 CHAPTER XII In vain I called on rest to come and stay. We were but seated at the festival of many covers when one cried, Away! Rose-garden of Sa'adi. Now I entered a time of experiences differing at every point yet interwoven closely, so that my days might compare to a rope whose strands are of violently contrasting colors. The rope would be inharmonious, startling to the eye, but strong to bind and hold, as I was bound and held. All day I lived in the wholesome household-atmosphere evoked by Vir and Filida. It is impossible to describe the sunny charm they created about the commonplace. Our gay, simple breakfasts where Filida presided in crisp, middy blouse, or flowered smock, were the grey cat sat on the arm of Vir's chair, speculative yellow eye, observant of his master's carving, while the Swedish Christina served us her good food with the spice of an occasional comment on farm or neighborhood events. How perfect a beginning for the day! How stale beside our breeze-swept table was any board at which I had ever sat! I do declare that I have never seen a more winning face than the bright one of my little cousin whom her world had pronounced plain. Vir and I basked in her sunbeams gratefully. Afterward we each had our work. Of the three, Vir was the most industrious, slow, steady, and unsparing of himself to a degree that accomplished surprising results. Filida flitted over the place indoors and out, managing the house, following Vir about, driving to village or town with me on purchasing trips for our supplies. I did rather more of my own work than usual, that summer, and consequently had more of the commercial side to employ me. A healthy, normal life? Yes, until the hours between midnight and dawn. I never knew when I laid down at night whether I should sleep until sun and morning overlay the countryside, whether the whispering call of desire Mitchell would summon me to an hour more exquisite than reality, less satisfying than a dream, or whether I should leap into consciousness of the loathsome eyes fixed coldly malignant upon me, while my enemies inhuman hate groped toward me across the darkness its presence fouled. For my two guests kept their promises. If I speak briefly of the coming of the thing during this time, I do so because the mind shrinks from past pain. It came again, and again. It craftily used the torture of irregularity in its coming. For days there might be a respite, then it would haunt me night in succession until my physical endurance was almost spent. I have stood before the breach in that barrier, fighting that nightmare duel until the place of colossal desolation, last frontier the human race might hope to keep, became as well known to me as a landscape on earth. Yet the effect of the things assault upon me never lessened. On the contrary, the horror gained in strength. A dreadful familiarity grew between it and me. Communication flowed more readily between us with use. I will not set down, perhaps I dare not set down, the intolerable wickedness of its alternate menaces and offered bribes. Contact with its intelligence poisoned. There were nights when it was dumb, when all its monstrous power concentrated and bore upon me, its will to destroy locked with my will. My victory was that I lived. In the shadow Desire Mitchell and I drew closer to one another. How can I tell of a love that grew without sight? So much of the love of romance and history is a matter of flower-pedal complexions, heart-consuming eyes, satin lips, and all the form and color that make beauty. How can I make clear a love that grew strong and passionately demanding, new delicate coquettries of advance and evasion, intimacy of minds like the meeting of eyes and understanding, all in the dark? The blind might comprehend, but the blind have a physical communication we had not. Touch has enchantments of its own. Every night, near midnight, I switched off the lights and waited in the chair at my writing-table, where I was accustomed to work. If she had not come by two o'clock, I learned to know she would not visit me that night. I might sleep in that certainty. A strange trist I kept there in the dark, listening to the flow of the waterfall from the lake, loud in that dead hour stillness, or hearing the soft, incessant sounds of insect life awake in trees and fields. If she came, a drift of perfume, a movement slight as a curtain stirred by the wind, then an hour with such a companion as the ancient magician might have drawn out of the air to his nine mystic lamps. Strange, fantastic tales, she told me, spun of fancies luminous and frail as threads of glass. She could not speak without betraying her deep learning in sciences rejected and forgotten by the modern world. Alchemy, astrology, geomancy furnished her speech with illusions blank to my ignorance, which she most gently and politely enlightened when I confessed. I learned that the green line of Paracelsus was not a beast, but a recipe for making gold. That salamander's feather was better known today as Asbestos, and that the emerald table was by no means an article of furniture. I give these examples merely by way of illustration. On the other side of the shield held between us, I soon discovered that she knew no more of modern city life than a well-taught child who has never left home. She listened eagerly to accounts of theatres and restaurants. The history of Philida and Ethan Veer seemed to her more moving and wonderful than any story she could tell me. I was amazed and humbled to find that she rated my ability to make music as a lofty art among the occult sciences. Of the evil thing that haunted me we came to say little. To press her with questions meant to end her visit, I found by experience. When I spoke of that strand between the barrier and the gray, mist-hidden sea, her passion of distress closed all intercourse with the plea that I go away at once while escape was possible, while life remained mine. So for the most part I curbed my tongue and my consuming curiosity, not from consideration but of necessity. One night I asked her how the dark thing spoke to me by what medium of communication. Spirits of all orders can speak to man in every language, so long as they are face to face, she answered with a faint surprise at my lack of knowledge. When they turn to man they come into use of his language and no longer remember their own, but as soon as they turn from man they resume their own language and forget his. But they themselves are unaware of this fact, for they utter thought to thought by direct intelligence. So if angel or demon turns his back to you, Roger, you may not make him hear you, though you call with great force. How do you know that desire? But by simple reading. Do not enemoser and many writers record it? Have you spoken to such beings' desire? The question was rash, but it escaped me before I could check the impulse. To my relief she answered without resentment. No. No? The thing, the enemy that comes to me, has never spoken to you? No. I was silent in amazement and in credulity. The dark creature claimed her, she declared herself helpless to escape from that dominion into normal life, and yet it had never spoken to her. It spoke to me, a stranger most ignorant, and not to the Cirrus who was familiar with its existence and the lore which linked humanity to its fearful kind. You do not believe me? Her voice came quietly across my thoughts. I believe you, of course, I stammered. I was only astonished. You have described it and the barrier so often, from the first night. I supposed you had seen all I have and more. All you have seen? Now tell me with what eyes you have seen the barrier and the far frontier, the eyes of the body, or that vision by which man sees in a dream, and which is to the sight as the speech of spirits is to the hearing. I suppose, with the inner sight, then understand me when I say that I have seen with the eyes of another, by a sight not mine and yet my own. You mean, I floundered in vague doubts and jealousy of her human associations of which I knew nothing. You mean, hypnotism? She laughed with half-sad railery. How shall I answer you, Roger? Once upon a time the jewel called barrel was thought unrivaled as a mirror into which a magician might look to see reflected events taking place at a distance, or reflections of the future. But by and by magicians grew wiser. They found any crystal would serve as well as a barrel. Later still they found a little water poured in a basin, or held in the hollow of the hand, showed as true a phantasm. So one wrote, There is neither crystal amansi nor hydromansi, but the magic is in the seer himself. Well, desire? Well, Roger, if to see with the sight of another is hypnotism, then every man who writes a book or tells a good tale is a hypnotist. Every historian who makes us see the past is a necromancer. You read of the thing? No, she replied, after a long pause. I knew it through sympathy with one who died as I would not have you to die, my friend Roger, of whom I shall think long in that place to which I go presently. Question me no more. When the time comes for you to throw a certain braid of hair and a pommander into the fire, I will never do that. No? Well, you might keep the pommander, which is pure gold engraved with ancient signs and the name of the shining dawn, Dahana, in Sanskrit characters. Also the perfume it contains is precious, being blend with the herb vervane which is powerful against evil spirits. It is not the pommander that I should keep, nor the pommander that holds the powerful spell. You value the braid so much? I value only one other beauty as highly. Yes, Roger? Yes, desire, and that beauty is she who wore the braid. Now the darkness in the room was dense. Yet I thought I sensed a movement toward me as airy as the flutter of a bird's wing. The fragrance in the atmosphere eddied as if stirred by her passing. But when I spoke to her again, after a moment's waiting, she had gone. I am sure no housekeeper was ever more nice in her ideas of neatness than my little cousin Filida, and no maid more exact in carrying out orders than Christina. Nevertheless automobiles pass on the quietest roads, and my windows are always wide open. There is the fireplace, too, with possibilities of soot. Anyhow there was a light gray dust overlaying the writing table on the following morning. And in the dust was a print as if a small hand had rested there, a yard from my chair, a slim hand it must have been. I judged the palm had been daintily cupped, the fingers slender, smooth, and long in proportion to the absurd size of the whole affair. My hand covered it without brushing an outline. I could not put this souvenir away with the braid and the pommander, but I could put its evidence with their witness of Desire Mitchell's reality. End of CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII For may not the devils send to their fantasy their senses being dulled, and as it were asleep, such hills and glycering courts wear unto he pleaseth to delude them? King James's Demonology Now I have to record how I walked into the oldest snare in the world. Perhaps it was the sense of her near-presence brought home to me by her hand-print on the table, so close to where my hand rested. Perhaps it was her speech of presently leaving me to return no more. Or perhaps both these joined in urging on my determination to learn more of Desire Mitchell before some unknown bar fell between us. I only know that I passed into a mood of trapped exasperation at my helplessness and lack of knowledge. It seemed imperative that I should act to save us both, act soon and surely. Yet inaction was bound upon me by my ignorance. Who was she? Where did she live? What bond held her subject to the thing from the barrier? What gates were to close between us? Why could she not put her hand in mine any night, and let me take her away from this haunted place? Why, at least, not come to me in the light and let me see her face to face? I was a man groping in a labyrinth while outside something precious to him as being stolen. For the first time I found myself unable to work, unable to share our household life with Phyllida and Vir, or to find relaxation in driving about the countryside. Anger against Desire herself stirred at the bottom of my mind. Desire, who hampered me by the word of honour in which she had netted me so securely. It was then that my enemy from the unknown places began to whisper of the book. I encountered that enemy in a new mood. We did not meet at the breach of the mighty wall, confronted in death conflict between its will and mine. Instead, night after night, it crept to my window as at our first meeting. I started awake to find its awful presence blackening the starlight where it crouched opposite me, its intelligence breathing against mine. As always my human organism shrank from its unhuman neighbourhood. Chill and repugnance shook my body, while that part of me which was not body, battled against nightmare paralysis of horror. But now it did not menace or strive against me. It displayed a dreadful suavity I might liken to the coiling and uncoiling of those great snakes who are reported to mesmerize their prey by looping movements and figures melting from change to change in the hunger dance of Ka. There was a book that held all I longed to know, it whispered to me. A book telling of the woman she did not wish me to read, for fear I should grow overwise and make her mine. The book was here in my house, I might arise and find if I would be guided by it. I thrust the whispers away. How could I trust my enemy? If such a book existed, which seemed improbable, there was a taint of disloyalty to desire in the thought of reading without her knowledge. The thing was not turned away. How could I do harm by learning what she was, unless she had evil to conceal? Did I fear to know the truth? As for the book's existence, I had only to accept guidance from it. I persisted in refusal, but the idea of the book followed me through my days like a wizard's familiar, dogging me. Where could such a volume be hidden? In what secret nook in wall or floor? How came a book to be written about the girl, I supposed young, unknown and set apart from the world? Was I letting slip an opportunity by my fastidious notions of delicacy? Indecision and curiosity tormented me beyond rest. Filida and Vir began to consider me with puzzled eyes. Christina developed a habit of cooking individual dishes of a special succulent and triumphantly setting them before me as a surprise, a kindness which of course obliged me to eat whether I was hungry or not. I suspect my little cousin abetted her in this transparent ruse. I pleaded the heat as an excuse for all. We were in late August now. Cicadas sang their dry chant in the fields, where the sun glared down upon Vir's crops and painted him the fine bronze of an Indian. Our lake scarcely stirred under the hot still air. It was after a day of such heat succeeded by a night hardly more cool that the lights in my room quietly went out. I was sitting at my table, some letters which required answers spread before me while I brooded, pen between my fingers, upon the mystery which had become my life. For the moment I attributed the sudden failure of light to some accident at the power-house. Not for long. The hateful cold that crept like freezing vapor into the room, the foul air of damp and corruption pouring into the scented country atmosphere, the frantic revolt of body and nerves. Before I turned my eyes to the window, I knew the monster from the frontier crouched there. Weakling, it taunted me. Puny from of old, how should you prevail? By your fear the woman stays mine. Miserable earth-crawler in whose hand the weapon was laid and whose shrinking let it fall unused, the end comes. The book, I gasped against my better judgment. The book was the weapon. No, or you would have not offered it to me. Coward, believe so. Hug the belief while you may. The offer is past. Past? A madness of the bafflement and frustrated curiosity gripped and shook me. I take the offer, I cried in passion and defiance. If there is such a book, show it to me. The thing was gone. Light quietly filled the lamps. Or was it that I had opened my eyes? I gripped the arms of my chair, waiting. For what? I did not know. Only all the horror I ever had felt in the presence of the thing was slight compared to the fear that presently began to flow upon me as an icy current. There, in the pleasantly lighted room, alone, I sank through depths of dread down into an abyss of despair. Down! A long sigh of rising wind passed through the house like a sucked breath of triumph. Windows and doors drew in and out against their frames with a rattling crash, then hung still with unnatural abruptness. Absolute stillness succeeded. I felt a very light shock as if the ground at my feet was struck. I fled from the terror for the first time. Yes, towered at last, deserter from that unseen frontier's defense, I found myself in the hall outside my room, leaning sick and faint against the wall. Behind me the door shut violently, yet I felt no current of air to move it. From the other side of the house there sounded the click of latch, then a patter of soft-shod feet. Philida came hurrying down the hall toward me. She was wrapped in some silky pink-flower garment. Her short hair stood out around her head like a little girl's well-brushed crop. She presented as endearingly natural a figure, I thought, as any man could seek or imagine. The wisdom of Ethan Veer who had garnered his love there. "'Cousin?' she exclaimed. The hall light is so dim. You almost frightened me when I glimpsed you standing there. Did the wind wake you, too? I think we're going to have a thunderstorm. It is so hot and gusty. I heard poor Bagheera mewing and scratching at the door, so I was just going down to let him in before the rain comes.' "'Yes,' I achieved. Then finding my voice secure. I will let in the cat. Where is Veer?' "'He did not wake up, so I tiptoed out. Why?' "'I do not like to have you going about the house alone at this hour.' Her eyes widened, and she laughed outright. "'Why, Cousin Roger, what a funny idea to have about our very own house. I have one of the electric flashlights you bought for us all. See?' "'What could I tell her of my vision of her womanly softness and timidity brought to bay by the thing of horror down in those empty lower rooms? How did I know it stocked no prey but me? Its clutch was upon Desire Mitchell. These were its hours between midnight and dawn.' "'Tramps,' I explained evasively. Give me the light.' But she patted her down the stairs beside me. Kimono lifted well above her pink-flowered slippers, one hand on the balustrade. The light glinted in the white topaz that guarded her wedding-ring. A richer jewel than any diamond, in the sight of one who knew the tender thought with which she had said it there. "'No, the horror was not for her,' clothed in her wholesome goodness as in armor of proof. Surely, for such as she, the barrier stood unbreached and strong. When I opened the front door, Bagheera darted in like a hunted cat. A drift of mist entered with him. Looking out, I saw the night was heavy with a low-hanging fog that scarcely rose to the treetops. A ground mist that eddied in smoke-like waves of gray where our light fell upon it. Such mists were common here, yet I shivered and shut it out with relief. While I refastened the lock, Bagheera purred around my ankles, pressing caressingly against me as if thanking me after the manner of cat. I remembered this was not the first time he had shown this anxiety and gratitude for shelter. "'Bagheera does love you,' Phyllida commented, stooping to pat him. Isn't it funny, though, that he never will go into your room? He is always petting around you downstairs. When Christina or I are doing up your quarters, he will follow us right up to the door-sill, but we can't coax him inside. Perhaps he doesn't like that perfume you always have about.' A qualm ran through me, recalling the night I had taken the cat there by force and its frantic escape. But I snapped the key fast and straightened myself with sharp self-contempt. Had I fallen so low as to heed the caprices of a pet-cat? Was it not enough that I had fled from my enemy after accepting the knowledge it had striven so long to force upon me? For I had that knowledge. When I had halted in the passage outside my room in the moment before Phyllida had joined me, there had been squarely set before my mental sight the place to seek the book. Phyllida, there was a bookcase in this house when it was bought, I said. I believe it stood in my room before the place was altered. A small stand. I remember putting my candle on its top the first night I slept here. Have you seen it? Some tone in my question seemed to touch her expression with a surprise as she lifted her eyes to mine. Or perhaps it was the hour I chose for the inquiry. Oh, yes, she answered readily. I supposed you had noticed it long ago. I mean where it stands. The quaintest bit, a genuine antique. And holding the stuffiest collection of old books, too. I believe they may be valuable out of print, early editions. If—her voice faltered wistfully—if father ever forgives me for being happy with Ethan and comes to visit us, he would love every musty old volume. Do you think mother and he ever will, cousin Roger? I am sure they will, Phil. Feuds and tragic parents are out of date. They must adjust themselves gradually when they realize Vir is himself. Before you go upstairs to him, will you tell me where to find that bookcase? Now? Why, of course. She led me across the hall to her sewing-room. I cannot say that she sewed there very much, but she had chosen that title in preference to Boudoir or study as more becoming a housewife. She had assembled here a spinning-wheel from the attic, some samplers, a hepple-white sewing table, and chairs discovered about the house. Her canaries' cage hung above a great punch-bowl of flowered ware in which she kept goldfish. A pipe of Veers balanced beside the bowl showed that his masculine presence was not excluded. In a corner stood the bookcase. Phyllida pulled the chain of a lamp bright under a shade of peacock chint, and watched me stoop to look at the faded bindings. Thank you, Phil, I said. It may take some time to find the book I want. You'd better hurry back to bed before Vir comes hunting for a missing wife. Are you going to stay and hunt for the book tonight, then? Unless you're afraid I shall disturb your canaries? She did not laugh. Drawing nearer she stroked my sleeve with a caressing doubt and remonstrance. But you have not been to bed at all, and soon it will be morning. Do you have to write your lovely music at night, cousin Roger? You have been growing thin and tired this summer. Are you quite well? You're so good that you should be happy, but are you? Good, Phil, I wondered, touched. Why, how did your lazy, tune-spinning, frivolous cousin get that reputation in this branch of the family? You're so kind, she said simply. Ethan says so. You know, cousin Roger, that I was overeducated in my childhood. My brain choked with little, little stupid knowledge that hardly matters at all. We went to church Sundays because that was the correct thing to do. But I was almost a heathen when Ethan married me. He doesn't trouble about church. He doesn't trouble about the past, or life after death, or punishment for sin. He believes if one tries to be kind and straight, the big kindness and straightness takes care of everything. So I have learned to feel that way, too. It is a calm sort of feeling all the time, if you know what I mean. And that is the way you are good, although perhaps you never thought of it. Thank you, Philoda, I acknowledged, and walked with her to the foot of the stairs. When her pink-clad figure had vanished behind her bedroom door, I went back to the sewing-room and drew up a chair before the case of books. Philoda had not unreasonably stigmatized them as stuffy. They were a sober collection, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, an ancient copy of the Apocrypha, and a three-volume Life of Martin Luther loaded the first shelf. I looked at the second shelf, and I saw the first shelf, and found it filled with the bound sermons of a divine of whom I had never heard. The lowest shelf held strange companions for the sedate volumes above. Erudite works on theosophy, magic, the interpretation of dreams, and demonology, huddled together here. Not all of them were readable by my humble store of learning. There was a Latin copy of Artemidora's, Mesmer's Shepard, Matthew Paris, some volumes in Greek, and some I judged to be Arabian and Hebrew. At the end of the row stood a thin, dingy book whose title had passed out of legibility. I took it out and opened the covers. Fronting the first page was a faded woodcut, the portrait of a woman. Beneath an old long S-type, dim on the yellowed paper, was printed the legend Desire Mitchell Ye Fowl Witch. Closing the book I forced reason to come forward. I was resolved that panic should not drive me again, nor my defence fall from within its walls. Master of my enemy I might never be. Master of my own inner kingdom I must and should be. But I was glad to be here instead of upstairs while I read. Glad of the interlude in Phyllida's company, and of the presence of the three sleepy canaries who blinked down at the disturbing lamp. The date stamped into the back of the book in Roman numeral was of a year in the 1700s. What connection could its Desire Mitchell have with the girl I knew? Perhaps she had adopted the name to mystify me. Or at most she might be of the family of that unfortunate woman branded witch by a bigoted generation. Reopening the book I studied the dim stiff portrait. The face was young, delicate of line, with long eyes set wide apart, eyes that even in this wretched picture kept a curious drowsy watchfulness. The inevitable white Puritan cap was worn, but curls clustered about the brow, and two massive braids descended over either shoulder. The perfumed bronze-colored braid up in my drawer. The volume was entitled Some Manifestations of Satan in Witchcraft in Ye Colonies, by Abimelech Featherstone. Disregarding the satanic manifestations set forth in the other four chronicles, I turned to Yefau Witch, Desire Mitchell. As I began to read another breath of wind side through the house, sucking windows and doors in and out with the shock of sound, instantly ended, that is produced by a distant explosion. I thought a flash of lightning whipped across my eyes, but when I glanced toward the windows, I saw only the smoke-like fog banked in drifts against the pains. End of Chapter 13. Recording by Roger Maline. Chapter 14 of The Thing from the Lake. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline. The Thing from the Lake by Eleanor M. Ingram. Chapter 14. Beauty is a witch. Much ado about nothing. I will tear the core out of many yellow pages of diffuse writing spiced with smug moral reflections. Desire Mitchell had been no traditional old hag, hideous and malevolent, no pallid, raving epileptic to accuse herself in shrieking tales of black men and sabbots, and harm done to neighbor's cattle or crops. Her father was a clergyman who brought his goods and his motherless daughter from England to the colonies and settled in Yipequat Marsh Country. There he found a congregation and they lived much respected. Their culture appeared to be far beyond that of their few hardworking neighbors. Young Mistress Mitchell was reputed learned in the use of symbols, among other arts, and to have been, of a beauty exceeding the custom among godly women, to so great degree that sorcery should have been suspected of her. However, sorcery was not suspected, not even when her fame spread among near-dwelling Indian tribes, who gave her a name signifying, water on which the sun is shining. Admiration was her portion, then, with all the suitors the vicinity held. But from fastidiousness or ambition, she refused every proposal made to her father for her. She walked aloof and alone, until another sort of wooer came to the gate of the minister's house. This man's full name was not given, apparently through the writer's cautious respect for place and influence. He was vaguely described as goodly in appearance, of high family, but not abundantly supplied with riches. However, he chanced to come to the obscure settlement, was not stated. He did come, saw Desire Mitchell, and fell as objectively prostrate before her, as any youth who never had left the village. He pressed his courtship hard and eagerly. At first he was welcome at the minister's house, but a day came when Master Mitchell forbade him to cross that door, and rumor whispered, scandalized, that Sir Austin's suit had not been honorable to the maid. Sir Austin sulked a week at the village inn. Then he broke under the torment of not seeing Desire Mitchell. Their betrothal was made public, and he rode away to prepare his home for their marriage in the spring. Travel was slow in the winter. News trickled slowly across snowbound distances. With spring came no bridegroom. Instead, word arrived of his affair with an heiress recently come to New York from England. She was rich in gold and grants of land from the crown. Her husband would be a man of weight and influence, it seemed. Sir Austin had married her. Desire Mitchell shut herself in her father's house. The clergyman did not live many months after the humiliation. Alone the girl lived. Student, wrote a Bemelach Featherstone, of black and bitter art, or, as some say, having, like Bombastus de Hohenheim, a devil's bed. In his distant home, Sir Austin sickened. He burned with fever, anguish consumed him. Physicians were called to the bedside of the rich man. They could not diagnose his ailment or help him. He screamed for water. When it was brought, his throat locked, and he could not swallow. He was a man of weight and influence, and he did not know what to do. He could not swallow. He raved of Desire Mitchell, beseeching her mercy. In his times of sanity, he begged and commanded his wife and servants to send for the girl. In her pardon, he saw his sole hope of life. Finally he was obeyed. Messengers were sent to the village. They were not even admitted to the house they sought, or to sight of Mr. Mitchell. Your master came himself to Woo. Let him come himself to plead. That was the answer they received to carry back to the sick man. Sir Austin heard and submitted with trembling hope. Riving in the anguish wasting him by day and night, he made the journey by coach and litter to Desire Mitchell's house. At her door sill he implored entrance and pity. The door did not open. It never opened for him. For three days in succession he was born to her threshold, calling on her in his pain and fear. His servants and physician clustered about, staring at the house, which stood locked and blank of response. At night, fireshine was seen from an upper room. Some declared they heard wild, melodious laughter. On the third day Sir Austin died. A stern-faced deputation of men went to the house of the late clergyman. They found the door unlatched and open to their entrance. In the upper room they found Mistress Mitchell seated before her hearth, where a dying fire fell to embers, her hair flowing down in great beauty. What have I to do with Sir Austin, or he with me? She calmly asked the men who gaped upon her. How should I have harmed him who came not near him, as ye know? Burry him and leave me in peace. If she had been aged and ugly, she might have been hung. Gossip ran rife through the countryside. But indignation was strong against the man who had jilted the local beauty. There existed no proof of harm done, and the matter slept for a time. New matters came. A horror grew up around the house. The girl was seen flitting across the fields at dawn, a monstrous shadow following. Her voice was heard from the room where she locked herself alone, raised in unknown speech. Strange lights moved in her window, in the deep night. The old woman who had served in the house for years was stricken with a palsy, and was taken away mumbling unintelligible things that iced the blood of superstitious hearers. There was a young man of the neighborhood whose love for Mistress Mitchell had been long and constant. One morning he was found dead on her doorstep, his face fixed in drawn terror. Under his hand four words were scrawled in the snow. Sarah, daughter of Ruel There were those who could finish that quotation. Next Sabbath the new minister took as his text, ye shall not suffer a witch to live. And he spoke of Sarah, the daughter of Ruel, who was wed to ten bridegrooms, each of whom was dead on the wedding eve, for she was beloved by an evil spirit that suffered none to come to her. Authority moved at last against desire Mitchell. But when the officers came to arrest her, she was found dead in her favorite seat before the hearth. Fair and upright in her place, scented with a perfume she herself distilled of her learning in such matters, which was said to contain a rare herb of Jerusalem called Lady's Rose, resembling spikenard, with vervane and cedar and secret simple, in which she steeped her hair so that wherever she abode were sweet odors. So did she escape justice, but shall not escape hell's damnation and heaven's casting out. I closed the book and laid it down. Reading those dim, closely printed pages had taken time. I was astonished to find the window-spaces gray with dawn when I glanced that way. The night was past. Neither from desire nor from the thing without a name which had sent me to this book could I find out what I was expected to glean from the narration. My enemy had made no conditions on directing me to the book. It had asked no price, uttered no menace. Why, then, had I so solemn a certainty that a crisis in our affair had been reached? I had come to an end. A corner had been turned. I had opened a door that could not be closed. How did I know this? Why? Why was the fog against the windows this morning so like the fog that shrouded the unearthly sea opposite the barrier? By and by Christina came downstairs and busied herself in the kitchen. Bagheera, who had slept beside my chair all night, rose and padded out to the region of breakfast and saucers of milk. Next the voices of Filada and Veer drifted from above. To have Filada find me there in her sewing-room, finishing an all-night vigil, invoked too many explanations. I did an unwise thing. From the lowest shelf of the bookcase I gathered such books as were readable by my knowledge and carried the armful up to my room. After a hut bath and breakfast I would look over these companions of the New England witch-book, end of Chapter 14, Recording by Roger Maline. Chapter 15 of The Thing from the Lake. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline. The Thing from the Lake by Eleanor M. Ingram. Chapter 15 Not a drop of her blood was human, but she was made like a soft, sweet woman. Lilith. The fog stayed all day. The mist was so dense that it gave the effect of a solid mass in closing the house. No wind stirred it, no cheering beam of sun pierced it. Through it sounds reached the ear, distorted and magnified. All day I sat in my room, reading. There are books which should not be preserved. I, who am a lover of books, who detest any form of censorship, I do seriously set down my belief that there exist chronicles which would be better destroyed. With this few people will agree. My answer to them is simple. They have not read the books I mean. Not all the volumes from the old bookcase were of that character, of course. Nearly all of them were well known to classical students, at least by name. Obscure, fantastic, cast aside by the world they were, but harmless to a fairly steady head. But there were two that clung to the mind like pitch. I have no intention of giving their titles. Ugly and sullen, early night closed in when I was in a mood akin to it. Dinner with phyllida and veer was an ordeal hurried through. We were out of touch. I felt remote from them, fenced apart by a heavy sense of guilt and defilement left by those hateful books, most incongruously blended with contempt for my companion's childish lightheartedness. As soon as possible I left them. Alone in my room, in my chair behind the writing-table again, I pushed aside the pile of books and sank into somber thought. What should I say to Desire Mitchell if she came to-night? Who was she who was claimed by the unspeakable and who did not deny its claim? Was I confronted with two beings from places unknown to normal humanity? If she was the woman that she had seemed to be throughout our intercourse, how could the dark enemy control her? Even I, a common man with full measure of mankind's common faults and weaknesses, could hold its clutch from me by right of the law that protects each in his place. Was she one of those who have stepped from the permitted places? Sarah, the daughter of Rule, who is beloved by an evil spirit who suffered none to come to her. There was a young gentlewoman of excellent beauty, daughter of a nobleman of Mar, who loved a foul monstrous thing, very horrible to behold, and for it refused rich marriages. Until the Gospel of St. John being said suddenly, the wicked spirit flew his ways with sore noise. I put out my hand and thrust the pile of books aside from my direct sight. But I could not so easily thrust from my mind the thoughts these books had implanted. I could not forget that Desire Mitchell herself had alleged jealousy as the thing's reason for attacking me. What if we came to an explanation to-night and ended this long delirium? Was it not time? Had not my weeks of endurance earned me this right? Resolution mounted in me defiant and strong. The evening had passed to an hour when I might look for the girl to come. I switched off the lights and sat down to keep our nightly trist. In the darkness of the haunted room the thoughts I would have held at bay rushed upon me as clamorous besiegers. Desire! Desire of the world! Desire of mine and of the unhuman thing! Did we grasp at Eve or Lilith? At the fire on the hearth or the cold phosphorescence of swamp and marsh? A drift of fragrance was afloat in the air. A delicate stir of movement passed by me. I raised my head from my hands, expectant. I am here," her familiar voice told me. Desire, you had to come to-night. Some quality in my voice carried to her a message beyond the words. But she did not break into exclamation or question as another woman might. She was mute as one who stands still to find the path before taking a step. You are angry," she said at last. Something here has gone badly for you. I knew that before I entered this room. How can you say that, I challenged? If you are like other men and women, how can you know what happens when you are absent? How do you know what passes between the thing from the frontier and me? Not no, unless you tell me, Roger. If I feel from afar when you are in sorrow, why do so many people feel with another in sympathy? You feel more than ordinary sympathy can," I retorted. Then perhaps it is not an ordinary sympathy I have for you, Roger. Her very gentleness struck wrong on my perverted mood. Is she trying to turn me from my purpose with her soft speech? She had never granted me anything so near an admission of love until now. It is not an ordinary trial that I have borne for these meager meetings where I do not see your face or touch your hand," I answered. That must end. Put your hand in mine, Desire, and come with me. Let us go out of this room where shadows make our thoughts sickly. You shall stay with my cousin, or if you choose we will go straight to New York or Boston. I am asking you to be my wife. Let us have done with phantoms and spectres. I love you. No," she whispered. You do not love me tonight. Tonight you distrust me. Why? Is it distrusting to ask you to marry me? Not this way would you have asked that of me when I last came, but I will answer you more honestly than you do me. To go with you would be the greatest happiness the world could give. To think of it dazzles the heart. But it is not for me. Have you forgotten, Roger, that my life is not mine? That I am a prisoner who has crept out for a little while? The gates soon close now upon me. What gates, I demanded. Sacrifice and Expiation Expiation of what? I exclaimed, exasperated. Desire, I have read the book of Desire Mitchell downstairs. I heard her gasp and shrink in the darkness. Silence bound us both. In the hush it seemed to me that the house suddenly trembled as it had done the night before. A slight shock as from some distant explosion. In my intentness upon the woman opposite me the tremor passed unheeded. She must answer me now, surely, now. She spoke with a breathless difficulty, spacing her words apart. How did you find the book? It told me, the thing from out there, I admitted, sullenly defiant of her opinion. She cried out sharply. You? You took its gift? You did that fatal madness, and you are here? Oh, you are lost and the guilt mine. Yet I warned you that danger flowed from knowing me. You accepted the risk and the sorrow. Yet you have thrown down all for a bribe of knowledge. Do you not know what it means to take a gift from the dark ones of the borderland? To brave the loathsome eyes so long and fall this way at last. Yet there may be a hope since you still live. But go, not tomorrow, not at dawn, but go now. By all that man can dread for soul or body, go now. Not without you. Me? Oh, how can I make you understand? I shall never come here again. Take with you my gratitude for our hours together, my prayers for all the years to come. There is no blame to you because you could not trust a woman on whom falls the shadow of the awful watcher that stalks behind me. I make no reproach if only you will go. Do not linger. I do most solemnly warn you not to stay alone in this room one moment after I have gone. Desire, I exclaimed. Wait. Forgive me. I trust you. I did not mean what you believe. Do not leave me this way. Desire. I can say honestly that my next action was without intention. On my table lay, as usual, a small electric torch. Every member of our household was provided with one for use in emergencies, likely to occur in a country house, the time of candles being passed. Now, rising in agitation and repentance, my hand pressed by chance upon the flashlight's button. A beam of light poured across the darkness. What did I see starting out of the black gloom? A spirit or a woman? Were those a woman's draperies or part of the night fog that showed mere swirl upon swirl of pale gray twisting in the path of light? I glimpsed a face colorless as pearl, the shine of eyes dark and almond-shaped. Then a drifting mass of gray smoke, all intermingled with glittering gold flashes, seemed to close between us. The whole apparition sank down out of vision. As aghast I lifted my hand and the torch went out. Shaken out of all ability to speak, I stood in my place. Did I hear a movement or only a stirring of the orchard trees beyond the windows? Desire, I ventured, my voice hoarse to my ears. No answer. I felt myself alone. I would not at once turn on the lamps. My haste might seem an attempt to break faith with her a second time. I sat down again, folding my arms upon the table and resting my forehead upon them. Well, I had seen her at last, but how? A wan loveliness seemingly painted upon the canvas of the dart by a brush dipped in moonlight. A white moth caught fluttering in the ray of the torch. Seen at the instant of her leaving me forever, insulted by my suspicions, my love hurled coarsely at her like a command. My promise of security for her visits apparently broken. How dared I even hope for her return! Now I knew why my enemy had guided me to those books that I might read, fill my mind with the poison of vile thoughts, and destroy the comradeship that bound me to Desire Mitchell. How should I find her? How free us both! The clock in the hall downstairs struck a single bell. With dull surprise I realized that considerable time had passed while I sat there. Still I did not move, weighed down by a profound discouragement. Suddenly, as a wave will run up a beach in advance of the incoming tide, impelled by some deep stir in the ocean's secret places, an icy surge rushed about my feet. Deathly cold from that current struck through my whole body. My heart shuddered and staggered in its beating from pure shock. Go! Not to-morrow, not at dawn, but now! The wave, seeped back, receded away from me down its invisible beach. Desire's warning hammered at my mind, striving to burst some barred door to reach the consciousness within that had loitered too long. This was the new peril. This was what I had fled from, unknowing the source of my panic, the night before. This was death. A second surge struck me with the heavy shock of a veritable wave from some bitter ocean. This time the tide rose to my knees, boiling and hissing in its rush. Blood and nerve seemed to freeze. I felt my heart stop, then reel on like a broken thing. Flex of crimson spattered like foam against my eyelids. The wave broke. The mass poured down the beach, tugging at me in its retreat. With the last strength ebbing away from me with that receding current, I dragged the chain of the lamp beside me. The comfort of light springing up in the room. The relief of seeing normal, pleasant surroundings. Truly light is an elixir of courage to man. That cold had paralyzed me. I had no force to rise. Nor did I altogether wish to rise and go. I had lost desire to-night. Was I to lose my self-respect also? Was I to run a beaten man from this peril after standing against my enemy so long? Should I not rather stand on this, my ground, where I was not the lamefeller? Down by the lake the snarling cry of a terrified cat broke the night stillness. It was Bagheera's voice. The cry was followed by sounds indicating a small animal's frantic flight through the thickets of goldenrod and willow that edged the banks of the stream below the dam. The series of progressive crashes passed back of the house and continued on, dying away down the creek. As I braced my startled nerves after this outbreak of noise, the light was withdrawn from every lamp in the room. At the same moment the electric torch rolled off my table and fell to the floor. I heard its progress across the muffling softness of the rug, across the polished wood beyond, and final stoppage at some point out of my reach. As vapor rises from some unseen source and forms in vague growing mass within the curdled air, so blackening dark the hideous bulk reared itself in the night and stared in upon me. As so many times I felt the eyes I could not see, the pressure of a colossal hate loomed over me, poised to crush, yet withheld by a force greater than either of us. The venom of its malevolence flowed into the atmosphere about me, fouling the breath I drew. My lungs labored. PIG ME! its intelligence thrust against mine. Frail and presumptuous will that has dared oppose mine, you are conquered. This is the hour foretold to you, the hour of your weakness and my strength. Weakling, feel the death-surf break upon you. Fall down before me. Cower, plead! Now indeed I felt a sickness of self-doubt, for the wash of the invisible sea never had come to me until to-night. And there was desires saying that I had destroyed myself by accepting the thing's gift of knowledge of the book. But I summoned my forces. Never, my thought refused it. Have we not met front to front these many nights? And who has drawn back, breaker of the law? You return, but I live. The duel is not lost. It is lost, man, and to me. Have you not taken my gift that you might spy meanly on the secret of your beloved? Have you not opened your mind to the evil thoughts that creep upon the citadel of strength within and tear down its power? Of your own deed you are mine. My breath drinks your breath. Your life falls down as a lamp that is thrown from its pedestal. Your spirit rises from its seat and looks toward those spaces where it shall take flight to-night. Man, you die! Again the surge and shock of that frigid sea rushed upon me. I felt the swirl and hiss of the broken wave higher about me before it sank away down whatever dreadful strand it owned. My life ebbed with it, draining low. My enemy spoke the truth. One more such wave. My imagination sprang ahead of the event. In fancy I saw bright dawn filling this room of mine, shining on the figure of a man who had been myself. His head rested on his folded arms so that his face was hidden. On the table beside him a vase was overturned. A spray of heliotrope lay near and water had trickled over scattered sheets of music, staining the paper. By and by Vier would come to summon that unanswering figure to the gay little breakfast-table. Filida would leave her place behind the burnished copper percolator she prized so highly and come running up the stairs. In her gentleness she would grieve, no doubt. I was sorry for that. But it was a contentment and pleasure for me to recall that I had settled my financial affairs so that my little cousin would never lack money or know any care that I could spare her. Strange how she had been raided below more beautiful or more clever women, until the wave Ethan Vier had set her dearness in full sun for us to wonder at. Pig me, will you think of another pig me now? Raged the thing. Yourself, think of yourself. Crouch, think of death, corruption, the vileness of the grave. Think how you are of the grave. Think how you are alone with me. Think how you are abandoned to me. But with that tenderness for Filida a warmth had flowed through me like strength. Not so, my defiance answered it, for where I am I stand by my own will. With where I shall stand you have nothing to do. Back, then, for with the death of my body your power ends. Back, or else face me, thing of darkness, while we stand in one place. At this mad challenge of mine silence closed down like a shutting trap. Consciousness sank away from me with a sense of swooning quietness. I stood before the barrier on the ghostly frontier, erect, arms folded, fronting the breach in that inconceivably mighty wall. Above, a way out of vision on either hand stretched the gray, glimmering cliffs. This I had seen before. But behind me lay that which I had not seen. The mists I believed to be eternal had lifted. Naked, a vast gray sea stretched parallel with the barrier, like it without end or even a horizon to bound its enormous desolation. Between these two immensities on the narrow strand at the foot of the wall I stood, pygmy indeed. In the breach, as of old, the thing whose home was there reared itself against me. Man, it spat, would you see me? Would you see the eyes once seen by the witch-woman who fell blasted out of human ken? Creature of clay, crumbling now in the sea of mortality. Do you brave my immemorial age? It reared up, up, a towering formlessness. It stooped a lowering menace. Man, whenever man has summoned evil since the youngest days of the world, have I not answered? Have I not brought my presence to the magician's lamp? Have I not shadowed the alchemist at his crucible? When the woman called upon me with ancient knowledge, did I not come? I am the guardian of the barrier. Whoever would pass this way must pass me. Have you the power? Die, then, and be gone. With a long, heaving sound of waters and movement, the grey sea stirred from its stillness. As if drawn to some center out of sight, the tide began to recede down that strange beach. Then realization came to me that here was the ocean which, invisible, had surged icy death upon me a while past. The ocean now gathered for the final wave that should overwhelm the defeated. Braggart, my thought answered the taunt. If the witch-woman was yours, the girl's desire is mine. With this I know, as little as man has to do with you, so little have you to do with the human and the good. Living or dead, our path is not yours. I did not summon you. I do dare to look upon you, if you have visible form. Now in the hush a sound that I had faintly heard as a continuing thing seemed to draw nearer. With light, swift footsteps, hurrying, hurrying, the steps of one in pitiful eagerness and haste. But I heated this slightly. My gaze was upon that which took place within the cleft in the great wall. For there, in the cold darkness, was writhing and turning, visible, yet obscure, as the rapids of a glassy, twisting river might look by night. And as one might glimpse beneath the smooth boil and heave of such a river the dim shape of crocodile or water-monster, so in that moving dark there seemed to lie something from which the mind shrank, appalled. Now gigantic tentacles rolled about a central mass, groping out in unsatisfied greed. Now an ape-like shape seemed to stock there, rearing up its monstrous stature until all that breach was choked with it. It fell down into vagueness, where huge coils upraised and sank their loops. But through all change steadily fixed upon me I felt the eyes of the unseen. I stood my ground. With what pain and draining cost to my poor endurance there is no need to say. Each instant I anticipated the surge of that returning sea whose flood should smother out the human spark upon its shore. This I had brought upon myself. Yes, and would again to help desire Mitchell. If I had sheltered her for one hour the thing halted, stooped. Man, cast off the woman! it snarled at me. Fool! Evil goes with her! For her you suffer! Thrust her from your breast! I looked down, wavering against my breast, just above my heart glimmered a spot of light. The little hurrying steps had ceased. I thought, if the bright head of desire Mitchell were rested there against me, how I would strive to shield her from sight of the thing yonder. In the sweep of that will to protect I drew my coat about the spot of hovering brightness. I felt her press warm against me. I heard the roar of the death wave far out in that sea. Before me! Oh, horror of the frontier! What broke through the dread breach? What formed there more inhuman from its lightness to humanity? What hand reached for me, for us? CHAPTER XVI I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Midsummer night's dream. Mr. Locke! Mr. Locke! I opened heavy eyes to meet the eyes of Ethan Veer, who bent over me. Philoda was there too, pale of face. But what was that, just vanishing into the darkness beyond my windowsill? What malignant glare seared disappointment and grim promise across my consciousness? Had I brought with me, or did I hear now, a whispered, PIG ME AGAIN! Cousin! Cousin! Are you very ill? Philoda was half sobbing. Drink the brandy, please? Oh, Ethan, how cold he is to touch! Hush, dear! Veer bade in his slow, steadfast way. Mr. Locke, can you swallow some of this? I became aware that his arm supported me upright in my chair while he held a glass to my lips. Mechanically, I drank some of the cordial. Veer put down the glass and said a curious thing. He asked me, Shall I get you out of this room? Why should he ask that, since the specter was for me alone? Or, if he had not seen it, how did he know this room was an unsafe area? My stupefied brain puzzled over these questions while I managed a sign of refusal. Any effort was impossible to me. The cold of the unearthly sea still numbed my body. My heart labored, staggering at each beat. Veer's support and nearness were welcomed to me. His tact let me rest in the mute inaction necessary to recovery, while my body, astonished that it still lived, hesitatingly resumed the task of life. Somehow he reassured and directed Philoda. Presently she was busy with the coffee apparatus in the corner of the room. It was too much weariness even to turn my eyes aside from the expanse of the table before me. The vase was upset, I noted, as I had seemed to see it. The spray of purple heliotrope Philoda had put there the day before lay among the wet sheets of music. The book of Hermes lay open at the page I had last turned, the rosy lamp light upon the text. Behold! I saw a great beast that he might devour a city whose name is Higrin. Thou hast escaped, because thou didst not fear for so terrible a beast. If, therefore, ye shall have prepared yourselves, yet may escape. What did they mean, the old, old words men have rejected? What had Hermes glimpsed in his visions? How many men are written down liars because they travelled in strange lands indeed, and explorers strove to report what they had seen? Who before me had stood at the barrier and set foot in the frontier between the worlds? The fog, still dense outside, was whitening with daybreak. A few hours while the sun ran its course once more for me, then night again, bringing completion of the menace. I recognized that this delay could not affect the end. Perhaps it would have been easier if all had finished for me tonight, easier if Vir and Philoda had not found me in time to bring me back. How had they found out my condition? Wonder stirred under my lethargy. Had I called or cried out? It did not seem that I could have done so. Certainly I had not tried. I was not quite so poor an adventurer as that. Philoda was back with a cup of steaming black coffee, tiptoeing in her anxiety and questioning Vir with her eyes. He took the cup, stooping to receive my glance of assent to the new medicine. The brandy had stimulated but sickened me. The coffee revived me so much that I was able to take the second cup without Vir's help. When I had walked up and down the room a few times, leaning on his arm, life had taken me back, if only for a little while. The two nurses were so good in their care of me that our first words were of my gratitude to them. Then my curiosity found voice. How did you happen to come in at this hour, I asked. How did you know I was ill? I cannot imagine what made Ethan wake up, said Philoda, with a puzzled look toward her husband. He woke me by rushing out of the room and letting the door slam behind him. Of course I knew something must be wrong to make draws hurry like that. Usually he does such a tremendous lot in a day while looking positively lazy. So I came rushing after and found him in here trying to awaken you. I thought at first that you were not living, cousin Roger. It was horrible. You were all white and cold, she shivered. Vir poured another cup of coffee. He said nothing on the subject, merely observing that the stimulant would hardly hurt me and some might be good for Phil. I asked her to bring cups for them both. I am not sure I really care about the coffee, but I'll make some more, she nodded, dimpling. I love to drink from your wee porcelain cups with their gold holders. You do have pretty things, you bachelors from town. When she was across the room I asked quietly, What was it, Vir? What sent you to me? He answered in as subdued a tone, looking at the tinted shade of the lamp instead of at my face. The young lady woke me, Mr. Locke. She came to the bedside, whispering that you were dying. Would be dead if I didn't get to help you in time. She was gone before Philip aroused up so she doesn't know anything about it. My heart, so nearly stopped forever and so lethargic still, leaped in a strong beat. Desire, then, had come back to save me. For all my doubt and seemingly broken faith she had brought her slight power to help me in my hour of danger. For my sake she had broken through her mysterious seclusion to call Vir and send him to my rescue. Neither he nor I being unsophisticated I understood what Vir believed and why he looked at the lamp rather than at me. But even that matter had to yield precedence to my first eagerness. You saw her, I demanded. You call her young. You saw her face, then? I could forget it if I had, he said, drily. As it happened I didn't. She was wrapped in a lot of floating thin stuff, grey, I guess. The room was pretty dark and I was jumping out of sleep. I don't know why she seemed young unless it was the easy, light way she moved. By the time I got what she was saying and sat up she was gone. Gone? She went out the door like a puff of smoke. I just saw a grey figure in the doorway where the hall lamp made it brighter than in the room. When I came into the hall there wasn't a sign of anybody about, nor afterward either. Considered briefly. I suppose I know what you're thinking, Veer. It is natural, but wrong. The lady—Mr. Locke, he checked me. I'm not thinking. I guess you're as good a judge as I am about what goes on in this house. After the way you've treated us from the first I'd be pretty dull not to know you're as choice of Filida as I am, he is all that matters. Who is, demanded Filida, returning? Me? I haven't the least idea what you're talking about, Drawls, but I think Cousin Roger matters a great deal more than I do, just now. Perhaps now he is able to tell us about this attack, and if he should have a doctor. I have noticed for weeks how thin and grave he has been growing to be. If only he would drink buttermilk. I looked into the candid affectionate face she turned to me. From her I looked to her husband, whose New England steadiness had been tempered by a sailor's service in the war, and broadened by the test of his experience in a city cabaret. A new thought cleaved through my perplexities like an arrow shot from a far-off place. How much do you both trust me? I slowly asked. I do not mean trust my character or my good intentions, but how much confidence have you in my sanity and common sense? Would you believe a thing because I told it to you? Or would you say, this is outside usual experience, he is deceiving us, or mad? I regarded one another, smiling with an exquisite intimacy of understanding. Don't you see yourself one little, little bit, cousin? She wondered at me. Anything you say goes all the way with us, veer corroborated. Wait, I bade. Drink your coffee while I think. Please drink yours, cousin Roger, all fresh and hot. I emptied the cup she urged upon me, then leaned my forehead in my hands and tried to review the situation. They obeyed like well-bred children, settling down on a cushioned seat together and taking their coffee as prettily as a pair of parakeets. They seemed almost children to me, although there was little difference in years between veer and myself. But then I stood in the brink where years stopped. With the next night my triumphant enemy could be put off no longer. That I could not doubt. I cannot say that I was unafraid, yet fear weighed less upon me than a heavy sense of solemnity and realization of the few hours left during which I could affect the affairs of life. What remained to be done? On one of my visits to New York I had called on my lawyer and made my will. There were a few pensioners for whom provision should continue after my death. The aged music master under whom I developed such abilities as I had, who was crippled now by rheumatism and otherwise dependent on a hard-faced son-in-law. The three small daughters of a dead friend, an actor, whose care and education at a famous school of classic dancing I had promised him to finance. A few such obligations had been provided for, and the rest was fulfilled. But now what of desire Mitchell? She had seemed so apart from common existence that I never had thought of her possible needs any more than of the needs of a bird that darted in and out of my windows. Until to-night when I had seen her and she had proved herself all woman by her appeal to Ethan Veer. It was not a spirit or a seerous or yefau witch, desire Mitchell, who had fled to him for help in rescuing me. It was simply a terrified girl. What was to become of this girl? Under what circumstances did she dwell? Had she a home, or did she need one? Could I care for this matter while I was here? Day was so far advanced that a clamor of birds came into us along with a freshening air. The strangely persistent fog had not lifted, but the lamps already looked wan and faded in the new light. I switched them out before speaking to the pair who watched me. I have a story to tell you both," I said. The beginning of it Phyllida has already heard. Perhaps. Have you told Veer about the woman who visited this room the first night I spent in the house? Who cut her hair and left the braid in my hand to escape from me? Yes, she nodded, wide-eyed. Will you go to my chiffonere there in the alcove and bring a package wrapped in a white silk from the top drawer? She did as she was asked, and laid the square of folded silk before me. I put back the covering, showing that sumptuous braid. The rich fragrance of the gold pommander wrapped with it filled the air like a vivifying elixir. Phyllida gathered up the braid with a cry of envious rapture. Oh, the gorgeous thing! How do some lucky girls have hair like that? If it was unbound, my two hands could not hold it all. What a pity to have cut it! Look, Ethan, how it crinkles and glitters! She held it out to him, extended across her palms. Veer refrained from touching the braid, surveying it where it lay. Being a mere bachelor, I had no idea of Phyllida's emotions, until Veer's usual gravity broke in a mischievous, heartwarming smile into the brown eyes uplifted to him. Beautiful, he agreed politely. No more. But as I saw the wistful envy pass quite away from my little cousin's plain face and leave her content, I advanced in respect for him. In the beginning it was even harder to speak than I had anticipated. When Phyllida laid the braid back in its wrapping, I left it uncovered before me and looked at its reassuring reality rather than at my listeners. How, I wondered, could anyone be expected to credit the story I had to tell? How should I find words to embody it? How should I be at first? Whether there clung about me some atmosphere of that land between the worlds where I so recently had stood, or the room indeed kept as I fancied, the melancholy chill of the unseen tide that had washed through it, I met no skepticism from the two who heard my tale of wild experience. They did not interrupt me. Phyllida crept close to her husband, putting her hand in his, but she did not exclaim or question. Silence held us all for a while after I had finished. I had a discouraged sense of inadequacy. After all, they had received but a meager outline. The color and body of the events escaped speech. How could they feel what I had felt? How could they conceive the charm of desire Mitchell, the white magic of her voice in the dark, the force of her personality that could impress her image sight unseen beyond all time to erase? How convey to a listener that understanding her so little I yet knew her so well? I have told you all this because I need your help, I said presently. Will you give it to me? Go away, Phyllida burst forth. She beat her palms together in her earnestness. Cousin Roger, take your car and go away, far off. Go where nothing can reach you. You must not spend another single night here. Ethan will go with you. I will too, if you want us. You must not be left alone until you are quite safe. Perhaps in New York? And desire Mitchell? She is in no danger, I suppose. She is not my cousin anyhow. And even she told you to go away? You believe my story, then? You do not think me suffering from delusions? Ethan saw the girl too. If he had not come here in time to save you, I believe you would have died in that terrible stupor. Besides, I have seen for weeks that something was changing you. What does Vier say, I questioned, studying the absorbed gravity of his expression? I wondered what I myself would have said if anyone had brought me such a story. He passed his arm around Phyllida and drew her to him with a quieting protective movement. His regard met mine with more significance than he chose to voice. I am satisfied to take the thing as you tell it, Mr. Locke, he answered. Phyll is right, it seems to me, about you not staying here. I don't think the young lady ought to stay either. She refuses to leave, Vier. What can I offer her that I have not offered? How can I find her? You have heard how I searched the countryside for a hint of such a girl's presence? No one has ever seen her, or else someone lies very cleverly. In the pause Phyllida hesitatingly ventured an idea. Perhaps she is not real. If the monster is a ghost thing, may not she be one too? If Vier to believe in such things at all, she almost seems to intend that you shall believe her the ghost of the witch-girl in that old book. I shook my head with the helpless feeling of trying to explain some abstruse knowledge to a child. I had spoken of the colossal spaces, the solemn immensities of the place where I had set my human foot. I had tried to paint the desolate bleakness of that borderland where the unnamed thing and I met each beyond his own law-decreed boundary and locked in combat bitter and strong. Phyllida had listened and talked of ghosts, the bug-bearers of Graveyard's superstition. Did Vier comprehend me better? Did he visualize the struggle, weirdly akin to Legends of Night and Dragon, as prize of which weighted Desire Mitchell, forlornly helpless as white Andromeda chain to her black cliff? Could the main countryman, the cabaret entertainer, seize the truths glimped by Rosicrucian's and mystics of lost cults when the highly bred college-girl failed? It seemed so. At least his dark eyes met mine with intelligence. Hers held only bewilderment and fear. They are not ghosts, I said, only. But how can you be sure, she persisted? Beneath the braid and the pommander lay the sheet of paper on which Desire had written weeks before, the first page of that composition now pouring gold into my hands. This I passed to Phyllida. Do ghosts write? I queried. She read the lines aloud. We walk upon the shadows of hills across a level throne and pant like climbers. They do write, people say, with Ouija boards and mediums, she murmured. I looked at Vier with despair of sustaining this argument. He stood up as if my appeal had been spoken, drawing her with him. Now that it's a decent hour, don't you think Christina might give us some breakfast? He suggested. I guess bacon and eggs would be sort of restoring. If you feel up to taking my arm as far as the porch, Mr. Locke, the fresh air might be good medicine, too. I have speculated sometimes upon how civilized man would get through days not spaced by his recurrent meals into three divisions. Those meals are hyphens between his mind and his body, as it were. What sense of humor can view too intensely a creature who must feed himself three times a day? Are we not pleasantly urged out of our heroics and into the normal by breakfast, luncheon, and dinner? Deny it, as we will, when we do not heed them we are out of touch with nature. We went downstairs. After breakfast was over, Vier and I walked across the orchard to a seat placed near the lake. There I sat down while he remained standing in his favorite attitude, one foot on a low boulder, his arm resting on his knee as he gazed into the shallow, amber-tinted water. Fog still overlay the countryside, but without bringing coolness. The damp heat was stifling, almost tropical, as the sun mounted higher in the hidden sky. I watched my companion waiting for him to speak. He appeared intent upon the darting movements of a group of tiny fish. But I knew his thoughts were afar. Mr. Locke, I didn't want to speak before Phyllida because it would not do any good for her to hear what I have to say, he finally began. It is properly the answer to what you asked upstairs about our believing you had not imagined that story. Did anything slip out over the windowsill when you were waking up? Startled, for I had not spoken of this, I met his gaze. Yes, did you see nothing exactly, something, though, like, well, like something pouring itself along, a big, thick mass, something sort of smooth and glistening, like black, oily molasses slipping over, only alive somehow, drawing coils of itself out of the dark, into the dark. I can't put it very plain. What did you think? The air in the room was bad and close, hard to breathe. I guessed maybe I was a little dizzy, jumping out of bed the way I did and finding you like dead, almost. He paused and returned his contemplation to the fish darting in the lake. That is what I thought, he concluded. What I felt, well, it was the kind of scare I didn't used to know you could feel outside of bad dreams, the kind you wake up from all shaking with your face and hands dripping sweat. That isn't all, either. This time the pause was so long that I thought he did not mean to continue. My excuse for speaking of such matters before Filida is that I may need a woman friend for Desire Mitchell. I reverted to the implied rebuke I acknowledged his right to give. I wanted her help and yours. More than ever, since you have shared my experience so far, I want your advice. I'll be proud to give it in a minute. First, it's only fair to say I've felt enough wrong around here to be able to understand a lot that once I might have laughed at. Nothing compared to you, but I've been working about the lake sometimes after dark or before daylight was strong when a kind of horror would come over me. Well, I'd feel I had to get away and into the house or go crazy. That morning when you called from your window to ask where I'd been so early and I told you looking for turtles, that was one time. I had gone out looking for turtles, but that horror drove me in. When you hailed me, I had it so bad that I could just about make out not to run for the house like a scared cat yelling all the way. Turning back to the lake with you was a poser, but I did and the feeling was all gone as quick as it came. We had a nice morning shooting. Once in a while I felt it sort of driving me indoors when I stepped off the porch or over to the barn at night. That's a funny thing. The fear was always outside, not in the house. I thought of that while you were telling us how the thing at the window kept trying to get in at you. We haven't got a haunted house, but a haunted place. Why have you not spoken of this before? I asked, deeply stirred. He made a gesture too American to be called a shrug. He said nothing, watching a large bubble rise through the pure brown-green water float an instant on the surface, then vanish with the abrupt completeness of a miniature explosion. I watched also with an always fresh interest in the pretty phenomenon. Then I repeated my question, rather impatiently as I considered what a relief his companionship in experience would have afforded all these weeks. Why not, Vir? Mr. Locke, I don't like to keep saying that you never exactly got used to me as your cousin's husband," he reluctantly replied. But I can see it's a kind of surprise to you right along that I don't break down or break out in some fashion. Of course, I haven't known that you were meeting queer times too. If you hadn't been through any of this, what would you have thought if I'd come to you with stories of the place being haunted by something nobody could see? You would have judged I was a liar, trying to fix up an excuse for getting away from the work here and shoving off. I don't want to go away. I don't intend to go. I can't see any need of it, fulfilling to me. But, and this is the advice you spoke of, I think you ought to leave and leave now. It's little better than suicide to stay. And abandon Desire Mitchell? He turned his dark observant eyes toward me. If I said yes, you wouldn't do it. Phil and I will take care of the young lady if she will let us. Couldn't a note be left for her telling her to come to us? I shook my head. She would not come. Now, less than ever, I broke off, shot with sharp, self-reproach at the memory of how I had driven her from me last night. You won't be any help to her if you're dead," he bluntly retorted. At that I rose and walked a few paces to knock out my post-breakfast pipe against an apple-tree. I was not so sure that he was right, self-evident as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly in my mind. Convictions somehow impressed when that golden bronze spot of light so gently came to rest above my heart when I last stood at the barrier. The light so like the bright-imagined head of Desire. To fly from my place now, herded like a cowardly sheep by the thing of the frontier, would that not be to thrust her away to save myself? No, not myself, my life. I had the answer now. I walked back to Veer and took my seat again. Both of us, or neither, I told him. If you can help me make it both by any ingenuity, I shall be mighty glad. It's a pleasant world, but we will not talk any more of my running for New York like a kicked pup. The question is, will you and Philida take care of the lady who calls herself Desire Mitchell if tomorrow morning finds her free, but alone and friendless? As long as we live, Mr. Locke, he answered. But I guess there isn't any disgrace in your going to New York, running or not, if you take her with you. And that is what ought to have been done long ago. Veer, he nodded. You've got me. Just pick the lady up, carry her out of that room, and have a showdown. Put her in your car and take her to town. I gave her my word, not people can't stand bowing to each other when the ship's afire. If she is worth dying for, she doesn't want you to die for her. The simplicity of it. And leaping the breach of faith, the temptation. What harm could I do Desire by this plan of Veers? What good might I not do her? Was it mere slavishness of mind on my part not to overrule her timid will? She must pardon me when she realized my desperate case. A dying man might be excused for some roughness of haste, Shirley. Whether flight could save us, I did not know. I did know, absolutely, that my enemy had crossed the barrier last night and I was prey merely withheld from it by the chance respite of a few daylight hours. Suppose our escape succeeded. A whole troop of pictures flitted across the screen of my fancy. Desire beside me in the city, my wife. Desire in those delightful shops that make Fifth Avenue gay as a garden of tulips, where I might buy for her frocks and hats, shoes of conspicuous frivolity, and those long white gloves that seem to caress a woman's arm, everything fair and fine. Restaurants I had described for her were she might dine in silken ease and perhaps here played the music she had named. I aroused myself and looked at Veer. You'll do it," he translated my expression. I will, if she gives me the opportunity. Do you judge she will? I hope so. Since she went so far as to show herself to you in order to send help to me when I was in danger, I believe she will come to my room tonight if I wait there. He looked at me silently. The consternation and protest in his face were speech enough. If I wait there alone, I finished somewhat hurriedly. If she comes in time, we will try the plan. Have the car ready. You and Filida will be prepared, of course. We will waste no time in getting away as far as possible. And if that thing comes before she does, Mr. Locke, is there any other way? I guess you haven't considered that you're inviting me to stand by while you get yourself killed," he said stiffly. I'm not an educated man. I never heard the names you mentioned this morning of people who used to study out things like this. I never heard of any worlds except earth and heaven and hell. But then I couldn't explain how an electric car runs. I know the car does run, and I know you nearly died last night. If you go back and stay alone in that room, we both know what you're going to meet. I turned away from him because I sickened at the prospect he would devote. The memory of that death-tide was too near and rolled too coldly across the future. If the trial had been hard when mercifully unanticipated, what would it be to meet my enemy now that I knew myself conquered? Would it not deliberately forestall desires coming tonight? Mightn't you help the lady more if you went away now and come back, he urged? The deserter's argument, time without end. Was I to fall as low as that? Philip's voice called to veer from the veranda, summoning him to some need of farm or household. In a moment, pretty, he called assent. But he did not move. I guessed that he hoped much for my silence would not disturb me lest my decision be hindered or changed. By and by I stood up. Veer, in your varied experiences in peace and war, did you ever chance to meet a coward? Once, he answered briefly. And did you like the sight? No. Then I said, Let us not invite one another to that display. Shall we go into Phyllida? End of chapter 16, recording by Roger Maline.