The Thing from the Lake Part 29

The tone of the diary altered rapidly. At first, the unknown from beyond the wall appalled the woman only by its unhuman strangeness, the repugnance of flesh and blood for its loathly neighborhood. Fear emanated from its presence, seen yet unseen, a blackness moving in the black of night when it visited her. Yet she had courage to endure those awful colloquies. She listened. She strove by the spell and incantation to subdue This to her service, as the demon Orthone served the Lord of Cora.s.se, as Paracelsus was served by his Familiar, or Gyges by the spirit of his ring.

Alas for the sorceress, misguided by legend and fantasy! She had evoked no phantom, but a fact actual as nature always is even if nature is not humanly understood. The Thing was real.

The awe of the magician became the stricken panic of the woman. She had unloosed what she could not bind. She had called a servant, and gained a master. Gone forever were the dreams of power and splendor and triumph.

Now she learned that only pure magic can discharge the spirits it has summoned, nor could a murderess attain that lofty art.

We were given a glimpse of a frantic girl crouched in the useless pentagram traced on the floor for her protection, covering her beauty with the cloak of her hair against the eyes that burned upon her between the overturned silver lamps.

A deepening horror gathered about the house of Mistress Desire Mich.e.l.l.

The old dame who had been the girl's nurse and caretaker fled the place and fell into mumbling dotage in a night. No child would come near the garden, though fruit and nuts rotted away where they dropped from overripeness. No neighbor crossed the doorstep where Sir Austin had died. She lived in utter solitude by day. By night she waged hideous battle against her Visitor; using woman's cunning, essaying every expedient and art her books suggested to her desperate need.

With each conflict, her strength and resource waned, while That which she held at bay knew no weariness. Time was not, for it, nor change of purpose.

"I faint, I fail!" she wrote. "The Sea of Dread breaks about my feet. It is midnight. The pentagram fades from the floor--the nine lamps die--the breath of the One at the cas.e.m.e.nt is upon me----"

Vere stopped.

"A handful of pages have been torn out here," he stated. "The next entry that I can read is in the middle of a stained page, and must be considerably later on."

Phillida made an odd little noise like a whimper, clutching at his sleeve. The third shock for which I had been waiting shuddered through the house, this time distinctly enough for all to feel. A gust of wind went through the wet trees outside like a gasp.

"Ethan, what was that?" she stammered. "Oh, I'm afraid! Cousin Roger----?"

I had no voice to answer her. In my ears was the rush and surge of that sea whose waters had gripped me in the past night. I felt the icy death-tide hiss around me in its first returning wave, rise to my knee's height, then sink away down its unearthly beach. What I had dimly known all day, underlying Vere's st.u.r.dy cheerfulness and our plans and efforts, was the truth. Through those intervening hours of daylight I had remained my enemy's prisoner, bound on that sh.o.r.e we both knew well, until It pleased or had power to return and finish with me. No doubt It was governed by laws, as we are.

As before, the cold struck a paralysis across my senses. Vere's rea.s.surance sounded faint and distant.

"The thunder is getting closer," he said. "That was a storm wind, all right! Would you rather go upstairs and lie down, and not hear any more of this stuff tonight?"

"No! Oh, no! I could not bear to be alone," she refused. "Just, just go on, dear. Of course it is the coming storm that makes the room so cold."

He put his left arm around her as she nestled against him. His right hand held the diary flattened on the table under the light.

"The next entry is just one line in the middle of a page where everything else is blotted out," Vere repeated. "It reads: 'The child is a week old today.'"

The wave crashed foaming in tumult up the strand, flowing higher, drenching me in cold sharp as fire. The tide rose faster tonight. The silence that held the others dumb before the significance of that last sentence covered my silence from notice. Desire's face was quite hidden; lamplight and firelight wavered and gleamed across her bent head. I wanted to arise and go to her, to take her hands and tell her to have patience and courage. But when this wave ebbed, my strength drained away with the receding water. Moreover, the darkness curdled and moved beyond the window opposite me. The curtains hung between were no bar to my vision, as the light and presence of my companions were no bar to the Thing that kept rendezvous with me. Since last night, we were nearer to one another.

A breath of chill foulness crept across the pungent odor of the burning apple-log in the fireplace. A whisper spoke to my intelligence.

"Man conquered by me, fall down before me. Beg my forbearance. Beg life of me--and take the gift!"

"No," my thought answered Its.

"You die, Man."

"All men die."

"Not as they die who are mine."

"I am not yours. You kill me, as a wild beast might. But I am not yours; not dying nor dead am I yours."

"Would you not live, pygmy?"

"Not as your pensioner."

The logs on the hearth crackled and sank down with a soft rustle, burned through to a core of glowing red. Phillida spoke with a hushed urgency, drawing still closer to her husband, so that her forehead rested against his shoulder.

"Go on, Ethan. Finish and let us be done."

Vere bent his head above the book on the table to obey her. Across the dark I suddenly saw the Eyes glare in upon him.

"On the next page, the writing begins again," he said. "It says:

"'I am offered the kingdoms of earth. But I crave that kingdom of myself which I cast away. The child is sent to England. The circle is drawn.

The names are traced and the lamps filled. Tonight I make the last essay. There remains untried one mighty spell. This Mystery----'"

A clap of thunder right over the house overwhelmed the reader's voice.

Phillida screamed as a violent wind volleyed through the place with a cras.h.i.+ng of doors and shutters, upstairs and down. The diary was ripped from beneath Vere's hand and hurled straight to the center of that nest of fire formed by the settling of the logs. A long tongue of flame leaped high in the chimney as the spread leaves of the book caught and flared, fanned by wind and draft. Vere sprang up, but Phillida's clinging arms delayed him. When he reached the fire-tongs there was nothing to rescue except a charring ma.s.s half-way toward ashes.

He turned toward me, perhaps at last surprised by my immobility.

"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he apologized.

Desire had started up with the others when the sudden uproar of the storm burst upon them. Now she cried out, breaking Vere's excuse of the loss. Her small face blanched, she ran a few steps toward me.

"It has come! He will die--he is dying. Look, look!"

CHAPTER XX

"Behold! Where are their abodes?

Their places are not, even as though they had not been."

--TOMB OF KING ENTEF.

Desire Mich.e.l.l was beside me, and I could not rise or answer her. She bent over me, so that the Rose of Jerusalem fragrance inundated me and drove back the sickening air that was the breath of our enemy.

"Let me go," she sobbed, her head beside my head. "If you can hear me, listen and leave me as It wills. You know now that I belong to It by heritage? You know why we can never be together as you planned? Try to feel horror of me. Put me away from you. No evil can come to me unless I seek evil. But It will not suffer you to take me. Live, dear Roger, and let me go."

"Yield to me, Man, what you may not keep," the whisper of the Thing followed after her voice. "Would you take the witch-child to your hearth? Cast her off; and taste my pardon."

"Can you hear, Roger? Roger, let me go."

With an effort terrible to make as death to meet, I broke from the paralysis that chained me. As from the drag of a whirlpool, I tore myself from the tide-clutch, from the will of the Thing, from the numb weakness upon me. For a moment I thrust back the hand at my throat. I stood up and drew Desire up with me in my arms, both of us reeling with my unsteadiness.

"I do not give you up," I said, my speech hoa.r.s.e and difficult. "I claim you, now, and after. And my claim is good, because I pay."