This was Nigger Swamp at last. The dark road ran like a pencil line
across the level expanse that waved in the rainy wind its monotonous
host of thin reeds. These reeds clacked together with a tiny rippling
sound that was half-drowned in the sturdier bluster of the lessening
gale. Rain still fell in a dispiriting manner, cold, large-dropped,
maddening in its relentless evenness. Dreeme felt the rain no longer,
for, soaked to the skin and numbed to the bone, the surface of his body
had lost all sensation. Even his feet were senseless now. He followed
the lurching beat of Walden Slater’s boots like a man in a trance. Yet
his faculties were alert. Though he experienced no physical sensation
he realized that his brain was clearing and capable of swift action.
It was like a live intelligence in a dead body. It was this live
intelligence that noted, even before the phlegmatic Walden Slater, that
the bobbing lantern ahead of them had stopped. The young doctor touched
the farmer on the arm.
“Look!” he whispered. “The man ahead has stopped.”
Both of them paused in their tracks and observed the stationary light
with some unrest. Dreeme glanced behind him and saw that the light
which was following them was steadily approaching nearer. He remembered
Walden Slater’s warning: “The muck is up to your waist on either side.”
“What shall we do?” he whispered to Walden Slater, indicating the
approaching stranger in their rear. The farmer said nothing but opened
his coat a bit and loosened the revolver in his belt. He glanced first
at the stationary light before them and then at the approaching light
behind them. After that, he spat reflectively into the swamp at his
side.
“We don’t want to kick up a fuss till we locate Deborah,” he said
mildly.
Even as he spoke the stationary lantern before them began to return on
its tracks, to approach them from the front even as the other lantern
approached them from the rear. They were caught between two fires now.
“Perhaps we can hide our faces,” whispered Dreeme. “Perhaps we can pass
them as we passed those other fellows back in Briony Wood.”
“Perhaps,” said Walden Slater noncommittally.
“Shall we stand out in the swamp?” asked Dreeme suddenly.
Walden Slater shook his head.
“You’d never pull yourself out of it again,” he said.
The light before them returned ten or twelve yards on its own track,
and then suddenly disappeared to the right, vanishing completely from
sight. Walden Slater grunted.
“They missed the cross path,” he said. “It’s a lucky thing for us.”
He started forward, accelerating his pace as much as the hummocky road
would permit, and Dreeme, suddenly relieved from the tenseness that
had held him like a coiled steel spring, followed with agility. It was
remarkable how refreshed he felt after that brief halt. He even forgot
the lantern that was following at his heels, perhaps fifty yards behind
him in the rainy gloom, a dancing midge in the deceptive air. The road
dipped a bit as they proceeded forward, and soon Dreeme observed low
bushes lining it, bushes that rose in height as they stumbled along
over the increasing unevenness. They were entering another expanse of
wooded territory, this time, without a doubt, the center of the swamp.
Trees shot up out of the mist about them and the road assumed the
aspect of a funnel that dwindled to nothingness before them. Walden
Slater walked very slowly now inspecting the bushes at the right of the
road. Soon the misty light vanished behind the climbing shrubbery and
trees and the farmer cursed softly to himself.
“Whereabouts did that lantern turn in?” he inquired of the night in
general. Dreeme did not attempt an answer, but went down and felt the
dark ground, fumbling about for possible footprints.
“You can’t find anything that way,” said the farmer ungraciously. He
blundered along close to the bushes, sometimes stepping through only
to catch himself just in time from toppling into the sunken mire from
which the soggy growths sprang. It was intensely dark now and they
could perceive nothing before them. Dreeme, lifting up his hand a foot
from his face, could not make it out. They were in an alley of small
trees and bushes that met above them.
“The lantern came back from here,” muttered Walden Slater. “I’ll swear
to that.”
He turned on his heel and retraced his steps.
“Look!” whispered Dreeme.
The lantern that had been following them was now less than thirty yards
before them. It approached slowly, its feeble spark illuminating a
small circle of milky haze. Who held it or how many were in the party
could not be made out. Walden Slater stopped by the side of the path
and Dreeme paused beside him. The lantern approached deliberately at
such a speed as to indicate that the person carrying it was walking
very slowly. The stranger, or strangers, were evidently studying the
right side of the road even as Walden Slater and Dreeme had studied
it, searching for an ingress into the swamp, for a concealed road that
would take them off at an angle from this main path.
“If they miss the road they won’t miss us,” murmured Dreeme.
The farmer said nothing but waited mutely for what might happen. When
the lantern was within ten yards of them it paused for an instant and
then disappeared. Walden Slater crept forward slowly. Dreeme followed
close at his heels. Reaching the spot where the lantern had disappeared
the farmer went over and fumbled at the ground. The charred trunk of a
tree met his hand. He grunted and stepped by it, almost sliding as he
struck a sharp incline, and then caught his balance on a narrow ribbon
of hard soil. The lantern had disappeared entirely, but the farmer and
Dreeme, stepping tentatively, discovered that the tiny footpath they
were now on curved steadily. They walked very silently now, stepping
as gently as they could along the path, a path covered with the soaked
dead leaves of many seasons. Their instincts told them that they were
reaching the end of their journey, that the time would soon come for
any action that they might plan. Dreeme felt a momentary inclination
to ask the farmer what he intended to do, but he repressed it, feeling
that Slater desired silence now. Like two Indians they stole forward
through the bushes and small trees, disturbing only an occasional
frog that croaked dismally from the swamp about them. A musty smell
of rotting vegetation was in their nostrils, of green-scummed water
disturbed by violent rains, of disintegrating animal life.
After some minutes walk the underbrush thinned sufficiently to permit
the pale reflection of the cloudy sky to reach them. It had practically
stopped raining, the unceasing drizzle dwindling into no more than an
occasional flutter of large cold drops that dashed against their faces.
The few trees dripped disconsolately, however, and whenever the uneven
road caused them to lurch against a bush they were covered by a tiny
unpleasant downfall. Some distance ahead of them they caught unfrequent
glimpses of the tiny lantern, glimpses that immediately winked out as
the road turned and followed the narrow ribbon of raised territory.
Something hard and cold cut against Dreeme’s naked foot and he bent
over and picked it up. Holding it up to the faint light he could dimly
make it out. A surprised and agitated exclamation broke from him, and
he turned to Walden Slater who had paused.
“Look,” he said, handing the object to the farmer.
Walden Slater turned it over slowly in his large dripping hand. His
long upper lip drew downward as he recognized it and handed it back
without a word to Dreeme. The young doctor stared at it again. It was
a brooch. A brooch upon which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s
head. Deborah’s brooch. The brooch he had seen hanging on her bosom
that evening before when they had walked through the quiet street of
Marlborough and had told each other so much. She had passed along ahead
of them, then, and was already at the place called Dagon. There could
be no time to lose now. Walden Slater, who had not said a word, was
walking along as rapidly as he could on the narrow uncertain road.
Dreeme, close at his heels and sometimes abreast with him when the road
permitted, kept pace with the farmer.
They were back among trees again. The young doctor had never realized
the extent of Nigger Swamp before. He had always pictured it as a small
circumscribed area of loathsome water and rotting bushes but now he
understood that it covered a vast expanse of territory. It was either
very large or the deceptive path they followed wound round and round
it in a spiral. Perhaps they had circled Dagon. Perhaps the path was
a maze that took the ignorant wanderer round and round until, by some
lucky chance, the riddle was solved and he stood at the heart. As
Dreeme labored onward his imagination drew into the dark void about
them the first descendants of the fugitive Salem witches who had
settled in this part of the world. He pictured to himself a breed of
silent, mad-eyed men in steeple-crowned hats and baggy knee-breeches
and homespun stockings and square-toed buckled shoes lurching along
this immemorial road. On their shoulders they bore heavy bell-mouthed
muskets and stands upon which to rest these muskets when they fired
at enemies. Powder horns swung from their shoulders and bags of round
bullets. There were women, too, sharp-faced, hawk-nosed women in white
caps and dull gray dresses, hurrying along and laughing hysterically
at the storm for there was no secrecy in those days, no reasons for
quietude in the unspoilt wilderness, no one to watch them except the
lean Indians in their breech-clouts of deer-skin, their proud fierce
faces crowned by the scalp-lock and the turkey-feather peering from
behind the trees in superstitious wonder. The startled deer crashed
through the underbrush and the brown bears lumbered away from the
flares of the torches and the old-fashioned lanterns. All this had died
away, had been erased by Time, had vanished into the nothingness of
dead and unwritten history.
Then, decades and decades and decades later, Uriah Carrier, by the maps
in his black book, had found the lost place called Dagon and he had
worked on the slumbering instincts of the people about him, appealing
to the madness that slept in their subconscious memories, bringing
them again to the secret stone and the place where the crumbled bones
rested. He had probably promised them dominion over their days, the
power of exerting their wills and destroying their enemies, the joys
of the liberation of their darkest instincts. It sounded impossible
enough on the face of it, like some insane fairytale that a sick
imagination might bring forth, and yet it must have been a fact for
here he was, a sane doctor in the twentieth century, stumbling through
the rotting vegetation of an untraveled swamp in search of a madman and
the fanatical minds he had released from the kindly bondage of reason.
It was like a nightmare.
Walden Slater halted abruptly. The road had grown somewhat wider
now and they had been walking abreast. About them the trees rose to
an imposing stature and the ground to right and left of them seemed
higher and firmer than that through which they had toiled for the last
half-hour. Dreeme imagined that they had reached a sort of island in
the middle of the swamp and his conviction was intensified when, after
peering right and left, before him and behind, Walden Slater stepped
from the road and began to thread a slow circuitous advance through
the trees. The ground as he stepped on it seemed softer than safety
might desire but the young doctor followed with alacrity. His bare
feet sank to the ankles in the soft ooze but following Walden Slater’s
example and stepping close to the trunks of the trees he discovered
that the walking was not so difficult after all. They appeared to be in
a tall woodland now where the thin trees rose straight out of a soggy
soil, a soil in which the rotting stumps of lightning-blasted growths
and scattered boulders cluttered up and made difficult any swift
passage. The boulders seemed unusual and Dreeme wondered about them.
They possibly were evidence of a strata of rock, the slice of some
prehistoric glacier, that thrust upward out of the marshy soil here.
Walden Slater walked warily, taking care to step on no dead branches or
to crash through none of the small undergrowths that sprang up between
the slender trees. Dreeme followed suit.
They had walked through this woodland for a few minutes only before the
young doctor observed a faint glow among the trees that faced them. He
instinctively hastened his pace a little and soon was several feet in
front of Walden Slater. The farmer plodded along doggedly exhibiting
no excitement or unrest. Dreeme, clutching Deborah’s brooch in his
hand, was about to break into a stumbling run when the wiry hand of
the farmer jerked his shoulder back. A trifle angry but aware of the
wisdom of the rebuke the young doctor adjusted his pace to the farmer’s
steady progression and they moved forward toward the faint glow, a glow
that brightened perceptibly as they neared it. The rain had stopped
altogether, even the large infrequent drops disappearing into the mist
of the night. In those few minutes while Dreeme crept forward beside
the farmer a dozen and one thoughts flashed through his mind, plans of
rescue, schemes of attack, possibilities of tactics to be employed.
Would they rush into the group of farmers, and, while Walden Slater
held them back with the menace of his revolver, would he snatch up
Deborah and make away with her along the exhausting road which he had
been traveling for nearly an hour? What could they hope to do against
a dozen or more men who were mad? He wanted to ask Walden Slater what
he thought but the farmer was so evidently bent on silence that he did
not venture a word. The glow was quite bright now and it seemed to come
upward from the earth, from a hollow beyond them that was masked by
crowded tree-trunks. There were many lanterns in that hollow and there
were many men. Deborah was there, too. Perhaps at this very moment she
was a part of the unclean ceremonies that were taking place. It seemed
an eternity to the young doctor while they crept slowly and silently
through the last ring of trees, stepping gingerly over the protruding
boulders and rotting branches and mouldering stumps. Walden Slater now
carried his revolver in his hand. Leaving the last of the trees behind
them and facing the yellow glow of the invisible light that formed a
strange fan of color against the milky atmosphere they crept up an
inclined bank toward a ring of low intertangled bushes. The subdued
hum of voices reached their strained ears. Walden Slater carefully
pushed aside one of the branches of the bushes against which they
now rested and cautiously thrust his face forward. For a second he
looked downward. Then he drew back and putting his mouth very close to
Dreeme’s ear said:
“This is the place called Dagon.”
The young doctor, his blood beating furiously, crept up to the bush,
drew the branch aside, thrust his face forward, and looked downward.