the gory print of a shod human foot in the middle of its naked back.
Blood was spattered everywhere--on the walls, furniture and floor. My
knees gave way as I took in the sight, so that I had to stumble to
a chair and slump down. The thing had obviously been a human being,
though its identity was not easy to establish at first, since it was
without clothes and had most of its hair hacked and torn from the
scalp in a very crude way. It was of a deep ivory color, and I knew
that it must have been Marceline. The shoeprint on the back made the
thing seem all the more hellish. I could not even picture the strange,
loathsome tragedy which must have taken place while I slept in the room
below. When I raised my hand to wipe my dripping forehead I saw that
my fingers were sticky with blood. I shuddered, then realized that it
must have come from the knob of the door which the unknown murderer had
forced shut behind him as he left. He had taken his weapon with him, it
seemed, for no instrument of death was visible here.
"As I studied the floor I saw that a line of sticky footprints like the
one on the body led away from the horror to the door. There was another
blood-trail, too, and of a less easily explainable kind; a broadish,
continuous line, as if marking the path of some huge snake. At first
I concluded it must be due to something the murderer had dragged
after him. Then, noting the way some of the footprints seemed to be
superimposed on it, I was forced to believe that it had been there when
the murderer left. But what crawling entity could have been in that
room with the victim and her assassin, leaving before the killer when
the deed was done? As I asked myself this question, I thought I heard
fresh bursts of that faint, distant wailing.
"Finally, rousing myself from a lethargy of horror, I got on my feet
again and began following the footprints. Who the murderer was, I
could not even faintly guess, nor could I try to explain the absence
of the servants. I vaguely felt that I ought to go up to Marsh's attic
quarters, but before I had fully formulated the idea I saw that the
bloody trail was indeed taking me there. Was he himself the murderer?
Had he gone mad under the strain of the morbid situation and suddenly
run amok?
"In the attic corridor the trail became faint, the prints almost
ceasing as they merged with the dark carpet. I could still, however,
discern the strange single path of the entity which had gone first, and
this led straight to the closed door of Marsh's studio, disappearing
beneath it at a point about halfway from side to side. Evidently it had
crossed the threshold at a time when the door was wide open.
* * * * *
"Sick at heart, I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Opening
it, I paused in the waning north light to see what fresh nightmare
might be waiting me. There was certainly something human on the floor,
and I reached for the switch to turn on the chandelier.
"But as the light flashed up, my gaze left the floor and its
horror--that was Marsh, poor devil!--to fix itself frantically and
incredulously upon the living thing that cowered and stared in the open
doorway leading to Marsh's bedroom. It was a tousled, wild-eyed thing,
crusted with the dried blood and carrying in its hand a wicked machete
which had been one of the ornaments of the studio wall. Yet even in
that awful moment I recognized it as one whom I had thought more than
a thousand miles away. It was my own boy Denis--or the maddened wreck
which had once been Denis.
"The sight of me seemed to bring back a trifle of sanity--or at least
of memory--in the poor boy. He straightened up and began to toss his
head about as if trying to shake free from some enveloping influence.
I could not speak a word, but moved my lips in an effort to get back
my voice. My eyes wandered for a moment to the figure on the floor in
front of the heavily draped easel--the figure toward which the strange
blood-trail led, and which seemed to be tangled in the coils of some
dark, ropy object. The shifting of my glance apparently produced some
impression in the twisted brain of the boy, for suddenly he began to
mutter in a hoarse whisper, the purport of which I was soon able to
catch.
"'I had to exterminate her--she was the devil!--the summit of
high-priestess of all evil--the spawn of the pit--Marsh knew, and tried
to warn me. Good old Frank! I didn't kill him, though I was ready to
before I realized. But I went down there and killed her--then that
cursed hair----'
"I listened in horror as Denis choked, paused, and began again.
"'You didn't know--her letters got queer and I knew she was with
Marsh. Then she nearly stopped writing. He never mentioned her--I felt
something was wrong, and thought I ought to come back and find out.
Couldn't tell you--your manner would have given it away. Wanted to
surprise them. Got here about noon today--came in a cab and sent the
house-servants all off--let the field hands alone, for their cabins are
all out of earshot. Told McCabe to get me some things in Cape Girardeau
and not bother to come back till tomorrow. Had all the niggers take the
old car and let Mary drive them to Bend Village for a vacation--told
'em we were all going on some sort of outing and wouldn't need help.
Said they'd better stay all night with Uncle Scip's cousin, who keeps
that nigger boarding-house.'
"Denis was getting very coherent now, and I strained my ears to grasp
every word. Again I thought I heard that wild, far-off wail, but the
story had first place for the present.
"'Saw you sleeping in the parlor, and took a chance you wouldn't wake
up. Then went upstairs on the quiet to hunt up Marsh and--that woman!'
"The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marceline's name. At
the same time I saw his eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the
distant crying, whose vague familiarity had now become very great.
"'She was not in her room, so I went up to the studio. Door was shut,
and I could hear voices inside. Didn't knock--just burst in and found
her posing for the picture. Nude, but with that hellish hair all draped
around her. And making all sorts of sheep's-eyes at Marsh. He had the
easel turned half away from the door, so I couldn't see the picture.
Both of them were pretty well jolted when I showed up, and Marsh
dropped his brush. I was in a rage and told him he'd have to show me
the portrait, but he got calmer every minute--told me it wasn't quite
done, but would be in a day or two--said I could see it then--she
hadn't seen it.
"'But that didn't go with me. I stepped up, and he dropped a velvet
curtain over the thing before I could see it. He was ready to fight
before letting me see it, but that--that--she--stepped up and sided
with me. Said we ought to see it. Frank got horribly worked up, and
gave me a punch when I tried to get at the curtain. I punched back and
seemed to have knocked him out. Then I was almost knocked out myself by
the shriek that--that creature--gave. She'd drawn aside the hangings
herself, and had caught a look at what Marsh had been painting. I
wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad out of the room. _Then I
saw the picture._'
* * * * *
"Madness flared up in the boy's eyes again as he got to this place, and
I thought for a minute he was going to spring at me with his machete.
But after a pause he partly steadied himself.
"'O God--that thing! Don't ever look at it! Burn it with the hangings
around it and throw the ashes into the river! Marsh knew--and was
warning me. He knew what it was--what that woman--that leopardess, or
gorgon, or lamia, or whatever she was--actually represented. He'd tried
to hint to me ever since I met her in his Paris studio, but it couldn't
be told in words. I thought they all wronged her when they whispered
horrors about her, but this picture has caught the whole secret--the
whole monstrous background!
"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece of work
any living soul has produced since Rembrandt! It's a crime to burn
it, but it would be a greater crime to let it exist--just as it would
have been an abhorrent sin to let that she-demon exist any longer. The
minute I saw it I understood what she was, and what part she played
in the frightful secret that has come down from the days of Cthulhu
and the Elder Ones--the secret that was nearly wiped out when Atlantis
sunk, but that kept half alive in hidden traditions and allegorical
myths and furtive, midnight cult-practises. She was the real thing. It
wasn't any fake. It would have been merciful if it had been a fake. It
was the old, hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention--the
thing hinted of in the _Necronomicon_ and symbolized in the Easter
Island colossi.
"'She thought we couldn't see through--that the false front would
hold till we had bartered away our immortal souls. And she was half
right--she'd have got me in the end. She was only--waiting. But
Frank--good old Frank--was too much for her. _He knew what it all
meant, and painted it._ I don't wonder she shrieked and ran off when
she saw it. It wasn't quite done, but God knows _enough was there_.
"'Then I knew I'd got to kill her--kill her, and everything connected
with her. It was a taint that wholesome human blood couldn't bear.
There was something else, too--but you'll never know that if you burn
the picture without looking. I staggered down to her room with this
machete that I got off the wall here, leaving Frank still knocked out.
He was breathing, though, and I knew and thanked heaven that I hadn't
killed him.
"'I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She
turned on me like a wild beast, and began spitting out her hatred of
Marsh. The fact that she'd been in love with him (and I knew she had)
only made it worse. For a minute I couldn't move, and she came within
an ace of completely hypnotizing me. Then I thought of the picture,
and the spell broke. She saw the breaking in my eyes, and must have
noticed the machete too. I never saw anything but a wild jungle
beast look as she did then. She sprang for me with claws out like a
leopard's, but I was too quick. I swung the machete, and it was all
over.'
"Denis had to stop again there, and I saw the perspiration running down
his forehead through the spattered blood. But in a moment he hoarsely
resumed.
"'I said it was all over--but God! some of it had only just begun! I
felt I had fought the legions of Satan, and put my foot on the back
of the thing I had annihilated. _Then I saw that blasphemous braid of
coarse black hair began to twist and squirm of itself._
"'I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable
hair had a life of its own, that couldn't be ended by killing the
creature herself. I knew I'd have to burn it, so I started to hack it
off with the machete. God, but it was devilish work! Tough--like iron
wires--but I managed to do it. And it was loathsome the way the big
braid writhed and struggled in my grasp.
"'About the time I had the last strand cut or pulled off I heard the
eldritch wailing from behind the house. It's still going, off and on.
I don't know what it is, but it must be something springing from this
hellish business. It half seems like something I ought to know but
can't quite place. It got my nerves the first time I heard it, and I
dropped the severed braid in my fright. Then I got a worse fright,
for in another second the braid had turned on me and began to strike
venomously with one of its ends which had knotted itself up like a
sort of grotesque head. I struck out with the machete, and it turned
away. Then, when I had my breath again, I saw that the monstrous thing
was crawling along the floor by itself like a great black snake. I
couldn't do anything for a while, but when it vanished through the door
I managed to pull myself together and stumble after it. I could follow
the broad, bloody trail, and I saw it led upstairs. It brought me
here--and may heaven curse me if I didn't see it through the doorway,
striking at poor dazed Marsh like a maddened rattler as it had struck
at me, finally coiling around him as a python would. He had begun to
come to, but that abominable serpent thing got him before he was on
his feet. I knew that all of that woman's hatred was behind it, but
I hadn't the power to pull it off. I tried, but it was too much for
me. Even the machete was no good--I couldn't swing it freely or it
would have slashed Frank to pieces. So I saw those monstrous coils
tighten--saw poor Frank crushed to death before my eyes--and all the
time that awful faint howling came from somewhere beyond the fields.
[Illustration: "I saw those monstrous coils tighten--saw poor Frank
crushed to death before my eyes."]
"'That's all. I pulled the velvet cloth over the picture, and I hope
it'll never be lifted. The thing must be burnt. I couldn't pry the
coils off poor, dead Frank--they clung to him like a leech, and seemed
to have lost their motion altogether. It's as if that snaky rope of
hair had a kind of perverse fondness for the man it killed--it's
clinging to him--embracing him. You'll have to burn poor Frank with
it--but for God's sake don't forget to see it in ashes! That and the
picture. They must both go. The safety of the world demands that they
go!'
* * * * *
"Denis might have whispered more, but a fresh burst of distant wailing
cut us short. For the first time we knew what it was, for a westerly
veering wind brought articulate words at last. We ought to have known
long before, since sounds much like it had often come from the same
source. It was wrinkled Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witchwoman who
had fawned on Marceline, keening from her cabin in a way which crowned
the horrors of this nightmare tragedy. We could both hear some of the
things she howled, and knew that secret and primordial bonds linked
this savage sorceress with that other inheritor of Elder secrets who
had just been extirpated. Some of the words she used betrayed her
closeness to demonic and palesgean traditions.
"'_Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo!_ Ya,
yo, pore Missy Tanit, pore Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen
de water an' git yo' chile--she done daid! She done daid! De har ain'
got no missus no mo', Marse Clooloo. Ol' Sophy, she know! Ol' Sophy,
she done got de black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky! Ol'
Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de crocodile-stone befo' de
N'bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo' Tanit! No mo'
Isis! No mo' witchwoman to keep de fire a-goin' in de big stone place!
Ya, yo! _N'gagi 'bulu bwana m'lolo! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!_ She daid! Ol'
Sophy know!'
"That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay
attention to. The expression on my boy's face showed that it had
reminded him of something frightful, and the tightening of his hand
on the machete boded no good. I knew he was desperate, and sprang to
disarm him if possible before he could do anything more.
"But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much
physically. There was a struggle, but he had done for himself before
many seconds were over. I'm not sure yet but that he tried to kill me,
too. His last panting words were something about the need of wiping out
everything that had ever been connected with Marceline, either by blood
or marriage.
"I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant, or in
the moments and hours afterward. In front of me was the slain body of
my boy, the only human being I had to cherish, and ten feet away, in
front of that shrouded easel, was the body of his best friend, with a
nameless coil of horror wound around it. Below was the scalped corpse
of that she-monster, about whom I was half ready to believe anything. I
was too dazed to analyze the probability of the hair story, and even if
I had not been, that dismal howling from Aunt Sophy's cabin would have
been enough to quiet doubt.
"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me
to--burned the picture and the body-grasping hair at once and without
curiosity--but I was too shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered
foolish things over my boy--and then I remembered that the night was
wearing on and that the servants would be back in the morning. It was
plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and I knew that
I must cover things up and invent a story.
"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. I didn't dare
touch it, and the longer I looked at it the more horrible things I
noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention it, but
it partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as
Marceline had always done.
"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar, with
quicklime, which I knew we had in the storehouse. It was a night of
hellish work. I dug three graves--my boy's a long way from the other
two, for I didn't want him to be near either the woman's body or her
hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil from around poor Marsh. It
was terrible work getting them all down to the cellar. I used blankets
in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil around him. Then
I had to get two barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must have
given me strength, for I not only moved them both but filled all three
graves without a hitch.
"Some of the lime I made into white-wash. I had to take a stepladder
and fix over the parlor ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And
I burned nearly everything in Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls
and floor and heavy furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and
the trail and footprints that led there. And all the time I could hear
old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil must have been in that
creature to let her voice go on like that. But she always was howling
queer things. That's why the field niggers didn't get scared or curious
that night. I locked the studio door and took the key to my room. Then
I burned all my stained clothes in the fire-place. By dawn the whole
house looked quite normal, so far as any casual eye could tell. I
hadn't dared touch the covered easel, but meant to attend to that later.
* * * * *
"Well, the servants came back next day, and I told them all the young
folks had gone to St. Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have
seen or heard anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the
instant of sunrise. She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out
a word of what had been on her brooding witch-brain the day and night
before.
"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone
back to Paris and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from
there--letters I had fixed up in forged handwriting. I had the deaths
of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline
had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric
ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have
been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to
burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage
things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly
has brought me to. Failing crops, hands discharged one by one, place
falling to ruin, and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of
queer countryside stories. Nobody will come around here after dark
nowadays--or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you
must be a stranger.
"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up
too closely with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't
have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to
have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I
went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked
first--and that changed everything.
"No--there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for
yourself presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I
don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was
different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant.
"Denis had been right--it was the greatest triumph of human art since
Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start,
and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was
to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry, and Marceline was the key
that had unlocked his inmost genius.
"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings--stunned
me before I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only
partly a portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he
wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond
her.
"Of course she was in it--was the key to it, in a sense--but her figure
only formed one point in a vast composition. She was nude except for
that hideous web of hair spun around her, and was half seated, half
reclining on a sort of bench or divan, carved in patterns unlike those
of any known decorative tradition. There was a monstrously shaped
goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid whose color I haven't
been able to place or classify to this day.
"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the
strangest sort of scene I ever saw in my life. I think there was a
faint suggestion of its all being a kind of emanation from the woman's
brain; yet there was also a directly opposite suggestion--as if she
were just an evil image or hallucination conjured up by the scene
itself.
"I can't tell you now whether it's an exterior or an interior, whether
those hellish cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the
inside, or whether they are indeed carven stone and not merely a morbid
fungous arborescence. The geometry of the whole thing is crazy--one
gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up.
"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual
demon twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a witches'
sabbat with that woman as a high priestess! The black shaggy entities
that are not quite goats--the crocodile-headed beast with three legs
and a dorsal row of tentacles--and the flat-nosed Ægipans dancing in a
pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called accursed!
"But the scene wasn't Egypt--it was _behind_ Egypt; behind even
Atlantis; behind fabled Mu, and myth-whispered Lemuria. It was the
ultimate fountainhead of all horror on this earth, and the symbolism
showed only too clearly how integral a part of it Marceline was. I
think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any
creatures of our planet--the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk about
in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the
whole scene is deep under water, though everybody seems to be breathing
freely.
* * * * *
"Well, I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw
that Marceline was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated
eyes on the canvas. It was no mere superstition--Marsh had actually
caught something of her horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and
color; so that she still brooded and stared and hated, just as if most
of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. _And it was worst of
all when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to lift
themselves up from the surface and grope out into the room toward me!_
"Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realized I was a
guardian and a prisoner for ever. She was the thing from which the
first dim legends of Medusa and the Gorgons had sprung, and something
in my shaken will had been captured and turned to stone at last.
Never again would I be safe from those coiling snaky strands--the
strands in the picture, and those that lay brooding under the lime
near the wine casks. All too late I recalled the tales of the virtual
indestructibility, even through centuries of burial, of the hair of the
dead.
"My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there
has lurked the fear of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a
month the niggers began whispering about the great black snake that
crawled around near the wine casks after dark, and about the curious
way its trail would lead to another spot six feet away. Finally I had
to move everything to another part of the cellar, for not a darky could
be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen.
"Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited
old Sophonisba's cabin every night after midnight. One of them showed
me its trail, and not long afterward I found out that Aunt Sophy
herself had begun to pay strange visits to the cellar of the big house,
lingering and muttering for hours in the very spot where none of the
other blacks would go. God, but I was glad when that old witch died! I
honestly believe she had been a priestess of some ancient and terrible
tradition back in Africa. She must have lived to be almost a hundred
and fifty years old.