Always, since I was a child, I have sought to avoid physical combat.
The reason is more terrible than cowardice; for a red demon seizes my
body, with the first blow I strike. Blind destroying fury overwhelms
all restraint. And afterward, when the calm of sanity returns, a
crimson fog dulls the memory of the fearful things I may have done.
It is as if some malevolent fiend wakes in me, to fight....
A .45 automatic was slung under my armpit, but that mad demon had
neither knowledge nor need of the weapon. I was conscious of an
unseeing, savage fury that flung me at the giant. Then scarlet chaos
ruled my brain....
When it ebbed away, Valyne was pulling at my shoulder with frantic
hands.
"Come, Clay!" her urgent voice was pleading. "You've done enough to
him. Too much----"
Her voice released the cold shock of sanity.
The bearded man was lying in the muddy road, gasping hoarsely for
breath. Fresh blood, now, was mingled with the dry on his overalls. His
lips were crushed to a crimson pulp, and two of his front teeth were
gone.
* * * * *
A faint sickness came into me, to see what I had done. Once in
Singapore two Macanese attacked me in a dark alley, with knives, and
when my mind had cleared of its scarlet madness, their heads had been
almost severed with their own weapons. Since then I have walked in
dread of that indwelling fiend....
But the bearded man was able to stand up, when I aided him. His bulging
eyes stared at me, and then at Valyne, without any expression that I
could read. He cleared his throat, and spat a scarlet stream of teeth
and blood. He pulled out a big, nickel-plated watch, that ticked like
a clock, and looked at it sullenly. Then, without a word, he went down
the road toward the village, reeling like a drunken man.
I wished that he had cursed or blustered. There is deadly menace in the
silence of a beaten man. His glassy, inscrutable eyes had given no hint
of what hellish thoughts might be passing through his twisted, brutish
brain.
Valyne called for my handkerchief, and bound it around my bleeding
knuckles.
"I'm sorry," I told her. "I'm not myself, when I fight. I might have
killed him----"
She looked after the staggering figure, and her violet eyes were dark
with dread.
"I'm glad--glad you beat him," she said, in a small, shuddery voice.
"It was terrible to watch. But I've been so afraid! He's so strange, so
dreadful! Perhaps now he'll let me alone.
"He's Jud Geer," she added, "the butcher."
I remembered Jud Geer, the butcher's son. He had been a queer,
slow-witted bully. We smaller boys had dreaded him. It had been his
perverted delight to torture us with gruesome objects from his father's
shop, as when he bound and gagged little Tommy Lanning with the
entrails of swine, and left him lying all night in a pool of blood and
offal, where the rats came....
When Valyne had done with the bandage, I grasped her small hands. She
smiled at me. A queer, sharp little pain came into my throat, for her
beauty was more exquisite than all my memories and dreams. I yearned to
brush the haunting shadow from her pale face, to keep this strong lamp
of joy burning for ever in her violet eyes.
"He doesn't matter," I told her, "Valyne darling."
It was sheer delight to be calling her that again, after seven grim and
bitter years.
"He doesn't matter, for we shall soon be gone." I caught her precious
warmth close to my heart. "Let's go--now!" I urged her, on a sudden
impulse. "We can hire a car in the village, to take us down to the
railroad."
"Clay----" she began, and hesitated doubtfully.
"I'm afraid of Creston," I told her. "I don't know why. But I've always
dreaded returning--as much as I love you, Valyne! Every minute here is
a torture to me. Let's go--today--right now!"
I could find no words for the singular dread that was seeping into me
from the town's somber antiquity, from the forbidding gloom of these
immemorial forested hills. I yearned to shake off the squalid poverty
of Creston, its desolate, haunting decrepitude. I hungered for the
lights and the bustle and the laughter of a city that was alive.
But my feeling was more than that. It was horror of the brooding evil
that lurked like an invisible spider in this vale of desolation. And
Valyne shared my dread. Her hand grew tight on mine.
"I'm glad you've come, Clay!" she whispered tremulously. "I'll be so
glad to get away. You can't realize what it has been to wait, these
last few months, in Doctor Kyle's house! The terror----"
With a little frightened gasp, she checked the words.
"But we can't go tonight, Clay. The doctor and his wife will want to
see you, after all these years----"
"We must," I said. "Doctor Kyle doesn't want us to marry, Valyne----"
Her face had grown paler, and her violet eyes looked down at the road.
"I know," she whispered. "I know! And I have promised him that I won't
marry you, until you have come and talked with him."
"If we must," I yielded. "But there can't be any sane reason, Valyne--I
know it!"
Hand in hand, we walked slowly up the steep, rutted road, toward the
old stone house; slowly, for we were laying bright plans. I told her
again of the small fortune I had brought back from the Orient, of the
good position now promised me with an importing firm. We were planning
our escape, for ever, from Creston's brooding horror. Slowly, too,
because we were both heavy with unspoken forebodings.
But at last the gray bulk of the old stone house loomed up before us
in the dying twilight. Pale yellow lights winked malevolently at us
from the narrow, squinting slits of windows. Valyne opened the heavy,
iron-studded oaken door, and we entered.
How often have I wished that we had slammed that accursed door, and
fled into the haunted night!
_2. "Fear Is Calling for You, Clay!"_
The stone house was old. It had been old when I was a child; but now it
had changed. Now it seemed to me that nameless evil had sprung, since I
had gone, from festering roots sunk deep into its grim antiquity. For
the age of it then had been mellow, aloof, austere, even kindly; now it
was a leering, gibbering horror. It was as if the house had died since
my departure, and was now a restless specter, haunting its own hollow
corpse.
Sarah Kyle met us in the hall, standing motionless under vast, grimy
roof-beams two centuries old. Seven years had changed her. Her teeth
were gone. Her face was narrowed, sharpened, shriveled. Her eyes were
sunken, curiously bright. She was stooped, until her posture suggested
some queer, bright-eyed bird.
She took my hand in her horny claw, and welcomed me with a cackling
laugh. Then she began to make apologies for the poverty of her house,
and to hint transparently for news of my business in the Orient.
"May I see the doctor?" I said.
Her bird-like eyes fixed me, with their uncanny glitter.
"You had better see him, Clay, if you have come to marry Valyne," her
cracked voice shrilled. "And ye had better take his warning. Don't walk
too near the edge of hell!"