“Behold! Where are
their abodes?
Their places are not, even as though they had
not been.”
- TOMB
OF KING ENTEF.
Desire Michell 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 hoarse and difficult. “I
claim you, now, and after. And my claim is good,
because I pay.”
Desire exclaimed something. What,
I do not know. Her voice was lost in the triumphant
conviction that I was right. She was free, and
the freedom was my gift to her. I was not vanquished,
but victor. The life I paid was not a penalty,
but a price.
Her face was uplifted to mine as she
clung to me; then my weight glided through her arms
and I fell back in my chair.
I was alone amid blackness and desolation
that poured past me like the wind above the world.
For the last time, I opened my eyes
on the gray shore at the foot of the Barrier.
I, pygmy indeed, stood again before the colossal wall
whose palisades reared up beyond vision and stretched
away beyond vision on either side.
I was alone here. No whisper
of taunt or menace, no presence of horror troubled
me. Opposite me, the Breach that split the cliff
showed as a shadowed canon, empty except of dread.
Far out behind me the sea that was like no sea of
earth gathered itself beneath its eternal mists as
a tidal wave draws and gathers. With folded arms
I stood there, waiting for the returning surge of
mighty waters to overwhelm me in their flood.
I waited in awe and solemn expectancy, beyond fear
or hope.
But now I became aware of a new doubleness
of experience. Here on the Frontier, I was between
the worlds, yet I also saw the room in the house left
behind. I saw myself as an unconscious body reclined
in a chair beside the hearth. Desire Michell
knelt on the floor beside me, her hands grasping my
arms, her gaze fixed on my face, her hair spilling
its shining lengths across my knees. Phillida
was huddled in a chair, crying hysterically.
Vere apparently had been trying to force some stimulant
upon the man who was myself, yet was not myself, for
while I watched he reluctantly rose from bending above
the figure and set a glass upon the table. I
echoed his sigh. Life was good.
The sea behind me began to rush in
from immeasurable distances. The roar of the
waters’ thunderous approach blended with the
heat and flash of storm all about the house into which
I looked.
“He dies,” Desire spoke,
her voice level and calm. “Has it not been
so with all who loved the daughters of my race these
two centuries past? Yet never did one of those
die as he dies not for passion, but for
protection of the woman not as a madman
or one ignorant, but facing that which was not meant
for man to face, his eyes beating back the intolerable
Eyes. Oh, glory and grief of mine to have seen
this!”
Phillida cowered lower in her chair,
burying her face in the cushions. But Vere abruptly
stood erect, his fine dark face lifted and set.
Just so some ancestors of his might have risen in
a bleak New England meeting-house when moved powerfully
to wrestle with evil in prayer. But it is doubtful
if any Maine deacon ever addressed his Deity as Vere
appealed to his.
“Almighty, we’re in places
we don’t understand,” he spoke simply as
to a friend within the room, his earnest, drawling
speech entirely natural. “But You know
them as You do us. If things have got to go this
way, why, we’ll make out the best we can.
But if they don’t, and we’re just blundering
into trouble, please save Roger Locke and this poor
girl. Because we know You can. Amen.”
Now at this strange and beautiful
prayer or so it seemed to me a
ray of blinding light cleaved up from where Vere stood,
like a shot arrow speeding straight through house
and night into inconceivable space. Then the
room vanished from my sight as the great wave burst
out of the mist upon me.
I went down in a smother of ghastly
snarling floods cold as space is cold. Something
fled past me up the strand, shrieking inhuman passion;
the Eyes of my enemy glared briefly across my vision.
One last view I glimpsed of that dread
Barrier, amid the tumult and welter of my passing.
The breach was closed! Unbroken, majestic, the
enormous Wall stood up inviolate.