The Thing from the Lake Part 23

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 meagre 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 Mich.e.l.l, 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!" Phillida 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 Mich.e.l.l?"

"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 Vere 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 pa.s.sed his arm around Phillida and drew her to him with a quieting, protective movement. His regard met mine with more significance than he chose to voice.

"I'm satisfied to take the thing as you tell it, Mr. Locke," he answered. "Phil 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, Vere. 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, Phillida hesitatingly ventured an idea:

"Perhaps she is not--real. If the monster is a ghost thing, may not she be one, too? If we are 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 s.p.a.ces, 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. Phillida had listened; and talked of ghosts the bugbears of grave-yard superst.i.tion. Did Vere comprehend me better? Did he visualize the struggle, weirdly akin to legends of knight and dragon, as prize of which waited Desire Mich.e.l.l; forlornly helpless as white Andromeda chained to her black cliff? Could the Maine countryman, the cabaret entertainer, seize the truths glimpsed by Rosicrucians 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 pomander 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 pa.s.sed to Phillida.

"Do ghosts write?" I queried.

She read the lines aloud.

"'We walk upon the shadows of hills, across a level thrown, and pant like climbers.'"

"They do write, people say, with ouija boards and mediums," she murmured.

I looked at Vere 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 Cristina 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 s.p.a.ced 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, Vere and I walked across the orchard to a seat placed near the lake. There I sat down, while he remained standing in his favorite att.i.tude: 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 Phillida, 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 window-sill 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 ma.s.s. Something sort of smooth and glistening; like black, oily mola.s.ses 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 use 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 Phillida is that I may need a woman friend for Desire Mich.e.l.l," 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's shooting. Once in a while I've 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 companions.h.i.+p in experience would have afforded all these weeks.

"Why not, Vere?"

"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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 n.o.body 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 for Phil and 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 Mich.e.l.l?"

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.