"You'll understand when we have talked," he said, "but now there's no
time. Come!"
I drew away from Valyne, and followed him. Unobtrusively, I loosened
the .45 under my coat. I found no need of the weapon, however--then.
The great cellar of my memory had been cut in half with a heavy wall
of new masonry. There was a massive connecting door, studded with iron
bolts, pierced with a small opening thickly barred.
Eben Hand and his wife were waiting at the foot of the steps, beside
Sarah Kyle. Hand's fingers were moving rapidly, as his wife watched
them in the light of a kerosene lamp on a rough deal table. On the
floor was another red circle, where the can of blood had rested.
The three were silent as I came down the steps. They retreated from me,
as if I had been somehow--dreadful.
Doctor Kyle led me to the grating, and I became aware of a peculiar
odor from beyond. It was an animal scent, powerful, acrid, unpleasant,
yet certainly the scent of no animal I knew.
Through the bars came a whining, low, eager, bestial.
"Speak to it," Doctor Kyle told me, swiftly. "Doesn't matter what you
say. Just use a firm, friendly tone----"
As I hesitated, some fiend of fortuity thrust into my mind Poe's
macabre lines:
They are neither man nor woman--
They are neither brute nor human--
They are Ghouls.
As I spoke it, a stronger wave of that feral effluvium came through the
grating. It rocked me with nausea. I heard the clatter of a chain, the
shuffling of some great, clumsy body.
And stark horror peered through the bars, with eyes like twin scarlet
pits of flaming hell. Its half-glimpsed face was monstrous, swollen,
livid, queerly hairy, without a nose. It was the face of nothing sane
or right or normal.
One fearful glimpse brought home the fearful aptness of my quotation.
Then I heard a massive body drop in jangling chains upon the floor
beyond. There was a low, singular sound, not unlike the contented purr
of a gigantic cat. Then the sound of lapping....
When I looked at the others, in the lamp's yellow glow, their
apprehensive tension was gone, although they still looked askance at me.
"It's satisfied," said Josepha Hand, looking at her husband's fleeting
white fingers. "Now it's willing to feed."