The mark of the monster
he can't get it quiet. It keeps whimpering. He thinks it knows _he's_
in the house. He thinks it's calling for _him_."
With that last word, her dark head jerked at me.
Doctor Kyle's deep-sunk, flaming eyes came wonderingly to my face.
"It couldn't remember," he whispered faintly, as if to himself. "It
couldn't know Clay, after all these years."
Again, from the cellar, I heard that eager, feral whining.
"It does," whispered Josepha Hand. "It wants _him_!"
And I perceived suddenly that all eyes were fixed upon me, glazed and
distended with horror, as if I had been some ghastly apparition. In
that abrupt and fearful silence, Valyne's fork rattled shockingly on
the floor.
_3. "Your Father Was--Horror!"_
When the meal was finished, Doctor Kyle took me apart to the end of the
room, and lowered his hollow voice.
"Clay," he said solemnly, "I beg you to trust me, as if I were your
true father. I want you to leave Valyne--to go away, without making me
tell you the secret of your life."
"Why?" I demanded, bluntly impatient.
"I love you, Clay." His voice quivered faintly with emotion. "I love
you as my own son, in spite of what I must tell you. That is why I have
never told you, and why I am unwilling to tell you now.
"If you go away from Creston, Clay, you may find some happiness. I beg
you to go, and to heed my warning--never marry!"
I seized his arm. Despite his age, it felt hard and powerful as Jud
Geer's.
"I'm not going," I told him flatly. "Life without Valyne wouldn't be
life. And why shouldn't I marry? I'm healthy, without any stain that I
know of."
He bowed his yellow, cadaverous head, resignedly.
"I see that I must tell you. It is better for my words to wreck your
life, than to let you and Valyne plunge unwarned into the horror
waiting----"
His voice stopped suddenly; his dark eyes flew toward the cellar door.
From below I heard a hoarse scream, thick, maddened; the clanking of
a heavy chain; the shriek of rusty nails being drawn; the crashing of
splintered planking.
The doctor stood voiceless, ashen, trembling, until Eben Hand burst
again into the room, mouthing incoherent sounds, fingers flying.
"It's breaking out!" cried Josepha Hand. "It's coming to _him_!"
Her dark eyes darted to me again, terrible with an undisguised and
savage odium.
Abruptly recovering himself, Doctor Kyle picked up a heavy chair and
ran through the cellar door. His wife scurried after him, with her
astonishing bird-like agility.
"Let me, Latham!" her thin voice shrilled. "Let me! It always heeded
me."
The two servants followed them apprehensively.
Valyne was standing at the other end of the room, staring after them
with stunned tragedy in her shadowed violet eyes. I walked to her
hastily, and grasped her cold hands.
"Valyne," I said urgently, "you tell me! What have they in the cellar?
What makes this house so strange? Why does the doctor want us not to
marry?"
Her eyes, looking back at me, were dark and wide with dread. Her cold
hands trembled.
"You're afraid, darling!" I cried. "Tell me--what do you fear?"
But a terrible intuition had already given me the answer.
"You're afraid of me!"
She looked at me in mute agony, without denial.
"I know only what he told me, Clay."
Her voice broke, and her eyes gleamed with tears. Her warm arms were
suddenly around me, clinging with the pressure of urgent need.
"Remember I love you, Clay!" she sobbed. "Whatever you may be, remember
that I love you."
* * * * *
She was still in my arms when Doctor Kyle came back up the stairs,
walking with a hasty, shaken step. His voice quick and nervous, he
called:
"Clay, will you please come with me for a moment? And hurry! I think
our lives are all in danger, if you don't."
Doubtfully, I said, "But why?"
"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."
I swung upon my foster-father.
"Now," I pressed him, "you've got to tell me!"
His fleshless head jerked toward the steps.
"Come to my room." And when we were on the stairs, his hollow voice
added: "Try to keep a grip on yourself, Clay, when you know. And pray
to God that no other demon may ever be born into this accursed house!"
* * * * *
The bare and ancient rafters were low upon his locked attic room. It
was cold, and his two lamps could not dispel its sinister gloom. There
were chairs, and an antique writing-desk. The shelves were heavy with
dark and massive volumes in age-discolored bindings, whose titles,
a glance told me, had all to do with the history of witchcraft,
occultism, lycanthropy, demonology, and darker lore. A tall glass
cabinet held crystal globes, grotesque little idols and figurines of
wood and wax, parcels of dried herbs, and a few stained and rusted
weapons.
"My study and museum," Doctor Kyle boomed, as I shivered from the
musty chill. "Here I have carried on my research into the evil
practises that have festered in the hills of Creston. Knowing these
people, I have gained access to precious material. Clay, even now there
are hideous forbidden rites of demon-worship being----"
"Doctor," I broke in, "if you really have anything to say, say it."
"Sit down, Clay," he said.
But I was too much concerned to sit. I stood behind a chair, gripping
the back of it with my hands. Doctor Kyle paced up and down before me,
two or three times, running his lank fingers nervously across his bare
yellow scalp, as if to flatten invisible hair.
"I suppose you don't remember your mother, Clay?" he asked at length,
as if seeking an easy way into a difficult subject.
"No," I told him. "She died, and you brought me here, before I was two
years old."
"We told you that she died," his voice rumbled, suddenly hoarse and
low. "And you never knew of your twin?"
"You told me I was the last one of my family."
His flaming eyes stared at me, and his voice pealed solemnly:
"Your mother died only a few months ago, Clay. And your twin brother is
still living."
Questions thronged my mind. But the stinging dust of horror had
suddenly filled my throat. I could only listen, as that hollow voice
went on, like a booming chant of doom.
"I shall begin, Clay, with the early history of your family." His lean
hand gestured at the dark, heavy volumes on the shelves. "I have here
the library of your grandfather, Eliakim Coe. From his private papers
I have learned a great deal of the secret history of Creston--and of
your people.
"The first Coe in America came with a cloud upon his name--the Church
had almost obtained his conviction on charges of demonolatry. The Henry
Coe who founded Creston was a fugitive from the witchcraft trials of
Salem, and in this inaccessible wilderness he carried on the evil
worship that had roused the Puritan ire.
"These dark forests have hidden fearful things, Clay! It may shock you
to learn that for four hundred years every generation of your family
has dealt in every manner of Satanism, black magic, and demon-worship.
"Your grandfather, Eliakim Coe, was the last and the most powerful of a
line of wizards. But he paid a fearful price for his power. He paid his
daughter, Elizabeth, who was your mother."
"My mother!" I was bewildered and shocked.
"Your true father, Clay," continued that ringing, hypnotic chant, "was
not the distant cousin, Esmond Coe, who married your mother over your
grandfather's protests, and was found stabbed to death beside her on
the morning of the bridal night. No! That crime was but the beginning
of a frightful ceremony. And Eliakim Coe took his daughter, on the
night following, to a circle of stones about an ancient altar on the
summit of the mountain----"
"Once," the shuddering whisper was wrung from me, "I saw that altar!"
"And there," that dread, compelling voice throbbed on, "that diabolical
ceremony was carried to its blasphemous completion. Stripped and bound,
the virginal body of your mother was laid across the blackened altar.
In response to the esoteric forbidden rituals of the wizard, a Dark
Power came to claim the offering.
"And Eliakim Coe brought his daughter back, crippled and maddened, to
give birth to you, Clay--and to your twin!"
"What"--I forced out the faint whisper--"what do you mean?"
Doctor Latham Kyle snapped his jaws together. His yellow lips were
tight and hard as a mummy's. His deep eyes flamed at me. The boom of
his hollow voice was startling.
"Clay," he said, "there are forces, powers, entities, that science
has never glimpsed--because they are too colossal. But you must sense
the tremendous shadows that fall upon our tiny earth from the frigid
voids of space. Clay, you must know the fearful rulers of the fourth
dimension! Your own dark blood must whisper to you----"
I had to nod, in spite of the outraged protest clamoring in my brain.
For in the mystic Orient, as well as in my strange childhood, I had
seen things that science and sanity could not account for.
"Then----"
The dry, husky whisper crept like an odious reptile past my lips.
"Then--my father was not a man? And I'm not entirely--human?"
The yellow skull nodded solemnly; the hollow voice intoned:
"That is the hideous truth, Clay, that I have feared to tell you."
Panic was rushing through my heart, like a black and frozen wind.
"So that's why," I breathed, "I've always felt--different! That's why
I've always been a stranger among men! It's that evil blood that seizes
my body when I fight, like a destroying demon----"