. ‘Flesh and blood can do nothing, sir, against devils, and that’s what’s in the Grey Room after dark.’

“I examined the seals on all the doors as I went along and found them right, but when I got to the Grey Room, the seal was broken, though the visiting-card over the keyhole was untouched. I ripped it off and unlocked the door and went in, rather cautiously, as you can imagine; but the whole room was empty of anything to frighten one; and there was heaps of light I examined all my seals, and not a single one was disturbed. The old butler had followed me in, and suddenly he said, ‘The bedclothes, sir!’

“I ran up to the bed and looked over, and surely, they were lying in the comer to the left of the bed. Jove! you can imagine how queer I felt. Something had been in the room. I stared for a while from the bed to the clothes on the floor. I had a feeling that I did not want to touch either. Old Peter, though, did not seem to be affected that way. He went over to the bed-coverings and was going to pick them up, as doubtless he had done every day these twenty years back, but I stopped him. I wanted nothing touched until I had finished my examination. This I must have spent a full hour over and then I let Peters straighten up the bed, after which we went out and I locked the door, for the room was getting on my nerves.

“I had a short walk and then breakfast, which made me feel more my own man. Then to the Grey Room again, and with Peters’ help and one of the maids, I had everything taken out except the bed, even the very pictures.

“I examined the walls, floor and ceiling then with probe, hammer and magnifying glass, but found nothing unusual. I can assure you I began to realise in very truth that some Incredible thing had been loose in the room during the past night.

“I sealed up everything again and went out, locking and sealing the door as before.

“After dinner that night, Peters and I unpacked some of my stuff and I fixed up my camera and flashlight opposite to the door of the Grey Room with a string from the trigger of the flashlight to the door. You see, if the door really opened, the flashlight would blare out and there would be, possibly, a very queer picture to examine in the morning.

“The last thing I did before leaving was to uncap the lens and after that I went’ off to my bedroom and to bed, for I intended to be up at midnight, and to insure this, I set my little alarm to call me; also I left my candle burning.

“The clock woke me at twelve and I got up and into my dressing-gown and slippers. I shoved my revolver into my right side-pocket and opened my door. Then I lit my darkroom lamp and withdrew the slide so that it would give a clear light. I carried it up the corridor about thirty feet and put it down on the floor, with the open side away from me, so that it would show me anything that might approach along the dark passage. Then I went back and sat in the doorway of my room, with my revolver handy, staring up the passage towards the place where I knew my camera stood outside of the door of the Grey Room.

“I should think I had watched for about an hour and a half, when suddenly I heard a faint noise away up the corridor. I was immediately conscious of a queer prickling sensation about the back of my head and my hands began to sweat a little. The following instant the whole end of the passage flicked into sight in the abrupt glare of the flashlight. Then came the succeeding darkness and I peered nervously up the corridor, listening tensely, and trying to find what lay beyond the faint, red glow of my dark-lamp, which now seemed ridiculously dim by contrast with the tremendous blaze of the flash-powder… . And then, as I stooped forward, staring and listening, there came the crashing thud of the door of the Gray Room. The sound seemed to fill the whole of the large corridor and go echoing hollowly through the house. I tell you, I felt horrible—as if my bones were water. Simply beastly. Jove! how I did stare and how I listened. And then it came again, thud, thud, thud, and then a silence that was almost worse than the noise of the door, for I kept fancying that some brutal thing was stealing upon me along the corridor.

“Suddenly, my lamp was put out, and I could not see a yard before me. I realised all at once that I was doing a very silly thing, sitting there and I jumped up. Even as I did so, I thought I heard a sound in the passage, quite near to me. I made one backward spring into my room and slammed and locked the door.

“I sat on my bed and stared at the door. I had my revolver in my hand, but it seemed an abominably useless thing. Can you understand? I felt that there was something the other side of my door. For some unknown reason, I knew it was pressed up against the door, and it was soft. That was just what I thought. Most extraordinary thing to imagine, when you come to think of it!

“Presently I got hold of myself a bit and marked out a pentacle hurriedly with chalk on the polished floor and there I sat in it until it was almost dawn. And all the time, away up the corridor, the door of the Grey Room thudded at solemn and horrid intervals. It was a miserable, brutal night.

“When the day began to break, the thudding of the door came gradually to an end, and at last I grabbed together my courage and went along the corridor in the half light, to cap the lens of my camera. I can tell you, it took some doing; but if I had not gone my photograph would have been spoilt, and I was tremendously keen to save it. I got back to my room and then set-to and rubbed out the five-pointed star in which I had been sitting.

“Half an hour later there was a tap at my door. It was Peters, with my coffee. When I had drunk it we both walked along to the Grey Room. As we went, I had a look at the seals on the other doors, but they were untouched. The seal on the door of the Grey Room was broken, as also was the string from the trigger of the flashlight, but the visiting-card over the keyhole was still there. I ripped it off and opened the door.

“Nothing unusual was to be seen, until we came to the bed; then I saw that as on the previous day, the bedclothes had been tom off, and hurled into the left-hand comer, exactly where I had seen them before. I felt very queer, but I did not forget to look at all the seals, only to find that not one had been broken.

“Then I turned and looked at old Peters and he looked at me, nodding his head.

“ ‘Let’s get out of here!’ I said. ‘It’s no place for any living human to enter without proper protection.’

“We went out then and I locked and sealed the door, again.

“After breakfast I developed the negative, but it showed only the door of the Grey Room, half opened. Then I left the house, as I wanted to get certain matters and implements that might be necessary to life, perhaps to the spirit, for I intended to spend the coming night in the Grey Room.

“I got back in a cab about half past five with my apparatus, and this Peters and I carried up to the Grey Room where I piled it carefully in the centre of the floor. When everything was in the room, including a cat which I had brought, I locked and sealed the door and went towards my bedroom, telling Peters I should not be down to dinner. He said ‘Yes, sir,’ and went downstairs, thinking that I was going to turn-in, which was what I wanted him to believe, as I knew he would have worried both himself and me if he had known what I intended.

“But I merely got my camera and flashlight from my bedroom and hurried back to the Grey Room. I entered and locked and sealed myself in and set-to for I had a lot to do before it got dark.

“First I cleared away all the ribbons across the floor; then I carried the cat—still fastened in its basket—over towards the far wall and left it. I returned then to the centre of the room and measured out a space twenty-one feet in diameter which I swept with a ‘broom of hyssop.’ About this I drew a circle of chalk, taking care never to step over the circle.

“Beyond this I smudged, with a bunch of garlic, a broad belt right around the chalked circle, and when this was complete I took from among my stores in the centre a small jar of a certain water. I broke away the parchment and withdrew the stopper. Then, dipping my left forefinger in the little jar I went round the circle again, making upon the floor, just within the line of chalk, the Second Sign of the Saaamaaa Ritual, and joining each Sign most carefully with the left handed crescent. I can tell you, I felt easier when this was done and the ‘water-circle’ complete.

“Then I unpacked some more of the stuff that I had brought and placed a lighted candle in the ‘valley’ of each Crescent. After that I drew a Pentacle so that each of the five points of the defensive star touched the chalk circle. In the five points of the star I placed five portions of a certain bread, each wrapped in linen; and in the five ‘vales,’ five opened jars of die water I had used to make the ‘water-circle.’ And now I had my first protective barrier complete.

“Now anyone, except you who know something of my methods of investigation, might consider all this a piece of useless and foolish superstition; but you all remember the Black Veil case, in which I believe my life was saved by a very similar form of protection; whilst Aster, who sneered at it and would not come inside, died.

“I got the idea from the Sigsand MS., written, so far as I can make out, in the fourteenth century. At first, naturally, I imagined it was just an expression of the superstition of his time and it was not until long after my first reading that it occurred to me to test his ‘Defense,’ which I did, as I’ve just said, in that horrible Black Veil business. You know how that turned out. Later I used it several times and always I came through safe, until that Noving Fur case. It was only a partial ‘Defense’ there and I nearly died in the pentacle. After that I came across Professor Garder’s ‘Experiments with a Medium.’ When they surrounded the Medium with a current of a certain number of vibrations in vacuum, he lost his position—almost as if it cut him off from the Immaterial.

“That made me think, and led eventually to the Electric Pentacle, which is a most marvellous ‘Defense’ against certain manifestations. I used the shape of the defensive star for this protection because I have, personally, no doubt at all but that there is some extraordinary virtue in the old magic figure. Curious thing for a Twentieth Century man to admit, is it not? But then, as you all know,

I never did, and never will allow myself to be blinded by a little cheap laughter. I ask questions and keep my eyes open!

“In this last case I had little doubt that I had run up against an ab-natural monster, and I meant to take every possible care, for the danger is abominable.

“I turned-to now to fit the Electric Pentacle, setting it so that each of its ‘points’ and ‘vales’ coincided exactly with the ‘points’ and ‘vales’, of the drawn pentagram upon the floor. Then I connected up the battery and the next instant the pale blue glare from the intertwining vacuum tubes shone out.

“I glanced about me then, with something of a sigh of relief, and realized suddenly that the dusk was upon me, for the window was grey and unfriendly. Then I stared round at the big, empty room, over the double-barrier of electric and candle light, and had an abrupt, extraordinary sense of weirdness thrust upon me—in the air, you know, it seemed; as it were a sense of something unhuman impending. The room was full of the stench of bruised garlic, a smell I hate.

“I turned now to my camera, and saw that it and the flashlight were in order. Then I tested the action of my revolver carefully, though I had little thought that it would be needed. Yet, to what extent materialisation of an ab-natural creature is possible, given favourable conditions, no one can say, and I had no idea what horrible thing I was going to see or feel the presence of. I might, in the end, have to fight with a material thing. I did not know and could only be prepared. You see, I never forgot that three people had been strangled in the bed close to me, and the fierce slamming of the door I had heard myself. I had no doubt that I was investigating a dangerous and ugly case.

“By this time the night had come (though the room was very light with the burning candles), and I found myself glancing behind me constantly and then all round the room. It was nervy work waiting for that thing to come into the room.

“Suddenly I was aware of a little, cold wind sweeping over me, coming from behind. I gave one great nerve-thrill and a prickly feeling went all over the back of my head. Then I hove myself round with a sort of stiff jerk and stared straight against that queer wind. It seemed to come from the comer of the room to the left of the bed—the place where both times I had found the heap of tossed bedclothes. Yet I could see nothing unusual, no opening—nothing! …

“Abruptly I was aware that the candles were all a-flicker in that unnatural wind. … I believe I just squatted there and stared in a horribly frightened, wooden way for some minutes. I shall never be able to let you know how disgustingly horrible it was sitting in that vile, cold wind! And then—flick! flick! flick! all the candles round the outer barrier went out, and there was I locked and sealed in that room and with no light beyond the weakish blue glare of the Electric Pentacle.

“A time of abominable tenseness passed and still that wind blew upon me, and then suddenly I knew that something stirred in the comer to the left of the bed. I was made conscious of it rather by some inward, unused sense, than by either sight or sound, for the pale, short-radius glare of the Pentacle gave but a very poor light for seeing by. Yet, as I stared, something began slowly to grow upon my sight—a moving shadow, a little darker than the surrounding shadows. I lost the thing amid the vagueness and for a moment or two I glanced swiftly from side to side with a fresh, new-sense of impending danger. Then my attention was directed to the bed. All the coverings were being drawn steadily off, with a hateful, stealthy sort of motion. I heard the slow, dragging slither of the clothes, but I could see nothing of the thing that pulled. I was aware in a funny, subconscious, introspective fashion that the ‘creep’ had come upon me, prickling all over my head, yet I was cooler mentally than I had been for some minutes; sufficiently so to feel that my hands were sweating coldly and to shift my revolver, half-consciously, whilst I rubbed my right hand dry upon my knee; though never for an instant taking my gaze or my attention from those moving clothes.

“The faint noises from the bed ceased once and there was a most intense silence, with only the dull thudding of the blood beating in my head. Yet immediately afterwards I heard again the slurring sound of the bedclothes being dragged off the bed. In the midst of my nervous tension I remembered the camera and reached round for it, but without looking away from the bed. And then, you know, all in a moment, the whole of the bed-coverings were torn off with extraordinary violence and I heard the flump they made as they were hurled into the comer.

“There was a time of absolute quietness then for perhaps a couple of minutes and you can imagine how horrible I felt. The bedclothes had been thrown with such savageness! And then again the abominable unnaturalness of the thing that had just been done before me!

“Suddenly, over by the door, I heard a faint noise—a sort of crickling sound and then a pitter or two upon the floor. A great nervous thrill swept over me, seeming to run up my spine and over the back of my head, for the seal that secured the door had just been broken. Something was there. I could not see the door; at least, I mean to say that it was impossible to say how much I actually saw and how much my imagination supplied. I made it out only as a continuation of the grey walls… . And then it seemed to me that something dark and indistinct moved and wavered there among the shadows.

“Abruptly I was aware that the door was opening and with an effort I reached again for my camera; but before I could aim it the door was slammed with a terrific crash that filled the whole room with a sort of hollow thunder. I jumped like a frightened child. There seemed such a power behind the noise, as if a vast, wanton Force were ‘out.’ Can you understand?

“The door was not touched again; but, directly afterwards I heard the basket in which the cat lay creak. I tell you, I fairly pringled all along my back. I knew that I was going to learn definitely whether what was abroad was dangerous to Life. From the cat-there rose suddenly a hideous caterwaul that ceased abruptly, and then—too late—I snapped on the flashlight. In the great glare I saw that the basket had been overturned and the lid was wrenched open, with the cat lying half in and half out upon the floor. I saw nothing else, but I was full of the knowledge that I was in the presence of some Being or Thing that had power to destroy.

“During the next two or three minutes there was an odd noticeable quietness in the room, and you must remember I was half-blinded for the time because of the flashlight, so that the whole place seemed to be pitchy dark just beyond the shine of the pentacle. I tell you it was most horrible. I just knelt there in the star and whirled round on my knees, trying to see whether anything was coming at me.

“My power of sight came gradually and I got a little hold of myself, and abruptly I saw the thing I was looking for, close to the ‘water-circle.’ It was big and indistinct and wavered curiously as though the shadow of a vast spider hung suspended in the air, just beyond the barrier. It passed swiftly round the circle and seemed to probe ever towards me, but only to draw back with extraordinary jerky movements, as might a living person who touched the hot bar of a grate.

“Round and round it moved and round and round I tinned. Then just opposite to one of the ‘vales’ in the pentacles it seemed to pause as though preliminary to a tremendous effort. It retired almost beyond the glow of the vacuum light and then came straight towards me, appearing to gather form and solidity as it came. There seemed a vast malign determination behind the movement that must succeed. I was on my knees and I jerked back, falling on to my left hand and hip, in a wild endeavour to get back from the advancing thing. With my right hand I was grabbing madly for my revolver which I had let slip. The brutal thing came with one great sweep straight over the garlic and the ‘water-circle,’ almost to the vale of the pentacle. I believe I yelled. Then, just as suddenly as it had swept over it seemed to be hurled back by some mighty, invisible force.

“It must have been some moments before I realised that I was safe, and then I got myself together in the middle of the pentacles, feeling horribly gone and shaken and glancing round and round the barrier, but the thing had vanished. Yet I had learnt something, for I knew now that the Grey Room was haunted by a monstrous hand.

“Suddenly as I crouched there I saw what had so nearly given the monster an opening through the barrier. In my movements within the pentacle I must have touched one of the jars of water, for just where the thing had made its attack the jar that guarded the ‘deep’ of the ‘vale’ had been moved to one side and this had left one of the ‘five doorways’ unguarded. I put it back quickly and felt almost safe again, for I had found the cause and die ‘Defense’ was still good. -1 began to hope again that I should see the morning come in. When I saw that thing so nearly succeed I’d had an awful, weak, overwhelming feeling that the ‘barriers’ could never bring me safe through the night against such a Force. You can understand?

“For a long time I could not see the hand; but presently I thought I saw, once or twice, an odd wavering over among the shadows near the door. A little later, as though in a sudden fit of malignant rage, the dead body of the cat was picked up and beaten with dull, sickening blows against the solid floor. That made me feel rather queer.

“A minute afterwards the door was opened and slammed twice with tremendous force. The next instant the thing made one swift, vicious dart at me from out of the shadows. Instinctively I started sideways from it and so plucked my hand from upon the Electric Pentacle, where—^for a wickedly careless moment—I had placed it. The monster was hurled off from the neighbourhood of the pentacles, though—owing to my inconceivable foolishness—it had been enabled for a second time to pass the outer barriers. I can tell you I shook for a time with sheer funk. I moved right to the centre of the pentacles again and knelt there, making myself as small and compact as possible.

“As I knelt, I began to have presently, a vague wonder at the two ‘accidents’ which had so nearly allowed the brute to get at me. Was I being influenced to unconscious voluntary actions that endangered me? The thought took hold of me and I watched my every movement. Abruptly I stretched a tired leg and knocked over one of the jars of water. Some was spilled, but because of my suspicious watchfulness, I had it up right and back within the vale while yet some of the water remained. Even as I did so the vast, black half-materialised hand beat up at me out of the shadows and seemed to leap almost into my face, so nearly did it approach, but for the third time it was thrown back by some altogether enormous, over-mastering force. Yet, apart from the dazed fright in which it left me, I had for a moment that feeling of spiritual sickness as if some delicate, beautiful, inward grace had suffered which is felt only upon the too near approach of the ab-human and is more dreadful in a strange way than any physical pain that can be suffered. I knew by this more of the extent and closeness of the danger, and for a long time I was simply cowed by the butt-headed brutality of that Force upon my spirit. I can put it no other way.

“I knelt again in the centre of the pentacles, watching myself with as much fear almost, as the monster, for I knew now that unless I guarded myself from every sudden impulse that came to me I might simply work my own destruction. Do you see how horrible it all was?

“I spent the rest of the night in a haze of sick fright and so tense that I could not make a single movement naturally. I was in such fear that any desire for action that came to me might be prompted by the Influence that I knew was at work on me. And outside of the barrier that ghastly thing went round and round, grabbing and grabbing in the air at me. Twice more was the body of the dead cat molested. The second time I heard every bone in its body scrunch and crack. And all the time the horrible wind was blowing upon me from the corner of the room to the left of the bed.

“Then, just as the first, touch of dawn came into the sky the unnatural wind ceased in a single moment and I could see no sign of the hand. The dawn came slowly and presently the wan light filled all the room and made the pale glare of the Electric Pentacle look more unearthly. Yet it was not until the day had fully come that I made any attempt to leave the barrier, for I did not know but that there was some method abroad in the sudden stopping of that wind to entice me from the pentacles.

“At last, when the dawn was strong and bright, I took one last look round and ran for the door. I got it unlocked in a nervous, clumsy fashion; then locked it hurriedly and went to my bedroom where I lay on the bed and tried to steady my nerves. Peters came presently with the coffee and when I had drunk it I told him I meant to have a sleep, as I had been up all night. He took the tray and went out quietly, and after I had locked my door I turned in properly and at last got to sleep.

“I woke about midday and after some lunch went up to the Grey Room. I switched off the current from the Pentacle, which I had left on in my hurry; also, I removed the body of the cat. You can understand, I did not want anyone to see the poor brute.

“After that I made a very careful search of the comer where the bedclothes had been thrown. I made several holes through the woodwork and probed, but found nothing. Then it occurred to me to try with my instrument under the skirting. I did so and heard my wire ring on metal. I turned the hood-end of the probe that way and fished for the thing. At the second go I got it. It was a small object and I took it to the window. I found it to be a curious ring made of some greyish metal. The curious thing about it was that it was made in the form of a pentagon; that is, the same shape as the inside of the magic pentacle, but without the ‘mounts’ which form the points of the defensive star. It was free from all chasing or engraving.

“You will understand that I was excited when I tell you that I felt sure I held in my hand the famous Luck Ring of the Anderson family which, indeed, was of all things the most intimately connected with the history of the haunting. This ring had been handed on from father to son through generations, and always—in obedience to some ancient family tradition—each son had to promise never to wear the ring. The ring, I may say, was brought home by one of the Crusaders under very peculiar circumstances, but the story is too long to go into here.

“It appears that young Sir Hulbert, an ancestor of Anderson’s, made a bet one evening, in drink, you know, that he would wear the ring that night. He did so, and in the morning his wife and child were found strangled in the bed in the very room in which I stood. Many people, it would seem, thought young Sir Hulbert was guilty of having done the thing in drunken anger and he, in an attempt to prove his innocence, slept a second night in the room. He also was strangled.

“Since then no one has spent a night in the Grey Room until I did so. The ring had been lost so long that its very existence had become almost a myth, and it was most extraordinary to stand there with the actual thing in my hand, as you can understand.

“It was whilst I stood there looking at the ring that I got an idea. Supposing that it were, in a way, a doorway—you see what I mean? A sort of gap in the world-hedge, if I may so phrase my idea. It was a queer thought, I know, and possibly was not my own, but one of those mental nudgings from the Outside.

“You see, the wind had come from that part of the room where the ring lay. I pondered the thought a lot. Then the shape—the inside of a pentacle. It had no ‘mounts,’ and without mounts, as the Sigsand MS. has it: ‘Thee mownts wych are three Five Hills of safetie. To lack is to gyve pow’r to thee daemon; and surlie to fayvor thee Evill Thynge.’ You see, the very shape of the ring was significant. I determined to test it.

“I unmade my pentacle, for it must be ‘made’ afresh and around the one to be protected. Then I went out and locked the door, after which I left the house to get certain matters, for neither ‘yarbs nor fyre nor water’ must be used a second time. I returned about seven-thirty and as soon as the things I had brought had been carried up to the Grey Room I dismissed Peters for the night, just as I had done the evening before. When he had gone downstairs I let myself into the room and locked and sealed the door. I went to the place in the centre of the room where all the stuff had been packed and set to work with all my speed to construct a barrier about me and the ring.

“I do not remember whether I explained to you, but I had reasoned that if the ring were in any way a ‘medium of admission,’ and it were enclosed with me in the Electric Pentacle it would be, to express it loosely, insulated. Do you see? The Force which had visible expression as a Hand would have to stay beyond the Barrier which separates the Ab from the Normal, for the ‘gateway’ would be removed from accessibility.

“As I was saying, I worked with all my speed to get the barrier completed about me and the ring for it was already later than I cared to be in that room ‘unprotected.’ Also, I had a feeling that there would be a vast effort made that night to regain the use of the ring. For I had the strongest conviction that the ring was a necessity to materialisation. You will see whether I was right.

“I completed the barriers in about an hour and you can imagine something of the relief I felt when I saw the pale glare of the Electric Pentacle once more all about me. From then onwards, for about two hours, I sat quietly facing the corner from which the wind came.

“About eleven o’clock I had a queer knowledge that something was near to me, yet nothing happened for a whole hour after that. Then suddenly I felt the cold, queer wind begin to blow upon me. To my astonishment it seemed now to come from behind me and I shipped round with a hideous quake of fear. The wind met me in the face. It was flowing up from the floor close to me. I stared in a sickening maze of new frights. What on earth had I done now! The ring was there, close beside me, where I had put it Suddenly, as I stared, bewildered, I was aware that there was something queer about the ring—funny shadowy movements and convolutions. I looked at them stupidly. And then, abruptly, I knew that the wind was blowing up at me from the ring. A queer indistinct smoke became visible to me, seeming to pour upwards through the ring and mix with the moving shadows. Suddenly I realised that I was in more than any mortal danger, for the convoluting shadows about the ring were taking shape and the death-hand was forming within the Pentacle. My goodness, do you realise it? I had brought the ‘gateway’ into the pentacles and the brute was coming through—pouring into the material world, as gas might pour out from the mouth of a pipe.

“I should think that I knelt for a couple of moments in a sort of stunned fright. Then with a mad, awkward movement I snatched at the ring, intending to hurl it out of the Pentacle. Yet, it eluded me as though some invisible, living thing jerked it hither and thither. At last I gripped it, but in the same instant it was tom from my grasp with incredible and brutal force. A great black shadow covered it and rose into the air and came at me. I saw that it was the Hand, vast and nearly perfect in form. I gave one crazy yell and jumped over the Pentacle and the ring of burning candles and ran despairingly for the door. I fumbled idiotically and ineffectually with the key, and all the time I stared, with the fear that was like insanity, toward the Barriers. The hand was plunging towards me; yet, even as it had been unable to pass into the pentacle when the ring was without; so, now that the ring was within it had no power to pass out. The monster was chained, as surely as any beast would be, were chains riveted upon it.

“Even then, in that moment, I got a flash of this knowledge, but I was too utterly shaken with fright to reason and the instant I managed to get the key turned I sprang into the passage and slammed the door with a crash. I locked it and got to my room, somehow; for I was trembling so that I could hardly stand, as you can imagine. I locked myself in and managed to get the candle lit; then I lay down on the bed and kept quiet for an hour or two, and so I grew steadier.

“I got a little sleep later, but woke when Peters brought my coffee. When I had drunk it I felt altogether better and took the old man along with me whilst I had a look into the Grey Room. I opened the door and peeped in. The candles were still burning wan against the daylight and behind them was the pale, glowing star of the Electric Pentacle. And there in the middle was the ring—the gateway of the monster, lying demure and ordinary.

“Nothing in the room was touched and I knew that the brute had never managed to cross the Pentacles. Then I went out and locked the door.

“After a further sleep of some hours I left the house. I returned in the afternoon in a cab. I had with me an oxy-hydrogen jet and two cylinders, containing the gases. I carried the things to the Grey Room and there, in the centre of the Electric Pentacle, I erected the little furnace. Five minutes later the Luck Ring, once the ‘luck’ but now the ‘bane’ of the Anderson family, was no more than a little splash of hot metal.”

Carnacki felt in his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper. He passed it to me. I opened it and found a small circle of greyish metal something like lead, only harder and rather brighter.

“Well,” I asked, at length, after examining it and handing it round to the others, “did that stop the haunting?”

Carnacki nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I slept three nights in the Grey Room before I left. Old Peters nearly fainted when he knew that I meant to, but by the third night he seemed to realise that the house was just safe and ordinary.

And you know, I believe in his heart he hardly approved.” Carnacki stood up and began to shake hands. “Out you go!” he said, genially.

And, presently, we went pondering to our various homes.

The Unnamable

H. P. Lovecraft

We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the center of the cemetery, whose trunk had nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possible exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.

With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England’s self—satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs. Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic re-combinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really “unnamable.” It didn’t sound sensible to him.

Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defense of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy’s own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives’ superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it. extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes—or absences of shapes—which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly “unnamable”? “Common sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.

Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on about the “unnamable,” and after my friend had finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.

My tale had been called “The Attic Window,” and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; but New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic “Magnalia Christi Americana,” and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair gray. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.

It had been a eldritch thing—no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface—so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom—we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron straightjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the umnamable.

Cotton Mather, in that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stem as a Jewish prophet, and laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man—the thing with the blemished eye—and of the screaming drunken wretch that they hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell—there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.

It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man-was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With the years the legends take on a spectral character—I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously—all the more hideous because it was so secret.

During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.

Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations—perhaps dying for lack of being thought about. Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?

The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.

“But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I have seen it.”

“And did you find anything there—in the attic or anywhere else?”

“There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw—if he was sensitive he wouldn’t have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him. If they ail came from the same object it must have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine.”

At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his curiosity was undeterred.

“And what about the window-panes?”

“They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in the others there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond aperture. They were that kind—the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don’t believe they’ve had any glass for a hundred years or more—maybe the boy broke ’em if he got that far; the legend doesn’t say.”

Manton was reflecting again.

‘Td like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an inscription.—the whole thing must be a bit terrible.”

“You did see it—until it got dark.”

My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that demoniac attic window.

Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mold of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant.

Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary’s Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull—though the animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.

After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question:

“Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars— was it like that?”

And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected—

“No—it wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes—and a blemish. It was the pit—the maelstrom—the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”

The Thing on the Roof

Robert E. Howard

They lumber through the night

With their elephantine tread;

I shudder in affright

As I cower in my bed.

They lift colossal wings

On the high gable roofs

Which tremble to the trample

On their mastodonic hoofs.

—Justin Geoffrey: Out of the Old Land.

Let me begin by saying that I was surprised when Tussmann called on me. We had never been close friends; the man’s mercenary instincts repelled me; and since our bitter controversy of three years before, when he attempted to discredit my Evidences of Nahua Culture in Yucatan, which was the result of years of careful research, our relations had been anything but cordial. However, I received him and found his manner hasty and abrupt, but rather abstracted, as if his dislike for me had been thrust aside in some driving passion that had hold of him.

His errand was quickly stated. He wished my aid in obtaining a volume in the first edition of Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults—the edition known as the Black Book, not from its color, but because of its dark contents. He might almost as well have asked me for the original Greek translation of the Necronomicon. Though since my return from Yucatan I had devoted practically all my time to my avocation of book collecting, I had not stumbled onto any hint that the book in the Diisseldorf edition was still in existence.

A word as to this rare work. Its extreme ambiguity in spots, coupled with its incredible subject matter, has caused it long to be regarded as the ravings of a maniac and the author was damned with the brand of insanity. But the fact remains that much of his assertions are unanswerable, and that he spent the full forty-five years of his life prying into strange places and discovering secret and abysmal things. Not a great many volumes were printed in the first edition and many of these were burned by their frightened owners when Von Junzt was found strangled in a mysterious manner, in his barred and bolted chamber one night in 1840, six months after he had returned from a mysterious journey to Mongolia.

Five years later a London printer, one Bridewall, pirated the work, and issued a cheap translation for sensational effect, full of grotesque wood-cuts, and riddled with misspellings, faulty translations and the usual errors of a cheap and unscholarly printing. This still further discredited the original work, and publishers and public forgot about the book until 1909 when the Golden Goblin Press of New York brought out an edition.

Their production was so carefully expurgated that fully a fourth of the original matter was cut out; the book was handsomely bound and decorated with the exquisite and weirdly imaginative illustrations of Diego Vasquez. The edition was intended for popular consumption but the artistic instinct of the publishers defeated that end, since the cost of issuing the book was so great that they were forced to cite it at a prohibitive price.

I was explaining all this to Tussmann when he interrupted bruskly to say that he was not utterly ignorant in such matters. One of the Golden Goblin books ornamented his library, he said, and it was in it that he found a certain line which aroused his interest. If I could procure him a copy of the original 1839 edition, he would make it worth my while; knowing, he added, that it would be useless to offer me money, he would, instead, in return for my trouble in his behalf, make a full retraction of his former accusations in regard to my Yucatan researches, and offer a complete apology in The Scientific News.

I will admit that I was astounded at this, and realized that if the matter meant so much to Tussmann that he was willing to make such concessions, it must indeed be of the utmost importance. I answered that I considered that I had sufficiently refuted his charges in the eyes of the world and had no desire to put him in a humiliating position, but that I would make the utmost efforts to procure him what he wanted.

He thanked me abruptly and took his leave, saying rather vaguely that he hoped to find a complete exposition of something in the Black Book which had evidently been slighted in the later edition.

I set to work, writing letters to friends, colleagues and bookdealers all over the world, and soon discovered that I had assumed a task of no small magnitude. Three months elapsed before my efforts were crowned with success, but at last, through the aid of Professor James Clement of Richmond, Virginia, I was able to obtain what I wished.

I notified Tussmann and he came to London by the next train. His eyes burned avidly as he gazed at the thick, dusty volume with its heavy leather covers and rusty iron hasps, and his fingers quivered with eagerness as he thumbed the time-yellowed pages.

And when he cried out fiercely and smashed his clenched fist down on the table I knew that he had found what he hunted.

“Listen!” he commanded, and read to me a passage that spoke of an old, old temple in a Honduras jungle where a strange god was worshiped by an ancient tribe which became extinct before the coming of the Spaniards. And Tussmann read aloud of the mummy that had been, in life, the last high priest of that vanished people, and which now lay in a chamber hewn in the solid rock of the cliff against which the temple was built. About that mummy’s withered neck was a copper chain, and on that chain a great red jewel carved in the form of a toad. This jewel was a key, Von Junzt went on to say, to the treasure of the temple which lay hidden in a subterranean crypt far below the temple’s altar.

Tussmann’s eyes blazed.

“I have seen that temple! I have stood before the altar.

I have seen the sealed-up entrance of the chamber in which, the natives say, lies the mummy of the priest, It is a very curious temple, no more like the ruins of the prehistoric Indians than it is like the buildings of the modern Latin-Americans. The Indians in the vicinity disclaim any former connection with the place; they say that the people who built that temple were a different race from themselves, and were there when their own ancestors came into the country. I believe it to be a remnant of some long-vanished civilization which began to decay thousands of years before the Spaniards came.

“I would have liked to have broken into the sealed-up chamber, but I had neither the time nor the tools for the task. I was hurrying to the coast, having been wounded by an accidental gunshot in the foot, and I stumbled on to the place purely by chance.

“I have been planning to have another look at it, but circumstances have prevented—now I intend to let nothing stand in my way! By chance I came upon a passage in the Golden Goblin edition of this book, describing the temple. But that was all; the mummy was only briefly mentioned. Interested, I obtained one of Bridewall’s translations but ran up against a blank wall of baffling blunders. By some irritating mischance the translator had even mistaken the location of the Temple of the Toad, as Von Junzt calls it, and has it in Guatemala instead of Honduras. The general description is faulty, the jewel is mentioned and the fact that it is a ‘key.’ But a key to what, Bridewall’s book does not state. I now felt that I was on the track of a real discovery, unless Von Junzt was, as many maintain, a madman. But that the man was actually in Honduras at one time is well attested, and no one could so vividly describe the temple—as he does in the Black Book—unless he had seen it himself, How he learned of the jewel is more than I can say. The Indians who told me of the mummy said nothing of arty jewel. I can only believe that Von Junzt found his way into the sealed crypt somehow—the man had uncanny ways of learning hidden things.

“To the best of my knowledge only one other white man has seen the Temple of the Toad besides Von Junzt and myself—the Spanish traveller Juan Gonzalles, who made a partial exploration of that country in 1793. He mentioned, briefly, a curious fane that differed from most Indian ruins, and spoke skeptically of a legend current among the natives that there was ‘something unusual’ hidden under the temple. I feel certain that he was referring to the Temple of the Toad.

“Tomorrow I sail for Central America. Keep the book; I have no more use for it. This time I am going fully prepared and I intend to find what is hidden in that temple, if I have to demolish it. It can be nothing less than a great store of gold! The Spaniards missed it, somehow; when they arrived in Central America, the Temple of the Toad was deserted; they were searching for living Indians from whom torture could wring gold; not for mummies of lost peoples. But I mean to have that treasure.”

So saying Tussmann took his departure. I sat down and opened the book at the place where he had left off reading, and I sat until midnight, wrapt in Von Junzt’s curious, wild and at times utterly vague expoundings. And I found pertaining to the Temple of the Toad certain things which disquieted me so much that the next morning I attempted to get in touch with Tussmann, only to find that he had already sailed.

Several months passed and then I received a letter from Tussmann, asking me to come and spend a few days with him at his estate in Sussex; he also requested me to bring the Black Book with me.

I arrived at Tussmann’s rather isolated estate just after nightfall. He lived in almost feudal state, his great ivy-grown house and broad lawns surrounded by high stone 95
walls. As I went up the hedge-bordered way from the gate to the house, I noted that the place had not been well kept in its master’s absence. Weeds grew rank among the trees, almost choking out the grass. Among some unkempt bushes over against the outer wall, I heard what appeared to be a horse or an ox blundering and lumbering about. I distinctly heard the clink of its hoof on a stone.

A servant who eyed me suspiciously admitted me and I found Tussmann pacing to and fro in his study like a caged lion. His giant frame was leaner, harder than when I had last seen him; his face was bronzed by a tropic sun. There were more and harsher lines in his strong face and his eyes burned more intensely than ever. A smoldering, baffled anger seemed to underlie his manner.

“Well, Tussmann,” I greeted him, “what success? Did you find the gold?”

“I found not an ounce of gold,” he growled. “The whole thing was a hoax—well, not all of it. I broke into the sealed chamber and found the mummy-”

“And the jewel?” I exclaimed.

He drew something from his pocket and handed it to me.

I gazed curiously at the thing I held. It was a great jewel, clear and transparent as crystal, but of a sinister crimson, carved, as Von Junzt had declared, in the shape of a toad. I shuddered involuntarily; the image was peculiarly repulsive. I turned my attention to the heavy and curiously wrought copper chain which supported it.

“What are these characters carved on the chain?” I asked curiously.

“I can not say,” Tussmann replied. “I had thought perhaps you might know. I find a faint resemblance between them and certain partly defaced hieroglyphics on a monolith known as the Black Stone in the mountains of Hungary. I have been unable to decipher them.”

“Tell me of your trip,” I urged, and over our whiskey-and-sodas he began, as if with a strange reluctance.

“I found the temple again with no great difficulty, though it lies in a lonely and little-frequented region. The temple is built against a sheer stone cliff in a deserted valley unknown to maps and explorers. I would not endeavor to make an estimate of its antiquity, but it is built of a sort of unusually hard basalt, such as I have never seen anywhere else, and its extreme weathering suggests incredible age.

“Most of the columns which form its facade are in ruins, thrusting up shattered stumps from worn bases, like the scattered and broken teeth of some grinning hag. The outer walls axe crumbling, but the inner walls and the columns .which support such of the roof as remains intact, seem good for another thousand years, as well as the walls of the inner chamber.

“The main chamber is a large circular affair with a floor composed of great squares of stone. In the center stands the altar, merely a huge, round, curiously carved block of the same material. Directly behind the altar, in the solid stone cliff which forms the rear wall of the chamber, is the sealed and hewn-out chamber wherein lay the mummy of the temple’s last priest.

“I broke into the crypt with not too much difficulty and found the mummy exactly as is stated in the Black Book. Though it was in a remarkable state of preservation, I was unable to classify it. The withered features and general contour of the skull suggested certain degraded and mongrel peoples of lower Egypt, and I feel certain that the priest was a member of a race more akin to the Caucasian than the Indian. Beyond this, I can not make any positive statement.

“But the jewel was there, the chain looped about the dried-up neck.”

From this point Tussmann’s narrative became so vague that I had some difficulty in following him and wondered if the tropic sun had affected his mind. He had opened a hidden door in the altar somehow with the jewel—just how, he did not plainly say, and it struck me that he did not clearly understand himself the action of the jewel-key. But the opening of the secret door had had a bad effect on the hardy rogues in his employ. They had refused point-blank to follow him through that gaping black opening which had appeared so mysteriously when the gem was touched to the altar.

Tussmann entered alone with his pistol and electric torch, finding a narrow stone stair that wound down into the bowels of the earth, apparently. He followed this and presently came into a broad corridor, in the blackness of which Ids tiny beam of light was almost engulfed. As he told this he spoke with strange annoyance of a toad which hopped ahead of him, just beyond the circle of light, all the time he was below ground.

Making his way along dank tunnels and stairways that were wells of solid blackness, he at last came to a heavy door fantastically carved, which he felt must be the crypt wherein was secreted the gold of the ancient worshippers. He pressed the toad-jewel against it at several places and finally the door gaped wide.

“And the treasure?” I broke in eagerly.

He laughed in savage self-mockery.

“There was no gold there, no precious gems — nothing”—he hesitated—“nothing that I could bring away.”

Again his tale lapsed into vagueness. I gathered that he had left the temple rather hurriedly without searching any further for the supposed treasure. He had intended bringing the mummy away with him, he said, to present to some museum, but when he came up out of the pits, it could not be found and he believed that his men, in superstitious aversion to having such a companion on their road to the coast, had thrown it into some well or cavern.

“And so,” he concluded, “I am in England again no richer than when I left.”

“You have the jewel,” I reminded him. “Surely it is valuable.”

He eyed it without favor, but with a sort of fierce avidness almost obsessional.

“Would you say that it is a ruby?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I am unable to classify it.”

“And I. But let me see the book.”

He slowly turned the heavy pages, his lips moving as he read. Sometimes he shook his head as if puzzled, and I noticed him dwell long over a certain line.

“This man dipped so deeply into forbidden things,” said he, “I can not wonder that his fate was so strange and mysterious. He must have had some foreboding of his end—here he warns men not to disturb sleeping things.”

Tussmann seemed lost in thought for some moments.

“Aye, sleeping things,” he muttered, “that seem dead, but only lie waiting for some blind fool to awake them—I should have read further in the Black Book—and I should have shut the door when I left the crypt—but I have the key and I’ll keep it in spite of hell.”

He roused himself from his reveries and was about to speak when he stopped short. From somewhere upstairs had a come a peculiar sound.

“What was that?” He glared at me. I shook my head and he ran to the door and shouted for a servant. The man entered a few moments later and he was rather pale.

“You were upstairs?” growled Tussmann.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hear anything?” asked Tussmann harshly and in a manner almost threatening and accusing.

“I did, sir,” the man answered with a puzzled look on his face.

“What did you hear?” The question was fairly snarled.

“Well, sir,” the man laughed apologetically, “you’ll say I’m a bit off, I fear, but to tell you the truth, sir, it sounded like a horse stamping around on the roof!”

A blaze of absolute madness leaped into Tussmann’s eyes.

“You fool!” he screamed. “Get out of here!” The man shrank back in amazement and Tussmann snatched up the gleaming toad-carved jewel.

“I’ve been a fool!” he raved. “I didn’t read far enough—and I should have shut the door—but by heaven, the key is mine and I’ll keep it in spite of man or devil.”

And with these strange words he turned and fled upstairs. A moment later his door slammed heavily and a servant, knocking timidly, brought forth only a blasphemous order to retire and luridly worded threat to shoot any one who tried to obtain entrance into the room.

Had it not been so late I would have left the house, for I was certain that Tussmann was stark mad. As it was, I retired to the room a frightened servant showed me, but I did not go to bed. I opened the pages of the Black Book at the place where Tussmann had been reading.

This much was evident, unless the man was utterly insane: he had stumbled upon something unexpected in the Temple of the Toad. Something unnatural about the opening of the altar door had frightened his men, and in the subterraneous crypt Tussmann had found something that he had not thought to find. And I believed that he had been followed from Central America, and that the reason for his persecution was the jewel he called the Key.

Seeking some clue in Von Junzt’s volume, I read again of the Temple of the Toad, of the strange pre-Indian people who worshipped there, and of the huge, tittering, tentacled, hoofed monstrosity that they worshipped.

Tussmann had said that he had not read far enough when he had first seen the book. Puzzling over this cryptic phrase I came upon the line he had pored over—marked by his thumb nail. It seemed to me to be another of Von Junzt’s many ambiguities, for it merely stated that a temple’s god was the temple’s treasure. Then the dark implication of the hint struck me and cold sweat beaded my forehead.

The Key to the Treasure! And the temple’s treasure was the temple’s god! And sleeping Things might awaken on the opening of their prison door! I sprang up, unnerved by the intolerable suggestion, and at that moment something crashed in the stillness and the death-scream of a human being burst upon my ears.

In an instant I was out of the room, and as I dashed up the stairs I heard sounds that have made me doubt my sanity ever since. At Tussmann’s door I halted, essaying with shaking hand to turn the knob. The door was locked, and as I hesitated I heard from within a hideous high-pitched tittering and then the disgusting squashy sound as if a great, jelly-like bulk was being forced through the window. The sound ceased and I could have sworn I heard a faint swish of gigantic wings. Then silence.

Gathering my shattered nerves, I broke down the door. A foul and overpowering stench billowed out like a yellow mist. Gasping in nausea I entered. The room was in ruins, but nothing was missing except that crimson toad-carved jewel Tussmann called the Key, and that was never found. A foul, unspeakable slime smeared the window-sill, and in the center of the room lay Tussmann, his head crushed and flattened; and on the red ruin of skull and face, the plain print of an enormous hoof.

Mr. Ames’ Devil

August Derleth

Sherwood Ames was an amiable little man whom nobody looked at twice. It was not his fault; he had nothing distinguishing about him, and neither had his parents. Somewhere in his early years, however, Mr. Ames had picked up some knowledge of wizardry, and secretly, he often convinced himself that he was an adept at summoning devils, and practising the black arts.

Mr. Ames, however, had never really summoned a devil.

Until one night in mid-summer when he had nothing better to do. He constructed all the designs he had learned, took his place in the middle, and did all the mumbo-jumbo he was supposed to do. He was both surprised and shocked at his success. He had hardly uttered his last syllables before there was a flash of fire, an overwhelming odor of brimstone, and there was Mr. Ames’ devil. He was pint-size, to be sure, but Mr. Ames himself was not a giant.

“Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Ames thoughtlessly.

The imp grimaced and informed Mr. Ames that he was being extremely distasteful. He went on to inquire why Ames needed a personal devil, since he had been having things pretty much his own way insofar as his meager demands on life were concerned. Besides, complained the imp, he had personally been having a good time making things hot for a couple of sinners in Vichy.

“In that case,” said Mr. Ames agreeably, “I’ll send you back.”

“Impossible,” said the devil.

Mr. Ames remained agreeable. He explained that he had just wanted to summon a devil; he had not really believed he could do it.

Firmly the devil pointed out to Mr. Ames that he had gone through the accepted ritual for summoning a personal devil, and there was now nothing for it but to keep him on. “My name is Zebub,” concluded the imp. “I’m something in the line of Beelzebub.”

“All the same, Zebub, I’m going to send you back,” said Mr. Ames cordially. “I really have no use for a devil.”

“Oh, you could use me,” said Zebub. “I could see to that.”

“No, you’ll have to go back,” said Mr. Ames firmly.

Zebub shook his head and hopped around quite agilely to a comfortable position astride Mr. Ames’ instep. “Quite impossible,” he said. “I may like it here.”

“I may have forgotten the words,” agreed Mr. Ames uncomfortably.

“Even if you haven’t forgotten,” said Zebub.

Mr. Ames thought hard, and words came back. He said them faithfully and performed the prescribed ritual. Nothing whatever happened. Zebub had gone over to the window and looked out.

“You see,” he said over his shoulder. “That ritual’s no good anymore. It’s been outlawed. By the union.”

“What union?”

“The Personal Devils’ Union, Local Number 7. Really, Mr. Ames, for a summoner of devils, you’re not up to date. The fact is, the moment we organized, we made it impossible to discharge any one of us without due and sufficient cause.”

Mr. Ames was aghast. “You mean you’re going to stay?”

“Certainly.”

Mr. Ames did not know what to say. He was even farther from knowing what to do. He looked dubiously at Zebub and contemplated his future. What would people say? After all, he had his position in Tattersall, Swithin & Ames to think about. What would old Tattersall say? Contemplating the head of the firm, Mr. Ames began to perspire.

“No,” said Ames firmly, shaking his head, “it won’t do. It can’t be done. Why, just think, I’ll be asked all sorts of embarrassing questions, and what will I say?”

“I see your point,” said Zebub. “Naturally, I don’t hold with telling them the truth—but in this case, they would believe you were telling a preposterous lie, and the resulting slander and libel in malicious gossip might well be profitable—from my point of view.”

“Never!”

Zebub shrugged. “The trouble with you is, you have no imagination. I suppose I can always make myself invisible.”

“Well, that might be different.”

Zebub obligingly vanished. His voice, however, was not gone. It was as commanding as ever. “I’m really still here,” he said. He went on to point out that arrangements ought to be made at once; he would sleep next to the fireplace—“It reminds me of home!”—he would spend all the rest of his time at Mr. Ames’ elbow, ready to serve. “Service is our motto, Mr. Ames, but please try to leave the deity out of your conversation as much as possible. You have no idea how mention of him sends cold shivers up my spine.”

“I didn’t know devils had feelings.”

“Of course we have,” said Zebub in an injured voice. “Thank Satan, however, we’re not entirely human. Only a few of us have sunk to that level of degradation to suffer the punishment of being banished to earth to become human—like Hitler, for instance. The only trouble with him, with his methods, he sends more business to the other place.”

Mr. Ames swallowed hard in an effort to convince himself he was not, after all, dreaming. Zebub’s voice came out of the air beside him; the imp had moved over closer to the fireplace, and now spoke from there. It was inconceivable that he should have succeeded in his little experiment; it was monstrous that he should now be saddled with Zebub. Deep down in his rather simple mind, he had never really believed he could summon a demon. But he had. He had raised Zebub out of the Pit, and here he was, a permanent addition to the household, which consisted only of Mr. Ames and a woman who did the place.

The whole thing was beyond reason. He could take the devil in his stride, given a month or so in which to do it, but all this talk about the Personal Devils’ Union and the rules and regulations of that union were too much for him; it was not fair; it was riot in the books. Somehow he had been put upon.

Zebub made himself visible again, quite abruptly. He was standing in the middle of the fire toasting himself a brilliant crimson. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. “After all—we aim to serve. Anyone whose neck you want broken, for instance?”

“Certainly not!” exclaimed Mr. Ames, honestly shocked.

“Tch, tch! How disappointing! Remember, you have only to wish, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Forthwith he disappeared once more. It did not add to Mr. Ames’ comfort to become aware of the strong odor of brimstone and sulphur that tainted the air.

When he did not see Zebub for twenty-four hours, Mr. Ames began to think he had been a little hasty to respond to his visit by despairing for his future; it began to seem that Zebub had indeed taken his departure, union or no union, and he was free of him. He breathed easier, and made a determined effort to forget him.

In a week’s time, Mr. Ames had quite regained his self-composure. He was convinced that Zebub had given him up as a bad job and taken French leave, and he began to look back on his summoning of Zebub as a pleasantly dangerous episode, much as the errant husband looks back on his straying when it is quite safe to do so.

Unfortunately, his composure was premature. He had made the mistake of not taking the devil at his word, and unlike what he might have expected from that notorious purveyor of prevarications, the devil’s word was as good as his bond. Zebub had promised not to leave him; he had said nothing of making a nuisance of himself. As a matter of fact, he was profoundly bored with his existence and spent most of each day enjoying his memory of the Vichy sinners.

Ultimately, of course, Mr. Ames was destined for a rude awakening. This took place on the ninth day after Zebub had first made his appearance. It had been a trying day, and old Tattersall was in one of his worst moods. There was no doubt about the old man’s ability to be the most disagreeable person on the face of the earth if he had a mind to. On that day he very definitely had. He ranted and stormed and called repeatedly upon heaven to witness the mental infirmities of his partners and the staff. He made things so miserable for Ames, whose chief happiness lay in being unobtrusive, that Ames was fervently convinced there was not another martinet like Old T. in all Chicago. Or even in New York. In any case, the upshot of his misery was that Ames left the office that evening in a cold rage. I wish the old fool were on the Styx! he thought.

“How’s that again?” asked a voice at his side.

“I wish old Tattersall were on the Styx,” said Ames, thinking one of the junior clerks had spoken to him.

“Now, that’s something like it!”

Young Ruston, coming up behind him, said, “I guess everybody but Swithin feels the same way.”

Mr. Ames was comforted.

His comfort lasted less than an hour. He had hardly got home when the telephone rang. It was Mr. Swithin, begging to inform Mr. Ames dolefully that Mr. Tattersall had been struck and killed by a Wilson Avenue bus at a street intersection. Mr. Swithin was now head of the firm, Mr. Ames its junior, and young Mr. Tattersall, the old man’s nephew, would replace Mr. Ames.

Ames was not a man given to belief in coincidence. He was badly shaken when he retired to his favorite chair and, swallowing hard, ventured weakly to address Zebub.

“Yes?”

There he was, in his preferred position smack in the middle of the fire, switching his tail to and fro, his complexion a deep rose. He looked sleek and happy, and just at the moment seemed very well satisfied with himself.

“You called, I believe?”

“You’ve been here, then—all the time?”

“At your elbow except for the time you sent me on that errand.”

“What errand?”

“To take care of Mr. Tattersall.”

“I said I wanted him on the Styx—not pushed in front of a bus. That’s what you did, isn’t it?” Mr. Ames’ anger vied with his hysteria.

“It was really nothing. He pushed very easily.” Zebub smiled modestly.

“But that’s murder!”

“How did you think we could get him to where you wanted him? We couldn’t transfer him bodily. That’s against all the rules and regulations. Oh, I know we used to do it back in the middle ages. We snaffled a bishop or two that way. But really, Old Timer, it’s not being done these days. Help them to shuffle off their mortal coil, and then—pouf!” he snapped his fingers and grinned engagingly, “it’s done. Right now Old T. is enjoying himself on a houseboat on the Styx—you knew John Kendricks Bangs has one there.”

_ Mr. Ames gritted his teeth and muttered, “I’m dreaming this.”

“No, it’s just your lack of imagination.”

Ames closed his eyes tightly.

“You needn’t do that,” protested Zebub, and obligingly vanished. “It really makes no difference whether you see me or whether you don’t. Considering your state of mind, I think you’d feel better if you didn’t see me.”

There was a pause. Mr. Ames opened one eye warily.

Zebub was gone. He expelled a breath cautiously and opened the other eye.

“Another thing,” said Zebub’s voice out of the fire, “I wish you wouldn’t call me like this unless you really have something for me to do.”

Mr. Ames gave forth a strangled gasp and fled the house.

He walked for a long time around Lincoln Park, but the walk was no comfort to him. He thought and thought about how to get rid of Zebub, but nothing presented itself to him. There was always one alternative—he could go to see MacDougal, the psychic researcher who was a member of his own Club—but he hesitated to do so lest Mac, who was a congenial old soul, think he had lost his mind. He went home at last, unhappy.

He conditioned himself to living with the threat of Zebub. That was the way he thought of the imp; since he did not see him, and did not hear him, he considered him an omnipresent threat rather than a reality. He conditioned himself very simply by taking strict care that he wish no one any trouble, no matter how hard-pressed his patience might be.

He never knew how he got through those first few days. He had gone to old Tattersall’s funeral in a pall of gloom so deep that he thought everyone would notice; his gloom only superficially covered his air of guilt. But no one seemed to pay any attention to him, and his spirits lifted a little; he felt a little less like a murderer and that evening simply hurried past newspaper pictures of gangsters instead of sitting and staring at them and imagining that he was a brother under the skin. But somehow he managed to overcome that dreadful conviction of guilt, and after two months or so he could almost forget it. He might have forgotten it completely had it not been for his superior position in the firm; there was always that to remind him that Old T. was no more and that his position in the world had altered. More than once even then he caught himself wondering what Old T. did to pass the time on that houseboat on the Styx.

But of course, even with every good reason in the world, it could not be expected that any man—least of all, a man like Mr. Ames—could hold himself in, especially with Herbert Swithin around. Old T. had been bad enough; but there was really no comparison. Swithin was insufferable; after being held down so many years by Old T., Swithin now made up for all his lost time, and doubled up on it. All at the expense of Ames and the staff. Nagging, fault-finding, querulousness, a dictator complex —all these and more, poor Ames suffered.

No one could really blame him for giving vent to his spleen by calling down a pox on Swithin.

So Herbert Swithin got the pox, and with a vengeance.

It was Zebub’s doings; there was never a question of that in Ames’ mind. He hurried home that day, after learning at the office the reason for Swithin’s absence, and summoned Zebub.

“Now what?” demanded the imp. “Isn’t my work satisfactory?”

“Well, no. Only, you’ve taken me too literally.”

Zebub grinned and wagged his tail. “Oh, not at all. Mr. Swithin will be gathered in next Monday. He will have a nice warm spot.”

“You don’t mean.—he’s going to die?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Mr. Ames. Of course he is. I read your heart when you called down that pox.” He smirked. “Now you’ll be head of the firm, and since that is soon to be a fact, there is a little matter I’ve been meaning to bring up. I’ve not really been paid, you know, and it’s about time for an accounting.”

“Paid!” shouted Ames, almost beside himself. “What are you talking about? It’s enough that I’m at fault in this business of murder—an accessory before and after.”

“Oh, posh! Don’t moralize. You’ve no idea how tiresome that is for a person of my connections. To get back to the point—my remuneration. You must admit I’ve served you well. Now, then, Swithin has no heirs; so your nephew can step into young Tattersall’s place, when you two are moved up.”

“I have no nephew.”

“Oh, you will have. I’ll serve. I’ll make the change. I’ve long thought it would be much more fun to have a really active part in a legal firm. The chances of chicanery are very good—I’ve observed them repeatedly from the vantage point of my invisibility. Something ought to be made of them. As it is, you’re all too disgustingly honest.”

Ames thought Zebub was joking. When finally the imp had persuaded Mr. Ames that he was most certainly in earnest, Ames was in no condition to argue. Indeed, he commanded Zebub to disappear and himself went out, hailed a cab, and was driven down town.

It was only too clear that Zebub’s long inactivity was getting the best of him. Just as it would undoubtedly get the best of Ames if something weren’t done immediately. Like it or not, he had to see MacDougal.

He went straight to the Cliff dwellers’ and there was old Mac, playing chess and talking politics with a couple of architects. As soon as the game was finished—after two agonising hours—he managed to comer Mac.

“You look ill, Ames. What is it?” Mac was solicitous, his watery blue eyes grave.

Out came Ames’ story in a burst of extraordinary frankness. He bared his soul for MacDougal, and the old man did not once interrupt. His face betrayed his surprise, however, but, as far as Ames could see, there was no great disbelief. That was one major obstacle hurdled. Now what to do?

“That should be quite simple,” replied MacDougal ingratiatingly. “You’ll have to change your status.”

“My status? But how would that affect Zebub and his infernal union regulations?”

“Ah, don’t you see? If you cease to be an employer, and become an employee instead, the rules won’t apply to him any more.”

“But now …”

“That’s formula 73. Just look it up. You’ll just have to join the union, what was it?—the Personal Devils’ Union, Local Number 7, I think you said.”

Mr. Ames was delighted at this simple way out. He hurried home forthwith and looked up the formula.

“I wouldn’t pay any attention to that old fogy,” cautioned Zebub.

“Naturally, you wouldn’t!” chortled Ames.

“Just the same . .

“Now, see here, Zebub. As long as you’re in my service, you’ll do as I say. And I’m telling you to hold your tongue.”

Zebub switched his tail angrily and held his tongue, withal grinning sardonically.

Mr. Ames got himself ready. He laid out all the cabalistic designs, and began to recite the formula which would admit him to membership in the Personal Devils’ Union and at the same time rid him of Zebub.

Unfortunately for Mr. Ames, he forgot that membership in the Personal Devils’ Union entailed certain responsibilities and put him under the same rules and regulations which governed Zebub.

Zebub disappeared as the last words of Formula 73 were uttered.

So did Mr. Ames.

In the X-Ray

Fritz Leiber, Jr.

“Do the dead come back?” Dr. Ballard repeated the question puzzledly. “What’s that got to do with your ankle?”

“I didn’t say that,” Nancy Sawyer answered sharply. “I said, ‘I tried an ice pack.’ You must have misheard me.” “But …” Dr. Ballard began. Then, “Of course I must have,” he said quickly. “Go on, Miss Sawyer.”

The girl hesitated. Her glance strayed to the large, gleaming window and the graying sky beyond. She was a young woman with prominent eyes, a narrow chin, strong white teeth, reddish hair, and a beautiful, doe-like figure which included legs long and slim—except for the ankle of the one outstretched stockingless on the chair before her. That was encircled by a hard, white, somewhat irregular swelling.

Dr. Ballard was a man of middle age and size, with strong, soft-skinned hands. He looked intelligent and as successful as his sleekly furnished office.

“Well, there isn’t much more to it,” the girl said finally. “I tried the ice pack but the swelling wouldn’t go down. So Marge made me call you.”

“I see. Tell me, Miss Sawyer, hadn’t your ankle bothered you before last night?”

“No. I just woke up from a nightmare frightened because something had grabbed my foot, and I reached down and touched my ankle—and there it was.”

“Your ankle didn’t feel or look any different the day before?”

“No.”

“Yet when you woke up the swelling was there?”

“Just as it is now.”

“Do you think you might have twisted your foot while you were asleep?”

“No.”

“And you don’t feel any pain in it now?”

“No, except a feeling of something hard clasped snugly around it and every once in a while squeezing a bit tighter.”

“Ever do any sleepwalking?”

“No.”

“Any allergies?”

“No.”

“Can you think of anything else—anything at all—that might have a bearing on this trouble?”

Again Nancy looked out the window. “I have a twin sister,” she said after a moment, in a different voice. “Or rather, I had. She died more than a year ago.” She looked back quickly at Dr. Ballard. “But I don’t know why I should mention that,” she said hurriedly. “It couldn’t possibly have any bearing of this. She died of apoplexy.” There was a pause.

“I suppose the X-ray will show what’s the matter?” she continued.

The doctor nodded. “Well have it soon. Miss Snyder’s getting it now.”

Nancy started to get up, asked, “Is it all right for me to move around?” Dr. Ballard nodded. She went over to the window, limping just a little, and looked down.

“You have a nice view, you can see half the city,” she said. “We have the river at our apartment. I think we’re higher, though.”

“This is the twentieth floor,” Dr. Ballard said.

“We’re twenty-three,” she told him. “I like high buildings. It’s a little like being in an airplane. With the river right under our windows I can imagine I’m flying over water.”

There was a soft knock at the door. Nancy looked around inquiringly. “The X-ray?” He shook his head. He went to the door and opened it.

“It’s your friend, Miss Hudson.”

“Hi, Marge,” Nancy called. “Come on in.”

The stocky, sandy-haired girl hung in the doorway. “I’ll stay out here,” she said. “I thought we could go home together though.”

“Darling, how nice of you. But I’ll be a bit longer, Tm afraid.”

“That’s all right. How are you feeling, Nancy?”

“Wonderful, dear. Especially now that your doctor has taken a picture that’ll show him what’s inside this bump of mine.”

“Well, I’ll be out here,” the other girl said and turned back into the waiting room. She passed a woman in white who came in, shut the door, and handed the doctor a large, brown envelope.

He turned to Nancy. “I’ll look at this and be back right away.”

“Dr. Myers is on the phone,” the nurse told him as they started out. “Wants to know about tonight. Can he come here and drive over with you?”

“How soon can he get here?”

“About half an hour, he says.”

“Tell him that will be fine, Miss Snyder.”

The door closed behind them. Nancy sat still for perhaps two minutes. Then she jerked, as if at a twinge of pain. She looked at her ankle. Bending over, she clasped her hand around her good ankle and squeezed experimentally. She shuddered.

The door banged open. Dr. Ballard hurried in and immediately began to re-examine the swelling, swiftly exploring each detail of its outlines with gentle fingers, at the same time firing questions.

“Are you absolutely sure, Miss Sawyer, that you hadn’t noticed anything of this swelling before last night? Perhaps just some slight change in shape or feeling, or a tendency to favor that ankle, or just a disinclination to look at it? Cast your mind back.”

Nancy hesitated uneasily, but when she spoke it was with certainty. “No, I’m absolutely sure.”

He shook his head. “Very well. And now, Miss Sawyer, that twin of yours. Was she identical?”

Nancy looked at him. “Why are you interested in that? Doctor, what does the X-ray show?”

“I have a very good reason, which I’ll explain to you later. I’ll go into details about the X-ray then, too. You can set your mind at rest on one point, though, if it’s been worrying you. This swelling is in no sense malignant.” “Thank goodness, Doctor.”

“But now about the twin.”

“You really want to know?”

“I do.”

Nancy’s manner and voice showed some signs of agitation. “Why, yes,” she said, “we were identical. People were always mistaking us for each other. We looked exactly alike, but underneath …” Her voice trailed off. There was a change in the atmosphere of the office, a change hard to define. Abruptly she continued, “Dr. Ballard, I’d like to tell you about her, tell you things I’ve hardly told anyone else. You know, it was she I was dreaming about last night. In fact, I thought it was she who had grabbed me in my nightmare. What’s the matter, Dr. Ballard?”

It did seem that Dr. Ballard had changed color, though it was hard to tell in the failing light. What he said, a little jerkily, was, “Nothing, Miss Sawyer. Please go ahead.” He leaned forward a little, resting his elbows on the desk, and watched her.

“You know, Dr. Ballard,” she began slowly, “most people think that twins are very affectionate. They think stories of twins hating each other are invented by writers looking for morbid plots.

“But in my case the morbid plot happened to be the simple truth. Beth tyrannized over me, hated me, and … wasn’t above expressing her hate in a physical way.” She took a deep breath.

“It started when we were little girls. As far back as I can remember, I was always the slave and she was the mistress. And if I didn’t carry out her orders faithfully, and sometimes if I did, there was always a slap or a pinch. Not a little-girl pinch. Beth had peculiarly strong fingers. I was very afraid of them.

“There’s something terrible, Dr. Ballard, about the way one human being can intimidate another, crush their will power, reduce to mush their ability to fight back. You’d think the victim could escape so easily—look, there are people all around, teachers and friends to confide in, your father and mother—but it’s as if you were bound by invisible chains, your mouth shut by an invisible gag. And it grows and grows, like the horrors of a concentration camp. A whole inner world of pain and fright. And yet on the surface—why, there seems to be nothing at all.

“For of course no one else had the faintest idea of what was going on between us. Everyone thought we loved each other very much. Beth especially was always being praised for ‘sunny gayety.’ I was supposed to be a little ‘subdued.’ Oh, how she used to fuss and coo over me when there were people around. Though even then there would be pinches on the sly—hard ones I never winced at. And more than that, for… .”

Nancy broke off. “But I really don’t think I should be wasting your time with all these childhood gripes, Dr. Ballard. Especially since I know you have an engagement for this evening.”

“That’s just an informal dinner with a few old cronies. I have lots of time. Go right ahead. I’m interested.”

Nancy paused, frowning a little. “The funny thing is,” she continued, “I never understood why Beth hated me. It was as if she were intensely jealous. Yet there was no reason for that. She was the successful one, the one who won the prizes and played the leads in the school shows and got the nicest presents and all the boys. But somehow each success made her worse. I’ve sometimes thought, Dr. Ballard, that only cruel people can be successful, that success is really a reward for cruelty … to someone.”

Dr. Ballard knit his brows, might have nodded.

“The only thing I ever read that helped explain it to me,” she went on, “was something in psychoanalysis. The idea that each of us has an equal dose of love and hate, and that it’s our business to balance them off, to act in such a way, that both have expression and yet so that the hate is always under the control of the love.

“But perhaps when the two people are very close together, as it is with twins, the balancing works out differently. Perhaps all the softness and love begins to gather in the one person and all the hardness and hate in the other. And then the hate takes the lead, because it’s an emotion of violence and power and action—a concentrated emotion, not misty like love. And it keeps on and on, getting worse all the time, until it’s so strong you feel it will never stop, not even with death.

“For it did keep on, Dr. Ballard, and it did get worse,” Nancy looked at him closely. “Oh, I know that what I’ve been telling you isn’t supposed to be so unusual among children. ‘Little barbarians,’ people say, quite confident that they’ll outgrow it. Quite convinced that wrist-twisting and pinching are things that will automatically stop when children begin to grow up.”

Nancy smiled thinly at him. “Well, they don’t stop, Dr. Ballard. You know, it’s very hard for most people to associate actual cruelty with an adolescent girl, maybe because of the way girls have been glorified in advertising. Yet I could write you a pretty chapter on just that topic. Of course a lot of it that happened in my case was what you’d call mental cruelty. I was shy and Beth had a hundred ways of embarrassing me. And if a boy became interested in me, she’d always take him way.”

“I’d hardly have thought she’d have been able to,” remarked Dr. Ballard.

“You think I’m good-looking? But I’m only good-looking in an odd way, and in any case it never seemed to count then. It’s true, though, that twice there were boys who wouldn’t respond to her invitations. Then both times she played a trick that only she could, because we were identical twins. She would pretend to be me—she could always imitate my maimer and voice, even my reactions, precisely, though I couldn’t possibly have imitated her—and then she would … do something that would make the boy drop me cold.”

“Do something?”

Nancy looked down. “Oh, insult the boy cruelly, pretending to be me. Or else make some foul, boastful confession, pretending it was mine. If you knew how those boys loathed me afterwards… .

“But as I said, it wasn’t only mental cruelty or indecent tricks. I remember nights when I’d done something to displease her and I’d gone to bed before her and she’d come in and I’d pretend to be asleep and after a while she’d say—oh, I know, Dr. Ballard, it sounds like something a silly little girl would say, but it didn’t sound like that then, with my head under the sheet, pressed into the pillow, and her footsteps moving slowly around the bed—she’d say, ‘I’m thinking of how to punish you.’ And then there’d be a long wait, while I still pretended to be asleep, and then the touch … oh, Dr. Ballard, her hands! I was so afraid of her hands! But … what is it, Dr. Ballard?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“There’s nothing much more to say. Except that Beth’s cruelty and my fear went on until a year ago, when she died suddenly—I suppose you’d say tragically—of a blood clot on the brain. I’ve often wondered since then whether her hatred of me, so long and so cleverly concealed, mightn’t have had something to do with it. Apoplexy’s what haters die of, isn’t it, doctor?

“I remember leaning over her bed the day she died, lying there paralyzed, with her beautiful face white and stiff as a fish’s, one eye bigger than the other. I felt pity for her (You realize, doctor, don’t you, that I always loved her?) but just then her hand flopped a little way across the blanket and touched mine, although they said she was completely paralyzed, and her big eye twitched around a little until it was looking almost at me and her lips moved and I thought I heard her say, ‘I’ll come back and punish you for this,’ and then I felt her fingers moving, just a little, on my skin, as if they were trying to close on my wrist, and I jerked back with a cry.

“Mother was very angry with me for that. She thought I was just a selfish, thoughtless girl, afraid of death and unable to repress my fear even for my dying sister’s sake. Of course I could never tell her the real reason. I’ve never really told that to anyone, except you. And now that I’ve told you I hardly know why I’ve done it.”

She smiled nervously, quite unhumorously.

“Wasn’t there something about a dream you had last night?” Dr. Ballard asked softly.

“Oh yes!” The listlessness snapped out of her. “I dreamed I was walking in an old graveyard with gnarly gray trees, and overhead the sky was gray and low and threatening, and everything was weird and dreadful. But somehow I was very happy. But then I felt a faint movement under my feet and I looked down at the grave I was passing and I saw the earth falling away into it. Just a little cone-shaped pit at first, with the dark sandy earth sliding down its sides, and a small black hole at the bottom. I knew I must run away quickly, but I couldn’t move an inch. Then the pit grew larger and the earth tumbled down its sides in chunks and the black hole grew. And still I was rooted there. I looked at the gravestone beyond and it said ‘Elizabeth Sawyer, 1926-48.’ Then out of the hole came a hand and arm, only there were just shreds of dark flesh clinging to the bone, and it began to feel around with an awful, snatching swiftness. Then suddenly the earth heaved and opened, and a figure came swiftly hitching itself up out of the hole. And although the flesh was green and shrunken and eaten and the eyes just holes, I recognized Beth—there was still the beautiful reddish hair. And then the ragged hand touched my ankle and instantly closed on it and the other hand came groping upward, higher, higher, and I screamed … and then I woke up.”

Nancy was leaning forward, her eyes fixed on the doctor. Suddenly her hair seemed to bush out, just a trifle. Perhaps it had “stood on end.” At any rate, she said, “Dr. Ballard, I’m frightened.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve made you distress yourself,” he said. The words were more reassuring than the tone of voice. He suddenly took her hand in his and for a few moments they sat there silently. Then she smiled and moved a little and said, “It’s gone now. I’ve been very silly. I don’t know why I told you all I did about Beth. It couldn’t help you with my ankle.”

“No, of course not,” he said after a moment;

“Why did you ask if she was-identical?”

He leaned back. His voice became brisker again. “I’ll tell you about that right now—-and about what the X-ray shows. I think there’s a connection. As you probably know, Miss Sawyer, identical twins look so nearly alike because they come from the same germ cell. Before it starts to develop, it splits in two. Instead of one individual, two develop. That was what happened in the case of you and your sister.” He paused. “But,” he continued, “sometimes, especially if there’s a strong tendency to twin births in the family, the splitting doesn’t stop there. One of the two cells splits again. The result—triplets. I believe that also happened in your case.”

Nancy looked at him puzzledly. “But then what happened to the third child?”

“The third sister,” he amplified. “There can’t be identical boy-and-girl twins or triplets, you know, since sex .is determined in the original germ cell. There, Miss Sawyer, we come to my second point. Not all twins develop and are actually born. Some start to develop and then stop.”

“What happens to them?”

“Sometimes what there is of them is engulfed in the child that does develop completely—little fragments of a body, bits of this and that, all buried in the flesh of the child that is actually bom. I think that happened in your case.”

Nancy looked at him oddly. “You mean I have in me bits of another twin sister, a triplet sister, who didn’t develop?”

“Exactly.”

“And that all this is connected with my ankle?”

“Yes.”

“But then how—?”

“Sometimes nothing happens to the engulfed fragments. But sometimes, perhaps many years later, they begin to grow—in a natural way rather than malignantly. There are well-authenticated cases of this happening—as recently as 1890 a Mexican boy in this way ‘gave birth’ to his own twin brother, completely developed though of course dead. There’s nothing nearly as extensive as that in your case, but I’m sure there is a pocket of engulfed materials around your ankle and that it recently started to grow, so gradually that you didn’t notice it until the growth became so extensive as to be irritating.”

Nancy eyed him closely. “What sort of materials? I mean the engulfed fragments.”

He hesitated. “I’m not quite sure,” he said. “The X-ray was . .. oh, such things are apt to be odd, though harmless stuff—teeth, hair, nails you never can tell. We’ll know better later.”

“Could I see the X-ray?”

He hesitated again. ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t mean anything to you. Just a lot of shadows.”

“Could there be … other pockets of fragments?”

“It’s not likely. And if there are, it’s improbable they’ll ever bother you.”

There was a pause.

Nancy said, “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it,” she repeated. “It’s as if Beth had come back. Inside me.”

“The fragments have no connection with your dead sister,” Dr. Ballard assured her. “They’re not part of Beth, but of a third sister, if you can call such fragments a person.”

“But those fragments only began to grow after Beth died. As if Beth’s soul… . And was it my original cell that split a second time?—or was it Beth’s?—so that it was the fragments of half her cell that I absorbed, so that. …” She stopped. “I’m afraid I’m being silly again.”

He looked at her for a while, then with the air of someone snapping to attention, quickly nodded.

“But, doctor,” she said, also like someone snatching at practicality, “what’s to happen now?”

“Well,” he replied, “in order to get rid of this disfigurement to your ankle, a relatively minor operation will be necessary. You see, this sort of foreign body can’t be reduced in size by heat or X-ray or injections. Surgery is needed, though probably only under local anaesthetic. Could you arrange to enter a hospital tomorrow? Then I could operate the next morning. You’d have to stay about four days.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, I think I could manage that.” She looked distastefully at her ankle. “In fact, I’d like to do it as soon as possible.”

“Good. We’ll ask Miss Snyder to arrange things.”

When the nurse entered, she said, “Dr. Myers is outside.”

“Tell him I’ll be right along,” Dr. Ballard said. “And then I’d like you to call Central Hospital. Miss Sawyer will take the reservation we got for Mrs. Phipps and were about to cancel.” And they discussed details while Nancy pulled on stocking and shoe.

Nancy said goodbye and started for the waiting room, favoring her bad leg. Dr. Ballard watched her. The nurse opened the door. Beyond, Nancy’s friend got up with a smile. There was now, besides her, a dark, oldish man in the waiting room.

As the nurse was about to dose the door, Dr. Ballard said, “Miss Sawyer.”

She turned. “Yes?”

“If your ankle should start to trouble you tonight—or anything else—please call me.”

“Thank you, doctor, I will.”

Dr. Ballard nodded. Then he called to his friend, “Be right with you.” The dark, oldish man flapped an arm at him.

The door closed. Dr. Ballard went to his desk, took an X-ray photograph out of its brown envelope, switched on the light, studied the photograph incredulously.

He put it back in its envelope and on the desk. He got his hat and overcoat from the closet. He turned out the light. Then suddenly he went back and got the envelope, stuffed it in his pocket, and went out.

The dinner with Dr. Myers and three other old professional friends proved if anything more enjoyable than Dr. Ballard had anticipated. It led to relaxation, gossip, a leisurely evening stroll, a drink together, a few final yams. At one point Dr. Ballard felt a fleeting impulse to get the X-ray out of his overcoat pocket and show it to them and tell his little yam about it, but something made him hesitate, and he forgot the idea. He felt very easy in his mind as he drove home about midnight. He even hummed a little. This mood was not disturbed until he saw the face of Miss Willis, his resident secretary.

“What is it?” he asked crisply.

“Miss Nancy Sawyer. She… .” For once the imperturbable, graying blonde seemed to have difficulty speaking.

“Yes?”

“She called up first about an hour and a half ago.”

“Her ankle had begun to pain her?”

“She didn’t say anything about her ankle. She said she was getting a sore throat.”

“What!”

“It seemed unimportant to me, too, though of course I told her I’d inform you when you got in. But she seemed rather frightened, kept complaining of this tightness she felt in her throat…

“Yes? Yes?”

“So I agreed to get in touch with you immediately. She hung up. I called the restaurant, but you’d just left. Then I called Dr. Myers’ home, but didn’t get any answer. I told the operator to keep trying.

“About a half hour ago Miss Sawyer’s friend, a Marge Hudson, called. She said Miss Sawyer had gone to bed and was apparently asleep, but she didn’t like the way she was tossing around, as if she were having a particularly bad dream, and especially she didn’t like the noises she was making in her throat, as if she were having difficulty breathing. She said she had looked closely at Miss Sawyer’s throat as she lay sleeping, and it seemed swollen. I told her I was making every effort to get in touch with you and we left it at that”

“That wasn’t all?”

“No.” Miss Willis’ agitation returned. “Just two minutes before you arrived, the phone rang again. At first the line seemed to be dead. I was about to hang up. Then I began to hear a clicking, gargling sound. Low at first, but then it grew louder. Then suddenly it broke free and whooped out in what I think was Miss Sawyer’s voice. There were only two words, I think, but I couldn’t catch them because they were so loud they stopped the phone. After that, nothing, although I listened and listened and kept sayin ‘hello’ over and over. But, Dr. Ballard, that gargling sound! It was as if I were listening to someone being strangled, very slowly, very, very… .”

But Dr. Ballard had grabbed up his surgical bag and was racing for his car. He drove rather well for a doctor and, tonight, very fast. He was about three blocks from the river when he heard a siren, ahead of him.

Nancy Sawyer’s apartment hotel was at the end of a short street terminated by a high concrete curb and metal fence and, directly below, the river. Now there was a fire engine drawn up to the fence and playing a searchlight down over the edge through the faintly misty air. Dr. Ballard could see a couple of figures in shiny black coats beside the searchlight As he jumped out of his car he could hear shouts and what sounded like the motor of a launch. He hesitated for a moment, then ran into the hotel.

The lobby was empty. There was no one behind the counter. He ran to the open elevator. It was an automatic. He punched the twenty-three button.

On that floor there was one open door in the short corridor. Marge Hudson met him inside it.

“She jumped?”

The girl nodded. “They’re hunting for her body. I’ve been watching. Come on.”

She led him to a dark bedroom. There was a studio couch, its covers disordered, and beside it a phone. River air was pouring in through a large, hinged window, open wide. They went to it and looked down. The circling launch looked like a toy boat. Its searchlight and that from the fire engine roved across the dark water. Shouts and chugging came up faintly.

“How did it happen?” he asked the girl at the window.

“I was watching her as she lay in bed,” Marge Hudson answered without looking around. “About twenty minutes after I called your home, she seemed to be getting worse. She had more trouble breathing. I tried to wake her, but couldn’t. I went to the kitchen to make an ice pack. It took longer than I’d thought. I heard a noise that at first I didn’t connect with Nancy. Then I realized that she was strangling. I rushed back. Just then she screamed out horribly. I heard something fall—I think it was the phone—and footsteps and the window opening. When I came in she was standing on the sill in her nightdress, clawing at her throat. Before I could get to her, she jumped.”

“Earlier in the evening she’d complained of a sore throat?”

“Yes. She said, jokingly, that the trouble with her ankle must be spreading to her throat. After she called your home and couldn’t get you, she took some aspirin and went to bed.”

Dr. Ballard switched on the lamp by the bed. He pulled the brown envelope from his coat pocket, took out the X-ray and held it up against the light.

“You say she screamed at the end,” he said in a not very steady voice. “Were there any definite words?”

The girl at the window hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “They were suddenly choked off, exactly as if a hand had tightened around her throat. But I think there were two words. ‘Hand’ and ‘Beth.’ ”

Dr. Ballard’s gaze flickered toward the mocking face in the photograph on the chest of drawers, then back to the ghostly black and whites of the one in his hands. His arms were shaking.

“They haven’t found her yet,” Marge said, still looking down at the river and the circling launch.

Dr. Ballard was staring incredulously at the X-ray, as if by staring he could make what he saw go away. But that was impossible. It was a perfectly defined and unambiguous exposure.

There, in the X-ray’s blacks and grays, he could see the bones of Nancy Sawyer’s ankle and, tightly clenched around them, deep under skin and flesh, the slender bones of a human hand.

One Foot and the Grave

Theodore Sturgeon

I was out in Fulgey Wood trying to find out what had happened to my foot, and I all but walked on her. Claire, I mean. Not Luana. You wouldn’t catch Luana rolled up in a nylon sleeping bag, a moonbeam bright on her face.

Her face gleamed up like a jewel sunk deep in a crystal spring. I stood looking at it, not moving, not even breathing, hoping that she would not wake. I’d found that horror of a skull ten minutes ago and I’d much rather she didn’t see it.

She stirred. I stepped back and sideward into a bear-trap. The steel jaws were cushioned by my heavy boot; they sliced through from instep to heel, but did not quite meet. All the same, it was a noise in the soughing silences of the wood, and Claire’s eyes opened. She studied the moon wonder in gly for a moment because, I presume, her face was turned to it. Then she seemed to recall where she was. She sat up and glanced about. Her gaze swept over me twice as I stood there stiff and straight, trying to look like a beech. Or a birch. I must be of the wrong family. She saw me.

“Thad . . She sat up and knuckled her eyes. Claire has a deep voice, and meticulous. She peered. “It—is Thad?”

“Most of me. Hi.”

“Hi.” She moved her mouth, chewing apparently, the end of sleepiness. She swallowed it and said, “You’ve been looking for me.”

“For years,” I said gallantly. That might have been true. At the moment, however, I was in pursuit of my foot, and possibly some peace and quiet. I hadn’t counted on this at all.

“Well, Lochinvar, why don’t you sweep me into your arms?”

“I’ve told you before. You’re everything in the world I need, but you don’t strike sparks. Go on back to bed.”

She shook her hair, forward, out and down, and then breath-takingly back. She had masses of it. In the moonlight it was blue-gray, an obedient cloud. “You don’t seem surprised to find me out here.”

“I’m not. The last thing I said to you in town was to sit tight, stay where you were, and let me handle this. The fact that you are here therefore does not surprise me.” “You know,” she said, putting one elbow on one knee, one chin in one palm, and twinkling, “you say ‘therefore’ prettier than anyone else I ever met. Why don’t you come over here and talk to me? Are you standing in a bear-trap?”

She was wearing a one-piece sunsuit. It was backless and sideless and the summer flying-suit, hanging on the bush at her head, plus the light nylon sleeping bag, were obviously everything in the world she had with her. About the bear-trap I said, “Well, yes.”

She laughed gaily, and lay back. Her hair spread and spilled; she burrowed into it with the back of her head. She pulled the sleeping bag tight up around her throat and said, “All right, silly. Stand there if you want to. It’s a big boudoir.”

I said nothing. I tugged cautiously at the trap, moving just my leg. The boot all but parted; the moon gleamed on the steel jaws, now only an inch apart and closing slowly. I stopped pulling. I hoped she would go back to sleep. I hoped the trap wouldn’t clank together when it finally went all the way through. I stood still. There was sweat on my mouth.

“You still there?”

“Yup, I said.

She sat up again. “Thad, this is stupid! Do something! Go away, or talk to me or something, but don’t just stand there!”

“Why don’t you just go on back to sleep and let me worry about what I do? I’m not in your way. I won’t touch you.”

“That I don’t doubt,” she said acidly. “Go away.” She thumped down, turned away, turned back and sat up, peering. “I just thought … maybe you can’t. . . .” She flung out of the bag and stood up, slim in the moonlight. I could see her toenails gleam as she stepped on the fabric. Her right toenails, I mean. Her left foot wasn’t a foot. It was a cloven hoof, hairy-fetlocked, sharp and heavy. She was as unselfconscious about it as she was of the casual coverage her sunsuit afforded her. She came to me limping slightly.

“Go on back to—let me al—oh for Pete’s sake, Claire, I’m perfectly—”

She breathed a wordless, sighing syllable, all horror and pity. “Thad,” she cried. “Your—your foot!”

“I didn’t want you to know.”

“How could you just stand there with that—that—Oh!” She knelt, reached toward my trapped foot, recoiled before she touched it, and stayed there looking up at me with her eyes bright in the silver light, silver tear-streaks on her face like lode-veinings. “What shall I do?”

I sighed, “Keep your fingers away from the trap.” I leaned back and pulled. The macerated leather of my high-laced hunting boot held, gave, held—and then the jaws whanged together, close-meshed. I fell back against a birch-trunk, banging my head painfully. Claire, seeing almost the entire foot dangling under the arch of the trap’-s jaws, started a shriek, then jammed it back into her mouth with her whole hand. I grunted.

“Oh,” she said, “you poor darling! Does it hurt?” she added inanely.

“No,” I said, rubbing my skull. “It was just my head.”

“But your foot! Your poor foot!”

I began unlacing what was left of the boot. “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it,” I said. I pulled the boot-wings aside and slipped my leg out of boot and woolen stocking together. She looked, and sat down plump! before me, her jaw swinging slackly. “Shut it,” I said conversationally. “You really looked beautiful a while back. Now you look silly.”

She pointed to my hoof. It was larger than hers, and shaggier. “Oh, Thad! I didn’t know … how long?”

“About three weeks. Damn it, Claire, I didn’t want you to know.”

“You should have told me. You should have told me the second it started.”

“Why? You had enough on your mind. You’d already been through all the treatment that anyone could figure out, and I was in on all of it. So when it happened to me, I didn’t see the sense in making a federal case out of it.” I shrugged. “If Dr. Ponder can’t cure this no one can. And he can’t. Therefore—”

Through her shock, she giggled.

“Therefore,” I continued, “there was nothing left for me to do but try to find out what had happened, by myself.” I saw her lower lip push out before she dropped her face and hid it. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I—kind of thought you were trying to help just me.”

Claire can switch from giggles to tears, from shock to laughter to horror to fright, faster than anyone I ever met. It goes all the way down too. I said, “Don’t kid yourself. I don’t do things for people.”

“Well,” she said in a very small voice, “that’s what I thought, for a while anyway.”

“You better get back in that sleeping bag. You’ll catch cold,” I said.

She rose and crept obediently back to the sleeping bag. Once into it, she said, “Well, you care if I catch cold.”

I went and hunkered down beside her. “Well sure, I might catch it.”

“You wouldn’t get that close!”

“Oh, I don’t know. I read somewhere that a sneeze can travel thirty feet.”

“I hate you.”

“Because I sneaked out behind your, back and got a fancy foot just like yours?”

“Oh, Thad! How can you joke about it?”

I sat back and lifted my hoof, regarding it thoughtfully. I had found it possible to spread the two halves and relax suddenly. They made a nice loud click. I did this a couple of times. “I’d rather joke about it. How frantic can you get?”

‘Thad, it’s my fault, it is, it is!”

“That’s what I get for playing footsies with you in roadhouses. You’re contagious, that’s what.”

“You’re no comfort.”

“I don’t comfort stupid people. This isn’t your fault, and you’re being stupid when you talk like that. Does yours itch?”

“Not any more.”

“Mine does.” I clicked my hoof some more. It felt good. “What gave you the idea of coming out here?” “Well,” she said shyly, “after you said you’d track this thing down for me, but wouldn’t say how, I thought it all out from the very beginning. This crazy trouble, whatever it is, started out here; I mean, it developed after I came out here that time. So I figured that this is where you’d be.”

“But why come?”

“I didn’t know what you’d get into here. I thought you might—might need me.”

“Like a hole in the head,” I said bluntly.

“And I thought you were doing it just for me. I didn’t know you had a foot like that too.” Her voice was very small.

“So now you know. And you’re sorry you came. And first thing in the morning you’ll hightail it straight back to town where you belong.”

“Oh no! Not now. Not when I know we’re in this together. I like being in something together with you, Thad.”

I sighed. “Why does my luck run like this? If I got all hog-wild and feverish about you, you’d turn around and get short of breath over some other joker. Everybody loves somebody—else.”

“You’re thinking about Luana,” she said with accuracy. Luana was Dr. Ponder’s typist. She had taut coral pneumatic lips, a cleft chin, and a tear-stained voice like that of an English horn in the lower register. She had other assets and I was quite taken with both of them.

“If I were as honest about my feelings as you are about yours,” I said, “and as loud-mouthed, I’d only hurt your feelings. Let’s talk about our feet.”

“All right,” she said submissively. “Thad…

“Mm?”

“What did you mean when you said you’d seen me be beautiful?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! Skip it, will you? What has that to do with feet?”

“Well… . Nothing, I guess.” She sounded so forlorn that, before I could check myself, I reached out and patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Claire. I shouldn’t brutalize you, I guess. But it’s better than stringing you along.”

She held my hand for a moment against her cheek. “I s’pose it is,” she said softly. “You’re so good … so good, and—and so sensible.”

“So tired. Give me back my hand. Now; let’s put all this fantastic business together and see what comes out. You start. Right from the beginning, now; somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be an answer to all this. I know we’ve been over it and over it, but maybe this time something will make sense. You start.”

She lay back, put her hands behind her head, and looked at the moon. She had to turn her head for this, because the moon was sinking, and there were knife-edges of light among the cords of her throat. “I still say it was the night I met you. Oh, don’t worry; I won’t get off on that again … but it was. You were just a face among faces to me then. A nice face, but—anyway, it was the Medusa Club meeting, the night we got talking about magic.”

“I’ll never forget that night,” I said. “What a collection of neurotics! Saving your presence, Ma’am.”

“That’s, the only purpose of the club—to find those things which frighten neurotics and stare them down, and to keep on doing it until somebody drops dead. Score to date: umpteen-odd dead boogie-men, no dead people. Hence the discussion of magic that night.”

“That makes sense. And I remember Ponder’s point that we are not as far removed from the days of the witches and wizards as we like to think. We knock on wood; we slip bits of wedding-cake under our pillows; we hook fingers with each other when we suddenly say the same thing together, and so on and on. And he said that perhaps this subconscious clinging to ritual was not because of a lingering childishness, but because the original magic forces were still in operation!”

“That was it,” said Claire. “And a fine flurry of snorts he got for that!”

“Yup. Especially from you. I still don’t understand why you got so steamed up.”

“I hate that kind of talk!” she said vociferously. “But I hated it especially hearing it from Dr. Ponder. Ever since I’ve known him he’s been so reasonable, so logical, so—well, so wonderful—”

I grinned. “I’m jealous.”

“Are you, Thad? Are you really?” she said eagerly; then, “No. you’re laughing at me, you heel… anyway, I couldn’t stand hearing that kind of poppycock from him.” I put out my cloven hoof and snapped it in front of her nose. “What do you think now?”

“I don’t know what to think . . she whispered, and then, with one of her startling switches of mood, continued in a normal voice, “so the next day I decided to track down some of the old superstitions for myself.

Heaven knows this part erf the country is full of them. The Indians left a lot, and then the Dutch and the French and the Spanish. There’s something about these hills that breeds such things.”

I laughed. “Sounds like Lovecraft.”

“Sounds like Charles Fort, too!” she snapped. “Some day you’ll learn that you can’t laugh at one and admire the other. Where was I?”

“In the woods.”

“Oh. Well, the most persistent superstition in these parts is the old legend of the Camel’s Grave. I came out here to find it.”

I scrabbled up some of the soft earth to make a pit for my elbow and a hummock for my armpit. I lay on my side, propped up my head with my hand, and was comfortable. “Just run off that legend again, once over lightly.”

She closed her eyes. “Somewhere in this no-good country—no one’s ever been able to farm it, and there’s too much jimson weed and nightshade for grazing—there’s supposed to be a little hollow called Forbidden Valley. At the north end of it they say there’s a grave with something funny about it. There’s no headstone. Just a skull. Some say a man was buried there up to his neck and left to die.”

“The Amazon Indians have a stunt like that But they pick an ant-hill for the job. Cut off the feller’s eyelids first. After that the potato race, ducking for apples and ice cream is served in the main tent.”

“A picnic,” she agreed, shuddering. “But there was never anything like that among the local Indians here. Besides, we don’t run to that kind of ant either. Anyway, this skull is chained, so the story goes, with a link through the edge of the eye-socket. It’s supposed to be a magician buried there. Thing is, the legend is that he isn’t dead. He’ll live forever and be chained forever. Nothing can help him. But he doesn’t know it. So if anyone wanders too close, he’ll capture whoever it is and put ’em to work trying to dig him out. The old tales keep coming out—kids who had wandered out here and disappeared, the old woman who went out of her head after she got back to town, the half-witted boy who mumbled something about the skull that talked to him out of the ground. You know.” “Why do they call it the Camel’s Grave?”

“I don’t know. Some say the magician was an Egyptian who used to ride a camel around. Some say it comes from some Indian name. The nearest I can find in the library to ‘Camel’ is ‘ko-mai’ which means the green stick they used to spit meat over a fire. But that’s Winnebago, and there were no Winnebagos around here.”

“Wait. You mean there were Indian legends about this?”

“Oh, sure. I dug those out. There are all sorts of stories. Some of them are shocking—I mean in a nice way.” She giggled. “But they all have one thing in common—the imprisoned magician, who, by the way, was old, old as the hills. He wasn’t an Indian either. They made that quite clear. And always Camel, or ‘Grave of the Camel.’ Just to mix that up even more for you, I looked up ‘camel’ in the dictionary and found out that the word is derived from ‘Djemal,’ which is Arabic, or ‘Gamal,’ which is Hebrew.

“Fine,” I said bitterly. “Much progress. So go on with your little trip out here.”

“That first time? Oh, nothing happened. I brought some chow and stayed out here about four days at the full moon, which is supposed to be the time when the Forbidden Valley can be found. I didn’t see a soul but old Goo-goo running his traps. No one pays attention to Goo-goo.”

“Not even people who step into one of his bear-traps? You’re lucky you didn’t bed down in it.”

“Oh, don’t blame him, Thad! He’s a sweet old man, really. He’s deaf and dumb, you know. He keeps out of people’s way as much as he can. Comes in with a few skins every now and then and lives off the land. He could tell us a diing or two about Forbidden Valley if he could talk. But he can’t even write. They say he doesn’t mind the haunted hills because no one ever found a way to tell him about them. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. As for the trap, he put it where he thought it might do him some good, among the birches where bears sometimes come to hunt for bugs under the bark. Practically no one ever comes out here. When they do, it’s their lookout, not Goo-goo’s.”

“Hey.” I straightened up. “How can you be so casual about bunking out here with a wildcat or two and an occasional bear wandering around? There are copperheads too, to say nothing of a trapper who must be lonesome, to put it mildly.”

“Why I—” She paused, wonderingly. “I never thought about it, I guess. Thad—nothing ever hurt me. I mean it. No dog ever bit me, no cat ever scratched me. I don’t even seem to be very tempting to mosquitos. Once when I was a little girl a bull gored a hired man who was walking across a field with me. The bull bellowed and jumped and capered all around me, but he didn’t touch me. I’ve never even been stung by a bee.”

“You don’t say.” I considered her thoughtfully. “I begin to see why I asked you out for a beer the night of the meeting.”

“Why, Thad?”

“Now don’t get ideas. I just pegged you as being—different, that’s all. Not better—different. You puzzled me. I’ve been a lot of places, Claire. Tropics. At sea. Construction jobs. I’ve met a lot of people, but no one like you.”

“That again,” she snorted. “People are always telling me that, one way or another. And what’s it get me? The very first time I fall for a big dead-pan stranger, he doesn’t know I’m alive. All large muscles and bad taste.”

“What do you mean bad taste?”

“Luana.”

“Now look. I won’t bandy her about. Stay off the subject, see?”

Surprisingly, she laughed. “Temper—temper,” she cautioned. “My, you roar purty. But back to the subject at hand. I was out here four days and nights, wandering around, trying to find the Forbidden Valley. Once I thought I had it. It was about midnight. The moon was bright, like tonight. I was near here somewhere. There was a little swag in the ground with a high bluff at one end. I went up to it. I tripped over something. I don’t know what it was. I almost never fall over things but I sure did that time. I fell right on top of some little animal. I hope I didn’t hurt it. I don’t know what it was. It wriggled out from under me and whizzed away fast as a deer-fly. I never saw anything move so fast; a blur and it was gone. It was about as big as a chipmunk, but longer—oh, three times as long. I got a vague impression of pointed ears and the funniest broad, flat tail. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“I thought nothing happened in those four days.”

“Well—that couldn’t be important. Oh; I see what you mean. Anything might be important. All right. Now—what else?”

“Goo-goo.”

“Oh. I saw him once. Twice. The first time he was setting a whip-snare in a clearing in the woods. I waved at him and smiled and he nodded and gurgled the way he does and smiled back. The second time I don’t think he saw me. He was out in the open. Early morning. He was tramping round and round in a circle in the grass. Then he stopped and faced the sun. He did something with his knife. Held it out, sort of, and touched himself on the shoulders and chin with it. I don’t remember very clearly. It didn’t last long. And that’s all.”

“Hmp,” I plucked some grass and chewed it. “What next?”

“Well, suddenly it began to be the way it is. It was awful at first. The toes gathered, and the whole foot began to get pointed. It was longer at first. I mean, my foot straightend out like a ballet dancer’s, and I couldn’t get my heel down.

Then the whole thing thickened up and grew shorter, and the tip turned black and hardened and—”

I interrupted, “I know, I know. Had one once myself. Now, how many people did you tell about it?”

“Oh, nobody. I mean, Dr. Ponder, of course, and then you. Dr. Ponder was so—so—”

“Wonderful,” I submitted.

“Shut up. So understanding, I mean.”

“That’s an odd word to use.”

“Is it? Anyway, he said I had a— a—”

“Chitinous podomorphia.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You told me, right after he told you. Only / remembered it. Mine began shortly afterward, and I remembered it again.” I spit out my grass and selected another stem. “A brilliant diagnosis.”

“Thad … you—sometimes you say things in a way I don’t understand.”

“Do I?” In the growing predawn darkness, I could feel her sharp swift gaze on me. I said, “Go on. He treated the foot?”

“He bound it. It was very clever. As the foot changed shape from day to day he changed the bandages, so that it never looked any worse than a slightly sprained ankle. He seemed to know all about the trouble. He predicted the course of the trouble as it developed, and told me that it would go just so far and stop, and he kept me from getting frightened, and explained why I should keep it a secret.” “What did he say?”

“He harked back to the meeting, and the things that had been said. Especially about the readiness of people to believe in so-called mystical events. He said there was enough residual superstition in town to make life miserable for a girl with a cloven hoof. Especially for me.”

“Why you especially?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you? I thought I had, … See, my mother and dad … they were engaged. I mean, they were each engaged to someone else. Dad came from Scoville way. That’s eight miles or more on the other side of these woods. He didn’t know Mother at all. He took to coming out here at night. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t help it. And Mother—she was about eighteen at the time —Mother jumped up from the dinner table one night and ran. She just ran out here. It’s a long way. Granddad tried to follow her, but she ran like a deer. When he finally came huffing and puffing into the wood—it was a white night like tonight—and stopped to get his breath back, he heard a man calling, ‘Jessica! Jessica!’ That was Mother’s name. Granddad followed the sound. It was out here in the open somewhere. Granddad climbed a rise and looked down and saw this young man standing with his arms out, calling and calling, turning every which way as he called. Granddad was going to yell at him but then he saw Mother. She was going down the slope ahead of him, walking slowly—he used to say, ‘as if the meadow was a grand marble stair, and she in a gold dress, for all she was tattered with thorns.’

“The two of them stopped two yards apart and stood there staring at one another for longer than it took Granddad to get to them. He had to yell twice or three times before she even knew he was there. She kept her eyes on the young man’s face and just said, ‘Yes, Father.’ And Granddad bellowed at her to come home. She stepped to the young man—that was my Dad—and she put a hand on his arm and said, ‘He’ll come too.’ Granddad said, ‘The hell he will!’ He wouldn’t talk to my Dad, he was so upset and angry. ‘I don’t even know his name!’ and Mother said quietly, ‘No more do L You’d better ask him, Father’. And that was how it was.”

I sat up and crossed my legs, entranced. “You mean that was the first time they saw each other?”

She nodded, though by now I could barely see her, for the moon was gone and only its cold loom stood in the sky over the western hills. “The very first time,” she said. “And they got married right away.”

“How were they married so fast?” I asked curiously.

She shifted uncomfortably as I asked it, and said, “By a judge. It wasn’t a church wedding. It was quicker. People talked. They still talk. They have lots of ideas about what went on out here, but what I’m telling you is the truth. Anyway, Granddad got used to the idea very soon, though he was against it at first. Even the talk didn’t bother him; those two lived in a world of their own. Nothing touched them. Dad made wood-carvings—clock cases and newel-figurines and so on, and Mother was with him almost every minute. Granddad used to say if you pinched the one, the other’d say ‘Ouch.’ He said nobody could stay mad in that house; he knew because he tried. So … it didn’t matter what people said.” She paused, and I just waited. Later, questions.

Presently she said sleepily, “And it doesn’t matter. My mother and Dad are like that now. They always will be. Nothing can change what you remember.”

I waited again. This was a long time. Finally I asked, gently, “Where are they?”

“They died.”

She slept. Somehow the moon had moved around to the east again. No: it wasn’t the moon. It was a cloudless dawn, a dilution; light staining the hem of the sky. I sank back with my elbow in the hole I had dug and my armpit on the me-shaped hummock, and looked at the sleeping girl. I knew now what the single thing was that made her different. She was as changeable as bubble-colors; she felt, immediately and noticeably, all the emotions except one. And that was her difference. She was absolutely fearless.

That story … so simply told, and then, “They died.”

Cloven hooves.

“They died.” People like that … for a time I was angrier at such a death than I was, even, at the ugly excrescence that was once a foot. Dr. Ponder seemed to know a lot about these things. “Chitinous podomorphia.” Oh, fine. That meant “Change of a foot into chitin—hoof, horn, and fingernail material.” I hadn’t gone to Ponder. I couldn’t really say why. Maybe Luana was the reason! At any rate, Claire had already been afflicted with the same trouble, and I’d been on that from the word go. I just did for my foot what Ponder had done for Claire’s, and hoped that Luana would never hear about it. What girl would give a tumble to a man with a cloven hoof?

The sun poked a flaming forehead over the wall of hills. By its light I studied Claire’s relaxed face. She was not beautiful, by any means. She had a round, pleasant face. When she laughed, a transverse crease appeared under her nose; she was the only human being with that particular upper lip that I had ever liked. Her lashes were thick but not long, and now, with her eyes closed, half the beauty she had was cloaked, for she had the most brilliant eyes I had ever seen. Her jaw was round and small, slightly cleft. She missed being square and stocky by fractional proportions.

“I must be out of my mind,” I muttered. Claire was a wonderful person … a wonderful person. Genuine, honest, full of high humor, and, for me, no fireworks.

But Luana, the beautiful secretary of Dr. Ponder, now, that was a different story. She had an odd, triangular face and a skin that seemed lit softly from underneath. Her cheeks were a brighter rose than the sides of her neck but you couldn’t tell just where the gradations began. Her hair was the extremely dark but vivid red of black-iron in a forge just beginning to heat. Her hands were so delicate and smooth you’d think they’d break on a typewriter, and her canine teeth were a shade too long, so that her head looked like a flower with fangs. She had one expression—complete composure. Her unshakable poise made me grind my teeth; some way, somehow, I wanted it broken. I don’t think she had brain one and I didn’t care; it wasn’t her brains I was after. Her face floated before me on the flames of the fireworks she generated in me, and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it. When I was in town I’d date her, when I could. On the dates we didn’t talk. She danced sedately and watched movies attentively and ate pineapple frappés with delicacy and thoroughness, and I’d just sit there and bask, and count the seconds until, after I walked her to her gate, she closed it between us and leaned across for a demure kiss. Her lips were cool, smooth, and taut. Pneumatic. Then I’d stride away snarling at myself. “You’re a bumpkin,” I’d say. “You’re all feet and Adam’s apple.” I’d tell myself I had a hole in the head. I called myself forty kinds of a fool. “There’s no future in it,” I’d say. I’d tell myself, “You know that ten years from now, when the bloom is off, she’ll look like something the cat dragged in, her and her teeth.” And thinking about the teeth would make me visualize those lips again, and—so cool!

Often, those nights, I’d run into Claire, who just happened to be in Callow’s Friendly Drug and Meat Market buying a whodunit, and we’d get a soda or something and talk. Those were the talks where everything came out. I never got so thick with anyone so fast. Talking to Claire is like talking to yourself. And she told me, somehow or other, about the foot, right from the first. She didn’t tell anyone else. Except Dr. Ponder, of course… .

What a strange person she was! It was inconceivable that she should not have questioned Dr. Ponder more about her foot—yet she had not. His prognosis was that the condition would stop at her ankle, and may or may not be permanent, and, for her, that was that. In the same situation anyone else on earth would be scrambling around from specialist to specialist between trips to a wailing wall. Not Claire. She accepted it and was not afraid.

A patch of sun the size of a kitten crept up the edge of her sleeping bag and nestled in her hair. After a pause to warm and brighten itself, it thrust a golden pseudopod around the curve of her cheek and touched her eyelid. She stirred, smiled briefly at what must have been a most tender dream, and woke.

“Good morning.”

She looked at me mistily, and smiled a different smile. “I fell asleep.”

“You did. Come on—stir your stumps. I want to show you something that I’ve discovered.”

She stretched and yawned. “I was talking to you and I fell asleep right in the middle of it. I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad. You got your beauty sleep.” Her face softened, so I added, “You need it.”

“You’re so sweet, Thad,” she said. “Much sweeter than gall. ’Bout like vinegar, when you try hard.” She slid out of the sleeping bag and idly scratched her hairy ankle. “If I had to choose between this thing with you, and my ordinary old foot without you, I think I’d keep the hoof. How do you make that noise with it?”

I showed her. She tried it. All she could get was a muffled pop, like fingers snapping with gloves on. She laughed and said I was a genius, and rose and climbed into her flying suit. She had half-length boots, padded inside to support her hoof. Once they were on, no one could have guessed. While she was about these small chores, and others concerning folding and stowing the sleeping bag and breaking out some C and K rations, I rescued my amputated shoe from the bear trap and, by cutting and piecing the leather straps, made a sort of stirrup that would hold it together once it was on.

When that was done, Claire, looking shapeless and tousled in the loose-fitting coverall, handed me one of the sticky-rich candy bars from the rations. “Thad,” she said with her mouth full, “you just wouldn’t go to see Dr. Ponder. Why not? Don’t you trust him?”

“Sure I trust him,” I said shortly. Why mention that 1 was keeping away from him because of Luana? “Come on,” I said.

We crossed through a neck of the forest to the rolling scrub-meadow on the other side, and down and across the first little valley.

“This is where I was last night. There’s something just over the next rise that I want you to see. Last night I was afraid you’d see it.”

“What’s so different about today, then?”

“I found out last night you’re not afraid of anything.”

She did not answer. I looked back at her. She was grinning. “You said something nice about me,” she half-sang.

“Not necessarily. Sometimes fearlessness is nothing more than rank stupidity.”

She swallowed that silently. As we climbed the rise she asked, “Will you tell me about the time you saw me be beautiful?”

“Later,” I said.

Abruptly she clutched my arm. “Look!”

“Where? What?”

“There!” She pointed. “No—there—there, see?” She pointed rapidly to the ground, to a rock, to a spot in midair to our left. “See?”

“What is it, Claire? A deer-fly? or spots in the eyes?”

“Just watch,” she said with exaggerated patience. “The little animal I fell on that time—remember? It’s all around here, and moving so fast!”

There are certain optical illusions where a missing object becomes vividly clear as soon as you know what to look for. I focused my mind’s eye on what she had described as a tapering, fan-tailed monstrosity with two front legs and a blue-black hide, and suddenly, fleetingly, there it was, crouching against the sheer side of the bluff. It blinked at me, and then disappeared, only to pop into sight for a fraction of a second right in front of us. We moved back with alacrity as if pulled by the same string.

“I want out!” I gasped. “That’s the thing that gave you the fancy boot!”

Somehow we were twenty feet back and still backing.

Claire laughed. “I thought that was your specialty.”

“You pick the dog-gondest times … get back, Claire! Heaven knows what will happen to you if it gets to you again!”

She stood still, peering. The thing, whatever it was, appeared twice, once a little to the right, once—and this time, for a full two or three seconds—over against the sidehill. It balanced on two forelegs, its head thrust out, its wide fluked tail curled up over its back, and it blinked rapidly. Its eyes were the same color as its skin, but shiny. It disappeared. Claire said, “It can’t hurt us. Dr. Ponder said the condition would be arrested where it is.”

I snorted. “That’s like saying you’re immunized against being bumped by a truck because one ran over you once. Let’s get out of here.”

She laughed at me again. “Why, Thad! I’ve never seen you like this! You’re pale as milk!”

“You have so seen me like this,” I quavered, “the last time you called me sensible. Remember?”

The blue-black thing appeared again almost under my feet. I squeaked and jumped. Then it was by Claire, inches away. She bent toward it, hand outstretched, but it vanished.

“Thad, it seems terribly excited. I think it wants something.”

“That I don’t doubt,” I said through clenched teeth. “Claire. Listen to me. Either you will hightail with me out of this imp-ridden corner of hell, or you and that monstrosity can stay here and watch me dwindle.”

“Oh, Thad! stop blithering. The poor little thing is probably ten times as frightened as you are.”

“Oh no it isn’t,” I said with authority. “It’s alive, isn’t it?”

She snorted and squatted down in the grass, her hands out and close together. Simultaneously with my warning cry, the creature appeared between her hands. Very slowly she moved them together. I stood petrified, babbling. “Claire, don’t, please don’t, just this once how do you know what that thing might do, Claire… . Okay—it’s small, Claire. So is a fer de lance. So is a .45 slug. Please, Claire—”

“Will you stop that infernal chattering!” she snapped. And just before her closing hands could touch the beast it was gone, to reappear six inches to the left.

She rose and stepped forward gently, stooping. The poised animal—if it was an animal—waited until she was a fraction of an inch away and again bounded out of visibility and in again, this time a yard away, where it waited, blinking violently.

“I think it wants us to follow it,” said Claire. “Come on, Thad!”

It moved again, farther away, and bounced up and down.

“Oh, Claire,” I said at last, “I give up. We’re in this together and we’ve got to depend on each other. Maybe you’re right after all.”

Surprisingly, there were tears in her eyes as she said, “I feel as if you had been away a long time and just got back.”

I thumped her shoulder, and we went on, we followed the strange creature up the slope to its crest, where the creature disappeared again, this time, apparently for good.

Claire had been right, we found a moment later. Distantly, sunlight flashed on the windshield of Ponder’s parked convertible, which was parked where the wood road skirted the desolate flatland. Nearing the foothills where we stood were two plodding figures, and it was easy to spot Ponder, for no one else in the area had his stooped height and breadth. He was so perfectly in proportion that he made normal people look underdone. The other, I noticed with a gulp, was Luana, with her contained, erect posture, and the sunlight, after its cold journey through space, reveling in the heat of her hair.

We went to meet them. I looked once at Claire, catching her at the woman’s trick of swift comparative appraisal of Luana’s trim plaid skirt and snug windbreaker, and I smiled. Claire’s coverall was not a company garment.

“Thad!” the doctor boomed. He had an organ voice; in conversation it always seemed to be throttled down, and his shout was a relaxation rather than an effort. “And Claire … we were worried.”

“Why?” asked Claire. We reached them. 1 buzzed right on past the doctor—“Hi, Doc,”—and took both Luana’s hands. “Lu.”

She looked up at me and smiled. Those lips, so taut, so filled with what strange honey … when they smiled they grew still fuller. She said Hello, and I thought, what’s language for? what’s poetry for? when two small syllables can mean so much. … I held her hands so hard and so long that it may have been embarrassing. It was for me, anyway, when Claire’s voice broke into my ardent scansion of Luana’s eyes with “Hey! Svengali! Got her hypnotized yet?”

I released Luana, who looked Claire’s rumpled flying suit up and down. “Hello, Claire,” she purred. “Hunting?”

“Just walking the dog,” said Claire through her teeth.

I met the doctor’s eyes and he grinned. “Good of you to take all this trouble over Claire’s trouble,” he said. “She just told me you knew about it. Does anyone else?”

I shook my head, but said, “Why all the mystery, doctor?”

“I certainly don’t have to tell you that this is not an ordinary medical matter.”

Claire said, “Let’s go on up to the Wood and sit down and talk. It’s getting hot.”

“I’ll tote that if it’s heavy,” I offered, indicating Ponder’s black bag.

“Oh no. Just a couple of things I brought with me, just in case.”

He and Claire started back up toward the Wood. I put my hand on Luana’s forearm and checked her.

“What is it, Thad?”

“I just want them to get a little way ahead. Luana, this is wonderful. What on earth made him come out here? And with you?”

“I don’t know. He’s a strange man, Thad. Sometimes I think he knows everything. Nothing surprises him.” We began to walk, “We were working this morning—he was dictating some letters—and he all of a sudden stopped as if he was listening to something. Next thing I knew we were on our way.”

“Does he really know what’s the matter with Claire’s foot?”

She looked at me. Her eyes were auburn and most disturbing. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“She told me. It turned into a cloven hoof. I’ve seen it.”

“Oh. Then why ask?”

I hadn’t expected this kind of resistance. “I mean, does he know why it happened?”

“Of course he does.”

“Well, why?” I asked impatiently.

“Why not ask him?” she shrugged. “He’s the doctor. I’m not.”

“Sorry I asked.” I said glumly. I was annoyed—I think at myself. I don’t know why, subconsciously, I always expected this vision to melt into my aims, and was always sticking my neck out. But that’s the way it is when you get fireworks.

We walked on in silence. Claire and the doctor had disappeared into the Wood when we entered the edge of it. We stopped for a moment to look about. There was, of course, no path, and the windless growth muffled and absorbed sounds so it was difficult to know which way they had gone. I started in, but Luana held me back. “I don’t think they’re that way.”

“I’ll yell,” I said, but she put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no!”

“Why not, Lu?”

“I’m—I don’t know. You shouldn’t, in here.” She looked about the silent halls of the forest. “Please, Thad.

Go look for them. I’ll wait. But don’t shout, please.” Completely puzzled, I said, “Well, sure, honey. But I don’t get it. Is something the matter?”

“No. Nothing.” Her arched nostrils twitched. “Go look for them, Thad. I’ll wait here, in case they come back for us.”

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“Go on. Go on,” she said urgently. I suddenly thought that for certain reasons I might be behaving tactlessly. I must have blushed like a schoolgirl. “Well, sure. I’ll be right back. I mean, I’ll find ’em and call you.” I flapped a goodbye selfconsciously and blundered off through the woods. That girl really threw me for a loss.

I followed the level ground until I emerged from the Wood at the other side of its narrow neck—Just what I should have done in the first place. Dr. Ponder and Claire were out in the open fifty yards away, apparently waiting for us. I went to them. “We lost you,” I said. “Luana’s waiting back there. She didn’t want to thrash around in the woods hunting for you. Hold on and I’ll get her.” Ponder’s big head went up, and his eyes seemed to focus on something I couldn’t see for a moment. Then, “Don’t bother,” he said. “She’s all right. I wanted to talk to you two anyway. Let’s go in the shade and sit down.” “But—will she be all right?”

“She’ll be all right,” he grinned. He had good teeth.

I shrugged. “Everybody seems to know what’s right around here but me,” I said petulantly. “All right.” I led the way to a thicket at the edge of the wood and plumped down with my back against a tree. Claire and the doctor joined me, Ponder setting his bag carefully within his reach.

“Now for heaven’s sake tell us,” said Claire, who had kept an amused silence during my jitterings about Luana. She turned to me. “He wouldn’t say a thing until you got here.”

“Tell us about what? Who knows anything?” I said resignedly.

“You know about her foot,” said Dr. Ponder. He looked down. “What, speaking of feet, has happened to your boot?”

I happened to be looking at Claire, and microscopically shook my head. “Oh,” I said casually, “I left it on a railroad track while I was frog hunting in a culvert. Go on about Claire.” Claire’s eyes widened in astonishment at this continued deception, but she said nothing. I was pleased.

Ponder leaned back. He had a long head and a big jaw. The touch of gray at his temples and the stretched smoothness of his skin told lies about each other. He said, “First, I want to thank you both—you, Claire, because you have trusted me in this matter, when I had every reason to expect nothing but hysteria from you, and you, Thad, for having kept your own counsel. Now I’ll tell you what I know. Please don’t mind if I seem to wander a bit. I want you to get this straight in your minds.” He closed his eyes for a moment, his brow furrowed. Then he wet his lips and continued.

“Imagine a man walking up to a door which stands firmly locked. He raises his hand and makes a certain motion. The door opens. He enters, picks up a wand. He waves it; it suddenly glows with light. He says two words, and a fire appears in the fireplace. Now: could you duplicate that?”

“I’ve seen doors open for people in a railroad station,” said Claire. “They had a beam of light in front of them. When you walked into it, a photo-electric cell made the door open.”

“About that wand,” I put in, “If it was made of glass, it could have been a flourescent tube. If there was a radio-frequency generator in the room, it could make a tube glow, even without wire connections.”

“I once saw a gadget connected to a toy electric train,” Claire said. “You say ‘Go!’ into a speaker and the train would go. You say ‘Now back up’ and it would back up. It worked by the number of syllables you spoke. One would make the train go forward; three would make it stop and back up. That fire you mentioned, that could be controlled by a gadget like that.”

“Right. Quite right,” said the doctor. “Now, suppose you fixed up all that gadgetry and took it back in time a couple of centuries. What would the performance look like to a person of the time—even an intelligent, reasonable one?”

I said, “Witchcraft.” Claire said, “Why, magic.”

Ponder nodded. “But they’d understand a kitchen match. But take a kitchen match back a couple more centuries, and you’d get burned at the stake. What I’m driving at is that given the equipment, you can get the results, whether those results can be understood by the observer or not. The only sane attitude to take about such things is to conclude that they are caused by some natural, logically, explained agency—and that we haven’t the knowledge to explain it any more than the most erudite scholar could have explained radar two centuries ago.”

“I follow that,” I said, and Claire nodded.

“However,” said Ponder, “most people don’t seem to accept such things that easily. Something happens that you can’t understand, and either you refuse to believe it happened at all—even if you saw it with your own eyes—or you attribute it to supernatural forces, with all their associated clap-trap of good and evil, rituals and exorcisms. What I’m putting to you is that everything that’s happened to you is perfectly logical and believable in its own terms—but it’s much larger than you think. I’m asking you to accept something much more mysterious than an r-f generator would be to a Puritan settler. You just have to take my word for it that it’s as reasonable a thing as an r-f generator.”

“I don’t understand an r-f generator, as it is,” smiled Claire. I heard the soft sound of her hoof clicking. “Go ahead, Doctor. At this point I’m ready to believe anything.”

“Fine,” applauded the doctor. “It’s a pleasure to talk to you. Now, I’m going to use ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in this explanation because they’re handy. Bear in mind that they , are loose terms, partial ones; external evidences of forces that extend forward and back and to either side in time and space.” He laughed. “Don’t try to follow that. Just j listen.

“A long time ago there were two opposed forces—call them intelligences. One was good and one was evil. It turned out to be quite a battle, and it went on for some time. There were gains and losses on each side, until one was captured by the other. Now, these intelligences were not living creatures in the ordinary sense, and in the ordinary sense they could not be killed. There are legends of such captures—the bound Prometheus, for example, and the monster under Ygdrasil. The only way to keep such forces imprisoned is to lock them up and set a watch over them. But, just as in our civilization, it may take profound intelligence and a great deal of hard work to capture a criminal, but far less intelligence and effort to keep him in jail.

“And that’s the situation we have here. Not far from where we sit, one of those things is imprisoned, and he—I say ‘he’ for convenience—has his jailer.

“That’s the thing known as ‘The Camel’s Grave.’ The Camel is a living intelligence, captured and held here and, if right has its way, doomed to spend the rest of eternity here.”

“That’s a long time,” I put in. “The earth won’t last that long.”

“He’ll be moved in time,” said Ponder complacently; and that was when I began to realize how big this thing was. There was that about Dr. Ponder which made it impossible to disbelieve him. I stared at Claire, who stared back. Finally she turned to him and asked in a small voice, “And—what about my foot?”

“That was a piece of tough luck,” said Ponder. “You are a sort of—uh—innocent bystander. You see, the Camel is surrounded by … damnit, it’s hard to find words that make sense! Fields. Look: if I call them ‘spells,’ will you understand that I’m not talking mumbo-jumbo? If I call them ‘fields,’ it presupposes coils and generators and circuits and so on. In its way ‘spells’ is more accurate.” “I’m with you so far,” I said. Claire nodded.

“Well, the Camel is conscious. He wants out. Like any other prisoner, he looks through the bars from time to time and talks with his jailer—and with anyone else he can reach. What you stumbled into, though, wasn’t the Camel: he’s pretty well sealed away from that. You hit one of the spells—one of the small warning devices set there in case he should begin to escape. If it had hit him, it would have stung him a little perhaps like an electric fence. But when you walked into it, you got that hoof. Why the result was exactly that I can’t say. It’s the nature of die thing. It’s happened before, as mythology will tel] you.”

“I’ve thought of that,” I said. “Pan, and the satyrs, and so on. They all had cloven hooves. And isn’t the Devil supposed to have one too?”

“One of the marks of the beast,” Ponder nodded. “Now, as to what can be done about it, I’m here to do the best I can. Claire, exactly where was it that you walked into—whatever it was, and fell down on that little animal?”

“I don’t know,” she said calmly. “I haven’t been able to locate it. I should be able to—ever since I was a child I’ve had dream compulsions to come out here, and I know this country like my own house.”

“I wish you could find it It would help.” Ponder twiddled the catch on his black bag thoughtfully. “We have to try to get through to the Camel and let him know what has happened to you. He could counteract it. Well, anyway, we might be able to do something. We’ll see.” “Doc,” I said, “About that hoof. You’re sure it was from contact with something out here. I mean, couldn’t it have been something in town that caused it?”

“Positively not,” he said. And I said to myself, now that is damned interesting, because I have a hoof too and I was never out here before last night.

Ponder turned to Claire. “Exactly why did you come out here that time you saw the little animal?”

“In a way it was your doing, Doctor. It was that Medusa Club meeting. You made me so mad with your intimations that there were still magical forces at work, and that superstitions served to guard humanity against them.” She laughed diffidently. “I don’t feel the same way now, so much… . Anyway, I know this part of the country well. I made up my mind to go to the most magical part of it at the most magical time—the full moon—and stick my neck out. Well, I did.”

“Uh-huh,” said the doctor. “And why did you come out yesterday?”

“To find Thad.”

“Well, Thad? What were you after?”

“I wanted to see what it was Claire had walked into.” “Didn’t trust my diagnosis?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. If I’d found anything at all, I probably would have told you about it. I was just curious about the cause and cure of cloven hooves.”

“Well, I could have told you that you wouldn’t find anything. Claire might, but you wouldn’t”

“How so?”

“Hasn’t it dawned on you yet that Claire is something special? In a sense she’s a product of this very ground. Her parents—”

“I told him that story,” said Claire.

“Oh. Well, that was the Camel at work. The only conceivable way for him to break out of his prison is through a human agency; for there is that in human nature that not even forces such as the one which imprisoned him can predict. They can be controlled, but not predicted. And if the Camel should ever be freed—”

“Well?” I asked, after a pause.

“I can’t tell you. Not ‘won’t.’ ‘Can’t.’ -It’s big, though. Bigger than you can dream. But as I was saying, Claire’s very presence on earth is his doing.”

“My parents were murdered,” said Claire.

I turned to her, shocked. She nodded soberly. “When I was six.”

“I think you’re right,” said Ponder. “Their marriage was a thing that could cancel many of the—the devices that imprison the Camel. The very existence of a union like that threatened the—what we can call the prison walls. It had to be stopped.”

“What happened?”

“They died,” said Claire. “No one knew why. They were found sitting on a rock by the road. He had his arm around her and her head was on his shoulder and they were dead. I always felt that they were killed on purpose, but I never knew why.”

“The Camel’s fault,” said Ponder, shrugging.

I asked, “But why didn’t they—he—kill Claire too while he was about it?”

“She was no menace. The thing that was dangerous was the—the radiation from the union that her parents had. It was an unusual marriage.”

“My God!” I cried. “You mean to say that Camel creature, whatever it is, can sit out here and push people’s lives around like that?”

“That’s small fry, Thad. What he could do if he were free is inconceivable.”

I rubbed my head. “I dunno, Doc. This is getting to be too much. Can I ask some questions now?”

“Certainly.”

“How come you know so much about all this?”

“I am a student of such things. I stumbled on this whole story in some old documents. As a matter of fact, I took the medical practice out here just so I could be near it. It’s the biggest thing of its kind I’ve ever run across.”

“Hm. Yet you don’t know where the Camel’s Grave is, exactly.”

“Wrong,” said the doctor. “I do. I wanted to know if Claire had been able to find it. If she had been able to, it would mean that the Camel had established some sort of contact with her. Since he hasn’t, I’ll have to do what I can.”

“Oh. Anyone who can find the Grave is in contact with the Camel, then.”

“That’s right. It takes a special kind of person.”

I very consciously did not meet Claire’s gaze. There was something very fishy going on here, and I began to feel frightened. This thing that could shrivel a foot into a hoof, it could kill too. I asked, “What about this ‘jailer’ you mentioned. Sort of a low-grade variety of the Camel himself?”

“Something like that.”

“That little animal—would that be it?”

A peculiar expression crossed the doctor’s face, as if he had remembered something, dragged it out, glanced at it, found it satisfactory, and put it away again. “No,” he said. “Did you ever hear of a familiar?”

“A familiar?” asked Claire. “Isn’t that the sort of—pet that a witch or a wizard has-—black cats and so on?” “Yes. Depending on the degree of ‘wizard’ we’re dealing with, the familiar may be a real animal or something more—the concretion, perhaps, of a certain kind of thought-matrix. That little animal you described to me is undoubtedly the Camel’s familiar.”

“Then where’s the jailer?” And as I asked, I snapped my fingers. “Goo-goo!”

“Not Goo-goo!” Claire cried. “Why, he’s perfectly harmless. Besides—he isn’t all there, Thad.”

“He wouldn’t have to be,” said the doctor, and smiled. “It doesn’t take much brains to be a turnkey.”

“I’ll be darned,” I said. “Well, now, what have we got? A cloven hoof and an imprisoned something that must stay imprisoned or else. A couple of nice people murdered, and their pixilated daughter. All right, Doctor—how do you go about curing cloven hooves?” “Locate the Camel’s Grave,” said Dr. Ponder, “and then make a rather simple incantation. Sound foolish?”

He looked at both of us. “Well, it isn’t. It’s as simple and foolish as pressing a button—or pulling a trigger. The important thing is who does it to which control on what equipment. In this case Claire is the one indicated, because she’s—what was it Thad said?—pixilated. That’s it. Because of the nature of her parents’ meeting, because of what they had together, because she is of such a character as to have been affected by the Camel to the extent of the thing that happened to her foot—it all adds up. She’s the one to do it.”

“Then anyone who’s subject to this particular kind of falling arches could do it?” I asked innocently.

“ ‘Anyone’—yes. But that can’t happen to just anyone.”

I asked another question, quickly, to cover up what I was thinking. “About familiars,” I said. “Don’t I recall something about their feeding on blood?”

“Traditionally, yes. They do.”

“Uh-huh. The blood of the witch, as I recall. Well how in time can the Camel character supply any blood to his familiar if he’s been buried here for—how long is it?” “Longer than you think … well, in a case like that the familiar gets along on whatever blood it can find. It isn’t as good, but it serves. Unless, of course, the familiar makes a side trip just for variety. Occasionally one does. That’s where the vampire legends come from.”

“How do you like that,” I breathed. “I’ll bet a cookie that the animals Goo-goo traps are supplying blood to the Camel’s familiar—-and Goo-goo supposed to be guarding the jail!”

“It’s very likely—and not very important. The familiar can do very little by itself,” said the doctor. He turned to Claire. “Did you ever see anything like a familiar taking blood? Think, now.”

Claire considered. “No. Should I have?”

“Not necessarily. You could though,” he indicated her foot, “being what you are.”

She shuddered slightly. “So I’m privileged. I’d as soon not, thank you.”

I sprang to my feet. “I just thought … Luana. What could have happened to her?”

“Oh, she’s all right. Sit down, Thad.”

“No,” I said. “I’d better go look for her.”

Claire leaned back, caught her knee in her hands, and made a soft and surprisingly accurate replica of a wolf-howl. “Drop desperately ill,” I said to her, and to Dr. Ponder, “That’s for people you like too well to tell’m to drop dead.” And I strode off.

It took only a few minutes to regain the spot where I had left Luana. She was not there.

I stood still, my brain racing. Witches, wizards, familiars … people who could see familiars sucking blood, and people who could not … one more cloven hoof than the good doctor bargained for, and a theory that such a thing came from contact with Something out here, when I knew darned well I had acquired mine in town … a girl who did what her dreams told her to do and another with hair like hot metal and lips bursting with some cool sweetness. And where was she?

I moved into the Wood, walking quietly more because of caution for my tom boot than any other reason, and peering into the mottled shadows. Once, with my eyes fixed on a distant clearing, I blundered into a nest of paper-wasps with my neck and shoulder. I started violently and moved back. The angry creatures swarmed out and around the damaged nest, and came after me as I sidled away, batting at them. They bumbled against my mouth and hair and forearms, but not one stung me. I remember thinking, when at last I was clear of them, that Claire had said something about bees … but before I could dredge up the thought I saw Luana.

If it had not been for the plaid skirt I couldn’t possibly have seen her. She was as still as a tree-trunk in a little glade, her head bent, watching something which struggled on the ground. Moving closer, silently, I could see her face; and, seeing it, I checked any impulse I might have to call out to her. For her face was a mask, smooth, roundeyed, with curling lips and sharp white teeth, and it was completely motionless except for the irregular flickering of her nostrils, which quivered in a way reminiscent of a snake’s swift seeking tongue. Slowly she began to bend down. When I could no longer see her face I came closer.

Then I could see. I shall never forget it. That was when the fireworks went out … and a terrible truth took their place.

At the foot of a little bush was a bare spot, brushed clean now of loose leaves, doubtless by the struggles of the rabbit. It was a large brown-brindle rabbit caught in a whip-snare which had fouled in the bush. The snare had caught the animal around the barrel, just behind the forelegs, probably having been set in a runway. The rabbit was very much alive and frightened.

Luana knelt slowly and put out her hands. She picked the rabbit up. I said to myself, the darling! She’s going to help it! … and I said, down deeper, but a woman looks tenderly at the thing she is about to help, and Luana’s face, now, whatever it was, it wasn’t tender.

She lifted the rabbit and bit into it as if it were an apple.

I don’t know what I did. Not exactly. I remember a blur of trunks, and dim green. I think I heard Luana make a sound, a sigh, perhaps—even a low laugh. I don’t know. And I must have run. Once I hit something with my shoulder. Anyway, when I reached Claire and the doctor I was panting hoarsely. They looked up at me as I stood panting, not speaking. Then, without a word, Ponder got up and ran back the way I had come.

“Thad! Oh, Thad—what is it?”

I sank down beside her and shook my head.

“Luana? Did something happen to Luana, Thad?”

“I’ll tell you,” I whispered. Something trickled down the outside of my nose. Sweat, I suppose. “I’ll tell you, but not now.”

She pushed my hair back. “All right, Thad,” she said. And that was all, until I got my breath back.

She began to talk then, softly and in a matter-of-fact tone, so that I had to follow what she said; and the sharp crooked edges of horror blunted themselves on new thoughts. She said, “I’m beginning to understand it now, Thad. Some of it is hard to believe, and some of it I just don’t like to believe. Doctor Ponder knows a lot, Thad, a whole lot… . Look.” She reached into the doctor’s bag, now open, and brought out a limp black book. On its cover, glittering boldly in a sunbeam, was a gilt cross. “You see, Thad? Good and evil… . Doctor Ponder’s using this. Could that be evil? And look. Here—read it yourself.” She opened the book at a mark and gave it to me.

I wiped my eyes with my knuckles and took the book. It was the Bible, the New Testament, open to the sixth chapter of Matthew. The thirteenth verse was circled: It was the familiar formula of praise:

“Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

“Look at the bottom margin,” she urged.

I looked at the neat block lettering pencilled there. “Ah-tay mahlkuth vé-G’boorah vé-Gedula lé o’lam, om.” I read haltingly. “What on earth is that?”

“It’s the Hebrew translation of the thirteenth verse. And—it’s the trigger, the incantation Dr. Ponder told us about.”

“Just that? That little bit?”

“Yes. And I’m supposed to go to the Camel’s Grave and face the east and say it. Then the Camel will know that I have been affected and will fix the trouble. Dr. Ponder says that although he is evil—a “black” magician—he can have no reason to leave me in this state.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Nor you either. You’ll go with me and we’ll both be cured.”

“Claire—why haven’t you told him I’ve got a hoof too?”

She looked frightened. “I—can’t,” she whispered. “I tried, and I can’t. There’s something that stops me.”

I looked at the book, reading over the strange, musical sounds of the formula. They had a rhythm, a lilt. Claire said, “Dr. Ponder said I must recite that in a slow monotone, all the while thinking ‘Camel, be buried forever and never show your self to mankind.’ ”

“Be buried forever? What about your foot? Aren’t you supposed to say something about your foot?”

“Well, didn’t I?”

“You did not.” I leaned forward and looked close into her eyes. “Say it again.”

“ ‘Camel, be buried forever, and never show yourself to mankind.’ ”

“Where’s the part about the foot?”

She looked at me, puzzled. “Thad—didn’t you hear me? I distinctly said that the Camel was to restore my foot and yours and then lie down and rest.”

“Did you, now? Say it again, just once more the way you’re supposed to.”

Obediently she said, “ ‘Camel, be buried forever, and never show yourself to mankind.’ There. Was that clear enough? About the foot, and all?”

Suddenly I understood. She didn’t know what she was saying! I patted her knee. “That was fine,” I said. I stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to think,” I said. “Mind, Claire? I think better when I walk. Dr. Ponder’ll be back soon. Wait here, will you?”

She called to me, but I went on into the Wood. Once out of her sight, I circled back and downgrade, emerging on the rim of what I now knew was the Forbidden Valley. From this point I could easily see the bluff at the far end. There was no sign of the skull. I began to walk down to where it should be. I knew now that it was there, whether it could be seen or not. I wished I could be sure of a few dozen other things. Inside, I was still deeply shaken by what I had seen Luana doing, and by what it meant—by what it made of me, of Claire, of Ponder… .

Behind me there was a horrible gargling sound. It was not a growl or a gurgle; it was exactly the hollow, fluid sound that emerges from bathrooms in the laryngitis season. I spun, stared.

Staring back at me was one’ of the most unprepossessing human beings I have ever seen. He had matted hair and a scraggly beard. His eyes were out of line horizontally, and in disagreement with each other as to what they wanted to look at. One ear was pointed and the other was a mere clump of serrated flesh.

I backed off a pace. “You’re Goo-goo.”

He gabbled at me, waving his arms. It was a disgusting sound. I said, “Don’t try to stop me, Mister America. I know what I’m doing and I mean to do it. If you get too near me I’ll butter these rocks with you.”

He gargled and bubbled away like mad, but kept his distance. Warily I turned and went on down the slope. I thought I heard Claire calling. I strode on, my mind awhirl. Luana. Ponder. Claire. Goo-goo. The chained skull, and the blue beast. The rabbit, Luana, Luana and those lips… . Ah-tay malkuth … and a cloven hoof. I shook my head to clear my brain.… vé G’boorah. . ..

I was on level ground, approaching the bluff. “Get up, Camel!” I barked hoarsely. “Here I come, ready or not!” Shocking, the skull, the famous mark of the Camel’s Grave, appeared on the ground. It was a worn, weatherbeaten skull, worn far past the brilliant bleaching of bones merely desiccated and clean. It was yellowed, paper-brittle. The eyebrow ridges were not very prominent, and the lower jaw, what I could see of it, was long, firm. It’s most shocking feature was part of it, but not naturally part of it. It was a chain of some black metal, its lower link disappearing into the ground, its upper one entering the eye socket and coming out through the temple. The chain had a hand-wrought appearance, and although it was probably as thick as the day it was made, unrusted and strong, I knew instinctively that it was old, old. It seemed to be—it must be—watching me through its empty sockets. I thought I heard the chain clink once. The bleached horror seemed to be waiting.

There was a small scuffling sound right at my heels. It was Goo-goo. I wheeled, snarling at him. He retreated, mouthing. I ground out, “Keep out of my reach, rosebud, or I’ll flatten you!” and moved around to the left of the skull where I could face the east.

“Ah-té malkuth vé—” I began; and something ran across my foot. It was the blue beast, the familiar. It balanced by the skull, blinking, and disappeared. I looked up to see Goo-goo approaching again. His face was working; he was babbling and drooling.

“Keep clear,” I warned him.

He stopped. His clawlike hand went to his belt. He drew a horn-handled sheath knife. It was blue and keen. I had some difficulty in separating my tongue from the roof erf my mouth. I stood stiffly, trying to brace myself the way an alerted cat does, ready to leap in any direction, or up, or flat down.

Goo-goo watched me. He was terrifying because he did not seem particularly tense, and I did not know what he was going to do. What was he, anyway? Surely more than a crazy deaf-mute, mad with loneliness. Was he really the jailer of a great Power? Or was he, in some way, in league with that disappearing bad-dream of a familiar?

I began again: “Ah tay mahlkuth vé G’boor—” and again was distracted by the madman. For instead of threatening me with his glittering blade, he was performing some strange manual of arms with it, moving it from shoulder to shoulder as I spoke, extending it outwards, upwards … and he stopped when I stopped, looking at me anxiously.

At last there seemed to be some pattern, some purpose, to what he was trying to do. When I spoke a certain phrase, he made a certain motion with the knife. “Ah tay …” I said experimentally. He touched his forehead with the knife. I tried it again; he did it again. Slowly, then, without chanting, I recited the whole rigmarole. Following me attentively, he touched his forehead, his chest, his right shoulder, his left, and on the final “Oh” he clasped hands together with the point of the knife upward.

“Okay, chum,” I said. “Now what?”

He immediately extended the knife to me, hilt first. Amazed, I took it. He nodded encouragingly and babbled. He also smiled, though the same grimace a few minutes earlier, before I was convinced of his honest intentions, would have looked like a yellow-fanged snarl to me. And upon me descended the weight of my appalling ignorance. How much difference did the knife make to the ritual? Was it the difference between the blanks and slugs in a gun? Or was it the difference between pointing it at myself or up in the air?

Ponder would know. Ponder, it developed, did, and he told me, and I think he did it in spite of himself. As I stood there staring from the steel to the gibbering Goo-goo, Ponder’s great voice rolled down to me from the Wood end of the vale. “Thad! Not with the knife!”

I glanced up. Ponder was coming down as fast as he could, helping Claire with one hand and all but dragging Luana with the other. Goo-goo began to dance with impatience, guggling away like an excited ape, pointing at me, at his mouth, at the knife, the staring skull. The blue beast flickered into sight between his legs, beside him, on his shoulder, and for a brief moment on his head, teetering there like some surrealistic plume. I took all this in and felt nothing but utter confusion.

Claire called, “Put down the knife, Thad!”

Something—some strange impulse from deep inside me, made me turn and grin at them as they scurried down toward me. I bellowed, “Why, Doc! I don’t qualify, do I?”

Ponder’s face purpled. “Come out of there!” he roared. “Let Claire do it!”

I reached down and yanked the makeshift stirrup from my boot, laughing like a maniac. I kicked off the toe of the boot with its padding, and hauled the rest up my leg. “What’s she got that I haven’t got?” I yelled.

Ponder, still urging the girls forward, turned on Luana. “You see? He saw you feeding. He could see you! You should have known!” and he released her and backhanded her viciously. She rolled with the blow deftly, but a lot of it connected. It was not she, however, but Claire who gasped. Luana’s face was as impassive as ever. I grunted and turned to face the skull, raising the knife. “How’s it go, little man?” I asked Goo-goo. I put the point of the knife on my forehead. “That it?”

He nodded vociferously, and I began to chant.

“Ah-tay …” I shifted the knife downward to my chest. Ponder was bellowing something. Claire screamed my name.

“Mahlkuth. …” With part of my mind I heard, now, what Ponder was yelling. “You’ll free him! Stop it, you fool, you’ll free him!” And Claire’s voice again: “A gun. …” I thought, down deep inside, Free him! I put the knifepoint on my right shoulder.

“Vé-G’boorah! There was the sharp bark of a shot. Something hit the small of my back. The blue beast stumbled from between my feet, and as I shifted the knife to my left shoulder, I saw it bow down and, with its mouth, lay something at my feet. It teetered there for a split second, its eyes winking like fan-blades in bright light, and I’ll swear the little devil grinned at me. Then it was gone, leaving behind a bullet on the grass.

“Vé Gedula …” I chanted, conscious that so far I had not broken the compelling rhythm of the ancient syllables, nor missed a motion with the knife. Twice more the gun yapped, and with each explosion I was struck, once in the face, once on the neck. Not by bullets, however, but by the cold rubbery hide of the swift familiar, which dropped in front of me with its little cheeks bulging out like those of a chipmunk at acorn time. It put the two bullets down by the first and vanished. I clasped my hands on the knife-hilt, pressing it to my chest, point upward the way Goo-goo had done.

“Lé o-lahm. …” From the comer of my eye I saw Ponder hurling himself at me, and the ragged figure of little Goo-goo rising up between us. Ponder struck the little man aside with one bear-like clubbing of his forearm, and was suddenly assaulted either by fifty of the blue familiars or by one moving fifty times as fast as a living thing ought to. It was in his ears, fluttering on his face, nipping the back of his neck, clawing at his nostrils, all at once. Ponder lost one precious second in trying to bat the thing away, and then apparently decided to ignore it. He launched himself at me with a roar, just as I came out with the final syllable of the incantation: “OM!”

It isn’t easy to tell what happened then. They say The Egg hit Hiroshima with “a soundless flash.” It was like that. I stood where I was, my head turned away from the place where the skull had been, my eyes all but closed against that terrible cold radiance. Filtering my vision through my lashes, I saw Ponder still in midair, still coming toward me. But as he moved, he—changed. For a second he must have been hot, for his clothes charred. But he was cold when he hit me, cold as death. His clothes were a flurry of chilled soot; his skin was brittle, frigid, eggshell through which his bones burst and powdered. I stood, braced for a solid impact that never came, showered with the scorched and frozen detritus of what had been a man.

Still I stood, holding the knife, for hardly a full second had passed; and my vision went out with that blinding light. I saw Claire thirty yards away on her knees, her face in her hands; and whether she had fallen or was praying I could not know. Goo-goo was on the ground where Ponder had stretched him, and near his body was the familiar, still at last. Beyond stood Luana, still on her feet, her auburn eyes blindly open to the great light, her face composed. She stepped forward slowly, hanging her arms, but with her head erect, her heated hair flung back. The cruel, steady light made sharp-edged shadows at the hinges of her jaw, for all they were sunlit. For a brief moment she was beautiful, and then she seemed to be walking down a staircase, for she grew shorter as she walked. Her taut skin billowed suddenly like a pillow-slip on a clothes-line, and her hair slipped down and drifted off in a writhing cloud. She opened her mouth, and it made a triangle, and she began to bleat. They were wordless sounds, each one higher in pitch than the one before. Up and up they went, growing fainter as they grew higher, turning to rat-squeaks, mouse-squeaks, bat-squeaks, and at last a high thin whistle that was not a sound at all but a pressure on the ear-drums. Suddenly there was nothing moving there at all; there was only a plaid skirt and a windbreaker tumbled together with blood on them. And a naked, lizard-like thing nosed out of the pathetic pile, raised itself up on skinny forelimbs, sniffed with its pointed snout at the light, and fell dead.

Claire drew a long, gasping breath. The sound said nothing for Claire, but much for the vale. It said how utterly quiet it was. I looked again at the plaid skirt lying tumbled on the grass, and I felt a deep pain. I did not mourn Luana, for Luana never was woman; and I knew now that had I never seen her again after our last kiss over the gate, I would not have remembered her as a woman. But she had been beauty; she had been cool lips and infernal hair, and skin of many subtle sorts of rose; I mourned these things, in the face of which her lack of humanity was completely unimportant.

The light dimmed. I dropped the knife and went to Claire. I sank down beside her and put my arms around her. She let her hands slide off her face and turned it into my shoulder. She was not crying. I patted her hair, and we rested there until I was moved to say, “We can look at him now,” and for a moment longer while we enjoyed the awe of knowing that all the while he had been standing there, released.

Then, together, we turned our heads and looked at him.

He had dimmed his pent-up light, but still he blazed. I will not say what he looked like, because he looked like only himself. I will not say he looked like a man, because no man could look like him. He said “Claire, take off your boot.”

She bent to do it, and when she had, something flowed from him to us. I had my hoof under me. I felt it writhe and swell. There was an instant of pain. I grasped the hairy ankle as the coarse hair fell out, and then my foot was whole again. Claire laughed, patting and stroking her restored foot. I had never seen her face like that before.

Then he laughed. I will not say what that was like either. “Thad, Thad, you’ve done it. You’ve bungled and stumbled, but you’ve done it.” I’ll say how he spoke, though. He spoke like a man.

“What have I done?” I asked. “I have been pushed and pulled; I’ve thought some things out, and I’ve been both right and wrong—what have I done?”

“You have done right—finally,” he chuckled. “You have set me free. You have broken walls and melted bars that are inconceivable to you … I’ll tell you as much as I can, though.

“You see, for some hundreds of thousands of years I have had a—call it a jailer. He did not capture me: that was done by a far greater one than he. But the jailer’s name was Korm. And sometimes he lived as a bird and sometimes as an animal or a man. You knew him as Ponder. He was a minor wizard, and Luana was his familiar. I too have a familiar—Tiltol there.” He indicated the blue beast, stretched quietly out at his feet.

“Imprisoned, I could do very little. Korm used to amuse himself by watching my struggles, and occasionally he would set up a spell to block me even further. Sometimes he would leave me alone, to get my hopes up, to let me begin to free myself, so that he could step in and check me again, and laugh… .

“One thing I managed to do during one of those periods was to bring Claire’s parents together. Korm thought that the magic thing they had between them was the tool I was developing, and when it began to look like a strong magic, he killed them. He did not know until much later that Claire was my magic; and when he found it out, he made a new and irritating spell around me, and induced Claire to come out here and walk into it. It was supposed to kill her, but she was protected; all it did was to touch her with the mark of the beast—a cloven hoof. And it immobilized me completely for some hours.

“When I could, I sent Tiltol after her with a new protection; without it she would be in real danger from Korm, for he was bound to find out how very special she was. Tiltol tried to weave the new protection around her—and found that he could not. Her aura was no longer completely her own. She had fallen in love; she had given part of herself away to you, Thad. Now, since the new spell would work only on one in Claire’s particular condition, and since he could not change that, Tiltol found a very logical solution: He gave you a cloven hoof too, and then cast the protection over both of you. That’s why the bear-trap did not hurt you, and why the wasps couldn’t sting you.”

“I’m beginning to see,” I said. “But—what’s this about the ritual? How did it set you free?”

“I can’t explain that. Roughly, though, I might say that if you regard my prison as locked, and your presence as the key in the lock, the ritual was the turning of the key, and the use of the knife was the direction in which the key was turned. If you—or Claire, which was Korm’s intention—had used the ritual without the knife, I would have been more firmly imprisoned than ever, and you two would have lived out your lives with those hooves.” “What about Goo-goo? I thought for a while that he was the jailer.”

He chuckled. “Bless you, no. He is what he seems to be—a harmless, half demented old man, keeping himself out of people’s way. He isn’t dead, by the way. When he wakes, he’ll have no recollection of all this. I practiced on him, to see if I could get a human being to perform the ritual, and he has been a good friend. He won’t lose by it. Speaking of the ritual, though, I’d like you to know that, spectacular as it might have been, it wasn’t the biggest part of the battle. That happened before—when you and Claire were talking to Ponder. Remember when Claire recited the spell and didn’t know what she was saying?”

“I certainly do. That was when I suddenly decided there was something funny about Ponder’s story. He had hypnotized her, hadn’t he?”

“Something very like it … he was in her mind and I, by the way, was in yours. That’s what made you leap up and go to Luana.”

I shuddered. “That was bad … evil. What about this ‘good and evil’ theory of Ponder’s, incidentally? How could he have worked evil on you with a spell from the Bible?”

There was a trace of irritation in his voice. “You’ll have to get rid of this ‘black and white magic’ misconception,” he said. “Is a force like electricity ‘white’ or ‘black’? You use it for the iron lung. You use it also for the electric chair. You can’t define magic by its methods and its materials, but only in terms of its purpose. Regard it, not as ‘black’ and ‘white’ but as High and Low magic. As to the Testament, why, that ritual is older than the Bible or it couldn’t have been recorded there. Believe me, Ponder was using it well out of its context. Ah well, it’s all over with now. You two are blessed—do you realize that? You both will keep your special immunity, and Claire shall have what she most wants, besides.”

“What about you?”

“I must go. I have work to do. The world was not ordained to be without me.

“For there is reason in the world, and all the world is free to use it. But there has been no will to use it. There’s wilfulness aplenty, in individuals and in groups, but no great encompassing will to work with reason. Almost no one reads a Communist newspaper but Communists, and only prohibitionists attend a dry convention. Humanity is split up into tiny groups, each clinging to some single segment of Truth, and earnestly keeping itself unaware of the other Truths that make up the great mosaic. And even when humans are aware of the fact that others share the same truth, they allow themselves to be kept apart from each other. The farmer here knows that the farmer there does not want to fight a war against him, yet they fight. I am that Will. I am the brother of Reason, who came here with me. My brother has done well, but he needs me and you have set me free.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“The earliest men called me Kamäel.”

“The Camel … in every language,” murmured Claire. Suddenly her eyes widened. “You are—an … an archangel, Kamäel! I’ve read… .”

He smiled, and we looked down, blinded.

“Tiltol!”

The tiny familiar twitched and was suddenly balancing on its two legs. It moved abruptly, impossibly fast, zoomed up to Kamäel, where it nestled in the crook of his arm. And suddenly it began to grow and change. Great golden feathers sprouted from its naked hide, and a noble crest. It spread wide wings. Its plumage was an incredible purple under its golden crest and gold-tipped wings. We stared, filling our minds with a sight no human being alive had seen—of all birds, the noblest.

“Goodbye,” said Kamäel. “Perhaps one day you will know the size of the thing you have done. The One who imprisoned me will come back, one day, and we will be ready for him.”

“Satan?”

“Some call him that.”

“Did he leave earth?”

“Bless you, yes! Mankind has had no devil but himself these last twenty thousand years! But we’ll be ready for the Old One, now.”

There was more sun, there were more colors in the world as we walked back to town.

“It was the Phoenix!” breathed Claire for the twentieth time. “What a thing to tell our children.”

“Whose children?”

“Ours.”

“Now look,” I said, but she interrupted me. “Didn’t he say I was to have what I wanted most?”

I looked down at her, trying hard not to smile. “Oh, all right,” I said.

I Kiss Your Shadow —

Robert Bloch

Joe Elliot sat down in my favorite chair, helped himself to a drink of my best whiskey, and lighted one of my special cigarettes. I didn’t object.

But when he said, “I saw your sister last night,” I was ready to protest. After all, a man can only take so much.

So I opened my mouth and then realized there was nothing to say. What could I say to a statement like that? I’d heard it from his lips a hundred times before, during their engagement, and it sounded perfectly natural then.

It would sound perfectly natural now, except for one thing—my sister had been dead for three weeks.

Joe Elliot smiled not too successfully. “I suppose it sounds crazy,” he said. “But it’s the truth. I saw Donna last night. Or, at least, her shadow.”

He still wasn’t giving me the opportunity for a sensible answer; the only sensible thing I could do was remain silent and listen.

“She came into the bedroom and leaned over me. I’ve had trouble getting to sleep nights, ever since the accident, but I guess you know that. Anyway, I was lying there looking up at the ceiling and trying to decide if I should get up and pull down the shade, because the moonlight was so bright. Then I turned on my side and got ready to swing my legs out of bed, and there she was. Just standing there, bending over me and holding her arms out.”

Elliot leaned forward. “Sure, I know what you’re thinking. The moonlight was deflected by something in the room and made a shadow, and I made the rest of it myself. Or 1 really was asleep and didn’t know it. But I know what I saw. It was Donna, all right—I’d recognize her anywhere, just from the silhouette.”

I found my voice, or a reasonable facsimile. “What did she do?” I asked.

“Do? She didn’t do anything. Just stood there, holding her arms out as if she were waiting for something.”

“What was she waiting for?”

Elliot stared at the floor. “This is really the hard part,” he murmured. “It sounds so—well, the hell with how it sounds. When Doona and I were engaged, she had this trick of hers. We’d be talking, or perhaps getting ready to do the dishes when I ate over at her place, some ordinary thing like that. And then, all at once she’d hold out her arms. I got so I recognized the gesture. It meant she wanted to be kissed. So I’d kiss her. And—go ahead, laugh!—that’s what I did last night. I got up out of bed and kissed her shadow.”

I didn’t laugh. I didn’t do anything. I just sat there and waited for him to continue. When he showed no signs of saying anything further, I had to fill the gap. “You kissed her. And then what happened?”

“Why, nothing. She just went away.”

“Disappeared?”

“No. She went away. The shadow released me and then turned around and walked through the door.”

“The shadow released you,” I said. “Does this mean you—?”

He nodded. I’m not a nod-interpreter, but it was obvious that there was no defiance in his movement; only a sort of resignation. “That’s right. When I kissed her she put her arms around me. I—I saw it. And I felt it. I felt her kiss, too. Funny sensation, kissing a shadow. Real, and yet not all there.” He glanced down at the glass in his hand. “Like a watered drink.” .

There was something wrong with his comparison, but then there was something wrong with the whole story. I suppose the main trouble lay in mere chronology—he’d come to me with it just about fifty years too late.

Fifty years ago, it might not have sounded quite so odd. Not in the days when people still believed in ghosts, by and large; the days when even so eminent and hardheaded a psychologist as William James was active in the Society for Psychical Research. There was a certain receptivity then to the sentimental approach—undying love, capable of reaching beyond the grave, and all that sort of thing. But to hear it now was wrong.

The only thing that kept me from coming right out and saying so was the realization that there was another aspect to the business even wronger than the rest. Joe Elliot himself. He was the professional skeptic, the confirmed scoffer.

Of course, maybe the shock of Donna’s death—

“Don’t say it,” he sighed. “I know how cockeyed and corny it all sounds, and I know what you’re thinking. I won’t argue with you. The accident did hit me pretty hard, you understand that. And I admit I was in some kind of shock-state when they pulled me out of the car down there in the ravine. But I snapped out of it before the funeral. You know that, too. And if you don’t believe it, just check with Doc Foster.”

My turn to nod.

“I was all right at the funeral and after,” he continued. “You’ve seen me almost every day since then. Have you noticed anything—offbeat?”

“No.”

“So it wasn’t just imagination. It couldn’t be.”

“Then what’s your answer?”

He stood up. “I have no answer. I just wanted to tell you what happened. Because it’s one of those things where you must tell someone, and you’re the logical person. I can trust you not to go around repeating it. Besides, you’re her brother, and there’s a chance that she might—come to you.”

Joe Elliot moved to the door.

“Leaving so soon?” I asked.

“Tired,” he said. “I didn’t sleep very much last night, afterwards.”

“Look,” I said. “How about a sedative? I’ve got 6ome stuff here that—”

“Thanks, but I’d rather not.” He opened the door. “I’ll call you in a day or so. We can have lunch together.” “You’re sure you’re—”

“Yes, I’m all right.” He smiled and went out I frowned and stayed in. I was still frowning as I got ready for bed. Something was definitely wrong with Elliot’s story and that meant something was definitely wrong with Elliot. I wished I knew the answer.

“There’s a chance that she might—come to you I crawled between the sheets and noted that the moonlight was bright on my ceiling tonight, too. But I didn’t look at the moonlight very long. I closed my eyes and contemplated the chance. It seemed to be a very slim one, as chances go.

My sister Donna was dead and in her grave. I hadn’t seen her die, but I was the first one summoned right after the accident, as soon as the police arrived on the scene. I saw them lift her out of the crumpled car, and she was dead, no doubt about it. I didn’t like to think about seeing her. I didn’t like to think about seeing Joe Elliot, either, shaking in shock; unconscious of my presence, unconscious of the gash in his forehead, unconscious even of the fact that Donna was dead. He’d kept talking to her while they carried her to the ambulance, trying to make her understand that it was an accident, there was oil-slick on the road, the car had skidded. But Donna never heard him because she was already dead. She had died when her head went through the windshield.

That’s what they thought at the inquest, too. Verdict of accidental death. And surely the morticians who embalmed her had no doubts, nor did the minister who preached the sermon over her casket, the workmen who lowered hex body into the grave out there at Forest Hills. Donna was dead.

And now, three weeks later, Joe Elliot came to me and said, “I saw your sister. Or at least, her shadow.” Hardheaded Joe, a rewrite man on the desk and cynical as they come, kissing a shadow. He had said she stood there with her arms extended and he recognized her.

Well, I hadn’t seen fit to mention it, but I recognized that particular gesture from his description. Because it so happens I’d seen it myself, long before Joe Elliot came into the picture. Way back when Donna was engaged to Frankie Hankins, she used to pull the same trick with him. I wondered if Frankie had heard the news yet, over there in Japan. He’d enlisted and that broke the affair up.

Come to remember, there was another time Donna used the open-arms technique. With Gil Turner. Of course, that hadn’t lasted, it was obvious from the-start: Turner was just a namby-pamby. Surprised everybody to see a wishy-washy character like him pull up stakes and leave town in such a hurry.

It must have surprised Donna, too, but not for long. Because just about that time I introduced her to Joe Elliot and the heat was on.

There was no question about this being the big thing for both of them. They were engaged inside of a month, and planning to be married before the summer was out. Donna just took over, lock, stock and barrel.

Of course I’d always known my sister was a determined woman Get’s face it, she made a habit of getting her Own way, and she was a hellcat if you crossed her) but it was interesting to watch how she worked on Joe Elliot. Talk about Pygmalion—here was one case where Galatea reversed the play. Before anyone knew it, Joe Elliot was out of his sloppy sports-jacket and into gray tweeds, out of smelly cigars and into briar pipes, out of cuppa-cawfee-’n-a-hamburger and into Donna’s comfortable little apartment for regular evening meals.

Oh, she made a lot of changes in that boy! Got so that he was shaving twice a day, and he trotted around the comer to the bank with his paycheck instead of over to Smitty’s Tap.

I had to give Donna credit. She knew what she wanted, and she knew just how to get it Maybe she was ruthless, but she was feminine-ruthless. She remade Joe Elliot, but she also made him like it. He certainly didn’t seem to object. I got so used to the new Elliot that I virtually forgot about the old one—the old one who used to sit in Smitty’s and swear a mighty oath that the girl didn’t breathe who could ensnare him into unholy dreadlock.

By the time the wedding drew near, Donna was already openly talking about their plans for buying a house—“You can’t raise a family in an apartment”—and Elliot would listen and actually grin.

“And another thing,” he used to say, shaking his finger at Smitty in solemn warning, “I may be a poor downtrodden wage-slave, but you’ll never catch me being a house-slave. Or turning into that typical figure of fun—the American Father. Dear Old Dad, the butt of every family radio and TV show in the country! Not for me. I believe in the old saying: children should be seen and not had.”

But this was before Donna. Before, I suppose, he found out how nice it is to have a woman around who lights your pipe, and straightens your tie, and fixes the fried potatoes at just the right time so they won’t get soggy when the steak is served. Before he found out what it is to have somebody who holds out her arms and doesn’t say anything, except with her eyes.

This much I was sure of: Donna wasn’t playing any trick. She loved the guy. She died loving him, the night they were driving back from my party. That part was real.

Everything was real, up to now. Now, and Joe Elliot’s story of the shadow.

I looked up at the shimmering ceiling. Somehow, here in the dark, with its mingling of moonlight, I could almost begin to believe.

Maybe we’re not quite as sophisticated as we like to think we are; ghosts happen to be unfashionable, and the concept of love conquering the grave went out with Outward Bound. But set a sophisticate down in the pitch-black bowels of a haunted house, bar the exit, and leave him there for the night Maybe his hair won’t turn white by morning; still, there’ll be some reaction. Intellectually, we reject. Emotionally, we’re not so sure. Not when the chips are down and the lights are low.

Well, the lights were low and I kept waiting for Donna to come. I waited and waited, and finally I guess I just fell asleep.

I told Joe Elliot about it at lunch two days later. “She never showed,” I said.

He cocked his head at me. “Of course not,” he answered. “She couldn’t. She was at my place.”

I finally managed to speak. “Again?”

“Two nights ago, and last night.”

“Same thing?”

“Same thing.” He hesitated. “Only—she stayed longer.”

“How much longer?”

More than hesitation now; a lasting silence. Until he brushed his napkin from his lap, stooped down to pick it up, and barely whispered, “All night”

I didn’t ask the next question. I didn’t have to. One look at his face was enough.

“She’s real,” Elliot said. “Donna. The shadow. You remember what I said the first time? About the watered whiskey?” He leaned forward. “It’s not like that now. Maybe they get stronger once they break through. Do you think that’s it? They learn the way, and then they get stronger.”

He was close enough so that I could smell his breath, and he hadn’t been drinking—any more than he’d been drinking the night of the accident. I’d testified to that, and it helped seal the verdict.

No, Elliot wasn’t drunk. I wished to heaven he was, so I wouldn’t have to say what I was going to say. But I had to.

“Why don’t you take a rum up to see Doc Foster?” I asked him.

Joe Elliot spread his palms on the table. “I knew you’d say that,” he grinned. “So I already called him this morning, for an appointment.”

I managed to withhold the sigh of relief, but it was there, and I could feel it. For a minute I’d been afraid of an argument—not because I dreaded arguments, but because of what it would imply about Elliot, I was glad to see he hadn’t gone completely overboard.

“You needn’t worry,” he assured me. “I know what Doc will tell me. Sedatives, relaxation, and if that doesn’t work, see a head-shrinker. And if he does, I’ll follow orders.”

“Promise?”

“Sure.” He gave me the grin again, but this time it was a little twisted. “Want to know something funny? I’m beginning to be a bit scared of that sister of yours—even if she is only a shadow.”

I put a large No Comment sign on my face and we went out together in silence. We separated in the street—I went back to the office and Elliot went over to Doc Foster’s.

I didn’t learn about his visit for several days. Because when I got back to the office they had a surprise for me.

The same newspaper employing Joe Elliot on the rewrite desk sees fit to retain me in the capacity of roving correspondent. And the M.E. was waiting for me with a suggestion that I rove in the direction of Indo-China. As of two days from now, with all watches synchronized.

I got busy. So busy that I never managed to call Joe Elliot. So busy that if he called me, I wasn’t around to get the message.

He finally caught me at the airport, actually, just before I took off for the west coast and die first leg of the flight.

“Sorry I couldn’t be on hand,” he said. “Bon voyage and all that.”

“You sound pretty happy.”

“Why not?”

“Doc’s sedatives do the trick?”

He chuckled. “Not exactly. When I told him, he didn’t even bother with the first part of the routine. Sent me packing right away to the you-know-who. Name of Partridge. Heard of him?”

I had. “Good man,” I said.

“The best.” He paused. “Well, I mustn’t keep you—”

“You’re all right?” My voice was insistent.

“Sure. I’m fine. I sailed for the works. Some of the things the guy told me make sense. I guess I’m more tangled up than I thought—oh, not just what I told you about, but there are other angles. Anyway, I’m going in to him twice a week for I don’t know how long. And it’s not as phoney as I thought it might be, either. None of this couch business. He really gets results.” Another pause. “I mean, I’ve been there just twice, and she’s gone.”

“The shadow, you mean?”

“The guilt-fantasy.” He chuckled again. “See, Pm picking up the lingo already. Time you come back, FU be ready to hang out my shingle. Well, lots of luck, kid. And keep in touch.”

“Will do,” I said. And hung up, listening to them announce my flight. And took the flight, and made my transfer in Frisco, and went to Manila, and went from there to Singapore, and from there to hell.

It was hot as hell in hell, and although I managed to get enough dispatches back to satisfy my M.E., I had no opportunity to keep in touch.

You know what happened in Indo-China, and when they opened a branch hell in Formosa, my M.E. sent me over there, and when hell got too hot for even a roving correspondent I was based in Manila and then Japan. I’m not trying to make a production out of it; just explaining why it turned out that I was gone for eight months instead of eight weeks.

When I got back they gave me a leave, and some information. Not much, but just enough to send me scurrying around to Joe Elliot’s apartment the first opportunity I got I didn’t waste any time on hello-how-are-you. “What’s this I hear about you leaving the paper?” I began.

He shrugged. “I didn’t leave. I got canned.”

“Why?”

“Hitting the sauce.”

He looked it, too. The sports-jacket was back and it was dirty. He wasn’t bothering to shave once a day, either, let alone twice. He was thin, and twitchy.

“Let’s have it,” I said. “What happened to you?” “Nothing.”

“Quit stalling. What does Partridge say?”

He gave me a grin, and to say it was twisted doesn’t even begin to describe it. They could have made a cast and used it to cut pretzels with.

“Partridge,” he echoed. “Sit down. Have a drink.”

“All right, but keep talking. 1 asked you a question. What does Partridge say?”

He poured for me. I was a guest; I got a glass. He gulped out of the bottle. Then he put it down. “Partridge doesn’t say anything any more,” he told me. “Partridge is dead.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“When did this happen?”

“Month or so back.”

“Why didn’t you go to another hea—psychiatrist?” “What? And have him jump out of the window, too?” “What’s all this about jumping out of a window?”

He picked up the bottle. “That’s what I’d like to know.” Gulp. “Personally, I’m not even sure he jumped. Maybe he was pushed.”

“Are you trying to tell me—?”

“No. I’m not trying to tell you anything. Any more than I’d try to tell Doc Foster or the boys down at the office. You can’t tell anyone a story like that. Just got to keep it to yourself. Yourself and the little old bottle.” Gulp.

“But you said—I mean, you sounded as if everything was going so well.”

“That’s right. And it went fine. Up to a point.”

“What point?”

“The point where I found out why she wasn’t coming back any more.” He stared out of the window, and then he went a million miles away and only his voice remained. I could hear what he said, plainly enough. Too plainly.

“She wasn’t coming back to me because she was going to him. Night after night after night. Not with her arms out—not the way she’d come to me, in love. She went to him out of hate. Because she knew he was trying to drive her away. Don’t you see, when he worked on me it was like—like exorcism. You know what exorcism is, don’t you? Casting out demons. Ghosts. A succubus.”

“Joe, you’ve got to stop this. Get hold of yourself.”

He laughed. “All I can get hold of is this.” And reached for the bottle, as he spoke. “You’re asking me to stop this? But I didn’t start it. I didn’t make it up. Partridge told me himself. Finally he broke down and he had to tell me. Do you get the picture now?—he came to me for help. And I couldn’t help him. I was getting well, there’s a laugh for you, I was getting over my delusions. I talked to him the way you’re trying to talk to me, real Dutch uncle stuff.

“And I went out of his office, and the next morning I read where he jumped. Only he didn’t jump—she must have pushed him—he was afraid of her, she kept getting stronger and stronger, just as I thought she would. They found him spattered all over the sidewalk—”

This time I reached for the bottle. “So you quit your job and started drinking, just because a psychiatrist cracked up and committed suicide,” I said. “Because one poor overworked guy went to pieces, you had to do likewise. I thought you were smarter than that, Joe.”

“So did I.” He took the bottle away from me. “You heard what I told you. I thought I was completely well. Even when he died, I still wasn’t sure about some things. Until that night, when she came back.”

I watched him drink and waited.

“Sure. She came back. And she’s been coming back,
every night, since then. I can’t fight it off, I can’t fight her off, she keeps clinging and clinging to me. But why try to explain? You don’t believe me anyway. I saw the look on your face when I mentioned the part about a succubus.” “Please,” I said. “I want to hear the rest. I’ve read about those things, you know. A succubus takes the form of a woman and comes to men at night—”

He was nodding and then he cut in. “So that explains it, don’t you see? What she was whispering to me. I guess I didn’t tell you, but she talks now. She talks to me, she tells me things. She says she’s glad, and it won’t be long now, then she’ll have everything she wanted—”

His voice trailed off, and I stood up just in time to catch him as he slumped. He was out cold; his body was limp and light in my arms. Too light. He must have lost a lot of weight. I guess Joe Elliot had lost a lot of things.

I suppose I could have tried to bring him around, but I didn’t make the effort. It seemed kinder just to carry him over to the bed, take off his things and let him rest. I found pajamas in one of the bureau drawers, got them on him—it was like dressing a rag doll instead of a man—and covered him up. Then I left him. He’d sleep now, sleep without shadows.

And while he slept, I’d figure out something. There had to be an answer. Because Donna was my sister and I’d loved her, and because Joe Elliot was my friend, there had to be an answer.

If Partridge were only alive. If I could just talk to him and find out what he’d really learned about this delusion! He must have learned something, in eight months. Even if Elliot deliberately tried to hold back, in eight months a man like Partridge would learn—

The thought hit me then; a stinging blow. I tried to duck. But it hit harder and this time there was a numbing reaction.

“No,” I told myself. “No.”

I kept telling myself no, but I was telling the cab-driver to take me down to the office again. I told myself no, but I told the M.E. I wanted all the stuff in the house on Partridge’s suicide.

Then I was reading it, and then I was over at the Coroner’s office, checking the report of the inquest.

I didn’t ask any fancy questions, and I didn’t do any fancy detective work. That’s out of my line. I won’t pretend to have done anything more except to jump at a wild conclusion. That’s all the records showed—Partridge had jumped to a wild conclusion.

But knowing what I did, I was more inclined to agree with Joe Elliot. Partridge hadn’t jumped to a wild conclusion.

There wasn’t a single solitary thing I could hang onto as tangible evidence; nothing to build a case around. But I checked and rechecked, and I fitted the pieces together and then everything shattered apart when I recognized the picture.

I left the Coroner’s office and went over to Smitty’s Tap and drank a very late supper, not talking to anyone. I didn’t know who to talk to now—surely not the Coroner, or the D.A., or the cops. They couldn’t help, because I had no evidence. Besides, I owed Joe Elliot a chance.

There was still the shadow of a doubt. A shadow named Donna, who’d come back. Maybe she’d be coming back tonight, but I wasn’t going to wait.

After a while it was quite late, but I was on my way, back to Elliot’s apartment. Chances were that he was still sleeping, and I hoped so in a way. Then again, I knew I had to see him now.

I went up the stairs slowly, one voice saying let him sleep and the other voice saying knock, and two of them fighting together, let him sleep—knock—let him sleep —knock—

It turned out that neither voice won, because when I got to the door, Joe Elliot opened it and looked out.

He was awake all right, and maybe he’d been back to the bottle again and maybe he hadn’t: he looked as if he’d swallowed strychnine. And his voice was the voice of a man with a burned throat.

“Come in,” he said. “I was just going out.”

“In your pajamas?”

“I had an errand—”

“It can wait,” I told him.

“Yes, it can wait.” He led me inside, closed the door. “Sit down,” he murmured. “I’m glad you’re here.”

I sat down, but I kept a grip on the arms of the chair, ready to move in a hurry if necessary. And I waited very carefully until he sat down, too, before I spoke.

“Maybe you won’t be so glad when I speak my piece,” I said.

“Go ahead. It doesn’t matter what you say now.”

“Yes it does, Joe. I want you to listen carefully. This is important.”

“Nothing’s important.”

“We’ll see. After I left you this afternoon, I did a little investigating. I went to the Coroner’s office, among other things. And I agree with you now. Partridge was pushed out of the window.”

For the first time his face showed interest. “Then I was right, wasn’t I?” he began. “She did push him, you found some evidence—”

I shook my head. “I didn’t find any evidence. Not any new evidence. I just began to check the facts and see if they fitted in with a theory of my own. They did.” I spoke very slowly, very deliberately. “I checked on one particular phase of the report, Joe. The account you gave of your own movements after leaving Partridge’s office the day he jumped. The whole story about not taking the elevator down because it was crowded and you were in a hurry to get to the office. And the part about not going to the office after all because you remembered you’d forgotten your hat and went back upstairs to get it. And how you came in just as they were looking out the window where Partridge had jumped.

“I read it all, Joe. I read your account of the last meeting with Partridge, how upset he seemed. Only I was a special reader.”

He was more than interested now; he was alert.

“They tried pretty hard to break down your story, didn’t they, Joe? Only they couldn’t, because there was no evidence to the contrary, and what you said made sense. About how Partridge was fidgeting and nervous and kept looking out the window. About how jumpy he’d been the past few weeks. Good word, that jumpy. Good enough for the Coroner’s Jury, anyway. But not good enough for me.

“Because you didn’t mention anything about the shadow in your story to the Jury. You told something entirely different.”

He hit the arm of his chair hard. “Of course I did, man! I couldn’t tell them what I told you, they’d think I was crazy.”

“But you were crazy, Joe. Crazy enough so that your story to me makes sense. Partridge didn’t jump, he was pushed—and you pushed him.”

Joe Elliot made a noise in his chest. Something came out of his mouth that sounded like, “Why?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that. The real answer. All I can do is guess. And my guess is that there wasn’t anything to this story of yours about Partridge being afraid of a shadow. My guess is that you were the one who was afraid—because in session after session, Partridge kept getting nearer and nearer to something you didn’t want him to find. Something you tried to hide, but couldn’t. Something he, as a trained analyst, found anyway. Or was on the very verge of finding. When you realized that, you panicked—and destroyed him.”

“Rave on,” he said.

“All right, I will. Joe, you’re not crazy. You never were. I think this is all an act You wouldn’t murder a man except for a very important reason. Whatever Partridge found out, or was about to find out, was something vitally necessary for you to conceal.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that you killed my sister.”

The words hit the wall and bounced. The words hit his face and twisted it up into the gargoyle grin, the spasmodic twitch.

“All right. So you know.”

“Then it’s true,” I said.

“Of course it’s true. But what you don’t know is why. You wouldn’t know, and you’re her own brother. How could I expect anyone else to understand if you never saw it? What Donna was really like, I mean. The way she tried to fasten her claws into me, pulling me down, trying to possess me, never letting go for an instant. Sure I loved her, she knew how to make a man love her, she had a thousand tricks to drive you mad with wanting her, holding out her arms was just the beginning. But that wasn’t enough, to possess me that way. She had to have everything, she wanted every minute, every movement, every thought. She was making me over and trying to turn me into all the things I always hated. I could see it, I knew what lay ahead, a life of slavery to her house and her kids and her future.”

He stopped because he had to, and I said, “Why didn’t you get out, then? Break the engagement?”

“I tried. Don’t you think I tried? But she wouldn’t let go. Not her, not Donna. Even then she was a succubus. She had her claws in me and she wanted to drain me. I can’t help it; there was something about her, and when she came into my arms I couldn’t break free because then I didn’t want to any more.

“But when I was alone again, I wanted to. You never heard about this part, but just before your party, I tried to sneak out of town. She caught me. There was a scene—or there would have been, except that Donna never made scenes. She made love. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“And after that I was sick. Not physically sick, but worse than that. Because I knew it would always be this way; me trying to get free and she clawing me back. There’d always be a succubus. Unless I got rid of her.” Another pause, another breath, and then he rushed on. “It wasn’t difficult. I knew the spot on the road where the rail hung over the edge of the ravine. I had a wrench in the car. You remember we left late, and the road was deserted. When we got to the ravine I suggested we park and look at the moon. Donna liked that kind of suggestion. So then I—I hit her. And sent the car over. And went down myself, and finished cracking the windshield and gave myself a gash in the forehead and crawled into the car. I didn’t have to do much pretending about the shock. Only it was a shock of relief, because I knew now she was really dead.”

I put my hands in my lap. “And that’s what Partridge was on the verge of finding out, isn’t it?” I asked. “All this business about the shadow was just what he told you it was—a guilt-fantasy. You felt compelled to spring it on me first because of the guilt-feeling, and you didn’t want to tell Partridge anything about the possible cause of the delusion. Only he kept probing until he was too close for safety. Your safety, and his. So you killed again.”

“No.”

“Why bother to deny it? You’ve already confessed to one murder, so—”

“Killing Donna wasn’t murder,” he said. “It was self-defense. And that’s the end of it. I didn’t kill Partridge, no matter what you think. She did.

“I told you how she went to him night after night, torturing him, breaking him down, trying to get him to the point where he was ready to jump.

“And when he told me, that day in his office, I couldn’t stand it. So I got ready to explain, I was going to tell him the truth about the shadow and what I’d done.

“I remember he was bending over me, asking me about the accident, and then he straightened up and looked surprised and I saw that she was there. A shadow, but not a shadow on the wall. A shadow in the room, right behind us, tugging at his arm. And he tried to scream but there was this blackness over his mouth, her hand, and she was pulling him over to the window, and his feet made little scuffing noises sliding along the carpet, and he tried to grab the window-frame but the shadow is strong and the shadow laughed so you could hear it above the scream when he went down and down and down—”

He snapped out of it suddenly. “Too bad you weren’t here earlier tonight. You’d have believed me then, because you would have seen her. She came a while before you arrived and woke me. Said she wanted me to go out there, because there was a surprise. Something to show me. At first I didn’t know what she was hinting at, but I know now. You see, I counted back, but you’d only laugh-I could take you along to look, too, but you’d laugh and—”

“I’m not laughing, Joe,” I said.

“Well, you’d better not. She wouldn’t like that She wouldn’t like to have anyone get in her way. And she’s so strong now, stronger than anyone. She’s already proved that. I’m going to do what she says. Now that she has a real claim on me, nothing can stop her.”

I stood up. “But she can be stopped. There’s a way, you know.”

“You mean you believe in exorcism now?”

“Joe,” I said, “you’re partially exorcised already. By confessing to me you’ve rid yourself of a portion of her power. You might have banished her forever if you’d succeeded in telling Partridge the truth, because he represented authority to you. That’s the answer, Joe. You’ve got to tell this to an authority. Then there won’t be any more guilt-feelings or guilt-fantasy, either. You’ll remember what actually happened to Partridge, and once they understand the situation you can put in a plea. I’ll help you all I can. There’s a pretty smart lawyer downtown who—”

Now Elliot stood up. “I get it,” he murmured. “You’re humoring me because I’m a psycho and that’s what you want them all to think. Maybe you’re afraid she’ll be coming after you, too. Well, don’t worry. She won’t, unless you try to stand in her way. I’m the one she really wants, and I’m going to her. I want to see—”

“Listen, Joe,” I began, but he wasn’t listening.

He reached out suddenly and his hand swept across the tabletop, gripped the half-empty bottle, raised it, and smashed it down until it shattered. Then he took a quick step forward, swinging the glittering weapon.

The whole operation from start to finish was almost instantaneous, and it silenced me.

He stood there, holding the jagged length of glass that splintered down from the broken bottle-top.

“Sorry to cut you off,” he said. “Now you’d better go. Before I really cut you off.”

I took one step forward. The gargoyle returned to his face, and I took two steps backward.

“I’m the one she wants,” he said. “You can’t stop me. And no sense going to the cops. They can’t stop me, either. She won’t let them.”

I should have jumped him then, even though he was a maniac with a broken bottle in his hand for a weapon. I often wonder what would have happened if I had jumped him.

But I didn’t.

I turned and ran, ran out of the apartment and down the stairs and through the hall and into the street, and I kept telling myself it wasn’t just because I was afraid. I had to find help, this was a job for the police.

There was a call-box two blocks down and around the comer, and I used it. I suppose it didn’t take more than five minutes between the time I left the apartment and the time I got back to meet the squad car as it pulled up.

That was enough, however. Joe Elliot had disappeared. They sent out a prowl car, and they put it on the police broadcast band, and you’d think a pajama-clad man would be easy to spot on a deserted city street.

But it wasn’t until I broke down and told them where I thought Joe Elliot was headed for that we got any action—and then it was because we piled into the squad car and drove all the way out to Forest Hills.

He couldn’t have made the trip out there in that time on foot. He must have stolen a car, although they never found one or heard a report of a missing vehicle.

But he was there, of course, lying across her grave. And he’d been digging long enough to claw down a good six inches through the thick turf and solid soil.

That’s when the stroke must have hit him. They never did agree as to the exact cause. The point is, he was dead.

And that left me to answer the questions.

I tried.

I tried to answer questions, and at the same time to leave out all the crazy stuff, the unfashionable stuff about ghosts and shadows and a succubus that kept getting stronger and stronger. They brought up the idea of a love reaching past the grave; it was their own idea, only of course they thought he was trying to reach her.

I tried to keep the murder part out of it too—because there was no sense opening that up now.

But they were the ones who finally got around to it, and they opened it up. The case, I mean. And then the grave.

If it had been just the case, I could have managed to hold on, I think. Hold on to my story, and to my belief, too.

But when they opened the grave, it was too much.

They dug down the rest of the way through the thick turf and solid soil; dug down to what hadn’t been disturbed for ten long months.

And they found her, all right, although there were no marks or anything to prove murder. No proof at all.

And there was no explanation for what else they found, either. The tiny body of a newborn infant in Donna’s intact coffin—lying there just as dead as Donna was.

Or just as alive.

I can’t make up my mind which is which any more. And of course the police keep asking me questions for which there are no answers. None that they’d believe.

I can’t tell them Donna wanted Joe so badly even death couldn’t deny her. I can’t tell them she came to him at the last and summoned him proudly, that he went out to Forest Hills to see their child.

Because there is no such thing as a succubus. And a 191
shadow does not speak, or move, or hold out its arms.

Or does it?

I don’t know. I just lay in bed at night, now, when the bottle is empty, and look up at the ceiling. Waiting. Maybe I’ll see a shadow. Or shadows.