Collected Short Fiction, page 267
I was looking at Valyne.
Her violet eyes were on her plate; her face was very pale. She was trembling; her even teeth were sunk deep into her full red lip.
“Valyne!” I whispered. “What is it, darling?”
She merely shook her head a little. She didn’t speak or lift her eyes.
“Copper and tin?” Sarah Kyle’s cracked voice was repeating. “And ye found it profitable?”
Doctor Kyle silently resumed his place.
His wife asked some inaudible question, and I caught his whispered reply:
“It’s restless—hungry, perhaps. Jud is late, today.”
His dark, brilliant eyes looked across at me.
“I must beg your pardon for this mystery, Clay. Please finish your supper. Later you will understand.” Then he asked, as if to launch a conversation, “Have you any collection of Chinese art?”
“No,” I said jerkily. “Yes, a few pieces of good jade.”
I had too much else to think about.
BEFORE the meal was done, there was a rapping at the back door. Answer it, Josepha Hand called:
“Doctor, it’s Jud.”
His haggard face was relieved.
“Let him in,” he called. “Let him take it down to Eben.”
The man Jud Geer passed across the end of the room, carrying a milk can. There was more fresh blood on his overalls. A stained bandage was wrapped around his head, to cover his lips where my fist had pulped them.
His glassy, bulging eyes rolled toward me. They rested for a moment upon Valyne’s still-bowed head, and I caught a lewd glitter in them.
He went out toward the cellar. The doctor and his wife listened anxiously. I heard an eager, bestial whining, and the sound of thickly splashing liquid.
Jud Geer came back into the room.
He stopped by Doctor Kyle’s chair, so close to me that I could hear the tick of his cheap watch. He held out his great, reddened hand, and muttered something through his bandage. But his filmed eyes were looking not at the doctor, but at Valyne.
Doctor Kyle dropped some coins into his palm, and he put them into his pocket, without taking his eyes off the girl.
Josepha Hand had opened the back door. At her impatient word, the gigantic butcher abruptly jerked his eyes away. He picked up his milk can, and went out.
It was after he had gone that I looked at the floor where the can had rested. On the bare pine boards was a circle of dark red. I knew that its contents had been blood.
Before I had time to digest that disturbing discovery, Eben Hand appeared again. His puffy face was strained and ashen; his colorless lips were twitching; his fat fingers nervously spelled out some hasty message.
“What is it?” Doctor Kyle’s hollow voice was apprehensive.
“He says it won’t touch it,” said Josepha Hand. “It won’t taste it. And he can’t get it quiet. It keeps whimpering. He thinks it knows he’s in the house. He thinks it’s calling for him.”
With that last word, her dark head jerked at me.
Doctor Kyle’s deep-sunk, flaming eyes came wonderingly to my face.
“It couldn’t remember,” he whispered faintly, as if to himself. “It couldn’t know Clay, after all these years.”
Again, from the cellar, I heard that eager, feral whining.
“It does,” whispered Josepha Hand. “It wants him!”
And I perceived suddenly that all eyes were fixed upon me, glazed and distended with horror, as if I had been some ghastly apparition. In that abrupt and fearful silence, Valyne’s fork rattled shockingly on the floor.
3. “Your Father Was—Horror!”
WHEN the meal was finished, Doctor Kyle took me apart to the end of the room, and lowered his hollow voice.
“Gay,” he said solemnly, “I beg you to trust me, as if I were your true father. I want you to leave Valyne—to go away, without making me tell you the secret of your life.”
“Why?” I demanded, bluntly impatient.
“I love you, Gay.” His voice quivered faintly with emotion. “I love you as my own son, in spite of what I must tell you. That is why I have never told you, and why I am unwilling to tell you now.
“If you go away from Creston, Gay, you may find some happiness. I beg you to go, and to heed my warning—never marry!”
I seized his arm. Despite his age, it felt hard and powerful as Jud Geer’s.
“I’m not going,” I told him flatly. “Life without Valyne wouldn’t be life. And why shouldn’t I marry? I’m healthy, without any stain that I know of.”
He bowed his yellow, cadaverous head, resignedly.
“I see that I must tell you. It is better for my words to wreck your life, than to let you and Valyne plunge unwarned into the horror waiting——”
His voice stopped suddenly; his dark eyes flew toward the cellar door.
From below I heard a hoarse scream, thick, maddened; the clanking of a heavy chain; the shriek of rusty nails being drawn; the crashing of splintered planking.
The doctor stood voiceless, ashen, trembling, until Eben Hand burst again into the room, mouthing incoherent sounds, fingers flying.
“It’s breaking out!” cried Josepha Hand. “It’s coming to him!”
Her dark eyes darted to me again, terrible with an undisguised and savage odium.
Abruptly recovering himself, Doctor Kyle picked up a heavy chair and ran through the cellar door. His wife scurried after him, with her astonishing bird-like agility.
“Let me, Latham!” her thin voice shrilled. “Let me! It always heeded me.”
The two servants followed them apprehensively.
Valyne was standing at the other end of the room, staring after them with stunned tragedy in her shadowed violet eyes. I walked to her hastily, and grasped her cold hands.
“Valyne,” I said urgently, “you tell me! What have they in the cellar? What makes this house so strange? Why does the doctor want us not to marry?”
Her eyes, looking back at me, were dark and wide with dread. Her cold hands trembled.
“You’re afraid, darling!” I cried. “Tell me—what do you fear?”
But a terrible intuition had already given me the answer.
“You’re afraid of me!”
She looked at me in mute agony, without denial.
“I know only what he told me, Gay.”
Her voice broke, and her eyes gleamed with tears. Her warm arms were suddenly around me, clinging with the pressure of urgent need.
“Remember I love you, Gay!” she sobbed. “Whatever you may be, remember that I love you.”
SHE was still in my arms when Doctor Kyle came back up the stairs, walking with a hasty, shaken step. His voice quick and nervous, he called:
“Gay, will you please come with me for a moment? And hurry! I think our lives are all in danger, if you don’t.”
Doubtfully, I said, “But why?”
“You’ll understand when we have talked,” he said, “but now there’s no time. Come!”
I drew away from Valyne, and followed him. Unobtrusively, I loosened the .45 under my coat. I found no need of the weapon, however—then.
The great cellar of my memory had been cut in half with a heavy wall of new masonry. There was a massive connecting door, studded with iron bolts, pierced with a small opening thickly barred.
Eben Hand and his wife were waiting at the foot of the steps, beside Sarah Kyle. Hand’s fingers were moving rapidly, as his wife watched them in the light of a kerosene lamp on a rough deal table. On the floor was another red circle, where the can of blood had rested.
The three were silent as I came down the steps. They retreated from me, as if I had been somehow—dreadful.
Doctor Kyle led me to the grating, and I became aware of a peculiar odor from beyond. It was an animal scent, powerful, acrid, unpleasant, yet certainly the scent of no animal I knew.
Through the bars came a whining, low, eager, bestial.
“Speak to it,” Doctor Kyle told me, swiftly. “Doesn’t matter what you say. Just use a firm, friendly tone——”
As I hesitated, some fiend of fortuity thrust into my mind Poe’s macabre lines:
They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls.
As I spoke it, a stronger wave of that feral effluvium came through the grating. It rocked me with nausea. I heard the clatter of a chain, the shuffling of some great, clumsy body.
And stark horror peered through the bars, with eyes like twin scarlet pits of flaming hell. Its half-glimpsed face was monstrous, swollen, livid, queerly hairy, without a nose. It was the face of nothing sane or right or normal.
One fearful glimpse brought home the fearful aptness of my quotation. Then I heard a massive body drop in jangling chains upon the floor beyond. There was a low, singular sound, not unlike the contented purr of a gigantic cat. Then the sound of lapping. . . .
When I looked at the others, in the lamp’s yellow glow, their apprehensive tension was gone, although they still looked askance at me.
“It’s satisfied,” said Josepha Hand, looking at her husband’s fleeting white fingers. “Now it’s willing to feed.”
I swung upon my foster-father.
“Now,” I pressed him, “you’ve got to tell me!”
His fleshless head jerked toward the steps.
“Come to my room.” And when we were on the stairs, his hollow voice added: “Try to keep a grip on yourself, Clay, when you know. And pray to God that no other demon may ever be born into this accursed house!”
THE bare and ancient rafters were low upon his locked attic room. It was cold, and his two lamps could not dispel its sinister gloom. There were chairs, and an antique writing-desk. The shelves were heavy with dark and massive volumes in age-discolored bindings, whose titles, a glance told me, had all to do with the history of witchcraft, occultism, lycanthropy, demonology, and darker lore. A tall glass cabinet held crystal globes, grotesque little idols and figurines of wood and wax, parcels of dried herbs, and a few stained and rusted weapons.
“My study and museum,” Doctor Kyle boomed, as I shivered from the musty chill. “Here I have carried on my research into the evil practises that have festered in the hills of Creston. Knowing these people, I have gained access to precious material. Clay, even now there are hideous forbidden rites of demonworship being——”
“Doctor,” I broke in, “if you really have anything to say, say it.”
“Sit down, Clay,” he said.
But I was too much concerned to sit. I stood behind a chair, gripping the back of it with my hands. Doctor Kyle paced up and down before me, two or three times, running his lank fingers nervously across his bare yellow scalp, as if to flatten invisible hair.
“I suppose you don’t remember your mother, Clay?” he asked at length, as if seeking an easy way into a difficult subject.
“No,” I told him. “She died, and you brought me here, before I was two years old.”
“We told you that she died,” his voice rumbled, suddenly hoarse and low. “And you never knew of your twin?”
“You told me I was the last one of my family.”
His flaming eyes stared at me, and his voice pealed solemnly:
“Your mother died only a few months ago, Clay. And your twin brother is still living.”
Questions thronged my mind. But the stinging dust of horror had suddenly filled my throat. I could only listen, as that hollow voice went on, like a booming chant of doom.
“I shall begin, Clay, with the early history of your family.” His lean hand gestured at the dark, heavy volumes on the shelves. “I have here the library of your grandfather, Eliakim Coe. From his private papers I have learned a great deal of the secret history of Creston—and of your people.
“The first Coe in America came with a cloud upon his name—the Church had almost obtained his conviction on charges of demonolatry. The Henry Coe who founded Creston was a fugitive from the witchcraft trials of Salem, and in this inaccessible wilderness he carried on the evil worship that had roused the Puritan ire.
“These dark forests have hidden fearful things, Clay! It may shock you to learn that for four hundred years every generation of your family has dealt in every manner of Satanism, black magic, and demon-worship.
“Your grandfather, Eliakim Coe, was the last and the most powerful of a line of wizards. But he paid a fearful price for his power. He paid his daughter, Elizabeth, who was your mother.”
“My mother!” I was bewildered and shocked.
“Your true father, Clay,” continued that ringing, hypnotic chant, “was not the distant cousin, Esmond Coe, who married your mother over your grandfather’s protests, and was found stabbed to death beside her on the morning of the bridal night. No! That crime was but the beginning of a frightful ceremony. And Eliakim Coe took his daughter, on the night following, to a circle of stones about an ancient altar on the summit of the mountain——”
“Once,” the shuddering whisper was wrung from me, “I saw that altar!”
“And there,” that dread, compelling voice throbbed on, “that diabolical ceremony was carried to its blasphemous completion. Stripped and bound, the virginal body of your mother was laid across the blackened altar. In response to the esoteric forbidden rituals of the wizard, a Dark Power came to claim the offering.
“And Eliakim Coe brought his daughter back, crippled and maddened, to give birth to you, Clay—and to your twin!”
“What”—I forced out the faint whisper—“what do you mean?”
Doctor Latham Kyle snapped his jaws together. His yellow lips were tight and hard as a mummy’s. His deep eyes flamed at me. The boom of his hollow voice was startling.
“Clay,” he said, “there are forces, powers, entities, that science has never glimpsed—because they are too colossal. But you must sense the tremendous shadows that fall upon our tiny earth from the frigid voids of space. Clay, you must know the fearful rulers of the fourth dimension! Your own dark blood must whisper to you——”
I had to nod, in spite of the outraged protest clamoring in my brain. For in the mystic Orient, as well as in my strange childhood, I had seen things that science and sanity could not account for.
“Then——”
The dry, husky whisper crept like an odious reptile past my lips.
“Then—my father was not a man? And I’m not entirely—human?”
The yellow skull nodded solemnly; the hollow voice intoned:
“That is the hideous truth, Clay, that I have feared to tell you.”
Panic was rushing through my heart, like a black and frozen wind.
“So that’s why,” I breathed, “I’ve always felt—different! That’s why I’ve always been a stranger among men! It’s that evil blood that seizes my body when I fight, like a destroying demon——”
“Yes,” the low, booming voice caught the word. “The demon in you.” The flaming eyes lifted. “Through some accident of inheritance, the dark blood is recessive in you, Clay. Physically, you appear quite human. Psychically, you are also, save for the shadow of strangeness that you feel, and for the waking of the demon when you fight.
“But I’m afraid for you, Clay!”
The terrible voice sank lower.
“Passion will awake that slumbering demon. It will transmute that shadow into reality. You must walk with care, my son, or you will lose all humanity, in a hideous reversion to the dark blood!
“If you married, you might become as monstrous as your brother. The strange blood was dominant in him. Tonight, in wishing to see you, he—or it—was displaying a fit of human emotion as rare as your fits of evil. For the most part, your twin is a mad monstrosity——”
“TONIGHT!”
My mounting terror seized the word, and I reeled under an avalanche of dread. Icy sweat drenched me. Sick, quivering, I sank against the back of the chair. It was a little time before my lips could form the faint query:
“Tonight? The thing in the cellar—that wanted me? That is my—my brother?”
Doctor Kyle nodded. His dark eyes looked quickly away, as if with pity. His voice throbbed to me faintly through the gray mist of dread:
“Your own brother, Clay. Its blood is your blood. Passion will cause your reversion to its form. What is equally dreadful, if you should marry Valyne, or any other woman, your children would probably be such things as it is!”
The chill gloom of the musty attic chamber was spinning around me. Fainter, ever receding, still I heard the booming tones:
“I attended your mother when you and your twin were born. I wanted to destroy the other, but neither she nor her father would allow. There was a strange perversity in her love. And Eliakim Coe desired the monster in the practise of the dark art that was overwhelming him.
“As the strange being grew, your mother saw that it could never be reared in the world of men. When you were two years old—when Eliakim Coe died, a victim of the fearful powers he had summoned out of space—she left you in this household, and took the other into the forest.
“Clay, it was a dreadful, secret life that your mother led, for the next twenty years and more, in these dark mountains above Creston! She sacrificed herself for her monstrous son. She kept it in a cave, on Blue Squaw Mountain.
“She had no contact with the world, save for her infrequent midnight visits to me. But many a time, Clay, until the year when you left Creston, she stood beside your bed at night, and even touched your hair. But always she went back.
“A few months ago she came to me, ill. I told her that she was going to die. On the last night of her life, she coaxed your strange brother down from the cave, and gave it into my keeping. Since then we have kept it in the cellar.
“I still feel that it should be destroyed—as I wanted to destroy it when it was born. But I have preserved its life because of my promise to your mother, and because it will be a living exhibit to prove the authenticity of my book: A History of the Sorceries and Demonolatries of Creston.”
