Chapter VI: Part 6

Dreeme heard the solemn-toned clock in the Slater house striking as he pushed his own unlatched door open and stepped into the narrow hall. One hollow sound. A single and ineffectual blow at the star-lit night. It must be eleven-thirty, he thought, for Walden Slater had mumbled something about ten-thirty when he had paused at the back piazza an hour before. Time for all good men to go to bed. Time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. After he pulled the door shut behind him and shot the bolt and turned around he realized that the lamp was glowing in his little study. For an instant he stood in stupid perplexity, wondering how he could have been so excited as to leave the light aflare and the door ajar when he had hastened forth two hours ago to the burned mill. Was he actually as absent-minded as that? “I didn’t leave them so,” he said to himself, shaping the words silently with his lips, and then walked slowly along the hall to the study. Through the angle of the partially opened door he could see a patch of black dress against which a long white hand hung languidly, the fingers idly curled. He stopped and observed it, not with surprise--indeed, subconsciously he had expected it--but with a vague distaste that wrinkled his forehead and tightened his lips. She was sitting in a listening attitude waiting for him to turn the corner of the door. He was tempted to turn and walk out hastily, letting her have the house to herself until the loneliness and weariness of waiting forced her to return to her own home. He was tired and didn’t want to talk. He had ridden a wave of excitement all day, a towering tidal wave that had swept him high and far, and now he was exhausted, let down, filled with the glow of a faint triumph, to be sure, but pleasantly hollow inside. He was like a swimmer who had outreached his strength but achieved some goal in the endeavor. He desired nothing more than to climb into his bed, stretched out beneath the great square patches of the coverlet, and sleep dreamlessly, to renew his benumbed faculties for the day that was to follow. What on earth could she have to say to him now? Had his attitude not settled everything last night when he had left her at the mill without turning back? She had called him a miserable coward. Well, let her think so. Perhaps that was the safest way for him. All he desired now was to get out of the valley with Deborah. Let them continue as they willed with their own theories. They were all mad and perhaps it would be a good thing if they killed each other off in the process of their lunacies. His curiosity about them was sleepy now. The unrest that had pervaded him at the thought of the mystery hovering over Marlborough was slothful. It was more important to go out into that real world with Deborah and begin to live. Here, he was in a valley of shadows. He stood, therefore, in the shelter of the door peering through at the lighted room in sleepy impatience and lethargic anger. She sat there listening. She knew he was lurking just out of her sight. He could see her hand crumple up in irritation.

“Will you come in?” she said in a low husky impatient voice.

He crossed the lintel reluctantly and stood facing her. Her eyes glistened in the saffron glow of the lamp as she observed him coldly. It was only by the heightened rise and fall of her full breasts outlined beneath the dark fabric of her dress that he could see how enraged she was. Vaguely he wondered how long she had been sitting there and waiting for him.

“Since ten o’clock,” she said as though in answer to his thought. “I heard you walk about the house an hour ago. I heard you stroll away with that ... that servant girl. I heard you come back with that ... that servant girl.”

He decided that Deborah did not need any defence so he complacently ignored her contemptuous speech.

“Are you as lacking in ambition as you are in courage?” she inquired maliciously in her peculiar husky voice.

Dreeme nodded. He didn’t care what she thought as long as she left speedily. She could not rouse him to anger by anything she said. With an excitable gesture she stood up and paced swiftly about the room, her long shadow flickering across the atrociously-papered wall. Dreeme watched her objectively. She was magnificent. There was no doubt of that. Like a tigress. A great slumberous tigress in whose arteries ran a secret and smoldering flame. Full breasted, long in the thighs, wide cheek-bones and great eyes, hair like a blue-black smoke curling over her white forehead, archaic mouth. He had pictured her in so many ways. Medusa. Astarte Syriaca. Wife of the Afrit. Tigress. A creature of the imagination compounded out of dark and passionate urges. Yet his veins ran slow now at the thought of her. She could not touch his emotions again as she had that first time in the lamp-lit library when he had felt her presence like a dim magic in the room. He could look at her coldly and say, “Please go. I do not want you here. I do not trust you. You belong in this unreal world and I am not a part of it. There is the shadow of blood on your mouth.” He even opened his mouth to say these things and then thought better of it and closed his lips tightly. She stopped in front of him, her face a few inches from his, and studied him fiercely. The bitter-sweet aroma of her hair rose about his nostrils. He thought fixedly of the frail ghost-like figure of Deborah and observed her coolly.

“You have a new mask,” she said shortly. “Where is my weak doctor now?”

“He never existed except in your imagination,” he replied.

In spite of her anger she smiled.

“Do you think so?” she said.

She continued to study his face. Her large understanding eyes were disconcerting and he looked away from her finally.

“Did you go to the mill?” she inquired.

“Don’t you know?” he returned.

“So did I,” she added. “But he was there waiting. I knew he was waiting for you. I told you that Burroughs saw us. I came here, then, and waited.”

Dreeme moved over to the table and she followed him, seating herself by the side of it.

“Did he tell you to come here?” he asked. “How could you have passed me on the road?”

“He did not see me. He does not know I am here,” she said. There was a flash of anger in her eyes. After a second she added:

“I cut through ... in back of the Slater house. There is a path there. You must know it.”

He nodded absently. He didn’t care, after all.

“What do you want, anyway?” he demanded. “I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

She looked at him appraisingly.

“I want you to take me away from here,” she answered coolly.

He smiled at that and shook his head.

“Wait!” she said, lifting her hand. “I will be faithful to you. I will give you more than any woman has given any man. I will give you strength ... which you lack, and intelligence ... which you lack, and confidence ... which you lack, and.... Do you want love? I have an eternity of it stored up inside me.”

She spread her arms and her ripe bosom rose with the gesture.

“I don’t want any of these things,” he said in a low voice.

“That little girl has befuddled you,” she said in an angry voice. “You are like a somnambulist, a man walking in his sleep and afraid to wake up. You are dreaming like a schoolboy of a little empty face. I tell you I will take you up on the mountaintops of the world and show you all the riches of Time. You can pick what you will and with me beside you it shall be yours. I will pour strength into you and make you one of the proudest of men.”

The lamp sputtered fitfully between them and Dreeme sat looking at her sleepily. She was like a Sibyl now, muttering some incantation. All that she did was in the vein of play-acting. Even her rolling sentences seemed out of some old drama. Then, Dreeme thought of Westcott’s brief delirium and wondered how many of them Martha Westcott had heard to talk in this vein. Both of them were acting in life. Both of them were archaic masks.

“I don’t want the riches of Time,” he said wearily. “I’m satisfied as I am.”

He sat up suddenly.

“No!” he cried. “All I ask is to be let alone.”

“You don’t understand,” she said in a patient voice as though she was speaking to a child. “You are frightened and you don’t understand. You are frightened out of your wits at the idea of living life fully. You want to spend it in little ways beside a little fire with a little face in front of you. That is not life. That is merely a subterfuge for living. Life extends beyond the lighted square of the fireplace. The path leads upward to the high rocky places, to the granite cliffs, to the place where the free winds blow. There is a continual excitement there and no peace. The brain is sharpened in that rarefied atmosphere and the will is hardened. It is there that living is its own reward.”

Still he shook his head.

“I know!” she exclaimed fervently. Then she paused and seemed to cast about in her mind for some conclusive argument that might move him from his sleepy lethargy. “Shall I tell you about myself?” she asked at last. “Last night I tried to tell you what I thought, the sort of philosophy that I had built up out of the dreariness of my days. Shall I tell you who I am now?”

He did not answer but sat gazing at her weariedly. She took his silence for assent.

“My people came from Salem,” she began, “but that was a long time ago. It was back in the days of Cotton Mather. I was named for my first ancestor,--Martha Carrier. When I was a young girl I used to lie in bed and dream about that woman whose name I bear. Once I actually saw her. I do not think it was a dream. She really came into the room and stood beside my bed and there was a pale light all about her. She was a tall dark woman with a secret mouth and she walked like a queen. She leaned over the bed and said something to me but I forget the words if, indeed, I ever heard them. When she bent above me I saw a red stripe about her white neck and knew that she had been hanged. I was frightened at the sight and hid my face in the pillow but not before I heard a mingled sound of voices muttering and shouting and caught a glimpse of shadowy shapes swinging against the moon. I didn’t know, then, what it was all about but I know now. I was to learn all these things in the years that followed while I grew up alone in the valley here. My father died on the day that I was born, Peleg Carrier his name was, and so, of course, I never saw him. My mother died when I was three years old. She was a shadow, something that I cannot catch in my memory, strive as hard as I may. When my father died Jeffrey Westcott appeared in the valley and took charge of everything. He had been a friend to my father in those days when he had been a student in Germany. I was brought up by Jeffrey Westcott. We lived out on the Leeminster Road in an old house very near where the farm is now.”

Her eyes softened and she appeared to be turning back in memory to that house. Dreeme, whose faculties had quickened as her husky voice proceeded with her tale, had automatically drawn his pipe out and was filling it. She said:

“I carry that house about inside me. It was an old rambling structure. It must have been centuries old. My forefathers had lived in it since the first one came into the valley and raised it. It was a house that was full of the Past, full of the essence of times gone. When I wandered through the many rooms and the floors creaked beneath my feet and the shadows leaped out of the yawning closets and the huge stone fireplace. I seemed to be constantly accompanied by shapes in steeple-crowned hats and muffling cloaks. These shapes were always trying to say something to me, to whisper some secret, to tell me, perhaps, of a treasure that was hidden somewhere in the musty recesses of the building. There were so many things in that house, so many reminders of the past, that it was a haunted house. Jeffrey Westcott and myself lived there for thirteen years and it was rarely that we saw anyone. There were not so many people in the valley then and Jeffrey did all the house-work until I was old enough to take it over. Until I was thirteen or fourteen years old I was free, free to roam about as I pleased, and I became a wild creature. I loved to wander in the woods and along the bank of the Saccarac River and down the muddy roads. I was never lonely for I seemed to find living spirits in the river, the trees, the few houses. I could sit and converse with these invisible beings. Each season brought me something, a deposit of mystical knowledge. In the winter everything was mantled in white and the trees, covered with a crystal coating of ice, stood like crazy shapes blown out of glass. The wind roared down the valley and the branches rattled and clashed like pendants. The shivering deer trooped along the river bank and there were bears in those days. The thought came to me that the heart of nature was a frozen thing and that the natural state of the earth was cruelty, that only light and heat and fructification meant anything at all. Then the spring would come and the ice on the river would crack, split into whirling sheets, and vanish, and the earth became black again and tiny shoots of pale green would thrust out on the stark branches. There were early flowers and the pale sun would give out a thin warmth. Here, I thought, is the vague beginning of passion, the indomitable urge to live pushing against the ice of Time, the defiant gesture of the earth against itself. After that the full-flushed madness of the summer would descend on the valley and the wide fields would bear their yield and the heat would buzz in the air. August was a feverish madman running through lush grass and waving his fiery torch. This season became to me the end and purpose of being, the complete passion of the sensual earth, the triumphant vindication of self. The earth became a ruddy murderer standing above the pale shadow of itself and sucking its warm passion from its own secret heart. Out of the dead body came forth the living body. And then came autumn wearing a colored blanket striped with red and yellow and brown, walking through the flowers like a proud Indian chief in full head-dress of tufted feathers. In his eyes was a gray sadness and there was a mist about his mouth. The smoke from his pipe of peace curled over the valley. He was a tired man stirred by the last embers of passion. This was to me the period of weariness after the full flame of passion had died down. It was in this way that I became a mirror to the seasons, reflecting them in my moods, walking with them all the way. I dramatized myself. I became the earth alternately dead, fecund, full-flowering, and weary. You see how imaginative I was, how different from other children.”

When she paused Dreeme lit his pipe and the sharp flare of his match danced about the room. Martha Westcott’s cheeks were glowing with the ardor of her memories. She seemed to take on a girlish aspect as she spoke of her girlhood and her face reflected the seasons as she enumerated them. When she spoke of the winter her cheeks were as white as snow and when she described the summer they were flooded with rich blood that glowed through her pale skin. She was like some rare sensitive instrument reacting to the moods that flowed through her. Dreeme’s antagonism to her began to dissipate and a creeping interest manifested itself in his attitude, as, puffing upon his pipe, he leaned forward and listened to her recital. If she noticed this weakening on his part she gave no sign of it but continued to dwell among her memories whole-heartedly, snatching out of the past whatever came within the net of her words.

“Once,” she said, abruptly diverting the thread of her memories, “I was wandering about in the old house, poking into odd corners, opening forgotten chests, creeping under the stairs, investigating the numberless tiny closets that occupied so many curious places in the walls. It was a summer day and I can recall the buzzing flies that hovered about me and the sound of Jeffrey Westcott’s footsteps down stairs as he moved about the kitchen. I was running my hand along an upstairs fireplace, thrusting my fingers between the bricks when one of them moved. With an effort I pulled it out and discovered a hollow into which I could force my whole arm. I fumbled about and my fingers closed on something that felt soft. Drawing it out I discovered that I clutched an old book in a soft black leather cover, apparently a note-book for it was filled with a strange writing in archaic characters and symbols and a map. I was sitting on the floor investigating it when Jeffrey Westcott came upstairs. I could hear him walking behind me and pausing and looking over my shoulder. Suddenly he cried out, ‘Old Uriah’s black book!’ and snatched it from me. He retired to his room with it and passed the rest of the evening there. It was on that day that Jeffrey went mad. Old Uriah was my grandfather, Uriah Carrier. He....”

“I know,” said Dreeme, removing his pipe from his mouth. He remembered Humphrey Lathrop’s description of the old sea-captain. A hunter of whales in the Pacific who had terrorized and robbed the natives of Tahiti. A blackbirder off the African Gold Coast. A man with the devil in his tobacco pouch.

“What was in Old Uriah’s black book?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I did not find out till years later,” she replied. “I know but I will not tell you. It is not part of my story.”

She dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

“Jeffrey Westcott changed from that day,” she said. “His relations to me changed. He was no longer the kindly guardian but a silent malicious man eaten up with a mad dream, with an idea, with a monstrous theory. We met and ate in silence and he would have nothing to say to me. A year or two after that the old house burned down. It was struck by lightning one day while Jeffrey was in the fields working and I was wandering by the river. I saw the smoke and flames rising in the dark stormy air and then the storm burst. But it was too late. There was nothing but a black gutted ruin after the rain cleared and the last ember expired. For a while I thought my past had gone up in fire and smoke and then I began to realize that houses may burn and people may die but the past is indestructible. We carry it about inside of us and nothing can smash it to pieces. Jeffrey was not too demoralized by the fire. He said, ‘It was time. It is a symbol. It means there is nothing for me to find here until I have studied there.’ He decided to go away. I remember the long ride to Boston, the wait for the boat, and the longer trip to Hambourg. It was in Hambourg that Jeffrey married me. He said that it made things easier, that it smoothed the difficulties of traveling. It was in Germany that I grew to maturity, grew to a lonely maturity while Jeffrey dragged me from town to town and city to city, wherever there was an old library or an old withered man full of insane notions. He had been in Germany before, had studied there as he had studied in other parts of Europe and Asia. He left me much by myself and I read a great deal, all sorts of quaint old books, philosophy, poetry, history, and the natural sciences. At first I loved Germany. The little towns with their quaint houses delighted me and the homeliness of German life soothed me. As time went on, however, all this became an old story and a vast weariness descended on me. I knew that I did not love Jeffrey Westcott and he knew that he did not love me. I grew in upon myself, became silent and morbid, passed my days revolving the various thoughts that came to me out of old books. A reticence fell over me. I could not talk to people. I was eaten up by a desire to be myself and I knew that I could not be myself as long as Jeffrey Westcott dominated me. His will grew stronger and stronger as the days passed and I could feel it concentering on me as the attention of a doctor fixes itself upon a rabbit he is about to dissect. I found that I could not fight against his will, that something iron in his nature forced me to go the way that he wanted me to go. As his will developed he grew more and more morose, absenting himself from the society of people. Soon I was entirely cut apart from any common intercourse. It was then that he returned here, bringing me with him--a reluctant ghost. He bought the farm on the Leeminster Road and we have been there ever since.”

Dreeme’s pipe had gone out and he made no attempt to relight it. He felt a strange pity welling up inside of him for Martha Westcott and yet a faint voice within the dark convolutions of his brain told him not to pity too much. His mind, at the same time, was setting scattered facts together and he began to realize the situation in the valley. He felt now that there was only one thing left to discover--the placed called Dagon. After that, everything would be made clear.

“My life here,” she said, “has been a waiting. The seasons have passed by and I have wandered like a ghost about that lonely house waiting for somebody to come, waiting for a rescuer. All these years Jeffrey Westcott has sat immersed in his books or conducting his strange experiments and his will has made me a part of those experiments. I will not tell you what they are because I desire to forget them. They must not be a part of my life in the future.”

She paused again and glanced at him curiously.

“Yes,” she said then, “I will tell you one thing so that you may understand how he has dominated my mind. I will tell you this because it concerns you indirectly, because it was the thing that brought you into my life. One day he came out of his library and said to me, ‘I can make you shoot me in the leg.’ He sat across from me at the table and kept repeating it to himself. ‘I can make you shoot me in the leg.’ I set my will against his and laughed. ‘There will be no pain,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I shall will that there be no pain.’ He sat across the table from me. He kept saying that. I thought I should go mad. I rose up from the table to clear away the dishes and then I found myself in front of him with the rifle in my hand and smoke curling from the muzzle. ‘I will not,’ I said. ‘I will not shoot you in the leg but some day I will shoot you through the brain.’ He laughed at that and said, ‘You have shot me in the leg and there is no pain. Send for the doctor. Send Miles for the doctor.’ I looked down and there was blood running along his leg. It was running into his shoe. Then you came.”

Dreeme believed every word she said. He put the cold pipe on the table and pushed back his chair. Far away he heard a clock strike midnight. Mrs. Slater’s window must be open, he thought. Perhaps Deborah was lying awake listening to that chime that marked the end of a day. He felt restive and stood up from his chair. Martha Westcott felt his unrest and spoke rapidly.

“Then you came. We looked at one another and I knew that I might be saved from this living grave by you. You were the first young man I had seen to talk to since I left Germany. You were not like these bent-backed farmers who scrape at the soil and bow beneath the old horror that Jeffrey Westcott conjures up before them. You are different, a man from the outer world. You knew that I was different, too, for you trembled all over when I walked to the door with you that night. I thought of you all the time. I thought so fiercely that my thoughts brought you back to me the next day and you hid behind the stone wall and watched me draw water from the well. Something began to laugh inside me then. That was why I sent Wagner to you. That is why you met me at the burned mill. That is why I am here now.”

The yellow lamp-flare was burning dimly but Dreeme felt as though the little study was filled with a strange incandescence, a milky glow that lighted up both of their faces. He who had been so sure of himself was frightened again for he felt his pulses quickening in their beat and that trembling that had assailed him before in her presence was upon him like a palsy. He should not have listened to her. He should not have permitted her to creep into his mind, to envelop him with the warm mantle of her personality. He walked jerkily around the table toward her and she stood up as he came. Her eyes became luminous pools as he neared her and she half-raised her hands.

“I won’t have it,” he said in a grating voice. “I won’t have you say these things to me.”

She dropped her hands but remained standing in front of him, very near, her eyes studying his face.

“Are you entirely a stranger to passion?” she asked him. “Is there no pulse of life in you?”

He tried to talk rationally, to shake his anger from him. He said:

“I’ve heard what you have to say about yourself and I’m sorry. You have been the victim of a hard life and I pity you. But I do not feel toward you in the way that you seem to imagine. I am not in love with you and I shall never be in love with you. You surprised me, took me off my guard, so to speak, when I first saw you that night. I had not expected to see anyone like you. I was curious. You seemed to represent something, some part of the secret in this valley, and I thought about you a great deal. But that is all. If my emotions were stirred ... they were the ... the....”

He fumbled for adequate words for his thought was slipping from him. In the first place, he had never actually analyzed his emotions toward her, never satisfied himself as to the reason why she could at times make him tremble. It was certainly not because she was beautiful, although he realized as she stood there in front of him that she was very beautiful. No, it was not that. It might be ascribed to a certain magnetism that flowed about her and drew him insensibly toward her. Yet was not that a part of her beauty? Lost in conjecture he stood before her and observed her with tired eyes beneath a frowning brow. She had listened to him quietly, watching him closely all the time, and when he faltered and became silent, she placed her hand on his arm.

“You are reasoning,” she said. “You are trying to destroy me by reasoning, but you find that you cannot do it. I am in your mind and I shall stay there.”

“I shall root you out of my mind quickly enough,” he said brutally.

“Is it that little girl?” she said. “Do you think that I am afraid of that little girl?”

He shook his head impatiently.

“I will not discuss her with you,” he declared. “You have nothing to do with her ... or me, either.”

“Good-bye,” she said then, and put both her arms about his neck. He felt the heat of her long body against him, and instinctively held her to him.

“Good-bye,” he muttered against her blue-black hair.

His arms tightened about her as he felt her body pulsing against his, and he shut his eyes tightly. Waves of sunlit heat seemed to roar about him. She was no more than a creature of flesh and blood, after all, a warm breathing woman frantic with primitive urges, and unsuccessfully disguising them in a web of pretentious phrases. The thought of her lonely life crept into his beguiled consciousness, and a feeling of tenderness, of pity, swept through his blood. If he could help her, he would. But there was no way to it. She must go on and fight her own battle against life, against the close prison of the valley, and against the madness of Jeffrey Westcott. He was not a part of that arduous struggle. He was but an onlooker, a non-participant, a traveler who would shortly go away. And yet ... her body contained a kindling heat ... the scent of her hair was about his face ... he could hear the shuddering ecstasy of her breath.

Suddenly she drew away from him and stood in the center of the room, breathing rapidly. He could see her dilated nostrils and her archaic lips slightly parted. Her dark hair had fallen about her shoulders. Her hand was raised to her shoulder. For an instant she poised like a living statue, and then with a quick gesture, she tore the black dress from her shoulders, and the snow-white flesh rippled to gold in the lamp-light.

“Daniel Dreeme,” she gasped in a husky tone. “Daniel ... you ... you....”

He stood rooted to the spot, staring at her right shoulder, at the golden-white flesh that shone in the lamp-light and at the blue figure, no larger than the palm of his hand, that disfigured the glossy skin. It seemed to leap to his eyes at the instant conclusion of her abandoned gesture. He could not take his gaze from it, for it seemed to burn luminously by itself, a tracing of blue fire that writhed before his strained eyes. It fluctuated, drew near, retired from him, grew larger, and then diminished in size. He wanted to cry out, “What, in the name of Christ, is that!” but he could not force a single word through his lips. She had sensed the direction of his eyes the instant she had torn the dress from her shoulder, and a horrified hopelessness had swept across her face. She could see that the brief bond which had held them together was instantaneously snapped, that the charm was shattered. He was thinking no longer of her, no longer stirred to tenderness by her, or to passion by the whiteness of her body. Slowly she drew together the torn fragments of her dress and covered herself. Without a single word she walked slowly toward the door. She stood there with her back to him for a full minute and waited, but he said nothing. He still stood by the table, his eyes on the spot from which she had walked. His mind was an amazed welter of thoughts through which constantly moved the cold dead hand of Wagner, and the frail ghost-like figure of Deborah. He could piece nothing together, make sense of nothing, find no rational explanation of anything. The lamp began to sputter, shooting its thin protesting flame upward in the chimney as the oil burned out of the wick. In a minute it would go out and leave them in darkness. Every time the flame shot upward the shadows lengthened in the room and every time it went down the corners filled with curling pools of blackness. Dreeme walked slowly toward the lamp. It needed oil. It should be put out. His mind strove to function automatically as he stretched his hand out toward the lamp. He heard Martha Westcott move in the doorway, and he turned toward her. She was disappearing into the hall, walking slowly. Suddenly his voice came back to him.

“The goat’s head,” he said. “Where did you get the goat’s head?”

He could hear her feet walking down the hall, and he stood listening as the front door softly opened and then closed again. Leaning over he blew the light out and stood in the darkness, frowning.

Chapter Eight

I

When Dreeme awoke late in the morning he heard the heavy roar of rain on the roof, and, hurrying through his morning ablutions, he proceeded downstairs to his breakfast, finding the covered dishes on the table in the little study. Mrs. Slater had been there and had not waited, and he was thankful for this. He did not care to see her standing beside him, her eyes fluttering with excitement, and a repressed rancor in her pursed mouth. She resented his interference on Deborah’s behalf, and a strong distaste for her had grown in the young doctor’s mind. A regular New England aunt. A narrow-minded, overly-righteous, cold-hearted descendant of icy-natured forebears. The devil take her! Dreeme raced through his breakfast, not minding that the eggs were cold and coagulated on the heavy china plate, that the coffee was insipid and luke-warm. He would probably never get good service again from Mrs. Slater. Well, he would not need her services long. He would not be here in this small two-storied, two-room building that whined in the strong winds and drew in all the unpleasant heat of the summer. He would be in some large city, Boston or New York, and Deborah would be with him. There were lots of places where a young doctor could find a refuge. Finishing his meal he rose from the table and strode through the hall to the door and thrust it open. A wind-blown gust of rain dashed in his face, and he drew back from it. The weather had changed all right. Last night the largest moon he had ever seen had poured its silver light over Marlborough, but some time in the night it had disappeared, devoured by angry storm-clouds, and now the community lay prone beneath a furious down-pour. The farmers would not complain at this. Here was fecundation enough. Reaching for his rubber-slicker Dreeme adjusted it about his shoulders and stepped out into the storm. The heavy drops snapped against his face and drummed on his hat. The trees across the road were mere misty shadows. It was dark, too. Dreeme noticed that the lamps were lighted in the Slater house.

A New England rain-storm was a desolate phenomenon. It turned the entire vista gray and sodden green. Great puddles widened in the road, and the unceasing whir of falling water made a monotonous sound in the ears. Dreeme supposed that he should have put on boots, but he did not feel inclined to turn back into the house. He desired too much to go on and to finish up the business that was in his mind. He was going to face Humphrey Lathrop, and stay with the huge old doctor until he had made everything clear to him. He would tell Lathrop everything that had happened. Lathrop would help him, for, after all, Lathrop was a wise man. Even if he did look like a swelling frog at times. Dreeme sloshed through the puddles and mud on his way to the old doctor’s cottage, his mind a chaotic mixture of problems and unasked questions. He had all the facts now, but he could not put them together until he possessed the key. With the key he could unlock the last secret door, and when he did this everything would fall into order, and his curiosity about Marlborough would be satisfied. He crossed the square and saw nobody but the tall spare figure of Bidwell standing in the shelter of the porch of the post office and general store. Bidwell did not return his greeting, but stood immovable watching the young doctor who proceeded on his way, head down against the driving rain and wind. Dreeme smiled sarcastically to himself. He was certainly a popular man in Marlborough. The rain dripped in an unceasing stream from the front brim of his hat and got into his eyes. It flowed into the back of his neck. It was in his shoes now. Every time he stepped he made a sucking sound. But it was cool and not altogether unpleasant. It quenched the restless fire of his body, and soothed his torn nerves. He felt as though he could walk for miles with this heavy down-pour beating upon him and that he would be all the better for it. The front of Humphrey Lathrop’s cottage, small and gray in the rain, loomed before him, and he opened the rickety gate and walked up the path. He would find out everything now, and he would not leave Humphrey until he did.

II

Dreeme pushed the untasted tumbler of apple-jack away with an expression of disgust, and stood up and pointed a questioning finger at the old doctor. He demanded:

“Where is the place called Dagon?”

There was a finality in his voice that rang through the room. Humphrey Lathrop’s jaw dropped and his three chins quivered like jelly. He pushed back his reinforced chair from the table with a mighty effort and an enormous scraping sound. For an instant Dreeme feared that the old man’s eyes would pop out of his head. There was amazement in them, consternation, something very like terror. For the first time since Dreeme had known him the old doctor was completely taken off his guard, surprised, and routed.

“Where did ... where did....”

Lathrop fumbled for speech unsuccessfully, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He glanced cautiously about the room as though he expected invisible foes to spring up on all sides. Dreeme, amazed at Lathrop’s reaction, stood with outstretched hand and pointing finger, awaiting his answer with an obvious determination that no beating about the bush might distract. The rain dripped from the bottom of his trousers, and made a dark pool about him on the round rag carpet. The clock ticked desolately as he waited. Lathrop spoke slowly and with evident reluctance. He said:

“Where the bones were buried.”

He appeared to have given up all hope of dissuading Dreeme from the subject.

“Bones? What bones? What does that mean?” cried Dreeme.

Lathrop’s voice was monotonous.

“The bones of the Salem witches.”

A great light seemed to flood Dreeme’s mind, that light that had once been so far away, but it was too dazzling for him as yet. A voice deep inside him was talking feverishly, saying things, explaining, indicating. He could not catch the sound of the words. The voice was talking too fast. The words ran together. They were a febrile blur of sound.

“You must explain everything, Humphrey,” he said in a calm voice as he sat down. “I’m in this thing too deep now. Somebody I know ... is affected.”

The old doctor nodded, and then, reaching for his tumbler of apple-jack, drank the entire potion down in a single draught. He choked and wheezed for a moment.

“You hit me amidships then,” he remarked soberly. “Where did you hear of the place called Dagon?”

“Never mind,” returned Dreeme. “Don’t stave me off with questions. Tell me things.”

“I’m going to,” answered Lathrop mildly. “I’m going to tell you things. You’re going to have it all now, and much good may it do you.”

His eyes roved about the room. Then they reverted to Dreeme.

“Suppose you tell me everything first,” he said in a wheedling voice. “I want to know what you’ve found out. There is no use duplicating the few facts and suspicions that I possess.”

Dreeme eyed him impatiently.

“All right,” he said shortly, and plunged immediately into his tale. In a rapid condensed form he told Lathrop of the first visit he had paid to Westcott’s house, of the two conversations with Martha Westcott, of the death of Wagner, of the strange fright of Deborah, and of the goat’s head. He strove to reinterpret the theory of will which Jeffrey Westcott had put forward in the burned mill. He explained his suspicions of the Reverend George Burroughs. Lathrop listened attentively, his head on one side, and his great lips pursed so that they thrust out like the snout of a pig. Occasionally he would nod. Once or twice his eyes opened very wide. In one instance he emitted a triumphant cluck as though some suspicion he had carried in his mind for years were verified.

“Will you fetch me down that big black book?” he said softly when Dreeme concluded his tale, indicating the little shelf that was nailed high on the wall behind him. Dreeme strode over and drew forth a bulky volume that was covered with dust, blew it off, and brought it to the table where he placed it. He deliberately read the title on the back of the tome as he laid it down. The name “Cotton Mather” was printed there in faded gilt letters. Lathrop smiled, a smile with no humor in it, and drew the book toward him. Then he adjusted his spectacles and leaned back very much like a judge about to give a decision.

“I tried to keep you away from this,” he said, “for good and sufficient reasons, and chief among them was the peace of your own mind and the degree of your success in Marlborough. Well, you have lost the peace of your mind, and there is no longer any reason to suppose that you will ever have any success in Marlborough. There is no reason, therefore, why you should not know as much as I know. I will tell you, Daniel, that what you have told me has made some dark places clear to me, and verified certain suspicions which I have wisely kept to myself. Therefore, in making plain to you what I know I shall adjust some of your own information into the scheme of things.”

After this preamble he cleared his throat loudly, searched through the huge volume before him until he found a certain place, closed the book upon a pudgy finger that retained the page, and glanced soberly at Dreeme.

“It’s witchcraft we have to deal with,” he said mildly. “It’s a cursed madness that has ruled this valley since 1692.”

Dreeme nodded without surprise. He suspected this, indeed, he knew it.

“Yes, sir, witchcraft,” repeated the old doctor. “You probably don’t believe in it. No more do I. But the outward forms of it exist just as surely as the outward forms of the Christian religion exist. It has its established hierarchy, although I believe today that it is the weapon of madmen, charlatans, and fanatics.”

He sighed loudly.

“This is a mad world, Daniel,” he said. “We are all more or less insane. Well, I’m getting nowhere. As I age I grow more discursive.”

Dreeme moved restlessly and the old doctor lifted a hand.

“Let me tell you this in my own way,” he said. “You’ll have it all before I am done.”

Lathrop cleared his throat and fastened his eyes upon Dreeme.

“In 1692,” he said, “the little town of Salem went insane. You’ve read your history and you know all about the witch scares and the hangings on Gallows Hill. You know how the children cried out that they were possessed, and gave testimony against various men and women in the community, and how the judges and preachers strove to battle with this strange outbreak of insanity. I don’t have to give you a resumé of that history. It is enough to remind you of it. It is the common conclusion of most scholars that all this was a form of religious mania, and that the people who were hanged were not professed witches but victims of hallucinations and enmity. I don’t believe it. I believe those people belonged to a secret and blasphemous order that met all over the world, that they were divided into covens or parishes, that they each had their leader in the shape of a Black Man who represented the Devil, that they worshipped Satan, and that they attempted to practise magic. I believe that they were unhinged to such a degree that they could imagine themselves flying through the air, that they were addicted to hallucinations and delusions and visions, that, like the whirling dervishes, they could fling themselves into hysteric trances and dwell in the domain of their sick imaginations. They believed those things, Daniel. They had faith in Satan. And they attained a malevolent strength through their faith. They could superimpose their will on innocent people and make those people sick by the power of suggestion. There is nothing supernatural in that, after all. It is supernormal, perhaps, but you know my views on these things. The trappings and the ceremonies and the results might seem supernatural, but that was because the people in those days did not know about such things as thought-transference, auto-suggestion, and the impulsion of the will. In a measure, these people were liberating themselves from time, moving beyond the limitations of their days, subsisting in an arcane of their own manufacture through the full strength of those fanatical beliefs, which, after all, is saying no more than that they liberated their wills and believed in the strength of their wills. Well, in 1692 all this was brought to a halt by the hangings and the persecutions of the witch-judges. The Salem coven was demolished and scattered. Do not think, however, that all the witches were strung up on Gallows Hill. Others fled into the woods and sought far places where they might conduct their orgies and ceremonies in their own way. The larger group, and now, Daniel, I am telling you something I read in a book of which you have heard, hovered in the wilderness about Salem for some weeks, living on roots and berries and what the Indians might give them, for the Indians, too, believed in witchcraft. By night they ventured to the desolate graves of their hanged companions and dug up those bodies and bore them away with them into the thick forest. They pushed westward, avoiding the little settlements in the clearing, passing north of Springfield, crossing the Connecticut River, and eventually they came to a valley and discovered it to be a lost cul-de-sac in the hills, and there they settled down. With them they had the black book of the order, a book filled with ceremonies and liturgies, and in which a scribe set down the account of their wanderings. Can you guess where they settled, Daniel?”

Dreeme nodded.

“Here,” he said. “They settled in this valley. These farmers are their descendants. The black book they carried with them was the black book of old Uriah Carrier.”

Lathrop wagged his head up and down.

“That’s right,” he said. “As a boy I looked into that book and was frightened out of my wits. Yes, Daniel, they settled here, still carrying on their frightful ceremonies, still calling upon the devil by night and meeting in the secret forest clearings to dance in the light of the moon. One place they kept sacred. It was a hidden place, known only to the adepts. It was there that they buried the bones of the hanged witches, those poor bodies that they had carried for two hundred miles through the thick wilderness. There, too, they raised the Devil Stone upon which the Black Man stood during the great ceremonies. They called the place Dagon and strewed it with ashes. I can picture that place lighted by torches at midnight. I can picture the rapt faces of the witches and the compelling eyes of the Black Man as he stood above them and called on Satan, on Beelzebub, on Asmodeus, the fiends that he imagined served his purpose. I can hear the laughter of the women and see their glistening eyes as the madness took them. By day they were taciturn people, carrying on the quiet masquerade of pioneers, building up homes in the clearing, pushing the forest farther and farther back; but when the moon rose the madness that was in their blood swept them out of themselves and they became other creatures employing pagan symbols and ancient phallic ceremonials. They existed in a domain out of place and time, then, a land of hallucinations and dreams and primitive urges. It was a land where they celebrated the Black Mass and the Witches’ Sabaoth, and gave full rein to the frenzies of the blood and brain. I’ve never seen the place called Dagon, Daniel, and I never hope to see it, but I suspect where it is. I suspect that the Devil Stone is still there, and if one dug deep enough one would come to crumbled bones, if, indeed, bones last that long.”

The old doctor drew a long breath and paused. He reached for the apple-jack bottle and poured himself a drink.

“I’m developing into an old drunkard,” he remarked. “Imagine it. At my age!”

He drank half the tumbler of amber liquor and set it down on the table. The roar of the rain filled the room and Dreeme, gazing toward the window, could perceive nothing but a silver opaqueness that ran and glittered. He waited for Lathrop to go on, knowing that the old doctor could tell his story best in his own way.

“Now then,” said Lathrop, wiping his mouth with a fat hand. “Where was I? Where, for that matter, are any of us? That’s philosophy, Daniel.”

He summoned up a smile, but it was lost in the earnest attention of the young doctor. He said slowly:

“I didn’t actually lie to you, Daniel, but I did conveniently forget to tell you some things the other day. I thought there was no need of spreading a story that had better not have existed at all in the beginning. Well!”

He sighed wheezily. Then he resumed his story.

“It was not alone the descendants of the Salem witches who wandered into this valley and established homes,” he said. “You’ve heard of Thomas Morton of Merry Mount, haven’t you?”

Dreeme nodded. Of course, he had. Why, Deborah....