Collected Short Fiction, page 266
Have you never felt the strangeness in you, Clay? Have you never sensed the stain upon your soul? Are you never conscious of the blade venom flowing in your blood?
Much as Sarah and I long to see you, we both prefer that you should live and die in your new foreign home, than that you should wed Valyne, and drench her life in terror.
Heed this warning—you must sense its truth, like a cold serpent coiled around your heart! And accept all our congratulations upon your new prosperity.
YOUR SECOND FATHER.
The ominous enigma of that message, woven into the strange memories of my youth, and my old nameless fears of hill-girdled Creston, still shrouded me with dread. But it had merely hastened my return from the Orient. For if there were any real reason why I couldn’t marry Valyne, then the toil and peril of seven years had been in vain.
he didn’t meet me.
I walked up the cobbled street, past grim, silent houses that I had known when I was a child. Some hoary evil, I thought again, had come down out of the forests to haunt them, since I had gone.
Gaunt, hoary-headed men peered at me from sagging doors. I knew the names of some; but their dull, rheumy eyes returned my greetings with stares of hostile dread. Even haggard, one-eyed Dud Morrow, the postmaster, who must have handled all my letters to Valyne, and all of hers to me, did not know me until I spoke. Then he started and seemed to shrink from me, as if I had been afflicted with some fearful contagion.
“Valyne Kirk?” he mumbled hastily. “Why, since the old woman died in the summer, she lives at Doctor Kyle’s house. Just half a mile up the hill.”
He gestured as if to hasten me. And as I went on, I sensed a furtive murmur behind me in the narrow street, as if swift, unpleasant things were whispered.
Valyne had written of her mother’s death, but not that she had gone to my foster-father’s house. I wondered briefly at her silence.
Up the muddy road I hastened, through gnarled trees older than Creston, toward the house of Doctor Latham Kyle. No need to ask the way! I knew each turning, each battered oak, each moss-stained boulder. But I felt again that some secret evil had come down from the hills, to grasp this vale in tentacles of slithering horror.
An old, insidious fascination drew my eyes up the gloomy slopes of Blue Squaw Mountain. The tangled, monstrous trees of its forbidden fastness had filled my first nightmares. Often in childhood, driven by strange instinctive impulses that overcame my trembling fear, I had ventured into its immemorial wilderness. And once, in a desolate glade near the summit of the mountain, thick-walled with gnarled, gigantic trees, I had come upon a great circle of monolithic upright stones, that ringed a low stone altar black with fire and blood.
When I stood before that hidden sylvan altar, a singular, exhilarating terror had clutched my heart. I shook to the wakening of elder memories, more wonderful, more dreadful, than any I had known. Some savage compulsion made me kneel and strike my forehead against the altar stones until a jagged point was bright with blood.
But as soon as I left the circle of crude pillars, a frightened, utter revulsion had seized my sensitive, childish soul. Terrified and bewildered, I had run back to tell Doctor Kyle what I had found.
His thin lips had tightened strangely as he listened. The dark eyes deep beneath his shaggy brows had peered into mine, as if probing to my soul. Solemnly, his deep and hollow voice had warned:
“Son, if you want to save your life, your sanity, your soul, never go back to that circle of stones! And never tell another human being that you have found them. Forget. Promise me you will forget.”
And I—then I must have been no older than six—I promised him. But I never forgot. I had never gone back; but that strange, instinctive dread clung still, a web of insidious evil that meshed my soul.
I strove to push that ancient, haunting memory from my mind, to think only of the beauty of Valyne Kirk. And her smiling image was clear in my mind, as I went up the hill toward the old stone house. But she came to me before I had passed the last turning.
I heard her voice from among the trees, on a dim wood road that ran a short way up the somber, forested slope of Blue Squaw Mountain.
“Help——”
She must have recognized me when I paused; for her voice came again, gasping and breathless, but with an eager joy crowding upon its fear.
“Clay!”
For my name is Claiborne Coe, and she has always called me that.
“Clay, is it really you? Oh, help me——”
Through the twilight under the trees, I saw the gigantic shape lumbering after her. I ran to meet a great, bearded hulk of a man. His faded overalls were dark with dried blood. His broad face, dark above the rusty beard, was twitching with lust. His eyes were bulging and glazed.
Valyne was at my side, panting:
“Oh, Clay, stop him——”
I called to him, “Stop!”
He mouthed some bestial sound, and came on, ignoring me. His great hands were twitching, as if already shredding the clothing from Valyne’s lovely body.
I stood before him. He swung at me carelessly, with one great hairy arm, as if to brush me out of the way. I ducked under his arm, and slapped his bearded face.
“Stop it, man,” I said sharply. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
For the first time, then, his glassy, protruding eyes seemed to focus on me. In the hoarse, cursing rasp of his voice I read the words:
“My gal. . . . Git out of the way! . . .”
His great arm swung at me again. I didn’t move, and the open-handed blow jarred me to my feet.
I heard Valyne’s quick voice, low and distressed:
“Gay! Don’t let him hurt you. He’s a beast! I was coming down to meet you, when I saw him on the road. I hid. But he must have seen me. He found me, chased me——”
Muttering in the tawny beard, the man came at me, now in earnest, with his hairy fists balled.
I fought him, then.
Always, since I was a child, I have sought to avoid physical combat. The reason is more terrible than cowardice; for a red demon seizes my body, with the first blow I strike. Blind destroying fury overwhelms all restraint. And afterward, when the calm of sanity returns, a crimson fog dulls the memory of the fearful things I may have done.
It is as if some malevolent fiend wakes in me, to fight. . . .
A .45 automatic was slung under my armpit, but that mad demon had neither knowledge nor need of the weapon. I was conscious of an unseeing, savage fury that flung me at the giant. Then scarlet chaos ruled my brain. . . .
When it ebbed away, Valyne was pulling at my shoulder with frantic hands.
“Come, Clay!” her urgent voice was pleading. “You’ve done enough to him. Too much——”
Her voice released the cold shock of sanity.
The bearded man was lying in the muddy road, gasping hoarsely for breath. Fresh blood, now, was mingled with the dry on his overalls. His lips were crushed to a crimson pulp, and two of his front teeth were gone.
A FAINT sickness came into me, to see what I had done. Once in Singapore two Macanese attacked me in a dark alley, with knives, and when my mind had cleared of its scarlet madness, their heads had been almost severed with their own weapons. Since then I have walked in dread of that indwelling fiend. . . .
But the bearded man was able to stand up, when I aided him. His bulging eyes stared at me, and then at Valyne, without any expression that I could read. He cleared his throat, and spat a scarlet stream of teeth and blood. He pulled out a big, nickel-plated watch, that ticked like a dock, and looked at it sullenly. Then, without a word, he went down the road toward the village, reeling like a drunken man.
I wished that he had cursed or blustered. There is deadly menace in the silence of a beaten man. His glassy, inscrutable eyes had given no hint of what hellish thoughts might be passing through his twisted, brutish brain.
Valyne called for my handkerchief, and bound it around my bleeding knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m not myself, when I fight. I might have killed him——”
She looked after the staggering figure, and her violet eyes were dark with dread.
“I’m glad—glad you beat him,” she said, in a small, shuddery voice. “It was terrible to watch. But I’ve been so afraid! He’s so strange, so dreadful! Perhaps now he’ll let me alone.
“He’s Jud Geer,” she added, “the butcher.”
I remembered Jud Geer, the butcher’s son. He had been a queer, slow-witted bully. We smaller boys had dreaded him. It had been his perverted delight to torture us with gruesome objects from his father’s shop, as when he bound and gagged little Tommy Lanning with the entrails of swine, and left him lying all night in a pool of blood and offal, where the rats came. . . .
When Valyne had done with the bandage, I grasped her small hands. She smiled at me. A queer, sharp little pain came into my throat, for her beauty was more exquisite than all my memories and dreams. I yearned to brush the haunting shadow from her pale face, to keep this strong lamp of joy burning for ever in her violet eyes.
“He doesn’t matter,” I told her, “Valyne darling.”
It was sheer delight to be calling her that again, after seven grim and bitter years.
“He doesn’t matter, for we shall soon be gone.” I caught her precious warmth close to my heart. “Let’s go—now!” I urged her, on a sudden impulse. “We can hire a car in the village, to take us down to the railroad.”
“Clay——” she began, and hesitated doubtfully.
“I’m afraid of Creston,” I told her. “I don’t know why. But I’ve always dreaded returning—as much as I love you, Valyne! Every minute here is a torture to me. Let’s go—today—right now!”
I could find no words for the singular dread that was seeping into me from the town’s somber antiquity, from the forbidding gloom of these immemorial forested hills. I yearned to shake off the squalid poverty of Creston, its desolate, haunting decrepitude. I hungered for the lights and the bustle and the laughter of a city that was alive.
But my feeling was more than that. It was horror of the brooding evil that lurked like an invisible spider in this vale of desolation. And Valyne shared my dread. Her hand grew tight on mine.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Clay!” she whispered tremulously. “I’ll be so glad to get away. You can’t realize what it has been to wait, these last few months, in Doctor Kyle’s house! The terror——”
With a little frightened gasp, she checked the words.
“But we can’t go tonight, Clay. The doctor and his wife will want to see you, after all these years——”
“We must,” I said. “Doctor Kyle doesn’t want us to marry, Valyne——”
Her face had grown paler, and her violet eyes looked down at the road.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know! And I have promised him that I won’t marry you, until you have come and talked with him.”
“If we must,” I yielded. “But there can’t be any sane reason, Valyne—I know it!”
Hand in hand, we walked slowly up the steep, rutted road, toward the old stone house; slowly, for we were laying bright plans. I told her again of the small fortune I had brought back from the Orient, of the good position now promised me with an importing firm. We were planning our escape, for ever, from Creston’s brooding horror. Slowly, too, because we were both heavy with unspoken forebodings.
But at last the gray bulk of the old stone house loomed up before us in the dying twilight. Pale yellow lights winked malevolently at us from the narrow, squinting slits of windows. Valyne opened the heavy, iron-studded oaken door, and we entered.
How often have I wished that we had slammed that accursed door, and fled into the haunted night!
2. “Fear Is Calling for You, Clay!”
THE stone house was old. It had been old when I was a child; but now it had changed. Now it seemed to me that nameless evil had sprung, since I had gone, from festering roots sunk deep into its grim antiquity. For the age of it then had been mellow, aloof, austere, even kindly; now it was a leering, gibbering horror. It was as if the house had died since my departure, and was now a restless specter, haunting its own hollow corpse.
Sarah Kyle met us in the hall, standing motionless under vast, grimy roof-beams two centuries old. Seven years had changed her. Her teeth were gone. Her face was narrowed, sharpened, shriveled. Her eyes were sunken, curiously bright. She was stooped, until her posture suggested some queer, bright-eyed bird.
She took my hand in her horny claw, and welcomed me with a cackling laugh. Then she began to make apologies for the poverty of her house, and to hint transparently for news of my business in the Orient.
“May I see the doctor?” I said.
Her bird-like eyes fixed me, with their uncanny glitter.
“You had better see him, Clay, if you have come to marry Valyne,” her cracked voice shrilled. “And ye had better take his warning. Don’t walk too near the edge of hell!”
I stepped back, startled, demanding: “Mother Kyle! What do you mean?”
“Latham will tell you,” she said, “if your own strange blood hasn’t written it on your soul!”
“Where’s the doctor?”
Her white head jerked sharply. “Latham’s still at work,” she told me.
“in his study in the attic. He’s busy on his great book.”
“His book?” I said, wondering.
“He is writing a history of the demonolatries of Creston.”
“I want to talk to him right away.”
“You can see him after supper.” Her thin nose jerked at me emphatically, like the beak of a bird. “He’ll give you reason enough why you can’t marry Valyne, and drag her soul to hell!”
Valyne rescued me from her cackling strangeness, and led me up to my old room.
There I met the two servants of the house. They, Eben Hand and his wife Josepha, were setting up my bedstead.
Eben Hand was a fat, panting man. There was no color in his blond hair, his vague pale eyes, or his pasty skin. Mute, he expressed himself very swiftly to his wife with white, pliable fat hands.
She was a big, dark woman. Her eyes were wide and sharp and black. Her raven hair was coiled into glistening, oily ropes. Her upper lip bore a thick, dark fuzz. She was doing the most of the work, issuing commands to her silent husband in a coarse, mannish voice.
She bowed to me, oddly, as I entered with Valyne and set down my light bag. Her dark avid eyes remained fastened on my face, while she told her husband: “Eben, this is Clay. Ye remember little Claiborne Coe, Eben, that used to run through the village. Well, this is him, come back to take our Valyne away. Clay got rich, Eben, in them furrin parts!”
At that last sentence, Eben Hand’s small, pale eyes shifted suddenly from his wife to me. They searched my person, and seized upon my modest gold ring. His white fingers made some swift, covert reply.
When they had gone, I said to Valyne: “I don’t like them—or this house! Can’t we stay somewhere else, tonight?”
“There’s no hotel in Creston,” she told me. “And it would look strange if we went away tonight. Besides, you must stay to talk with Doctor Kyle. I promised him.”
But even the electric warmth of her kiss couldn’t thaw out the chill of my forebodings.
DOCTOR KYLE came down at last from his attic room.
He was a big man. Although his body and his limbs remained massively powerful, his head had become curiously fleshless. His yellow cheeks were hollow, his dark flaming eyes were very deeply sunken. His head had become almost completely bald, so that it gave the disconcerting impression of a yellowed skull.
We met at the foot of the stairs. His hand was very cold, as if he had been working too long without a fire in his attic study.
No smile broke the solemn preoccupation of his cadaverous face.
“You are welcome to your old home, Clay,” said his deep, hollow voice. “I’m very glad to see you, but”—his shrunken face changed curiously—“I had hoped that you would heed the warning of my letter, and never come for Valyne.”
“I have come for her,” I told him bluntly. “And I’m going to take her away, in spite of anything you tell me.” His gaunt head shook.
“Clay,” he said, “you were always queer and reckless. But I know that you aren’t reckless, madly selfish, enough to drag Valyne away to a living hell! Not after you have heard; for there must be one drop of human blood left in your veins!”
“Of course I wouldn’t hurt Valyne,” I told him. “Go ahead and tell me; I’ve had enough vague hints.”
But Josepha Hand was setting supper on the table, and Valyne came toward us at the foot of the stair.
“Doctor,” she said, smiling, “you’ve worked too late again! You know you shouldn’t——”
Her light voice was swept away by his hissing whisper:
“Later, Clay. But it is a crime that God forbids!”
Valyne caught his arm, and mine, and drew us toward the table.
Sitting beside Valyne, so that sometimes my arm touched the firm warmth of hers, I wondered vainly what he could have to say. What demoniac purpose sought to bar me from her? What eldritch madness lurked in this ancient house?
As we ate, the man Eben Hand appeared suddenly in a doorway. He looked disturbed, his white hands fluttered agitatedly at his wife. And she called in a tone of startled dread:
“Doctor! You must go, Doctor! He can’t get it quiet!”
Doctor Kyle’s yellow, tight-skinned face grew a little paler. He rose hastily and followed Eben Hand through the doorway which, I remembered, led to the cellar stair.
Silently, the doctor’s toothless, wrinkled wife watched the door with her too-bright eyes. She listened. Presently we heard a sound from below. It was a low scream—of tortured, animal agony.
When she heard it, Sarah Kyle relaxed as if with relief. Her bright eyes came back to the table; her brown, claw-like hands buttered a piece of bread. Her thin voice asked me:
“Clay, what business was ye in, in China?”
“One and another,” I told her, absently. “The last was copper and tin, in the province of Szechwan.”
