“Not a drop of her blood
was human,
But she was made like a soft sweet woman.”
- LILITH.
The fog stayed all day. The mist
was so dense that it gave the effect of a solid mass
enclosing the house. No wind stirred it, no cheering
beam of sun pierced it. Through it sounds reached
the ear distorted and magnified. All day I sat
in my room reading.
There are books which should not be
preserved. I, who am a lover of books, who detest
any form of censorship, I do seriously set down my
belief that there exist chronicles which would be better
destroyed. With this few people will agree.
My answer to them is simple: they have not read
the books I mean.
Not all the volumes from the old bookcase
were of that character, of course. Nearly all
of them were well known to classical students, at
least by name. Obscure, fantastic, cast aside
by the world they were, but harmless to a fairly steady
head. But there were two that clung to the mind
like pitch. I have no intention of giving their
titles.
Ugly and sullen, early night closed
in when I was in a mood akin to it. Dinner with
Phillida and Vere was an ordeal hurried through.
We were out of touch. I felt remote from them;
fenced apart by a heavy sense of guilt and defilement
left by those hateful books, most incongruously blended
with contempt for my companions’ childish light-heartedness.
As soon as possible, I left them.
Alone in my room, in my chair behind
the writing-table again, I pushed aside the pile of
books and sank into sombre thought. What should
I say to Desire Michell if she came tonight?
Who was she, who was claimed by the
Unspeakable and who did not deny Its claim? Was
I confronted with two beings from places unknown to
normal humanity? If she was the woman that she
had seemed to be throughout our intercourse, how could
the dark enemy control her? Even I, a common man
with full measure of mankind’s common faults
and weaknesses, could hold Its clutch from me by right
of the law that protects each in his place.
Was she one of those who have stepped
from the permitted places?
“Sara the daughter of Ruel who
was beloved by an evil spirit who suffered none to
come to her.”
“There was a young gentlewoman
of excellent beauty, daughter of a nobleman of Mar,
who loved a foule monstrous thing verie horrible to
behold, and for it refused rich marriages....
Until the Gospel of St. John being said suddenlie
the wicked spirit flue his waies with sore noise.”
I put out my hand and thrust the pile
of books aside from my direct sight. But I could
not so easily thrust from my mind the thoughts these
books had implanted. I could not forget that Desire
Michell herself had alleged jealousy as the Thing’s
reason for attacking me.
What if we came to an explanation
tonight and ended this long delirium? Was it
not time? Had not my weeks of endurance earned
me this right? Resolution mounted in me, defiant
and strong.
The evening had passed to an hour
when I might look for the girl to come. I switched
off the lights, and sat down to keep our nightly tryst.
In the darkness of the haunted room,
the thoughts I would have held at bay rushed upon
me as clamorous besiegers.
Desire! Desire of the world!
Desire of mine and of the unhuman Thing, did we grasp
at Eve or Lilith? At the fire on the hearth or
the cold phosphorescence of swamp and marsh?
A drift of fragrance was afloat on
the air. A delicate stir of movement passed by
me. I raised my head from my hands, expectant.
“I am here,” her familiar voice told me.
“Desire, you had to come, tonight.”
Some quality in my voice carried to
her a message beyond the words. But she did not
break into exclamation or question as another woman
might. She was mute, as one who stands still
to find the path before taking a step.
“You are angry,” she said
at last. “Something here has gone badly
for you; I knew that before I entered this room.”
“How can you say that?”
I challenged. “If you are like other men
and women, how can you know what happens when you
are absent? How do you know what passes between
the Thing from the Frontier and me?”
“I do not know unless you tell
me, Roger. If I feel from afar when you are in
sorrow, why, so do many people feel with another in
sympathy.”
“You feel more than ordinary sympathy can,”
I retorted.
“Then, perhaps it is not an ordinary sympathy
I have for you, Roger.”
Her very gentleness struck wrong on
my perverted mood. Was she trying to turn me
from my purpose with her soft speech? She had
never granted me anything so near an admission of
love until now.
“It is not an ordinary trial
that I have borne for these meagre meetings where
I do not see your face or touch your hand,” I
answered. “But that must end. Put
your hand in mine, Desire, and come with me. Let
us go out of this room where shadows make our thoughts
sickly. You shall stay with my cousin. Or
if you choose, we will go straight to New York or Boston.
I am asking you to be my wife. Let us have done
with phantoms and spectres. I love you.”
“No,” she whispered.
“You do not love me tonight. Tonight you
distrust me. Why?”
“Is it distrusting you to ask you to marry me?”
“Not this way would you have
asked that of me when I last came! But I will
answer you more honestly than you do me. To go
with you would be the greatest happiness the world
could give. To think of it dazzles the heart.
But it is not for me. Have you forgotten, Roger,
that my life is not mine? That I am a prisoner
who has crept out for a little while? The gates
soon close, now, upon me.”
“What gates?” I demanded.
“Sacrifice and expiation.”
“Expiation of what?” I
exclaimed, exasperated. “Desire, I have
read the book of Desire Michell, downstairs.”
I heard her gasp and shrink in the
darkness. Silence bound us both. In the
hush, it seemed to me that the house suddenly trembled
as it had done the night before, a slight shock as
from some distant explosion. In my intentness
upon the woman opposite me the tremor passed unheeded.
She must answer me now, surely! Now
She spoke with a breathless difficulty,
spacing her words apart:
“How did you find the
book?”
“It told me the Thing
from out there,” I admitted, sullenly defiant
of her opinion.
She cried out sharply.
“You? You took Its gift?
You did that fatal madness and you are here?
Oh, you are lost, and the guilt mine! Yet I warned
you that danger flowed from knowing me. You accepted
the risk and the sorrow yet you have thrown
down all for a bribe of knowledge. Do you not
know what it means to take a gift from the Dark Ones
of the Borderland? To brave the Loathesome Eyes
so long and fall this way at last!
Yet there may be a hope since
you still live. But go. Not tomorrow, not
at dawn, but go now. By all that man can dread
for soul or body, go now.”
“Not without you.”
“Me? Oh, how can I make
you understand! I shall never come here again.
Take with you my gratitude for our hours together,
my prayers for all the years to come. There is
no blame to you because you could not trust a woman
on whom falls the shadow of the awful Watcher that
stalks behind me. I make no reproach if
only you will go. Do not linger. I do most
solemnly warn you not to stay alone in this room one
moment after I have gone.”
“Desire!” I exclaimed.
“Wait. Forgive me. I trust you.
I did not mean what you believe. Do not leave
me this way. Desire”
I can say honestly that my next action
was without intention. On my table lay, as usual,
a small electric torch. Every member of our household
was provided with one for use in emergencies likely
to occur in a country house, the time of candles being
past. Now, rising in agitation and repentance,
my hand pressed by chance upon the flashlight’s
button. A beam of light poured across the darkness.
What did I see, starting out of the
black gloom? A spirit or a woman? Were those
a woman’s draperies or part of the night fog
that showed mere swirl upon swirl of pale gray twisting
in the path of light? I glimpsed a face colorless
as pearl, the shine of eyes dark and almond shaped,
then a drifting mass of gray smoke, all intermingled
with glittering gold flashes, seemed to close between
us. The whole apparition sank down out of vision,
as aghast, I lifted my hand and the torch went out.
Shaken out of all ability to speak,
I stood in my place. Did I hear a movement, or
only a stirring of the orchard trees beyond the windows?
“Desire?” I ventured, my voice hoarse
to my ears.
No answer. I felt myself alone.
I would not at once turn on the lamps.
My haste might seem an attempt to break faith with
her a second time. I sat down again, folding my
arms upon the table and resting my forehead upon them.
Well, I had seen her at last but
how? A wan loveliness seemingly painted upon
the canvas of the dark by a brush dipped in moonlight.
A white moth caught fluttering in the ray of the torch.
Seen at the instant of her leaving me forever; insulted
by my suspicions, my love hurled coarsely at her like
a command, my promise of security for her visits apparently
broken. How dared I even hope for her return?
Now I knew why my enemy had guided
me to those books, that I might read, fill my mind
with the poison of vile thoughts, and destroy the
comradeship that bound me to Desire Michell. How
should I find her? How free us both?
The clock in the hall downstairs struck
a single bell. With dull surprise I realized
that considerable time had passed while I sat there.
Still I did not move, weighed down by a profound discouragement.
Suddenly, as a wave will run up a
beach in advance of the incoming tide, impelled by
some deep stir in the ocean’s secret places,
an icy surge rushed about my feet. Deathly cold
from that current struck through my whole body.
My heart shuddered and staggered in its beating from
pure shock.
“Go! Not tomorrow, not at dawn, but
now!”
The wave seeped back, receded away
from me down its invisible beach. Desire’s
warning hammered at my mind, striving to burst some
barred door to reach the consciousness within that
had loitered too long. This was the new peril.
This was what I had fled from, unknowing the source
of my panic, the night before.
This was death.
A second surge struck me with the
heavy shock of a veritable wave from some bitter ocean.
This time the tide rose to my knees; boiling and hissing
in its rush. Blood and nerves seemed to freeze.
I felt my heart stop, then reel on like a broken thing.
Flecks of crimson spattered like foam against my eyelids.
The wave broke. The mass poured
down the beach, tugging at me in its retreat.
With the last strength ebbing away from me with that
receding current, I dragged the chain of the lamp
beside me.
The comfort of light springing up
in the room! The relief of seeing normal, pleasant
surroundings! Truly light is an elixir of courage
to man.
That cold had paralyzed me. I
had no force to rise. Nor did I altogether wish
to rise and go. I had lost Desire tonight.
Was I to lose my self-respect also? Was I to
run a beaten man from this peril, after standing against
my enemy so long?
Should I not rather stand on this
my ground where I was not the “lame feller”?
Down by the lake, the snarling cry
of a terrified cat broke the night stillness.
It was Bagheera’s voice. The cry was followed
by sounds indicating a small animal’s frantic
flight through the thickets of goldenrod and willow
that edged the banks of the stream below the dam.
The series of progressive crashes passed back of the
house and continued on, dying away down the creek.
As I braced my startled nerves after
this outbreak of noise, the light was withdrawn from
every lamp in the room. At the same moment, the
electric torch rolled off my table and fell to the
floor. I heard its progress across the muffling
softness of the rug, across the polished wood beyond,
and final stoppage at some point out of my reach.
As vapor rises from some unseen source
and forms in vague growing mass within the curdled
air, so blackening dark the hideous bulk reared Itself
in the night and stared in upon me. As so many
times, I felt the Eyes I could not see; the pressure
of a colossal hate loomed over me, poised to crush,
yet withheld by a force greater than either of us.
The venom of Its malevolence flowed into the atmosphere
about me, fouling the breath I drew. My lungs
labored.
“Pygmy,” Its intelligence
thrust against mine. “Frail and presumptuous
Will that has dared oppose mine, you are conquered.
This is the hour foretold to you, the hour of your
weakness and my strength. Weakling, feel the
death surf break upon you. Fall down before me.
Cower plead!”
Now indeed I felt a sickness of self-doubt,
for the wash of the invisible sea never had come to
me until tonight. And there was Desire’s
saying that I had destroyed myself by accepting the
Thing’s gift of knowledge of the book.
But I summoned my forces.
“Never,” my thought refused
It. “Have we not met front to front these
many nights? And who has drawn back, Breaker of
the Law? You return, but I live. The duel
is not lost.”
“It is lost, Man, and to me.
Have you not taken my gift that you might spy meanly
on the secret of your beloved? Have you not opened
your mind to the evil thoughts that creep upon the
citadel of strength within and tear down its power?
Of your own deed, you are mine. My breath drinks
your breath. Your life falls down as a lamp that
is thrown from its pedestal. Your spirit rises
from its seat and looks toward those spaces where
it shall take flight tonight. Man, you die.”
Again the surge and shock of that
frigid sea rushed upon me. I felt the swirl and
hiss of the broken wave higher about me before it sank
away down whatever dreadful strand it owned.
My life ebbed with it, draining low. My enemy
spoke the truth. One more such wave
My imagination sprang ahead of the
event. In fancy, I saw bright dawn filling this
room of mine, shining on the figure of a man who had
been myself. His head rested on his folded arms
so that his face was hidden. On the table beside
him a vase was overturned; a spray of heliotrope lay
near and water had trickled over scattered sheets of
music, staining the paper. By and by Vere would
come to summon that unanswering figure to the gay
little breakfast-table. Phillida would leave her
place behind the burnished copper percolator she prized
so highly and come running up the stairs. In
her gentleness she would grieve, no doubt. I was
sorry for that. But it was a contentment and
pleasure for me to recall that I had settled my financial
affairs so that my little cousin would never lack
money or know any care that I could spare her.
Strange, how she had been rated below more beautiful
or more clever women until the waif Ethan Vere had
set her dearness in full sun for us to wonder at!
“Pygmy, will you think of another
pygmy now?” raged the Thing. “Yourself!
Think of yourself! Crouch! Think of death,
corruption, the vileness of the grave. Think
how you are of the grave. Think how you are alone
with me. Think how you are abandoned to me.”
But with that tenderness for Phillida
a warmth had flowed through me like strength.
“Not so,” my defiance
answered It. “For where I am, I stand by
my own will. With where I shall stand, you have
nothing to do. Back, then, for with the death
of my body your power ends. Back or
else face me, Thing of Darkness, while we stand in
one place.”
At this mad challenge of mine silence
closed down like a shutting trap. Consciousness
sank away from me with a sense of swooning quietness.
I stood before the Barrier on the
ghostly frontier; erect, arms folded, fronting the
Breach in that inconceivably mighty wall. Above,
away out of vision on either hand stretched the gray
glimmering cliffs.
This I had seen before. But behind
me lay that which I had not seen. The mists I
believed to be eternal had lifted. Naked, a vast
gray sea stretched parallel with the Barrier; like
it, without end or even a horizon to bound its enormous
desolation. Between these two immensities on
the narrow strand at the foot of the wall, I stood,
pygmy indeed. In the Breach, as of old, the Thing
whose home was there reared Itself against me.
“Man,” It spat, “would
you see me? Would you see the Eyes once seen by
the witch-woman, who fell blasted out of human ken?
Creature of clay, crumbling now in the sea of mortality,
do you brave my immemorial age?”
It reared up, up, a towering formlessness.
It stooped, a lowering menace.
“Man, whenever man has summoned
Evil since the youngest days of the world have I not
answered? Have I not brought my presence to the
magician’s lamp? Have I not shadowed the
alchemist at his crucible? When the woman called
upon me with ancient knowledge, did I not come.
I am the guardian of the Barrier. Whoever would
pass this way must pass me. Have you the power?
Die, then, and begone.”
With a long heaving sound of waters
in movement, the gray sea stirred from its stillness.
As if drawn to some center out of sight, the tide
began to recede down that strange beach. Then
realization came to me that here was the ocean which,
invisible, had surged icy death upon me a while past.
The ocean now gathered for the final wave that should
overwhelm the defeated.
“Braggart!” my thought
answered the taunt. “If the witch-woman
was yours, the girl Desire is mine. This I know:
as little as man has to do with you, so little have
you to do with the human and the good. Living
or dead, our path is not yours. I did not summon
you. I do dare look upon you, if you have visible
form.”
Now in the hush a sound that I had
faintly heard as a continuing thing seemed to draw
nearer. A sound of light, swift footsteps hurrying,
hurrying; the steps of one in pitiful eagerness and
haste. But I heeded this slightly. My gaze
was upon that which took place within the cleft in
the great wall. For there the cold darkness was
writhing and turning, visible, yet obscure; as the
rapids of a glassy, twisting river might look by night.
And as one might glimpse beneath the smooth boil and
heave of such a river the dim shape of crocodile or
water-monster, so in that moving dark there seemed
to lie Something from which the mind shrank, appalled.
Now gigantic tentacles rolled about a central mass,
groping out in unsatisfied greed. Now an ape-like
shape seemed to stalk there, rearing up its monstrous
stature until all that Breach was choked with it.
It fell down into vagueness, where huge coils upraised
and sank their loops. But through all change
steadily fixed upon me I felt the eyes of the Unseen.
I stood my ground. With what
pain and draining cost to my poor endurance there
is no need to say. Each instant I anticipated
the surge of that returning sea whose flood should
smother out the human spark upon its shore. This
I had brought upon myself. Yes, and would again
to help Desire Michell! If I had sheltered her
for one hour!
The Thing halted, stooped.
“Man, cast off the woman,”
It snarled at me. “Fool, evil goes with
her. For her you suffer. Thrust her from
your breast.”
I looked down. Wavering against
my breast, just above my heart glimmered a spot of
light. The little hurrying steps had ceased.
I thought, if the bright head of Desire Michell were
rested there against me, how I would strive to shield
her from sight of the Thing yonder. In the sweep
of that will to protect, I drew my coat about the
spot of hovering brightness.
I felt her press warm against me.
I heard the roar of the death-wave far out in that
sea. Before me
Oh Horror of the Frontier, what broke
through the dread Breach. What formed there,
more inhuman from Its likeness to humanity? What
Hand reached for me for us