The trees reached out and took them in, circling about them in a massed
formation. They were in the darkness of Briony Wood now, a darkness
that was unrelieved by any light except the pale intermittent glow of
the sky that filtered through the bowed branches of the trees. The
unceasing storm rumbled in the leaves above them, and the incessant
drip of water sounded about them as they lurched over broken branches,
stones, unbared roots, and washed-out hollows. Far above the moist
darkness through which they struggled Dreeme thought he could hear a
faint humming, the sound of wind, perhaps, flowing along the tilted
tops of the taller trees. His labored breath chimed with it. Walden
Slater was lurching along doggedly beside him now, no longer ahead,
but shoulder to shoulder with him except when the unevenness of the
road they took caused them to stumble apart. It was good to feel his
sturdy shoulder as it struck against him occasionally. It was like a
tower filled with armed men who were always on guard. It was a fortress
against evil and chance. The farmer was silent, conserving his strength
for the difficult journey through the wood, and Dreeme, taking a lesson
from him, refrained from speech, although questions were beginning to
boil up in his restless mind. His intelligence was clarifying although
he was still in a riot of fear over the situation in which Deborah
must be. Images appeared and dissolved before his eyes. Deborah lying
on the rainy ground bound and gagged. Deborah insensible in some
secret retreat where George Burroughs, his sallow face aflame with
malice, bowed over her and blasphemously intoned Biblical phrases that
were twisted to serve the devil’s purpose. Deborah sitting wide-eyed
in an hypnotic trance while Jeffrey Westcott stood before her, his
cloven head bared to the rain and the wind. Deborah gazing into the
heavy-lidded remorseless eyes of Martha Westcott while the taciturn
farmers, muttering to one another, gathered about a great dripping
stone in the heart of Nigger Swamp.
The humming in the air increased steadily above the two travelers now
until it seemed as though a hundred and one far-away aeroplane engines
were singing their way through the darkness and rain like a swarm of
huge and unbelievable mosquitoes. Dreeme’s labored breath sucked in
his throat as he pushed the entangling spiky vines aside and thrust
his tired body forward. His bare feet were bruised and cut, but they
seemed devoid of all sensation, blotches of white meat that lifted and
fell with a maddening regularity. He was not sure that the humming he
heard was more than the blood pounding in his ear-drums and throbbing
in his temples. Yet it seemed to be more than that, to be, in fact, an
ominous and steadily-increasing warning of the approach of mysterious
and frightful things. It would not have surprised him to see a host
of devils and witches suddenly sweep through the tree-tops screaming
and laughing to one another. He could imagine them calling to one
another gross phrases, turning their red-rimmed eyes downward at him,
pointing with long-nailed hands and bursting into gales of infernal
laughter. Then he realized that his imagination was slipping from
his control and he strove to concentrate on Deborah, to save himself
from his own madness through the memory of her. He pitched forward
over oozy hummocks. The fierce thorns of clutching vines ripped along
his legs and arms. Malicious branches lashed murderously at his face.
Water sucked and gurgled about his naked feet. But he pressed forward
half-blindly, hardly conscious of the direction in which he was
proceeding, knowing only that Walden Slater’s shoulder struck against
his from time to time, and that a desperate and imperative necessity
was urging them into the depths of the marshy wood. Some small beast
scurried beneath his feet, and he screamed at the nervous tension of
the moment. He heard laboring branches crack and groan above his head
and the hollow sound where a dislodged stone rolled down an incline and
landed in a huge puddle. The humming had developed into a roar about
him. It was so dark that he could not see Walden Slater. He could not
even hear the heavy thud of the farmer’s boots. Suddenly he became
conscious that a devastating delirium of fear was engulfing him and
rendering him incapable of any action, “This is horrible!” he sobbed in
his throat. He stopped dead in his tracks, straightened his body, and
gazed upward until the faint glow of the stormy sky pierced his dulled
eye-sight. It came slowly, a gradual light, a milky hue against which
the silhouettes of the black branches cut sharply. Gazing steadfastly
he strove to quiet the tempest that shook his mind. He thought for
a moment that he could see small winking lights scurrying across the
surface of that milky sky, but, forcing himself to gaze fixedly, he
decided that these lights were no more than optical illusions or the
small sparks that rise in tired and over-strained eyes. His heart
was beating like a loud trip-hammer and he pressed one hand against
it tightly. Standing so for several seconds he experienced a slowing
of his nervous faculties, a sensation of again being master of
himself and not the victim of an unreasonable fear that was, perhaps,
self-implanted by a too imaginative mind. It was with actual surprise
that he felt Walden Slater’s sturdy arm about his shoulder urging him
forward. Clear-headed now he resumed the laborious toil of the journey.
This is New England, he thought. This is the tired land of forgotten
pioneer enterprises. This is the land of machinery and shoe factories
and canned goods and ice-skates. It is everything that is material
and dispiriting and “up-to-date” and unlovely. It is the land of lean
farms and thin mouths, too. It is a land of humming commercial cities,
of great businesses, of the New Day. But it is more than this, as
well. How if all this glittering commercial civilization is no more
than a huge shell, an incrustation of years, beneath which lurk the
old pagan madnesses that were corollaries of the Puritan repression?
How if the ancient Dionysiac urge did not perish but remained like an
ominous monster in a deep cavern biding its time and waiting its day?
Suppose that the May Pole of Merry Mount and the Witches’ Sabaoths of
Salem were to be reborn with disastrous consequences because of their
long suppression? Might not the humming wind be saying, “The day is
coming! The Black Man is coming! The May Pole of Merry Mount is to
be reared again on the site of the factory! The witches and warlocks
are to rule! The cities are to be laid waste for this huge shell of
civilization is no more than a pasteboard affair and it is only the
ancient furies and instincts that count in the long run!” Dreeme
permitted his imagination to go to whatever lengths it pleased as he
plunged through the forest with Walden Slater. He was fully aware of
the fancifulness and impossibility of his thoughts, but they seemed to
act as a release-valve for the feelings that boiled within him.
Walden Slater suddenly clutched his wrist in a huge gripping hand.
He drew the young doctor to one side, and as he did so Dreeme became
aware of the tiny bobbing jewel of light before them, a spark of yellow
that disappeared behind trees only to reappear again. The farmer did
not slack his pace but kept on rapidly, but Dreeme noted that there
was a tenseness in his walk. The light bobbed before them and they
gained on it. It grew in dimensions and before they had traveled many
rods Dreeme, by straining his eyes, perceived that it was a lantern
carried by a dark figure. He grew aware at the same time that other
figures were slipping noiselessly through the trees before them. He
even heard the subdued mutter of a voice somewhere to the right of
him. Still holding the young doctor by the wrist, Walden Slater made
a detour to the left and they circled the bobbing lantern. Keeping
their eyes turned toward the lantern they drew abreast of it, passed
it, and then Walden Slater uttered an exclamation as he bumped into a
sluggishly moving figure in the shadow of a huge over-arching tree.
“At Dagon,” said a low voice. An inspiration came to Dreeme. In a calm
subdued tone he answered, “For the Master.” The figure fell away into
the darkness of the trees and as they forged ahead Dreeme could feel
Walden Slater’s fingers tighten on his wrist in an approving manner.
The ground was growing more marshy and their feet sank into the soft
soil as they pressed forward. The young doctor suspected that they were
reaching that portion of Briony Wood that degenerated into Nigger Swamp
and that their objective was not so far before them now. Walden Slater
appeared to sense the same thing for his pace quickened automatically.
They moved rapidly now, their feet making a distinct sucking sound as
they lifted them from the muddy earth. The incline turned downward and
as its slope increased the two men found themselves wading through
good-sized pools of water and tall scratchy reeds that tore against
their legs. Their feet sank deeper in slushy mire and occasionally the
sleepy croak of a frog sounded in the darkness beyond them.
Although the journey was harder now, a painful lifting of one foot
after the other, Dreeme’s weariness seemed to fall from him. He was
like an eager hunter hot on the scent with the quarry almost in view.
Any moment, he thought to himself, I may turn a corner and see a ring
of dim lanterns about a huge stone and know that I am at the end of my
journey and that I have seen what no other stranger in this valley has
ever seen. The thought exhilarated him. So, too, did the memory that he
had passed other mysterious figures in Briony Wood, for it meant that
he was not late, that Deborah would be unharmed when he reached Dagon.
How she was to be taken away from the group of fanatics who gathered
in the swamp he did not know, but he trusted partially to the skill
of the silent Walden Slater and partially to the inspiration of the
moment. There would be a way, for he would make one. He was pleased
to think that there was no fear in his heart now, that his brain had
cleared, and that his nerves were steady. He had lost his madness in
Briony Wood, and that was good. There was nothing but a clear flame of
determination in him.
Walden Slater’s mouth was close to his ear.
“We’re not quite in the swamp yet,” he said. “There’s a road. We’ve got
to find it.”
He turned and started to walk rapidly at right angles to their previous
direction and Dreeme followed him.
There seemed to be nothing but swampy land, and in certain sunken
places the slimy water rose to their knees. The drizzling rain
continued to spit about them.
“We should have followed the lantern,” said Dreeme in a low voice.
“We’ll find the road all right,” replied Slater.
They trudged for some minutes through the water and mud and then Walden
Slater emitted a low ejaculation of satisfaction. At the same moment
Dreeme stumbled upward from the sucking mud to a firm elevation.
Turning again in the direction which they had previously followed the
two men followed this elevation which appeared to extend in a long
narrow ribbon into the darkness before them. It was the road all right,
and it ended at Dagon. Some distance ahead of them they could see the
bobbing lantern, and looking back Dreeme observed another lantern
coming down from the higher ground upon which stood Briony Wood. There
were farmers before him and behind them, and the only way in which
they might hope to avoid them would mean taking off into the swamp on
either side of the narrow road. Walden Slater, as though in answer to
an unasked question from Dreeme, said:
“The muck is up to your waist on either side. Don’t step off the road.”
The trees had thinned out, although a few grotesquely-twisted forms
loomed up about them. The eery glow in the sky swept across the long
desolate expanse, but it was not bright enough for the young doctor
to make out anything with any degree of accuracy. All that he could
see were great motionless shapeless shadows, bulks that squatted on
the marshy ground like prehistoric beasts. In the daytime they would
probably dwindle into nothing more menacing than bushes. But now
there was something sinister about them. They sat on huge haunches
and watched the two men travel along the narrow lifted road that ran
through the flooded land. Dreeme could almost imagine great sleepy
eyelids beneath which peered motionless eyes. He was neither frightened
nor moved by his thoughts. Instead of excitement the slow blood of
determination ran through his cold veins. He lifted his hand and
brushed the wet matted hair from his forehead and rubbed his straining
eyes. He could feel how set his face was, how the lines had deepened
in his cheeks, how tight his jaw was set. He could not make out Walden
Slater’s face in the deceiving rainy light, but he imagined that it was
set like his own, reflecting a determination that would be ruthless and
unescapable when the time for action came.