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.
* * * * *
She 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----"