MEDUSA'S COIL

It was a lonely and deserted country, but at last I spied a roof among a clump
of trees near the small river on my right; perhaps a full half-mile from the
road, and probably reachable by some path or drive which I would presently come
upon. In the absence of any nearer dwelling, I resolved to try my luck there;
and was glad when the bushes by the roadside revealed the ruin of a carved stone
gateway, covered with dry, dead vines and choked with undergrowth which
explained why I had not been able to trace the path across the fields in my
first distant view. I saw that I could not drive the car in, so I parked it very
carefully near the gate--where a thick evergreen would shield it in case of
rain--and got out for the long walk to the house.

Traversing that brush-grown path in the gathering twilight I was conscious of a
distinct sense of foreboding, probably induced by the air of sinister decay
hovering about the gate and the former driveway. From the carvings on the old
stone pillars I inferred that this place was once an estate of manorial dignity;
and I could clearly see that the driveway had originally boasted guardian lines
of linden trees, some of which had died, while others had lost their special
identity among the wild scrub growths of the region.

As I ploughed onward, cockleburs and stickers clung to my clothes, and I began
to wonder whether the place could be inhabited after all. Was I tramping on a
vain errand? For a moment I was tempted to go back and try some farm farther
along the road, when a view of the house ahead aroused my curiosity and
stimulated my venturesome spirit.

There was something provocatively fascinating in the tree-girt, decrepit pile
before me, for it spoke of the graces and spaciousness of a bygone era and a far
more southerly environment. It was a typical wooden plantation house of the
classic, early nineteenth-century pattern, with two and a half stories and a
great Ionic portico whose pillars reached up as far as the attic and supported a
triangular pediment. Its state of decay was extreme and obvious; one of the vast
columns having rotted and fallen to the ground, while the upper piazza or
balcony had sagged dangerously low. Other buildings, I judged, had formerly
stood near it.

As I mounted the broad stone steps to the low porch and the carved and
fanlighted doorway I felt distinctly nervous, and started to light a
cigarette--desisting when I saw how dry and inflammable everything about me was.
Though now convinced that the house was deserted, I nevertheless hesitated to
violate its dignity without knocking; so tugged at the rusty iron knocker until
I could get it to move, and finally set up a cautious rapping which seemed to
make the whole place shake and rattle. There was no response, yet once more I
plied the cumbrous, creaking device--as much to dispel the sense of unholy
silence and solitude as to arouse any possible occupant of the ruin.

Somewhere near the river I heard the mournful note of a dove, and it seemed as
if the coursing water itself were faintly audible. Half in a dream, I seized and
rattled the ancient latch, and finally gave the great six-panelled door a frank
trying. It was unlocked, as I could see in a moment; and though it stuck and
grated on its hinges I began to push it open, stepping through it into a vast
shadowy hall as I did so.

But the moment I took this step I regretted it. It was not that a legion of
specters confronted me in that dim and dusty hall with the ghostly Empire
furniture; but that I knew all at once that the place was not deserted at all.
There was a creaking on the great curved staircase, and the sound of faltering
footsteps slowly descending. Then I saw a tall, bent figure silhouetted for an
instant against the great Palladian window on the landing.

My first start of terror was soon over, and as the figure descended the final
flight I was ready to greet the householder whose privacy I had invaded. In the
semi-darkness I could see him reach in his pocket for a match. There came a
flare as he lighted a small kerosene lamp which stood on a rickety console table
near the foot of the stairs. In the feeble glow was revealed the stooping figure
of a very tall, emaciated old man; disordered as to dress and unshaved as to
face, yet for all that with the bearing and expression of a gentleman.

I did not wait for him to speak, but at once began to explain my presence.

"You'll pardon my coming in like this, but when my knocking didn't raise anybody
I concluded that no one lived here. What I wanted originally was to know the
right road to Cape Girardeau--the shortest road, that is. I wanted to get there
before dark, but now, of course--"

As I paused, the man spoke; in exactly the cultivated tone I had expected, and
with a mellow accent as unmistakably Southern as the house he inhabited.

"Rather, you must pardon me for not answering your knock more promptly. I live
in a very retired way, and am not usually expecting visitors. At first I thought
you were a mere curiosity-seeker. Then when you knocked again I started to
answer, but I am not well and have to move very slowly. Spinal neuritis--very
troublesome case.

"But as for your getting to town before dark--it's plain you can't do that. The
road you are on--for I suppose you came from the gate--isn't the best or
shortest way. What you must do is to take your first left after you leave the
gate--that is, the first real road to your left. There are three or four cart
paths you can ignore, but you can't mistake the real road because of the extra
large willow tree on the right just opposite it. Then when you've turned, keep
on past two roads and turn to the right along the third. After that--"

"Please wait a moment! How can I follow all these clues in pitch darkness,
without ever having been near here before, and with only an indifferent pair of
headlights to tell me what is and what isn't a road? Besides, I think it's going
to storm pretty soon, and my car is an open one. It looks as if I were in a bad
fix if I want to get to Cape Girardeau tonight. The fact is, I don't think I'd
better try to make it. I don't like to impose burdens, or anything like
that--but in view of the circumstances, do you suppose you could put me up for
the night? I won't be any trouble--no meals or anything. Just let me have a
corner to sleep in till daylight, and I'm all right. I can leave the car in the
road where it is--a bit of wet weather won't hurt it if worst comes to worst."

As I made my sudden request I could see the old man's face lose its former
expression of quiet resignation and take on an odd, surprised look.

"Sleep--here?"

He seemed so astonished at my request that I repeated it.

"Yes, why not? I assure you I won't be any trouble. What else can I do? I'm a
stranger hereabouts, these roads are a labyrinth in the dark, and I'll wager
it'll be raining torrents outside of an hour--"

This time it my host's turn to interrupt, and as he did so I could feel a
peculiar quality in his deep, musical voice.

"A stranger--of course you must be, else you wouldn't think of sleeping here,
wouldn't think of coming here at all. People don't come here nowadays."

He paused, and my desire to stay was increased a thousandfold by the sense of
mystery his laconic words seemed to evoke. There was surely something alluringly
queer about this place, and the pervasive musty smell seemed to cloak a thousand
secrets. Again I noticed the extreme decrepitude of everything about me;
manifest even in the feeble rays of the single small lamp. I felt woefully
chilly, and saw with regret that no heating was provided, and yet so great was
my curiosity that I still wished most ardently to stay and learn something of
the recluse and his dismal abode.

"Let that be as it may," I replied. "I can't help about other people. But I
surely would like to have a spot to stop till daylight. Still--if people don't
relish this place, mayn't it be because it's getting so run-down? Of course I
suppose it would a take a fortune to keep such an estate up, but if the burden's
too great why don't you look for smaller quarters? Why try to stick it out here
in this way--with all the hardships and discomforts?"

The man did not seem offended, but answered me very gravely.

"Surely you may stay if you really wish to--you can come to no harm that I know
of. But others claim there are certain peculiarly undesirable influences here.
As for me--I stay here because I have to. There is something I feel it a duty to
guard--something that holds me. I wish I had the money and health and ambition
to take decent care of the house and grounds."

With my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word;
and followed him slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very dark
now, and a faint pattering outside told me that the threatened rain had come. I
would have been glad of any shelter, but this was doubly welcome because of the
hints of mystery about the place and its master. For an incurable lover of the
grotesque, no more fitting haven could have been provided.

There was a second-floor corner room in less unkempt shape than the rest of the
house, and into this my host led me, setting down his small lamp and lighting a
somewhat larger one. From the cleanliness and contents of the room, and from the
books ranged along the walls, I could see that I had not guessed amiss in
thinking the man a gentleman of taste and of breeding. He was a hermit and
eccentric, no doubt, but he still had standards and intellectual interests. As
he waved me to a seat I began a conversation on general topics, and was pleased
to find him not at all taciturn. If anything, he seemed glad of someone to talk
to, and did not even attempt to swerve the discussion from personal topics.

He was, I learned, one Antoine de Russy, of an ancient, powerful, and cultivated
line of Louisiana planters. More than a century ago his grandfather, a younger
son, had migrated to southern Missouri and founded a new estate in the lavish
ancestral manner; building this pillared mansion and surrounding it with all the
accessories of a great plantation. There had been, at one time, as many as 200
negroes in the cabins which stood on the flat ground in the rear--ground that
the river had now invaded--and to hear them singing and laughing and playing the
banjo at night was to know the fullest charm of a civilization and social order
now sadly extinct. In front of the house, where the great guardian oaks and
willows stood, there had been a lawn like a broad green carpet, always watered
and trimmed and with flagstoned, flower-bordered walks curving through it.
"Riverside"--for such the place was called--had been a lovely and idyllic
homestead in its day; and my host could recall it when many traces of its best
period remained.

It was raining hard now, with dense sheets of water beating against the insecure
roof, walls, and windows, and sending in drops through a thousand chinks and
crevices. Moisture trickled down to the floor from unsuspected places, and the
mounting wind rattled the rotting, loose-hinged shutters outside. But I minded
none of this, for I saw that a story was coming. Incited to reminiscence, my
host made a move to shew me to sleeping-quarters; but kept on recalling the
older, better days. Soon, I saw, I would receive an inkling of why he lived
alone in that ancient place, and why his neighbours thought it full of
undesirable influences. His voice was very musical as he spoke on, and his tale
soon took a turn which left me no chance to grow drowsy.

"Yes--Riverside was built in 1816, and my father was born in 1828. He'd be over
a century old now if he were alive, but he died young--so young I can just
barely remember him. In '64 that was--he was killed in the war, Seventh
Louisiana Infantry C.S.A., for he went back to the old home to enlist. My
grandfather was too old to fight, yet he lived on to be ninety-five, and helped
my mother bring me up. A good bringing-up, too--I'll give them credit. We always
had strong traditions--high notions of honor--and my grandfather saw to it that
I grew up the way de Russys have grown up, generation after generation, ever
since the Crusades. We weren't quite wiped out financially, but managed to get
on very comfortable after the war. I went to a good school in Louisiana, and
later to Princeton. Later on I was able to get the plantation on a fairly
profitable basis--though you see what it's come to now.

"My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was
rather lonely after that; and in '85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans.
Things might have been different if she'd lived, but she died when my son Denis
was born. Then I had only Denis. I didn't try marriage again, but gave all my
time to the boy. He was like me--like all the de Russys--darkish and tall and
thin, and with the devil of a temper. I gave him the same training my
grandfather had give me, but he didn't need much training when it came to points
of honor. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit--all I could do to
keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven! Romantic young
devil, too--full of high notions--you'd call 'em Victorian, now--no trouble at
all to make him let the nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same school I'd
gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class of 1909.

"In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical
School. Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the
family, and argued me into sending him across to the Sorbonne. I did--and
proudly enough, though I knew how lonely I'd be with him so far off. Would to
God I hadn't! I thought he was the safest kind of boy to be in Paris. He had a
room in the Rue St. Jacques--that's near the University in the 'Latin
Quarter'--but according to his letters and his friends he didn't cut up with the
gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from
home--serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of
striking attitudes and painting the town red.

"But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line
between serious studies and the devil. The aesthetes--the decadents, you know.
Experiments in life and sensation--the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally
Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal of their life.
They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults--imitation devil-worship, fake
Black Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the
whole--probably most of 'em forgot all about it in a year or two. One of the
deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school--for that
matter, whose father I'd known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of
Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh--regular epitome of the yellow
'nineties. Poor devil--he had the makings of a great artist, at that.

"Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris, so as a matter of course they
saw a good deal of each other--to talk over old times at St. Clair academy, and
all that. The boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn't see any especial
harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was
some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the
Bohemian element on the left bank--some nonsensical thing that pretended to
reach back to forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African
civilisations--the great Zimbabwe, the dead Atlantean cities in the Haggar
region of the Sahara--and they had a lot of gibberish concerned with snakes and
human hair. At least, I called it gibberish, then. Denis used to quote Marsh as
saying odd things about the veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa's snaky
locks--and behind the later Ptolemaic myth of Berenice, who offered up her hair
to save her husband-brother, and had it set in the sky as the constellation Coma
Berenices.

"I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the night of
the queer ritual at Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the
devotees of the cult were young fellows, but the head of it was a young woman
who called herself 'Tanit-Isis'--letting it be known that her real name--her
name in this latest incarnation, as she put it--was Marceline Bedard. She
claimed to be the left-handed daughter of Marquis de Chameaux, and seemed to
have been both a petty artist and an artist's model before adopting this more
lucrative magical game. Someone said she had lived for a time in the West
Indies--Martinique, I think--but she was very reticent about herself. Part of
her pose was a great show of austerity and holiness, but I don't think the more
experienced students took that very seriously.

"Denis, though, was far from experienced, and wrote me fully ten pages of slush
about the goddess he had discovered. If I'd only realised his simplicity I might
have done something, but I never thought a puppy infatuation like could mean
much. I felt absurdly sure that Denis' touchy personal honour and family pride
would always keep him out of the most serious complications.

"As time went, though, his letters began to make me nervous. He mentioned this
Marceline more and more, and his friends less and less, and began talking about
the 'cruel and silly way' they declined to introduce her to their mothers and
sisters. He seems to have asked her no questions about herself, and I don't
doubt but that she filled him full of romantic legendry concerning her origin
and divine revelations and the way people slighted her. At length I could see
that Denis was altogether cutting his own crowd and spending the bulk of his
time with his alluring priestess. At her especial request he never told the old
crowd of their continual meetings; so nobody over there tried to break the
affair up.

"I suppose she thought he was fabulously rich; for he had the air of a
patrician, and people of a certain class think all aristocratic Americans are
wealthy. In any case, she probably thought this a rare chance to contract a
genuine right-handed alliance with a really eligible young man. By the time my
nervousness burst into open advice, it was too late. The boy had lawfully
married her, and wrote that he was dropping his studies and bringing the woman
home to Riverside. He said she had made a great sacrifice and resigned her
leadership of the magical cult, and that henceforward she would be merely a
private gentlewoman--the future mistress of Riverside, and mother of de Russys
to come.

"Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated
Continentals have different standards from our old American ones--and anyway, I
really knew nothing against the woman. A charlatan, perhaps, but why necessarily
any worse? I suppose I tried to keep as naïve as possible about such things in
those days, for the boy's sake. Clearly, there was nothing for a man of sense to
do but let Denis alone so long as his new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let
her have a chance to prove herself--perhaps she wouldn't hurt the family as much
as some might fear. So I didn't raise any objections or ask any penitence. The
thing was done, and I stood ready to welcome the boy back, whatever he brought
with him.

"They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of marriage. Marceline was
beautiful--there was no denying that--and I could see how the boy might very
well get foolish about her. She did have an air of breeding, and I think to this
day she must have had some strains of good blood in her. She was apparently not
much over twenty; of medium size, fairly slim, and as graceful as a tigress in
posture and motion. Her complexion was a deep olive--like old ivory--and her
eyes were large and very dark. She had small, classically regular
features--though not quite clean-cut enough to suit my taste--and the most
singular braid of jet black hair that I ever saw.

"I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her magical cult,
for with that heavy profusion of it the idea must have occurred to her
naturally. Coiled up, it made her look like some Oriental princess in a drawing
of Aubrey Beardsley's. Hanging down her back, it came well below her knees and
shone in the light as if it had possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its
own. I would almost have thought of Medusa or Berenice myself--without having
such things suggested to me--upon seeing and studying that hair.

"Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange itself
in distinct ropes or strands, but this may have been sheer illusion. She braided
it incessantly, and seemed to use some sort of preparation on it. I got the
notion once--a curious, whimsical notion--that it was a living being which she
had to feed in some strange way. All nonsense--but it added to my feeling of
constraint about her and her hair.

"For I can't deny that I failed to like her wholly, no matter how hard I tried.
I couldn't tell what the trouble was, but it was there. Something about her
repelled me very subtly, and I could not help weaving morbid and macabre
associations about everything connected with her. Her complexion called up
thoughts of Babylon, Atlantis, Lemuria, and the terrible forgotten dominations
of an elder world; her eyes struck me sometimes as the eyes of some unholy
forest creature or animal goddess too immeasurably ancient to be fully human;
and her hair--that dense, exotic, overnourished growth of oily inkiness--made
one shiver as a great black python might have done. There was no doubt but that
she realised my involuntary attitude--though I tried to hide it, and she tried
to hide the fact that she noticed it.

"Yet the boy's infatuation lasted. He positively fawned on her, and overdid all
the little gallantries of daily life to a sickening degree. She appeared to
return the feeling, though I could see it took a conscious effort to make her
duplicate his enthusiasms and extravagances. For one thing, I think she was
piqued to learn we weren't as wealthy as she had expected.

"It was a bad business all told. I could see that sad undercurrents were
arising. Denis was half-hypnotised with puppy-love, and began to grow away from
me as he felt my shrinking from his wife. This kind of thing went on for months,
and I saw that I was losing my only son--the boy who had formed the centre of
all my thoughts and acts for the past quarter century. I'll own that I felt
bitter about it--what father wouldn't? And yet I could do nothing.

"Marceline seemed to be a good wife enough in those early months, and our
friends received her without any quibbling or questioning. I was always nervous,
though, about what some of the young fellows in Paris might write home to their
relatives after the news of the marriage spread around. Despite the woman's love
of secrecy, it couldn't remain hidden forever--indeed, Denis had written a few
of his closest friends, in strict confidence, as soon as he was settled with her
at Riverside.

"I got to staying alone in my room more and more, with my failing health as an
excuse. It was about that time that my present spinal neuritis began to
develop--which made the excuse a pretty good one. Denis didn't seem to notice
the trouble, or take any interest in me and my habits and affairs; and it hurt
me to see how callous he was getting. I began to get sleepless, and often racked
my brain in the night to try to find out what made my new daughter-in-law so
repulsive and even dimly horrible to me. It surely wasn't her old mystical
nonsense, for she had left all the past behind her and never mentioned it once.
She didn't even do any painting, although I understood that she had once dabbled
in art.

"Oddly, the only ones who seemed to share my uneasiness were the servants. The
darkies around the house seemed very sullen in their attitude toward her, and in
a few weeks all save the few who were strongly attached to our family had left.
These few--old Scipio and his wife Sarah, the cook Delilah, and Mary, Scipio's
daughter--were as civil as possible; but plainly revealed that their new
mistress commanded their duty rather than their affection. They stayed in their
own remote part of the house as much as possible. McCabe, our white chauffeur,
was insolently admiring rather than hostile; and another exception was a very
old Zulu woman, said to have been a sort of leader in her small cabin as a kind
of family pensioner. Old Sophonisba always shewed reverence whenever Marceline
came near her, and one time I saw her kiss the ground where her mistress had
walked. Blacks are superstitious animals, and I wondered whether Marceline had
been talking any of her mystical nonsense to our hands in order to overcome
their evident dislike.

"Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the summer of
1916, things began to happen. Toward the middle of June Denis got a note from
his old friend Frank Marsh, telling of a sort of nervous breakdown which made
him want to take a rest in the country. It was postmarked New Orleans--for Marsh
had gone home from Paris when he felt the collapse coming on--and seemed a very
plain though polite bid for an invitation from us. Marsh, of course, knew that
Marceline was here; and asked very courteously after her. Denis was sorry to
hear of his trouble and told him at once to come along for an indefinite visit.

"Marsh came--and I was shocked to notice how he had changed since I had seen him
in his earlier days. He was a smallish, lightish fellow, with blue eyes and an
undecided chin; and now I could see the effects of drink and I don't know what
else in his puffy eyelids, enlarged nose-pores, and heavy lines around the
mouth. I reckon he had taken his dose of decadence pretty seriously, and set out
to be as much of a Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or Lautreamont as he could. And yet he
was delightful to talk to--for like all decadents he was exquisitely sensitive
to the color and atmosphere and names of things; admirably, thoroughly alive,
and with whole records of conscious experience in obscure, shadowy fields of
living and feeling which most of us pass over without knowing they exist. Poor
young devil--if only his father had lived longer and taken him in hand! There
was great stuff in the boy!

"I was glad of the visit, for I felt it would help to set up a normal atmosphere
in the house again. And that's what it really seemed to do at first; for as I
said, Marsh was a delight to have around. He was as sincere and profound an
artist as I ever saw in my life, and I certainly believe that nothing on earth
mattered to him except the perception and expression of beauty. When he saw an
exquisite thing, or was creating one, his eyes would dilate until the light
irises were nearly out of sight--leaving two mystical black pits in that weak,
delicate, chalk-like face; black pits opening on strange worlds which none of us
could guess about.

"When he reached here, though, he didn't have many chances to shew this
tendency; for he had, as he told Denis, gone quite stale. It seems he had been
very successful as an artist of a bizarre kind--like Fuseli or Goya or Sime or
Clark Ashton Smith--but had suddenly become played out. The world of ordinary
things around him had ceased to hold anything he could recognize as
beauty--beauty, that is, of enough force and poignancy to arouse his creative
faculty. He had often been this way before--all decadents are--but this time he
could not invent any new, strange, or outré sensation or experience which would
supply the needed illusion of fresh beauty or stimulatingly adventurous
expectancy. He was like a Durtal or a des Esseintes at the most jaded point of
his curious orbit.

"Marceline was away when Marsh arrived. She hadn't been enthusiastic about his
coming, and had refused to decline an invitation from some of our friends in St.
Louis which came about that time for her and Denis. Denis, of course, stayed to
receive his guest; but Marceline had gone on alone. It was the first time they
had ever been separated, and I hoped the interval would help to dispel the daze
that was making such a fool of the boy. Marceline shewed no hurry to get back,
but seemed to me to prolong her absence as much as she could. Denis stood it
better than one would have expected from such a doting husband, and seemed more
like his old self as he talked over other days with Marsh and tried to cheer the
listless aesthete up.

"It was Marsh who seemed most impatient to see the woman; perhaps because he
thought her strange beauty, or some phase of the mysticism which had gone into
her one-time magical cult, might help to reawaken his interest in things and
give him another start toward artistic creation. That there was no baser reason,
I was absolutely certain from what I knew of Marsh's character. With all his
weaknesses, he was a gentleman--and it had indeed relieved me when I first
learned that he wanted to come here because his willingness to accept Denis'
hospitality proved that there was no reason why he shouldn't.

"When, at last, Marceline did return, I could see that Marsh was tremendously
affected. He did not attempt to make her talk of the bizarre thing which she had
so definitely abandoned, but was unable to hide a powerful admiration which kept
his eyes--now dilated in that curious way for the first time during his
visit--riveted to her every moment she was in the room. She, however, seemed
uneasy rather than pleased by his steady scrutiny--that is, she seemed so at
first, though this feeling of hers wore away in a few days, and left the two on
a basis of the most cordial and voluble congeniality. I could see Marsh studying
her constantly when he thought no one was watching; and I wondered how long it
would be that only the artist, and not the primitive man, would be aroused by
her mysterious graces.

"Denis naturally felt some irritation at this turn of affairs; though he
realised that his guest was a man of honour and that, as kindred mystics and
aesthetes, Marceline and Marsh would naturally have things and interests to
discuss in which a more or less conventional person could have no part. He
didn't hold anything against anybody, but merely regretted that his own
imagination was too limited and traditional to let him talk with Marceline as
Marsh talked. At this stage of things I began to see more of the boy. With his
wife otherwise busy, he had time to remember that he had a father--and a father
who was ready to help him in any sort of perplexity or difficulty.

"We often sat together on the veranda watching Marsh and Marceline as they rode
up or down the drive on horseback, or played tennis on the court that used to
stretch south of the house. They talked mostly in French, which Marsh, though he
hadn't more than a quarter-portion of French blood, handled more glibly than
either Denis or I could speak it. Marceline's English, always academically
correct, was rapidly improving in accent; but it was plain that she relished
dropping back into her mother-tongue. As we looked at the congenial couple they
made, I could see the boy's cheek and throat muscles tighten--though he wasn't a
whit less ideal a host to Marsh, or a whit less considerate husband to
Marceline.

"All this was generally in the afternoon; for Marceline rose very late, had
breakfast in bed, and took an immense amount of time preparing to come
downstairs. I never knew of anyone so wrapped up in cosmetics, beauty exercises,
hair-oils, unguents, and everything of that kind. It was in these morning hours
that Denis and Marsh did their real visiting, and exchanged the close
confidences which kept their friendship up despite the strain that jealousy
imposed.

"Well, it was in one of those morning talks on the veranda that Marsh made the
proposition which brought on the end. I was laid up with some of my neuritis,
but had managed to get downstairs and stretch out on the front parlour sofa near
the long window. Denis and Marsh were just outside; so I couldn't help hearing
all they said. They had been talking about art, and the curious, capricious
elements needed to jolt an artist into producing the real article, when Marsh
suddenly swerved from abstractions to the personal application he must have had
in mind from the start.

"'I suppose,' he was saying, 'that nobody can tell just what it is in some
scenes or objects that makes them aesthetic stimuli for certain individuals.
Basically, of course, it must have some reference to each man's background of
stored-up mental associations, for no two people have the same scale of
sensitiveness and responses. We decadents are artists for whom all ordinary
things have ceased to have any emotional or imaginative significance, but no one
of us responds in the same way to exactly the same extraordinary. Now take me,
for instance.'"

"He paused and resumed.

"'I know, Denny, that I can say these things to you because you such a
preternaturally unspoiled mind--clean, fine, direct, objective, and all that.
You won't misunderstand as an oversubtilised, effete man of the world might.'"

"He paused once more.

"'The fact is, I think I know what's needed to set my imagination working again.
I've had a dim idea of it ever since we were in Paris, but I'm sure now. It's
Marceline, old chap--that face and that hair, and the train of shadowy images
they bring up. Not merely visible beauty--though God knows there's enough of
that--but something peculiar and individualised, that can't exactly be
explained. Do you know, in the last few days I've felt the existence of such a
stimulus so keenly that I honestly think I could outdo myself--break into the
real masterpiece class if I could get ahold of paint and canvas at just the time
when her face and hair set my fancy stirring and weaving. There's something
weird and other-worldly about it--something joined up with the dim ancient thing
Marceline represents. I don't know how much she's told you about that side of
her, but I can assure you there's plenty of it. She has some marvellous links
with the outside.'

"Some change in Denis' expression must have halted the speaker here, for there
was a considerable spell of silence before the words went on. I was utterly
taken aback, for I'd expected no such overt development like this; and I
wondered what my son could be thinking. My heart began to pound violently, and I
strained my ears in the frankest of intentional eavesdropping. Then Marsh
resumed.

"'Of course you're jealous--I know how a speech like mine must sound--but I can
swear to you that you needn't be.'

"Denis did not answer, and Marsh went on.

"' To tell the truth, I could never be in love with Marceline--I couldn't even
be a cordial friend of hers in the warmest sense. Why, damn it all, I felt like
a hypocrite talking with her these days as I've been doing.

"'The case simply is, that one of her phase of her half hyponotises me in a
certain way--a very strange, fantastic, and dimly terrible way--just as another
phase half hypnotises you in a much more normal way. I see something in her--or
to be psychologically exact, something through her or beyond her--that you
didn't see at all. Something that brings up a vast pageantry of shapes from
forgotten abysses, and makes me want to paint incredible things whose outlines
vanish the instant I try to envisage them clearly. Don't mistake, Denny, your
wife is a magnificent being, a splendid focus of cosmic forces who has a right
to be called divine if anything on earth has!'

"I felt a clearing of the situation at this point, for the abstract strangeness
of Marsh's statement, plus the flattery he was now heaping on Marceline, could
not fail to disarm and mollify one as fondly proud of his consort as Denis
always was. Marsh evidently caught the change himself, for there was more
confidence in his tone as he continued.

"'I must paint her, Denny--must paint that hair--and you won't regret. There's
something more than mortal about that hair--something more than beautiful--'

"He paused, and I wondered what Denis could be thinking. I wondered, indeed,
what I was really thinking myself. Was Marsh's interest actually that of the
artist alone, or was he merely infatuated as Denis had been? I had thought, in
their schooldays, that he had envied my boy; and I dimly felt that it might be
the same now. On the other hand, something in that talk of artistic stimulus had
rung amazingly true; so that the more I pondered, the more I was inclined to
take the stuff at face value. Denis seemed to do so, too, for although I could
not catch his low-spoken reply, I could tell by the effect it produced that it
must have been affirmative.

"There was a sound of someone slapping another on the back, and then a grateful
speech from Marsh that I was long to remember.

"'That's great, Denny, and just as I told you, you'll never regret it. In a
sense, I'm half doing it for you. You'll be a different man when you see it.
I'll put you back where you used to be--give you a waking-up and a sort of
salvation--but you can't see what I mean as yet. Just remember old friendship,
and don't get the idea that I'm not the same old bird!'

"I rose perplexedly as I saw the two stroll off across the lawn, arm in arm, and
smoking in unison. What could Marsh have meant by his strange and almost ominous
reassurance? The more my fears were quieted in one direction, the more they were
aroused in another. Look at it any way I could, it seemed to be a rather bad
business.

"But matters got started just the same. Denis fixed up an attic room with
skylights, and Marsh sent for all sorts of painting equipment. Everyone was
rather excited about the new venture, and I was at least glad that something was
on foot to break the brooding tension. Soon the sittings began, and we all took
them quite seriously--for we could see that Marsh regarded them as important
artistic events. Denny and I used to go quietly about the house as though
something sacred were occurring, and we knew that it was sacred as far as Marsh
was concerned.

"With Marceline, though, it was a different matter, as I began to see at once.
Whatever Marsh's reactions to the sittings may have been, hers were painfully
obvious. Every possible way she betrayed a frank and commonplace infatuation for
the artist, and would repulse Denis' marks of affection whenever she dared.
Oddly, I noticed this more vividly than Denis himself, and tried to devise some
plan for keeping the boy's mind easy until the matter could be straightened out.
There was no use in having him excited about it if it could be helped.

"In the end I decided that Denis had better be away while the disagreeable
situation existed. I could represent his interests well enough at this end, and
sooner or later Marsh would finish the picture and go. My view of Marsh's honour
was such that I did not look for any worse developments. When the matter had
blown over, and Marceline had forgotten about her new infatuation, it would be
time enough to have Denis on hand again.

"So I wrote a long letter to my marketing and financial agent in New York, and
cooked up a plan to have the boy summoned there for an indefinite time. I had
the agent write him that our affairs absolutely required one of us to go East,
and of course my illness made it clear that I could not be the one. It was
arranged that when Denis got to New York he would find enough plausible matters
to keep him busy as long as I thought he ought to be away.

"The plan worked perfectly, and Denis started for New York without the least
suspicion; Marceline and Marsh going with him in the car to Cape Girardeau,
where he caught the afternoon train to St. Louis. They returned after dark, and
as McCabe drove the car back to the stables I could hear them talking on the
veranda--in those same chairs near the long parlour window where Marsh and Denis
had sat when I overheard them talk about the portrait. This time I resolved to
do some intentional eavesdropping, so quietly went down to the front parlour and
stretched out on the sofa near the window.

"At first I could not hear anything but very shortly there came the sound of a
chair being shifted, followed by a short, sharp breath and a sort of
inarticulately hurt exclamation from Marceline. Then I heard Marsh speaking in a
strained, almost formal voice.

"'I'd enjoy working tonight if you aren't too tired.'

"Marceline's reply was in the same hurt tone which had marked her exclamation.
She used English as he had done.

"'Oh, Frank, is that really all you care about? Forever working! Can't we just
sit out here in this glorious moonlight?'

"He answered impatiently, his voice shewing a certain contempt beneath the
dominant quality of artistic enthusiasm.

"'Moonlight! Good God, what cheap sentimentality! For a supposedly sophisticated
person you surely do hang on to some of the crudest claptrap that ever escaped
from the dime novels! With art at your elbow, you have to think of the
moon--cheap as a spotlight at the varieties! Or perhaps it makes you think of
the Roodmas dance around the stone pillars at Auteiul. Hell, how you used to
make those goggle-eyed yaps stare! But not--I suppose you've dropped all that
now. No more Atlantean magic or hair-snake rites for Madame de Russy! I'm the
only one to remember the ld things--the things that came down through the
temples of Tanit and echoed on the ramparts of Zimbabwe. But I won't be cheated
of that remembrance--all that is weaving itself into the thing on my canvas--the
thing that is going to capture wonder and crystallise the secrets of 75,000
years.'

"Marceline interrupted in a voice full of mixed emotions.

"'It's you who are cheaply sentimental now! You know well that the old things
had better be let alone. All of you had better watch out if ever I chant the old
rites or try to call up what lies hidden in Yuggoth, Zimbabwe, and R'lyeh. I
thought you had more sense!

"'You lack logic. You want me to be interested in this precious painting of
yours, yet you never let me see what you're doing. Always that black cloth over
it! It's of me--I shouldn't think it would matter if I saw it.'

"Marsh was interrupting this time, his voice curiously hard and strained.

"'No. Not now. You'll see it in due course of time. You say it's of you--yes,
it's that, but it's more. If you knew, you mightn't be so impatient. Poor Denis!
My God, it's a shame!'

"My throat was suddenly dry as the words rose to an almost febrile pitch. What
could Marsh mean? Suddenly I saw that he had stopped and was entering the house
alone. I heard the front door slam, and listened as his footsteps ascended the
stairs. Outside on the veranda I could still hear Marceline's heavy, angry
breathing. I crept away sick at heart, feeling that there were grave things to
ferret out before I could safely let Denis come back.

"After that evening the tension around the place was even worse than before.
Marceline had always lived on flattery and fawning and the shock of those few
blunt words from Marsh was too much for her temperament. There was no living in
the house with her anymore, for with poor Denis gone she took out her
abusiveness on everybody. When she could find no one indoors to quarrel with she
would go out to Sophonisba's cabin and spend hours talking with the queer old
Zulu woman. Aunt Sophy was the only person who would fawn abjectly enough to
suit her, and when I tried once to overhear their conversation I found Marceline
whispering about 'elder secrets' and 'unknown Kadath' while the negress rocked
to and fro in her chair, making inarticulate sounds of reverence and admiration
every now and then.

"But nothing could break her dog-like infatuation for Marsh. She would talk
bitterly and sullenly to him, yet was getting more and more obedient to his
wishes. It was very convenient for him, since he now became able to make her
pose for the picture whenever he felt like painting. He tried to shew gratitude
for this willingness, but I thought I could detect a kind of contempt or even
loathing beneath his careful politeness. For my part, I frankly hated Marceline!
There was no use in calling my attitude anything as mild as dislike these days.
Certainly, I was glad Denis was away. His letters, not nearly so frequent as I
wished, shewed signs of strain and worry.

"As the middle of August went by I gathered from Marsh's remarks that the
portrait was nearly done. His mood seemed increasingly sardonic, though
Marceline's temper improved a bit as the prospect of seeing the thing tickled
her vanity. I can still recall the day when Marsh said he'd have everything
finished within a week. Marceline brightened up perceptibly, though not without
a venomous look at me. It seemed as if her coiled hair visibly tightened around
her head.

"'I'm to be the first to see it!' she snapped. Then, smiling at Marsh, she said,
'And if I don't like it I shall slash it to pieces!'

"Marsh's face took on the most curious look I have ever seen it wear as he
answered her.

"'I can't vouch for your taste, Marceline, but I swear it will be magnificent!
Not that I want to take much credit--art creates itself--and this thing had to
be done. Just wait!'"

"During the next few days I felt a queer sense of foreboding, as if the
completion of the picture meant a kind of catastrophe instead of a relief.
Denis, too, had not written me, and my agent in New York said he was planning
some trip to the country. I wondered what the outcome of the whole thing would
be. What a queer mixture of elements--Marsh and Marceline, Denis and I! How
would all these ultimately react on one another? When my fears grew too great I
tried to lay them all to my infirmity, but that explanation never quite
satisfied me."

"Well, the thing exploded on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August. I had risen at
my usual time and had breakfast, but was not good for much because of the pain
in my spine. It had been troubling me badly of late, and forcing me to take
opiates when it got too unbearable; nobody else was downstairs except the
servants, though I could hear Marceline moving about in her room. Marsh slept in
the attic next his studio, and had begun to keep such late hours that he was
seldom up till noon. About ten o'clock the pain got the better of me, so that I
took a double dose of my opiate and lay down on the parlour sofa. The last I
heard was Marceline's pacing overhead. Poor creature--if I had known! She must
have been walking before the long mirror admiring herself. That was like her.
Vain from start to finish--revelling in her own beauty, just as she revelled in
all the little luxuries Denis was able to give her.

"I didn't wake up till near sunset, and knew instantly how long I had slept from
the golden light and long shadows outside the long window. Nobody was about, and
a sort of unnatural stillness seemed to be hovering over everything. From afar,
though, I thought I could sense a faint howling, wild and intermittent, whose
quality had a slight but baffling familiarity about it. I'm not much for psychic
premonitions, but I was frightfully uneasy from the start. There had been
dreams--even worse than the ones I had been dreaming in the weeks before--and
this time they seemed hideously linked to some black and festering reality. The
whole place had a poisonous air. Afterward I reflected that certain sounds must
have filtered through into my unconscious brain during those hours of drugged
sleep. My pain, though, was very much eased; and I rose and walked without
difficulty.

"Soon enough I began to see that something was wrong. Marsh and Marceline might
have been riding, but someone ought to have been getting dinner in the kitchen.
Instead, there was only silence, except for that faint, distant howl or wail;
and nobody answered when I pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord to summon Scipio.
Then, chancing to look up, I saw the spreading stain on the ceiling--the bright
red stain, that must have come through the floor of Marceline's room.

"In an instant I forgot my crippled back and hurried upstairs to find out the
worst. Everything under the sun raced through my mind as I struggled with the
dampness-warped door of that silent chamber, and most hideous of all was a
terrible sense of malign fulfilment and fatal expectedness. I had, it struck me,
known all along that nameless horrors were gathering; that something profoundly
and cosmically evil had gained a foot-hold under my roof from which only blood
and tragedy could result.

"The door gave at last, and I stumbled into the large room beyond--all dim from
the branches of the great trees outside the windows. For a moment I could do
nothing but flinch at the faint evil odour that immediately struck my nostrils.
Then, turning on the electric light and glancing around, I glimpsed a nameless
blasphemy on the yellow and blue rug.

"It lay face down in a great pool of dark, thickened blood, and had the gory
print of a shod human foot in the middle of its naked back. Blood was spattered
everywhere--on the walls, furniture, and floor. My knees gave way as I took in
the sight, so that I had to stumble to a chair and slump down. The thing had
obviously been a human being, though its identity was not easy to establish at
first; since it was without clothes, and had most of its hair hacked and torn
from the scalp in a very crude way. It was of a deep ivory colour, and I knew
that it must have been Marceline. The shoe-print on the back made the thing seem
all the more hellish. I could not even picture the strange, loathsome tragedy
which must have taken place while I slept in the room below. When I raised my
hand to wipe my dripping forehead I saw that my fingers were sticky with blood.
I shuddered, then realised that it must have come from the knob of the door
which the unknown murderer had forced shut behind him as he left. He had taken
his weapon with him, it seemed, for no instrument of death was visible here.

"As I studied the floor I saw that a line of sticky footprints like the one on
the body led away from the horror to the door. There was another blood-trail,
too, and of a less easily explainable kind; a broadish, continuous line, as if
marking the path of some huge snake. At first I concluded it must be due to
something the murderer had dragged after him. Then, noting the way some of the
footprints seemed to be superimposed on it, I was forced to believe that it
could have been there when the murderer left. But what crawling entity could
have been in that room with the victim and her assassin, leaving before the
killer when the deed was done? As I asked myself this question I thought I heard
fresh bursts of that faint, distant wailing.

"Finally, rousing myself from a lethargy of horror, I got on my feet again and
began following the footprints. Who the murderer was, I could not even faintly
guess, nor could I try to explain the absence of the servants. I vaguely felt
that I ought to go up to Marsh's attic quarters, but before I had fully
formulated the idea I saw that the bloody trail was indeed taking me there. Was
he himself the murderer? Had he gone mad under the strain of the morbid
situation and suddenly run amok?

"In the attic corridor the trail became faint, the prints almost ceasing as they
merged with the dark carpet. I could still, however, discern the strange single
path of the entity who had gone first; and this led straight to the closed door
of Marsh's studio, disappearing beneath it at a point about half way from side
to side. Evidently it had crossed the threshold at a time when the door was wide
open.

"Sick at heart, I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Opening it, I
paused in the waning north light to see what fresh nightmare might be awaiting
me. There was certainly something human on the floor, and I reached for the
switch to turn on the chandelier.

"But as the light flashed up my gaze left the floor and its horror--that was
Marsh, poor devil--to fix itself frantically and incredulously upon the living
thing that cowered and stared in the open doorway leading to Marsh's bedroom. It
was a tousled, wild-eyed thing, crusted with dried blood and carrying in its
hand a wicked machete which had been one of the ornaments of the studio wall.
Yet even in that awful moment I recognised it as one whom I had thought more
than a thousand miles away. It was my own boy Denis--or the maddened wreck which
had once been Denis.

"The sight of me seemed to bring back a trifle of sanity--or at least of
memory--in the poor boy. He straightened up and began to toss his head about as
if trying to shake free from some enveloping influence. I could not speak a
word, but moved my lips in an effort to get back my voice. My eyes wandered for
a moment to the figure on the floor in front of the heavily draped easel--the
figure toward which the strange blood-trail led, and which seemed to be tangled
in the coils of some dark, ropy object. The shifting of my glance apparently
produced some impression in the twisted brain of the boy, for suddenly he began
to mutter in a hoarse whisper whose purport I was soon able to catch.

"'I had to exterminate her--she was the devil--the summit and high-priestess of
all evil--the spawn of the pit--Marsh knew, and tried to warn me. Good old
Frank--I didn't kill him, though I was ready to before I realised. But I went
down there and killed her--then that cursed hair--'

"I listened in horror as Denis choked, paused, and began again.

"'You didn't know--her letters got queer and I knew she was in love with Marsh.
Then she nearly stopped writing. He never mentioned her--I felt something was
wrong, and thought I ought to come back and find out. Couldn't tell you--your
manner would have given it away. Wanted to surprise them. Got here about noon
today--came in a cab and sent the house-servants all off--let the field hands
alone, for their cabins are all out of earshot. Told McCabe to get me some
things in Cape Girardeau and not bother to come back until tomorrow. Had all the
niggers take the old car and let Mary drive them to Bend Village for a
vacation--told 'em we were all going on some sort of outing and wouldn't need
help. Said they'd better stay all night with Uncle Scip's cousin, who keeps that
nigger boarding house.'

"Denis was getting very incoherent now, and I strained my ears to grasp every
word. Again I thought I heard that wild, far-off wail, but the story had first
place for the present.

"'Saw you sleeping in the parlour, and took a chance you wouldn't wake up. Then
went upstairs on the quiet to hunt up Marsh and that woman!'

"The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marceline's name. At the same time
I saw his eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the distant crying, whose
vague familiarity had now become very great.

"'She was not in her room, so I went up to the studio. Door was shut, and I
could hear voices inside. Didn't knock--just burst in and found her posing for
the picture. Nude, but with the hellish hair all draped around her. And making
all sorts of sheep's eyes at Marsh. He had the easel turned half away from the
door, so I couldn't see the picture. Both of them were pretty well jolted when I
shewed up, and Marsh dropped his brush. I was in a rage and told him he'd have
to shew me the portrait, but he got calmer every minute. Told me it wasn't quite
done, but would be in a day or two--said I could see it then--she--hadn't seen
it.

"'But that didn't go with me. I stepped up, and he dropped a velvet curtain over
the thing before I could see it. He was ready to fight before letting me see it,
but that--that--she--stepped up and sided with me. Said we ought to see it.
Frank got horrible worked up, and gave me a punch when I tried to get at the
curtain. I punched back and seemed to have knocked him out. Then I was almost
knocked out myself by the shriek that--that creature--gave. She'd drawn aside
the hangings herself, and caught a look at what Marsh had been painting. I
wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad out of the room--then I saw the
picture.'

"Madness flared up in the boy's eyes again as he got to this place, and I
thought for a minute he was going to spring at me with his machete. But after a
pause he partly steadied himself.

"'Oh, God--that thing! Don't ever look at it! Burn it with the hangings around
it and throw the ashes into the river! Marsh knew--and was warning me. He knew
what it was--what that woman--that leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia, or whatever
she was--actually represented. He'd tried to hint to me ever since I met her in
his Paris studio, but it couldn't be told in words. I thought they all wronged
her when they whispered horrors about her--she had me hypnotised so that I
couldn't believe the plain facts--but this picture has caught the whole
secret--the whole monstrous background!

"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece any living soul
has produced since Rembrandt! It's a crime to burn it--but it would be a greater
crime to let it exist--just as it would have been an abhorrent sin to let--that
she-daemon--exist any longer. The minute I saw it I understood what--she--was,
and what part she played in the frightful secret that has come down from the
days of Cthulhu and the Elder Ones--the secret that was nearly wiped out when
Atlantis sank, but that kept half alive in hidden traditions and allegorical
myths and furtive, midnight cult-practices. For you know she was the real thing.
It wasn't any fake. It would have been merciful if it had been a fake. It was
the old, hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention--the thing hinted
at in the Necronomicon and symbolised in the Easter Island colossi.

"'She thought we couldn't see through--that the false front would hold till we
had bartered away our immortal souls. And she was half right--she'd have got me
in the end. She was only--waiting. But Frank--good old Frank--was too much for
me. He knew what it all meant, and painted it. I don't wonder she shrieked and
ran off when she saw it. It wasn't quite done, but God knows enough was there.

"'Then I knew I'd got to kill her--kill her, and everything connected with her.
It was a taint that wholesome human blood couldn't bear. There was something
else, too--but you'll never know that if you burn the picture without looking. I
staggered down to her room with this machete that I got off the wall here,
leaving Frank still knocked out. He was breathing, though, and I knew and
thanked heaven I hadn't killed him.

"'I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She turned on
me like a wild beast, and began spitting out her hatred of Marsh. The fact that
she'd been in love with him--and I knew she had--only made it worse. For a
minute I couldn't move, and she came within an ace of completely hypnotising me.
Then I thought of the picture, and the spell broke. She saw the breaking in my
eyes, and must have noticed the machete, too. I never saw anything give such a
wild jungle beast look as she did then. She sprang for me with claws out like a
leopard's, but I was too quick. I swung the machete, and it was all over.'

"Denis had to stop again, and I saw the perspiration running down his forehead
through the spattered blood. But in a moment he hoarsely resumed.

"'I said it was all over--but God! some of it had only just begun! I felt I had
fought the legions of Satan, and put my foot on the back of the thing I had
annihilated. Then I saw that blasphemous braid of coarse black hair begin to
twist and squirm of itself.

"'I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable hair had a
life of its own, that couldn't be ended by killing the creature itself. I knew
I'd have to burn it, so I started to hack it off with the machete. God, but it
was devilish work! Tough--like iron wires--but I managed to do it. And it was
loathsome the way the big braid writhed and struggled in my grasp.

"'About the time I had the last strand cut or pulled off I heard that eldritch
wailing from behind the house. You know--it's still going off and on. I don't
know what it is, but it must be something springing from this hellish business.
It half seems like something I ought to know but can't quite place. It got my
nerves the first time I heard it, and I dropped the severed braid in my fright.
Then, I got a worse fright--for in another second the braid had turned on me and
began to strike venomously with one of its ends which had knotted itself up like
a sort of grotesque head. I struck out with the machete, and it turned away.
Then, when I had my breath again, I saw that the monstrous thing was crawling
along the floor by itself like a great black snake. I couldn't do anything for a
while, but when it vanished through the door I managed to pull myself together
and stumble after it. I could follow the broad, bloody trail, and I saw it led
upstairs. It brought me here--and may heaven curse me if I didn't see it through
the doorway, striking at poor dazed Marsh like a maddened rattler as it had
struck at me, finally coiling around him as a python would. He had begun to come
to, but that abominable serpent got him before he was on his feet. I knew that
all of the woman's hatred was behind it, but I hadn't the power to pull it off.
I tried, but it was too much for me. Even the machete was no good--I couldn't
swing it freely or it would have slashed Frank to pieces. So I saw those
monstrous coils tighten--saw poor Frank crushed to death before my eyes--and all
the time that awful faint howling came from somewhere beyond the fields.

"'That's all. I pulled the velvet cloth over the picture and hope it'll never be
lifted. The thing must be burnt. I couldn't pry the coils off poor, dead
Frank--they cling to him like a leech, and seem to have lost their motion
altogether. It's as if that snaky rope of hair has a kind of perverse fondness
for the man it killed--it's clinging to him--embracing him. You'll have to burn
poor Frank with it--but for God's sake don't forget to see it in ashes. That and
the picture. They must both go. The safety of the world demands that they go.

"Denis might have whispered more, but a fresh burst of distant wailing cut us
short. For the first time we knew what it was, for a westerly veering wind
brought articulate words at last. We ought to have known long before, since
sounds much like it had often come from the same source. It was wrinkled
Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witch-woman who had fawned on Marceline, keening
from her cabin in a way which crowned the horrors of this nightmare tragedy. We
could both hear some of the things she howled, and knew that secret and
primordial bonds linked this savage sorceress with that other inheritor of elder
secrets who had just been extirpated. Some of the words she used betrayed her
closeness to daemonic and palaeogean traditions.

"'Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Ya, yo, poor
Missy Tanit, poor Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an' git yo
chile--she done daid! She done daid! De hair ain' got no missus no mo', Marse
Clooloo. Ol' Sophy, she know! Ol' Sophy, she done got de black stone outen Big
Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky! Ol' Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de
crocodile-stone befo' de N'bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No
mo' Tanit! No mo' Isis! No mo' witch-woman to keep de fire a-goin' in de big
stone place! Ya, yo! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! She daid!
Ol' Sophy know!'

"That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay attention to.
The expression on my boy's face shewed that it had reminded him of something
frightful, and the tightening of his hand on the machete boded no good. I knew
he was desperate, and sprang to disarm him before he could do anything more.

"But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much
physically. There was a terrible struggle, but he had done for himself before
many seconds were over. I'm not sure yet but that he tried to kill me, too. His
last panting words were something about the need of wiping out everything that
had been connected with Marceline, either by blood or marriage."

"I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant--or in the
moments and hours afterward. In front of me was the slain body of my boy--the
only human being I had to cherish--and ten feet away, in front of that shrouded
easel, was the body of his best friend, with a nameless coil of horror wound
around it. Below was the scalped corpse of that she-monster, about whom I was
half-ready to believe anything. I was too dazed to analyse the probability of
the hair story--and even if I had not been, that dismal howling coming from Aunt
Sophy's cabin would have been enough to quiet doubt for the nonce.

"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me to--burned the
picture and the body-grasping hair at once and without curiosity--but I was too
shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered foolish things over my boy--and then I
remembered that the night was wearing on and that the servants would be back in
the morning. It was plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and
I knew that I must cover things up and invent a story.

"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. As I poked at it with a
sword which I took from the wall I almost thought I felt it tighten its grip on
the dead man. I didn't dare touch it--and the longer I looked at it the more
horrible things I noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention
it--but it partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as
Marceline had always done.

"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar--with quicklime,
which I knew we had in the storehouse. It was a night of hellish work. I dug
three graves--my boy's a long way from the other two, for I didn't want him to
be near either the woman's body or her hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil
from around poor Marsh. It was terrible work getting them all down to the
cellar. I used blankets in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil
around him. Then I had to get two barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must
have given me strength, for I not only moved them but filled all three graves
without a hitch.

"Some of the lime I made into whitewash. I had to take a stepladder and fix over
the parlour ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And I burned nearly
everything in Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls and floor and heavy
furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and the trail and footprints that
led there. And all the time I could hear old Sophy's wailing in the distance.
The devil must have been in that creature to let her voice go on like that. But
she always was howling queer things. That's why the field niggers didn't get
scared or curious that night. I locked the studio door and took the key to my
room. Then I burned all my stained clothes in the fireplace. By dawn the whole
house looked quite normal so far as any casual eye could tell. I hadn't dared
touch the covered easel, but meant to attend to that later.

"Well, the servants came back the next day, and I told them all the young folks
had gone to St. Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have seen or heard
anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the instant of sunrise.
She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out a word of what had been on
her brooding brain the day and night before.

"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to Paris
and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from there--letters I had
fixed up in forged handwriting. It took a good deal of deceit and reticence in
several things to various friends, and I knew people have secretly suspected me
of holding something back. I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during
the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was
an orphan whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana.
Things might have been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the
sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage
things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has brought me
to. Failing crops--hands discharged one by one--place falling apart to ruin--and
myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody
will come around here after dark anymore--or any other time if it can be helped.
That's why I knew you must be a stranger.

"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely
with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps,
if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I
honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the
horror, but I looked first--and that changed everything.

"No--there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself
presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can
hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too
much of what it all meant.

"Denis had been right--it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt,
even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor
Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what Baudelaire
was to poetry--and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his inmost stronghold
of genius.

"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings--stunned me before
I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a portrait.
Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he wasn't painting Marceline
alone, but what he saw through her and beyond her.

"Of course she was in it--was the key to it, in a sense--but her figure only
formed one point in a vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web
of hair spun around her, and was half-seated, half-reclining on a sort of bench
or divan, carved in patterns unlike those of any known decorative tradition.
There was a monstrously shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid
whose colour I haven't been able to place or classify to this day--I don't know
where Marsh even got the pigments.

"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort
of scene I ever saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all
being a kind of emanation from the woman's brain, yet there was also a directly
opposite suggestion--as if she were just an evil image or hallucination conjured
up by the scene itself.

"I can't tell you know whether it's an exterior or an interior--whether those
hellish Cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether
they are indeed carven stone and not merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The
geometry of the whole thing is crazy--one gets the acute and obtuse angles all
mixed up.

"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual daemon
twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a Witches' Sabbat with
that woman as a high-priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite
goats--the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal row of
tentacles--and the flat-nosed Egyptians dancing in a pattern that Egypt's
priests knew and called accursed!

"But the scene wasn't Egypt--it was behind Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind
fabled Mu, and myth--whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of all
horror on this earth, and the symbolism shewed only too clearly how integral a
part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was
not built by any creatures of this planet--the thing Marsh and Denis used to
talk about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the
whole scene is deep under water--though everybody seems to be breathing freely.

"Well--I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that
Marceline was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the
canvas. It was no mere superstition--Marsh had actually caught something of her
horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and color, so that she still brooded
and hated, just as if most of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime.
And it was worst of all when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair
began to lift themselves up from the surface and grope out into the room toward
me.

"Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realised I was a guardian
and a prisoner forever. she was the thing from which the first dim legends of
Medusa and the Gorgons had sprung, and something in my shaken will had been
captured and turned to stone at last. Never again would I be safe from those
coiling snaky strands--the strands in the picture, and those that lay brooding
under the lime near the wine casks. All too late I recalled the tales of the
virtual indestructibility, even through centuries of burial, of the hair of the
dead.

"My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there had lurked
the fear of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers
began whispering about the great black snake that crawled around near the wine
casks after dark, and about the curious way its trail would lead to another spot
six feet away. Finally I had to move everything to another part of the cellar,
for not a darky could be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen.

"Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited old
Sophonisba's cabin every night after midnight. One of them shewed me its
trail--and not long afterward I found out that Aunt Sophy herself had begun to
pay strange visits to the cellar of the big house, lingering and muttering for
hours in the very spot where none of the other blacks would go near. God, but I
was glad when that old witch died! I honestly believe she had been a priestess
of some ancient and terrible tradition back in Africa. She must have lived to be
almost a hundred and fifty years old.

"Sometimes I think I hear something gliding around the house at night. There
will be a queer noise on the stairs, where the boards are loose, and the latch
of my room will rattle as if with an inward pressure. I always keep my door
locked, of course. Then there are certain mornings when I seem to catch a
sickish musty odour in the corridors, and notice a faint, ropy trail through the
dust of the floors. I know I must guard the hair in the picture, for if anything
were to happen to it, there are entities in this house which would take a sure
and terrible revenge. I don't even dare to die--for life and death are all one
to those in the clutch of what came out of R'lyeh. Something would be on hand to
punish my neglect. Medusa's coil has got me, and it will always be the same.
Never mix up with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your
immortal soul."

As the old man finished his story I saw that the small lamp had long since
burned dry, and that the large one was nearly empty. It must, I knew, be near
dawn, and my ears told me that the storm was over. The tale had held me in a
half-daze, and I almost feared to glance at the door lest it reveal an inward
pressure from some unnamable source. It would be hard to say which had the
greatest hold on me--stark horror, incredulity, or a kind of morbid fantastic
curiosity. I was wholly beyond speech and had to wait for my strange host to
break the spell.

"Do you want to see--the thing?"

His voice was low and hesitant, and I saw he was tremendously in earnest. Of my
various emotions, curiosity gained the upper hand; and I nodded silently. He
rose, lighting a candle on a nearby table and holding it high before him as he
opened the door.

"Come with me--upstairs."

I dreaded to brave those musty corridors again, but fascination downed all my
qualms. The boards creaked beneath our feet, and I trembled once when I thought
I saw a faint, rope-like line trace in the dust near the staircase.

The steps of the attic were noisy and rickety, with several of the treads
missing. I was just glad of the need of looking sharply to my footing, for it
gave me an excuse not to glance about. The attic corridor was pitch-black and
heavily cobwebbed, and inch-deep with dust except where a beaten trail led to a
door on the left at the farther end. As I noticed the rotting remains of a thick
carpet I thought of the other feet which had pressed it in bygone decades--of
these, and of one thing which did not have feet.

The old man took me straight to the door at the end of the beaten path, and
fumbled a second with the rusty latch. I was acutely frightened now that I knew
the picture was so close, yet dared not retreat at this stage. In another moment
my host was ushering me into the deserted studio.

The candle light was very faint, yet served to shew most of the principal
features. I noticed the low, slanting roof, the huge enlarged dormer, the curios
and trophies hung on the wall--and most of all, the great shrouded easel in the
centre of the floor. To that easel de Russy now walked, drawing aside the dusty
velvet hangings on the side turned away from me, and motioning me silently to
approach. It took a good deal of courage to make me obey, especially when I saw
how my guide's eyes dilated in the wavering candle light as he looked at the
unveiled canvas. But again curiosity conquered everything, and I walked around
to where de Russy stood. Then I saw the damnable thing.

I did not faint--though no reader can possibly realise the effort it took to
keep me from doing so. I did cry out, but stopped short when I saw the
frightened look on the old man's face. as I had expected, the canvas was warped,
mouldy, and scabrous from dampness and neglect; but for all that I could trace
the monstrous hints of evil cosmic outsideness that lurked all through the
nameless scene's morbid content and perverted geometry.

It was as the old man had said--a vaulted, columned hell of mumbled Black Masses
and Witches' Sabbaths--and what perfect completion could have added to it was
beyond my power to guess. Decay had only increased the utter hideousness of its
wicked symbolism and diseased suggestion, for the parts most affected by time
were just those parts of the picture which in Nature--or in the extra-cosmic
realm that mocked Nature--would be apt to decay and disintegrate.

The utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline--and as I saw the bloated,
discoloured flesh I formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas
had some obscure, occult linkage with the figure which lay in quicklime under
the cellar floor. Perhaps the lime had preserved the corpse instead of
destroying it--but could it have preserved those black, malign eyes that glared
and mocked at me from their painted hell?

And there was something else about the creature which I could not fail to
notice--something which de Russy had not been able to put into words, but which
perhaps had something to do with Denis' wish to kill all those of his blood who
had dwelt under the same roof with her. Whether Marsh knew, or whether the
genius in him painted it without his knowing, none could say. But Denis and his
father could not have known till they saw the picture.

Surpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair--which covered the rotting
body, but which was itself not even slightly decayed. All I had heard of it was
amply verified. It was nothing human, this ropy, sinuous, half-oily,
half-crinkly flood of serpent darkness. Vile, independent life proclaimed itself
at every unnatural twist and convolution, and the suggestion of numberless
reptilian heads at the out-turned ends was far too marked to be illusory or
accidental.

The blasphemous thing held me like a magnet. I was helpless, and did not wonder
at the myth of the gorgon's glance which turned all beholders to stone. Then I
thought I saw a change come over the thing. The leering features perceptibly
moved, so that the rotting jaw fell, allowing the thick, beast-like lips to
disclose a row of pointed yellow fangs. The pupils of the fiendish eyes dilated,
and the eyes themselves seemed to bulge outward. And the hair--that accursed
hair! It had begun to rustle and wave perceptibly, the snake-heads all turning
toward de Russy and vibrating as if to strike!

Reason deserted me altogether, and before I knew what I was doing I drew my
automatic and sent a shower of twelve steel-jacketed bullets through the
shocking canvas. The whole thing at once fell to pieces, even the frame toppling
from the easel and clattering to the dust-covered floor. But though this horror
was shattered, another had risen before me in the form of de Russy himself,
whose maddened shrieks as he saw the picture vanish were almost as terrible as
the picture itself had been.

With a half-articulate scream of "God, now you've done it!" the frantic old man
seized me violently by the arm and commenced to drag me out of the room and down
the rickety stairs. He had dropped the candle in his panic; but dawn was near,
and some faint grey light was filtering in through the dust-covered windows. I
tripped and stumbled repeatedly, but never for a moment would my guide slacken
his pace.

"Run!" he shrieked, "run for your life! You don't know what you've done! I never
told you the whole thing! There were things I had to do--the picture talked to
me and told me. I had to guard and keep it--now the worst will happen! She and
that hair will come up out of their graves, for God knows what purpose!

"Hurry, man! For God's sake let's get out of here while there's time. If you
have a car take me along to Cape Girardeau with you. It may well get me in the
end, anywhere, but I'll give it a run for its money. Out of here--quick!"

As we reached the ground floor I became aware of a slow, curious thumping from
the rear of the house, followed by a sound of a door shutting. De Russy had not
heard the thumping, but the other noise caught his ear and drew from him the
most terrible shriek that ever sounded in human throat.

"Oh, God--great God--that was the cellar door--she's coming--"

By this time I was desperately wrestling with the rusty latch and sagging hinges
of the great front door--almost as frantic as my host now that I heard the slow,
thumping tread approaching from the unknown rear rooms of the accursed mansion.
The night's rain had warped the oaken planks, and the heavy door stuck and
resisted even more strongly than it had when I forced an entrance the evening
before.

Somewhere a plank creaked beneath the foot of whatever was walking, and the
sound seemed to snap the last cord of sanity in the poor old man. With a roar
like that of a maddened bull he released his grip on me and made a plunge to the
right, through the open door of a room which I judged had been a parlour. A
second later, just as I got the front door open and was making my own escape, I
heard the tinkling clatter of broken glass and knew he had leapt through a
window. And as I bounded off the sagging porch to commence my mad race down the
long, weed-grown drive I thought I could catch the thud of dead, dogged
footsteps which did not follow me, but which kept leadenly on through the door
of the cobwebbed parlour.

I looked backward only twice as I plunged heedlessly through the burrs and
briers of that abandoned drive, past the dying lindens and grotesque scrub-oaks,
in the grey pallor of a cloudy November dawn. The first time was when an acrid
smell overtook me, and I thought of the candle de Russy had dropped in the attic
studio. By then I was comfortably near the road, on the high place from which
the roof of the distant house was clearly visible above its encircling trees;
and just as I expected, thick clouds of smoke were billowing out of the attic
dormers and curling upward into the leaden heavens. I thanked the powers of
creation that an immemorial curse was about to be purged by fire and blotted
from the earth.

But in the next instant came that second backward look in which I glimpsed two
other things--things that cancelled most of the relief and gave me a supreme
shock from which I shall never recover. I have said that I was on a high part of
the drive, from which much of the plantation behind me was visible. This vista
included not only the house and its trees but some of the abandoned and partly
flooded land beside the river, and several bends of the weed-choked drive I had
been so hastily traversing. In both of these latter places I now beheld
sights--or suspicions of sights--which I wish devoutly I could deny.

It was a faint, distant scream which made me turn back again, and as I did so I
caught a trace of motion on the dull grey marshy plain behind the house. At that
human figures are very small, yet I thought the motion resolved itself into two
of these--pursuer and pursued. I even thought I saw the dark-clothed leading
figure overtaken, seized, and dragged violently in the direction of the now
burning house.

But I could not watch the outcome, for at once a nearer sight obtruded itself--a
suggestion of motion among the underbrush at a point some distance back along
the deserted drive. Unmistakably, the weeds and bushes and briers were swaying
as no wind could sway them; swaying as if some large, swift serpent were
wriggling purposefully along on the ground in pursuit of me.

That was all I could stand. I scrambled along madly for the gate, heedless of
torn clothing and bleeding scratches, and jumped into the roadster parked under
the great evergreen tree. It was a bedraggled, rain-drenched sight; but the
works were unharmed and I had no trouble in starting the thing. I went on
blindly in the direction the car was headed for nothing was in my mind but to
get away from that frightful region of nightmares and cacodaemons--to get away
as quickly and as far as gasoline could take me.

About three or four miles along the road a farmer hailed me--a kindly, drawling
fellow of middle age and considerable native intelligence. I was glad to slow
down and ask directions, though I knew I must present a strange enough aspect.
The man readily told me the way to Cape Girardeau, and inquired where I had come
from in such a state at such an early hour. Thinking it best to say little, I
merely mentioned that I had been caught in the night's rain and had taken
shelter at a nearby farmhouse, afterward losing my way in the underbrush trying
to find my car.

"At a farmhouse, eh? Wonder whose it could'a been. Ain't nothin' standin' this
side o' Jim Ferris' place acrost Barker's Crick, an' that's all o' twenty miles
by the rud."

I gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended. Then I asked my
informant if he had overlooked the large ruined plantation house whose ancient
gate bordered the road not far back.

"Funny ye sh'd recolleck that, stranger! Must a ben here afore some time. But
that house ain't here now. Burnt down five or six years ago--and they did tell
some queer stories about it."

I shuddered.

"You mean Riverside--ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there fifteen or
twenty years ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad, and some folks
thought she was a mighty odd sort. Didn't like the looks of her, then she and
the boy went off sudden, and later on the ol' man said he was kilt in the war.
But some o' the niggers hinted queer things. Got around at last that the ol'
fellow fell in love with the gal himself and kilt her and the boy. That place
was sure enough haunted by a black snake, mean that what it may.

"Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house burned down.
Some do say he was burnt up in it. It was a mornin' after a rainy night just
like this, when lots o' folks heard an awful yellin' across the fields in old de
Russy's voice. When they stopped and looked, they see the house goin' up in
smoke quick as a wink--that place was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain.
Nobody never seen the ol' man again, but onct in a while they tell of the ghost
of that big black snake glidin' aroun'.

"What d'ye make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye ever
hear tell of the de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the trouble with that gal young
Denis married? She kinder made everybody shiver and feel hateful, though ye
couldn't never tell why."

I was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The house
burned down years ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I passed the
night? And why did I know what I knew of these things? Even as I pondered I saw
a hair on my coat sleeve--the short, grey hair of an old man.

In the end I drove on without telling anything. But did I hint that gossip was
wronging the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear--as if
from distant but authentic reports wafted among friends--that if anyone was to
blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not
suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married
her.

More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly
cherished honour and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more.
They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a daemon
of the pit--what a gorgon of the elder blasphemies--had come to flaunt their
ancient and stainless name.

Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my
strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me--that horror which
he must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of
poor Frank Marsh.

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside--the
accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even
now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a
lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation--was faintly, subtly, yet to the
eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No
wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman--for, though in deceitfully
slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.